Mage of Clouds (The Cloudmages #2) (81 page)

“I can’t!” Meriel answered, shaking her head as she remembered the feel of her mam’s madness, how she had nearly lost herself twice in it. “I can’t. Not again.”

The power flared, closing her fingers tightly around the cloch. “You must.”

The voice resonated with her own heart; she could feel the rightness of what it said even though it frightened her. Truth was the rich green of spring grass and the gold of sunset. Truth tasted of the salt of the sea and the sourness of fresh bread. She nodded. She held the power of Treoraí’s Heart and released it. It twined around the tornado that linked Jenna to the mage-lights and plunged in, heedless of the clamor and destruction around them.

Inside the red wall, there was silence. The roaring chaos was gone. Here, there was a stillness painted with shadows. She tried to merge with her mam, to become Meriel/ Jenna as she had the previous times, but though she could feel the touch of emotions that were not her own, something held her away. “Mam?”

A faint sob answered her.

Meriel could see nothing. She drifted in a black void, suspended in the depths of a moonless sea. The sobbing continued and a touch brushed her arm. Meriel gasped in fright, whirling around, but there was nothing to see and the touch was gone. The weeping seemed to come from all about her, directionless. “Mam?” she called again. “Is that you? I’m here. It’s Meriel.”

The touch came again like the brush of a warm breeze: on her cheek, lifting her hair, and gone. The sound of a breath approached her, touched her ear, and vanished. Indistinctly, Meriel could begin to hear the clamor and confusion of the battle raging in Falcarragh and streaks of wild red rippled and flowed all around her, a scarlet cage. She could feel faint shudders and tremblings, as if something were striking the cage now and again. The breath came again, a bellow’s sigh. Yellow splashed on the walls surrounding her, fading to orange and red and finally returning slowly to black, and the colors were accompanied by a wave of pain that made Meriel gasp and close her eyes.

“It’s not safe in here, Mam,” Meriel called out when she could breathe again. “You can’t hide from this.”

No answer. But there was a faint thread of white light she could see now. She reached down to touch it.

“Leave her be!”
It was the shriek of a harridan, a witch, a demon—hissing and venomous. A face rose from the darkness: her mam’s, but twisted and disfigured and nearly unrecognizable. Pale and sickly yellow light played over her scowling features. “Can’t you see she doesn’t need you? Doesn’t want you.
Never
wanted you. You’re a leech, a parasite, as greedy as all the rest of them.”

Meriel ignored the apparition. She reached again for the white thread, and this time taloned hands closed around her arm, the nails digging deep into her flesh so that Meriel screamed. Blood welled around the scabrous nails and flowed thickly away as the fingers tightened, digging ever deeper into Meriel’s forearm. Meriel couldn’t move without ripping out great chunks of her own flesh with those nails; the arm held her. “Now you’ll stay here with me,” the mam-thing husked. “You’ll stay here always.”

“You’re going to die if you don’t stop what you’re doing, Mam,” Meriel said frantically, trying to pull away, but the hand clenched her more tightly.

“I don’t care,” it said. “It doesn’t matter. We all die. You’ll die with me.”

“Mam!” Meriel shouted, but the thing only laughed at her.

“Your mam is dead already,” it said. “Your mam is gone.”

“No.”
Meriel shrieked the word, as if the force of her voice could shatter the awful mockery of Jenna that hovered in front of her. She ripped her arm away from the creature with the shout, heedless of the terrible wounds it left on her arm as she tore herself from the deeply-embedded claws.
“No!”
she howled again in denial as she took the white thread in blood-slicked fingers.

You should leave now,
she knew. The madness had released her and all she needed to do was let go of Treoraí’s Heart and she would be back in her own body, away from this. Meriel trembled, part of her wanting to do just that. If she left, her mam would die, but she might be able to save herself. If she stayed here, they both might die.
Let it go,
she whispered to herself, but though her breath came fast and panicky and she whimpered, she could not.

Edana and Doyle had forced their way up to the wall where they could see, in doubled vision, the battle taking place. Even as Edana set the mage-demon to tearing at the wall Jenna had erected around herself, she saw with her true eyes the slight figure of Meriel rushing up from the ruins of the street below, clambering up the slope through the shattered blocks of the Old Wall and the crushed heather to where her mam stood. The others saw her as well; the Clochs Mór attacked this new arrival, but Owaine and the Saimhóir who had come to Jenna’s aid deflected the fury aimed at Meriel. Edana could see Meriel holding Treoraí’s Heart aloft to the sky, saw her touch her mam’s arms even as Jenna went down under the lash of a dragon’s tail.

For a moment, there was little change: Lámh Shábhála continued to battle, continued to throw wild, dangerous lightning everywhere, to pull at the walls and hurl back the clochs of the Tuathian mages. But though the wall stayed up around Jenna, her counterattacks had stopped. Edana stared downward, watching as Meriel’s arms went around her mam.

“Hold!” Edana shout to the Ríthe. Near Edana, the mage-demon went still. Brasil Mas Sithig, standing with Torin Mallaghan and the other Ríthe and cloudmages, glanced over to Edana. “Rí,” she told him. “Wait! A moment, only. Let her daughter have a chance . . .”

“Bantiarna O Liathain, Tiarna Mac Ard,” he said, as if seeing them for the first time. “I am Rí here, not you.” “Aye,” Edana answered. “But look—” She pointed down the hill. Lámh Shábhála pulsed in a cage of mage-lights, but their brilliance flowed around the Holder and then back into the sky—not destructively out to Falcarragh. The manifestations of the other Clochs Mór surged around her, but Jenna was no longer attacking them.

Rí Mas Sithig raised his hand, as did Rí Mallaghan; slowly, the din of the battle subsided and Edana’s cloch-vision receded.

Meriel hugged Jenna to herself, and Edana remembered Meriel’s touch and the way she had brought Edana out of her own darkness. “Hold,” she said again. “For a few breaths more . . .”

With Meriel’s touch, the white line began to glow, as did Treoraí’s Heart. The new light from the cloch pushed back the darkness and banished the apparition. It faded like a quick morning fog, the wispy hands still reaching for Meriel even as they vanished.

She saw her mam—or some internal image of her—huddled in a corner of the mind-room. Her face was thin and drawn, her eyes dark hollows, her hair hanging in limp strands. She lifted a hand, shining with the light of Lámh Shábhála and the hand trembled with a palsy. “I won’t let it go,” she said. “It’s mine. I won’t let you take it away from me. I don’t care that you’re my daughter. Lámh Shábhála is
mine
.”

“Aye,” Meriel told her soothingly. “It is yours, Mam. It always has been, and I don’t want it. I don’t. But you can’t use it this way.”

“I have to,” Jenna answered. “Don’t you see? I have to kill them or they’ll kill me. Look! They’re all against me. They want what I have, all of them, and I have to kill them to keep Lámh Shábhála. I have to.”

“They’ll kill you either way, Mam. There are too many of them and the mage-lights will eventually fail. But there’s still a way out, Mam. Dhegli’s here, and if we can reach the water, we could escape as Saimhóir.”

“The water . . .” For a moment Jenna sounded hopeful, then she shook her head. For the first time, Meriel began to slip into her. She could feel the chaotic thoughts, the contradictory impulses of the madness, and Meriel straggled to hold onto herself. “I can’t. I hurt too much. I can’t hold on.” Jenna began to sob, her chest heaving with the cries. “It hurts so much. Let it end here. At least I won’t hurt anymore.”

Lost . . . lost . . .
Meriel could feel the comfort that the image of Jenna lying dead on the ground gave her mam.
All the pain gone. All the madness, just a long sleep, and then the comfort of the Mother-Creator. . . .

Meriel/Jenna could hear, faintly, the sounds of ghostly voices in the air, wafting up from Lámh Shábhála:
“Aye, let it go.” “Come join us.” “We’re waiting here for you.” “I went mad, too, in the end . . .” “And me . . .” “And me . . .” “It’s better to be dead than to bear the stone . . .”

“The voices lie. They want you to fail,” Meriel said, but she could see her mam’s head tilt as she listened to them. And Meriel/Jenna listened, too.

“Hold . . .” Edana said, but though the other Clochs Mór paused when Rí Mas Sithig and Rí Mallaghan both barked out the order, one mage did not.

Doyle, with Snapdragon.

The gold-and-red beast snarled and hissed near the wall of Lámh Shábhála, pacing. Its great head reared back as it lifted itself, then snapped down again as it disgorged fire from its open mouth. The shield around Jenna shuddered and began to melt, even as Edana screamed at Doyle, as she turned to strike at him with her bare fists. “Stop it, Doyle!” she yelled at him, but his face was grim and determined.

“Not this time,” he told her. He backed away from her assault, though the dragon tore at the black wall with its claws. “Edana, we have Lámh Shábhála in our grasp.
Everything
we wanted could be ours.”

“You’ll kill Meriel, too. Let her try to stop this.”

“Why?” His head whipped around to look at her, and there was nothing but fury in his gaze. “By the Mother, Edana—look around. How many people has my sister killed here? How much of the city has she destroyed? She
deserves
death, as much as anyone ever did. If Meriel dies with her, well, so be it.” He pressed his lips together. The dragon roared and belched flame at Jenna once more.

“I don’t want it this way,” she told him. She struck him again in the chest with a soft fist. “Not now. This has already cost us too much, Doyle. I don’t want to lose the rest of what I once loved. You have Snapdragon and your sanity back. That’s enough. If you take Lámh Shábhála, you’ll lose me. I feel that. I
know
that.”