The Gates of Sleep

doing so.

The cold had the desired effect. The serpent tried to raise its head and failed. It tried to crawl away, and couldn’t. In a moment, it couldn’t move at all. A moment more, and it lay scarcely breathing, sheathed in ice from head to tail. The eyes glared balefully at her, red and smoldering, but Madam could not force the body she had chosen to do what she willed.

Marina fell out of the transformation, landing as herself on her knees on the ice-rimed grass beside the prone reptile. She was spent. I can’t—

I must. There was no other choice, but death. Go past the end of her strength and live and return to Andrew—or die.

Weeping with the effort, she gathered the last of her power, isolated the vile black-green energies of the curse just as she had isolated the poison in Ellen’s veins, and shoved it into her hands and held it there. With the last of her strength, she crawled to Madam—she didn’t need to pierce Arachne’s skin for this—they were both immaterial, after all—

She placed both hands on the serpent’s head—and shoved. And screamed with the seething, tearing pain that followed as the thing that had rooted in her very soul was uprooted and sent back to its host.

Reggie waited for Andrew where he had clearly been for some time; in the center of a red room, with a desk like an altar in the very center of it. An appropriate simile, since on the desk lay the dead body of a woman in a superior maid’s outfit, her throat slit, blood soaking into the precious Persian rug beneath.

Reggie was not alone, either. To one side stood—something.

There had been a sacrifice here to call an ally, and the ally had answered in person.

It wasn’t a ghost, it wasn’t material—it didn’t even have much of a form. To Andrew’s weary eyes, it was a man-shaped figure of black-green flame, translucent, and lambent with implied menace. Reggie pointed straight at Andrew. “Kill him!” he barked—a smile of triumph cutting across his face like the open wound of the woman’s throat.

“No.” The figure shifted a little. “No. First, he is Favored, and I may not touch him. Second—” Andrew got the impression of a shrug. “—think of this as a test of worth. Yours, and perhaps, his.”

Reggie stared, aghast—he had not expected this response. “But the bargain—” he cried. “I’ve worshipped, given you souls, corrupted for you, killed in your name—”

“Which was the bargain. You have received in the measure that you earned. This is outside the bargain. You will see me again only when this combat is decided.”

And with that, the figure winked out, and was gone. Hah, Andrew thought, with a glimmer of hope. “But will they answer when you do call them?”

Reggie stared at the place where it had been with his mouth agape. And Andrew took that moment to attack.

He did what another magician would have considered madness—he rushed Reggie physically, like the rugby player he had been at university, his momentum carrying him over the desk, knocking the body of the poor dead girl off the top, and carrying carcass and Reggie both to the ground. He grabbed for both wrists and got them, pinning the other to the blood-soaked carpet.

Pain lashed him, the pain of Reggie’s mage-fire raging over him, burning him physically as the fire ate into his shields. Reggie still held the sacrificial dagger he had used to sever the girl’s throat; Andrew screamed in agony, but held to the wrist that held that dagger—for he knew, with a cold fear of the sort that he had never felt before, that if Reggie managed to free his hand and use that dagger, it would kill him no matter how slight the wound.

He built up his shields as the pain and fire burned them away; he bit back his screams as Reggie rolled under him and tried to throw him off. And he used tricks learned in the violence of the rugby scrum, bashing his forehead into Reggie’s nose, smashing it in a welter of blood, distracting him just long enough for him to try the desperate call he hoped would be answered. He made a summons of it, calling through the channel that they had shared, hoping that she had been freed to answer it.

Because if it wasn’t—he and Marina were both doomed. “Here!”

The voice in his mind was weary, weary—but he felt Marina’s spectral presence, felt her spirit, tired, battered, but alive and free of the limbo into which she had been sent! Felt her join her power with his—

And knew that it wasn’t enough.

Desperately, he reached for the power of Earth—and found it closed against him, violated by the sacrifice of the servant and more blood shed over the past months, poisoned by blasphemy in a way that made it impossible for him to touch. He could use it—but only if he cleansed it. And he didn’t have time.

With nose smashed aside and bleeding profusely, Reggie grinned up at him, a savage grin that made him cold all over. And in that moment, he knew utter despair. “No, damn it, NO!” Marina cried.

Reggie gathered his own power; Andrew felt it gathering above him—them—like a wave poised to break over them, threatening to send them both back into the limbo where Madam had cast Marina.

Then—from some unguessed depth of her spirit, Marina reached for a source of her power uncontaminated by the blood and black magic—reached down into the village, where a wellspring lay doubly blessed, by Elemental and Christian mage—She should not have been able to touch it—and reaching so far and so desperately might doom her, burn her out forever—He couldn’t stop her.

She wouldn’t let him.

“I love you,” she said, “And I’ll be damned before I let him have you!”

The words gave him a last burst of energy past his own strength in that last instant, and he, too, reached further and deeper than he ever had in his life—and then, two floods met—evil and good, light and dark, life and death—

Andrew was caught up in the maelstrom, and was thrown about like a cork in a hurricane. The power was beyond his control now, or Marina’s, or indeed anyone’s. It was its own creature with its own laws, supremely indifferent to the wishes of a few puny humans. In the depths of the storm he thought he sensed others—one, two, a dozen, more—who found themselves unwitting channels for a power with a will of its own. He lost sight and sense of Marina, lost sight and sense of Reggie, clung only to his own identity, desperately, praying, as the competing waves of power battered him indiscriminately, and finally drove him down into darkness.

And his last thought was that if Marina was not to survive this confrontation—he didn’t want to, either.

The last thing he heard was a dreadful wailing, a howl of the deepest and most profound despair and defeat—and the sound of demonic laughter.

Then he lost track of everything, and knew nothing more.

He woke in a bed in his own sanitarium; he knew that ceiling—it was the one above his bed. He coughed, and suddenly there were half a dozen faces looking down at him. And among the faces around his bed was the one he wanted to see most.

“Marina!” The word came out as a croak, from a throat raw and rasping.

“Alive, thanks to you,” she said, her eyes dark-circled, her voice heavy with exhaustion, her smile bright and full of an emotion he hardly dared name. “And well, thanks to my—our—friends. And so are you.” She turned her smile on the three men, who looked equally exhausted. “Clifton bridged the power-well of the rectory to the greater power of the other Masters—and got a bit of a shock!”

“I should say,” Davies admitted, rubbing the side of his head, as if it still ached. “Never have I seen such an outpouring of power—not only from the Masters we had telegraphed, not only from your Undines and the lesser Water creatures, but from the Mermaids and Tritons, the Hippocampi and other salt-water powers all the way down at the sea, and from the Air, the Sylphs, the Winds, the Fauns and other Earth creatures, the Salamanders and Dragons of Fire—things I can’t even put a name to! They cleansed the earth for you, Andrew! And you reached for your power and it answered with more than I have ever heard of!”

“And you did exactly what that irascible old reprobate told you to do,” Sebastian said, as words failed the Reverend Davies and he shook his head in wonder. “You unwound that curse and wrapped it around Reginald and tied it back to Madam, and then—” He shrugged. “Well, we don’t precisely know what happened then. All we know