He nodded excitedly. “I must have flown by it hundreds of times, but I couldn’t see it until your mortal body started to die. The moment you began crossing over into death, the door appeared right in front of me, like it was waiting for us.”
Marci still couldn’t believe it. “So you’re telling me there’s aliteralMerlin Gate, and we’re flying to it? Do I just walk through and get my Merlin license or something?”
“I’m sure it won’t be that simple,” Ghost said. “Nothing else about this has been. But that’s what it looks like.”
“Fits what I’ve heard, too,” Amelia added. “The Merlins I knew in the few decades I was alive before the drought hit wouldn’t tell me squat because they were miserly, secretive bastards, but the way they talked made it sound like being a Merlin was more than justbeinga Merlin. They always acted like they were a part of some kind of larger organization. If that’s true, then having the gate on this side makes perfect sense. Where better to hide the Guild Hall for a secret society of mages and spirits than inside magic itself?”
“It would also explain why the gate didn’t appear until you started to die,” the Empty Wind added. “This is the realm of immortal spirits. You can’t even move through the magic of this place without one of us to guide you, which I couldn’t do until you got closer to my domain.”
“Which is death,” Marci finished, glancing up at the nauseating swirls of magic shimmering like the rainbow sheen of oil on whirlpools of black water all around them. “So if I touch this without your protection—”
“You’ll be burned away.”
“Right,” she said, remembering how just the brief brush with the circle of pure, undulating magic at the top of her death had been enough to nearly dissolve her hand before Ghost had yanked her to safety. Her fingers looked all right now, thank goodness, but it wasn’t an experience she was eager to repeat. “Guess I’m sticking to you, then. Not that I’d do anything else, but how are we going to deal with the gate? Do you carry me over the threshold or something?”
Her spirit shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never done anything like this. But we’ll find out soon enough.”
He nodded ahead of them, and Marci turned to look before she remembered that any movement in this place made her ill. Sure enough, she had to fight not to hurl as the asymmetrical whirlpools filled her vision, making the whole world spin in five different directions. Awful as she felt, though, Marci didn’t close her eyes. No amount of magical seasickness was going to keep her from getting her first glimpse of whatever a Merlin Gate was. She forced herself to keep looking, straining to see through the liquid chaos of the constantly moving magic.
It really was like trying to look through the deep ocean. Other than Ghost’s glowing eyes and Amelia’s fire, there was no light in this place. Thankfully, that didn’t seem to be too much of a problem now that she’d shed the limitations of physical eyes. She couldn’t do anything about the churning chaos, but eventually, her vision adapted, filtering out the waves and swirls and black-on-black motion of the magic rushing by to see what was actually changing.
Just like before, the first thing she saw was Ghost. TherealGhost, not the human-shaped shadow she clung to. That must have been just for her comfort, because the longer Marci looked, the more she realized that the cold calm surrounding them wasn’t coming from the Sea of Magic. It was all him. She wasn’t standing next to Ghost—they wereinsidehim, inside the shelter of the Empty Wind’s own magic as he cut through the black depths like a shark toward a much larger, darker shape Marci could now see looming in front of them.
Ghost had called it a gate, so that was the shape Marci had been expecting, but the reality looked more like a column. A huge, round, black pillar rising straight up like a post from the rolling expanse of the sea floor. It got even bigger as they flew closer, which explained why Ghost had seen it the moment it appeared. Even in a place as big, dark, and chaotic as this, something that big was hard to miss. Still, Marci didn’t understand how anyone could possibly call it a gate until Ghost landed in front of it.
“Stay close,” he whispered as they set down on the flat, seemingly rocky ground that formed the floor of the Sea of Magic. “The currents are strong here.”
She could feel them. Now that they’d stopped moving forward, she realized that the black swirls were more than just nauseating movements. They were forces, swirling balls of magical torque that wrenched and pushed against her spirit’s edges, bowing the faintly glimmering barrier of his wind inward.
“Whatarethey?” Amelia asked, her voice excited as she leaned perilously close to one of the bulges. “I mean, clearly, they’re disturbances in the magic, but what’s causing them?”
“I don’t know,” the Empty Wind said, tightening his grip on Marci’s shoulder. “The Sea of Magic is always restless, but it’s been especially volatile since Algonquin’s attempt to raise a Mortal Spirit from dragon blood in Reclamation Land failed.”
“Guess she made waves in more ways than one,” Marci muttered, crossing her arms over her chest to keep as far as possible from the chaotic flows of power banging on Ghost’s edges. “Where now?”
The Empty Wind pointed at the column in front of them. This close, the curving surface looked more like a flat, featureless wall, its face polished smooth by the constantly battering currents. Between the dark and the swirls of magic that rolled through it like thicker shadows, it was nearly impossible to make out what Ghost was trying to show her. Eventually, though, she spotted a gap in the pillar’s flat stone face.
It wasn’t what Marci would have called a gate. The small, rectangular dent in the pillar’s surface was neither grand nor obvious. It was no taller than she was, a hole that was cut less than an inch deep into the stone and blocked by a door that looked as if it had been stolen from a medieval kitchen: a tight-set slab of rough-hewn wooden planks held together with tar and iron banding. There was no knocker, no handle, no knob, no announcements or decorations of any sort. If it weren’t for the fact that it was so clearly out of place in this world of swirling, nonphysical chaos, Marci wouldn’t have thought it was special at all.
“Is that it?” Amelia asked skeptically.
“I think so,” the Empty Wind said. “I’ve never been closer than this, but it feels right.”
Marci thought it felt like a letdown. Still, if there was anything she’d learned from Ghost, it was to never judge on appearances. Especially if that appearance happened to be the only opening in the base of what was clearly an artificial, man-made structure poking out of the otherwise flat floor of the Sea of Magic.
“Guess we should give it a try,” Marci said, holding out her hand to Ghost.
He took it, wrapping his freezing fingers around hers as they walked together to the pillar. When they were both standing on the threshold, Marci took a final breath of the Empty Wind’s cold magic before lifting her shivering hand to knock.
And high above, hidden in the chaos, an enormous swirl of magic shaped like a raven nodded in satisfaction before nipping back into the land of the living.
***
Emily?
General Emily Jackson, commanding officer of the UN’s Magical Disaster Response Team, and current prisoner of Algonquin, shifted her aching head.
What, no hello?
