The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) (30 page)

The ensuing explosion spat sparks of energy out the gap as a sound like a maddened chorus shivered up to her, all keening voices and fractured harmonies.  Wild light played within the chamber, and she shoved her legs into the gap and slid through before sanity could take over.  One hand caught the lip of the hole and for a moment she hung there, overseeing the brilliant chaos as she redrew Serindas.

Then she dropped into it.

The floor was not solid; she hit it and it gave like a thick gel, its substance roiling with auroral radiance.  It kept her from splintering anything in the long drop, but she struggled to rise, to find steady footing in the flux.  All around her, the walls quivered, their crystal protrusions morphing, and the two wraiths were rising from where they had been flattened by the blast, their bodies starting to separate like unfolding origami.  On the south wall, a portal sputtered out of existence as the crystals of its frame warped convulsively; in the chamber’s center, only blackened shards remained of the Weave-knot, slowly sinking into the spire.

On the west wall, the raywings shivered, their fearful hisses adding to the lingering choral wail.  Cob was nearly invisible within his crystalline cocoon, but the chains—and the area around him—seemed stable.

That meant he was alive, and the Guardian was active.

Dasira’s relief nearly killed her; with her gaze on Cob, she did not see the first wraith approach until it was almost too late.  Partially unfolded, it was like looking at a figure through a kaleidoscope—a bizarre mirrored disjunction of limbs all reaching for her bodily, as if it dared not use magic in this chaos.

She scrambled back, barely evading its grasp, the surging floor of the chamber staying just solid enough to support her.  Though she had killed haelhene before, she had only fought an unfurled one once, and that win had not been worth it.  Now, against two wraiths in their own spire, with the blast she had hoped would harm them only seeming to have shaken them up, she felt a spike of concern.

But if this was it, then she would perish proud, having done all she could.

The hands reached for her again and she lurched sideways, cutting one in half as she went.  Instead of bleeding, the limb split to the shoulder and all the others followed suit.  A forest of half-hands converged upon her as something else bent within the wraith’s torso—an extra joint forming in the center of its mass, slicing its chest into thick bands, the gaps in between gleaming like oily glass.  It no longer had a head, only a bright orb glowing behind the blur of limbs, but its legs still looked vaguely humanoid.

She dodged again, and her heel hit a crystal outcropping which responded to her touch like a lamprey, jabbing needles through her boots and into her flesh.  With a muffled shriek, she tore forward, feeling tiny needles etch her shoulders and back even as others snapped off in her ankle.  The wraith converged its arms on her and she dropped low, feeling a hundred fingers brush down her spine like electric rods before Serindas sliced through its leg at the shin.

Pearly blood flew, and she flung herself after it, rolling away as the wraith sang a piercing note of pain.  More crystal outgrowths clutched at her, taking cloth and skin as she tore free.  Across the room, the second wraith was blessedly occupied with repairing the portal, its unfolded self like a burning, fractal chandelier on attenuated but still humanoid legs.

Sparing a glance at Cob, certain somehow that the leg-thing had to do with the Guardian, she saw him open jet-black eyes beneath the mesh of chains.  Her heart clenched.

On sheer instinct, she lurched up and leapt at the wraith that pursued her.

Blackness caught her in midair: the crushing pressure of the Guardian's aura.  Without her feet on the floor, it made her threads scream but not convulse, made darkness fringe her vision but not consume it—and the floor flattened into a pristine pane, the wraith snapping from a dozen-armed monstrosity to a stricken, reeling humanoid.

Serindas took it in the shoulder, cutting through spell-woven robe and flesh with equal ease.  Her knees hit its chest and it crumpled backward, reaching for her even as she rolled off to skid on the near-frictionless floor.  The blackness shoved her down, but she had taken some distance from Cob with that roll, and though it felt like a half-ton of bricks on her back, she could still move.  Slowly.

But so could the wraith.  As she struggled to put her feet beneath her, it rose with much less effort.  A huge gouge marred its shoulder from where Serindas had cut, with pale light and fluid leaking out, but by the gleam in the eye-slits of its mask, it had no intention of calling this a day.  Stretching one hand toward her, it made a beckoning motion, and motes of radiance flitted to it from every nearby surface to form a blinding bolt.

Squinting desperately to gauge the moment it would strike, Dasira saw a blurry shape fall through the air behind it.  Then came a crunch like a bag of gravel hitting the ground, and the tip of a sword pierced out through the gap between robe-collar and mask.

The light in the haelhene’s hand scattered, and it grabbed at the blade that protruded from its throat.  Dasira took the opportunity to rush in and bury Serindas just above it, driving up under the mask and into its skull.

Through the mask slits, the wraith’s brilliant eyes flared madly, pale then pinkish-red as the akarriden blade began to drink.  Dasira had to let go of it as the wraith grappled with her, its touch sending fire through her threads.  For a moment she feared it would somehow claim Serindas—that as the spire had changed the akarriden blade’s color, so a wraith could control it—but when it locked its fingers around the bloated leech of a hilt, Serindas refused to budge.  The wraith trembled violently and finally wrenched the blade from its throat only to have a trail of shimmering motes pour from the wound after it, extinguishing the light in its eyes.

The wraith collapsed like a broken doll.  Panting, Dasira looked around but the blur was gone, as was the sword that had saved her.

As was the chandelier-looking wraith, its portal work abandoned.

She pulled Serindas from the dead wraith’s grip, feeling it thrum with unusually sated pleasure.  Pale color still spooled through its runes, but the red had begun to reassert dominance.

Eyeing the translucent walls warily for sign of the last wraith, she moved toward Cob.  The Guardian’s aura faded as she did.

“Shit,” she said as she took in his appearance.  His face was dead-grey under its tan, mouth and chin and nostrils painted with blood.  Though his eyelids were slightly parted, the eyes beneath were blank as glass marbles, and under the layers of crystalline chain she could tell he was not breathing.

Her consciousness constricted to a black chamber, everything grey outside her, the humming spire muted to a low buzz.  It felt like her head was packed with wool, her only vision that of the froth on his lips.  Something in her was thrashing, screaming, an insect locked alive in amber, but the rest of her had gone thick.  Nerveless.

No
, she told herself.  “No,” she said aloud.  “White Herald, acknowledge.”

No answer.  Her world shrank further, a pinspot, a cell, claustrophobic and bleak.

“Lerien, answer me,” she hissed.

A tic of his cheek, a crack in the crust of blood.  Her head filled with the static of relief, so loud that she almost did not hear him say, “
Acknowledged.
”  His voice tiny, ragged.  His eyes still blank.

“
He’s in there.  Tell me he’s in there.”  She moved to cut the chains only to realize that Serindas was not in her hand.  It had slid from her lax grip, embedded now in the floor an inch from her foot, but she dared not take her eyes off Cob to reclaim it.

“
He is in the water
. 
With them.
”

“
But he can come back,” she said, hating her voice for shaking.  She touched his face, the skin cool and dry, chapped by the wind.  Abruptly remembering, she looked to his neck for the arrowhead on its cord, but it was gone, a clean shape in the blood from where it had been removed.

“
He is in the water,
” Lerien repeated quietly.

Nodding, she forced herself to stoop and reclaim Serindas, to start cutting the chains.  She did not know how she would get him out of here except to slice through the wall, and then it was a long drop to the sand and sea.  Above them, the raywings watched with their multitudes of beadlike eyes, animal-indifferent, and a thought nagged at her about them but she was too afraid to focus on it, too afraid to take her attention from Cob.

Only when the ceiling dissolved and the last wraith flowed through to land atop one raywing did she realize it.  Cob was still chained to them.

“
No!” she shouted, but the raywings were already floating backward through their perches, through the wall, taking Cob with them as that whole part of the spire vanished.

Beyond good sense, Dasira clambered up the nearest spray of crystals, feet scraping for purchase, then leapt onto one of the half-dissolved raywing platforms.  The riderless raywing trailed the other, Cob strung haphazardly between them, and as the wall began to reform below, she flung herself through the opening.

She hit the raywing’s broad tail, the breath gusting from her lungs, and clawed forward as the beast wobbled under her.  Across the way, she saw the wraith leveling a spell with its free hand, so she slid Serindas under the nexus of the raywing’s chains and sliced through.  The crystalline mass fell away, chiming delicately, to add to the weight hanging from the wraith’s mount.

It teetered in the sky, forcing the wraith to haul on the reins and abandon its spell.  As Dasira’s raywing started to drift from the other, she scrambled to her feet, gained traction on its rubbery ridged back, and charged across its broad wing to leap again into thin air.

The wraith tried to steer its raywing away, but burdened with the full mass of chains, it turned awkwardly, and Serindas bit like a hook into the tip of its wing.  Dasira swung wildly underneath it, then managed to plant a foot in one of its straining vents and haul herself upward.  For a moment she had a vision of victory: getting topside, slaying the wraith and taking the reins to bring the beast gently down to shore.

But when she clamped her hand on the thick muscle of the wing and tried to sling herself up, she found the wraith awaiting her, hand outstretched to aim a coil of power that ran the full length of its arm.  Still holding onto Serindas, she could only raise her bracered arm in defense.

The bolt blasted her away, tearing Serindas from its mooring.

Trailing smoke, Dasira fell into the sea.

*****

At the moment Ilshenrir took to the sky, Lark had risen, thinking she could somehow assist in the aerial fight.  But in their eye-straining native forms, the two wraiths moved with the deftness of minnows, and though she took aim many times with her bow, she never found a clear shot.  Sometimes the wraiths even seemed tangled, their materials interlocked as if they were fighting over some invisible object.

Despite what Ilshenrir had said about her arrows, she still wanted to be of use.  When a burst of light illuminated the top of the spire, she cautiously moved closer, Arik pacing her in barely-controlled fury.  Whatever was occurring there was only inside the spire though, and her fingers started to itch on the bowstring.

For what seemed like a long time, nothing happened.

Then a broad swath of the spire’s top disappeared like it had when the flyers docked, and she glimpsed figures up there and the flyers flexing their wings again.  As they took flight through the clear space, she saw the cocoon that held Cob.  Her heart sank.

A last figure leapt through the air and hit the back of a raywing.  A chain snapped.  The cocoon swung wildly as it came half-free.

That was all the sign Lark needed.  The raywings hovered close to shore and the tiny figure up there was still moving, so she grabbed a handful of arrows from the quiver and planted them by her feet, then drew back on the one she had kept nocked.  Taking aim at the flat underside of the flyer, where the red vents made clear targets, she set it loose.

She did not look to see if it hit, but pulled the next arrow from the sand and did the same.  The figure hung on the wing of the creature, scrabbling up, and she aimed for the beast’s other side lest she hit her comrade.  The arrow flew and she pulled the next.

A flash from the sky.  The figure fell, twisting in midair.  Lark steeled herself not to watch it and aimed for the flyer again, sensing Arik rush from her side toward the water.

Third arrow in the air.  She thought the flyer flinched.  She pulled the next and drew it back, her arms already aching like fire.

Fourth arrow.  That one she saw clearly as it pierced the flyer's underside.  The beast wobbled in the air, flecks of ichor falling from it, and the white-robed wraith on its back yanked at the reins to drive it further out to sea.  Grabbing another arrow, Lark ran to the edge of the water, sea-foam around her boots, and buried it to the fletchings in the black flyer’s underbelly.

It jolted once in the air, then started to spiral, the cocoon swinging like a pendulum beneath it.  Lark reached back and found another arrow, but as the beast seemed in its death throes, she aimed for the white wraith, which had leapt from its back and now hung in the air, gathering threads of pallid energy from all points of the sky.