Daughter of Ancients (59 page)

I stopped her.
Let it go, Jen'Larie,
I whispered in her mind, trying not to frighten or overwhelm her with the direct contact, trying to mute my urgency and allow her to choose what I was prepared to insist on.
Relinquish your enchantment so that
I
can wield it. Please. This I must do myself.

After all, I was the Destroyer. What was one more holocaust to my account?

To my relief, she did not resist. When I felt her release the solid weight of her enchantment—truly little more than an immensely complex thought bound to a physical object with simple threads of magic—I held it carefully, envisioned its accomplishment, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling the shattering to come. And then I reached for power. . . .

I thought my soul might be sucked out of Jen's body as the power rushed out of me. The lectorium candles winked out, leaving the swelling oculus as our only illumination, a lurid pulsing red glow. Much more than an enchanted metal ring of the Lords' design, this oculus had been bound with the talent and power of every hospice resident. Bearing the substance of their lives and their sorcery, of their pain and diseases, the device existed with the same formidable presence as a phenomenon of nature—a glacier or a forest or a sea—though tainted always and ever with the most unnatural poison of Zhev'Na.

I fought to slow the rush of power and to focus our enchantment on the weakened structure of the brass circle. No rough or halting application of power here. Jen grasped the ring, her physical contact allowing me an unhindered path to the oculus, even as it threatened to tear her apart. She trembled, sobbed, and swore, but her small hand did not release the burning ring. I could not help her, for I had to devote every particle of my strength and concentration to control, to ensuring that I drew on everything of myself that I could safely give. Thoughts and memories swept me down and down, faster, tumbling, choking as if I were caught in an avalanche. . . .

I wrenched my thoughts away from my father. My mind darted here and there: to riding horses . . . to the storms of the Bounded . . . backward to my childhood in Leire . . . to the day my mother came to Comigor, long before I knew she was my mother . . . before Zhev'Na . . .

No!
Rage and terror yanked me out of the whirlpool of memory. That memory was not mine
. Not mine . . . not mine . . . not mine . . . shut it away . . . I am not what they made me . . . I have chosen. I am not evil. I will not be their instrument..

I slammed the door on memories.
Concentrate. Focus. The world feels wrong. The avantir sings of war to D'Sanya's lions.
The oculus pulsed like a diseased heart, refusing to yield. I released my attachment to Jen's vision so I could no longer see the cursed thing. The power rushed out of me . . . leaving me parched. . . .

Hollow. Empty. Why did I care?
Care, like joy and sorrow and worry and honor, was only a word, thin and spidery and gray, unattached to anything of substance. I plummeted into a well of gray. Shrunken and withered, I huddled in its depths. Voices . . . weeping . . . invaded my gray world, one and then another.

I tried to ignore them.

I didn't want to hear this. I turned inward.

“Gerick! You must listen to me.” Jen's voice, strained and harsh, shouted above the fading clamor. “D'Sanya betrayed these people. She used the Lords' magic to deceive them and rob them of their Way. Don't hide. Listen to them. Embrace them. We're so close: Her enchantment—the oculus—is failing. But you must give just a little more to break it. Don't hold back. For your father, Gerick. Have mercy. Let him die.”

Her pleas pulled me out of the dry well. But I refused to think of my father. Rather I returned to thoughts of the Bounded, of the Singlars, of their strange place in the world. What would happen to them if D'Sanya gave this world to the Zhid? What would happen to them if I withered away here in this hole in the desert of spirits? They weren't ready. The power poured out of me. . . .

The world exploded in red-orange light.

 

“... on and get up. You can't . . . here. D'Sanya . . . sense what's happened . . . come and . . . you.”

The woman wasn't speaking in fragments. I was hearing in fragments. Seeing in fragments as well. Darkness. Wavering light. Swimming reflections. And my chest was on fire . . .

Panic gripped my gut. Suffocation.
Inhale, fool.

The inflow of air cleared some of the cobwebs from my head. The floor was hard. An overpowering scent of lamp oil filled the air. Somewhere people were clamoring. Anger. Confusion. Fear. Panic . . . But I wasn't sure whether it was inside of me or out.

“Can you get up? We must get away from here. I tried to break her circle on the floor, but I can't. Her portal exists there, just waiting for her to trigger it. She can be here almost as soon as she thinks of it.”

Forcing myself to breathe, forcing my eyes to focus, I convinced my arms and legs that they were mine and pushed up to all fours. Only then did I feel control enough to raise my head and look at the person crouched in front of me, exhorting me to move. Dark, dark eyes, pools of shadow, too large for a face so pale and exhausted and afraid. Behind her the lectorium was in shambles. Broken glass, sheets of twisted metal, barrels of sand and dry plaster spilled across the tiles. Tools and implements scattered everywhere. Scorch marks clouded what remained of the great mirrors.

“We did it,” she said, dropping crumbled nuggets of brass on the floor in front of me.

“Must . . . destroy . . . this place. Fire.” The words would have been easier spoken by a newborn infant.

Jen smiled faintly. “We will. One or the other of us developed that idea about the time the world exploded. But we must get these men out before we torch it. Not to mention I need a spark. All the candles went out. I'm flat. I don't suppose you could manage it.”

I gasped again, when my starving lungs and wobbling joints reminded me to keep breathing. “Madwoman.”

A gut-twisting rip of enchantment, a crashing blow that ripped the bolts from the wood, and the door to the passageway swung open. I sat up on my knees and fumbled for a nonexistent knife with fingers that could scarcely distinguish between steel and leather.

Na'Cyd, the elegant angularity of his high forehead marred by the bruised swelling on the left side, stood in the doorway holding a small lamp and surveying the wrecked lectorium. “No need for weapons, Master Gerick,” he said, sniffing the fume-laden air. “I'll not interfere with your activities. As I said before, I merely keep order in the place I've chosen to live. My duties include ensuring the safety of guests and visitors at this hospice, as well as investigating mysterious explosions in the Lady's house.”

He set his lamp on the nearest worktable and wagged a finger at the three fallen soldiers. “Are they dead?”

“Only one,” said Jen.

As the consiliar moved toward the nearest man, Jen grabbed her metal rod and bashed his lamp with it. The glass panes shattered and flames rippled outward across the table. She held the rod stiffly between herself and the Dar'Nethi. But Na'Cyd just sighed and bent over the dead guardsman, pressing a finger into his neck. Emitting a matter-of-fact grunt, the consiliar moved to the other two. He hefted the one with the bloody thigh onto his shoulders. As he exited the broken door, he called back to us. “I'll return for the other one.”

His boots clumped heavily on the stairs. Popping glass on the burning worktable released little geysers of colored flame, reflecting eerily in the broken mirrors.

“Come on.” Jen offered her arm to support my shoulders.

I refused her help and stumbled to my feet. “Did you see anything that might hint of the Lady's other works?” I said.

“Nothing I could recognize. The pieces at the far end of that table are strange. But they're not metal.”

Jen grabbed two tall candles from sconces by the door, lit them in the increasingly eager flames, and used them to set off the oil she had spilled on the other worktables and the cushions scattered on several chairs. The fire spread quickly to a stack of paper packets that billowed scented smoke.

The items she had mentioned were broken chunks of plaster, scorched and smudged as if they'd fallen into a fire before someone threw them into this heap. Most were roughly boxlike, each piece having five relatively flat sides and one with a design pressed or carved into it—a coin, a galloping horse, a key—and patterns of straight slits cut into the plaster face. Several larger pieces were broken, but when I assembled them revealed only simple round hollows scooped out of them. Again the patterns of narrow channels radiating from the concavity. Other pieces had a rounded bulge left in relief that would fit inside the scooped out sections like an egg in a nest. Molds, of course, for casting her metal objects. I rummaged through the stack, looking for something that would tell me which of these designs might channel her power to the avantir. I found a small one for the lion pendants, but nothing else that seemed significant.

Voices rose outside the house. I tossed aside the mold in my hand and peered out of the broken window. Men and women were streaming across the lawns toward D'Sanya's garden, carrying lamps and torches, calling one to the other, some of them supporting each other, pointing their fingers at the window from which I looked down.

The bound guardsman groaned, drawing my attention back to the lectorium. To my left a burst of flame shot toward the coffered ceiling. Who knew if Na'Cyd would actually choose to return?

“We'd best get this fellow out,” I said, my eyes watering from the smoke filling the room.

By the time Jen and I had carried the heavy man across the room, out the doorway, and to the head of the stairs, two explosions had shot flames through the roof. Billowing smoke set us both coughing, and the heat scorched my back. We rested our arms on the banister, and I considered the merits of rolling the man down the steps and tumbling down after him.

But Na'Cyd bounded up the stairs just then and, with only a steadying hand from us, lifted the bulky guardsman onto his shoulders.

“Thank you,” said Jen, as we stumbled after him.

“I don't burn living men to death. Not any more.” He staggered across the foyer and out the front doors.

Brown smoke filled the graceful rooms where I had learned to be a child again. The paint on the ceiling bubbled, charring at the edges like evil flowers blossoming and dying all at once. Another explosion, and the rumble of flames above our heads grew louder.

“We should leave through the back garden,” I shouted over the din, restraining Jen as she tried to follow Na'Cyd.

She jerked her arm away. “I need to find Papa. Help him. And you—”

“We can't delay here, Jen. Did you hear D'Sanya? ‘One place or the other.' She knows the Zhev'Na oculus is gone. So she must have another device. And then there's the avantir itself. There could be several of them. The Lords always had three.”

“You must speak to your father.” She sniffled and coughed and wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

“There's no time.” I pulled her face into my chest and dragged her toward the back hall. But a great cracking noise and a sudden burst of heat sent me backward, just as the upper stair landing collapsed into the passageway in front of me. Flames licked at Jen's cloak, and I yanked her back and slapped at the sparks glowing in the dark wool. A massive burning beam crashed to my right, raining fiery debris on our heads. Jen and I ducked at the same time, but in opposite directions, and I lost my hold of her.

“Watch out! Ah—” Jen's cry was aborted, and she collapsed to the smoldering carpet, a sooty gash on the side of her head.

“Jen! Jen'Larie!” I scooped her into my arms. Reversing course, I ducked around the blazing beam and hurried through the front doors, only to meet a sea of faces.

Fifty or more people crowded the garden, the eerie light of the flames shifting on pale cheeks and flashing in worried eyes. Behind me the flames roared, but the people had fallen silent, save for hissing breath and moaning misery . . . or perhaps that was the wind wrought up by the fire or perhaps it was entirely in my imagination. Somewhere in the crowd a woman sobbed. They did not move to let us pass.

“Where is the Lady?” demanded an elderly woman with tightly curled hair and a voice like a trumpet. She stood in the front ranks, supported by a pudgy youth of twelve or fourteen years, whose handlight was tinted orange by the flames behind me. “Who are you?”