Caught in Crystal

  “Get back!” Kayl called sharply to all of them. “Back beside the cube. It’ll be safe there for a little while yet.”

  She pulled Mark with her as she followed her own advice. “Stay there,” she said firmly, positioning him beside the Crystal. Then she turned to Corrana and the Magicseeker. “Help me move Glyndon.”

  “What is that thing?” the Magicseeker demanded. He let go of Corrana’s arm, but his eyes remained fixed on the slowly spreading darkness.

  “If we knew, maybe we could stop it,” Kayl said. “Come on.” She knelt by Glyndon, who was groggy but not yet quite unconscious, and gently slid her arms beneath his head and his good shoulder.

  The Magicseeker did not move. “Maybe we could jump out the windows.”

  “If the fall didn’t kill you, the creature would,” Corrana said. “It is no longer limited to the Tower.”

  The blackness was oozing dangerously near to Glyndon. “I can’t move him alone,” Kayl snapped at Corrana, hiding her fear behind anger. “Or do you want to let that thing have him?”

  “What’s the use?” the Magicseeker said. He started to sheath his sword, then looked at the blackened, pitted blade and flung it away with a curse.

  Corrana gave him a long look, then turned and joined Kayl. She knelt and worked her arms carefully under Glyndon’s legs. Then, without looking up, she said in a low voice, “I couldn’t keep that thing from taking Javieri. I’ll do what I must to keep it from getting Glyndon as well.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” Kayl said. “Nothing seems to do any good against that stuff. Now lift, easy.”

  Together, they slid Glyndon a little closer to the crystal cube, away from the encroaching blackness. “Again,” Kayl said. “I want him right at the foot of the pedestal.”

  As they shifted into better positions for the next effort, the Magicseeker crouched beside Corrana and added his strength to theirs. With his help, they reached the base of the pedestal in one try. “Thank you,” Kayl said.

  The Magicseeker stood up and turned away with a shrug. “It’s halfway around the room now,” he said, and his voice was unsteady. “What happens next?”

  Kayl smoothed wisps of hair back from Glyndon’s forehead and rose. Mark and Dara moved closer to her, and she automatically put an arm around each of them. “I don’t know,” she told the Magicseeker. “It isn’t behaving the same way it did last time I was here.”

  “How much time do we have?” Corrana said quietly.

  “I can’t—” Kayl started, then stopped short as Glyndon’s hoarse voice broke in.

  “Time,” said Glyndon in a pain-filled whisper. “The Crystal. You’ll have to use the Crystal.”

  “What does he mean?” the Magicseeker demanded.

  Corrana bent over Glyndon. “How?” she said urgently. “What did you do to use it before? Tell me, and I’ll try!”

  “I don’t know,” Glyndon said. “I’m sorry, Kayl.”

  “It’s all right,” Kayl said. She leaned closer, wanting to tell him while there was still time how much she cared for him, how much she had always cared for him. “I love you” seemed inadequate, too short a phrase to convey all the things she felt. “I love you,” she said.

  Glyndon smiled. “I love you, too,” he said, and for a moment his voice sounded stronger. “Use the Crystal, Kayl. It’s the only way left.” Then his eyes closed and his head rolled sideways.

  “Unconscious,” Corrana said before Kayl had time for more than a brief stab of fear. The Elder Sister looked at Kayl. “Well?”

  “I’m not a magician.”

  “At the moment, neither am I. But we have no choice but to try.” She gestured at the room, which was slowly darkening as the blackness covered one window after another.

  “Mother.”

  Kayl turned and saw Dara standing calmly with one hand resting on the Crystal. “Dara, get away from—”

  “I’m all right, Mother, but I can’t do it myself. You have to help.”

  Kayl hesitated, fighting her instinctive desire to pull Dara away from the Crystal, then stepped forward to join her daughter. She saw Mark standing beside Dara, his face blank and rigid with the effort not to disgrace himself by crying. Kayl felt Corrana beside her, and saw the remaining Magicseeker take up a position on the opposite side of the Crystal. Then her hand touched the cool, smooth surface of the cube.

  For a moment, nothing seemed to happen. Then, with a suddenness that left her dizzy, she was part of the crystal cube. She tried to shake herself, to dispel the vertigo, but she had lost all sensation from her body. Dara and Mark were with her, linked to Kayl by blood and to the Crystal by talent and heritage. Kayl could sense Corrana and the Magicseeker as well, but not as clearly. They, too, had become part of the Crystal, but Kayl could tell that they were not as closely linked to it as she and the children were.

  Wondering what to do now, Kayl tried to look about her. The effort set off something in the magic of the cube. Pictures began flashing before her, visions of strange people and stranger places. A tall woman with the hard hands of an artisan and golden skin knelt on a slender bridge made of crystal, hammering a band of silver into place along its edge.

  A blond man in a ragged tunic cut and stabbed at a huge, gray-green creature that snapped at him with foot-long fangs.

  A green-haired Neira boy swam cautiously through drifts of seaweed toward a delicate structure of coral and mother-of-pearl. A demon, dark-haired and human-looking, fought desperately against a faceless man in a dark cape, while behind him a muscular youth sent ravens into the battle. A human girl with the slanted green eyes of a Shee rode out of a snowstorm into a cave and collapsed. A black-furred Wyrd grinned fiercely and lifted a silver goblet in a toast to a Shee woman dressed in red silk. A slender woman with dark, fine hair raised a sword of fire in a triumphant gesture. A band of Thar raiders trudged across a wilderness of ice; a ship with blue sails ran before a storm; armies battled around the foot of a sinister black mountain; a strange, silver-hued moon cracked and broke apart….

  Kayl recoiled from the flood of images. They stopped as suddenly as they had begun, and once again she was a disembodied part of the cube. Kayl shook herself, remembering the description of the cube in the Ri Astar Diary. “Whenever a man stared into it… he would see what the Crystal would show.” The writer of the diary had understated the effect.

  Kayl had not simply seen pictures; it was as if she had actually been present at each of the places she had been shown. She wondered whether she could control the phenomenon if she tried.

  From somewhere outside herself, the knowledge floated up that Kayl could, indeed, control the visions. She was startled at first; then another phrase from the diary drifted through her mind: “… if the watcher fixed his heart on some one thing, past or present, that too he would see pictured.…” Again, the diarist had apparently understated. The Crystal was not limited to visions; it could provide information as well. Kayl considered briefly, then filled her mind with the desire to know how Glyndon had used the Crystal to save the remnant of the first expedition, sixteen years before, and how she might repeat it.

  Pictures began unrolling before her once more, painfully familiar yet oddly skewed. Kayl realized after a moment that she was seeing her first visit to the Tower, but from a viewpoint inside the crystal cube. She watched Kevran, Beshara, Varevice, and Glyndon arguing over the purpose of the cube; saw Kevran knock a corner from the cube with the hilt of his dagger; saw the black creature swallow Beshara and her demon; watched her younger self hacking uselessly at the oozing darkness.

  A soundless, twisting explosion rocked the room, and for an instant time stopped. In that moment, Kayl knew what Glyndon had done, and saw as well the price they had all paid as a result. For Gadeiron’s Crystal was far more than a simple scrying tool; in the hands of a wizard, it could actually manipulate the past. Glyndon had not been powerful enough to reach very far back in time, but he had been able to change things so that they had never reac
hed the Crystal room. Enough so that some of them had survived.

  But the Crystal could not alter what had happened to itself. Kevran had kept the corner he had chipped from it, without realizing any longer what it was. All of the survivors of the expedition had kept two sets of memories, though one was buried deep in their minds. And Glyndon… Glyndon had remained unknowingly joined to the Crystal, unable either to use its power consciously or to sever the link. Kayl felt a pang of pity for him as she wondered why the Crystal had shown her all this. She was no wizard; she could take visions from the Crystal, and knowledge, but she could never use it as Glyndon had.

  A mental nudge brought Kayl back to the present. Corrana was beside her, wordlessly demanding to know whether Kayl had found a solution to their problem. With a sense of surprise, Kayl realized that Corrana had seen and felt nothing of the vision Kayl had just had. She explained what she had learned, and its futility, and felt Corrana’s denial.

  “Alone, you could not use the power of the Crystal,” Corrana said. “But with your daughter beside you, you can save us all. Hurry, before it is too late!”

  Kayl started to protest, but the knowledge of the Crystal confirmed Corrana’s words. Dara was close beside her, and she could feel the power surging around them. All she had to do was reach out. Still, Kayl hesitated. If she repeated Glyndon’s spell with the Crystal, was she not repeating his mistakes as well? And she could not help feeling that trying to change the past, to go back to what should be memory, was a mistake. If she had learned anything in the last year, it was that. There must be some other way to get out of the Tower, some other way to destroy the black thing.…

  Knowledge poured into her mind. With a violent pull, Kayl wrenched herself and the others free of the Crystal. She stood panting for a moment, watching the confusion on their faces give way to surprise. “What are you doing?” Corrana cried.

  “Getting rid of that thing for good,” Kayl said, nodding at the wall of blackness. It had moved closer while they were entranced by the Crystal; on one side it was little more than two paces from the base of the pedestal that supported Gadeiron’s Crystal. Kayl set her shoulder to the cube and pushed.

  The Crystal did not move; it was heavier than she had thought. “Don’t stand there; push!” Kayl panted, shoving at the cube again.

  The children shook themselves out of their immobility and joined her. The Magicseeker hesitated, glanced at the blackness, and added his efforts to theirs. Corrana stared at them. “Stop! You’ll destroy the Crystal!”

  “Would you rather that creature destroyed us?” Kayl said. “Together now; heave!”

  The Crystal slid a finger’s width, and the pedestal rocked. “Again!” Kayl said. Together, they shoved at the Crystal. The pedestal teetered. Then, with a kind of majestic slowness, it toppled over. An instant later the crystal cube disappeared into the curtain of blackness.

  The surface of the blackness twitched, then froze. Kayl held her breath, expecting something dramatic to follow. Nothing happened. Cautiously, she stepped forward. The black creature did not move; no tentacles lashed out to drag her into it. Kayl took another step and peered at the black wall. It looked as if it were made of smooth black stone.

  Kayl heaved a sigh of relief and turned to her companions. “I think it’s—”

  The rest of her sentence was lost in a noise like thunder. The floor swayed beneath Kayl’s feet. As she struggled to keep her balance, she saw the blackness crack. Shards began falling from the walls; great sheets split away from the windows that the blackness had covered. Kayl heard Corrana shouting, but the noise from the crumbling creature was too great for her to make out the words.

  The floor itself began to break apart. Kayl jumped frantically back toward the children, but the stones beneath her feet fell even as she leaped. Then something caught her and lowered her slowly, knocking aside the wickedly pointed shards of blackness that filled the air, while the Twisted Tower came apart around her. When the air cleared, Kayl found herself standing atop a pile of rubble, blinking in the sunlight. Mark and Dara were a little way away with the Magicseeker and Corrana; Glyndon lay sprawled at their feet, still unconscious.

  Corrana’s face was split by the first broad smile Kayl had ever seen her wear. “I am a sorceress again!” she cried triumphantly.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  KAYL BLINKED AT CORRANA for a moment, unable to absorb the meaning of her words. “Oh,” she said at last. “Then it was your spell that let us down, there at the end.”

  “Of course.” Corrana was the cool sorceress of the Sisterhood once more, but beneath the calm façade Kayl sensed an undercurrent of disappointment at her reaction.

  “I am glad for you,” Kayl said quickly, “but I just can’t…” Her voice trailed off as her eyes were drawn irresistably to Glyndon’s recumbent form.

  “You are right,” Corrana said. “We must find the others. Risper will be able to help him.”

  If he is still alive, Kayl thought, but she did not voice her doubts. She started across the shifting rubble, toward Glyndon and the children. As she reached them, Mark, who was facing away from her, shouted and began waving his arms. “Hey! We’re up here!”

  Kayl put her hand on his shoulder in time to keep him from trying to jump up and down on such unsteady footing. She looked past him and saw a small group of figures near the foot of the pile of rubble.

  “Barthelmy’s down there,” Dara said positively. Kayl nodded, surprised to find that she felt none of the relief she would have expected even a few days before. That reaction, more than anything else, told Kayl that she was finished with the Sisterhood at last. The final tie had been broken when the crystal cube disappeared into the black thing; now she was free of her past. It didn’t seem to matter as much as she had thought it would. She shrugged mentally and started carefully down the hill of rubble, hoping that one of the healers was among the survivors. Mark and Dara came sliding after her.

  The first face Kayl made out as she neared the foot of the hill was Risper’s, and a wave of relief swept her. “Risper! We need you. Glyndon’s badly hurt.”

  Risper started up the treacherous heap of stones. She looked tired and drawn, and there were shadows in her eyes that made Kayl wonder whether she had lost one of the Sisters of her Star Cluster. “If it was another one of his visions, I can’t do much,” Risper said as she reached Kayl.

  “It’s a sword wound in his left arm, just below the shoulder,” Kayl replied. “I’m not certain, but I think it hit the bone. He’s unconscious.”

  Risper began climbing more rapidly. “Blood loss or shock. Was anyone able to do anything for him?”

  Kayl turned and joined Risper’s climb. “Dara tried.”

  “Did she stop the bleeding?”

  “I think so,” Dara volunteered. She looked worriedly at Risper. “He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?”

  “I won’t know that until I look at him.” Risper caught at the hand Corrana was reaching down to her, and scrambled the last few feet to the top of the pile of rubble. She hesitated briefly when she saw the Magicseeker, then glanced at Corrana. Corrana made an ambiguous gesture. Risper shrugged and squatted beside her patient.

  “He’ll live,” she said after a quick examination. “But we have to get him down from here. If you two,” she waved at Corrana and Kayl, “will help me lift him—”

  Kayl and Corrana bent to assist Risper. To Kayl’s surprise, the Magicseeker joined them. Risper gave him one penetrating look, then went on with her instructions.

  “Shouldn’t you be off to join your friends?” Kayl whispered to the Magicseeker.

  “When we’re finished here,” the man said. “I believe in paying my debts whenever possible.”

  They carried Glyndon carefully down the heap of shards and tumbled stone that was all that remained of the Twisted Tower. Elder Mother Miracote and three of the Sisters met them at the bottom. Miracote waited until Risper had established Glyndon in a shelte
red spot, then drew Kayl and her companions a little way away. “What happened?” the Elder Mother demanded unceremoniously.

  “We found the Crystal room, and Utrilo found us. He wounded Glyndon; the black creature killed Javieri, Utrilo, and one of Utrilo’s men. The Crystal and the creature… destroyed each other.” Kayl paused. “The details and the guesswork can wait until later. What’s happened here?”

  Miracote frowned, but answered. “I assume Corrana told you of Ferianek’s attempt to lift the spell that bound us? It failed quickly, and the Magicseekers overwhelmed us. Their leader took three of his followers and Javieri into the Tower; shortly after, a… a blackness swept out of it. The Magicseekers tried to fight it, but…” Miracote shrugged.

  “What about Bryn? And Ferianek?”

  “They are both alive, but we lost two Sisters and Mother Siran in the fighting with the Magicseekers, and four others to that creature. Fortunately, the black thing seemed to find Magicseekers more to its taste.”

  The man beside Kayl made a choking noise, and Miracote looked at him closely for the first time. “And what are we to do with him?” she asked Kayl disapprovingly.

  “Need we do anything?” Corrana said. “There is nothing left here for us to fight over.”

  “True.” Miracote turned and addressed the Magicseeker directly. “And what is your opinion?”

  “Of you, or of your plans, star-witch?” the Magicseeker said with evident dislike.

  Kayl broke in quickly, before Miracote could answer. “If we let you leave, will you give us your word not to attack us?”