Summoner's Bond (The Endless War Book 4)

by D. K. Holmberg

Lachen glanced at Wansa and Oliver. “Many things, but the first might be hardest for you.” She waited as he paused. “I would ask that you sit on the council and serve.”

  Alena squeezed her eyes shut. She wasn’t sure that she’d be able to serve on the council, just as she wasn’t sure that she could not.

  “And the rest?”

  “You won’t care for that, either.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll need to continue to teach. We must have our shapers ready. The next battle comes soon, and we are woefully unprepared.”

  53

  Jasn

  If I could find the college, could the Khalan?

  —Lachen Rastan, Commander of the Order of Warriors

  Jasn paced inside the simple room that they’d placed him in. It wasn’t the same as the one he’d been given when he first came to Hyaln, but there still was nothing in it other than a bed and a basin of water. The other room had clothes Katya had arranged for him, but he’d preferred to remain in the clothing of Ter that he’d come with.

  He hadn’t seen her since she had been taken. But then, he hadn’t seen anyone since she’d been taken. He was held in this room, a prisoner of sorts, though he had no guards that he could tell. The door to the room had been sealed in such a way that he couldn’t easily open it, not without shaping it, and that would risk him remaining in Hyaln, he suspected.

  So he waited.

  With each passing hour, waiting grew more difficult.

  How long had it been since they had come for Katya?

  Jasn set his hands on the door and used a shaping of water to probe for a way out.

  The shaping was repelled.

  Now that he’d been here, he knew a few ways to do that. One involved summoning, but that would require that the summoner remain present at all times. That seemed unlikely. The other was a rune trap, but unless he knew which rune trap had been used, he wouldn’t be able to counter it.

  A shaping might be able to hold him here as well, but there would be some residual effects from the shaping, something that he could detect.

  What can you tell me about this seal? he asked water.

  Within Hyaln, the presence of water was felt differently than he had felt it in the barracks, or anywhere in Ter for that matter. Water seeped through the stone, moving slowly, methodically, but it also was there in the steady crashing of waves along the shores. There was power here, more than in some places.

  An image flashed into his mind, formed by water as it seeped through the door, drawn either by his connection to it, a shaping, or summoning. Jasn had found that sometimes they were all the same, at least the way that he used them. Especially with water. It was what made his water shaping—or summoning—so much more potent. And Rehnar had demonstrated that water could do much more than heal.

  It was something that he hadn’t given much thought to when he’d been in Atenas and then in Ter. He’d always used water for healing. Most in Atenas only used water for healing. Even when he’d gone to the barracks, there hadn’t been much that he’d done with water offensively. Jasn had always reached for earth or wind, even fire, though he wasn’t as potent with fire as with some of the other elements.

  Jasn recognized the image.

  Not because it was one that he’d used before, but Tobin had asked him to go through enough of the texts stored in the library that Jasn had come across it before. He didn’t know how it could be used, but knowing the rune trap meant that he could find a way to undo the seal on the door.

  Can you help me undo it?

  This is not water.

  Does it matter?

  With this it does.

  What is it if not water?

  Darkness.

  Jasn shivered.

  That someone would so brazenly use a rune trap for the darkness in Hyaln meant that the Khalan did not hide as he had suspected. It meant that Jasn was likely in danger. It meant that Katya was likely in danger, whether she knew it—and believed it—or not.

  He attempted a shaping but nothing about the rune changed.

  Would summoning work?

  He tried a series of summons, first earth, then wind and fire, but Jasn wasn’t nearly as skilled with summoning as Rehnar. He could use it for blunt work, but this required a fine touch.

  And if water wouldn’t assist him, if the connection to it wouldn’t help, then perhaps he would be trapped.

  Jasn sighed. There had to be a way past it.

  Ciara had managed to summon something that countered the darkness and Thenas. He didn’t have the same skill with summoning as her either, but he didn’t need to to free himself from this rune trap. All he needed was to find a small fraction of what she did.

  But what was it?

  Not one of the elements or elementals or warrior shapers would have managed to defeat Thenas. It had taken each of them the first time, shaping from all of them, to defeat Thenas and to help the draasin.

  Was there any combined shaping that he could use?

  The only combined shapings that he knew involved the warrior traveling. Anything else was not useful.

  But it was the only thing that he could think of.

  Jasn focused on water first, letting his awareness of the element fill him. Then he added earth. Earth was complementary to water, and an element that he had some skill with, making it easier to add to water. To that, he added wind, and then finally fire.

  He held this awareness within him, shifting it through different combinations of shaping, but none really had any impact on what he wanted.

  But all were focused outward.

  Attempting anything different, focusing the shaping inwardly, could be dangerous. Most didn’t think that shapings could be used in such a way, but his experience with water had taught him otherwise. He could be injured, but then the connection to water elementals seemed able to counter that.

  To get free, and to help find Katya, he would try.

  Jasn shifted the shaping and focused it on himself.

  When it settled through him, he gasped.

  Cold and hot mixed together. Pain flared, searing along his skin, and then deeper, as if into his bones and beyond. The pain prevented him from focusing. He began to crash, his mind failing, his body beginning to crumble.

  The shaping would destroy him.

  But then the elemental power again took over, surging through him.

  Water began to restore him as it always did, building up what he had broken. In the past, he had done so negligently, not caring if he lived or died, but this time, he did so knowing that water would help, and counting on it.

  The pain receded.

  Jasn was left with the awareness of his shaping. He clung to the shaping, forcing it through him, pressing with a kind of intensity that he had reserved in the past for attacks, only this time he attacked himself.

  Something shifted inside of him, and he had an awakening.

  As he did, he knew he could reach for more.

  Jasn pulled on that sense, not really knowing what it was, only that it was a part of him. With this, he sent it through the pattern on the other side of the door, the rune trap designed to hold him in place.

  Light flared through the edges of the door and the trap cracked.

  Jasn reached for the door and pulled it open.

  One man stood at the end of the hall, a long staff in his hand. When he saw Jasn, he started tapping it in quick succession. A summons.

  Jasn used water and pushed with the force of a river. The man resisted, but there was only so much anyone could resist of that onslaught. He was forced back and crashed into the wall behind him, where Jasn held him as he raced forward.

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “You have made a grave mistake.”

  “No. I think the Khalan have made a mistake.” At the mention of the name, at Jasn’s acknowledgment that he knew of them, the man’s eyes widened. Jasn used a shaping of earth and pressed down until the man passed out.

  He paused and looked arou
nd. Doors lined the hall, and he suspected that he was in some sort of prison wing of the castle. He used earth and inadvertently dipped into the strange sense that had awoken within him, and could tell that there were dozens of others trapped along the hall.

  How was it that he managed to detect so many? Had they been here the entire time and he hadn’t known?

  None of them were Katya. He moved on. He would return once he found her and once he knew what was happening here. A division within Hyaln, but had it become so stark that they would attack so openly?

  Unless something had changed.

  With the continued push from Tenebeth, things had been changing. The darkness continued to sweep over the land, growing more and more potent, to the point where the darkness no longer feared others knowing what was coming.

  That was what he needed to fear.

  Jasn pulled open the door and hurried from the hall. He couldn’t detect Katya with earth yet, but he maintained his awareness, ready to reach her as quickly as he could.

  As he did, he added some of that strange sense that he had deep within him, that sense of awakening that he’d detected. Without knowing what it was, or why he should be aware of it, Jasn let himself draw upon it.

  As he did, he felt a flash from Katya, almost like a sudden understanding.

  And he knew where to find her.

  He raced through the castle and reached a wide door with dozens of rune traps. None were those he recognized, but he knew enough about them to know how to press his shaping power through them. As he did, he tapped on his leg, drawing on water, and shaping at the same time. The door resisted him. Not until he added a shaping of that new sense within him did he manage to open the door.

  Jasn didn’t want to think about what he had managed. The more that he managed to use that awareness within him, and the more things that it seemed to work on within Hyaln, the more that he suspected that he had somehow awoken spirit within him. Had he somehow shaped himself to become one of the Enlightened? It wasn’t something that he would have thought possible, but then, he wouldn’t have believed it possible for him to summon elementals. For that matter, he wouldn’t have thought it possible for him to master the rune traps as he had.

  The other side of the door opened into a wide chamber.

  Jasn stopped. The door closed on him, swinging back so that he was left in darkness. Using a shaping, he added power to the shaper lanterns he sensed hanging all along the walls, and they sent the room into a bright glow.

  An older man stood at the other end of the room. Was it Jasn’s imagination or did shadows seem to swirl around him? The man stepped forward, draped in a long cloak. His eyes burned with a dark intensity and he surveyed everything around him as if expecting someone else.

  “Only you?” the man asked.

  “What is this?”

  The man stepped forward, his feet moving in something like a quick pattern. A summoner, then. Was he one of the Khalan?

  “This is the Varden. I would ask how you managed to reach it, but it appears that you’re not sure yourself.”

  Had the man managed to know his thoughts? Katya had done the same, and he wished he understood if there was some way to prevent it. It was another thing that he needed to learn while in Hyaln.

  “I’m not as helpless as you would believe,” Jasn said.

  The man danced forward a few steps. Be ready, he sent to the water elemental.

  “Oh, I should think that you are not helpless at all, Wrecker of Rens.” He smiled at Jasn’s expression. Other than Katya, he hadn’t thought that anyone had known him by that name here. But then, he wasn’t that person anymore. He’d told Katya that, and hadn’t fully believed it, but he did now. Much like he wasn’t the same person who once would have done anything for Katya. That man was gone. Dead.

  Perhaps he had succeeded in killing him when he’d been in Rens. And here he’d thought he had been a failure.

  “Why do you smile?” the man asked.

  “Because that man is dead,” Jasn said.

  “And that amuses you?”

  “No. It pleases me.”

  The man took another few steps forward. His feet tapped as he did, moving so quickly that Jasn could barely see it. If he summoned, Jasn might not be able to do anything to stop him. If the man were one of the Varden, a master in one of the areas, he might not be able to do anything anyway.

  “Why have you come here, Wrecker Who is Not?”

  “I’ve come for Katya. She is here.”

  He frowned. “Katya. We have none by that name in Hyaln.”

  “Ilyana. Issa. You may choose what you call her, or she may, but the person is the same.”

  “Is she? Are we not only the names that we give ourselves?”

  Jasn shrugged. “I’m not here to debate philosophy. We are who we choose to be, nothing more.”

  “And who do you choose to be, Wrecker Who is Not?”

  Jasn smiled at the man, focusing on his sense of Katya. She was here, in the room somewhere, shrouded from him. Ignoring the other man, he called on water, a summoning and a mixture of his abilities combined, and reached where he knew that she would be.

  When he tried to push past the shroud, he found that he couldn’t, much as he couldn’t open the door to the Varden and he couldn’t open the door to his cell. But when he added a mixture of that other, that sense he had awakened—spirit or whatever it was—he managed to disperse the shrouding.

  Darkness failed and fell, and then he saw her.

  Katya looked over at him.

  The man made a stuttering few steps toward. “Interesting. Few have ever managed to disperse the shadows so easily. I think that I’ll…”

  He looked up, his head cocked as if listening to something. As he did, Jasn realized that he heard something as well. A harsh and shrill cry, one full of power and rage and chaos that burned through his soul. The new awakening within him reverberated with it, as if attempting to answer it.

  The man glanced at Jasn and then Katya.

  Jasn felt a buildup of power and pushed against it using everything that he’d learned in his time in Hyaln. Shadows swirled around the man, and then, in a flash of darkness, he disappeared.

  54

  Jasn

  I have felt the touch of darkness and managed to resist. I attribute success to my training, but others would not be as successful. That is why we must be vigilant, and why we must search for those who might be tainted, even if they do not appear it. Those within Atenas are especially in danger.

  —Lachen Rastan, Commander of the Order of Warriors

  Jasn stood with Katya on the roof of the castle, looking up at the sky as dozens of draasin circled. They were nothing but shadows at first, but they swooped toward Hyaln, flying swiftly. Smoke and fire preceded them and every so often, their cry pierced the sky. It was the same cry that he’d heard when he had been in the Varden with Katya.

  “How is this possible?” she asked.

  She had been silent other than to remark on the fact that he had somehow managed to reach spirit. That would be the only way that he would be able to reach the Varden. The room was protected in such a way that only the combination of different abilities would allow entrance. That Jasn had managed to do it alone was unheard of.

  “I don’t know,” he started.

  He had seen one of the creatures before, the one Alena had called Sashi.

  And of the three figures sitting on the draasin’s back, he recognized the beautiful dark-haired woman in the center. Her bright eyes seemed to see him, and somehow he sensed relief in her.

  “You recognize her,” Katya said.

  Jasn nodded. “She is from Rens. They call them nya’shin.”

  Katya said the word to herself, a smile pulling on her lips as she did. “Who does?”

  “The people of Rens, I suspect. Why?”

  Katya shook her head. “Cheneth is a sneaky bastard, isn’t he?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  �
��The term he chose. Yashin. One without talent.”

  “How do you know it was Cheneth?”

  “Because he was given the name here.”

  The draasin landed and Ciara climbed down. She looked from Jasn and then at Katya before starting forward hesitantly. “Jasn Volth. Are… are you well?”

  Jasn took a few steps forward and almost took her hands. The time in Hyaln had shown him that he had changed. The feelings that he’d thought he had for Katya were gone, but that didn’t mean his ability to care was gone. He still had that, and still had the same desire for affection. He had changed, but not so much that he didn’t recognize it.

  And he understood the feelings that he’d had around Ciara now for what they were. He had changed.

  He nodded slowly in answer. “How are you here? Who are they?”

  A few other draasin landed, and on one of them, he saw the old woman Olina.

  His frown deepened.

  “Ciara?” He reached for her and took her hand. She didn’t resist.

  Her heart fluttered, and with a flush of excitement, he realized that she felt the same as him. “That is for another time,” she said. “But I’ve found the draasin. Many have been restored. And the Wise have returned to Hyaln.”

  Book 5 of The Endless War, Seal of Light, coming in December 2016. Sign up here to find out details!

  Also check out Book 1 of The Shadow Accords trilogy: Shadow Blessed

  The A'ras of Nyaesh have a terrifying reputation: skilled swordsmen, owners of powerful magic, and ruthless killers. When they kill her parents, Carth discovers her father has trained her for shadow magic she never knew she possessed.

  She must use those skills to stay alive, discover a way to find answers, and avenge her parents if she can. Only the discovery of a greater threat than the A'ras forces her to risk herself for new friends and a home she never wanted but now can’t imagine losing.

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