Leaves of Flame (17 page)

“W
E’LL REACH THE WELL TODAY,” Colin announced when they woke, the others packing up what little they’d taken out the night before. He noticed they kept their cattans free, their clothing loose. Here inside the cavern, they didn’t need the heavy clothes to keep the harsh wind at bay and so were dressed in layers mostly to protect against the cold. “Stay near me at the Well. And don’t drink from it, don’t even touch it.” He pulled back his sleeve enough for everyone to see the black marks, heard one of them suck in a sharp breath, another whisper “shaeveran.” He caught all of their gazes with a hard glare. “It will change you, even with a touch.”

Then he spun and led them down the tunnel. Everyone stayed close, and everyone was on edge. Colin drew their tension around him like a cloak, his focus on the Well, on what he would find when he reached it.

He nearly gasped when, from the darkness ahead, he saw a faint flicker of bluish light.

“What is it?” Vaeren spat behind him. Only then did he realize he’d halted in his tracks, that he stood with his staff angled defensively before him.

Eraeth and Aeren came up on his left, Siobhaen to the right. He motioned to the faint glow with his staff. “There shouldn’t be any light.”

Both Vaeren and Eraeth reached for their cattans. They shot each other annoyed glares.

“What does it mean?” Aeren asked.

“The light comes from the Well. It means that something has definitely disturbed their balance. This happened before, when Walter and the Wraiths began awakening the Wells the first time.”

“So it doesn’t mean that someone is at the Well now.”

“No. But someone has been to one of the Wells somewhere and manipulated it.”

“Back in Caercaern, you said that none of the Wells have been touched,” Vaeren said.

Colin frowned at the harshness in his voice. “I said none of the Wells that we know of have been disturbed.”

Vaeren’s eyes narrowed at the distinction, but before he could say anything Eraeth broke in.

“Vaeren, Siobhaen, and I will take the lead,” he said, “Colin and Aeren the center, the rest behind. We’ll use the torches until the light ahead is bright enough we can see without them.”

He didn’t wait for an argument, simply stepped forward, drawing his cattan. A moment later, Siobhaen and Vaeren joined him, their own blades bare, moving cautiously but quickly.A short time later,Eraeth motioned for the torches to be doused, their bearers grinding them into the soil and smothering their fl ames with their feet. The bluish light filled the tunnel, and as it grew, Colin picked out a faint pulse to its glow. The pall of the Lifeblood fell across him, heavier and heavier the closer they came, throbbing in his skin in time with the light. His grip tightened on his staff and his heart quickened, falling into the same rhythm.

The tunnel widened, the ceiling reaching away at a slow slope. Eraeth increased the pace, the group fanning out.

And then the tunnel ended, expanding into a huge chamber, the ceiling of ice rising into a massive dome. The ground rose slightly, the wind-torn grass of the tundra giving way abruptly to trees. Water dripped down from the heights in a slow, steady fall of rain, and as they stepped forward to the edge of the forest, they could feel the heat pressing forward, damp and humid against their faces. Colin wiped the wetness from his face with one hand, saw many of the others doing the same. The rain pattered against the wide, flat, copper-colored leaves of the trees as they entered the grove, runneling down the smooth edges and dripping from the sharp yellowed tips. Within twenty paces, Colin’s hair was plastered to his forehead, water seeping in under the edge of his clothing and settling uncomfortably against his skin. He noticed the others pulling at the collars of their shirts and shrugging their shoulders as they adjusted to the annoyance.

They continued forward, the forest silent except for the rainfall, the white-barked trunks of the trees slipping by on either side. The Phalanx and the Flame had circled Colin and Aeren and were scanning beneath the foliage, swords bared, but they saw nothing.

After a long moment, and at a backward, questioning glance from Eraeth, Colin said, “It should be just ahead.”

Ten paces beyond, the land rose in a steep ridge, the boles of the trees falling away as it flattened into a circular stone plaza.

The Well stood in the center, its edge rising from the flat stone to waist height. There was nothing else in the plaza, although when he had been here last, Colin had found evidence of other structures built on top of the stone, their foundations still visible as outlines on the surface. The strange trees surrounded the plaza on all sides, their branches draping over the edge of the platform in places.

“How can there be trees?” Aeren asked. He whispered, but his voice breaking the near silence still made some of the Phalanx start. “No sunlight can reach down here.”

“The Well,” Colin said, moving out from the edge of the platform toward its lip even as he spoke. “The Lifeblood keeps them alive.”

The group re-formed, Colin drawing up to the edge of the Well to stare down into the depths of the perfectly flat water, the bluish light washing up over his face, the rest hanging back. He could taste the Lifeblood now, wanted to reach out and drink it down, feel its coolness in his mouth, slipping down his throat and suffusing his body with warmth. The need was an ache. When he reached one hand forward, it trembled. He stared at it, the skin pale, nearly translucent, the marks that had pulled free of the cover of his sleeve a hideous black in contrast.

“I need to see if I can fi nd out what has happened through the Well,” Colin said. “I won’t be aware of what’s happening around me as I work.”

Eraeth immediately ordered the rest of Aeren’s Phalanx to spread out, halfway between the Well and the trees. Vaeren grudgingly did the same, sending Siobhaen, Petraen, and Boreaus to join them. Both Vaeren and Aeren remained close to Colin, who turned his attention completely on the Well and the pulsations of light.

With a small sigh of regret, he leaned forward and dipped his hand into the water, bringing it to his lips. He drank as little as possible, enough to connect him to the Well and no more. The tingling cold fire of it burned as he swallowed.

He leaned forward onto the stone lip, then closed his eyes and sank to his knees at its edge, as if in prayer in one of Diermani’s churches. He nearly crossed himself in reflex—shoulder, shoulder, heart, waist—but halted the gesture mid-motion with a small smile and a shake of his head.

Then he sank into the Well.

He dove deep, through the pulsating light and into the depths, even though he knew his body remained behind, at the lip of the Well, protected by Aeren and Eraeth and the others. He followed the Lifeblood, followed its taste of leaves and earth and snow, deep and deeper, until the flow that fed this Well emptied out into a vast reservoir of Lifeblood, a lake of power far beneath the surface of the earth. A lake that spread southward, beneath the lands that the Alvritshai had once claimed as their own, beneath the mountains. It grew shallow in places, deeper in others, was blocked by pillars of earth and stone and rock through huge sections of land and narrowed down to channels in others. He followed those channels, wove his way along them, rising to the surface through streams whose mouths were the Wells that had been discovered over the past few hundred years, Wells like those in the Ostraell at the heart of the dwarren plains. At each Well, he checked his wards and found them intact, so he kept roaming, reaching out along additional channels, along less familiar routes, searching for something that had changed, something that was different.

As he skirted the edges of the Lifeblood beneath the dwarren’s easternmost lands, he found it.

The flow of the Lifeblood had changed, the currents eddying in new directions. He felt them drawing him eastward, pulling him with a strength greater than any he’d felt before. He let himself be drawn along this new direction, felt himself funneled into new paths, ones that had not existed thirty years before. But as he was swept along, he realized that they
had
existed thirty years before. He felt the age in the rock, felt the hunger of the stone as the Lifeblood coursed through it, speeding eastward. These passages had been here long before the dwarren claimed the plains, long before the Faelehgre had built their city around the Well and been caught and transformed by it.These channels that now seethed with the Lifeblood had been closed off somehow, blocked.

And someone had released that block.

That was what had upset the balance of the Wells. That was what had caused the return of the ethereal storms on the dwarren plains, and the occumaen and iriaem of the White Wastes.

Walter.

Colin’s heart seized in his chest and he suddenly realized that the current dragging him eastward had increased, stronger now than it had been before. He began to struggle against it, fought his way back toward the west, felt a moment of pure panic as he thought the current had gotten too strong.As he struggled,he reached out to the east with thin tendrils, tried to determine where the new channels ended, because he suddenly knew that that was where he would find Walter, where he would fi nd the Wraiths. He sensed further branches of the Lifeblood, far beyond the edges of dwarren lands. He snaked more tendrils east, followed as many of the paths as he could, but they all led toward the same location, toward the same central source.

Then, at the edges of his senses, stretched so thin he thought he would snap, he caught the faint vestige of another reservoir, another lake of Lifeblood so vast he gasped. His strength fl ed, and for a moment he lost his struggle against the current and was dragged toward that vast sea buried deep beneath the land.

A vast sea that had recently been awakened.

He snatched the tendrils back to himself, gathered them close. He couldn’t spare anything for a further search, for further answers. The currents of the Lifeblood had him, were increasing as they drove him toward that sea. He needed everything he had to push against it, to force himself through the churning flow. Surging forward, he struggled back through the formerly blocked channels, his progress increasing with every step forward as the strength of the current decreased, until he roared from the opened mouth of the passage and back onto familiar ground.

He paused to gather his strength, knew that his body back at the Well would be trembling, perhaps had even fallen from the lip of the Well itself. But he spared a moment to search the edges of the dwarren plain for other breaches leading to the sea he’d discovered. He found three, each drawing Lifeblood toward the sea as the two sources connected.

Then he shot northward, back to the Well, back to his body. As he traveled, his rage grew.

Walter had found another source of power. He’d opened up the paths to the east, had awakened the sea beneath, was drawing on its power even now, had been drawing on its power for decades. There was no other explanation. While Colin had been fumbling with creating the knife,Walter had already been moving forward, working outside the influence of the Trees. He’d thought there was nothing that Walter could do, that he’d accounted for everything by warding the Wells and protecting the Lifeblood.

He’d been so stupid!

The rage nearly blinded him to the taint in the taste of the Well as he approached the north. He caught it at the last moment—a bitterness, like sap. The taste startled him with its acridness, but it wasn’t in the Well itself. It was approaching from the south, from the direction of the tunnel through the glacier.

And he recognized the taint.

He dove into his body, tried to seize control of it even as he felt it slip from the lip of the Well with the force of his return, even as he felt seizures race through his arms and legs. He tried to speak, heard Aeren cry out to Eraeth, heard Vaeren swear harshly. He opened his eyes, the bluish glow of the Well too bright, blinding him. He couldn’t breathe, his chest heaving, and he broke out in racking coughs as he rolled onto his side.

“Shaeveran!” Aeren barked. “Don’t try to talk. Breathe in deeply. You’re only making it worse.”

“Wra—” Colin wheezed, but his chest contracted and he hacked dryly into the damp, rain-slicked stone of the plaza. The coughing sapped his strength, already drained from his battle with the currents of the Lifeblood.

“What is he trying to say?”Vaeren demanded.“What did he find out?”

“I don’t know,” Aeren said, his voice calm, although Colin could hear the tension beneath.

“It sounded like Wraith,” Eraeth cut in tersely.

Colin nodded, drew in another ragged breath, then gathered enough strength to snatch Eraeth’s arm and drag him in close. “Shadows are coming, with a Wraith. Through the tunnel.”

Before he finished, someone screamed, a horrid, high-pitched sound that cut off before it was finished.

Eraeth and Vaeren lurched back from Colin, Eraeth ripping free of Colin’s grasp. Colin rolled to the side, coming to rest on his shoulder, his view of the trees in the direction of the tunnel’s mouth clear.

One of Aeren’s Phalanx had fallen, the blackness of a Shadow writhing over his form in frenzied ecstasy. Before anyone could react, four more Shadows flowed out of the forest, two falling on another of Aeren’s guardsmen even as he swung his sword. He fell with a curse that cut into a shout and then silence. The third Phalanx member scrambled backward, falling back to Petraen’s side, his breathing harsh as he moved.