Michael Scott - The Magician

“The Morrigan.” Perenelle leaned over the hole and snapped her fingers. A slender feather of soft white light peeled off her fingertips and drifted down the hole, disappearing into the gloom below, shedding a flickering milky light on the streaked and dripping walls. The light had also revealed the narrow ladder, which turned out to be little more than spikes driven at irregular angles into the wall. The spikes, each no longer than four inches, were thick with rust and dripping moisture. Leaning over, she caught the first spike and tugged hard. It seemed solid enough.

Perenelle twisted around and slid one leg into the opening. Her foot found one of the spikes and immediately slipped off. Drawing her leg back out of the hole, she tugged off her sandals and tucked them into her belt. She could hear the flapping of birds-thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of them-drawing closer. She knew her tiny expenditure of power to melt the stone and light up the interior of the tunnel would have alerted the Morrigan to her position. She had only moments before the birds arrived…

Perenelle put her leg into the shaft again, her bare foot touching the spike. It was cold and slimy beneath her skin, but at least she was able to get a better grip. Grasping handfuls of tough grass, she lowered herself, her foot finding another spike, and then she reached down and caught a spike in her left hand. She winced. It felt disgusting, squelching beneath her fingers. And then she smiled; how she’d changed. When she was a girl, growing up in Quimper in France all those years ago, she’d gone paddling in rock pools, picking and eating raw shellfish. She’d wandered barefoot through streets that were ankle deep in mud and filth.

Testing each step, Perenelle climbed down the length of the shaft. At one point a spike broke away beneath her foot and went clanging into the darkness. It seemed to fall for a long time. She lay back against the foul wall, feeling the damp soak through her thin summer dress. Holding on desperately, she sought another spike. She felt the metal nail in her hand shift, and for a heart-stopping moment, she thought it was going to pull free of the wall. But it held.

“A close call. I thought you were going to be joining me,” the ghost of de Ayala said, materializing out of the gloom directly before her face.

“I’m not that easy to kill,” Perenelle said grimly, continuing to climb down. “Though it would be funny if, having survived decades of concentrated attacks from Dee and his Dark Elders, I was to die in a fall.” She looked at the vague shape of the face before her. “What’s happening up there?” She jerked her head in the direction of the opening of the shaft, visible only because of the wisps of gray fog that curled and dribbled into it.

“The island is covered with birds,” de Ayala said. “Perhaps a hundred thousand of them; they are perched on every available surface. The Crow Goddess has gone into the heart of the prison, no doubt in search of the sphinx.”

“We don’t have much time,” Perenelle warned. She took another step and her foot sank up to the ankle in thick gooey mud. She had reached the bottom of the shaft. The mud was icy cold, and she could feel the chill seeping into her bones. Something crawled over her toes. “Which way?”

De Ayala’s arm appeared, ghostly white, directly in front of her, pointing to the left. She realized that she was standing at the mouth of a tall, roughly hewn tunnel that sloped gently downward. De Ayala’s ghostly luminescence lit up the coating of spiders’ webs that sheathed the walls. They were so thick that it looked as if the walls were painted silver.

“I cannot go any farther,” the ghost said, his voice rasping around the walls. “Dee has placed incredibly powerful warding spells and sigils in the tunnel; I cannot get past. The cell you are looking for is about ten paces ahead and on your left-hand side.”

Although Perenelle was reluctant to use her magic, she knew she had no choice. She was certainly not going to wander into a tunnel in pitch-darkness. She snapped her fingers and a globe of white fire winked to life over her right shoulder. It shed a soft opalescent glow over the tunnel, picking out each spider’s web in intricate detail. The webs stretched in a thick curtain right across the opening. She could see webs woven on top of webs and wondered how many spiders were down here.

Perenelle stepped forward, the light moving with her, and she suddenly saw the first of the Wards and protections Dee had placed along the tunnel. A series of tall metal-tipped wooden spears had been implanted deep in the muddy floor. The flat metal head of each spear was painted with an ancient symbol of power, a square hieroglyph that would have been familiar to the ancient Maya peoples of Central America. She could see at least a dozen spears, each painted with a different symbol. She knew that individually the symbols were meaningless, but together they set up an incredibly powerful zigzagging network of raw power that crisscrossed the corridor with invisible beams of black light. It reminded her of the complicated laser alarms banks used. The power had no effect on humans-all she could feel was a dull buzzing and a tension at the back of her neck-but it was an impenetrable barrier to any of the Elder Race, the Next Generation and the Creatures of the Were. Even de Ayala, a ghost, was affected by the barrier.

Perenelle recognized some of the symbols on the spearheads; she had seen them in the Codex and etched onto the walls of the ruins at Palenque in Mexico. Most of them predated mankind; many of them were even older than the Elders and belonged to the race that had inhabited the earth in the far-distant past. They were the Words of Power, the ancient Symbols of Binding, designed to protect-or trap-something either incredibly valuable or extraordinarily dangerous.

She had a feeling this was going to be the latter.

And she also wondered where Dee had discovered the ancient words.

Sloshing through the thick mud, Perenelle took her first step into the tunnel. All the spiderwebs rustled and trembled, a sound like the whispering rustle of leaves. There must be millions of spiders in here, she thought. They didn’t frighten her; she’d come up against creatures much more frightening than spiders, but she was aware that there were probably poisonous brown recluses, black widows or even South American hunting spiders amongst the mass of arachnids. A bite from one of them would certainly incapacitate her, possibly even kill her.

Perenelle jerked one of the spears out of the mud and used it to swipe away the web. The square symbol on the spearhead glowed red and the gossamer webs hissed and sizzled where the spear touched them. A thick shadow that she knew was a mass of spiders flowed backward into the gloom. Advancing slowly down the narrow tunnel, she knocked over each spear she came to, allowing the filthy mud to wash away the Words of Power, gradually dismantling the intricate pattern of magic. If Dee had gone to all this trouble to trap something in the cell, it meant that he couldn’t control it. Perenelle wanted to find out what it was and free it. But as she drew nearer, the globe over her shoulder throwing a flickering light across the corridor, another thought crossed her mind: had Dee imprisoned something that even she should be afraid of, something ancient, something horrible? Suddenly, she didn’t know if she was making a terrible mistake.

The doorposts and the entrance to the cell had been painted with symbols that hurt her eyes to look at. Harsh and angular, they seemed to shift and twist on the rock, not unlike the writing in the Book of Abraham. But whereas the letters in the ancient book formed words in languages she mostly understood, or at least recognized, these symbols twisted into unimaginable shapes.