The murmurs rose. Satomi gestured sharply, and the assembled witches and students fell silent. “What have you done?” the Void Prime whispered, almost spitting the words out. “Combined yourself with an outsider—a Hunter? This is an abomination!”
“No worse than you’ve done,” Mirei shot back. She tried to stay restrained, but failed; her voice grew louder. “Would you like me to start listing the actions you’ve taken? Would you like me to tell these women about Wraith?”
“We need not listen to your lies,” Arinei snapped above the rising noise.
“Lies? I am Mirage and Miryo. I know what you have done.”
She was ready to say it, to expose the Primes’ assassination of Tari before the listening witches, and damn the consequences. Before she could, though, Satomi stepped forward, green eyes glittering with hard fire. “We have done what we must, for the safety of all. There is no choice. ‘The doppelganger is anathema to us. It is destruction and oblivion, the undoing of all magic. It is the ruin of our work, and the bane of our being. It and our magic will never coexist, and its presence threatens all that our powers can do.’ So wrote Misetsu—”
“Five days before she died. Yes, you told me that before. And I believed it then, but now I know it’s wrong. Misetsu ought to have listened better when the Goddess spoke to her.” Mirei pitched her voice to cut through the air of the hall. “Destruction. Oblivion. Undoing. Void.
“That is what we are lacking. That is why the clergy call us unbalanced. That is why we have no sons. We are crippled in our ignorance, and yet we think that ignorance is power. For centuries now, we’ve turned our faces from the rest of the power that should be ours.”
“The Void is untouchable,” Koika said. “It is nothingness. You cannot work with nothing!”
“You can’t,” Mirei said, with a reckless grin. “I can.” She looked up and around, eyeing the ruling hall with calculated distaste. If she had to do this publicly, then she’d better exploit the theatrics of it. “I’ve never liked this place. So why don’t we go elsewhere? Let’s adjourn to Star Hall, and I’ll show you just what I can do.” She directed her smile right at Satomi, let it widen slightly. “Follow me however you can.”
Then she sang herself out.
Mirei staggered when she appeared on the center dais, breath ragged in her chest.
Goddess, I hope the Primes don’t realize how hard that is. I can’t afford to let them think I’m tired.
She waited, slowing her breathing, for the others to arrive. It would take a few minutes; they, unlike her, would have to walk. Adrenaline still flooded her body, but she was grateful for it. Without it, she might fall over.
Noise outside the hall alerted her. Mirei spared one last glance upward, into the unfathomable blackness of the hall’s crossing, imagining the stars above. I’ve come this far. Please, Goddess, don’t desert me now.
The Primes led the way. Satomi, Mirei saw, chose to enter from the branch of the hall dedicated to Fire; she wondered briefly if that meant anything. At least she wasn’t entering with Shimi. The look in the Air Prime’s eye was murderous.
As the other four raised themselves onto columns of Elemental light, just as they had during Miryo’s test, the Void Prime stalked up onto the dais and opened her mouth to speak.
Mirei sang two quick notes and twisted one hand through the air, and the witchlights in the hall went out.
She heard involuntary gasps from the Primes, lit from beneath by their shining columns. Then Koika’s voice sounded, and the lights came back up, giving her a better look at the absolute shock on the five women’s faces.
“This is what I mean,” Mirei said, hoping her own surprise wasn’t visible. She hadn’t known she was going to do that. In fact, she hadn’t known she could. It seemed the Goddess was still with her. “Void magic is the undoing of magic.”
She had hardly any warning before Shimi began to sing. Mirei had just enough time to identify the spell as an immobilizing one; then words were flying out of her mouth and her body was in motion, slightly different this time, canceling the Air Prime’s spell.
That was a different phrase. So they don’t all cancel the same.
Shimi’s eyes looked like they were going to fall out of her skull. It was a fundamental truth that magic could be counteracted, but never canceled. And Mirei had just turned that on its head.
“This is what Misetsu didn’t understand,” Mirei said. The branches of the hall were filling up. She couldn’t spare the attention to be sure, but it looked like all the witches from the ruling hall were entering the branches for their Rays. The Void witches made a ring around the Primes, and the students were packing in at the back of each branch, eyes wide. There were even Cousins, squeezing into the spaces behind the columns. “Doppelgangers are the undoing of magic. As you have just seen.”
The reaction was not what she had hoped.
It was even worse than she had feared.
Miryo had never been in a true battle of any kind, physical or magical. So it was purely Mirage’s instincts that guided Mirei when terror possessed the Primes’ faces and the spells began to sound.
She flew into motion, singing frantically, body twisting, slashing through spells right and left. They came only from the Primes, and for that she was grateful; had any other witches joined in, she would have been dead. As it was, only the power of the Void and the other women’s fear of it saved her from the Primes’ spells. Ordinarily she would never have stood a chance against the five of them, not together and probably not alone, but she had canceling magic, which they had never seen before and did not know how to react to. A spell that took them twenty pitches to construct, she could cut through in four.
Her canceling could overpower any one of them. But only barely, and they soon realized that just as well as she did.
They began to sing together.
Mirei didn’t even recognize what they were constructing. That made things worse; if she didn’t know what it was, she couldn’t cut it effectively. And the odds of her managing to outmuscle all five Primes in concert were beyond bad.
She saw the look in Shimi’s eyes, and knew she wasn’t likely to survive whatever they were building.
I can’t stop them.
But I can try to turn them.
Mirei didn’t let herself consider what she was about to do. She took a deep breath, prayed to the Goddess, and threw her voice into their spell.
She did not seek to cancel it; she didn’t have the strength. Instead, she did something even more reckless: she wove herself and her power into the spell they were building. Satomi was at its head, and so she found herself in direct competition with the Void Prime for control of the energy.
She and Satomi faced off across the central dais. Electricity surged up Mirei’s spine; her movements had closed in to nearly nothing, but the energy she was channeling lived in them just the same, suffusing her body until she knew she might well die of it. The two witches stood at the heart of a vortex of power that was spinning wildly out of control; Mirei couldn’t take it from the Void Prime, but her efforts threatened Satomi’s grip.
If this goes on, Mirei realized, we are all going to die.
Any of the witches in the hall could stop her. Mirei could not see them through the lightning swirl of energy that surrounded her, but she heard no voices beyond the six of them, and felt no interference. No one was going to risk touching this maelstrom.
She could not take it, and Satomi could not hold it.