The Gates of Sleep

without expending as much energy as he took in. So Reggie was now immensely powerful, bloated with the strength stolen from an entire household—his mother’s collapse a half hour ago had given him plenty of time to array his defenses, and he would, of course, be expecting an attack.

And before he went to face his enemy, Andrew now found himself faced with a dilemma. Of all of those sleeping servants, there must be some who had fallen while doing tasks where their lives would be in danger— tending animals—near fires—

He ran for the kitchen.

Marina, transmorphing into the form of a wren in the blink of an eye, shot up through her own shields and darted into the cover of the dying bushes. All she could do was to thank heaven that she had spent so much time among wild creatures—she knew how they felt, moved, acted. She could mimic them well enough to use the unique strengths they had. And it didn’t take nearly as much power to do so as it did to lash out with mage-fire or change the world around her. If she could keep attacking Madam physically, Arachne could not possibly attack Marina magically. To change into a beast or a bird or some other form cost Marina a fraction of the power it took to lash out with mage-lightning. And she was younger than Arachne; that might be an advantage too.

She left the shields in place behind her, hoping that Madam would be deceived into thinking she was still inside them.

She peered out from under the shelter of a leaf the same color and almost the same shape as she, shaking with fear and anger mingled. Green lightning lashed at the shields, splattering across their surface, obscuring the fact that there was nothing inside them. Madam held both her hands out before her, lightning lashing from her fingertips, her face a contorted mask of hatred mingled with triumph.

Go ahead. Waste your power. You won’t find any more here. Marina let the shields collapse in on themselves. Taken by surprise by the sudden collapse of those defenses, Madam lashed at the empty place for a moment, the energies that pummeled the spot where Marina had stood so blindingly powerful that when she cut off her attack, there was nothing there but the smoking ground.

Madam stood staring at the place for a moment, then cautiously stepped forward to get a better look.

She was so single-mindedly intent on destroying Marina that it had not yet dawned on her that if Marina really had been destroyed, Madam herself should have been snapped back into the real world again.

And in that moment of forgetfulness, it was Marina’s turn to strike.

Madam’s advantage—she was swollen, bloated with stolen power. Still. But bloated as she was—and used to having all the power she needed—she might not think to husband it. And here, probably for the first time, she was able to see what her power was doing, able to use it directly instead of indirectly. That might intoxicate her with what she could do, and make her less able to think ahead.

Marina had to combat Madam in such a way that Madam couldn’t use all that stolen power directly. So it was a very, very good thing that Elizabeth had been so very busy collecting folk ballads as the prime motive for her visit to Blackbird Cottage—and a very good thing that Marina had been employed in making fair copies of them.

Because one of them, “The Twa Magicians,” had given her the pattern for the kind of attack she could make, one that might lure Arachne into making a fatal mistake.

That curse—I can do things against it here that I couldn’t do in the real world. I can see it—and I can move it. It’s a connection between us, and I think I can make that work in my favor.

Swift as a thought, Marina the wren darted out of the cover of the leaves, and in the blink of an eye, had fastened herself in Madam’s hair.

But she didn’t stay that way for long.

With a writhing effort of will, she transmorphed herself again, and a huge serpent cast its coils about Madam in the same moment that the evil sorceress realized that something had attacked her.

By then, it was a bit late, for her arms were pinned and the serpent was getting the unfamiliar body to contract its coils. Belatedly, Madam began to struggle, and Marina squeezed harder.

But Madam wasn’t done yet. And what Marina could do—so could she.

Suddenly, Marina found her coils closing on air, as a little black cat shot out from under the lowest loop just before she collapsed in a heap under her own weight. Then the little cat turned to a great black panther, and leapt on her, landing just behind her head, pinning her to the ground and biting for the back of her neck.

That’s a ploy anyone can play—Marina became a mouse, and ran between its paws. And from behind the panther’s tail, went on the offensive again; became an elk, and charged at the big cat, tossing her into the air with her massive antlers.

Ha! Into the air the great cat flew, and she came down as a wolf.

But not just any wolf—one of the enormous Irish wolves, killed off long ago, but which had, in their time, decimated the herds of Irish elk.

Oh no—! The wolf slashed at her legs, by its build and nature designed to kill elk; Marina leaped into the air—

And became a golden eagle, dropping down onto the wolf’s back, fastening three-inch-long talons into fur and flesh and slashing at the head with her wicked beak. The Mongols of the steppes and the Cossacks of Russia hunted wolves with golden eagles—

But before the beak could connect, fur and flesh melted into a roaring tower of flame, and Marina backwinged hastily into the air before the raging fire Madam had become could set her feathers alight. But evidently Madam hadn’t heard “The Twa Magicians,” or she would have known Marina’s next transformation—

—into a torrent of water. The form most natural to a Water Mage.

Andrew was not a moment too soon; the cook had fallen across the front of the big bread-oven, although she had only just started the fire in it, and it hadn’t heated up sufficiently to give her serious burns. One of her helpers had been cutting up meat, though, and the last falling stroke of his cleaver had severed a finger.

Blood poured out of the stump, running across the table, dripping off the edge, pooling on the floor. He could easily have bled to death if Andrew hadn’t gotten there when he had.

In a moment, Andrew had the bleeding stopped, though he’d been forced to use the crudest of remedies, cauterizing the stump with a hot poker, for he hadn’t time to do anything else, and blessing the spell that kept the poor fellow insensible. Another kitchen maid was lying too near the fire in the fireplace where the big soupkettle hung—one stray ember and she’d have been aflame. He moved her out of harm’s way.

That cleared the kitchen—with his heart pounding, he ran out into the yard and the stables.

There he discovered that the animals had fallen asleep as well, which solved one problem. At least no one was going to be trampled.

Here the problem was not of fire, but of cold; left in the open, the stablehands would perish of exposure in a few hours as their bodies chilled. He solved that problem by dragging two into the kitchen, which was certainly warm enough, and the third into an empty, clean stall onto a pile of straw, where he covered the man with horse- blankets.

He dashed back inside, painfully aware of the passing of time. It was too late—he hoped—for the maids to be mending and laying fires. He couldn’t go searching room to room for girls about to be incinerated—

But his heart failed him. Oh, God. I must. He began just such a frantic search of the first floor, wondering as he did so just how long it would be before Reggie ambushed him.

Whenever it happened, it would be when Reggie was at his readiest—and he, of course, at the least ready.

Madam was running out of ideas, so she became a huge serpent, at home on land or water—which was just what Marina had hoped for.

The torrent turned immediately to hail and sleet, the enemies of the cold-blooded reptile, and the one thing they were completely vulnerable to. Marina poured her energy into this transformation—which would have to be her last, because she was exhausted, and could sense that she hadn’t much left to spend. But she didn’t have to kill Arachne. All she had to do was immobilize Madam, then get her own two hands on the woman. It was, after all, Madam’s curse, and curses knew their caster; she could feel the thing tangling them together. Over the course of this battle, Marina had been weaving the loose ends of that curse back into Madam’s powers whenever they came into physical contact. Now Marina would just send it back, if she could have a moment when she could concentrate all of her will—her trained will—on