The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) (90 page)

“
Is this all you can do when unleashed?” he said doubtfully.  “I know that you’ve lost your way over these past centuries, Guardian, but I hadn’t thought you’d become weak.  You’re no use to me if you’re weak.  Perhaps I should—“

A glint of light sped from the courtyard entry, hit the necromancer in the back and exploded into a mob of shrieking crows.  Ice swept over his wings, freezing them stiff and weighing him down, and he crashed to the snow with a look of shock only to be immediately attacked by the swarm.  White and black feathers flew.

Cob’s mouth fell open, and he looked to the edge of the maze where three timid figures hung back among the hedges.  Then he steadied himself and reached into the earth to bring up a great surge of soil, roots and ice around his thrashing enemy.

It closed over the tumult of Ravager and crows, and for a long moment all was still, the sphere of dark elements solid around its prisoner.  Cob saw one of the three figures step forward from the maze and recognized Fiora with her sword and shield.  His heart lifted slightly; he had worried for her, for all of them, and the fact that only three of the five were here brought a sick, dull anger to the fore.  He waved her back and concentrated on the sphere, on piling more earth and snow onto it.  Crushing it inward.

The thrashing sensation at its center slowed, then stopped.

“
Did we get him?” Fiora said, and Cob glanced up, annoyed that she had come closer.

Then his sense of the sphere’s interior went dead.

“Get b—“ was all he managed before molten light pulsed through the sphere, evaporating the ice in the instant before it exploded into thick, half-liquid shards of slag glass.  Fiora went down under several of them; more hit Cob, and though he had planted his hooves firmly enough to stay up, they splashed over him and hardened into shackles.  He struggled to crack them, swearing as the ground beneath his feet and under Fiora went dead in a debilitating wave.

From the cracked glass egg rose the Ravager in full form.

It was an awful thing, made of luminous bone and scale and sinew, its cheeks hollowed from starvation, its eyes blue fire in sunken sockets.  Crests of feathers both fine and stiff rose from its scalp like hair, undulating in a phantom wind, and its lower face was malformed—more a maw than a mouth, full of tearing teeth.  Ribs showed beneath the white flesh of its emaciated torso, a few actually poking through the flesh.

Unlike the Ravager in the tower, it was not rotting.  Every inch looked malevolently alive, and as it spread its wings and focused on Cob, he felt the hairs on his arms lift despite his Guardian armor.

He had only an instant to thrust a shield of ice and roots around his friends before lightning crashed down in sheets throughout the courtyard.  But the strike did not seem targeted; instead, electricity splashed out in a crawling web that scorched earth and vaporized water, leaving bone-dry dirt behind.  Cob fell back as another bolt leapt from the Ravager's hand to spark off his armor.  Behind him he sensed ice still clinging to the sword, but it was the last in the yard.

Don’t just stand there
, he told himself,
attack it!
  But when he moved to aim a punch at the Ravager, it surged into the air higher than he could reach, then dropped another cascading bolt of lightning on his head.  He stumbled back, feeling the electricity crackle wildly through his antlers and down his spine.  His armor absorbed the shocks but not the pain.

“
Get down here and fight!” he shouted.

Before the words had left his mouth, the Ravager stooped upon him.  He threw up one arm in time to keep its talons from his face, but both clawed feet and both hands clamped on him and wrenched him from the earth.  Desperately he sent a vine from his own armor downward, connecting to the ground before his grip on the Guardian could fail, and as he made contact he grabbed the Ravager by one ankle and pulled the earth up to meet him.

It felt like pulling a bag of gravel through a small hole, the earth’s inertia resisting more the harder he yanked, but enough reached him to arrest his flight.  Staring up into the Ravager’s seething eyes, he forced vines from his armor to lash around its leg and started reeling himself back down toward the ground, resisting the furious beat of the white wings.

The Ravager snarled, gripped an antler in each hand, then bent double to bite at his face.

Its awful, jagged teeth scraped his forehead and drew deep grooves beside his nose as he struggled to avoid it.  Its breath was frost and fire, its radiance so piercing that he had to shut his eyes against it.  His vines kept wrapping its thigh but though he wrenched at it with them, he could not seem to throw the Ravager off-balance; those monstrous wings kept it on an even keel despite its attempts to scalp him with its teeth.

Focusing, he drew lightning-glassed rock up from the ground into a protective helm, and the world dimmed.  Teeth struck sparks against his brow.  With a sound of disgust, the Ravager released him.

He fell like a stone, the vine searing from the Ravager’s flesh like straw in a bonfire, and hit the ground awkwardly but felt no pain.  Strength filled him as he pushed to one knee, regaining his bearings.  Fiora was a few yards away, struggling from the vine cocoon he had made for her; Arik and Lark had withdrawn into the maze.

A sudden force struck him on the back of the neck, shoving him face-first into the dirt with such power that it would have shattered his spine if not for the Guardian’s presence.  Talons clamped around his throat, and another foot planted between his antlers, yanking his head back so that sharp fingers could scrape for his eyes.  But it had driven him down too far; planting his hands, he brought earth over his shoulders, up the back of his neck to break the Ravager’s grip, up his scalp again to replace what the talons tore.  Wrenching upward, he caught after its feet as it took flight.

It evaded, too swift for his heavy limbs, then was on him again from the front, clawing, slashing, striking, screaming, full of such piercing light that his translucent faceplate flaked away before its glare.  Every time he thought he had caught it, it twisted away somehow, leaving his nerves stinging and his hands full of electric feathers.

Again and again, it pounded at him, and though he found he could weather the assaults through constant reinforcement, he could make no headway.  He saw his frustration mirrored in the Ravager’s face, its uncompromising fury becoming wilder and wilder, its wings arcing greater and greater streams of energy into him that did nothing but dissipate down his armor into the ground.

Deadlock.

Can’t keep doing this
, Cob thought as the claws tore at his faceplate then evaded his hands yet again.  Anything he tried, the Ravager countered, but for all the Ravager’s power, it could not break his armor completely—yet it was only a matter of time before the Ravager realized there were still vulnerable targets in the area. 
There has to be some way...

Another burst of energy trickled down his armor to disappear into the earth, and he felt the breath of the Hungry Dark.

No
, he thought, then stopped.

Considered it.

All his life, he had feared it.  In Thynbell he had opened himself somehow and been drawn into it, and in Cantorin he had fallen again, sinking into its cold embrace and nearly taking the entire temple with him.  Only the goddesses’ power had brought him back from the brink.  Even the Guardian, a Dark spirit, had told him to stay away.

But it was beneath him now, lurking in subterranean blackness like an empty reservoir.  Like a leech, lured by the taste of vibrant energy.

Through his hooves, he felt the tingle in the baked earth; it had become saturated by the electricity he had grounded from Enkhaelen, and soon would hold no more.  And what would happen when the necromancer's strikes had nowhere to go?  Would they jump back to him, or lance out at the others, or just keep gathering until Cob's defenses finally blew to bits?

But the Hungry Dark was bottomless.

Throw him to it
, he thought. 
Bear him down.

He waited to feel some protest from the Guardian, but there was nothing—not a twinge or a whisper.  Somehow it had finally meshed with him; his easy command over the elements was the spirit working in concert with his mind and flesh, no longer having to be filtered through proxies.  Still, for its earlier warnings, he thought it would voice an opinion.

Silence means assent.  I’m stronger now.  I won’t be washed away.

The Hungry Dark reached toward him, its strange fingers tickling at his soles.

So he let it in.

The world went black-and-white, the shadowed sea surging up to embrace him.  He breathed it in, tasting hollowness and a cold more absolute than Enkhaelen’s aura could ever be.  It soothed something in him—some aching knot he could neither name nor understand—and as it buoyed him in its arms, he felt suddenly calm.

In control.

The Ravager slashed down at him in a frenzy, its bright claws carving through the darkness that shrouded him, but every gouge was instantly refilled, every kick and bite and strike by its radiant essence just a dim flash in the black.  Dying stars straining against the inevitable.

Reaching out, he let the Dark flow through his hands, his eyes, his mouth, his very pores.  It came easily, and as it engulfed the Ravager, he heard its roar change to a keen.  Other sparks fizzled in the black waters nearby, but they could not hold his attention.

He wanted the light.

He wanted to quench it, to clasp its flame in his great cold fists and squeeze it to nothing.  To extinguish that annoyance, that pest, that fleck of malice that had broken his dreamless sleep and forced him to hide behind debris in the shadows of stars, to lurk and rage and long for rest.  For silence.  For the empty singularity beyond ice, beyond cold, beyond darkness.

For the Void.

Dimly he sensed that he was falling, but it only mattered because the light had gone further away, glimmering beyond his hands like an insult that had to be blotted out.  Slowly, ponderously, he closed his grip around it.  The tiny light struggled and nearly flitted free.

Then there were other hands on his.  Cool, smooth, dusky in the darkness, and a body supporting him from behind.  Familiar.  A scent of high-mountain flowers, of cold stone and warm hearth, of rain and thunder.

Fingers interlaced with his, pressing them together over the frantic thrash of the firefly light.

“
Mother?” he whispered, and felt her smile against his cheek.

The shock returned him to his body for a moment, and he felt water on his eyelids and trickling into his mouth, his nostrils.  But her hands were still there, clasping his tighter, and he tried to look back, desperate to see her again, no longer caring about the little light.

Black eyes in the black ocean…

Do not turn from me!
screamed a voice of fire.

Agony pierced him, and he looked up as white feathers filled the world, white talons buried in his ribs and thighs, the tiny spark between his hands escaping in the form of a ringhawk as its much greater master heaved six heavy wings.  Wiry muscle strained beneath stark white skin, cords of tension stood out in the white neck, then it tore him upward like a fish speared from a river while the black water poured through its blazing wings to scald his face and arms.  His mother’s hands slipped from his like a skin of ice, and he cried in despair at their loss.

The wings flowed around him, banishing the last remnants of the Dark with searing light, and he felt himself start to burn.

And then—

He hit the ground hard, coughing up dirty water.  His chest felt savaged, his face tight, eyes swimming with afterimages.  Under his fingers was soft mud, and for a moment he clawed at it, trying to find strength in his limbs to get up, to face the threat Enkhaelen still presented, but his arms were like lead and his legs would not respond beyond a twitch.

A gloved hand cuffed him lightly upside the head.  “Child,” said the necromancer.  “Lay still.  You’ve done enough to harm yourself without fighting me again.  I’ll have this and be on my way.”

Boots squelched past him, and he grabbed after one awkwardly, fingers barely skimming the leather.  Through wavery eyes he saw the black figure approach the sword—still thinly covered with ice—and reach for the hilt.

Black glove touched silver pommel, and a spark jumped between them.  The necromancer recoiled as strands of energy peeled from his fingertips and began to unravel down his arm.

“No, no,” he said, taking a step back and clasping his other hand over the stricken arm.  Despite his grip, the strands of blue-white energy continued to unwind along his wrist and elbow.  As Cob stared blearily, he saw the affected hand sag, then the whole forearm start to wither.

Teeth bared, Enkhaelen made a cutting gesture toward his upper arm, and the sleeve and limb sheared away, leaving a bloodless stump.  But that too began to unravel, and his wings—which had already receded to stubs—flickered away entirely on the disintegrating side.  With an ogrish curse, he took an abortive step toward the sword, then seemed to change his mind as the fallen limb collapsed to ash within its glove and sleeve.

“
Sanctuary
,” he said, and vanished in a warp of air.