Lightborn

by Alison Sinclair

  The dowager had been there when the archduke was carried out, arching his burned back away from the stretcher. When one of his bearers jarred a chair, he had screamed. Touch had given Telmaine that memory, too. Bile rose in her throat; she gagged against her sleeve.

  “Pull yourself together!” Merivan said. “Be glad you’re still alive.”

  Telmaine started to laugh at the bitter horror of it all. To laugh, and then to sob, crying through her sobs, “Be thankful! This is my fault!”

  Merivan reached over and pinched her. “Not. One. Word,” she said. Telmaine hiccuped into her hands. “When we get home—,” she began.

  said the voice, and she gave a short shriek of horror. said the Lightborn mage—she felt his magic grip and bear down on hers, hard, his will lock and mute her voice.

 

 

  And then the night split open with a sound like thunder, but a thunder low to the ground across the river. She had heard that very sound—or she had not heard it, but she had imagined it—or Sachever Mycene had imagined it, and she had swept the imagining from his mind. Out of the reverberations came the great shells howling overhead. Barely, she heard Kip’s yell, and the carriage lurched into a gallop and a careening turn, crashing against a wall, rebounding onto four wheels with a rain of splinters. Merivan fell against her legs. She caught at her sister with one hand, striving to keep herself upright with the other, feeling her sister’s fright for her unborn child. The guns across the river boomed again, deafening her to the sound of the impact of the first flight, which she felt only as a shudder through the floor of the coach, almost lost in the jolting. Another flight of shells raved overhead. The near side of the coach ground against stone, and it dragged to a stop. The far door opened; Kingsley seized the sprawled Merivan around the waist. “Come,” he screamed, “or we’re all dead.” He dragged her out, threw her away from the coach. “In there!” Even as Telmaine started to follow, he seized her arm and hauled her out. Her skin was suddenly stinging, the stinging building up to a sear. She remembered, suddenly, the light that had burned her hand through the keyhole of Balthasar’s house. She struggled against his grip, sonning wildly around her. “Get inside!” he shouted, and thrust her into a dank-smelling doorway, following at her heels to grab and slam the damp-swollen door behind them. Cheek almost against the scarred, splitting wood, he sobbed, “Bastards. Lunatic crazy bastards. Every cursed one of them ought to be in an asylum!”

  Merivan and the coachman were both there, as stunned as she. Kip turned on them. “What are y’standing there for like sheep? This door’s rotten and misfit.” He pounded it, a sodden sound. “We’ve got to go down.” All veneer of the genteel footman or educated apothecary abandoned, he grabbed Telmaine’s cloak and dragged her toward worn stone steps. They breathed damp and old sewers. “We’ll be—,” he started to say.

  Then she lost him, the steps beneath her feet, and everything else around her. Magic surged up around her, at first with the familiar lightness, but swiftly beyond mere lightness, a dissociating thrust as though the very earth repelled her. As it had done before, when the Lightborn mages conjured a storm to quench the fires of the Rivermarch, the magic—Lightborn magic—caught her as it blazed out of the ruin of the Mages’ Tower. It burst apart the third salvo of incoming shells—and plunged down onto the gun emplacements on the slopes above the river. Fleetingly she sensed the vitality of the men there, before the magic plunged into the carefully stacked boxes of fuses and shells. A final, immense concussion pounded across the city as the gun emplacements exploded, annihilating the men servicing them, and half the hillside surrounding.

  She came back to herself, slowly. Ishmael’s memories whispered of this, of being so utterly spent in magic and body that even breathing seemed too much effort. Her mouth tasted of blood from her bitten tongue; she was lying on the uneven stone stairs, each step marking a bruise from her hips to the back of her head. She swallowed blood and turned her head to one side, struggling against the need to inhale, mortally terrified that she should breathe in smoke and seared flesh.

  Her cheek brushed skirts, spread upon the stairs around their owner’s ankles. She gasped in the stench of damp and old drains with profound gratitude. The skirts belonged to Merivan, who was sitting above her with one hand on her stomach and her face set in resentful nausea. On her far side, Kingsley crouched with his back braced against the rough wall. He sonned her, an odd, unsettled expression on his face. “Sorry, m’lady. I should’a warned you that it was slippery,” he said. A threadbare excuse for her collapse; did he realize, then, what had happened to her?

  “And why, exactly,” Merivan said, and swallowed, “did you bring us down here?”

  He shifted his attention from Telmaine to Merivan, very slowly. “The Lightborn tower’s been breached.”

  But it was supposed to happen near sunset, not sunrise, floated out from behind Telmaine’s eyes. Nobody reacted; she had not spoken aloud. She was still drifting, mind detached from body, thought from emotion. That, she thought lucidly, was why the curfew: Dukes Mycene and Kalamay clearing the streets before the attack began.

  “How do you know?” demanded Merivan.

  “Overheard Lord V. and Blondell arguing. Didn’t make sense of what I’d heard, until now.” His hands hung between his knees, fingers apart; his skin must be stinging even more than hers was, since he had been the longest exposed, pulling them all to safety. “Lord V. knew, I’m sure of it. That was what Blondell called treason.”

  “He was supposed to stop it,” Telmaine heard her own, faint declaration.

  Sonn snapped at her. “What?” Merivan said, and Kingsley, flatly, “He didn’t.”

  Telmaine pushed herself up on the damp steps, elbow still on the hem of Merivan’s dress. “He wouldn’t—” But wouldn’t he? He had defined the Mages’ Temple as one threat, and Kalamay and Mycene as another. Set one at the other, and let them destroy each other, was that it? He said he understood the threat of magic, but could he, truly? Could anyone who had not felt what she had felt, in the storm that quenched the Rivermarch fire, and in the howling roar of magic that ruptured the gun emplacements, truly understand what Lightborn power meant?

  But could anyone who had not heard the thunder of those guns appreciate the power of gunpowder and iron? Her own smarting skin attested to the ruin of the Mages’ Tower.

  The barest whisper, almost all she was capable of and all she dared. There was no answer.

  “Telmaine,” Merivan said, “from your bizarre behavior, I suspect you know rather more than you have admitted. Let us find shelter, if such is to be had, and then, by the Sole God, you will tell me. Or I swear that I shall return you to the palace, and let the dukes do with you what they will.”

  Tammorn

  Tam had twice in his life been caught in an earthquake in the mountain hamlet of his birth, and when the guns boomed, when the ground trembled with their consequence, it was the first thing he thought of. Then Lukfer’s agony ripped across his mind, shearing away his connection with the resistant Darkborn mage.

  Fejelis had rolled from a restless doze onto his feet, and had his hand on the window shutter before he remembered night and Darkborn and law, and hesitated. That gave Lapaxo time to seize upon him, and bellow, “Downstairs!” to his lieutenant. The vigilant caught Fejelis’s other arm and between them they ran the prince out of the door while Fejelis was still trying to muster resistance. The mage vigilant who had been guarding Fejelis swung wildly around, her hair unraveling as Lukfer’s turbulence manifested itself in physical form. With a cry of dread, she fled after the prince and vigilants, leaving Tam alo
ne in the room.

  Through the link with Lukfer he sensed foulness, cold, life’s antithesis, life’s annulment, darkness. He smelled stone dust, brimstone, blood. He felt pain, shocking pain, utter disbelief, outrage, death. From the direction of the tower he felt a massive gathering surge of magic, magic with such rage impelling it as he’d never felt; he felt the magic rise, surge, shape itself, and plunge toward the far side of the river. With his own ears he heard the last immense explosion.

  He found himself down on hands and knees, in the brightly lit bedroom. On the bed, the bedsheets spun themselves into cords and danced like entranced serpents to a piper’s flute. Books leaped from the shelves to swirl, birdlike, around the ceiling. He came to his knees, panting, and sweeping out his magic to sense first Fejelis, deep in the palace, and then Beatrice and the children, across the river, and the artisans at their various lodgings, all waking in fear at the sound.

  Suddenly the dancing snakes collapsed back into mere bedsheets and the bird-books tumbled from the air. All that wild magic coiled and tightened around him. Lukfer’s strength shattered his like an eggshell.

  There was no refusing magic and will united to such purpose. As he felt himself being wrenched out of place, he brought his arms across his chest and bent over, as though by physical effort he could resist even a magical dismemberment.

  He landed whole, amidst billowing dust and the stench of brimstone, in Lukfer’s fine, wide main room. Shutters and window had been blown in, showing darkness beyond. The curtains lay shredded across the rubble. Part of the ceiling had collapsed. There was barely enough light to live by. Gasping, holding the hem of his jacket to his nose to filter the worst of the dust, he lurched toward Lukfer’s bedroom.

  He did not at first see Lukfer, for the great slabs of ceiling and wall that had fallen across the bed, but he could sense him. His eye went at once to the red gray ooze creeping outward across the sheets. The magic pummeled him, sending him stumbling forward, enough to see that Lukfer’s upper body and head were still intact. A fallen light, resting on the pillow, blazed upon the bloodless skin of Lukfer’s face as his head turned, wolf yellow eyes glaring up at him, pupils constricted with bright light and pain. Tam reached for the slabs, but Lukfer’s magic caught his. Lukfer said.

  Lukfer’s hand lay flung out and palm up, dust coated, its fingers clenching and unclenching. Tam fumbled for it as tears blurred his ordinary sight. All his magic sensed was Lukfer’s injury, legs and pelvis crushed, right arm and shoulder mangled, heart straining as blood saturated the mattress beneath him.

  Magic drew him in like a hand on the scruff of his neck, shook him, forced his attention outward. He could sense ripples of magic spreading out from the dying mage, a profligate and senseless expenditure of vitality. All around him he could sense the fragments of antithesis-of-life that had penetrated stone, wood, flesh, the same lethal magic that had been on the bolt that had brought down Fejelis, that had nearly killed himself. The ruins of the tower were riddled with it.

  But there was none of it in these rooms, he realized, as Lukfer’s magic cuffed him hard, so that, physically, he staggered. . . . There was no residue in Lukfer or these rooms, and he realized then that the spreading ripples of Lukfer’s magic were not random agonal spasms. He was purposefully rooting out the shell fragments, crushing and annulling them.

  Shocked, he recognized that not only was the power not random, but it was controlled, and with every second growing more so. After a hundred and thirty years a prisoner to his wild magic, and even as he died, Lukfer was finally becoming the mage he should have been. Tam could sense his exhilaration, his hunger to have this, to know this, no matter how briefly. It was not a hunger he could refuse. Lukfer’s power raced outward, and Tam scrambled after, sensing the faltering vitalities around them, feeling lineage mages struggling to weave integrity back into flesh, and failing and knowing their failure, and knowing despair. His magic caught and merged with Lukfer’s, spinning wide to destroy the many—so many—deadly fragments of magic- imbued matter. He had never, in his own turbulence and ambivalence around his own power, known anything so purely glorious. But gradually the effort was less and less Lukfer’s, more and more Tam’s own, as the body pinned beneath the stone slabs steadily weakened. But Lukfer’s will and magic were still strong enough, aware enough, to thrust aside one last effort at healing. Lukfer said.

  A lie; there was great pain, though it was starting to recede. The exhilaration was dwindling away to a sense of repletion, of resignation, a mortal weariness. Tam let the vast mesh of magic dispersed throughout the tower slip away from him, and crouched beside Lukfer. He did not care about others’ needs, only Lukfer’s. He felt no grief, only devastation and outrage at having to accept this. Lukfer whispered in his mind. He moved his head slightly, glazed yellow eyes seeking Tam.

  Tam felt Lukfer’s strained heart lose its rhythm, starved of blood and poisoned by the damaged body. His instinctive reaction was enacted before he thought; he reached in and caught Lukfer’s heart with his magic.

  Lukfer gasped. His stare returned from a great distance; he was frowning as though he had been interrupted in pleasant thought. The fingertips of Tam’s hand blanched with pressure on Lukfer’s chest. He would have to let go, Tam thought, he would have to let go, and for good. It had been wrong for him to take hold as he had. In another beat or two, he would let go. I would gift, Lukfer had said, before his heart tried to stop. Surely he meant the gift between mage and student of the master’s lifetime knowledge, seldom given in full. But surely, though Lukfer deserved to give it, he did not deserve to receive it.

  Lukfer’s eyes suddenly crinkled in a smile.

  And he opened his mind and his magic to Tam, delivering up all the experience and knowledge of a lifetime trying to tame his untamable strength, accrued unrealized until the final moments of his life.

  that wolf-bristle inner voice growled, and Lukfer’s magic surged up for the last time, sweeping away Tam’s hold on his heart, his hand on his chest, his touch on his mind—tossing Tam himself away to sprawl across rubble with bruising and winding force. Tam’s own magic snapped him upright; magic reached for Lukfer; magic grasped the fibrillating heart and tried to restore it once more, but Lukfer’s eyes were already fixed, their pupils slowly opening wide to death, and Tam had no more sense of Lukfer’s magic or presence in the world.

  With a stab of his hand Tam blasted apart the murdering slabs of stone and tile, flicking aside the splinters, punching away the billows of dust. He wound the blood-sodden sheets around Lukfer’s body, lifted the body into his arms, gathered the lights around himself with a twist of the will, and launched himself and Lukfer and the lights through the shattered window and over the balustrade, plunging in the heart of whirling points of light toward the rubble-strewn and half-lit plaza below. Whether he would have caught himself, he would never know, but magic surged up around him, snared him, and set him down as light as a mote of dust settling in a still afternoon. A voice shouted, “Tam!” and beyond the spinning lights, he glimpsed a figure hurdling rubble with an agility its gangliness belied. Light flickered across Fejelis’s dusty face as he halted, squinted, and tried to duck between the spinning lights. One hit his ribs; a second glanced off his head. Tam slapped the ensemble to the ground, where they shattered, the shards still brightly glowing.

  Fejelis scrambled to his feet as the Vigilance reached them. “I’m all right—my fault . . . entirely my fault . . . stupid of me.” He glanced around, seemed satisfied that violence was not going to be offered by his protectors, and then his eyes slid down to the burden in Tam’s arms. “. . . Magister Lukfer?” He took a long, shivering breath, and returned
his silvery gaze to Tam’s face again, stepping close enough that his chest touched Tam’s encircling arm. “. . . Don’t crack on me, Tam,” he said, in a low voice. “Don’t you dare crack on me.”

  He caught Tam’s arm as someone went to take Lukfer’s body from him and he thrust them back with his magic. “. . . Let go,” Fejelis ordered, but gently. “I know how hard it is for you, but it’s time to let him go.”

  So Lukfer had commanded him. He yielded up the lifeless shell that had held great and frustrated magic and a great and frustrated heart, and left the others to discover for themselves that no act of healing would recapture lost life. Their magic lapped around him, leaving him untouched. Their voices lapped against him, going unheard. Fejelis abruptly kicked his knees out from underneath him to dump him sitting on a stone slab, and called for more light.

  Tam blinked Fejelis’s face into focus, wondering how long he had been in the tower, that Fejelis, whom he had last seen being bundled into the safer interior, could now be outside. He felt chilled and ill, too aware of the wrongness of the night pressing down on him, as though the light of the world itself had been annulled.

  Fejelis gripped his shoulder. “. . . Tam, I am so sorry.”

  An echo of his own words to Fejelis, after Isidore’s death. How inadequate they were. He focused a small part of a mind roiling with grief and magic on his young charge. “You shouldn’t be out here.”

  “. . . I know.” Fejelis was wearing a plain vigilant’s uniform and helmet, though the disguise would not deceive anyone who observed the way the vigilants aligned themselves toward him. “My word was needed for them to bring lights out here.” He gestured, indicating the night, province of Darkborn. “. . . I justified it to myself with the thought that anyone who had been caught outside had found shelter or would already be dead or dying. . . .”

  “What . . . happened?”

  “. . . As far as I know, the tower was fired upon by cannon—Darkborn cannon—emplaced across the river. We had no prior warning, no prior information. The damage done is—” He gestured upward, up the great flank of the tower above them, dim above the lights except where light shone outward through gaps in the walls, limning broken stone or fractured windows.