by Kyra Halland
A little less than half a league up, they came to a large rockfall that spilled down from the left to block most of the ravine. “A little farther beyond that,” Fazar whispered. Awkward in his bindings, he started climbing around the tail end of the heap of fallen rocks and boulders.
Silas turned to Lainie. “Wait here,” he said. Her chin set in a stubborn line and she drew breath, but he didn’t wait to hear her argument; Fazar had already disappeared around the rockfall. Silas scrambled over the rocks to catch up with him.
On the other side, he paused and looked around. Fazar was nowhere in sight. The rope that had bound him lay discarded on the ground.
A sick feeling hit Silas in the pit of his stomach. Something was wrong, very wrong…
Laughter edged with madness sounded from higher up the ravine. Startled, Silas looked up to see Fazar standing on a ledge on the left-hand slope several measures ahead, above a shallow cave. A gold ring – not the silver ring he had given to Silas – glowed deep green on his right hand. Waves of magic rolled off the renegade, forming a nearly-invisible shield in front of him. Silas unshielded his own power and sensed the Granadaian power that he recognized as Fazar’s mixed with Wildings-flavored magic.
“No!” Lainie cried out behind him, realizing her mistake in the same instant Silas did.
“It’s been fun, Vendine,” Fazar said. Arrogance filled his voice; all trace of the familiar craven whining was gone. “But I’m ready to end it now.”
“Run!” Silas shouted, not daring to take his eyes off of Fazar to see if Lainie obeyed. He drew on the entirety of his power to throw his own shield, but he wasn’t fast enough. Raw power, wild and alien, slammed into him and threw him back against the rocks, and the world fractured into pain and darkness.
* * *
LAINIE CAME TO. Her body throbbed and stung from being pounded with magic and thrown against the ground. She had just been coming around the tail end of the rockfall when the magical blast hit; now she looked around, careful of her aching head, and saw that she was lying five or six measures back down the ravine. There was no sign of Silas.
Slowly, she pushed herself up. Pain flared through her sprained shoulder, and her head pounded even harder. The sickening knowledge of her mistake sat like a cold lump deep in her stomach. Both of the powers she had sensed belonged to the same person, the Granadaian power kept near the surface, the Wildings magic so deeply suppressed it had felt to her like it was leagues away. Fazar must have let his Wildings power come closer to the surface that morning, to fool her into thinking they were closer to the killer.
When all the time he had been right in front of them, toying with them.
How could she have made such a terrible mistake? She had been born in the Wildings of Granadaian blood; her own power had both Wildings and Granadaian qualities. It should have occurred to her that both of the powers she had detected were in the same person. But she never would have thought that the two strains of power could be split apart like that. Had he learned to do that at school in Granadaia? He must have had a lot of training, to be able to do the things he could do.
The same training that she had refused.
And now Silas was paying the price for her failure. She felt sick with fear and guilt. In her mind she saw Verl Bissom hanging from the Onetree, and Garis Horden dead in the street with his throat cut open. Silas was bigger, taller, and more muscular than Fazar – but Bissom and Horden had been, too. Physical size and strength meant nothing in the face of massive, ruthless power. Even a powerful mage like Silas might not be able to deal with unfamiliar magic wielded by a man with considerable training and no conscience, no inhibitions, and no real fear.
She had to help Silas, whether he wanted her to or not.
Lainie checked to make sure her gun was still in its holster, then quietly crept back up to the rockfall. Crouching behind the rocks to keep herself hidden, she peered around the pile. Farther up the ravine, deep green light flickered from the shallow cave. Fazar sat in the cave, tossing a large knife up and down. Was that the same knife that had carved open Garis Horden’s throat? Lainie wondered. The green glow was coming from the ring on Fazar’s right hand.
In front of Fazar, Silas lay face down on the ground, his feet tied and his hands bound behind his back. Lainie clenched her fists at the sight of him captured and defeated, and her throat ached and her eyes stung with tears. Silas Vendine shouldn’t be at that awful man’s feet; it was just plain wrong.
“How should I do this?” Fazar was saying. “Drowning you didn’t work. After all these years in the Wildings, I didn’t think you’d still be able to swim so well. Hanging’s interesting, but I’ve done that already. We’re nowhere near a town, so I can’t put on a show. And anyway, if I did that again it would draw too much attention. Gotta admit, though, it was mighty impressive.” He tossed the knife spinning into the air, and caught it blade first. “Maybe I’ll just take off little bits, until you run out of bits. And in between bits, you can watch me and the girl have some fun.”
Silas’s reaction was loud and angry but unintelligible. From where she was, Lainie couldn’t really tell, but it sounded like he was gagged. She fought back an urge to go in fighting right then; she was no match for Fazar in a straight-ahead fight. She needed a plan.
“Why, you ask?” Fazar said in response to Silas. “As you’ve most likely guessed, I was hired to eliminate you and Bissom and Horden. The three of you were becoming inconvenient for my employers. I was given free rein to carry out the job however I wanted as long as I took care of business in a place where word wouldn’t spread to the wrong people, and as long as nothing I did pointed back to my employers. So I decided to have a little fun with it.”
This was answered by long, muffled outburst from Silas.
Fazar chuckled. “I may be a sick sheepknocking bastard, but I’m not the one lying there all trussed up like a pig for roasting… Now, there’s an idea.”
Silas said something else that sounded like a demand.
“Who am I?” Fazar said. “You want my life story? Glad you asked. I’d be happy to share it. Soon after the first settlers came out here to the Wildings, stories started making their way back to Granadaia about the blueskins and their power. A small group of powerful, influential mages, including my parents, decided to try an experiment. By the way, my family is as old and powerful as yours on our Islander side, and even older on the Granadaian line. If you think about it, you can probably figure out who we are.
“Anyhow, my parents came out here, and, well, let’s just say they persuaded some blueskins to show them a good, powerful piece of land. They set up camp there and set about producing a child. Me, as it happens. I was conceived, gestated, and born right here in the Wildings, in a place where a great amount of power runs through the earth. After I was born, my parents took me back to Granadaia. When I was old enough, they sent me to school, but that didn’t work out very well. I was too strong, and too different. None of the teachers could come anywhere near my power or what I was learning on my own. They tried to control me, but they couldn’t, and I… did some damage. So the other mages involved in the project arranged for me to be privately taught. They also made sure I never received the fertility block.”
Silas made a muffled questioning sound.
“What’s that, you ask? Who were those mages? Well, I’m not at liberty to reveal the identities of the members of that group, but if I told you their names, you’d know who they are. They’re connected to my present employers; we’ll leave it at that. And that brings me to the other part of this job. The aim of this group is to breed a line of highly powerful mages gifted with both Wildings and Granadaian magic. When I was hired to eliminate you and the others, I was also instructed to find a powerful Wildings-born female to mate with. Imagine my delight when I discovered, much to my surprise, that Miss Lainie is perfectly suited for the position.”
Silas burst out with an angry explosion, and Lainie’s mind reeled. Breed. Fazar had
been deliberately bred by a group of important mages to be an extra-powerful Wildings-Granadaian mage, and now Fazar meant to use her to breed a second generation of hybrid mages. Her stomach, already wracked with nerves, churned at the sickening thought.
What did that group want with hybrid Granadaian-Wildings mages? Was this part of a plan to take over the Wildings? If the Mage Council was getting ready to extend their rule into the Wildings, that would explain why they were getting rid of the Hidden Council mages who would fight against their plans. And mages with Wildings power might be better able than regular Granadaian mages to take on the Hidden Council mages and also the blueskins, to clear the Mage Council’s way to power.
This wasn’t just a matter of saving herself and Silas, she realized. It could be a matter of protecting the whole Wildings and everyone who lived there, settlers and blueskins alike.
“Now,” Fazar went on, “I had a pleasant time getting to know Horden. Me and him, we were almost pals by the time I was finished with him. He would have done anything I wanted. But I’m ready to finish this job and move on, soon as I think of an entertaining way to get it done.”
Somehow, Lainie doubted it would take him long to come up with a way to kill Silas. She had to think of a plan, fast. Maybe she could ask some blueskins for help; there had to be some around somewhere. But she hadn’t seen any since they passed the markers in the ravine, and Silas had told her how the blueskins in Yellowbird Canyon had refused to help him against Carden. They expected the settlers to solve their own problems and clean up their own messes. Even if she could find some in time, they probably wouldn’t help her. So it looked like she was going to have to do this on her own.
She drew her gun. Bracing her arms against the boulder she was crouching behind, she took aim at Fazar’s head. She had a free and clear shot at him, and he wasn’t moving around much. Then, with the lightest touch she could manage, she searched with her mage senses for a protective shield; no point in warning Fazar of her presence with a gunshot that wouldn’t do any good.
As she feared, he was heavily shielded. Crazy as Fazar seemed to be, he wasn’t taking any chances. A shield like the one he had up would slow down or stop an ordinary bullet so that it wouldn’t do any harm; she had figured out that much on her own before she ever met Silas. If she had been with her brother Blake when he got caught in the crossfire of a shootout, she could have put up a shield like that and saved him –
She pushed back the memory and the accompanying pang of grief and guilt. That was all water down the creek. All she could do now was make sure no one else she loved was killed if she could help it.
Could she try suppressing Fazar’s power again and force the shield down? She wasn’t entirely sure how she had done it before, though it had seemed easy. She had been in physical contact with Fazar; did that make a difference? And he had been caught off guard that time; he would be more wary of her now, and might even have figured out a way to keep her from doing it again. Just like with a pointless gunshot, it wouldn’t do to warn him of her presence with an attempt at magic that might not work.
Still keeping her gun trained on Fazar, Lainie thought back to the fight between Silas and Carden in the caverns beneath the Great Sky Mountains and how Carden couldn’t attack and shield himself at the same time. If she could draw an attack from Fazar without getting herself killed, she could shoot him while his shield was down.
The trick, of course, would be not getting herself killed.
“I know you’re out there, baby girl,” Fazar called out. “No point in tryin’ to hide. Come on in, and let’s have a little talk.”
Anger flared inside Lainie again at the sound of that murderer saying her Pa’s pet name for her, and she nearly pulled the trigger. With an effort, she held herself back. If she didn’t respond, maybe that would rattle Fazar a bit and give her an opening. She stayed crouched behind the rocks, as silent and still as she could be, barely even breathing.
“Baby girl? You listening to me?”
Still she didn’t answer, or even move.
“You don’t ignore me, you hear me, woman?” Fazar shrieked in sudden insane fury. “You get your sweet ass over here right now or I’ll come over there and drag it in! You got a choice, you can have it gentle or you can have it rough, but one way or another you’re gonna do what I say!”
She stayed silent, peering out from behind the rockfall, and reached out again with her mage senses. His shield was still in place; he hadn’t completely lost control of himself yet.
“Damn it, bitch, don’t say I didn’t warn you!” Fazar leaped to his feet. As he started to storm out of the cave, Silas twisted up and around and threw himself right in his path. Fazar tripped over Silas and hit the dirt in a sprawl. His shield faltered and disappeared, but a shot at this new angle from this distance might hit Silas. Lainie scrambled over the rockfall and ran to the cave. She came to a halt standing over Fazar, her revolver aimed down at his head. “Don’t call me that!” Her voice, her whole body, shook with rage. She pulled the trigger.
The bullet hit the dirt not a finger-width from Fazar’s head.
Fazar laughed. In the instant before Lainie could fire again, a wave of green light slammed into her. Blinded by the magical explosion, she felt herself fly backwards for an endless length of time then hit the ground hard.
Chapter 11
THE FIRST THING she was aware of was pain. Every part of her body hurt, from her head to her feet. Lainie blinked; the darkness over her vision cleared to reveal a wavering view of the sky. Carefully, she turned her head first one way then the other. The movement made her head pound so bad she nearly threw up, but she was able to see that she was lying on steep, bare, rocky ground. From somewhere below came a whiff of smoke.
Trussed up like a pig for roasting… Fazar’s words burst into her memory. Panic lent her strength and she pushed herself up, her head and shoulder protesting the effort. She was high up on the steep hillside across the ravine from Fazar’s cave; from there, she could see the ledge overhanging the cave and the deep green light of Fazar’s power shining out from under it. A second, fainter drift of smoke brushed past her nose, and this time she realized that it didn’t carry the smell of burning flesh. At least Silas wasn’t being burned.
But that didn’t mean he was still alive.
Either way – if he was still alive and needed to be rescued, or if he was dead and could only be avenged – she would take down Fazar if it was the last thing she did, for Silas’s sake and to protect herself and the Wildings. But Fazar was clever, and fast, and so powerful he had tossed her halfway up the hillside with his magic. And he had years of training from some of the most powerful mages in Granadaia. How was she going to beat him?
If only she was stronger. She dug her fingers into the ground in frustration. If only she was better-trained and more powerful. Silas was doing his best to teach her, and was doing a pretty good job, but it hadn’t even been two months yet. She was a bare beginner; she hardly knew anything at all.
Through her contact with the ground, amber warmth brushed her mage senses – the power of the earth of the Wildings, flowing abundantly beneath her. If only she could use it… But Silas had told her that power couldn’t be used; it belonged to the land. Below that, though…
Sister. The memory of the Sh’kimech’s cold, eager voices crept into her mind. You are kin to us, and our power is yours whenever you wish it.
In that cavern under Yellowbird Canyon, she had sensed the mass of the Sh’kimech’s mindsoul spreading far beneath the earth of the Wildings. Was it here, under these hills, as well? Hardly daring to hope, she set her hands flat against the ground and reached down with her mage senses. She passed through the amber Wildings magic and deeper still, through power that shaded from amber to brown to black. A chill crept up through her arms and into her bones.
They were there, but silent and asleep.
Lainie drew back a little. Did she dare awaken them and draw their mindsoul, their co
llective life force and awareness, into herself? More than anything, they wanted to make her one of them, to add her life, her mind, her spirit to theirs, and to have her act as their hands, their weapon, to destroy the mortal infestation that polluted the surface of their world.
She had commanded them before. By rejecting the power and unending life they offered her, she had proved herself stronger than they were. But if she invited them in, she would be making herself vulnerable to them, giving them power over her. That was how Carden had nearly become their servant, and how Silas had almost been lost to them. Was she strong enough to remember the dangers and stay in control of herself and the Sh’kimech even as she opened herself to them?
She had to be. Silas’s life depended on it. And even more than that, the freedom and peace of the people of the Wildings might depend on her stopping Fazar and the schemes he was involved in. If she saved Silas but lost herself to the Sh’kimech, she would just have to hope that Silas would do whatever it took to stop her from acting as the Sh’kimech’s weapon of destruction.
Again, she reached down deep with her mage senses to the utter darkness and cold of the Sh’kimech’s realm. Sh’kimech! she called out in her mind. Wake up! I need your help.
She felt them stir, then reach eagerly for her. Cold tendrils crawled up through her arms, clutching and pulling at her. Sister. Have you chosen to join us? Will you be our hands? Come live forever with us, and you will be stronger than any other. They pulled harder on her, filling her mind with their hatred of all that lived on the surface of the world, and with their promises to her and their desire for her.