Michael Scott - The Magician

“Sewers…and worse.” The Alchemyst suddenly looked very old and tired. “Below us are the legendary Catacombs of Paris,” he whispered.

Joan crouched down and pointed to where the mud around the edge of the manhole cover was disturbed. “This was opened very recently.” She looked up, her expression grim. “You’re right; they’ve taken him down into the Empire of the Dead.”

“O h, stop that!” Perenelle bashed the spider Elder on the top of the head with the flat side of the spear in her hand. The ancient symbol of power blazed white-hot and the spider darted back into the cell, the top of its skull sizzling, gray smoke curling upward.

“That hurt!” Areop-Enap snapped, more irritated than wounded. “You’re always hurting me. You nearly killed me the last time I saw you.”

“And let me remind you that the last time we met, your followers attempted to sacrifice me to activate an extinct volcano. Naturally, I was a little upset.”

“You brought down an entire mountain on top of me,” Areop-Enap said in a peculiar lisp caused by its overlong fangs. “You could have killed me.”

“It was only a small mountain,” Perenelle reminded the creature. She thought Areop-Enap was female but couldn’t be entirely sure. “You’ve survived worse.”

All of Areop-Enap’s eyes were on the spear in Perenelle’s hand. “Can you at least tell me where I am?”

“On Alcatraz. Or rather, below Alcatraz, an island in the San Francisco Bay on the West Coast of the Americas.”

“The New World?” Areop-Enap asked.

“Yes, the New World,” Perenelle said, smiling. The reclusive spider Elder often hibernated for centuries and missed huge chunks of human history.

“What are you doing here?” Areop-Enap asked.

“I am a prisoner-like you.” She stepped back. “If I lower the spear, are you going to do something stupid?”

“Like what?”

“Like jump at me.”

All the hairs on Areop-Enap’s legs rose and fell in unison. “Truce?” the spider Elder suggested.

Perenelle nodded. “Truce,” she agreed. “It seems we have a common enemy.”

Areop-Enap moved to the door of the cell. “Do you know how I got here?”

“I was rather hoping you would be able to tell me that,” Perenelle said.

Keeping several wary eyes on the glowing spear, the spider took a tentative step out into the corridor. “The last place I remember was Igup Island. It’s part of Polynesia,” it added.

“Micronesia,” Perenelle said. “The name changed more than one hundred and fifty years ago. Just how long have you been asleep, Old Spider?” she asked, calling the creature by its common name.

“I’m not sure…when did we last meet and have our little misunderstanding? In humani years, Sorceress,” it added.

“When Nicholas and I were on Pohnpei investigating the ruins of Nan Madol,” Perenelle said immediately. She had an almost perfect memory. “That was about two hundred years ago,” she added.

“I probably took a nap sometime about then,” Areop-Enap said, stepping out into the corridor. Behind it, the cell came alive with millions of spiders. “I remember waking from a very nice nap,” it said slowly. “I saw the Magician Dee…but he was not alone. There was someone else- something else-with him. Instructing him.”

“Who?” Perenelle asked urgently. “Try and remember, Old Spider, this is important.”

Areop-Enap closed each of its eyes as it tried to recall what had happened. “Something is preventing me,” it said, all its eyes opening simultaneously. “Something powerful. Whoever was with him was protected by an extraordinarily powerful magical shield.” Areop-Enap looked up and down the corridor. “That way?” it asked.

“This way.” Perenelle pointed with the spear. Even though Areop-Enap had called a truce, Perenelle was not prepared to stand unarmed before one of the most powerful of the Elders. “I wonder why he wanted you prisoner.” A sudden thought struck her and she stopped so quickly that Areop-Enap brushed against her, almost sending her face-first onto the muddy floor. “If you had to make a choice, Old Spider, if you had to choose between returning the Elders to this world or leaving it in the hands of the humani, who would you choose?”

“Sorceress,” Areop-Enap said, mouth gaping to reveal its terrifying teeth in what might have been a smile, “I was one of the Elders who voted that we should leave the earth to the ape-kin. I recognized that our time on this planet was over; and in our arrogance we had almost destroyed it. It was time to step back and leave it to the humani.”

“So you would not be in favor of the return of the Elders?”

“No.”

“And if there was a fight, who would you stand with-the Elders or the humani?”

“Sorceress,” Areop-Enap said very seriously, “I’ve stood with the humani before. Along with my kin, Hekate and the Witch of Endor, I helped bring civilization to this planet. Despite my appearance, my loyalties are with the humani.”

“And that’s why Dee had to capture you now. He couldn’t afford to have someone as powerful as you fight alongside humankind.”

“Then the confrontation must be very close indeed,” Areop-Enap said. “But there’s nothing Dee and the Dark Elders can do until they secure the Book of…” Areop-Enap’s voice trailed away. “They’ve got the Book?”

“Most of it,” Perenelle confirmed miserably. “And you should know the rest of it. You are familiar with the prophecy of the twins?”

“Of course. That old fool, Abraham, was always twittering on about the twins and scribbling down his indecipherable prophecies in the Codex. I never believed a word of them myself. And in all the years I knew him, he never got a single thing right.”

“Nicholas found the twins.”

“Ah.” Areop-Enap was silent for a moment, then shrugged what shoulders it had, eyes blinking in unison. “So Abraham was right about something; well, that’s a first.”

While Perenelle slogged through ankle-deep mud, recounting what she had discovered in the cells above, she noticed that despite its enormous size, the spider Elder glided over the top of the muck. Behind them, the walls and ceilings pulsed with millions of spiders as they followed the Elder. “I wonder why Dee didn’t kill you.”

“He couldn’t,” Areop-Enap said matter-of-factly. “My death would send ripples through myriad Shadowrealms. Unlike Hekate, I have friends, and too many of them would come to investigate. Dee would not want that.” Areop-Enap stopped when it came to the first of the spears Perenelle had pushed down. A huge leg turned it over, and the spider examined the faint traces of the hieroglyph painted on the spearhead. “I’m curious,” it lisped. “These Words of Power. They were ancient when the Elders ruled the earth. And I thought we had destroyed both them and all record of them. How did the English Magician rediscover them?”

“I was wondering the same thing,” Perenelle said. She turned the spear in her hand to look at the single square hieroglyph. “Maybe he copied the spell from somewhere.”

“No,” Areop-Enap said. “The individual words are powerful, it is true, but Dee set them up in the particular pattern that kept me trapped in the cell. Every time I tried to escape, it was as if I ran into a solid wall. I’ve seen that pattern before, but it was in the days before the Fall of Danu Talis. In fact, now that I think of it, the last time I saw that pattern was before we had even created the island continent and dragged it up from the ocean floor. Someone instructed Dee; someone knew how to create these magical Wards, someone who’d seen them.”