“I know.” He remained impossibly serene.
Karigan trotted to where Cade was moving another case and helped. They exchanged worried smiles.
“Is the Eletian going to find our way out?” Cade asked.
Karigan wished she could be as calm as Lhean. “I don’t know. I really don’t.” She glanced back at Lhean, kneeling on the floor. Beside him stood the ghostly figure of Yates, gazing back at her. The residue of dream came back to her, of when she was last in this room. “Laurelyn!”
“What is it?” Cade asked.
“A gift—the ice-glazed moon!” she cried at Lhean. “The ice-glazed moon!”
“An elder name,” he said. Beside him, the ghost of Yates faded away.
“Do you know it?”
She did not hear his response for there was another great crash near the entrance. She peered through the gloom to see that the enemy had toppled Ghallos and were leaping over him.
“Do not break anything else,” came Silk’s anxious voice. “Just get the prisoners!”
Cade had a gun, which he aimed out into the museum. The silver of the weapon flared, hurting her eyes. He’d leaned his longsword against their barricade, close at hand.
“About half a dozen of them,” he said, “plus Silk and a pair of Enforcers.”
Not good odds. “I’m going out there,” she said.
“What? No!”
Shots rang out as Silk’s men ran toward their end of the museum. Karigan faded out and climbed over the barricade. When she landed lightly on the other side, bullets whizzed by her. She crouched to make herself as small a target as possible. They might not be able to see her, but she understood that even wild shots could hit a mark.
Her saber in one hand and the bonewood in the other, she ran toward the enemy. So only six men and two Enforcers, which meant that although these were not good odds, the emperor’s guards did not rate them so great a threat that more had been sent. The first man she encountered, she tripped with the bonewood, and his cry caught the attention of the others. They swung their weapons around in her direction.
Uh oh. Silk must have informed them of her ability.
A shot rang out from behind her and one of the men dropped. She glanced back and saw Cade toss his gun aside and pick up his sword. She ran to the next closest guard, and her sword, like a song in her hand, took him down. The remaining men shouted in confusion, but were more disciplined in their shooting than Mr. Howser had been. They did not take down any of their own.
Karigan’s blade passed through the rib cage of another guard. As he slid off her sword, the lights were thrown on, and she found herself surrounded and very visible. Cade had also climbed over the barricade, his ancient sword held in a position of readiness, a hard gleam in his eyes she had never seen before. He was prepared to die in this fight. She could sense it. She knew it.
“We can see you, Miss G’ladheon,” Silk called out from his location near the light lever.
Guns and the eyestalks of the Enforcers, were aimed at her and Cade. She dropped her fading. It would not aid her now. Though her sword and staff were useless against the firepower of the empire, she did not lower them.
Acceptance descended on her. Like Cade, she realized this was the end. She wasn’t going home, it was going to end right here. A bead of sweat trickled down her temple as she stared into the barrel of the nearest gun. She would, she decided, die fighting.
One of the Enforcers sprang over bodies and landed in front of her. It opened a hatch and ejected a net. The weight of it threw her down.
Damnation! She frantically tried to pull it off, but every movement just entangled her further. The mechanical held Cade off with one of its legs, using it like a sword to parry his blows.
“Hold fire,” Silk ordered as his men advanced. “We’ll take them alive if we can.”
Cade’s longsword clattered against the Enforcer’s leg even as the mechanical dragged Karigan closer. She poked the bonewood through the net and whacked it against the central orb with a resounding clang. The mechanical paused, swiveled its eyestalk toward her, and appeared to be opening another hatch.
With a grunt, Karigan smashed the eyestalk, shattering glass and denting metal. It dangled from its socket by wires that sparked. The mechanical squealed and whirled around, skittering erratically and dragging Karigan on the floor in circles at a breakneck speed.
“Cade!” she cried.
Her blind Enforcer ran into display cases and grew more erratic by the moment, bowling into the guards and bouncing off the other Enforcer, which went flailing across the room. Glass and wood and plaster smashed around Karigan until Cade shoved his sword between the mechanical’s legs and tripped it. It heaved over, splitting its central orb along a previously invisible seam. Dark viscous fluid and tubing, like entrails, gushed out onto the floor into a boiling, hissing puddle.
At that moment, another wave of discord passed over and through Karigan. The ground shook and articles fell off shelves and smashed to the floor. The guards who remained standing paused in consternation. The remaining Enforcer, already unbalanced by its collision with its companion, staggered. The quaking undermined the last of its stability, and it tripped over its own spindly legs. It keeled over, its legs scurrying in the air like a dying insect.
“What in the name of—?” Silk cried.
Even if Karigan had wanted to give him an answer, she didn’t have one.
YOLANDHE UNLEASHED
If anyone tried to stop Yolandhe, she simply shoved them aside with a thrust of air. If they actually threatened her with a weapon, their landing was messier than that of others. She had, in fact, left a trail of bodies from the lift all the way to the emperor’s throne room.
The emperor was not present in the icy throne room when she arrived, but Webster Silk was. He’d known she was coming so he met her with a small army. They were nothing to her. She flung them and their spider-legged mechanicals away with a gesture, like the felling of a forest, leaving only one tree standing. The others were meaningless to her, but not Webster Silk, not the man who had imprisoned and tormented her, the first to carve his initials on her body. Those scars now blazed with furious light. The power filled her, and even without eyes, she could see.
He tried to shoot her with one of his fire weapons. She melted it in his hand. He screamed and tried to shake off the molten metal. His cries were music to her. Next she stripped off his clothing with a mere thought, first the fur coat, then his suit, and finally his small clothes, revealing flesh and a manhood shriveled by cold and fear.
“Do you wish to romance me, Webster Ezmund Silk?” Her voice rang out more sweetly than it had since he had crushed her vocal chords.
“Please . . .” he said, shaking.
Beautiful music.
“Do you remember how you shackled me? I will shackle you now.”
She drew on her powers and melted ice from the ceiling. She reshaped the melt water and froze it into an icicle-pronged noose around his neck. He fought to break it off, but it might as well have been made of steel. Blood trickled from his neck onto his chest.
“Webster Ezmund Silk, you were the first to show me your love.” She pointed to his initials across her breasts. She would not sully herself by touching him, so instead, she hurled her memories of the violations, the degradations, the torture, into his mind so he experienced them as she had. His body thrashed and pleas spilled from his mouth in incoherent sobs, a grand symphony.
It was still not enough.
She slashed her hands through the air, and he howled. With every gesture she sliced his skin open, writing her own name upon his flesh in the characters of a long lost language that once belonged to the goddesses of the sea. Blood pooled around his feet. She covered him in her name.
“Webster Ezmund Silk, no sea witch am I, but a goddess of elder days. Older than old, yes? You
played at an eternal life, but you will not know immortality.”
He sobbed.
“I am Yolandhe. Look upon me. You did not make me, but you reshaped me.”
She forced him to look, to look at the river of power flowing through her. She drew on the etherea that was so rich within these upper levels of the palace, as though trying to quench a deep thirst.
When she was sure he had seen her, she with her scars blazing triumphantly, she slashed out his eyes. She admired her handiwork, satisfied. She did no more and dismissed his existence from her mind. He was no longer of any consequence to her, for she sensed the arrival of her beloved. Anticipation sent shockwaves of power through the palace, through the water-borne systems of etherea. The very ground shuddered.
Her beloved strode toward her, giving Webster Silk, writhing in his collar of ice, a sidelong glance, but that was all. His eyes were wide, and all for her.
“Is it really you?” he murmured more to himself than to her. “You are so very bright.”
“Yes, my love.”
“They told me you’d died. That you’d perished in the war. All my fault.”
“No, my love, I was entrapped. Held prisoner beneath the earth, but now I have emerged.”
He reached for her, trembling. His third aspect, the corrupt, vile one, attempted to assert control. His gray eyes clouded, darkened in a storm.
“It is time,” she said, “to lance the poison in you.”
His body convulsed then steadied. His eyes were completely black. “You are too late, Yolandhe. All is mine.”
“We shall see.”
She warmed the room so that ice drip-drip-dripped into a crescendo of rain and steam rose up from the floor. Webster Silk’s noose melted and broke. He fell to the ground, an icicle driven through his throat.
The vile one laughed as water streamed down his face. “You believe warming the room will cause me to burn up?”
She froze the water around him so he became encased in ice, but he just cracked it off with a shrug.
“Feeble elemental magic,” he scoffed. “Is that all you can conjure? Minor entertainments?”
“Entertainments, perhaps, while I drown your empire.”
“You cannot. You are not capable.”
“Oh, but you have concentrated so much etherea here, and I had so much time to consider you.”
His eyes briefly lost focus as his awareness traveled the empire, witnessing the raging seas tossing up against coastal cities, including Gossham. He took in rivers bursting their banks and flooding fields, villages, and cities. He perceived the turbines beneath the palace, mere man-made machines of steel, disintegrating from the forces she threw at them.
“Why would you do this?” he demanded.
“If I kill your empire, I kill you. It is those you rule who give you power. I will cleanse the world, renew it.”
He burned with anger. Yolandhe knew he struggled to retain his composure, for if he scorched his current body, he no longer had Webster Silk in reserve to contain him. Should he try to use her body, he would find it inhospitable, to say the least.
He lashed at her with oily, black, slithering strands of power, but she was prepared, and it sizzled against her shield of water and air. He was ancient and mighty, but she was more ancient still, a goddess rooted in the earth, the ocean, the sky. He may be a deep dark force that fouled the world, but her power had become terrible, as well, after absorbing so much tainted etherea. Terrible, yes, but she’d use hers to purge the empire from existence. She regretted the loss of life, but with time, the forests would grow back, the rivers would run their natural courses, and etherea would be free of corruption.
She teased him with feints and parries of her own elemental magic—a sharp wind, mini-waterspouts that skittered across the floor—teasing him, distracting him, while thick, dark clouds rumbled across his lands. Lightning touched off fires in valuable tracts of forest, while ocean waves ate off the coastline. She sought to keep the vile one occupied so maybe her beloved could surface and re-exert some control. He smashed the ceiling with more strands of power, blasting plaster and stone that collapsed around her. She showered him with sharp needles of water that turned into a hissing steam when they hit him. The stream that had meandered through the throne room overflowed and trout flopped across the floor. One slapped his foot.
It was at that moment it happened: the gray returned to his eyes in some small measure, and her beloved, the warrior sea king and the nobleman thief combined, loosed his own power. Yes. Together they would cleanse the world.
In the harbor, an island awakened, a huge barnacle-clad head of a sea dragon reared up and out of the surf, shaking off kelp and rockweed, revealing the iridescent scales of its hide. Fishing boats capsized and men fell screaming into the sea. In the lake that surrounded the palace, the little island next to it shifted, shaking off small trees and moss that had grown along its spine. In the Great Mounds, where a Green Rider out of time had observed something out of place, one of the mounds uncoiled and shook the dirt of its burrow off its back. It unfolded membranous wings and roared into the evening sky.
Across the empire, the strategically hidden beasts had lain in wait for almost two centuries, slumbering the years away until the one who commanded them called them in need.
They attacked the empire. Their fiery breaths flared in the night sky. They glided over fields, scorching them. They burned down towns. Taloned feet the size of small cottages tore down mills and imperial government buildings.
The Eternal Guardian, with a complaining Arhys sitting in the saddle in front of him, whipped his horse across the bridge from the palace toward Gossham. Lorine frantically held onto the mane of her horse as she tried to keep up without falling, her veil peeled away from a face tight with fear. They galloped through spray that lashed over the bridge from the stormy lake. Droplets sparkled in a rainbow haze beneath the lamps that lit the way. Pursuit was just lengths behind, a dozen horsemen armed with guns.
Fastion had ordered Lorine and Arhys not to look back. He told Arhys to close her eyes before he slaughtered the guards at the gates and checkpoints with his sword. But as they neared the mainland, a great presence hovered over them. Fastion looked up, and what he saw brought back his memories of being engulfed in the burn of dragon breath during the fall of Sacor City. His emperor’s great weapon had been released.
The dragon of the lake was silvery like a fish as lamplight glanced off its belly, its true size hidden by night, its sinuous tail a rudder that steered it through the sky. It circled over the bridge. Arhys started screaming hysterically. She had looked. Lorine stared ahead with an expression of determination.
Gunfire rang out, but their pursuers aimed not at the fleeing trio, but at the dragon, which backwinged as if taken aback, but not for long. It roared in rage and plunged down at the men. Fastion had no need of looking back when, over Arhys’ cries, the crashing of waves, and the roar of the dragon, he heard the screams of men.
Forward. They could only go forward. He lashed his horse onto shore, not slackening speed for the panicked folk of Gossham who ran in a confusion of light and dark, into their path. Fastion’s first duty was to the little girl struggling and shrieking in the saddle before him. He never saw the palace tremble from the magical battle that racked it from within and the great turbines breaking apart from beneath. When those forces undermined the palace’s foundation, he did not witness the collapse of one of the towers. He did not look back to see what was left of the bridge or the men who had pursued them.
Forward. Duty. He kept faith in Rider G’ladheon, but just in case, the little girl he protected may very well be all that was left of their future. If anyone survived what was being unleashed, anyway, for there to be a future.
The dragon from the Great Mounds soared through the dim sky above, its scales luminescing in moonlight as it attacked the engineers
, archeologists, overseers, and slaves operating the drill in the Old City. Heward Moody was killed by a single slash of talons, his steam engine knocked apart by another. Steam scalded the dragon. It bellowed in pain and pumped its wings, lifting it vertically into the sky. From a generous elevation, it stooped into a dive, preparing to obliterate any thing and any human left standing at the drill site.
Below, in the tombs, the dust circulated in ever-thickening clouds, and more rubble collapsed from the ceiling and walls.
“Chelsa!” Joff cried.
“Give me a moment,” came her muffled reply from the other side of the cave-in.
Joff could not know of the dragon attack above, he only knew the danger underground, and when he no longer heard the chew of the drill, and yet the tombs still shook, his fear mounted.
The last thing he expected to hear from Chelsa was laughter. Not hysterical laughter, but the hearty laughter of someone who had been told a good joke.
“Chelsa?”
“Joff,” she called. “I have found it, the antidote to the emperor’s weapon, and—”
He never heard more for layers of bedrock and earth, weakened first by the destruction of the castle and Sacor City one hundred and eighty-six years ago, and then by the drill, collapsed. Dirt and rock and tombs crashed down atop Chelsa and Joff. Chelsa’s people would never know of her discovery and how close she came to averting the destruction wrought by the emperor’s dragons.
THE BLADE OF THE SHADOW CAST
It was no longer just a sense of discord Karigan felt from beneath the net that still trapped her, but the palace shuddering. Wall-mounted artifacts crashed to the floor. Cabinets and display cases toppled over. Above the din, she heard Dr. Silk cry out in dismay as he attempted to rescue teetering urns and busts. The lights blinked and the walls around them groaned.
The remaining guards retreated as a heavy scrolled cornice smashed to the floor around them. They ran for the museum entrance.
Mirror Sight Page 75
