Threading the Needle

by Joshua Palmatier

  Who had given that order?

  “We certainly will protect them, won’t we?”

  Marcus tried not to flinch as Lecrucius stepped up on one side of him. Iscivius boxed him in on the other side. “Where have you been?”

  “Organizing a little demonstration.”

  Marcus leaned forward, to better see the area Lecrucius and Iscivius were concentrating on. A section of the plaza had been cordoned off by the enforcers, a black stone spike jutting up out of the flagstone at its center. As he watched, Father’s sermon coming to a close, three men raced out of a nearby temple door carrying a snake made of paper and wooden struts, almost like a kite. They made it slither toward the crowd, which backed away in horror before surging back as the men danced away. Then they circled the spike—obviously a representation of the Needle—and laid the snake down before vanishing back into the temple at a sprint.

  A moment later, Marcus felt a surge on the ley from Lecrucius and, from the stone beneath the snake, white light bubbled upward. It fountained around the spike, completely obscuring the paper snake, and when it receded, the snake was gone, completely obliterated.

  Those gathered went wild, the roar of approval bouncing off of the buildings. Father raised both arms to the heavens and the thunderous noise grew even louder.

  Lecrucius stepped back from the edge of the roof. “Now all we need to do is make his prophecy come true.”

  Twenty-Three

  “NOW HOLD THAT ONE STEADY and rotate the other crystal slightly to the left.”

  Kara barely heard Marcus’ instruction, her eyes closed, her concentration on the panes of crystal floating in the depths of the Needle’s pit below her. Sweat beaded her forehead with the effort. She could feel the flows of the ley around her, feel it surge and eddy. The pane she held steady vibrated slightly as she reached out to pull the edge of another pane closer to her. As it shifted, the currents in the ley reacted, new eddies forming. They struck the remaining four panes, tried to alter their orientations, but each one of them was being monitored by one of the White Cloaks that surrounded the pit near them. They held the panes in place while Kara worked. She could sense them on the ley, knew they were watching her more closely than even Marcus behind her, mostly with suspicion. All of them were ready to seize control of the crystals if Kara showed even the slightest hint that she intended to destroy them.

  The situation was strangely and comfortably familiar: Marcus standing beside her, mentoring her as she learned something new about the ley, about her job as a Wielder. They had spent years like this, as partners, wearing the purple jackets in Erenthrall. That partnership had grown into something more, something deeper. Some of those old emotions rushed through her now, his presence soft and supportive. She wanted to lean back into him, let his arms close about her, let him hold her.

  She pulled herself back from the comfort with a jerk, hardened herself. Marcus’ subtle shift of weight wasn’t lost on her, though. “Careful. You have to hold the panes steady as you shift one pane or they’ll begin tilting and spinning out of control in a cascade effect. Once the pane is in its new position, keep them in place until you feel the new configuration take hold and stabilize.”

  “Is that what happened with the Shattering?” She felt the pane she was manipulating slip into place. But even as she held it, she felt a quiver of dissonance in the new setup. The alignment would hold once she let go of the panes, but it wasn’t perfect.

  She reached out, searching for what was wrong. It was like the stones Ischua had tested her with in Halliel’s Park so many years before. She could feel what belonged, what didn’t, and that the placement of the stones wasn’t quite right, all through the energy seeping up from the ground through her feet.

  “In a sense. From what we’ve been able to piece together here at the Needle, something catastrophic happened in Tumbor. It sent a surge through the system that hit the Nexus in Erenthrall hard enough that the delicate configuration of the crystals there was thrown off. I’m certain the Primes attempted to reestablish some kind of stability, but they were too slow. Or the surge was too powerful to overcome. The crystals shattered, and any chance that the concentrated power of the ley could be contained vanished.”

  Kara opened her eyes and faced him. “Boom.”

  “Boom.”

  She turned back to the crystals with a frown. “The new alignment isn’t quite right.”

  “Show me.”

  His presence flooded the Nexus below them, flowing around her. She repressed a pleasant shudder. “There. The pane Irmona controls. Its bottom corner should be skewed a touch up and to the left.”

  “I don’t sense anything wrong,” Irmona said from her position twenty paces away.

  “Can you correct it, without losing control of the Nexus?”

  “Marcus! She’s not one of us. She’s not a White Cloak.”

  Marcus ignored the warning in Irmona’s voice, kept his gaze steady on Kara. “Can you?”

  She reached out toward Irmona’s pane. Irmona resisted, refusing to release her hold on it, until Marcus said, “I am the Son.”

  She practically thrust the pane at Kara, retreating, but not far. Kara seized it before it could swing out of control, then steadied it back into position, but tilted the bottom just so.

  The Nexus rippled with the new alignment, ley surging upward and curling around in thicker tendrils, the power increasing significantly. Everyone felt the backwash as it spread outward into the small city. High above, the veins of ley in the Needle pulsed brighter. No doubt all of the ley globes throughout the temple and streets below had done so as well.

  In the pit, silence held, until: “There’s a reason you weren’t on track to become a Prime, Irmona.”

  She drew breath for some kind of scathing remark, but before she could voice it a rumble echoed through the chamber. Everyone tensed. “See! She’s triggered another quake! On purpose!”

  A wave of ley slammed into the Nexus from the direction of Erenthrall.

  The entire pit heaved, tossing the White Cloaks and Kara to the stone. Okata cried out as his legs slipped over the edge. He clawed at the lip with both hands as ley fountained up from below. Kara scrambled to her knees. “It wasn’t me! It came from Erenthrall!”

  The building jolted again. Irmona crawled toward the stairs. The ley leaped higher, splashed across the ledge on the side opposite Kara, the White Cloak who’d been positioned there enveloped before he could raise his arms in protection. It burned him from existence.

  Marcus snatched at Kara’s arm and tugged her toward the steps, but she jerked away. “Okata!”

  She stumbled to her feet, then staggered toward Okata. His torso had slipped down into the pit, so that he hung by his elbows, the edge tucked up under his armpits. His fingers dug into a crevice of the sandstone that made up the ledge, his knuckles white. Kara reached him as his right hand gave way. She snatched it and hauled backward. A moment later, Marcus appeared at her side, throwing himself flat on the stone and reaching out over the edge. He snagged a handful of Okata’s white shirt. Together, they dragged him back onto the ledge.

  All three scrambled toward the steps, where the rest of the White Cloaks were hunched over. No one had risked the stairs. Before they made it halfway, the earth heaved again. A raw, visceral crack resounded through the pit and debris rained down from above. Kara covered her head with her arms and flung herself to the stone floor as chunks of stone skittered around her. Dust filled the air, and she sucked in a lungful before covering her mouth with her shirt as she coughed.

  But the quake was finished. The earth settled, the rumble dying out. Someone sobbed in the group of White Cloaks. Behind Kara, the geyser of ley began to subside.

  “Irmona, Okata, Chekla, check the Nexus. Stabilize it if necessary. Everyone else, start checking the lines.”

  All of the Wielders broke from their huddle an
d made for the pit. Marcus turned to her. “Are you hurt?”

  “Bruised, but not seriously.”

  “Can you help?”

  “I don’t know the layout of the ley lines you’ve established—”

  “But you can follow them, see if they’re stable or not.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, striding toward the pit. The others were already arranging themselves around the lip, even Okata. Kara could sense them reaching out and seizing the ley, reorienting the crystals, some of them stretching farther, traveling the ley lines out of the Needle toward their sources.

  Kara climbed to her feet and brushed herself off, then paused. A huge crack ran up the stone wall of the pit, a gap maybe a hand wide, slicing through the stairs and jagging out onto the ledge they stood on, all the way to its lip. She couldn’t see where it ended.

  She turned her back on the fissure and headed toward the pit, her feet crunching in the grit that now coated the ledge.

  Marcus gave her a sideways glance as she halted beside him but said nothing. She reached out, the ley in chaos, but Okata, Chekla, and Irmona appeared to have the crystals in hand. So she dove into the ley lines below, found the one leading toward Erenthrall, and followed it. As she traveled, she realized the line wasn’t as strong as it had been before the quake.

  Then she hit Erenthrall and she knew why.

  “One of the lines in Erenthrall has been cut.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve been there recently. I know some of what you’ve altered there to set up the Nexus.”

  “It looks like the node in Dunlap has failed. It was feeding us a line from the northern Steppe—from Ikanth, Severen, and Dunmara.”

  “Was it cut on purpose?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  Kara followed him on the ley, stretching out from the network they’d set up around the distortion in Erenthrall to a node to the northwest. She realized with a wrench that the node he spoke of must be the one she and Artras had found in the small town just before they’d reached Erenthrall. There was a small line of ley leading toward it from the Needle, but then it dead-ended. No ley stretched off to the north.

  Without a connection, they couldn’t see what was happening to the north, whether natural or not.

  Kara returned to the nodes around Erenthrall. The empty space of the distortion was like a gaping wound in her own body that she couldn’t quite leave entirely alone. As she worked her way around the network, she kept probing it, unable to resist. She wanted to reach out and heal it, but it was too large. There hadn’t been enough Wielders in the Hollow—

  She halted, aware her body had stiffened back in the Needle.

  “What is it?”

  She swore silently. Marcus had noticed her sudden tension. She shook it off, sought desperately for a diversion as Marcus’ attention shifted toward her position.

  “It’s the network of nodes you have built up around Erenthrall.” She cleared her throat, forced herself to talk slower. “It’s not stable.”

  “None of the lines are stable anywhere.”

  “That’s the problem. No matter what configuration you give the crystals in the Nexus, it won’t be enough to hold the entire ley system in check. At some point, a line is going to shift, a node is going to give out. That’s going to cause a ripple in the system, and that ripple is going to hit the Nexus here and throw those crystals out of alignment again.”

  “That’s why we have White Cloaks here, constantly monitoring the system.”

  “How many White Cloaks do you have?”

  “We had thirty-three. But we lost Sanderson today.”

  Thirty might be enough. Even if they weren’t as strong as Marcus or even Dylan. And they had a Prime.

  But could she trust Marcus? Or Lecrucius? They were Wielders. But was that enough?

  There was too much history between her and Marcus, too much bad blood.

  “Can you see a way to stabilize the nodes around Erenthrall?” Marcus asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s too chaotic, the ley lines split. They’re trying to compensate for the loss of the Nexus, but there aren’t enough nodes.” They needed the nodes locked inside the distortion. They needed to heal it so they could repair the damaged network. Or at least patch it. Erenthrall by itself wouldn’t be enough anymore, not with Tumbor’s distortion sealing away even more nodes, but it would be a start.

  She pulled herself back toward the Needle, settling into her own body. “I’ll have to study what you already have set up in Erenthrall to see what I can do to fix it, but we don’t have much time. The quakes are getting stronger.” She pointed to where the jagged crack ran up the side of the pit. “We need to find a solution before the Needle crumbles and falls down around us.”

  The first sign that something was wrong was when one of the horses in Aurek’s group screamed and reared, legs kicking.

  From his perch on the bench of the Hollowers’ lead wagon with Artras, Allan glanced toward the Baron’s group of men, keeping a discreet distance to the east after the first few days of travel near each other had erupted in three brawls and one near rape, broken up by Bryce and Aurek together. Allan and Aurek had agreed to keep the two forces separated by at least a hundred yards after that. Since then, the troubles had died down, although they still eyed each other warily across the distance.

  Now, Allan stood, leg braced against the seat for balance, as the horse dropped down again to all fours, the shouts from the men nearby reaching them. “What’s happening?” Artras asked.

  Before Allan could answer, the wagon lurched. “What in hells?”

  The horse pulling them began tossing its head and snorting. It jerked forward, as if trying to escape its harness, then halted abruptly, nearly tossing Allan over the front and onto its rump. Gaven cursed.

  All four of their horses were acting odd, and more shouts came from Aurek’s group. Far distant, a wolf began to howl, and on the plains ahead, a flock of at least forty geese took sudden flight, honking in anger. Three horses, saddled still, broke from Aurek’s men, one of them with a man still caught in the stirrup. As they watched, the horse twisted and kicked him free. He lay where he’d fallen and didn’t move.

  At the front of their small caravan, Bryce suddenly spun and shouted, “Quake!”

  A second later, Artras sucked in a sharp breath. “It’s coming up the ley line.”

  Then it struck.

  The earth heaved. The wagon Allan stood on bucked. The horse squealed, a hideous sound Allan had never thought to hear coming from any animal. If he hadn’t been holding onto the front for support after the horse stopped so abruptly, he would have been thrown. Artras clung to the side, the entire contraption rattling in the tremors that followed. Men were bellowing, everyone crouched low to the ground. Aurek’s men were doing the same.

  After another, smaller heave, the trembling faded. Everyone began to pick themselves up, dusting each other off.

  Artras righted herself. “That came from the Needle.”

  “Stronger than the few we’ve experienced in the past week.”

  “And the quakes are coming closer together.”

  Allan didn’t know what to say. They were running out of time. “How far to the Needle?”

  “Hard to say. At least three days at this pace, maybe more.”

  “Then we’d better start moving faster.”

  “Look!” Gaven pointed toward the west, where a plume of dust was rising from the land, blowing away from them. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” Allan caught Bryce moving toward him, but motioned the Dog toward the west before stepping over Artras’ legs and hopping down from the wagon. He turned back to the others. “Keep everyone here. Bryce and I will check it out.”

  “There’s someone headed over from Aurek’s group.”

  �
�Deal with them.”

  “Do you want to stop here for the day?”

  “No! If Aurek’s men are up to it, get everyone back in motion.” He cut through the men clustered around the wagons, ignoring their questioning looks.

  “Another quake,” Bryce muttered as they intercepted each other, both trotting out toward the distant smear of dust. It was beginning to settle. “They’re getting stronger.”

  “How did you know it was coming?”

  “The animals back in the Hollow acted the same way before one of the stronger ones earlier.”

  They fell silent, moving swiftly. The dust settled completely. Allan’s chest began to ache with effort, his muscles to protest—

  Then Bryce’s hand shot out and pulled him up short. “What—?”

  But then he saw.

  The earth had opened up before them, a fissure over ten feet wide, earth from the edge crumbling down into the depths. He heard stone hitting the sides as it fell, but he couldn’t tell when it hit bottom.

  Hernande’s words echoed in his head: The ley system may end up ripping the entire continent apart.

  “How long is it?”

  Bryce took a step forward, then jumped back as a chunk of grassy earth fell away a few steps ahead of them. “Hard to tell. Long enough. It’s not a sinkhole.”

  “No, it’s not. Hernande warned us this might happen. I can’t say I believed him, not truly. Until now.”

  They stared down into the fissure, neither one moving, until movement on the far side caught Allan’s attention.

  A Wolf loped into sight, appearing from behind a fold in the land. It trotted up to the edge of the fissure, its motions slightly unnatural, its tongue lolling out of its mouth. It halted and faced them, faced Allan.