Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver) (49 page)

He had a point, actually. His initial plans just involved winning Eva and punishing Dan—and he was going to wait until Jimmie was gone for that second part. So he really wasn’t absolutely evil…just more evil than I was.

“Maybe you aren’t yet as destructive as the surroundings I am seeing would suggest—but I bet this is where your plans will lead.”

“How, exactly? I get the girl I love, and I get other things I deserve…we deserve. We are an epically great musician, Tal. Only a live audience can feel the power of our ability to put magic into the music now, but with our technological know-how, we can figure out how that magic effect can be transmitted even if the music isn’t live, and then the whole world will soon be under our spell. We’ll be the leaders of the greatest band in history. And that will just be the beginning.”

I had to admit I had had a fantasy like that…when I was twelve and first realized what I could do. I was wiser now. Maybe I would end up as a musician…but because of my musical talent, not my magic.

“The rulers of Annwn will never tolerate that kind of widespread, semi-public use of magic,” I protested. “They don’t want anyone in the mortal world to realize that magic is out there. You know they will shut us…you…down.”

Dark Me snorted derisively. “The rulers of Annwn won’t dare to interfere if they know what’s good for them. We can reduce our need for them by figuring out how to forge magical weapons and such. I’ll bet all we have to do is spend some time watching Govannon. Then we won’t need them, and if they are daring enough to try to get us in this world, we will have a big surprise for them—the ability to make technology work in Annwn!

“You know we can do it. At the first sign of trouble, I’ll send an army into Annwn, and we’ll see how well faerie archers fare against machine guns. Then we’ll see how well faerie castles stand up to nukes!”

Where he was going to get nuclear weapons I didn’t bother to ask. Start controlling the minds of key U.S. military personnel, probably. Not pure evil, huh? Well, maybe not yet, but it was clear he would do whatever he needed to get what he wanted. His desire to be a rock star wasn’t innately evil, but what he would do if anyone got in his way certainly was, though he couldn’t see that it was.

“Don’t you see? That kind of thinking is what brings about all this destruction.”

Dark Me stared at me as if I were an idiot. “I wouldn’t really destroy Annwn. I wouldn’t have to. The fact that I could would be enough.”

“Perhaps the fact that you could would be enough to convince the faeries to launch a preemptive strike. Yeah, maybe they would strike first, and that’s what wipes out the whole town. Or maybe your plan works, and you nuke them. Maybe creating a nuclear holocaust in Annwn poisons our world. Or maybe you dodge that bullet, and this devastation comes from something else.”

“You’ve made military preparations yourself,” pointed out Dark Me. “We have swords. We fight. Sometimes we kill.”

“When we have to! All of my preparations have been defensive. What you want to do is invite an attack. That’s completely different!”

“What I want to do is have what I deserve, what we deserve. We have a combination of talents no one has ever had in the history of the world. I want to use those talents, just like anyone uses theirs. You, you want to hide them. You want to let the likes of Vanora and Nurse Florence order you around. You want to play by stupid rules that make no sense. No, you know what? It’s even worse than that. Rather than developing to your full potential, you want to mope around all the time about problems you could solve with just a little magic. You want to die, in fact. What was that stunt with Khalid about today? And that’s just the most recent one. How many times have you thrown yourself right into death’s jaws, even when it wasn’t even remotely necessary? Well, you may want to die, but I want to live, and I want to be a big success, and I want to have my love at my side!”

His pitch shouldn’t have been that convincing, but as he talked, the world around us morphed more and more into the way he saw things. He looked more and more like me with each passing second, and suddenly we were standing on the roof of Awen in bright sunlight, with Santa Brígida restored, even enhanced. Eva was there too, with her arm around his waist, gazing at him adoringly.

“Suicide is a sin,” observed Dark Me. “Has it occurred to you that maybe I’m not the evil one—you are! Maybe you see devastation everywhere because you are going to bring it about!”

Now it was not just that Dark Me looked like me. I was beginning to look as he had in the beginning. I could feel shadows taking the place of my flesh.

As a creature drawn from my own mind, Dark Me knew I felt guilty about the consequences of some of my actions and was using that guilt against me. I also knew that if I continued to doubt myself I would be lost. No, I wasn’t perfect, but he was far worse—and if I didn’t stop him in the next few minutes, I never would.

I raised White Hilt then, and with a considerable effort, I willed my appearance to return to normal. Dark Me raised his sword as well, expecting to meet fire with fire. He was not expecting me to shoot from the blade, not fire, but the most plausible imitation of Jimmie’s light that I could produce. I think there was also a touch of the light that shone from any sword that David was holding.

No, I wasn’t arrogant enough to think that my ability to learn spells by watching them cast gave me the ability to replicate the light of Jimmie’s goodness, and certainly not whatever power God lent to David. This was, however, all happening in the world Dark Me had created inside my head. If I believed what I created could defeat the darkness—and, more to the point, if he believed it—that would be good enough.

The light that sprayed out of my sword was still grayer than Jimmie’s light, but I could see horror in Dark Me’s eyes. He countered by spraying from his sword, not green flame, but pure darkness. As he did so, he became as he had been when I had first seen him, as did the world around him. He could not maintain his pretense of rightness when defending himself meant drawing power from my basest impulses.

We battled long on that roof. My light met his darkness midway between us, and we each strained to drive our energy forward. Trying to battle the darkness without knowing the way in which it existed in my head, it had seemed much stronger. However, once I realized the true nature of my dark side, and I knew how to deal with it, I could see it really wasn’t stronger than I was.

Sadly, it still seemed equally strong, and my gray light was not quite as effective as Jimmie’s white in countering the darkness, which was winning, inch by inch. Unless I could believe more in myself, I would eventually lose.

The problem was that part of what Dark Me had said was true. Could I believe in myself when I had caused people pain, when I had sometimes failed?

I thought about my friends. The guys believed in me enough to follow me into deadly peril. Carla had done the same, even knowing I didn’t really love her. So had Eva, even with her ambiguous feelings toward me. So had Nurse Florence. So had Khalid, who was really a total stranger. And Jimmie had stuck with me all those years when Dan and I had been hostile, treating me as much like a brother as he had Dan. Could they all be wrong?

What was David’s problem when I first met him? Not that God hadn’t forgiven him. That he hadn’t forgiven himself!

I did my damnedest to put all my mistakes behind me, and the light got a little whiter, but I was still losing ground, though at a little slower pace.

I knew Jimmie wasn’t sinless himself, but he’d had a lot fewer years for self-doubt, and he had never had other people depending on him the way I did, so any mistakes he might have made during his nine years had much less potential to load him down with guilt. That must be why he could achieve such a white light with such seemingly little effort.

I thought about trying to reach Jimmie on the outside and linking to him. Then I remembered what Merlin had said. If anyone else helped me, I would not succeed in reintegrating Dark Me into my personality, at least not completely. I had to figure out a way to beat him, but I was running out of options—and the darkness from his sword was advancing relentlessly upon me.

Come to think of it, beating him wouldn’t be enough. When I integrated my past selves, I had to get each one to realize the situation and voluntarily join with me. I had needed David’s cooperation even to manage an incomplete connection to Stan. I had needed to gain control of Alcina to get Carla back in charge of her body. I had never succeeded in merging or connecting any past life to its current self without some kind of willingness on the part of that past life. How the hell was I supposed to get that kind of cooperation from Dark Me?

What was it he had said earlier? Something like, “You want to think I am pure evil, but I’m not. I’m just willing to look after myself…” If that were really true, then I might be able to make him see “the light,” so to speak. I couldn’t read his “mind” without opening myself to other kinds of attack, so I had to try to reach him without really knowing whether my appeal would work or not.

I had been able to project what I was seeing to him earlier, so unless he had blocked that kind of connection, I should still be able to communicate with him that way. We were, after all, still aspects of the same person, despite our current separation.

Keeping up the light from my sword as best I could, I hit his mind full blast with how much damage I had suffered under Alcina’s spell. He was really already aware of those effects, of course, but he was clearly in denial. Then I simulated, as best I could, how Eva’s mind would react to the same spell and blasted him with that.

“It’s a lie!” he shrieked, obviously bothered by the reality I was forcing on him. “Eva will never feel pain, never want anything except to love me!”

“There will be damage,” I shouted. “I didn’t realize how I was being affected until the spell was broken, but the effect occurred, regardless. People don’t have to know they have cancer for it to be growing within them.”

“It’s not like that! You would have suffered nothing if the spell had remained unbroken.”

“Slavery always takes its toll, even if one is not aware he or she is being enslaved. You have my memories. You know I speak the truth.”

For good measure I worked up as many vivid scenarios as I could about how Dark Me’s schemes might hurt other people, like Stan, and hit him with each one, one at a time. Dark Me tried to resist, tried to deny the truth of my “tricks,” but I could tell he was weakening. He flashed in and out of looking like me; the world around him shuddered repeatedly back and forth between his optimistic vision and my view of the destruction, and I could swear that the darkness radiating from his sword was now speckled with gray.

Realizing what I was doing, he tried to fire images at me, images designed to strengthen my guilt and shake my confidence, but I had prepared for that kind of counterattack and remained blind to what he was trying to show me.

After what seemed like hours, the energy from his sword fused with the energy from mine instead of working against it, and the combined energy ripped the sword from his hand. By now the world around us was chaos; he was no longer able to maintain any kind of consistency. He now looked almost exactly like me, and he fell to the ground, sobbing. I closed the distance between us in seconds, and then I hugged him. (I know—you were expecting me to take his head off in one stroke, or something like that. That might have been more satisfying after all the danger he had created, but it would not have solved the problem.)

“You are…lying to me, trying to trick me,” he gasped between sobs. “I will not…believe you!”

“You already do,” I whispered gently. “If you did not, the world you have created here would still be intact.”

“I don’t want to die!” he said with surprising force. “I want to live!”

“You will live…within me. That is what you were meant to do in the first place!”

“But—”

“No buts. You remember what it was like with the past selves. So it will be with you. You will be part of me every bit as much as the original Taliesin and all the others are. We can even continue the argument we were having earlier.”

Dark Me considered that as he wiped tears off of his cheeks. “I could make a man out of you yet! I could get you to take what is rightfully ours!”

About the time pigs fly…or I use dark magic again, whichever comes first.

“You can try to move me in that direction.”

“Well, I guess that’s the best I can do for now.”

I hugged him again, and for a moment I thought his acquiescence might be a trick, that he would wrestle free, retrieve his sword, and take off my head with one stroke. Instead, he dissolved in my arms—not dissolved into tears again, just dissolved. He was a cloud of tiny particles all around me. I breathed him in, and we were one being again. (None of my past selves had created such a physical image of reunion; it was apparent to me that Dark Me was a little bit of a drama king.)

In moments the shredded remnants of the world he had created had vanished as well, leaving me free to come out of my trance and rejoin everyone else. It took me awhile to find my way back to consciousness, but at last I could feel David and Dan holding my hands, and I opened my eyes.

Merlin was nodding his head, clearly satisfied. “You have done well, young Taliesin.”

“I’m still going to have to fight temptation for the rest of my life,” I said ruefully.