Caught in Crystal: A Lyra Novel (41 page)

The Crystal did not move; it was heavier than she had thought. “Don’t stand there; push!” Kayl panted, shoving at the cube again.

The children shook themselves out of their immobility and joined her. The Magicseeker hesitated, glanced at the blackness, and added his efforts to theirs. Corrana stared at them. “Stop! You’ll destroy the Crystal!”

“Would you rather that creature destroyed us?” Kayl said. “Together now; heave!”

The Crystal slid a finger’s width, and the pedestal rocked. “Again!” Kayl said. Together, they shoved at the Crystal. The pedestal teetered. Then, with a kind of majestic slowness, it toppled over. An instant later the crystal cube disappeared into the curtain of blackness.

The surface of the blackness twitched, then froze. Kayl held her breath, expecting something dramatic to follow. Nothing happened. Cautiously, she stepped forward. The black creature did not move; no tentacles lashed out to drag her into it. Kayl took another step and peered at the black wall. It looked as if it were made of smooth black stone.

Kayl heaved a sigh of relief and turned to her companions. “I think it’s—”

The rest of her sentence was lost in a noise like thunder. The floor swayed beneath Kayl’s feet. As she struggled to keep her balance, she saw the blackness crack. Shards began falling from the walls; great sheets split away from the windows that the blackness had covered. Kayl heard Corrana shouting, but the noise from the crumbling creature was too great for her to make out the words.

The floor itself began to break apart. Kayl jumped frantically back toward the children, but the stones beneath her feet fell even as she leaped. Then something caught her and lowered her slowly, knocking aside the wickedly pointed shards of blackness that filled the air, while the Twisted Tower came apart around her. When the air cleared, Kayl found herself standing atop a pile of rubble, blinking in the sunlight. Mark and Dara were a little way away with the Magicseeker and Corrana; Glyndon lay sprawled at their feet, still unconscious.

Corrana’s face was split by the first broad smile Kayl had ever seen her wear. “I am a sorceress again!” she cried triumphantly.

K
AYL BLINKED AT CORRANA
for a moment, unable to absorb the meaning of her words. “Oh,” she said at last. “Then it was your spell that let us down, there at the end.”

“Of course.” Corrana was the cool sorceress of the Sisterhood once more, but beneath the calm façade Kayl sensed an undercurrent of disappointment at her reaction.

“I am glad for you,” Kayl said quickly, “but I just can’t…” Her voice trailed off as her eyes were drawn irresistably to Glyndon’s recumbent form.

“You are right,” Corrana said. “We must find the others. Risper will be able to help him.”

If he is still alive, Kayl thought, but she did not voice her doubts. She started across the shifting rubble, toward Glyndon and the children. As she reached them, Mark, who was facing away from her, shouted and began waving his arms. “Hey! We’re up here!”

Kayl put her hand on his shoulder in time to keep him from trying to jump up and down on such unsteady footing. She looked past him and saw a small group of figures near the foot of the pile of rubble.

“Barthelmy’s down there,” Dara said positively. Kayl nodded, surprised to find that she felt none of the relief she would have expected even a few days before. That reaction, more than anything else, told Kayl that she was finished with the Sisterhood at last. The final tie had been broken when the crystal cube disappeared into the black thing; now she was free of her past. It didn’t seem to matter as much as she had thought it would. She shrugged mentally and started carefully down the hill of rubble, hoping that one of the healers was among the survivors. Mark and Dara came sliding after her.

The first face Kayl made out as she neared the foot of the hill was Risper’s, and a wave of relief swept her. “Risper! We need you. Glyndon’s badly hurt.”

Risper started up the treacherous heap of stones. She looked tired and drawn, and there were shadows in her eyes that made Kayl wonder whether she had lost one of the Sisters of her Star Cluster. “If it was another one of his visions, I can’t do much,” Risper said as she reached Kayl.

“It’s a sword wound in his left arm, just below the shoulder,” Kayl replied. “I’m not certain, but I think it hit the bone. He’s unconscious.”

Risper began climbing more rapidly. “Blood loss or shock. Was anyone able to do anything for him?”

Kayl turned and joined Risper’s climb. “Dara tried.”

“Did she stop the bleeding?”

“I think so,” Dara volunteered. She looked worriedly at Risper. “He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?”

“I won’t know that until I look at him.” Risper caught at the hand Corrana was reaching down to her, and scrambled the last few feet to the top of the pile of rubble. She hesitated briefly when she saw the Magicseeker, then glanced at Corrana. Corrana made an ambiguous gesture. Risper shrugged and squatted beside her patient.

“He’ll live,” she said after a quick examination. “But we have to get him down from here. If you two,” she waved at Corrana and Kayl, “will help me lift him—”

Kayl and Corrana bent to assist Risper. To Kayl’s surprise, the Magicseeker joined them. Risper gave him one penetrating look, then went on with her instructions.

“Shouldn’t you be off to join your friends?” Kayl whispered to the Magicseeker.

“When we’re finished here,” the man said. “I believe in paying my debts whenever possible.”

They carried Glyndon carefully down the heap of shards and tumbled stone that was all that remained of the Twisted Tower. Elder Mother Miracote and three of the Sisters met them at the bottom. Miracote waited until Risper had established Glyndon in a sheltered spot, then drew Kayl and her companions a little way away. “What happened?” the Elder Mother demanded unceremoniously.

“We found the Crystal room, and Utrilo found us. He wounded Glyndon; the black creature killed Javieri, Utrilo, and one of Utrilo’s men. The Crystal and the creature… destroyed each other.” Kayl paused. “The details and the guesswork can wait until later. What’s happened here?”

Miracote frowned, but answered. “I assume Corrana told you of Ferianek’s attempt to lift the spell that bound us? It failed quickly, and the Magicseekers overwhelmed us. Their leader took three of his followers and Javieri into the Tower; shortly after, a… a blackness swept out of it. The Magicseekers tried to fight it, but…” Miracote shrugged.

“What about Bryn? And Ferianek?”

“They are both alive, but we lost two Sisters and Mother Siran in the fighting with the Magicseekers, and four others to that creature. Fortunately, the black thing seemed to find Magicseekers more to its taste.”

The man beside Kayl made a choking noise, and Miracote looked at him closely for the first time. “And what are we to do with him?” she asked Kayl disapprovingly.

“Need we do anything?” Corrana said. “There is nothing left here for us to fight over.”

“True.” Miracote turned and addressed the Magicseeker directly. “And what is your opinion?”

“Of you, or of your plans, star-witch?” the Magicseeker said with evident dislike.

Kayl broke in quickly, before Miracote could answer. “If we let you leave, will you give us your word not to attack us?”

The Magicseeker shrugged, but his tone was less hostile as he said, “I see no reason not to.”

“Can you speak for your companions as well?” Miracote demanded.

“They’re reasonable people,” the Magicseeker said, in a tone that implied Miracote wasn’t. “And as your friend said a minute ago, there’s nothing left here for us to fight over.”

“Go, then,” Corrana said.

Miracote’s eyes narrowed at Corrana’s assumption of authority, but she was too shrewd to correct the Elder Sister in front of a stranger and enemy. The Magicseeker gave Corrana and Kayl each a brief nod of farewell, looked at Miracote with dislike, and strode off toward the forest that bordered the valley. “He’ll find few of his companions to persuade,” Miracote said with some satisfaction as she watched him go. “The creature killed most of them.”

“Without his help in the Tower, we would all have died,” Kayl said coldly.

Miracote looked at her. “He’s a Magicseeker. Don’t ask me to feel sorry for him.”

Kayl suppressed a wave of irritation and said, “I won’t. What can we help with here?”

Miracote put them to work helping Risper with the wounded. The second healer had been among the fatalities, so Risper was forced to tend all of the most severely injured herself. She had little time or energy for anyone else. Kayl cleaned and bandaged flesh wounds, cuts and scrapes for close to two hours. Then she joined the more able-bodied in burying the dead.

Alden and Xaya arrived shortly after the Tower’s fall, drawn by the noise of the collapse. They were relieved to find Bryn only slightly injured, and volunteered almost at once to be part of a group heading back to the camp for supplies. By noon they had returned with Risper’s bags of medicine, two tents to shelter the wounded, and enough flatbread and yellow cheese to provide lunch for everyone. They also brought several brimming waterskins, for which everyone was grateful. A brackish trickle at the far end of the valley was the only source of water near the Twisted Tower, and Risper, after one look at a sample, had refused to allow anyone to drink from it.

Several more trips were made back to the camp on the other side of the hills, for it quickly became evident that they would have to spend the night in the valley. Risper refused to allow certain of the wounded to be moved, Glyndon among them, and there no longer seemed to be a good reason to avoid camping in the valley. Kayl did not argue with the decision. As she set up the tent for herself and the children, however, she made sure that every particle of black stone had been removed from the ground beneath the tent. Most of the Sisters copied her precaution.

By evening, the camp had been moved to the valley. Things began to look more normal, though the atmosphere remained subdued. Neither grief nor victory had had time to penetrate the minds of the survivors; that, Kayl knew from experience, would come with the morrow.

Over dinner, Kayl and Corrana told their story to the remnant of the expedition, omitting only the exact details of their brief experience with the magic of the Crystal. When they finished, Elder Mother Alessa stirred. “So the crystal cube is gone,” she said.

“It’s such a waste,” Ferianek said in a mournful tone. “A thing that could actually show the past! We could have learned so much from it.”

Alessa gave him a sharp look. “Indeed we could.”

“We had no other choice,” Kayl said firmly. “Not really.”

“No?” Alessa said skeptically. “You could not have used it as the Varnan did, instead of destroying it?”

Corrana’s eyes met Kayl’s briefly, and a message of understanding passed between them. “No,” said Corrana. “We could not have used the Crystal.”

“What we did was the only possible way to kill that black thing,” Kayl added. “And it had to be killed. You had a brief taste of it; imagine what it would have done if we hadn’t stopped it here!”

“But how did it get out of the Twisted Tower?” one of the sorceresses asked. “It shouldn’t have been able to get out. The door was sealed; it shouldn’t have come out.”

Kayl recognized the woman and felt a deep pang of sympathy. Of the four members of her Star Cluster, two had been killed by the black creature. Kayl knew all too well what that was like.

“I cannot say for certain what set the creature free,” Corrana said. “I can, however, speculate. I believe the chip of crystal broke the seals that held the creature inside the Tower.”

“I don’t understand,” the woman said.

“When Kayl brought the chip into the Twisted Tower, Glyndon and Barthelmy had weakened the sealing spells. If they had not, the spells would have killed anyone who tried to enter. But when Glyndon realized that Magicseekers had also come into the Tower, he used the power of the crystal cube to renew the spells that sealed the doors. Thus, when Utrilo’s swordswoman tried to carry the chip out of the Tower, it passed through the full strength of the spell. I think the spell could not hold against even a small piece of the Crystal which powered it, and so the sealing was broken.”

“What of the chip itself?” Miracote said, leaning forward.

Corrana shrugged delicately. “I looked for it, but all I found was the body of the Magicseeker who carried it. Perhaps passing through the seal was too great a strain for it to bear, and it crumbled like the Tower.”

“Ah.” Miracote sat back not bothering to hide her disappointment. “Then we have nothing to show for all our efforts.”

“We have our magic again,” Corrana said gently. “I think that is enough.” Her eyes flickered across Kayl’s as she spoke.

Kayl nodded, acknowledging Corrana’s unspoken message in a way that the others would take as agreement. She was careful to keep her hands in her lap, away from the small, hard lump under her belt. She was sure now that Corrana suspected Kayl of having the chip; this was Corrana’s way of showing that she would not mention her suspicions to anyone else. Kayl was glad. She had been the first to find the body of the Magicseeker, and she had spotted the chip of crystal at once, lying in the dust less than a hand’s breadth from the outstretched fingers. She had taken it and gone on, leaving the body for someone else to discover.

What she would do with the chip, Kayl did not know. Touching it no longer brought her visions of her past, and she was not magician enough to discover and use whatever other powers it possessed. She only knew that she could not give it to the Sisterhood, and she did not want to spend any more of her time in fruitless arguments with them. She was grateful to Corrana for sparing her that.

“We still do not know what took our magic from us, or how it was returned,” Alessa pointed out. She gave Barthelmy a sidelong glance as she spoke.

“Your spells came back with the destruction of the Twisted Tower,” Kayl contradicted sharply. “Do you have to know for certain whether it was the creature, the Crystal, or the Tower itself that took them?”