Last Witch Standing (Mountain Witch Saga) (4 page)

He dropped the control into a garbage can at the edge of
the park, as he passed.

One Year Later

Thursday, May 17, 1973

The Citadel Universe

Katie could hear them moving in the halls below, blocking
her paths of escape. Didn’t matter. They may think that they could just box her
in here, and then, when the Witches’ Council Members returned in force, capture
her. But they underestimated her. Plasma bombs were not her only trick.

Katie grasped the ladder with white-knuckled fingers. She
needed to reach that book: the one on mathematics. Now that she was at war with
the Citadel, her learning had to be accelerated. With higher mathematics, she
could learn how to create abstract models of physical systems to measure new
theories and techniques against. Without it, she was limited to her own crude,
trial-and-error experimentations.

Katie stood inside the Citadel’s library, a stack of
pilfered books by her feet. Around her were shelves of hefty volumes containing
the knowledge accumulated by the Citadel over the course of the last thousand
years: magic books, physics and math texts from many worlds, histories and
biographies of key events and individuals in history. Painted scenes from the
Citadel’s history looked down from the domed ceiling: a group of witches from
an earlier millennium, gathered around a stone table in a grass field,
hammering out the Accords by which they would govern their world; a battle
scene between the Citadel’s defenders and invading witches from, Andreas,
another world; the inauguration of the first Headmistress of the Citadel’s
academy.

A few plasma bombs had ensured Katie access to this room.
Students and teachers had fled. With the Witches’ Council out of town for a
convention, the Citadel Guard was probably awaiting instructions before acting.

Calculus could be used to model the world.

That was the tool. Too many variables. If she could create
the right models, isolate the needed variables, she could unlock the secrets
around her. Physics could tell her which variables were most important, and
mathematics, how to isolate these variables to produce usable solutions. There
had to be a reason for all of this. Headmistress’s explanations made no sense
to her. If Katie could understand science and mathematics, she could discover
who and what she was, where her brother, mother and father had gone and how to
return to them.

What was she doing here? Where was her family?

With each week that passed, memory of them faded further.
Now, she couldn’t even remember their names. She had to return before she
forgot too much and couldn’t find her way.

Katie grabbed the books on math and science and put them in
her satchel. It was time to make it past the gauntlet.

She opened the library door. The hall was empty. Floor,
ceiling and walls were scorched black from her battle to gain entrance and the
area smelled strongly of burnt wood and singed plaster dust.

At the end of the hall a box window overlooked the
library’s backyard. That was the way to freedom. Downstairs held guards. She
did not fear them, but why fight when you don’t have to?

At the window, she grabbed her satchel tightly.

“Halt!”

Katie turned to face the noise. A tall witch in a black
robe and red hair pointed at her with a staff, a wood and brass shaft topped
with glittering jewels. Katie recognized her as Eudora, a Representative of the
Witches Council, here on a visit from another world. Behind this witch stood
several robed witches and a squad of the Citadel guard. Headmistress was not
among them.

Katie willed a plasma bomb into her palm. It fluttered
blue, then extinguished. Katie lit it again. It extinguished again.

“We can block your channeling, sorceress.” Eudora banged
the bottom of her staff on the wooden floor.

The window was the thinnest barrier to the outside and
Katie backed up towards it, grateful she had never allowed Headmistress or any
of the student’s or staff to see her fly. Below it, a drop of nearly a hundred
feet: higher than she had ever flown before.

Eudora smiled as Katie bumped into the wall below the
window. Trapped. Now or never.

Katie willed her insubstantial body to pass through the
windowpane and the crisscrossed iron lattice reinforcing it. Her stomach
fluttered as she entered the matter, a jolt of electricity stunning her
briefly, then she was through, in the open air. Flying. What would her big
brother say if he saw that his little sister could fly?

She looked back. Through the window, Eudora, and the
witches in her party, stared at her hovering figure, mouths open. Katie waved
at them.

Into the air she fled, each step putting her forward by
several yards. Below her lay the deep green of the well-manicured Citadel
lawns. Ahead, the lake sparkled in the sunlight. It didn’t matter now that the
mill was destroyed; the area was effectively off limits to her. She had
underestimated the effect her destruction of it would have upon the Citadel
staff. With one act, she had gone from cute little Citadel pet to mortal enemy.

Where to go? How far could she walk through the air like
this? This was further than she had ever gone. It was one thing to jump across
the squash fields, another to stay in the air and cover large distances.

When she had passed the lake and into the forest, beyond,
even, the ruins of the old city, she descended, gently gliding onto a ridge.

Katie looked out across the landscape for signs of pursuit,
but saw none. Nevertheless, she could not stay here. If they could block her
plasma bombs, they might be able to overpower her. The best thing to do was to
rest, then see how far she could fly.

Maybe she could find a place far away, deep in the woods to
hide. To hide and study. She clasped the books tightly. Inside, she was
certain, was enough knowledge to render her invulnerable to the Citadel. She
would study then, perhaps, go on another raid into the library for more books.

After that? Maybe she would know enough to return family,
wherever they were? This was a strange place and she was frightened. Katie
wanted to go home.

June, 1975

The Planet Pangea

Katie hovered over the immense planet. Green land masses,
with the blue of oceans covering large portions, indicated its habitability. It
was nearly twice the size of the Citadel’s world and half again as large as
Earth.

This would be her home, her Pangea.

She recalled her first, tentative steps, at flying. Now,
she could fly large distances, and travel at will throughout the Cosmos.
Instinctively, by feel. This disturbed her; she needed to know how and why she
could do so. First, though, she had to find a permanent place to stay.

A shadow cast at her feet. Katie looked up to see a giant
condor-like bird overhead. She decided to follow it and see where it went.
Anywhere a big bird nested would probably be a pretty neat place.

Over trees, meadows and lakes, the pair flew. Where the
largest lake ended, the terrain rose into steep cliffs. At its zenith, the sky
radiated a warm, deep blue; at the horizon, cool, light blue. The lakes,
pristine and untouched by humankind, reflected deep aquamarine and ultramarine
blue hues. Beside the shores, large herds of gazelle-like creatures drank
abundantly from the water, apparently oblivious to predators. The air around
was clean, absent of all pollution. Katie knew about Africa from her brother’s
World
Book Encyclopedia
set. This is what she imagined Africa would be like. Her
Africa! Her Pangea! 

Her own planet, named after the supercontinent that once
existed on Earth.

When the condor reached the first cliff, it veered to the
right, but Katie did not follow. In the distance she counted five more
circling. They made their nests here and here was where she would make hers.

If only she could show her brother! But where
was he? Something had happened to her before arriving on the Citadel grounds.
There was a family. Hers?

The images and memories were fading into nothingness. She
was alone now.

Katie expected a trial finding a place to make permanent
camp, but this first cliff she landed upon had a cave that could be used as
shelter for her precious books. And the view! All around rose majestic cliffs,
below, a deep valley filled with wildflowers and trees. Condors were the largest
birds she knew of. It was fitting that she, a powerful creature herself, should
share a home with them. It was perfect!

Even with the Power, it took Katie most of the remainder of
the afternoon to clear out the cave and make it suitable for habitation. In the
furthest reaches, stacks of bones lay in the dust. So, there had been other
predators here. Well, she was at the top of the food chain now. She left these
remains undisturbed – in case she later wished to reconstruct them to see what
sort of animals they were, how they were composed, and what had killed them.

Even in such a place, on a remote planet at the edge of the
known universe, Katie took precautions. First, she strengthened the walls in the
front, using the Gift to compress the molecules into a near diamond hardness,
then she created a tunnel from the back of the cave to the start of a trail she
intended to clear up the cliff. This she sealed with a boulder. In case the
front was blocked, she now had an exit. Tomorrow, she would construct a path
down the cliff and into the lake valley. This would take some time as it would
need to be hidden and accessible only to her. She wanted no surprises – either
by wild creatures from this world, or Citadel Witches come to take her away.

The work done for the day, she arranged a bed of foliage
collected from the bushes and small trees that protruded from the cliff’s
sides, and set her pack beside it.

Now that she was safe and isolated, it was time to practice
her skills. Those visiting Citadel witches had blocked her power during the
library battle. How had they done so? Katie produced a ball of plasma in her
left palm and tried to recreate, in her mind, the moment it had happened. No,
she hadn’t felt the Power being choked off at the source – her collecting of
solar power. That meant they must have extinguished the plasma itself.

She tried to destroy the plasma. First, she set up a
counter-wave. This caused the ball to become unstable, decomposing from a ball
into an amorphous shape in her palm, but it did not extinguish the blue fire.

Then it hit her. They didn’t extinguish it at all. The
witches moved it! They interfered with her channeling for an instant, possibly
as short a period as a microsecond, and sent the plasma somewhere else –
perhaps into deep space. Katie willed the plasma to another area of the cave, behind
her. It disappeared from view.

A shield.
I need a shield!
If she could shield it
until the last moment, they would not have time to move it once she hurled it.
Leaving it there, as she had that day in the Citadel library, had been an open
invitation to a counter.

Katie took out the books from her raid upon the library. In
two years on the run from the Citadel, she had mastered the science and
mathematics from several of the volumes. A dozen or so books remained. Among
them were several non-science books she had mistakenly grabbed in her haste.
Before discarding them, she would read them at least once. Perhaps they could
help her understand what had happened to her. She picked up the first of them –
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
by Friedrich Nietzsche – and began to read.

“We
knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried,
most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the
Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his
duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now, I am
become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that one way
or another.”

J.
Robert Oppenheimer, Father of the Atomic Bomb

June, 1975

Pangea

The playground of creation. That is what Katie thought as
she flew around Pangea. Cliffs, forests, jungles, waterfalls of incredible
height and power, grasslands that spread for miles in all directions: all could
be found on this planet.

After landing, she retrieved
Thus Spake Zarathustra
from the cave and sat outside on a rock that gave the grandest view of the
valley below and the cliffs around them. The air was pristine, as it always was
on her Pangea, and a slight wind blew Katie’s hair as she spread the book open
before her.

Nietzsche was making everything so much clearer for her.
She was alone because she was
special
. That was why she could do so much
more than the human Citadel Witches. Katie was the
Overman
of which the philosopher
spoke.