Chapter Thirty-One

As we trudged forward, wading through the dross of a forest long dying, the desperateness of our situation became increasingly apparent. It was plain why the Fae would support Malice, once all the facts were laid in order. Mori’s decay had begun with the closing of the Gates, and my mother’s aim of tearing them open again could only be good from their perspective. If I ever had the chance to talk to Li again, he would have some serious explaining to do.

Now though, it seemed our only salvation would have to come from the Wizard’s Council. I didn’t hold out any high expectations from that corner. They were in hiding, they feared Malice, and they would probably turn out to be a bunch of decrepit old men in bath gowns that they insisted on calling wizard’s robes. If they were going to do any good, they would have done it already.

Above, the stars were dim in their liquid void, and most of the light came not from the burning orb my father held, but from the silver grey mists, alive with their own lunacy. Ajax and Fletcher were saturnine, glaring straight ahead, and the wolves padded warily at their sides. Their heads flicked from side to side, openly distrustful of the flame’s protection against the fog.

Shamblers moaned in the unseen wilderness.

“It is not far,” my father said, though it was a mystery how he judged distance at all. Away from the ruins, the only landmarks to go by were the trees, unevenly scattered stakes of no use as signposts.

It occurred to me that, dramatically speaking, we were approaching the optimal juncture for a daring surprise rescue. Maybe the Wizard’s Council would show up. Somehow, I doubted it.

Out of the silver grey clouds appeared two alabaster pillars, joined by a seamless arch twisted like a Mobius strip. This had to be the Door, and the end of all hope.

No one was holding me any longer. Even if I could have escaped, if there had been an out for me alone, I would not have taken it. I could not leave Li to my mother. I think our captors had already guessed that.

Suddenly, a glistening film expanded from column to column, and the fog vacated a clearing around the arch. I could feel the telltale tingle of powerful magic, spiders dancing on my skin. On the other side of that threshold, Malice waited. A foolish part of me wondered what it would be like to meet my mother for the first time, even though I knew it wasn’t really her in that body. My mother had died. What was left was a Shadow, a shell.

In his eagerness to be reunited with his wife, my father did not as much as glance at me before running through the portal. He was sure we would follow. Malice had the Numians by their throats.

A woman’s scream split the forest, a dozen ear-shattering shrieks beyond the boundaries of humanity, crashing in from every direction at once.

At that same instant, I felt myself struck, sent rocketing over the ground to fall hard on my shoulder in a shower of rotten leaves. As I landed, air driven from my lungs with the force of a fist, the clearing rocked again with a howl of soul-wrenching violence and anguish. Three lesser calls answered it, vowing revenge.

“Silly puppies,” purred a woman’s voice, warm and rich and inviting. “Scream for me.”

Getting to my knees was a struggle, a compromise with the impossible task of rising to my feet. None of my bones were broken, but they should have been. I had flown nearly ten feet from Ajax’s side and felt like I had been hit by a car.

Endless instants passed as my bounced about brain processed the chaos in front of me. I saw Ajax had taken his other form, a shaggy red-gold wolf the size of a grizzly. Fearsome jaws and monstrous teeth snapped at the air as his great forepaws scrabbled in the loam, digging ruts with their claws. His peridot eyes glowed bright as beacons, lit with febrile intensity, yet for all his fury, he could not join his brothers in battle. His rear legs were paralyzed. His back had been broken.

Further on, three wolves stirred the mists into a boiling froth. They leapt, darted, snarled and snapped, flashing in and out of the wall of fog. Weaving among them, a feral blur of midnight blue and eldritch green, was the Pard. For every frenzied growl there was a bubbling and contented laugh, for every lunge and bite there was the swipe of bare white talons. She was a black, dancing shape holding all three of her opponents to a standstill.

Then there was Li, and all else faded into the background. He lay in a bed of the decayed matter that carpeted all of Mori, facing skyward and unmoving. I went to him stumbling, kneeling beside him and bringing his head up onto my legs.

He was no longer bleeding and his breathing remained steady, but he gave no sign of waking.

“Li, wake up.”

He could not hear me. Our rescue had arrived in the final seconds from an unexpected corner, the perfect artifice. A regular Deus ex Machina, only…he wouldn’t wake! Though the Pard was doing a remarkable job of holding the wolves at bay, she wasn’t making any forward progress. One would tire before three.

“Li, please, I need you.”

Even the beasts at war were only phantoms compared to this, the reality of what I felt, seeing him so vulnerable. I could not imagine we had come this far only to be delivered into Malice’s hands. Not when all he had to do was open his eyes for us to escape. I couldn’t help fight the wolves, and I couldn’t heal him. My Shadow was only a dull ache in the far end of my skull. It had saved us once, but it could not do it again.

He was so pale. His eyes seemed set in bruises. I brushed the hair from his forehead and he was more beautiful than I could believe. A knot formed in my throat.

“I love you, Li.” I said what I could not when his eyes were open, and I pretended he was merely sleeping. Our surroundings receded into a muffled haze as I bent to kiss him, but his lips were cold. They did not mold to mine. A tear splashed his cheek from my own, but still he did not stir.

From across a vast distance, I heard the Pard give a cry of mingled outrage and pain. She could not match them any longer. Dashing up a tree to escape being born down by the wolves, she had bought us all the time she could. Blood dripped like neon stripes from her neck and flanks. Her sides heaved as she clung to her perch, and she let out a woeful keening.

Casey and the others were obscured by the fog, but I could hear them ramming their shoulders into the tree. With each brutish thud it swayed farther, stirring the mists, and over their howls of bloodied triumph, I heard its rotten core split.

The Pard leapt free as the tall spire began to fall, loosing a banshee song. She never touched the ground.

A jagged arch of crimson lightning exploded from the forest to my right. Thunder roared in the clearing as the midnight blur of the panther was caught in mid-air, frozen by that hell-born lightning. In a fraction of a second, she was gone. Only a pinkish afterimage remained, and that too soon faded.

Before there was any opportunity to react, riotous bolts burned away the mists where the wolves had been. Their silhouettes glowed a bright cerise before diminishing into nothing. Ajax, trying to turn, was only a breath behind them in being taken, and the oak the Pard had occupied fell with a crack into a rise of fog that felt like an afterthought.

My ears rang in the silence that succeeded this storm and I shifted, twisting so I could spy its source.

Timothy.

The burgundy flask was clutched in his hand, a delighted smile on his face. The branches and bodies of the fog shied away from him like a pack of whipped dogs, and his skin shimmered as if he were coated with crystal dust. His eyes were a dark, electric blue that could draw you up into infinity.

“Well,” said the sorcerer’s apprentice “isn’t this nicely complicated.”

I gaped at him.

“Please,” he said jovially, “don’t drown me in your gratitude.”

Then it all came clear. Timothy hadn’t belonged to Milton; he had been an agent of the Wizard’s Council. He had sabotaged the sorcerer and helped me escape. He had been on the side of good all along. And now he had saved us at the very climax of the story. I really was living a fairy tale.

“Timothy! You’ve saved us!” I cried. “The Council sent you?”

“No.” His voice was chilled iron. I nearly didn’t realize what he intended to do as he held the flask toward me, but I threw myself to cover Li’s body at the final instant, calling out in shock and disbelief.

It did no good.

The red lightning passed through me, icing my insides, and Li became a warm glow in my hands, then nothing. I experienced only the trembling in my own body, and the sense of the ghost in my hands. That, and the sound of Timothy’s words striking my awareness relentlessly.

“He isn’t dead, dear Abigail. He’s tucked away, dreaming in the Demon’s Vial. That is what they named this fabulous device in the age that made it. By far, it was Milton’s most prized possession. But now it is mine, and he is dead. Be proud that you killed him.”

He came closer, dividing his attention between me and the shimmering portal.

“Your beloved unicorn is safe, as long as I choose to keep him that way.”

He hung the flask around his neck, and raised his free hand to the high stone arch with its Mobius twist. A look of concentration crossed his face and he balled his hand into a fist.

For an instant, he shone white as a falling star.

The stone cracked and the pillars crumbled in a heap of useless stone. The portal was no more.

“Wouldn’t want Malice checking in on us, would we?” he said with a pleased smile, looking like a young boy who has played a trick very well and knows it.

“What do you want from me? Will you try to use me, too?

There was no heat in my accusation. I was worn out. I could hardly care what he did, until the world made sense again.

“No, Abigail.” He spoke with an approximation of kindness. “I will do nothing to you but keep you near me, and even that I will not force.”

My gaze slowly rose to meet those blue glaze eyes, not understanding.

“What are you talking about, Timothy? Why are you doing this?”

He offered his hand to help me stand, but I did not take it, rising slowly on my own. He sighed.

“Your mother is mad,” he said. “She must be stopped. Milton, for all his ambition, was a bitter old fool. The world of magic is reduced to a boneyard of weaklings. The Wizard’s Council, the Fae, the scattered myths that still walk free, these are phantoms of greatness. They are a lost cause and not all the magic that remains could make them whole again.”

“You’re going to open the Gates,” I asserted, not even surprised.

“No. That way lies destruction. There is not magic left enough to make the earth new, but it does not need to be new. I intend to gather to me all the power that is, and use it to bind humanity together, under me. The lumpen have accomplished great things since the Gates closed and history passed us by, but they are not fit to rule themselves. Even the wraith of what once was magic is more than they are capable of defending against.

This is all a mere beginning, you see. I need the Vial and I need the unicorn both to accomplish what I wish. It is you who brought them to me, while you followed your own story. But you are more than a tool to me. Much more. We are going to rule the world together; you and I. Don’t look so alarmed.”

He laughed, and his laughter was surprisingly sane.

“I don’t need your help, or ask it. I want you close to keep you from harm until I have dealt with Malice and her kind. You are free to do as you wish. I expect you to hate me, to try to foil me and find a way to have your Lialanni back. I expect it and do not resent it. Your scheming will keep you close, and that is all I want.

“I know well enough the sort of effect a unicorn can have, must have had on you. You wouldn’t appear so stricken otherwise. But in a hundred years or a thousand, he will be nothing to you. One day you will love me, and on that day I will give you a crown.”

He paused, seeing this imagined future as easily as if it were already before him. Then, musingly, “Perhaps I will release him. For by that time I will have no use of the power he gives me in the Vial, or of the hold he once had over you. We will rule, immortal and unchallengeable, until the world dies. As all worlds do in the end.”

Everything I had once thought about Timothy was shredded. I had been wrong. It wasn’t just Milton, all sorcerers were insane. What did he mean, ‘make me his queen?’ He couldn’t bring back the Middle Ages, could he? Yet, he really believed it, all of it.

I tried to work up my resentment, my anger, and couldn’t. He had Li trapped in his bottle, and there was no telling what could happen to him in there. I would have to save him. I would have to find a way. Only Li mattered.

It was with some irony that I considered Timothy had already said he expected me to make such a resolution. Love him ? Timothy had already guessed how I felt about Li and acted as if it was of no consequence. A thousand years?

“No, no,” he said. “No need to say a word. I can guess well enough what your opinion of all this must be now. But these things must be done in order, and I swear not to influence your mind through enchantment. I could hardly be said to care for you if I did that .

“Opportunity ripens, and I will let you freely choose your own course until it finally joins with mine. I have no qualms about time. Death is the least of my enemies.”

He shook his head, smiling as if to laugh at his own foolishness. “How I ramble,” he said. “I apologize. You must be weary.”

Timothy gripped the air with his hand like it was a solid fabric, and drew reality aside like it was a velvet curtain. A window appeared into what looked like a commercial storage space, dimly lit and unused. It was large enough to walk through comfortably.

He made a sweeping gesture, a mocking bow.

“After you, my lady?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“None of us do,” answered the former sorcerer’s apprentice. “But life is more livable if we pretend as if we do.”

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