Lightbreaker

Without the natural flame of the storm lantern, there wasn't any way to grow a fire without magick, and magick meant setting off Julian's ward. I crawled every inch of the container in the dark, trying to find some flaw in the ward. Some tiny hesitation in the script that could be exploited. Nothing. Julian's work was too precise.

My stomach knotted itself over and over, and the rest of my insides were equally shriveled. Two days, maybe more, since my last meal. Minnie's? What had I eaten? Details were starting to become vague.

Some time later, when I was too weak to move, I hallucinated. Visions of psychedelic butterflies and phantom lizards with rainbow-striped crests. The tarot dream came back and started to loop in my head, the details getting more surreal and psychotic with each iteration.

An ocean of light poured over me, and the rushing wave came with an overwhelming racket of church bells. I floated off the floor, and gasping like a lungfish coming out of the mud, I gulped at the light. It was transformed- habes aquam vivam-and I choked, unprepared for such a transformation. The light grew firm, shadows intruding in the blankness, and I began to remember what these shapes were. My hands trembled as they reached to hold the bottle against my mouth.

'Let him finish it,' a voice said. 'He needs to be coherent.' I tried to distinguish this shadow from the others.

The water slowed to a trickle and, under the vacuum suction of my infantile need, stopped. My stomach ached from the sudden influx of fluid even as the rest of me sighed in delight. I lowered the plastic bottle and held it out for more.

The light went out: rough fabric over my head, a rope cinched against my neck. I inhaled instinctively, and my lungs choked on a cloying miasma. The cloth was soaked with an anesthetic and, with each breath, I pulled more of it into my lungs. The butterflies came back-more and more of them-and I drifted away, covered by iridescent wings.

I woke under a rounded roof, a cupola of iron girders rising to a capstone of riveted metal. Long shadows crept along the ribs of the roof. Tainted by the scent of dead fish and seawater, the air was damp and cold. Beneath me, a row of rivets pressed into my shoulder blade instead of the flat ridges of the container. My head was a block of wood, and based on the taste in mouth, I had been sucking on dirty wool.

I rolled onto my side and sat up. Metal bleachers from an old high school gymnasium lined up along one wall. On either side, oil drums burned with blue flame. Hollow Men, dressed in gray robes with deep hoods, were scattered across the seats. At the base of the bleachers stood two men-one in the same gray, the other in a black hoodless garment. I recognized him, though Doug was taller and thinner in person. They were standing at the edge of the ceremonial circle in which I lay.

At four equidistant points along the circle-the cardinal directions, probably-there were metal sculptures. Scrap iron fused by blowtorch into skeletal frameworks. Lion, bull, eagle, and angel. Each held a different object: rod, sword, cup, and disk. Tarot suits, held by evangelical symbols.

My first guess was that the circle was something out of Solomon's grimoires, but this was more medieval, more late-period European alchemy in its representation. The statues were the beings seen by Ezekiel in his vision. This was the-

'The Wheel speaks the law of the living and of the dead.' Doug's companion spoke the words as liturgy. The phrase rolled around in my head, stirring dull roots. The Wheel of Fortune. The tenth card of the tarot's Major Arcana. The cycle of death and rebirth. The Chorus moved sluggishly, old snakes reluctant to rise from their hibernation.

'Rota taro orat tora ator.' Doug said his part of the ritual. He was wearing the sort of shift that went over the head and tied around the waist with a length of old rope. Though Doug hadn't bothered with the rope.

Still unsteady with nausea, I managed to stand. A glob of thick spit was rolling on the back of my tongue and I worked it forward until I could spit it out. My input to the ceremonial rhetoric.

'Kings and princes are equal upon the circle of fate.' The priest ignored my commentary. 'And their fate is determined by the rotation of the Wheel.' A mutter of agreement ran through the rank of Hollow Men. In the wan light of the blue flames, they looked like empty statues.

'You have been challenged by Douglas Rassmussen, Initiate Ascendant in the Order of the Hollow Men. While you have no rank within the Order, a temporary conveyance has been established to allow you to fight upon the Wheel. At the resolution of this combat, this conveyance will be terminated. You will have no recourse to membership or recognition by the Order. Is that clear?'

'Yeah,' I said, finally getting my words under control. 'I get it.' I rolled my shoulders and shook out my arms. The turgid Chorus finally moved out of my belly and into the rest of my frame. I was weak from a lack of food-the water hadn't done much beyond whet my appetite-but I was functional. Functional enough for Doug, apparently.

It had been his voice in the container, when I had been given water. He needs to be coherent. If he wanted me dead, they would have killed me in the box. They wouldn't have bothered with all this pomp and nonsense. This was a sacrament that met some ritual need of Doug's. I couldn't sense Julian, and I doubted Bernard was one of those watching; this was an unsanctioned event. Those two wouldn't have bothered with showing me how the mirror worked if this was where I was going to end up.

Doug had deviated from the plan. He wanted something of his own. A little piece of me. 'In the old days,' I said as adrenaline finally started to charge my blood, 'they would just rope off a section of floor and let us beat each other bloody. No one gave a shit about recognition or rank.'

'We've grown more civilized,' the orator said.

'I suppose he's planning on reading my guts if he can?'

Doug nodded.

'So much for civilized,' I said. I raised a hand and waved Doug over. 'Come on, chump. Quit letting your master bore us with his liturgy. Come and take what you think you deserve.'

The orator looked over his shoulder at the assembled host. 'Witnesses?' he asked. They all raised their right hands. He nodded at them. 'I'm done talking then,' he said, sweeping a hand toward the ring and me. 'Shut him up,' he said, breaking from his stoic character. Raising his hood to cover his face, he stepped back from the circle.

A puff of light followed Doug as he crossed the border of the circle, a mystic ripple that preceded a clatter of metal. Long triangular pieces of steel rose up from the trough at the edge of the circle. Speaking in one sepulchral voice, the Hollow Men incanted an old propulsion spell. They stamped their feet three times to focus, actualize, and initiate the magick. Machinery beneath the floor groaned, and the triangles began to move along a recessed track.

They spun about the circumference of the circle, their rotational rate increasing in time to the beat of the Hollow Men's feet. The blades became a blur, and the Hollow Men stopped. The barrier at the edge of the circle kept moving.

So many blades. I had drawn a lot of them in my reading. The Wheel was where they all came to pass.

Doug stripped off his black robe as he prowled along the edge of the circle. Underneath, he wore a dark track suit. He bunched up the collar of the robe and held the garment in one hand.

Chorus-sight revealed a sphere of violet light around his head. Tiny contrails drifting in his wake like long strands of mist. It wasn't a complex spell, hand-to-hand combat was the worst time to attempt an intricate incantation. While one fighter was busy shaping energies, his opponent would just brain him with a rock. Combat magic was sharp and quick. Not like the fire spell Julian had had floating over his head-that sort of magick took time to nurture and position. The tiny streamers coming off Doug's head were something else. .

Doug raised his hand to his mouth, whispering to the robe, and some of the violet light from his halo slipped into the robe. He let go of the garment and it spread out like a manta ray. Its edges rippled and pulsed as it soared across the ring.

It was just a cotton robe-it couldn't harm me-but it could distract me. If it managed to wrap itself around my arm or leg, I would be encumbered.

I side-stepped its first lunge. As it fluttered past, I charged the desiccated atmosphere in my mouth and spat a drop of fire. The hot spark struck the robe's fluttering wing, melting through the flight aspect of the spell. Fire