“I’m out of arrows,” he said.
She reached and grabbed all of hers that remained, handing them over. “Take them,” she spat when he resisted. “I’ll use Aielan’s Light instead.”
He nodded once, then grabbed the arrows and shoved them into the quiver on his back. There weren’t many left.
She spun, reaching deep down inside herself, reaching deep inside the earth as well, down toward the source of Aielan’s Light beneath the city.
Then she called it forth.
Colin jabbed his staff into Walter’s stomach and unleashed a burning pulse of power as it connected, even as Walter brought his sword down across Colin’s chest and threw a wave of power from his other hand. The sword nicked Colin’s chin as he jerked his head away, cut into his arm on the downswing, and then the power hit him full force and flung him backward. Walter screamed as Colin’s blast burst from the end of the staff before disengaging. Both of them hit the floor and scrambled to their feet, breathing hard. Walter was covered in scorch marks-on his chest, stomach, arms, and back-his clothing seared and smoking. Colin’s entire body ached with bruises from the energy punches Walter had flung at him. Scores of nicks and cuts riddled his body. They glared at each other across the debris of the crystal dome, night sky above, the chamber lit only by the heartbeat of the Source at its center.
That heartbeat pulsed through Colin’s blood, seethed through his skin with its urgency. The Well was filling; it was nearly awake.
Walter leaped across the distance separating them and dove at Colin with an overhead swing. Colin barely caught it with his staff, the force of the blow driving Colin and Walter to the ground. Colin’s back slammed into the debris, stones and shards of crystal biting into his back, but he heaved upward with the staff and flung Walter up and over his body using all of his strength. As soon as Walter’s weight lifted off of him, he rolled into a crouch. He heard Walter grunt as he hit the ground, turned in time to see the Wraith slam into the side of one of the chunks of crystal, and then he pushed forward with his feet, bringing his staff up and around.
It cracked into Walter’s wrist. Bones crunched, and Walter screamed as he lost his grip on the blade again. But Colin didn’t back off. Before the sword had halted in mid-fall, his staff pounded into Walter’s chest, into his side, his legs, his shoulder. He pummeled his age-old nemesis, primeval pressure building in his chest, escaping in a wordless cry of pent-up frustration riddled with childhood fears, with the rage of youth, with grief and nearly two hundred years of hatred. Through the tears coursing down his flushed face, he beat at Walter’s head, pounded the staff into the bully’s body, seeing the youthful Walter who’d kicked the shit out of him in Portstown. He saw the blurred image of an older Walter, face swirling with blackness and speckled with blood, after he’d slaughtered the Tamaell of the Alvritshai in the parley tent at the Escarpment. He vented all of the stress of searching for him in the years since, following in the Wraiths’ footsteps as they awakened the Wells, trying to catch them, to destroy them, only to have them slip away, as insubstantial as the Shadows that had tainted them.
And then he heard Walter laughing through his own strained and shortened breath.
Colin jerked back, breaking off his attack, his breath coming so fast and so short that he felt light-headed. Weakness shook his arms, his body, and he coughed harshly, trying to seize control of his hyperventilation. His skin was flushed and he felt hot and nauseous, his whole body trembling. The sensation was familiar, and he suddenly realized that this was how he’d felt after attacking Walter and his cronies with the sling back in Portstown, when he’d been only twelve years old.
And still Walter laughed. Face bloody and bruised, bones cracked, he still sucked in breath after breath and laughed. From his crumpled position against the slab of crystal, the Source’s light pulsing blue against his black-swirling, blood-spattered skin, he watched Colin, his grin cutting into Colin like a knife.
Colin straightened as Walter’s laughter faded into chuckles. When Walter tried to shift and grimaced in pain, Colin could see his teeth were stained red with blood. But still he chuckled.
Colin frowned in confusion. He stepped forward, stood over Walter, the Wraith staring up at him from where he’d collapsed.
“Why are you laughing?” he asked, although the question wasn’t for Walter. He didn’t expect the Wraith to answer, was surprised when Walter did.
“Because you’re too late,” Walter said, choking on blood as he spoke. He swallowed, face twisting in pain, and yet he grinned his bloody grin, saying more forcefully, “You’re too late.”
The Source suddenly flared with light, Colin turning as it pulsed upward and out, surging up through the floor and through Colin’s body. The heartbeat that had been escalating reached its height. Partially blinded, Colin could still make out the Lifeblood that had nearly reached the lip of the Well. At some point, while fighting with Walter, or attempting to beat him senseless, he’d let his hold on time go. They were in real time now, and as they fought, the process that Walter and the Wraiths had started had neared completion.
The Source stirred from its slumber.
With a sickening twist of rage, Colin realized it had all been a ruse. The entire fight between them had been nothing but a distraction. Walter had simply been keeping Colin occupied while the Well continued to fill.
Colin snapped his attention back to Walter to find the Wraith watching him.
“You can’t kill me,” Walter said. “We can’t die.”
“No,” Colin said, shifting his grip on his staff. He felt something deep inside him harden. “Not yet. But I can hurt you.”
Fear flickered for a brief moment across Walter’s face as Colin lifted his staff and then drove its end into Walter’s chest two-handed, releasing the power of the Lifeblood that coursed through him through the living wood in a flood. He held nothing back, the shame that had caused him to halt his attack with the sling in Portstown and had sent him staggering from Walter here in this ruined city a moment ago burned away. Walter screamed, louder than anything Colin had heard before, the pain in the sound reverberating in Colin’s head, in his bones, and yet he ground the staff harder into Walter’s chest. Walter writhed beneath the onslaught, arms juddering against the floor and crystal slab, legs kicking, heels drumming a staccato rhythm against the stone.
When the scream died, Colin jerked his staff away, Walter’s body arcing on its side as residual energy coursed through it, then collapsing back to the floor, the Wraith unconscious. Beneath the blackened and charred circle where his staff had connected to his body, Walter’s chest still moved. He still breathed.
Colin nearly drove the staff into him again, but wrenched himself away from the body and stalked toward the edge of the Well. The Lifeblood lapped within a few inches of the edge of the stone, but it had not fully awakened. There might still be time.
He raised his arms, staff in one hand-
And then sank into the power that coursed around him, into the eddies and flows of the Lifeblood, down and down into the Well, diving deep into the reservoir and the Source beneath. He let the Lifeblood fill him. Through its power, he felt a sudden flare, although it was distant and removed. He tasted it, recognized it as Aielan’s Light, and relaxed. Siobhaen must have called it. She was the only one he knew of in the chamber besides himself who could control it.
He wondered briefly why she’d needed it, but then shoved that concern aside. He didn’t have time. The Well was almost full, almost awake. Its power had escalated and was reaching its crest. It would peak within moments. He needed to halt it, or he would never be able to stop the attacks on the Seasonal Trees. If the Wraiths managed to solidify this power, they would be able to use it for years against the three races, decades perhaps. It might take him that long or longer to bring the rest of the Wells into balance enough that he could protect its power from the Wraiths.
He searched the Source for a way to halt the awakening. Lifeblood surged fro
m the reservoir below into the Well, the currents of the underground lake and the surrounding streams that fed and stemmed from it forcing the water higher. He knew from his attempts to balance the Wells to the west that cutting off the flow along one branch or widening it along another would affect the entire system. It had taken him years of experimentation to figure out how it had worked. The introduction of the reservoir had complicated that system immeasurably. Yet he had only a few minutes to figure out how to stop it now.
He paused his frantic search of the currents and focused on the Well in the ruined city. Trying to calm his thundering heart, heightened by the pulse of the awakening, he let himself sink into the flows beneath the city. The Lifeblood coursed through a maze of tunnels and chambers, like those the dwarren used beneath the plains. Those corridors lay everywhere, connected to the lake far beneath. All he needed to do was find which currents would ease the pressure on the one filling the Well and then divert them.
He tried to calm his breathing, tried to relax.
There.
Excitement cut through him, but he forced it back, focused on the one channel he’d chosen and then began pouring power through himself into the flows there. He pushed them to one side, tried to divert them into a new passage, as if he’d taken his hand and plunged it into the edge of a stream to affect the currents.
The Lifeblood reacted, swirling around him as if he were merely a stone, creating new eddies, but not blocking the main channel feeding the Well. The stream was too large. He needed more power.
Opening himself up further, he let more of the power of the Wells course through him, felt his presence expand in the stream, but it still wasn’t enough. He needed more. Shaking with the effort, he opened himself wider, and wider still, felt his control of the power trembling in his grasp. He had never extended himself this far, had never absorbed and held this much within himself, had never allowed so much of the Lifeblood to flow through him. He shuddered in ecstasy, on the verge of allowing it to carry him away, tasted its coldness to his core, the scent of ice and loam and earth overwhelming him.
And it wasn’t enough.
“I can’t,” he murmured, trying to push himself further, to block the flow of Lifeblood. “It’s too far along. I’m not strong enough. I can’t stop it.”
His voice drew his awareness back to his body, drew him back to the edge of the Well, the Lifeblood a finger’s breadth away from the top now. He felt Aielan’s Light burning around him, felt Siobhaen and Eraeth’s presence on the far side of the Well, heard Siobhaen shouting something, her voice thick with warning.
“I can’t,” he whispered, trying to answer her, despair beginning to wash through him.
The Wraiths were going to succeed. Walter was going to win. They’d planned everything too well, Colin and Aeren and the dwarren reacting too late.
Then pain punched through the despair, a white-hot, ragged pain that began in his back and erupted from his chest, searing through his body as it arched, someone grabbing hold of his shoulder to keep him steady as the pain widened, gripping his entire chest, sending sheets of fire into his arms and legs. He glanced down as blood gurgled up in the back of his throat, coating his mouth, and saw the end of Walter’s blade jutting out of his chest.
Walter’s breath blew hot against his neck as the Wraith whispered, “You never did open yourself completely to the Lifeblood and all it offered as I did, did you?”
The white fire of Aielan’s Light leaped from Siobhaen’s hands in an arc, burning into the outer ring of sukrael instantly, setting them afire. Their shrieks filled the blue-lit chamber as Siobhaen pushed the fire outward, the Shadows twisting and writhing as they tried to escape. Eraeth had an arrow nocked and ready to shoot, sight trained along its length as he swung it back and forth, searching for any of the sukrael that might break free, but there was no need. Siobhaen could feel them through the fire as it seethed through her, knew where to direct the tendrils of flame. They were like voids in the living world around her, pits of emptiness.
She filled those pits with fire.
There were over twenty of the sukrael left and they all died within the space of ten heartbeats. Their black bodies flapped in the white furnace that Siobhaen called forth, burned to embers as the Light flowed through her. She found herself murmuring prayers to Aielan, litanies from her youth coming to her lips without thought. She prayed to her ancestors, to the flames beneath Caercaern, to the fire she drew upon now, and when the last Shadow had ceased to exist she felt that fire taper off and die within her.
Weakness shuddered through her and she collapsed to her knees, then back onto her heels.
“Siobhaen!”
She turned toward Eraeth’s voice, removed from her body, hollowed out and burned to a cinder. She tried to smile in reassurance. “It came too easy,” she said, and her voice trembled. “I couldn’t control it.”
“You controlled it enough to kill the sukrael.”
She shook her head. He didn’t understand. “I could guide it, but I couldn’t control its power. It was too much. It burned me out.”
She could tell by his scrunched up look that he still didn’t understand.
Then movement caught her eye. Movement on the far side of the Well.
Shaeveran stood at the water’s edge, arms raised, staff in one hand, but his eyes were closed, his face tense with concentration. To her burnt-out senses, he appeared to be throbbing, as if he were greater than he appeared, filled to bursting. The bluish light of the Well washed over him, casting him in strange shadows.
But the movement came from behind him and to one side.
“Eraeth,” Siobhaen said in horror.
The Protector spun at the warning in her voice, bow already rising, string creaking as he drew the arrow back, fingers near his ear. But the Wraith had already risen, had already slipped behind the oblivious Shaeveran.
The human’s eyes flickered. His mouth moved, as if he were speaking.
Siobhaen couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to, too drained by Aielan’s Light. But she could still talk.
She drew in a deep breath and screamed, “Shaeveran! Behind you!”
And then the tip of a blade burst from Shaeveran’s chest. He arched back, but the Wraith’s hand clamped onto his shoulder and held him as the blade twisted and the Wraith murmured something in Shaeveran’s ear.
With a jerk, the Wraith withdrew the blade and let Shaeveran fall to the side.
Siobhaen couldn’t breathe. Her chest had constricted, her throat locked shut, mouth open. Horror tingled through her body, paralyzing her.
But not Eraeth.
She heard the twang of the bowstring, saw the first arrow streaking across the now completely full Well, the shaft shimmering with light from the water beneath. She felt it sink into the Wraith’s chest as if it had struck her own instead. She jerked, drawing air through the constriction, something painful tearing deep inside. A second and third arrow were already speeding across the Well after the first, the sound of the bow somehow amplified in her ears. The Wraith’s body had twisted, the force of the first shaft throwing him back. The second arrow hit him high in the shoulder, kicking him in the opposite direction, the third taking him in the throat.
The fourth took him in the eye.
He fell, Siobhaen so attuned to the chamber she heard his clothes rustle, heard the thud of the body hit the stone. Then Eraeth’s hands were under her armpits, heaving her up and slinging one arm across his shoulders so he could support her. She instinctively pulled away, not wanting his help, disgusted at the presumption, but when she dragged her feet under her, they would not support her weight.
“Come on,” Eraeth growled. “I don’t know how long he’ll stay down.” He began hauling her around the edge of the Well, heading toward the bodies. She noted he unconsciously veered around the blackened ash where the sukrael had died.
“He isn’t dead?” she asked, her voice dry and ragged.
“No.”
&nbs
p; Stunned, she let Eraeth carry her for a moment, then began struggling to regain her footing, her legs tingling as the bloodflow returned to them. She hissed at the sensation, but by the time they’d reached Shaeveran’s side, she could stand on her own.
Eraeth let her go and dropped down beside Shaeveran, rolling him onto his back.
Siobhaen sucked air through her teeth.
The hole in Shaeveran’s chest still leaked blood, a large pool of it already surrounding his body, his clothes plastered to his side, his hair matted with it. More blood than Siobhaen had ever seen. Some of it had reached the edge of the Well, curling red-black in the water before dispersing. Shaeveran’s face was ashen, his hands pale, his lips blue. And yet he breathed. If she hadn’t seen his chest moving, she would have known by the bubbles of blood that formed at the hole in his chest. But his breathing was slow, perhaps one breath for every three of Siobhaen’s.
“Is he alive?” she asked.
Eraeth gave her a scathing look. “Of course.”
Siobhaen tensed at the derision, but Eraeth had already dismissed her, was digging through his satchel. He pulled out one of the waterskins, uncapped it, and upended the water onto the ground.
Siobhaen lurched forward. “What are you doing? We need that! We’re in the middle of a desert!”
He thrust the skin into her hands. “Fill this with water from the Source as best you can. He may want it when he awakens. Don’t touch the water. Don’t even touch the waterskin where it gets wet. And for Aielan’s sake, don’t drink any of it.”
He didn’t wait to see if she obeyed him, turning back to Shaeveran instead, ripping the bloody shirt apart over the wound and beginning to clean it, not being gentle. As soon as he cleared it, the wound filled with fresh blood. Dark blood, rich and vital. Eraeth swore and continued working, motions frantic.
Siobhaen shuddered and turned away. Shaeveran had told her he couldn’t die, but she hadn’t believed it until now. He shouldn’t still be alive. Any Alvritshai with a wound like that would have died before he hit the floor.
Leaves of Flame ch-2 Page 49