by E. E. Holmes
A pair of calloused hands seized me by the shoulders, shaking me from my stupor. I turned to see a dark-complexioned Caomhnóir, his face an unfocused blur of stubble and scowling brows and bared teeth. He was shouting something at me, but my blood was roaring in my ears, and I could not make sense of his words. When he started pulling me toward the staircase, I obeyed the pull at first, letting him take me where he would, my brain completely disengaged. I probably would have let him drag me right up the stairs, through the door, and clear out onto the castle grounds without a shred of resistance, if it weren’t for the parchment.
A little flutter, like the wings of the frightened birds, caught my eye, and I recognized it: the map that Moira had been holding in her hand when the pendulum had collided with her. It was skittering around the tower floor, blown here and there by the breeze that the swinging pendulum was generating. As I watched it numbly, it fluttered past me like a wayward bird, and I saw the little red “X” that Moira had scrawled upon its surface just before she’d been hit. I followed it with my gaze as it tumbled back-and-forth across the surface of the map, as though it were hypnotizing me, and then, just as my heels hit the bottom of the staircase, a thought occurred to me. I had to get that map. It was the only way to understand what was causing the Léarscáil to go out of control.
Looking back on it, I was pretty sure I’d gone temporarily insane, but in the moment, it made sense to do quite possibly the stupidest thing I’d ever done.
I turned toward the stairs, and the Caomhnóir loosened his grip on my arm, evidently convinced that I was going to willingly follow him up the steps. As his fingers slackened, I shook my arm free of him and bolted across the room. I could hear shouts and cries echoing and bouncing all around the room, and I knew they were directed at me, but I did not care. I had to get that map. Moira had figured something out, and we would never know what it was unless we rescued that damn paper. I hadn’t been able to save her, but dammit, I would save the work that she died doing rather than abandon it.
After only taking four or five steps across the room, I had to drop to the ground and roll to my left to avoid the pendulum as it whizzed by me. I crawled a few more feet before I had to jump up and leap to the side to avoid it once again. Each time the pendulum flew by, the map fluttered away in an unlikely direction, and I had to keep changing my path across the room in order to follow it. At last, when I made it nearly to the center of the room, I saw it flap up against Moira’s still body, seeming to wedge itself beneath her arm. And though it continued to flutter and flap, it no longer floated away as the pendulum swung by it.
Desperate to reach it before it freed itself and flew away again, I made a mad dash the rest of the way across the room. A few feet from Moira, I wasn’t quite quick enough, and the pendulum caught me on my outstretched elbow. I was knocked to the ground, and landed with a thud beside her. Ignoring the throbbing pain in my arm, I looked down and heaved a sigh of relief to see the map a mere foot from where I lay. I reached out and snatched it from under Moira’s robe, and then slid myself across the floor so that I was pressed safely against the wall beside her. Though it was the very last thing I wanted to do, I could not stop myself from looking at her.
The bizarre headdress of binoculars and lenses, like something out of a steampunk fantasy, had been knocked from her head and lay battered and bent on the ground beside her. Her neck was turned at the strangest angle. Just the sight of it sent a shiver of horror up my spine and into the roots of my hair. I didn’t need to reach my hand out and feel for her pulse, but I did anyway. The Durupinen blood had fallen still inside her veins.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to her, and I couldn’t even hear my own voice in the tumult that surrounded us. “Oh, Moira, I am so, so sorry.”
The apologies just kept coming out of my mouth, over and over again. I couldn’t seem to stop them, and I was still babbling hysterically about how sorry I was when Seamus appeared at my side. I didn’t hear him approach, and I didn’t even realize he was there until he took my face in both hands and wrenched it around so that I had no choice but to look at him. It was only then, without the awful sight of Moira’s broken body filling my vision, that the apologies died in my throat and the tears found their way through my shock and into my eyes.
“It’s all right,” Seamus was saying, still clutching my face. “It’s all right, now. You’ve nothing to be sorry for, do you understand me? You tried to get her out of here. You did everything you could.”
He thought I was apologizing to him, but I didn’t bother to correct him. I was too busy fighting against a tidal wave of sobbing that was threatening to push its way out of me.
“Come now,” Seamus said, and despite the fire blazing in his eyes, his voice was not unkind. I even thought I detected a tremor of emotion in it. “There’s nothing more you can do for her. There’s nothing more that any of us can do for her. It’s time to get you out of here before the same can be said of you.”
My throat was too choked with repressed tears, so I just nodded, and trusted that he understood that to mean that I would follow his orders and do what I needed to do to get out of there.
Seamus reached down for my hand to help pull me to my feet, and then looked down in surprise. “What is that?” he asked, pulling at the corner of the parchment still clutched in my hand.
“It’s Moira’s. She was trying to—”
An uptick in the shouting made us both look around, and we saw that the door at the top of the stairs was open once more, this time revealing Catriona, Hannah, Milo, and several other Council members gathered behind them. They were all staring down at the pandemonium below, and not one of them looked as though they had the slightest idea of what to do.
“Christ,” Seamus cursed under his breath. “Why won’t anyone in this bloody castle listen to me? This is just what we need, half of the damn Council in danger now as well!” He cupped his hands to either side of his mouth and shouted up toward the staircase, “Stay where you are! Please, we can’t keep anyone safe down here.”
Catriona nodded her head once, to show that she had heard him, and turned back over her shoulder, presumably ordering the rest of the Council members to stay where they were. Satisfied that he was not going to have to rescue the newly arrived crop of Durupinen as well, Seamus turned back to me. “I saw it hit you—the pendulum. You’re lucky you weren’t killed. Are you hurt? Do you think you can walk?”
I attempted to assess my own physical condition for the first time. My elbow was aching, but it seemed bruised at worst, not broken, and the rest of me seemed unharmed. “I think so,” I said.
“Right then,” Seamus said. “I want you to keep close to me and keep your back against the wall. We’ll work our way around as quickly as we can until we get to the staircase. Stay on your toes and do what I tell you to do. No more heroics, you understand me?”
I nodded. I didn’t feel capable of any more heroics. I barely felt capable of putting one foot in front of the other. Seamus helped me to my feet, careful to avoid touching my injured elbow. With both of our backs to the wall and our eyes fixed carefully on the pendulum, we began to shuffle around the perimeter of the room. We’d only made it a few feet when a deafening noise caused us to throw our hands up over our ears.
The cacophony came from high above our heads. Every eye was drawn upward as the trickles of stone dust turned to an avalanche of stone. It was happening at last. The chain was going to give way, and the ceiling was going to cave in. And once that pendulum was free of its chain, there would be no stopping it from barreling right into the walls and killing everyone in the tower.
The Caomhnóir were panicking. They were raising their weapons, and spreading out around the room, as though taking positions for a battle that there was no chance they could possibly win. The links of the chain shrieked, and the pendulum seemed to drop another half a foot closer to the ground, so that the point of it was scraping with a spine-tingling grating sound across the surface of the
map. Still, it continued to swing wildly back and forth, only now there was almost nowhere left to hide from it.
“Run,” Seamus ordered. “We must run. Now.”
My brain was freaking out, but thank God the muscles in my legs knew what to do. They took off at a sprint, following Seamus around the outside of the room. A few seconds later, we had to stop as the pendulum whizzed by in front of us, heading straight for Moira’s workstation. With a deafening crash, it slammed into the desk, sending lethal shards of wood flying everywhere. Without hesitation, Seamus turned and pinned me against the wall with his body, shielding me from the debris. I heard him grunt as several pieces of the wood struck him. When the pendulum had veered off in another direction, he leapt aside, grabbed me by the hand, and continued pulling me around the tower walls toward the staircase, which still felt a mile away.
I glanced down at Seamus’s torso and saw a sharp, splintered shard of wood protruding from his side. Blood was seeping through the ragged hole in his shirt. “Seamus! Oh, my God, you’re hurt!” I pulled back instinctively, wanting to stop to examine how badly he’d been injured, but he just tugged on me harder.
“I’ve noticed. And I’ll deal with it when we’re safely out of here,” he growled, his teeth gritted against the pain.
We took off again, Seamus grunting with every step. We’re never going to make it in time, said a small terrified voice in my head. We’re never going to make it. It’s too far. I spared just enough energy from running to tell myself to shut the hell up, and then a shout from the middle of the room caught our attention. Two Caomhnóir had run up behind the pendulum as it swung past them and attempted to grab onto it. I think they may have been trying to slow it down with the weight of their bodies, but it didn’t make the slightest difference. The first Caomhnóir merely stumbled a few feet behind it before he lost his grip and fell on his face, sliding across the surface of the map. The second Caomhnóir, whether out of stubbornness or panic, continued to hold onto the pendulum even as it arced high toward the side of the room, lifting him off his feet and taking him with it. A few seconds later, the force of the motion flung him off, and he crashed into the wall just as Moira had done. But even as I screamed, he leapt to his feet, evidently uninjured, or at least, uninjured enough to get the hell out of the way as the pendulum swung back toward him yet again.
“It’s no good!” Seamus was shouting. “It’s no good! Just get out of the way. There’s nothing we can do to stop it!”
Another deafening bang, and two huge chunks of stone fell to the ground, with such force that the ground beneath us trembled. With a final, earsplitting shriek, the massive chain finally let go. The pendulum hit the ground, and began to roll across the room, aiming for the Caomhnóir like bowling pins until it crashed into the wall. The entire tower shook with the force of the impact, and screams and cries rose into a chorus of terror from Caomhnóir and Durupinen alike. The Caomhnóir started running for the stairs. Catriona started pushing the crowd of Council members back through the doorway up above us. Only Hannah remained where she was, a strange blank look upon her face.
The expression was so odd, so inexplicably calm in that moment, that it drew my eye, and even with the massive pendulum barreling around, placing us all in imminent danger, I could not look away from her. Was she in shock? Why was she just standing there? I reached into our connection, calling out to her, absurdly concerned about her when I was the one who was likely about to be crushed to death.
The connection was blank. Empty. All I could hear was a great rushing sound, and a tug on something that was deep within me. Then I realized what was happening and I gasped aloud.
Calling. Hannah was Calling.
Even as the realization hit me, the temperature in the tower dropped so significantly that my panicked breaths turned to puffs of steam instantaneously. From all around the walls, from above and below us, spirits were flocking to the tower. They flooded in, the power of their energy pressing in upon us so forcefully that I could barely get breath into my lungs. Beside me, Seamus had a hand pressed to his chest as though he were being suffocated by the sheer pressure of spirit energy. He stared around us, his mouth agape as he took in the hundreds upon hundreds of spirits that were crowding themselves into the space.
Above us, Hannah’s hair was floating gently around her face, buffeted here and there in the waves of ghostly presence that were crashing down upon us, waves that she was commanding. Beside her, Milo looked both thrilled and wary, in awe of her power and yet terrified by it. Behind her, blocking the doorway with her body so that the other Council members were safely contained in the corridor, Catriona’s fascinated fear had turned her to stone. It was clear from her expression that Hannah had not told her what she was about to do, and that she did not dare try to intervene now that she had begun.
As the spirits flooded in, something was happening to the Léarscáil. The pendulum’s seemingly endless momentum was slowing, as though it were suddenly trying to push its way through water, instead of air. When it next made contact with the wall, it bumped against it, making a grating sound, but it did not send tremors through the stones, and no pieces of rock broke away. It pitched drunkenly back from the wall, but it no longer seemed to have a clear direction in which it wanted to move. It was almost as though the pendulum itself were confused and disoriented. It rolled a few feet in one direction, and then stopped and veered off in another, before stopping again and rolling in a slow circle. At last the pendulum came to a stop, rolling back-and-forth just a few inches in each direction as though it were being pulled between two points in a well-matched game of tug-of-war. It was shaking with the tension of being pulled so strongly in two opposite directions at once. I stole a glance down at the map, and saw that the point of the pendulum was hovering over the craggy island mass of the United Kingdom.
I looked back up at Hannah, and saw her face transformed, lit from within by her uncanny power. It was a look that I had hoped never to see on her face again, a look that she was frightened she could not control. And I knew that she was doing it to save me.
“Move,” I said to Seamus. “To the stairs, now. I don’t know how long she’ll be able to hold it.”
If Seamus was put off by the fact that I was now giving the orders, he did not let on. Without a word of discussion, he turned and pelted for the stairs, with me right on his heels. Taking a cue from him, all of the Caomhnóir seemed to snap themselves out of a trance as one and began to run as quickly as they could. We all thundered up the staircase, crowding two and three to a stair to be sure that everyone was high enough off the ground and out of reach of the pendulum in case it began rolling again. When at last not a single person remained in harm’s way, we turned as one to watch the pendulum. It gave a long, groaning shiver and shattered as though it were made of ice, tiny bits of metal falling to the floor like a deluge of raindrops, until the last of the tinkling sounds died away, and we were left to stare down on the sea of glittering golden debris that had once been the Fairhaven Léarscáil.
I was the first to break the spell the Léarscáil’s destruction seemed to cast over us all. I turned and scaled the last two steps, until I was standing beside Hannah. Slowly, I reached out a hand and slid it gently into hers, which was hanging loosely at her side. Her hand was shockingly cold, and I could feel a pulsing current of incredible power flowing through it beneath the surface. She seemed completely oblivious to my presence, but I expected that. There was little that could contend with the all-consuming nature of such control as she was channeling now.
On Hannah’s other side, Milo was watching her with a rapt and terrified expression. He tore his eyes from her just long enough to give me a pleading look. “You have to help her,” he whispered to me. “I’m not sure she can let go by herself.”
I nodded my head. Yes, the compulsion to Call was strong, but I knew one thing that was stronger, and it was flowing back-and-forth between my sister and me, flowing freely between our two clasped hands like t
he blood that bound us from our very conception. It had led me back from the other side of the Aether, and it would lead her back to me right now.
“Hannah,” I said quietly, and as I said her name, I squeezed that hand I knew so well, that hand that I felt for the first time in a dream, so familiar that it felt like holding my own hand. “Hannah, it’s time to let them go now. You’ve saved everyone. You can let them go. Just let go.”
Beneath my fingers, Hannah’s hand twitched ever so slightly, and from that tiny movement, I knew that she heard me, knew that she was struggling against the pull and lure of her own power. I gave a small encouraging smile, knowing that she could not see it, but hoping that she could feel it: my confidence in her, my surety of her control.
“Go on, now,” I told her again. “You can do it, you control this gift. This gift does not control you. Let go now.”
All around us, a legion of spirits, hundreds deep, was crowding the tower and expanding out into the air around it, waiting like soldiers for her slightest command. I could feel their eyes upon her, but I could also feel all the living eyes upon us too, the Council members and the ranks of the Caomhnóir, all holding their breath in anticipation of what Hannah would do next. Beside her, Milo gave a nervous twitch, but I held up a hand to still him. “Give her a chance,” I said. “She’s right there. She’s fighting it. She can do it on her own, I know she can.”
As though my words of confidence in her was the key to finding her own confidence, Hannah’s body language began to change. Her fingers stopped trembling, and instead closed around my own, returning their gentle pressure. The wild, faraway expression in her eyes shrank away, retreating far into the recesses of her mind. The sparkle that I associated with her, that I knew so well, lit again within her eyes. She gave her head a gentle shake, and her eyelids fluttered before they closed. When she opened them again, I could see that she had fully pried herself loose from the grip of the Calling.