The God Eaters

  Give it to me, he thought desperately. Knowing that words wouldn't make it through, not sure whether the sense of his intention would carry. Send it here!

  "Exhausted already?" Thelyan's smug voice was an irritating distraction. "Get up, Ka'an. We've barely started."

  "Shut up," Kieran said through his teeth, not looking up. He couldn't spare the attention for his adversary just now. He needed to reach out, couldn't find a direction in which to reach -- was suddenly sick to death of all this magic, all this vagueness and sideways thinking. Groping with his mind at the leaking energy, he bullied his way into the part of his pattern that was joined to Ash's, wrenched it wide, flung more strands into it. He robbed his shield to do it, and was buffeted by fragments of an attack from Thelyan, but he didn't care. He could sense the pressure on the other side of that divide, the agony and fear, Ash screaming, he couldn't stand it --

  With a soundless sound and a prickling across his scalp, the dam burst. Power shoved into him. It hurt, even more than taking in the Burn had hurt; it was not his own power, not fitted to his pattern. It was something icy and sawtoothed and regular, and he couldn't find a place to put it.

  No wonder it had pained Ash so much. He heard himself panting, blood from his broken nose gurgling in his throat as he gasped for breath. It seemed, for a time, that he might have sacrificed himself.

  That wouldn't be so bad. But it would be better if he lived, better still if he could find a way to keep this power and use it... and with this thought, an instinct rose in him, some vestige of the dead god.

  The process was violent. Stone cracked beneath his knees. Dust blew away from him in a widening circle. Thelyan intensified his attack, but Kieran ignored the cuts and blows. He tore apart the power as it came, smashed it out of alignment, forced it to follow the rules of his own mind. Sweat beaded and ran, stinging broken skin. His eyes were useless, his limbs frozen, his whole attention focused on this one task.

  There was too much -- a river turned to an ocean, a bullet between the eyes, a firehose jammed down his throat -- he couldn't keep up, his brain was going to melt, it was all over --

  And then it stopped. There was no more.

  He opened his eyes, realized he was lying facedown on the ground. Shoving himself up to kneeling, he scraped his hands across his face, examined the mud of sweat and blood that came off. Looked around for his enemy, to see why Thelyan hadn't finished him off.

  The Director was staring at him with an expression of angry awe. "How?" The one syllable was nearly a whine.

  Kieran coughed his throat clear, spit, grinned. "Pure sex appeal."

  Thelan made a jerky gesture dismissing this flippant answer. "It's not possible. It simply can't be done."

  Laughing a bit, Kieran climbed to his feet. His pattern still wove its wall around him, but it was now thick and thorny with the new energy he'd pulled in. He could feel that Ash was alive, and no longer hurting. Weakened, maybe unconscious. But alive.

  "Okay," Kieran said gamely. "It can't be done. So I didn't just do it. Damn you're dim."

  "How?" Thelyan stepped forward with clenched fists, angrier by the moment. "I've studied power for centuries, and you -- but you're a primitive, a savage! Our last battle -- you couldn't adapt, you weren't smart enough, you were nothing like this, nobody should be able to do what you just did!" He pointed at Kieran, and the pointing finger shook. "You are the soul of darkness, Ka'an. You have no place in the light. How... how dare you change!"

  Kieran shook his head. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers, pressing hard, dragged down, felt the broken place snap right with a sharp pain behind his eyes. It was easy to trickle in just enough power to heal it. Now his voice came out right when he answered. "I'm not Ka'an, all right? I swallowed him. We fought and I won. I got some of the story from him, but not the part about you. I don't know what you guys were fighting about -- though I bet it had something to do with the fact that Ka'an was a self-involved jackass who pissed off everyone who had to deal with him. Anyway, he's dead now. Can you get that through your head? Or do we have to go around again? Because I'm game, if you wanna. But it's getting stale."

  For a long moment, Thelyan just stared at him. The Director looked young, just then, with his white skin pink-blotched and his pale hair darkened with sweat and dust, straggling out of its queue and into his face. It occurred to Kieran that the body Thelyan was using couldn't be much older than Kieran was. And Thelyan must have pushed out the soul that was born in it, killed whatever towheaded boy that face would have belonged to. At this point, one more death probably mattered less than pocket change to him.

  He deserved to die. He deserved to be beaten in the most humiliating way and then squashed like a bug. Kieran didn't feel like doing that, though, which didn't make a whole lot of sense.

  Thelyan was apparently having the same thought. With narrowed eyes, he said, "Even if that were true, why would you want peace with me?" After a moment's pause, Thelyan's face relaxed, conflict gone. "If you're Trevarde and not Ka'an, then the beast's power is in the hands of a sexual-deviant multiple-murderer from a race of brawling, squabbling savages."

  "Well." Kieran snorted, wiped clotted blood on his knuckles. His pattern spiked out all over in a forest of thorns. He heard his voice from a distance, slow and drawling. "That was kinda the wrong thing to say."

  The Director moved his hands, had time for the first syllable of an attack, and then Kieran sent spikes of power shooting deep into Thelyan's shield. He aimed not for the forming spell but for the pattern itself, tearing its fabric, grasping and breaking.

  Thelyan cried out and lost his spell. He wrenched at the attacking thorns, formed slicing shapes in reply. Locked together, wrestling power against power, they bent all their attention to destroying each other.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  When Ash screamed and fell, Chaiel's only thought was that he should have expected something like this. Things had been going too well.

  He was able to get his hands under Ash's head before it hit the stone, but snatched them back immediately as a cold burn of power snapped at him. The little girl was whimpering, hiding her eyes. Ash lay slack-mouthed, twitching, while the structure of the ward dissolved and reeled into him in pale, roping strands. This went on for a handful of long seconds, and then the ward was gone and Ash lay quiet. Chaiel made one more attempt to reach out to him, to see if he lived; what he sensed when he came near, though, made it impossible for him to offer any help. All of Ash's natural aura was replaced with a high, tight vibration of foreign energy.

  Chaiel bowed his head. The blue-eyed boy was not yet dead, but it seemed his mind had been burned away. Such a shame. It had been a beautiful mind.

  "There's nothing more we can do for him," he said softly. He reached for the child's hand. "He sacrificed himself so we could escape. Let's not waste it."

  She obediently put her clammy little hand in his and let herself be pulled to her feet. Walking slowly, as much from his own fatigue as from consideration for the child's weakness, Chaiel led her away past the place where the ward had been. His thoughts turned ahead: there was chaos all around, above and outside, and it would be difficult to get through it, unarmed and with a sick child in tow. It would have been better if Ash hadn't let his ambition outrun his abilities. Still...

  I won't forget what you did for me, Chaiel thought reverently. Or what Medur said through you.

  All people are mine; mine to care for, mine to watch and learn from. I'll begin with this child.

  --==*==--

  It began as a headache. Everything was just a little too loud. Moving a little too fast. Duyam Sona thought it might be just the onset of one of his spells of despair, at first. They had been more frequent since he'd been recaptured. He sat listening to the distant sounds of running and barked orders, not really trying to imagine what might be going on out there, ignoring the muttering of his cellmate. Gibner was acting a bit odd. The bald, bearded man who was his only remaining f
riend generally responded to every stimulus with the same surly silence. Muttering wasn't his style. But then, they'd all been a bit more insane than usual since that bastard Trevarde had got some of them out and then left them to their own devices.

  The problem with his head was getting worse. His brain itched. He felt the walls pressing in, felt Gibner in the cell with him, agitated. Like a jittering flame, like the spitting spark on the end of a fuse. Sona could almost smell the smoke.

  "God's balls!" Gibner leapt to his feet, looking more like a monkey than ever. "Motherfucker!

  Fuck!"

  Sona turned, scowling, and then his jaw dropped. Gibner's bed was on fire.

  "Holy shit," Sona breathed, awestruck. His head-problem jumped into focus, and he suddenly understood that it was not a problem at all.

  Gibner raised his head slowly to meet Sona's eyes. The understanding was mutual. "You're a kinetic," the bald man said. "Ain't you."

  As an answer, Sona spread his fingers across the lock plate in the cell door. There was a faint creaking, as of metal under stress, and then a heavy clank. The door swung open.

  The next few minutes were a smear of noise and movement. Others had realized it at about the same time -- the ward was down. Their magic would work again. Kinetics, pyros, breakers, all the destructive Talents came swarming out of the cells, to find only a quartet of fearful guards between themselves and freedom. There were some shots fired, but Sona didn't see who fell; the guards lasted only a breath's time beyond that. Torn apart, burned up, and melted down, all at the same moment.

  Those who had been present for Trevarde's stunt after the storm, which was most of them, would rather have died than be recaptured again. No one said it out loud, but all had the same idea: make certain that this prison could never enclose them again. Deafening noise rose up as debris showered down. Some kinetics, Sona among them, had the presence of mind to steer the falling rubble toward areas where no one was standing, but they couldn't catch every boulder or glass shard. There were screams, and sobbing whimpers afterward.

  Desperate men ignored wounded ones. The roof came down. The walls crumbled. A slope of crushed stone formed at one end, the one with the door that led to the mess hall and exercise yard, the direction most of them associated with 'out.' Men began swarming up it before others were finished making it, and more injuries resulted. Sona was one of these, though he didn't remember deciding to climb up. One moment he was realizing that escape was possible -- then there was a mess, and catching falling things, and then he found himself twisted beneath a slab of stone, and howling.

  He bent everything he had to lifting the stone off him, but it wouldn't budge. It had crushed one of his legs. He could see, in the flickers of lucidity between swarms of pain, that his left leg was utterly gone, not just broken but smashed to paste. He wanted to separate himself from it, certain that the pain would go with it. Tugging at it made him scream, but he couldn't stop doing it.

  Somewhere above, guns were barking. Shouting and flickers of power. He rolled his head, but it was aiming in the wrong direction. Back toward where his cell had been. Please all the gods, don't let that be my last sight. Urotu help me -- haven't I always been true? Haven't I always resisted the Dalanists and their heresy? Is this my reward?

  Something moved, something pale, in a hollow of broken rock. Up above the shells of the cell tiers, up where the gun post had been. A soldier? Watchman? Left alive to shoot me dead? The figure went to the edge where the floor had broken off, stepped out onto thin air, and drifted gently down. I used to be able to do that... Sona wanted to play dead, but couldn't keep his sobs behind his teeth. The pain was unbelievable.

  Bounding lightly over the strewn floor, the figure came nearer, and Sona began to doubt his senses. Not a soldier. The paleness was not a white uniform, but white flesh, crowned with something that in Sona's blurred eyes glowed like a streak of fire. Flickered, as the figure moved through bands of falling sunlight.

  "Can you speak?" The voice was gentle. A young man's voice, and oddly familiar. "Can you hear me? Do you remember me, Sona?"

  Sona clenched his teeth, blinked fast to clear his eyes. The bright figure's face jumped into focus.

  It was Trevarde's redheaded bumboy. It was Ash Trine.

  "I'll have to make a tourniquet, or you'll bleed to death when I take that rock off you. It's going to hurt, but you have to try to hold still. Do you understand?"

  "You came back." Sona's voice came out in a thin whine. "You came back for us. Is he here too?

  Trevarde?"

  "Yes. I'm going to use some of your shirt, I don't have a lot of clothes left." Trine barely touched Sona's arm, but the sleeve of his sweat-soaked prison shirt flew away in neat strips. A brush of power trailed it along his skin, and that tiny touch was enough to clear his mind and ease the pain.

  With full consciousness came a different kind of confusion. Trine's face was unmistakable, nobody else had a beaky freckled mug like that, and for all the dirt in it his hair was still a dead giveaway. But somehow, Sona was certain that if he thought of this as the same person he'd brawled with before, he'd be wrong. Power breathed from Trine like the cool of evening. His pale blue eyes, no longer frightened, held a kind of wry serenity that Sona had seen in the eyes of very old men. The pain in Sona's leg as Trine knotted twisted fabric around it wasn't nearly as bad as it should have been.

  He would have been afraid, remembering how nasty he'd been to the kid, except that he had a feeling that this version of Trine would never harm him. Was too powerful to have to do harm.

  "This is going to hurt a lot," Trine cautioned. "Are you ready?"

  "Thank you," Sona said. Just in case something kept him from saying it later. There was no use in wondering how Trine could be so different, or even whether it was enough to help. "You don't owe me this and I know it. I'm ready."

  With no sign of effort except a slight frown, Trine pressed his palms to the slab of stone that pinned Sona, and it shattered to gravel.

  Pain fizzed up Sona's spine and burst in his head in a galaxy of spinning sparks.

  When he woke, he was alone. He was dizzy, nauseous from loss of blood, but nothing hurt. By inches, he raised himself on his elbows to look at what was left of his leg. Ready for anything, not sure what he expected. Gagged at the sight of the mess of bloody meat and splintered bone that stretched out before him -- but it wasn't attached to him. Beyond where his trouser leg had been neatly sheared, the brown skin of his thigh gave way to pink, shiny scar. The stump looked as if it had been healed for years.

  Beside him, placed neatly to his hand, was a length of steel bar from one of the skylights, one end melted and fused into a shape like the handle of a cane.

  --==*==--

  Colonel Warren had gone past the point of having his hands full about fifteen minutes ago. Five minutes ago, he'd stopped trying to contain the breakout. Now all he could hope to do was save as many of his men as possible.

  Rifles were a little use against the escaping prisoners, but not much. For the most part the weapon of choice in this fighting retreat was magic. Warren had only a handful of men left -he'd counted twenty-one, but a few had gone down since then. They were backing toward the only intact building he could see, firing and casting as they went; he could feel that they were exhausted.

  "That's it, boys," he kept saying. "Just a few more yards." He hoped they couldn't hear his fear in his voice.

  The prisoners flinging themselves against his line were a snarling mass, all filthy skin and stringy hair and blue-gray rags. Rabid. Not like last time, when they'd all bolted as far from the compound as possible. This time they were determined to tear the place apart. Warren didn't have time to wonder how the wards had come down. He didn't have time to wonder what he'd do when the few men he'd managed to chivvy out of the shaking mountain had reached the guardhouse that was their goal. They'd be boxed in, there. But at least they'd have cover... cover which would come down on their heads if they didn't spend
energy keeping it up...

  A breath of wind ran across his sunburned skin, and with it came clarity, and the smell of cold brine. At its passing, a change fell over the sound of the battle; not a hush, not at first, but a faltering of fury. Then, one by one, the prisoners straightened their backs, took deep breaths.

  Their magics went from attack to defense, then ceased completely. His own men began by crouching to reload and check their ammunition, but lost interest in the process partway through, and they too were still.

  Warren felt his own spine straighten, his own lungs and eyes clear. Peace grew through him. It was a spell, of sorts, but not a heavy hand of passivity like the spells he knew. He still had the option of fighting, if he wanted to. It was just obvious to him, suddenly, that fighting was the least logical of his options, provided this cease-fire lasted into the next few seconds.

  Waves of murmuring went through the prisoners. They parted; someone came through. Someone tall, bird-boned, pale as new ivory, with eyes like sea ice.

  "My God," Warren breathed. "How -- of all the -- what --"