He could not simply draw the thing into this empty world, like a draft horse dragging a fallen log. Though he shuddered at the notion, he knew what he must do. And quickly, too, for though time did not flow in the Overworld as it did on Darkover, every passing moment narrowed the chances for his friends’ safe escape.
Coryn loosened his fingers, keeping only a guiding touch on the net strands. Bending all his strength, he began to shorten the strands, to draw them into himself. They slid easily, though the effort was enormous. Nothing he had done before in his life, not climbing the tallest peak in the Hellers or battling a forest fire, had been this difficult, this close to impossible. Pain shrieked through his body, along every nerve and muscle, bone and sinew.
Moment by moment, heartbeat by heartbeat, he drew the storm into himself. He was the net, he held the net. He was the storm, he held the storm. When he contained it fully, he, Coryn, would cease to exist.
With trained senses, he felt his own energon channels swell as more and more power surged through him. But unlike riverbeds in flood, where the water could overflow, there was no place for the extra power to go.
He had heard stories of the Aldaran clan and their experiments with weather control, how on occasion one or the other had channeled lightning or even the magnetic forces of the planet through their own bodies and had died horribly as the result. Now he realized the true folly of what he had done. He had taken into himself the stored laran energies of the entire battery array, concentrated and magnified through a ninth-level matrix. He, one single man, had bonded himself to this thing and now there was no escape.
He would die, he knew that now. With each passing moment, with each sliding of the thought-cables into his astral body, he felt delicate channels bursting, nodes swelling with congestion. His energy-body systems had already begun shutting down in a desperate, reflexive attempt to contain the forces surging through him. Soon even the minimum necessary for self-survival would degrade under the pressure.
And yet he must hold on, hold on until the Towers below were evacuated, the workers safe.
Blue flames crept along the nerves from fingertips to shoulders. It crisped the skin on his hands. Like clingfire, it burned even more brightly as layers of flesh fell away in cinders. The air shuddered with his silent screams as the fire reached for his heart.
Taniquel!
Without thinking, he cried out to her. Once he had promised her that he would come to her across fire. Now he had become that fire. His words were as ash upon the wind.
Coryn had no hands to hold the skeins of thought-stuff, but that no longer mattered. Nothing remained to grasp. He had taken it all into himself. Of the form that was his body, only a few shards of charred bone remained. Bone and the shrieking echoes of pain.
CORYN!
A voice called somewhere in the distance, called a name which was no longer his. The sound reverberated through the air, fracturing the tenuous bonds which held what remained of his consciousness.
Far away, in a room high in the ruins of a mighty Tower, a man toppled across banked arrays of artificial crystals. The weight of his inert body collapsed the metal frames, warping them past repair. It fractured the larger gems and sent others skidding into the crevices which had opened up in the stone floor.
Dust sifted to the floor, only to billow up again as the Tower trembled. From above, walls gave way. Structural stones tumbled earthward, corridors and stairwells caved in.
The translucent laran form of a woman shimmered above the prostrate man, eyes brimming with emotion. Her mouth moved softly, but no sound came, only the thunder of the falling stones.
A moment later, two men pushed their way past the fallen doorframe. The head of one was bound with a bloodstained cloth, ripped hastily from a woman’s shift. His companion knelt beside the ruin of the matrix and reached one hand toward the fallen man.
“Aldones spare us! He’s not breathing!”
BOOK V
40
Taniquel swayed with weariness in the saddle. Her mount, a raw-boned sorrel mare which one of Rafael’s officers had lent her after her own had fallen with an arrow through its throat, trotted on in silent endurance. She had been riding toward Acosta for what seemed a tenday, but was only a night and the better part of the next day. Dust scoured her throat and coated her skin. Her hair had come loose after the first hours and now fell in a tangled mop almost to her waist. Her eyes burned and the tracks of dried wind-tears on her cheeks itched. With one hand she clutched both the mare’s reins and the pommel of the saddle. The other held the dagger Gerolamo had given her, although she no longer feared she would have to use it. It was enough to keep her seat as the war cries died and the last of the fleeing enemy surrendered.
The Ambervale forces had swept into the Hastur camp expecting an easy victory. Expecting, she reminded herself, that her uncle and all his men would be still paralyzed by mindless fury. But the spell lifted in enough time for Rafael and his officers to gather them together. The defenders, released from their madness, had leaped to follow their orders.
Never had she seen her uncle’s genius for military strategy so clearly. With a few orders, simple enough for men still dazed and quick enough to carry out in the little time granted them, he had prepared an ambush.
Deslucido, gloating with triumph, had ridden headlong into it.
As the great Bloody Sun cleared the horizon, it illuminated a field stained the same color. The armies of Hastur and Acosta fell upon their tormentors like captive dragons suddenly unchained. After the first few minutes, the battlefield disappeared into a hurricane of dust, of flying hooves and striking steel, flights of arrows and the screams of men and beasts. Taniquel had yelled herself hoarse from where she watched, shoved hastily aside with the laranzu’in and a handful of her own Acosta men, who’d appointed themselves her bodyguard.
At one point, the fighting swept in her direction, a sudden shift that happened too quickly for her guards to pull her away. A huge red-gold stallion reared straight up, above the billows of dust. For a moment it seemed to hover there, forefeet pawing air, eyes whitened, ears pinned to its neck. Yellow froth streaked with blood covered the bit of its bridle. Its rider, twisting away to slash at some unseen foot soldier, jerked hard on the reins. The horse lost its balance and went over backward. Foot soldiers, many of them in Hastur colors, swarmed out of the melee toward it.
A Hastur aide came by a few moments later to see how she fared. Taniquel shouted above the din, indicating the Acosta men who encircled her, spears and swords pointing outward.
Suddenly, trumpet calls blasted above the noise of the battle. The aide turned back, face quickening. “Stay here, vai domna!”
For a few long minutes, the fighting continued as before. Then Taniquel heard a new rhythm to the shouting, “Hastur! Hastur!” taken up and repeated. One of her bodyguard pointed, “Look there! They’re runnin’ like rabbit-horns!”
Within an hour, the field was swept clear. The Ambervale retreat turned rapidly into outright rout into the hills. Taniquel’s bodyguards insisted that she stay toward the rear as the Hastur army, organized now and euphoric with victory, charged after them. Much as she resisted restraint, she agreed with them. Desperate men acted in desperate ways, and she had no right to risk herself more than could be helped.
As the dust settled, she spotted the fallen red-gold horse. The beast lay unmoving, its neck twisted in an unnatural angle. Something appeared to be pinned beneath its body, perhaps a man. She urged her own mount forward, gesturing for her bodyguard to follow. Little moved upon the field except for the wounded and a few Hastur men.
As she circled the fallen horse, she recognized its rider. Belisar Deslucido lay there, twisted half on his side. Both legs disappeared beneath the bulk of his dead mount. He grasped one thigh with his hands, his face twisted in agony. As she halted, the rising sun cast her shadow across him. His eyes squinted open.
“You are my prisoner,” she said.
He nodded with a grace she had
not expected of him. At her signal, men rolled the horse to pull the prince free. Belisar cried out once, then bit his lip.
Taniquel looked down at her enemy without any recognizable feeling, not even joy in his pain. She ought to hate him with a fiery, consuming hate. She ought to hold every memory of him, from that last vision of Padrik falling to Belisar’s insolent grin as he talked about bedding her lady companion to the endless moments of terror on the trail. But she could not summon the feeling.
Something ran like ice within her veins. In the dust and blood, all personal hatred had fallen away. What remained, colder and far more implacable, was the fact that the secret of lying under truthspell—and everyone who knew it—must be obliterated. She supposed this was what it meant to be a Queen, to have no purpose of her own, no duty save that of her caste and country.
One of the Acosta men examined both of Belisar’s legs quickly, carefully, pressing here, moving the hip and knee joints. All the while, Belisar made no sound except for the hiss of his breath through clenched teeth.
“His leg is broken,” the soldier said, pointing to Belisar’s thigh. The other leg was, by some miracle, whole. There might be internal abdominal injuries from a blow by the saddle horn, but the soldier could not be sure.
The thin, supple leather of the prince’s breeches was stained by seeping blood. His face was already turning white under the coating of dust and sweat. Taniquel slipped from her horse and knelt beside him. His pupils dilated as she bent over him. For a moment, she thought he might already be slipping away from her, but then his eyes cleared.
Taniquel brushed one hand over the break. Although her fingers barely touched the leather, she felt the waves of pain shooting through him. “I want to know one thing only.” She pitched her voice low, so that only he could hear. “This—ability of your father’s. To lie under truthspell. How did he come by it?”
His mouth worked, cracked lips twisting. He looked as if he were about to spit at her. Then he shook his head.
With a slow, deliberate movement, Taniquel placed her hand on his shattered thigh, placed and leaned her weight. His body spasmed, eyes rolling up in their sockets. For a long moment, he did not breathe. The muscles of his torso quivered. She released the pressure and waited. She took no joy in his pain, nor had there been any sense of punishment in her callous action, only of necessity.
“I ask you again.” The words which came from her throat were as cold as steel from Zandru’s forge. “How did he come by this ability?”
“It—it is a family Gift.”
“And you—do you have this Gift also?”
Blue eyes widened, and she had her answer. What was more, she knew the history of the old laran breeding programs. It was a genetic trait. And it bred true.
Taniquel bade the men splint Belisar’s thigh and tie him to a litter, guarded so that he might not speak with anyone. He could not get far on his own, and from the look of him, he had not long to live. In the event he survived until the battle was over, she would decide what to do with him. How she would ensure, once and for all, that Darkover was safe from this threat.
Horns sounded. Voices raised in a triumphant cheer. “Hastur! Hastur! Permanedal!” The senior of her Acosta bodyguards, riding in front of her, slowed his mount, turned in the saddle, and grinned. They halted in a knot, she in the center of her guards. Her horse lowered its head, gulping air.
She gestured to the senior guard. “Find out—do they have the Oathbreaker? Has Deslucido surrendered?”
He nudged his tired horse forward, into the dust and melee. Taniquel closed her eyes, trying to slow her pulse and quiet the wild sick excitement running like a fever through her veins. In a moment, word would come, whether she had them both, father and son. Without him and his armies, the castle there would be easy prey. There still might be nedestro offspring to be searched and tested. That would come later, once this diseased root was uprooted. That would—
TANIQUEL!
She rocked in the saddle and only her grip on the pommel kept her from falling. Dry lips moved of their own volition, forming a name, Coryn!
His voice echoed through her mind, raw and yet honey-sweet, as if all the longing and tenderness of their few brief hours together were distilled in that single cry. Again she called to him in her mind, but there was no response. When she opened her eyes to the now-familiar scene of men and horses, spear points rising above the dust and the Venza Hills like the broken spine of a dragon, she wondered if she had imagined it.
They camped in the open that night. By the time Rafael’s officers had restored some semblance of order, disarming the defeated Ambervale soldiers and cordoning off areas for prisoners, the light had seeped from the sky. But the night was mild, and Taniquel content with the prospect of a pallet of blankets.
Two moons glimmered in the sky, mauve Idriel and the tiny pearl of Mormallor, still low on the horizon. Taniquel made her way to the area where her uncle had set up his command center, marked by pennants curling in the evening breeze. A few men called out to her as they sat around their cookfires, hailing her as Queen. She heard the admiration in their voices bordering on reverence, scant recompense for the questions roiling inside her.
Coryn—what could have happened to him? No matter how many times she told herself she had her own work to do—the matter she must discuss with her uncle—and even if Coryn were in trouble, there was nothing she could do, she could not drive the memory of that anguished cry from her mind.
A meal had been laid out on a folding table, along with a flagon of wine from the same mysterious stores which had produced the tent and scrap of carpet. Rafael Hastur himself was nowhere in sight, although a young aide busied himself about the tent. She recognized him, although she’d forgotten his name. When he saw her, he bowed and stammered greetings.
Outside, Taniquel lowered herself to the smaller of the two camp stools and composed herself to wait. Her stomach rumbled, for she had not eaten since breaking her fast that morning, but she wanted sleep more than anything else. Or rest, for she feared that on this night of all nights, sleep would elude her. Not yet. Once this night’s business was finished, maybe then.
The sky darkened and more stars became visible. The aide lit torches. The moons swung in their silent dances. Mormallor set and Kyrrdis rose to shimmer like a blue-green jewel.
Rafael Hastur strode up to his tent, talking in quiet tones with Gerolamo. Taniquel rose and bowed, the restrained salute of one monarch to another. In the flickering orange light, the lines of his face, etched deep by the strain of the past year, ran like gullies through the landscape of his flesh. He filled both goblets with wine, handed the flagon to Gerolamo with a nod to go off and enjoy it, and downed his own. As he settled on his own stool, his dark eyes glinted.
“What a day’s work,” he said in a voice roughened by exhaustion. “What I really want is to fill my belly and get more than halfway drunk.” He reached for a chunk of bread. “But I don’t think you’ll let me.”
“I am not your Keeper,” she replied, smiling despite herself. “And if any man deserved it, you do.”
Rafael gestured to the meal laid out. “Break bread with me and then we will talk.”
They ate in quiet. The camp food, although better than anything the men would receive, was dry and tasteless. After they finished, Rafael sat stroking his beard. “What is on your mind? You would not be sitting there so primly without a reason.”
She met his gaze, levelly. “Damian Deslucido and his son.”
“They are both in chains. Neither of them is going anywhere tonight.”
“Except to Zandru’s coldest hell.”
“Lord of Light, woman!” he cried with such force that the two swordsmen standing guard turned to see what was the matter. “What do you want of me—to just cut their heads off and be done with it? Without a trial?”
“What purpose would that serve?” she plunged on, hating what she must do. “Except to buy them a slim chance of escape or rescue
. Uncle,” she leaned forward, thought of touching his arm for emphasis, then held back, “that must not happen. If we are to wipe out the whole nest of scorpion-ants, we must do so at once. Deslucido and his son are within our grasp. We must finish what we have begun. We will never get a better chance.”
Rafael sighed deeply. She felt, like a shimmer along her bones, how much he wanted this whole bloody business to be over with. He was exhausted in spirit as well as body, tired of slaughter, tired of hard pounding days in the field. Tired of the endless struggle to hold something of value together in a time where every force split the land apart. Compassion whispered through her and she wished there were some other way.
He has his own burden, one I cannot share without surrendering my own.
“Perhaps you are right,” he said, straightening his shoulders, “and it must be done quickly, before the heat of battle has faded. The people will accept a swift execution as the natural outcome of defeat. Deslucido gambled on easy conquest—and he lost. Such is the way of the world.”
When he met her gaze once more, the light in his eyes glinted. Jaw muscles tightened, visible along his temples. With a word, he summoned his aide and gave orders for Deslucido and his son to be brought.
“But first,” Rafael answered Taniquel’s objection, “I will hear him.”
“He is not to be trusted,” she cried. “You know he will swear anything if it serves him.”
“I will hear them both.” His voice deepened in pitch and he sat even straighter. “Deslucido faced his test and chose tyranny, but we must not answer him with the same. Do you see, it is not enough to defeat him by force of arms or superior strategy? If we follow our passions and do as we please, without any regard for justice, then we are no better.”
“But he lied—”
He hushed her with a gesture, and she saw him torn between his own ideals and the absolute necessity of preserving Darkover’s fragile progress from chaos. With a shiver, she realized he would not retreat. He would insist on justice as well as peace.
The Fall of Neskaya Page 44
