Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver) (21 page)

“A couple of days here, but more like a couple of hours back in Santa Brígida.”

“When we met Gwynn in October, the visit didn’t take only one twenty-fourth of the time,” objected Stan. “It took more or less the same amount of time here as it did there.”

“It is hard to explain in scientific or even rational terms,” replied Nurse Florence. “The flow of time here is not connected to the flow of time in our world in any logical way. Just take my word for it.”

“Nonetheless,” I began, “it does seem odd that we picked a location in Annwn two days away from the gateway to the Order’s headquarters. Why not emerge right at the gateway?”

“That’s one of the Order’s security measures. The headquarters maintains a connection to Annwn, and members of the Order who happen to be in the headquarters can use that connection to enter Annwn and return to the headquarters from the same spot. However, travelers, even Order members from outside headquarters, can’t enter through the gateway unless they have entered Annwn at least two days distance from it. That makes it harder for a potentially hostile force to pop in unannounced.”

“It also makes it hard on those of us who aren’t used to hiking,” observed Carlos.

“I thought all that swimming made your legs strong,” said Gordy.

“Yeah, you’d think, but it doesn’t work quite the same muscles that hiking and running do.”

Carlos glanced self-consciously in my direction while he was talking, then quickly looked away. He had mentioned to me before that he often ended up feeling like the odd-man-out during our adventures. He had gotten somewhat less sword training than the others, and though he was as athletic as anyone in the party, except for Shar, the skills he had acquired as a water polo player and a swimmer didn’t have the same value on the battlefield as Shar’s martial arts training or even Dan and Gordy’s football background. To me Carlos looked as effective in combat as anyone else, but he clearly didn’t see himself that way, and now here was yet another situation in which he felt less capable than the others. I wanted to make him feel better about himself, to affirm his value to all of us, but I knew just telling him wouldn’t do the trick. I would have to think of some way to convince him once we had taken care of Carla and dealt with Morgan.

There were occasional other bursts of conversation, but as we walked on, most of our attention went to sightseeing. The Santa Barbara area did have its park space and nearby forests, but they just couldn’t compare to the pristine beauty of the forests of Annwn. While we walked, I sang, partly for entertainment, but also to keep my magic at its height, just in case. I also magicked all of us to be a little faster, except Khalid, who naturally didn’t need the boost. The speed would also serve a purpose in the unlikely event of attack, but it would also get us to the Order much faster. Sir Arian glanced down, having no doubt felt the power, and smiled approvingly.

For what seemed like several hours we marched through Annwn, enjoying the scenery and gradually becoming somewhat less alert, though probably the faeries remained as vigilant as ever, and Nurse Florence spent most of her time carefully monitoring Carla’s condition. As for me, I was diligently daydreaming about what life would be like with Carla restored. To hold her in my arms again, to kiss her again, even to have a conversation with her again, would move me more than all the natural beauty around me.

Then I noticed the chill. The usual mist made the time of day a little more difficult to figure out in Annwn, but I think we had started in Annwn’s morning and were now somewhere in late afternoon. However, it was not the sun gliding toward the west that was causing the sudden cold. The breeze had been relatively warm only moments before. No, something was wrong…very wrong.

Just as I was realizing that we had a problem, Sir Arian landed right next to me. “There is a deep fog rolling in from the east,” he began solemnly. “It is not a natural fog. My men and I sense dire evil within. I know not who would dare raise such wickedness in an area ruled by Gwynn ap Nudd, but they will come to regret their arrogant folly.”

However much
they
might come to regret it later, I was pretty much regretting it now. We were traveling toward the east, and as I glanced in that direction, I could already see the fog swallowing part of the road we were on. Avoiding it seemed impossible, unless we all flew around it, and the guys couldn’t do that. I suppose we could have magicked them into the air, but steering that many people who really couldn’t steer themselves would be problematic, to say the least—even assuming that the fog couldn’t follow us, and I was sure my luck wasn’t going to be that good.

“What’s our next move, Sir Arian?” Before he could answer me, he had to stretch out his arm so that an owl could land on it, and not just any owl; it was larger than I had ever seen, and its eyes were certainly bigger and brighter. Sir Arian whispered to it in what seemed to be owl language, then sent it flying toward the west.

“Owls are Gwynn’s sacred birds,” he explained. “That one will carry the message of this incursion to Gwynn, who will be here straightaway with a much larger force. As for our next move—”

Before he could finish, we both saw the enormous night-black raven emerge from the steadily advancing fog and fly with unnatural swiftness after the owl. At Sir Arian’s signal, nineteen fairy arrows pierced its breast—and it just kept on flying. Sharpening my vision, I looked closely at it and could see why the arrows had not stopped it: it was already dead, reanimated by the darkest of dark magics. Sir Arian could see the same thing.

“Aim for the wings!” he shouted to his men. “Alive or dead, it can’t fly if its wings are badly enough damaged.”

The next round of arrows punctured the wings in several places, and the raven began to falter, but its momentum was still carrying it closer to the owl. I had already drawn White Hilt, so I simply channeled its flame into a bolt aimed at the raven. Unfortunately, a combination of factors, including my comparative lack of experience with ranged weapons and my inability to adjust the focus of my enhanced distance vision quickly enough, caused me to miss.

Another round of faerie arrows sailed through the air, but the raven struck the owl first, digging its claws into it and causing it to lose control of its flight. The owl tried to turn its head enough to counterattack with its beak, but it was unable to twist that far. In a moment the two birds crashed into the top branches of a nearby alder tree and were lost to sight.

The raven’s flight had only distracted us for a couple of minutes, but in that time the fog had picked up speed, cutting its distance from us in half. The guys had already drawn their swords, but there was still no visible enemy. One of Sir Arian’s men flew off to attempt a rescue of the messenger owl, while the rest landed with our group.

“I cannot accurately gauge the strength of this menace,” warned Sir Arian. “In such circumstances, I would counsel retreat.”

Much as I wanted to get Carla to the Order’s headquarters, retreat seemed the only option for now—except that the fog, which must have been accelerating exponentially, suddenly engulfed us, rendering retreat difficult, if not impossible. Aside from feeling the cold gnawing at my bones, I realized that I had lost all sense of direction. Perhaps that was the fog’s effect, or perhaps it was actually shifting us to a different place. That second kind of attack, difficult to pull off in the regular world, was easier in Annwn, and it would be a serious threat in our present circumstances, because if we could be shifted out of Gwynn’s territory, he would not be able to protect us. Then there was the problem of finding our way to the Order’s headquarters. Getting lost in Annwn would not be easy with someone like Nurse Florence along, but it was not impossible.

“Don’t move!” I yelled to the guys; the faeries I felt sure would know how to handle the situation. If anyone got separated from the party at this point, that person could be in grave danger.

Whether we were being moved or just disoriented, the fog effectively disrupted our defenses. It was thick enough that a threat could get very close to us before we could see any sign that anything was wrong. As for the faerie archers, their primary fighting mode was completely eliminated. They all managed to land, stow their bows on their backs, and draw short swords they carried for just this kind of situation, but unquestionably they were at a disadvantage. Nonetheless, they encircled us, determined to fulfill their trust—or die trying. The question was, what exactly was in the fog?

We did not have to wait too long to find out. The fog did not muffle sounds, and so we had no difficulty hearing the clanking of enough armor to suggest that a sizable force was approaching, though from which direction was impossible to say.

A short distance away, I could just make out the emerald gleam of Zom as Shar wielded it to cut through the fog, which, being magical, could not resist the blade. Clever as that idea was, it didn’t get him very far, because Zom only affected the part of the fog it actually touched, so even if Shar took his biggest swing, he could only clear the area within a blade’s length of himself, and it started to fill in again very quickly.

The sound of armor all around us had become louder and louder, but I still couldn’t tell from what direction it was coming. I gave up trying and instead went back to singing, pouring every ounce of power I could into my words, heightening the guys’ abilities, speed, and morale for the fight that had to be only a minute or two away at most. Near me I could hear Nurse Florence casting a spell in an effort to lift the fog.

Then I could see sparks all around me as swords clanged against swords. From what I could tell, we faced a small force—at least I hoped it was small—in black armor. The only thing that saved us from disaster in the first round of attacks was that the attackers swung rather slowly. Otherwise they could have gotten close enough to us to wound us almost before we could respond. Even as it was, we were hard-pressed immediately. Our adversaries might be a bit slow, but they were strong, bringing their blades down with enough force to jar out teeth and nearly rip the swords from our grasps. Only Shar and sword-enhanced Stan really had enough muscle to maintain firm grips in the face of that kind of assault, and the faeries couldn’t come close. One of them was disarmed almost immediately, and they quickly switched strategies and started dodging more than parrying.

It did not take me long to figure out that our foes weren’t human. I managed to hit the closest ones with fire, but the resultant superheating of their armor didn’t elicit any response from them at all, not even a whimper, much less a scream. Could they be animated suits of armor such as we had encountered a couple of months ago during our first meeting with Morgan? No, I thought I could smell burning flesh. Come to think of it, though the armor made it difficult to tell, they could be reanimated dead, like the raven earlier. (I tended not to think of them as undead, because that’s really a modern term. At King Arthur’s court, one was either alive or dead, and that was it.)

It was Shar who first proved my theory. Zom would not break whatever was animating them just by striking their armor, but any flesh wound might just end their unnatural travesty of life, and hacking away at armor with a sword like Zom, it was only so long before Shar could actually wound an opponent, at which point that opponent clattered to the ground, dead again, just as I had suspected.

The rest of us were not doing as well. It did not take me long to realize I needed fire hot enough to melt the armor on one of these dead knights to do their dead flesh enough damage to “kill” it, but it was dangerous to stir up that much of a blaze in such close proximity to either humans or faeries. Not only that, but Sir Arian was shouting at me to be careful and not anger the forest. I did get a couple good shots in, but I needed to find a way to do better than that before we were overwhelmed.

Gordy and Carlos both had faerie swords designed to affect living adversaries, so neither one was much supernatural use against the dead, though physically they could still cut through ordinary armor pretty well, and fortunately the dead had only ordinary armor. Stan was managing a little better, because the strength his sword gave him enabled him to strike his opponents a little harder. Dan, on the other hand, was managing worse. His sword protected him against bleeding from a wound, but these opponents appeared to be striking to hack off limbs, and not bleeding wouldn’t help him much if his arms ended up lying on the ground. To avoid being struck, he had to dodge their blows, just like the faeries did. If we got out of this alive, I would have to remember to point that out to him.

Abruptly the fog melted away. I glanced at Nurse Florence, who was shaking from the effort. As it turned out, the effort was well worth it, because the battle turned decisively at that point. The faeries took to the air and started pounding the remaining dead with archery attacks. The dead were confused by airborne enemies, and the faeries were expert at scoring hits in the armor’s joints, weakening it and soon causing it to fall apart. They also hit gaps created by the guys’ swords, and those faerie arrows seemed to short-circuit the animation of the dead almost as effectively as Zom did. With better vision, it was easier for me to hit the dead with fire where it would do the most damage. Under these conditions, we made short work of the revived corpses sent against us.

Then, tired from all the sword swinging, arrow shooting, and spell casting, we had to face the one who had sent them.