Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (85 page)

To the rear of the room, standing against the tapestry-decorated walls as if they were attendants at the meal were hand upon hand of people, Daoine and Arruk both. Their features were bloodied and broken, their skin as pale as that of maggots.

“Sit,” Ennis told Sevei. “Did you come to join us? Did Isibéal invite you?”

Sevei waited in the shadows, not wanting to come closer to the tableau. She lifted her hands and heard the rustle of a silken clóca falling back; her hands and arms were as they once had been. She touched her face; it was the face she remembered, scarless and smooth. “Ennis,” Sevei said softly, “you know me. I’m Sevei, darling. Remember? You cried so hard when I left to go to Inishfeirm; you were just five then, and you wouldn’t let go of my clóca, trying to keep me there. Do you remember that? Look at me.”

Ennis shook his head. “I don’t know you. Isibéal says I can’t trust you. She says you’re a monster.” He held up Treoraí’s Heart in his hand; she could see the jeweled facets gleaming through his thin, grimy fingers. “She talks to me through this. I can hear her in my head even though I killed her.”

The Taisteal woman giggled loudly at that, raising her hand to her mouth. She saw Sevei staring at her, and her eyes narrowed and her mouth snapped shut in a manic frown. The pool of wine crawled toward a vase of dead and decaying flowers set at the center of the table. “What does Mam say, Ennis?” Sevei said. “She must be in the Heart also. What does she tell you?”

“She doesn’t talk to me,” Ennis said, almost angrily, glaring at the body next to him at the table. “They won’t let her.”

Sevei took a step toward the table, toward the vision of her mam’s body. Isibéal hissed warningly and began to rise from the table, her mad eyes gleaming. The corpses against the wall moved with her, all of them converging on Sevei. “Maybe I can help her,” she said softly to Ennis, watching Isibéal and the others carefully. Ennis sat, not moving, locked in position. Sevei saw that her skin was metamorphosing, turning back to the scarred white skin of the Bán Cailleach; she could feel the changes crawling across her face, also. The power was still draining from Lámh Shábhála in an effort to keep them together in this place while holding back the true world, and Sevei knew she couldn’t sustain this much longer.

“Listen to me, Ennis. You shouldn’t listen to Isibéal or the others. I know the voices. I know how dangerous they are.”

In her own head, the voices of the ancient Holders cackled with mad laughter. Isibéal hissed again, and she flung her arm out across the table before Sevei could reach her mam. Isibéal’s fingers locked in Meriel’s hair, lifting her face up from the table. Her face was a rotting skull with grave worms crawling from her eyes and her nostrils. Her mouth opened; a black, swollen tongue protruded. “You lie! You’re the White Beast. The Enemy,” it shrilled, the voice a foul wind that carried the smell of carrion. Isibéal’s mouth moved with the same words at the same time.

Sevei ignored the apparition. She watched Ennis. “That’s not Mam, Ennis. We both know it. Let me try. I can find her in the Heart. She’ll tell you the truth. Mam would never lie to you.”

“It’s too late,” he said urgently. “I’ve found the pattern and I have to dance to it or I’ll die. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Mam would help you, Ennis. She would tell you what’s right to do.”

“The pattern . . .” Ennis said, and aqua shades of him shivered around him. “The blue ghosts . . .”

“Mam can send the ghosts away.”

“No!” he shouted, and the corpse of her mam shouted with him, the two voices intertwined and strong with the power of the Heart. Ennis ran to his mam, putting his arms around the skeletal figure. As Sevei watched, the light of the Heart in Ennis’ hand enveloped her: the death process reversed itself and it was her mam standing there again. Isibéal, standing next to him, smiled at Sevei. “You see,” they said, all of them in the room: Ennis, Mam, the Taisteal, the Daoine, and the Arruk. Their united voices battered at her. “You lie! You’re the White Beast, the Abomination. You should be destroyed like a wild animal. That’s the pattern. That’s the way.”

“Ennis . . .” She took a step toward him, toward them. He was melting into Mam’s body, his body glowing the color of a storm sea and drawing the azure light around him until there were two images of Ennis glaring at her. Sevei reached toward Ennis/Mam with her hand, with Lámh Shábhála. He pushed her back with the Heart, but she continued to force herself forward, to take one step, then another. She touched the blue image. Touched him.

She could
see
Ennis, held in a cobalt shell: fractured and broken, his mind all angles and razored edges, the Ennis that she’d once known scattered in this new image and held in by the gleaming cage. “Oh, Ennis,” she whispered with a sob. “What have they done to you?”

“Go away!” he screamed at her, his voice shrill.

“Let me help you.”

“Go
away
!” With the throat-shredding bellow, Ennis sent the energy of the Heart pouring out at her. The unexpected assault threw Sevei out of his mind, hurled her past the dining room and the cowering Taisteal woman and the dead onlookers, slamming her to the ground in the rain and mist of the Narrows. The armies lurched into motion around her; she heard swords clashing against jaka, the howls of the Arruk and the war cry of the Daoine, the chants of the Svarti and the thunder of the Clochs Mór. Kekeri roared overhead and vanished into the clouds. The Arruk Kralj was pulling himself to his feet with the staff of his jaka. Kayne was astride his horse, staring at Sevei in confusion and shock.

And Ennis was there also, as well as the stunned Arruk who he’d ridden. Ennis lifted the Heart in one hand, his spell-stick in the other. He seemed to glow like a moon in fog. “Die, White Beast,” he said to her, and gestured.

The power of the Heart collided with that of Lámh Shábhála, and the sound of Sevei’s wail was lost in the thunder of the mage-energy crackling about her. The voices of the Holders and the voices of memory cried with her.

Yet two voices came strong and vivid to her. One was her gram.
“. . . he’s your brother. My great-son. You have to save him . . .”

“Only those who come long after can truly judge us . . .”
She heard Carrohkai’s voice loudest of all.

Sevei rose. She accepted the pain, feeling it but not letting it touch her. She touched Lámh Shábhála as Ennis sent a new attack cascading from the Heart toward her. He wanted to crush her, to annihilate her. She could feel his intent and desire welling from him, from the blue shell that held him.

It was what she wanted most: to heal Ennis and bring him back. It was what she wanted for
all
those she’d lost: for Gram, for poor Dillon, for Da and Mam, for Tara and Ionhar, for Séarlait, for Máister Kirwan. But she couldn’t bring them back.

Yet she might be able to save Ennis. She might be able to plunge back into his mind and find the child Ennis who was lost and locked deep inside. Perhaps she could pull him from the madness. Perhaps she could banish the ghosts that haunted him. Perhaps.

But if she did that, there would be nothing left in Lámh Shábhála, not if she had to hold off the Heart for the time it would take. And there was too much to do here. Too much . . .

“You must choose . . .”
It could have been Gram speaking, or Carrohkai. She could no longer tell.

“Ennis,” she called again, desperate. “It’s Sevei and Kayne. We’re here, right in front of you. You have to stop. I’ll take the Arruk where they need to go, I promise. But you have to stop now.”

“Listen to her,” Kayne shouted at Ennis, then to Sevei. “Sevei, please don’t hurt him!”

The only answer to them was a grimace from Ennis. The spell-stick in his hand shifted as he aimed it toward Kayne. The Kralj rose from the tangle of his attendants, loping forward with his jaka upraised. The space that Kayne had carved out with Blaze was closing, and the battle would overtake them again in a few breaths.

Strangely, the Arruk who Ennis had rode pushed himself to his feet at the same time, and his jaka caught the Kralj’s weapon, stopping the Arruk chieftain in full charge. Sevei had no time to wonder at that.

She reached deep into Lámh Shábhála and dredged out the power with her mind—all the mage-energy within the stone—and shaped it. In her mind, she
was
Lámh Shábhála, holding it . . . holding it . . .

And bringing it smashing down.

Ennis shifted his focus too late. The spell-stick shattered in his hand, the energy within the Heart flaring. He screamed as Lámh Shábhála crashed past his defenses, Sevei pushing more and more of the cloch’s reservoirs into the effort. The pain was nearly intolerable, and the scars on her skin glowed as if a smithy’s forge burned inside her body. Sevei closed her eyes; she saw only with the mage-vision as the whirlpool of maddened force spread over the Narrows from the two of them. They fought to control it: Sevei and the blue-shelled Ennis. “Don’t hurt me,” the blue thing that held Ennis pleaded. “I’m your brother, Sevei. Don’t hurt me.” Then it smiled, as if expecting her to hold back the onslaught, and it grasped for the energy itself.

But she hadn’t listened to it or let go. She caught Ennis in a hand of emerald and pushed him back, and he gasped in surprise. “The pattern,” he said. “It’s not supposed to happen this way . . .”

Uncertainty trembled the Heart. Sevei saw the opening and pushed forward.

“Sevei!” Ennis called in that instant, and she finally heard the true Ennis—the child, her brother—in his voice. The blue shell around him crumbled to powder and dust. He was crying, sobbing. He held out his arms toward her pleadingly.

Lámh Shábhála fountained in white sheets of flame around Ennis; Treoraí’s Heart caught within it. Sevei heard Isibéal’s wail, Gyl Svarti’s cry, the screams of all the murdered ones trapped there, and she plunged past them to another presence, one pushed far down into the stone. “Mam,” she said. “I miss you so much.”

Meriel’s figure emerged from shadow, limned in cold fire. “Sevei, my love,” she said. Her face was twisted with sadness, her eyes dark from weeping. “Ennis . . .” she said, and she turned from Sevei to him. “Oh, Ennis, my poor baby.”

“Mam!” he said, and it was the cry of a child, touched with a wail that became a racking sob. “Oh, Mam, they wouldn’t let me hear you, and I was so scared, and I had to stay with the blue ghost’s dance.” He stopped. “The dance is over now, isn’t it?” he said.

“Aye, my dear,” Meriel told him, and she looked at Sevei as she spoke. “Aye, finally it is.”

“Mam?” Sevei said, her voice choking. Meriel smiled.

“I know, my love,” she said, hugging Ennis. “I know.” Meriel nodded to Sevei.

The light from Lámh Shábhála enveloped them both, and Ennis cried out as Meriel’s form hugged him. Sevei heard Kayne and the Arruk whom Ennis had ridden scream. Ennis’ cry ended in a strange, falling wail, and when the light faded from around him, there was only a charred, twisted body on the ground.

Cima saw Kurhv Kralj recover himself. Their leader snatched up his fallen jaka and charged toward the White Beast with a howl. Cima hesitated.
“I’ll take the Arruk where they need to go,”
the White Beast had said, and she had called Ennis Svarti by name, had called herself his sister. Cima knew the importance the bluntclaws gave to their family relationships, and he saw how Ennis reacted.

He remembered Ennis leaking water from his eyes in the night. He remembered the grief the boy felt over his losses.

And yet here were some of his family, miraculously alive again, and they were trying to help him.

Cima tightened his hands around his own jaka. He moved to intercept Kurhv Kralj. Their jakas met in midstrike. “No,” he told the Kralj. “You can’t.”

Kurhv Kralj only glared. He stepped back and lifted his jaka again, and this time the blade would have come down on Cima. A true Arruk would have stood there, would have met force with force, and the strongest would have won. Kurhv Kralj would have won.

But Cima did something that a Daoine warrior might have done. He stepped to the side, sliding forward at the same time and slicing his jaka in a long, horizontal blow that caught Kurhv Kralj in the abdomen. Kurhv Kralj grunted, his jaka dropping from his hands in midstrike. He made a strangling, choking sound deep in his throat as his blood spattered over Cima’s scales, as a flood of it poured over Cima’s blade.

Kurhv Kralj fell.

Cima stared. The attendants around the Kralj stared as well. Strange shifting light from behind him sent shadows racing over the ground. As Cima whirled around, he saw the mage-glare from the White Beast strike Ennis, saw the boy fall, and he howled.