Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (84 page)

The power in the Heart reminded him too much of Lámh Shábhála.
That would have taken everything in a Cloch Mór and more. Perhaps that was all he had, and he’s used it up . . .
But he knew already that this faint hope was misplaced: they could not win here, not with the Heart against them, and he despaired of being able to reach Ennis. Images and memories of his brother surfaced—
smiling, laughing, always so proud of his big brother, always wanting to be like him
—and he shook his head at them

He wondered if he’d have the strength and resolution to strike Ennis down. He wondered if the chance would come at all.

A growl, too close, brought him back. Several Arruk had leaped from the canyon toward him and Edana, alone now after the Heart’s attack. The mage-demon, restored, roared and charged at them; Kayne sent hissing gouts of fire to them. Those closest went down, but more were coming, an endless stream of them. “Close the line!” Kayne shouted to the gardai behind them, and slowly they moved to obey, as if mesmerized by the carnage and violence before them. Kayne could see the Kralj now, fighting with his entourage around him, and there . . . there was Ennis.

He could see his brother, astride another Arruk’s shoulders as if he were riding the creature. A garda rushed at Ennis—it was Garvan, Kayne realized, a shield lashed to his broken arm—but the Arruk with the boy cut Garvan down with a stroke of his jaka. Then Kayne lost sight of Ennis as more Arruk came pouring out from the gap, the drums beating furiously, the banners waving, and Svarti howling their chants and spell-lightning—pale after the Heart’s brilliance—slashing through the Daoine troops.

The mage-landscape was flooded with the power being expended here: the Clochs Mór and clochmions arrayed against the spell-sticks of the Svarti, and there . . . in the center, all the energy swirling around it like a storm sea around a terrible, huge whirlpool, was Treoraí’s Heart, gathering itself again, pulling in the power it held and feeding on itself, ready to burst out once more.

Kayne clutched Blaze desperately, but he’d already used most of the energy stored within the stone, and he knew it was the same for the others.

“We can’t stop him,” he heard Edana call. “Kayne, he’s too strong.”

“I know,” he told her. “The army’s yours, Aunt. Be ready to retreat to the top of the pass. We’ve done all we can here.”

“Kayne . . .”

In answer, he kicked his horse, screaming the
caointeoireacht na cogadh
in defiance, and riding ahead into the line of the Arruk. He used Blaze liberally, not caring that the stone would soon be exhausted, riding against the storm he felt gathering. He pushed the Arruk aside, clearing a path for himself and arrowing straight for Ennis. He could see his brother now, not a dozen strides from him, and Ennis turned to him at the same time, Treoraí’s Heart in one hand, the remnants of an Arruk spell-stick in the other. “Ennis!” Kayne shouted to him. “Ennis, you have to stop this!”

The boy seemed to look at him, and Kayne wanted to believe that there was a flash of recognition in Ennis’ eyes. But just when Ennis’ mouth started to open, a change came over the boy’s face, even as Kayne used the last reservoirs of Blaze to push aside the remaining Arruk between himself and his brother. The Arruk who carried his brother stared at the horse and rider that confronted them, its eyes wide and almost frightened. Ennis blinked and his gaze went hard; his mouth closed and the lips set themselves in a tight frown. The spell-stick came down and he pointed the riven end directly at Kayne.

He spoke a word, and the word was in the Arruk tongue.

Kayne, with the wisp of energy left in Blaze, felt Treoraí’s Heart erupt and flare outward, and he could do nothing to stop it.

“Ennis!” the rider shouted toward him. “Ennis, you have to stop this!”

The blue ghost to which he had bound himself shuddered with the call, threatening to shatter around Ennis. Since the battle the day before, when he’d felt his da’s Cloch Mór outside the stone, since he’d glimpsed what seemed to be Kayne with the riders set against the Arruk, he’d clung to the pattern as if it were a log in the middle of a tempestuous ocean, his only chance for life.

“It’s not your brother,”
Isibéal’s voice insisted in his head, in the blue ghost’s head, as she had since he’d seen him.
“That’s what they want you to think. Kayne is dead. It’s a trick, my dearest one; a nasty, terrible trick. They want to kill you. They want to kill you as they did me. They want the Heart for themselves.”

“Let me talk to Mam. She’d know. She’d tell me,”
he’d cried back to her.

Isibéal and the ones he’d killed with the Heart, hands upon hands upon hands of them now, shouted back denial to him.
“No, you can’t talk to her. You must listen to us . . .”

But Ennis stared at the rider and he saw someone who must be Kayne, and he hesitated. Around him, a dozen ghosts of himself appeared, futures unglimpsed, and he began to slip away from the chosen pattern. He felt the chill of the wind, felt the cold rain on his face and body, felt the terror of the battle and the uncertainty, and all the emotions threatened to overwhelm him. Kurhv Kralj, a few strides away, was howling at Ennis: “Kill him! Kill the stone-bearer bluntclaw!” The Kralj waved his well-blooded jaka and shoved an attendant out of the way. Ennis knew that the Kralj would rush toward Kayne himself.

“Ennis Svarti!” Cima called up at him. “What should I do?”

His breath coming fast and panicked, Ennis forced himself to hold onto the blue, shoved himself back into the constricted shell of the pattern. With the effort, the panic began to subside.
“There . . . That’s better, isn’t it, my darling . . .”

“Aye,” he wanted to whisper, but his lips could not move because the blue ghost would not allow it. He turned Treoraí’s Heart in his hand, glancing at the facets that in his mage-vision were almost too bright to bear, and he took the energy in his mind, letting it gather in the ruined spell stick. “Stay!” he said to Cima and Kurhv Kralj both, and pointed the spell-stick at the false Kayne.

He imagined all the power rushing out and smashing the foul pretender, obliterating him so that his deception would be revealed for the sham it was.

As he released the attack—far stronger than it needed to be, but the ghost demanded it—he felt something else, a new presence, and even the blue ghost looked up in surprise and alarm.

“THERE!” SEVEI SHOUTED, and Kekeri folded his great leathery wings and fell like a stooping hawk from the air. Sevei let herself tumble from the dragon’s back, the lashing of wind and rain an agony. She took Lámh Shábhála in her hand and wrenched it open in her mind. The world shifted around her.

The Bán Cailleach vanished . . . and reappeared on the ground as the dragon wheeled overhead spouting thick fire. The wave of energy from Treoraí’s Heart, intended for Kayne, struck Sevei fully and she shuddered with the impact, closing her eyes as Lámh Shábhála took the mage-power in and vented it out again. Crouching, Sevei caught the Heart’s energy in a mage-hand of bright emerald before it struck Kayne and threw it; one of the spires of the Narrows well to the west shattered and collapsed in a fiery gout of molten and broken rock.

She stood between Kayne and Ennis, shaking out her white hair as she rose and standing naked in the rain. She enjoyed the coolness even though the drops battered her like small fists; the moisture slaked the heat in her body, soothing her enough that she could ignore the clamor of the voices in her head.

“Enough,” she said to Ennis, to Kayne, to all of the contentious voices in her head. “It’s over now.” She existed mostly in the mage-world: she saw Kayne and Ennis through the colors of their clochs na thintrí; there also, close by, was Demon-Caller with Aunt Edana, Snarl with Padraic, Firerock with Greada, and Winter with one of the Fingerlanders. None of the Riocha who had attacked Kayne and Séarlait were there, she realized: none of the other Ríthe or the green-robes of the Order of Gabair except for Padraic.

She grimaced sadly. The world around her was murky and mist infested. She saw movement in the shadows: the Arruk Kralj, rushing at her, and she flicked a bare tithe of Lámh Shábhála’s power toward him. He fell back into his attendant warriors with the crack of bones, and she turned from him no more bothered than if he’d been an insect.

“No!” Ennis screamed at her—a boy’s shrill cry. But the attack that came at her from the Heart was full and masterful, and she barely managed to snare it with Lámh Shábhála. The two Great Clochs’ power burned together, searing, the forces within them intertwined and locked together. Both Sevei and Ennis were swept up in the furious tidal eddies.

Time had stopped around them. Sevei could see, through the furious glare of the clochs, the Daoine soldiers and the Arruk in the field of the Narrows standing frozen in mid-motion, Kekeri caught in mid-turn in the sky above them. The energy of Lámh Shábhála flooded out from her, a constant stream holding this moment within itself.

In the light, a boy’s form was sitting.

“Ennis? It’s Sevei, Ennis. It’s your sister.”

The boy looked up, his movements stiff, as if his joints were so stiff and bound that he could only move in limited ways. “No, you’re not Sevei. Sevei’s dead. You’re the White Beast. Isibéal says you’re horrible and I need to kill you. That’s the pattern. That’s what the blue ghost means.”

“No, Ennis. I’m truly Sevei. Here . . . let me show you.” She extended the power of Lámh Shábhála toward him, fashioning an opening into her mind through which he could step and look into her thoughts and memories. But he scrambled to his feet like a puppet whose strings had been pulled, and the mage-energy within Treoraí’s Heart slammed into her once more. The impact shattered the opening she’d made, sending shards hurtling back toward her. Sevei gasped at the raw, visceral power of the attack. Spears of blood-red thrust gore-dripping points toward her, and though she shoved them aside with folds of Lámh Shábhála’s power, the droplets spattered on Sevei’s skin where they hissed and boiled and stripped away the flesh down to muscle. The smoldering burns, atop the already throbbing hurt of wielding the cloch, tore an unwilling scream from her throat, and she heard Ennis laugh. The spears came at her again, a new wave, and this time she threw a blanketing curtain around herself from which the spears rebounded. The acid of the drops sputtered and fumed against the protection but did not touch her.

With reflexive anger, she sent lightning arcing out from the stone in her hand, lancing toward Ennis in crackling, brilliant white streaks. The first few he shoved aside, laughing at her, but she continued to pour them out, faster and more powerful, until one shattered the walls he was furiously erecting and sent him falling backward from the shoulders of the Arruk who carried him. The Arruk went sprawling one way, and Ennis another. Sevei rushed forward through the breached defenses of her brother . . .

. . . and into him.

It was night inside Ennis, a twilight illuminated by candles. Ennis was sitting at a table set as if for a feast with fine plates and silver. Sevei recognized the room: one of the rooms in Mam’s chambers in Dún Laoghaire. The supper steamed on the table, half-eaten. A Taisteal woman in bright, foreign clothing was seated at the table with Ennis, and Mam was there also, slumped in her chair with her face on the delicate linen of the tablecloth, her body unmoving. Her wine was spilled, the goblet just out of the reach of her white fingers and a red pool staining the white cloth. Mam’s plate had lifted under her head, meat and sauce spilled and smeared in the red tresses of her hair. The Taisteal woman was staring at Meriel’s corpse, smiling and giggling like a mad thing. Her amusement punctuated Ennis’ greeting.