Shattering the Ley (62 page)

Kara heard the fight, heard the growls, the scream as one of the guards died, the desperate curses as the remaining guards were driven closer to them. She knew the half-man, half-wolf Hagger had joined the fight because swords clashed. She knew the battle had turned against them when Artras squeezed her upper arm and stood, looming over her, one hand slipping into a fold in her shirt, withdrawing a surprisingly vicious-looking blade.

At that point, her attention drifted to the distortion, to the pulsing light high above.

The piercing whine faltered and cracked, Kara sucking in a sharp breath in the sudden silence. Then the distortion flared. Once. Twice. And Kara tensed in anticipation. The baying of the wolves made her flinch, her held breath expelled in surprise.

And then the distortion quickened.

Kara’s eyes widened at the beauty of the spray of color, even as she cried out an inarticulate warning. Like the distortions she’d repaired in the city, this one blossomed outward, multicolored arms spiraling out into the city. One—a brilliant blue-green—roared through the air directly overhead, causing Artras to duck. As wide as a street, it swung out toward the city, passing through the remains of the towers and out of Kara’s sight. Additional arms struck out in all directions, reds and golds and purples, jagged white lightning laced between them. Kara sucked in another sharp breath as she felt the distortion expanding, as she felt the Tapestry tearing and shredding around her. Reality ripped . . . no, reality
fractured
, like the crystal of the dome of the Nexus. She clenched her jaw as it cracked, hissing like ice on the surface of a puddle before it breaks. The hairs on her arms, at the nape of her neck, stirred as the air vibrated and shuddered. Behind them, beneath them on the stairs, the wolves, the guards, and Artras halted in awe and abject terror. For a moment, through the reek of her own sweat, through the stench of blood thick on the air, through the dust and grit disturbed by the tremors, Kara smelled sunlight, new grass, and fresh rainfall.

Then the swirling mass of the distortion slowed. The tension in the air coalesced. The shards of the new reality within Erenthrall solidified, and on the cusp of an exhaled breath—

They set.

K
ARA BECAME AWARE
of the world slowly, sound intruding first—someone’s muffled breath, distorted and far away. The breathing slowly resolved. Kara’s eyes were open, had been open, but her vision remained a dark blur. As it solidified into darkness—night, she realized—a face coalesced above her.

“Allan,” she tried to say, but her throat wouldn’t move. She realized that nothing would move—her arms, her legs, her chest. She wasn’t breathing, couldn’t blink, her entire body locked in place.

She panicked. But there were no signs. The fear, the desperation, the clawing for release—it was all in her head. And in her heart. Even though her heart didn’t beat, her chest felt tight, confined, her emotions running rampant through unresponsive flesh.

She screamed without sound, long and hard, until she realized that Allan was speaking to her.

“—relax,” he said. “You can’t move now, but that will fade. Give it time. It shouldn’t be more than another twenty minutes.”

She tried to relax, but found herself still racing about her head, trying to find a way out, a way to
move
. She’d never felt so claustrophobic in her life.

Ten minutes later, she realized Allan was gripping her arm. His attention had drifted and as feeling slowly returned to her limbs she watched him scanning the distance, his face grim, expression hard. He knelt next to her, one knee up, his other arm resting on it. His forearm was bandaged, and there were new cuts across his face. Nothing serious, but they would add to his scars.

And then she gasped, choked in a breath. At the same time, memory returned, of the fight on the steps of the Nexus, of the baying of the wolves, of the distortion flashing above and then
expanding
.

She choked again, her body wanting to breathe, but acting as if it didn’t know how. Her heart stuttered, thudded hard in her chest, then halted, thudded again painfully a moment later. Allan reached across her and held her down as she thrashed, her heart beginning to beat normally an eternity later, air flowing comfortably into her lungs once again. The tingling of her blood beginning to flow through her limbs made her clench her jaw against a scream.

“Easy,” Allan said. “Easy. It will settle down shortly. Just don’t jerk out of my hold.”

“What—?” she grated, the word barely audible, the air catching in her unresponsive lungs.

“The distortion quickened,” Allan said. “Everyone here—everyone and everything in the entire city of Erenthrall—is now locked inside it, including you. Except for me. I’m immune, remember? After checking things out, I started trying to get you out. I’ll get the others who survived—Artras, Dylan, Anthon, Ryant, and Trace—out as well, once you’re safe.”

The seizures were lessening, but Allan didn’t remove his hands from her arms, nor did he lean back from where his body lay across her stomach. “How—?” The word came out clearer, but she still had to swallow hard.

“I’ve never done this before. But I’ve discovered I have to be close,” he said. “And I have to be touching you. But it’s taken awhile, and based on your reaction it isn’t pleasant. Here.” He gripped her arms and hauled her into a seated position. She gasped as shockwaves of pain coursed through her arms and chest, reached down into her legs, but then he propped her up against him so she could look around.

It was night, but the arms of the distortion glowed in vibrant shades above and throughout the city, jagged white-hot lightning laced between them, but frozen, pulsing slightly. Stars glimmered above, and the moon sat low on the horizon, but in the faint glow of the arced light surrounding them, she could see the wolves, locked in mid-charge, muzzles drawn back in vicious snarls, slobber streaming out to the side. Three of them were leaping, attacking Ryant, Trace, and Anthon, barely twenty feet away, but frozen by the distortion. Beyond them, a figure lay on the steps with a sword sticking out of his chest, another body beside him. More wolves were bounding down the stairs behind them.

“That group was attacking Ryant, Trace, and Anthon. They’d already taken out Keith.” Allan nodded toward one of the bodies. “I killed Hagger just before the distortion quickened. That’s when the wolves above began descending on us. And then there were the ones Hagger had sent around to flank us.” He turned her, so she could see those streaming up the steps below them, where Artras stood in a defensive half-crouch over Dylan’s unconscious form. “If it hadn’t quickened, they’d have slaughtered us.”

Kara stirred, surprised she could move as much as she did. “How long have you known the distortions couldn’t touch you?”

“I knew I could affect the power of the ley, but I didn’t know anything about being immune to the distortions until Morrell and I were trapped in the one you were repairing. I didn’t know I could move around inside them either, or whether or not I could bring you out of its hold. Not until you started struggling.” He hesitated, then added, “But before I tried to save you, I checked on the others. Those at the University . . . they made it outside of the distortion’s radius. Barely. If you hadn’t repaired it as much as you did, they’d be locked inside with us.”

Kara wanted to ask if he would have saved them all if they had been trapped, or simply taken Morrell and left. She suspected the latter. But then again, he’d come back for her, and it sounded like he meant to save Artras and the others as well. He could have left, claimed everyone had been killed by the wolves or caught in the distortion and he couldn’t help them. Maybe her earlier impression of him had been wrong.

“What about Cory? Hernande? Morrell?”

“They all survived Hagger’s attack. Many of those in the group didn’t. Twenty-two were killed, and there are another four that might not survive their wounds. But the rest made it.”

Kara nodded. “What do they plan to do?” she croaked. “Where are they going?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Allan shifted, jostling her, then sighed heavily. “I wasn’t going to take any of you back to the Hollow. I lied. I was going to take Morrell and abandon you all.”

“But now?”

“Now . . . I think the Hollow is going to need you and the other Wielders. You haven’t been outside of the city yet. What’s happening here isn’t isolated, it’s all over. Not as intense as here, but still occurring. The lights that warped Devitt, that transformed Hagger and the other Dogs into wolves, the surges of ley, the quakes. . . . It’s not the same world anymore. I’m not certain what it is, but I think having a few Wielders in the Hollow would be a good thing right now.”

“But you don’t want everyone in the group in the Hollow, do you?”

She felt his chuckle through her chest. “No. I don’t think some of them will fit in. Bryce, for instance. The other Dogs. But I also think we’re going to need men like them. I think the world is going to become very rough for the next few years. The Hollow, if it’s survived so far, will have to be defended. But it can’t support everyone either. There isn’t enough arable land around it, not defensible land anyway. And there are thousands who survived Erenthrall, scattered out into the surrounding lands.”

“You’ve given this thought.” She tried to shift away from him and he let her, although his grip on her arm tightened. She trembled in relief when she found she could move her arms and legs, although they felt heavy.

“I’ve had time,” Allan said quietly as she stretched her arms out and rolled her head, the muscles in her neck cracking. “You’ve been inside the distortion for three days.”

Kara couldn’t breathe for a moment. She couldn’t remember anything from the time the distortion quickened to the time Allan’s face blurred into existence above her.

She shuddered, and suddenly the urge to move, to leave, made her muscles twitch. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, and tried to stand.

Only to collapse back into Allan when her legs wouldn’t support her.

“Easy,” Allan said. “You may have been trapped for three days, but your body still thinks you just finished dealing with the distortion. You’re still weak. I’ll have to carry you.”

He pulled her around and swept her up into his arms as if she were a rag doll. She gasped in protest, but he’d already begun moving, climbing the stairs up out of the depression that held the Nexus.

When they reached the summit and stepped out from behind the wall that had once protected the Nexus, Kara sucked in a breath in shock and wonder, although Allan didn’t slow.

The entire city was cloaked in the filigree arms of the distortion, some passing through the remains of the towers in Grass, others snaking down into the earth, Erenthrall fractured into a thousand different shards. Some of those shards glowed from within as if lit with daylight. Others appeared to be filled with ley, pulsing a hot white.

And everything was eerily silent. No sound at all, except for the noise Allan made as he moved—the rustle of cloth, his breath, an occasional cough.

They came up on one of the edges between shards, the frozen lightning a lacework along a tilted plane before them. Allan slowed, shifted her into a new position, and said, “We have to move slower through the walls. And it will feel strange.”

“Like what?”

Allan simply frowned and shook his head, ducking down as he pressed forward so that he passed between two jagged edges of lightning. Kara’s chest compressed and she struggled to breathe, her skin tingling as if she’d just dunked her entire body into frigid water. She shivered, a bone-aching chill settling over her—

And then the pressure against her chest loosened and they passed through to the other side. With her first indrawn breath, Kara tasted a difference in the air; it was sharper, crisper. She took it in greedily, hadn’t even realized that her breathing had been stifled before. The light was different here as well, almost gray, like just before dawn.

“Wait,” she said, and Allan slowed before she motioned him on again and continued. “What time of day is it? When I woke, I thought it was night, but here it almost feels like dawn.”

“I don’t know. I won’t know until we step beyond the distortion. All of the shards appear to be caught in different phases of time, some moving faster than others. At least that’s what it looked like to me. But there’s still something more you need to see.”

“What?”

Allan shook his head. “I can’t show you until we leave the distortion. And I want to hear an untarnished opinion.”

Kara pressed him, but he wouldn’t relent and so she settled back and watched as they moved from shard to shard, slowing at the walls, the same pressure and coldness seeping into her bones at each. She reached out on the Tapestry and felt the distortion around her, but its sheer magnitude daunted her. Her instinct was to heal it, to fix it, but she had no idea where to begin. She tried to push the thought from her mind, but kept returning to it as they traveled.

Allan didn’t head straight for the bridges or to the west. He wove through the shards, seeking out specific locations to pass through, bypassing some shards altogether. He claimed that some shards were tainted, as if rotten or decaying, while others felt as if they vibrated, making it unpleasant to pass through them. At her insistence, they stepped into one, Kara nearly gagging and slipping from his grip at the stench after only one breath. He dragged her back through the wall and moved on without a word.

By the time they reached the bridge over the Tiana River, Kara could walk on her own, although Allan still had to support her, aside from keeping in contact with her. They crossed the bridge, passing through two walls, and then into the outer districts. The shards were larger here, the walls farther apart. Kara forced Allan to stop for a rest, but when he offered to carry her again, she dragged herself to her feet and they continued. Her stomach growled. Her mouth was dry and tasted of linen.

And then they passed beyond the final wall, slid out of the distortion, moving from a shard of night into midafternoon daylight. Kara blinked up at the sun, stumbling, Allan steadying her before letting her go. The absence of his hand on her forearm felt strange.

“The others took shelter in a building on the edge of this district,” Allan said, “beside the river’s new channel.”

“What new channel?” Kara noted the lack of surprise in her voice. She’d reached the point where she simply accepted everything as if it had always been that way. She knew it was weariness and exhaustion, but she didn’t feel tired, merely . . . numb.

“The distortion blocked the rivers, so they found new paths around the city. Right now, the Tiana’s churning through the streets, taking down buildings to the west. The quakes haven’t stopped either, so it keeps shifting.”

As if mocking him, the earth shook, but it was only a minor tremor.

It still unsettled her. She said sharply, “Where are they? I need to see them—Cory and the others. I need to know—”

—that they’re real. Although she wasn’t certain what
was
real anymore. Her mind felt fuzzy.

“Here,” Allan said, moving down one of the streets, the buildings on either side heavily damaged because they hadn’t been built of stone. “They aren’t far.”

Kara followed, climbing over the debris, thankful for the breeze that pushed against her face and for the chirp of birds, the hiss of sand against stone, the eerie howl of wind through vacant windows—desolate sounds, but sounds nonetheless.

She heard the others before she saw them, laughter and the shrieks of children. They rounded a corner, the building at its edge surprisingly whole, and found a stone building still standing across the thoroughfare. Youngsters were playing in the street, tossing around a leather-stitched ball in some sort of game, overseen by a few women and twice as many men, at least half of them carrying weapons and obviously on watch.

“Some of those that survived have already formed into loose groups and aren’t friendly,” Allan said wearily, voice low. “We’ve already been attacked twice.”

The guards spotted them first, a warning shout rising before they recognized Allan.

And then the two were inundated with people, everyone talking, everyone trying to touch her, the kids screaming, their voices shrill. She shrank back from them, Allan forging his way through the crowd ahead of her toward the building. They ducked inside and left the majority of the people behind, only to be greeted by those inside.