Magisterium (30 page)

Glenn touched down a few steps away from him.

“Glenn,” he said with a smile. “I honestly didn’t think you had it in you. I —”

With a sweep of her hand, Glenn lifted Sturges into the air by his throat, squeezing hard enough to shut him up. She let him dangle there before her, his eyes wide. His face was creased with old burns.

“Tell your people to go,” she said.

“Wait,” he rasped, clawing at his throat. “Glenn. Listen to me. I want what you want. To have things back the way they were. We can work together. Put me down and we’ll talk. I know you don’t want to hurt anyone else.”

Glenn clenched her fist tighter and his words cut out in an instant.

She could end this now. Twist one way or another and his neck would snap like a twig. Sturges hung in the air, his face red and bloated, panic coming off him in steely waves.

“There are things you can never take back….”

The strength rushed out of Glenn. She slackened her grip on Michael’s throat and he gasped and tumbled to the ground.

“Just go,” Glenn stuttered, feeling as if she were speaking from the bottom of a dark hole. “Leave and don’t come back.”

“If I do, they’ll send another just like me,” Sturges said. “This won’t end until they have what they want, Glenn.”

“I can stop them.”

“And live like your mother did?” he said. “Alone. Spending

every thought on us. Eaten up by power. It’s happening already, isn’t it, Glenn? You can feel it happening. You’re slipping away.”

Sturges drew himself up and crossed the muddy ground toward her. Glenn tried to push him away and stop him from talking, but it was getting harder. Affinity was pounding at her from every direction. It wanted to devour her. The effort to control it brought Glenn to her knees.

“I think you just want to go home.”

The next thing she knew, Michael was standing in front of her, his hand resting on her shoulder with a kindly weight.

“Isn’t that right?”

Glenn nodded. She was so tired. Michael smiled, then nodded to someone behind her and walked away. Glenn turned and there, standing at the edge of a muddy crater, was the black-draped figure of Abbe Daniel.

“Hello, Glennora.”

A column of fire materialized at the end of Abbe’s fingertips.

Glenn grasped a reserve of strength and leapt up into the sky to avoid it.

She didn’t make it three feet before something grabbed her ankle and yanked her back down again. Glenn crashed through the mud and hit solid earth beneath it. The air shot out of Glenn’s lungs and she rolled over, coughing. She tried to get her hands under her chest, tried to get up, but before she could, what felt like an immense hand pushed her down farther, filling her mouth with muck.

In the next instant, she was in the air again. Abbe flipped her upside down and let her hang there, admiring her as if she was a prize catch.

“What are you doing?” Glenn asked, gasping for air. “The

Magisterium is your home.”

Abbe laughed. “I think you need a better sense of which way the tide is turning, Glenn.”

The blood was rushing to Glenn’s head. She tried to strike back, but Abbe laughed again and spun her around in the air so fast that Glenn couldn’t concentrate. She went limp. The earth turned faster below her, a brown and black swirl. Glenn reached down into it.

The ground beneath Glenn was vast and hard, miles of rock

stretching into darkness. Glenn prayed —
Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka
—

and let the earth flow up into her, stiffening her joints and weighing her down. She became more and more dense until her spinning slowly stopped and she felt herself lowering to the ground. Abbe strained against her, only now she was losing. Glenn touched down, iron, rock, and the molten heart of the earth coursing through her. The earth trembled as she moved toward Abbe. The girl in black called down a flash of lightning, but Glenn shrugged it off and kept coming.

Abbe tried to fly but it was nothing for Glenn to thicken the air and pull the witch back down. Abbe plummeted face-first into the mud.

Her hands were splayed out on the ground beside her.

“We don’t have to do this,” Glenn said as she approached the girl.

“We should be working together.”

Abbe squeezed the earth in her fist, and there was a deep rumble.

A rip in the ground appeared at Abbe’s fingertips, widening as it shot out across the space between them. Glenn went to escape it, but she was too heavy, too slow. By the time the tear in the ground reached her, it was a chasm several feet across. Glenn tried to dodge away, too late.

The ground disappeared beneath her and she tumbled helplessly into the dark.

Glenn tried to grab on to something, or pull in a gust of wind to lift her up, but she was moving too fast and was too depleted. It was deadly quiet as she fell, careening through the dark, and then it all came to an end in one body-shaking crash. Glenn slammed into an

outcropping of rock, her right side first, ribs taking the impact. There was a snap and a firecracker burst of pain in her midsection.

When Glenn tried to sit up the pain exploded again and she fell back, her body buzzing with shock. Glenn moved her hands along her side, looking for wounds. There was a deep gash in her arm that was slick with blood, and what felt like a snapped rib. She nearly screamed when her fingers found it.

She must have fallen a hundred feet. To her left was the edge of the gorge, falling hundreds of feet into the darkness. To her right was an opening in the rock wall, the mouth of a cave.

Above her the darkness she had fallen through began to lighten.

Had morning come already? No. It wasn’t the sun. It was a single light, hazy at first, illuminating the lip of the gorge. Glenn stared up at it, transfixed, as it moved along the edge. She thought she heard a voice calling down to her. She wanted to cry out, “I’m here!” and even managed to open her mouth, but no sound came out, just a strained whisper.

The light left the edge of the gap, floated there for a moment, and then began to fall toward her, slow at first, and then with increasing speed.

“We’re not finished, Glennora!”

Abbe Daniel was coming for her, her way illuminated by a

yellow orb of light centered around her right hand. At the rate Abbe was falling, Glenn didn’t have much time. She nearly screamed with pain as she forced herself up and stumbled into the dark cave beside her.

She took a couple steps then crashed into rock.

Glenn took a deep breath and concentrated, imagining the earth’s fiery core flowing to one spot in the center of her hand. The air above her palm wavered and a single small flame appeared, illuminating the walls of the cave. Glenn ran, hunched over and wincing in pain, down a narrow stone corridor.

“Glennora!”

Abbe had made it to the ledge and was following close behind.

The path wound through the rock until finally Glenn ran straight into a large cavern. In front of her was a pond and columns of rock that rose nearly a hundred feet above her head. The air was cooler here and felt fresh for the first time. Glenn raised her hand and urged the flame higher. There! At the top of the far wall was a hole in the rock. Glenn could feel fresh air pouring down into the cavern from its mouth. It was easily big enough for her to squeeze through and escape. All she had to do was get to it.

Glenn ran into the water and then jumped up toward the hole, summoning every scrap of will she had in her and hoping it was enough to lift her to freedom. Glenn’s fingers brushed the wet stone and she scrambled upward. There was a splash behind her.

“Glenn!”

Glenn grabbed hold of the ledge and started to pull herself up but watched in horror as the rock surrounding the hole grew until it closed off completely. She was ripped away from the wall, and sent flying across the room and into the icy water of the pool. The cold lanced into her, every scrap of energy she had drained out of her. Glenn went limp, sinking down into the murk, but then a hand seized the back of her shirt and pulled her toward the surface.

Glenn sucked in a desperate breath. Her feet kicked at the rock as she tried to stand, but Abbe yanked her forward, dragging her out of the water and tossing her like an empty sack onto the stone shore. Glenn barely even felt the pain anymore. Her body was like a lump of clay.

Useless. Lifeless. If there was any Affinity left in her now, it was too far away and too small to touch.

Abbe towered over her, one hand lit up like a lantern. Her face was twisted into a horrible mix of hatred and glee. With the other hand she reached into her robe and pulled out a silver-bladed dagger. The way the light from her hand reflected off the mirrorlike edge was almost blinding.

“You don’t have to do this,” Glenn said.

“Sorry. Killing you is the price of admission into the good graces of the Colloquium.”

“How can you just switch sides?”

Abbe laughed, making a sick echo off the damp stone walls. “I thought you would have learned more by now, Glennora.” Abbe leaned in to whisper in Glenn’s ear. “There are no sides. The Magisterium.

The Colloquium. They’re the same — words on banners that people wave around to get others to do what they want. It’s a game. Pity you had to learn that too late.”

Abbe pulled back the dagger and in that second, Glenn dug inside herself and prayed for strength, but when she prayed, she didn’t see 813

or three distant stars, she saw the faces of Kevin and Aamon, her mother and her father. She saw them all and reached for one last bit of Affinity, her fingers scrambling toward it. Glenn strained and pushed, but in the end it was too far. Time slowed. The tip of Abbe’s dagger rose. She remembered Kevin’s lips on hers. His hand on her back. The look in his eyes. The swirling snow. A night she could have seized that was now lost.

There was a scream and Abbe flew away from her, her body bent nearly in two. Time rushed forward again. Across the cavern, Abbe was rising from the water, her black hair plastered against her face. The dagger was gone and her eyes were blazing as she looked past Glenn to the mouth of the cave.

Glenn turned and caught a flurry of movement. There was a dark blur and then a sound like thunder as the cave lit up with a flash of light.

When Glenn’s eyes adjusted, she saw Abbe slumped and unconscious on the shore across from her and a figure standing between them.

Her back was to Glenn, but it was clear that this was not the wasted woman she had left lying on Opal’s bed. She was impossibly tall, with hair the color of coal. The bracelet was gone from her wrist, and her entire body glowed, illuminating the cave with a murderous green light. She stalked across the shallow end of the water toward Abbe’s limp body, pulsing with violence.

Glenn forced herself up and staggered through the freezing water.

She made it only a few steps before her legs gave out and she collapsed, falling into the water and against her mother’s legs. Glenn reached up and grabbed hold of her dress.

She turned and Glenn saw those eyes, perfectly black, without thought or feeling or recognition, just as they had been that night past the border when Glenn was six. Whatever impulse had sent her mother down into the caves had already been wiped away and replaced with blind hate. Glenn marshaled her fear and grabbed her mother’s wrist, turning her away from Abbe.

“Stop,” Glenn breathed as she forced herself to stand.

For a moment the two of them stood inches apart, the Magistra

glowering down at her. “What do you care if she dies?” she asked in an awful, distorted echo.

“I don’t,” Glenn said. “I just don’t want you to be the one to kill her.”

The Magistra’s eyes narrowed. Glenn saw her chance and threw her arms around her, pulling her close, battering at the wall between them. When it fell, the entire weight of her mother’s last ten years crashed into Glenn all at once. In that moment, Glenn knew that during all those years, there was a small kernel of the woman her mother once was, imprisoned deep inside her, forced to watch the things the Magistra was doing and helpless to stop them. Every death hung on her like the links of a chain, endlessly heavy, always present. There were ghosts in the Magisterium, and they never let her rest.

Worst of all, her mother always knew exactly how far away she was from everything she wanted — her husband, Glenn, their life in the Colloquium — and she could do nothing about it. The moments of the three of them together — gathered around the dinner table, in the garden, floating in the cool lake waters — lived in her like bits of a distant sun, dazzling but too far away to reach, taunting her day in and day out.

“Come back,” Glenn whispered, willing her last bit of strength into her mother, unraveling a plea that had been knotted up inside her for ten years. “I know you’re there. Please. Just listen to my voice and come back.”

Glenn held her breath and pulled away slowly.

Her mother was gazing down at her, her eyes a deep and piercing blue.

They rose out of the cavern together, Glenn’s mother’s arms wrapped tight around her, until they reached the surface and landed on the muddy ground.