Someone, maybe one of the ghouls, maybe not, pointed a finger at me and started shouting, and things got a lot worse, quickly. People started shoving. A woman cried out and went down on her back, striking her head.
And a tall, dark-haired man stepped out from between two of the houses across the street. He took off a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses and swept me a mocking bow.
Lord Raith.
He gave me a smile that a cat might give a mouse caught out on an open floor. Then he vanished between the houses again.
“Hell’s bells,” I spat. “That’s what’s been going on. He’s been setting this up for months.”
“Who?” Bear said.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said quietly. “Not relevant. What’s done is done. Okay. Okay.” I swallowed. I checked my staff. I wasn’t sure it could bear the kind of energy I’d need to put through it.
So it would have to go through me.
I wasn’t sure I could bear the kind of energy I’d need to use, either. But if I didn’t, innocent people were going to die.
Time to wizard up.
I walked to the center of the roof and told everyone, “Stay back from me. You don’t want to get too close to this.”
“Too close to what?” Fitz called.
“The big time,” I said, and rapped my staff on the stones of the roof, sending out a burst of my will along with it.
Green-gold light swept out from the end of the staff in a circle, rolling over the barely visible carvings in the stones, picking out a circle of glowing sigils around me that formed into a magic circle almost at once. I could feel the power congeal around me, feel unseen walls snap up in a cylinder above me—and simultaneously thrust down into the castle and the earth below.
The stones beneath my feet began to vibrate.
“Bob,” I said quietly.
The spirit of intellect’s voice came, conducted through the stone beneath me, up the length of the dense wood grain of my staff, to buzz in my ear. “Yeah, boss?”
“You got those ley lines called up?”
Merlin’s fortress, they had called it, this castle. And it had been built not only to shelter and protect, but to channel magical energy as well. Its layered enchantments gave it a metaphysical mass far beyond the weight of mere stone. Magically speaking, it was made of a superdense substance, like the material of a collapsed star.
And like that material, it had its own kind of gravity.
“It’s ready to bring them together,” Bob said. “But…Harry, are you absolutely sure? You haven’t worked with stuff this big before. And even though everything seems to check out, they might not have put this place back together just right, you know? When Marcone brought it here?”
“He had a fallen angel whose province is magic advising him when he did,” I noted. “Marcone is a lot of things, but one thing he isn’t is incompetent.”
I took a deep breath.
A month ago, I wouldn’t have even considered this, much less actually tried it.
Either I’d been healing…or just getting crazier.
Or both. You know.
Things are rarely monolithic.
“Bring it up to power,” I said to Bob.
“Got it, boss,” Bob said nervously. I supposed I couldn’t blame him. Bob was living in the stone of the castle itself now, and I was about to flood that stone with dangerous amounts of energy.
I closed my eyes, shutting out distractions, the shouts from the crowd. Rocks had begun being thrown, judging from the clack of stone on stone coming from the walls at the castle’s front. Screams rose, some of fury, some of pain. I shut those out, too, and sent my senses completely into the stone beneath me.
