by Sam Hawke
Hadrea let out her breath in a tumbled rush. “It is not working.”
“Why not?” My hands balled into frustrated fists. “It worked during the siege, why not now?”
She didn’t open her eyes, but the little jerk of her chin in my direction was chastening. “It is not that easy. Speaking is not Summoning, and both rely on the attention of the spirits.” Her voice softened slightly as she explained. “The spirits are old and powerful but they are part of the character of the land. A lake is deep and cool and quiet, difficult to stir. So too is the Os-Woorin. It is not—it is not like calling out and being answered, like a person.”
A section of seating shuddered and tilted farther, bending into the hole with creaks and groans, increasing the angle at which the people scrambled to find purchase. Sweat poured down An-Ostada’s broad back as she chanted. With visible effort, sweat also beading down her face—or perhaps that was just the heat billowing off the flames?—Hadrea made a firm, two-handed gesture, as if pushing something away. She opened her eyes. An-Ostada grunted and shook like we had pulled a foundation brick out of her very structure, but she continued the group’s work.
“I am going to try something else,” Hadrea said. She slipped something out of her sleeve, and if I could have felt worse, I did; it was a small, pale yellow tablet, and I knew what it was.
“What are you doing?”
She ignored me.
“Hadrea,” I began, but a booming voice cut me off.
“Everyone off!” One of the blackstripes had got hold of a speaking trumpet and she and several other blackstripes and Guards were herding people off the tiers. “Quickly! This whole thing might come down and take everyone with it.”
Bitter, I stepped back farther to clear space as many of the remaining rescuers hurried off the at-risk areas. This feeling of utter impotence I’d felt twice before, at the bedside of men I had loved but could not help save. Now I was to stand back and watch any chance of rescue diminish, without contributing in any way?
“Had—”
The sight of Hadrea’s face sent an uneasy jolt through me. Her eyes had gone very black. With a beatific smile, she spun a slow circle, looking out around at the panicking crowd. At intervals, she stopped moving and stared, until the subject of the gaze returned it, almost as if she had summoned their attention from a distance. Several people did this until there were six of them. As if as one, they began to approach the wreck. I didn’t recognize any of them; just ordinary men and women, mostly on the younger side, but they seemed to know Hadrea, and some kind of silent communication passed between them. Like the people surrounding An-Ostada, they formed a group behind Hadrea. They seemed dazed, almost as if they were sleepwalking, but they moved in disquieting, fluid unity.
Then Hadrea froze suddenly, the smile dropping from her face. She opened her eyes and looked directly at me. “Kalina! He is alive! Jovan is alive. I can feel him.”
“What?” But hope flooded me, instant, premature, foolish. She had just said she could feel him, what did that even mean? I didn’t understand, but my singing heart did not care. “Can you—”
She had turned away again, concentration back on her arcane task.
Movement caught my eye behind her: a woman pushing through the crowd toward us. Perhaps in her sixties, she was strong and fat, with a strip of white hair amidst her still-dark curls, and such an aura of self-possession and power I’d have recognized her as another Speaker even without the traditional Darfri garb and neck laden with charms. My spirits rose again. Perhaps, with the power of every Speaker, Hadrea could do this.
The seating dropped another few treads with a sudden, terrifying jolt. This time the screams from within the hole rang clearer. As I watched, my heart pounding, a section on the side closest to us jerked suddenly, and another set of benches buckled and collapsed, swallowing at least one rescuer and the person he’d been reaching for. The entire section shuddered and slipped, and in that moment I knew the entire thing was going to collapse in on itself. Involuntarily I covered my face with my hands. But gasps rose around me like birds taking flight and I dropped them.
The structure had frozen, mid-collapse, wobbling like an artful confection in Etan’s kitchen, and the flames diminished down to nothing as if all the air had been sucked from them. Hadrea had her hands out, as did the group behind her. They were helping her or feeding her power, somehow, I didn’t understand how, but I recognized the kind of raw-power feat Hadrea must have used to save us all two years ago. And where An-Ostada had failed, Hadrea was succeeding. “Get everyone off! They can’t hold it forever!” I yelled, and someone else took up the cry. Armed with the confidence of this sudden temporary stability, Guards and blackstripes and ordinary citizens climbed up the structure, and limbs and heads and finally whole people began to emerge from the edges they’d been clinging to, scrambling up and linking hands with their rescuers. The King of Doran himself emerged with assistance from three Guards hauling the massive man together, then immediately turned around to assist someone else. The broken pieces of the arena shakily, impossibly, rose with a slow scream of metal, tipping up, correcting, until the pieces were almost horizontal.
I glanced at Hadrea, biting my lip. She wore an expression of intense concentration and though her body trembled and sweat beaded over her face and neck, she seemed to be in control. It was only purest luck I was looking exactly in the right direction to catch a movement behind her. The Darfri woman with the white strip in her hair, the one I’d noticed earlier, jerked, a little pulse of energy that would have been lost in a thousand other reactions in the crowd if I hadn’t been looking right at her, and her mouth opened and eyes widened, like she was surprised—shocked, even. She shook her head, shock peeled away into anger, and something about the way her hands moved made me certain she was using fresken, just like Hadrea was, only Hadrea’s apparent success was not what she was working for.
I remembered suddenly how Jov had seen a Darfri Speaker using fresken at the Hands’ party, and Hadrea had not believed him. He had described drums, and a painted urn, and there, from a pouch around the woman’s waist, peeked such an urn. I didn’t know what it meant, but I did not doubt that whoever this woman was, she was not on our side.
I made my way closer to her, my mouth dry. And now I could see the actions corresponding to her movements: there, her arm jerked and one of the giant torches at the edge of the walkway, its base already aflame, creaked and started to fall toward the last of the people trying to help the injured off the wobbling, chaotic seats. Her other hand moved and the flames on the other side rose higher. I heard Hadrea’s grunt in response and saw the pillar steady, the flames recede.
Trying to move as quietly and smoothly as possible, I slipped between the gawking onlookers—no one paid me any heed at all, so focused were they on the strange, supernatural effort holding together the massive broken structure—and drew closer and closer to the Darfri woman. Watching her I could see her hands regularly returned to the urn at her waist, as if it was part of her ritual or assisting in some fashion. I’d heard Hadrea scoffing at the need for items to focus power, but whatever it was, it seemed important to this woman.
My hand stole down and grabbed a piece of random debris, a piece of twisted metal about as long as my forearm. Sweat made it slippery in my palm, and my skin still throbbed from the burn. Closer I drew, and closer again. Three treads away. Two treads. Right behind her. I lined up the trajectory—side of the knee—and drew the makeshift baton back.
She spun in an instant, and my arm swung into nothing then stopped, ringing pain and reverberation up my arm as if I’d struck metal with all my strength. She bared her teeth and I sucked in a breath to scream, to warn Hadrea, but the woman closed one hand in a soft, strange motion, like she was squeezing an invisible piece of fruit. The air simply … vanished. My mouth stayed open, I tried to let the breath and the scream out, but it was as though my mouth and nose had been blocked off somehow. I started to step forward, clawing
with my free hand at my throat and face, trying to understand the source of the suffocating, terrifying force, but to no avail.
The Darfri woman’s grimace twisted into a grin, and with one more hand motion I felt something gripping my foot, as if it were being sucked down into the very earth. Dirt and grit and stone and rubble rose over my sandal, ate my foot with ease, and crept up to my ankle like loose metal filings onto a magnet. No amount of frantic pulling could free it. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move, the edges of my vision were growing dark, and random spots were bursting with sparkling light, like staring at the sun. And no one was looking at me, no one but the woman, who wore the most terrible expression yet, a hungry, ecstatic pleasure as I scraped at my throat, my mouth moving soundlessly, panic infecting every pore of my body.
She turned abruptly, her hands going to the urn at her waist, and her focus visibly shifted to the arena again. I tried to see but the terrible pressure of the solid, unmoving air in my lungs sucked all my attention. I fell awkwardly to my knee on the side that wasn’t trapped, the bright spots and black corners of my vision growing closer together until I could see nothing, feel nothing but the absence of air.
You know what this feels like, a tiny voice told me, dispassionate, without judgment. My weak lungs, seizing, fighting me. Drowning, drowning in the river again, drowning in the air. Aven’s face, smiling, amused, as I tumbled back into the water. Drowning. The water closing over my face, a cold cloth on fevered skin. This is how you die.
But I did not want to die like this. I will not. I knew what it felt like to struggle to release the air from my lungs. I’d lived through it a hundred times. The lack of air would kill me if I let it. Relax. Don’t panic. I let my body go limp, dropped my hand from my chest, released the other’s grip on the metal bar. It dropped from my hand and I could move that arm again, could move everything but the foot captured by the earth. Lightheaded, but the panic receding, I felt a moment of clarity.
I lunged.
My dive stretched the length of my body and it was enough to clumsily catch the woman’s billowing skirt with both hands. She was jerked hard to one side and stumbled toward me, taken by surprise. It was enough. The waist sash opened up and the urn tumbled toward me; with the last of my energy I swatted it with one hand and knocked it to the ground.
The woman hissed, furious and guttural, and I could breathe, honor-down, the air was flooding in and out of me, and my foot was free, and I rolled over, sucking in air in grateful, sweet gasps.
As my vision swam back to normal the Darfri woman’s face wobbled into focus above me, twisted in its rage. There was no energy left for one last effort, one last trick. I couldn’t even move my head. She needed no fresken to defeat me now. She raised a foot to stomp down on my head, but then suddenly it was her who was crumpling, staggering, pushed under the weight of some unseen force. A wind had come from nowhere, a targeted, buffeting, silent wind, like a miniature Maiso directed at her. She was knocked off me, almost falling over onto her back, and I had enough energy to look at the direction it was coming from to see Hadrea, her face calm and her hands outstretched, strolling toward her like some savior hero out of a story. She dropped her hands down abruptly and the wind disappeared into nothing.
“Get away from my friend,” she said into the sudden silence around us.
Still panting grateful breaths, I scrambled out of her way as Hadrea walked toward the Darfri woman. The latter stood warily, her uncertainty obvious. Her gaze darted between Hadrea and the urn beside me, and her tongue darted out to moisten her lips as she backed away slowly. The crowd near us scuttled away in turn, their faces stuck in silent terror. Too many people here had seen the battle of Silasta, and knew what Darfri magic was capable of.
“Keep back and no one else need be hurt,” the Darfri woman said. She had a deep, lustrous voice, and the imperious tone of someone used to being obeyed. She looked directly at Hadrea. “Come with me. I can show you things these fools never could. I can show you real power.”
She was facing the woman who had gone toe-to-toe with the great Os-Woorin but seemed to expect her to be cautious or willing to engage in a discussion before doing any more. Apparently she didn’t know Hadrea.
With an almost casual movement Hadrea brought her hands together, and just as the ground had risen and pinned my foot, so it now rose and grabbed at the Darfri woman, pieces of earth and shrapnel and grass and rock swarming like a thousand small insects up her feet and legs and almost to her waist. The woman snarled, jaw pulsing, sweat pouring off her, and flung out a hand. Hadrea was momentarily buffeted backward by another unseen force. But with an answering movement of her own hand the air before her seemed to shimmer, to thicken into a barrier, a retort. The false wind diverted away from Hadrea and blew into the crowd, knocking the onlookers back farther, and the woman’s rage was now edged with confusion, and perhaps a little fear. This was not like the battle of the Bright Lake, where Os-Woorin and Hadrea had struggled for control over the same source, tied intrinsically to that being. Hadrea was wielding power without obvious source or effort. She flicked her fingers and the air fell away into nothing.
“How are you doing that?” the woman demanded, and with another guttural exclamation and an ungraceful sweep of her arms, the pieces of rock and earth and broken arena holding her in place pulled off her body, quivering and shivering, still swarm-like, then raced toward Hadrea in a clattering maelstrom.
“Watch out!” I yelled, pointlessly, but if Hadrea heard me she didn’t show it. She drew her hands, palm out, in front of her and then slashed them apart, and all of the pieces flying at her dropped harmlessly to the ground in a pattery rain of shards. Her opponent let out an exhausted, frustrated whimper, and Hadrea strolled closer, unfazed as if she were taking a stroll by the lake. Her face looked wrong, not quite like herself; her eyes were too black, the way she held her jaw and shoulders all off. A sudden deep fear stirred inside me, and it wasn’t for myself.
“You’re not involving the spirits at all, are you?” The woman stared at Hadrea and gradually her anger and confusion turned, not with fear or anger now, but with fascination. “What are you doing? How are you doing this? No Darfri elder taught you anything like this, they wouldn’t know how. Only through service to him can you learn such things.”
Hadrea ignored her. “Are you all right?” she asked me, and I could only nod, unsure what to say.
The woman had not given up. In the moment Hadrea took her eyes off the woman to look at me, she dove—not at me, but at the urn I had left on the ground. The instant her arms wrapped around it a burst of light and heat sprang up between her and Hadrea, a giant flaming fireball of angry red and orange, blue at the core. Hadrea braced herself, hands moving in preparation for defense, but the fireball roared into motion not toward her, but straight toward the crowd of terrified citizens who had circled us.
It all seemed to happen very slowly, even though it could not have been more than a few heartbeats. The flame hurtled toward the crowd, but Hadrea brought down her hands with a scream of effort, and just as the heat blasted out in a nightmarish wall and the flames seemed to catch the people who had barely had time to turn, let alone run, an invisible barrier slammed down between them. For a second I could see it, shimmering in the air like a giant bubble centered around the Darfri woman, framed and defined by the shape of the flames. They collided with the barrier like the flames of an oil lantern licking the glass, then in the space of a breath, having nowhere else to go, they bounced back inward.
The Darfri woman erupted in flame like a wick.
“Stop it!” I yelled at Hadrea over the sound of the woman’s agonized screams. “Put it out!”
But Hadrea, showing strain for the first time, turned wildly to me, her whole body shaking. “I cannot! It is her fueling it, not me!” Her eyes were wide and frightened.
Oddly, her fear dissolved mine. I seized my abandoned baton from the ground and, covering my face with my dress with one hand, I r
aced in close to the shrieking, burning pillar of a woman and swung the baton into her middle, where her melting hands still clutched the painted urn. It shattered under the force of my blow and all at once the flames and the heat were gone, extinguished as if they had never been there.
The woman was upright, a half-melted and blackened candle, for a moment, and then she was gone, collapsing into a pile of meat and bones on the ground.
Hadrea took a step toward me, then her legs buckled under her and she fell in a crumpled heap as well.
* * *
It had seemed like a dream, or a nightmare, an otherworldly experience. The whole thing had taken so little time, and most of it without anyone even noticing, and already there were too many other competing catastrophes to dwell on the bizarre and terrifying miniature battle we had just witnessed. In the cold reality of the destruction under the moonlight, it seemed a thing we might have imagined, a horror conjured from too much real trauma.
New patients recovered from the freshly damaged section of the arena were rushed in in varying states of crisis. The physics were sweating, running between patients, calling out instructions to anyone able-bodied enough to assist. I picked my way across the space slowly, the various pains I had been able to ignore for a short time returning like an orchestra building to a crescendo. My hand throbbed and stung, and my whole torso felt like it was barely hanging together, like soggy paper on the brink of collapse. Still, my injuries were nothing in comparative terms.
Hadrea and the Darfri who had assisted her had all collapsed and been carried by well-wishers to the treatment area; though I’d been left behind in the rush, it was easy enough to see where they’d gone, as a reverent crowd of apparently awestruck onlookers gathered around where they now lay on a cleared section of ground. I battled my way slowly through until I could see Hadrea, her head propped up on some balled-up fabric and her eyes closed. She looked uninjured but it was unclear whether she was conscious or not. People nearby were staring and whispering; no one seemed game to approach.