The outraged yelling from the audience grew even louder. Rudolph pounded his staff for order, but everyone ignored him. Most of the people seemed to be aghast that their hero was turning out to be a villain, but then voices rose in support of Ramsay. It was the people I’d recognized as part of the protest mob, and they moved down the aisle in lockstep, practically in formation. Ramsay stood in the aisle, with them at his back. “You cannot diminish the support I enjoy with a few baseless accusations,” he said as his supporters chanted his name.
I turned to look up at Merlin, who gave a subtle nod. Suddenly, the supporters reeled and blinked in confusion as the spell broke. Some of them didn’t even seem to know where they were or how they got there. When they realized they were standing in the aisle in the Council chamber, most of them slunk away to take seats. That event sent a fresh wave of murmurs through the crowd.
“I would suggest that if you have bought any tokens from Spellworks, you discard them immediately,” Merlin said dryly, raising his voice to be heard above the tumult. “They only leave you open to manipulation.” There was a rustling and clattering sound as the former mob members emptied their pockets and tossed charms and amulets on the floor. Merlin turned to address the rest of the Council. “I believe that is evidence that Spellworks was not what Mr. Ramsay led us to believe. It was merely his vehicle for manipulating people and events.”
“And so all of these charges against Mr. Palmer were part of that scheme?” Rudolph asked, sounding like he was waking up from a dream and wasn’t yet sure what was real.
“Aside from the escape and evasion, yes. But I think you can see why escape and evasion were necessary,” Merlin replied.
Mack vanished the silver cord binding Owen’s wrists. I was just moving to go stand at Owen’s side when Ramsay gave a roar of fury and rushed at Owen, magic shooting in violent sparks from his outstretched hands. Owen staggered backward, unable to defend himself, and Mack stepped in to shield him, counterattacking against Ramsay.
But Ramsay seemed entirely unaffected. He kept advancing on the circle. I heard Merlin cry out behind me at the Council table, and I turned to see him nearly fall out of his seat again. I whirled back to face the room. “Stop! Don’t!” I called out to Mack while I tried to block out the noise and chaos to think.
Owen was within the circle of tile on the floor that kept prisoners from using magic, but he had used magic instinctively against Idris, and it had worked, but it had harmed Merlin instead of Idris. Mack was sticking close to Owen and had one foot still within the circle, and his magic had also hurt Merlin. That was it! It looked like instead of preventing magic use, the circle now turned magic used within it into an attack on Merlin. That must have been what Ramsay planned to make it look like Owen was the bad guy. But how? We’d swept the room before the hearing. Nothing had been altered or out of place.
The Council’s guards rushed forward to grab Ramsay, but the remaining loyalists in the audience got in their way. James, Gloria, and Rod left their seats to help defend Owen. “Stay out of the circle,” I called to them. They were able to protect Owen from most of the fighting, but Mack apparently didn’t have the power to take Owen out of the prisoner’s circle. Owen was stuck there as securely as if there were iron bars around him, and while he was, he couldn’t do anything magically without hurting Merlin.
The Council members were now getting into the fray, mostly in a vain attempt to restore order. Merlin, looking a little pale and shaken but otherwise unharmed, came down from the high table and headed straight for Ramsay, and Ramsay turned to face him. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it, Ivor?” Merlin said. “You wanted to face me so that nothing would stand in the way between you and total power.” He held his arms out to the side. “Here I am.”
I’d seen some big magical battles in the past, but this was a clash of the titans. Even though Merlin wasn’t wearing his mystical robe, I felt like I could see the aura of it around him. He and Ramsay were more evenly matched than I would have thought. Ramsay held his own and showed no sign of tiring as they flung spell after spell at each other. Fights against Merlin usually didn’t last very long, but this one kept going.
Idris moved to join his boss, which surprised me. He was the type to switch to the winning side, especially after learning that Ramsay was using him. It had to be that compulsion spell. He didn’t have a choice but to fight—probably even to the death—alongside his master. I told myself that meant I was actually doing him a favor when I grabbed the ceremonial gavel from the high table and whacked Idris on the back of the head. He crumpled, and I dragged him under a bench, out of the way of the fight. I looked around for one of the enforcers to watch or bind Idris, but they had their hands full.
Apparently, there were some true Ramsay loyalists even without the charms and amulets—or else he had some people under more direct compulsion spells, like Idris—since there were still people trying to get to the front of the room, either to help Ramsay against Merlin or to attack Owen.
Since I wasn’t much use in a magical battle and wasn’t affected by all the magic flying around me, I focused on figuring out how Ramsay had rigged the circle to make magic deflect onto Merlin. If the spell wasn’t there before the hearing, then he must have brought it in after our search. His briefcase, I realized. That had to be it.
I wove my way around combatants to get back to the front of the seating area, and there I saw the briefcase, which rested right on the edge of that tile circle. I kicked it to move it out of the way, but the only thing that happened was my foot going numb from the direct contact with powerful magic. If I’d been wearing my magic-detecting necklace, I’d have probably passed out. The case didn’t move even a fraction of an inch.
Owen had dropped to the ground to get below the worst of the magical attacks, and he crawled over to the perimeter of the circle where I was. “What is it?” he asked.
I pointed to the briefcase. “Ramsay brought this in. See how it’s sitting right there on the edge of the circle? And it won’t budge—I tried. My guess is this has something to do with that redirect spell.”
Frowning, he tried to move it, and I had to jump into the circle to grab him when he nearly collapsed just from touching it. He blinked rapidly and shook his head to clear it. “Whoa,” he said. “That’s not just redirecting power. It’s also working something like an amplifier. The circle is part of this room’s defensive and protective systems, and whatever’s in that case is tapped into the whole system. He’s drawing power from the building itself, and from all power being used in the building.”
“So it’s not just about making you look bad?”
There was a rumble overhead. The heavy wooden roof beams were shifting. Bits of plaster showered down. “It’s about giving him an advantage over Merlin,” Owen said.
A chunk of plaster fell not too far from us, and I turned at a loud popping sound to see a crack appear in one wall. “And I think it’s about bringing the building down around us.”
“Well, he is desperate,” Owen said.
“We should get Rudolph to drop the wards. Maybe that will stop it, or at least let people escape.”
“Do we want to give either Ramsay or Idris a chance to escape?”
I looked at him in horror. “So, it’s a magical cage match—only the victor leaves alive? But Ramsay is cheating, and he’s going to kill us all.”
We both turned to check on the battle. Merlin was still holding his own, deflecting every burst of power Ramsay sent his way while shooting plenty of sparks and lightning bolts at Ramsay. He was tiring, but he was more clever than Ramsay, and he was still clear-headed, while Ramsay was desperate and panicky. “If only I could get out of here and help,” Owen said wistfully.
“Let me guess, only Rudolph can let you out.”
“I’m not sure even he could while this spell is tied into the wards.”
One of the beams came loose and crashed to the ground. A split second before it fell, Owen grabbed me and threw me down, shielding me with his body. We came up, coughing from the plaster dust, to see the beam not far above our heads, resting across the benches on either side of the aisle. Chunks of rubble were all over the floor. Owen gasped, and I turned to see James kneeling next to a fallen figure that I assumed was Gloria.
On the other side of us, at the front of the room, Ramsay cackled madly. “Are you willing to let all these people die, just to defeat me, Merlin?” he spat.
“I am trying to prevent the many more deaths that will occur should I let you win,” Merlin said, a little out of breath, but still calm. “I am merely serving my purpose—preventing evil wizards from seizing power.”
Owen’s jaw took on a stubborn set that I recognized all too well. “That does it, we have to stop this, now,” he said. He glanced around. “Get me one of those amulets.”
I crawled out of the circle, passing where Gloria was sitting up shakily. The ceiling swayed overhead, which I figured wasn’t a good sign. I found an amulet and crawled back to Owen. “Gloria’s okay,” I reported as I handed him the amulet.
“Good.” Then he caught my chin in his hand and kissed me. “Now, go.”
“Go?”
“The wards won’t stop you. You can get out of here before the building falls around us all. Go get help.”
“What help? What would anyone from the outside be able to do?”
“Just go, Katie.”
I shook my head. “No. I’m not leaving you trapped here. You may need my help. You can barely touch that case without passing out.”
He clearly didn’t like it, but he accepted it with a curt nod. “Okay, then, see if you can open it.”
Although I hadn’t been able to move the case away from the circle, I could lay it flat where it stood. Ramsay hadn’t used blood magic to seal the case or even locked it, so it opened easily for me. He probably assumed that anyone not using whatever protective device he had wouldn’t be able to touch it. Inside the case, resting in a velvet lining like a giant, evil jewel was a softly glowing crystal. “Maybe I can move the crystal if I can’t move the case,” I said.
“It’s worth a shot.”
I tried, but I couldn’t lift it. The thing seemed to weigh a ton. I glanced back at Owen. “Sorry, no go. It’s either bonded to the circle or it’s incredibly dense.”
Owen took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay, Plan B,” he said, scratching the back of his neck. He handed me the amulet and said, “Drape this across it.”
I did as he said. “What’ll that do?”
“I hope it’ll make what I do next feed back to Ramsay. He’s drawing power from the building, but I can give him more than he can handle, all at once.”
“Won’t it be dangerous for you?”
“A bit, I’m sure. No magic is entirely safe. There’s always risk.” He gave me a shaky smile. “But I’ll be careful.”
Ramsay got in a wild bolt of something that sent Merlin a few steps backward. “Get away from the circle, Katie,” Owen said. “Get under a bench. Get everyone under benches. I don’t know what will happen.”
Reluctantly, I left his side to go warn everyone. Nobody needed much urging to take cover, since the one beam falling had really destabilized the roof. Even the magic making the chamber bigger on the inside than it appeared on the outside wasn’t enough to withstand Ramsay’s magic. When I was sure everyone else was safe, I crawled under a bench.
I couldn’t see from my hiding place exactly what Owen was doing, but I knew it couldn’t be easy since that crystal was channeling some serious power. It must have been like digging bare-handed in an electric generator. Whatever it was, he did it quickly. There was a loud explosive sound, a burst of white-hot bright light, and then total silence.
I waited a few moments more, then crawled out from under the bench. The building had stopped shaking, and nothing was falling from above. I first looked to where Merlin and Ramsay had been fighting to make sure the fight really was over. I didn’t see Ramsay, but Merlin was kneeling in the circle, next to a motionless figure in black.
My heart started pounding so hard I could hear my pulse. “No,” I whispered as I drew close enough to see Owen. He was so pale his skin was almost transparent.
“He’s alive,” Merlin assured me, “but very weak.”
“And Ramsay?”
“He is unconscious, as well, and rather badly singed.”
James, Gloria, Rod, and some of the others joined us. Gloria immediately knelt by Owen and brushed a strand of hair off his forehead. “Will he be okay?” I asked. “What happened to him?”
“He sent most of the built-up power surging into Ramsay, but some of it blew back to him,” Merlin explained.
“And what does that mean?” I demanded.
“It means he received too much power for the human body to manage, though not as much as Ramsay left himself open to.”
That still didn’t mean much to me, but Owen was the one who was good at explaining magic using nonmagical metaphors. “So it’s bad?” I asked.
“It could be,” Merlin acknowledged. “The full impact remains to be seen.”
Rudolph joined us. Almost as an afterthought, he pounded his staff against the floor to break the wards. Emergency crews then rushed into the chamber. I watched with a sense of despair as they carried Owen away.
James, Gloria, Rod, and I followed to the building’s medical facility, where I sat holding Gloria’s hand in a waiting room while the healers did their magical healing thing and James paced. “He’ll be fine,” I said, wishing I had the power to make that be true. “I don’t think he’d have done something like that if he didn’t know exactly what he was doing.”
“I’m afraid he did know what he was doing. He knew what he risked, but he also knew the danger of not acting. I am very proud of him,” Gloria said, holding her chin up, even though her voice trembled. Now I was worried. If Gloria was practically writing his eulogy, that was a bad sign.
The chief healer came out then and said, “We’ve done what we can for now. Physically, there appears to be no permanent injury. The full extent of the magical damage remains to be seen. He will likely remain unconscious for a day or so.”