Intense pain rolled through her. She was already tired, and this was one injury too many. She completed her roll and even managed to find her way to her feet, but then they slipped out from under her again. She lurched to the side like a drunken soldier on holiday, her balance a memory and her magic impossible to reach.
She fell. Face-up to the sky.
She saw something above her. Tiawan, pointing his arm at something. A bright flare of light flew from his arm... and then her field of vision held only one thing. La'ug. Blood still gouted from her side, but she seemed not to notice it.
A moment later, there was nothing too notice. The blood just ceased. The wounds were simply gone.
La'ug raised her huge, horribly jointed arms over Sword. Her taloned feet scraped huge furrows in the ground.
Silence suddenly fell. Nature itself seemed to wait for the inevitable moment. In one of the few corners of her mind not devoted to pain or exhaustion or fear, Sword realized the tornado that surrounded the castle was gone.
Then La'ug fell upon her with a snarl and the gape of a dagger-filled mouth that should never have existed…
… the world disappeared, there was only the monster's bulk…
… and then, at the last possible moment, something barreled into the beast.
The object, whatever it was, wasn't enough to stop La'ug. Not even enough to slow her as she fell toward Sword. But it diverted her mass, if only barely. The monster collided with the ground only a handsbreadth from Sword.
Perhaps it was the proximity of the monster. Maybe it was the sudden shock that came with the realization that she was still alive. Whatever the reason, Sword felt a small measure of strength return to her. She scrabbled away from the beast, still not sure what had happened but with a voice screaming at her from within that she must get away get away!
She managed to stand in a series of jerky steps, her legs nearly going out from under her twice before she regained a semblance of balance. Only then did she turn, to see what had saved her.
Wahy.
The berserker was all over La'ug. Pummeling the beast with bloody fists, kicking it as fast as he could, even ramming fingers into the bloody gap at her side. A berserker as before, but not biting, not tearing with his teeth.
Because his head was still gone.
Sword noticed this as she noticed the jewel still embedded in his chest. Glowing again, but it was no longer yellow. Instead, it beamed a bright red. The color was familiar somehow. Almost the color of….
"See? Now you have a plaything."
Sword had forgotten about Marionette. But the little girl hadn't gone anywhere. She stood nearby, holding her tortured doll up so it could see the fight between the monster and the headless berserker. "See, my darling?" she whispered to the toy, and idly yanked one of its arms out of its socket. She dropped it on the ground and looked at Sword. "Phoenix said you might need help." She curtsied, a strangely dainty move. Then she had the doll echo the movement.
Sword was riveted for a moment. Utterly captured by the strangeness of her rescue and the insanity behind it. She wondered how Phoenix had convinced the mad little girl to do his bidding; and in the next moment she knew: he had promised her toys to play with. Either when he killed the unGifted, or when he fought the enemy below.
Mad. They're both completely mad.
Then she turned back to La'ug and Wahy. The monster seemed completely unnerved by the sudden appearance of the dead man. Wahy struck the monster's head, he gouged at her eyes with one hand while the other raked wounds in her side and then pulled those wounds wide.
The monster screamed. But it did not fight back. It looked at Wahy with the expression of someone who has just fallen into a vast chasm, and knows that they will die there.
The monster shimmered. La'ug and her woolly separated. Her side was bleeding, and Sword saw the woolly's side was slick and red as well, but neither of them seemed as badly injured as they had in their monster form.
Wahy – the thing that had once been Wahy – drew back for a moment. La'ug stared at him dully. Sword understood the look: she knew what she had lost. She knew it would never come back. And she didn't know whether life without it would be worth living.
It is! Sword wanted to shout. It is and you can't –
Marionette clapped her hands. Giggled.
And Wahy – what had once been Wahy – leaped at La'ug.
"No!" shouted Sword.
Marionette turned a disapproving eye on her. "Phoenix said they would be mine to play with," she said reproachfully.
Sword turned toward Wahy, toward the little girl he reached for. She didn't know La'ug's story, not completely. But for a child to hate this way, to desire such revenge….
La'ug was not evil. It was simply that mercy had been cut out of her heart.
Not evil.
Just terribly damaged. And terribly sad.
"No!" Sword screamed again. She lurched toward La'ug. She would save her – had to save her.
But her body betrayed her again. She tripped. She fell.
I have to save her.
But when she managed to stand again, there was no one left to save.
She looked away from the sight. Turned away, and now was facing Marionette, who turned trancelike red eyes on her for a moment before beginning to whisper into her doll's one remaining ear.
That was even worse than the sight of La'ug and her woolly, worse than the sight of Wahy, whom Marionette had obviously released since he now lay across the dead girl, his arm around her shoulders in a mockery of friendship.
Sword couldn't look at the dead. She wouldn't look at Marionette.
She looked up.
Something fell from the sky.
She had a moment to realize what it was: Phoenix. Unconscious, rolling through the air in an almost lazy turn. He fell, and fell… and then hit the ground a hundred feet away with such force that the ground seemed to explode around him.
Now Sword did look at Marionette. The little girl had seen it, too. She looked at the dust that still settled around a new crater in the ground, but didn't seem to care about what had just happened. She resumed whispering into the broken ear of her plaything.
Sword looked away. Up again. The only direction to look.
And she saw Tiawan.
He flew toward her so quickly, so directly, that she knew in an instant that he had seen. He knew his family and friends were dead.
The tube on his arm glowed bright. Aimed right for her.
Sword could not run. She was too spent. She wanted to fall, to lay there and just wait for oblivion.
No. I can't run. But I will stand.
She looked up.
And the sky suddenly caught fire.
7
Wind knelt at Malal's side.
The room was quiet.
The Patches remained, trying to keep up with the poison that was killing Malal, but no one else was in the room.
One by one, the guards that remained had crept away. Some fell at their post, and were dragged away by a fellow – usually another guard who was barely standing upright.
Now it was just her. Her and the Patches.
She knelt beside her love. Held his hand. He did not hold hers in return.
The Patches were losing their fight, she knew. One of them fell back, crumpling to the floor in exhaustion. But where before there had always been another Patch to replace one who was too worn out to continue… this time there was no one.
She could not hear the soft breathing of the Patches, the labored inhalations of the one who had fallen, or Malal's own tortured gasps. But she knew they were there, just as she knew the wind must be screaming as it swirled around the gastle: the storm that Cloud had conjured to keep the rest of the world safe. No one really knew if this –
(What? Poison? Plague?)
– would or could spread beyond the walls here, but this was certain: everyone within the swirling winds who was not a Gift was dead.
And as t
hough her thought triggered some horrible signal to the Gods, Malal gasped. Wind couldn't hear it, of course, but she saw it clearly. Saw his half-rotted lips open wide, saw his wretched frame suddenly inflate with terrible effort.
His eyes – what was left of them – opened. They were terrible to see, one eye almost melted to nothing, the other crazed with burst blood vessels. But somehow he managed to look at her.
Somehow, he managed to smile.
And then he died.
Wind stood.
She sensed something behind her. She turned. Cloud stood there, his face a mask of misery. "I'm so sorry," he said.
She turned away, heading toward the door. He moved into her path. "Where are you going?" he asked, his lips moving in that exagerrated way he occasionally used when he wanted to be extra-sure she was paying attention to him.
To kill him.
Cloud didn't ask who she meant. He didn't have to.
He shook his head. "I can't let you leave," he said.
Wind looked behind her. Out the window. The winds outside the castle walls suddenly seemed darker, thicker. More forbidding, more impenetrable.
She looked back at her brother. His expression crumbled. Tears tracked down his cheeks. "I'm so, so sorry," he said again. "But I can't… I can't let you –"
Cloud's voice cut off as a layer of air suddenly turned into an invisible fist that slammed into his chest. He flew back into the stone wall behind him. The wall itself crumbled, cracked. Perhaps it had been weakened by the previous attack on the palace. Perhaps not.
Wind suddenly found she didn't care.
Either way, her brother was flung into the hall beyond the Emperor's deathchamber. He lay still.
Wind turned around in time to see the storm that had cut them off fall away to nothing in an instant.
She walked out of the room. Down the hall, not looking at her brother. She only had eyes for the way that would lead her out of the palace, and her mind only had a single thought. A single word that repeated in an endless cycle, over and over and faster and faster until it was nearly meaningless. Not a word at all, but a feeling. No thought, only the most base of all human desires.
Vengeance.
Vengeance.
Vengeance vengeance vengeancevengeancevengeance –
Then clarity shattered the confusion. A single point of bright, searing light that became Wind's entire being.
I will kill him.
A light blossomed around her. She thought at first that a glo-globe must be malfunctioning. Then realized the light was coming from her.
What is this? asked a weak, quiet part of her. What is happening?
And as she walked, the answer came.
8
Sword watched Tiawan approach, and watched the tube brighten on his arm, and felt no fear. She knew what was going to happen – the image of him using his weapon on the palace was imprinted forever on her mind.
But still… no fear. Only a sense of sadness that she had not finished what she began. That the Empire might fall, that most – perhaps all – the good people who lived in the Five States might die.
That she would never see Arrow again.
It was this last that bothered her the most. She knew that was wrong. Shouldn't she care more about the masses of people? Shouldn't the fate of an entire nation weigh more heavily on her mind than the fact that she would not see Arrow again?
No. This is as it should be.
The voice she heard was not her own. It came from within her, but the voice was Armor's. Her first true friend, and – even after she discovered he was on the wrong side of the battle – still the closest thing to a father she had ever had.
You have found family. All the world is nothing but a collection of families, each struggling to protect their own, each hoping to find a part in the greater Family that is the world. But in the end, we seek first those we love most. Great sacrifices are made in the name of the greater good, but what is that good if not simply the community that protects those closest to us?
She wondered if Armor had actually said that – some half-remembered moment where he taught her the wisdom he had accumulated. Perhaps.
But in the end, she knew that whoever said the words didn't matter. What mattered was that they were true. What mattered was that, live or die, she had found something worth living for. And in so doing, she found something to cling to and find peace in at the end.
She was an instant away from her death.
And that's when it happened.
The tornado surrounding the castle had disappeared. The sky was bright and bluer than Sword could ever remember.
But out of the clear blue sky, shattering the silence of the moment, a bolt of lightning smashed into the earth.
It shouldn't have been possible. Not even Cloud, with his Greater Gift that controlled the storm, could cause such flame to erupt from nothing at all.
Could he?
Sword saw Tiawan wheel above her, momentarily distracted by the jagged lightning that passed close by him.
More lightning came. And more. And still more. It fell like raindrops, scorching the earth wherever it touched. Burning plants to cinder and melting stone to black glass.
Sword took a step. Thought about running. Realized it wouldn't matter. She couldn't tell where the strikes would touch down.
Here was as good a place as any.
The lightning streaked through the still-blue, still-bright sky. It looked random at first, but as Sword watched she realized it was anything but. The bursts radiated out from a central point, slamming down at uneven intervals, but drawing ever closer, like a shrinking wheel.
The center point was Tiawan.
As the lightning closed on him, Tiawan stopped moving. He seemed to be waiting for the crackling flames to hit him. He even stretched out his arms as though taunting them.
Why would he do that? Who is –
Sword blinked. None of the lightning had struck her, obviously, but one of the shards suddenly touched down so close she could have spit on it. The blast of it almost knocked her off her feet, but she managed to stay upright – barely – and in that moment, she thought she saw something in the lightning. A form she recognized, a face she knew.
Wind?
Then the lightning flickered to nothing, and with it went the image of Sword's friend.
The lightning came faster. Faster. It pounded the earth every time it slashed the air, and soon nearly every inch of ground in sight was a blackened, smoking wreck. Even the bodies of Wahy and La'ug had been consumed, turned to ash and smoke in a Heavenly funeral pyre.
There was a perfect circle of unmarked space around Sword and Marionette though. Seeing that was how Sword knew.
It is her. Wind.
But how?
The answer came instantly.
She has found a Second Gift.
Wind controlled the air. She could use it to move herself, could make it hard and strong as iron, as sharp as any sword. Sword had often wondered at how similar her power was to that of Cloud; Brother Scieran had even conjectured that the similarity of their powers had something to do with their being twins. As though Gifts might be linked to family.
Just like what Phoenix said. We are being bred for our Gifts.
If that was true, then it made sense that, as Cloud's Gift was to control the storm and call down the lightning, so Wind's Second Gift was to become that lightning.
The lightning flared again, brighter and brighter, faster and faster.
And then, in the instant before it should have licked at Tiawan's fingers, should have enveloped him in flame, it abruptly stopped.
Wind hung in the air. Invisible a moment before – or rather, only visible in her new, radiant form – she had appeared in front of Tiawan. Both were close to Sword. Close enough that she could see every detail of Tiawan's armor. Every detail of Wind's expression.
Sword's guts coiled within her. She felt sick. Because she knew. One look at Wind was all it took.
Malal was dead.
There was more to it, perhaps – Wind's visage was one of such perfect despair that Sword suspected she had lost more than her love, perhaps had lost her soul – but the clearest thing was Malal's death.
The Emperor was dead. Again. And this time, there was no one to replace him.
Sword felt a terrible weight fall on her. She had failed. Failed everything, failed everyone.
Wind drifted closer to Tiawan, and as she did, Sword saw the other woman's face change. The sorrow melted away, leaving behind only the purest rage Sword had ever seen.
Tiawan hung there as well, though his fires could not keep him quite as even or still as Wind. He seemed almost jittery in comparison to her smooth flight, but that was only the mechanics of his suit. When he spoke there was no fear in his voice.
"You can't hurt me, girl," he said. "And I will do what I came to do."
Tiawan's helm was on. His head was invisible, and Wind could neither hear him nor read his lips. Still, she reacted in that moment, as though she had somehow heard his words.
She screamed.
It was a wordless, throaty scream. The scream of a woman who cannot hear her own voice, but who still must find a way to speak. The sound was dark, full of rage and hate and despair and pain. Tears pressed behind Sword's eyes as she heard it.
She thought, again, of Arrow.
She wondered how she would react if she saw him die.
She knew what Wind was going to do.
Tiawan faltered for a moment. His helm opened, and he looked at Wind with tired eyes.
"Girl," he began with a voice as weary as his expression. "Just let me –"
Wind disappeared. And this time the lightning did not shear the sky. This time the lightning was the sky.
It came not as a bolt, but as a mountain of pure white, crashing down from the heavens, cascading over and around and through Tiawan. Sword had just enough time to see him look up with a shocked expression before her world turned white and thunder sounded so loud she wondered if she would ever hear again.
She closed her eyes, but even through her eyelids the light blinded her. She clapped her hands over her eyes as well, and even then the pink light that filtered through was far too bright for her body to cope with.
Child of Sorrows Page 38
