only that, but she was getting assistance from a being that had been created from part of my own personal arcane assistant. Evil Bob had probably given her similar advice on constructing wards.
Wards weren’t like a lot of other magic. They were based on a threshold, the envelope of energy around a home. Granted, the loonies currently inhabiting the tunnels were hair-on-fire bonkers, but they were still human, and they still had the same need for a home that everyone else did. Thresholds don’t care about sunrise, not when a living, breathing mortal fuels them every moment, just by living within them. Build a spell onto a threshold and it doesn’t easily diminish. As a result, you can slowly, over time, pump more and more and more energy into spells based upon it.
The Corpsetaker hadn’t needed access to a wizard-level talented body to create the wards. She’d just used tiny talents regularly over months and months, and built up the wards to major-league defenses a little at a time, preparing for the night when she would need them.
Obviously, she’d decided that since she was torturing a world-class ectomancer in order to make her big comeback from beyond the grave, tonight was a great night not to be interrupted.
“I hate fighting competent people,” I growled. “I just hate it.”
“Formidable defenses,” said a quiet voice behind me.
I looked over my right shoulder. Sir Stuart studied the wards as well. He’d become a tiny bit more solid-looking, and there was distant, distracted interest in his eyes.
“Yeah,” I said. “Got any ideas?”
“Mortal magic,” he replied. “Beyond our reach.”
“I know that,” I replied grumpily. “But we’ve got to get in.” I looked around at the crew of lunatic ghosts I’d mentally dubbed the Lecter Specters. “What about those guys? Breaking the rules is kind of what they do. Are they crazy enough to get in?”
“Threshold. Inviolable.”
Which again made sense. I’d gotten into the fortress the night before because the door had been open and the ghost-summoning spell had essentially been a big old welcome mat, a standing invitation. Clearly, tonight was different. “Well,” I muttered, “nothing worth doing is easy, is it?”
There was no response.
I turned to find that Sir Stuart’s shade had faded out again and his eyes were lost in the middle distance.
“Stu? Hey, Stu.”
He didn’t respond except to face forward again, his expression patient, ready to follow orders.
“Dammit,” I sighed. “Okay, Harry. You’re the big-time wizard. Figure it out by yourself.”
I vanished and reappeared at the doorway. Then I leaned on my staff and studied the active wards. That did me limited good. I knew them. I’d used constructions much like them on my own home. You’d need to throw several tons of bodies at them, literally, to bring them down—which was what had happened to my first-generation wards. Wave after wave of zombies had eventually gotten through.
I mean, go figure. You prepare your home for an assault and you don’t take zombies into consideration. I’d fallen victim to one of the other classic blunders, along with not getting involved in a land war in Asia and never going in against a Sicilian when death was on the line.
My second generation of wards had planned for zombies. So had these. So even if I had zombies, which I didn’t, I wasn’t going to be able to go through them.
“So,” I said. “Don’t go through them. Go around them.”
Yeah, smart guy? How?
“There’s an open Way between the heart of the fortress and the Nevernever,” I said. “That’s like a permanently open door with an all-day invitation, or they wouldn’t need fortifications on the other side. All you have to do is get to it, assault Evil Bob’s defenses and Evil Bob and whatever the Corpsetaker recruited from God only knows what kind of dark hellhole, smash them up, and blast through from the spirit world.”
Well. That plan did have a lot of words like assault and smash and blast in it, which I had to admit was way more my style. One problem, though: I couldn’t open a Way to the Nevernever. Once I was through, I could probably find Evil Bob’s fortress—it would perforce have to be nearby. But, like the mortal-world lair, I couldn’t open the door.
“Other than that, though, it’s genius,” I assured myself.
A direct assault against a fortress that had undoubtedly been designed to defeat direct assaults? Brilliant. Uncomplicated, do-or-die suicidal, and there’s the minor issue that you aren’t capable of actually implementing it. But genius—absolutely.
Gandalf never had this