Into the West, page 45
“Feed stone, feed you?” Pebble asked anxiously. “Like bad bads took?”
“Yes,” he replied, assuming that Pebble meant the Heartstone. “Can you do that?”
Pebble said nothing . . .
But in the next heartbeat, he felt power surging into him through the ley-lines and from the Heartstone. He jolted against the wall. This was power of a sort he had never experienced in his entire life. It was the sweetest of tastes, the most refreshing of waters, the contentment of a still lake. It was the high and low pitches of the same instrument, factoring their frequencies, and simply passing through him, cleansing along the way.
This was like the power he’d felt in the Chamber of the Beast, where a wounded Pebble had been lying, healing itself, and emitting vast amounts of magical energy doing so. But it wasn’t the same, any more than water from a cesspool was like water from a pure, clear spring. And it wasn’t the same, because Pebble was giving this to him and all the other mages, rather than being drained of it by Imperial spells, through what was left of the Heartstone. Freely given, tuned to their abilities as Masters, literally rock-steady power. He practically felt his hair stand on end, and up on the wall, he heard Jonaton’s wordless exclamation of shock and surprise.
“Hey! Hey—nice! Yeah, let’s have more of that! More of that!”
And up beyond the wall—the Veil began to glow, a pale blue light that rippled like the surface of a Gate coming into lock.
He ran back up the stairs to see Jonaton standing as still as a statue, arms spread above his head, also haloed in a faint blue light. What—
“Kordas!” Jonaton shouted, not turning his head. “Get back to the front gate. I’ve got the Veil! We can hold the thing off back here!”
As if to affirm that claim, a whipping branch soared up into view, hit the Veil, and—disintegrated.
He can’t hold alone! Not for long—
But it appeared that he could. Or at least, he would die trying.
“Saver!” shouted Pebble. “Gate! Gate! Gate!”
He didn’t stop to think. He just moved.
At least by this point, the animals still remaining above ground were all in hiding, probably huddled together in the center of the Vale, not running about in a panic. He should be able to sprint—
Just as he thought that, a Doll came running up to him, pulling a panicking horse along by main strength—the horse wasn’t bridled or saddled, in fact, all it had was a hackamore, but that was all he had ever needed. He tapped into his levitation abilities, vaulted onto the gelding’s back from the lower stairs, grabbed the reins, and gave it a smack on its heavily sweating rump. It took off at a barely controlled gallop, carrying him around a tightly packed mob of mixed animals, cutting directly across picturesque, winding paths, veering around little groves and homes among the trees, and ending him up at the front gate.
He leapt off the back of the poor beast and it immediately ran away. He didn’t blame it. The cacophony was worse here than it was at the rear; he sprinted up the stairs, taking them two at a time, past stationed Dolls to where Delia, Sai, and the loading team stood. The Veil glowed here, too; Sai stood in a pose nearly identical to Jonaton’s, as the tree branches thrashed just out of touching range of the Veil.
Delia was still hard at work, mouth set in a grim line, exploding canisters as fast as she could Fetch them into the Forest. Sai glanced at Kordas, then turned his attention back to the trees. “Pebble?” he asked brusquely.
“Pebble,” Kordas confirmed. “How long can you hold?”
“Until I drop,” Sai confirmed. “And then—it won’t matter how much power Pebble feeds us, because we won’t have the strength to use it. But this has bought us some time.”
“Ye—” Kordas began.
He stopped speaking as a high-pitched whistling sound—like nothing he had ever heard before—made him whip his head around to the left.
Just in time to see a ball of fire a hundred times bigger than anything he could produce hurtling out of the sky to land in the midst of the trees.
The sound it made when it hit wasn’t as loud as the thunder accompanying the weather mages’ lightning, nor as loud as the canisters exploding, but it was more than enough to make everyone on the wall wince and instinctively drop behind the parapet.
The Veil flickered a moment, but Sai and the rest popped back up and went back to work reinforcing it. “What in the hell was that?” Sai shouted.
“Damn if I know!” Kordas shouted back, taking over from Delia in shooting the canisters so she could concentrate on Fetching them. “Whatever it is, it’s on our si—”
And another fireball came arcing into the Forest on his right, with similar results.
It was difficult to tell for sure, between the POOMs of the canisters and the crash of thunder, but he thought he heard more of those fireballs hitting somewhere out of sight, to the left, the right, and the rear. But were they making a difference?
He felt a tiny, tiny bit of hope creep into his heart. Where that fireball had hit in front of them, there were trees actually engulfed in fire, there was a hole among them showing the bare earth and rocks, and nothing was throwing snow on the fires. Of course, that could be because by this time the ground had been branched free of snow. But—wait! The trees nearest the ones engulfed were trying to beat the flames out. And getting set on fire themselves for their trouble.
It was a good thing those fireballs were taking long, leisurely arcs to get where they were going, because he heard another one coming in that sounded—well, too close—and he had just enough time to scream “Duck!” at the top of his lungs and grab Delia’s shoulder and throw her beneath the parapet when the incoming fireball landed right in front of the closed gate.
The wall shook under them, and even though he managed to clap his hands over his ears at the last minute, once again, he was deafened.
Fortunately the reinforced Veil deflected most of the flames away, but when he cautiously looked back up again, the ends of Sai’s eyebrows had little wisps of smoke coming up from them, and his face was distinctly redder. He hadn’t ducked. He hadn’t fallen, either. They are my heroes, I swear, Kordas thought.
He had grown so accustomed to the waves of rage coming from the forest that at first he didn’t notice when they intensified. But when Delia abruptly put both fists to her temples and dropped to her knees, and the exhausted Healer that stumbled over to her did the same, a moment later he got hit in the face by the brutal anger, and nearly went to his knees, himself. He fought the alien emotion back, clinging to the parapet, and surveyed the battlefield, his eyes burning and watering with the effort—and from the smoke that billowed over the wall from the burning trees.
That gave him a little more hope—until a gust of wind blew the smoke away, and he saw that the trees had closed in all the holes that had been blown in the forest, and the smoke was because they had stopped burning and were only smoldering.
Wait—
“Kordas,” Rose said in his ear. Well, actually shouted it in his ear, because mostly all he could hear was a ringing sound. If we live through this, the Healers are going to be treating us all so we don’t go permanently deaf.
Speaking of Healers—the one he’d last seen crouched next to Delia was supporting the girl as she sagged with exhaustion, sobbing silently, the tears pouring down her face leaving tracks in the soot. It was clear Delia had wrung herself dry of energy. Nothing I can do to help there—
Sai still stood defiantly, valiantly, pouring magic into the Veil. Kordas tried not to look for signs of exhaustion on the old man’s face.
“Kordas!” Rose shouted again. “The Forest has pulled back from the rest of the wall and is regrouping. Everyone but a couple of mages is on their way here.”
Wait, what? Hope rose again. Were they actually holding their own? Could they possibly win?
Before that thought had done more than merely flash through his mind, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sai sway slightly. He moved to help, but Rose was faster than he was, and caught the old man before he fell.
He didn’t even think about it; he invoked full mage-sight, connected himself fully to the ley-lines feeding from what was left of the Heartstone, and took Sai’s place in reinforcing the Veil.
This moment is all there is, he said in his mind, and “heard” it replied to by the other mages holding the Veil up. “This moment is all there is.” He felt himself drop into the kind of half-trance that really big mage-work required, the sort of thing that needed a dozen mages if not more. This was something he’d done maybe three times in his life. He ceased to be Kordas, and became one strand of the greater web. All emotions repressed, to prevent rattling the others, he became one with the whole. Not absent emotions, not as such, but they were cast into the background and made invisible, so he could concentrate on what needed to be done, this moment. And this moment was all there was.
He closed his eyes. He didn’t need outer sight, he needed inner sight right now. He called it up, established his strongest shields, and opened his vision to the world around him.
And . . . this was, in every way possible, nothing like the land he had come from. There, back in the Duchy, everything magical was orderly, tamed. The ley-lines pulsed with their many-colored energies in regulated waves. Elementals were few—and now he knew why, given the terrible use that the Emperor had made of the vrondi and little Pebble. There were concentrations of magic, like spires of power, in places where Imperial mages lived and worked. Like Heartstones, but turned inward, denying their power to the greater world instead of sharing it with the world. In that lost world, he and the mages he sheltered had to slink around in the shadows, and do their work as undetectably as they could, between the lines of the web that others could read from. The magic of the Empire was so regulated that he and his had spent as much time hiding their tracks as they did actually working.
Not here . . .
Out here there were ley-lines, of course, but they did not pulse with the measured regularity of a heartbeat. They flowed like wild, unfettered rivers, intoxicating and dangerous, the colors of their magic braiding and unbraiding as they flowed. Tributaries flowed in and out of them, mainly with the surface levels of the land, but also deep into the ground and even into the sky. The tributaries had their own flares and prominences, flinging out power with a rhythm of their own. But the ley-lines were the least of the things he saw.
Because the land was full to bursting with chaotic life. Not just material life; immaterial as well. The water, the air, the earth, were full of things he had never seen before; there were magical beings everywhere, some material, most not. Some he recognized as Elementals he had studied, even if he had never personally seen them. Some were—well, there just was nothing in his experience to compare them to. Some he couldn’t even “look” at directly: it was as if they twisted in and out of the reality he knew. Some were so incomprehensible he felt his mind trying to grasp them and failing utterly. Some were clouds of infinitesimally small motes that radiated power all out of proportion to their tiny size. And high in the sky above were creatures like skeins of light, undulating across the heavens with little to no regard for the clumsy creatures of earth.
His “view” encompassed all the degrees of the compass as well as up and down, since he was not limited to his physical eyes. He sensed Pebble behind him, valiantly radiating power as hard as it ever could. And in front of him, the Forest, and Sai had been right: this ravening thing had once been an Earth Elemental itself; not one of the Deep Earth Elementals, like Pebble and Pebble’s mother, but one of the sort that slumbered amid the landscape until awakened, in the guise of a rock outcropping, or a hill, or a gigantic boulder. And it had, indeed, been caught in a Change-Circle in the aftermath of that long-ago war. Once, it might have been at least as intelligent as Pebble, but when its body was mingled with the tree-grove it had slept near, between the pain and the scrambling effect of the pure chaos of the Circle, what intelligence it had was lost. Now what was left was agony and instinct, and not much else. It hated, fiercely, but intellectually dimly—some part of it knew that it had once been greater than it was now. It was full of rage for the same reason. It lived to destroy, because destruction permitted feeding, and the pleasure of feeding was what eased its pain for a little while.
And—to his surprise, he realized that they had hurt it, back when they first encountered it.
They were nowhere near killing it, then or now, but they had hurt it, and that angered it more than anything it had ever encountered in all the centuries since its creation.
And it was very, very hungry. They were the teasers of the best food source it had ever encountered since its violent and agonizing birth, when it had been torn apart and mingled with insensate wood. And they had dared to fight it, to hurt it, and then to escape from its clutches, and presumably take that good food with them.
So driven by rage, hate, and hunger, it had roused from its winter hibernation and come looking for them.
But the Forest was by no means the most powerful thing within the sphere of his comprehension now. There was something greater.
Much greater.
At first, She—for it was a female entity—was merely a light-filled shadow in his mind nearly as vast as the sky. The great Air creatures flowed and danced around Her, in tribute to Her beauty and power. But as he became more aware of Her, She became more aware of him, and for one brief moment, showed Herself to him in all Her strength.
Vast as the night, and as full of incandescence as the night is full of stars, She regarded him with eyes without whites or pupils, only an infinite starfield. He could not tell what She thought of him, but a tiny, still-thinking part of him recognized from Silvermoon’s tales what She might be.
This was the Star-Eyed. And She had taken notice of him.
So when the wall began to shake under his boots, for a few heartbeats, he didn’t even sense it, so frozen was he in the deep regard of Her gaze.
:: Have hope, Kordas. You are beloved. All will be well. ::
But then the shaking increased, and the enchantment on him—if it was such a thing—snapped, as he was nearly knocked to his knees.
Maybe it was because some deep part of him, a part of him seared with pain and memories, knew this shaking, and recognized the shaking for what it meant. He shook himself free of mage-sight, and looked out over the thrashing trees of the Forest, the arcing fireballs, the lightning strikes, and the occasional exploding canister, and saw—
The raw, red, fiery surface of the Great Deep Elemental that was Pebble’s “Mama,” thrusting her way out of the earth. As she shoved her way to the surface, the forest around her caught fire, circling her in a halo of flames. He remembered this creature all too well; unlike Pebble, she was not featureless rock. And she was anything but small.
Two sets of glowing, yellow-white claws splayed out on the surface of the earth on either side of her. He could not begin to measure the size of those knife-like talons, but they were at least three times the height of the enormous trees now aflame on either side of the erupted earth through which she had thrust her body. Chest, neck, and head rose above them, to a dizzying height. The pointed head was mostly jaws. Weirdly, it looked like a bird’s head and stabbing beak—or perhaps the narrow head of a lizard. Her head, neck, chest, and forelegs glowed red mottled with black, and molten rock jetted back and forth underneath, as if he was seeing fast-pumping arterial flow in translucent blood vessels. White-hot eyes glared from the glowing red of that head, throwing beams of light—but they were not glaring at Kordas, nor at the Vale.
The creature stared at the Red Forest. But not with the same malevolence he had felt from her when she had come to rescue Pebble. Fierce, yes. Malevolent, no. No, the way she stared at the Forest looked more like revulsion.
And he heard her voice in his mind for the first time, a mental impression of white-hot bronze, dignity, and immense age. But with that voice in his mind, came a real, physical voice, like an enormous brass gong or bell.
“This is abomination.”
She contemplated the Red Forest for several heart-stopping moments more.
“THIS SHALL BE CLEANSED.”
But she didn’t move. Why didn’t she move?
Wait, if she moves—she might wreck this entire area, the way she destroyed the Capital. And she doesn’t want to do that.
As if she understood what he was thinking, she raised her head skyward and let out a challenging roar. It sounded like an avalanche. Molten rock spattered from the roar, falling as lava bombs over the Red Forest, igniting trees.
Kordas was out of the Veil trance, but was still tuned to ambience enough to sense the Forest wavering. Half of it wanted to keep on attacking the humans in their cursed protections, and get to the food. Half of it wanted to go after this new—likely delicious—challenger. He felt the Forest’s hunger . . . and Pebble’s mother was a giant, radiating source of magical energy. They were both Earth Elementals; the Forest knew instinctively that if it fought and vanquished her, it could absorb all of her. Then it could turn back and obliterate the ants that were resisting it now.
“Help Mama!” Pebble cried from behind him, still fiercely radiating magic. “Push! Push!”
Wait, what?
“Push! Push!” Pebble insisted. All Pebble could do was supply power; it didn’t know how to apply power. And Kordas didn’t know what it wanted.
“For fuck’s sake, Kordas!” An exhausted Jonaton stumbled up the stairs behind him. “Are you dazed or stupid? The cute rock means push the Veil!”
Bloody hells . . . Hitting himself in the head could wait until later. He was the freshest, most rested mage on the wall, since he hadn’t been using his powers nearly as much as the rest. He’d been shooting canisters while they’d been reinforcing the Veil or igniting the apple brandy.
But how?
Chances are Pebble understands magic instinctively, though it is limited in what it knows how to do. But I have those skills that it doesn’t. So he did what Pebble wanted. He pushed.
