The Fall of Neskaya (62 page)

In the next moment, Coryn reached the laboratory which housed the weapon that should have been Neskaya’s defense. The huge screens burned as brightly as the sun, all color washed to incandescence. The glare left him half-blind, but he did not need his fleshly eyes to see what had happened. Powered by its fully-charged
laran
batteries, the matrix spewed forth a barrage of incinerating blasts.

And he, Coryn, had done this thing.

The last assault had penetrated Neskaya’s psychic defense, as it had been intended to do. It had left the Overworld battleground and had struck the physical Tower. Bernardo, fearing such a possibility, had already dispatched Coryn to disarm the trigger, to prevent any counterattack. Instead, Coryn had set the
laran
shield to blast his own Tower.

How could he have made such a mistake? He knew the device thoroughly. It had been designed to prevent such an error.

If not by mistake, then deliberately? How? How?

The voice echoed in his mind,
YOU ARE MINE.

The corridor . . . The shadowy visitor, the knife slashing open his belly . . . the soul-sickness whenever he thought of—
Rumail.

Rumail had implanted some kind of
laran
trap in his mind, that day so many years ago when he had taken a trusting boy into a linen closet under the guise of testing his talent. Coryn saw it all in a flash—his nightmares, his suspicion of the Deslucido
laranzu.
He had sensed the wrongness of what happened, but had no clue as to what it was.

As clearly, Coryn remembered coming to this chamber only a fraction of an hour ago. His hands had picked up a tool, then another, had moved across the huge artificial crystals. But he had not disarmed the trigger, as he had intended. He had not rendered the weapon inert. Instead, he had disarmed the third layer, the one which would have taken the energy of the incoming attack and redirected it, amplified a thousandfold, against the attacker.

Tramontana’s lightning bolt had triggered the device, which had then unleashed its stored power here, at Neskaya. And he, Coryn, had been Rumail’s agent to do this thing.

Coryn stilled the impulse to hurl himself into the flaming screens. There would be an instant of agony as the unearthly fires shunted through his own body before they killed him. But Rumail would go free . . . and for that reason alone, he must live. Live and avenge Neskaya.

Until that moment, he had not known it was possible to hate another man so much.

His face set in an unconscious rictus, Coryn strode to the bank of screens. Blue fire washed his face. He breathed it in, drawing pain to himself as a rudder. The tray of tools lay as he had left it. His fingers curled around metal already heated to the point of pain, but he did not flinch. He plunged his hand into the inferno.

The glare was so intense, Coryn could not make out any shapes or colors. He did not need to. He knew the device, its layers and connections, the flow and check of power, as the movements of his own hand.

The last time he reached into its depths, it had been to separate, to cleave. Another’s will had guided him. Now it was his own bone-deep fury which pulsed through every movement as he rejoined severed connections. He did not need to plan, to consult, to consider. A new pattern emerged from his will as he reshaped the device from reflexive defense to outright retaliation.

To retribution.

As he worked, the stone floor began to burn, lines of pale flames seeping up through the hairline cracks. Smoldering wood, furniture, and carpets gave off acrid smoke. He coughed, his throat scoured raw.

Flames licked his booted feet. Leather sizzled as heat seared through to his skin. A voice cried out, wordless, unrecognizable. Beyond the open door came the thunder of walls crashing. His hands did not waver.

With the final connection, the immense power stored over weeks and months in the
laran
batteries flowed into a new course, following the path left by the incoming energy. To Tramontana . . . and Rumail.

In an instant, the flames diminished but continued to burn. Its brilliance shifted, colors reemerging. Voices called from the corridor outside. More stones shattered.

Gasping, Coryn drew back from the crystalline arrays. Distantly, in far Tramontana, he felt the awful explosions, the leaping flames, the splinter and crash of stone walls, the screams torn from human throats as flesh crisped or ripped under a hail of rocky shards. Images burst upon his mind—

—Rumail shrieking orders as the floor beneath him heaved and collapsed—

—Tomas’ colorless cheeks flecked with blood—

—Aran contorted in wordless agony, his lower body pinned beneath a huge granite slab—

Aran! No!
Coryn’s heart stuttered within his chest. Horror washed over him.
Aran!

“Coryn!” Amalie stood in the doorway, one arm slick with blood. Behind her, dust billowed. “You’ve got to get out!” Her words disappeared as a hail of loose stone cascaded from the roof above. One struck her. She fell like a hamstrung deer.

The doorframe collapsed, falling in on itself. The long flat stone of the lintel crashed sideways to the floor, covering Amalie.

Coryn rushed forward and tried to lift the stone. Its upper end had landed on another, thicker chunk, or he would not have been able to move it at all. With a heave that wrenched his back muscles, he rolled it to one side, enough to make out Amalie’s curled form. One arm was outflung, near enough for him to reach. He grabbed her wrist and pulled. She slid toward him, at first inert, then struggling, drawing herself toward him. Kneeling, he wrapped her in his arms. Half-sobbing, half-coughing, she laid her face against his chest. Her fingers dug into his arms.

All around them, the Tower was burning, falling. And he knew as certainly as he knew the beating of his own heart that the same thing was happening at Tramontana. Both Towers had been caught in the same wave of destruction.

I—I unleashed it.
The thought came with deadly calm to Coryn’s mind.
And I must put an end to it, no matter what the cost.

C
oryn lifted Amalie to her feet. For all her outward appearance of frailty, she wasn’t light, but wiry with muscle. “Get out,” he said, adding the weight of a mental command. “Don’t stop, not for me, not for anyone.”

Amalie opened her mouth to protest, then nodded. She might be strong for her size, but she could not drag an unwilling man to safety, not with the Tower collapsing every moment around them. The best way she could serve Neskaya now was to stay alive and whole, to be ready to help those who escaped. To her credit, she did not linger to ask questions. She raised herself to her tiptoes, kissed him lightly, and left without a word. He watched her crawl over the tilted stone and disappear into smoke and flames.

Back at the borderlands, when Deslucido loosed the horror of bonewater dust, Lady Caitlin and the others had formed a sphere of
laran
energy to protect the retreating Hastur troops. Now he must do the same, only this time he would be keeping the destruction
in
rather than
out
, and he would be acting alone.

Once more, Coryn bent over the immense matrix screens. He clenched the starstone at his throat with one hand and held the other out, skimming the glittering halo. This time, he needed no metal tools as intermediaries. He himself would enter into the heart of the crystalline array. He closed his eyes and dove.

Shock jolted through him, neither searing heat nor paralyzing cold, but the worst of both. Immensely powerful streams of energy flowed from the batteries and outward. A moment’s effort disconnected the source, and yet the energy surged on, no longer growing but with a life of its own.

Instantly, Coryn was caught up, buffeted, the merest bit of flotsam on a torrential flood. The edges of his mental form dissolved. For an awful moment, he lost all sense of himself as a separate entity. Nothing existed but the tempest.

Fool!
a distant voice cried.
Fool and triple fool, to think you can control a matrix of this level!

What hope had he? The onslaught swept away all purpose but its own. Despairing, he gave himself over to it.

Power surged around and through him. He was no more a man, but a river of blue fire, endlessly burning, endlessly hungry. It carried him in widening circles, engulfing the two mirrored towers. His body—his form—his essence, for he no longer had any words for what he was—stretched out upon its vastness like a fisher’s net spread upon the sea.

Here, in this world that was stranger still than the Overworld, distance and size meant nothing. Blue flames burned on the earthly plane in two separated locations, but there was only one firestorm. The only reality was the single maelstrom upon which he rode.

He rode it . . . and by degrees he saw the pattern of its mindless devastation. It existed in both planes, straddling them, just as it burned in both places. In the physical world, he saw the shapes of men and women struggling to escape as the walls about them flared and shattered. He heard their screams, smelled singed flesh and powdered blood and stone. He felt the heat of the pallid blue flames.

In the Overworld, the fires leaped even higher. Whatever had been touched by
laran
—stone or human mind—fed it, fueled it.

His mission was even harder than he’d imagined, for he must battle this monstrous storm on both levels. In human form, even here on the psychic plane, he could never contain it alone. Even a full-strength circle might not be able to. It would have been like trying to scoop up a river in flood with his two arms. By surrendering to it, he had allowed it to carry him, to shape him, and so he had become part of it.

Once he had used a cord of mind-stuff to lead him to Taniquel here in the Overworld. It was an image he trusted. Concentrating now, he envisioned himself as a network of tiny fibers stretched across the outside of the storm. At first no more than a film of gauze, he watched the strands thicken. Webs grew between the fibers. At first they were delicate, pliable. But just as the most slender waterweed stems create eddies in a stream, he sensed the building effect. At a hundred minute points, the energy-flood swirled and slowed.

He tensed, drawing himself smaller. The strands of the net coalesced. Moment by moment, the storm shrank in size, but not ferocity. In its core it still raged, far beyond his strength. This must be what it is like to hold a dragon by the tail, he thought, or to ride a banshee. One false move and it would blast clear through him. Without any hope of directly controlling it, he must guide, direct, channel its force . . .

In the real world, Bronwyn knelt over Aran, screaming orders at two men Coryn could not see. Her hair was singed half away, and blood streaked her arms. Aran’s face, under the dust, was ashen. The massive stone shifted. She hooked her hands under his shoulders and slid him free . . .

. . . Bernardo, leaning heavily on Gerell’s arm, limped down the stairway, pausing at each barrier of fallen stone, breathing hoarsely . . .

I must hold on,
Coryn thought.
I must give them time.

He could not dissipate the storm. Hundreds of hours of
laran
energy, concentrated in the batteries and flowing through the device, was now loosed beyond control. He must move it to where it would do the least harm, where no human mind would ever venture. Already he was growing weary . . .

With a burst of effort, he launched himself back into the Overworld, but not where he had last been, between the manifestations of the two Towers. Once more in human form, he stood on a plain so gray and featureless that he could not distinguish the ground beneath his feet or any roof or sky overhead.

His teachers had told him that often the dead hovered between one world and the next, especially those who had been torn from life without any preparation. One of the dangers of the Overworld was that sometimes their loved ones, gifted with enough
laran
to venture there, would see them at a distance, would call to them, run toward them. But no matter how fast or far the person traveled, the beloved would retreat in an endless and futile chase. On a few sad occasions, the person would himself become lost, his mind wandering forever as his fleshly body withered and died.

Coryn had brought himself, tied to the energy-storm, to the very brink of the land of the dead. It was even more empty than he had envisioned it. Were he not so desperate, he would have wept for its desolation.

His hands grasped a thousand cords, woven into an impenetrable whole and rooted in the deepest core of his being. The strands spread out, spanning time and psychic space. He tugged, and the resulting countershock almost knocked him from his feet.

Coryn tightened his grip and leaned his weight against the net. For a long moment, nothing happened. The ropes might have been attached to a mountain. Then he sensed a slight give. When he tried to take a step backward, the mass rebounded, pulling him forward again.

He could not simply draw the thing into this empty world, like a draft horse dragging a fallen log. Though he shuddered at the notion, he knew what he must do. And quickly, too, for though time did not flow in the Overworld as it did on Darkover, every passing moment narrowed the chances for his friends’ safe escape.

Coryn loosened his fingers, keeping only a guiding touch on the net strands. Bending all his strength, he began to shorten the strands, to draw them into himself. They slid easily, though the effort was enormous. Nothing he had done before in his life, not climbing the tallest peak in the Hellers or battling a forest fire, had been this difficult, this close to impossible. Pain shrieked through his body, along every nerve and muscle, bone and sinew.