The Fall of Neskaya (60 page)

They came alert as one, without any need for words, as Bernardo’s footsteps sounded on the stone corridor outside. Amalie raked her fingers through her pale frizzy hair, a gesture of impatience. Demiana placed two fingertips on the back of her wrist, caught her gaze, and held her. She closed her eyes and then slowly opened them as tension left her jaw.

Bernardo slipped into the room with barely a whisper of his crimson Keeper’s robes. “They refuse to alter their course,” he said. They all knew, of course, but hearing the words spoken aloud brought a certain finality.

“This is the word of Tomas, Keeper of the First Circle?” Coryn asked.

“Tomas no longer speaks for Tramontana,” Bernardo said, his voice rumbling. “Rumail commands there in Deslucido’s name. He is now Keeper as well as voice of the King.”

Coryn flinched under the reflex sizzle of energy around the circle. These people had known Rumail, had worked with him . . . had made the painful decision to set him aside no longer one of them, when they expelled him from their company.

“There is no hope of any further discussion, then,” Mac said. A statement, not a question.

“It was a small chance,” Bernardo said. “We are no worse off now than before. Come,” he held out his hands for them to take their seats. Gerell, whose back had been bothering him, joints stiff from too many long Hellers winters as a younger man, arranged the cushions on his chair. “Let us begin.”

Coryn went to the low bench he preferred. A thin pillow softened the wood surface. He crossed his legs loosely and settled his body. A wave of relaxation passed through his muscles. It was a posture he could hold for hours, head balanced on a straight neck, chest lifted, back long and easy.

He closed his eyes and dropped into the circle. Bernardo began weaving them into a unified whole. As they attuned to one another, Coryn saw them as an ever-changing rainbow, then heard them as voices settling into harmony, then sparkling dots of sun reflected on a clear pool of water. Bernardo’s touch dropped a stone into the water, creating ripples. Energy surged through each ring, out and then in again—in to the center point, where Bernardo gathered it together.

Once again, Coryn found himself standing outside the Overworld manifestation of Neskaya. Bernardo moved them to the topmost spire, looking down. Deftly, he began to reshape the psychic substance of the tower. Walls thickened and grew battlements, windows narrowed. A tracing of lace-ivy burgeoned into a covering of sword-edged thorn vines. From a landmark of grace and beauty, Neskaya drew in on itself, now a fortress.

“Tramontana!”
Bernardo’s psychic voice rang like a gong, reverberating from ground and sky alike.

With the speed of thought, they now faced the other Tower. Here in the Overworld, it was as easy to move an edifice as a game token.

Although the Tramontana circle must surely be aware of their appearance, there was no reaction. For a moment, Coryn did not recognize his former home. This squat edifice, encased in constant electrical discharge and dwarfed by the huge lenslike structure, bore no resemblance to either its physical reality or the airy, graceful form Kieran had designed, reminiscent of a grove of willowy goldenbark trees.

A beam of thought-energy, invisible but readily discernible to Coryn’s
laran
senses, emanated from the lens and disappeared through the seamless ground. This, he knew, was the source of the spell which held the Hastur army in shambles. He felt Demiana’s shiver of disgust, Gerell’s stony loathing of the thing. From Mac came a simple, almost mechanical suggestion.

With precise control, Bernardo shifted the position of the astral Neskaya to take the full impact of the lens beam. Atop the tallest battlement, Coryn reached out his hands. Strength flowed around the circle. The walls, resilient as living things, flexed and held.

Coryn caught a fleeting glimpse of soldiers in Hastur colors scrambling to their feet, of officers waving them forward, hands clutching sword and bow, men mounting and spurring their horses into formation, eyes glowing like white-hot coals. Then a ferocious shout from Tramontana brought his attention back to the present.

“NESKAYA SCUM! GET OUT OF THE WAY OR WE WILL BLAST YOU ALL TO ZANDRU’S COLDEST HELL!”

He had almost forgotten that voice, though he had dreamed of it enough times in his early years at Tramontana. Just as some people had different bodily appearances in the Overworld, so did their voices sound different, although still recognizable. They sounded more like themselves, their true selves. This voice, though, had not changed since the first time he’d heard it as a child.

By what right does Rumail of Ambervale speak for Tramontana?
The thought flamed within him.

Coryn held back his mental challenge, for it was Bernardo’s place, as Keeper of Neskaya, to speak for all of them. Bernardo simply waited.

Slowly, silently, the lens swelled even larger. It tilted on its bearings so that it faced Neskaya directly. Scintillating particles of blue and poison-green appeared in the colorless beam. At first, there were only a few, drifting outward like so many colored dust motes. They moved almost lazily, coming to rest on the outer surface of Neskaya’s wall. Tiny explosions blossomed into pinpoints of brightness where they touched. They reminded Coryn of the stinging flies of Verdanta summers.

Within moments, the colored specks multiplied, not tens but hundreds, thousands, even more. The beam swarmed with them. Several struck at once, so that the combined impacts grew ever larger and brighter. Fire lingered in the wake of each explosion. Coryn felt the heat on his face. He sensed the flames burrowing through the substance of the wall, searching for what it could feed on, like some demonic mental
clingfire.

Even as a roar of denial rose in his throat, he felt Bernardo’s sure guidance. From Neskaya’s slitted windows came a flurry of wings—feathers in every hue of the dawn or skin stretched over long, delicate bones. Hunting cries filled the air, sweet and high. The beam disintegrated into shards of brilliance as birds and tiny bats dove and fed on the light-motes.

Laughter bubbled up in Amalie, spreading through the circle. Minutes seeped by and the flying hunters slowed as fewer of the motes appeared. Soon only a cluster here and there remained, quickly snatched on the wing. Moving as one, the flocks circled Neskaya and rose skyward.

Somewhere below, in the material world, steel clashed against steel, sweat ran with blood, war cries rent the air . . .

“Hastur! Hastur!
Permanedal!” The Hastur motto,
I shall remain.

A figure appeared on top of Tramontana’s manifestation, arms raised. Red robes whipped in unseen winds. The hood had been pulled far down to shadow the face, but Coryn would have known Rumail anywhere.

The winds died, leaving an island of crystalline calm. As clearly as if they faced each other across a sparring square, the Tramontana circle appeared. Coryn knew that Bernardo and the others were equally visible. He recognized each one who stood to the side and behind Rumail—Cathal, Garreth . . . Aran. Aran, once so filled with life, now bore the appearance of an old, gray man. He stared past Coryn with white, unseeing eyes.

Only Tomas and Bronwyn were missing from the Tramontana circle, though Coryn sensed their presences elsewhere in the Tower. Rumail had taken Tomas’ place as senior Keeper.

Rumail lifted the hood back from his face. He looked younger than the last time Coryn had seen him, his skin unlined over arching bone. With an impassive expression, he surveyed the Neskaya circle. His gaze rested on each one in turn, as if none of them were worthy of further notice. When he came to Coryn, however, he lingered for a heartbeat. His eyes glinted red in the reflected color of his Keeper’s robes, as if they glowed with their own inner fire.

Burning . . . probing . . . the light in those eyes shifted with recognition.

Deep within Coryn’s body, something roused, uneasy as the memory of a half-healed wound. He told himself he had nothing to fear. Whatever had happened was a long time ago, and he was no longer a child. He was a grown man, a trained
laranzu,
and he stood in the midst of his own circle.

Dark patches swirled across the gray Overworld sky. Coryn licked his lips, tasting ozone. A gust of chill, moist air lifted his hair. He tightened his hold of Demiana on one side and Bernardo on the other and took a deep breath, steeling himself for what he feared would come next.

Rumail reached up with one arm. He cried out, though Coryn could not make out the words. Lightning, a jagged tree of eye-searing white, burst from the sky and came to his hand. For an instant, he poised there, though whether he held it or hung from it, Coryn could not be sure. He remembered the old proverb about the perils of chaining a dragon to roast one’s meat. Surely dragon-fire could be no less brilliant . . . or deadly.

Rumail shifted, gathering himself beneath the pulsing lightning.

“Here it comes!” Mac cried.

With an odd, puppetlike jerk, Rumail hurled the bolt toward them.

E
ven as the lightning bolt left Rumail’s hand, Coryn felt a terrible pull, a drawing of energy from his own Keeper. He channeled all his strength into his response. He felt the skill of Bernardo’s mental shaping and saw instantly what the Keeper was doing.

Bernardo acted the instant before the lightning struck. Instead of stone and thorn-vine, it crashed into a sheet of impenetrable mind-stuff, smoothly curved, a mirror to the other tower’s lens. White heat reflected back. For a long moment, the backlash played over Tramontana’s walls, smoothing out the crazed energy patterns. Then it vanished in a sizzle and a fall of fine black powder. Atop the tower, Rumail slumped. The sky cleared.

“Coryn,” came Bernardo’s voice. “We have a moment of respite before he can try again. But there is great danger here. He is using forces he cannot control, forces that span both worlds. Should we take a direct hit here in the Overworld, I fear the result would break through into the physical plane.”

Coryn’s thoughts raced ahead.
And that would be equivalent to an actual
laran
attack. The doomsday device—

“Yes!” Bernardo agreed. “You must go quickly and disarm it, lest we destroy Tramontana in truth.”

It would put an end to Rumail Deslucido,
Coryn thought hotly. Then, with a rush of shame, he remembered—
Aran is in that Tower, and Bronwyn, and Gareth, people I love.
As quickly as he could, without disrupting the linkage, he dropped from the circle and into his physical body.

To reach the laboratory where the
laran
shield had been assembled, Coryn had to descend one staircase and cross to another. As he went down, he missed a step. His legs gave way beneath him so that he had to grasp the rope support which had been strung along the stone wall. He stood there, gulping acid, fingers curled around the coarse twisted fibers, and sweated hard in the cool of the stairwell.

He was not alone. Something—
someone
—rode within him, no longer quiescent but aroused.

When the two circles faced one another in the Overworld, Rumail had known him. And what of that? Rumail knew them all, from Bernardo the Keeper to Amalie, from his years of service here. The man had gone mad with power now, unfit for the robes he had taken on. Any fool could see that.

Then what had he, Coryn, to fear? Why did he tremble like an orphaned
chervine
kid in the shadow of a banshee?

Suddenly, Coryn’s fingers opened, nerveless upon the rope railing. Without support, he crumpled on the stairs. Stone, hard and cold as ice, bit into his flesh. As if an invisible hand turned a key in a lock, something opened inside him, no mere physical wrenching of the gut, but an even deeper, more profound ripping at his very essence.

Memories filled his vision, blinding him to the shadowed walls. As it had so many years ago, a corridor appeared before him, composed of the featureless gray substance of the Overworld. He had been here before, had sought refuge from a shadowy figure. The memory shifted, dissolving as quickly as it arose. Cold, more than marrow-deep, shivered through him and for a moment, he was a child, painfully poised on the brink of manhood, tortured with the changes racking his body as his
laran
awoke. Wordless terror jolted through him, stripping thought. He bolted down the corridor.

No escape this way
. . . The words came slowly, pale and thin. He struggled to remember more. There had been a talisman, something which would guard him. Darting this way and that, he searched for it. His hands were empty, the gray corridor featureless. There was no help there, or anywhere.

Walls surrounded him, drawing closer until he could no longer run. Coryn tried to brace one shoulder and shove it aside, to kick out. Each time, the substance of the walls gave way, elastic, only to constrict even more. He was trapped, like a rabbit-horn in the coils of a snake. Knowing this, he tried to calm himself, to gather his resources. There must be some way to escape.