Shattering the Ley (46 page)

Smiling tightly to herself, Kara followed Cory past the old barracks—now student dormitories—around the stables and training grounds, to a set of halls in the back, behind the main manse. She could feel the Tapestry in use all around her, the lines of the ley beneath the grounds pulsing, tingling against her skin, even when they entered one of the halls. The interior foyer and main corridor were lit with only a few ley globes. The scent of old wood, soot, and musty parchment permeated the building, the stone solid but with the scuff marks of use and age, the wood paneling polished but scarred in places. Cory led her down the main corridor, past a few turns, then halted in front of a door and knocked.

The door opened without warning. A short man with a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard nearly a hand’s span in length glared out at them. His skin was darker than Kara’s, but not as dark as the Gorrani from the south. She thought he was from across the western mountains, from one of the Demesnes, although she couldn’t determine which one since she couldn’t see the tattoos on the backs of his hands. The fact that he was here, in the University, was surprising. Those from the Demesnes rarely left their lands, especially those that could wield the Tapestry or the ley. He was dressed like someone from the Demesnes as well, in a linen shirt with embroidery along the upper torso and shoulders, breeches cut off at mid-calf, stockings and leather shoes beneath.

“Ah,” he said, dismissing Cory completely, focusing on Kara. His voice was soft, but forceful. She found herself shifting uncomfortably under his scrutiny, his gaze slicing through her, everything exposed, as if he could see her every thought. “I see you convinced her to come.”

“She actually has a question for you, Mentor Hernande,” Cory said. “I haven’t told her anything about the sands.”

The mentor’s brow furrowed. “A question? Then perhaps we can help each other.”

He turned away, vanishing inside his rooms, leaving the door open. With a shrug, Cory entered.

Kara shot Cory a dark look as she followed. “What about the sands? What
are
the sands?”

Every surface in the room was covered with books and parchment, materials stacked on the large desk against one wall, all of the myriad tables, the shelving to either side, the chairs strewn throughout the room, and the floor. Paths wound through the books, and a few plants hung in clay pots from the ceiling. A doorway led into another room, which appeared as cluttered with books as the first from what Kara could see, although she caught the end posts of a bed with rumpled blankets draped to the floor before the mentor reappeared.

He’d donned a dun-colored mentor’s robe over his Demesne clothing, but hadn’t tied it in front.

“The sands are where the mentors train us to use the Tapestry,” Cory said.

“And where we perform our experiments,” Hernande added.

“What do they have to do with me?”

“It’s not the sands themselves that are of interest, but what we’ve done with them. I asked Cory to bring you here so that perhaps you could verify a hypothesis I have regarding the outcome of our latest experiment.” He hesitated, catching Kara with that penetrating stare again. “If you are willing.”

“What about my question?”

“I’d consider your question regardless of whether you’re willing to help me or not. You are, after all, a Wielder. Shall we retire to the sands?” he asked, motioning them out the door again. “We can discuss your question as we set up.”

“To the main field?” Cory asked.

“No.” Kara caught the look of disappointment on Cory’s face, but Hernande continued. “For our purposes, we shall only need the sands in one of the training rooms.”

They entered the back of the old manse through what must have been a servant’s entrance. Here, the corridors were narrower, stairs smoothed, with dips in the center from long use. When Kara ran her hand along the stone, she could feel the grit and, beneath an old sconce, a layer of soot and grease. Hernande led them out of the servant’s section, across a wide corridor, and into a different wing, this one lined with identical doors evenly spaced along one side. Kara received a few odd or curious glances from the students they passed, and Hernande nodded to fellow mentors in their own dun-and-black robes, but otherwise they were ignored.

Hernande paused at one door, listened a moment, then tried the handle. It opened easily and they stepped into a small room. The rough stone walls were bare—no sconces, no wood paneling, no tapestries—but they were covered with scars. Some were from obvious sources, like fire, swaths of soot and char etched on the stone. In one section, the stone appeared to have melted and dripped down like candle wax. In a few places, chunks of stone were missing, as if they’d been struck by a sword, the raw stone beneath exposed.

Kara turned a raised eyebrow on Cory, who shrugged. “These are the practice rooms. Sometimes experiments . . . don’t go as expected.”

“‘Sometimes’ is misleading,” Hernande muttered. “‘Often’ is more precise.”

All three turned to the center of the room.

A stone walkway surrounded a set of three steps that led downward on all sides to a shallow pit. The pit was filled with sand, the granules of mostly beige stone glittering in the white light of the ley globes that hovered high above, near the ceiling. Depressions riddled the sand, footprints, as if someone had fought here recently. The room was dry, but not dusty, and smelled of salt.

“This isn’t sand from the rivers,” Kara said, moving forward. “Where does it come from?”

Hernande grunted. “This sand is from the beaches off the Galicia Demesne, my homeland, which is why I prefer to work in this room when it’s available. Other rooms contain sands from other areas—the obsidian sands of the Correllite Isles, the white sands off the cliffs of Warten to the east, even the rare pink silt from the Qumar River near the equator.” He breathed in deeply, catching Kara’s eye, his own lit from within as he smiled. “That is the scent of the Murcia Ocean. I lived in a villa on the ocean, played in this very sand as a child.”

His obvious joy made Kara wonder why he’d left. Or what had forced him to leave.

Before she could ask, he clapped his hands together and said, “Now, Cory, please smooth the sands while I prepare. Then send someone to cancel my next class, since I will obviously be occupied here.”

“And what should I do?” Kara asked.

“Ask your question. Then I have something to show you.”

Kara settled down on the steps while Cory left the room, returning a moment later with what looked like a rake with small tines. But she couldn’t remain seated, a strange nervous energy coursing through her. As she watched Cory begin smoothing out the dunes in the sand, she began pacing. “Have you ever heard of someone surviving a distortion once they’ve been caught in it?” she asked.

Hernande had pulled small incense holders from his pockets and began placing them at the four corners of the sand pit. “Of course. You and your fellow Wielders save people from the distortions and all of the other anomalies caused by the misuse of the ley on a daily basis. It’s your job.”

Kara gave the mentor an irritated look, noticed the smile touching his eyes. “I mean survival without the interference of a Wielder, after the distortion has quickened, then closed.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because this morning, a man and a young girl were caught in a distortion and it collapsed before I could free them. They left unharmed, and while we were caught in the distortion, I saw both of them moving.”

Hernande halted his preparations and stared at her over the sand pit with one eyebrow raised. “You were caught in the distortion yourself?”

“It quickened while I was too close. I was only caught in its edge.”

He grunted. “Still . . . it would be interesting to discuss your perceptions while inside the distortion. Some of my colleagues have theorized that the distortion actually fractures time and space. Perhaps you would have some insight into their theories. But that is not what you came to discuss.” He shrugged the tangent thoughts aside and paced back and forth across the length of the sands, one hand stroking his chin, elbow cupped in his other arm, head bowed. Every now and then he pulled his beard up and chewed on the end thoughtfully, which made Kara grimace.

Finally, he turned to Kara with his penetrating stare. “I cannot recollect an instance where anyone survived a distortion without some form of outside help. Are you certain—”

“Yes,” she said, cutting him off.

He nodded. “Ah. I’ll have to do some research, look into accounts of the distortions, especially the earliest ones. However, I’d hypothesize that whatever this effect is, it doesn’t originate with the distortion.”

Kara straightened. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning that it wasn’t the distortion that skipped over the man and girl,” Cory answered. He finished with the last of the sand, the pit now smooth. He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Whatever caused it to stop came from the man.”

Hernande nodded. “Or the girl.”

“I don’t think he realized what was happening. Not at first.”

Hernande shrugged, his attention shifting from the conversation to the sands. “More evidence that it may have been the girl. It may be an unconscious manipulation of the Tapestry, something he or she has no control over. Or it may have nothing to do with him or the girl.” With a wave of his hand, Hernande dismissed the question. “I’ll need time to think on it. Now, I have something to show you.”

Irritated by the dismissal, Kara began, “But—”

“Don’t,” Cory said quietly as he came to a halt at her side. “He’s already thinking about it, even if it doesn’t appear that way. And he needs to focus for this to work.”

“I don’t see what anything you two are doing would have to do with me.” She pitched her voice loud enough to carry to Hernande where he had crouched, concentrating on the sands.

“It might have nothing to do with you. But I think it does,” Cory said, his voice low as he watched Hernande. “This is what I was telling you about the other day, what we were starting when the ley went dark.”

Kara frowned as she felt Hernande reaching out to the Tapestry, drawing it in and focusing it. A Wielder’s job was to smooth out the Tapestry, to iron out the wrinkles and repair the tears and rents in its fabric caused by the ley or the misuse of the Tapestry by those untrained with their own abilities. But what Hernande was doing was different. Instead of smoothing it out, he was gathering it in folds, drawing it together and twisting it in such a way that no tears or rents appeared.

Then Kara felt him reach up to the ley globes, felt him form a connection between the two, drawing some of the ley down into the folds he’d created. The globes above dimmed as he drew from their power. Ripples spread outward on the Tapestry, but dissipated before they’d traveled too far.

Hernande looked up. “Everyone knows there’s a connection between the ley and the Tapestry. We can see the consequences of that connection in the distortions, which only began appearing when the ley was subverted by the Primes and the Barons into the current ley system. However, we don’t know what the connection between the two is. I’ve been studying the ley and the Tapestry for the last thirty years with the help of my graduate students, like Cory, trying to find the connection between them. This is what I’ve found most recently.”

Without moving, he threw the gathered folds of Tapestry and ley out over the sands, the entire construct spreading like a fisherman’s net and settling slowly, its corners tied to the incense burners Hernande had placed at the edges of the pit. Kara stepped forward as it began to sink into the sands, the grains and ley and Tapestry comingling, until she couldn’t see the folds anymore, could only sense them hidden underneath.

For a long moment, nothing happened.

But then the sands began to move, like water, shifting and flowing in set patterns. It started in the center of the pit and spread, channels snaking outward like a web.

Kara tensed, Hernande watching her intently.

When the moving sands reached the stone edge of the pit, they halted. After a moment, everything settled and Kara began to pick out paths in the pattern. Some of the eddies were moving faster than others, appeared stronger and wider, thicker. Others were narrow and moved slowly. Still other sections of sand weren’t moving at all.

“It’s like the currents in a river,” she said, moving around the corner of the pit toward Hernande. “In some sections, the current is stronger than others.”

The mentor nodded. “Yes. Tell me what else you see. What you sense.” He didn’t say anything more. Cory started to speak, but Kara saw Hernande motion his student silent with a subtle gesture.

A quarter of the way around the pit, Kara halted abruptly.

Something in the flows seemed familiar.

She focused in on one particular section, tilted her head slightly to change her orientation, brow furrowed. Her heart beat in her chest, throbbing in her skin, the nervous tension she’d felt earlier prickling along the hairs on her arms, although that could be coming from the Tapestry and the ley, an aftereffect of the construct Hernande had created. She shrugged the sensation aside and concentrated, focusing on the section that had caught her attention, that seemed vaguely familiar. Hernande and Cory waited, their breath held.

Then she gasped and glanced up sharply. “That’s the Eld District, and that’s Stone. These are the ley lines. This is the ley structure for the entire city of Erenthrall. All of it, what can be seen above ground and what’s hidden below.”

Hernande nodded with a tight smile, eyebrows raised. “It extends a little beyond Erenthrall as well.”

Kara held his gaze, her mind racing, thinking back to the discussion she’d had with Illiana and Steven in the node, back to the map tacked to the table, the implications and ramifications of what Hernande had constructed penetrating with sudden swift force, like a blow.

“We can use this,” she whispered, excitement already creeping into her voice. “We can use this to find out what’s wrong with the ley system.”

Hernande frowned. “But if this is what you say it is, if this is a true map of the ley system and its current flows, and the Primes find out we have it. . . .”