It swerved at the last moment, careering past Oscar with a great banging, like a fast train passing, crashing into the corner of the room in its headlong flight. The cat landed on the Charter Table itself, turning carefully to face the great shifting and slipping pile of glass panes that were the White Dragon, as it tried to unwind itself from the knots its collision had tied it in.
Oscar ran to the window to look out at the Hall below. The battle had started again, but it was difficult to tell who was winning, as spirits and Magi were locked in combat all over the Hall. Just below Oscar, at the edge of the stage, something like a giant bat with a tiny silver head, was fighting back three chairs that kept leaping and snatching at it with their lion clawed feet. The bat swirled up and lunged forward, throwing its attackers back, and out of its shadow staggered Skelton, falling back against the side of the stage. He still had his sword, but his waistcoat was tattered and his shirt was stained red with blood. There was a cut on his forehead and he wiped the blood out of his eyes with his sleeve.
“Uncle Rufus!” Skelton turned at the sound of Oscar’s voice and looked up, “The Dragon! It’s here!”
“The black cat! Trust the cat!”
“But what can a cat do?”
“Nothing: if it’s just a cat,” Skelton grinned suddenly, “Have you found anything?”
“We found it! The stone!”
“Then do it quickly - I’ll try and buy you some time…” and with that Skelton heaved himself onto the stage and then, barely pausing, threw himself forward onto the back of one of the Magi’s chairs. Before it could react, he leapt forward again, running across the backs and heads of the fighting hordes, jumping from chair to Spirit to Magi, struggling up the Hall towards his goal: Cuddy.
There was a great hissing and clanging from behind Oscar and he turned to see the White Dragon hauling itself up from the corner where it had landed. It shook its head, the glass plates clattering, as it turned to face Oscar and, between them, the little black cat. The cat seemed so small and vulnerable before that great, sharp, gleaming head, but all it did was yawn and stretch and… carry on stretching and stretching… actually getting longer and thicker, it’s head pulling out into a long snout, it’s fur laying down flat and shiny, it’s tail winding and curling, it’s shoulders bunching, growing.
There was a tug at Oscar’s arm and Maggs pulled him away from the window into the relative shelter of a doorway. Oscar couldn’t take his eyes off what had been the little black cat - only it was no longer little, no longer a cat, no longer even black but deeply, darkly red…
Maggs hugged Oscar tightly: “All this time, all this time and we never even guessed…”
“Maggs, what’s happening? What’s it doing?”
“There are two dragons, Oscar, remember: young Uncle did a deal with the greatest Dark Spirit of them all…”
And the Great Red Dragon of Britain unfurled its wings and shook them. Now nearly as big as the White Dragon, it stamped its claws on the tabletop and stretched out its neck and hissed. At this the White Dragon hunched back on itself, as if preparing to spring. Oscar felt something tap his leg. He looked down and saw it was the pointed tip of the Red Dragon’s tail. It tapped again, several times. He stared at it, dimly aware of the dragons snarling and snapping at each other.
Finally the tail flicked against him, hard, knocking his leg from under him and he lurched sideways, taking Maggs with him, both of them stumbling out of the doorway in to the wreckage of the benches round the walls. At that moment the White Dragon pounced forward and the Red Dragon met it in mid air, tumbling over backwards with the force of the attack. For a brief moment the air was full of scales and glass, teeth and claws, smoke and fire and then, with a great tearing, they crashed through the door Maggs and Oscar had been standing against and disappeared with the sound of a hundred suits of armour falling downstairs.
Maggs pulled Oscar up, back towards the table. Almost half the table had come away in that first ferocious meeting between the Dragons and they could see the stone that the King had laid even more clearly now.
“We need to find something heavy to hit it with,” Maggs started throwing bits of broken furniture around, “Something heavier than that candle stick, anyway…”
“No, wait,” Oscar saw something and pulled it out of a pile of splintered wood, “We need something long and thin and strong… like this… Help me, Maggs…”
He was pulling on a long piece of metal that had once formed the back and the legs of one of the benches.
“What do we want this for?” Maggs put her weight behind his and they pulled it out of the ruins.
“A lever,” said Oscar, who vaguely remembered something about them from science, “We stick one end in this crack under the stone, and then we put all our strength into pushing down on this end…”
“Brilliant!” Maggs threw herself over the end of the piece of metal, trying to force down and lever the King’s stone from where it was cemented to the stones beneath. They both strained at the lever and… nothing happened…
“We’re… not strong…. enough…” Maggs gave up pushing and leant on the lever, puffing, “We’ll never… do it…”
“No, not not strong enough, just not heavy enough…” Oscar started pulling more bits of furniture from the debris, “We just need more weight on this end, help me get some of this onto the end of the lever…”
Maggs grabbed hold of a section of bench and heaved it up onto the lever, forcing it down with the weight, and Oscar piled on another piece. The she grabbed hold of him and jumped up onto the pile, adding their weight on top… the metal bent under them, and for a moment Oscar was afraid it was going to break, then there was a grinding, crunching sound as the lever began to push up against the King’s stone.
“We’re almo…” Maggs never got to finish her sentence as, with a great roaring and rushing, the White Dragon hurtled back through the doorway and threw itself at the lever, snatching it in it jaws and throwing Maggs and Oscar flying.
It threw the metal to the ground and stamped on it, snapping it beneath its feet and grinding the parts into the floor. Then it rounded on them, with a terrible bared grin on its face… which was immediately smashed to the ground as the Red Dragon leapt on its back, tearing at its neck with its fangs.
Maggs pulled Oscar away as the two Dragons rolled over each other, locked in each other’s talons, careening into the walls.
“We’ve got to find another lever!” She was pulling him back to the benches.
“It’s no good! There’s no time! We’re too useless!” The Red Dragon was forced back into a corner, fending of the White Dragon’s claws with its front feet, Oscar knew they couldn’t do it in time, “If only Uncle Rufus was here, or Ridley, or anyone - any Magi could do it in seconds…”
Maggs suddenly turned and grabbed both his arms, “But we don’t have any Magi - we have one of the most powerful in the land: Oscar, you’re still Lord Protector!”
“But I can’t do magic!”
“But you must be able to! You’re Lord Protector! You’re defender of the Magi, commander of the Temple: so command!” She pointed at the table, the other side of which the two dragons were snapping at each other, “Command the stone: tell it what to do!”
“But I don’t know any magic!” Oscar stared at the stone, unable to think of anything, “I don’t what to do!”
“Rise!”
“What?” he turned to look at Maggs. She was pointing at the stone with a pained expression on her face, like she needed to go to the lavatory.
“Call out to the stone,” she grabbed hold of him, turning him to face it, “Rise!”
Sheepishly he raised his hand towards the table
“Rise…”
“No, no, no,” Maggs was standing behind him now, one hand holding his arm up, the other in the small of his back, keeping him in place, “You have to speak to the stone: look at it, feel it, you have to get the idea of the stone in your mind and speak to it directly: concentrate on it, see nothing except the stone…”
Oscar stared at the block of marble under the table, trying to understand what Maggs was talking about, but he just couldn’t see it: it was just a bit of stone: chipped underneath where they had tried to lever it out, a long brown vein running diagonally down one side of it, where grains of mica glinted in the light, square, solid, sitting there under the table for hundreds of years, supporting the Charter, supporting the Temple, really… the key to the whole building, tying all the other stones together, all leaning on each other, one stone on another, all leading to this single block… the weight, the solidity, all slotting into place neatly around it, the Temple, the city, the Great Work, spreading out across the world, all knotted together in this one place…
And the two dragons hurtling over the top of the table towards him, locked in a vicious embrace… Maggs pulled him out of the way just in time as they clanged past: he had almost had it then, the stone - he had almost been able to feel what he imagined it felt… The dragons, wrapped up in each other, turned over and over, all claws and teeth, scraping along the wall towards them. The floor sparked under them and huge bits of wood splintered out around them.
Maggs pulled him back into the corner as the Red Dragon shook the White Dragon off across the room, with one last desperate heave. The White Dragon clattered up against the Table, scrabbling to regain it’s footing on the stone slabs.
He had almost had it… he still almost had it - the Temple was still all around him, the stone was still there, at the centre of it all. The Red Dragon hauled itself across in front of them, dragging a lame back leg behind it, trying to get between them and the White Dragon. Its head was lolling, exhausted and blood dripped from its mouth.
The stone was right there, right in front of him, as the White Dragon coiled itself up above it, rearing up, about to pounce, to sweep the Red Dragon aside and come roaring down on him and Maggs… Its teeth flashed in a hideous grin and…
“Rise!”
And with a great howling grinding, the King’s stone tore itself up from the floor, shooting into the air. The table above it shattered into a hail of shards, the Charter itself rippling away in the rush as the stone crashed straight into the White Dragon, driving it back, clear across the room and out through the empty arch into the Great Hall beyond, trailing a fine, tinkling rainbow of stained glass in their wake.
Then there was a deafening thunderclap that shook every stone in the Temple, throwing Oscar and Maggs off their feet, filling the room with the flying debris, as the Dragon and the Stone exploded into a rushing cloud of dust and powered glass. And as the cloud rattled the windows of the Hall, there came in its wake the sound of a great exhalation, like a thousand people sighing, and in that one, suspended moment, the Great Work of the Magi was dissolved. Every spell and every compact, every conjuration and subjugation, every lock, curse, binding and command was loosed and all the spirits in the Hall were suddenly set free.
Oscar scrambled to his feet, tottering to the window just in time to see the Hall filled with an endless shifting cloud of golden light and writhing white smoke. Shapes and beings boiled and swam below him as the cloud rose and thinned, for one moment filling the Hall with a warm, fiery glow before just as suddenly drifting and fading, revealing below, the wreckage of the battle, smashed furniture and scattered Magi.
In the centre of them stood his Uncle, his clothes torn and his feet unsteady. Around him the Magi began to pick themselves up, still barely aware of what had just happened to them. There was a great scrabbling and rattling from behind Oscar and then the Red Dragon rushed past him, through the window and down into the Great Hall, landing inelegantly next to Rufus Skelton with an untidy thump.
The Magi around him shrank back and then, as it stretched out its head and hissed at them, turned and ran, scrambling over the remains of the chairs towards the exits. Slowly their panic turned into a general rout as all the Magi in the Hall rushed for the doors, trampled over each other in their haste.
Oscar felt Maggs’ hand on his shoulder as the Dragon turned to look at Skelton and then suddenly lifted into the air, disappearing in a wisp of red smoke.
The Great Work was destroyed and the Royal Brotherhood of the Magi was no more and Oscar, despite everything, couldn’t help but sorrow at its passing.
