Morrell parted the stalks of grass before her, then inhaled sharply.
The plains were silvered by the moon, stretching into the distance, but far distant auroral storms played across the land. She counted at least four distinct areas, the ripples of light dancing, as if caught in invisible winds. They were all moving in the same general direction, changing colors as they went. Vibrant blues, incandescent greens, breathtaking reds and purples and yellows. One of the storms began to rise toward the heavens, fading into wisps before it vanished. Farther east, two more storms blossomed into existence, expanding with startling swiftness.
“They’re beautiful.”
Okata shifted uneasily beside her. “They’re dangerous. And they’re drifting through what used to be Tumbor.”
Light bloomed and Cory struggled toward it, recognizing it as the fading effects of the drug they were using. Like the last twenty times, he struck the glass wall between lucidity and true consciousness, but he immediately looked beyond.
The room was full of enforcers and servants, all of them smears of color and light that slowly solidified and cleared. Most were kneeling next to the cots of the other mentors and students, either washing them or feeding them. Two servants sat next to Cory, one holding him upright, the other with a bowl of soup and a spoon.
Since they’d taken Bryce, Ty, and the others, the Kormanley had come on a regular basis to feed them and take care of them. Cory still couldn’t feel his arms or legs, but they’d lessened the dosage enough that during these times he could swallow, even though his throat and lungs were raw. Each time, he forced himself to eat to keep his strength up. So when the servants began spooning the soup into his mouth, he swallowed it all.
Today was vegetable stew, mostly broth.
He scanned the room, counting the enforcers and servants, and swore. Over thirty in all. Too many for him to handle alone. He sought out Jerrain and Sovaan, but both of them looked worse off than he felt. The servants had to force Jerrain to swallow reflexively. Most of his broth ended up dribbling out of the corners of his mouth. Sovaan actively fought his handlers. He had enough mobility that he could clamp his mouth shut and jerk his head to one side. The rest of the students were in similar situations.
He focused on the guards. All enforcers, all looking slightly bored, a few uneasy. Cory didn’t know how long they’d been held here, but it must have been days. Long enough for the guards to relax. They weren’t afraid that the mages would waken fully and attempt something anymore.
Cory reached beyond the wall and snagged a piece of the Tapestry near a small stool one of the servants had brought to use as a table when feeding Jerrain. The Tapestry felt oddly loose in his mental grip, as if it had once been pulled taut, but now some of those ties had given way. He tried to ignore the implications of that as he tweaked it into a small fold, then released it.
The stool jounced and scraped across the floor an inch.
One of the servants feeding Jerrain screamed and leaped to her feet. “It did it again! Did you see?”
“See what?” an enforcer asked, shifting away from the wall toward the two women.
“That stool,” the first woman said, pointing to where the stool now sat, bowl still on it, but now with stew sloshed over the side and dripping off one edge. “The last three times we’ve been here, it’s suddenly moved on its own at some point during feeding. I swear it’s these damned mages!”
The guard laughed. “The mages?” He leaned down and gripped Jerrain’s chin, staring hard into his eyes, then released him. “There’s nothing they can do. They’re too drugged up. See?” He slapped Jerrain with the palm of his hand. “They’re paralyzed, barely conscious, only brought out of it enough you can feed them. If we woke them up any more, they’d be blowing holes in the walls. Now finish up with this one. Darius and Father want him.”
He stalked off, as Cory’s heart stuttered. What could Darius and Dalton want with Jerrain?
The spooked servant slapped her helper. “Was it you? Have you been kicking it?”
The second woman fended her off with one hand. “It wasn’t me, I swear!”
Cory ignored the two, focused on Jerrain’s face, on his eyes. Mostly paralyzed, it was difficult to read anyone’s expression, but he thought Jerrain’s gaze fixed on the stool then shifted toward Cory. He couldn’t tell for certain. The startled woman knelt again and jerked the stool closer, spilling more stew. She tilted Jerrain’s head back and shoved in a spoonful, the other woman massaging his throat to make him swallow. Cory couldn’t see his eyes.
But a moment later he felt a flick against his chest. It couldn’t have come from the two feeding him; it must have come from Jerrain or Sovaan. They were the only two with enough skill to risk something that precise near someone’s body. Even Cory didn’t trust himself to do that. If he used too much force, it could have bruised Jerrain, or worse.
Before he could decide what to do next, the servant who’d been startled stood and grabbed her stool. “We’re finished here. You can have him.”
She stalked out of the room, her helper trailing behind. The enforcer stepped forward.
“That’s enough for today. All of you, get out. You two, grab the mage and bring him with us.”
Two enforcers trotted forward, sheathing their swords, then hauled Jerrain up, throwing an arm over a shoulder. They dragged him from the room, his feet scraping on the floor behind them. Two others brought in another one of the damned buckets of water as the rest in the room filed out, the servants hurrying to get out of the way. The gas was already filling the room, burning into Cory’s lungs, by the time they closed the door. The bloom of light and the glass wall fell away.
When consciousness returned, he searched immediately for Jerrain.
His cot was empty.
The servants filed in again, began bathing everyone using sponges and towels. They’d brought some kind of oatmeal or gruel that slid down Cory’s throat like thick paste. He barely noticed, consumed by worry over Jerrain. He tried to use the Tapestry to catch Sovaan’s attention, even considered flicking Sovaan’s chest like Jerrain had flicked his own—the bastard deserved a few bruises—but didn’t get up enough nerve. Instead, he tried to tug on Sovaan’s loose shirt. Sovaan didn’t appear to notice, and at the end of the visit the enforcer had Sovaan taken from the room.
Cory flailed against the glass wall, frantically searching the room for some option that didn’t involve killing everyone present except the mages, but the gas was already starting to spread as the last enforcer slipped out of the room.
As it began to burn down his throat, his gaze met Mirra’s on a cot across the room. Even with a mostly paralyzed face, the undergraduate looked terrified.
They took Cory next. Neither Sovaan nor Jerrain had been returned, their cots empty, the blankets still rumpled. Cory reached out for the enforcers’ hearts as he was pulled upright and manhandled through the door. They nearly dropped him into the bucket of water, the two hauling it cursing. The corridor outside was filled with enforcers. Even if he dropped the two carrying him in their tracks, he’d never have enough time to take care of the rest before one of them bludgeoned him unconscious.
He voiced an inarticulate cry of frustration from behind his glass wall and let the men’s hearts go.
They dragged him through corridors Cory didn’t recognize, his head hanging forward. His view consisted of the familiar rough stone floor of the temple, the occasional niche for a doorway or cross-corridor, and the enforcers’ feet. He heard the lead enforcer ahead of them, calling out orders, and the tread of others both in front and behind. The scent of spice and charred meat hit him, his stomach cramping with hunger, but then they turned another corridor and it faded. The smell told him they’d been near the kitchens, on the first level of the temple, and were now in the rooms and halls to the north, a section he’d always assumed was servants’ quarters.
The en
forcers paused and a door opened. They entered and tossed Cory onto another cot. The glimpse of the corridor outside while they shifted his body gave him no new information about his location, but he did catch sight of Darius speaking to the lead enforcer.
Then his head rolled, and he was left staring up at the ceiling overhead. The door closed, the sounds of conversation and footfalls outside fading. He unconsciously tried to hold his breath, so he wouldn’t breathe in the burning gas, but it never came.
He didn’t know how long he lay there, mind drifting, before he realized that the skin of his face prickled, as if being stabbed with thousands of tiny needles. It started beneath his eyes and spread across his cheeks to his ears and down toward his neck. His lips burned, the sensation twice as intense there, and he moaned, shocked when he actually heard a sound. He tried to say his name with nothing more than a forceful exhale, but his mouth twitched.
With agonizing slowness, the paralysis around his face and down into his chest released. He laughed when he first managed to mutter, “Cor,” then, an eternity later, “Cory.”
His shoulders had begun to tingle when the door opened. Without thought, he twisted his head, the muscles stiff and protesting, as Darius and Dalton stepped through with two enforcers, at least four others visible outside. The two enforcers set chairs in front of Cory’s cot, then stood back as Darius and Dalton seated themselves.
“I see you’ve regained some mobility,” Dalton said. “Can you speak yet?”
“Where Jerrain Sovaan?” It came out as an angry choked croak.
“I see you can. Good. It will get easier as the gas wears off.” Dalton leaned forward, searching him with his pale, milky eyes before sitting back again. “We have a proposal for you. Darius?”
“The Gorrani and Baron Devin are coming—the serpents and the dogs—just as Father predicted. We’re going to have to defend the Needle once they get here. You and the other mages could help us with that. We’ve seen what you can do, what damage you can inflict. You infiltrated our walls in a matter of minutes, blasting your way in through solid stone. We want you to turn that power against the Gorrani and Baron Devin’s forces when they arrive.”
“You can hurt them significantly from the walls,” Dalton said. “We can place you on one of the towers of the main gate and you can do whatever it is that you do with the Tapestry and destroy them before they come within a hundred yards of the Needle.”
“And if you agree, the others will follow,” Darius added. “They are only students.”
The two fell silent. They stared at Cory, waiting.
He coughed, then said brokenly, “Where are Jerrain and Sovaan?”
“Dead,” Darius said.
“They both proved to be uncooperative,” Dalton added.
Cory strained to leap from the cot for Dalton’s throat, his entire chest constricting with the effort, but he only managed to lift his head. The cords on his neck stretched and stood out, but he finally collapsed back to the cot with a strangled cry. His breath came in gasping pants. Tears burned at the corners of his eyes, but he fought them back. He fought all of it back—the rage, the grief—his breath leveling out.
He stared at the ceiling until he was composed, then rolled his head to one side. The fingers of his right hand twitched. He didn’t think that was supposed to happen so early based on what Dalton had said about the gas, so he clamped his teeth together and glared at the two Kormanley, hoping they wouldn’t notice.
“Jerrain didn’t deserve that,” he finally said, voice low but still cracking, still rough. He didn’t think it would ever return to normal; his throat felt too raw for that. “Neither did Sovaan.”
“They chose not to help us.” Dalton lifted his chin. “What do you choose?”
Cory laughed, a dark sound. “And if I say no, you’ll kill me, too, then move on to Mirra or one of the others?”
“If necessary.”
“That’s not much of a choice.”
Darius stood, loomed over him, one hand resting on the hilt of his sword. “It’s what you’ve been given.”
Cory stared up at him, then down at Dalton, who remained seated. “They’re only students.”
“Students who hold the power to destroy stone and earth, flesh and blood. To kill with a thought.”
Cory wanted to spit in their faces, but he drew in a breath through his nose and said, “I’ll help you.” As soon as he was free from the damned paralysis, he’d find a way to get the rest of the students out of Dalton’s hands and away from the temple. Let Dalton think he would help until then.
Darius immediately moved to open the door, gesturing toward the guards outside. Dalton stood, blocking Cory’s view.
“You made a wise decision, Cory. If we can’t hold the Needle, none of us will survive. Neither Devin nor the Gorrani will use it as is needed.”
He shifted away, revealing a small table with a bowl sitting on top, brought in by the enforcers. Darius and the other guards had already exited. Dalton halted at the door.
“We’ll wake you fully once the Gorrani have arrived. Until then . . .”
He pulled a small packet from his pocket and dropped it in the bowl, then stepped outside, the door closing softly behind him.
Seconds later, the stench of the gas hit him and Cory cursed as it dragged him back down behind the glass wall and into the dark.
Morrell spluttered as the wind tore the edge of the oiled leather coverlet from her hand and lashed the heavy rain into her face. She snatched at the flailing coverlet and dragged it back into place, hunkering down lower in the shallow depression where she and the rest of her group cowered as the storm raged above. Lightning flared, followed almost instantly by thunder, and the wind once again tried to tear her minimal protection from the sting of the rain away. She gripped it tighter and cursed, her teeth chattering. The rain was cold and had already soaked her through to the skin. It came in sheets and vicious gusts.
She glanced around at the others, the watchmen with their heads bowed down to shield them, Okata looking up toward the sky, his beard glistening as more lightning danced across the plains all around them. Boskell looked miserable, while Drayden hadn’t even bothered with a coverlet, merely sat and let the rain wash off him. They’d searched for some kind of shelter before the clouds from the northwest overtook them, but they’d found nothing. The horses were standing a short distance away, rumps to the fiercest wind, heads lowered, black shapes in the frigid gray. One occasionally shook its head.
“How much longer will it last?” Boskell shouted.
Okata lowered his head, rain streaming from his face. He didn’t seem to mind it at all. “Do I look like a weather-witch?”
And suddenly three figures emerged from the grayness behind them. In a flare of light, Morrell caught the Gorrani’s startled faces.
She screamed and pointed, Okata and Hanter reacting the swiftest, rising, blades already being drawn. But the Gorrani were quicker and Hanter the closest. A curved Gorrani sword cut across his chest and he fell without a sound, Sesali and Boskell surging upright and forward, out of their reach, toward Morrell. Okata took their place, his own sword clashing with the other two, fending both of them off as the man who’d hit Hanter stepped toward Boskell and Sesali. Drayden shoved Morrell back toward the horses, her coverlet snapped away by the wind in the process, then turned to join the others. She caught the fight in flashes as she tried to circle around toward Hanter. Her fingers scrabbled for the knife at her belt, mostly used for eating, then pulled it free.
Behind, one of the horses screamed, and she spun as arms closed around her and dragged her tight against someone’s chest.
“Drayden!” She squirmed in the man’s grip, feet kicking as they hauled her up and back, the arm holding her knife trapped. Her free hand clamped down on the man’s upper arm, her fingers digging into the muscle. He wrenched back with a curs
e in the Gorrani language, his shirt ripping. Morrell grabbed at him again, her fingers slipping through the tear, touching flesh. She dove through the contact into the man’s body, merged with him in the space of a breath, and then tweaked a few muscles in his shoulders and sent a bolt of pain into his stomach.
His arms went lax, numbed, and she wrenched herself from his grasp a moment before he folded over his gut and vomited into the trampled grass. She kicked him in the head, hard, then thought better of it as he moaned and rolled onto his side. Reaching down, she touched his forehead and said, “Sleep.”
He slumped into unconsciousness.
A hand clamped down onto her shoulder and she spun, knife reaching, but another hand grabbed her wrist. “It’s me, Morrell.”
She recognized Boskell’s voice before lightning revealed his face. Blood snaked down from a cut on his forehead, black against his pale skin. Okata finished off the last Gorrani, Drayden standing over three others Morrell hadn’t seen arrive, his eyes feral. Sesali stood off to one side, her face a portrait of grim pain as she held her arm to her side. Morrell counted seven Gorrani. She guessed all of them were dead except for the one who’d grabbed her.
Her gaze fell on Hanter.
She ran to his side, pulled him over onto his back, and grabbed the sides of his head with both hands. The aurora came easily, flickering into existence practically before she’d called it, far stronger than anything she’d felt while practicing at the Needle. She rode it into Hanter’s body.
“He’s still alive.”
The others gathered around. “Can you—”
“Quiet.”
Morrell raised her face to the rain. It pelted her skin, stinging as if it were hail, but she hardly felt it. Hanter consumed her, the wound across his chest raw and open and horrendous. The sword had sliced through cloth and skin and muscle, had slipped between two ribs and caught the lungs, nicked the heart. The blood loss was monumental. Hanter’s consciousness had dwindled down to a faint light, like a firefly, sputtering to life, then dying, each resurgence fainter than the last.
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