Christopher Golden - The Nimble Man

Fear gave way to rage. Ceridwen pressed the ice sphere at the top of her elemental staff against her face and felt the warmth of its energies spread through her. This was her magick, a simple object to channel her own innate power and to help her focus her rapport with the elements. Morrigan was Fey. She was family. Ceridwen easily countered the spell her aunt had cast, restoring her flesh, healing her face.

"You think you can run away from me?" Morrigan asked. Still floating, she spun in the air, glaring down at her niece. "From me?"

And for the first time, Ceridwen really saw the familial resemblance between herself and her aunt. The nose, the eyes, the lips

… it made her feel sick.

"I have never run from you," Ceridwen replied.

With a flutter of her eyelids and a tugging deep inside her, an ache in her loins, she reached into the wood floor and drew it to life again. Vines burst from the floor and twined around Morrigan's legs, reaching up to encircle her arms, trapping them against her body. Thorns pushed out from the vines, slicing her flesh. It would not hold her for long.

Ceridwen heard Conan Doyle scream Danny's name. She turned her gaze for just a moment from her conflict with Morrigan. In horror, she watched the demon boy impaled and then cast aside. She saw Arthur, grimly determined, bathe himself in the magicks spilling from Sweetblood's chrysalis. As Morrigan struggled to be free of her bonds, Ceridwen saw Conan Doyle passed a hand across his face.

His features shimmered, a glamour dissipating, and Ceridwen felt a stab of despair in her heart as she saw what he had done. Gore streaked the left side of Conan Doyle's face, dried and crusted there. Where his left eye had been there was now a small silver orb that crackled with magick.

The Eye of Eogain.

Conan Doyle had torn out his left eye and replaced it with a magickal construct, with the weapon he would need. Had he brought it into the house in his pocket, or in Eogain's yellowed skull, Morrigan might have gotten hold of it. But now it was his, rooted into his mind, into his brain.

He threw his arms out, let the power of Sweetblood wash over him, and the light around that magickal eye began to pulse, to churn.

"Noooo!" Morrigan screamed.

Ceridwen turned in time to see the Fey witch tear herself loose from those mystical vines, their thorns cutting her flesh to the bone. Morrigan seemed not to notice the pain of those wounds, nor even to remember that she had been fighting Ceridwen moments before.

Conan Doyle had said something about the door still being open. Ceridwen understood. He meant to send The Nimble Man back to his limbo world, and the possibility drove Morrigan to utter madness. She shrieked like the ancient sidhe and thrust herself across the room, staggering into the air, buoyed by a rush of magick so powerful it seemed to give her flight.

Ceridwen would not allow it. Conan Doyle had left her to deal with family business, and so she would.

As she raised her elemental staff, the sphere at its apex lengthened and thinned, wooden fingers closed on its new shape, and now it was a blade, sharp as diamond. Ceridwen screamed as she lunged at her aunt and drove the spear into her side, burying it deep. She thought about how many of her people had died because of Morrigan, about the grief that hung so heavily upon her uncle, her king. She thought about her mother's death in the Twilight Wars and all of the heartache that Morrigan had ever brought to Faerie.

Her aunt screamed and fell to the floor, writhing, struck to her core with the purity of elemental magick. Her black heart was poisoned by it. Ceridwen pulled the spear out of her and thrust it into her again, stabbing her chest and belly again and again. There was no honor in it, but there was so much pain.

Dr. Graves appeared beside her. In her peripheral vision, Ceridwen saw him, took in the look of concern and dismay upon his spectral features, and raised the spear to impale Morrigan again. Graves reached out and his ghostly fingers encircled her wrist.

He was a phantom, nothing more. He could not have forced her to stop. Yet somehow the next blow did not fall. Ceridwen looked down at her aunt, Fey blood bleeding out across the ravaged floor, tiny animal mewling noises coming from Morrigan's mouth, and she felt nothing. Yet she wished that Dr. Graves was more than a wandering soul, that in that moment he could have had flesh so that she could have touched his arm, leaned on him, just to feel something warm.

"Conan Doyle," Graves began.

Ceridwen spun to go to Arthur's aid, but even as she did the remnants of Sweetblood's chrysalis exploded in a blast of magickal light that blinded her and knocked her back. It passed through her and she had to catch her breath, her every sense excited beyond reason by the touch of this power. She blinked, tried to see through the brilliance, but could not make out even the silhouette of The Nimble Man and the man she had once loved.

The pain in Conan Doyle's head was sheer agony, like nothing he had ever felt before. It was as though someone were hammering a railroad spike through his skull, a shattering bit of trepanning. He screamed even as the chrysalis burst, and he clapped his hands to the side of his head. In the orbit where his left eye had been, he felt the Eye of Eogain move and pulse of its own accord. It seemed to swell, pressing against the bones of his skull, expanding. He knew his head would crack wide open at any moment.

"Good God, no!" Conan Doyle cried, and he fell to his knees.

Another wave of power from the disintegrated chrysalis passed through him. The pulse of it nearly killed him. The Eye of Eogain gathered up all of Sweetblood's magick, and siphoned all of Conan Doyle's own magick as well.

" You are nothing!" The Nimble Man roared above the blaze of light and sound. " You are only a man."

Conan Doyle forced himself to look up at the damned one. The Nimble Man had grown so large that his head and shoulders had crashed through the ceiling above, debris raining down around him. His mane of raven black hair was swept back by some unearthly wind and several black feathers swirled and eddied on the floor. His ruined wings were still dying.

What will he be like when he has regained his full power?

Behind him, Conan Doyle could see the slit in reality, the door into that limbo world where he had been an eternal prisoner until now. Morrigan had cast the spells, performed the ritual, spilled the blood and the power to open it, but she had not had a chance to close it. And now Ceridwen was dealing with her.

Gray mist still clung to The Nimble Man, residue of that limbo, detritus from nowhere. And Conan Doyle saw that the wind that ruffled the damned one's ravaged wings and jet black hair did not originate in this room, or even from this world. It was a vacuum, the void of limbo, tugging at The Nimble Man, trying to draw him back to where he belonged, back to the place where the Creator and all the devils in Hell had abandoned him.

"Only a man?" Conan Doyle screamed into the maelstrom that now began to whip around the room, Sweetblood's power and the pull of that doorway merging, twisting together. "There is no such thing as only a man! And you, pitiful thing, will never be free until the Lord himself wills it!"

All of the magick churning in the ballroom began to stream into Conan Doyle's body and he absorbed it, twitching, wracked with pain. He thrust it outward in a burst of magick that required no spell, only thought. His own magick enhanced with Sweetblood's power, Conan Doyle reached toward The Nimble Man, not with his own hands, but with fingers of glistening energy the hue of a forest's heart. Those tendrils of power lashed out, snatching at The Nimble Man.

But that was merely a distraction. For Conan Doyle's magick touched more than the damned one. Shimmering emerald energy whipped at the gray web of strands coming from that limbo realm. The Nimble Man had, all along, been in the process of extricating himself from its hold, as though dragging himself up from quicksand. Its grasp was still upon him, but it was weakening.