by Spurrier, Jo
When she felt Isidro stir, Sierra gave him a sleepy smile without opening her eyes, and let him kiss her awake. The sounds of pleasure were contagious, and Isidro kissed her more deeply, pulling her closer as Sierra ran her hands over the muscles of his belly and his chest, so different from his painfully thin frame of just a few months earlier. In the darkness, smelling of leather and smoke, she felt safe and loved and perfectly content. It reminded her of when her family was still whole and she shushed her siblings’ giggles when the sounds of lovemaking passed from couple to couple in her parents’ furs.
When Cam entered Mira Sierra felt the echo from both of them. It wrung a gasp from her lips, which Isidro stifled with a kiss. She wrapped her legs around him, aching with pleasure as an echo of his sensation joined the others. The power taken from pain might be vast and endless, but it lacked the intoxicating sweetness of power raised between willing lovers. Sierra felt as though she was drowning in the heady rush.
She fought to keep from being swept away — this was too fine to waste by losing herself to senselessness. Sierra focussed on Isidro’s face, reaching up to touch his cheek, but as she did, a flicker of pain crossed his features, and he went still with a shudder of breath.
In the furs nearby, Cam cried out with a gasp of pain. Sierra’s power spilled in a glowing nimbus of blue light, and by the glow she saw him hunch, pressing a hand to his chest. Mira whimpered, too, and writhed beneath him
Isidro went rigid and began to tremble and, as Sierra watched in horror, his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed on top of her. ‘Isidro!’ she gasped — he was so heavy she couldn’t breathe under his weight. He did not respond, and she knew he was past hearing.
Sierra drew her knees to her chest and pushed him off, rigid and convulsing, with his left arm twisted beneath him.
Cam and Mira had broken apart — Cam stumbled towards her while Mira propped herself up on one arm, pressing the other hand to her chest as she struggled to draw breath.
‘Sirri, what are you doing?’ Cam shouted over the roar of her power, and Sierra realised the tent was full of writhing strands. She gaped in horror until Cam grabbed her shoulder and shook her out of it once more.
‘The chamber!’ Sierra gasped, and Cam nodded. ‘Go!’
She snatched up a discarded shirt — whose it was she didn’t know — and pulled it on as she ran for the cascade on bare feet. Behind her, Cam shouted for Rhia, and by the time she reached the platform overlooking the cavern, the entire camp was in uproar.
Cam watched numbly as Rhia set a pillow under Isidro’s head and knelt out of reach of his flailing arms. ‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘Sierra did something to us,’ Cam said. ‘She didn’t mean to, but I can still feel it.’ It was horribly familiar. Before she allowed herself to be taken by the Akharians, he’d let her perform a Blood-Mage ritual on him, binding his life-force to fuel the enchantment that let them communicate. It had felt just like this: like a barbed hook entangled in his vitals.
A moment later, the pain faded, and he could breathe without feeling as though his chest would tear apart. At the same time, Isidro’s convulsions stopped, and he lay still, panting in ragged breaths.
Mira had pulled on a shirt, and dumped some clothes at Cam’s side. ‘Bright Sun be thanked, it’s stopped.’
‘Because Sierra made it to the chamber,’ Cam said, struggling into his clothes.
Amaya hovered nearby, wide-eyed and frightened, and Rhia beckoned her over to deliver instructions on how to care for someone in a seizure. She pried one of Isidro’s eyelids open, but his eyes were rolled back in his head.
‘What do we do?’ Cam asked.
‘Wait,’ Rhia told him. ‘Most wake after a few moments, but he will likely need to sleep for a while. Has he ever had a fit before? As a child, perhaps?’
‘No, never,’ Cam said.
‘Then it should not take long,’ Rhia said. She covered him with the blankets, and they waited. And waited. But Isidro did not stir.
Sierra hugged her knees to her chest, and shivered. The shirt was Isidro’s — she could smell his scent on the cloth, and she recognised the stitching where she’d sewn down a loose cuff for him. Now the sleeves were wet with tears, and she was chilled to the bone. The installation was warmer than the cavern, but that only meant it was above freezing. There were blankets in the nearby chambers, but she didn’t dare leave the shielded room.
An age seemed to pass before the silence was broken by someone coming down the stairs. When Cam appeared in the doorway he seemed utterly exhausted, so serious and so sombre that Sierra feared the worst. ‘Is he d-dead?’ she asked, her teeth chattering from the cold.
The words seemed to startle him out of a stupor. ‘Fires Below, you must be frozen,’ he said. ‘No, Sirri, he’s alive. Let me get you a blanket and I’ll tell you more.’
He brought her a pair of blankets from the next chamber, and sent for her clothes. By the time he returned she was tightly wrapped in layers of wool but still shivering violently.
Cam entered the chamber and leant against the opposite wall. ‘He hasn’t woken,’ Cam said. ‘And he’s had another fit. Sirri … Look, I know you didn’t mean any harm, but we have to know what you did to him.’
Sierra couldn’t help herself. She began to cry again. ‘Cam, I honestly don’t know. If I could talk to Nirveli, or even Rasten, I might be able to find out, but I don’t dare leave this room. Maybe you could talk to Nirveli, or find someone to run messages …’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s our best option. We could ask Delphine, but I’m not sure it’s wise to let her know Issey’s out of action. He’s the only one with any influence over her …’ He broke off and turned to the stairwell as Sierra heard someone hurrying down.
Amaya appeared in the doorway, her eyes fearful. ‘My lord? Rhia asks you to come at once. He’s having another fit.’
‘He’s getting weaker,’ Rhia said. Isidro had fallen still again, and the healer pressed her ear to his bare chest with a frown. ‘We have to do something.’
‘But what?’ Cam demanded. ‘You’re the cursed physician, Rhia! Tell us what to do!’
‘This is no physical ailment! If Sierra did this then sorcery is the cause. We need a mage to cure him.’
Delphine touched the stone bound against her wrist and wiped her fingertip on the leg of her trousers, leaving a faint smear of chalky dust.
Something had gone horribly wrong. If the shouts hadn’t given it away, the disruption of the usual routine would have made it clear. The milky translucence of the stones turning a dead, chalky grey was just one more sign.
She bit her lip and swallowed hard against the lump forming in her throat. A few weeks earlier, she would have been ecstatic to find the restraints breaking down. Now that she had come to appreciate what was at stake here, she just felt ill.
When she heard footsteps approaching her tent, Delphine pulled her sleeves down as Cam ducked inside. He glanced around her little prison with flinty eyes, and then fixed his gaze on her. ‘On your feet,’ he told her. ‘Come with me.’
Isidro’s foster-brother still terrified her. She had never been the sort of woman to send lingering looks after soldiers; she preferred her men urbane and refined, not wrapped in leather and steel. Delphine started to rise, but not quickly enough to please him — he seized her wrist and hauled her to her feet, pulling her towards the door before she had a chance to reach for her boots.
‘Wait —’
Grudgingly, he allowed her to put on her shoes and snatch up her coat, but he dragged her from the tent before it was settled around her shoulders.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked him, forced into a trot to match his long stride. His grip pressed the wrist-band into her flesh, but he ignored Delphine’s yelp of pain just as he ignored her question.
Cam hurried her up the cascade and into the installation. People were everywhere — far more than she usually saw there, which the common fo
lk usually avoided out of superstition.
The lower level was crowded, but the people scattered from Cam’s path. A moment later, Mira was there, prying Cam’s hand free of her wrist. ‘Cam, let her go, you’re scaring the poor woman.’ She turned to those crowding the corridor. ‘Anyone who doesn’t have a specific task, leave now. Give us some room.’
There was scarcely a mutter as three-quarters of those present filed out and up the spiral staircase. Left behind were Rhia and her assistant, Amaya, Anoa and some other folk who Delphine didn’t know, though they had the demeanour of servants. There was also the other nobleman, the one who was sweet on Anoa, and a handful of guards armed with bows and spears.
Lying on the floor in the midst of it all was Isidro, wrapped in blankets on a makeshift stretcher. His face was ashen and his lips tinged blue. She gaped at him and then turned for a moment to the door of the dampening chamber, where Sierra gazed down at him with red-rimmed eyes.
Delphine hurried to his side. ‘What happened?’
‘We’re not sure,’ Rhia said. ‘Perhaps you can help?’
She reached automatically for her power, as she still found herself doing a dozen times a day. The cursed restraints were an impervious wall, but did the barrier feel different this time? Or was it just wishful thinking? Delphine sat back and raised her hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘Not with these things around my wrists.’
Mira and Cam moved to flank her. ‘Roll up your sleeves,’ Cam commanded. ‘But be warned — give us any trouble, and Sierra will hit you like an avalanche. Do you understand?’
Delphine looked from his green eyes to Sierra’s stormy gaze, and nodded. Only Isidro would sense any change in those stones — Sierra was too powerful to notice the damage.
Mira produced a pair of shears, and within moments the hateful things were slipped from her wrists. It felt as though she was able to breathe again after weeks of suffocation, but the pallor of Isidro’s face had her too deeply worried to enjoy the sensation.
‘Let’s see what we have …’ Delphine said, and she slipped into a light trance to see the shifting currents of power welling up from his core. What she saw was shrunken and as ashen grey as his skin, except for one point on his chest where a small, ragged wound gushed energy like smoke streaming from a chimney. ‘Oh, by the Good Goddess … what in all the hells happened?’ Delphine exclaimed, looking up at the people looming over her, and with a shock she saw similar wounds inside Mira and Cam. Those injuries leaked a trickle of energy, not a flood, but they were unmistakeably the same.
When neither of them answered at once, she turned to Sierra. ‘You have to tell me what happened.’
‘I don’t know,’ Sierra said. ‘We were in our furs, and he blacked out and had a fit. I came down here right away …’
‘Can’t you see what’s happening?’ Delphine demanded. ‘He’s leaking life-force like a torn water-skin.’
‘I don’t care what caused it, I need you to fix it!’ Cam thundered. ‘Now!’
Delphine reflexively drew breath to argue, but she bit back the words. He was right, there was no time to waste. But she had never seen anything like this before, had never even heard of it. A mage could work to exhaustion, depleting his store of power until he lost consciousness, but only those as highly trained as the military mages could harm themselves that way. An ordinary mage would pass out before doing any great injury though it would be days before he could perform magecraft after so depleting his reserves. This was a different matter entirely, and there was only one way it could have happened. The Sympath had done it to him. No Akharian Sympath had ever drained one of their servitors in such a way. It had to be a result of the corruption.
She sat back on her heels. ‘There’s a device in my gear, a slab of green stone about so big —’ she held her hands about a forearm’s length apart ‘— with handles at each end.’ Her captors were looking at her blankly, and she desperately cast around for someone who knew what she was talking about. ‘Where’s Lucia?’
‘Her name is Amaya,’ Rhia said firmly, but at a snap of her fingers the girl appeared at her side. Delphine repeated her description, and Amaya nodded at once. ‘I know it, madame,’ she said, and hurried away.
‘Be careful with it,’ Delphine called after her. It was a prototype, and wretchedly fragile.
Delphine turned back to Isidro. There was one avenue she could explore on her own. The Blood-Mages had tapped into the same well of life-force now gushing out of him, and they’d left a mark to show their tracks. Knowing how much he hated it, Delphine had to steel herself to reach for the old scar. Just have some guts and go for it, you wretched woman, she told herself. ‘Help me roll him onto his side.’
Rhia was the first to assist her. ‘What’s happening to him?’
‘In a way, he’s bleeding to death.’
He was heavy and limp, but Rhia seemed accustomed to manipulating people in such a state. She steadied him while Delphine felt for the insubstantial scar.
Once she made contact with the sigil, she felt the energy pumping out of him with every pulse of his heart, but still there was nothing to tell her how to stop the flood.
Then something shifted beneath her hand — it was as though she’d gathered up a handful of sticks, only to discover one was a snake. Before she could react, it struck through her, and a presence that reeked of tainted power shoved itself into her mind to look out through her eyes.
Who are you? a male voice demanded in Ricalani. Delphine could only stammer in response, but that seemed enough to let him identify her. Oh, the Akharian mage, he said, speaking in her own tongue this time, but with a distinctly northern accent.
She realised then who it must be — who it could only be. Rasten, the Blood-Mage’s apprentice.
W-what do you want? she faltered, and realised she was trembling.
To save his wretched life, if possible, he replied. Don’t ask me why, I don’t truly know. As he spoke she felt him poking about in her mind, sniffing in corners and riffling through memories, even testing the depths of her power. Isidro had always been utterly helpless against these invasions, and she, too, had no means to fight them.
I want to save him too, but we’re wasting time, she told him. What did she do?
When she realised she was draining him, she panicked, he said. She doesn’t know how to safely disengage, so she simply tore away. It ripped him open.
So, we have to sew the wound closed, like any other gash. How?
I don’t know. You’re not a Blood-Mage or a Sympath. Your power is of a different order, and I don’t know how to make it translate.
At that point Amaya returned with the device, and Rasten released Delphine to take it. She and Rhia rolled Isidro onto his back, and Delphine laid the slab of mottled green stone on his chest while she activated the stones set in bronze fittings around the edge. The enchantment was slow to rouse, like most complex workings.
As she waited, her mind raced. She may not be either a Blood-Mage or a Sympath, but Isidro’s Blood-Mage’s mark gave her a way to reach his life-force. That was her way in, she just needed to find some way to manipulate the wound once she got there.
She turned to Sierra. ‘The Blood-Mage text: does it mention bleeding energy through wounds of the soul, or some such thing?’
Sierra frowned. ‘I … yes. Yes, I think so —’
‘Someone get that book,’ Delphine snapped. ‘Bring it here at once.’
There was a quick scatter of conversation, and someone left at a run. Delphine didn’t see who — Alameda’s device had finally woken up. It was still set to viewing bones, and the slab glowed with a green tracery, illuminating his spine and his curving ribs.
Rhia gasped and reached for it, but quickly pulled back rather than disturb Delphine’s work. Delphine turned her attention to the settings and adjusted them to view the subject’s latent energy. This particular function was not as well developed as the bone-viewer — Alameda had stumbled on the capability, but they
had no practical use for it. They had left it there as a curiosity, fortunately. As the slab dimmed and brightened again, the ragged-edged wound was plainly obvious, exuding a great gout of energy with every beat of his heart. At the sight of it the Ricalanis around her murmured in wonder and awe, and Sierra stifled a sob.
A flurry of footsteps heralded Anoa returning with the book, and Delphine waved her to Sierra. ‘I can’t read it and hold this at the same time. Give it to Sierra.’
‘She can’t read Mesentreian that well,’ Cam said.
‘But Rhia can,’ Sierra said. ‘Rhia, will you help me?’ Anoa handed Sierra the book and she settled it in her lap to begin flicking through the pages. ‘I know I saw it …’ It seemed to take her an age to locate the passage.
‘It says … a mage-talented subject may tear himself free of the ritual tether. A reluctant Sympath may rebel to this end, too, if proper discipline has not been instilled. This causes a wound of the soul through which the subject may bleed out. The wound can be repaired if the subject is of particular value, but in most cases the operation is too delicate and time-consuming to bother with. Instead, hasten to the end-ritual to ensure what little value the subject retains is not wasted …’ Rhia read on silently for a moment, and then looked up. ‘That’s it,’ she said in Akharian. ‘It just goes on to talk about different sigils and how they’re used.’
‘Is there anything else?’ Delphine asked Sierra.
‘No, I don’t think so. Blood-Mages use people up and cast them aside; they never stir themselves to save a life.’
‘Well, at least we know it’s possible to repair the wound,’ Delphine said. Rasten, are you still there?
You know who I am, then?
It was no great deduction. Do you have any insight?
No. I’ve never had this happen to a subject of mine.
‘Right,’ Delphine said aloud. ‘Right then.’ She could see what she needed to do, and she could reach into him via the sigil. All she needed was a way to patch that hole. Isidro had no power to spare — the cloud of energy pumping from the wound with each heartbeat had grown noticeably smaller. Sierra had energy to burn, but she couldn’t venture beyond the shield. That left Delphine herself.