He hit the ground with a thud, the bands of light that had held him fast vanishing into the air. Gauk tumbled to the ground with him, and the boy joined his hands together, pressing the globes of blue light together into one, the size of a large stone, resting weightlessly in the boy’s arms.
Onundr struggled to stand, but all his will, all his strength had been sapped. He got as far as one knee till his legs turned watery beneath him and he fell back to the cool grass.
“It is not a great deal of power that is given to you,” the boy opined as he studied the ethereal thing he held. “And yet you do not even realize that. The ability to take whatever you wish—or be given it out of fear—is the only measure of strength you know. It is time that men like you learned to fear a different kind of strength.”
With that the boy turned and walked away, the globe of what he’d taken from them, of Braech’s broken trust with them, lighting his steps as he disappeared into the door of the tall building in front of them.
CHAPTER 35
The Barrier
Torvul could feel the building pressure all around him, like the feel of the air before a storm against his skin, or the press of an ache against the eyes, the throb of a loud harmony in his throat. It was all of these at once, and yet it also spoke to his inner senses, to his connection to the earth itself, the power of his craft and link with the Mother.
And he knew that whatever it was, it originated with Gideon and it was happening near the Inn.
Wincing in pain, as his broken arm throbbed with every step, Torvul labored towards the green. It was a long and a painful walk, but finally the center of the village hove into his view. Gideon stood in the midst of it, glowing balls of power coalescing in his hands. The two Dragon Scales Torvul had blinded floated in the air, but their bodies were twisting and mutating before his eyes.
He stumped his way up closer, hugging his arm tightly against his side. He sucked in a deep lungful of air. Trying to breathe was difficult, not only from the pain, but from whatever Gideon was doing.
“Gideon! Gideon, stop! Whatever it is you are doing, wait.”
“You know what I’m doing, Torvul,” Gideon said. “You know what I have meant to do all these months.”
“You don’t have to do it tonight, Gideon. You can’t change the world in one night!”
Gideon turned his eyes to Torvul and once more they flashed that golden color, just for a moment. “Yes, Torvul. I can,” the boy said, and though the words were simple and his voice was calm, they resounded with thunder.
“You could hurt yourself. Or the folk around ya. They’ve already been hurt enough.”
“No, Torvul. No hurt will come to them. And I will not let you talk me into delay,” the boy said through clenched teeth. He let the moaning berzerkers drop to the ground; they lay unmoving, but Torvul thought they still breathed.
Gideon looked down at them, holding what he’d taken from them in his hands, and shook his head. “Power in the hands of men like them is power in the hands of a dog in foaming madness. When they are made to serve the ends of a man like Symod, of a god as mad with bloodlust as Braech has become, it never ends. It will never end so long as the great masses of people haven’t the means to defend themselves. I mean to give it to them, Torvul. My solution is not perfect. It will be dangerous. But it will be a step.”
Torvul took an involuntary step backwards, chastened by the anger in Gideon’s words, by the power that radiated from him, as if he was drawing it from the air.
“Think, boy,” the dwarf said. “Just think. Wait for Allystaire. You’re tryin’ t’do too much.”
“No,” Gideon said, shaking his head. “He told me once that the most important quality for a leader to be is decisive. Make a decision now, he said, for if you wait for the perfect moment, the clearer picture, you’ve only made it harder. No. It happens now. Tonight.”
“I’ll stop you if I have to, boy,” Torvul said, taking a step forward, trying to plant his feet more firmly than his voice.
“No, Torvul,” Gideon said as he turned his back and walked towards the Inn. “You won’t. You can’t.”
Torvul watched the Will walk away from him, fearful and shamed, for he knew his words to be true.
* * *
Gideon was already inside the Inn and moving past a crowd of frightened onlookers, including Timmar, who clutched a woodaxe determinedly in both hands, and Giarud’s daughter Lenoir, holding one of her father’s rock-hammers, before he realized they were all staring silently.
Mouths agape, they watched hushed and fearful as he kicked open the door and took a few steps inside. Finally, he gathered himself. “Try not to be alarmed,” he said, though it was difficult to concentrate on forming the words, on keeping his voice calm and even. “There is no longer any danger; the attackers have been dealt with. Two of them are outside on the green, but are no more threat. See to them if you wish.”
He stood there, watching their faces, finding himself envious of Allystaire’s easy way with command. A gentle word from him and they’re all moving. A loud word and they’re running, he thought.
“I, ah, have business in the storage behind the bar. In the cold well. If someone would be so kind as to open it.”
Timmar cleared his throat and lowered the axe to rest the blade beside his foot. “What’ll ya need from the cold well? I just put a fresh barrel in there.”
“I am afraid the barrel may be a total loss, goodman Timmar,” Giden said, his teeth clenched, a dribble of sweat running from his scalp and over his cheek. “But what I have to do is quite vital.”
Still no one moved. Timmar tapped his foot against the axe. “Expensive barrel. It was just fired. Good ale, too. What’ll ya need ta do?”
Finally, Gideon’s patience fraying, he snapped. “I haven’t the time to explain to anyone, so no questions please, but the well you use to keep beer at cellar temperatures is a holy spring that was once dedicated to the Mother, in Her last incarnation in this world, in a time lost to our historians. This would go a great length towards explaining why there was rarely even simple violence in this place until the reavers brought it here, and why that act and Mol’s refuge in it awoke Her, but I haven’t the time to give an extensive lecture on the metaphysics or the theology of it all, so if you could please just take my Freezing word for it, move out of my way, and open the trap door, I would be very much obliged.”
Gideon’s throat was a bit raw by the time he shouted out the final words, but the intensity had the desired effect. Timmar finally moved, quickly, stepping behind the bar and around the shelves.
The boy followed the Innkeep, conscious of the stares upon him, but he heard the telltale creak of the door being lifted open.
He came around the corner finding Timmar quickly pulling down the rope that threaded through a pulley on the ceiling. The rope’s end was threaded through the eye at the end of a heavy metal hook, and Timmar quickly lowered that towards the well, pulling up a handful of chain affixed to the top of the barrel.
“Happy t’help, young master,” Timmar was saying, as he secured the chain against the hook and then took up the rope and began hauling the barrel out. “No sense wastin’ the barrel or the ale,” he muttered.
Gideon felt his arms trembling, his body starting to fatigue with the effort of holding the power he’d ripped from the Dragon Scales in his hands, without letting it escape him or drawing it into himself. Some force was trying to tug it free, and his own Gift was reaching for it hungrily.
“You may want to leave the room, and get the others out in case I am wrong,” Gideon warned him, before stepping forward and plunging into the cold well the moment the barrel was clear.
His robe instantly waterlogged and clung against him, and he felt the cold seeping into his skin. He plunged his hands into the water and extended his senses, flexing his Will to try and push the coalesced power
away from himself, away from the world he knew, and into the world beyond.
It was, in a physical sense, like trying to push a tiny sliver of steel through a castle wall. The ache of the force he expended soon outweighed the shock of the cold water, but soon enough, the facts of his physical existence faded.
A blur of sensation hit him all at once. There was the feeling of being trapped within this well with the heat of a fire raging outside, the foreign sounds of violence and the screams of pain and death. Cold, and hunger, and then a voice that held within all the warmth of the world. There was a long, slow, black silence. A great anger and an overpowering sadness. A vast and incoherent music that he thought, if he could only listen to it closely enough, would resolve itself. It was tempting, so very tempting, to lose himself in the attempt.
His ability to form language, to understand the idea of what he was feeling as language, was becoming too small for the concepts assailing him. Gideon found himself losing consciousness. He shook himself, reached a hand up out of the water to slap his cheek.
He pushed all that threatened to close in on him away and focused on that sharp sliver of steel in his hand and pushed with all his might at the wall in front of him. Though he had no steel and there was no wall, he could feel it resisting, feel it looming over him and threatening to tumble atop him and bury him under all of its weight.
There is no wall, Gideon told himself. There is only strength and weakness. I will be strong enough.
The point of his sliver seemed to dig a little further, but he had scratched away only a few grains.
If there is no wall, the Will thought, then there is no tiny bit of steel in my hand. There is whatever I wish.
And suddenly it was a hammer in one hand, and a chisel in the other. The hammer, he knew without thinking, looked like the one Allystaire had broken against the Battle-Wights, but smaller, fitted to his own hand.
He set the chisel and swung, focusing his own Will upon the point of the power he’d ripped from the Braechsworn.
Stone flaked at the first blow.
He swung again.
It chipped and slid away in a heavy rain of pebbles, but he felt them disappearing and melting away to nothingness as they passed.
It is not stone. The piece in front of me is not stone. It is loose earth. It is damp mud, Gideon thought.
And it was so; the stone crumbled, and he abandoned his tools, digging with his hands.
I do not need to destroy the wall, he told himself. I need only push through it here, in one place, and in time it will crumble on its own.
Gideon dug furiously, leaning into a hole in the stone now, crawling in, shoveling the earth behind him like a beast.
The exertion left him all but untethered to his body now. On some level he felt the cold of the water, felt his legs sinking underneath him, his arms trembling, his breath coming shallow.
But his whole being was invested into the action of his Will, and if tearing a hole between two worlds was going to kill him, then it would be a worthy death.
Gideon knew now that all his worrying, his planning, all his fear had been for nothing. This act, this moment, was what his Gift was meant for, what the Mother had hoped all along he would do with the power She had unlocked in him.
He felt a smile play upon his face as he realized what he needed to be willing to do.
Gideon felt his body slump down into the water, the breath driven from his lungs, as he let go of his hold upon his body. He needed to be anchored to the world, yes, but if he loved it enough to die for it, then he did not need to waste any of his Will in propping himself up. It was a small thing, but it was everything.
When he let go, his arms reached for more of the Barrier to move aside and found nothing.
His senses touched a pure flowing stream of power, and he extended himself to it. Gideon knew he could absorb it, could draw it into himself and make himself more powerful than ever he had been, even when he drew into himself the remnant of the God of the Caves.
Instead, he let himself be a channel, a conduit, for the power did not flow through the breach like water through a broken damn. It moved slowly, like an animal being forced into a strange place. He had to reach into it, grab it, and pull.
Once it found purchase within—and then through—Gideon himself, it began to move. Slowly, yes, and Gideon could not imagine how much lay behind the barrier he had bored through, but it was a beginning. The sheer weight of power Gideon felt pressing forward was overwhelming.
It was done; raw magic was seeping into the world. Gideon imagined he could see it, little globes of bright energy in every color, in colors he couldn’t name, floating into the night, invisible to any eyes but his own.
He smiled as weariness overcame him. He imagined opening his mouth to mutter some prayer to the Mother, felt cold water seep in to fill it.
It did not matter; his task was done. If he drowned here, he had done the Mother’s work. Both his inner and his outer vision clouded.
Gideon was letting himself slip from the world entirely when strong, familiar hands seized his shoulders and hauled him up and out of the cold well.
It was not, Gideon knew, before consciousness left him, the first time that Allystaire had found him adrift and pulled him back to life, back to the world.
In some place in his soul, Gideon had known that he would.
* * *
Gideon awoke in darkness. Opening his eyes was an act of supreme physical exertion; sitting up proved beyond him. He was warm, though, and dry, and despite the darkness of the room around him he could feel another presence.
“How did you know to come back?” The voice that emerged from his throat surprised him. It was barely more than a whisper.
“Took a prisoner in Ashmill Bridge. The whole thing was a trap, attacking there so we would respond, exposing the village, and you.”
“It wasn’t very well designed,” Gideon wheezed. “How would they know you’d leave me behind?”
“They did not,” Allystaire said. “I suppose if we had left Thornhurst and the Temple entirely undefended, they would have come into the village and taken prisoners, tried to exchange them. But you were definitely their target.”
“How did you get back so fast?”
“Ardent.”
Gideon thought on the distance from Ashmill Bridge to Thornhurst, that the destrier would’ve traveled it one way already in a short time. “Did it kill him?”
“Hardly,” Allystaire said. “Torvul and I have both had a look at him. He labored, yes, but he is as healthy as ever.”
“Perhaps,” Gideon mused, “you were not the only one Gifted by the Mother outside of Bend.”
“Speculate at another time,” Allystaire said. “For now, you need the kind of healing I cannot give you. Only sleep can.”
“Did Torvul tell you what I did?”
“No,” Allystaire said. “Says he is uncertain he could explain it so that I could understand.”
“I will,” Gideon said, even as he felt weariness overtaking him. “Later. You and Mol and Idgen Marte all need to know. But…had t’be done. Had to be,” he muttered, trailing off.
* * *
Allystaire listened to Gideon’s deep, steady breathing for several long moments until he was certain that sleep had well and truly claimed the boy. He stood, feeling the exertion of the long ride, and his long stay at Gideon’s bedside trying to turn his legs to lead. A yawn threatened to crack open his jaw, but he stifled it until he could slip outside the door of Gideon’s room and close it as quietly as possible.
Once in the hallway, he let the yawn out, startled by the exhaustion that seized him; he found himself starting to lean against the wall, then stiffened his back and walked down the stairs, keeping his hands defiantly at his side.
The mood in the taproom was somber. Most of the village folk ga
thered at the tables and chairs, and Torvul and Andus Carek sat by the hearth, though the bard was without his lute and Torvul sat silent and glum.
Allystaire drifted towards them. The dwarf looked up to him, those deep dark eyes all but unreadable.
“He awake?”
“Briefly,” Allystaire said.
“What’d ya speak of?”
“Very little,” Allystaire answered as he sank gratefully into a chair, sighing. “I do not think he knows about Chals or Morgen.”
“Will he be awake for the buryin’?”
“I do not know,” Allystaire replied. “It did not seem prudent to press him when he nearly killed himself, Torvul.”
“Has he told you what it was he did?”
“No,” Allystaire said, letting his voice fall like a clenched fist. “And I will wait until he is ready.”
“He did somethin’ dangerous, Allystaire. Somethin’ that needed more time t’consider,” Torvul said, leaning forward, scowling. “Not to mention what he did to that berzerker.”
“Faith, Torvul,” Allystaire muttered, lowering his voice, conscious of the peering eyes of the crowd around him. And let us not argue here, he added.
He killed him like it was nothin’, Allystaire. Froze him and then shattered him with a wave of his hand. It was terrifying. Torvul stared hard at him, the anger clear. He stared right back, matching the dwarf’s gaze evenly, so it was easy to read the shock when he replied.
Good, Allystaire thought. If any men want killing, it is these berzerkers.
To shatter a man like an icicle?
I am not particular about the manner of their deaths.
You’re a cold man, Allystaire Stillbright, Torvul replied, as he sat back in his chair, looking away.
I wish I could spare the lad the need to do it, Allystaire offered. Yet there cannot always be mercy for men as far gone as them.
Then what’ll you do with the others? Hang ‘em?
Crusade Page 51
