The Sorceress sotinf-3 Page 6

"Not vampires," Palamedes said quickly. "I have no time for the blood drinkers."

  "What then?"

  "Larvae and lemurs… the undead and the not-dead."

  "And what are they?" Josh asked. He was guessing that larvae did not mean insect young and that lemurs were not the long-tailed primates he'd seen in zoos.

  "They are…" Palamedes hesitated, then smiled. "Nocturnal spirits."

  "Are they friendly?"

  "They are loyal."

  "So why are we waiting?" Josh asked. It was clear that Palamedes wasn't going to tell him anything else. "What are you looking for?"

  "Something out of the ordinary."

  "So what do we do?"

  "We wait. We watch. Have a little patience." He glanced back at Josh. "By now much of the immortal world knows that the Alchemyst has discovered the legendary twins."

  Josh was surprised by how direct the knight was being with him. "You didn't seem too sure about that earlier. Do you think we are?" he asked quickly. He needed to find out what Palamedes knew about the twins and, more importantly, about the Alchemyst.

  But Palamedes ignored the question. "It doesn't matter if you are the legendary twins or not. What matters is that Flamel believes it. More importantly, Dee believes it also. Because of that, an extraordinary series of events has been put in motion: Bastet is abroad again, the Morrigan is back on this earth, the Disir brought the Nidhogg to Paris. Three Shadowrealms have been destroyed. That hasn't happened in millennia."

  "Three? I thought it was just Hekate's realm that was destroyed." Scathach had spoken of other Shadowrealms, but Josh had no idea just how many existed.

  Palamedes sighed, clearly tired of explanations. "Most of the Shadowrealms are linked or intersect with one another through a single gate. If anything happens to the Shadowrealm, the gate collapses. But the Yggdrasill, the World Tree, stretched up from Hekate's realm into Asgard and down deep into Niflheim, the World of Darkness. All three winked out of existence when Dee destroyed the tree, and I know that the gates to another half dozen have collapsed, effectively sealing off that world and its inhabitants. Dee added a few enemies to the long list of people-both human and inhuman-who hate and fear him already."

  "What will happen to him?" Josh asked. Despite all he'd been told about the Magician, he found he still had a niggling admiration for him… which was more than he had for the French Alchemyst at the moment.

  "Nothing. Dee is protected by powerful masters. He is completely focused on bringing the Elders back to this earth by any means possible."

  Josh still didn't get that. "But why?" he asked.

  "Because he is that most dangerous of foes: he is absolutely confident that what he is doing is right."

  There was a flash of movement out of the corner of Josh's eye and he turned to see a huge dun-colored dog loping down the center of the street, running on the white line. It looked like a cross between an Irish wolfhound and a Borzoi, a Russian wolfhound. It raced past the taxi, right up to the gates of the car yard, then padded back and forth, sniffing the ground.

  "Flamel's arrival has stirred up many ancient things," Palamedes continued, watching the dog intently. "I saw creatures today I thought had left this earth entirely, monsters that gave birth to humani's darkest legends. You should also know that Dee has posted a huge bounty on your heads. My spies tell me he wants you and your sister taken alive. Interestingly, he no longer wants Flamel alive; he will accept proof of his death. That is a major change. Elders, Next Generation, immortals and their humani servants are all converging on London. Just keeping the rabble from each other's throats is going to be a huge job; I've no idea how Dee is going to do it." Palamedes suddenly turned the engine back on, inching the car forward. "We're clear," he announced.

  "How do you know?"

  Palamedes pointed to where the dog sat before the gates, facing them. He hit a button on the dashboard and the gates started to slide open.

  "The dog," Josh answered his own question. "Except it's not really a dog, is it?"

  Palamedes grinned. "That's no dog." ll the hair on Areop-Enap's enormous body suddenly stood on end, individual strands quivering. "Madame Perenelle," it said. "I am going to suggest something that may seem shocking."

  Perenelle turned toward the Elder. Behind it, incalculable numbers of spiders scattered across the enormous wall of web the ancient creature had created. "It's hard to shock me."

  "Do you trust me?" Areop-Enap asked.

  "I do," Perenelle said without hesitation. Once, she would have considered the Old Spider an outright enemy, but now she knew where its allegiances lay-with the humans. And it had proven itself in the battle with the Morrigan and her flocks. "What do you want to do?"

  "Be still and do not panic," Areop-Enap said with a toothy smile. "This is for your own good." Abruptly, a thick blanket of web fell across the Sorceress, enveloping her from head to foot. A wave of spiders flowed up off the ground over the woman, quickly sheathing her in silk, cinching the cloak tight to her body with sticky threads. "Trust me," Areop-Enap said again.

  Perenelle remained perfectly still, although her every instinct was to fight against the web, to tear it apart, to allow her aura to bloom and crisp it to blackened dust. She kept her mouth clamped tightly shut. She had fought monsters and seen creatures from the darkest edges of mankind's legends, but she still found the thought of a spider crawling into her mouth absolutely repulsive.

  The Old Spider's head swiveled, and a long leg rose, hair gently blowing as it tested the air. "Prepare yourself," Areop-Enap said. "They're coming. So long as the web remains unbroken, you are protected."

  Perenelle was now completely sheathed in a thick cocoon of white silken spiderweb. She had worn the finest silk before, but this was different. It was like being tightly wrapped in a soft blanket, incredibly comfortable but slightly constricting. The web was thinner around her mouth and eyes, so that she could breathe and see, but it was like looking through a gauze curtain. She felt a jolt, and suddenly she was hoisted up into the air and tucked into a corner. A wave of black spiders immediately swept over her, securing the cocoon tightly to the walls and the metal girders that buttressed the house. From her new vantage point, she could look down over the room to where Areop-Enap squatted in the middle of the floor. Perenelle realized that the dark carpet beneath the Elder was a mass of thousands-maybe even millions-of spiders. The floor rippled and pulsed under Areop-Enap, which was facing north, toward Angel Island, now lost in early-morning mist. Shifting in the cocoon, Perenelle strained to look in the same direction. From her perch she could see out over the water. There were storm clouds massing on the horizon, thick and blue-black; she expected to see them spike and flash with lightning. But through the silk covering her face, she saw that this cloud was twisting, turning in on itself… and it was racing closer. In less than a dozen heartbeats, it had flowed over the north end of Alcatraz.

  And then it started to rain.

  There was no roof on the ruined Warden's House. Thick black drops fell out of the cloud and spattered against Perenelle's web cocoon… and stuck.

  And the Sorceress abruptly realized that these were not raindrops-they were flies.

  Huge bluebottles and houseflies, squat fruit flies, narrow horseflies, soldier flies and robber flies rained down over the island, hitting and sticking to her web cocoon.

  Before Perenelle even had a chance to call out in disgust, individual spiders were darting across the web and had commenced wrapping the struggling flies in silk.

  Perenelle looked up. The huge cloud was almost upon them. But now she could see that it was not a cloud at all. The initial shower of insects was only a taste of what was to come. The roiling mass was flies, millions of them, crane flies and black flies, mosquitoes and tiny midges, squat botflies and red-eyed pomace flies.

  The insects exploded against Alcatraz in a dark buzzing sheet. The first wave were caught by the white silken cobwebs, which quickly turned dark and heavy with the weight of the s
truggling insects. Perenelle watched the webs around her quickly rip and tear as more and more flies crashed against them. Hordes of spiders rolled over the trapped flies and were quickly locked in an ancient battle. The silk-sheathed walls heaved with wriggling spiders and desperately struggling flies, until it looked as if the sides of the building were alive, pulsing and throbbing.

  The flies whirled around Areop-Enap, and the few that found Perenelle were trapped by the protective web around her. Faintly, she could hear their buzzing as they attempted to escape.

  More and more waves of flies washed in over the island, and the spiders-Perenelle hadn't realized there were so many-swarmed over them. An incalculable number of flies had attached themselves to Areop-Enap, completely coating the Old Spider, until it resembled a huge buzzing ball. The Elder's massive leg lashed out of the heaving mass, scattering a wave of dead husks, but countless more took their places. The Elder leapt up and then crashed to the ground, crushing thousands more beneath its huge body.

  And still more came in an endless dark surge.

  Then, suddenly, Perenelle noticed that the walls and floor had stopped moving and rippling. Focusing hard through the gauzy curtain in front of her eyes, she saw something that shocked her: the spiders were dying. She watched a black-and-white zebra spider sink two iridescent blue fangs into an enormous crane fly that was stuck to its sticky web. The fly thrashed about, desperate to escape, but then, abruptly, the spider shuddered and stiffened. Both creatures died at the same time. And it was happening again and again: the moment the spiders bit into the flies, they died. It took a lot to frighten the Sorceress, but suddenly, she began to feel the first twinges of disquiet.

  Whoever or whatever had sent the flies had poisoned them.

  And if a single fly could kill a spider, then what could the huge mass do to Areop-Enap?

  Perenelle had to do something. All around her, millions of spiders were dying, poisoned by the flies. Areop-Enap had disappeared beneath the dark mass. It was still heaving with the Old Spider's struggling and thrashing about, but as the Sorceress watched, she realized that the struggles were becoming weaker. Areop-Enap was ancient and primal but not completely invulnerable. Nothing-Elder, Next Generation, immortal or human-was completely indestructible. Not even Areop-Enap. Perenelle herself had once brought an ancient temple down on the spider's head and it had shrugged off the attack-yet could it survive billions of poisonous flies?

  But Perenelle was caught. Areop-Enap had tucked her high on the wall, out of harm's way. If she were to cut through the web cocoon, she would fall at least twenty feet to the floor below. The impact probably wouldn't kill her, but it might snap an ankle or break a leg.

  And how was she going to defeat a plague of flies?

  Looking out over the island, she saw yet another curling thread of insects coming in on the breeze. Once they reached Alcatraz, it would all be over. The wind carried the faintest hum, like the sound of a distant chain saw.

  Wind.

  Wind had carried the insects onto the island… could Perenelle also use it to drive them away?

  But even as the thought crossed her mind, Perenelle realized that she didn't know enough of wind lore to control the element with precision. Perhaps if she'd had time to prepare and her aura were fully charged, she would have attempted to raise some type of wind-a typhoon, maybe, or a small tornado-in the heart of the island and sweep it clean of flies, and probably spiders, too. But she couldn't risk it now. She needed to do something simple… and she needed to do it quickly. All the spiders had stopped moving. Millions of flies had died, but millions more remained, and they were swarming over Areop-Enap.

  So if she couldn't drive the flies off the island, could she lure them away? Someone was controlling the insects-a Dark Elder or immortal, who must have first poisoned them, then set the tiny mindless insects on the island. Something had drawn them here. Perenelle's eyes snapped wide in realization. So something would have to draw them away. What would attract millions of flies?

  What did flies like?

  Behind the gauze web, Perenelle smiled. For her five hundredth birthday on the thirteenth of October in 1820, Scathach had presented her with a spectacular pendant, a single piece of jade carved into the shape of a scarab beetle. More than three thousand years previously, the Shadow had brought it back from Japan for the boy king Tutankhamen, but he'd died a day after she'd presented it to him. Scathach had despised Tutankhamen's wife, Ankhesenamen, and hadn't wanted her to have it, so she'd broken in to the royal palace late one night just before the boy king was embalmed and taken it back. When Scathach had given her the jade, Perenelle had joked, "You're giving me a dung beetle."

  Scathach had nodded seriously. "Dung is more valuable than any precious metal. You cannot grow food in gold."

  And flies were attracted to dung.

  But there was no dung pile on the island, and to catch the flies' attention, she would have to create an exceptionally strong odor. Perenelle immediately thought of the beautiful plants of the arum family. Some of them stank abominably of dung. There was the cactuslike desert herb the carrion flower: beautiful to look at, but it reeked of something long dead. And there was skunk cabbage, and the world's largest flower, the giant rafflesia, the stinking corpse lily, with its putrid odor of rotting meat. If she could replicate that scent, she might be able to lure the flies away.

  Perenelle knew that at the heart of all magic and sorcery was imagination. It was this gift for intense concentration that characterized the most powerful magicians; before attempting any great piece of magic, they had to clearly see the end result. So before she concentrated on creating the smell, she needed to think about a location that she could see in every detail. Places flickered at the edges of Perenelle's consciousness. Places she had lived, places she knew. In her long life she'd had the opportunity to visit so much of the world. But what she needed now was someplace reasonably close, a location she knew well, and one where there was not a huge human population.

  The San Francisco Dump.

  She'd only been to the dump on one previous occasion. Months ago, she'd helped one of the bookshop's employees move to a new apartment. Afterward, they'd driven south toward Monster Park and the dump on Recycle Road. Always sensitive to smells, Perenelle had caught the distinctively acrid-though not entirely unpleasant-smell of the dump when they'd turned onto Tunnel Avenue. As they'd got closer, the stink had become eye-watering and the air had filled with the sound of countless seabirds calling.

  Perenelle drew upon that memory now. Fixing the dump clearly in her imagination, she visualized a huge clump of stinking, corpse-smelling flowers in the very heart of the refuse and then she imagined a wind carrying the foul stink northward toward Alcatraz.

  The stench of something long rotten wafted over the island and a rippling wave coursed through the massed flies.

  Perenelle focused her will. She visualized the sprawling dump scattered with blooms: calla and carrion flowers poking through the rubbish, giant red and white spotted rafflesia thriving amid the junk, and the air filling with the noxious scents, mingling with the dump's own fetid odor. Then she imagined a wind pushing the scent north.

  The smell that washed over the island was eye-wateringly foul. A wave pulsed through the thick carpet of flies. Some rose buzzing into the air, circled aimlessly but then dropped back onto Areop-Enap.

  Perenelle was tiring, and she knew that the effort was aging her. Drawing in a deep breath, she made one final effort. She had to move the flies before the second swarm joined them. She concentrated so hard on the foul stench that her normally odorless ice white aura shimmered and took on the hint of putrefaction.

  The sickening stink that flowed over the island was a nauseating mixture of fresh dung mixed with long-spoiled meat and the rancid odor of sour milk.

  The flies rose from Alcatraz in a solid black blanket. They hummed and buzzed like a power station and then, as one, set off heading south toward the source of the stench. The depa
rting insects encountered the second huge swarm as it was just about to descend on the island and both groups mingled in an enormous solid black ball; then the entire mass turned and flowed south, following the rich soupy scent.

  Within moments, there was not a living fly left on the island.

  Areop-Enap shook itself free of tiny carcasses and then slowly and stiffly climbed the wall, sliced the web holding Perenelle in place and lowered her gently to the ground on a narrow spiral of thread. Perenelle allowed her aura to flare for a millisecond and the cocoon of spiderweb, now dotted and speckled with trapped flies, crisped to dust. She threw back her head, pushed her damp hair back off her forehead and neck and breathed deeply. It had been suffocatingly warm in the web.

  "Are you all right?" she asked, reaching out to stroke one of the Elder's huge legs.

  Areop-Enap swayed to and fro. Only one of its eyes was open, and when it spoke, its normally lisping speech was slurred almost beyond comprehension. "Poison?" it asked.

  Perenelle nodded. She looked around. The ruins were thick with the husks of flies and spiders. She suddenly realized she was standing ankle-deep in the tiny corpses. When all this was over, she'd have to burn her shoes, she decided. "The flies were deadly. Your spiders died when they bit into them. They were sent here to kill your army."

  "And they succeeded," Areop-Enap said sadly. "So many dead, so many…"

  "The flies that attacked you also carried poison," Perenelle continued. "Individually, their bites were unnoticeable, but Old Spider, you have been bitten millions-perhaps even billions-of times."

  Areop-Enap's single open eye blinked slowly closed. "Madame Perenelle, I must heal. Which means I must sleep."

  Perenelle stepped closer to the huge spider and brushed the husks of dead flies from its purple hair. They crackled to dust at her touch. "Sleep, Old Spider," she said gently. "I will watch over you."

  Areop-Enap staggered awkwardly into the corner of the room. Two huge legs swept a section of the floor clean of dead spiders and flies, and then it attempted to spin a web. But the silk was thin, threadlike and slightly discolored. "What did you do with the flies?" Areop-Enap asked, struggling to create more web.