You Win Some, You Lose Some
Braefoot Business Park, Lanark, 34 miles west of Edinburgh
They picked an SUV and drove the black car out of the yard; the headlights cutting through the blackness as the mains power had been destroyed in the attack, extinguishing all the streetlights.
The roads were empty because the civilian population that hadn’t joined Morrigan were hiding in their homes with cutlery under their doormats (making dining a harder experience than usual) and hoping the situation would resolve itself before they ran out of food.
“I keep meaning to ask you this, but something always crops up,” he said, pausing to make sure that nothing cropped up, “Why does she want me so badly when she has––what did you say––twenty-three witches and warlocks of her own already?”
“So that’s at least three of my briefings you’ve read,” she said, sounding pleased. “Her mages are mostly young, stupid or both, anybody older or smarter is keeping a low profile until they see which way the wind is blowing. And while she’s busy conquering the world, she’ll need a general (ideally one as powerful as you) to build and lead a mage army so they can slaughter the fairies and other magickal folk as soon as they stop being useful and before they realise that megalomaniacs don’t share power. She’ll try hard to recruit you, but make no mistake, she can’t afford to let you live to join the other side, if she fails.”
The plan was to get as close to Morrigan as possible, which was the most sensible of the stupid ideas they’d come up with but he didn’t have the raw power to fight her without tapping into the ley line that flowed into the Black Hill, which unfortunately, she was sitting right on top of, syphoning off the same energy.
They came to where the main battle had been fought earlier and had to swerve around the still-warm bodies and severed limbs that littered the road. They hit potholes filled with arterial blood in grim silence, “I know what you’re thinking,” he said once they were travelling on clear roads again, “but none of this is your fault; you warned them, that’s all you could do.”
“I know, but still…”
“Given her overwhelming advantage, she could have burned the place to the ground; I don’t understand why she backed off,” he said, interrupting to distract her.
“She’ll have surrounded the town with ten or twelve regiments, to make sure no-one could escape, but only sent in enough thralls for a fair fight. It’s not about the battle, it’s not even about the victory, it’s about prolonging pain and suffering for as long as possible. This will be a night when no-one sleeps, when fear and foreboding will fill the air and she’ll inhale it all with relish before striking in the morning. Even then, it’ll take a couple of days to massacre everybody and move on to the next town. She knows that no human-built weapon can stop her so she’ll take her time and savour every moment.”
“Pure evil,” he said.
“She’s neither evil nor good, she’s just what the universe made her.”
“Yeah, well, evil is as evil does as my mother might have said if she’d ever actually cared enough to have a conversation with me.”
After a few seconds of travelling in silence Cooper shouted, “Stop!” as they took a road that led out into the countryside.
Cassie stood on the brakes and the car screeched to a halt, “What’s wrong?” She said looking all around wide-eyed.
“Look,” he said, pointing to the back seat where the runes on his staff were flickering on and off in a random pattern.
“What’s causing that?”
“I’ve no idea,” he said, as he got out and walk forward slowly until all the runes on the staff pulsed at once. Then he tapped it on the ground and whispered, “leig ort,” after an interminable second something shimmered into view yards ahead, it was a dome that covered the entire town and looked like it was woven out of sparkly spiders’ webs. He touched one silky strand cautiously with his staff, and a faint bass note sounded in the back of his head.
“It’s a perimeter alarm,” he said as he got back into the car, “and a pretty crude one at that, but still good enough to have brought all of her pet witches and warlocks running if we’d driven right through it.”
“Can you disable it?”
“Not really, I could destroy it easily enough but any use of magick would set it off which is why the invisibility and intangibility spells we would’ve used to get past her thralls won’t work either.”
“Then we’re stuck here in town?”
“No, it’s just going to be more complicated,” Cooper said with a sigh, “but then again, what’s new?” as he spoke he opened the passenger door and, without getting out, slammed his staff down onto the road with a cry of “Scort-tuairmeach!”
Three-hundred-and-sixty bullet-sized balls of red light spat out of the top, shooting high into the air and spreading out in all directions.
When they stopped he tapped the side of the car with his staff as he whispered, “Atharrais,” all around the boundary identical images of them and their car appeared, mimicking their every action.
All the of balls of light breached the perimeter at the same time, sounding an alarm in his head, “Drive!” he shouted over the ear-piercing noise that she couldn’t hear, he clutched his head in pain as three-hundred-and-sixty cars, one for each degree of the compass, shot forward simultaneously.
On the other side of the dome all hell was breaking loose, witches were flying overhead trying to work out which car was real, as even the best of them couldn’t cast more than a spell of two and stay airborne at the same time.
Meanwhile, warlocks circumnavigated the town, running at speeds that the fastest thrall would have been envious of, but they had the same limitations as the witches, and one, big incantation, or a couple of smaller ones, would leave them exhausted, so there was no way to pick off the decoys one by one.
In the distance Morrigan’s soldiers were staying far enough back to close off all escape routes as her generals watched keenly from miles away.
A shout of, “I smell the blood of humans, that’s the real car!” came from above. He looked up to see a fat black rat sitting in front of a witch on her broomstick flying low overhead. He was holding a darning needle with a gold eyelet like a sword in one hand and the lid of a ring-pull tin as a shield with the other.
“Rattus Rattus Rex without as much as a fee-fi-fo-fum,” Cooper said through gritted teeth as he glanced sideways at Cassie, “I blame you for this.”
“Why me? What did I do?” She said without taking her eyes off the road, white knuckles gripping the steering wheel as the speedo passed eighty miles an hour.
“You’re a bad influence, before I met you I’d have fed him to the cats,” as he spoke a green glob of rat spit landed on the roof of the car, eating through the metal. Hitting the ceiling with his staff, he shouted, “Sgoilt!” the roof sheered off, the edges white hot, as if he’d cut it with an oxyacetylene torch. It shot up, hitting the broomstick and knocking the witch the rat off.
She waved her wand on the way down, summoning a cushioning spell, unfortunately she made a slight pronunciation error and got a repelling enchantment instead, leaving them bouncing up and down for several seconds before landing on the ground airsick and staggering around dizzily.
Cassie swerved the car violently when she heard a cry of “Scort!” from outside. A pale red ball of light hit the door, caving in the side panel as a second one, from a different source, blew out the front driver-side tyre. They veered wildly, hitting a crash barrier, flipping over several times as the airbags exploded in their faces. They landed upright in a ploughed field, the radiator gushing water and gouts of steam that evaporated into the cold air.
Cassie was slumped forward against her seatbelt, blood trickling from a cut on her forehead. He placed two fingers on her carotid artery to check her pulse, but she was just unconscious. The thralls would be there in overwhelming numbers in less than a minute and there was no way to take her with him without getting caught and he couldn’t fight effectively and carry her at the same time.
He looked around as he climbed out of the wreck just in time to see two young warlocks (the family resemblance showing that they were brothers) stepping out from behind their invisibility veil, they stood facing him gripping their staffs nervously, one was about sixteen and the other had barely hit puberty, they were wearing black, hooded wizards’ cloaks bought for them by their mother on eBay.
“W-w-we’re n-n-not scared of you,” the older one said. They were only children, and even though every second was vital, and they could have killed Cassie, he couldn’t bring himself to hurt them.
“Hey, Harry Potters, can I borrow one of your cloaks?” he said, holding a hand out with a mean grin, the runes on the staff in his other hand flaring far more brightly than theirs.
They looked at each other puzzled, holding their staffs up defensively, but saying nothing, “The reason I ask is that if you’re still here in ten seconds I’m going to cast a disembowelment spell and I don’t want your blood and guts splattering all over me.”
They looked at each other for a moment before running off, stumbling as they tripped over their own and each other’s feet. He slammed his staff down with a cry of “Astar!” and started to sprint around the boundary of the field.
Every brain cell fired up, working at a preternatural level just to allow him to navigate as his speed increased exponentially.
His staff slowed and directed a jet of breathable air into his face, whilst creating a shield against the friction and buffeting wind. He was well aware that his body could only cope with the strain for a limited amount of time.
Thralls came running from all around, eight thousand of them closing in on him, forcing him to run in ever decreasing circles. When they were almost touching him, he drove his staff into the ground. He was travelling at over five hundred miles an hour and it launched him into the air like a supercharged pole vaulter, sending him flying over the crowd. He forced his arms and legs closed, streamlining himself as much as possible, as he called his staff to him. Why can a witch fly and I can’t? He wondered as he arced through the air. Cassie would know the answer to that, and he hoped they’d both be alive after this was all over for her to tell him.
As he began to drop he realised that he would fall a few feet short of the other side of the tightly packed crowd below. He’d planned to land in the clear and spend the last few seconds of his remaining strength running just fast enough for them to follow but not catch up.
He shouted, “Cuisean!” correcting the witch’s pronunciation as he fell onto the tightly packed thralls beneath him, the air swirling into a semi-solid mass cushioning and slowing his fall, when he was inches above their heads he yelled, “Dheich!” a repulsor bubble formed around him, throwing everyone it hit clear of him.
As he rolled to his feet, a dozen running bodies slammed into him hard from every direction, knocking him back down. He was too exhausted to fight the flurry of blows that robbed him of consciousness.