Heart's Magic (40 page)

"How long have you been
living here with these creatures?" she asked Nigel absentmindedly,
worrying over why Harry didn't rouse.

"I don't know. How long has
it been since I escaped Holborn Tower?"

"Hmm--maybe three weeks?"
She had pushed Harry deeper into unconsciousness, so she ought to
be able to bring him back. If she could figure out how she had done
it. "Have you been here all that time?"

"I think so." Nigel
frowned. He folded the knife, put it in the bag, fastened the
latch, and gathered it into his protective embrace. Then he seemed
to realize he was still holding the handkerchief he'd used to clean
the instruments Elinor had used. "It's all bloody."

"Yes. Shall I take it
back?" It was Harry's blood. Harry was her familiar. She should be
careful with it.

Elinor held her hand out and
Nigel laid the handkerchief in it. Somehow, touching the blood
Harry had shed while she removed the dart allowed her to follow the
path he had taken to his deep sleep. She found him there, curled up
on a massive pile of dream world feather beds.
Harry.
She called him once more
without speaking aloud.
Harry, wake
up.

Oh. Wot?
His mental shape blinked up at her.
Is
it time?

Yes, it is. Time to
go.

All right, then.
He opened his actual eyes. "Why does my leg
hurt?"

"You got shot. Again."
Elinor took another moment to check the status of his wound.
Already the flesh was knitting back together, though not as quickly
as she'd have liked. She pulled magic from the handkerchief and
used it to replace the magic destroyed by the dart. "It's healing
well, though. You ought to be able to walk on it long enough to get
away from here."

"Where is 'ere?" Harry sat
up and looked around. "Hello, Nigel."

"Tomlinson." Nigel nodded
in brusque acknowledgment.

"I'm guessing somewhere in
the East End?" Elinor looked to Nigel for confirmation.

He nodded. "A bit north of
Whitechapel Road, near Osborn Street."

"I think I know the place.
Damn, woman--me best trousers, ruined."

"Better the trousers than
your leg." Elinor was not sympathetic. "And you've better
trousers."

"I am not impressed with
your choice of companions, Nigel." Harry eyed the machines still
wandering more or less aimlessly around the room.

"Neither have I been, truth
to tell." Nigel shrugged. "They were here when I arrived. They are
a nuisance, stealing anything left unattended, but they keep the
rats down. They have never interfered with me."

"How did you come here?"
Elinor asked. "How did you find this place?"

Nigel looked troubled. "I
don't-- Much of that night, leaving the tower and afterward, is a
blur. I--I might have been led. Not by a machine, but by who or
what I do not recall."

"We need to leave." Elinor
had felt the need since she woke and now an urgency gripped her so
tight, it was all she could do not to run screaming for the door.
Except Harry couldn't run and she wouldn't leave him.

"Go right ahead." Nigel
plunked himself down on his lump of a mattress again. "I won't be
here when you send your bully boys after me."

"You can't prefer this
filth and cold to the tower." Elinor couldn't believe
it.

"No warding
here."

"True enough." Harry tried
to stand and fell back to the bricks. The machines startled and
began running about even more agitatedly. Elinor clasped his
forearm and braced herself, serving as an anchor for Harry to pull
against as he got to his feet. She put his arm over her shoulders
to provide support. He would fall if she didn't.

"Tell you wot, Nigel."
Harry put all his weight on his good leg, leaning very slightly on
Elinor. "I got people 'ere who'll keep an eye on ya. Long as you
behave yourself--don't cause trouble or 'urt anybody--I won't send
Briganti down 'ere after ya. I know you weren't part of the attack
on Elinor and me--"

"What attack?" Nigel
frowned. "You don't have authority to send Briganti
anywhere."

"Oh, that's right--you
scarpered before Sir Billy--Sir William resigned." Harry filled him
on all the changes of position. "And the attack was from Dodd and
Allsup and all the rest of your cowardly cronies afraid of
change."

"
You?
Head of the Magician's Council?
That's--" Nigel puffed right to the edge of outrage, but couldn't
quite work up the proper head of steam to go over. "Not
Carteret?"

"He didn't want it. Nor did
the ladies."

"
Harry.
" The men could talk politics
for hours, if she let them. "We need to leave. I want you in a
proper bed somewhere warm."

He raised a wicked eyebrow
at her. She could have phrased that better, should have known even
his new, proper self wouldn't be able to resist it. "Well, why
didn't you say so?"

She rolled her eyes at him
and started walking toward the door. Since she was holding Harry
up, he was forced to limp along with her.

The machines had settled
somewhat from their furious racketing about, but as Elinor and
Harry moved toward the door, the machines ramped up their motion,
making their odd whistling, squealing, clicking noises at each
other. They were moving to block the path to the door, Elinor
realized.

"Kitty" scrambled toward
them over the bodies of the other machines and Elinor turned,
placing herself between the cat-skull creature and Harry. "That's
the one that shot you," she told him. "You can't take being shot
again."

"Didn't it shoot you too?"
he growled. He already had his wand out. Wands, one in each hand.
"How did it get you here?"

"It didn't shoot me with a
dart." Elinor fumbled in her pocket for her wand, but could only
find her pouch full of pegs. "It was something else. It felt like
an electrical shock."

"Can we get out another
way?" Harry tossed a strange blue light toward the rafters as he
turned to survey the rest of the building. The machines didn't like
it.

"Stop disturbing them!"
Nigel pulled his feet and all his possessions on top of his
mattress. "They are unpleasant when they are disturbed."

The machines clashed
mandibles together, snapped pincers, crowding closer. They were
wary of the wands Harry pointed at them. The one in his hand draped
over her shoulder was steel, the other, copper.

"
Nigel.
" Elinor demanded his attention,
backing from the threatening machines. "Is there another
door?"

"No. Only the one. Don't
upset them. They're bad when they're upset."

"Walls are 'alf rotted."
Harry pointed his copper wand at the walls, directing the crackling
light to illuminate them. "Could probably knock straight
through."

Elinor had finally found
her wand. She had a handful of pegs in the other hand. She needed
to keep hold of Harry's hand, she thought, or his wrist--bare skin
somewhere--so they could reinforce each other's magic. She put her
wand in the same hand with the pegs, dropping one in the
fumble.

It bounced off her skirt,
rolled down, hit a bent hoop, and went flying out toward the
machines. "Wood burns--" she said tentatively as she watched it
go.

"So it does.
Ignis!
" With a twitch of
his wand, Harry lit the peg up as it dropped into the mass of
machines. Elinor could
feel
the twist he gave to the magic to turn the flame
to refiner's fire, hotter than any ordinary fire.

One of the machines
squealed and ran in stuttering circles, setting its compatriots
alight, until it collapsed and burned. The other machines ignored
their own burning hulls, as if they couldn't even feel
it.

"You'll set the city on
fire!" Nigel cried. He was on his feet, standing on his
mattress.

"Don't think so." Harry
didn't sound concerned. "Everything's too wet. And refiner's fire's
easier to control than the other sort." As if to prove it, he
circled the tip of his wand and the fire skittered over the top of
the burning machines, spreading to more of the creatures. As long
as the magical fire had fuel, it could spread. It would keep
burning even without fuel until extinguished by an alchemist but it
wouldn't spread, or so Harry had told her.

Elinor felt the magic
adjust again, confining the fire to burn only these creatures and
others like them. Not that it seemed to be doing much
damage.

"It'll burn through the
armor," Harry muttered. "Someday."

Harry was
her
familiar, but so far,
he was the one doing all the magic. But what could she do? Would
innocent blood magic work on a machine?

Elinor was about to try it,
gathering magic from Harry's injury, as she had learned to do only
this afternoon, when the machines began to climb one atop the
other. Not as they had earlier, clambering over each other to reach
a target, treating the other machines as obstacles in their way.
This climbing was more purposeful, especially when the machines
began to lock onto each other, as if--

Each machine was made of
disparate parts, gathered up from the detritus left behind when
people abandoned the dead zones and joined together to function as
a whole. Now, the individual machines seemed to be joining together
as parts creating some kind of--of super machine.

Elinor invoked the blood
from Harry's wound, shaped the spell, adding more power from
Harry's magic, and threw it at the oversized creature, now about as
high as her shoulder. The magic shook the thing, knocked it awry. A
few machines went crashing back to the ground, their locking
mechanisms failing. Other machines took their place, as if nothing
at all had happened.

"Nigel, you should come
over here with us," she said, hiding the fear quaking in the pit of
her stomach. "I don't think it will be safe there in another few
minutes."

"They've never done that
before." The wizard's voice had gone cracked and
quavery.

"All the more reason to get
yourself over 'ere." Harry could put out a lot of sound without
actually shouting.

"You mean me no
harm?"

"We mean you less 'arm than
they do, I wager. Now come on." Harry leaned his head near Elinor's
and spoke softly. "Wot do ya want with 'im anyway? He's well-nigh
useless."

"He's human. That thing is
not." It seemed reason enough to Elinor.

Nigel took a cautious step
off his mattress and edged toward them, jumping every time one of
the nasty little beasts spun a knife-edge his way or clacked its
pincers. The machine of machines kept building itself larger, until
it was as tall as Harry and a fair bit wider. Harry, Elinor, and
Nigel backed toward the wall behind them as smaller machines
fastened onto each other in single file, slowly creating clumsy
arms.

It didn't create legs for
itself, but a wide base floored with wheels to move it. Perhaps it
feared losing balance and topping over, Elinor thought. Walking was
a trickier business than trundling about on wheels.

It.
Did a single mind direct the assembled machines? Whose mind
was it, if so? What drove them to lock together like
this?

Harry put his hand behind
his back, the one not over Elinor's shoulder for support. She felt
him draw magic--from the air?--and fed strength into him. His leg
wound was still bleeding his strength away with a slow seep of
blood she couldn't seem to stop. He flicked his copper wand toward
the back wall behind them, speaking the word for his concussion
spell. She used her own blood in all three of them present to throw
up a protective wall, to keep the air from blasting back against
them.

It did. It also shaped
Harry's spell, giving it more directional force. The spell blew a
great hole through the wall. Big enough for them to walk through,
if Nigel ducked a little. He was quite tall. But before they could
escape, machines scrambled to cut off their path.

"Naughty,
naughty."

The whistling rumble of the
voice behind them had Elinor spinning around. The men already
stared at the patchwork machine, which was indeed the source of the
eerie voice.

It spoke again. "Didn't
your mummy teach you 'tisn't polite to leave when you're expecting
company?"

The voice seemed to come
from the creature as a whole, rather than a particular location,
like a mouth. Elinor got the impression that the entire machine
worked together to create the sounds making up its speech. It gave
her cold shivers.

So did the way it looked.
Elinor had seen a dead lamb crawling with maggots once while on a
walk in the country when she was younger. The machine reminded her
of that, the limbs and pincers and gears and mandibles of the
individual machines constantly moving, as each one willed. She
shuddered.