Song of the Beast (40 page)

Chapter 28

I picked a position perhaps fifty paces left of MacAllister and halfway down the steep ring wall, among the largest boulders I could find. The boulders might shelter me briefly, though no venue so close to a kai was safe for long. It didn't matter that I was still outside the Riders' perimeter, for the purpose of the rite was to drive the beast into madness so that its fire burned sheer white, the hottest it could possibly be. When I took up my stance on the top of an angular boulder, a new risk presented itself. Just below me was a stone-and-leather hut—a Rider's hut. Bad luck if it belonged to the Rider who controlled this kai. I wasn't sure I could prevail in a direct contest of wills with the bound master of the beast. But there was nothing for it but to begin.

I dismissed every thought of Aidan, of love and guilt, of doubt and fear. There could be no place inside me for anything but will. Already the kai's nostrils flared wider, and the red eyes blazed hotter, and from the monstrous head came a low rumbling that made my teeth hurt. I uncoiled my whip and unsheathed my dagger.

“Teng zha nav wyvyr,”
I cried out.

Thus began the most difficult battle of my life—harder even than the disastrous venture of my childhood. On this night I had not only to control the kai, but, at the same time, purposely drive it into uttermost frenzy. It wasn't going to take long. By the time I was through the initial summons and the first of the seven invocations, the beast screamed so powerfully that I lost my balance and fell backward on the rock. Without releasing my control I got back to my feet and found a steadier foothold on a narrow ledge with my back to the angular boulder. Then I pronounced the second invocation.

I had reviewed Narim's journal where he had written all he knew of the Rite of the Third Wing—of the day the Elhim had enslaved the dragons using the songs the dragons sang to calm their restless younglings, of the day the dragons had seen those younglings dead and breathed white fire upon the Elhim, somehow binding dragon and Elhim to the vile bloodstones. I had racked my childhood memories for tone and position and every slight variation that could influence the outcome. But in the rites I had witnessed, the Rider had carried a bloodstone and worn armor to protect him from the dragon's wrath. And the only Elhim to survive the long-ago debacle beside the lake of fire had worn bloodstones. Aidan planned to go defenseless, thinking ... what? That he could himself become some living bloodstone? That his talent ... his heart ... his compassion would bind him to some scrap of sentience buried in this horror and allow him to control it?

I spoke the third invocation—a verse about gathering with brothers and sisters in the realm of the wind. The kai thrashed its tail and unfurled its wings, an ocean of flailing green and copper that seemed to cover half the valley. Forbidden by its bound Rider to fly from the lair, the kai set up such a screaming that I thought I would be deaf again. It lurched closer, half the distance between us in the space of a heartbeat. I pressed my back against the rock, wishing the kai were blind like Keldar or crippled like the beast in Fandine.

From before and below me came a glimmer of red light, and as I screamed out the fourth invocation, the Rider stepped out of his hut. The kai's hatred was made more vicious and more direct by the command of its Rider. The beast lurched forward again, and the snout waved back and forth, searching ... listening ... closer. My eyes burned with the acrid smoke. Too close. I ducked and shifted right along the ledge, trying to find a place where I could retreat, then threw myself onto the ground again when a wing swept past my head. I was coughing and choking, buffeted by the stinking wind of its passing. Raging malevolence blazed in the red eyes as I struggled to speak the fifth invocation. I lay on my back, pressed to the rock by the weight of hatred from the devil kai.

“Lara! What madness is this?” The voice came from behind and above me. My brother's voice.

“Get her out of here!”

“She'll have us all baked.”

“Holy Jodar! Treachery! She wears a bloodstone!”

“Slay her now and be done with this. Gruesin, get up here!”

“Let it go, Lara,” Desmond yelled. “Gruesin will control the kai if you but let it go.” Four men in Rider's armor moved toward me from the left. A fifth, the Rider from the hut, climbed up from the valley floor to my right.

I lashed out to each side with my whip, as much to keep Desmond and his cohorts away as to deter the monstrous head that swayed toward me. I screamed the sixth invocation, and the dragon reared backward, spewing fire straight up—white flames only slightly tinged with orange. My helm had been knocked off when I fell, so the skin of my face blistered in the heat.

Hands clutched at my armor, and I slashed at them with my dagger while I struggled to get out the last verse. I had never listened to the words before. “Take this youngling, child of fire and wind. Lift its wings with your breath and your power. Be its third wing until it masters the upper airs. This fledgling is yours and not yours. It lives by your grace and dies by your command, and its service shall ever be your pleasure. In the sun shall you fly as one; in the cold moonlight shall you together devour the night. Inseparable. Unchanging. Eternal.”

The Riders dragged me across the rocks and up the slope, away from the raging kai. My dagger was snatched from my hand, and my whip snagged in the rocks. Five whips slashed around me and at least two bloodstones flickered, fighting to keep the maddened beast at bay. But as the screeching kai stretched its neck high above us and belched forth a trailer of pure white flame, I pulled loose my left hand and raised it high. Abruptly I was dropped onto the hard, hot ground, while my captors pointed and yelled in dismay at a dark figure scrambling down the steep rocks on our right. I began kicking and screaming, laying my hand on the spare knife hidden in my boot and embedding it in at least one leather-clad leg so they had no chance to give chase until it was too late. For, of course, the kai had seen him, too.

He stopped no more than twenty paces from the mad dragon and raised his arms in supplication. So tiny, so fragile a being beside the monster. I could not hear if he said anything before he began screaming, for the dragon knocked him instantly to his knees with a bone-shattering bellow and bathed Aidan MacAllister in eye-searing white fire. “Aidan, beloved!” I sobbed. His hair and clothes were burning when I closed my eyes, and covered my head, and sank to the hot, stony earth. I could not weep. All my tears had burned away with my heart.

Chapter 29

AIDAN

Chapter 30

What is the shape of time? Humans speak as if time takes the form of those things that occupy it: pleasurable things gone too quickly or dull things that linger long past their welcome. Yet in my years of silence, when life was emptiness, the hours did not collapse upon themselves like empty grain sacks. Every moment had depth, breadth, and length; every hour had its immutable volume and built one upon the other until time's edifice was tall enough that I could be free. Yet from the moment I gave myself to Roelan in Aberthain Lair, the shape of time was altered, so that I could not say what was a moment or an hour or a day.

Half a minute, Lara had told me. Half a minute from the time she would raise her left hand until the dragon would let loose its fire that could melt stone. And I would need half of that to ensure I stood directly in its path. Mad fool. How did I ever expect to deliver the message I had worked on so painstakingly in the past weeks, the words so carefully chosen from my memories of joy?

It was not that I was unwilling. My intent was clear. My resolution firm. Whatever were Narim's secrets—and I had come to the conclusion that his secrets were monumental—I believed they were beyond my purpose. I had to reach for truth. But I had not counted on being half-crazed with Lara. Mazadine had presented no torment so refined as had these last two days with her, playing at the intimacy I desired above all things, forbidden by her spoken hatred from making it real, yet tantalized with words and deeds that lured me into thinking she cared what happened to me. And I had not counted on my rage at learning that Narim had sent me to the netherworld to keep me “safe,” because he believed no human capable of faith. Yet even from that horrific revelation had sprung a hope to feed my love-struck lunacy. Lara must have thought her revelation would make me despise her, but all I could see was that she refused to leave untruth between us. And even as I wrestled with all of this, the dragon threatened to crack my head with its trumpeting madness.

What rational words can form themselves from such chaos in a quarter of a minute? What instant's communication can penetrate the awesome, terrifying, majestic horror of a dragon in wildest frenzy?

So when the time came and I ran to embrace the world's worst nightmare, all I could come out with was “Roelan, remember!” And it was clearly not enough. The red-slimed nostrils flared and the monstrous head dipped toward me; then came the ear-shattering bellow and blinding holocaust that knocked me to my knees. One fleeting instant of grief for Lara, for music, for dragons, and for glorious, decadent, holy life, and I was consumed by pain so horrific it made everything I had ever experienced a mere pinprick.

Across my mind skittered the word
hurry
, which was odd in itself because I was expecting death to be quick at least. But time had begun to play its unsettling tricks, and the pain and the earth-splitting noise did not end. Somewhere amidst the cacophony of raging white flames and dragon's madness, I heard my own screaming, and thought, “Why isn't that miserable soul dead? Why doesn't he shut up?”

Was it my own word echoing in my dying ears?

“Aidan, beloved!” From outside the fire came Lara's cry ... so dear, so poignant, penetrating my agony with sweet revelation and piercing regret.

Then from somewhere so remote as to be beyond the moon and stars, drifted the same call, so faint that the flutter of a moth's wing would mute it, or the whisper of a cloud's passing, or the landing of a snowflake on a knee-high drift. Not words, for the speaker could no longer shape words, not even the subtle vocalizations Keldar had used. An image. A questioning image.
Aidan . . . Aidan, beloved?