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Horde Thief
Chapter 49
Harry invites you in in a few short words and leads you along the hall to the stairs leading up to the top floor of his home. It's not a large place, but it's certainly a home, not a house. You know the difference, but it's hard to focus on through the layers of protections boiling in the air around it. The wards you'd seen on your first visit were still there, but now it's apparent that they're only the foundation of something much more powerful. You've seen better, but only in a few places in this world. And there are more layers still there, waiting to be activated. It is, in simple terms, a magical fortress; but one that is failing to protect those within.
"How is she?" You ask as you follow your host up the stairs. There'd only been so much said on the phone before you'
d willed yourself here, after all. You've sent a short message to John from your mobile phone before Harry had answered the door, asking him to smooth the waters. Expansion is becoming more difficult, or at least the legal opposition to it is. And for all their talk of market-based stability – you let the thoughts fall away. John would handle it.
"Tired mostly," Ser Harry replies, turning at the top of the staircase. "She said her head hurt. But Mouse wasn't happy, and when I looked at her," his words hiccup over something, a memory perhaps, so small a pause that it's almost unnoticeable. He shakes his head, the anger and pain very clear on his pale face. "There's a spell of some sort, sunk into her soul and eating away at her life. I've seen magic like it before. First it makes you tired, then it puts you to sleep, then it or something else kills you. And," he adds, unknowingly cutting you off, "it's not just her, Viserys. I wish to god it was."
"What do you mean?" You ask, very precisely, something dull and hot flickering in the pit of your stomach as you stop in front of a closed wooden door.
"I tried to do a tracking spell," he speaks quietly, not wishing to be heard through the door, you expect. "And it went insane. Usually I'm able to lock on to the source of a spell pretty quick, but when the source is out of range, my spell locks on to targets instead."
"And?" Harry produces a sound that you might be able to call a laugh if by someone who'd never heard real laughter before.
"My focus snapped in half before I could push the range out beyond the Midwest. And according to the Council, it's even bigger than that." There's something very wrong in Harry's voice, a sick sort of edge to his words that turned them into blades of harsh sound. "Calls are coming in from all over the planet, Viserys. And not even putting Maggie in a Circle was enough to break the spell. That mean," you raise a hand, not rudely, but a simple gesture of understanding. There's at least one solution you know for the draining of lifeforce. You can try that first, then something greater if it fails. After that, yes. That will suffice.
"Alright," you tell Harry, facing him squarely. You've faced things like this before. Never something quite so large, a part of your mind whispers, but you swallow the words and choke them in fire. Paying attention to that is a waste of time that won't help anyone. First things first.
"There are a few spells I know that might be able to protect her. After that," and if they work, you don't add. Months before, you'd never consider that possible, but this world's magic is tricky in how it finds ways through wards that you'd once been certain were absolute. "After that, I go looking for the source of this. That's why you called me, isn't it." Harry nods once, and you match it in acknowledgement. "You were right to."
He pushes the door open and leads you into the room. It's a pretty place, wide and open, with a bed at the top of a set of little stairs and a wide space below it where Harry's dog currently sits. Not really a dog, you know, but it you don't know the proper name, and it serves as a title. You still weren't sure about the name, though.
He lets out a low growl as you enter the room, but there's nothing aggressive in it, simply the sound of a guardian making it very clear that he's there. You nod once to accept his presence, and he settles back as Harry leads you forward. You let the magic around your eyes bleed through a little from your glamour, looking over Maggie, and the dull heat deep within stabs sharp and full of rage.
"Calmly," Varys whispers to you from her place beneath the mantle of your cloak, where she'd leapt to a moment before you'd completed your spell of translation.
"You know this is not your doing." The words are true, but even so – you let more fire consume those thoughts, searing them clean. Not now. Still, you send a thankful word back to the little dragon. Helping even now.
Maggie is blissfully asleep, but her face is very pale, beads of sweat standing out on her skin. She doesn't appear to be in pain, but the tendrils of dark magic are winding steadily deeper into her being. Pain will come with that, you think, given enough time, but not yet. Wishcraft burns your soul for a moment, but it's a light touch compared to other things you have used it for as you settle a warding of life around the girl, sufficient to blunt the touch of the most powerful creatures of death you've ever encountered. The silvery veil sparks against the dark intruders…and yet they still remain. As you watch, they even continue to grow. Another tack, then.
You gather the magic founded in your lineage, the power which gave you the ability to return a young woman to the girl she'd once been. You set that strength against that which is wrapped around your soul, perhaps the greatest spell you have ever come to know, and your eyes go very wide as the fabric of your spell tears itself apart as it strikes. Something slams against your soul in that moment, too possessed of intent to just be the spell, and you feel the Conqueror's Crown burn cold against your scalp. Then the moment passes, and Maggie is still asleep, and the power draining her is still there.
You stare at it, a feeling that is too pure to be anger bubbling now within you. What purpose could this possibly serve? You turn to Harry. There are other things you could try, but you know him now. He wouldn't accept them, not except as a last resort, and you are not in that time yet. You shake your head, unwilling to speak, and he leads you back out of the room, sealing a Circle around his daughter before you go. Neither of you says anything until you are downstairs again.
"Nothing?" Harry asks. He already knows that answer, but he needs to hear it, you think.
"Nothing. I have not felt power like that," you trail off, unsure of what you were planning to say. Have you ever? "Still, there is a trail I can follow. And if there is truth to be found, I will find it. May I borrow one of your chairs?"
"Of course," Harry says, gesturing to the two in the cosy living room.
"This may take a little while," you explain, taking one. "Not long, but enough that I would prefer to sit than stand."
"Do you need anything?" Harry asks immediately, but you shake your head, truly thankful for the thought even in the middle of such chaos.
"Just time." You tell him, and then reach down into the wellspring once again, this time for a magic that goes beyond truth and reason and the very concept of lies. To let you see what stalks Maggie and untold thousands like her. Drain like that could mean a failing in the spell, but you're more tempted to believe it means something more. Time and place means something in powerful magic, it always has. But what? You don't know enough about this world to tell.
"Let me see." You speak the words in the tongue of dragons, and the world blows away around you, as if it had all been painted dust hanging in the air, suddenly brushed by a gust of wind. You feel the world shift and move around you, spinning out from where you're still sat, you can feel it, across an ocean of blue and green. You brush the wings of an airplane in flight as you find land a pair of what feels like instants later, angling south towards green land clinging to the banks of vast river delta, beyond it only sand and baking heat.
The sun blurs, passing once, twice, three times, and then setting again. The moon hangs in the sky above, and somehow you know it is barely short of midnight. Three days, what day was that? The vision does not give you time to answer. Instead you plummet down, towards pyramids of stone and a city built on the bones of their makers. Blinding crimson fire blazes up before you, a block to your path, but you are not so easily turned away. You whisper a word, invested with power that is more than magic, and the instant before you meet the wall of flame, you turn in the air and slide through it like a phantom.
A powerful ward, perhaps, but not a match for you.
The vision blurs, changes, you can feel the soft seat beneath you, yet also firm stone at your feet and dry air around you. There is a block of unmarked stone before you, no, not a block, a coffin. You can see the faint line in the stone where it would be opened, but your attention is drawn to what lies on that lid.
Coins of tarnished silver ring an old cup of moulded clay, half full of blood and with a crack of bloody light in its side. The entire ensemble pulses with power. Then the vision whirls you up, away from it all, spinning madly fit to shake the entire picture apart. The last thing you see before it does is the silhouette of an angel of shadows leap from the top of the pyramid. Its wings beat once, and it is the size of a wyvern, then a dragon, then something more. It sweeps across the Earth, and you feel the death following its vast shadow. Then it sweeps over you, dark and cold pressing against the dream-self that you've become. The suffocating mass tightens around it, painful now, and the world fades into grey before going completely black.
You lurch forward in your chair, and the reality of Harry's home reasserts itself. Harry steps forward very quickly, anxious, and you raise your hand again to stop him. "I'm alright," you say, around vast breaths, refilling your lungs and letting them empty. You blink away a few stray tears, and take another breath, calmer this time, making sure everything you saw is still there. A look at the clock tells you that most of an hour has passed.
"Did you get what you needed?" Harry asks you.
"I think so," you nod, your mouth twisting with the unpleasant admission ahead. "But I'm not sure what all of it means. The place, maybe, but not everything else."
"Tell me," he says, and so you do. He stays silent as you explain passing of time and the pyramid, though recognition glimmers in his eyes when you talk about the second one. A place he knows, then. Then you come to the coins, and his entire body goes tense with pure rage. He controls it, but you know it's there.
"They were arrayed around a cup," you continue, and he cuts you off with a question.
"How many?" You consider the question, but thinking back it was never clear. Ten, twenty? Were there more?
"I don't know," you admit finally, "it wasn't clear, and I couldn't see all of them from the angle it showed me them from. But they were all set around a cup." You see the question on Harry's lips, and make a gesture. An image of the simple clay chalice appears above your hand, and the question is lost in a sudden hiss of indrawn breath.
"Then there was…I was pulled back. And there was the figure of an angel at the top of the pyramid. It jumped from there, and with every wingbeat it grew larger, spreading a shadow across the entire world. And I felt death in that shadow."
Harry's face goes very pale. "How long did you say, Viserys?" He asks faintly. "How many days?"
"Midnight, three sunrises from now." You complete the math in the same moment he does. "This Friday. Is that-" you begin to ask.
"Oh god," Your friend's face is absolutely bloodless as his greater knowledge of this world brings the final picture into stark, horrific clarity. "Passover."
