A Flame in Hali (18 page)

“
Dom’na,
I thank ye.” When he spoke, he sounded even younger than before, with his light tenor voice and country accent.

Dyannis found she could not meet his eyes. “Are you well enough to help the others?”

“Sure and I’ve done my share of patchin’ and dosin’ on the farm, every time the King’s men come through. M’brother, he went off for a soldier.” Bitterness ran like a counterpoint through the boy’s words. A soldier, his silence said, in some King’s war, fallen under sword or spell or
clingfire,
and never come home.

With a clatter and a rush, a group of people from Hali came running, servants and novices and even pale-faced Ellimara. One of the men on the ground regained enough of his wits to snatch up a pitchfork and lunge at Lewis-Mikhail. The
laranzu
glared at the man, who fell to his knees, whimpering. Dyannis saw no more of the confrontation, for Ellimara darted up to her.

“We must find the dying and give them aid, quickly—the man with the heart seizure!” Steel rang in Ellimara’s light, girlish voice.

Dyannis spotted the old man by his whitened hair. He was the one she’d spotted from aloft, with the woman bent over him already keening her grief. Everything looked so different now, as she wove through the toppled crowd. Voices rose about her, moaning, weeping, crying out names she did not know. Her mind was still open, and the tatters of their fear shivered through her thoughts.

As Dyannis approached, the woman straightened up, her expression unrecognizable, as if the horror of the day had burned away all human feeling. Lips, cracked and pale, moved for a moment before she forced out a sound.

“Demon-spawn—keep away—”

“I’m here to help,” Dyannis said, moving past the woman to kneel beside the man.

“You—your lot have never—”

Beneath the coarse white beard, the old man’s skin was chalky gray. Dyannis laid her fingertips along one wrist and felt the thready leap of a pulse. In that brief moment of contact, however, the flesh became dense and still. She grabbed her starstone with one hand, placed the other flat against the man’s chest and focused her
laran
senses. Through the layers of coarsely woven cloth, past wasted muscle and arching rib, she dove, a mote of consciousness. There, in the lightless heat of his body, a heart struggled, muscle fibers stretching, tightening, like mice in the shadow of a hawk, each moving in its own disparate rhythm.

She knew enough to recognize what was happening, to know how little time she had to act. Like every other novice at Hali, she had first trained as monitor; over the years, she had served as healer many times, but never in a case so dire and complex as this. She could clear a blocked vessel, could ease the oxygen starvation of the tissues it fed, but it was beyond her power to do that and at the same time, restore the heart’s normal rhythm. Either, untreated, would take his life.

Ellimara!
she called out, hoping wildly that the younger woman was able to respond and not already sunk into a healing rapport with another victim.
Ellimara, help me!

She cannot leave her patient,
came Varzil’s calm mental voice.
I will lend you what aid I can.

Dyannis saw without looking up that although Varzil was only now climbing the sandy banks of the lake, in his mind he stood beside her in every way that mattered.

She dropped her barriers, so that he would see and sense everything she did.

We must stop his heart,
Varzil said,
and start it afresh.

Yes, that made sense. She gathered the psychic power running through her, even as she had gathered up the residue of electrical tension in the air, and sent it coursing through the old man’s heart. The random jerk and twitch of the muscle fibers halted, minutely easing the dark blotch of the dying cells. She waited a moment, until she was sure that all motion had ceased, that the heart was completely at rest.

This way.
Varzil’s power lay lightly upon her, as if he gently rested his hands upon hers. She cast a bolt of energy through the old man’s heart, starting at the upper pole, where normally the contraction would begin. Varzil came up and under her, sweeping through her, carrying her like one of the lake waves during a storm.

She waited for a long moment and then another, listening and hoping. Not a twitch, not a hint of motion answered her. She thrust her mind deeper, agonizingly aware that with each passing second, the man’s life forces plummeted. With her inner vision, she saw the heart not as a solid object the size of her fist, muscle-red and tapered, but as a layering of light. Light that even now faded from her sight. Once or twice, she thought she saw the faint glimmer, like the trail of a shooting star, but never more than that.

Again!
Varzil cried.

Though part of her wailed that the old man was already gone, that anything more was hopeless, she summoned her strength for another try. She could not have done it without Varzil’s insistence, his surge of mental power. Even as his mind joined with hers, she felt his own desperation. For an instant, she seemed to be standing in the Overworld, watching the figure of a red-haired woman dwindle into the distance, longing to rush after her yet knowing she would never catch her, never reach her, never hold her.

With the second shock, a quiver ran through the aged body. Nerves and muscle fibers lit up in a tracery of fire. Dyannis heard a single beat of a drum, echoing deep and from a great distance, as if some other, hugely massive heart enclosed them all. Whether it was the last stroke of the old man’s heart, she could never tell, but after that came a silence darker and deeper than she had ever imagined. She felt herself falling into it, welcoming it, becoming it . . .

As if a massive hand reached down and snatched her out, she came back to herself with a gasp. Brightness and noise battered her. A woman’s hoarse voice howled, “He’s gone! He’s gone!”

“You did everything you could,” said a familiar voice.

Dyannis squinted up into the face of her brother. He stood just beyond the dead man, his clothing sodden and trailing water-weeds, his face drawn, worn beyond his years. Compassion shone in his eyes.

Something inside her gave way. She collapsed over the old man’s body. Guilt spasmed through her.

Nor was there any help for it—not in her Tower-trained
laran
that had caused so much harm to so many—not in empty words of comfort.

“Dyannis Ridenow, one who is
leronis
and
Comynara
does not behave with such self-indulgent hysterics!” Her brother’s voice lashed out, salt on her excoriated nerves. “There is work to be done and men who are not yet beyond our help!”

Stung, her cheeks flaming in shame, Dyannis straightened up. There was no need to reply, for anything she said in her defense would only condemn her further. She gathered herself and went to perform what small measure of restitution she could. Judgment would surely come, but for this hour, it would have to wait.

Dyannis lost all track of time, monitoring, assisting the healers, bandaging wounds, and offering what words of comfort she could dredge from her increasingly numb mind. More help arrived after what seemed an eon, men and carts from King Carolin. The King also sent his own household physicians and
leronyn.

Varzil took charge of the operation, apportioning resources, conferring with the senior monitors as to which men and women were in direst need and must go to the Tower, which to return to the city, and which were well enough to go about their own business after a night’s rest and a hot meal.

“You must warn them that for some time, they may have nightmares or see things that are not truly there,” he told Dyannis and the others. “This was no simple mob, driven by hunger and injustice. These people have been overshadowed by some force beyond my understanding. I can sense a foreign
laran
behind their thoughts, as if some renegade
laranzu
had spurred them to this attack, but there is something more, some malevolent influence that I have never encountered before.”

Dyannis noticed that he said nothing of her counterattack, of how she had abused her training and her Gift. At this point, she was too tired to care. She trudged back to the Tower, refusing the offer of a mount and biting back a retort when Lewis-Mikhail suggested she ride in a litter, as had Rorie. Varzil had already castigated her, and rightly so, for indulging in her own personal self-recrimination. She had no right to demand any special attention or consideration.

The next morning, although she had barely slept and forced down only a few morsels of food, she went down to the infirmary to work. Ellimara, who was in charge that morning, ordered her back to bed.

“What do you think you are doing?” the younger woman demanded. “How do you think you will serve anyone if you make yourself ill from inattention to the most elementary principles of care? And do not tell me your health is yours to abuse as you wish, Dyannis Ridenow, for we are all of us needed.”

Mute and miserable, Dyannis did as she was told.

Days blended into one another. Dyannis slept and ate, as she had been taught, escaping further censure from Ellimara, and awaited what came next.

During this time, she woke often from fragmented dreams, reliving the attack. Sometimes, she would be buried in an avalanche of howling, distorted faces, all crying out their accusations. She fell down corridors where every door gaped open and hordes of scorpion-demons rushed out, stabbing at her with pincer and stinger. Other times, she became the pursuer, seeking that flash of trained
laran
in the mass of fleeing minds. Once, as she strained to touch it, a breath beyond her reach, she found herself back in a real memory, lying in Eduin’s arms at Midwinter Festival Night. She awoke trembling, confused, aroused. Had her mind, under the onslaught of recrimination and exhaustion, retreated for a moment to a happier time, or had Eduin been there, amidst the rabble?

Of Eduin, there was no trace. She must have imagined that moment of recognition. When she mentioned it to Varzil, he looked thoughtful but offered no comment.

Finally, the worst of the cases, the men and women who had withdrawn into nightmares within their own minds, whose bodies had been locked in catatonic spasm, had been judged well enough to go about their own lives again, or other provision had been made for those few who would never recover. The old man was one of three deaths. One woman jumped from a window high in the Tower, although it was never clear how she had gained access to it from the infirmary; a painfully thin young man, barely out of his teens, slipped away quietly in his sleep, his body riddled with tumors. It was a mystery how he had kept going so long.

I have done a wrong that can never be made right,
Dyannis repeated to herself, and threw herself back into the oblivion of work.

She knew rationally that the boy’s death was not her doing, but the three lives hung on her like leaden chains. She sat with each of them before they were taken away for burial, etching their features into her mind, the jaws slack and eyes sunken, the flesh so still in death, repeating to herself that this was the result of her willful defiance of all the rules of ethical
laran
use. Against all training, against all decency, she had used her powers over the minds of ordinary men and these deaths, with all the anguish the others had suffered, were the result.

I must never for an instant forget that these people paid the price for my own recklessness
.

More than that, she had violated the Compact, to which every member of Hali Tower was sworn. She had used her Gift as a weapon to kill defenseless men at a distance, while she herself remained immune from any such counterattack.