Mentally, she picked herself up. Deep beneath Erenthrall, she stepped back from the wall of the ley line she’d clung to since discovering the secondary pool of ley and centered herself, forced herself to think. Not like a Wielder, but like a Prime.
There was too much ley. The system couldn’t handle it, because the only parts of the system left in Erenthrall were the secondary lines outside the center of the city. These were the nodes that had powered the outer districts, the barges, the heat, the ley globes that lined the streets and lit the interiors of the buildings of those that could afford to pay for it. All of the major junctions and the Nexus itself were sealed up inside the distortion.
“There’s nothing left that’s strong enough for this much ley to anchor itself to.” She was aware that Marcus was still shouting at her, that the pit at the Needle was heaving under another quake, that part of the pit’s wall had collapsed. “Everything that we could use to control the ley is locked inside the distortion.”
She turned from the awe-inspiring view of the secondary reservoir overflowing its boundaries toward the distortion overhead.
“It all comes back to the distortion. We have to heal the distortion.”
She still wasn’t certain there was enough power in the Nexus and strength in the White Cloaks and Wielders remaining to do it, even with the reservoir so close, but they had to try. Erenthrall was being torn apart.
Far distant, in the pit at the Needle, she grabbed Marcus’ arm. “I’m going to try to heal the distortion over Erenthrall. It’s the only way to stop the surges coming from the city. We need the nodes locked inside. I need you to channel as much of the energy from the Nexus as you and the White Cloaks can handle to me.” She tightened her grip. “Send it even if it might burn me out.”
He tensed, ready to argue with her, the emotions felt more through her fingers than seen. Her concentration was on the distortion in Erenthrall, on its edges, on not allowing it to daunt her. Then Marcus breathed out, the air a gust in her face.
“All right.” His voice was laced with an old pain. “Give us a moment.”
He leaned in and kissed her, a light touch on her lips, and then he pulled out of her grasp. She focused on the distortion. She stretched herself outward, as she’d done as a Wielder before the Shattering, extending herself so that she could feel the edges of the fractured reality, the planes and facets, the jagged arcs of lightning and the brilliant-colored arms. As she sank herself into its surface, noting the fractures that were smaller and should be healed first, the intricacies of the shards and how one would collapse upon the other if healed too quickly, images of this distortion forming played across her mind. She’d been lying on the stone steps outside the Nexus, the Wolves led by Hagger closing in, all of her strength gone. Artras had stood over her protectively, dagger glinting in the distortion’s pure white light above. Then that light had flickered. Its penetrating whine had cut off and it had collapsed down to a pinprick, then nothing.
And exploded outward, the thick arms swirling overhead, reaching greedily toward the city, reality breaking in an elegant, beautiful whirl of energy that had consumed all of them there on the steps—Allan, Artras, Dylan, Hagger, the Wolves, and Kara.
Then it had slowed and set, reality halting in their shard, time stopped. Only Allan had been unaffected. Without Allan, they would have all been lost.
How many others were trapped in the shards even now? It wasn’t the same distortion as before. There were ragged holes in the edges now, from where Kara and the White Cloaks had healed individual shards before realizing how useless a solution that had been. But they’d seen what had happened in a few of those shards—like the group that had hoarded their food supplies but ultimately killed themselves when they realized no one was coming to free them. Yet there were thousands of shards, must be thousands of people still trapped, still alive in shards where time had slowed or been halted.
Her goal since surviving the quickening had always been to free them, however possible. That drive had been forgotten as she fought to survive and the realities of the new world after the Shattering had taken over. Now she had to heal the distortion. Not simply to save those caught inside, but to save everyone else on the plains as well, before the fractured ley system tore the land apart.
She settled herself around the spherical distortion, drawing herself up around the edge where she knew she and the White Cloaks had healed shards. Those points would be the weakest, the most likely to destabilize the distortion and cause a catastrophic collapse as she worked.
“We’re ready.”
She drew in a few deep breaths to steady herself. The ground heaved at the Needle again, but she ignored it. Through the ley, she could feel the earth around Erenthrall shifting as well, felt buildings collapse as fissures opened up through the streets. Strangely, the areas closest to the distortion were the most stable.
The distortion itself wasn’t being affected.
“I’m ready.”
Far distant, Marcus said, “Now.”
Kara felt the wave of ley roaring toward her, channeled up from the Needle’s junction, funneled through the Nexus, guided by the White Cloaks and Wielders down the ley line that connected the node to Erenthrall. She braced herself for its impact—
And still it nearly carried her away when it struck. She screamed. She knew she’d screamed, but the whitewash noise of the ley pummeling her drowned it out. With monumental effort, she seized hold of the power thrust upon her and focused it on the distortion. Her reach doubled, then tripled, expanding around the distortion until she completely enclosed it. But unlike her attempt to heal it before it had quickened, this time she had no immediate support. There were no Wielders here to lend her strength or guide her. They were all intent on maintaining the new Nexus. So she drew upon all of her training as a Wielder, all of the intricacies of the clocks her father had allowed her to help repair before his death, and she began to work.
The rough edges where shards had already been healed came first. She held the rest of the distortion together as she began smoothing the edges down. Carefully, first one shard, then the next came free. The arms that were the backbone of the distortion trembled as each shard released, and she paused until she was certain she hadn’t started a collapse. Then she continued, the energy from the Nexus still roaring through her. She handled it by dispersing it around the distortion, letting it flow out, around, and back toward her again until she could use it.
She’d already smoothed out three areas that the White Cloaks must have dealt with when she turned her attention to a new area. A small shard had been isolated from the rest of the distortion, and she realized it was the piece that contained the wagon and family being attacked by Wolves. They hadn’t been able to figure out how to repair the distortion without also freeing the Wolves, and there would have been little chance they could stop the Wolves before they tore the family apart. So they’d left the shard alone, and then been caught up in the war between the Rats and the Tunnelers.
She hesitated over the isolated shard, afraid to heal it, since it would mean the family’s almost certain death, then set it aside and returned to the distortion. She could return to it later.
She attacked the distortion again, running the ley energy over the fractures, the cracks slowly sealing, melding the shards back to reality as the fissures withdrew. Her confidence grew and she began to work faster, the ley pulsing around her. Without thought, she reached for more, drew ley from the reservoir that had overflowed and started the current crisis, integrating the two flows from beneath the distortion and the ley line from the Needle. She began sweeping over the distortion in waves, as if she were polishing it, the fractures thinning and retreating as she worked, but it was so large.
And the one engulfing Tumbor was even larger.
She refused to let the thought rattle her.
Everything was healing smoothly until another viol
ent heave in the pit at the Needle threw her body to the floor. Staggering pain sizzled through her shoulder and something cracked in her chest, a bolt of white-hot agony ripping through her lungs. She jerked back from the distortion involuntarily, her concentration broken. The disruption rippled through the ley—
And the distortion quivered.
“No.”
She was already reaching forward to seize control again. But it was too late.
The quiver intensified, and then the entire distortion began to collapse.
“No, no, no!” Those at the Needle were screaming as more of the pit fell apart around them, but back in Erenthrall, the distortion began chewing up the streets and buildings caught in the shards that were suddenly snapping closed around them. Images of the seamstress’ hand being torn to shreds in front of her, blood splattering her cheek—and the distortion that had killed her dog Max’s original owner—jolted through her. Except those had been minor distortions compared to this one.
This distortion would reduce the center of Erenthrall—Grass, Stone, Confluence, and her home in the Eld District—to rubble.
And the collapse was accelerating.
She wasted precious moments stretching out with the power of the ley in the hopes of surrounding the distortion and stabilizing it that way. But that had never worked before. The collapse was drawing inward, toward the center. She was on the outside. There was no place to grip the distortion, to counteract the inertia pulling it into itself. All of her efforts only aided the collapse.
Frantic, she raced around the distortion once, twice, seeking a crack, a fissure, anything that she could pry open to get at the inside, as the distortion continued to shrink. But there was nothing.
“No!” White-hot agony seared through her chest again.
Everything in Erenthrall inside the distortion was going to be destroyed. Everything she had feared from the moment she’d escaped its clutches was playing out before her eyes.
She couldn’t let it happen. She needed to halt the destruction. She needed to get inside, needed to heal it from inside out, not the outside in.
Steeling herself, she gathered up as much of the ley as could, focused it into a single blade. No. A needle, narrow and thin. A path. She needed a path of least resistance. A conduit.
The well of the original Nexus.
Diving deep beneath the distortion, down to the reservoir of ley, she seized the needle of power she’d created—
And then she drove it up through the ley line that connected the original Nexus to the lake of ley far below. The wall of the collapsing distortion fractured as she pierced it, the shards shattering as she shoved the needle deeper and deeper, until it exploded into the heart of the distortion, into the shards surrounding the cracked crystal dome of the building that had contained the Nexus. She hovered over the jagged openness of that dome, the sheared-off towers of Grass—including the Amber Tower—like spikes beneath her. If she’d looked, she would have seen the bodies of Hagger and the Wolves below on the steps, but she didn’t take the time. With the ley funneling through her, she sent it out into the distortion in an explosion of power. Here at the heart, she had access to all of the structural arms, the jagged edges, the facets and faces. Everything connected to this one place, and so she sent the ley through those arms, sent it screaming out toward the destruction drawing steadily toward her from all directions.
The entire distortion lit from within with a fiery incandescence, like a white sun. It sizzled through her mind, scorched through her body, and seared into her bones.
And then everything went black.
In Erenthrall, the distortion trembled, a motion barely discernible from the heaving of the earth that surrounded it. Then it shuddered and began to shrink, slowly drawing in upon itself, leaving churned up buildings, bridges, streets, and parks in its wake. The implosion accelerated, the swirling arms that had swallowed the center of Erenthrall whirling back in upon themselves. The splintering of stone overwhelmed even the tortured grinding of the quakes around it.
Then a white-hot fire bloomed in its center. The light expanded outward in a sudden flash, flaring brighter than the sun. It swallowed the distortion whole and blazed beyond, visible across the plains, from the small town in Haven to the Hollow to the scattered groups huddled around the new distortion in Tumbor. Commander Ty and his enforcers on the walls at the Needle looked up from their battle with the Gorrani below, then shaded their eyes before being forced to turn away, the light too bright. Caravans of Temerite refugees to the far east cowered beside their wagons at the second sun on the western horizon. To the north, beneath the blazing white eyes of the Three Sisters, the light seared through the gray-black clouds and sheets of auroral lights that drifted through the mountains and gave the tortured souls there a fleeting burst of hope. And in the west, the people of the Demesnes paused in their prayers at the basilicas or halted their marching armies as the eastern clouds burned in a stunning wash of white that hurt the eyes.
In Erenthrall, those that had survived the quakes quailed and fell to their knees, or screamed at the heavens, or bowed their heads and wept, all of them—Rats, Tunnelers, Temerites, Gorrani—convinced it was a second Shattering.
But the intense light merely blazed over them. Those that stared at it were blinded, some for a few days, others weeks, some permanently.
Then it died, imploding down to a pinprick, a scintillant star.
And then it winked out.
In its wake, the ground continued to shudder, but the distortion had vanished. The center of the city—surrounded by a ring of chewed earth—remained intact, the buildings that had survived the Shattering freed from the distortion. The quakes began to subside.
The uneasy silence held for nearly an hour before a hideous rumbling crack rocked the entire city, the shockwave of sound heard hundreds of miles away. With a slow, shuddering grind, the entire city of Erenthrall sank over a thousand feet down into the plains, the grassland around it fracturing, riddled with hundreds of fissures. Buildings and towers that had withstood the Shattering, the quakes, and the distortion fell inward, columns of dust rising in plumes. Fires broke out. Geysers of ley shot upward.
But the earth settled and the quakes stopped.
And after a day of quiet—no tremors, no aftershocks—the survivors began to stir.
Twenty-Six
“THIS TEMPLE IS A GODS-DAMNED MAZE!”
Bryce’s voice echoed in the odd corridor far ahead of Cory. The entire building shook with the quakes that were now one continuous roar of grinding stone and teeth-rattling tremors. He staggered against the side wall, reaching forward unconsciously to steady Hernande as they followed Allan, Bryce, the Wolf leader and two of his pack, and a half dozen of Bryce’s Dogs deeper into the building. They hadn’t had any problems finding a door—most of the guardsmen appeared to be at the walls, defending against what remained of the Gorrani, or stationed near the plaza where most of the citizens of the Needle were gathered.
Another lurch of the ground beneath them caused someone behind to shriek, but Cory didn’t pause to find out who. They were spread out along the corridor, Cory with Hernande and Jerrain, a few more Hollowers immediately behind them, then the Wielders and the rest of the Hollowers, the Wolves interspersed here and there. Whenever they reached a corridor or side room, the Wolves would scent the air, one of them occasionally breaking away to lope into the flickering ley-lit halls to investigate before returning. The main group didn’t pause as they made their way straight toward the center and the black tower, passing darkened rooms with barely a glance. Dust drifted down from the ceiling as the ground shook, and once or twice a pebble struck Cory’s head or shoulder.
He barely noticed, his focus ahead on the black tower, on Kara. He needed to find her, needed to see her, hold her, smell her. He needed to know she was alive. It pushed him forward even when some of the others quailed. It h
ad driven him since they’d left the charred remains of the Hollow behind, since Allan had appeared at the top of the stairs in the caverns with Artras, Cutter, Gaven, and Glenn, since he’d told them all of their capture by the Tunnelers and the betrayal of Kara and the rest to the White Cloaks.
Those ahead suddenly stopped, Jerrain and Hernande crowding up behind them.
“What is it? Why have you stopped?”
“The Wolves may have something. A scent.”
“Yes.” The pack leader’s voice was the low rumble of a wolf’s growl. “Your Wielder has passed through this cross-corridor before. I can smell her.”
“How long ago?”
“A day at most.”
Weakness buckled Cory’s knees and he caught himself against the angled wall, Hernande now reaching back to steady him. “She’s still alive.”
“I can’t tell which direction will lead us toward her, though. We’ll have to split the group.”
Allan cleared his throat. “Bryce, take Grant and four others and follow the left corridor. The rest of us will take the right.”
They split without words, Bryce angling down a corridor to the left that looked identical to the one leading to the right. Cory could see farther ahead of them now, with half of the men up front gone. Allan was trotting, a Wolf at his side, two Hollowers behind, then Jerrain, Hernande, and Cory. Doorways and halls intersected the new corridor, like the one they’d just left, but this corridor curved subtly.
And these rooms were in use.
Allan noted the sudden appearance of cots and chairs and habitation an instant before Cory did, slowing, but not quickly enough to avoid plowing into a woman emerging from one of the rooms with a handful of wadded laundry.
She screamed as they both fell to the ground, clothes flying, the Wolf erupting into a low, menacing growl Cory could hear over the constant thunder of the quaking. The woman continued shrieking as she and Allan thrashed about, the two Hollowers standing over them, swords readied, but then the woman’s cry cut off.
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