Lord of the Fading Lands (42 page)

Kolis kept Jiarine chanting the Feraz spell in a voice so quiet not even the lord sitting next to her could hear it over the buzz of conversation that filled the banquet hall. Across the room, the Baristani girl had taken on a glow. The hint of light was so faint it would be undetectable to any non-magic-wielders in the room, but Jiarine Montevero had been born in the north. In addition to her many other useful talents, she possessed a fair command of Spirit. Enough, in any case, to recognize the unmistakable signature of the faint lavender flows spinning out from Ellysetta Baristani. He felt Jiarine's body grow tense.

Spirit. The girl was weaving Spirit.

But what strength? The weaves seemed too fine and fragile. A minor command was not what the High Mage was looking for. Only a master's strength would do.

He made Jiarine focus more energy into the
talis
spell, pushing the girl harder to see how strong that faint weave would become. A few chimes later, the glow around her grew brighter, the threads of her weave intensified, light shot out across heretofore invisible streams that had already blanketed the room from one corner to another without anyone being the wiser.

Only then did Kolis realize the weaves were already working on Jiarine, had been for longer than he knew. The clenching tightness that he'd mistaken for tension was her female body growing hot and aching with need.

A hand squeezed Jiarine's thigh. Kolis looked down and followed the plump hand to the portly body of Lord Bevel. Perspiration gleamed on the man's bald pate, and his thick lips glistened with saliva. He was leaning forward, breathing heavy hot breaths against the bare, plump tops of Jiarine's breasts.

Kolis's consciousness reeled back in disgust. Surely she wouldn't. Jiarine appreciated her own value too well to hump a foul
rultshart
like Bevel.

But the Baristani girl's weave was no slight suggestion, and Jiarine could not resist its dictates despite Kolis's attempts to stop her. When Bevel's fat tongue slid across her skin and dove down to curl around one diamond-hard nipple, she came in an ecstatic gush and reached hungrily for the thick bulge tenting the man's trousers.

Sickened, Kolis fled Jiarine's body and left her to her rutting. He had what he'd come for. Ellysetta Baristani was a master of Spirit, powerful enough to exceed even the High Mage's lofty standards.

Ellysetta couldn't look away from Rain's burning eyes. She was distantly aware of the shrieking madness of the tairen. She was even more distantly aware that the room had fallen silent, the quiet broken only by the shallow gasps of hundreds of lungs desperately seeking air. She wanted to speak, but her tongue felt too thick, her throat too dry. Her mind was a whirl of feelings and incoherent thoughts, simple sentences stripped to their barest essence.

I want. I need. I ache. I burn.

«Burn with me.
”

And then Rain's arms were around her, sweeping her out of her chair and against his chest, and air blew in a cooling rush against her hot skin as he sped up the stairs and out of the palace into the cool Celierian night. Her head fell back against his arm, her eyes drank in the star jeweled sky. The sky whooshed past in a dizzying rush. Rain was running, with her in his arms. Then they were home in the night- darkened front room of her house. She was reaching for Rain, trying to hold him, needing him, wanting … something. The ache was a terrible pain inside her. "Rain, please.”

His face was drawn tight, his eyes burning. "I can't,
shei'tani.
If I thought I could give you what you need and still keep my oath, I would. But this is too much. Don't ask it of me. I would break my honor. Forgive me." His mouth turned grim, his eyes went bleak. "And forgive me for this as well." He raised his hand. She watched without comprehension as magic gathered at his fingertips, then spun out to surround her. She fell, unconscious, in his arms.

He passed her gently into Ravel's keeping. "Guard her," he bit out. "Keep her safe." He didn't wait for Ravel's answer. He simply stepped outside and leapt into the sky. The tairen's roar rattled windows in panes across the city, and a fierce jet of flame lit up the darkness. He shot up into the icy ether and arrowed east through the night, away from the city.

Sian and Torel ran south through the forest, dazed and shaken by what they'd learned from the woodcutter Brind Paldwyn. They didn't speak, didn't look at each other. For a full bell at least, they just ran.

«We
should call General vel Jelani,
» Sian finally said, breaking their long silence.
«He'll
want to know.»

Torel stopped so abruptly, Sian went pelting ten yards past. "All right," he said. "We'll call him now. You're stronger in Spirit than I. Do it. I'll stand guard.”

Torel's nerves were singing as Sian closed his eyes and summoned his power. If the information they now carried was true, it was beyond deadly.

Twenty miles back, in the hut Sian and Torel had left in such a hurry, long, pale fingers passed over the sightless eyes of Brind Palwyn, pulling the lids shut. A pale hand turned over, palm upward. Fingers curled as if cupping a ball. A shadowy spiral, glowing with red lights, rose up from the fingers. Black eyes flickering with red lights stared deep into the whirling spiral of Azrahn. Light and shadow flickered on the ridges of the scar running from the center of his forehead and through his eyebrow to just below his right ear. A moment later, the Azrahn weave dissolved, and the weaver's eyes faded back to their normal piercing pale blue, colder than the glaciers beyond the Mandolay mountains to the far north, the elongated pupils narrowed to thin slits.

The crouching black figure rose to an imposing height and pointed one long finger, calling Fire. Brind Palwyn's body burst into flames, searing, unnaturally hot flames that turned his body to ash in moments, yet never spread to the rest of the cabin.

Swift and agile as a deer, black-booted feet raced through the night-darkened forest, the footsteps soundless, as if they never touched ground.

Flaming gods, Rain was never going to survive this courtship.

Lying on his back on the still-warm sands of Celieria's Great Bay, he stared blindly at the sky as the salty, rolling surf of the Pereline Ocean washed over him. Every muscle in his body was still drawn tight in throbbing knots, desperate for the release he was beginning to doubt would ever come. Or if it did come, it would be too late to save him from insanity.

His need for Ellysetta was an intense, living, driving thing, a relentless torture that kept him near to screaming on the razor-sharp edge of his control.

Gods rot the soulless bastards who invented pinalle. Plague take the servant who kept pouring the bottled blue frustration into her glass. And Rain hoped to all the seven bitter hells that Dorian mated the very life's essence out of Annoura tonight for her thrice-cursed, sowlet-stupid idea of plying Ellysetta with pinalle in the first place.

Because Ellysetta had not only roused Rain's passion with her sensual, heavy-lidded glances and unguarded emotions. Oh, no, it went far, far beyond that. In her uninhibited, pinalle-induced and keflee-enhanced daze, she had woven a Spirit web of carnal hunger so subtle and yet so scorchingly strong that she had sent every breathing person in the banquet hall—mortal and Fey alike—spiraling into an abyss of driving sexual need before anyone knew what was happening. When last he'd seen his fellow dinner attendees, they were falling upon one another like ravening wolves, some couples staggering off to find privacy while others shed every last ounce of reserve they ever possessed on the very spot where they stood.

Bel and the rest of Ellie's quintet had barely managed to make it to the Baristani home before pleading for Rain to release them from their duties. He did, of course. They would have been useless in the state they were in. They'd all five taken off walking towards Celieria's brothel district, but by the time they reached the end of the block, they were running.

After leaving Ellysetta in Ravel's care, he'd thrown himself into the sky and flown here, to the silver beaches of the southern coast, hoping to find some respite—or at the very least a lessening of the weave. He'd found none.

The gods alone knew how long the effect of her weave would last, but it was still going agonizingly strong three bells after its inception. Even with hundreds of miles separating himself and Ellysetta. Lying in the surf, Rain shrieked his fury to the open skies above and pounded his fists in the wet sand around him.

Torel paced restlessly as Sian attempted for the sixth time in the last two bells to contact Belliard vel Jelani and relate what they'd discovered.

"You still can't reach him?" Torel asked in concern. He ran his hands through his dark hair and blew on his fingers. The woods seemed colder than they had just chimes ago.

Sian shook his head and dissolved his weaves.

"Try someone else.”

"I already have. I can't reach Bel or any of the Feyreisa's quintet, nor Dax, Lady Marissya, or any of her quintet. I even tried to contact the Feyreisen. None of them are answering me. They must still be at that palace dinner Bel mentioned earlier today. We dare not pass the information on to anyone else.”

Although Brind Palwyn had steadfastly insisted he knew nothing about a redheaded child, Sian had woven Spirit between them and retrieved the man's memories. Those memories had contained exactly the information Sian and Torel had been sent to find, but not at all what they'd expected.

As a child of ten, Brind had seen his parents tortured and killed by an Elden Mage looking for an escaped slave and a flame-haired child. A child the Elden Mage had claimed was the stolen daughter of his master, the High Mage Vadim Maur.

Even now, Torel wanted to cry out that it wasn't true, that it couldn't be true. He'd seen the Feyreisa with his own eyes, seen her brightness. But Brind's memories were so vivid, he couldn't doubt they were real.

The Paldwyns had only offered a night's shelter to the slave and the child, but afterwards, unbeknownst to his parents, Brind had agreed to hide the baby in the woods while the slave drew off her pursuers. That task had kept Brind from dying with his parents. The slave girl, he later discovered, had set her own body aflame and thrown herself off the cliffs of Norban's quarry to avoid being tortured and questioned by the Mage. Brind had retrieved what little remained of her burned and broken body, and had buried it alongside his parents. As for the baby, Brind had followed a Celierian couple traveling through the woods and put the baby beneath a tree where they would find her. He'd stayed hidden until he was sure they would take the child, and then he'd spent the rest of his life trying to forget everything that had happened.

He'd been relatively successful, too, until recently. While searching Brind's memories, Sian discovered another disturbing image of local villagers bringing treasured Fey-gifts passed down through generations into the town square to be destroyed in a huge bonfire, while a white-haired priest in a voluminous, hooded blue cloak stood by and collected shards of Tairen's Eye crystal from the villagers Brind had inquired about the bonfire later, but none of the villagers remembered anything about the Fey-gifts they'd thrown into the fire, or the Tairen's Eye shards they'd given to the blue-cloaked priest. It was as if those memories had been wiped clean. But Brind, who'd watched from the woods rather than participating in the bonfire, remembered—and he'd suffered nightmares about his parents' deaths ever since.

Sian had erased all memory of Mages, death and Ellysetta from Brind's mind, then gave the poor man what he'd wanted his whole life: memories of a happy childhood, unmarred by tragedy, memories of parents who died happily in their sleep after a satisfying life. It wasn't legal. It broke the Fey-Celierian treaty and several Fey laws, but Sian did it anyway and dared Torel to say a word.

Torel wouldn't, of course. He'd still been young when the Mage Wars started. He hadn't even completed his first level of the Dance of Knives. But he, too, had seen his parents slaughtered by the Eld, just as Sian and Brind had, and there were days Torel wished someone would weave Spirit to remove
his
memories of that horror.

"Come on, then," Torel said, clapping his friend on the back. "With a little effort, we might just make Celieria City by moonset tomorrow.”

"Do you think it's true?" Sian didn't elaborate, but he didn't have to.

Torel didn't want to believe it, but Fey didn't lie, so instead, he forced a chiding look on his face and said, "She made Bel's heart weep again. Do you think she could have done that if even the smallest part of her were tainted by Elden evil?”

"Of course. You're right" Sian nodded and stared at his booted toes.

"Silly
pacheeta"
Torel grabbed his friend around the throat and scrubbed his knuckles against Sian's skull through his wavy brown hair. "Come on, then. All doubts are forgotten. Let's get back to our brothers.”

They were still smiling when the
sel'dor
shrapnel ripped through them.

Sian and Torel staggered, fell, then leapt back to their feet with red Fey'cha steel bared, automatically assuming the slightly crouched battle stance of a Fey warrior. Only then did they detect the reek of Azrahn and see the red-black glow of it around them. Only then did they see the shadowed mob of attackers lying in wait for them.

There were fifty or more, Torel estimated. Too many to beat. He and Sian were already surrounded, so there was nowhere to run. It was a fight to the death, then, his and Sian's.

"Where did they come from, Torel?" Hands moving at incredible speed, Sian fired red Fey'cha into the surrounding mob with deadly accuracy.

"Scorched if I know. Guard my back." Torel cursed as a barbed
sel'dor
arrow pierced his thigh, then gritted his teeth and sent four of his own red Fey'cha whirling into the shadows that surrounded him. Muffled shrieks, quickly silenced as tairen venom did its job, made him grin with savage victory. He would take as many with him as he could before he died.

Though he had yet to see the face of a single attacker, Torel was certain they were Eld. The sickly sweet reek of Azrahn was too strong for them to be anything else. He and Sian should have sensed them miles away—if only through their Fey instinct for danger—yet neither of them had detected the Eld even when standing virtually on top of them.

The
sel'dor
piercing their flesh prevented Torel and Sian from summoning magic to their defense. The black metal of Eld burned Fey flesh like acid and twisted even the weakest weave into agony. They could not weave Spirit to cry out a warning to the Fey warriors in Celieria.

But they could fight. With naked steel, deadly skill, and grim determination, Torel and Sian fought like the Fey warriors they were.

Within mere chimes, dozens of their attackers lay dead about them, and more fell dead each moment. It wasn't enough. Torel and Sian were bleeding heavily, both from the

hundreds of tiny shrapnel wounds and the numerous arrows bristling from their bodies like quills.

Torel heard his cradle-friend grunt in pain as another of their attackers' arrows pierced his body. Sian fell heavily to one knee.

«I hear the tairen calling, Torel.»
Sian's breath wheezed out of lungs rapidly filling with blood. His hands, though, still fired Fey'cha daggers with the fierce precision perfected over a thousand years as a warrior.

«I know, my brother,»
Torel replied. Even the small thread of Spirit required to mindspeak over the short distance between them caused agony to rip through him as each tiny piece of
sel'dor
shrapnel in his body twisted his Spirit weave into pain.

It would all be over soon. When Sian fell, Torel's back would be open to attack.

And they had not even had a chance to let Belliard vel Jelani know what they had found.

«It's beautiful, Torel. So beautiful.»
The sending was a whisper of sound.

«Save a piece of the sky for me, Sian. I'll fly with you soon.»
Torel heard the rattle of his cradle-friend's last breath followed by the low, heavy thud of his lifeless body falling to the ground. A tear slid from Torel's eye. Over a thousand years they had known each other.
Soar, Sian. Soar high and laugh on the wind.

Dark, shadowy figures moved closer, circling.

Torel pulled his two
seyani
longswords free of their scabbards. "Come, then!" he shouted. "Come dance with the tairen, if you dare!
Miora felah ti'Feyreisa!
Joy to the Feyreisa! And death to you all!”

And he became a whirling blur of motion—black leather, shining steel, red blood—spinning in the moonlight, delivering death to all he touched until he moved no more.

It was time. Dawn was only a few bells away and the Daughter moon had nearly set. The sky was as dark as it would become tonight.

Vadim Maur entered his spell room. Rings gleamed on three fingers of each hand: five colored cabochon stones and one gleaming black
selkahr,
each surrounded by a rainbow of smaller cabochon stones in repeating six-color patterns. Rings of power, worn in the most powerful configuration possible: Earth, Water, and Spirit on his left hand, mated by Air, Fire, and Azrahn on his right. On each wrist, he wore thick gold bands that held dark, gleaming
selkahr
crystals— Tairen's Eye altered by Azrahn to unleash its vast, dark power. He carried Kolis's Mage blade, placed it on the stone table, and began the cleansing ritual.

When he was finished, he plunged the Mage blade into the clear water in the offering bowl and murmured the spell to release the rich blood stored in the dark Eld metal. Streamers of red billowed out from the blade, tinting the water. He added a fresh vial of blood from his prisoner in the levels below and submerged the Tairen's Eye crystal to complete the spell. When the water cleared after his last incantation, he dipped his cup and drank.

Magic flowed over him in a rush of near-sexual pleasure, making his eyes flutter half closed. She
was
powerful. With just that little bit of her blood to strengthen the spell, he could feel the promise of her power coursing through his veins.

He summoned his own magic, wove the camouflaged rope of Azrahn, and sent it spiraling upwards through the pipe and into the world.

"Girl," he whispered in the darkness. He sensed her frightened flinch, felt the brief twinge of his own muscles as her blood reacted in his veins. Oh, yes, she was there, and still trying to hide from him. She would not be able to hide any longer.

A smile widened on his rapidly chilling lips.

Rain swam down to the deepest depths of Great Bay's main channel, where the water was only a few degrees above freezing. Even that did not cool the need that had driven him for nearly seven full bells now. Giving up, he swam back to the surface and made his way to shore.

He was close to the city, less than twenty miles away, and desperate to keep that distance. Already he'd let the tairen draw him back towards Ellysetta. Control was but a ragged illusion, a bare thread he clung to with desperate hope.

If the weave didn't end soon, gods help him. He had no more strength to resist.

Ellysetta dreamed of heat. Rain was with her, eyes glowing like lavender suns, arms holding her close. His hands and Spirit weaves played over her skin in endless, breathtaking torment. Dear gods, she wanted ... so badly. What she wanted, she didn't know, but the need for it burned inside her, hungry and yearning, desperate for fulfillment.