Zandru's Forge (65 page)

The words had the ring of a speech memorized and reluctantly delivered, yet Varzil could detect no hesitation. However the
laranzu
who had spoken them might feel about those commands, he would indeed carry them out.

I will deliver your message,
Varzil said.
But I cannot tell how soon you may have your answer. Our monitor is attending to Loryn of Hestral even as we speak.

It was both warning and concession, and Varzil knew it.
I thank you for whatever you can do.

Varzil let the contact drain away. Slowly he got to his feet. Marius, at his side, looked to him, eyes brimming with emotion. Clearly, the boy had been able to follow enough scattered thoughts to catch the essence of the message.

“Loryn will never surrender,” Marius said.

“No, I think not,” Varzil replied, striding toward the stairs. “I very much doubt if he would be able to enforce it if he did. But we must accord him the courtesy of his own decision.”

Even as he reached the archway to the topmost stair, Varzil felt a massive shuddering of psychic energy through the Tower. The earth heaved and bucked like a rebellious mount. He grabbed the archway to keep his balance. Someone below screamed.

Another impact jarred the Tower, or perhaps it was an after-shock from the first one. Varzil knew of a certainty that Hestral was now under attack, and not by a minor aggregation of
leronyn,
such as traveled with the army. The energy could only be generated by a full circle within the protection of a Tower, their powers focused and amplified through a matrix screen.

Varzil had not gone more than a few steps down, with Marius at his heels, when another wave hit, followed an instant later with a deafening
crack!

Loryn!
Varzil reached out mentally.

HESTRAL IS UNDER ATTACK!
The Keeper’s silent command filled his mind.
EVERYONE WHO CAN, JOIN WITH ME! WE MUST FORM A CIRCLE!

Who is behind the attack?
Serena cried silently.

Hali Tower!
Varzil answered, pitching his mental voice to carry thoughout the Tower.
At Rakhal’s command. They tried to warn us
—

A horrendous rumble issued from the northern comer of the Tower, the dormitory wing. Varzil, his
laran
senses stretched wide, felt stones shift and slide, walls buckle, wooden beams splinter. The entire section shuddered like a hamstrung beast.

Varzil rushed down the last few steps to meet Loryn and a handful of senior workers, responding to Loryn’s silent summons.

“There’s no time to reach a laboratory!” Varzil cried.

He jerked open the door of the nearest room. It was the old infirmary, where Felicia had first been taken. It took only a few minutes to pull benches and pillows into a rough circle.

As each one quieted his mind and breathing, settling into rapport, Varzil assessed their condition. They were all worn thin by unrelenting vigilance. Loryn himself was near exhaustion, his focus patchy. He’d been deep in healing trance when Marius tried to wake him, and its residue clung to him like a clouded film.

Loryn, let me serve as Keeper,
Varzil said.
I am stronger for this task.

Loryn’s refusal was swift.
The fault and hence the responsibility for our situation are mine alone. If I had not been weak, Eduin would have not acted rashly. I must deal with the consequences.

Rather than provoke further dissension, Varzil settled into the circle. He allowed Loryn to integrate his psychic energy into the flowing whole. As he fed power into the circle, his concentration deepened. There were only five of them, a small circle working with only their personal starstones. At the back of his awareness, he sensed another presence, a warmth, an invisible radiance.

I am with you
... sang a precious, familiar voice.

Once more, Varzil found himself looking into a clear lens through which he could see energy as well as physical objects. Hestral had been built centuries ago as a military fortress, strong enough to withstand the most determined physical assault. It stood upon solid rock, which would not yield easily. Only a tenday or so earlier, they had used their
laran
powers to reinforce the physical bonds between the particles of stone and mortar. What the Hastur army
leronyn
had sought to rend apart, they had preserved, not by any direct opposition of power, but simply by willing stone to remain itself.

As before, Varzil’s vision penetrated into the substance of wall, roof and floor, wood, stone and mortar. He saw the energy form of Hestral like a second Tower overlapping the real one, shadowy and yet more real. Without these interlaced bonds, the physical Tower would crumble into nothingness.

The attack from Hali came in bursts of invisible fire. Each one touched the outer edges of Hestral’s energy form like a wave crashing against a boulder, seeking a crevice or gap.

Hold ... hold .
..
hold...
pulsed through the Hestral circle like an echo of that earlier defense.

As before, the bonds between the particles of stone strengthened. Each succeeding blast of power spattered and flowed harmlessly over the surfaces. It fell away, leaving both the physical and the energy form of Hestral Tower untouched.

Elation swept the circle. With each passing moment, the walls maintained their solidity, the stone smooth and dense, heavy with the weight of the earth. This attack was more intense than the previous attempts, but the circle was well able to counter it. Loryn’s strategy was working.

Beneath them, Hestral Tower shuddered again. Varzil followed the course of the energy blasts from the outer walls deep into the earth beneath. In horror, he realized that the first attack from Hali had been a feint, a maneuver to lure their attention away from the real object—not the walls of stone and mortar, but the bedrock upon which Hestral Tower stood. The underlying layers of rock and soil crumbled and gave way.

Varzil saw within his mind what his fleshly eyes could not. In the dormitory wing, the massive beams that supported the upper structures tilted as the foundations fell away at strategic, targeted points. The weight of stone and wood, tipping and sliding, came crashing down on what was left of the substructure. Like slivers of silvery pain, he felt the screams of those who were trapped, ripples of panic in others rushing to their rescue along the shifting, uncertain corridors.

Dismay shook the circle. There was no use in trying to shore up the Tower. The disintegration had already progressed too far. Even if the bedrock could have been welded solid in an instant, the entire dormitory wing was unstable. It was rapidly collapsing under its own weight.

Hali Tower paused in their onslaught, but only for a moment. Varzil, attuned now to the method of their attack, sensed the next target almost at the same moment. Hali was systematically demolishing the key supporting structures.

Varzil did not know how long they might hold out, or how long Loryn’s will to resist would last. The Keeper held the circle in an iron grip. Iron, he reminded himself, could be brittle if stressed too far.

The floor beneath them staggered, slipped. Although the blast from Hali had not been aimed directly beneath the infirmary, the devastation from the dormitory wing had destabilized connecting structures, setting off a chain of collapse.

Loryn, we cannot stay here,
he said silently.

At that very moment came a crash so loud and percussive, it stunned him. The air burst from his lungs; his psychic vision darkened. He reeled with the sudden, jolting return to his physical body. Heart hammering in his chest, muscles quivering, he scrambled to his feet. The floor at the far end sagged. A cot slipped toward the depression, colliding with an upended stool.

The cry came not from one of the other
leronyn,
now stumbling toward the doorway, but silently.

White light surged around him, filled him, blinded him. His body tripped and caught itself against the wall beside the door. From what seemed an immense distance, someone cried, “Loryn! Help him!” and “Varzil, are you hurt?”

The light drew him up like a vortex. He had no strength to fight it. For a terrible moment, he found himself stretched and scraped thinner than the finest parchment, then twisted and wrenched—

Around him, stone walls toppled. He saw them as shadows of white against white, bathed in stark brilliance. Dust and powdery shards rose like a stormcloud. Something sharp and hard shattered, throwing out slivers that shot right through him.

The shriek of pain shifted his vision once more. With the eerie doubled sight that came from being partly in one world and part in another, Varzil looked down/around at the little stone cellar where he and Loryn had so painstakingly disassembled the stockpile of
clingfire
. Here, on the very table they had used, Felicia’s body had lain, held in stasis.

Instead of the table, and the shrouded form of his beloved, Varzil stared at a pile of rubble. One wall had fallen and the adjacent ones were about to give way.

He threw himself where the table had stood, thinking only to pull the stones away, quickly while there still might be hope. He thought nothing of their weight, of his own danger—

His hands passed, ghostlike, right through the stone. The ceiling crashed down through him, completely filling the remaining open space. The white light seized him once more. He was no longer in the little stone cellar, or the infirmary either, and he was not alone. Though he was again blinded, he was filled with that familiar presence, light and sure.

Quickly!
Felicia’s mental voice sang in his mind.
We must force Hali to end this madness before anyone else dies!

Her face floated before him, very much like the last time he had seen her, a vision spun of dreams and the memory of the heart. A smile, inexpressively sweet for all its briefness, flickered across her lips. She reached out one pale hand to him—

—and he stood at her side in the Overworld. Her fingers slipped through his, insubstantial as mist. He saw that, like the strange gray plain, she had turned colorless. Already her eyes, once so full of intelligence and emotion, were fading. She gathered herself with visible effort. An instant of clarity kin-died. Her lips moved—

Go—

Though she stood as still as before, she began to recede. A great maw of distance opened up between them. Varzil thought he had only to reach out and touch her, to take her in his arms once again, to taste her lips—

Felicia took a step away and shook her head. He understood; he was no raw novice, but
laranzu
and Keeper. He had been trained in the dangers of the Overworld, and most especially the certain failure of trying to maintain contact with the dead. Once he gave way to this temptation, he knew, there would be no turning back. No matter how far or how fast he ran after her, she would elude him. Time; which was difficult enough to keep track of in the Overworld, would lose all meaning. He would go on and on in fruitless chase, bound by desperation and hope, until his physical body withered and died.

And so would those who depended upon him.

Go
—she had urged him. Begged him.

Though it felt like tearing his heart from his breast, he turned his back on her and summoned the Overworld landmark of Hali Tower.

Varzil pictured Hali as he had first seen it, a slender white Tower with the cloud-waters of the Lake at its base. The image wavered, mingling with the vision of the same Tower at the far distant time of the Cataclysm and his all-too-brief warning. He bent his will and concentration on the flashes of present-day personalities—Dougal DiAsturian ... the
laranzu
from the relays ... Dyannis ....

Varzil, no!
wailed through his mind, distorted, barely recognizable.

He had never worked in a circle at Hali. From his visits, he knew only a little of the layout. He remembered the room in which he had woken, the kindness of the healers who tended him. Details evaded him; he had been a boy then and had just suffered a tremendous shock.

It was years ago,
he told himself.
They will not remember me.

Yet he recalled the translucent blue stone of Hali Tower, used not as accents but in huge opulent blocks, tokens of a time when the will and pleasure of the
Comyn
lords was the only consideration. Once more, he looked down upon a circular room, generous in proportion, and the enormous artificial matrix at its center. A circle had gathered here, eyes closed in concentration, heads of flame and copper hair bowed, hands linked. Energy, visible as a eoruscation of blue-white, bathed their faces. In memory or perhaps in sympathetic resonance, he felt an answering surge along his own
laran
channels.

His mental vision leaped into focus and he stood, not as a passive observer looking down upon the room, but at its very center. The faceted white light of the matrix surrounded him.

Somehow, Felicia had linked him with the device, and it had drawn him here.