“Accursed witch!” someone screamed.
“Down with the sorcerers! Kill them all!”
The dark shadow of a woman bent over the mob, her cloak spread upon the wind to encompass them all.
Even as the crowd roared out their hatred, they hesitated. Glancing to each side, Dyannis saw that the Hali circle had reformed after a manner, this time facing outward. She stretched her hands to each side, creating a protective sphere of energy around herself and her friends. They were still joined in rapport, still partly in the psychic realm. But for the moment, they were safe.
Varzil was down in the lake, cut off from their anchoring support—
She sent out a mental call, though it meant shifting her focus from the angry faces and raised fists before her.
Get out of there!
Must—finish— His answer stumbled, distant, as if the very act of forming mental speech were barely possible.
Varzil had always had a stubborn streak, from her first girlhood memories of him. Once he had decided on a thing, not even their father’s temper could dissuade him. What a fuss there had been about his training at Arilinn! Old Dom Felix had mounted such ferocious opposition that only Varzil’s tenacious will could overcome it.
This time, he must listen! He must not risk himself. There would be another chance, a safer time—
Stones, some of them the size of fists, others handfuls of pebbles and clods of dirt, hailed down upon the circle. One hit Dyannis on the side of her forehead. She felt the impact as an instant of numbness, then the rush of heat as if she’d been struck by a flaming coal. Reaching up, her fingertips brushed a smear of wetness. An instant later, a second volley landed.
She felt the arrow pierce through the air even before the thwap! of its release from the bowstring. Pain exploded behind her eyes. She reeled, gasping. The mob rushed forward, all caution fled, even as a second flight of arrows fell upon the circle.
Instinct kept Dyannis on her feet, as the first crush of agony faded and she realized that she herself was not the one struck by the arrow.
Rorie!
Inner and outer vision leaped into a single focus. Rorie clutched the shaft still quivering from his upper chest. As if moving through honey, his legs bent, folding at hip and knee. Dyannis rushed to his side, faster than she had ever moved in her life, and caught him just as he hit the ground.
No, not Rorie!
His weight bore her down, but she managed to keep hold of him and land in a sitting position. In her arms, Rorie struggled for breath. With one hand, she brushed the bare skin of his throat. She felt the wound as if it were her own, the path of the arrowhead between the ribs, the punctured lung collapsing, the seepage of blood from severed vessels. There was no major artery cut, bless Cassilda—
Someone behind her cried out, so distorted that Dyannis could not tell which of her friends it was.
The mob surged forward. They scented victory. A miasma rose from them, reeking of blood lust and madness. Metal gleamed, the thin deadly crescent of a knife.
Another arrow ponged into the earth beside Dyannis. Crimson flooded her sight, leaving an emptiness—Raimon! Without its Keeper, the circle fractured. Cold swept through her, as if the phantasmic figure generated by the crowd had touched them with Zandru’s frozen breath.
Adrenaline sizzled through Dyannis. Outrage sharpened her vision. How dare they raise a hand against a circle battling to save their world? How dare they harm her friend, a laranzu whom they ought to revere? How dare they?
Zandru curse them all!
The sky loomed over her, the planet below her, and caught between them lay the residue of immense psychic power. Varzil might have cut off its source at the bottom of the lake, but enough of it remained for her purposes.
With a roar like a Hellers avalanche, the mob rushed forward. Dyannis threw her body across Rorie’s to shield him. From the edge of her vision, she glimpsed Lewis-Mikhail grapple with a man wielding a wooden mallet. The others were down, or would be shortly. She could not feel Raimon’s mind.
How dare they?
Dyannis curled her fingers around her starstone and reached out to the energy above her. In a spasm of fury, she drew upon images deep within her mind, the worst childhood nightmares she could remember. When she was four, her brother Harald had kept them all up with stories of hideous beasts, and she had awakened screaming each night for a month afterward.
Against the dark shadowy figure of the woman muffled in cloak and veil, she summoned a dragon out of legend—hugely reptilian, sinuous, and winged—and projected it into the minds of the mob. Her trained laran met with no resistance as she thrust aside their pitifully weak shields.
She added more details, each more vivid and horrific. From the dragon’s tapered head, slit-pupiled eyes gleamed. Wings churned air into dust and a tail lashed the air with its barbed spines. From its fangs dripped beads of glowing poison.
As one, the mob halted their attack, drew back, eyes lifted, arms upraised. Their howls of anger turned to terror. From a single forward motion, some turned to bolt, others darted aimlessly, and still more fell to their knees or crouched with hands covering heads. Only a scattered few held their ground, but these men bore weapons. One or two notched their bows, aiming again at the circle.
Dyannis grasped the raw energy of their emotions—confusion and fear—and fed it into the nightmare image. The edges of the dragon sharpened. Its sinuous shape curved downward. She added sounds—the hiss of wing and talon through the air, the rattle of scales, rumbling thunder edged with brass.
Yammering in mindless panic, the mob broke. Pitchforks and bows clattered to the ground. Men shoved each other, scrambling over the fallen bodies of their comrades in their haste.
Dyannis sent the dragon harrying after them, spewing frozen sparks. She soared aloft with this monster of her own creation, looking down at the witless men. Vengeance, like Zandru’s frozen whips, scored her heart.
Let them flee, the pathetic fools who thought to raise their hands against the leronyn of the Towers! See them grovel in the dust, scrabbling, stumbling, gibbering in fright. It was no more than they deserved!
She opened her dragon’s mouth and breathed forth a stream of brightness, glowing white as if incandescent, but cold, cold as the breath of hell itself.
Those men who remained on their feet scattered, gibbering. Not a shred of the ghostly cloaked figure remained. Their thoughts, those who retained any vestige of rationality, were bent only upon escape. With another blast of malevolence, she let them go and turned her attention to those still on the ground. Some lay sprawled or tightly curled, knees drawn up and arms covering their faces. Other bodies jerked spasmodically.
Helpless prey, ripe for the taking.
Grim and exultant, she swooped toward them.
Dyannis! The name burst upon her mind, a sound so foreign she could not for a moment tell its meaning. A name—hers? And a voice she should know—
Dyannis, break it off! Now!
The words tore through her, as if she were suddenly thrust inside an enormous resonating bell. She paused in flight. A cacophony of horror and rage from the field below shocked through her. Through them she felt a silvery arrow of pain, metallic claws lancing deep into flesh—
—heart convulsing, chest gripped by an invisible vise, skin clammy with grave sweat—
Dark Lady, what have I done?
The dragon shape disintegrated as if it had never existed, leaving only a swath of unbroken sky.
Dyannis blinked, looking around her. Rorie sprawled unconscious across her lap. His breathing was slow, his skin cool, but not with deadly shock. She touched his mind, felt the stillness of healing trance. The bleeding had almost stopped. Lewis-Mikhail, untouched, was helping Raimon to rise. Blood matted the hair over the Keeper’s temple, trickling down the side of his face, but his eyes were clear and focused. He’d been stunned, nothing worse, and she knew from her training as a monitor that scalp wounds bled freely. The other memb
ers of the circle looked unharmed.
All around, men, some in farmers’ homespun, others in layers of stained, tattered rags, lay as if felled by a giant hand. She saw now that there were women among them, in garments as drab and ragged as the men’s. One woman crouched beside a fallen white-haired figure, wailing.
Was this what war was like? Dyannis had never ridden to battle along with Carolin’s armies. Her hands flew to her face and yet she could not cover her eyes or look away.
Everywhere, she saw bodies curled in agony or crumpled disjointedly like discarded toys. There was little blood, and only the occasional reek where some man had soiled himself. And yet a miasma, a mind stench, hung like an ashen veil over the lake shore. Underneath lay a terrible stillness, the silence after the final beating of the heart, the last shuddering breath.
I—I have done this thing.
10
Chill clawed at Dyannis, nausea shivering through her bones and numbing the skin around her mouth. If she did not act quickly, she would faint. She did not deserve that luxury, she whose anger had caused the devastation before her. Drawing upon her Tower training, she steadied her nerves. She sucked air deep into her lungs. Her pulse hammered in her skull, but her vision cleared.
Quickly she assessed the situation. There was nothing she needed to do for Rorie. He had already entered a state of lowered bodily function that would sustain him until proper care arrived. Raimon, his scalp wound still oozing, cupped his starstone between both hands, gazing into its depths, using his laran to contact Hali Tower for help.
And Varzil, beneath the turbulent cloud-water, cut off from them all—
I am well, little sister, came his mental voice, clear and strong. She realized it had been he who had called her back and broken her killing rage. There is no time to waste. You must see to those who are hurt.
Yes, there must be something she could do for these poor wretches. Their plight was all her doing. She rushed to the nearest and knelt down. From the twitching of his limbs, he was still alive. White ringed his eyes, but his pupils were equal, dilating as her shadow passed across his face. He was surprisingly young, yet weather-worn, his fingers marked by calluses cracked and gray with soil. She touched one hand, using the physical contact to reach his mind.
It is over, you are safe. Nothing can harm you.
After a long moment, the boy closed his eyes. His shudders eased and his hands relaxed. She thought he might slip into an exhausted sleep, but he braced himself into a sitting position. Shaking himself like a dog, he glanced around.
“Dom’na, I thank ye.” When he spoke, he sounded even younger than before, with his light tenor voice and country accent.
Dyannis found she could not meet his eyes. “Are you well enough to help the others?”
“Sure and I’ve done my share of patchin’ and dosin’ on the farm, every time the King’s men come through. M’brother, he went off for a soldier.” Bitterness ran like a counterpoint through the boy’s words. A soldier, his silence said, in some King’s war, fallen under sword or spell or clingfire, and never come home.
With a clatter and a rush, a group of people from Hali came running, servants and novices and even pale-faced Ellimara. One of the men on the ground regained enough of his wits to snatch up a pitchfork and lunge at Lewis-Mikhail. The laranzu glared at the man, who fell to his knees, whimpering. Dyannis saw no more of the confrontation, for Ellimara darted up to her.
“We must find the dying and give them aid, quickly—the man with the heart seizure!” Steel rang in Ellimara’s light, girlish voice.
Dyannis spotted the old man by his whitened hair. He was the one she’d spotted from aloft, with the woman bent over him already keening her grief. Everything looked so different now, as she wove through the toppled crowd. Voices rose about her, moaning, weeping, crying out names she did not know. Her mind was still open, and the tatters of their fear shivered through her thoughts.
As Dyannis approached, the woman straightened up, her expression unrecognizable, as if the horror of the day had burned away all human feeling. Lips, cracked and pale, moved for a moment before she forced out a sound.
“Demon-spawn—keep away—”
“I’m here to help,” Dyannis said, moving past the woman to kneel beside the man.
“You—your lot have never—”
Beneath the coarse white beard, the old man’s skin was chalky gray. Dyannis laid her fingertips along one wrist and felt the thready leap of a pulse. In that brief moment of contact, however, the flesh became dense and still. She grabbed her starstone with one hand, placed the other flat against the man’s chest and focused her laran senses. Through the layers of coarsely woven cloth, past wasted muscle and arching rib, she dove, a mote of consciousness. There, in the lightless heat of his body, a heart struggled, muscle fibers stretching, tightening, like mice in the shadow of a hawk, each moving in its own disparate rhythm.
She knew enough to recognize what was happening, to know how little time she had to act. Like every other novice at Hali, she had first trained as monitor; over the years, she had served as healer many times, but never in a case so dire and complex as this. She could clear a blocked vessel, could ease the oxygen starvation of the tissues it fed, but it was beyond her power to do that and at the same time, restore the heart’s normal rhythm. Either, untreated, would take his life.
Ellimara! she called out, hoping wildly that the younger woman was able to respond and not already sunk into a healing rapport with another victim. Ellimara, help me!
She cannot leave her patient, came Varzil’s calm mental voice. I will lend you what aid I can.
Dyannis saw without looking up that although Varzil was only now climbing the sandy banks of the lake, in his mind he stood beside her in every way that mattered.
She dropped her barriers, so that he would see and sense everything she did.
We must stop his heart, Varzil said, and start it afresh.
Yes, that made sense. She gathered the psychic power running through her, even as she had gathered up the residue of electrical tension in the air, and sent it coursing through the old man’s heart. The random jerk and twitch of the muscle fibers halted, minutely easing the dark blotch of the dying cells. She waited a moment, until she was sure that all motion had ceased, that the heart was completely at rest.
This way. Varzil’s power lay lightly upon her, as if he gently rested his hands upon hers. She cast a bolt of energy through the old man’s heart, starting at the upper pole, where normally the contraction would begin. Varzil came up and under her, sweeping through her, carrying her like one of the lake waves during a storm.
She waited for a long moment and then another, listening and hoping. Not a twitch, not a hint of motion answered her. She thrust her mind deeper, agonizingly aware that with each passing second, the man’s life forces plummeted. With her inner vision, she saw the heart not as a solid object the size of her fist, muscle-red and tapered, but as a layering of light. Light that even now faded from her sight. Once or twice, she thought she saw the faint glimmer, like the trail of a shooting star, but never more than that.
Again! Varzil cried.
Though part of her wailed that the old man was already gone, that anything more was hopeless, she summoned her strength for another try. She could not have done it without Varzil’s insistence, his surge of mental power. Even as his mind joined with hers, she felt his own desperation. For an instant, she seemed to be standing in the Overworld, watching the figure of a red-haired woman dwindle into the distance, longing to rush after her yet knowing she would never catch her, never reach her, never hold her.
With the second shock, a quiver ran through the aged body. Nerves and muscle fibers lit up in a tracery of fire. Dyannis heard a single beat of a drum, echoing deep and from a great distance, as if some other, hugely massive heart enclosed them all. Whether it was the last stroke of the old man’s heart, she could never tell, but after that came a silence darker and deeper than she ha
d ever imagined. She felt herself falling into it, welcoming it, becoming it . . .
As if a massive hand reached down and snatched her out, she came back to herself with a gasp. Brightness and noise battered her. A woman’s hoarse voice howled, “He’s gone! He’s gone!”
“You did everything you could,” said a familiar voice.
Dyannis squinted up into the face of her brother. He stood just beyond the dead man, his clothing sodden and trailing water-weeds, his face drawn, worn beyond his years. Compassion shone in his eyes.
Something inside her gave way. She collapsed over the old man’s body. Guilt spasmed through her.
Everything I could? I caused this in the first place—death and torment! How can I ever put it right? Can I give this old man’s life back to him or wipe the memories of this day from the minds of these people?
Nor was there any help for it—not in her Tower-trained laran that had caused so much harm to so many—not in empty words of comfort.
It is all my doing, mine! Mine!
“Dyannis Ridenow, one who is leronis and Comynara does not behave with such self-indulgent hysterics!” Her brother’s voice lashed out, salt on her excoriated nerves. “There is work to be done and men who are not yet beyond our help!”
Stung, her cheeks flaming in shame, Dyannis straightened up. There was no need to reply, for anything she said in her defense would only condemn her further. She gathered herself and went to perform what small measure of restitution she could. Judgment would surely come, but for this hour, it would have to wait.
Dyannis lost all track of time, monitoring, assisting the healers, bandaging wounds, and offering what words of comfort she could dredge from her increasingly numb mind. More help arrived after what seemed an eon, men and carts from King Carolin. The King also sent his own household physicians and leronyn.
Varzil took charge of the operation, apportioning resources, conferring with the senior monitors as to which men and women were in direst need and must go to the Tower, which to return to the city, and which were well enough to go about their own business after a night’s rest and a hot meal.