by Mark Henwick
Was she on our side? Would she help?
Or would letting her in allow her to prevent us from escaping?
Or worse, if we got out and called Kaothos, would we find this was all another elaborate trap for the Hecate’s own ends?
Maybe. Maybe not. We had no other options at the moment.
I pulled my second inside straight and let her in.
Great wings around me, lifting me up. Cold. Cold. Blue.
The water-door stuttered.
A fraction of a second without the continuous sheet of water enclosing the entire room. A tiny break in the working. It was enough to reach out, but would it be enough to spirit walk?
Tullah was suffering too much to help.
The Hecate wasn’t there anymore.
My eukori shot through the water-door, through the empty mine.
I needed an anchor out here, a relay. Something to attach myself to, so I could gather myself for the next leap. All in that closing fraction of a second.
Kane!
The crazy coyote had found the generator’s vent and was scrabbling his way down the shaft into the mine. He was using some shapeshifting illusion to pass himself off as one of Celum’s werewolves, in case he met anyone. Creeping behind him was Flint.
Stupid boys.
I couldn’t project words with simple eukori, but we both knew what the other was thinking.
You’re welcome, Boss.
I latched onto them and they gave me the strength to keep the tiniest pinhole in the water-door while my eukori raced up the ventilation shaft to find Yelena, Rita.
Relief. Fear.
I had no time. I needed the soultree’s power. I didn’t even have time to warn anyone. The best I could do was to reach slowly. Try and limit the shock.
Ash! Ash!
The Irish soultree’s power seethed and started to rise through me, and through everyone connected to me. Dark. Seductive.
But it rose too slowly, as if being held back. Three spirit anchors fought against me. I screamed. I had no time. No time. No time!
Kane understood.
I sensed him hesitate and shudder at the feel of Ash’s magic. Sensed him tremble on the brink. If he cut me out, the water-door would probably close, leaving me trapped in the pit.
But what I was asking him to do was to put all his strength into blood magic.
My eukori link stretched, grew pale and insubstantial as mist.
The presence of Ash, that sense of power, receeded.
Despair flooded me.
And then Kane shook himself and fed his power into our link. Somehow, without words, he warned the others.
Thank you!
I sensed what I needed to do and pulled with everything I could. Poured pain and anger down at what was holding Ash back. Pulled again. Mercilessly. Felt the shock. Felt the spirit tethers break, and I wrenched Ash’s power into me.
Pain!
Like molten lava through my veins.
Bubbling up. Weaver’s workings snuff out in my head. What damage is done, is done.
The workings in Tullah’s head are more difficult. They slow. Stop. That has to be enough for the moment.
My surroundings disappear. I’m in the mine and I’m outside and I’m on the ground and I’m in Ireland and I’m in the sky and I’m soaring south and east over the Rockies like a missile, screaming anger and pain into the sky.
“She’s spirit walking! She got out! Stop her!”
Somewhere, far away, there is a great alarm. People shouting. Running.
Doesn’t matter. All so slow.
I arc down.
Denver. Evergreen. Bear Ridge.
Finally, Haven.
Where I have come from there’s a silken thread in the sky and I pull it after me, down the secret elevator, through the tiny gaps in Alice’s working, down into the dungeon.
Diana leaps up in shock. What’s happening?
Kaothos speaks: Amber Farrell? Is that you?
Her voice rocks the dungeon.
Yes, it’s me. Quick.
She manifests in a panic, her body filling the room, shattering furniture and pushing Lyssae off their pedestals. Screams and fear.
I slap my silken thread on the dragon’s snout and point. Follow it. Up, back. Tullah. Hurry! Now! Go. Go. Go!
Kaothos is slow. So slow. It’s as if she’s a part of Diana now. She can’t get free.
It’s tearing Diana apart. Tearing them both apart.
Pain.
Everything is painful.
Except death, maybe.
And that was when someone back in the pit must have picked up a miner’s shovel and hit me over the head with it.
Chapter 72
Light. Dark. Light. Dark.
The contrast was too painful to open my eyes just yet. I was shuffling forward, swaying.
Hot. Cold. Hot. Cold.
Scrape of soft shoe on stone.
That was good, right? Hearing and feeling means I’m alive. Even the pain in my eyes is proof I’m alive.
I put out my hands to feel my way and cracked an eyelid. I touched nothing, but the light stabbed in like needles.
Blurry.
Light. Dark.
Hot. Cold.
I was shuffling along some sort of corridor.
Oh, my God, I’m in a hospital. An asylum. I’ve gone crazy. I’m full of drugs. It was all a hallucination.
No.
Stone floor. High ceiling. Windows at regular intervals. No, not windows. Arches. Weathered stone arches, like an Old World monastery. Not an asylum.
Cold and dark in the shade. Light and hot in the sun.
Where the hell?
I opened my eyes a bit more. The corridor went on and on, angling smoothly to the right, so I couldn’t see more than about fifty paces ahead. Outside, featureless green grass stretched away to a dark line meeting a chalky blue sky at the horizon. Weird as hyper-realistic art.
“Am I dead?” My voice belonged to someone else. It creaked.
No, replied Speaks-to-Wolves from behind me. Not yet, anyway.
“Thanks so much for the boost, great-grandmother. Wonderful turn of phrase.”
I felt the sigh and the rolling eyes. But a little laughter behind that as well.
If I’d brought you up, you’d have more respect for your elders.
“You once said you wanted me to have Coyote as my spirit guide. I don’t think he does respect very well.”
You have Coyote now. And Raven. Not exactly as spirit guides, but similar.
“I need all the help I can get, and I’ll take it where it’s given. Where the hell am I?”
It doesn’t matter where this is, and I can’t explain it to you.
“It does matter. I have some friends that need my help.”
I turned around, but she was just a shape of light and dark, standing next to me. I could see we were dressed in buckskin and moccasins. I felt my cheeks and forehead; a bar of dark war paint crossed my face.
Your friends will be there when you get back, Speaks-to-Wolves said. Time isn’t the same here.
“This is the spirit world? I’m having a time-out?”
No. You must concentrate on why you’re here, not where you are. You have a really important choice to make. Everything there depends on what you decide to do here.
I grunted. “And according to you, I get no help from anyone else to make my decisions.”
Yes.
“If time doesn’t matter, it would really help me... in a different way... to understand where we are.”
She sighed and laid a hand on my arm, stopping me.
It seemed like a real, flesh-and-blood hand.
I couldn’t see her face. I’d seen her before, in the shape of a wolf and as a woman, but today, she was a phantom in the darkness between the arched windows, apart from her hands, which she stretched out in the bright sunlight.
She put them together, slipped finger over finger.
What do you see, there
on the floor?
I looked down at the shadow of her hands.
“Wolf.”
As soon as I said it, there was the whisper of hand slipping against hand.
“Rabbit. Eagle. Elk. Cougar. Hey, that’s really good, that one.”
And yet they are none of those animals. They are hands.
Humans see the shadows in their world and name them, but none can imagine, from the shadow, what shape in the light causes them. We are standing in the light, but the only words I can use are words you have for the shape of shadows. We are not in the physical world, or the spirit world.
We are where the shapes you have names for, come from.
Strangely, it did help. However chilling and obscure it was.
I started walking again.
Warm and light in the sunlight. Cold and dark in the shade.
“So what do I have to decide?”
Speaks-to-Wolves sighed again.
What will you do with Kaothos?
The question shocked me enough that I stopped in the shadow between windows.
“What? I’m not doing anything with her at all, other than guiding her to Tullah.”
Your spirit bridge through the sky leads to you. She will come to you first.
“And then on to Tullah.”
Maybe. If you let her go. The problem is, Tullah will be unable to do anything until she recovers from Weaver’s workings. As well as that, spirit guides and hosts develop over time. Kaothos has been greatly changed by her time with Diana. In the same way, Tara and Hana have been greatly changed by their time with Tullah.
It was cold in the shadow. I edged forward until the sunlight warmed me.
“Still...”
Kaothos might be a better fit for you. Tara and Hana might be a better fit for Tullah.
“No!”
Are you sure? You can barely imagine the power that Kaothos will develop over time, given a host who can direct and use those powers. You are more experienced than Tullah, much better placed in the coming events of Emergence. Think of what you could achieve...
I was thinking all right.
That power. Even more power than Ash, and not full of pain and hatred. A force for good.
That’s exactly right. A force for good.
There was a sweetness to it, a rightness, that tasted familiar. Beguiling. A taste that would never cloy. Addictive.
But was Kaothos good?
“The Hecate said... implied that dragons can’t be good. She said the name comes from drac which means devil. Was she just trying to confuse me?”
I don’t think she was trying to confuse you. What did she mean? Think it through.
I frowned.
Drac was a name. A name humans came up with. A name for shadows, without knowing the true nature of what stood in the light.
Diana again, explaining about people calling Athanate monsters: The monster’s inside you. It has always been. The Athanate powers do no more than tempt it from its lair inside your head. What happens next is up to you.
I blinked. “There are no devils, but we make them,” I said.
Speaks-to-Wolves nodded, a movement of light and darkness.
Kaothos could be a devil, if we made her so. And dragon spirit guides had been devils, in history, because that’s what humanity had made of them.
“And power... the use of power is what defines them. The greater the power, the more the temptation to go wrong.”
Yes, daughter. And the easier the corruption.
“But how to use power without becoming a monster?”
There are ways. A guardian angel. A sacrifice of the self. Both.
“Well, there are no guardian angels. And besides, my old Sergeant always asked who guarded the guardians.”
A wise man. Yet they exist, where such names are given.
“Whatever.” Did she mean the physical world? I couldn’t unpick her puzzles now. “Which leaves us with sacrifices.”
Who wielded a lot of Adept power? What had they given up?
The Hecate? I couldn’t think what she might have sacrificed; I didn’t know her well enough.
“All I can think of is Tolly in his library. Content to sacrifice his sight to be able to read what no one else can.”
A small example, but yes.
“What would I sacrifice to wield a dragon’s power?” I spoke without meaning to. “Or Ash. Even for a minute.”
Posing the question in my mind, I saw the appalling, seductive temptation to choose others for the sacrifice. That’s how you set out with good intentions and became a monster.
But Speaks-to-Wolves swept on to answer my question.
A great heart knows what to offer, my daughter. Strength for strength. Measure for measure. It’s all about the soul seeking balance. A sacrifice may or may not be known at the time, for this decision belongs here, in this true realm, not in the physical world, and time is not the same between them.
It almost sounded as if she wanted me to take Kaothos.
“Whoa! Hold on. If it’s such a good idea, why doesn’t Diana want to hold on to Kaothos?”
She does.
“Yeah, but she let go.”
Yes.
To help me think, I walked on, along the corridor, through light and dark.
Did letting Kaothos go count as a sacrifice? Yes. And no, because Diana chose not to wield the power.
Diana was better placed than me to influence Emergence and prevent it from turning into the apocalypse. But she’d decided not to hold on to Kaothos. Had she decided she had nothing sufficient for the sacrifice, and wouldn’t contemplate sacrificing others? Or another reason?
Or did Kaothos not want to stay?
No, their parting had been slow and painful, but they were both pulling apart.
Because Diana didn’t think there was such a thing as a force for good? Or that one person could be?
No, those guesses didn’t feel right.
Then it came to me. For Diana, it wasn’t about the sacrifice. It was about the power concentrated into one person. A person that others believed in, uncritically. That others looked up to. That wielded absolute power. That’s what Diana didn’t want.
Speaks-to-Wolves had it wrong, this time.
“I do have a guide for this decision.”
Diana? If you chose to follow her...
“Diana wouldn’t keep Kaothos, despite the temptation. I’m certainly not in Diana’s league, so there’s no way I’ll keep Kaothos. She belongs back with Tullah. Which means Tullah must choose what to sacrifice or we need...”
Guardians. Tullah needs protection and guidance. Starting with physical protection, because she’s vulnerable as she tries to host Kaothos again.
“Am I her guardian angel, then?”
No, daughter. Not exactly. Not in the long term, where such considerations are measured.
The light flooding in the windows got paler. The dark in between got lighter.
I needed to ask so much more. I’d used Ash’s power to call Kaothos. What was my sacrifice for that?
A sickening thought came to me. What were the sacrifices that had fed Ash’s power? What did Ash feed on?
Not Kath’s unborn baby. Not that. Please. Not that.
I saw Speaks-to-Wolves clearly as the light and dark blended. There were tears, like a spray of priceless diamonds, carelessly cast on her cheeks.
And then I was gone.
Chapter 73
PAIN.
Kaothos crashed into my body like a runaway train.
Tullah, linked through eukori, was completely unconscious.
Better. That way she avoided some of the worst aspects of spirit guides moving between hosts.
“Stop chewing coal and get on with it, you stupid lizard.”
My voice clearly still belonged to someone who’d abused it with a long life of smoking and drinking.
Traffic jam, Kaothos said. Sorry about this, Amber Farrell. Profoundly sorry...
Incredibly
, the pain doubled.
I screamed. The sheer shock of it made me leap to my feet.
One of Weaver’s Adepts was coming at me, swinging a slim iron construction rod. My sudden movement saved my head from being split open. I took the blow on the thigh. The pain was nothing in comparison to what I was feeling from Kaothos.
And meeee!
“TARA?” I screamed it like a war-cry.
I’m back. With Hana. Punch that bastard already will you?
The Adept had put all his weight behind the rod. He was off balance and unable to get out of my way. Years of training, culminating in being beaten up in the gym regularly by Yelena, took over. I struck out, without thought. I broke his jaw. Then his elbow. Then his knee.
Oh! Nasty.
Her vacation being hosted by Tullah hadn’t improved her wit, but the violence made the next rank of attackers think twice.
I wasn’t looking at them. I was looking at Weaver.
The bastard had the controller for the collars that Tullah and I wore.
But he wasn’t using it. He’d started another working.
“Kaothos?” I called out.
Nothing.
The dragon had her work cut out for her, reviving Tullah.
I felt the working that had been shielding the room change. It was as if we’d slipped sideways and spun away into the deeps. My skin crawled. The whole room was now a substantiation. We were adrift in the spirit world.
Oh, crap.
I raised the iron bar in my hand. I was still chained to the floor, but the bar would make a reasonable spear to kill Weaver. Then I was down to the knife hidden in my boot against fifty or more Adepts.
I had no time to throw the bar before the Adepts all collapsed.
Huh?
Something Kaothos had been able to do?
No. Hold still.
Tara spoke from behind me.
I ignored her and twisted around.
A wolf stood behind me. Not a normal wolf, or even a werewolf. A wolf who breathed fire. A wolf biting the chain that held me, whose saliva dripped and made puddles of smoke on the concrete floor. A wolf whose fur seemed to be ablaze.
“Hana?”
Tara-Hana. Both. One. No time. Weaver’s going to take the whole coven’s energies into that thing. He’ll try to do the same with Tullah and Kaothos.
The chain parted. I spun back.