A Life Less Ordinary (36 page)

“But I didn’t grant you my permission to transform me,” I said. “I believe that you owe me a favour.”

Circe looked at me for a long moment. “Very well,” she said. “I will answer three questions for you, as truthfully as I can, and then provide you with transport to wherever you want to go.”

I frowned. “As truthfully as you can?”

“I am not the August Personage,” Circe said, flatly. “I can and will answer questions, but I am not omniscient. And after this, we are even and I will owe you nothing.”

“I understand,” I said. I had to think quickly. I had to ask the right questions. “Where is the final kidnapped girl, the one who Cardonel stole from me, being held?”

Circe smiled at me. I understood, suddenly, that I’d asked the right question. “She is being held on Arthur’s Seat, in the Hill Fort there,” she said. I scowled. That made a great deal of sense. Arthur’s Seat was one of the most magically powerful places in Edinburgh, but because of its strange nature no magician – even the Thirteen – had dared to set up a permanent home there. The hill had little to do with King Arthur, but far too much to do with Merlin, once the greatest sorcerer of his age. “You will need to be very careful.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Are the other kidnapped victims being held there too?”

“Yes,” Circe said. She sounded disappointed. I guessed that that hadn’t been such a good question. “You may find your master and the ghosts there.”

I thought hard. The final question had to be a good one. “What defences are there, waiting for me?”

Circe didn’t smile. “There are so many there,” she said. “They have summoned a demon and used him to man their defences. Even looking at him is hard for me...”

I had to remind myself that Circe was even less human than the Nameless Elf. What I was looking at was merely the tip of the iceberg, something she wore to allow us to see her and pretend that we understood her or what she was. The eyes of a goddess could see for miles, uncover secrets and learn great truths. In the past, we had worshipped the gods, giving them power through our supplications. Even now, strange things came into existence in the magical world, purely because humans believed in them. What came first; the chicken or the egg?

“Three questions, three answers,” Circe said. “I will warn you to be careful, but then...I could give you a glamour-spell that would allow you to penetrate most of the defences without being detected. Would you like that?”

My eyes narrowed. “I want to know the price ahead of time,” I said. I’d read too many stories of bargains with the gods going horrifically wrong. “What do you want from me?”

Circe didn’t bother to play around. “I want you to do me a favour sometime in the future,” she said. “I don’t know what yet, but I give you my word that you won’t have to betray Master Revels or anyone else. I may just need another agent in the mundane world.”

I considered and then nodded slowly. “Very well,” I said. “Give me the spell.”

Circe leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. Her lips were as cold as ice. “Be careful, Dizzy,” she whispered. “You are not walking into a safe place.”

The world went white and then faded away. I looked up to find myself standing in front of the Mosque. How had Circe known that I had intended to come here next? I found myself shaking my head in awe. No wonder primitive humans had called her and her kind gods and goddesses. They’d had no other context to look at them. And yet...did the gods exist because we believed in them, or did we believe in them because they existed?

Dervish looked relieved to see me as I walked into his apartments. “Dizzy,” he said, in relief. “The entire magical world is chattering about you.”

I blinked and then nodded. Naturally; I’d freed thousands of people from the clutches of the Nameless Elf. Everyone would know what I’d done. I wondered, suddenly, how the Thirteen would view it. They’d tolerated the Nameless Elf’s activities and even concealed most of them. They wouldn’t be able to claim ignorance now. The remainder of the magical world would know that they were lying. Master Revels might not be too happy with me.

“I know,” I said. I wasn’t about to discuss everything with him. After all, he’d sent me to the Nameless Elf. I didn’t want to believe that he was a villain, but I still knew to be careful. Besides, Master Revels had considered him a friend...and I had considered Cardonel a lover. “I need something in your possession.”

I looked around and saw the sword in the stone. “I think I have to try to take the sword,” I said. “Please don’t try to stop me.”

Dervish twisted his hands together in agitation. “Dizzy, be careful,” he urged. “There are powers in that sword that haven’t been dreamed of for hundreds of years. If you take it – if Allah lets you take it – you will be responsible for it until the time comes to pass it on to someone else. The responsibility has killed many people and sent others to hell. You’re not ready to take the sword.”

I reached out to the sword, ignoring him. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear voices singing, drowned out by the clash of battle. The world seemed to tilt and twist around me, sending eerie shadows flickering out into the normal world. The sword...was so much more than a sword. It was something far greater and far more powerful.

“The sword is made from a strand of His power,” Dervish said. I barely heard him. “A mortal who wields it will eventually be destroyed by it. To use the sword is to be certain of everything, to be transformed into a fanatic. You will be consumed by it, the moment you lose your grasp on yourself. Don’t...”

My hand closed around the hilt. I felt it then, a history that stretched back to before the dawn of time itself. I saw mighty angels clashing in battle, before falling down towards the fires and the darkness below. I saw the first humans climbing up from the water, only to be tempted into sin and rediscover war for themselves. I saw the sword passed from hand to hand, from mighty warrior to mighty warrior, from religion to religion, until it was passed to Dervish’s ancestors, who took the sword and hid it away far from the Muslim Lands. I pulled and the sword came easily out of the stone. A moment later, there was a brilliant flash of white light and I felt as if someone had stabbed me in the heart.

And there was a voice calling my name.

“Dizzy,” Dervish said. “Can you hear me?”

I looked up and smiled. My senses had never been so sharp, yet when I tried to stand up I felt another burst of pain. Moving cost me everything I had. “What...”

I cleared my throat and tried again. “What happened?”

“You drew the sword,” Dervish said. I felt it now, like a splinter lodged in my heart. The sword was part of me now, at least until I passed it onwards. “You...”

“I have to go,” I said. I could tell, now, that time had passed quickly while I’d collapsed. It was nearly midnight. “Thank you for everything.”

“Don’t thank me,” Dervish said. There was something in his eyes I didn’t like. He was afraid, afraid of me. The sword seemed to find it coldly amusing. No mere human ever lived up to his religion. “I will go, instead, to pray for your success and your soul.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

I could feel the intricate traces of magic spilling out over Arthur’s Seat as I ran towards it, silently cursing the needle in my heart. I wasn’t sure if the sword had become something else or if it was somehow coexisting with my body, but it hurt to move. It explained, I decided, why so few people have tried to hold onto the sword after they’d accomplished their task; the sword’s presence was a constant pain in the ass. If it had been a conventional sword, on the other hand, it wouldn’t have been any use against a demon. I could feel the demon’s presence too in the distance, a nexus of power I didn’t dare look at too closely. It might have looked back.

The Hill Fort, to mundane eyes, was just another set of ruins. To my eyes, gazing into the magical world, it was a building built right on top of a nexus of wild magic. The Thirteen, or their Celtic predecessors, had tamed the magical nexus under Edinburgh Castle and learned how to use it as a source of power, but no one had ever succeeded in taming Arthur’s Seat. The Hill Fort had been built, at least according to the magical world, to prevent an invasion of our world from the Fairy Roads. Several roads converged in the nexus of wild magic and not all of them led to friendly territory. Even if they had all been friendly, the roads changed at whim. Tomorrow, they might lead directly to a dimension of evil demons or monsters.

I paused, after staggering up the path towards the Hill Fort, trying to catch my breath. The climb had winded me more than I had expected, the result of complex and subtle magical wards designed to discourage mundane people from coming too close. Someone really didn’t want to be disturbed. I opened my mind slightly and peered out towards the Hill Fort, feeling out the defences and booby traps. There were warning wards, backed up by defences that ran the gauntlet from freeze spells to change spells, followed by a handful of death spells capable of dealing with anyone that managed to get through the earlier ones. They were so powerful that they were actually bleeding into the mundane world. I hoped that no mundane people were walking towards the Hill Fort now. The results would not be pleasant.

Time to see if Circe is as good as she says
, I thought. There was no way I could dismantle all those wards in time to prevent the sacrifice. I knew, somehow, that they would kill the girl precisely at midnight, when all the stars would be aligned. If Circe’s promise of protection didn’t hold I was about to walk right into a trap, without any way to escape. The sword’s mere presence, as painful as it was, was a reminder that there was another option, but slicing through the wards would have warned everyone inside that they had an intruder. I knew better than to think that the sword, even if it was the most powerful Object of Power I had ever seen, would make me invincible. And besides, I had a feeling that drawing and using the sword too much would have its own side effects. Dervish had been terrified, with – I suspected – good reason.

I stepped forward and felt the first ward shimmer over me. I held my breath as it ghosted through me and onwards, choosing to ignore my presence. I let out a sigh of relief and took another step, passing through a second ward and then a third. They ignored me, although I felt as if I were being scrutinised right down to the molecular level. I shivered as the fourth ward flickered into existence. It was so powerful that it had been keyed to physical footsteps, not a magical presence. I suspected I knew who had designed that ward and it hadn’t been Cardonel. Linux would have been smart enough to link a ward into the mundane world.

The next set of defences loomed up in front of me and I braced myself. The freeze spells should have been triggered at once, even though freeze spells were the easiest for a trained magician to dispel. I felt a wave of cold air blowing across me, but nothing else. I stepped through the wards and onwards to the next set of defences. The change spells flared out over me and accomplished nothing. Cardonel might have meant to transform anyone who got so close into a worm, a very helpless form, but they did nothing to me. I had to smile. If there were any spells Circe would know inside out, they would be change spells. I winced as the death spells loomed up in front of me, emitting terrifyingly bad vibes, yet they too ignored me. I just kept walking.

Up close, the Hill Fort was just as impressive as Edinburgh Castle and, like the Castle, it was far bigger on the inside than the outside. The people who had built it originally had known what they were doing, for rather than link it to a pocket dimension or a building elsewhere in time and space they’d hollowed out the space inside the hill and built their inner defences there. I had to admire what they’d done, although I wasn’t sure I’d have risked it myself. They’d balanced the inner world on the magical nexus and if anything happened to the nexus their world would collapse and, as two things couldn’t occupy the same space without powerful magic, probably explode out into the mundane world. The mundane world knew that the volcano below Arthur’s Seat was extinct. I wondered what they’d do if the explosion took out the hill and unleashed a new volcano in the heart of Edinburgh. Or perhaps it wouldn’t work like that. I knew very little about volcanoes.

I walked around the Hill Fort twice, looking for a door or a way in, but found nothing. The building was surrounded by stone walls, blocking all access. I cursed under my breath, knowing that time was running out, as I hunted desperately for the way in. The building was already within the magical world. There should have been no need to hide a doorway into the building, not unless Cardonel had been far more paranoid about his defences than I had expected. Unless...I looked over at part of the wall and frowned. It looked as if it had been in the wars, yet there was a curious regularity to it, something that rang a bell in my mind. It clicked suddenly and I swore again. Cardonel and his friends hadn’t walked through a door into the Hill Fort; they’d clambered over the walls!

It had been years since I had done any climbing at school and this was far harder than wall bars, although there weren’t any sadistic PE teachers either. I braced myself, put my foot on the first stone, and started to climb. The sword’s presence was surprisingly reassuring, although I didn’t dare look down. Sheer terror would have held me frozen until it was far too late. Years ago, I’d watched a demonstration by army climbers in Princes Street. The men had shimmied up the poles and sheer walls as if they had been monkeys. I had no idea how they’d made it look so easy.

A cold wind blew around me as I climbed higher, something I suspected was intended to discourage other climbers or maybe even blow them off if they didn’t hang on tightly. Now I was so high, I couldn’t go back down; it was hard enough concentrating on climbing higher and higher. I moved between the gusts of wind and just kept going. The higher I got, the more dangerous it became. I almost slipped on a rock that felt wet to the touch. I nearly didn’t realise when I reached the battlements because I was so focused on the climb.