Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3) (87 page)

“Sevei!” Kayne rushed toward her as if he were about to embrace her, and she held up her hand to hold him back. Cima stared, his fierce mouth open. Sevei held up her hand to stop Kayne.

“No,” she told him. “You . . . can’t. I can’t. I couldn’t bear your touch, Kayne, especially now.” She looked past him to the Arruk. “Cima, it’s time to fulfill my promise to you. I will show you Cudak Zvati, though it will be both less and more than you think it is. But you’ll return to your people as Svarti Kralj, the First. As for Treoraí’s Heart, you’ll do with it what you should.”

“Sevei!” Kayne interrupted. She could see his confusion and his uncertainty in the way he stood, still grasping Blaze as if it were still full of the mage-lights’ energy. “The Heart was given to Gram and then Mam. It belongs to the Daoine. It’s not yours to give away.”

“Belongs to the Daoine?” she asked him, remonstrating with him gently. Now that she’d made the decision, a calmness seemed to have come over her. She could still feel the awful pain, but it seemed to hover around her like a mollusk’s shell, as if it were not quite part of her any longer. “Treoraí would disagree, wouldn’t he? His Heart’s not mine to give, nor yours. The Heart, like Lámh Shábhála, chooses its own. And it arranged to be there in Cima’s hand.” She looked at him. She wanted so much to touch Kayne, to put her arms around him and embrace him, to weep with him at all they’d lost, to grieve together, brother and sister. Yet she knew that if she did that, the pain would come rushing in to her again, and she might succumb to it. “I wish . . . I wish . . .” she began, then shook her head, unable to continue. She felt tears sliding down her cheeks, so hot they seemed to steam against her skin. “You will be Rí Ard,” she told Kayne. “And you will hold Lámh Shábhála.”

Puzzlement creased his battle-stained forehead. “What do you mean . . . ?”

She smiled at him again. “I think you know,” she told him. “Or you will. When you have the stone, Gram and Carrohkai will tell you. And so will I.” She could see the realization break on his face. “It’s fine, Kayne,” she told him. “Remember for me and tell the others when they say I did nothing or that I was a traitor: I chose this path. I chose it because it was best.”

She didn’t give either of them the chance to speak or protest, or for her to hesitate and perhaps reconsider. She plunged her mind into Lámh Shábhála, forcing herself deep into every last crystalline recess of the great stone and taking all that was there into herself. When she was full, when she and Lámh Shábhála were the same vessel, she turned to the wall that Kekeri and the others had fashioned to replace hers. “Now,” she thought to Kekeri. “I need all of you now,” and she opened herself to their power also.

The power lacerated her hands as she held them out, shattering bones and shredding muscle and sinew. She forced her mind to hold Lámh Shábhála, to form it, to place it where it must go. Then, praying to the Mother that she had done it right, that she had seen the correct pattern for the energy, she let it go with a great cry, the last sound she would make.

Sevei, with her final thought, was surprised at the resplendent ferocity that she released.

“Sevei!” Kayne shouted, but there was nothing he could do. He started to draw in a breath, to move to her, to stop her, but the light . . . the light was nothing he’d experienced before. The glimmering wall she’d erected across the battlefield coalesced and merged with Lámh Shábhála. He’d once seen the sun emerge full from behind fast dark clouds, gleaming low behind a lake in Céile Mhór and the orb and its reflections from the water so bright and piercing that he’d thought for a moment that he’d been blinded, even though he immediately averted his eyes. The corusca tion of gathered mage-energy here made that a twilight in comparison. Crisp black shadows were thrown behind every object, radiating out from the center of the Bán Cailleach. Kayne’s slitted eyes could barely see her. Her body was consumed in this new sun, and then . . .

The light burst outward, and he felt the impact of its heat and saw its fury even through eyes quickly closed and shielded. Kayne shouted into the thunder of the explosion, his voice lost in the clamor.

And as suddenly, it was flashed past him, racing east like a backward sunrise. He could follow the pure, unfettered radiance as it moved over the Finger and into the misted distance of the horizon. The echoes of the moment roared in his ears; the afterimages danced and swayed in shifting curtains in front of him. He blinked and pawed at his eyes. Around him, he could hear the others calling and shouting, as bewildered and lost as he was.

“Kayne!”

“Aunt Edana.” He saw her, or at least a form obscured by blotches of purple and green that looked somewhat like her.

“What happened, Kayne? Where have they gone?”

“Who?” he asked, still rubbing at his eyes. As his vision cleared, he found his breath gone.

There were no Arruk here except the dead. The rest, all of them, had vanished. The passage where they’d crawled in their thousands was empty. Except for the reminder of the slaughtered corpses, they might never have been there at all.

And the Bán Cailleach—Sevei, his sister—was gone as well. On the trampled ground where she’d been standing a moment before, a green stone lay.

Kayne reached down and picked it up.

As his fingers touched the stone, he heard a voice.
“Remember for me,”
Sevei said.
“Remember . . .”

AFTERWARD, THE PEOPLES of Talamh An Ghlas and Céile Mhór would talk of the Day of the Brightness. Traveling much faster than the fleetest horse could run, the Brightness of the Pale Witch raced over the mountains of the Finger, and the clans shut their eyes and cried out at the manifestation, but it did not touch them. For them, there was a moment of terrible disorientation and blinding light, and many would say they felt a hurricane wind and glimpsed figures hurtling by them, wailing in the tongue of the Arruk.

It is said that when the Pale Witch’s Brightness reached the ruins of the Bunús Wall, the stones that had fallen leaped up on their own and set themselves back into place, the creatures carved into their granite faces came alive as the intense light touched them, and their voices joined the thunder of the Brightness’ flight, and the Brightness shouted back to them as it rushed toward Céile Mhór.

Where the Finger joined the long flank of Céile Mhór, the Brightness lengthened and turned south. It swept down over the towns and villages that the Arruk had taken from the Thane’s people, and where the Brightness passed, there were no Arruk left behind. It swept them up, growing brighter and taller and larger as it moved. Above the Brightness, the mage-lights swirled in the sky as if night had come, and there were those who said they saw dragons wheeling above it, or black-furred seals riding in it as if the Brightness were an ocean wave. There were those who say they saw even stranger creatures in the Brightness—creatures that were yet legends of old times.

One thing is certain: the Brightness reached the ancient fortifications of the Uhmaci Wall, all the way at the foot of Middle Céile, before the sun set that day. There, the Brightness bloomed like an awful flower, and it raised the Uhmaci Wall that the Arruk had torn down, raised it higher and wider than it had been before. Then the Brightness collapsed, spreading out over Lower Céile before fading entirely at The Feet. As the Brightness moved through Lower Céile, it left behind the Arruk it had gathered up, all of them alive and whole, though blinded for a time.

The people of Talthma, the Daoine city closest to the Uhmaci Wall, say that as the Brightness died, they heard a loud voice speaking to the Arruk in their own tongue. Though many in later years claimed to know what the voice said, the truth is that their tales all contradict one another.

What the Brightness said, only the Arruk know.

Cima woke from the intense cold of the passage in a tor por, his body so frigid that he found it difficult to move his joints. A flat-faced bluntclaw watched him silently, leaning on a wooden staff. Cima forced his reluctant knees to bend and rise from where he knelt. Cima was clutching Ennis Svarti’s spell-stick in his left hand, with the symbols of the Kralj’s Svarti carved into its oaken surfaces, though he didn’t remember picking up the spell-stick. His right hand was still fisted around Treoraí’s Heart.

“Where am I?” he asked the bluntclaw as his body warmed and movement returned, “Where is the White Beast? Where are my people?”

He could still hear the whisper of the White Beast’s voice in his head, the whisper he’d heard in the darkness of the passage:
“I give you this gift, Cima. I give it to you in the name of all the Aware. My gift to you, my gift to all . . .”

“The White Beast is gone,” the bluntclaw answered. “She’s returned your people to their homes as she promised. But you, she’s taken another way. This—” the bluntclaw indicated the landscape with a sweeping wave of his hand, “—is Bethiochnead in Thall Coill. It is also what you would call Cudak Zvati.”

Cima forced his neck to swivel, to look around. He was standing on a cliff top bordered by a gray, heavy sea. The shadowstar had already set, but there was still light in the sky. He could hear wind shrieking past his ears and the waves battering rocks far below, could sniff the brine and fish smell of the ocean. The verdant line of a forest curved inland nearby, though he and the bluntclaw stood in a grassy meadow. Near the cliff’s edge, as if it had rested there for centuries watching over this place, its body cracked and set at a strange angle in the ground . . .

“Cudak . . .” Cima said. “That is Cudak, who called us.”

“Perhaps,” the bluntclaw agreed. “Or perhaps it is the God of whom all the rest are shadows and echoes.” Cima said nothing. The bluntclaw leaned on his staff, resting his hands on the knobbed end and his chin on his hands. “I am Beryn,” he said. “I am the Protector of this place.”

“I am Cima, and I am—” Cima stopped. “I don’t know what I am,” he finished finally. The bluntclaw showed his teeth at that in the way the Perakli did when they were amused. Cima walked over to the statue and placed his hands on the time-eroded stone. Even though the sun shone brightly here and he touched the flank of the carven god in full sunlight, the stone was so cold that he plucked his hand away in surprise.

“What am I supposed do?” he asked Beryn.

“Use the gift that the Bán Cailleach, the White Beast, gave you.”

Cima glanced down to the gem that was still in his hand, the sky-stone that Ennis had called the Heart. “Will I be able to use this as Ennis Svarti did?”

“Perhaps,” Beryn answered. “I don’t know. Only we Bunús Muintir and the Daoine, who are the same people, have been able to use the clochs na thintrí in the past. The other Aware have their own way to the power of the mage-lights: the Saimhóir through Bradán an Chumhacht or the dragons through the ordeal of mage-fire. You were called here to find the way for the Arruk. I suspect that you will also find a new path, but for now look at the Heart, Cima. Let yourself fall into it. The Heart will open a way for you.”