C.E. Murphy – Mountain Echoes (страница 9)

I was not prepared for sympathetic magic to skyrocket across the power circle, south to north, and catch me in the breastbone. Catch me right where my magic had lodged itself for all the long months before I’d really accepted it, in fact. Not my heart: my center. I wasn’t prepared for its vainglorious brilliance, four shades of brightness that whipped and blended together so fast they became white. And I was really not prepared for the boom of power that erupted when that magic and my own fused.

A visible ring bounced through the power circle like a shock wave, vibrating the mountain under our feet. Vibrating the air, vibrating sound, vibrating everything: I could’ve been standing under the bells at Notre Dame and gotten less resonance.

The gasp couldn’t have been audible, not beneath all the power noise, but it felt audible. Everyone took a step forward, a step closer together, like we were drawn in by that power burst. Part of my brain screamed an objection, not wanting to get any closer to the Nothing than it had to, but it wasn’t the part in control. I moved just like everyone else.

The Nothing shrank. Rolled in on itself, no farther than we’d stepped forward, but it got just a little bit smaller. Emotion spiked through the power circle, hope and confusion and flaring confidence. We stepped forward again, magic ricocheting between me and the southern point like some kind of earthbound display of Northern Lights. My power sluiced along the outsides of the other adept’s magic, encompassing it with silver and blue. The four bands of bright colors spun inside mine, and everybody else’s swam alongside ours, drawn back and forth at light speeds. From inside I could See the different auras, though only faintly: mostly they remained blended to brilliance, subsuming themselves to the massive working of white magic. We all took one more step forward, coming much closer to the Nothing, and a sense of nervous anticipation swept through the working. Six of them were waiting: waiting to see what the southern and northern compass points to their circle did next.

I wasn’t sure voices would carry through the Nothing between us. I clenched my stomach, preparing myself for a fight, and sent that feeling of determination through the magic.

It bounced back at me so fast it felt like laughter. A grin stretched across my face, wild and a little crazy. I spread my arms, knowing I was much too far away to catch the hands of the elders nearest me, but feeling like it was a statement: Come and get me. Catch me if you can. The same feeling crashed back at me from the other side of the circle, all kinds of reckless and foolhardy and ready for a fight. I knew the feeling intimately. I’d been like that as a kid. Who was I kidding: most of the time I was still like that. I hadn’t been set on the warrior’s path just because there was a big bad monster who needed taking out. I was sort of an aggressive little punk most of the time. Mouthy and full of ’tude, even—or especially—when it wasn’t warranted.

God knew I had plenty to introspect over, but even I thought this was sort of a weird time for it to crop up. I told myself it was the familiarity of emotion in my partner’s magic, and let it go. There were far more important things to worry about right now.

Like how to crush the Nothing into a tiny ball of, er, nothing. We had some kind of major power blend going on here, far stronger than I’d anticipated. Stronger than the Master had anticipated, too, I was willing to bet. But I didn’t know if the Nothing could be undone, or only captured. Wondering made my head hurt, so I took action instead of thinking anymore, and squeezed my shields down.

The first couple advances we’d made had been instinctive. This was deliberate, and there was a world of difference. The Nothing made a sound, a shriek of anger that reverberated in my ear bones. It collapsed in, shrinking visibly as the southern adept squeezed, too, and as the others followed our lead.

Glee rose up from my counterpart. Glee and triumph and all sorts of other premature but obvious emotions that I was inclined to share. I’d had a hell of a couple of weeks. I thought I deserved one easy win, especially if it made my homecoming a little easier. But I wasn’t quite foolish enough to do a touchdown dance yet. Shriveling evil magic was not the same as eliminating evil magic, and I wanted it good and eliminated. My shields were rock-solid, and I wrapped them in the idea of a net, just to help squish everything down a little more. Step by step we closed in around the Nothing, and with every step the others became more confident. It made a positive feedback loop, creating stronger magic because our belief in it was stronger. I had no idea how much time passed before I touched hands with my right neighbor, and then moments later with my left, but suddenly we were a physical construct as well as a magical one, and the Nothing roiled and shrieked and spat fury in the circle created by our linked hands.

Someone finally spoke aloud. Not either of my closest cohorts, and not the next people over, either. I could see them, but the Nothing still rose tall enough to block the other three from my line of vision. I figured it was the southern compass point, the other one who was flinging as much magic potential around as I was. She had a light voice, still a teenager’s voice, which fit with the glimpse I’d had of a slight figure, on my way into the holler.

“It’s a time traveler,” she said. “It’s trying to slide through. Forward, backward, I don’t think it cares very much as long as it pulls bad shit through. We’ve gotta cut it out. We’ve gotta remove it from the timeline entirely. That’s the only way it’s gonna be vulnerable enough for us to smash it.”

I had the impression she was lecturing me specifically. That kind of made sense, since everybody else had been here for days, and she had no way of knowing I’d recognized the Nothing’s time-slip capability, too. She sounded pretty sure she knew how to deal with it, and for a half second I wondered if I could’ve been her, self-assured and rife with magic, if I hadn’t blown it so badly half a lifetime ago.

Not that it mattered, because I had blown it, and I’d largely come to terms with that. I let regret go, said, “Sounds like a plan,” to my unseen counterpart, and let her take the lead.

For the first time, an edge of alarm slipped through the power circle. Her alarm, not mine, which made me think maybe giving her the lead hadn’t been so bright, but it also seemed not only rude but potentially dangerous to yank it back now. Besides, I wasn’t at all sure how a person went about yanking things out of time to castrate them. I knew how to yank things around in time, albeit clumsily, but that didn’t seem like the skill set necessary here. The kid across the circle had sounded sufficiently confident that I’d assumed she did know.

Eventually I was going to learn that assumptions were dangerous, but today was clearly not that day. I breathed, “Calmly, calmly,” and sent a ripple of healing power through the circle. I didn’t usually use it as a soporific, but it seemed to help. I felt the multistranded adept’s aura and power strengthen again.

An image popped into my head. I didn’t know if it was my own or my counterpart’s, though if it was hers I really wanted that nifty telepathic aspect to my magic. Either way, the idea of a sensory deprivation tank came to mind. That, in essence, was what we needed to do to the Nothing. Except where I was supposed to find a tank so secluded that time didn’t affect it, I didn’t know. Well, except maybe on the event horizon of a black hole, but that led to all sorts of other really bad possibilities that I wasn’t eager to explore.

It did, though, give me an idea. Space was affected by time: anything that light passed through kind of had to be. But the idea of the dark side of the moon introduced itself to me, and I seized on it. It wasn’t really dark, I knew that, it was just that we never saw its other face, so maybe that was close enough. I was willing to take it.

I filled my shields with that idea: cold black timelessness, lingering in the silence, no pressure or need for change. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good, and the cold started crackling the edges of the Nothing. That was shamanism: change instigated by belief. I could turn the air within that crushing shield to a space vacuum without harming any of the nonspacesuit-clad elders in the power circle. And that little inkling of time that was still part of the equation, that was no big deal, that was—

—slipping.

Slipping, cracking, sliding out of control, bringing the Nothing back into the world because it still had something to latch on to. I clamped down, trying to ignore it, trying to hold on to the possibility of taking something entirely out of time, trying to remember just how much depended on me doing that, and felt a jillion little bug feet run up my spine and send shivers all over me. They all leapt off, my spine abandoned by an infinitesimal number of bugs, and I lost control of the magic.