A Flame in Hali (68 page)

Moving confidently now through her darkened room, Dyannis went to the door and opened it. One of the young novices, an Elhalyn boy, stood with his fist raised to knock again. He held an ordinary candlestick in the other hand, and his eyes bulged slightly, ringed with white.

“
Domna,
I don’t know what to do!” The child was trembling visibly. “Raimon is still working in the circle with the others and I dare not disturb him.”

Dyannis knew that the night’s work involved the synthesis of fire-fighting chemicals, destined for Verdanta and High Kinally. There were a number of steps in the process when the elements became unstable, handled safely only through unwavering concentration of
laran.
As kindly as she could, she said, “There is nothing to fear. Whatever is the matter?”

“Three aircars—coming in fast—they won’t answer us, not even
Dom
Rorie. He sent me to ask you to come.”

Dyannis frowned. Rorie was a strong telepath, skilled and experienced, and only trained
leronyn
could guide an aircar. If Rorie could not reach them with his mind, something terrible must have happened. Were the pilots all dead, then, or rendered unconscious by some spell or disease? That didn’t seem likely. The aircars, cut off from motive power and guidance, would surely have dropped from the sky and not continued on their course.

“Where is he?”

“In the second laboratory, along with everyone else who is not working in Raimon’s circle tonight.”

Dyannis sensed Rorie’s mind, bent in concentration upon the incoming aircars, but did not press him for a response. They must make preparations in case the aircar pilots were injured.

“Summon everyone with monitor’s training and meet me there.”

The boy scurried away, visibly relieved to have some definite task.

Hurriedly, Dyannis pulled on a shift and loosely belted working robe. She shoved her bare feet into a pair of worn suede sandals, using the time to put her thoughts in order. The discipline and calm she had practiced every waking hour since beginning her Keeper’s training returned quickly.

She drew out her starstone to see what she could perceive directly about the aircars. Close by, Raimon’s circle blazed with energy like a ring of blue fire. She sensed Rorie and several others, their minds also alight. The Tower, which was not merely a physical structure but a psychic one as well, surrounded them all. She swept through its walls and upwards.

Only a short distance from Hali Tower, three motes like encapsulated emptiness zoomed ever closer. They felt like nothing she had known, certainly not ordinary aircars, more like disturbances in the air currents with only the faintest auras of psychic energy.

Hail, aircars approaching Hali Tower!
she called out.

Silence answered her. She might have been shouting into an empty sky.

If the aircars did not change course, they would swoop over the topmost turrets in only a few minutes. As near as she could judge, they were too high to collide with the Tower. Even unguided, their momentum would carry them beyond. They might crash into the surrounding countryside or—Her breath caught in her throat—they might be heading for the lake.

No, Varzil had sealed the rift, forever barring access to that terrible
laran
machinery. Perhaps these invaders did not know that. In the process of attempting to recover the Cataclysm device, what disaster might ensue? The cloud-water of the lake retained the vibrational pattern of its transformation. Dyannis knew all too well how readily it could transmit psychic energy.

A series of breaths heightened her trance, freeing her mind to quest deeper. Perhaps if she searched on a wider band, not just the usual mode of telepathy, she could discover something about the intruders. She could not have done it a year ago, before she began her training as under-Keeper, but she had grown in skill as well as strength and confidence.

By shifting her own mode of mental listening, she was able to glimpse the patterns of inanimate glass and metal that comprised the aircars.
Laran
energy sizzled like tiny lightnings along the mechanisms that controlled the flying apparatus, wings and stabilizer fins. The craft were functional, then, and not derelict. Why could she not reach the pilots?

Dyannis pressed her search harder and brushed against a grating vibration. Instantly she recognized an interference pattern like that generated by a telepathic damper. They must have found a way to surround themselves with a barrier impenetrable to
laran
and still be able to guide the aircars with their minds. It was not impossible, just puzzling.

Something tugged at the lower levels of her mind, a ripple, an ache, a calling. She paused in her reflections.

It came from the Overworld. Someone was crying out to her with an urgency that transcended the usual separation between the ordinary physical realm and that vast, formless region.

It made no sense that one of the pilots might be trying to reach her. This was no general plea for help, but rather a sending aimed at her specific mental pattern, which meant an intimate familiarity. It could not be one of the pilots.

The call came again, too faint for recognition yet imbued with desperate need. A cold shiver passed through her, as if some demon from Zandru’s Hells ran its talons along her spine.

Dyannis summoned the image of Hali Tower in the Overworld, the psychic counterpart that she had helped to establish and maintain. This would be her anchor, as it had so many times in the past. In form and color, it resembled its physical counterpart, a slender structure of white set with panels of translucent stone, a bejeweled finger reaching for the heavens.

The next instant, she stood upon its threshold. The temperature and odor of the air shifted. She blinked, waiting for the distant gray horizon to come into focus. The sky would be overcast and featureless, the light diffuse. A flat plain would stretch in every direction, until she shaped it into something else.

Instead of a gray monotone overhead, an enormous boiling darkness rushed toward her, growing larger and closer with each passing moment. She had never seen anything like it, either in the physical realm or this one. In its churning shadows, she glimpsed the form of a woman, face white as a polished skull, cloak whipping about.

A man raced toward her, outstripping the storm. Although she could not make out his features, she instantly recognized the touch of his mind.

Neither time nor distance held any meaning in the Overworld. Between one heartbeat and the next, Eduin stood before her. If she had not known him, she would never have recognized the man who stumbled to a halt, barely able to keep his feet. Hair hung in sodden ropes about a haggard face, creased with lines of suffering. He wore only filthy rags, which might once have been the robe of a
laranzu,
and he looked as if some huge predator, a banshee perhaps, had savaged him. A mangled wound gaped in his belly, dripping blood. Through the tatters of his clothing, welts and scratches marked his body.

Yet it was undeniably Eduin, and for an instant, she wanted nothing more than to take him into her arms. The eyes that glowed in their bruised sockets met hers, both resolute and pleading.

“Dyannis, there is no time! Run, get out of there! Any moment now, you will be attacked!”

“Eduin—what are you talking about? What—”

He turned to glance at the onrushing storm. The cloak of the ghostly woman blew aloft and Dyannis saw that she held in her outstretched hands three firebolts and was even now preparing to hurl them at Hali Tower.

“You cannot stop them!” Eduin cried. “They are shielded against any contact—please, you must save yourself!”

The first firebolt left the hands of the ghost-woman. It moved faster than Dyannis could follow, faster than thought. Eduin screamed, “No!” and struggled to sculpt the Overworld thought-stuff to stop the missile.

Screams filling her head, Dyannis was jerked back into her room in the Tower. The very stones around her vibrated. The silent cries fell away and she heard Rorie’s clear mental voice.

ATTACK!
Rorie called.
Anyone who hears this, help us! Raimon, answer me!

Dyannis pulled the door open and sprinted down the corridor. Only a few of Hali’s inhabitants were asleep at this hour, whether they were working in Raimon’s circle or not. Some were finishing other
laran
tasks, or keeping to their schedule of daytime sleep. She passed a servant bringing warm water and towels.

“Oh,
Domna
Dyannis, what has happened? Is it an accident?”

“I don’t know!” Dyannis did not slow her pace. In her mind, flames encircled the laboratory in which Raimon worked. One of the workers was injured, her mind sending out waves of pain. The circle had fractured; all was in confusion.

She reached the stairwell. Without warning, something burst through the outside wall just above her. Stones tumbled inward, fracturing with a horrendous noise. Orange-white flames poured through the opening. Dust and shards rained down upon her. She ducked, instinctively covering her head with her arms, and drew in the acrid reek of
clingfire
.

Motes of the deadly caustic sprayed the stairwell. She flung herself backward, narrowly avoiding one of the larger drops. Stumbling, twisting, she escaped back into the corridor leading to the living quarters. Smoke and flame filled the air, each moment hotter and denser.

She was cut off from both the laboratories and her only escape.

One of the older women, a matrix mechanic named Javanne, rushed up to her. “Blessed Cassilda, we’re under attack!”

Dyannis felt rather than heard her words above the roar of the flame and the crack of splintering stone. Somewhere else in the Tower, another explosion shuddered through the stone walls. She heard screaming, distant and muffled.

“Come with me.” With a firmness of touch almost unknown among telepaths, Dyannis grabbed the other woman’s hand and pulled her back along the corridor. The
clingfire
would eat its way to them eventually, or the Tower would collapse, but in the meantime, they must find a place quiet enough to create a circle.

Dyannis closed the door of the farthest room behind them. Its owner had been working in Raimon’s circle; Dyannis did not know if the woman was still alive.

She went to the window and looked down. Like most of the rooms in this wing, it overlooked sheer rock walls. There was no possibility of jumping to safety.

Safety.
What was she thinking? There would be no escape for any of them.

Dyannis pulled the other woman down to sit facing her on the bed and took both her hands, Cedestri-style. Javanne’s eyes were glassy with fright.

Gently, with a Keeper’s quiet confidence, Dyannis touched Javanne’s mind with her own.
Together we can reach Raimon and strengthen his circle. Our only hope is to contain the fire with our joined
laran
.

Javanne calmed under the mental contact. She had spent many years at one Tower or another, drilled in obedience to a Keeper.

The
clingfire
crept along the corridor, gaining intensity as it went. Dyannis felt it through her closed eyelids, a heat upon her mind.

Javanne fed mental power to Dyannis. Dyannis seized it, wove it together with her own, and reached for Raimon and his circle. Dyannis thought that with the addition of her own strength, Raimon might be able to regather the circle and throw up some kind of psychic shelter around them.

For a terrifying moment, she could not locate his mental signature anywhere. Then she saw the laboratory through his eyes, wooden floor and furniture ablaze. One figure lay writhing, outlined in eye-searing orange-white. A robed figure tried to reach her, but could not penetrate the fire. Raimon himself sprawled face-down on the floor. Lewis-Mikhail sobbed as he slashed away the muscle on Raimon’s upper back, digging for the mote of
clingfire
.

Dyannis!
Lewis-Mikhail cried out, recognizing her.

I do not know,
she answered, and then realization shook her.
But I know who does.

A blast from above jerked Dyannis back into her physical body. She glanced up just as the ceiling broke open and flaming rock poured down upon her.

D
yannis hurled herself into the Overworld. Her only thought was that Eduin had
known
about the attack before it began, that he was somehow connected to the dreadful shadow-woman.

She stood outside a burning Tower, and it seemed to her that the flames fed not only upon the physical structure, but the minds of the people within it. The Tower itself had gone translucent, fading. Its form might persist for a time, even after those who created it had perished.

A shadow fell across her, a blotch of darkness. She turned to see the cloaked woman, shrunk now to almost human size.

Someone was grappling with the woman. Eduin had placed himself between her and the Tower. They struggled silently, twisting to one side and then the other. The cloak flared out like a living thing, seeking to wrap itself around its adversary. Somehow, Eduin managed to keep free from its entanglement, or perhaps that was because he fought with such single-minded determination. Step by shuffling step, he forced the figure backward.