Michael Scott - The Sorceress

But Perenelle was caught. Areop-Enap had tucked her high on the wall, out of harm's way. If she were to cut through the web cocoon, she would fall at least twenty feet to the floor below. The impact probably wouldn't kill her, but it might snap an ankle or break a leg.

And how was she going to defeat a plague of flies?

Looking out over the island, she saw yet another curling thread of insects coming in on the breeze. Once they reached Alcatraz, it would all be over. The wind carried the faintest hum, like the sound of a distant chain saw.

Wind.

Wind had carried the insects onto the island… could Perenelle also use it to drive them away?

But even as the thought crossed her mind, Perenelle realized that she didn't know enough of wind lore to control the element with precision. Perhaps if she'd had time to prepare and her aura were fully charged, she would have attempted to raise some type of wind-a typhoon, maybe, or a small tornado-in the heart of the island and sweep it clean of flies, and probably spiders, too. But she couldn't risk it now. She needed to do something simple… and she needed to do it quickly. All the spiders had stopped moving. Millions of flies had died, but millions more remained, and they were swarming over Areop-Enap.

So if she couldn't drive the flies off the island, could she lure them away? Someone was controlling the insects-a Dark Elder or immortal, who must have first poisoned them, then set the tiny mindless insects on the island. Something had drawn them here. Perenelle's eyes snapped wide in realization. So something would have to draw them away. What would attract millions of flies?

What did flies like?

Behind the gauze web, Perenelle smiled. For her five hundredth birthday on the thirteenth of October in 1820, Scathach had presented her with a spectacular pendant, a single piece of jade carved into the shape of a scarab beetle. More than three thousand years previously, the Shadow had brought it back from Japan for the boy king Tutankhamen, but he'd died a day after she'd presented it to him. Scathach had despised Tutankhamen's wife, Ankhesenamen, and hadn't wanted her to have it, so she'd broken in to the royal palace late one night just before the boy king was embalmed and taken it back. When Scathach had given her the jade, Perenelle had joked, "You're giving me a dung beetle."

Scathach had nodded seriously. "Dung is more valuable than any precious metal. You cannot grow food in gold."

And flies were attracted to dung.

But there was no dung pile on the island, and to catch the flies' attention, she would have to create an exceptionally strong odor. Perenelle immediately thought of the beautiful plants of the arum family. Some of them stank abominably of dung. There was the cactuslike desert herb the carrion flower: beautiful to look at, but it reeked of something long dead. And there was skunk cabbage, and the world's largest flower, the giant rafflesia, the stinking corpse lily, with its putrid odor of rotting meat. If she could replicate that scent, she might be able to lure the flies away.

Perenelle knew that at the heart of all magic and sorcery was imagination. It was this gift for intense concentration that characterized the most powerful magicians; before attempting any great piece of magic, they had to clearly see the end result. So before she concentrated on creating the smell, she needed to think about a location that she could see in every detail. Places flickered at the edges of Perenelle's consciousness. Places she had lived, places she knew. In her long life she'd had the opportunity to visit so much of the world. But what she needed now was someplace reasonably close, a location she knew well, and one where there was not a huge human population.

The San Francisco Dump.

She'd only been to the dump on one previous occasion. Months ago, she'd helped one of the bookshop's employees move to a new apartment. Afterward, they'd driven south toward Monster Park and the dump on Recycle Road. Always sensitive to smells, Perenelle had caught the distinctively acrid-though not entirely unpleasant-smell of the dump when they'd turned onto Tunnel Avenue. As they'd got closer, the stink had become eye-watering and the air had filled with the sound of countless seabirds calling.

Perenelle drew upon that memory now. Fixing the dump clearly in her imagination, she visualized a huge clump of stinking, corpse-smelling flowers in the very heart of the refuse and then she imagined a wind carrying the foul stink northward toward Alcatraz.

The stench of something long rotten wafted over the island and a rippling wave coursed through the massed flies.

Perenelle focused her will. She visualized the sprawling dump scattered with blooms: calla and carrion flowers poking through the rubbish, giant red and white spotted rafflesia thriving amid the junk, and the air filling with the noxious scents, mingling with the dump's own fetid odor. Then she imagined a wind pushing the scent north.

The smell that washed over the island was eye-wateringly foul. A wave pulsed through the thick carpet of flies. Some rose buzzing into the air, circled aimlessly but then dropped back onto Areop-Enap.

Perenelle was tiring, and she knew that the effort was aging her. Drawing in a deep breath, she made one final effort. She had to move the flies before the second swarm joined them. She concentrated so hard on the foul stench that her normally odorless ice white aura shimmered and took on the hint of putrefaction.

The sickening stink that flowed over the island was a nauseating mixture of fresh dung mixed with long-spoiled meat and the rancid odor of sour milk.

The flies rose from Alcatraz in a solid black blanket. They hummed and buzzed like a power station and then, as one, set off heading south toward the source of the stench. The departing insects encountered the second huge swarm as it was just about to descend on the island and both groups mingled in an enormous solid black ball; then the entire mass turned and flowed south, following the rich soupy scent.

Within moments, there was not a living fly left on the island.

Areop-Enap shook itself free of tiny carcasses and then slowly and stiffly climbed the wall, sliced the web holding Perenelle in place and lowered her gently to the ground on a narrow spiral of thread. Perenelle allowed her aura to flare for a millisecond and the cocoon of spiderweb, now dotted and speckled with trapped flies, crisped to dust. She threw back her head, pushed her damp hair back off her forehead and neck and breathed deeply. It had been suffocatingly warm in the web.

"Are you all right?" she asked, reaching out to stroke one of the Elder's huge legs.

Areop-Enap swayed to and fro. Only one of its eyes was open, and when it spoke, its normally lisping speech was slurred almost beyond comprehension. "Poison?" it asked.

Perenelle nodded. She looked around. The ruins were thick with the husks of flies and spiders. She suddenly realized she was standing ankle-deep in the tiny corpses. When all this was over, she'd have to burn her shoes, she decided. "The flies were deadly. Your spiders died when they bit into them. They were sent here to kill your army."

"And they succeeded," Areop-Enap said sadly. "So many dead, so many…"

"The flies that attacked you also carried poison," Perenelle continued. "Individually, their bites were unnoticeable, but Old Spider, you have been bitten millions-perhaps even billions-of times."

Areop-Enap's single open eye blinked slowly closed. "Madame Perenelle, I must heal. Which means I must sleep."

Perenelle stepped closer to the huge spider and brushed the husks of dead flies from its purple hair. They crackled to dust at her touch. "Sleep, Old Spider," she said gently. "I will watch over you."

Areop-Enap staggered awkwardly into the corner of the room. Two huge legs swept a section of the floor clean of dead spiders and flies, and then it attempted to spin a web. But the silk was thin, threadlike and slightly discolored. "What did you do with the flies?" Areop-Enap asked, struggling to create more web.