The Serpent's Shadow

'Don robes, and we will assemble in the second chamber,' Alderscroft ordered, standing up and shoving his chair away from the table in a single decisive movement. Peter hung back a little, delaying the moment that he joined the others; there was a brief scramble for the robes, then those nearest the pegs began passing the common robes back to those behind them.

Some few of the members had special embroidered, personalized robes of various antique cuts and quaint designs. There was no uniformity to these robes; they ranged from something the most austere monk would feel comfortable wearing, to an elaborately embroidered creation that the Pope himself would have felt excessive for High Mass at Easter. Some were designed along the lines of those a Member of Parliament or a University don wore, others seemed to be recreations of a medieval burgher's festive attire. Alderscroft's hooded robe, of brilliant scarlet velvet, was somewhere between the two extremes.

The majority took one of the common robes passed to them, which were cut along the lines of the academic robes worn by the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge—but not constructed of sober scholastic black, but of burgundy red, sapphire blue, or emerald green. There were robes of the warm gold favored by Earth Masters on the hooks, but no one took any of them. Peter shrugged himself into a green robe, and joined the rest filing into the inner chamber of the War Room.

As each man entered the chamber, he took a plain wooden wand out of one of the four containers beside the door. Willow for the Water Masters, ash for the Fire, and birch for the Air; once again, there was a box of wands of oak for the Earth Masters, but there were none here tonight to take one.

Perhaps some will appear for Alderscroft's assemblage at Stonehenge, Peter thought, slipping the wand nervously through his fingers as he shuffled into a place in the circle. They really could not have fitted any more people into this room; they were all standing shoulder-to-shoulder as it was. There wasn't anything here but a series of concentric circles on the floor, the largest of which was flush to the walls. The walls, completely without windows, were painted a flat gray; the floor was of tan terrazzo with the circles inlaid in copper, so carefully that there wasn't the least crack or crevice to mar their perfect line. Gaslights high up on the walls gave perfect illumination to the room; someone, perhaps even the Head himself, had come in here earlier to light them.

By custom, Air Masters stood in the east, Fire in the south, and Water in the west. If there had been Earth Masters, they would have stood in the north; as it was, the Air and Water Masters spilled over into the northern quadrant, taking their place.

When they had all crowded into the room, Alderscroft nodded, and as one, they snapped their wands down to be held horizontally in front of them, each man's wand crossing the ends of the wands of the men to either side of him, rather like a giant Morris Dancers' figure. Peter supposed that they could have all held hands to maintain contact between them, but that would have been—well—rather embarrassing to most of them. Evidently at some time in the past, this method of linking all the members of the White Lodge had been decided on as being somehow more dignified than handholding like children in a circle dance.

The instant that full contact was made, the Lodge Shield sprang up behind them all. Peter felt it and Saw it; arcing over them all and glowing a violet-white, it hummed with the power of the three dozen Masters here tonight, along with all of the power invested in it by every Master who had ever stood in this room as a member of the White Lodge. If ever a thing made of magic was alive, it was this shield.

And it was this shield that they would use as the basis of the one meant to cover all of England.

However stupid an idea that is. . . .

Peter closed his eyes; it was not in anyone's best interest at the moment to argue with Alderscroft. He could do that later, if (when!) another death occurred, and it became obvious that all they had done was to trap their enemy inside their own walls.

Now was the time to raise the Cone of Power that would make it possible to expand the shield, and he was no less obliged to add his force to the rest, even though he privately considered the task to be absolutely futile.

He locked his knees, braced himself, and carefully detached his self from his body.

The ancient Egyptians had called this self the ka, and had portrayed it as a human-headed bird. Peter often wondered if, when an Egyptian mage had performed this same exercise, the ancient one had seen himself in that form. Peter never had; the form he took was of a younger, slimmer version of himself— basically, himself as he had been when he first achieved Mastery. Somehow that form never changed, though the outer one did. He knew that if he bothered to focus his attention on them, he would see the rest of his colleagues, in similar forms, detaching themselves from their corporal bodies—then vanishing, leaving behind the thin silver cords of power that tethered them to their bodies, trailing off into the void. These spirit forms were not limited to the dull plodding pace of their material hosts; they could be anywhere they chose in the blink of an eye. The Masters had gone to seek their natural allies, the creatures of magic and spirit that inhabited the particular Element of each mage.

And it was time that he did the same.

North, he thought.

In the speed of thought, he was there, in the place he felt most at home: hovering above the Great Deep, the ocean. Where he found himself, floating just above the moonlit waves, was somewhere off the coast of Scotland. It was an unusually calm night; a few clouds drifted across the sky, but there was only the usual breath of wind that blew from the sea to ruffle the surface of the waves.