Storm at the Edge of Time (13 page)

“Stealing church property? Give it here, please.”

“No!” Jamie cried, darting between the choir pews. As the man lunged for her, the air cracked explosively and turned white. Dazzled, Jamie stared toward the great window at the front end of the nave. The building shuddered with the thunder; then the window turned from lightning white to storm black.

Recovering, Jamie dodged around the pews and raced across the far aisle to another exit door. The two boys were there already, struggling to open it. Failing, they turned to run again, but both pursuers blocked them.

“All doors except the main one are locked at closing time, children,” the man said smoothly. “Give that to me, and we'll let you out.”

Angrily, Jamie turned back to the door. She jabbed the lock wildly with the point of the staff. “Open, blast you!” she yelled.

The flame that sprang from the staff was like a welding torch. The iron bands on the door turned white hot. With a screaming crack, the old oak planks split apart.

Jamie stood for a moment, staring dumbly at the smoldering staff in her hand. Then she charged through the shattered door, Tyaak and Arni right behind her.

Outside, the rain lashed down in a curtain the color of knife blades. They were in the cemetery, but could see only a few feet ahead of them. Tyaak took the lead. His hood blown back, dark hair streaked behind him as he dodged this way and that. The others followed, leaping graves and veering from tombstones that seemed to plunge at them through the rain.

Running through the cemetery gate and down the street, Jamie didn't need to turn to know those other two were running after them. She could feel the hatred they shot before them like headlights. And she was the little animal trying to get off the road.

The rain was too heavy to really see where
they were going, but splashing through torrents of water, she and Am i blindly followed Tyaak. Suddenly a bus showed in the murk ahead of them. This was the spot where they'd gotten off earlier. But the bus was already pulling out. They'd never make it.

The bus blared its horn and squealed to a halt. Sprinting even faster, Tyaak reached it and began pounding on the door. The driver hit his horn again, then opened the door. Panting and dripping, the three children clambered on. As Jamie was fumbling for her money, she glanced out the bus's front window. Through the blur of rain, she made out a cow. It stood in the center of the street, staring placidly up at them with large blue eyes. Then it turned and ambled out of the way.

Muttering something about rural routes, the driver gunned the engine and jolted them forward. Jamie thought she glimpsed two bedraggled figures standing in the street behind them and shaking their fists.

The three staggered to the back of the jouncing bus and dropped into seats. They shivered, letting water drip off them into spreading pools on the floor. For the first time, Jamie really looked at the staff she was gripping. At its top, the carved fish, still glistening with real water, seemed ready to leap free.

“Those people,” Jamie said at last, “they must be the same sort as the Viking raiders who followed us.”

Tyaak was wringing water from the long dark ropes of his hair. He grunted. “I wish Urkar had told us more. If these are the workers of destructive power he mentioned, are they as ignorant in all this as we are? Were they simply ordered to capture the banner or protect
the staff, or do they really know what is going on—about the storm and everything?” Suddenly he slammed his fists together and almost snarled.

“What's the matter?” Jamie asked.

“I am talking as if I believed this garbage!”

Arni laughed for the first time in a long while. “What is there to believe? Magic happens like the sun rising in the morning.”

Jamie was running her fingers along the smooth swirling grain of the staff. It felt warm and tingly. She wondered if anyone could feel that, or just carriers of power. “Those others must know more about some things than we do. I bet if they got their act together, they could do us some serious harm—magically, I mean.”

“But we have the staff,” Arni pointed out.

“Right,” Jamie said. “But do we have any idea how to use it? What I did was an accident—instinct, maybe—and it was probably the same with you, Arni.”

The boy looked down. “I was just trying to fend that fellow off as if I had a sword. I didn't guess …”

His voice faltered, and Tyaak stepped in. “That is the danger. We have a tool in our hands we do not know how to use. Magic, as you call it, is probably some rational understandable power like any other force in the universe. We just do not know the rules. And I, for one, am not interested in learning. The sooner we get this into Urkar's hands, the better.”

Jamie had been watching through the rain-blurred windows. “Our stop is coming soon. It's a ways from the circle, and there's nothing to have kept those two from getting a car and following us. If they know as
much as they seemed to, they might also know where we're going. The Viking raiders did.”

All three stared out the fogged-up back window, wiping little clear patches. But the road behind looked empty. Just the same, when the bus jerked to a halt at their stop, they hurried down the steps and headed up the road at a trot.

The rain had lessened, but the wind seemed worse, driving the cold and wet into them like needles. They had passed the remains of the earlier circle and were crossing the causeway between lochs when something made Jamie look around. A red car was speeding along the road behind them.

“Run!” she yelled, and dashed along the wet pavement. At each side, waves crashed and foamed against the rocks. White forms huddled together on the most sheltered side: wild swans, waiting out the storm.

The land widened out. They could see the jagged gray stones on the moor ahead. Arni left the road and began running crosscountry toward them. Jamie and Tyaak followed.

Behind them, the car rumbled across the causeway and, in a slurry of mud, pulled off the road. Two people in raincoats jumped out and started running after them. From the shape of the slower one, Jamie knew there was an orange sweater under the raincoat.

The wet heather was hard to run through. It kept snagging her feet, grabbing like tiny prickly hands. With a gasp she saw that that was what they were: little clusters of dark brittle hands, reaching out for her, grasping her shoelaces, clutching her ankles. Yanking away from them, Jamie struggled on. Then, swifter
than a snake, an arm from a taller bush hooked her about the knees and sent her sprawling.

Wet heather slapped her in the face. Staring into it, Jamie saw writhing hands inches away. With her free hand she battered them back and felt tiny nails ripping her skin.

She heard an animal yell beside her. Half sitting up, Tyaak was thrashing in the heather. The expression on his face, alien or not, was pure terror.

Just beyond him, Arni was kicking and stomping. Then, with a squeal, he threw his hands over his face and stopped moving.

“It's got to be magic!” he yelled. “They're making us see things that aren't there. It's just heather and grass!”

Sure, Jamie thought, heather and grass with tiny hands. But that was crazy! Plants couldn't have hands. It had to be some nasty illusion.

Even as she thought that, the vividness faded. The hands went pale and gray, feeble as spiderwebs.

With an angry laugh, she kicked free of them and leaped over to where Tyaak lay fighting with nothing. Grabbing his shoulders, she tried to drag him up. “Better believe in magic!” she yelled. “Or you'll never see that this
is
only magic.”

He looked at her, confused. She thrust the staff into his hands. “Come on, you can see through this. You've got the power!”

Leaning on the staff, he struggled to his feet. Hesitantly he swept the staff through the heather. Those smoky little hands, which Jamie could still see, withered and vanished. Tyaak's triumphant yell was cut short by words slicing through the wind.

“Child's play. Congratulations, but that's as far as you go.”

Nearby on the moor stood the two from the cathedral. They had stopped to see the effect of their trick, but now advanced again. And they were not alone. Beside them moved other dark figures. Deadly dark—except for the eyes.

Jamie turned to run, but other shadows were moving down the slope, shadows with eyes like glowing coals. “You're all illusions!” she shrieked. “You're not real!” They scarcely flickered. The things reeked of power stronger than illusion.

The three children banded together, looking fearfully at the closing figures. “The staff?” Tyaak said doubtfully.

Jamie grabbed it. Yelling like someone in a samurai movie, she ran up the slope, swinging the staff against the nearest figure. Its eyes flared when the staff sliced through it, and the whole creature burst into flame. But this was worse. Now a huge tower of flame advanced toward her. She swiped at another advancing figure and another. They too exploded into menacing flame.

Those two know how to use their power, Jamie thought despairingly, and we don't. She tried to see nothing but damp heather beneath empty gray sky. But she could feel the heat and see the heather beginning to smolder and smoke.

A hissing screech cut through the crackle of flame. White shapes dropped from the sky. Staggering, Jamie fell back into one of the flaming towers, but its heat was fading and she could see right through it.

Everywhere, white wings, necks, snapping beaks. Wild swans, dozens of them. They beat their wings and dove, hissing and biting, at the raincoat-clad figures. With angry cries, the two raised their arms to ward them off.

Jamie flinched as one swan peeled away and dove at the three of them. It beat its wings and struck like a snake, driving them up the slope, fleeing its fierce blue eyes.

Through fading flames and shadows the three ran toward the stones, real and solid, that rose in a broken circle out of the moor. Three children and a swan burst through.

Sobbing for breath, Jamie dropped into the heather. The ground was dry, and the sound of rain and wind had vanished. A dark man with the swan's blue eyes stood over her. Smiling weakly, she handed Urkar the staff. Then she rolled over and snuggled closer to the gently burning campfire. She wanted only to be warm, dry, and asleep.

What woke Jamie this time was the sound of wrongness. She opened her eyes and saw the perfect circle of stones still around her, still lit by the ruddy glow of the campfire. Above stretched the infinite darkness with its icicle glint of stars. But the perfect silence was gone. The roar of a distant storm shot her with fear.

Shivering, Jamie sat up. Nearby, the others were sitting as well, their eyes turned to the center of the circle. Urkar stood there beside a slender pillar, dark wood and golden twisting together, taller than either staff had been alone.

He walked toward the three of them. “I can't keep the storm away much longer. Once it breaks into this little island of eternity, there won't be much time before it sweeps into your world like a flood. For years destruction will rise in power, until this whole chunk of
the universe collapses. The only thing that will hold it back is raising this completed pillar. Up now! You must seek the third staff.”

“But Urkar,” Arni said uncertainly, “the magic—there's so much of it, and it's so powerful. I don't want to go off again with tools I don't know how to use.”

Urkar snorted. “Do you think I want to be stuck in this changeless nowhere, able to dip into real time only as some powerless animal? Do you think I want to send off clueless raw recruits on a mission this important? Do you think I want—”

Jamie burst in. “Stop shouting, Urkar! Can't you see that Arni is scared? We all are, but Arni's the only one who wanted this power in the first place. And all it's done for him is make him incinerate someone and send him to a time when everyone he knows and loves is dead. I feel sorry for your daughter, if this is the kind of explaining, patient parent you were.”

Urkar's face boiled with anger, then slowly calmed to a sad smile. “And well you might feel for my daughter. She was just like you, putting me in my place when I needed it.”

He squatted down beside them. “Look, Arni, your people weren't dead when you climbed into another century. They were just where and when you left them. Think of time as a tree, a huge one. It starts as a seedling and begins to sprout at the tip. Branches spring out; it grows taller and wider. The growth is still only at the tip, but the whole beautiful creation is still there, still alive.

“Time is like that. The growth is only at the front end, but the rest of it, where the growth used to be,
remains. From my little island in eternity, I can see the whole thing, I can go to any part I want, from the trunk to the growing, fragile tip.”

He stood up again and paced nervously around them. “And that is where you need to go now. Young Tyaak here comes from the time on the edge. I had despaired of success there. The staff had left the island; even in animal form, I cannot leave these shores. My descendants had long ago left as well. But then Tyaak returned, and perhaps now, with all three of you, unschooled as you are, working together it is not too late.”

“But what can I—” Tyaak had begun when a sudden gust of wind howled past them, shaking the stones where they stood.

Urkar raised his arms and shouted something, but the roaring wind tore away his words. Across the arching sky, a tiny gash appeared, stretching by the moment. Blackness oozed from it, deep, infinite blackness blotting out the stars.

“Hurry!” Urkar shouted. “Time is running out!”

Jamie, Tyaak, and Arni grabbed each other as the dizzying mist slammed into them, throwing them to their knees. Jamie felt as if a lifetime of sickening carnival rides had condensed into a single moment. The mist cleared, leaving them gasping and retching on the heather.