The instant he died, for Quyloc, it was as if the whole scene froze for just a second: the creatures in mid-leap; Rome and the two remaining soldiers fighting to bring weapons and shields around, their mouths and eyes wide; Ketora ducking away, the crystal tucked in tight to her chest.
In that frozen second, Quyloc saw a strange, sulfurous light bathe the room. An opening appeared in the air. Through the opening he saw the volcano, the gromdin perched on top of it. Then a burst of light he knew to be the man’s Selfsong shot through the opening. The frozen moment ended.
The dead man had barely struck the floor when Quyloc stabbed the creature that killed him in the chest.
Another of the creatures slammed into Rome’s shield just as he got it into place. Rome fell back a half step, then got his feet under him, and swung the war axe with his right hand.
The third creature rammed into Nicandro, knocking him down and clawing wildly at the shield.
The other soldier, his shield lost on the way in, screamed in fear and desperate defiance and chopped at the last creature with a wild, two-handed blow.
The creatures had no chance.
Rome cut the head of the one attacking him almost completely off with one fierce swing of his axe.
The one attacking Nicandro was on top of him, the shield blocking its attacks, while Nicandro hacked at it with his short sword. Spinning away from the one he had just killed, Quyloc slashed Nicandro’s attacker across the throat. The spear made a sizzling sound as it cut into the creature’s flesh and it sprawled in a heap on Nicandro’s shield.
The final soldier’s swing, powered as it was by fear and adrenaline, cut clear through the creature’s arm, the blade then biting into its shoulder. It shrieked and Rome hit it from the side and finished it off.
Silence then, except for their breathing. Nicandro pushed up on his shield, the creature slid off, and he picked himself up off the floor.
The other soldier jerked his weapon free. “Wow,” he said.
From the stairs came the sound of ponderous footsteps. A gray, humped back appeared for a second above the mass of leaves.
“Time to leave,” Rome said. He got no arguments.
Quyloc turned back to the exit. The others prepared their shields, the last soldier picking up the one dropped by his dead comrade. When they were ready, Quyloc jerked open the door, tensing, expecting to see a solid mass of vine covering their escape.
To his surprise, the way was clear. Kneeling on the path just beyond the outer edge of the vine was Ricarn, her hands placed flat on the ground before her.
There was a harsh, throaty growl from the depths of the vine behind them and the men ran for daylight. As they passed Ricarn, she stood up and stepped back. Once they were safely past the vine, they stopped. Quyloc turned to Ricarn.
“What did you do?”
“Let us just say that plant discovered that not all Life in this world is palatable,” she said, smoothing her red robe calmly. “Some things are poisonous.”
“That would have been nice to have on the way in.”
Ricarn only looked at him without answering.
“What’s that?” Nicandro asked, pointing at the tower door. Something lurked just inside its shadows, something large and hunched over, with a row of baleful red eyes.
“I don’t know,” Quyloc replied. “I’m just glad it doesn’t seem to want to follow us out in the open.”
Tairus hurried up then. “Increase the guard on the tower,” Rome told him. “Triple it.” To Quyloc he said, “We have to kill that vine.”
“Sure. Any good ideas?”
“Can we burn it?”
Quyloc shrugged. “Maybe.” He gestured toward the front gate, where the sound of pounding had gotten louder. “Maybe we have bigger problems to deal with first. Besides, even if we kill it, we’ll just get something else. There’s a hole between our worlds. One we made when we escaped.”
Rome winced. The hole was there because of him. Neither of them needed to say it. “No good way to close it?”
“The Kaetrians, with the full might of the Tenders behind them, never figured out how to close the hole by the prison.”
Tairus swore. “Don’t you two ever have any good news?”
Forty-four
“We got the crystal, didn’t we?” Rome said to Tairus.
“I noticed,” Tairus replied, rubbing his arms. “I don’t like that thing. You’re sure it’s not just going to kill us all?”
“Of course not. Ketora said as long as we don’t touch it we’ll be okay.” But he looked at the creature as he spoke and he wondered. She had no expressions that he could read. They knew nothing about her other than one of her people had been tortured and killed by humans and other humans had used her as a weapon. Could this be her opportunity to get revenge on them? He looked at Quyloc. As usual, Quyloc seemed to know what he was thinking without words. He met Rome’s gaze and turned his hands palm up as if to say, Your guess is as good as mine.
“It’s not like we have a lot of choices,” Rome said. “Sooner or later those things are going to break in here.” He heard a sound he could have sworn was stone cracking.
Ketora was looking at him, her face betraying nothing.
“Let’s get started,” Rome told her.
“You have forgotten that I require the assistance of the Nipashanti.”
Of course he did. What with almost being killed by a crazed plant and all, it had just slipped his mind. He must be getting old. “T’sim!” he yelled.
“I am right here,” T’sim said from right behind him.
Rome spun on him. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Never mind. Are you going to help or not?”
“I have been giving it a great deal of thought. I—”
“No offense, T’sim, but I don’t want to hear it right now.” This time he definitely heard the sound of stone cracking. There were yells from the vicinity of the gates. “We’re a little short on time. Are you in or not?”
“Yes. You, in particular, have—”
“Great,” Rome said, cutting him off. To Ketora he said, “What do you need to do this?”
“I need to be as close as possible to the center of the area you wish shielded.”
“Okay.” Rome looked around, then led the ronhym to a spot off one corner of the palace. The ground was paved with flagstones. The whole area was covered with tents being used to house the refugees. “This should be pretty close.”
Tairus gestured to some soldiers and they began moving people back and taking down the tents. Within a few minutes the area was clear.
“This will not be pleasant for you,” Ketora said to Rome. “You will want to stand back.”
“What shall I do?” T’sim asked.
“You will need to lend me your power.”
“Oh,” T’sim said. “Like this?” He raised his hand and the wind began to blow. In seconds it was howling, but it was no ordinary wind. It was focused around his hand. Rome, standing only a short distance away, couldn’t feel it at all.
“No. That is only control of something outside you. I require the power that makes you what you are.”
For the first time T’sim seemed disturbed. “Melekath shared this with you?” he asked. Ketora nodded. “Truly there is no length he will not go to for his Children.”
“This is so.”
“I have been so long in this form that I may not be able to reach it.”
“I require the power that is your essence, Nipashanti. Nothing less will do.”
“I will be uniquely vulnerable.”
“This is also so.”
T’sim looked at Rome, then back at Ketora. There was another loud crack from the direction of the gates. Rome realized he was holding his breath.
T’sim nodded.
Ketora raised the relif crystal high, then slammed it down, end first, into the ground. There was a loud cracking noise as the crystal pierced the flagstone and sudden
cracks radiated in all directions. A gasp came from the people watching and they all moved back further.
“I am thinking this will not be pleasant for me,” T’sim said.
“No. It will not.”
“Then let us proceed quickly before I change my mind.”
Ketora took T’sim’s hands in hers and clamped them both down on the crystal. T’sim’s eyes went very wide and he began to shake all over. It looked to Rome as if he tried to pull away, but Ketora did not let go.
His shaking grew more violent. It became hard to focus on him because he was vibrating so fast that his outlines had become blurry. His mouth opened and a painful, high-pitched wailing came from him. People put their fingers in their ears and moved further back. The ground underfoot was quivering madly. Rome’s teeth had begun to hurt and he felt a headache starting.
Still Ketora held his hands to the crystal. T’sim’s feet appeared to no longer be on the ground. He was beginning to change shape. It was as if he was dissolving in water. His arms and legs were no more than amorphous blobs. His head was nearly gone. The wailing coming from him had become the scream of the wind.
Fed by T’sim’s power, the crystal was glowing orange, so fiercely that Rome couldn’t look at it. Ketora was just visible as a black shadow in its midst.
Now Rome was sure T’sim was trying to get away. The shrieking coming from him seemed almost like a bizarre language and he was whipping about, jerking this way and that. But Ketora’s grip was implacable and he could not get free.
Flashes of light began to come from inside T’sim, like lightning seen in the depths of clouds. The flashing grew faster until it was nearly continuous. People were crying out and covering their eyes. Rome had his hand up to shield his face and caught only glimpses of what happened next.
All at once T’sim seemed to split in half. A ball of blue-white lightning burst from inside him, beginning to expand…
Then it was sucked back into the crystal.
Ketora let go. There was nothing left of T’sim but something like tattered bits of cloud that shredded in a sudden wind and was gone.
The crystal was pulsing madly, the light coming from it turning redder and redder by the second. The heat coming off it was incredible, worse than any furnace ever built. Rome heard yelling and wasn’t sure if it was him or not.
Then Ketora rapped on top of the crystal. The crystal cracked and wild energy began to spew upwards in a geyser. For a moment, Rome was sure they were all dead. That power would incinerate them all within seconds. Ketora had betrayed them.
Ketora stuck her hands into the geyser of Stone power. He could see how difficult it was for her, how close the power was to knocking her flying. Somehow she held on, forcing her hands down through the geyser until she reached the hole in the crystal, which she clamped her hands over.
The power still geysered upwards, but now it was changing. Fierce red cooled to orange. After a moment, Ketora removed her hands. She reached into the light and somehow took hold of part of it, which she bent away and down.
Again and again she did this and the geyser grew smaller as its power was diverted. Rome turned and saw that the air was shimmering with this orange light, that it was curving back down in an arc toward the perimeter of the palace grounds.
A few minutes later it was done. Ketora stepped back and sat down heavily on the ground, putting her head in her hands.
A thin stream of orange-tinged power still flowed upward from the crystal, much smaller than the geyser of before. It was feeding a translucent orange dome that covered the palace grounds. It looked seamless.
It looked impregnable.
Rome approached Ketora, Quyloc accompanying him. She looked up when they reached her.
“It is done,” she said. Her voice sounded very weak. “Goodbye.”
Her body began to lose shape, as if she were melting. In seconds she had seeped into the ground and was gone.
The Children stared up at the shimmering orange shield and all of them—even through the haze of three thousand years, even through the haze of insanity—knew instantly what it was.
A cry of despair went up from every throat.
Forty-five
After Qarath’s wall fell, Josef entered the city along with the rest of the Children. The hunger drove him and he was helpless to resist. Nor did he want to resist. The plants he loved so much were lost to him. They crumbled and died under his touch. Existence was agony and the only thing which offered the least respite was Song, even if it was only temporary.
The next hours were a blur of running through the streets, chasing fleeing people, tearing through homes, sniffing out those who were hiding, and the sweet taste of Song, cold water to a throat that had been parched for thousands of years. How many people he fed on he couldn’t say, but at some point he began to feel sick and he dropped the woman he was holding and stumbled out of the house and into the street. For a moment he stood there, surprised at the darkness. What happened to the light? When did it become night? Then he fell over on his side, holding his stomach, wondering if he was going to split open like an overripe watermelon.
Some hours later he opened his eyes and saw that day was coming. He had always enjoyed mornings the most. It was then that the plants he tended were at their freshest. They seemed to strain toward the morning sun, every leaf, every flower petal, brand new and beautiful.
He stood and looked around. He was on a narrow, cobblestone street. Stone buildings enclosed him on all sides, reaching upwards to block out most of the sky. It was a sterile place, not a single plant visible anywhere. He began stumbling down the street, hoping to find something to ease the ache inside him.
The street led to a larger one, then one even larger than that, one wide and clean and bordered by high walls, behind which could be seen opulent homes.
He walked along the wall of one estate until he came to the wrought iron gates. What he saw through the gates staggered him. It wasn’t the soaring towers of the mansion that weakened him. It wasn’t the verdant gardens wound with tiled footpaths, or the vast, green lawns. It was the trees. In the center of the estate, spaced around a small pool, were four huge, stately silver oaks. They were magnificent trees, taller than the mansion, trunks so broad it would have taken a half dozen men to put their arms around one.
Josef made a small sound of pleasure. Something ancient and rusty creaked to life within him as he looked at them. He had a passion for all growing things, a passion that even three millennia in the prison had not been able to quench, but trees were what he loved most and of all trees, silver oaks were his favorite.
With hardly an effort he ripped the iron gates from their hinges and threw them aside. With his hands outstretched before him he shambled forward, a smile on his craggy face.
Halfway there he came to a halt, the smile fading. He remembered what happened in the town of Ferien, when he touched the tree growing in the center of town, how it died under his hands.
He sank to his knees on the grass, afraid to go closer, but unable to make himself leave.
Their leaves fluttered in the morning breeze off the ocean. The leaves had just begun to turn, their silver edged in crimson and orange. They were brilliant, magical. They promised him life and hope when his world had been only bleakness and horror for so long. A smile stretched his cracked lips. This was what had kept him going during the long millennia of his imprisonment. Even the hunger pangs, already growing within him once again, didn’t seem so bad here, where he could stare up at his beloved trees.
How long he knelt there he didn’t know, but at some point he became aware of a nagging sense of wrongness. It was like a small rash in the corner of his mind. His brow furrowing, he looked around.
And gave a wounded gasp.
The grass all around him was gray and dead. Like a stain, the gray had spread across the lawn and had already reached the two closest silver oak trees. Josef scrambled to his feet and backed up a few steps. But it was too late. Before hi
s eyes the gray blight began to rise up the trunks of the trees. Where the blight spread the bark turned black. Within seconds the blackened bark split open and black ichor dripped from the raw wood underneath.
Heedlessly, Josef ran to one of the trees. He was flush with power; it seethed beneath his skin, and he summoned a small amount of it to his fingertips, thinking that with it he could wash away the infection and heal the tree.
But the Song that poured from his fingers was tarnished with gray and where it touched the blight it was like pouring oil onto a fire. The blight spread with frightening speed, across the trunk and deeper into the heart of the tree. It seemed he could hear the tree itself cry out in his mind.
Alarmed, Josef shut off the flow of Song and backed away from the tree. But it was too late. The blight was spreading like wildfire. Josef’s face twisted in horror. He tore at the wisps of hair that had grown in on his scalp overnight. What had he done?
The gray at his feet was still spreading, reaching out across the estate lawn with probing fingers. Before his horrified, disbelieving eyes it reached the other two trees and began to spread up them as well. Trembling, Josef backed away, watching helplessly as all four of the oak trees were consumed, the blight racing up their trunks and spreading out to cover the limbs, which began to thrash as if caught in a windstorm. The leaves turned black and fell to the ground. Smaller limbs cracked and broke off.
There were anguished cries in the depths of his mind as the trees died.
Josef wept, but there were no tears. There would never be tears again. As the last of the trees died, something within Josef finally, irrevocably snapped. His cherished memories of green things growing disappeared and with their passing the final, slender strand of sanity he’d clung to broke.
With an anguished cry, Josef fell to his knees and jammed his fists into the earth. “No!” he screamed. “You will not die!” With that he released a massive burst of stolen Song. It surged outwards from him, crackling across the dead grass and racing up through the mighty trees. Bands of gray-tinged light wrapped around the trees in a flash. More small limbs cracked and rained down on the ground.
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