That was just the warm-up, the vaudeville part they normally would have left to Hector or Stan. Now Phil was inviting Eamon Dooley to examine a length of rope and proclaim it perfectly ordinary. She uttered something in a foreign language, undulated her arms mysteriously, and tossed the rope high, where it snaked and then stiffened, apparently frozen in midair.
Arden was entranced. He knew there must be a wire, a hook, but for the life of him, he couldn’t see it. Then, oh so gingerly, Phil began to climb, feigning tremulous fear, but he could see from the light in her eyes that she was as in her element as an eagle high on an updraft. She struck a flourishing pose at the top and dropped lightly down, to stamping and hoots and boisterous clapping.
“That one, in the red waistcoat. Selkirk is his name.”
“What? Oh, yes, I had my suspicions.” She was pointing out the other traitors—or by her account, the magicians sensible enough to pick the winning side.
“And Montrose. He hasn’t declared, but he certainly knows what’s in his best interests, and he’s strong, a useful ally. He may not fight for us yet, but he’s too smart to fight against us. Arden, are you paying attention?”
“Of course, my dear.” But his eyes slid over to the stage, where Fee appeared to be drifting in and out of the visible plane, ethereal and fey in the rising sulfurous smoke. He could see the mirrors this time, but from the audience’s gaping amazement, it seemed real to them. Even his fellow magicians looked awestruck, though perhaps that was because, unbeknownst to the Albion sisters, the footlights made their costumes considerably more transparent than they’d planned.
Fräulein Hildemar continued her litany of names, while Arden did his best to pay attention. There were considerably more than the dozen he was certain of.
“And Bergen, of course. He is second only to you in his passionate loyalty to me. To us, that is.” She arched her golden eyebrows, and he realized she was trying to provoke him to jealousy.
Fräulein Hildemar, watching the permutations of his face, narrowed her eyes and said, “Bergen has already proven himself. It is time for you to do the same.”
“What do you mean?”
“A little thing, really. No more than blowing a speck of dust from your sleeve. Bergen has killed for me, and a magician at that!”
For a moment the Fräulein’s exquisite features blurred and transmogrified into the crushed pulp that had been murdered Rapp’s face.
“What I ask of you is far, far less,” she said, caressing him. “Kill a commoner for me, Arden.”
He stood, dumbfounded.
“Any commoner will do,” she said lightly. “That fat farmer in the front row, or the ginger biddy in tartan.”
“But why?” He fumbled desperately for a reason not to do as she asked. As a follower of the Dresden school, he’d affirmed time and again how he, too, despised commoners, how he’d be their master, subject them all to his lightest whim, and—he’d suggested this himself during one night of debauchery, delighting her—even culling a fair number of them outright simply to reduce their unnecessary, unsightly presence. How could he now say he wouldn’t kill one of them?
She waited. When he did not respond, she said, “I’ve decided to teach you how we in Dresden gain and hold our fearful strength. Listen.” Her warm breath tickled his ear as she whispered such blasphemy, it was all he could do not to shout a warning to the rest, to strike her, to weep at the very idea that any magician given such an incomparable gift as the Essence could deliberately misuse it in such a horrific way.
Draining power from a magician, and letting him live afterward, was bad enough—but this?
She saw his look of disgust, though he quickly disguised it. “How is this any different from eating?” she asked. “You kill a beast and eat it. It feeds you, keeps you strong for a time.”
He tempered his revulsion to a practical question, always the good spy. “When we drain an animal, its Essence passes through us and back to the earth. Are you telling me that you drain its essence and keep it?”
“This drains more than just Essence. It drains the other thing. That, we can keep for quite a while, held captive in the opals we all wear, the living stones.”
“What do you mean, the other thing?”
“We don’t name it. The soul, perhaps? The Essence is universal. It is in everything and flows in and out, continuously. This other thing, it is not universal. It is the essence of the individual. We take it, and it makes us strong, stronger than you can imagine!”
A wave of nausea swept over him.
“We have flocks of commoners, like sheep. The rabble who think they are in charge in Germany harvests them for us, pens them, and they are ours for the taking. Ah, wait until you experience it. I will guide you.” Her hands snaked over his body. “It is better than the act of love,” she whispered.
Onstage, Fee had placed her head in a box, and Phil was gracefully skewering it with an ice pick, a knitting needle, and a bayonet. Such realistic blood flowed that a woman in the front row fainted. Then, above the box, Fee’s disembodied, ghostly head floated in a fresh haze of Joey’s smoke bombs, sneezed, and broke character long enough to thank the many who blessed her before speaking a few prophetic words. Then the stage went black.
“What is more,” Hildemar said, “you can give it as a gift. Drain a commoner, my adored one. Take his life, take everything he is, and give it to me! I will save it, here”—she touched the large opal nestled in the hollow of her creamy throat—“to use against out enemies.” She was panting, and Arden saw the opal jump as she swallowed hard, salivating in anticipation.
Arden stood in the darkness, concealed by the Fräulein’s magic but feeling as if he were trapped in a horror show, on display and under judgment.
Then the lights snapped blindingly on, and in the glare a figure slowly resolved, luminous and pure as light itself, dressed in a silver-tinged white gown, a crown of yew berries atop the coiled braids of her hair.
What could Arden do? He knew the Fräulein’s strength, knew if he challenged her, she could very likely kill him now, with no one being any the wiser. And not just kill him but take his life, take it for her own. He’d always been told that in death, one rejoined the Essence. What, then, if one was sucked up, eaten, then used for evil?
He looked at Phil, strapping herself into a straitjacket, telling the volunteer from the audience to pull it tighter—tighter! Then chains, crisscrossed over her chest, and finally a slinglike harness that seemed held in place by no more than friction and the gradient between her slim waist and lush hips. Eamon and two other local swains hauled her up, hand over meaty hand, until she was ten feet up in the air, the belled skirt held mostly in place by a set of reverse garters she’d devised. They tied the rope to a ring in the wall.
Fee slipped lightly from the wings, almost brushing Arden’s arm, but they were in the curtain’s midnight velvet folds, and even without magic, they were concealed from her. She carried a large metal plate, from which protruded a half-dozen wicked-looking steel spikes as long as her forearm, and placed it precisely under the serenely dangling Phil.
Finally Fee crouched and lit a candle, adjusting it so the dancing flame licked the rope, sending up curling tongues of smoke. Arden forced himself to remain calm as he realized that, within only a matter of moments, the rope would be burned clear through, sending Phil plummeting down onto the deadly spikes.
“She would do,” came the serpent voice in his ear.
He followed her gaze to Phil. “No, that’s the descendent of Godric Albion I told you about. The Essence cannot touch her.”
“A pity. But it can touch the rope that holds her, no? Or the candle.” A shining silver worm of Essence undulated from the Fräulein’s fingertips, and the flame jumped and burned brighter.
“No, I won’t let you!” He grabbed her arm, expecting to be immediately smitten by her power. But she only cocked her head.
He knew he couldn’t stop her attack, so he said, “She...desperately wants her powers back. She hates her life, now she knows what she could be, and I know if only I could find a way to restore her link to the Essence, she’d join our side.”
“That’s the girl who struck the Kommandant. Bergen says she hates the Germans and would do anything to keep England from being conquered. We tried to have her killed, you know. It seemed like she was going to stand in our way.”
“She would have, until she understood what she was, what she should have been, if Godric hadn’t been stripped of his power. Now it’s only commoner Germans she hates. She deserves to have her birthright restored, don’t you think?” And though it killed him to say it, he added, “And she’s half mad for Hereweald, so she’ll follow wherever he leads.”
“Hmm. Interesting.” The flame returned to normal, but already it had eaten through a chunk of the rope.
From above came a rattle and crash as Phil’s chains fell to earth. A cheer rose, but there was still the straitjacket to go, and as far as Arden could see, there was no trickery to it, only skill. And skill might fail.
“So it will be another, then. Have you picked your victim...your sacrifice...your gift?”
“I’d rather have you,” he said huskily, pulling her close so she wouldn’t see his anxious glance at Phil. The shoulders of her straitjacket were definitely looser, but he didn’t think she’d make it. Nearby Fee crouched in the wings, watching her sister intently.
Phil had freed one long flopping straitjacket arm and dragged it wrenchingly over her shoulder. Would she make it? Arden began to hope—but no! The sling around her hips was beginning to slip!
The Fräulein pulled herself from Arden’s embrace. “Another loyal magician is always welcome. And I think you said she has a sister, too? Yet another soldier for our cause—or else a hostage for her sister’s good will. I will have to consider. Arden! Why do you look at her like that?”
Too late, he schooled his expression. The Fräulein’s lovely face twisted cruelly, and the candle flame leaped up, consuming the rope until Phil twisted on the barest thread. Arden’s hand reached for the Fräulein’s throat, even as he began to call upon the Essence to save Phil. Before he could, a shrill whistle sounded from somewhere onstage as Phil, writhing in her struggle to free herself, was enveloped in a sudden acrid cloud of smoke, and fell . . .
Nothing matters,
Arden realized with a terrible numb descent.
Nothing matters but her. Not the college. Not the Essence.
Now nothing matters at all.
His fingers touched the Fräulein’s throat, though he knew it meant his death. He felt dead already.
Then the smoke cleared, and the spikes were empty: no body, no blood. Phil, borrowing a trick from Fee, had vanished.
Whatever it takes to live,
he decided, dizzy and light in the incredible new altitude of relief.
I will do what I can for Rudyard, for the sake of the Essence, but now it is for her, above all.
He looked fleetingly at the spiked place where Phil was so astonishingly and absolutely
not,
and again turned his attack into a fierce caress.
“See how clever she is, even without the Essence, Fräulein.” he said, pretending indifference. “Won’t she do splendidly as your servant, or as a reward to one of your magicians? You say there’s such a shortage of women, and you want to keep the line as pure as possible.” He pinned her against the wall, shifting the curtain. “What a prize she’ll be to you—Godric Albion’s descendant! The one who started it all.”
He couldn’t tell if she was deceived; she melted into him with such practiced abandon.
“Shall we go someplace we can be alone?” he murmured, as the thunderous applause began to peter out. Phil had not yet produced herself, and the illusion hung suspended, incomplete.
“No one can see us here,” she said, fondling him, then broke away with a sigh. “But I should go. I have things to see at Stour and must report back to Dresden almost at once, to prepare the attack. You will discover when the magicians will all be gathered in the manor, so we can strike?”
“As soon as I can.”
“And then we will rule England, together. But first—you’ve forgotten about my gift.”
“Really, we’re both in a hurry—”
She stiffened. “Do it at once, before I doubt your loyalty, Arden,” she said, without a trace of her erstwhile softness.
He still needed all the details of the attack, and she’d never tell him if she had the slightest doubt. “I’ve never done it before,” he said, stalling. “Is it difficult?”
Her smile returned, slowly, creeping like a lizard. “You’re afraid? Oh, silly boy, I forget how inexperienced you are! You’re like a virgin with his first woman, aren’t you! I will guide you. Pick one.”
The audience should have been begging for curtain calls, standing and cheering bravo, tossing paper flowers. But only Fee stood onstage, baffled, uncertain whether to to follow her generations of training and force the show to go on, even if Phil was lying with a broken neck on the triple layer of mattresses under the hastily opened trap door set just before the mirrored image of the deadly spikes.
“Pick one. I swear, you have never known a feeling such as this!”
Arden closed his eyes and made his choice, reaching down from the stage wings to the first row, where frail Mrs. Abernathy sat, her eyes bright with excitement in their fringe of deep wrinkles. She was the oldest one in the village, Arden reasoned, half blind, wholly deaf, and subject to small strokes at the slightest provocation. If he must do evil, at least let it be the lesser evil. One old woman at death’s door, for hundreds of magicians.
Fräulein Hildemar placed her hand on his arm, and he felt a part of her flow through him in a way he’d never before experienced. It was cloyingly intimate, almost unbearable. Her Essence, and as she’d said, something else, some elemental part of her, coursed into his body as he stretched out to drain Mrs. Abernathy. He felt the old woman’s Essence enter him in a hot rush, followed by a quicksilver chill as he sucked away not just her life but her very self.
It was incredible. He felt...he felt...ah, he had no words for it except that he
felt—
everything! Sensation rushed at him as if for the first time, everything in its purest form. The air around him seemed abuzz with energy, colors shifted to new vibrancy, and the Essence seemed to flow into his every pore, making him preternaturally aware of every living thing near him, including, like a drink from a spring, Phil herself, near and safe and alive.