Ellinca shook her head, mouthing to him, “Sorry, I have to.” She signed it also then she turned to Sasskia, who was looking at her, open-mouthed.
“What were you doing?”
Clearly, she couldn’t see them, a blessing perhaps. “Ah. Never mind.”
They knelt facing each other. Sasskia gave her a hug that was far too tight and she had to pull her arms away. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “It’s okay, Sasskia. This is right in every way. I’m happy.”
“Are you really?”
“Yes.”
Ellinca placed her hands on either side of Sasskia’s head and began to concentrate.
“Why do they all say no?” Sasskia asked quietly.
Like a flood-torn river bursting its banks the pressure rammed into her. They were all trying to get into her head. Thumping and thumping and thumping. No, that was Gangar bumping with his head. No, it was both. She screamed in her mind. St-o-op!
Silence echoed in her head like the chiming of a bell. She still held Sasskia. Only now she knew...she knew she didn’t have to die. How stupid she was. They wanted her to use their power. Of course. Just as her mother had allowed her ghost to be used to heal Dost.
She wormed her way down into Sasskia’s mind and, ever so carefully allowed a little of the ghost energy to be channeled through her. A fiery pain surged from her head down her arms and she almost let go. She hung on despite the burning. If she opened her eyes there would be tiny blue flames coming out of her pores, she just knew it. Dying might even be better than this.
She had to get this right or this pain would send her spinning off course and doing the gods knew what inside Sasskia’s brain. And there was a problem. If she only corrected that small spot then, given enough time, it would regrow and the same thing happen again. It was programmed into Sasskia’s core – madness and bludvoik creation. It was inevitable with maturity. With time. With change.
She didn’t just heal. She retrieved the past, made it real, but every past led to this again. What could she do?
Ellinca opened herself to more of the power, until her body was a raging torrent of fire and pain. Still she dove into the past, further and further, reaching for that precise point, and there...there it was...and blackness pulled her down and quenched the flame.
When she climbed up from unconsciousness the world was a blurry heaving place. Gradually it stilled and she could sit up and look about.
Sasskia sat near her, eyes goggling, hands over her ears. “Have you stopped, lady?” she asked. “Have you stopped screaming?”
“Yes.” Her voice croaked and her throat was sore. Screaming? Well, it was to be expected. Her muscles ached too. Shakily she climbed to her feet. “Stay here, Sasskia. I have to see what’s happened upstairs. You’re safe here.”
“No! I’m scared. Where’s my mother, my father? And Dost, where is he?”
Oh, scum. Someone else could tell her. At least she remembered them. It was as good as she could hope. “Come with me then, but stay back if there’s any danger.”
The two of them, with Gangar and Mogg at their side, worked their way slowly along the hallways and up the stairs. If fighting was still going on, the stone of the building muffled it. Then, as they reached the top of the final stairway, she heard the awful sounds of men screaming in agony. Who had won?
Towing Sasskia by the arm, for the noise had scared her, she continued. A soldier, sorely wounded by a deep slash in his side, stumbled from the trees and grabbed her by the neck.
“Wait!” She tried to pull away and released Sasskia to have both hands free. “Do you need help?”
The cut went straight through his body from front to back, gaping several inches as he shifted. Gore soaked his surcoat and left a thick trail of red behind him. The arm that held her was white from blood loss. No man could survive that – only an Immolator, or Dost. The man stared triumphantly at her. Again she attempted to yank away from him but he held on tight.
“Hello.” The lieutenant chuckled. “Here you are! What better way to go out than to catch up with you. We’ve surrendered, you know.” His good arm raised a sword above her. The point wavered.
“No!” she shouted at him. “Let go!” She kneed him and hit him with clenched fist and elbow, and he laughed and tightened the grip on her throat. She coughed.
“I’ve done in the Imperator’s little boy in the warsuit. Now for you. And I might even manage to kill her as well.”
“No.” It came out a choked whisper. Air. She tried to suck in air. The world smeared and blackness hovered at the edges. She squeezed her eyes shut then open. Her fingers plucked feebly at his wrists. She felt a pulse. And beyond that, leading downward through a dark tunnel, she found the thick lub-dub, lub-dub of a heart. Even Immolators needed their hearts.
There she found her solution. Desperate, she reached for that moment in the past, a bare second before, and before, and before – when his heart was between beats...and she held it there. Each time it tried to beat, she took it back to that moment. His heart fluttered, became almost motionless, his blood stilled. There was a price, inside her something died. What it was, she didn’t care. His fingers relaxed as his life ebbed. His eyes rolled up. He fell, a crumpled and very dead corpse.
Ellinca coughed, hacked and drew in raw lungfuls of air, surprised to find she was on her knees. There’d be bruises on her throat. She dragged herself to her feet.
This time she left Sasskia behind. It was as safe back there as anywhere.
It wasn’t so much running that she did, it was more staggering, but it got her there. She rested her hands on her knees, swaying as she searched for signs of Dost.
No Immolators were left alive that she could see and only a few men in the uniform of the House Guard. There were twenty or thirty Imperial Guards from the wall prowling about, mostly checking the piles of bodies for signs of life. She saw Dayna being carried away on a stretcher alive, thankfully. Dayna cracked open an eye and her finger and thumb formed an O in the sign for okay.
She grinned back – nothing could stop that woman.
The Imperator knelt next to where the throne had rested. As she drew closer on her leaden feet she heard him saying a prayer for the dead.
And all she could think of was the singing of the choir at the last funeral she had attended. Their voices had been high and clear and so beautiful the song seemed to take wing and soar away into the sky.
Beside Uster she found Dost – most of the warsuit was concealed beneath bodies, though the guards worked to move them off him. His eyes were closed, his neck, the only vulnerable part of him, was cut halfway through.
“Is he dead?” What a stupid question. His throat was severed. Yet a bludvoik might survive. Her next words tried to stick inside her throat. Brusquely, she wiped away tears. No time for stupid feelings. “Is he?”
Uster completed the prayer and looked up, eyes dry this time, but lines of tension scoring his face. “The armor failed at the last. Not before he did all that was needed. He was a great son, a great man.” He stood slowly on knees that creaked with age. “But I – must be – Imperator once more. You have healed Sasskia?”
He hadn’t answered her. “Yes, I have.” He would know that wasn’t the whole truth.
She couldn’t stop looking at Dost, searching for some movement, anything at all, but he was still. His head only rocked a little when someone bumped him. “Careful!”
“Yes? She is healed? How then are you still whole?” His eyes seemed to shimmer. Breath hissed out through his teeth. “You have killed with those hands...” He took two steps back, as though she might be tempted to repeat the act.
What a statement, she thought with bemusement. Everyone here was guilty of killing many times over, though none had done it her way. “Later. You didn’t answer. Is he dead?”
Dost’s eyes were closed, he didn’t breathe, but yet...he was bludvoik.
“Yes, he is.” For a moment he was mute, staring at nothing. “Look, girl. I have thos
e to deal with.” He gestured at the horizon, toward the army that marched there. “Rebellion! I need...”
Everything went fuzzy. Hold on, she told herself, swaying. “Sasskia? She’s back there. Imperator...” Wide-eyed she faced him. “Before we go our ways... Please...this ability of yours...” Ellinca drew a deep breath, knowing the wrong words might get her beheaded...and said them anyway, “...is a gift from the gods. Use it wisely.”
He merely raised an eyebrow.
Ah, well, she had tried. She went over to subside onto her knees beside Dost. At least there wasn’t far to fall from here.
She put a hand on his pale forehead. Gods. He wasn’t dead, just ninety-nine parts of the way there. All the way soon. The neck wound was the worst, but the warsuit armor had also eaten into his bludvoik body wherever his skin had torn under the stresses of combat. She had no ghosts to help her here – no one and nothing to help her. She rested her head on her arm in exhaustion.
Gangar nipped her.
“Ouch!”
Pascolli was here, kneeling, head bent as he watched her tend to Dost, close enough that if he had still been human, she would have felt his breath. He placed his hands over his heart then held them out to her, miming, as if he offered it to her.
She blanched, remembering. At Mr. Therber’s house, the morning after she had healed Gangar, Pascolli had told her the same thing. She smiled sadly and reached out, then felt the cold envelope her fingers, her wrists, felt it begin to push its way into her veins, filling her with power.
She straightened. “No! No! Do not do this!”
Somehow he gripped her hands. He shook his head.
She could pull free, she knew that.
He mouthed a word that was clear to her: Choice.
Choice. “You want to do this?”
He nodded slowly.
“I wish... I wish...” She bowed her head. “I could have loved you.”
“And I you.” This time she heard the words inside her head, their union so close as he infused her blood that he was her and she became him.
She let out her breath, settled her fingers around Dost, cradled his head, and reached inside... Saddened, she knew at once that with Pascolli’s help she might have changed much of him back to human. Except that now she must drag him away from death.
In the darkening landscape of his mind he was the gathered remnants of a sigh, insubstantial and heedless, tossed and driven before her by icy winds toward a precipice. Beyond it was nothingness – oblivion. She raced after him.
The winds intensified, roaring scornfully at her and launching him with grim intent into the nothingness. She couldn’t catch him. It was impossible, too far...except that something held him suspended above the drop, something that tied him to the living though it was stretched thin as a hair, humming with tension, and about to snap. On tiptoes, she stretched out across the void and wrenched him to safety.
The tie, she sensed, led to Sasskia. The bludvoik within him was still linked to her.
Only she saw this wasn’t purely Dost anymore that she held. Strands of the chaos of death were entwined with his essence, working their way inward, taking hold. This would require a delicate touch. So she stayed there for what seemed like forever, gently unraveling the strands of death, pulling them away, collecting them and rolling them into a neat ball. All the while she felt the comforting presence of Pascolli with her, as if he leaned over her shoulder the way he used to when she tended the wounds of animals, handing her the right things when she needed them.
Gradually he faded as Dost grew stronger until she seemed at last to hear a faint goodbye. A gentle kiss caressed her cheek.
“Fare thee well,” she whispered. At least this time she had said goodbye.
In her hands she still held the collected strands – she wasn’t sure exactly what they were though she thought of them as death. The question was what to do with them? She began to roll them between her palms and felt them form into a ball. With each roll it grew smaller and smaller until there was nothing in her hands, not even a smear. She opened her eyes.
A circle cleared around them and widened as the nearest guards turned to her. As each of them looked, they would step back a pace, with shock or horror or both on their faces. All of the bodies that had lain near Dost had gone but Sasskia was only now being brought to Uster. Less time had passed than she had thought.
Through a heavy shroud of weariness she saw Uster and Sasskia speak a few words to each other and first puzzlement then anger dawn on Uster’s face. Then he too looked over at her. His eyes widened a fraction before he caught himself.
Beside her Dost snored loudly, his throat whole again with no sign of a cut. He didn’t wake when she prodded him with a finger, but he was alive. Silently, she ran through a prayer to every god who might possibly have a hand in this. Why hadn’t his father seen the life in him?
How many of the Imperial or House Guards knew he was bludvoik? Only the most trusted, that was certain. Uster would have a problem or two explaining this. She didn’t care. Exhaustion wracked her. She bowed her head and closed her eyes. There came the blare of trumpets, cheers, and the tramp of thousands of feet.
“Care for both the girl and Dost,” she heard Uster say quietly. “I want this rooftop cleared of all except my guards. Keep Frope under restraint in the Imperial guest suite. Use the ultimate in discretion. Get the best physicians for this young woman and my son – if he needs them. Find out which needle master betrayed me and gave Immolators to Frope and who allowed them to get this far. And, Captain Fingan, I want it known that my son donned the warsuit and saved us all. My son was a hero.” His voice sank. “He was more than I ever believed him to be, more perhaps than I deserved.”
Now that made her open her eyes.
“However.” He pointed discretely with his chin. “Those two men over there will gossip about...things if allowed free rein. They are untrustworthy in that respect at least. See to their disposal, but give them an honorable soldier’s funeral.”
“How can you know...” Captain Fingan looked nonplussed, but quickly recovered his composure. “Yes, sire!”
So, that was how it would be, she thought drowsily – execution on a whim.
Uster’s eyes flicked in her direction, as if he knew her thoughts. He held up one finger. “Wait. No. Do it this way. Send them to a most distant outpost – far enough that anything they say will be dismissed as the grumblings of the discontent.”
“Yes...sire!” The captain bowed, saluted crisply, and backed away to carry out his orders.
This was what it meant to have an Imperator who was an auratrist – lies and truths and half-lies, the usual. Only now he would know exactly which was which. Alarming and interesting, but sleep was even more interesting.
Men gathered about her and began efficiently unfastening and removing the warsuit, piece by piece. Torch and trink lights appeared as the night moved in.
For a long while she wondered at the yellow glow reflected on the undersides of the low clouds before the palace. Eventually it dawned on her that this was the light from the torches of the army below and that the roar that ebbed and flowed like the tide was the voices of those gathered below. If she would stand she would see them.
Ellinca watched, dazed, as the Imperator stepped forward, body highlighted against the sky, and slowly raised his arms then from his very first words – took command.
He was a conductor, his words wielded like a baton and those below were his orchestra.
Remembering exactly his words proved impossible, but she heard him speak of the Burgla’le nation and of loyalty and the impact of history. He spoke of his pride in the people and even she could tell he meant it in every way. That prompted a loud roar. Then he bent his head and told of his shame that he had not been truthful in his dealings with them. Because of this lies and gossip had sprung up regarding his daughter Sasskia. He asked for their forgiveness because he had not meant her illness to so affect the realm.
Illness? Where would he go from there?
Sasskia had been ill, apparently, and it had affected her mind severely. Then, in an act worthy of the best stage show she had seen yet in her life, he invited onto the rooftop three of the men and three of the women from the crowd below to witness that Sasskia was indeed as he had told them and not affected in any other way. By that she gathered he meant Sasskia was not a bludvoik mage.
Ellinca watched through drooping eyelids as he selected people from the crowd...and now someone was plucking at her sleeve and trying to get her to rise but her legs were jelly...and she knew that he used his auratrist ability. These people would be ripe for the picking – ready to be convinced of their Imperator’s suitability to re-ascend the throne. It was all too easy for him. Way too easy. She plunged into a dizzying spiral that sent her deeper into the night, to dive soundlessly into...nothing.
Chapter 30
The World Awaits
When Ellinca awoke she was in hospital.
For two weeks she recovered there – in a hospital that was, as far as she could tell, somewhere in Carstelan. It was a high-class establishment where even the bedpans were silver-plated and the very best herbologists, bio-energeers, needle masters and, last but not least, doctors, visited her in the first days. Extreme exhaustion and mild shock was a paltry problem to them. Of the other...
A senior bio-energeer came to her hospital bed trailing an entourage of magience physicians. Humming to himself, he ran his hands along her body, a few inches away from touching, and checked her from top to toe. Then he inched on a pair of black satin gloves, adjusted his three-piece suit and stood back a little. Contemptuous superiority radiated from him.
“Ah. Yes. As my colleagues have concluded, so I agree. As well as your minor injuries you have sustained damage to your left kidney. Irreversible damage due to the magience involved. The kidney is completely nonfunctional. Take care that you drink adequate water in future and lead a less suicidal life.” He hurrumphed then turned and marched away. The lesser physicians flashed a few surprised looks at her before hurrying after him.
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