The Fall of Neskaya

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  The lightning now overhead felt focused, aimed like a spear point. With a shiver, Coryn realized that what he saw was no accidental bleed-through, no overflow of energy from the Overworld. It was a deliberate attempt to bring the battle to the physical plane, to use the elastic space of the Overworld to span the miles between the two Towers. It carried a sense of determination bordering on obsession. He wondered what drove Rumail. Did he hate the Tower which had rejected him so very much, that he would now seek its destruction? It was fortunate he’d disarmed the laran shield to protect his friends at Tramontana from the devastating backlash. Neskaya would stand, if a little singed, and Rafael Hastur would triumph on the battlefield.

  As Coryn watched, the diffuse brilliance overhead condensed into a single line, not branched like ordinary lightning, but straight as an arrow. It hung for an awful instant, entire, filling the sky with its whitened glare, spanning from near the horizon to somewhere directly above him.

  A crack! resounded through the Tower. Beneath Coryn’s feet, the building shuddered like a stricken living thing. He fell to his knees. Pain lanced through his temples. He clapped his hands over both ears to ease the pain and drew them away covered with blood. The next sound also came from higher in the Tower, piercing the cloud of deafness, a sound like nothing he had ever heard. Coryn felt it through all his laran senses. It was as if the stones themselves cried out, as if each tiny particle were suddenly wrenched from its place.

  Screams now echoed through the corridors. With his ears still deadened and his head spinning, Coryn could not make out their direction. For a terrifying moment, he feared they came from aloft. He must be sure, he thought as he clambered to his feet.

  He had not climbed more than a step or two when the Tower shuddered again, rocked by an explosion so massive, the air burst from his lungs. Balance lost, he tumbled down to the landing. One elbow smacked hard against a step. Nerve pain and then numbness seized his entire arm. His eyes watered, blurring his sight. Before him, the pale blue stone rippled, as if seen through currents of rising heat. He blinked, struggling to focus. The wavering shapes elongated to take on the form of flame.

  Fire . . . Blue fire . . .

  Coryn’s mind raced ahead, up the stairs.

  Bernardo! Mac! Amalie!

  The circle’s concentration shattered, the interwoven strands of mental energy unraveling like badly ripped silk. The anchor which was Mac’s place was nothing more than a pit of darkness. Demiana’s mind twisted like a fistful of storm-blown streamers, shrieking in agony.

  Coryn touched Bernardo, felt the searing shock, the desperation as the Keeper struggled to gather the circle together again. Like two hands clasping, Coryn linked with the older man. Pain racked Bernardo’s body. Coryn scanned the astral image of Bernardo’s physical form and saw the great laboring wound of his heart.

  Demiana! Coryn called.

  In an instant, the monitor scanned Bernardo’s astral form, analyzing the energy flows and their correlations in his physical body.

  At the same time, Coryn drew together what was left of the circle. There was no sign of Mac except the pit of oozing darkness. Coryn feared he was dead, but there was no time to make sure, or to grieve. That would come later . . . if any of them survived.

  Here, as in the corridor, flames of blue so pale as to be colorless, leaped higher with every passing moment. Eagerly they seized on any fuel—the stones themselves.

  Gerell was the next to recover, to answer Coryn’s call. He dropped into the linkage and his strength flowed out to Demiana and the others.

  Moments later, Demiana’s clear mental voice spoke. Bernardo cannot take more strain. One of the vessels which carries blood to the heart muscle is blocked. I have eased it, but it will take time to repair the damage. If he is to live, he must rest.

  We cannot break the circle! Gerell said. Rumail will not let up the attack just because we have wounded.

  A circle without a Keeper— Coryn began in protest.

  You are our Keeper now, Amalie replied. What have you trained with Bernardo for, if not this?

  Another explosion rocked both realms, physical and psychic. This time it did not come from overhead. All around them, beneath and above them, raged a far greater storm. Blue flames, fiercer than any ordinary fire, raced along the bare walls and flooring. Stone cracked under its unearthly heat and splintered away.

  Even as Coryn tensed, he realized that they were no longer under outside attack. Not from Tramontana. Rumail’s circle had taken no action since the fatal lightning bolt. This assault arose from within Neskaya itself.

  Break the circle! Get everyone out! he roared. NOW!

  Forcibly, he thrust the others out of the Overworld. They glanced with dazed eyes from their own pale faces to the burgeoning flames. Gerell moved to lift Bernardo’s limp body.

  Coryn dropped back into his own body, huddled against the stairwell wall. His ears still rang and his muscles trembled, but he forced himself to stand, to turn back down and across the corridor. He hauled himself up the far steps, shaking now with anger. Rumail’s face shone behind his eyes, Rumail who had done this foul, obscene thing to him.

  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.

  If we go down, Rumail goes down with us.

  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!

  Lord of Light, what have I done?

  “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.

  39

  Coryn 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.

&nbs
p; 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.