"Then maybe we'll be able to catch him completely unawares."
"Maybe," Tik said. "But maybe he can sense us the same way she can sense him." He nodded at Rhiana. "Maybe he knows all about us already. Maybe he's just pretending to rest and it's all a trap."
Kate thought, knowing what she knew about the traitor in their midst, that was at least as likely as the possibility that they were going to successfully sneak up on him. In fact, she found the fact that the lower half of his house was dark both inside and out an ominous sign. What sort of surprise did he have waiting for them.
She said as much.
Val said, "We'll stick to our plan. The four of you in through the front door, me in through the back. You rush the stairs, I'll keep hidden and see if I can find another way to get at him."
"Don't assume he doesn't know we're here," Kate said. "Don't assume that he won't have the Watchers waiting just inside the door to swallow all of us."
"I'll be ready for anything," Errga said.
Val seemed less sure. "I hope I will."
Tik sighed heavily and flipped his braid back from his shoulder. "We aren't going to be any more ready than we are right now, no matter how many times we drive around the block. We need to go in." He looked at Kate. "I never knew any humans before, but if you're an example of a human, I think we're lucky Glenraven has a human Watchmistress. You'll be our luck."
Val touched Rhiana's shoulder and said, "Be careful, please. Don't let anything happen to you."
Errga said, "We can be sentimental here, or we can be sentimental when we get home to our families and friends. I suggest the latter."
Rhiana touched Val's hand. "I'll be careful. You be, too."
The warrag gave a half-disgusted, half-amused snort.
Kate turned the headlights off half a block from the house and before she got there, shifted the van into neutral and turned off the engine. She coasted into the driveway, where everything was quiet except for the pounding of her heart and the raspy, nervous breathing of her colleagues. She turned to look at the shadowy shapes behind her and said, "We can do this. So let's go do it. Don't close the van doors when you get out. Tik, don't shoot unless you don't have any other choice. We're supposed to take Callion back alive." She took the gun from him, jacked a shell into the chamber, and said, "It slides forward and back. You slide the safety back until you see the red dot…you see it?" Tik nodded. "Then you aim and pull the trigger. It's loaded with shot instead of slugs, so it will cover a wide area. Don't shoot if anyone else is close to Callion, and don't carry it with the safety off." She stared into his gentle, oafish face, and said. "Be careful, okay?"
He nodded and tersely repeated her instructions back to her, including demonstrating clearing the chamber of the shell that was in it and jacking another one in. She reloaded the shell he ejected, and said, "You're fine. Put the safety back on and let's go. Everyone else stay behind Tik."
Val dropped out first and ran around to the back of the house.
Tik and Errga, following their agreed-upon plan, crept to the front door.
Kate stayed back with Rhiana, drawing up the magic that they were going to use to contain the Watchers. She kept seeing those bodies on the television, glowing and expanding and then, sucked dry, shriveling into nothing. She rubbed her hands over her forearms and swallowed; it was time to move in and do what she had to do.
Rhiana carried the little cooler. The handgun nestled against the small of Kate's back suddenly felt like ice. The two women walked forward together, behind the dagreth and the warrag, and though Kate tried to hear the normal night noises—the whir and shuss of traffic, the chirps and hums of insects, the breeze clacking and rattling through the palm trees—and though she knew those sounds had to be there, she could hear nothing but the beating of her own heart and the rush of air through her lungs.
Then she heard the warrag whisper, "Try it first."
"My way," Tik growled. The dagreth slammed his shoulder into Callion's front door. It went down with a tremendous crash. Tik charged in, the warrag right behind him.
Kate and Rhiana brought up the rear, Kate holding her magic at ready, Rhiana tensed to catch it and cast the spell that would pin down the Watchers. The downstairs lights came on as she stepped through the battered doorway, and she looked up in time to see a creature that looked like a large, upright badger come to the top of the stairway at the left of the door and stand there, rubbing his eyes with one clawed paw and swearing. In the other hand he clutched a fancy wine decanter. "What kind of morons are you, anyway?" he yelled.
The warrag rushed up the stairs at him, teeth bared and hackles raised. Tik pointed the shotgun and shouted, "Don't move, Callion, or I'll shoot."
Val came into sight along the back wall of the main hallway; he crouched and watched.
Kate had time to think, No sign of the Watchers, and then the shotgun exploded with a roar. Errga howled, Tik screamed, Callion toppled down the stairs clutching his arm, and Rhiana shrieked "Magic!" and scrabbled one of the baby food jars free of its wrapping; she threw it against the floor where it shattered
and all the world went white
searing
eyeball-burning
nuclear-explosion
standing-in-the-center-of-the-sun
white
noise deeper than the ocean
wider than the sky
the wordless scream of the infinite damned consigned to the pits of Hell
and then silence.
Kate's vision came back first, well before her hearing. Rhiana lay sprawled on the entryway tiles, red blood draining from her ears and her eyes onto the white of the tiles. To her left, Tik formed a mountain of unmoving flesh. Callion hung head-down along the last four stairs, an arm flung through the banister rails; Kate could see blood seeping from his eyes and ears, too. She could see the warrag at the top of the stairs, a gaping hole in his side and sticky red-black blood oozing from it across the white of bone.
Val stood against the back wall, looking back at her. His mouth moved, but no sound came out.
"I can't hear you," she said—or tried to say. No sound came from her mouth either.
He began to walk toward her.
She slipped her hand to the small of her back and pulled out the .9mm pistol. She switched the safety off, aimed it at him, and saw the surprise in his face.
Rhiana had thrown her magic bomb in his direction. In spite of how she'd felt about him, when everything went wrong she identified him as the source of the problem. Now he and Kate were alone. Everyone else was dead. She didn't know how she'd survived, but she knew that he'd survived because of his wizardry.
She motioned for him to lie on the floor. Slowly, his mouth moving soundlessly the whole time, he complied.
She wanted to kill him. She had come to like Rhiana a lot, and she'd liked both Errga and Tik better than she'd liked him. Now they were dead. Callion was dead. The Watchers were nowhere to be seen, and she didn't know what she was supposed to do with them anyway, but she did know that she couldn't do anything alone. Val was the wizard. She would make him help her find the Watchers, make him take the two of them into Glenraven, and she would see that the Rift was closed. She hadn't come so far only to lose.
"…not going to hurt you," Val whispered.
Sound. She heard a moan behind her. She risked a look back, and found Rhiana dragging herself upright. Tik stirred slightly—enough that she could see the huge bloody hole in his clothing over his right chest wall, and the way his right arm hung limp, and the seared and torn flesh dangling along the right side of his face.
Neither Errga nor Callion showed any signs of life.
Rhiana moved to Tik's side and began to stroke his hair. Kate could hear the crooning of her voice as if she were in another room of the house, behind a closed door.
"Crawl to her," Kate told Val. After she kicked him once in the side, he did as he was told.
He didn't look sorry. He didn't have the decency to
show any remorse at all for what he'd done. Instead, he affected a look of blank puzzlement that got under Kate's skin and made her want to hurt him a lot. She restrained herself and managed to catch Rhiana's attention.
Rhiana turned and looked down at the prone traitor, and her face contorted into a mask of pure hatred. She spat on him. Then she got the binders out and slipped one over his wrists and one over his ankles.
Kate took the other pair and bound Callion hand and foot. His eyes opened as she bent over him, and he said, "Why aren't you hurt?"
"I don't know."
"I can't move my arms or my legs."
"I know."
"Why can't I?"
Kate left him where he was and headed up the stairs to check on Errga, the only one who hadn't yet moved.
Behind her, Callion shrieked, "Why can't I move my arms and legs?"
Errga wasn't going to move. Not ever. He was dead—killed, as far as Kate was able to determine, by the shell that had fired when the shotgun exploded in Tik's hands. It had been pointless, too. As far as Kate could tell, Callion hadn't made any attempt to fight them. He might have come with them peacefully; perhaps he had wanted nothing more than an opportunity to go home and make amends for what he'd done. Even if that wasn't what he'd hoped for, Kate could see no reason why Errga had to die, or why Tik had to be so grievously wounded.
Val had a lot to answer for.
Rhiana stood at the bottom of the steps. "He's dead, isn't he?"
"Yes."
"I'm telling you, I didn't do anything!" Val lay facedown on the floor, his head twisted to one side so that he could look at Rhiana. "I can't do magic! I have no ability whatsoever to do magic. You should be able to look at me and see that."
"We have Callion and the traitor," Rhiana said. "We need to find the Watchers."
"Can't you close your eyes and feel them, the way you did before?"
Rhiana's mouth twisted into a bitter smile. "Thanks to my spell-jar, I am as blind to magic as you are. I imagine Callion and Val are both suffering from the same problem."
Kate brushed her hand against Errga's head, and told him, "I'll find a way to tell your mate and your cubs that you were brave," she said. "It won't be much comfort. It never is, but it will be better than nothing…and it's the best that I can do." She glanced down at Val and added, "And I'll do everything I can to make sure the wizard who killed you gets what he deserves."
She headed down the steps, crouched by Callion, and said, "My name is Kate. I've come to take you back to Glenraven, and to return the Watchers to the Rift. Where are they?"
"He isn't going to tell you anything," Rhiana said, and in almost the same breath, Callion said, "They're in the decanter I was bringing down the steps. I was holding them when her spell went off and everything exploded. I don't know where they are now—I can't see them or feel them or manage even the smallest spell to find them."
Kate stood. "If they fell down the steps, they can't have gone far."
"You aren't going to believe him, are you?" Rhiana asked.
"Why not? He's helpless right now. If he lies to me, I can hurt him until he tells the truth," Kate said. She wondered briefly at the woman she'd become, the woman who could casually threaten torture. She wondered if she would be capable of carrying it out, should she discover he was lying, decided that she wouldn't, and hoped neither Callion nor anyone else would call her bluff.
She started her search at the foot of the stairs, worked her way along the hall on the right—the same hall Val had come down—and found the decanter lying around the corner beneath a huge Boston fern. Evidently it had rolled there when it fell. She knelt and shoved the fern aside. She didn't intend to pick up the bottle with her bare hands. The images of those bodies in the mall glowing translucent ruby red and swelling until they popped wouldn't leave her. She wasn't going to become one of those bodies if she could do anything to prevent it.
The bottle lay on its side, its cork intact. A few little sparkles of light, like currents of static electricity, coursed over the surface of the bottle. The opaque ceramic surface hid whatever was contained inside. Still, watching those crawling lines of light sliding silently through the decorative grooves and over the false gem-stones, she thought that she had most likely discovered the Watchers.
"As long as the bottle isn't cracked or the stopper loose, you'll be able to pick them up," Callion said.
Kate said, "Yes, I'm sure. But I think I won't."
She walked further back the hall. To the right she found a dark central room empty of all furnishings. Beyond that, she discovered a kitchen. In the pantry, she found forty or fifty jars of peanut butter of all brands and types, pounds of chocolates, an assortment of other high-fat, high-sugar foods, and a broom and dustpan.
She took those, located a brown paper grocery bag—Callion shopped at Publix, too—and went back to the bottle, which she carefully swept onto the dustpan and eased into the paper bag.
She didn't know if that would make carrying the damned thing safer, but it made it seem safer.
She picked up the bag by the top corners and carried it back down the hall to the foyer.
Tik had managed to sit himself up. A large part of the right side of his face, including his right eye, was gone. His right arm was mangled. "The bone is broken, too," Rhiana said. "If I could see the magic, I could heal him."
"You can't do it by memory?" Kate asked.
"I don't think so."
"We could try," Kate said. "At worst, you'll catch more power than you can handle and we'll blow another hole in the house."
Rhiana said, "I don't think magic can be done without sight."
"Maybe not, but I know that people who are blind in other ways manage to do things that would, on the face of it, seem to be impossible. I'm willing to at least try this. If you've done healing before, maybe you'll be able to carry out the steps by memory."
"Maybe." Rhiana said, "Tik, if you want, I'll try to heal you. I can't promise anything, you know, and maybe you'll be worse off when I've finished than you were when I began, but I will do everything in my power to reverse the injuries Val caused you."
Tik nodded. "I trust you, Rhiana. Do what you can."
Rhiana looked up at Kate. "Can you get me the power to do this?"
"Why couldn't I? I could never see it." She closed her eyes and visualized the cold white light flowing to her from all around her, from deep in the earth and high in the sky, from things both living and nonliving, from flesh and stone, from leaf and water. She saw herself as a container, filling and filling until she was full to overflowing, and then she said, "Hold out your hand, Rhiana, and I'll let the power flow into you through your fingertips."
Rhiana held out her left hand and Kate touched the tips of her fingers to the tips of Rhiana's. She imagined the light flowing from her hand to Rhiana's, filling Rhiana, too, while she continued to draw more power in.
"I can't feel anything," Rhiana said. "Nothing."
"It doesn't matter. You are full of magic now. See yourself doing whatever you would have done if you could have felt the magic flowing through you."
Rhiana kept her left hand back, touching Kate's, but raised her right hand to Tik's face. She touched a hanging strip of flesh that lay open to expose teeth and bone beneath it and pressed her finger to the wound. For an instant, nothing happened. Then the skin began to draw together as if an invisible zipper were zipping closed, and angry pink seams of healing flesh replaced the bloody tatters and gaping holes.
Rhiana gasped. "It works."
Kate said nothing. She concentrated, instead, on keeping both of them full of light and magic.
"That feels better," Tik said.
"Don't move. I don't have much control of this," Rhiana told him. "If you move, the seams may not line up correctly, and you'll have scars worse than what you're going to have."
She let her hand move further up his face, across the broad planes of his cheek, back to a rag of skin that became once again
a round, low-set ear, and then forward, to the socket where he had once had an eye. She slowed, closed her eyes in concentration, and rested her fingertip in the socket.
Tik whimpered, a pitiful mewling sound in a creature so large and strong.
"Just a moment longer," Rhiana told him. "Just one more."
She opened her eyes and saw the pink scar tissue filling the socket. No eye, though, blinked out at her. "Oh," she whispered. "No. That isn't right."
"It doesn't matter," Tik said. "I'm alive, and I can see from the other eye. If you could just set the bones in my arm and patch up the skin there…"
Rhiana turned to Kate, tears running down her cheeks. "If I could have seen what I was doing, I could have replaced his eye."
"He's right, Rhiana. You did the best you could do."
"It isn't good enough."
"It's going to have to be."
Rhiana turned back to Tik and rested her forehead against his broad, sloping shoulder for a moment. "I'm so sorry, Tik. I'm so sorry."
The dagreth patted her shoulder with his good arm. "We still have things to do, Lady Smeachwykke. I'll see as well with one eye as I did with two. I'm tough. But my arm truly hurts."
"I know." Rhiana straightened and said, "I'm still ready, aren't I, Kate?"
"You're ready."
Rhiana ran her finger along Tik's arm, and again the skin stitched itself shut. After a moment, Tik sighed. "Ah. That's better. I wish you could have gotten to Errga while there was still time to save him."
Rhiana looked over her shoulder, up the stairs to the place where Errga's dark form sprawled. "We will have payment for Errga's life," she said. "And we will have it in the coin that Errga paid." Kate heard in her voice an iron determination and a tone of command that she thought belonged much more to Lady Smeachwykke than it did to Rhiana. How hellish to discover love, and a day later discover that he whom she loved was a traitor and a murderer. Kate understood how she could slip into the fierce role of Lady Smeachwykke, who knew what she had to do and did it, and to temporarily smother Rhiana, who must want to curl up in a corner and weep for the loss of a love she so desired.
Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 02] Page 23