His Majesty's Elephant (17 page)

No use. No more use than her magic that tried to find chinks in his, and creep into them, and make them gape wide. For every one she found, another one closed in a smooth wall, and his guard grew stronger, the harder she strove to break it.

Kerrec was losing his fight, too. His first flat note was shocking; his second was inevitable. They made the discord worse than it had been before, and strengthened the sorcerer, and therefore the sorcery.

He kept trying, as Rowan did, because there was nothing else they could do, just the two of them, without the third to make them whole. If she could only reach the Talisman, only touch it for a moment, she would win the strength that she lacked, but the Talisman was hopelessly out of reach. Kerrec could not come to it, either, or he would have done so long since.

The sorcerer was laughing as he sang. He was almost done with his working.

Almost, thought Rowan with a spark of hope. He had to let her go if he wanted to shed Gisela's blood. She stopped trying to get away, and got a grip on his arm, holding as tight as he had been holding her.

He saw what she was doing. His arm tensed. Before she could brace against it, he flung her away.

As he flung her out, she flung herself in. She came crashing down on top of Kerrec, inside the broken circle.

The chanting stopped. The sorcerer looked down at the tangle that they made, and smiled. “There,” he said. “I have you exactly as I want you.”

Rowan untangled herself from Kerrec. He was breathing, but he seemed as unconscious as Gisela, who had slept through everything and looked ready to sleep till the Last Judgment.

Rowan stretched out a hand. She was not surprised or much frightened to find that it met a wall of air.

The wall's bottom bit deep in the earth as the black knife had before Kerrec worked his healing magic. She could touch it without pain, but she could not step past it.

And her magic was on the other side of it.

Not so long ago, she would have danced with joy to find it gone. Now she felt as if she had lost a limb.

Michael Phokias, she had noticed already, was not given to gloating. It was rather disappointing. Evil wizards always gloated. Michael Phokias simply went about his business. Maybe that was Byzantine, to be so practical about everything, even summoning demons.

“How are you going to sacrifice me if I'm in here and you're out there?” she asked him.

An ordinary person would have been in shrieking hysterics. Rowan had been brought up better than that.

Michael Phokias did not remark on her coolness. He had seen enough of it already, Rowan supposed. She was rather sorry. It would have made things easier if he had kept on being startled by her refusal to act like a self-respecting flutterbrain.

“Take the Talisman from your sister,” he commanded her.

Rowan blinked. Her mind did not want to work in the direction he was going. “What if I won't?”

“The demon eats you,” he said.

“But it will eat me anyway, won't it?”

“Take it,” said the sorcerer, and his voice was different. It rang like a great bell. She watched as if from outside as her body turned, stooped, reached.

A palm's width from the Talisman, her hand stopped.

“Resist the warding,” the sorcerer said.

He was laying a spell on her. Without thinking, she reached for her magic, to turn his command back on him. But it was still trapped outside the circle, and she was trapped within, apart from it.

“Resist the warding,” the sorcerer said again. “Take the Talisman.”

She pushed. It was like pressing against a firm cushion, except that cushions did not dissolve fraction by fraction, shrinking to the thinnest of skins about her sister and the Talisman. The Talisman was hot under the shield of its protection, burning with fire-heat.

This was just like the taking of that other talisman which was her magic, even to the degree and kind of the pain. If she could have protested, she would have done so, loudly. Twice was twice too often.

She clasped the Talisman and bent, raising her sister's head, slipping the chain from about her neck.

Gisela's brow wrinkled in a frown. Her head began to toss from side to side.

“Sleep,” said the sorcerer.

Rowan froze, but the command was not meant for her. Gisela sighed and went slack.

Rowan straightened with the Talisman swinging on its chain. It was all blackened and dull. It should have been nigh invisible in the moonlight, and yet it was so much darker than the darkness that it almost seemed to glow, as if light and not-light could be kin.

A spark woke in the Talisman's center. The crystal opened like an eye, blood-red, slit-pupiled.

Rowan made a sound halfway between a gasp and a shriek, and flung the thing away.

She tried to fling it, at least. The chain coiled about her fingers, flexing like a living thing.

That was enough. Royal upbringing or no, Rowan was not going to stand helpless in a sorcerer's circle with a demon wrapped around her hand, staring at her with its single ghastly eye.

Her free hand got hold of the chain and slowly, struggling not to shake, peeled it off like a glove. Then it wanted to cling to that hand instead, but she was ready for it; just as it started to coil, she shook it off. It dropped writhing to the grass.

Michael Phokias had been shouting for a while. Rowan struggled not to listen.

The Talisman's chain was like a snake with a broken back; it whipped and lashed but could not move forward. The weight of the head, the Talisman itself, was too heavy. The eye looked angry: it was redder than it had been, fire-red.

She looked about wildly for something to cover it with. Gisela's cloak lay forgotten on the ground. Snatching it up, Rowan dropped it over the Talisman.

The lashing of the chain-tail stopped. Rowan remembered to breathe.

She had not accomplished anything worth bragging about. She was still trapped in the circle, and Michael Phokias was still outside of it, and now he was angry. His arms swept up in a grand wizardly gesture, spreading wide the cloak that wrapped him. He mantled like a hawk.

Something stirred against her foot. She jumped. “Stop that!” hissed Kerrec.

He looked as unconscious as ever, but he was right next to her; he had been halfway across the circle. Without magic she could not know what he meant to do.

“You have magic,” he whispered, just loud enough for her to hear. “He tricked you, or you tricked yourself. Look.”

Look inside, he meant. She wanted to say that she had looked, and there was nothing.

Instead of looking she groped as if with hands, and found something. It was small and shivering and cold, but it was undoubtedly her magic.

Not that it could do much of anything inside the circle. Anything it tried would only rebound upon it, or go to feed the demon under the cloak.

“Take the Talisman,” breathed Kerrec.

Rowan kicked him, surreptitiously she hoped, under her skirt. Was he serving the sorcerer after all?

“Take it,” Kerrec whispered again. “I'm not the Byzantine's slave, damn it. I know what I'm doing. I'd do it myself if I could.”

The sorcerer was screaming at her to take the thing. That was what she had been willing herself not to hear.

“Pretend,” whispered Kerrec. “Let him think you obey him.”

“No,” she said, loud and clear. “I won't. I can't.”

“Take it,” they said together, one in a yowl, one in a hiss.

She would not.

Kerrec's hand darted out, plucked the cloak off the Talisman. Rowan leaped to stop him, but too late. She tripped over him and fell onto the hideous thing.

It beat under her like a heart. Her hand, which had been outstretched to break her fall, was caught under her, next to the burning metal. She scrambled to get up, to get away from it, but Kerrec's weight held her down.

He had her in a wrestler's hold, rather too much like some of the postures Rowan had seen Hrotrud in with certain of the young men of the palace. His breath was warm against her neck. His voice spoke in her ear. “Wrap your magic around it. Make a cloak or a veil, or anything that will wrap it and shield it.”

The circle, she noticed distantly, was getting in Michael Phokias' way. He could not break it to get at them, not either easily or quickly. And if he did break it, he would set his demon free.

She could not think of anything better to do than what Kerrec said. A veil was easier to conceive of than a cloak. Silk, she thought, maybe grey, maybe green, maybe something of both. It billowed as she stretched it out with the hands of her magic, but then wound itself obediently about the demon-Talisman.

The demon tried to catch fire, but the veil prevented it, though some of the threads were scorched. Rowan wondered how long the silk could hold before the demon burned its way through.

“Now,” said Kerrec, “I'm going to lift you up. Don't try to help me, and don't try to fight me. Just keep the demon from escaping.”

His weight left her. He drew her up almost gently and set her on her feet, still with her back to him, and folded his arms about her middle.

She was leaning lightly against him. They must have looked like a pair of lovers in a tryst.

“Hold up the Talisman,” he said in the most unloverlike voice imaginable. It was shaking, for one thing. For another, it sounded furious.

That was only terror, and profound concentration. She felt it in him with what little of her magic she had to spare from trapping the demon. As she raised the Talisman on its chain, one of Kerrec's arms kept hold of her, and the other rose under her hands, helping them to bear the sudden weight.

It dragged at her, heavier the higher it rose, as if it was bound to the earth. She could lift it no more than heart-high. Then, even with Kerrec to help, she ran out of strength. She could hold it, but she could raise it no higher.

While the two of them struggled against the Talisman, Michael Phokias struggled to hurl his sorcery through the circle's walls. Rowan saw it as flashes of sudden light, or little lightnings, crackling and sparking on the wards that he himself had raised. None of it yet had come through.

Michael Phokias lowered his arms at last, as if in defeat. But Rowan knew better than to think he would give up so soon.

His head bowed for a moment, then lifted. He spoke.

He put no music in the words, and no discord. He simply said them. They were not in any language Rowan knew or could guess at. They might have been nursery nonsense.

The power in them made the earth quiver. The Talisman jerked in her hands.

“Now,” said Kerrec clearly, and not to Rowan.
“Now.”

A cloud raced across the moon. Darkness fell, darker than it should ever be, darkness absolute. Out of it came darkness deeper yet, and silence that shattered in the blare of a trumpet.

The moon's light flowed back again. It was cleaner, somehow; brighter, if only because the darkness had been so black.

Abul Abbas had come at last. He stood among the apple trees, as tall as they and broader by far.

In the moon's absence he had been darkness made flesh. In the moon's splendor he was white unmarred, and his tusks were blades of light. High above his head in the snake's coil of his trunk struggled a small and gibbering thing that, with numbed slowness, Rowan recognized as Michael Phokias.

His gibbering had power in it, but it fell unheeded on the Elephant's head, dripped and ran and transmuted from blood-dark to glistening bright.

“Thank every god there is,” Kerrec said. He let Rowan go, stepping past her, striking the circle's wall with his fist. It shattered and fell in shards like glass.

Rowan cried out. “No! The demon—you've set it free!”

He had not. It was still in her hands, bound with its chain. She dared not leave the circle, broken or no. She dared not even move.

Michael Phokias twisted in the Elephant's grip. Something flashed: the blade of a knife. It stabbed the sensitive trunk. Abul Abbas squealed, piercingly high, and dashed him down.

In the same instant, the Talisman wrenched at Rowan's hands. She wrenched back.

Inside her, something snapped. She swung the thing up—it was weightless suddenly, as light as air—and then down.

Even as Michael Phokias fell, the Talisman struck the earth.

The ground heaved. Rowan fell to her knees and clung to the grass, as the world did its best to buck her from its back.

Abul Abbas stamped. The earth trembled one last time and went still. Very slowly, very unsteadily, Rowan wobbled to her feet.

Kerrec was stumbling up, too. Which one of them moved first, she never did discover. It seemed perfectly sensible to stagger together and cling, and stare stupidly at something that gleamed in the grass.

Gold, white, red, green, and the glitter of crystal under the moon. The Talisman was itself again. The demon was gone.

The spell was broken. Rowan sensed no taint or stain of it, anywhere that her magic could reach.

Victory could have been more obvious.

Michael Phokias was not dead. He was stunned and his arm was broken, but he had not had the good grace to die when the Elephant flung him down. Rowan handed him over to her father's guards, tied up bodily with strips torn from her shift, and bound in mind and magic with a spell that Kerrec knew. Both would hold him, she hoped, until she—or better yet her father—could decide what to do with him.

The guards' eyes were full of questions, but they did not ask any of them. They looked at Rowan's face and went white, and did as she commanded.

The sorcerer was taken, the Talisman returned to the light again, but nothing had changed in the palace. Neither Gisela nor the Emperor showed any immediate signs of waking.

Rowan and Kerrec between them put Gisela back to bed, where they found Gisela's erstwhile guards sound asleep, with no memory when they woke of doing anything but keeping vigil through a quiet night.