Oscar and the Magi: Battle of the Great Hall
Cuddy staggered back from his lectern as the terrible darkness plummeted towards him, tipping over the edge of the stage and down into the arrangement of flowers beneath. Skelton landed gently on the stage, the shadows boiling out around him. The robes coiled up and around the lectern and swept it from the stage. He stepped forward to face the Magi as Cuddy pulled himself out of a clump of ferns and started back up a set of steps into the safety of the crowd.
“You stand at a crucial moment in your history,” Skelton’s voice was amused, taunting them, “The fate of the country… the world… rests with you…”
“Yes! Yes, it does!” Cuddy scrambled into view up on a chair and the white dragon came clattering down to hang in the sir beside him, “And we will seize our moment.”
“Not if someone stops you.”
“Who? You? You’ve challenged the Magi before in this very Hall, and have been defeated before, too, by only a few Knights… and now, now, you face an army of Magi who have been preparing for this very moment: how exactly do you think you are going to stop us now?”
Skelton raised an eyebrow: “How else, but with an army of my own?” and he raised his arms up and spoke into the air, “Now! You are free! Free to fight our last battle!”
And with his words the Erl King’s robes suddenly exploded outwards in a great rustling wave of shadow. Tattered ends of cloth twisted free, coiling up into the air, spreading threadbare wings and opening baleful, dim eyes, tendrils of threads wove together into black bundles of spiders on thin twining legs, climbing over each other to the front of the stage. Where Skelton had stood, wreathed about in his coat of dark blood there was now a whispering army of shreds, a swirling crowd of creatures that scuttled and batted around him.
The assembled Magi cowered back as the Erl King’s horde massed before them and Skelton, in the middle of it all, smiled to himself and leant on his umbrella.
“Dark Spirits,” Maggs whispered to Oscar, “All the Dark Spirits that gave the Erl King his power - he has set them free: and given himself an army to fight with…”
“Well,” Skelton looked around the hall; “Let’s get this over with, shall we?” and the army of Dark Spirits broke like a wave of shadow into the hall beyond. The Magi in the stalls disappeared momentarily under the whirling cloud of spirits, but then a bright light burst through the shadow as the White Dragon came rushing up from below, scattering the Dark Spirits like smoke in the wind.
The Dragon rattled round the hall above the heads of the Magi, glittering and flaming with light, before dropping back to Cuddy.
“This is our moment!” The Dragon coiled round Cuddy in a stream of rushing, shining armour, “This is where we strike! Strike now, Magi! For the Brotherhood, for the future, strike!”
And all around the Magi the furniture of the hall reared up, an implacable army of iron limbs and unflinching wooden backs, forming ranks around their masters. The Dark Spirits gathered again behind Skelton, who advanced slowly to the front of the stage.
“Oh, don’t worry, Master Cuddy,” said Skelton, “I’ll come to you,” and he twisted the handle of his umbrella, pulling away and casting up the black cloth, revealing, hidden inside, a long, thin rapier that gleamed in the hall lights. Skelton smiled and flourished his sword.
“En garde, Master Cuddy,” and he leapt from the stage into the Magi, the cloth of his umbrella unfurling into life behind, great bat wings that drove the enemy from around him as the Dark Spirits followed his charge up the aisle towards Cuddy.
“Stop him!” shrieked Cuddy, scrambling back over the Magi behind him, and the White Dragon threw itself forward at Skelton. He swiped at it with his sword but it swung its head up at the last moment, coiling back on it self, to fill the aisle between Skelton and Cuddy. It rattled its scales and bared its teeth.
“Hand to hand against the greatest Spirit in Britain,” Skelton’s smile widened, “This ought to be interesting,” and he threw himself at the Dragon as the ranks of spirits closed in around him and the Hall exploded in battle.
“Oscar, get down!” Maggs grabbed hold of Oscar’s collar and dragged him back as a chair came hurtling up and crashed through Sir Isaac Newton’s head.
“The Dragon’s helping them,” Oscar fought against Maggs’ grip, “We’ve got to do something!”
“We are!” Maggs hauled him round the back of the pedestal the Charter sat on, “You stay here, out of the way - I’m going to carry on looking for… Ah! Get off, you awful thing!”
Oscar turned to see Maggs kicking out against a small stained glass boar who doggedly hanging on to the toe of her shoe with its little lead teeth. Before he could do anything, the little black cat leapt down from a chair straight into the boar, shattering it into pieces. Maggs staggered back into a chair while the cat batted the pieces of glass around the floor. Oscar was just about to go to Maggs when he realised something: just out of the corner of his eye he could see a word carved into the pedestal he was hiding behind, and that word was: ‘King’.
He turned and looked at the carving:
‘This stone was laid by His Majesty the King, George I in the year 1717′
“Maggs!”
“I’m alright, Oscar, I’m just a bit… out of breath…”
“No, no! I mean, good, I’m glad you are, but… Look! The King!”
“Oscar! That must be it!” Maggs scrambled over to join him on the floor under the table, “The King must have laid the stone that sealed the great work: this is it! This is what the rhyme meant!”
“But what do we do now?”
“Well, if I’m right and this is the key to the Great Work, then all we have to do is remove it.”
“It’s been there for hundreds of years Maggs - how are we going to move it?”
“We need a tool or something…” Maggs stood up, looking around, “Aha! Perfect!” She leaned over Oscar head and then stepped back hauling one of the candlesticks from the table up over her head. “Look out, Oscar!”
Oscar flung himself to one side as Maggs half fell, half threw herself at the pedestal, swinging the candlestick wildly. It struck the stone under the table at an angle, striking off sparks. The sound of the candlestick seemed to ring through Oscar like the tolling of a great bell, impossibly loud and deep, making the whole room tremble and rock. The stained glass cracked and shattered, spraying the room with shards of colour. Maggs stumbled away from the table, dropping the candlestick as Oscar dived under the chairs, covering his head with his arms against the glass.
As the echoes of the strike died away, Oscar became extraordinarily aware of the terrible silence that they left behind. For a moment he wondered whether the noise had made him deaf, but then he realised he could hear the tiny noises of crumbs of glass dropping to the floor. All the noise of battle from the hall beyond had stopped.
“The Charter Room!” Cuddy’s voice cut through the silence, “They’re doing something in there! Stop them!”
Oscar scrambled out from under the chairs just in time to hear the dreadful clashing and rattling of the White Dragon as it came roaring through the empty space where it had once stood, its stained glass lit from within by a pale, flickering fire. It wound through the window frames whirling up into the roof of the Charter Room and then dropping down, its mouth open wide, its teeth glinting and clattering in its head, dropping straight to towards Oscar…
And then the little black cat leapt up, over his shoulder and landed a paw full of claws right on the Dragon’s nose.