Chapter 16
We are so screwed.
This was the refrain that ran through Marci’s head as she crouched in her circle just beyond the edge of Vann Jeger’s water cage…bell jar…whatever, ignoring the horrible sounds coming from inside as she stared at her spellwork, trying to figure out how her simple plan had gone so wrong.
It hadn’t started out that way. The beginning was perfect. Vann Jeger had removed her curse and stepped into her trap without a twinge. He’d then proceeded to lock himself inside an evensmallercircle right in the middle. She couldn’t have invented a better setup for a banishing, and she’d gotten right to work, stealing his magic in whisper-light touches that rapidly became greedy tugs once she realized the spirit wasn’t reacting. She wasn’t sure if this was because Vann Jeger was simply too caught up in the dragons to notice her, or if he knew what she was doing and was too convinced of his superiority to care, but until he came out of his water palace to stop her, Marci was going pedal to the metal. And, ironically, that was her problem.
Marci bit her lip, shaking her head to fling off the sweat that was dripping down her brow. She’d been sucking down magic at top speed without stop for the last twenty minutes. The giant circle she and Julius had drawn was already nearly full, which meant she’d moved more magic tonight than in the entire rest of her life combined. She could do nothing but sit around casting her biggest spells over and over for a year andstillnot use all the power she’d pulled out of Vann Jeger, and yet, inexplicably, the spirit was no smaller he’d been when she’d started
“Screwed,” she muttered, glaring at the faintly glowing circle under her fingers. “So screwed.”
She wouldn’t have been so upset if the problem had madesense. Like any mage worth the name, she’d built contingencies into the spellwork, but all of her fallbacks had been designed assuming Vann Jeger would be fighting her for his magic. Never in a million years would she have dreamed the spirit just wouldn’t care, or that he’d have more than she could fit in a freaking quarter mile circle, or that it wouldn’t be doing anygood. Despite losing the equivalent of a municipal power grid’s worth of magic, Vann Jeger was as strong as ever, which should have been completely impossible. No spirit was infinite, especially not one so far from his domain. Therehadto be a bottom to Vann Jeger’s power somewhere, but damned if Marci could find it, and she was almost out of time.
With that grim thought, Marci stopped pulling. The holding circle was almost full anyway, and just sitting around sucking more magic out of Vann Jeger clearly wasn’t going to solve the problem any time soon. If she didn’t want to be the reason this whole thing failed, she was going to have to come up with a new strategy thatwouldwork, and fast. So, with that, Marci forced herself to quit worrying about how screwed they were and started digging into Vann Jeger’s magic.
Since there was no way he didn’t know she was here at this point, Marci didn’t bother with subtlety. She just dug in, peeling open the magic she’d just been sucking down to try and find the reasonwhy.Why was it endless? Where was it all coming from?
But while she’d hoped to find something obvious, Vann Jeger’s magic just looked like chaos. Even Ghost hadn’t been that disorganized when she’d found him. Not being a spirit expert, Marci had no idea if the disarray was normal for spirits this size or if Vann Jeger was in a class by himself. Either way, it was time for a second opinion.
“Ghost!”
The spirit had been at her side the whole time, watching the water dome that hid Vann Jeger, Julius, and Chelsie like it was the most interesting thing in the world. She’d specifically kept him out of her spell at the beginning due to Amelia’s warnings, but Marci had passed caring about such things ten minutes ago, and she didn’t hesitate now to shove Vann Jeger’s magic in his face. “What do you make of this?”
The cat wrinkled his nose.Mess.
“That’s what I thought,” she said, scowling. “Is that the way magic normally looks for a spirit this size?”
Normal is relative,Ghost said, flicking his ears.But that’s not his magic.
“Don’t joke,” she scolded. “If that’s not his magic, then what have I been siphoning for the last twenty minutes?”
Ghost yawned.His weapons.
“His weapons,” Marci repeated slowly. “You mean like the knife he formed out of water and put against my throat?”
It wasn’t formed out of water,Ghost said, looking at her like this was all too obvious for words.Water isn’t metal. Vann Jeger is a fjord. The knife was dropped into him long ago. All he did was pull it out again.The cat turned to stare again at Vann Jeger’s wall of water.He has hundreds, all different.His transparent tail began to lash back and forth.They have voices.
Marci had no idea what that last part meant, but her mind was racing too fast to care. “Are we talking magical weapons?” she asked quickly. “Like Tyrfing?”
The cat blinked his glowing eyes.Do you know anything else that can hurt a dragon?
Marci could have hugged him. Despite legends that described them as being forged by gods, magical weapons—like magical anythings—were usually the product of human mages. Like the Kosmolabe and so much else, the knowledge of how to make them had been lost during the thousand-year drought, but Vann Jeger was much older than that,andhis domain was a fjord that ran through land that had been settled by humans since Neolithic times. She’d never actually heard of a spirit using human weapons, but if that’s where Vann Jeger was getting his arsenal, then it would also explain why his power seemed limitless, because it wasn’t his at all! The endless magic she’d been pulling on wasn’t just the reservoir of an ancient and powerful spirit, it was alsoall the powerful magical artifacts that had fallen into him.
But while that hypothesis, if true, would totally explain everything that had been going on tonight, it actually made Marci’s current problem worse. Unlike spirits, who were loose embodiments of magic, magical weapons were basically super dense spells. The few times Julius had let her poke at Tyrfing, she hadn’t even been able to get past its surface thanks to the enormously complex and powerful enchantments that surrounded it like vacuum-sealed packaging. Even assuming Tyrfing was super high grade and therefore far more powerful than average, it wouldn’t take that many enchanted objects of any caliber to make a pool deeper than Marci could ever hope of draining, not to mention Vann Jeger was stupidly old and seemed to be a collector. Who knew how many magical swords and spears and whatevers he had stashed away?
Too many seemed to be the answer. Now that Marci knew what she was looking for, she could actually feel the different threads of spells that wove through Vann Jeger’s magic. The chaos she’d seen when she first dove in wasn’t actually chaos at all. It was a weave, a complex braid of power made up of far more than just Vann Jeger’s personal magic, and all her efforts tonight had barely been picking at the edges.
No wonder Vann Jeger hadn’t cared that she was pulling on his magic. She could drain him for a year and barely make a dent, because Vann Jeger wasn’t a simple spirit living off the power of his domain. He was an amalgam, a living arsenal of integrated, super-magical weapons, and she had no idea how to stop him.
That realization was crushing. She didn’t know how to beat him. She didn’t know how to win. From the sounds coming from inside the dome of water, Julius and Chelsie were clearly fighting him right now. Even if Marci could figure out a way to extract Vann Jeger’s weapons, there was no way she could do it before the two dragons went down. That must have been why Vann Jeger had told her in advance where the fight would be, and why he hadn’t spared her a glance when he arrived. Why be afraid of a trap when you knew you were too big to catch?
The more she figured out, the lower her hopes sank. Forget being screwed, she’d screwed them all. She’d told them she could handle this, told them to trust her, and she’d failed. She wasn’t sure how much time had gone by at this point, but she had to be over her thirty-minute deadline, and from the sound of Vann Jeger’s taunting laughter from behind the curtain of water, Chelsie and Julius were rapidly nearing the limit of what they could do. Even if they did manage to hold out five or ten more minutes, it wouldn’t matter. She couldn’t possibly do anything to stop Vann Jeger in so little time, which meant they were dead.Allof them were dead, and it was all her—
No.
Marci shook her head violently, curling her hands into fists above her glowing circle. This was not how great mages behaved. There’d be time for self-recrimination after she was dead. Right now, though, she was alive. They all were. So long as that was true, the fight wasn’t over, and Marci was going to do everything in her power to keep it that way.
First, though, she had togetpower.
