Shattering the Ley

by Joshua Palmatier

  The entire city was cloaked in the filigree arms of the distortion, some passing through the remains of the towers in Grass, others snaking down into the earth, Erenthrall fractured into a thousand different shards. Some of those shards glowed from within as if lit with daylight. Others appeared to be filled with ley, pulsing a hot white.

  And everything was eerily silent. No sound at all, except for the noise Allan made as he moved—the rustle of cloth, his breath, an occasional cough.

  They came up on one of the edges between shards, the frozen lightning a lacework along a tilted plane before them. Allan slowed, shifted her into a new position, and said, “We have to move slower through the walls. And it will feel strange.”

  “Like what?”

  Allan simply frowned and shook his head, ducking down as he pressed forward so that he passed between two jagged edges of lightning. Kara’s chest compressed and she struggled to breathe, her skin tingling as if she’d just dunked her entire body into frigid water. She shivered, a bone-aching chill settling over her—

  And then the pressure against her chest loosened and they passed through to the other side. With her first indrawn breath, Kara tasted a difference in the air; it was sharper, crisper. She took it in greedily, hadn’t even realized that her breathing had been stifled before. The light was different here as well, almost gray, like just before dawn.

  “Wait,” she said, and Allan slowed before she motioned him on again and continued. “What time of day is it? When I woke, I thought it was night, but here it almost feels like dawn.”

  “I don’t know. I won’t know until we step beyond the distortion. All of the shards appear to be caught in different phases of time, some moving faster than others. At least that’s what it looked like to me. But there’s still something more you need to see.”

  “What?”

  Allan shook his head. “I can’t show you until we leave the distortion. And I want to hear an untarnished opinion.”

  Kara pressed him, but he wouldn’t relent and so she settled back and watched as they moved from shard to shard, slowing at the walls, the same pressure and coldness seeping into her bones at each. She reached out on the Tapestry and felt the distortion around her, but its sheer magnitude daunted her. Her instinct was to heal it, to fix it, but she had no idea where to begin. She tried to push the thought from her mind, but kept returning to it as they traveled.

  Allan didn’t head straight for the bridges or to the west. He wove through the shards, seeking out specific locations to pass through, bypassing some shards altogether. He claimed that some shards were tainted, as if rotten or decaying, while others felt as if they vibrated, making it unpleasant to pass through them. At her insistence, they stepped into one, Kara nearly gagging and slipping from his grip at the stench after only one breath. He dragged her back through the wall and moved on without a word.

  By the time they reached the bridge over the Tiana River, Kara could walk on her own, although Allan still had to support her, aside from keeping in contact with her. They crossed the bridge, passing through two walls, and then into the outer districts. The shards were larger here, the walls farther apart. Kara forced Allan to stop for a rest, but when he offered to carry her again, she dragged herself to her feet and they continued. Her stomach growled. Her mouth was dry and tasted of linen.

  And then they passed beyond the final wall, slid out of the distortion, moving from a shard of night into midafternoon daylight. Kara blinked up at the sun, stumbling, Allan steadying her before letting her go. The absence of his hand on her forearm felt strange.

  “The others took shelter in a building on the edge of this district,” Allan said, “beside the river’s new channel.”

  “What new channel?” Kara noted the lack of surprise in her voice. She’d reached the point where she simply accepted everything as if it had always been that way. She knew it was weariness and exhaustion, but she didn’t feel tired, merely . . . numb.

  “The distortion blocked the rivers, so they found new paths around the city. Right now, the Tiana’s churning through the streets, taking down buildings to the west. The quakes haven’t stopped either, so it keeps shifting.”

  As if mocking him, the earth shook, but it was only a minor tremor.

  It still unsettled her. She said sharply, “Where are they? I need to see them—Cory and the others. I need to know—”

  —that they’re real. Although she wasn’t certain what was real anymore. Her mind felt fuzzy.

  “Here,” Allan said, moving down one of the streets, the buildings on either side heavily damaged because they hadn’t been built of stone. “They aren’t far.”

  Kara followed, climbing over the debris, thankful for the breeze that pushed against her face and for the chirp of birds, the hiss of sand against stone, the eerie howl of wind through vacant windows—desolate sounds, but sounds nonetheless.

  She heard the others before she saw them, laughter and the shrieks of children. They rounded a corner, the building at its edge surprisingly whole, and found a stone building still standing across the thoroughfare. Youngsters were playing in the street, tossing around a leather-stitched ball in some sort of game, overseen by a few women and twice as many men, at least half of them carrying weapons and obviously on watch.

  “Some of those that survived have already formed into loose groups and aren’t friendly,” Allan said wearily, voice low. “We’ve already been attacked twice.”

  The guards spotted them first, a warning shout rising before they recognized Allan.

  And then the two were inundated with people, everyone talking, everyone trying to touch her, the kids screaming, their voices shrill. She shrank back from them, Allan forging his way through the crowd ahead of her toward the building. They ducked inside and left the majority of the people behind, only to be greeted by those inside.

  Kara had reached her limit when Cory was suddenly there.

  She burst into tears when she saw him, reached forward and clutched him close. The strength left her legs and she clung to him, unable to control herself. She was vaguely aware of Allan and Hernande ushering people from the room, closing the door so that only Cory, Hernande, Allan, and herself remained.

  No one spoke until she trailed down into sobs and pulled back from Cory, wiping her nose with the back of her sleeve. She scrubbed at her eyes and said, “I’m sorry. I—I didn’t believe Allan when he said you’d survived.” She laughed, the sound odd and uncomfortable. “I don’t know why.”

  “I think it’s perfectly understandable,” Hernande said, stepping forward to touch Kara’s shoulder in comfort. “Nothing feels stable anymore. Nothing seems real.” He glanced toward Allan. “Has she seen?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think she noticed on our way here, after we left the distortion.”

  Hernande frowned and turned back to Kara with an uncertain expression.

  “What is it?” Kara asked.

  Hernande sighed. “Come see for yourself. And then you can tell us what you think.”

  They all shared a disquieting look, but then Hernande motioned her toward a set of stairs in the far corner of the main room. They ascended three flights, emerging on the roof of the building.

  Kara could see the extent of the distortion from here, could see the edges of the city as it sprawled out onto the plains that rolled into the horizon to the north, west, and south. The distortion itself was immense, a huge dome of colored light, the remains of the buildings within appearing even more broken through the jagged edges of the shards and the vibrant white of the lightning. She wondered how long they had before it closed, wondered what the city would look like once it did, thinking of the death the much smaller distortions had caused in Erenthrall before this.

  She shuddered, moved to the edge of the building, the wind blowing her hair across her face. The sun had begun to lower, the plains golden in its
glow. She scanned the city outside the distortion below, saw the river where it cut its new path through the streets, could even faintly hear it. When she saw nothing unusual—or nothing she wasn’t already expecting from what Allan had told her—she raised her eyes to the plains. “What am I supposed to s—”

  And she saw it. A faint pinprick of white light blazing on the horizon, like a star. Except it couldn’t be a star because it glistened on the horizon north of where the sun would set.

  She spun, a horrifying thought filling her mind, her stomach dropping away abruptly as she saw another fiery white light burning to the south, in the direction of Tumbor. The first must have been Dunmara in the Reaches. She couldn’t see anything in the direction of Farrade, or to the east, because the distortion blocked her view, but she was willing to bet there were white lights burning on the horizon there as well. In fact, if she squinted her eyes and looked farther north, she thought she could see additional lights in the Steppe, but she couldn’t be certain.

  She turned back to the others, their faces grim. “They’re distortions aren’t they? Distortions that haven’t quickened yet.”

  Hernande’s mouth pinched tight, then he sighed. “That’s what we thought as well.” He looked older, his face drawn. But his eyes were bright, lively, young, focused on Kara. “So what are we going to do about them?”

  Kara turned away from his gaze, placed her hands on the wall of the building, and stared out to the north, toward the light over Dunmara. The stone felt gritty beneath her hands, the wind cold against her face, but her jaw clenched with determination.

  “We have to fix them.”