Heads nodded, mine among them.
“When can your people do this?”
Ysbail looked at Boltof and Friday, “With the three of us—”
“You’re going to have one novice more than you should doing this. How long before Angor or Einion can back you up?”
Ysbail shook her head. “Days. Weeks.”
Baldassare frowned. “You must have other mages who can do this. Back you up. You’re going to need all the help you can get.”
She looked across at Baldassare and seemed to be weighing something. I noted a look of concern cross Boltof’s face. He shook his head and said, “We’re exposed too much.”
“There are others,” Ysbail said quietly.
Boltof shook his head. “This is a mistake. They’re underground for a reason.”
“They have learned at our knee,” Ysbail said. “To deliver us. This must work, or our purpose is lost. They will aid us.”
“You made the right decision,” Baldassare said.
I wondered.
Twenty-four hours later, I got a slight amusement out of the fact that Boltof loaded us into a minivan that was the twin of the one used by the SPU elves. The van had spent those hours as a target for nonstop scrying wards. We might only be on the road for about fifteen or twenty minutes before we entered an area where the wards wouldn’t be necessary, but each minute of that time was a risk. If Phillips’ mages zeroed in on us—
That didn’t bear thinking about.
Baldassare was in downtown Cleveland preparing to contact Nesmith, and it was about three hours short of my own personal zero hour.
Boltof drove the van off of Baldassare’s estate, and that gave me the option of either worrying about leaving that permanently warded haven, or worrying about the fact that Boltof was native to a world without the concept of speed limits.
The van blew through the night, racing at seventy along dark, curving, rural roads, while Boltof stared forward with an expression of manic ecstasy.
I gripped the seat, telling myself that our destination was close.
We were headed due north of Hunting Valley, toward the Metroparks. Toward an area of wild enchantment that would make it very hard for anyone to follow us.
It was there that our quartet was to meet up with a trio of elven mages. It was an assemblage that would gather together almost all the people who had any knowledge how to open a Portal—all there to thrust me into a meeting with Nesmith.
The roads the minivan swerved through were pitch-black and hemmed in by the silhouettes of trees. No streetlights broke the darkness as we passed a large green sign saying, “Warning: You are entering the North Chagrin Reservation. Enter at your own risk.”
Officially it was still part of the Metroparks system, but, since the Portal opened, it had become something unto itself. The woods here had changed. Neighboring developments in Willoughby Hills and Mayfield Heights had been overtaken by trees. Owners of half-million dollar vinyl monstrosities built on clear-cut lots would wake up to suddenly find their three-acre chemically treated front lawns home to a half dozen century-old maples and elms. New sewer lines would be clogged with roots, and wildlife from raccoons to skunks and deer would be making homes in garages, pools, and porches.
In a decade the enchanted wood had doubled in size, spreading northeast and southwest. The interior of the reservation—with the exception of a few human artifacts, like the road—had taken on a primeval character. Creatures were rumored to live here, sprites and dryads much more furtive than any elf.
Ysbail had picked this place for a reason.
Professor Shafran had explained to me—it felt as if it were a long time ago—that the magic flowing through the Portal was a fluid. It flowed and found itself concentrated in places, often at man’s whim, sometimes at nature’s. The North Chagrin Reservation represented such a concentration. For some reason, the geography here, the nature of the land, attracted the mana and kept it from flowing away, the woods becoming one of the densest concentrations of mana east of the Portal itself.
I could feel it hanging in the air. The sense of the sound just after, or just before, the portentous word is spoken. It ate into me with every breath I took, the weight behind the trees. It was almost as if we drove underwater instead of under a moonless sky.
Every so often we would pass an area where the trees were slightly thinner, and sometimes the headlights would catch the reflection of some pastel-tinted vinyl sagging off of the remains of a swaybacked house half eaten by vines and moss. Soon, even those traces were gone, and the van rocked on the broken asphalt as it edged into the heart of the wood.
There were no signs left. The wooden Metroparks signs had all rotted away, and the local park service hadn’t replaced them. It had been a long time since anyone had jogged here, walked their dog, or had a picnic.
Apparently, one human structure remained, and—according to Ysbail—it was one of the half-dozen highest concentrations of mana within the Portal’s influence. Anything cast there would have that much higher a chance of success. This one, in particular, was the choice for our ritual because it was the least accessible. The other places that offered as much of an advantage—Browns Stadium, Public Square, the reflecting pool in front of the Art Museum—all were much more public.
Squire’s Castle, on the other hand, had done all it could to remove itself from human ken.
“They say it moves,” Boltof said, by way of conversation. “Won’t let people it doesn’t like near it.” He looked at me and I wondered if he was trying to make me nervous.
The castle had been built by Mr. Squire, vice president of Standard Oil, back in the 1890s. The stone structure was intended as a gatehouse and caretaker’s quarters for an estate that was never built. By the time it passed into the hands of the Metroparks as a castellated turreted picnic shelter, it was little more than a shell. Proving that in the U. S. it only takes us half a century to reduce a castle to the state of ruin that Europe takes five or six hundred years to achieve.
I found it hard to believe it moved, magic or not. But I did know that it had, over the past decade, slipped rather quietly off the list of Cleveland landmarks anyone talked about.
Abruptly ahead of us, the headlights picked out a solid wall of trees blocking off the road. The van braked, coming to a graceless stop on the crumbling road.
“Here we are,” Boltof said, sliding aside the door on the minivan.
With the engine silent, it gave me a chance to hear how quiet the woods were. No insects, no bird calls, not even the leaves rustling in the still air. If it wasn’t for the quiet ticking of the cooling engine, I would have thought I’d been struck deaf. The scent of mulch and rotting leaves hung in the air.
“Have you ever done any meditation,” Friday asked me. “Any visualization exercises?”
I shook my head as I wiped my palms on my shirt. The air here was very still, as if the forest around us was locked in a single moment. If I didn’t know better, I would have had the impression of a forest unchanged for a thousand years.
The headlights died, plunging us into darkness.
“You need to hold the image in your mind,” Friday told me. “Concentrate on it. That’s your part. We do the spell, you concentrate on where we’re going.”
I nodded.
“Don’t let anything distract you,” he said.
I heard Boltof slam the door of the van, and one of the humanoid shadows around me spoke in Ysbail’s voice, “This way.”
I had no idea which way she meant, but someone grabbed my shoulder and led me. I think it was Friday.
We walked into the woods, and the way was clearer than I had expected. In the stark glare of the headlights, the way had looked impassable in every direction. The road appeared to be hemmed in by a wall of trees on every side. But, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the wood was not as dense as it had looked from the van. The trees were old and tall, and they didn’t crowd each other. At least not where we stood.
I thought, for a moment, I caught a whiff of woodsmoke and roses. Then I lost it under the damp smell of the leaves under my feet.
Once we had walked for about ten or fifteen minutes, and I could see enough not to walk into a tree, I got the eerie impression that, just beyond us, on every side, the woods crowded into impenetrability again. It was obviously an illusion, because we kept walking and the woods, if anything, thinned out around us as the trees got bigger.
Despite that, I knew that if I was separated from the others I would be hopelessly lost. I had heard the stories about these woods, and I could fathom how Boltof’s legend of the moving castle might have grown.
These woods were enchanted, and I suspect that their enchantment warped the way the woods were perceived. The magic locked in these anachronistically ancient trees radiated an aura that made me see them as menacing and impenetrable, and once I was in the woods, they filled my senses with a forbidding dread. The trees said I didn’t belong here. They said to stay here was to die.
It made panic seem like a viable option. Two things kept me from bolting and trying to make it back to the safety of the van. First was the fact that, if I bolted, I knew that my warped perception of the woods would have me lost within a few steps. The second reason was that I had the same sense I’d had during Bone Daddy’s ritual, that the emotions I felt weren’t my own. I knew that they came from the trees.
“This place,” Ysbail spoke quietly, barely above a whisper. But I heard her clearly. “Across the Portal, little like it is left. Such concentrations of wild magic were challenges to the authority of the Thesarch.”
“What happened to them?” I asked.
“Valdis, and his predecessors, would burn the woods and salt the ashes,” Ysbail told us. “Much of our world is desert.”
Somehow, even given the menace of the woods here, I found the statement by Ysbail more chilling. I’d always thought that our world had held the monopoly on large-scale, man-made environmental disasters.
I noticed that Ysbail and Boltof seemed to be checking landmarks. The things they looked for were mostly invisible to me, though once or twice I could catch a glimpse of something—a pile of debris that could have been weathered asphalt, a dead piece of moss-covered wood that could have been an old Metroparks signpost, a mound of earth just rectangular enough to mark a man-made foundation.
Sometimes it was too easy to pretend that the Portal hadn’t changed anything essential. I had spent most of the past decade avoiding the idea that the nature of my hometown had changed in a fundamental way. As we walked on, enveloped by the silent trees, I realized that the way I had been looking at things was wrong. The Portal, magic, the elves, the dragons, the mages—all of these things—I had seen them as simply additional layers on the city I had been covering all of my professional life. They were
additions.
As long as I saw them as separate from “my” city.
It wasn’t until we broke into the clearing that it sank in exactly how far I’d had to come. I stood in a woods that had, somehow, decided that mankind had not touched it for centuries, and had the power to rewrite its own history so that it was so. The land itself had changed, become something alien to me. The effect of the Portal wasn’t just a modification, an adjustment to what was already there. It wasn’t a demographic shift, like East Cleveland, or a flood of new investment, like Cleveland proper. It wasn’t the introduction of a new species, or a new discipline, or a new kind of technology, or the effect of interference.
These woods had
changed.
The land I walked on wasn’t the same as it had been a decade ago, the trees weren’t the same, even the air I breathed wasn’t the same.
And, when the scent of roses and woodsmoke returned, when we emerged into the clearing around Squire’s Castle, I could see that the
castle
wasn’t the same.
What I saw, lording it over the hillside, wasn’t the gatehouse that Mr. Squire built in the nineteenth century. It wasn’t the empty shell that had been used as a picnic shelter for the years before the Portal opened.
The castle had grown. The style had stayed the same, the stone walls still echoed an English baronial hall, but the walls had doubled in height, the turrets trebled and multiplied. The glow of firelight lit every window in a flickering orange, even in the upper stories where, in the original structure, there had been no floors. I saw shadows move and dance in the windows, as if the castle was occupied.
In the silence of the woods, I thought I could hear them. I heard songs in an unfamiliar tongue, heard the clatter of silverware. I could just barely perceive the perfume of an unearthly feast.
“What is this?” I whispered.
“The Folk,” Friday responded. “The denizens of these woods. This is the home of their king. The center of their kingdom.”
“How did they come through the Portal,” I asked, “without us knowing?”
Ysbail shook her head. “They are closer to the magic,” Ysbail explained. “Where it is, they are.”