Magisterium (25 page)

But the visitor didn’t leave. After exploring the far corners of the foundry, the footsteps grew louder. Glenn was wedged between two rows of heavy workbenches, a wall at her back. The rear of the building was to her right. She searched it until she saw a few thin lines of daylight that marked a back door.

The footsteps moved closer, stopping two rows of benches down to Glenn’s left, maybe twenty feet away. Glenn held her breath. A man’s body was outlined by the orange fire of the ovens. His head slowly moved side to side, reminding Glenn of the slink of a cobra as it searched for prey. Glenn tipped forward onto the balls of her feet, ready to bolt to the door. With the wall at her back, if he got close and turned down her row of benches, she’d be trapped. The man shifted, paused, then moved toward her.

Glenn ran from her hiding place and made for the door. She

pulled at the handles, and the door gave slightly but didn’t open.

Locked. A pair of hands grabbed her shoulders and spun her around.

Glenn cried out until a hand slapped onto her mouth, silencing her. A face loomed out of the darkness, a wrinkled gray plain lit by the fires and the sliver of daylight behind her.

Merrin Farrick.

“Who are you?” he said, his voice a horrible rasp. The scarlike line of the noose encircled his throat. He slowly moved his hand aside and Glenn gasped for air.

“No one. I’m just —”

Merrin grabbed Glenn’s wrist and jerked it up into the firelight.

The red jewel glowed between them. When Merrin saw it, his eyes sparkled with greed. “This is what Kapoor was talking about, isn’t it?

What does it do?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about! Please let me —”

Merrin shoved her into one of the wooden tables. Glenn’s spine slammed into its corner and she cried out in pain.

“We have lived for too long under that monster’s boot,” Farrick said. “If you think I’ll let our chance at freedom get melted down to slag, you’re out of your mind.”

Glenn’s hand slipped behind her to the knife at her back. There was a crash outside the foundry. Merrin turned to investigate it, and Glenn saw her chance. When Merrin turned back, Glenn’s blade was hovering at the rise of his Adam’s apple.

“Now, I said —”

Merrin grinned, then there was a flash of movement as he

snatched the knife out of her hand. He turned the blade over and rested the point just under Glenn’s chin, lifting it to expose the soft flesh of her throat.

“You come here and think you know what’s best for us,” Merrin growled as his free hand grabbed at the bracelet.

Glenn tried to pull it away from him, panicking at the memory of the power rising inside her, overcoming her, wiping her away.

“Don’t,” Glenn pleaded. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Merrin got hold of her hand, but Glenn yanked it to her chest, dragging Merrin forward until she was just inches from his hatchet-like face and stringy hair.

“She’s my mother,” Glenn said. “The Magistra. This bracelet is the only thing that keeps me from becoming just like her. So take it if you want, but you’ll be dead before you can walk to the door.”

Merrin stopped. His eyes narrowed on Glenn’s. He leaned

forward so Glenn could feel his lips alongside her ear.

“Well, then,” he whispered. “I guess I’ll have to sort you out
before
I take it.”

He raised his hand, and the pulse in Glenn’s throat beat against the blade of the knife. Glenn sucked in a breath, waiting for the cut.

“Merrin!”

The voice came from behind him. As Merrin turned, still holding the knife to Glenn’s neck, Glenn saw Kevin standing behind him. The sword in his hand gleamed red in the fires of the foundry.

“Get away from her.”

Merrin laughed. “Well, well, the hero of the hour.”

“I said —”

“You don’t have it in you, boy. If you’d been able to do your job and get the bracelet from her before, we wouldn’t be here now. Serves us right sending some outsider child to do our work for us.”

“Put the knife down,” Kevin ordered.

Merrin sneered and pressed the blade into Glenn’s throat. But before it could break her skin, Kevin rushed toward them. Merrin turned, knife in hand, but Kevin was faster, driving his blade into the thick of the older man’s stomach. Merrin cried out and crumpled to the dirt floor of the foundry. A pool of blood grew beneath him.

The sword slipped from Kevin’s hands as he fell backward,

crashing to the floor. His face was pale and drawn, no different from Aamon’s as he stood in that river, the horror of what he had done dawning on him. Glenn stepped over Merrin’s body and knelt beside Kevin. She wished she could say something to him, tell him he had no choice, but she knew it wouldn’t make any difference.

“We should go,” Glenn said quietly. “Now.”

Kevin’s body jerked as if he was waking from a dream. He stood and turned to the glowing ovens. “We can still use it,” he said, almost to himself. “We don’t have to destroy it. We can —”

Glenn pulled at his hand. “There’s no time for that. We have to go.”

Kevin’s hand stiffened as he drew away from her. “No time? You came here to …” Kevin’s eyes went sharp as he trailed off. “You weren’t coming here to destroy it.”

“Kevin —”

“What were you going to do?” His voice rose. Glenn backed

away from him as he came at her. “You were going to give it to him?

To Sturges?”

Glenn turned to run but Kevin grabbed her wrist. She cried out and tried to escape, but he was too strong. Her terror grew. Had the last vestige of Kevin Kapoor disappeared?

Kevin yanked Glenn toward him, and then, instead of taking the bracelet, he ripped opened his shirt and clamped her hand down on his side, covering it with his own. Beneath her fingers, Glenn could feel the heat of his skin and the long rough edges of his barely healed wound.

“You were going to give it to the man who did this?”

Glenn tried to tear her hand away, but Kevin kept it tight against his skin. Their eyes met.

“Kevin …” Glenn began, but was stopped by a deep boom from

somewhere outside. A second later the ground shook.

Kevin’s head cocked to one side. “What was that?”

There was a shrieking whistle overhead, then another boom. The whistle began to fill the foundry, growing louder by the second, turning into a scream. Something clicked in Glenn. She grabbed Kevin’s arm and pulled him toward the door at a run.

“Where are we going?”

“Just run!”

Glenn slammed through the front door with Kevin close behind.

The sound was deafening now. Glenn made for a building across the street. Its front door was open and she hoped it would be enough. Once they made it inside, Glenn threw both of them to the floor.

As soon as they landed, a series of explosions rocked the town, shooting tremors through the earth. All Glenn could see through the open door was an expanding wave of smoke and debris. A rain of bricks and shards of iron and glass and burning wood fell all around them.

As the smoke wave passed, Glenn saw that the foundry had been reduced to a pile of broken stone and wood and mangled iron. The fires from its shattered ovens had spread, setting the surrounding buildings aflame. There was a second’s pause and then another boom somewhere else in the town. More crashes followed with barely a pause, seemingly everywhere at once. Soon the air was filled with the sound of cracking wood and shattering glass and screams.

“What’s happening?” Kevin screamed over the din.

Glenn didn’t know. Some weapon of Garen Tom’s? Her mother’s?

Glenn looked up at a crackling sound and saw that the roof above them was burning.

“We’ve got to get out of here!”

Glenn took Kevin’s hand and dragged him out of the house and down an alley along the side of the building, nearly blind from the smoke. Glenn had no idea where they were going. She was guided by nothing but animal terror, falling face-first to the ground at each new crash, then forcing herself up again to run harder and faster.

The town was shrouded in thick gray smoke. As she ran, Glenn saw buildings that had been reduced to rubble and bodies fleeing in every direction. There was debris everywhere too, piles of brick and wood and here and there bodies lying on the road and on porches and hanging out of burning windows. The smell of it was overwhelming.

Glenn’s throat and lungs ached.

She didn’t know how long she ran but finally the smoke slowly began to clear. The road opened up ahead of her and she saw figures out in the gray. A group of ten or more — some standing, some holding others up, some slumped on the ground. At the center was a single hulking figure. As the smoke parted, she saw slate gray fur and then a snowy patch of white. Glenn ran and threw her arms around Aamon and he pulled her close. His face was swollen and streaked with blood and dust.

“What’s happening? What was that?”

“Did you do it?” Aamon asked. “Did you destroy it?”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”

A crunching sound came from all around them, boots on the

gravel road. Glenn turned, and from every direction, bodies moved in the smoke. She couldn’t guess how many but they seemed to be everywhere, converging on them.

Kevin snatched a fallen sword off the ground. Aamon moved in front of Glenn, pulling a handful of others to their feet to form a tight ring around her. All of them were injured. Some could barely stand.

The bodies in the smoke stopped. The men and women circling her barely breathed. They lifted their swords and drew their bows and waited. Two of the figures ahead parted, and a slight form emerged from the gray.

Michael Sturges pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his rumpled suit and calmly cleaned his glasses.

“Glenn Morgan,” he said with a pleased smile. “I had the funniest feeling I’d see you again.”

A growl rose from deep in Aamon’s throat as he crouched down, claws out, ready to spring at him. Kevin and the others tensed, surging forward to meet the legions of red-armored agents surrounding Sturges.

There was a clatter of metal as they raised their weapons.

“No!”

Glenn pushed through the line surrounding her and out into the space between Aamon and Sturges.

“Glenn!” Kevin cried.

She stilled the tremors that moved through her body and then slowly held out her hand. The bracelet gleamed in the smoky air.

“No one else has to get hurt,” she said, pushing the words past a thick lump in her throat. “Please. You win. It’s yours.”

Sturges moved fast. Within minutes, his agents packed Glenn, Aamon, and Kevin into a horse-drawn wagon and they pulled out of Bethany, surrounded by a squad of soldiers. Glenn sat up front next to Sturges while Kevin and Aamon were in the back. Aamon had been hurt badly in his fight with Garen Tom and in the bombardment after.

His body was cut and swollen, but he still sat up tall, even though the effort to do it, and the rocking of the wagon, made him wince. Kevin was only a little better off, bruised and scraped and singed. He was slumped against the side of the wagon, blankly staring behind them.

Bethany was a smoking wreck. The fires were mostly out now

that nearly every building had been flattened or reduced to a few stubborn lengths of wood. Whether the blood-streaked bodies they saw as they left were killed in the fighting before or by Sturges’s assault, Glenn didn’t know. The day had offered up so many different ways to die.

As they passed out of the town, Glenn looked up in awe at a line of muscular-looking collections of black scaffolding. They were each thirty or forty feet tall with a heavy base and a long arm attached to a pivot at the top.

“Trebuchet.”

Sturges was sitting high up in the seat beside her, his red silk tie flapping in the wind. He held the horses’ reins lightly in his hands, guiding them along.

“Medieval siege weapons,” he said with a laugh. “Only way to fight these people is to go back in time. They’re like catapults but more powerful. Even more powerful with a few mechanical tweaks and modern materials. These things can shoot a half-ton lump of metal practically into orbit before it falls. Big boom. No explosives. They weren’t easy to drag out here, but once our people told us that everybody in the Magisterium with a sword was converging in the one town that could destroy that trinket you’ve got, it seemed worth it. Now, honestly, I didn’t know you were already in the foundry when I ordered the strike. Last person we’d want to kill is you.”

Sturges smiled his ingratiating smile. Glenn crossed her arms and stared ahead at the approaching trees.

“I know you didn’t want to get mixed up in all this, Glenn. I had time to check into you and I can see that this was all just a big accident.

Your grades are outstanding. Your record is perfect. You were looking at Deep Space Service, right?”

Sturges dangled it out there like a hook on a line. Glenn was curious to see where he was going with it, but she stayed quiet.

“I thought about DSS when I was your age, you know.” Sturges laughed again. “I was a disaster. Wasn’t smart enough for it. Didn’t have the drive.”