As he watched Sevn lead, he wondered if he could set him up for failure, the same way that Shade had been set up for failure. If he could… Shade might be able to work his way back to where he wanted to be. A difficult game that he would play, but one that he needed to try.
The alternative meant that the balance would fail, and if the balance failed, they would lose the ability to summon the night. Worse, they would lose control over the night. That scared him more than anything else.
49
Alena
Atenas responded with war, claiming a Rens incursion. There was never any evidence for this.
—Lachen Rastan, Commander of the Order of Warriors
Alena sent spirit through her sword and dispelled the shadows that had grown up around her. As she did, she saw destruction all along the street. Chunks of rock were thrown up, cobblestones set into the ground ripped free and thrown into buildings. Walls collapsed and fires smoldered. The stink of char filled the air.
What happened while she faced Not-Margo?
What of Wansa and Oliver?
Alena carefully made her way down the street, hurrying toward the spot she had last seen either of them occupying. As she neared, she saw a body lying on the ground. Her breath caught, thinking that it might be either of them, but she didn’t recognize the person buried beneath a pile of rubble. The short staff the man held onto with his crushed arm was familiar, though.
Not a shaper of Ter.
Shouting caught her attention, and she hurried down the street.
With a pulse of shaping nearby, a wall bulged and then started to erupt toward her. Alena caught it with a shaping of wind and pushed back and against it, settling it into place.
There came another shaping.
Alena jumped onto a shaping of wind and looked down. A smaller man crouched in the shadows between two buildings, more shadows starting to congeal around him the longer that he stood there. She sent a shaping of spirit at him, dispersing the shadows, and then landed in front of him.
He smiled darkly as she did, and her ring flared painfully cold.
Alena waved her sword at him and then leaped toward him, sending at him spirit laced more heavily with fire. When it struck, he collapsed.
She paused to kick his staff from his hand and checked to see if he still breathed, but his heart no longer beat. Alena wished that she could find sympathy for him, but it wouldn’t come.
Back on the street, she scanned for others. Someone had to be responsible for what had happened here.
There was no one that she could clearly see. It was more than just shadows stretching across the night that obstructed her ability to see anything; it was as if the darkness itself had grown thicker and the night began to swallow everything around her.
She neared the base of the tower but still she hadn’t found any sign of Oliver or Wansa.
There came an occasional pop, the sound like a wet log snapping in a fire, and chunks of buildings exploded outward. Alena scanned the streets, looking for who might be responsible, but found nothing.
Heavy rumbling thundered through the street, not quite the sound of a shaper traveling but close enough to make her nervous. If there were more of these shadow shapers coming to Atenas, they wouldn’t be able to counter them.
Alena paused near the clearing outside the tower. The shaper circle was shrouded in shadows. With a shaping of spirit, she dispelled them, sending them scattering until they struck the tower itself and then faded.
She frowned. Why should the shadows collapse near the stone?
And why would they have focused so long on crawling up the tower itself?
Unless there was something about the stone that mattered.
She hadn’t had the chance to do much more than try to clear the shadows that crawled along the stone, but she had tried to dispel them with a shaping of spirit when she first encountered Wansa. Now that she was here, back in the night, she saw the way that the shadows seemed to writhe and crawl. Not only up to the wall of the tower, but as if they intended to crawl into the stone as well.
With the shadows gone, she stopped near the shaper circle and touched the stone.
The ring went cold.
Alena shaped through the sword, pushing as much as she could through it. The blade blazed a brilliant white, and she unleashed the shaping on the stone, attacking the darkness that moved along it.
The sword pulsed, the light surging, and then it began to fade.
Blast!
Whatever had attacked the tower was too powerful for her. More powerful than anything that she could summon through the sword.
As she stepped back, a chill bite came to the air, one that she had experienced often enough that she recognized the need to fear it.
Alena spun.
Three men dressed in dark cloaks stood across from her. All carried long staffs, these much like the one that she had seen with the men who had attacked Ciara.
Green light began to diffuse from the end of their staffs.
She pulled on a shaping of spirit. Power again surged in her sword, and the blade glowed a bright white. One of the men stepped forward, tapping his staff as he went, the green light flaring more brightly.
Alena started with him, sending her shaping at him, lancing it toward him with a sharper shaping of fire, much as she had the man in the alley.
He blocked the attack.
The others stepped to the side, flanking her.
She wouldn’t be able to withstand all three. She might be able to shape spirit, but Not-Margo had been right—Alena was inexperienced. There was much about spirit that she didn’t know, that she hadn’t had the time to understand. And these shapers—or whatever they were—had experience with the darkness, and the elementals, that made them powerful.
Alena reached for a shaping that would carry her away, drawing lightning toward her, for once not worried about whether she would harm someone as she did, but the shaping failed.
The nearest man smiled.
Had she seen him before? Were any of these the same men who had come for Ciara?
“Where is she?” Alena demanded.
The nearest man tapped his staff. The thick shadows that trailed from the end of it began to reach for her, and she flicked her sword toward them, dissipating them again. “You were there that night,” one of the other men said.
Alena risked glancing at him and barely managed to deflect the darkness that he sent toward her. “Where is she?” she demanded again.
The three began tapping their staffs at the same time. The rhythm ripped through her, making her head throb and the bones in her body ache. Her arm began to feel tired, and she started to lower her sword before realizing what she did.
“No!”
She jumped toward one of the men. If she fell here, she would slow this attack, give the others a chance to gather and hopefully give Atenas a chance to fight back. But it might already have been too late. The shadows ate away at the stone of the tower. She had sensed the way that the stone had begun to suffer, the way that it crumbled. Without a shaping of more strength than anything she had ever seen—and without the aid of the elementals—the tower would fall. Atenas would fall. Ter would fall.
The man caught her sword with his staff, but the suddenness of her attack had caught him off guard. He took a step back, which gave her the time that she needed to press forward. Alena was more than a competent swordsman. That was one of the things that Cheneth had stressed, and when she had first come to the barracks, she had worked with her sword almost as much as she worked with shaping, challenging herself to face increasingly skilled swordsmen.
She pivoted, turning the blade as she did, and sliced up.
Her sword caught his stomach.
His staff fell, but not before shadows began to grow around him.
She stepped forward, slashing down with her sword. Two against one would make much better odds. The man had disappeared.
Alena pivoted again, shaping as she did an
d ready to strike.
The other two men converged on her.
Both dragged their staffs as they did. She might not understand it, but their magic depended on their ability to summon. If she could disrupt that, she might be able to stop them. But that depended on her managing to control their summons.
Alena called on wind, using a shaping to throw their staffs from their hands.
With two sharp cracks on the ground, the lead man dispelled the wind.
She tried using earth, but they deflected that as well.
Fire. Given her connection to the elementals, it had to be fire.
She pulled on fire through the sword, and it burst into flames, burning more brightly than it had when she shaped spirit.
The lead man glanced at her sword, his eyes narrowing. “Perhaps we should have pursued her sooner,” he said.
“No matter. We have her now.”
Alena sent the shaping at them. More fire than she had ever shaped before streaked from the end of her sword. Heat sizzled in the air.
And then it faded, the steady chill tamping it down, as if the shadows and the darkness intended to swallow it completely.
Shaping again, she swung her sword, forcing earth and fire through the blade as it crashed down on the nearest man’s staff. The staff cracked and then split.
She started to spin, thinking that she might actually be able to stop them, when something struck her back.
She spun the opposite way but was hit on the other side.
Pain seared through her body. She lost her shaping, but she managed to hang onto her sword, knowing that if she lost it, she would have no way of defending herself.
The next strike caught behind her legs, and she fell.
Pain made her vision fade, or was that the shadows pressing around her?
It was the same as had happened when she had lost Ciara.
Not again!
She pulled on fire, sending it through the sword, calling to the draasin, wishing they could hear, that they could help. If her fire could push away some of the night and the shadows, what would the draasin be able to do? How much more would they manage than what she had handled?
The men stopped hitting her.
Someone grunted, followed by another.
Was it possible that she had managed to reach them with her shaping?
Alena doubted it. The attack had been unfocused and untargeted. There would have been nothing that it would have managed to strike.
She heard a voice. Were these men taunting her, using her name?
A hand grabbed under her arm, and she panicked, squeezing her sword as she swung out from her.
“Balls, Alena!” Oliver snapped.
“Oliver?” she whispered.
“What else did you think?”
A warm sense of water washed over her as Oliver healed her. Pain that had nearly incapacitated her, pain that had made it so that she couldn’t see, began to fade, slowly receding until it was no more.
She blinked and saw Oliver kneeling next to her. He held a wet spirit stick in one hand, but why would it be wet?
Not only wet, she realized. Blood.
One of the shadow shapers lay nearby, no longer moving, the staff that he carried still clutched in his hand. She kicked at it, sending it skittering across the stones until it collided with the tower.
Wansa stood next to Oliver. Her spirit stick was wet as well.
“You killed them with those?” she asked.
Oliver frowned. “Nothing else seemed to work. Almost as if they were protected from anything else that we could do. But with these… with this, I can jab them. Doesn’t take much shaping then.”
“Hurry, Oliver,” Wansa said.
“What happened to the two of you?”
Wansa glanced back. “After the explosion, we were tossed across the street. Had it not been for Oliver… My leg…”
Alena noted the rip in the fabric of her robe.
“What of Yanda? Any word?”
Oliver frowned. “Not from her. I keep thinking that she’ll turn up. She’s a clever one, that Yanda. Never know what she might be able to do to.”
Alena could hear the anguish in his voice and knew he worried even though he tried to put up a confident front.
“Were you attacked by others?” she asked.
“Twice. Both times, there was only one attacker,” Wansa said.
“Still took the two of us to defeat them,” Oliver said.
Wansa nodded, her mouth pulled into a tight frown. “These spirit sticks are the key. I think you might have the right idea turning yours into a sword,” she said.
Alena stood and took a deep breath. They needed to move before there was another attack. In the time that they’d been here, there had been another dozen explosions. If even half of them were shadow shapers appearing, then she needed to keep moving. Hopefully, Cheneth would arrive soon, but even if he did, there might not be anything that he could do to help when he appeared.
She moved forward, shocked to see the entire street had been destroyed. Buildings on either side had collapsed, leaving a smoldering ruin behind.
Atenas was falling.
The tower still stood, but for how much longer? The shadows had weakened it as well.
She turned back to Oliver and Wansa, only to see five shadow shapers standing at the base of the tower.
She had barely survived three, but five working together would be too much, even with Oliver and Wansa to help.
“We should—”
The air thundered before she could finish. There came a flash of light. For a moment, she hoped it was Cheneth with others from the barracks. When the cloud of dust cleared, she realized that it wasn’t Cheneth at all.
“Commander,” Wansa whispered as a shaping of earth pulled her from her feet. Another knocked Oliver to the ground. Both lay unmoving.
Without saying a word, the Commander tapped his foot on the ground in quick succession. With a dawning horror, Alena realized that it was a summoning, much like the shadow shapers.
The Commander had betrayed them. And he had come to see the full destruction of Atenas.
50
Ciara
Countless lives have been lost on both sides, but I could not end the war, not once I learned what else we risked.
—Lachen Rastan, Commander of the Order of Warriors
Carrying Doln through the halls of the tower was easier using a summons to earth. Ciara hurried, reaching Sinsa’s room and kicking open the door with another burst of earth. She cowered on the other side, as if expecting another assault.
“Doln?” Sinsa whispered.
“Come with me. We need to go.”
“But Shade—”
“I’ve held him off for now, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it if he returns with help. And I need to reach the draasin before he does. So if you want to go home, then you need to come with me.”
“But I haven’t learned everything I came here for.”
“You’ve learned all he was willing to teach. Look at Doln! This is what Shade would do to you.” And what he would have done to Ciara, had she not managed to reach her j’na and find a measure of recovery.
Sinsa stared at her for a moment and Ciara worried that she wouldn’t come along, but then she nodded.
Ciara ran down the hall, carrying Doln. Was there anything in her room she needed? Other than her j’na, she had nothing when she’d come to the tower, and she would leave with the same. But she would reach Sashi if she could. The draasin might not forgive her for what she had attempted, but she had to try.
She took the stairs two at a time, racing up until the heat from the draasin pressed on her again. Ciara turned down the hall, relieved to see that the door was still closed. With a summons, she forced it open. Interesting how the summons was so much stronger when she requested rather than forced the elementals into it. And she didn’t have to use any physical movements when she visualized what she wanted.
; Sashi stared at the wall, unmoving.
Whatever Shade had done to her remained.
Ciara slammed her j’na into the ground. Light surged once more.
Sashi lifted her head and looked at her with eyes that reflected sadness and a mixture of fear.
“I won’t hurt you,” Ciara said. “I didn’t know. He took away my memories. He forced me to do things that I would not have done.” But that wasn’t entirely true. She had done what she wanted, searching for power, but so that she could serve her people and her village. That was what had motivated her when Shade had influenced her thoughts. Now, what would motivate her?
Escape. And then defeating Tenebeth. No others would be tormented the way that she had, made to forget who they were, not if there was anything that she could do to prevent it.
The draasin snorted.
Ciara tapped her j’na again, this time, more softly. “Look. Light. Not darkness. I never managed to summon the darkness.”
What would have happened had she managed?
That seemed to be Shade’s goal, but he wasn’t like Thenas. There had been darkness in Shade, but he seemed in control of it, not at all like what she had sensed when she faced Thenas. There, it had seemed that Tenebeth had been in control.
“Please,” Ciara said, tapping her j’na in a familiar rhythm. She added to this a visualization of the same, holding her intent and a request in her mind. “We need to get to safety, Sashi. I will protect you. I will not let Tenebeth claim you again.”
The draasin unfurled her wings and shook herself, standing in the room until the spikes on her back pressed against the stone overhead. Her tail switched, slamming into the rock.
“Please,” Ciara asked.
The draasin lowered her head, meeting her eyes. A voice flared in Ciara’s mind, different than Reghal. Talyn. That is my name.
Ciara.
I know you, Little Light.
A burst of white erupted, once more filling the room, but this time, there was no focus to it. It came not from her j’na but from everywhere around her.
Summoner's Bond (The Endless War Book 4) Page 26
