Mercedes Lackey: The Gates of Sleep

Marina had to combat Madam in such a way that Madam couldn’t use all that stolen power directly. So it was a very, very good thing that Elizabeth had been so very busy collecting folk ballads as the prime motive for her visit to Blackbird Cottage—and a very good thing that Marina had been employed in making fair copies of them.

Because one of them, “The Twa Magicians,” had given her the pattern for the kind of attack she could make, one that might lure Arachne into making a fatal mistake.

That curse — I can do things against it here that I couldn’t do in the real world. I can see it—and I can move it. It’s a connection between us, and I think I can make that work in my favor.

Swift as a thought, Marina the wren darted out of the cover of the leaves, and in the blink of an eye, had fastened herself in Madam’s hair.

But she didn’t stay that way for long.

With a writhing effort of will, she transmorphed herself again, and a huge serpent cast its coils about Madam in the same moment that the evil sorceress realized that something had attacked her.

By then, it was a bit late, for her arms were pinned and the serpent was getting the unfamiliar body to contract its coils. Belatedly, Madam began to struggle, and Marina squeezed harder.

But Madam wasn’t done yet. And what Marina could do—so could she.

Suddenly, Marina found her coils closing on air, as a little black cat shot out from under the lowest loop just before she collapsed in a heap under her own weight. Then the little cat turned to a great black panther, and leapt on her, landing just behind her head, pinning her to the ground and biting for the back of her neck.

That’s a ploy anyone can play —Marina became a mouse, and ran between its paws. And from behind the panther’s tail, went on the offensive again; became an elk, and charged at the big cat, tossing her into the air with her massive antlers.

Ha! Into the air the great cat flew, and she came down as a wolf.

But not just any wolf—one of the enormous Irish wolves, killed off long ago, but which had, in their time, decimated the herds of Irish elk.

Oh no—! The wolf slashed at her legs, by its build and nature designed to kill elk; Marina leaped into the air—

And became a golden eagle, dropping down onto the wolf’s back, fastening three-inch-long talons into fur and flesh and slashing at the head with her wicked beak. The Mongols of the steppes and the Cossacks of Russia hunted wolves with golden eagles—

But before the beak could connect, fur and flesh melted into a roaring tower of flame, and Marina backwinged hastily into the air before the raging fire Madam had become could set her feathers alight. But evidently Madam hadn’t heard “The Twa Magicians,” or she would have known Marina’s next transformation—

—into a torrent of water. The form most natural to a Water Mage.

Andrew was not a moment too soon; the cook had fallen across the front of the big bread-oven, although she had only just started the fire in it, and it hadn’t heated up sufficiently to give her serious burns. One of her helpers had been cutting up meat, though, and the last falling stroke of his cleaver had severed a finger.

Blood poured out of the stump, running across the table, dripping off the edge, pooling on the floor. He could easily have bled to death if Andrew hadn’t gotten there when he had.

In a moment, Andrew had the bleeding stopped, though he’d been forced to use the crudest of remedies, cauterizing the stump with a hot poker, for he hadn’t time to do anything else, and blessing the spell that kept the poor fellow insensible. Another kitchen maid was lying too near the fire in the fireplace where the big soupkettle hung—one stray ember and she’d have been aflame. He moved her out of harm’s way.

That cleared the kitchen—with his heart pounding, he ran out into the yard and the stables.

There he discovered that the animals had fallen asleep as well, which solved one problem. At least no one was going to be trampled.

Here the problem was not of fire, but of cold; left in the open, the stablehands would perish of exposure in a few hours as their bodies chilled. He solved that problem by dragging two into the kitchen, which was certainly warm enough, and the third into an empty, clean stall onto a pile of straw, where he covered the man with horse-blankets.

He dashed back inside, painfully aware of the passing of time. It was too late—he hoped—for the maids to be mending and laying fires. He couldn’t go searching room to room for girls about to be incinerated—

But his heart failed him. Oh, God. I must. He began just such a frantic search of the first floor, wondering as he did so just how long it would be before Reggie ambushed him.

Whenever it happened, it would be when Reggie was at his readiest—and he, of course, at the least ready.

Madam was running out of ideas, so she became a huge serpent, at home on land or water—which was just what Marina had hoped for.

The torrent turned immediately to hail and sleet, the enemies of the cold-blooded reptile, and the one thing they were completely vulnerable to. Marina poured her energy into this transformation—which would have to be her last, because she was exhausted, and could sense that she hadn’t much left to spend. But she didn’t have to kill Arachne. All she had to do was immobilize Madam, then get her own two hands on the woman. It was, after all, Madam’s curse, and curses knew their caster; she could feel the thing tangling them together. Over the course of this battle, Marina had been weaving the loose ends of that curse back into Madam’s powers whenever they came into physical contact. Now Marina would just send it back, if she could have a moment when she could concentrate all of her will—her trained will—on doing so.

The cold had the desired effect. The serpent tried to raise its head and failed. It tried to crawl away, and couldn’t. In a moment, it couldn’t move at all. A moment more, and it lay scarcely breathing, sheathed in ice from head to tail. The eyes glared balefully at her, red and smoldering, but Madam could not force the body she had chosen to do what she willed.

Marina fell out of the transformation, landing as herself on her knees on the ice-rimed grass beside the prone reptile. She was spent. I can’t —

I must. There was no other choice, but death. Go past the end of her strength and live and return to Andrew—or die.

Weeping with the effort, she gathered the last of her power, isolated the vile black-green energies of the curse just as she had isolated the poison in Ellen’s veins, and shoved it into her hands and held it there. With the last of her strength, she crawled to Madam—she didn’t need to pierce Arachne’s skin for this—they were both immaterial, after all—

She placed both hands on the serpent’s head—and shoved. And screamed with the seething, tearing pain that followed as the thing that had rooted in her very soul was uprooted and sent back to its host.

Reggie waited for Andrew where he had clearly been for some time; in the center of a red room, with a desk like an altar in the very center of it. An appropriate simile, since on the desk lay the dead body of a woman in a superior maid’s outfit, her throat slit, blood soaking into the precious Persian rug beneath.

Reggie was not alone, either. To one side stood—something.

There had been a sacrifice here to call an ally, and the ally had answered in person.

It wasn’t a ghost, it wasn’t material—it didn’t even have much of a form. To Andrew’s weary eyes, it was a man-shaped figure of black-green flame, translucent, and lambent with implied menace. Reggie pointed straight at Andrew. “Kill him!” he barked—a smile of triumph cutting across his face like the open wound of the woman’s throat.