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Authors: Caroline Stevermer

BOOK: A Scholar of Magics
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Glassy, transparent, visible only as their motion caught the angled sunlight, barriers drifted around the hexagonal heart of the labyrinth. Walls hitherto unguessed-at were there, hidden in light, revealed by light. Lambert watched as they shifted, stately as clouds drifting across the sky on a fine afternoon. He perceived that the full scope of the maze took in not only the labyrinth itself and the garden that surrounded it but the stones and spires of all Glasscastle, university and town alike. The walls were held within walls, barriers within barriers, as neatly as the rings of an armillary sphere nested.
The illusion had moved into the precise center of the labyrinth as it disappeared. Where had it gone?
Had
it gone?
Lambert kept his eyes fixed on the hints of light that showed where the barriers were drifting. He did not look down as he stepped into the pattern of the maze. He did not spare a thought for Porteous, left beside Jane. The gleam of the transparent barriers was all that drew him. At last, he would see the heart of Glasscastle.
No bells, no birdsong, and no sense of time passed as Lambert made his way to the center of the labyrinth. He might have crossed it in a few strides, the journey went so quickly. He might have been crossing it for years. Rapt, he set foot on the flagstones at the edge of the central hexagon. He felt the scrape of them beneath his boots, yet he saw no flagstones. The hexagon before him was open to the sky, a well of green translucent glass that fell away out of light into
unimaginable shadows. But the well was not empty.
When he looked down, Lambert felt his heart lurch with dread and with surprise. Below him, six feet down and drifting slowly downward, Fell was caught in the translucence of the well. Holding him there, gathering power as he gathered light, was the Earl of Bridgewater.
Bridgewater was more Merlin than Arthur now, with his hat gone and his silver-streaked hair flowing almost to his collar. He grappled Fell to him, using both height and strength to subdue his captive. Bridgewater spoke slowly, with great effort, as if to soothe Fell. “Steady. Nearly ready now.”
Jane's illusion was gone. Forever gone. Lambert knew it without knowing how. The drowsing silence had pulled it to Bridgewater and Bridgewater had consumed it. Much of Jane's strength had gone with the illusion, strength that now belonged to Bridgewater. More strength was going, pulled inexorably into Bridgewater's light.
Lambert knew without analysis that Glasscastle itself was adrift, its power and serenity pulled into Bridgewater's orbit. As the transparent barriers continued to drift, gleaming in the fading daylight all around him, Lambert knew that Fell was adrift too. Bridgewater held him fast. It was Bridgewater's grasp of Fell's strength that had given him the foothold he needed to win Glasscastle. There was a piece of “Bridgewater's magic in everything, and every tendril it sent forth was a taproot, draining the magic, drawing it back for Bridgewater's use.
Lambert could see it all in the way Bridgewater held Fell, a puppeteer with his puppet well in hand. Lambert could see it all in the way Fell blinked up at him, as if blinded by dazzling light.
Fell's voice was a rasp of pain, a husk of sound. Only the acoustics of the well gave the words strength enough to reach the surface. “Samuel, are you there?”
From childhood memory, a scriptural reference stirred and surfaced. Lambert knew the books of Samuel, his namesake, best of all. The mere recollection calmed him:
The Lord called Samuel and he answered: Here am I.
“Here am I. Hang on.” Lambert found himself short of breath. “Just hang on.”
Not a rasp. A scrape. “I will. But you—” The voice hesitated, grew minutely stronger. “You must hurry. Kill me before he gets it all.”
Fell's words struck Lambert like a blow.
Kill
Fell?
Bridgewater tightened his hold on Fell.
Fell made a sound. It was not a word. It wasn't even the shape of a word. It was a sound of pain, frustration, and despair. After that sound, there was nothing. Only silence.
Still Lambert hesitated. The silence grew. The light was fading. Even as Lambert watched, Fell and Bridgewater sank farther out of sight into the depths of the well. He tried to say “Hang on” again but the words didn't come. His mouth was dry. His eyes were wet.
There was only silence. No chanting. No bells. No birdsong. Lambert turned and ran. All he saw was the labyrinth before him. All he heard were his own swift footsteps. That and the scrape of his panting breath, the beat of his leaping heart as he raced from the core of the labyrinth to the labyrinth's mouth.
At the labyrinth's entrance, Lambert tripped over Porteous, who was still leaning over Jane. “My dear child,” the
booming voice beseeched. “My dear child, you must try to breathe. That's it.
Try
.”
Lambert dared not spare a glance at Jane. He ignored Porteous and went straight for the black satchel. The latch yielded to force and he pulled the two halves of the top apart with a snap, as if opening a doctor's medical bag.
The Agincourt device, absurdly ornate, lay gleaming within. Lambert clawed it out, turned it over in his hands, hefted it, and looked through the sight. The image was inverted. Very dirsconcerting, to see the world turned upside down. From the outside, the device seemed just as he remembered it. He wished he'd had a better view when Voysey had aimed it at him.
To Porteous, Lambert snapped, “Have you disarmed this thing?”
Porteous gaped at him. “No. We don't know how. We haven't had time to learn.”
Before Porteous had finished speaking, Lambert was back in the maze. He wanted to hurdle the hedges, to cheat the long switchbacks, but he knew better than to try to cut corners. There was meaning in the intervals of the pattern, just as there was meaning in the intervals of St. Mary's arches, and meaning in the intervals of the chants.
Lambert ran as fast as he could through the maze. This was a pattern he understood. He knew he had to stick to it, every step. It was part of the game. Just as in baseball the infielders threw the ball around the horn after a putout, each putout a different pattern but every pattern counterclockwise; just as the third baseman, and only the third baseman, was to touch the ball last on the return to the pitcher, this was
inevitable, a pattern he knew to the marrow of his bones.
It mattered that Lambert follow the pattern. It mattered that he take each step in its proper order. The desire to break the pattern was part of the pattern, and that temptation augmented the power the pattern held. Turning and returning, Lambert ran back to the heart of the maze.
It took forever. It took five minutes. It took fifty years. Lambert reached the heart of the labyrinth, looked deep into that well of glass, raised the Agincourt device, and took aim. The frantic beat of his heart made it hard to keep his hands steady, to keep the target in its sight. His breath tore in and out. He tasted blood.
Lambert dropped to his belly on the ground, propped his elbows to steady his aim, and forced himself to breathe evenly. His pounding heart made the device seem to pulse in Lambert's grasp. From this angle the drifting barriers were harder to see, slower and more random in their movement. There was no possibility of calmness, no chance of deliberation. He had Fell in his sight. Lambert moved just enough to draw a bead on Bridgewater's head.
If this doesn't work, I'll have to try it on Fell. And if
that
doesn't work, I may have to try to kill Fell after all.
His father's words came back to him.
Never aim a gun at anyone unless you're fixing to kill him
. The memory settled him down. He steadied his breathing.
The gleaming shift of a barrier held Lambert up another five heartbeats until it cleared his view. He pulled the trigger. The device made a noise Lambert had never heard before—a piercingly sweet note just beside his ear—the only sound left in the world. Something inside the device shifted subtly
and then it felt as inert in Lambert's hands as a bugle or a flute. Lambert closed his eyes. He held his breath until spots danced on the inside of his eyelids.
When Lambert had to breathe again, when Lambert had to look, Bridgewater was no longer there. In the depths of the glassy shaft he could see only Fell. Fell was holding something under one arm, something a little smaller than a football. Lambert could just make out that it was a tortoise. He knew, without any idea how he knew it, that until he'd fired the Agincourt device, the tortoise had been Bridgewater.
Fell called up, “Don't shoot. It's only me.” He was calm but hoarse. He sounded far away.
Lambert lowered the Agincourt device. The silence wasn't draining into the well any longer. Nothing was draining anywhere. The gleaming barriers, and the whole world with them, simply drifted. The cylinder that had held the Egerton wand had split from one end to the other and there was nothing inside but dust. Lambert watched the dust sift out of the flawed brass and disappear into the sunlight. That was the sound he'd heard when he fired at Bridgewater, the final strain on the Egerton wand as it shattered.
“I've broken it,” said Lambert, forlornly.
“I broke it,” Fell replied, “when the answer came to me. It wasn't the spheres I needed to realign. It was the space between spheres. The shape of the intervals. The silence between the notes.”
All the while he spoke, Fell was climbing toward the surface on a stair Lambert couldn't see. He took it a step at a time, as though his knees hurt him, or as if he were very old. Bareheaded, unshaven, with a tortoise tucked under his arm,
Fell ascended. As he rose, the aimless drift of the barriers slowed and became deliberate motion, even as the barriers refined themselves back into invisibility.
Fell reached the surface and stepped out of the well. As he did, the flagstones were firm underfoot again, the glassy depths lost to sight under the familiar stones. From the towers of Glasscastle, bells began to ring. They did not strike the hour and stop. Instead they rang out every quarter they'd missed in the draining, drowsy silence. Bells answered bells. The birdsong returned. From every quarter the measured music of Glasscastle rang and redoubled.
Fell paused to listen, or maybe just to rest his knees, when he stood face- to-face with Lambert in the heart of the labyrinth. The light of the afternoon sun was in his eyes as he gazed at Lambert, his expression lit with intense interest and concern
“Are you all right?” Fell asked.
Lambert was listening too. It should have been impossible to hear the chants from such a distance, but he thought he could feel them in the marrow of his bones. “I am. Are you?” Lambert countered.
Fell's assent was in his expression. He said nothing, but led Lambert through the pattern of the maze at a stately pace. When they reached the mouth of the labyrinth, Fell placed the tortoise in Porteous's satchel, latched it, and handed it to the astonished Porteous.
Porteous accepted it without protest. He dropped back a deferential pace as Fell walked past. Lambert looked askance at such respect from one man to the other. Porteous
looked at Lambert with mild embarrassment and a faint air of apology. “He is the warden, you see.”
“He is?” Lambert watched Fell walk away into the rose garden as he helped Jane to her feet. That was it, then. The glow he had seen in Fell's eyes was not merely a fresh angle of the sun. There was a fire within him now, a pattern that gave a sense of rightness and fitness to Fell's every move.
“My goodness,” said Jane faintly, gazing after Fell, “he is, isn't he?”
But he still walked like an old man, Lambert thought.
“That's Bridgewater in your satchel there,” Lambert informed Porteous. “I had to use the device on him to save Fell.”
Horrified, Porteous gazed down at the black case he carried. “This is Lord Bridgewater?”
“He's a tortoise now. But I'd keep that thing latched all the same,” Lambert advised.
Jane was looking pale and sick and she sounded shaken. “No wonder the Egerton wand found its way into the Agincourt device. Bridgewater must have arranged it himself.”
Lambert held up the device and shook it. A few grains of dust drifted out. “It's broken. The Egerton wand has been destroyed.”
“Such a pity.” Jane sounded much more like herself. “I wanted a look at that wand.”
Porteous eyed the device warily. “If the wand's destruction saved Glasscastle, then it was a small price to pay.”
As Lambert and Jane and Porteous followed in Fell's wake, first through the rose garden, then through the herb
garden, then back through the quadrangles to Midsummer Green, Fell's stride smoothed and loosened. His head came up, as if he were listening to more than the bells. By the time he reached Midsummer Green, he seemed younger than his years. His energy made every step inevitable. His progress was a dance of grace that looked like a wise man walking. The bells announced him. The hours and quarter hours lapped and overlapped into cascades.
Porteous lifted a hand in recognition as they halted on the grass at the edge of Midsummer Green. “That's the bells of St. Mary's ringing the changes.” He listened to the fall and rise of it a while, a shy smile widening by degrees until he was beaming with pleasure. “They're ringing Spliced Surprise Major. Lovely.”

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