The Fall of Neskaya (58 page)

“Did you send word to my uncle?” Seeing him shrug and shake his head with an expression of
In this madness?
Taniquel took a step closer. Her hands curled into fists and the physical act of restraining herself from striking him sent jagged lightnings of pain up her forearms. “Then you must give us that hour!”

“Even if we could . . .” Graciela lifted her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “We are too few to stand against a Tower . . .”

“A Tower? What Tower?”

“Tramontana,” one of the men said wearily. “Only a full circle could cast a spell of this magnitude over such an area and control so many minds at once.”

“Graciela’s right,” the other said. “We don’t have enough strength.”

“Can you not reach them through your starstone?” Taniquel had heard of such things. Caitlin, who was a telepath like many in the Towers, could speak mentally with her friends at Hali, if the distance were not too great. She had done so, in sending word of the Drycreek disaster. “You must convince them to break off the attack so it will be sword against sword, unhindered!”

“We tried that, when the attack first began,” Graciela said. “They are barricaded against us. Nor can we contact Hali, to ask them to restrain Tramontana. There is too much—you wouldn’t understand the exact term—psychic static.”

Taniquel’s thoughts raced like wildfire. “There must be another way!”

“What do you want of us?” Graciela cried. “We are not enough to defend the camp as it is, and now you want one of us to go wandering through the Overworld on such a fool’s quest.”

“I ask only that we do what we can—all of us,” Taniquel said, putting all the command she could muster into those few words.

In response, they took up positions in a triangle, lightly joining hands. “It will do little good,” one of the men said, “but we will try our best.”

“I must go to my uncle now. He is—
I
am—counting on you to do your part.”

There was no reply, which Taniquel supposed was good. She hurried in the direction Rafael had gone. After a couple of steps, she cursed her own folly in not asking one of the
laranzu’in
to locate him. But she could not go back now and ask. That would surely start another debate all over again. She tried to make out those channels of order in the seething darkness of the camp which had marked where Rafael had spoken to his men, gathered them back into sanity. Minutes slipped away as she searched, while the awareness pulsed through her veins,
Only an hour away!

Almost by accident, she met Gerolamo giving orders to a group of younger officers. She heard his voice before she saw him, rough-edged but firm, and caught the gleam of ivory silk tied like a badge around one arm. He held a naked sword in one hand and looked ready to use it. The officers dispersed even as she approached.

“Where is King Rafael?” she said without preliminary.

“He’s taken those men still fit to fight to the field beyond,” Gerolamo said.

At least, there were some. She dared not think how many or what had happened to them when the circle broke. “I must speak to him right away!”

Gerolamo said it was not safe for her to be wandering the camp, even as he took her arm to escort her himself. Once an armed man rushed at them from the darkness. Moonlight glinted off the whites of his bulging eyes and the dagger he jabbed at Taniquel. He screamed, “Witch-hag! Your kind killed my father! You poisoned him in his sleep!”

Gerolamo deflected the thrust and sent the dagger skidding into the dust. The soldier stared at Gerolamo’s sword, then sprinted away. Gerolamo handed the dagger to Taniquel.

“Use this only if you must,” he told her, “but use it to kill.”

Nodding, she took the dagger. Rank and reason would avail her nothing tonight. If she needed to use the dagger, she would get only one chance.

In a pool of torchlight, Rafael was talking to his soldiers in quiet, even tones. She felt them drinking in his words. The pressure of the
laran
spell still resonated through her. Yet these armed men resisted its command, each in his own way. Until that moment, she had not understood how loyalty could override even the most deeply-rooted hatred.

“Each of us carries the seeds of war and the seeds of peace,” Rafael’s voice rang out. “We make a choice every day of our lives, every moment. To kill, to preserve. To grow a tree, to chop it down. To stand with law and right, to let loose the outlaw within us.”

And every moment he talked, they chose. They chose to stand, hands unmoving on their weapons, eyes fixed upon their king.

They are worth more than all the gold in Shainsa, these men,
she thought.
They must not fall beneath Deslucido’s swords!

Rafael, seeing her approach, paused in his speech and drew her aside.

“
Chiya,
you should not be here—”

“Edric and the others have been screening us from the worst of the
laran
attack,” she said, brushing his words aside. “It comes from Tramontana. Now Edric is hurt and our own defenses crippled. We have less than an hour before the Ambervale forces arrive.”

“An hour . . .” he said, drawing in a breath, “and we cannot withdraw with the men in such disorder. The hills will force us to scatter where they could hunt us down one by one.”
Or,
he thought but did not add aloud,
fight like this.

“Uncle, there must be something we can do!” Desperation rose in her, closed icy fingers around her throat. By the torches, she caught the shift in Rafael’s expression. He meant to order her from the camp, into what fragile safety lay beyond. He thought her useless at best, to be protected at the cost of his pitifully thin resources.

“No, do not spare a man for me,” she said as briskly as she could. “I can resist this spell, don’t you remember?” She lifted the dagger Gerolamo had thrust into her hands. “And I am armed. I will see what aid I can bring to Edric and the others.”

This might be the last time she saw Rafael Hastur alive and she wanted to throw her arms around him, thank him for his kindness and his vision. But she dared not. She had to pretend that they had a chance.

As Taniquel rushed back to her tent, the
laran
attack seemed to intensify. There was less active fighting among the soldiers, but more sitting with their heads bowed, sobbing or hiding their faces. In the eyes of the men who looked up as she passed, she saw not only lurking madness, but desperation. There must be
something
she could do.

Taniquel lowered the tent flap behind her, sat on her sleeping pallet, and buried her head on her folded arms. Not for the first time, she wished she had a starstone and the training to use it. Then she could join Graciela and the others and strengthen their resistance. She wished she could send visions of flaming scorpions upon Deslucido’s men in return. Perhaps she could even go out into that nebulous place apart from normal time and space called the Overworld and find help.

Help. Where would she go, whom would she ask? Except for Caitlin, she had only a passing acquaintance with the folk at Hali.

But Hali was not the only Tower beholden to her uncle. Neskaya Tower also owed allegiance to Hastur, and Coryn was at Neskaya.

Taniquel lifted her head. Memory flooded her senses—the warmth of dappled sun in the garden that magical afternoon, the sweet softness of his lips on hers, the smell of flowers and his skin. His hair, loose to his shoulders, had brushed her face when he turned; she could feel that light, silken touch even now. Shadows delineated the curve of his ear, the strong line of his jaw. In her mind, he turned back to her with those eyes so full of light that she felt herself falling into them . . .

She lay back on the pallet, clasping her hands.

Even as she spoke his name in her thoughts, her heart called out. Longing pierced her.

Through water you have come to me; through fire I must come to you.
But where was the water? Where the fire?

Fire . . . and once again, as in her dreams, she saw the impossible blue flames. Now she stood in the very heart of the blaze, in the heart of a sparkling matrix. For a moment she could not move, dared not even breathe lest she sear her lungs. But the flames burned without heat or smoke. They consumed nothing, arose from nowhere. Her hands passed through the shimmering walls, untouched.

Drawing courage, she took a step and then another. As she emerged from the blue fire, she felt solid ground beneath her feet. She blinked, clearing her vision.

She stood on a plain of unbroken gray beneath an equally featureless sky. No wind stirred the air, nor did any sound reach her ears. It seemed to go on forever, gray ground, gray sky, gray horizon.

Although she breathed, she had only the haziest sense of her own body. When she looked down, she saw the ghostly outlines of gauze-draped limbs. She had, by some eldritch magic, become a wraith in this strange colorless world. Yet she felt solid enough with her heart hammering against the inside of her chest.

Tramontana! Where in this monotone world would she find the Tower? She did not even know in which direction to begin her search. She pivoted slowly, scanning the horizon.

In the distance, Taniquel made out a building, squat and lit from within with lambent white. She made her way toward it. It grew larger much more quickly than it should have, given her own speed. Perhaps distances here did not mean the same thing as they did in the ordinary world.

It was, she saw as she drew nearer, a sort of tower, but of no architectural style she had ever seen. It seemed more theater dressing, as in the plays she had seen performed in Thendara, than any real place where people might work and live. Jagged lines of brilliance coruscated over its surface. The air bore a slight metallic tang which reminded her of summer lightning. Within its flickering aura, nothing human stirred.

“What is this place?” she called out. Her voice sounded tinny and weak to her own ears. She took in a breath and tried again, louder. “Show yourselves! Where am I?”

When minutes passed without an answer, she began to circle the tower. What she discovered on the far side startled her. Instead of a glistening surface, featureless except for the darting lines of brightness, she found a huge round piece of blue-tinted glass, twice the height of a man and mounted in a frame of silvery metal. As she gazed upon it, watched it swivel on its mountings as if turned by an invisible hand, she was reminded of a giant lens. She’d seen their kind used to concentrate the sun’s energy to start a fire.

By squinting, she could almost see the rays of invisible power streaming from inside the tower through lens . . . and disappearing from the Overworld. With a shudder, she realized that she stood before the psychic manifestation of Tramontana Tower even as it rained down madness upon her uncle’s camp. Here was the source. Here she must stop it.

With an inarticulate cry, she hurled herself at the lens, thinking only to point it elsewhere. Even as her fingertips touched the silvery mountings and the blue glass, jolts of electric energy leaped out to sting her with a thousand points of pain. Her body jerked away of its own accord, her arms reflexively pulling back.

She reached out a second time. Again, it was like trying to grasp a stalk of lightning or thrust a naked arm into a nest of scorpion-ants. She fell back, stumbling to her knees. Goosebumps covered her skin and every nerve shrilled. Too furious to think straight, she picked herself up, marched around to the smooth side of the Tower, and kicked it.

To Taniquel’s surprise, her foot did not meet solid rock. Something slowed the blow, but did not stop it. She had expected an unyielding surface and when her foot kept going, she almost lost her balance. She pulled her foot free without difficulty and aimed another kick.