A Flame in Hali (17 page)

Elation sparked—he was going to change the waters back!

The net tensed as the pressure inside built. Mist churned, currents surging back upon themselves. Power, freely given, flowed from the circle and through the linked Keepers. Instead of froth, bubbles of transparency formed, taking on the clearness of natural water.

A jagged arc of pain shot through the circle, shattering the interwoven unity. The net frayed, severed strands of
laran
power whipping free. Hearts raced, stumbled. Lungs gasped for air.

Dyannis swayed on her feet. Light seared her—whitened sky, robed shapes she should know—twisting in a vision caught between psychic and material realms. Colors warped and shapes fused together—sand and growing plants, the crimson of a Keeper’s garments. Sound buffeted her, cries so distorted they seemed inhuman.

She caught a hint of trained
laran,
a flash of recognition, but only for an instant.

“Kill the demon-spawn!” “No more sorcery!” “Down with Hali!”

Again came the rumble, like a drum roll—
“Death! Death! Death!”
—and overlaying it all, a looming shadow like a woman veiled in black. Eyes like shards of luminous ice glowed with pale, inhuman malice.

Dyannis whirled, staggering, to face a wall of men, faces red, eyes wild, clubs and sticks upraised. She had dropped her barriers completely, merged in the circle, and now her mind was utterly open. A boiling chaos of emotion overran her inner senses—the metallic heat of hatred run wild, smears of festering bitterness, curdled despair, the white, exhilarating shock of victory.

For a terrible moment, Dyannis was overwhelmed, swept away, torn into a hundred pieces. Each fragment was a thrum of agony and rage, the taste and smell of a separate life. She did not know these men, and yet in that instant, she
became
each of them. Most were a blur, a resonance of stories told or minds touched in her healing work or her childhood years at the ranch at Sweetwater. Some she had no reference for, they might have been Ya-men for their strangeness. For an instant, something flashed across her jumbled mind like the pure high note of a flute—
laran!
—trained like tempered steel—familiar, haunting—

Hold!
Raimon’s mental command shocked through the circle.

Hold? Hold what?
she caught the dazed response.

Hands seized her. Fingers dug into her arm. Her muscles went powdery at the sudden physical contact, callused skin against her own.

She gasped. Air seared her throat.

Instinct took over. The
laran
coursing through her during the circle work erupted into coruscating energy. White-blue traceries shot across the exposed skin of her arm, held in the rough grasp of her assailant.

With a shriek, the man hurled himself backward, releasing her. In place of a hand, he clutched a blackened claw to his breast.

“Accursed witch!” someone screamed.

“Down with the sorcerers! Kill them all!”

The dark shadow of a woman bent over the mob, her cloak spread upon the wind to encompass them all.

Even as the crowd roared out their hatred, they hesitated. Glancing to each side, Dyannis saw that the Hali circle had reformed after a manner, this time facing outward. She stretched her hands to each side, creating a protective sphere of energy around herself and her friends. They were still joined in rapport, still partly in the psychic realm. But for the moment, they were safe.

Varzil was down in the lake, cut off from their anchoring support—

She sent out a mental call, though it meant shifting her focus from the angry faces and raised fists before her.

Must—finish—
His answer stumbled, distant, as if the very act of forming mental speech were barely possible.

Varzil had always had a stubborn streak, from her first girlhood memories of him. Once he had decided on a thing, not even their father’s temper could dissuade him. What a fuss there had been about his training at Arilinn! Old
Dom
Felix had mounted such ferocious opposition that only Varzil’s tenacious will could overcome it.

This time, he must listen! He must not risk himself.
There would be another chance, a safer time—

Stones, some of them the size of fists, others handfuls of pebbles and clods of dirt, hailed down upon the circle. One hit Dyannis on the side of her forehead. She felt the impact as an instant of numbness, then the rush of heat as if she’d been struck by a flaming coal. Reaching up, her fingertips brushed a smear of wetness. An instant later, a second volley landed.

She felt the arrow pierce through the air even before the
thwap!
of its release from the bowstring. Pain exploded behind her eyes. She reeled, gasping. The mob rushed forward, all caution fled, even as a second flight of arrows fell upon the circle.

Instinct kept Dyannis on her feet, as the first crush of agony faded and she realized that she herself was not the one struck by the arrow.

Inner and outer vision leaped into a single focus. Rorie clutched the shaft still quivering from his upper chest. As if moving through honey, his legs bent, folding at hip and knee. Dyannis rushed to his side, faster than she had ever moved in her life, and caught him just as he hit the ground.

His weight bore her down, but she managed to keep hold of him and land in a sitting position. In her arms, Rorie struggled for breath. With one hand, she brushed the bare skin of his throat. She felt the wound as if it were her own, the path of the arrowhead between the ribs, the punctured lung collapsing, the seepage of blood from severed vessels. There was no major artery cut, bless Cassilda—

Someone behind her cried out, so distorted that Dyannis could not tell which of her friends it was.

The mob surged forward. They scented victory. A miasma rose from them, reeking of blood lust and madness. Metal gleamed, the thin deadly crescent of a knife.

Another arrow
pong
ed into the earth beside Dyannis. Crimson flooded her sight, leaving an emptiness—Raimon! Without its Keeper, the circle fractured. Cold swept through her, as if the phantasmic figure generated by the crowd had touched them with Zandru’s frozen breath.

Adrenaline sizzled through Dyannis. Outrage sharpened her vision. How dare they raise a hand against a circle battling to save their world? How dare they harm her friend, a
laranzu
whom they ought to revere? How dare they?

The sky loomed over her, the planet below her, and caught between them lay the residue of immense psychic power. Varzil might have cut off its source at the bottom of the lake, but enough of it remained for her purposes.

With a roar like a Hellers avalanche, the mob rushed forward. Dyannis threw her body across Rorie’s to shield him. From the edge of her vision, she glimpsed Lewis-Mikhail grapple with a man wielding a wooden mallet. The others were down, or would be shortly. She could not feel Raimon’s mind.

Dyannis curled her fingers around her starstone and reached out to the energy above her. In a spasm of fury, she drew upon images deep within her mind, the worst childhood nightmares she could remember. When she was four, her brother Harald had kept them all up with stories of hideous beasts, and she had awakened screaming each night for a month afterward.

Against the dark shadowy figure of the woman muffled in cloak and veil, she summoned a dragon out of legend—hugely reptilian, sinuous, and winged—and projected it into the minds of the mob. Her trained
laran
met with no resistance as she thrust aside their pitifully weak shields.

She added more details, each more vivid and horrific. From the dragon’s tapered head, slit-pupiled eyes gleamed. Wings churned air into dust and a tail lashed the air with its barbed spines. From its fangs dripped beads of glowing poison.

As one, the mob halted their attack, drew back, eyes lifted, arms upraised. Their howls of anger turned to terror. From a single forward motion, some turned to bolt, others darted aimlessly, and still more fell to their knees or crouched with hands covering heads. Only a scattered few held their ground, but these men bore weapons. One or two notched their bows, aiming again at the circle.

Dyannis grasped the raw energy of their emotions—confusion and fear—and fed it into the nightmare image. The edges of the dragon sharpened. Its sinuous shape curved downward. She added sounds—the hiss of wing and talon through the air, the rattle of scales, rumbling thunder edged with brass.

Yammering in mindless panic, the mob broke. Pitchforks and bows clattered to the ground. Men shoved each other, scrambling over the fallen bodies of their comrades in their haste.

Dyannis sent the dragon harrying after them, spewing frozen sparks. She soared aloft with this monster of her own creation, looking down at the witless men. Vengeance, like Zandru’s frozen whips, scored her heart.

Let them flee, the pathetic fools who thought to raise their hands against the
leronyn
of the Towers! See them grovel in the dust, scrabbling, stumbling, gibbering in fright. It was no more than they deserved!

She opened her dragon’s mouth and breathed forth a stream of brightness, glowing white as if incandescent, but cold, cold as the breath of hell itself.

Those men who remained on their feet scattered, gibbering. Not a shred of the ghostly cloaked figure remained. Their thoughts, those who retained any vestige of rationality, were bent only upon escape. With another blast of malevolence, she let them go and turned her attention to those still on the ground. Some lay sprawled or tightly curled, knees drawn up and arms covering their faces. Other bodies jerked spasmodically.

Grim and exultant, she swooped toward them.

Dyannis!
The name burst upon her mind, a sound so foreign she could not for a moment tell its meaning. A name—hers? And a voice she should know—

The words tore through her, as if she were suddenly thrust inside an enormous resonating bell. She paused in flight. A cacophony of horror and rage from the field below shocked through her. Through them she felt a silvery arrow of pain, metallic claws lancing deep into flesh—

—heart convulsing, chest gripped by an invisible vise, skin clammy with grave sweat—

The dragon shape disintegrated as if it had never existed, leaving only a swath of unbroken sky.

Dyannis blinked, looking around her. Rorie sprawled unconscious across her lap. His breathing was slow, his skin cool, but not with deadly shock. She touched his mind, felt the stillness of healing trance. The bleeding had almost stopped. Lewis-Mikhail, untouched, was helping Raimon to rise. Blood matted the hair over the Keeper’s temple, trickling down the side of his face, but his eyes were clear and focused. He’d been stunned, nothing worse, and she knew from her training as a monitor that scalp wounds bled freely. The other members of the circle looked unharmed.

All around, men, some in farmers’ homespun, others in layers of stained, tattered rags, lay as if felled by a giant hand. She saw now that there were women among them, in garments as drab and ragged as the men’s. One woman crouched beside a fallen white-haired figure, wailing.

Was this what war was like? Dyannis had never ridden to battle along with Carolin’s armies. Her hands flew to her face and yet she could not cover her eyes or look away.

Everywhere, she saw bodies curled in agony or crumpled disjointedly like discarded toys. There was little blood, and only the occasional reek where some man had soiled himself. And yet a miasma, a mind stench, hung like an ashen veil over the lake shore. Underneath lay a terrible stillness, the silence after the final beating of the heart, the last shuddering breath.

C
hill clawed at Dyannis, nausea shivering through her bones and numbing the skin around her mouth. If she did not act quickly, she would faint. She did not deserve that luxury, she whose anger had caused the devastation before her. Drawing upon her Tower training, she steadied her nerves. She sucked air deep into her lungs. Her pulse hammered in her skull, but her vision cleared.

Quickly she assessed the situation. There was nothing she needed to do for Rorie. He had already entered a state of lowered bodily function that would sustain him until proper care arrived. Raimon, his scalp wound still oozing, cupped his starstone between both hands, gazing into its depths, using his
laran
to contact Hali Tower for help.

And Varzil, beneath the turbulent cloud-water, cut off from them all—

I am well, little sister,
came his mental voice, clear and strong. She realized it had been he who had called her back and broken her killing rage.
There is no time to waste. You must see to those who are hurt.

Yes, there must be something she could do for these poor wretches. Their plight was all her doing. She rushed to the nearest and knelt down. From the twitching of his limbs, he was still alive. White ringed his eyes, but his pupils were equal, dilating as her shadow passed across his face. He was surprisingly young, yet weather-worn, his fingers marked by calluses cracked and gray with soil. She touched one hand, using the physical contact to reach his mind.

After a long moment, the boy closed his eyes. His shudders eased and his hands relaxed. She thought he might slip into an exhausted sleep, but he braced himself into a sitting position. Shaking himself like a dog, he glanced around.