Chapter 73: Gavotte In Five Dimensions
In Which Strephon and Miss True reunite under less than favorable conditions
“JOG BANDERLOG
OG POG MACHOG
ENOGS ENOGH!”
Cassandra didn't even realize she was shouting until she uttered the final words of the incantation and heard them echo in the still parlor. Without warning, the yammering of the spell within her head and the dreadful pressure in her skull ceased and she found herself surrounded by silence, and the unspoken concern of some very apprehensive friends.
Cecily broke the silence. “Is... is that it?”
Cassandra mentally prodded her memory. She couldn't even remember how the incantation started any more. “Yeah. It's gone.”
“Then shouldn't... shouldn't something be happening?”
Cassandra was about to say she didn't know...
...When something happened.
She found herself hurling backwards. It felt as if a trap door had opened up under her feet and she was falling, except that instead of falling down, she was plummeting sideways. She passed through the walls of Strephon's parlor as if they were mist, and across his lawn and past the neighboring houses. She tried twisting her body around so she could see where she was going, but this resulted in her going into a slow tumble which only made things worse. The entire city seemed to be revolving around her.
She caught a glimpse of a shimmering curtain of light as she passed through it. That must be the protective ward Grandma Simms had placed around the neighborhood.
Now she seemed to be ascending. She entered a block of phantasmal flats and emerged soaring above the rooftops. She must have entered the valley where the River Woggle cut through the town; her altitude hadn't changed, but the ground was receding beneath her. This felt slightly less terrifying than her initial plunge, and more like flying. She could see more points of light beneath her, which she guessed were pockets of magic. She also saw a broad path of light, as straight as a Roman road, that seemed to be paralleling her path. This must be one of the magical lines she'd heard about which met in the City. As she crossed the Woggle vale and approached Togwog Tor, she could see other magical lines converging on the hill from other directions.
Now the ground rose again as she neared Castle Redemption. The Castle had been built on the convergence point, and the meeting place of the Hidden Council lay beneath it. That had to be where the spell was taking her.
She also recalled Devon saying there was a magical barrier currently surrounding the Council Chambers; a barrier to which Cassandra was hurtling with no way to stop.
At this thought, Cassandra's trajectory intersected with the side of the hill, and she found herself immersed in shadow.
* * * * *
The tumult and shouting in the Council Chambers following Strephon's dramatic departure had finally subsided. Chairwoman Vane had nearly broken her gavel trying to restore order. In the end, she had to declare a fifteen minute recess.
During this time, Tobias's father took advantage of his authority as Chief Warden of the Castle and Sergeant-at-arms of the Hidden Council, as well as his greater parental authority, to impress Tobias into service as a Deputy Warder to help control the situation. He ordered Tobias and Perkins, one of the other Warders, to search the Council Chambers to find Strephon.
This should have been easy, since the magic wards placed around the chamber prevented anyone from entering or exiting the chamber. Tobias doubted that Strephon and that assistant of Melchior's were still in the main chamber; with all the people gathered in the room who had witnessed their disappearance, they couldn't possibly remain hidden for long; but there were other rooms within the barrier connected to the chamber: the vestibule just inside the entrance, a smaller conference room for the use of sub-committees and closed-door sessions, a private cloakroom for the Council members and a couple storage rooms. None of these bore the slightest trace that Strephon had even been there. Tobias suspected that there might be a sub-basement underneath the Council Chambers which they might have missed – he didn't have the Sight like his Gram, but his hunches were usually pretty good – but Perkins didn't know of any. So Tobias returned to the front of the Chamber and stood close by his father, partially to make himself available if Dad had any other assignments for him, but mostly because Lord Melchior was clearly angry about the situation and Tobias preferred not to return to his seat near him.
Timmy Worpleton, the Club Secretary, was just proposing a motion to table further discussion on filling the vacant seat in the Council, the seat for which Melchior had requested Strephon’s endorsement, until such time as Strephon could explain himself to the Council for his erratic behavior or until Melchior could find some other person to use as a character witness. In the middle of the motion, a strange sensation struck Tobias. Or rather, he became aware of an absence of something. His father obviously sensed it too, because he frowned and muttered, “Something’s wrong.”
In a few quick strides, Tobias’s father rushed to Chairwoman Vane’s seat. Tobias followed close behind and arrived in time to hear his father say, “Madame Chairwoman, there’s an emergency. You need to adjourn the meeting.”
Chairwoman Vane frowned, and several other members of the Council turned their attention to the Sergeant-at-Arms. “What Emergency?” Vane snapped.
“The protective wards surrounding the Council Chambers have just gone down. I think we’ve been hacked.”
“Hacked? That's impossible.”
“That may be, but I doubt the wards going down is an accident nor a coincidence. The Council's Peace and the Council's security is my responsibility, and I have to consider the possibility that this is some kind of attack. I think it only prudent to adjourn until we can determine the truth.”
Chairwoman Vane frowned. She clearly resented being told what to do by a mere Sergeant-at-arms, yet his recommendation to postpone action appealed to her instincts as a politician.
She hesitated too long. Worpleton had taken advantage of her distraction to wander off from his motion into an amusing and probably irrelevant story about ducks. As the Chairwoman urged Timmy to stick to his point, Tobias felt the floor shudder beneath him and a deep rumble echo in the chamber. Cracks appeared in the chamber walls and chips of stone fell from the reinforcing arches which supported its ceiling. Tobias didn't need Gran's Sight to know that this was bad.
Chairwoman Vane's voice shrieked over the frantic staccato of her gavel. “Meeting adjourned! Evacuate the chambers!”
* * * * *
“Where the devil is it?” Knox growled. “I can see the other four stones; where is the fifth one? It was the one we gave that True girl. How like a woman to misplace something!”
Once again, Knox's attention had wandered away from Strephon. Really, it was like being trapped in a room with an absent-minded tiger. This suited Strephon just fine. He had finished turning his suit coat inside-out and now donned the reversed garment. With that simple action, everything changed.
Among the many odd and arbitrary rules governing the relations between mortals and the faerie set out in the Great Pact was one concerning clothing. A mortal could dispel a faerie's glamour by reversing his jacket. This, Strephon had done.
Immediately, the illusion of Knox's office, and of Knox himself, vanished like a Cheshire Cat all except for the desk, which Strephon could now see was a huge mass of basaltic rock protruding from the floor of the chamber. Of course. The desk. He had been the desk all along.The most curious thing was that Strephon could also see Knox – or at least what he assumed was Knox: a large ogreish figure drawn up in a contorted ball and entangled in hawthorn bramble – encased in the stone. Sometimes he could see only the rock, sometimes the figure within; it shifted between the two like a trick painting. That must have been what those horrid cubist painters like Picasso were trying to get at.
More importantly, Strephon noted the hawthorn. He should have thought of that long ago; it had practically been staring him in the face. If plants could stare. Hawthorn was known even in mortal lore as having a special connection with the fae; it tends to grow near portals to the Faerie Realm and can bestow good luck, if harvested with reverence; but it also can be used to bind the Fae. Morrigan used hawthorn in the charms she made to enslave her two faerie servants, Winston and Sheila; and Knox himself had mentioned hawthorn as one of the faerie banes and spoke of his imprisonment bound in hawthorn and stone. Strephon raised his sword-crutch and transformed it into a lance of hawthorn wood. Perhaps this might be enough to actually harm Knox.
“It's that cousin of yours,” Knox continued. “He must have done something. He --” And here Knox seemed to notice Strephon again. The image trapped within the stone could not move, but Strephon could still hear him, like an aggravated wasp in his mind. “Ah. So that's how it is. Stop looking at me.”
Strephon couldn't help it. Knox did look pitiful in his present condition; but Strephon reminded himself that Knox was no less dangerous, and gripped the hilt of his hawthorn lance more tightly.
“I've changed my mind again,” Knox groused. “I won't let you live after all. Gloat away, then. It will do you no good.”
A sort of thaumaturgic tremor seemed to pass through the chamber that filled Strephon with foreboding, but which seemed to buck up Knox to no end. “Hah!” Knox laughed. “See? It's too late! Your True girl has completed the incantation! That was the magic barrier around the Council Chambers falling. I couldn't have the barrier interfering with my plan, so I incorporated a sub-spell into the incantation to shut it down. I persuaded Ananias Sedge to allow me access to the Council's security system back when he was the Council Chair in exchange for an autographed phylactery once owned by Simon Magus. And here is the next step...” Cracks began to appear in the mass of rock and Strephon could see Knox's trollish form begin to move. “Any second now, Miss True should be arriving to trade places with me.”
Now Strephon could hear a high-pitched whine, or rather, could feel it in his teeth, becoming louder and more highly pitched by the second. The walls of Knox's sepulcher began to distort, as if they were shifting in and out of reality.
“Hah ha! Come to Papa!” Knox shouted.
A circle of light appeared on one wall and Cassandra came hurtling into the room towards Knox. For a brief moment, she and Strephon locked eyes, exchanging a look of confusion and terror and then...
She whizzed past Knox and exited through another circle appearing on the other side of the chamber.
“That wasn't supposed to happen,” Knox said.
* * * * *
The time Cassandra spent traveling through the earth lasted barely the span of a few heartbeats when the darkness erupted in what seemed to be a blaze of light. For a moment, she saw Strephon, gaping at her, as if he'd just gotten an unexpected glimpse of her through the window of a passing express train. Before she could react, she felt another wrenching pull on her body and she shot out of wherever she had been and back into the earth. She had also seen some sort of monster in a rock. That had to be Togwogmagog. The spell had been bringing her to him, but something had gone wrong and she went past him and now she was underground again.
No, now she had emerged from the earth again. She was flying over the city and going up. Something had changed her trajectory. She was like a comet which should have crashed into the Sun, but which had missed and instead whipped around in a new direction. But was she in an elliptical orbit, or was she trapped in a parabolic one, doomed to go on zooming through space for all eternity? The Earth dwindled beneath her and grew smaller with every second.
* * * * *
“This is all your doing,” Knox sulked. “I don't know how you managed it but somehow you've cocked everything up.”
Much as Strephon would have liked to take credit for Knox's discomfort, he felt it more likely that Knox's own hubris was to blame; that and the fact that Knox had seriously underestimated Cassandra's resourcefulness. If he was truthful, Strephon had to admit that he had too, except that he had gotten used to being surprised by her; and although seeing Cassanddra flung uncontrollably through the Astral planes filled him with no small amount of dismay, it also gave him a curious sort of hope as well.
“She's still in the grip of the spell,” Knox said. “She'll be back. The spell will draw her back.”
“While we're waiting, then,” Strephon said, “you and I have unfinished business to which to attend.” He charged at Knox and thrust his hawthorn lance into the stone of imprisonment. Against an ordinary boulder, the wood would have splintered, but the magic of the lance merged into the magic of the stone. Knox gave an inhuman howl, and chunks of his prison broke off him. Was this another mistake? Was Strephon, by attacking Knox's prison, actually liberating him?
Before Strephon had time to ponder this question, he heard the whine in his head again, heralding Cassandra's approach. He broke off his attack. If he could grab onto Cassandra as she came in, perhaps he could save her; but he couldn't fight Knox at the same time.
* * * * *
Cassandra must have been out by the orbit of the Moon by the time she began returning to Earth. That's how it seemed anyway. But could she have been going that fast? She had a vague notion that this would be impossible, but she also had a suspicion that if she was going at even a fraction of the speed necessary to leave Earth's orbit, then the force of the impact when she landed would smash her to jelly. Don't think about that. Just think of this as like a roller coaster ride. An insane roller coaster ride. Or a mad dance.
Now she saw the city beneath her. She saw the castle and plunged into its foundations. A moment later, she saw Strephon and the stone-encumbered ogre with some sort of spear embedded in his chest. Strephon reached out to her but before they could touch, Togwogmagog swung a great stone-encumbered fist and knocked Strephon down. Then she was off again.
It seemed as if her course was becoming more and more erratic with every pass, but at least she was returning. She had to be ready for the next time around.
* * * * *
“You two are only delaying the inevitable,” Knox said and Strephon picked himself off of the stone floor. So, Knox had finally regained some degree of mobility. Strephon should have been looking out for that.
“Into the valley of Death then,” Strephon replied. He flung himself at Knox to grab hold of the lance. This would put him within grappling reach of the giant's massive arms, but he risked it.
“Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die, eh?” Knox chortled. “But you forgot the most significant line of Tennyson’s poem: Someone had blundered!”
Strephon managed to grasp the lance and tried to twist it deeper into Knox's torso, but Knox grappled him by the shoulder to rip him free.
Another tremor went through the chamber and more chunks of stone broke off of Knox's prison. They did not fall to the ground, but rather floated in mid-air, transfixed between the original spell of binding and the new one. Strephon suspected that as soon as the spell was complete, the stones would snap back into place to form a new prison. He had to somehow keep Cassandra out of that prison when it happened.
A loud crack resounded in the chamber and Strephon saw a thin, vertical line, as black as iniquity, split down in the wall behind Knox. The temperature in the chamber dropped and Strephon felt a sense of yawning emptiness, just beyond the crack. What fresh horror was this? It reminded Strephon of the oblivion which had almost destroyed Inanna. Where was Inanna?
“Something is fighting against the spell,” Knox said. “It's causing a stress fracture in reality. But it won't stop the enchantment. It's too late!”
“You... can... go to… the… devil!” Strephon grunted as he wrestled with the lance.
Knox uttered a kind of anguished gasp and his grasp on Strephon seemed to loosen. Had Strephon struck a vital? He wasn't sure. The keening whine had returned, heralding Cassandra's approach, and once again Strephon saw her body, tempest-tossed, come careening through the chamber.
At the same instant, the crack in the wall widened into a gap, and Strephon felt a shudder pass through his body. The smaller pieces of rock broken off from Knox's prison flew into the crack as if sucked up by a vacuum cleaner, and Cassandra's pass across the chamber took a sudden turn as the pull from the emptiness within the gap deflected her trajectory. She whizzed past Strephon and her hand stretched out to his, but before they could touch, she was out of his reach.
This time, Cassandra's course did not leave the chamber. Pulled by the dreadful abyss beyond the rent in reality, her trajectory had become a mad, ever-tightening spiral. She wasn't going to go into the rock, she was going to go into the gap.
Strephon had to stop her. He could keep fighting Knox, or he could try to save her. He gave his lance one final shove and tried to push himself away from Knox. Cassandra was coming around for another pass.
She called his name.
Their fingers touched. His hand clasped her wrist.
As their hands united, Cassandra's momentum jerked him out of Knox's and he and Cassandra began to spin in a delirious gavotte. The chamber whirled around him. Now he saw Knox speeding by; now the deadly crack, even wider than ever.
Knox gave an inhuman howl. His stony bonds had almost completely left his body, but he remained entangled in the hawthorn, which seemed thicker and spikier than ever, and had incorporated Strephon's lance into its thorny embrace. Knox charged at them and Strephon pulled Cassandra closer, hoping to shield her from Knox's attack with his body. Strephon squeezed his eyes shut.
So he did not see Cassandra give Knox a swift kick to the kneecap.
Perhaps she had been aiming for his manhood and missed. The kneecap proved quite adequate, though. Knox stumbled forward and collided with the two, breaking Strephon's hold on Cassandra and sending the two of them off in different directions.
Knox made a desperate grab at Strephon and caught a handful of his jacket. Staggering backwards, Knox could not see where he was going. Strephon could. The crack, now huge, loomed behind Knox threatening to swallow them both and perhaps the whole world as well.
Without thinking, Strephon cast a spell and his jacket dissolved like a shadow. Knox tumbled back into the crack. The whole chamber shook and chunks of stone whirled around Strephon and struck him about his back and limbs. A noise like a thousand thunders enveloped him, and then came darkness.
NEXT: Intermezzo