The Odin Inheritance (The Pessarine Chronicles Book 1) Page 15

  "Shut up, you!" He replied in a growl as he pushed up his sleeves and started to stalk toward us, the students in a line behind him mimicking his actions.

  Andrew looked up at the moon and whispered something I couldn't quite catch. To my amazement, the moonlight seemed to coalesce around him in a dim grey-white aura that disappeared almost as quickly as I noticed it.

  What the Hell? I thought but didn’t have time to wonder about it much more than that as Oberlin and the others continued their approach. Andrew dropped the pendant and gripped the shovel in both hands. Lizzie and I did the same.

  "Give it up Oberlin," Andrew said, swinging the shovel in a wide arc across the front of his body. "Someone else is controlling your thoughts and actions. Fight that influence! We don't want to hurt you!" Oberlin growled like an animal and continued to walk toward us, fists clenching and unclenching in fury.

  I was less certain about not wanting to hurt Oberlin, if only because the old fiend had done everything in his power to get in the way of my studies. It was hard to resist the urge to get a bit of my own back. Wisdom prevailed, however, since he was very clearly not himself. As much as I disliked him, it wasn't right to hurt him if he was a victim. Who, I wondered, controlls Oberlin and the others, and how do Andrew know that is the case? The answer came to me in an instant.

  "Laufeson mesmerized them," I said, my voice low.

  "So it would seem," Andrew ground out.

  I shook my head in wonder. "Damn and blast! Who is the damnable fiend and what does he want from me?"

  Andrew swung the shovel across his body again. "Laufeson is a powerful manipulator. He wants you in his control very badly if he's resorted to this. I just hope we can get out of this mess without having to hurt anyone."

  "Or get hurt ourselves," Lizzie remarked grimly. "Mesmerized or not, these blokes are serious."

  The three of us turned our backs inward to stand in a triangle, shovels at the ready. The wild eyed group ran at us, ready to fight, faces grim with violent intent. They leapt on us and our struggles began in earnest. There was a confusion of fists, shovels, and limbs. Grunts of pain and the blows of fists and shovel blades hitting flesh sounded around us. Spectacles went flying, the eyes behind them wild with fury and sporting what I could only describe as a weird silver sheen to them, like someone had painted the exposed eyes with a thin layer of silver paint. I’d never seen anything like it.

  I used my shovel to block the hits I could see coming at my head or at Andrew and Lizzie, but I felt fists strike my body in various places, knocking the wind out of me. I struggled against the onslaught, but eventually resorted to swinging at whatever fist came in range. I heard grunts of pain and thuds of impact as my companions did their best to keep from being injured.

  A fist connected with my head and I fell to the ground, dazed. I dropped the shovel as I fell to my hands and knees, my head spinning. Someone tall grabbed the back of my shirt and jacket and hauled me to my feet only to wrap an arm around my throat and choke off any cry I might have made. I struggled to free myself. The ruffian strengthened his grip on my throat so I saw stars and couldn't draw a breath.

  Andrew shouted words I didn't recognize and suddenly another mind—ancient, masculine and grimly resolved—gently eased my mind aside and I became a passenger within my own body very much like when I threw darts. It wasn't frightening, oddly. Somehow whatever was within me was a familiar and comforting presence, though I didn't have a lot of time to think on the matter too much... the world around me browned out as the arm continued to squeeze my throat.

  My right elbow drew forward and back with great force, striking my assailant in the abdomen hard enough to knock the wind out of him. He yelped and let go of my neck as he doubled over in pain. My body then stepped forward, turned, and as my hands grabbed the student's hair, my knee came up to strike the fellow hard in the face. I heard the crunch of bone as his nose broke. He collapsed, the fight knocked out of him.

  My body turned to look over the rest of the combatants. Lizzie still had her shovel, but it was clear she was tiring quickly as she kept two of the students at bay. Andrew fought the other two men, one of them the odious Oberlin. My body moved quickly to one of the wheelbarrows. My hands thrust down into the cobbles and I felt my mouth and throat working as I spoke though I couldn't hear what I said. My hands came out of the cobbles and spread wide. To my great surprise stones rose to float in mid-air between my hands as blue symbols I didn't know traced across the stones' surface.

  Another few words growled from deep in my throat and the blue symbol-covered cobbles flew toward the remaining assailants with great speed, knocking them unconscious with such precision it was as if the cobbles had minds of their own. It was the most extraordinary thing I'd ever seen. Once the stones struck, I felt all of the energy drain from my body, as if the blue symbols had used my vitality to fuel their attack. I sagged and nearly dropped to my knees as the presence that had summoned the power drifted away, leaving me in control of my own body once again. Unfortunately, though I commanded the movement of my limbs, I didn't seem able to do much more than pant for air and stay upright.

  Struck by the cobbles, Oberlin and the three students dropped to the ground like sacks of grain as Lizzie and Andrew looked at me in astonishment. Andrew got an alarmed look on his face as he pointed behind me.

  "Look out!" He cried as he tried to step over Oberlin to get to me.

  A hand grabbed my right shoulder and spun me around so I faced the student whose nose I'd broken. My consciousness swam with exhaustion as I stared at him, blood streaming down the lower half of his face and onto his shirt, his eyes silvered and narrowed. He held a cobblestone in his right hand and brought it down on my forehead despite my attempt to stop the blow. There was an explosion of pain and I felt something crack inside. The ground flew up to meet my limp form as darkness and pain consumed me.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I awoke, gasping for breath and shivering. My brain throbbed painfully, and it felt like my skull was too small to contain it. I’d never had such an awful headache in my life.

  It took a panicked and confused moment lying in the dark for me to realize I was in my own bed in my room at Towson. The smell of white cotton sheets and a wool blanket surrounded me, and the sheets felt familiar and smooth on my skin. I had no memory of making it home, or undressing to go to bed, yet I was in my cotton nightgown and my hair was braided down the back of my neck. I brought a hand up to my head and felt gauze and padding wrapped across my forehead and around my skull.

  I didn’t remember having any wounds dressed. In fact, at that moment I didn’t remember receiving any wounds. I gripped my bedsheets, stared at the dark grey ceiling and forced my racing heart to slow. My mind tore back and forth over my recollections of what happened on my way home from the Icarus Club with Lizzie and Andrew.

  The memories washed over me in a horrid rush. We’d encountered Oberlin and other men on the road home. Then we’d been... attacked?!?

  I sat up, desperate to find out what had happened to Lizzie and Andrew. I tore the sheet and blanket off my body, then swung my feet over the side of the bed in a rush. The room whirled at a fantastic speed around me, and I fell back onto my pillow, nauseated and dizzy. My skin bloomed with sweat.

  “Easy there, Ari,” a soft voice soothed from the desk chair to the right of my bed. “You’re all right.”

  I swallowed, tasting bile, and closed my eyes, hoping that would make the room stop spinning. “Lizzie?” I croaked. “Is that you?”

  “Yes,” Lizzie confirmed, and I felt her put my legs back up on the bed and then sit down beside me.

  I opened my eyes and tried to get up again, and again flopped back on the bed, dizzy. Why did the room refuse to stop spinning?

  I forced myself to speak. “Are you all right?” I asked. My eyes couldn’t focus on her, but I had a basic idea of where she was. She still wore the blue dress she’d had on at the Club, which meant I’d not been unconscio
us for all that long. “What time is it? How is Andrew? Those men—“

  Lizzie shushed me and placed a hand on my arm. “We’re fine, Ari. It’s about five in the morning. The only one hurt was you. Andrew has your books, and I’m sure he’ll bring them by later today or tomorrow. You’ll not be fit to go anywhere for a bit, I’m afraid.”

  “They attacked us—“

  Lizzie sucked in her breath, then made a low whistle. “You did get your brains addled. What attackers are you talking about?”

  I looked at her, able to focus better now. Her face was in shadow and hard to see in the darkness of the bedroom. “The students and Oberlin on the road. We went to the wheelbarrows, grabbed the shovels—“

  “Those men were workmen heading home from a night at the pub. They didn’t attack us.”

  I brought my hands up to clutch my aching head. I distinctly remembered a group of men. Andrew and Lizzie had reacted as if we’d been under attack. I also remembered a group of drunken workmen singing songs in inebriated camraderie as they swayed past us, but that memory seemed to be overlapping the previous one.

  That wasn’t right, I thought. The men weren’t drunk. They weren’t workmen. What in blazes is going on? The memory of drunkards floated in to cover the thought. I viciously shoved it aside and forged ahead with what I knew was the truth, blast it. My head started to throb faster, but I grit my teeth. Ill be damned if I let pain get in the way of knowing what really happened, I thought stubbornly.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated. I remembered hearing and saying snatches of a language I didn’t understand. Images of cobblestones covered with glowing symbols flying out of a wheelbarrow swam through my thoughts.

  Suddenly, my head felt as if it split in two. My stomach lurched, and I swallowed heavily and decisively. Vomiting would not help my throbbing head or my apparently weakened constitution.

  “Well then,” I croaked, deciding discretion was the better part of not throwing up, “why don’t you tell me what you think happened, if I don’t have the right of it.”

  “You need to rest,” Lizzie protested. “I can tell you—“

  “Now,” I interrupted. “Tell me what happened now.”

  Lizzie sighed. “Stubborn as always,” she muttered. “You’re right that we did encounter a group of men, and as a precaution we went over to where the wheelbarrows were. The men passed us, and we went to go around the wheelbarrows, but in the darkness you missed your footing. You fell against a wheelbarrow and hit your head so hard it knocked you out.”

  I felt the bandage again. “I hit my... head?” I had only a dim recollection of that, but, just like everything else I recalled, it didn’t match my memory. I seemed to recall... yes... someone had hit me with a cobblestone. “That’s not what I—“

  Lizzie nodded and adjusted her placement on the bed, patting my shoulder to calm me down. “Scared us, you did, and no mistake. There was blood everywhere, and we couldn’t revive you. Andrew stayed with you to do what he could to stop the bleeding. I hiked up my skirts and ran like the Devil himself was after me into Cambridge until I found a cabbie with a free carriage. I directed the cabbie back to where you and Andrew were, and we brought you back here. Mrs. Gildersleeve sent Andrew on his way despite his protests, and I ran for Dr. Sanburne. He examined you, bandaged you up, called it a severe concussion and posted me on watch until dawn, when Millie takes over.”

  Millie was the upstairs maid, Max’s girlfriend, and also a friend of mine. She started her duties at sunrise. I wondered idly where Sophie was.

  “Mrs. Gildersleeve gave Andrew quite a tongue lashing, you know,” Lizzie said.

  I grimaced. Mrs. Gildersleeve had a low opinion of my extra-curricular activities though she wasn’t certain what they were. She knew I helped aeronauts with navigational devices, and perhaps suspected I traveled in an airship occasionally, but she had no firm evidence. I took great care that she never found any, since I didn’t want her telling my parents. Luckily, my parents were not the sort who required constant updates of my activities while at school. Regardless, bashing my head on my way home would only confirm Guildersleeve’s belief that the Icarus Club was no place for ‘proper young ladies’.

  “What happened to Oberlin?” I asked.

  Lizzie stilled for a moment. “Oberlin? That horrible professor?” she asked. “I’ve no idea. Should something have happened to him?”

  I felt my heartbeat in my temples but forged ahead. “He was one of the men who came at us.”

  “I...” she began, "I... don’t recall that,” she said, but she didn’t sound very certain.

  “But—“

  “Ari, the men we saw on the road were drunk. They didn’t mean us any harm. They went on their merry way and you fell and hit your head. It’s as simple as that.”

  Lizzie’s version was a reasonable if somewhat embarrassing story of how I’d ended up with a throbbing brain pan, a protesting stomach, and a spinning bedroom. I could see the events unfolding in my mind as Lizzie described them, at least until I blacked out... but I knew without question no matter how reasonable her tale seemed, it was not the truth. We’d used shovels to defend ourselves. I knew I’d spoken odd foreign words and watched blue symbols flow across the cobbles –

  My skull exploded in pain again, and this time I couldn’t prevent the loss of my stomach contents. Lizzie was ready for it and held the basin while I retched up bile. She took a cloth from my nightstand to wipe my mouth when I finished and handed me a glass of water. She even held my head to help me take a sip.

  “You need to rest, but not for long stretches,” Lizzie told me as she laid my head back on my pillow. “I’m supposed to let you sleep for a couple hours, and then wake you up. If you don’t wake up, we’re supposed to call the doctor back. The nausea and pain are all part of the concussion.”

  “Wonderful,” I whispered. “How long did Dr. Sanburne say I’ll feel like this?”

  “You’re on bedrest for two days at least, and no doing mathematics or anything mentally strenuous until the doctor determines you’re better.”

  “Not bloody likely,” I said. “I have the Tripos coming up. I can’t spend time lolligagging.”

  “You need to rest,” she said. “Recovery from this sort of wound isn’t lolligagging, and I dare say you’ll be too tired and confused to make any sense of your mathematics until you’re better. Now be still and let your body heal.”

  A wave of dizziness rolled over me. “Did someone tell my parents I’m—“

  “Yes—Mrs. Gildersleeve telephoned them after the doctor left. Now hush,” Lizzie ordered.

  I slipped into sleep. I dreamt of an ancient, one-eyed wanderer making his way through a frost covered field with the worried waning Moon following behind him.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I quickly discovered that Dr. Sanburne’s prediction as to my overall mental capabilities was sadly accurate. I spent a day sleeping in short spurts, monitored by various members of the Towson house staff or one of my housemates to be sure I didn’t sleep too much or too deeply. My housemates, in particular, tried to ply me with everything from mango chutney to beef tea, but I couldn’t bring myself to take anything but water. My stomach rejected everything else.

  I did have some visitors other than my housemates, of a sort. My mother telephoned the house the afternoon following the encounter in the street to find out how I was and whether I should be shipped home for my recovery. Mrs. Gildersleeve wrapped me in a blanket like a Christmas parcel for my trip downstairs to take the call. After I lied about why I’d been out on a road instead of safely studying in my room, I assured my mother I didn’t need or want to come home. I did this with one eye open and one shut to limit the spinning of the sitting room to a slow barrel-roll. Mother reluctantly agreed to let me stay but expressed her intention to come get me unless I was right as rain in a few days. It was a notion that filled me with dread. I loved my mother, but she hadn’t understood my desire to get a college education
in the first place. I worried if she packed me off home, she’d not let me come back.

  Father called a little later, urging me to be more careful and to heal quickly. He sent Aunt Miranda’s love, since she was in France somewhere, he said. He knew how much I loved my studies and, therefore, didn’t suggest I leave Towson, but he did order me to take it easy until I felt better. He told me he loved me and rang off. Mrs. Gildersleeve trundled me back up to my bedroom, and I resumed my purgatorial bedroom existence.

  Andrew brought my books by the house the morning after the incident on the road but wasn’t allowed to see me, though he’d asked if he could. Mrs. Gildersleeve told me, with her usual bluntness, she ‘didn’t like the cut of the young man’s jib’ and urged me to avoid ‘colonial entanglements’ with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. Thankfully, her other comments about ‘damnable aeronauts’ and ‘infernal bicycles from Hell’ faded from my consciousness as sleep gobbled up my mind once again.

  I spent much of the time I was awake and unable to concentrate staring at the four walls of my room which was sparsely, yet comfortably furnished. I eyed my bookcase to the right of my bed, desk and desk chair with longing, wanting something – anything – to take my waking mind off the tedium. At one point, I managed to get myself across the room to my bookcase. I grabbed a copy of Aristotle’s Complete Works in English translation during a brief moment when I wasn’t being watched though the effort made my head swim. I discovered that the words on the page might as well have been in Ancient Greek for all the sense I made of them. It was as if the letters slid off the page into my lap, danced a tarantella, and leapt back on the page in random order. Frustrated, I dropped the tome to the floor with a thump.

  My friend the bright-eyed Cora Allington, who, like me, had Tripos exams coming up, dashed into my room at the sound of the thump. She was relieved to find it was Aristotle and not me sprawled on the floor.