Shattering the Ley

by Joshua Palmatier

  He moved up on the two enforcers as the head Prime growled, “No, no, to the left! A little more. A little more. Now, Retellus, skew the next crystal to the right and up slightly. Yes! Oretus, adjust yours to compensate! Capture as much of the ley coming in from Erenthrall as you can. We need to break free of Erenthrall’s control today. We’ll only get one shot at this, so move!”

  The Hound punched his knife up through the left enforcer’s back, reaching around to stifle the man’s grunt, but the other enforcer turned, a look of confusion on his face. It shifted immediately to horrified realization and he reached for his blade, but the Hound was already moving, letting the body he held slip behind him as he crouched low and brought his second knife up into the enforcer’s gut. He couldn’t dampen the man’s barked warning, so he twisted his blade savagely, blood already coating his hand, as he spun in behind him, using the enforcer’s body as a shield. Both the Baron and Arger turned, Arger’s sword already snicking from its sheath. With one glance, Arger noted the dead enforcers at the entrance and the one writhing on the floor to the Hound’s left, a pool of blood already forming beneath him. His face narrowed with sudden tension. Behind him, Leethe stiffened in rage. But he didn’t step back either and didn’t retreat behind the protection Arger offered.

  He glared at the Hound instead. “Who are you? Who sent you?” He glanced toward the two dead enforcers near the corridor and his mouth tightened. “A Hound. I knew Arent would send one of you. But I didn’t think he’d have the conviction until after we’d activated the Nexus here.”

  He turned to the head Prime, who had halted his orchestration of the other Primes and now watched the Hound with unadulterated fear. “You guaranteed that Augustus would not find out about the Nexus here. You said he would think the traitor came from within Erenthrall, that he would think it was a resurgence of the Kormanley.”

  “He d-did,” the head Prime stuttered. “My latest intelligence from our sources in Erenthrall stated that Augustus was looking for our activist in the city. It was already set up. He doesn’t even know he’s working for us. He thinks he’s working with the Kormanley, trying to bring the ley back to its natural course!”

  “It wasn’t enough,” Leethe said dryly. He motioned toward Arger. “Take care of him. And you,” he spat at the head Prime, his face reddening with fury, “get me my ley!”

  The Hound met Arger’s gaze. “I only came for Leethe.”

  Arger’s mouth twisted in a grim half smile. “I find that hard to believe.”

  The Hound flung the dead weight of the man he held forward and dodged to the side as Arger leaped toward him. Arger stepped onto the dead enforcer’s body without pausing and the Hound felt the tip of the chief enforcer’s blade tug at the back of his shirt. He scented the man’s fear, but none of it showed in the enforcer’s face. The pulse of the Nexus throbbed in the Hound’s temples and the heady aroma of blood intoxicated him, making his movements fluid as he ducked and spun, Arger lashing out after him, herding him across the room and away from Leethe. The Hound kept just out of reach, teasing him, goading him, trying to draw out his anger and irritation so he’d make a fatal move, but Arger was too well trained. The skin around his eyes tightened, but that was his only reaction.

  So the Hound changed tactics. With a shrug of his shoulders, he turned on the pad of his foot and sprinted toward the nearest Prime, the man’s attention completely focused on the coruscating wall of light before him, his hands raised and moving in subtle and obscure motions. The Hound had no idea what the Prime was doing, but he knew it was important.

  He stabbed the Prime in the side as he sprinted past, a quick thrust and then away, barely pausing as he headed toward the next Prime farther down the rounded chamber. The man behind cried out, followed by a curse from Arger. The Hound grinned, even as he punched his second knife into the next Prime’s back, the man collapsing to his knees, his outcry garbled as he choked and coughed up blood.

  He rounded the central flare of ley. Arger charged behind, his boots thudding against the stone floor. The Hound focused on the next Prime, a woman, her black hair streaming behind her in the pulsing wake of the ley. From much farther away, the head Prime yelled, “Stop him!” His panic was an acrid taint in the Hound’s nostrils. Then, to the remaining Primes, “Hold them! Hold the gods-damned crystals steady, you bastards!”

  The Hound cut low along the woman’s side, ducking beneath her hair. As he spun away, he saw the struggle on her face to keep control of the ley even though she’d been wounded, her lower lip clenched so tightly between her teeth she’d drawn blood. But her face was already pale and she stumbled as the Hound’s attention shifted toward Arger.

  The chief enforcer had nearly reached them.

  The Hound gripped the woman by the arm and flung her into Arger’s path. The chief enforcer dodged out of her way as she screamed, but she was already too weak to react. She hit the floor hard, rolling, leaving a trail of blood behind her—

  And then Arger swung, grunting with the force behind it. The Hound focused on the dance, on the swift movement of dodging and ducking the longer blade, waiting for his opportunity. They whirled around the Prime as she raised herself to her elbows and tried to drag herself away from them, but she was too weak to move, slumping over a moment later. The Hound felt Arger’s blade nick his shoulder, his thigh, but shoved the silvery white-hot pain aside, allowed the coppery scent of his own blood to mingle with that of the rest. It drove him harder and he pushed himself, felt his muscles beginning to burn, aware that Arger was flagging as well. The chief enforcer’s breath came in harsher gasps, but his blade never wavered. His frustration grew, though; the Hound could smell it. The Hound wasn’t attacking, all of his efforts going toward evasion, knowing that an opening would come.

  And it did.

  Arger swung hard, too hard, his blade dipping too low, the tip scraping along the stone floor and throwing off a smooth recovery. It was a subtle mistake, Arger correcting in a heartbeat.

  But a heartbeat was all the Hound needed.

  His knives dove in, one high, buried in Arger’s armpit, the other low along the fumbled swing and into his side.

  Arger gasped and staggered back, helped by a shove as the Hound withdrew his blades. His mouth opened, as if he wanted to say something, and then he fell, his body hitting stone with a heavy thud. His sword dropped from his fingers with a faint clatter.

  The Hound turned back to the Nexus, noticed a strange shudder in what had been a steady pressure from the ley. The trail of bodies led in a smooth arc toward Baron Leethe and the head Prime, around the curve of the room. The Baron watched him, the Prime’s attention riveted on the Nexus. The Prime’s hands were raised, like those of the Primes the Hound had killed, his face tortured with concentration, pale and sheened with sweat.

  The Hound began walking toward the Baron, his pace steady, not rushing. The Baron gripped the handle of a knife thrust through his belt, but the Hound ignored the gesture. It wasn’t a fighting knife. It was decorative, and as the Hound advanced, the Baron’s hand fell away from the blade.

  “We can come to some agreement, I’m certain,” he muttered when the Hound was twenty paces away.

  The Hound shook his head, raising the bloodied knives before him.

  The Baron raised his chin defiantly.

  To the side, the head Prime gasped at the strain, sweat dripping from his chin, his hands trembling. Before the Hound could advance on the Baron, the head Prime wheezed, “I . . . I can’t hold it.”

  Something deep inside of him audibly tore and he sighed, a trickle of blood coming from his nose. His arms dropped, and then he collapsed to the floor, his head falling to face the Hound. He was already dead, his eyes wide, one of them bloodshot and skewed in the wrong direction.

  The Hound and the Baron looked down at the body, toward each other, then at the Nexus.

  The white light fountaine
d out of the control, the remaining Primes crying out and collapsing on all sides, some succumbing to the waves of ley that roiled out from the center.

  The Hound felt the pressure from the Nexus triple, the strange shudder amplified, shivering in his bones and pressing hard against the inside of his head. In sudden realization, he lunged toward the Baron, knives raised.

  He never made it.

  The Nexus exploded, the ley breaching its containment in a wave of pure, hellish light. It consumed the Baron and the Hound in less than a heartbeat, seared the Primes and the bodies of the enforcers from existence, and tore through the ceiling of the chamber and the park above. It rose into the sky and expanded outward, engulfing the Flyers’ Tower, the Baron’s palace. It engulfed the entire central city, and still it expanded, burning through the Ganges and Tiana Rivers, water vaporized, and then deeper into Tumbor. Sky barges were scorched from the air, and the ground shuddered beneath the onslaught, the red stone of the surrounding strata cracking.

  And even as the white fire raged above ground, even as the earth shook, the fire within the Nexus channeled itself into the ley lines that connected Tumbor to the entire network and sent a pulse outward in all directions, toward Farrade and the Temerite coast to the east, the Archipelago and the Gorrani Flats and Horn to the south, the Demesnes and the lands farther west—

  And to Erenthrall and the rest of the Baronies to the north.

  Augustus tightened his grip on the ley, his anger coloring the Tapestry around him, and flung the presence of the intruder up against the rounded stone tunnel of the ley conduit. He’d come to the conclusion the traitor was nothing more than a Wielder; he wasn’t powerful enough to be a Prime. A Prime would have put up more resistance, would have been able to keep Augustus at bay longer.

  But this Wielder, this insufferable, disastrous interloper! This meddler, who’d somehow managed to weaken the network so easily, with so little power—!

  Augusts gritted his teeth, seized the nuisance, and drove him into the ceiling. He could feel the Wielder weakening, the hold on his block at the entrance to the conduit wavering. He’d break any moment, Augustus having wasted precious seconds dealing with him, seconds he could have spent bolstering the Nexus. The thought infuriated him. He seized the presence again and slammed it into the bottom of the channel, holding him there, increasing the pressure as the interloper struggled. Back beneath the Nexus, he could hear his own breath hissing through his teeth, could feel his face throbbing with his rage, but he didn’t let up. He wanted to strangle this man, this heathen, this peasant with pretensions of power.

  But then something throbbed through the entire system, an unsettling shiver. He glanced up, his attention within the conduit faltering. The traitor slipped from his grasp and fled, back toward Eld, like a dog with its tail between its legs, but Augustus could only spare a moment of derision for him. As the traitor fled, the block he’d placed on the conduit dissolved, the Tapestry slipping back into its natural folds. Augustus shot toward the Nexus, closing the conduit behind him with a snap, sealing off Eld’s direct access to the heart of the network. As he returned to his body, he barked, “What happened?”

  Temerius spun around, startled. “I don’t know. But we’ve managed to stabilize nearly half of the crystals. No one appears to be working up above. We haven’t felt any activity from the Primes up there.”

  “Most are probably dead,” Augustus said. “From the dome’s collapse.”

  Temerius flinched.

  Augustus ignored him, beginning to pace back and forth before the Nexus. The shiver disturbed him. He’d never felt anything like it on the ley before, and it had shot through the entire network, hitting every node, every locus in the outer reaches. It was as if the entire structure had been seized and shaken.

  The image didn’t hearten him.

  “Something’s wrong,” he muttered, but before Temerius could respond, he dove back into the ley, began methodically checking the integrity of the conduits. Not the ley itself, but the actual channels and corridors that the ley traversed, the stone and bedrock.

  He felt the pulse while in East Forks. It roared through the massive conduit connecting Erenthrall to Tumbor without a sound, but it roared nonetheless. The river stone that had been used at this ancient node trembled, the earth quaking as the pulse approached, the pressure inside the conduit increasing exponentially with each passing heartbeat. Augustus had time to think that it felt like the approach of a storm, the ley receding in a sudden rush—

  And then it hit. Augustus’ mind was incinerated in East Forks, his body collapsing in the Nexus as if it were a puppet whose strings had been cut, still breathing, heart still pounding, nothing but a husk. Temerius stared in confusion, the crystals above beginning to quake.

  They shattered simultaneously, the shards of glass splintering and needling the Primes, those closest flayed instantly. The shards peppered Temerius’ skin and he gasped, but before he could truly sense the pain, the Nexus exploded.

  Ley surged through the conduits, blossomed out through the dome, and expanded rapidly. The ground shook. The citizens of Erenthrall nearest the Nexus had a moment to turn, to gape, and then the ley burned them from existence. The towers of Grass snapped near their bases, debris flung toward the sky, pushed by the ley as it expanded. It consumed Grass, seared everything living and unprotected from existence, then swallowed the surrounding districts, rising higher, the radius of destruction increasing with every heartbeat. The buildings of Stone cracked and fractured. The water of the channels in Canal and the Tiana and Urate Rivers evaporated, and still it pushed on.

  Then, when its edge began to reach the outermost districts, it began to slow. Its fury dissipated, the piercing white light of the ley fading into the air. Nothing exposed to the direct power near its heart remained alive, the streets and alleys, bridges and towers swept clean. Only those who had been protected by buildings that had not crumbled in the ley’s wake survived. Farther from its center, bodies littered the streets, the power of the ley enough to kill but not incinerate. Those farthest away lived, but were stunned, a few driven insane.

  When the earth settled, the pulse continued on beyond Erenthrall. But when the roar of debris and destruction had faded, there wasn’t stunned silence, like a held breath.

  Instead, there was a high-pitched whine that shivered in the bones of the earth, coming from directly over the remains of Grass.

  PART V

  Twenty-Five

  KARA WOKE AND moaned, her entire body aching. Her first breath was choked with stone dust and she gagged, coughing, making every ache worse. Her head pounded. Not the thud of a headache, but something deeper, as if her brain had been bruised at its core. She winced and tried to take a shallow breath, the dust tasting gritty and bitter in her mouth. She opened her eyes—

  And saw nothing but darkness.

  Her eyes widened, as if seeking more light, but there was none, and the grit in the air stung and made her tear up. Her other senses kicked in. Pebbles rattled against each other as something shifted in the darkness. Small stones rained down from above, striking her shoulders where she lay on the floor. Nearby, the sound muted, she thought she heard someone screaming, but she couldn’t tell. It was too faint. She smelled nothing but crushed rock, her nose already filled with grit. It covered her face, her arms, her entire body.

  Clenching her teeth, she moved her arm, raising herself onto her elbow. She hissed at the pain, but as she shifted into a sitting position the aches began to work loose. She reached out to either side of the cell the Dogs had placed her in and felt the wall to one side, the wall that had been at her back when she’d sensed the hideous pulse of power descend on the city. The earth had heaved after that, a crack that shook the heavens flinging her to the floor, even as she felt the Tapestry around her convulse.

  She hadn’t even had time to roll onto her back before she’d blacked out.


  Raising one hand to her head she touched her temples, the throbbing intensifying for a moment. The convulsion must have knocked her out, and the headache was the result.

  Tentatively, she tried to sense the Tapestry, her breath rushing out in relief when she could. She’d thought she’d been burned out by the wave of energy. But the Tapestry was there.

  Except something was horribly wrong. The patterns were distorted, twisted . . . off.

  Keeping one hand above her, she rose into a crouch, then stood and began feeling her way along the wall. The cell wasn’t large, but before she’d taken two steps her foot hit something hard on the floor. Reaching down, she found a huge chunk of stone. She felt all around her and discovered a rockfall and realized one of the walls of the cell had collapsed.

  In horror, she scrambled around the edge of the fall, desperate to find the door, hoping it hadn’t been where the fall was. A puff of air pushed against her face a moment before her hands found a massive crack in the wall. Farther along, she found the door, cursing as splintered wood jabbed her hand. The door had folded near its center. Feeling upward, she realized why.

  The ceiling was lower. She could touch it with her hand, her arm not even straightened. The Amber Tower had collapsed.

  She suppressed a shudder and swallowed a dry sob, the weight of the building above suddenly pressing down on her. She forced herself to remain standing and felt around the edges of the door. A gap appeared where the lock had once been, the crack in the wall intersecting with the doorframe there, but when she tugged on the door it was lodged tight.

  She moved on, exploring the rest of the cell in short order. The remaining walls were solid. The only way out was through the door.