Firesong rubbed eyes so tired and puffy they were mere slits. In the end, there was only one device they could use, and it was not their first or even second choice. Karal had spent the time making himself useful while the mages pondered translations and probed the devices with every tool available to them. Precious time was lost while they did so, but none of them were wasting any time either. They hardly slept, and ate only when Karal or Silverfox put food in their hands.
And in the end, the shaman himself used his powers, ill-suited as they were to such a task, attempting to help with a selection. His "inspired guess" matched the choice of the mages.
"There's only one problem," Firesong said glumly, eyeing the unprepossessing pyramid of silvered metal. "This thing is going to kill whoever activates it. According to Treyvan's litany and what I've gleaned from the destruction information, the rest of us would be able to get far enough away to avoid incineration, but not the person setting it off. It can't be set off magically, we don't have anyone who can move things with his mind with us, and when it goes, not even Altra would be able to jump out in time. Assuming he had two hands with four fingers and a thumb each, which he doesn't."
"Unlessss—" Treyvan prompted.
Firesong shrugged. "I don't see where that could make a difference. The fatal flaw in this thing, and the reason Urtho never used it, is that there's spillover energy in the physical plane. Incandescent, white-hot spillover energy."
Karal looked from one to the other. "Unless what?" he prompted.
Firesong grimaced, and Treyvan answered. "Unless the perrrssson trrrigerrring it isss a Mage-Channel. He might be able to channel the ssspilloverrr enerrrgy to the enerrrgyplanesss wherrre it isss sssupposssed to go."
"Yes, well, there's just one little problem with that," Firesong snapped. "He stands even odds of getting burned out—if he succeeds—and he'll need to be completely shielded, and if he loses control, he'll still get killed along with whoever is shielding him! That assumes we had someone who was tough enough to—"
He stopped, suddenly realizing that Karal had gone white as snow, and An'desha, Florian, and Altra were all staring at him. The muscles in his throat tensed as he swallowed.
"I'm a channel," he said, in a whisper.
Now Firesong stared at him, too, his mind whirling. "You're a fool if you think you can do this," he said harshly. "If you thought the Iftel border was hard, it's nothing compared to channeling this thing! You're not trained, you can't even see mage-energy—
"But I am a channel," the young man persisted, though he was still pale and drawn. "And I've been told that channeling is instinctive, not learned."
"You're going to kill yourself!" Firesong shouted, unable to bear the tension. "You're out of your mind! We can't help you. You'd have to do this alone! The best we could do is shield you!"
"Is there any other choice?" Karal countered, looking each of them in the eyes. One by one, they each shook their heads. Finally, he came back to Firesong, who clenched his teeth angrily.
"Firesong—we all knew when we came here that we might not come back. We have all resolved in our own ways that we are willing to make sacrifices for even a chance of saving our homelands." Karal's facial expression looked like that of a boy ready to cry, but in the way he held his chin up and back straight, he acted like a grown man facing a moment of truth. "I know that if I have to give my life in this, I will be welcome in the Sunlord's arms."
How dare the whelp put him in this position? How dare he volunteer to get himself turned to a cinder before Firesong had a chance to get his own feelings straight?
"Damn you—" he began, but Karal interrupted him with a wan smile.
"I don't think your curse is capable of overriding Vkandis' blessing, Hawkbrother," he chided gently. "But if there is no other choice, I suggest you take it back anyway. I'm going to need all the help I can get."
"I take it back. But may all your children turn out like you!" Firesong exploded, unable to come up with a better "curse" to vent his feelings. He turned violently away and escaped to the empty chamber to pace. His gut was a solid knot of tensions, his neck felt as stiff as old rawhide.
How can he do this? He's right, but how can he? This is insane! An'desha will never forgive me!
Soft footsteps at the entrance to the chamber warned him that he was not alone.
"I have to, you know," Karal said quietly. "I had the feeling it might come to something like this. Altra kept saying he wanted me along for 'contingency'; I think he must have meant that there was an equal chance you'd have been able to use one of the other devices." A soft sigh. "The ForeSeers all said that the futures were so tangled they couldn't see past us getting here. There was always a chance that something else might have worked out."
"Maybe. If we had more time to study them. If I wasn't reasonably certain the wave front of the next mage-storm was going to get in here as well as everywhere else—this is the origin-point, after all. Hellfires! Where else would the energy go but here! And this place can't keep taking a battering without at least one of these devices going on its own!" He" stopped pacing and turned to look into Karal's white and, strained face. "I do not want you to do this!"
"I know," Karal told him.
"But if you're going to insist—by your gods and mine, I'm not going to stand around outside this place and leave you to do it alone." In this much, at least, he could assuage his own conscience. "I'll shield you—"
"We'll all shield him," An'desha said, coming up behind Karal. Firesong started to protest, then shrugged. It was their choice, too.
All right." He took a deep breath and tried to reckon the time passed. "How much time do we have left? I know it can't be much."
"About half a day." Karal sounded steady enough. Maybe he could do it. "I've been keeping very careful track. Every mark we delay means the closer the wave front will be to Haven and the Heartstone there. Tremane's people can weather one more storm, maybe two—"
"But the shielding on the Stone might go down, not to mention all the other Vale Stones, I know, I know." He suppressed a wave of irritation at Karal for restating the obvious. He let his irritation show as he answered in a growl. "All right, then, if that's the way you all want it, who am I to argue?"
An'desha looked for a moment as if he might retort, but only turned back to the main room. Karal followed him, leaving Firesong to trail behind, feeling as if he had somehow lost an argument, even though there hadn't really been one.
They spent their remaining time in rehearsal for the moment. Aya chittered at him from atop the pack as Firesong rummaged deep into the side pocket. He noticed that he was not alone in surreptitiously going to his belongings for stimulants to keep him wide awake and alert; such things were dangerous and they would all pay later—if they survived this—but every mage knew there would be times when there were not enough hours to rest before a vital working and carried a packet or two of such things. He even caught the shaman chewing a mouthful of something with an expression of distaste that told him it was not dried meat.
Tayledras stimulants had the peculiar quality of setting everything emotional at a distance, enabling Firesong to focus on the purely intellectual project at hand. The mental exercises that sharpened the mind came to him naturally, like a musician practicing his fingerings quicker and quicker. Diagrams of light shone against his lids as he concentrated, eyes closed—symbols for Vale, Veil, Heartstone, ley-line, shield, absorber, deflector, suspensor, buffer-current and anchor, circle and square, star and sphere—they all appeared and interwove. And it occurred to him, as soon as he felt that distancing of his inner turmoil, that there was a reason for that pattern in the floor of every storage chamber. The compass rose.
In his peculiarly exalted state, he leaped straight from flash of intuition to a plan, with no conscious reasoning in between.
"Look at this!" he said, as they entered the chamber for a final rehearsal. "Look, the device is in the exact middle of that inlaid compass rose—it can't be by accident! T
his is a shielding-circle!"
An'desha tilted his head to one side and frowned. "It doesn't look like anything in my memory—" he said tentatively.
"Of course it doesn't," Firesong interrupted impatiently. "Your memories are all of Urtho's arch rival, and if there was a way to do something the opposite of Urtho, you can be certain Ma'ar took it! The positioning is perfect, and I'll bet there's an amplification-effect when we set ourselves up and begin the shielding. Look here—the angle from point to point is a factor of eight, with eight points, and sixty-four marker triangles point in. Look at the cupping of those scallops around the center—I'll bet you all my silk that they're collectors. Check the angles of deflection from point to point, and they'll all line up to buttress each other."
An'desha looked at Treyvan and Hydona for confirmation. The female gryphon wagged her head from side to side. "It could be," she admitted. "Sssuch thingsss arrre known. Urrrtho wasss known forrr being rrresssourcsseful enough forrr sssixty men, beforrre brrreakfassst. It would be in hisss ssstyle to put sssuch thingsss herrre."
"Then you two—take North and South," he ordered, feeling as if this must be the proper configuration, though he did not know why. "Florian and Altra, East and West." That put all the nonhumans on cardinal points, which made a certain sense given what the gryphons had told him about Urtho and how he cherished his nonhuman creations. "Karal, stand in the center with the pyramid. An'desha, you go between Altra and Treyvan in the Northeast. An'desha, I'll be opposite you—"
But here he stopped, for there were only Lo'isha and Silverfox left, and both were shaking their heads. "I know nothing of shielding," the Shaman began—
Then, with a sigh and a rush of wings on a wind that existed somewhere other than here and now, the other two places were taken. Light filled the room, and Firesong's heart leaped straight into his throat.
The last pieces of the puzzle. They have had a hand in this, too—
Standing in the Northwest and Southeast were—
No—
Tre'valen—
"We have come to help in this," said one of the two creatures, part flame, part bird, and part man, with a face that had haunted his few nightmares since the moment he had found the lifeless body of the Shin'a'in shaman struck down by Mornelithe Falconsbane. "We are still as much of your world as of Hers, and this is, after all, Her chosen land. She wishes it protected, as do we."
Karal's eyes glowed with an emotion that Firesong could put no name to, but there was no mistaking the emotion on An'desha's face. It was pure, unleavened joy. And Firesong knew, truly, and with a settling of peace in his heart, that he had not "lost" An'desha to any human or any human arguments. There was no use arguing when someone heard the call of the Star-Eyed in his soul. That siren song was as unbreakable as any lifebond and as enduring.
The other bird-human-spirit spoke. "An'desha knows—we have been with you, aiding where we could—but the Star-Eyed helps only those with the bravery to help themselves. We have come of our own volition, and live or die, we stand beside you."
Lo'isha was on his knee with his head bowed, and the creature who had once been Tre'valen, himself a shaman, gestured to him to rise. The shaman did so, but wearing an expression so awestruck that Firesong doubted he would say anything as long as the two Avatars were there.
But as Firesong turned his attention back to the circle, he realized he knew what that look in Karal's eyes was.
It was the look of someone who knows he is about to die, but whose faith is certain and confirmed and who is no longer afraid of the prospect. "Fey," some called it.
Perhaps, as Stefen bid him farewell in the mountains of the North, Vanyel had looked that way.…
But it was too late now to do anything about it. The last few moments were trickling away.
"Raise your shields!" he shouted, his throat tight, as he brought up his own. To Mage-Sight, each of them now stood within a glowing sphere of rainbow light, and as he had somehow divined, each point on the compass rose glowed as well. The light radiating from each of them reflected from the angled patterns outlined in the stone. It looked as though, if they survived this, he wouldn't owe anyone his silk.
"Link shields!" he cried out, before his throat closed too much to speak. There was a moment of faltering, then all of the shields formed into a thick ring of light surrounding Karal and the waist-high pyramid in the center. The young man closed his eyes and placed his hands carefully on two of the sides, fitting his fingers into the depressions placed there for that purpose.
But once again, as Firesong had guessed, older magics were activated by the energies of their shields. The design on the floor began to glow, sending up eight arms of light that pulled the shields with them, until they all met in a point, making a cone of radiance that echoed the conical shape of the walls around them. Instead of being merely ringed with shielding, Karal was encased in it, and the energy that he would release would be funneled straight up by the shields.
Precisely as it needed to be, to keep any harm from coming to the Plains outside.
Silverfox and Lo'isha watched anxiously; Firesong knew that the shaman would be able to see the energies they had raised, but the expression on Silverfox's face suggested that he, too, saw them, which meant that they were powerful enough even for non-mages to see. That meant he had been right; Urtho had built a mechanism of amplification into the design of the floor.
But there was no chance to gloat over this triumph of instinct and artistry over intellect and reason. It was time. He knew that, as if he were a water-clock and the last drop had just fallen.
"Karal, now!" he shouted, and Karal's face spasmed as his fingers closed convulsively on the trigger points of the device.
The center of the design exploded soundlessly into power. Karal was somewhere in the midst of all that—more power than any Heartstone, more power than Firesong had ever seen in his life, power that made Aya shriek and flee into the next room, that was so bright the shaman and Silverfox shouted and hid their eyes.
Somewhere in the heart of that inferno of energy, Karal struggled to hold it, to transmute it—he struggled—
And Firesong felt him failing. Not failing to hold, but failing in his grasp on the world, on himself, on his life. He was thinning, vanishing, evaporating in a little microcosm of his incandescent God. In a moment, he would be lost, and if anyone dared try to help him, the circle would break and they would all perish.
Over my dead body! Anger finally penetrated his drug-born and aloof indifference. Though—if instinct failed him, it might well be just that—
"Everybody! On my count, take human-sized steps forward, follow your compass point!" he shouted into the roaring silence. "One! Two! Three!"
The circle contracted around Karal, tightening in on him, and having the effect of focusing the energy he controlled as the rays' edges flanged and flared.
"Four! Five! Six!" They were all within touching range now, if they had all had hands. But that was not yet what Firesong's instincts cried out for.
"Seven! Eight!" They were practically on top of Karal now—the pyramid was gone, completely, and Karal was as transparent as one of the Avatars, his head thrown back, his mouth open in a silent cry, surrounded and encased in a pillar of white-hot, ice-cold fire.
"Nine!" He reached out and seized one of Karal's arms—without prompting, each of the others did the same, except for Florian, who touched the young man's breast with his nose, and Altra, who reared up on hind legs and placed both paws in the middle of his back.
The light!
It flared up in his face the moment they all touched Karal, he closed his eyes, but it scorched through his eyelids and flung him physically back! He felt his hand discorporate, turning into vapor—he lost his grip on Karal's arm, and felt himself tossed backward through the air, to land against the wall and slide bonelessly and helplessly to the floor.
It was over.
He couldn't see; couldn't hear.
They had won—b
ut they had lost Karal.
Firesong fell back into darkness as profound as the explosion of light, and all feeble remaining awareness left him.
Firesong wasn't unconscious for very long, but it was certainly the first time in his life that he had been knocked out by magic—and the searing pain in his head told him just what price he had paid for tampering with such powers. He wouldn't be able to light a candle for the next week until he healed—and the next day or so was going to be pure hell. But with a shiver of glee, he realized he was alive.
He couldn't move for a moment; couldn't even think past the pain except for that tangle of elation and grief. We did it—I shouldn't have done that, he might have been all right if I hadn't told everyone to close in, it's my fault—
And—oh, gods, but who else had they lost? He forced himself to roll over and sit up, forced his eyes to open, but they were watering so heavily he couldn't see. He wiped at them frantically with his sleeve, as Aya scuttled back into the room and settled against his side, crooning.
"What in the name of Kal'enel happened?" he heard the shaman croak.
But the voice that answered was not Silverfox—nor anyone else who had been in the circle.
"I haven't a clue," Karal said, in a weak whisper. "I don't remember anything but pressing those ten trigger points."
Firesong managed to get his eyes clear, and to his utter astonishment, they confirmed what his ears had told him.
Lo'isha and Silverfox were bent over Karal, helping him to sit up. There didn't seem to be much of him inside those black robes of his—he looked as if he'd been undergoing a thirty-day Vision-Quest fast. Both of the others were handling him gingerly, as if they felt he was fragile glass.
Well, Firesong wasn't feeling any too sturdy himself at the moment....
But before he got a chance to build up even the faintest feeling of resentment, help arrived, pouring in through the tiny doorway, in the form of black-clad Shin'a'in Sword-Sworn who quickly and efficiently gathered them all up and carried them bodily out through the tunnel and up into the scarlet light of the setting sun. He let his body stay limp, simply cargo.
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