He could see beyond her eyes, through them, into her soul. His father had used Earth Powers to see into the hearts of men. Now Fallion used Fire to do the same.
And he saw how Rhianna had succumbed to despair and given herself to Shadoath, surrendering not only her wit, but her soul. That was when Asgaroth had taken her.
Fallion felt as if he were blazing with righteous indignation. The locus shuddered and trembled, seeking to escape his burning gaze.
“Why?” Fallion demanded. “Why are you here? Why now? Why do you trouble me?”
Rhianna fought Fallion then, fought him savagely, twisted onto the floor and tried to crawl away, but Fallion threw her onto her back, pinned her with a knee, and forced her to look into his face.
Asgaroth trembled and shuddered, and in a fit of rage, Fallion blazed. It was as if the sun suddenly flared, and Fallion heard children screaming and realized that many of them had come awake. Rhianna was screaming as Asgaroth shuddered and bulged and tried to break free.
“Answer me!” Fallion demanded, and the flaring light seared the locus, burned off an outer layer of skin.
“Nooooo!” Rhianna wailed, but Fallion did not even register her complaint, so intent was he upon the locus.
As it burned, layers of skin and flesh peeling under his scorching gaze, Fallion stripped away its secrets.
This world. For ages the loci had searched for this world, for it was like a large shard of a broken mirror, or a key piece to a vast puzzle. There was information written upon this world, a memory of the Great Rune.
The loci needed this information, this piece of the rune, to bind all of the shadow worlds back into One True World, flawless and brilliant, and under their control.
Asgaroth had taken Rhianna in the hopes that through her, Asgaroth could lead Fallion astray, make a tool of him, until a locus infected him, as it did the Bright Ones that were under Shadoath’s sway.
Fallion saw it all so clearly, he was amazed that he had never understood. In that moment his attention flickered, and Asgaroth fled.
One moment the locus gripped Rhianna and the next it released, surging off quicker than thought, so that Fallion saw it only briefly, escaping from the corner of his eye.
“Kill it!” Rhianna was shouting, and her voice suddenly rose above the pounding of blood in his ears. “Kill me if you must. Just get rid of it!”
Fallion suddenly found himself growing cold, shaking. The light in him had died, and the torch in his hand and the torches all around the room had all but burned out.
Dozens of children had come awake, and they huddled around him, peering with huge eyes, some of them screaming in terror, many of them coughing from smoke.
Fallion heard guards rushing toward the keep, iron shoes clanking down the hall. With a thought, he sent the smoke hurtling from the room, billowing down the corridor toward the guards, filling the narrow passage.
Fallion had Rhianna pinned to the floor, his knee in her chest, and now he crawled off.
I’ve burned her, he thought. I’ve blinded her.
But Rhianna was crying, shouting, “Kill it. Do it now!” and Fallion realized that whatever harm he had done to her, she would bear it gladly.
“It’s gone,” Fallion told her. “The locus has gone from you.”
Rhianna choked on a sob, reached up and hugged him, weeping bitterly.
“Can you see?” he asked.
“I can see,” she said. “I’m fine. I’m good. I’m good. I’m good. I’m good.” She repeated the words over and over, as if to comfort herself or to comfort him.
Fallion held her, hugged her tightly. “I know,” he said. “I know you’re good.”
Far away, Shadoath rode upon the back of a white graak, soaring above the tops of the stonewood trees, when suddenly a shadow whispered to her soul.
“The torch-bearer has awakened. He comes to destroy us all.”
She closed her eyes, and in her mind saw what had happened to Asgaroth. Fallion had burned him with light, pierced him, devastating the locus. Indeed, even as Asgaroth whispered to her, Shadoath could sense that he was dying.
For long moments, the shadow wailed in pain, until at last it fell silent.
Shadoath was stunned.
No locus had ever died.
We are eternal, she thought. We are spread across a million million shadow worlds, and not one of us has ever died. Asgaroth was one of the great and powerful ones.
But Fallion had awakened, had summoned a light that even the Bright Ones of old could not match.
If Asgaroth can die, so can I.
In rising fear, Shadoath raced her graak to Garion’s Port. Fallion would be coming for her, that much was certain. There was a new terror in the universe.
Shadoath was not ready to face him.
50
FIRE IN THE HEAVENS
His power smote the wicked, and his rage burned the sky.
—from an “Ode to Fallion of the Flames”
Fallion led Rhianna from the Dedicates’ Keep, into the outer corridors and to the guards’ chamber.
There, Fallion shoved on the door, found that it was unlocked.
The golath guards in the darkened chamber cringed and hacked, trying to clear the smoke from their lungs.
Some of them moaned in pain, their voices sounding strangely musical.
They had retreated here, fleeing. Fallion held his torch aloft, and he could see the flames dancing in their eyes.
“Take good care of the children,” Fallion warned them. “Or when I return, your cries of pain will become a symphony to me.”
He shut the door, walked out into the evening light. It limned the bowl of the volcano, all along the ridges.
A hundred yards away, near a rock, the sea ape lay on the ground, her huge paw still wrapped around Abravael’s throat.
Both of them were dead. Fallion could tell even at a distance by the whiteness of Abravael’s face, by the frantic way that his fingers clawed at the sky even though he lay perfectly still.
Rhianna stumbled to the pair, reached down, and petted the sea ape’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “He could never have loved you half as well as you deserved.”
Then Fallion led Rhianna past the dead strengi-saat, where she cringed in terror, and to the sea graak.
The great beast lifted off, lugged them both the three miles to the island of Wolfram. But the weary graak could not carry the weight of two for any great distance, and at Wolfram the children landed near the deserted docks, where they found a leaky sailboat.
They scrounged up some food—strange bread from the netherworld that tasted sweet and filling, along with some old dried figs.
A strong wind and a single sail was enough to let them reach Garion’s Port by late morning.
Fallion had no endowments with which to do battle. Instead, as the boat sailed toward port, he raised his left hand to the sky and drew down sunlight, ropes of light that came twisting out of the heavens in cords of white fire, running down his arm, filling him with light.
The sky darkened as he did this, and the ropes of fire blazed in the false night like lightning.
By the time he reached port and sailed between the Ends of the Earth, he was prepared for battle.
He saw the remains of ships in the harbor, but Shadoath’s armies had gone.
One great worldship lay beached a mile north of the city. Even from a distance, Fallion could see that it was empty.
Fallion and Rhianna climbed up a rope ladder into the stonewood trees at the port, and everywhere they found refugees returning to their homes.
“The armies ran off,” the innkeeper at the Sea Perch said. “They all took off last night, heading inland. They were blowin’ retreat on their warhorns, runnin’ like mad. And all of us folks that they’d captured, they just left us to ourselves.”
Fallion nodded thoughtfully, and told the innkeeper, “There’s an island to the south of Wolfram, a small island with a volcano. At its top y
ou’ll find a couple hundred children, Shadoath’s Dedicates.”
The innkeeper looked outraged. “We’ll ’ave to kill ’em,” he said. “There’s no other choice!”
Fallion shook his head and promised, “Shadoath will be dead by the time you reach the children.”
Fallion looked inland, wondering how far away the armies would be, and because he was filled with fire and light, he suspected that he knew the answer: he might never reach them.
Shadoath and her followers were fleeing far beyond the bounds of this world.
Shadoath had known that he was coming, and had grown afraid.
Fallion went to the Gwardeen Wood, and there found some male graaks. He and Rhianna rode them inland for several miles, following the river, until at the edge of the woods they spotted a large rune upon the ground, a green tracing of fire in a circle of ash. Within the circle, the flames formed something that looked vaguely like a serpent.
Golaths were charging from the woods by the hundreds, racing into the circle and then leaping but never landing, simply disappearing.
It was a gateway to the One True World.
Fallion saw no sign of Shadoath or even a single Bright One that served as her guard. The leaders had been the first to flee.
It would have taken little for Fallion to close the gate, to suck the last of the flames away and make the exit disappear. But then the folks of Landesfallen would only have had to face a cruel enemy, the stranded golaths.
Besides, he had one more task.
Nodding to Rhianna, he jutted his chin, pointing upstream. “Up in the hills about thirty miles from here, the river will fork. Take the right fork up. There, about fifteen more miles up, you’ll find a Gwardeen fortress.”
“What about you?” Rhianna asked.
But Fallion was already diving. His graak swooped out of the sky, and Fallion reached up one last time, drawing cords of light from heavens that suddenly went black, and then his graak was almost on the ground, skirting the flames.
Its wings thundered, and the world blurred and changed, and suddenly the graak was rising up from the ashes, into a sky where a million stars blazed profoundly.
He was in a stony valley, and all around were dark pines, towering, mountainous, almost blocking out the light.
Below, a vast army had congregated—tens of thousands of golaths and Bright Ones, all camped beneath the shadows of the giant trees.
Fallion soared above them, and he heard frightened shouts, saw golaths pointing upward.
There in the midst of her army, Shadoath sat beside a campfire. Fallion’s sharp eyes were quick to spot her, sitting so regally, a diaphanous jewel in the night.
Fallion let the graak dive, winging only three dozen feet above the heads of the golaths, and he saw Shadoath rise from her chair as she spotted him, her mouth falling open in rage.
Make an offering of her, Fire whispered. Burn her.
Fallion did not give her time to cry out.
He released the heat stored in him, blazing brighter than the sun. It felt as if his skin caught fire, and everywhere cries of pain and dismay rose up from those that were infested by loci.
Bright Ones cringed and cowered, unable to mount a defense. The golaths saw their masters’ fear and then turned to run.
Fallion peered down at their souls, saw wounded loci by the hundreds breaking free from their hosts, then streaking away to safety.
He bent his will most of all upon Shadoath.
She cried out in horror, the locus ripping free from her, a shadow hurtling away like a comet.
When it was gone, Shadoath stood, raging at him in defiance. She grabbed a great bow from a cringing golath, drew it to the full, and fired an arrow.
It blurred in its speed.
Fallion unleashed a fireball, sent hurtling toward it. The fireball raced down far faster than a horse could run, caught the arrow in midair, and turned it into cinders. The fireball roared along its course.
Shadoath took another arrow, fired again. But it met the same fate.
Shadoath barely had time to curse before the fireball took her full in the face.
An inferno washed over her, and she raised a fist and shook it, screaming in pain. The fireball turned those around her into flaming torches, yet with her endowments, Shadoath refused to die.
Shadoath cursed and raised her hands, shaking her fists, even as flames lashed out all around her, charring her flesh, bubbling her skin, melting her fat.
Her cries, by reason of many endowments, were amplified a hundredfold, so that her voice seemed to shake the heavens.
She roared and reached down to pick up a huge stone, and suddenly the cooked meat of her joints gave way, so that the bones of her hands ripped free, borne away by the weight of the stone.
The fire roared all around her, and she stood in the midst of the inferno, as if she would keep screaming endlessly.
Slowly, she began to collapse. First one cooked knee gave way, and she stumbled to the ground, as if compelled to kneel to her young master.
Still she shouted obscenities, even as her tongue boiled. By now her hair was gone, and her face a bubbling ruin.
Then she lowered her head as if in pain, and at last collapsed among the flames, falling forever silent.
Now the children are free, Fallion thought.
He fought back tears and pulled his mount up, soared back toward the world gate, and in moments he was gone.
And in Shadoath’s Dedicates’ Keep, babes that had not seen in years suddenly opened their eyes to the light.
The deaf heard other children shrieking in delight and laughing.
Those who had been too weak to walk suddenly leapt in the air and cavorted like frogs.
The sick became hale, and fools suddenly recalled their names, while many a child who had given away beauty discovered a new luster to their skin.
There was not enough room in the Dedicates’ Keep to contain all of the joy that was unleashed, and so the children ran out of the shadowy retreat into the sun and rolled about on the green grass.
It was a short journey to the Toth Queen’s Hideout. Fallion did not want to make it, but he had to. He needed to see if any of the children had survived.
When he returned from the netherworld, rising up from the world gate, he was surprised to find that Rhianna had waited for him. Her graak was high above, circling the field.
There was a fire in him now, a constant companion, endlessly burning.
He flew by the bright light of the sun, with Rhianna beside him, and at the fortress he found a twig and summoned a flame, and held it as if it were a candle.
As he held it, he peered at his hands and saw that they looked smoother than before, as if they had been shaved. The hairs on the back of his arms had turned to ash. He reached up, found that the hair of his head had met the same fate. He’d come perilously close to bursting into flame.
He hesitated outside the entrance to the tunnel and steeled himself. Nix could be there, dead, or Denorra or Carralee or any of a dozen other children that he had been training. He loved them as if they were brothers and sisters. He did not know if he could look upon their corpses and remain sane.
Rhianna landed her own graak and stood at his back.
“Stay out here,” he told her.
He took a deep breath and dove under the stone arch, into the blackness.
Inside, he found the corpses. It had been a bloodbath, and the sight of it left him ill, but he was relieved not to find Jaz or Nix or several others.
There was no sign of Valya.
He searched everywhere in the little tunnel, following it back into the mountain for nearly a mile.
One of the most dangerous times to ride a graak is on the takeoff, he thought. And a certainty filled him. He knew where to find Valya.
He raced to the mouth of the cave and peered down, two hundred yards below.
In the full sunlight, his eyes made out her form.
Valya lay on the rocks at t
he edge of the stream, her arms and legs splayed wide, as if she were reaching out to embrace the heavens. Her skin looked as white as parchment.
He let out a strangled cry, and Rhianna came up behind him, put a hand upon his shoulder, and tried to offer some comfort.
He left Rhianna on the bluff, and had his graak land beside Valya, and then waded through the shallows and pulled her to shore.
He’d never touched a human body that felt so cold. It wasn’t just the cold of death. The water had leached the heat from her, too.
He brought her up on the shore and peered into her face. Her eyes were closed, her face expressionless. It did not look as if she had died in pain.
Fallion combed her dark hair with his fingers, and just held her against his chest for a long time, until the body warmed a bit.
He did not know what to feel for her. Pity. Sadness. Regret.
I promised to set her free, he told himself. But what did I give her? If she could talk now, would she thank me for what I’ve done, or curse me?
Late that night long after the sun had set, Fallion and Rhianna flew high into the mountains up onto an arid plateau where an eerie fortress stood, a compound formed of white adobe bricks that gleamed like the bones of a giant in the starlight.
They landed at the gates, only seconds before a weary Sir Borenson arrived, hopping along on a tired rangit.
The travelers dismounted at the same time, and Borenson gave Fallion a long hug. He stared at Rhianna for a long moment, as if trying to place her, and then cried out in recognition.
“Rhianna?”
“Yes?”
“You look older,” he said. “You have an endowment of metabolism?”
She nodded.
“I never knew,” he said, astonished.
He looked to Fallion, his eyes locking on to Fallion’s bald head. “And Shadoath?”
“She’s dead,” Fallion told him. “Shadoath’s dead. In body, at least. I killed her, and her locus has fled.”
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