Holder of Lightning

by S L Farrell

  From there, what little vestige of order remained disintegrated into chaos, and Jenna was too busy to see what happened anywhere but in front of her.

  The demon fell upon them, claws and horrible mouth open in fury. Jenna sent a pulse of energy toward it, nearly too late: a taloned hand slashed air so close to her face that she felt the wind of its passage. The creature slammed into the wall of the tavern, timbers cracking and stone walls tumbling in. Splintered wood and sharp fragments of shattered stone splattered over Jenna; she ducked instinctively, raising her left hand to protect her face.

  The mage-creature howled in rage and pain, leather wings lashing as part of the roof collapsed and dust rose in a gray pall. It stalked out of the ruin, thrusting aside shattered roof beams, as Jenna stood again. She sent her mind into the well of the cloch, sending arcing bolts of energy toward the beast. It howled and screamed as they struck and went down to its knees. Jenna prepared a second strike, knowing that alone the creature couldn’t sur vive against Lámh Shábhála. But it was not alone, suddenly.

  Behind you . . . ! She could hear the scream of a chorus of ancient Holders in her head.

  Light flared in her cloch-vision, slashing toward her from two directions within the Inner Harbor: firebolts accompanied by streaks of azure lighting, both of them all too famil iar to Jenna: Mac Ard and Árón Ó Dochartaigh. Cursing, Jenna brought the energy she’d gathered to bear on the new attack: mage-power exploded so near her that she was thrown back, landing on the paving stones with a grunt, her clóca torn and skin scraped away on her left arm and side. Almost, she lost her grip on Lámh Shábhála; the cloch-vision shuddered, blinked, then returned. The demon pulled itself erect again . . .

  . . . but a form of molten rock hurtled past in front of Jenna, colliding with the demon with a screech of rage; MacEagan, somewhere close by, shouted in unison with the creature. A fury surged through her, overlaid with the memory of Árón’s murder of Ennis. She reached out with Lámh Shábhála, rushing back along the lines radiating from Árón’s cloch with the full force of her own cloch. But two additional clochs had joined in the attack; Jenna felt an unseen force drape around her; where it touched, it clung like a stinging spider’s web. The net constricted, pulling tighter, and she had to divert some of the force of Lámh Shábhála to push it back and allow herself to breathe. At the same moment, she felt the touch of a cloch on her mind. There was disconcerting sense of invasion, then it went away . . .

  . . . and Ennis was standing before her, smiling, his hands out. “Ennis . . .” Jenna breathed. Ennis, still smiling, raised a sword that appeared impossibly in his hands and slashed at her. She fell back, raising her left hand, and the blade cut deep in her forearm, opening a long wound through which bone shone white for a moment before blood poured from the gaping cut. The blade finished its diagonal slice at her hip, opening a shallower wound along her right side. The strike intended for Árón Ó Dochartaigh went wild, vanishing as she lost control of the power. Ennis was still smiling as he raised the sword—dripping red along its keen edge—once more.

  “Ennis!” She screamed his name. A line of fire hurtled toward her—Mac Ard—and she barely managed to turn the fireball aside; she could feel its terrible heat as it exploded in one of the buildings behind her. She heard screams from behind but couldn’t turn to look. The net tightened around her; in her cloch-vision, she could feel the snarling power of Ó Dochartaigh’s and Mac Ard’s clochs gathering for another stirke.

  Ennis—smiling fixedly like a mad creature—brought the sword down.

  Jenna brought up a shield of Lámh Shábhála’s energy. Where the power met Ennis’ sword, the blade hissed, smoked, and sheared away. Screaming wordlessly, Jenna sent the red-tinted fury past the useless weapon, hurtling into Ennis’ body, burning and tearing at it as if it were her own hands even as she cried. Ennis screamed in pain, calling her name like a curse, and she wept even as she pulled at the ribbon of energy that linked his image to the cloch that had created it. She could feel the Mage at the other end shrieking with agony as she raked the phantom with Lámh Shábhála’s power, and that fueled the anger even more. She ripped every last erg of energy from the other’s cloch and sent its remnants hurtling toward the netting laced around her. The impact loosed the constriction, and she rolled aside as azure lightning and red-orange fireballs both gouged craters in the earth at the spot where she’d been standing an instant before.

  For a moment, she was free, but the cloch-vision roiled with bright points of power even as she threw shields around Lámh Shábhála to keep it hidden. Some of them were matched with the clochs of the Inishlanders: Máister

  Cléurach, MacEagan, Aithne, Galen . . . Most of the Tuathian clochs were set against the Inish troops, but she could feel several searching for her. She wished she could make sense of the uproar and confusion around her. Men were shouting and yelling and moaning all around her; there was movement and the bright sound of clashing steel; the scent of blood and death, but she was standing alone in a small circle of calm. She spun around, looking for MacEagan, but though she could sense his cloch close by, she couldn’t see him. “MacEagan!” she shouted. “Kyle!” There was no answer.

  She thought for a moment she glimpsed Kianna through a gap in the clouds of smoke, sword lifted and bloody, hacking at two Tuathian solders, then the smoke covered her again. Where Aithne or Máister Cléurach or Rí Mac Brádaigh might be, she had no idea. She tried to walk and nearly went down; pain shot through her right hip, and she looked down to see her clóca ripped and covered with gore, her left arm slathered with blood and the wound gaping and raw. The sight of it made her nauseous and weak and she nearly fell. Her fingers loosened on Lámh Shábhála, and the cloch-vision faded, the world going gray and dim. She forced herself to stand erect, to pull strength from the cloch.

  “This is what war is like . . .” The voices came from within Lámh Shábhála.

  “. . . we warned you . . .”

  “. . . it’s pain and blood and loss and death . . .”

  “. . . it’s only in the songs and myths that war is glorious and brave and only the enemy is hurt . . .”

  Jenna felt despair and hopelessness wash over her. We’re going to lose. We need to call the retreat now, before it’s too late.

  But there were sea-green points of magic-imbued light, moving out in the water. One of them was very familiar. “Thraisha!” The blue seals moved among the ships of the Tuatha. Through the confusion of the battle, Jenna heard the sudden shouts of alarm aboard the boats and the splintering of wood. In the cloch-vision, Thraisha’s brilliance flared, and Jenna saw, out in the Inner Harbor, a ship suddenly heel over as if a giant hand had pushed it; at the same time, one of the cloch-lights winked out, extinguished.

  The Tuathian Mages now seemed to realize that they were being attacked from the sea and Jenna felt many of them turn away to deal with this new threat. Limping and slow, Jenna made her way toward the water. She felt the ground underneath move from stone flags to hard-packed earth to wooden planks as she reached the quays. She passed bodies, both Inishlander and Tuathian; she passed wounded who looked up at her beseechingly, moaning or calling out to her—she ignored them, lost in the cloch-vision.

  Mac Ard was still there, searching for her, and Árón Ó Dochartaigh also. She was near enough now that she could see the ships on which they stood, Mac Ard out near Little Head, and Ó Dochartaigh a few hundred yards out and to the south of her, his ship rowing in. “Strike before they find you ...” She heard the whispered advice, and plunged her being into Lámh Shábhála, gathering up as much of the cloch’s power as she could hold, keeping the shields around her as she prepared, Ó then dropping them as she threw the wild energy toward Ó Dochartaigh. Too late, he saw the attack and sent pulses of blue toward it, but the white-hot force was hardly blunted. Jenna followed the lines back, imagining that she handled lightning with her bare hands and shoved it, pushing it back at Ó Dochartaigh. She saw his face in her cloch-vision, gl
impsed his hatred as he realized that Jenna was there. “This is for Ennis!” she shouted at him, not knowing if he could see or hear her, not sure if it was truly his face or simply a shadow of it glimpsed in the cloch-vision. His lips shaped words, but she held the lightings and thrust them directly into that mouth. Lámh Shábhála tore at him, shredding flesh from bone, his hair aflame, his eyes bulging . . .

  And he was gone. The cloch-light went dark, and she felt him, finally, die.

  She had no time to savor her revenge, no time to feel any emotions at all. Lámh Shábhála was revealed again, and Mac Ard and the other cloch wielders saw her. Red violence streaked toward her; she thrust it aside and the piers to either side of her erupted in splinters and flame, the heat of Mac Ard’s attack rushing over her. The net-thrower was at her again, tossing its webbing about her. She could feel the attention of other clochs turning to her now. A giant wolf howled, leaping from nowhere toward her, mouth open and slavering. She speared it with Lámh Shábhála, tossing it into the water as somewhere a Mage howled in concert. Another wolf followed, and another . . . She dropped the pier from underneath one, then hurled the other into the fire of the docks Mac Ard had destroyed. The netting pulled tight around her as her attention wandered, tendrils closing around her throat, the ends writhing and pushing at her mouth. Her arms were trapped, and she felt herself being pulled toward the water, her feet lifting from the ground.

  Jenna was deep into the reservoirs of Lámh Shábhála now. She forced herself to concentrate, to find the power to pull away the cloch-bonds around her . . .

  . . . she felt them loosen, and at the same time, aqua light blossomed near her. “I’m here, sister-kin, as I promised,” a familiar voice boomed in her head, and she saw Thraisha lash out at the person holding Jenna while—through her eyes—she saw Thraisha clambering out of the water onto the broken pilings of the quay. In the cloch-vision, Thraisha was a darting, sleek blue presence, liquid and graceful, severing the threads surrounding Jenna and sending them recoiling backward. “There . . .”

  Freed, Jenna staggered backward. A sinister, double boom reverberated in her head and red flares came streak ing toward her: Mac Ard. She reached into Lámh Shábhála, imagining a wall, but Thraisha’s presence interposed itself before she could use the energy. Blue inundated red, each pushing against the other. Mental sparks flew, like a grinding wheel sharpening a blade, energy flowing from both of them toward the point of impact. Thraisha moaned, and Jenna heard pain and weariness in the call. The net-weaver had returned, and strands were coiling around Thraisha.

  Jenna sent her mind into Lámh Shábhála, and in her anger, she knew that this was the moment. She would smash Mac Ard now, overwhelm him and end this. End it forever. Thraisha’s vision had been false . . .

  . . . a noise . . . not heard with the senses of Lamh Shábhála, but with her own ears . . .

  . . . a hammer blow between her shoulder blades, sending her crumpling to the pavement . . .

  . . . the shock of the blow loosening her grip on the cloch, so that it rolled free of senseless, stiff fingers . . .

  . . . scuffed boots in front of her face, and laughter. Jenna looked up to see the face of a Tuathian soldier . . . . . . the pain coursing through her as she groped for Lámh Shábhála, a loss as intense as the moment she saw Ennis fall. She cried aloud, moaning and trying to reach the cloch, knowing that Thraisha was now alone against Mac Ard and the others, that Thraisha couldn’t stand against them all . . .

  . . . The soldier’s hand, grimy and broken-nailed, reaching for Lámh Shábhála as well . . .

  ‘. . . When you fell, the clochs turned to me, and I could not swim against that current . . .”

  Jenna saw Thraisha’s glimmering blue-and-black body skewered by scarlet lightning. The bolts ripped through the seal, nearly tearing her body in half. Her dying eyes seemed to stare at Jenna as the force of the strike from Mac Ard’s cloch toppled her back into the water. Blood spewed from the riven corpse and stained the waves, and a silvery form wriggled away from Thraisha’s open, silent mouth.

  “. . . Their magic drowned me, and Bradán an Chumhacht swam from my mouth. So if it’s destiny, then it’s not only your death . . .”

  Jenna wondered if death could hurt more than the pain of losing Lámh Shábhála.

  58

  Retreat

  “SO you’re the Mad Holder . . . and this must be Lamh Shábhála.“ Jenna looked up from the ground to see the soldier holding the cloch, and the sight of it caused her mouth to open and release a wailing cry that sounded more animal than human. She shuddered, reaching uselessly for the cloch, and the man kicked her scarred arm aside. He grinned down at her: a red-bearded face stained with black gore, a long cut down his left cheek and through one side of his mouth dripping blood. The deep gash through his lips widened sickeningly as he grinned at her. He was missing teeth, and his voice was slurred with his injuries. “ ’Tis mine now, ’tis.”

  Jenna blinked, peering up through the acrid smoke that wrapped the harbor. The man didn’t see the movement behind him. There was a flash of steel and the Tuathian’s head was suddenly separated from its shoulders, rolling away. The body stood for a moment, fountaining blood from the stump of the neck before it collapsed, nearly falling on top of Jenna.

  “Sometimes,” she heard someone say, “it’s just more satisfying to use a sword.”

  A hand was reaching for her—“Let’s go, Jenna . . .”—but she slapped it away, scrambling over to the body, tearing at the fist holding Lámh Shábhála’s chain and ripping the cloch away from lifeless fingers. “Mine!” she proclaimed, closing her right fist around it.

  “Jenna!”

  She whirled around at the shout, snarling. Lights flared wildly, confusingly, in the sudden cloch-vision. She started to tear Lámh Shábhála open, to send its power hurtling blindly at the person in front of her, but she could not hold the power; it burned her so that she screamed, her right arm in agony. Hands caught her as she fell.

  “Mother-Creator, you’ve been wounded! Didn’t you hear the call for retreat? Come on . . .”

  Jenna blinked away blood, trying to see the face. “Ennis?”

  “No, it’s MacEagan,” came the soothing voice. “Lean on me, Jenna. That’s it; let me support your weight. We have to leave now . . .”

  . . . there was the flickering of candles and the smell of wet stone, and a form moving in the twilight . . .

  “Here, Holder. Please sip this . . .”

  She could smell the andúilleaf in the crude clay mug the old man was holding out to her. For a moment, disoriented, she thought it was Seancoim and her heart leaped inside her, but then her vision cleared and she recognized him as the Banrion’s healer. He held out the mug toward her; she pushed it away. “No, I won’t drink that.”

  “It will take away the pain.”

  “No!” She pushed at it again even though she could feel herself yearning to drink it, to lose herself and the suffering in the leaf’s milky embrace. The healer grimaced and pouted, but he put the andúilleaf aside. Jenna was relieved; she didn’t know if she could have resisted if he’d insisted a third time. She tried to raise herself up, and the movement pulled at the stitched and healing wounds, making her cry out and bringing back all the anguish: in the wounded left arm, in the scarred right, her head, her stomach . . .

  . . . her stomach. She touched her abdomen, relieved to feel an answering stir. The healer grunted. “The babe is fine,” he said, and responded to Jenna’s shocked look with a faint, conspiratorial smile. “Aye. The Banrion told me since I was looking after you and she felt I needed to know. But no one else will know unless you tell them. At least not until it’s obvious. That’s another reason you need to rest, Holder.”

  “I need to understand—”

  “Understand what?” a new voice intruded. Someone had thrust aside a woolen curtain Jenna hadn’t noticed before, letting in a stream of sunlight that made her eyes water and blink, revealing the stone wall
s of a small cavern. The curtain dropped down behind the silhouetted form and the room went dark again.

  “Ah, Tiarna MacEagan,” the healer said. “Holder, I’ll leave you with your husband, then. Maybe he can get you to drink the infusion.”

  Husband . . . Jenna found herself turning the strange word over in her head as the healer left the room. MacEagan walked over and sat at the edge of the blankets on which she lay. A long cut crossed his forehead, scabbed brown with the skin an irritated red along the edges, and one hand was wrapped in bandages. “Infusion?”

  She shook her head. “You’re hurt.”

  “Have you seen yourself?” he answered. “At least I’m walking. It’s a rare person out there who isn’t wounded, and there are far too many familiar faces missing.” A sadness came over his own face.

  “Alby?”

  MacEagan smiled momentarily. “No, he’s alive, though he took injuries like the rest. He wouldn’t leave me, even though he’s more a liability with the sword than an asset.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. I know how you would have felt if you’d lost him.”

  Again the smile came and vanished. “That’s kind of you to say. Still, it was a terrible battle, and a terrible cost we paid.”

  The sounds and memories flooded back to Jenna in disjointed, unconnected fragments: the initial assault, the con fusion, the bitter victory of killing Áron, the struggle with Mac Ard, Thraisha’s sacrifice, the stunning moment when she lost Lámh Shábhála . . . She reached for the stone with a gasp. Aye, it was still there, but drained entirely of power. “I remember . . . You came, I think, and helped me up . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t remember anything past that. It’s all gone. And it was only yesterday.”

  “It was two days ago,” he told her. “You were badly hurt. I wasn’t sure you were even going to live.” He told her then: how the two of them together fended off another attack from Mac Ard and the Tuathian Holders with Lámh Shábhála and his own cloch, falling back past the square and finally finding what was left of the Inishlander defenders near the base of the Croc a Scroilm; fighting their way through another wave of Tuathians; Kianna falling near the harbor and the Rí MacBrádaigh severely wounded, but fighting his way to them; finally reaching the winding road to the keep, then making their way into the deep clefts beyond.