by S L Farrell
Kurhv Kralj fell.
Cima stared. The attendants around the Kralj stared as well. Strange shifting light from behind him sent shadows racing over the ground. As Cima whirled around, he saw the mage-glare from the White Beast strike Ennis, saw the boy fall, and he howled.
He also saw the Heart, lying in the steaming, open ruin of Ennis’ palm.
When he saw Sevei attack Ennis, Kayne leaped down from his horse, running toward them. But in the moment it took to cover the few strides between them, it was over. “No!” Kayne screamed even as he reached for Sevei, wondering how he could stop her, but Ennis was already gone. “Sevei! What in the Mother’s name have you done!”
“I did what I thought best,” she answered. Her voice was distant, distracted, as if she were listening to someone else and only answered because he annoyed her. Lámh Shábhála was searing through the skin of her body; the scars bright enough that he had to shade his eyes, and the mass of tangled hair around her head was a sun. She was an unbearable noon fallen to earth, but her eyes contained midnight, expressionless. The light was a wall that had pushed everyone back around from them. They stood in a quiet circle in the midst of the battle.
Kayne saw the Arruk that Ennis had been riding drop his bloodied jaka and dart forward toward the body of his brother. The creature plucked Treoraí’s Heart from Ennis’ blackened hand. “Sevei!” he shouted. “The Arruk—”
She looked at the Arruk, watched as the beast closed its hand around his mam’s cloch. The glow around her brightened and spread out until it touched the Arruk and took him in.
He didn’t hide in the light—Sevei knew no Arruk would ever cower. She touched the Arruk’s mind, marveling at the strangeness of it. She plucked memories from him, examining them and letting them drop away.
. . . feeling the pull of Cudak Zvati, feeling it as much as any of the Svarti and knowing that must be his calling as well . . .
. . . the horrible day when the first Svarti to whom he was apprenticed sent him away, not because he was hopeless, but because his skill already exceeded that of his mentor . . .
. . . enduring the taunts from those who had once been his peers . . .
. . . Kurhv Mairki humiliating him even more by ordering him to learn the bluntclaw language from the dishonored ones who had dropped their weapons rather than accept a good death on the battlefield . . .
. . . the bluntclaws backing away from him in fright, and slowly learning that it wasn’t fear that would make them talk to him but sympathy . . .
. . . lifting his chin before Kurhv Kralj and hating him at the same time . . .
. . . wondering at the sadness within the bluntclaw Ennis, and marveling also at the great power within the boy . . .
. . . hoping as he picked up the spell-stone that Ennis had carried that perhaps he could also use it, perhaps he could feel it . . .
. . . a surprising, terrifying ache inside him as he looked down at Ennis Svarti’s body . . . “Cima,” she said, taking the name she found there. “I can’t let you keep Treoraí’s Heart.”
“If I die, I’ll find Cudak Zvati even faster,” he told her. He carefully lowered his head so that she could see none of the bright scales of his throat. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“. . . kill the creature,” Gram whispered inside her. “. . . do it . . .”
She did not. Instead, she pushed herself deeper into Cima’s mind. Cudak Zvati . . . the search we’ve been told we must undertake . . . seeing the image of Cudak carved in the wall . . . the yearning to reach the place from where the sky-net grows . . . the gift of Cudak waiting for us . . .
Sevei saw everything: what Cima had experienced, what the Arruk searched for, their belief and their quest.
And she saw more.
“They will call you a traitor . . .” her gram hissed.
“Here’s what you can do . . .” That was Carrohkai, her voice loudest of all. “Let me show you . . .”
Sevei could not hold back the quick laugh that tasted bitter on her tongue as she saw the places inside Lámh Shábhála that Carrohkai knew. “I will take you to Cudak Zvati, Cima,” she said. “You alone. But the rest of you must go back.”
“No.” His refusal was sharp. She could feel his mind searching for the words, words that were not in his vocabulary but in hers. “We Arruk do not retreat. We do not surrender. We would rather all die here than do that.”
“I’m not asking for you to do either,” she told him.
Kayne thought that Sevei would smash the Arruk as he would have done, as he yearned to do. But when the glow faded, the creature was still holding the Heart and Sevei was nodding to him. “Damn it, Sevei!” He clutched Blaze. There was still a vestige of power in the cloch.
Desperate, he looked back at Edana. She was staring from her horse toward Sevei, to Ennis’ body, to the Arruk holding the Heart. She blinked, and the stasis broke. She frowned, taking her own cloch in her hand again. The mage-demon snarled next to Kayne.
“Sevei, with you here, we can take the Arruk,” Kayne said urgently. “We can end this now.” He looked quickly around; outside the ring that Sevei kept around them, the battle was still raging. He could see the clochs and spell-sticks disgorging death, hear the clash of metal and the screams of the dying.
She smiled at him, and for that moment she seemed to be only Sevei once more. “I’m sorry, Kayne.”
“Sevei—”
“I love you, Kayne. I’m sorry. But there’s no victory here. There never was, not for either Daoine or Arruk.”
She closed her seal-black eyes. The mage-demon screamed and the Arruk holding the Heart gaped as scarlet light leaped from his hand toward Sevei. Kayne felt Lámh Shábhála’s touch on Blaze at the same moment, as if every drop of stored mage-light within it was being sucked from the cloch, rushing outward toward Sevei and Lámh Shábhála. The ring around them brightened, flared, and vanished.
Now rippling, luminous walls radiated out from Lámh Shábhála. Snaking, curling, moving so rapidly that Kayne could barely follow them, they raced through the clusters of fighting Daoine and Arruk, separating the two, pushing one away from the other. Kayne saw, on either side, two huge columns of light erupt and fade, accompanied by numerous small ones, and he knew that Lámh Shábhála had stolen the essences of Snarl and Firerock as well as the slow magic within the Svartis’ spell-sticks. He looked down at his hand; he might as well have been grasping a pebble from the ocean shore. Blaze was a dead thing in his hand.
“Sevei!” he cried. “What have you done?”
Holding the walls between the armies took all of her attention, all of her power, but Lámh Shábhála’s power was limited, even for the Bán Cailleach. Sevei grimaced with the effort of holding it, wondering how she could do the rest.
“. . . in the end, you fail, like all the rest . . .”
“. . . you’ll be here, a ghost like us in the stone . . . ”
“Silence!” she shouted at them, and the word pounded in her head, the wall quivering with its violence. She tried to think, but the power hummed so loudly around her that she could not. The energy hissed and fumed and snarled in every muscle, every fiber of her being. The scars on her body were lines of molting, flowing lava. The power she held—plucked from all the clochs and the slow magic in the Arruk spell-sticks, mixed and bound with Lámh Shábhála—threatened to burst out from her. She was a fragile clay pot full to bursting, and she were falling, falling toward sharp rocks . . .
The voices of the old Holders were right. She was going to fail. She could not do what she wanted to do, not if she had to hold this wall. And if the wall fell, the battle would begin again, and this time the Daoine would have no magic at all against the Arruk, and she would have slain her brother for nothing. . . .
She thought she heard Kayne calling to her, but his voice was lost in the roaring of the mage-light’s power.
Above, she felt Kekeri fold his great wings and stoop, coming to land awkwardly near her. Because her eyes
were closed with the effort of maintaining the bright walls that now ran from one side of the Narrows to the other, she saw him only in her mage-vision, a shape of shifting fire. Others accompanied him: two stone-gray forms to either side of the pass that were Créneach; the blue-black, dark radiance of the Saimhóir, resting in the cold pools of water nearest the pass; a Bunús Muintir whose slow magics shimmered emerald, the sliding elusive brown of a dire wolf in a nearby copse of pines; the aloof, keen pinpricks of a pair of eagles high above the pass . . .
“We who are Aware will take this burden,” Kekeri told her, his voice a growl that was felt more than heard. “Do what you must.”
“Thank you,” Sevei told him, and she felt them take from her the mage-wall between the Daoine and the Arruk. She fell, gasping. The glare of the wall shifted hues, no longer the green-shot white of Lámh Shábhála, but now a melding of a dozen tints and shades racing through the barrier. Sevei lay in the midst of the multihued glow, every breath a stab of blades in her chest, the cold air like acid flowing down her throat. She rolled on her side: the scrape of dirt on her skin was as a cruel hand scouring her body. She could no longer stand this pain; she could not rise again.
The voices of the Holders were a din in her mind: mocking, laughing, weeping, each of them telling her something different. Gram’s voice, Carrohkai’s voice . . . She strove to find it in the confusion, to hear her. “You can do this . . . You must . . .” The Bunús Muintir was there, her voice gaining strength as Sevei focused on it. “Get up . . .”
“I can’t.”
“There’s time enough to die later. Get up.”
Groaning, she rose. “Did it hurt you so much?” she asked Carrohkai. She thought she could see the Bunús Muintir woman in front of her, wavering like someone glimpsed across a bonfire.
“Worse still,” Carrohkai told her. “As it will become worse for you. But not for much longer.”
Sevei blinked. Carrohkai was gone. She stood in the center of the brilliant wall. Her hand was trembling as she took Lámh Shábhála up again, and she groaned again as she opened Lámh Shábhála to her mind once more. She shaped the energy, reaching out with ethereal hands to either side of the wall she’d made and plucking away two people there. She brought them to her in the center of the brightness: Kayne and Cima.
“Sevei!” Kayne rushed toward her as if he were about to embrace her, and she held up her hand to hold him back. Cima stared, his fierce mouth open. Sevei held up her hand to stop Kayne.
“No,” she told him. “You . . . can’t. I can’t. I couldn’t bear your touch, Kayne, especially now.” She looked past him to the Arruk. “Cima, it’s time to fulfill my promise to you. I will show you Cudak Zvati, though it will be both less and more than you think it is. But you’ll return to your people as Svarti Kralj, the First. As for Treoraí’s Heart, you’ll do with it what you should.”
“Sevei!” Kayne interrupted. She could see his confusion and his uncertainty in the way he stood, still grasping Blaze as if it were still full of the mage-lights’ energy. “The Heart was given to Gram and then Mam. It belongs to the Daoine. It’s not yours to give away.”
“Belongs to the Daoine?” she asked him, remonstrating with him gently. Now that she’d made the decision, a calmness seemed to have come over her. She could still feel the awful pain, but it seemed to hover around her like a mollusk’s shell, as if it were not quite part of her any longer. “Treoraí would disagree, wouldn’t he? His Heart’s not mine to give, nor yours. The Heart, like Lámh Shábhála, chooses its own. And it arranged to be there in Cima’s hand.” She looked at him. She wanted so much to touch Kayne, to put her arms around him and embrace him, to weep with him at all they’d lost, to grieve together, brother and sister. Yet she knew that if she did that, the pain would come rushing in to her again, and she might succumb to it. “I wish . . . I wish . . .” she began, then shook her head, unable to continue. She felt tears sliding down her cheeks, so hot they seemed to steam against her skin. “You will be Rí Ard,” she told Kayne. “And you will hold Lámh Shábhála.”
Puzzlement creased his battle-stained forehead. “What do you mean . . . ?”
She smiled at him again. “I think you know,” she told him. “Or you will. When you have the stone, Gram and Carrohkai will tell you. And so will I.” She could see the realization break on his face. “It’s fine, Kayne,” she told him. “Remember for me and tell the others when they say I did nothing or that I was a traitor: I chose this path. I chose it because it was best.”
She didn’t give either of them the chance to speak or protest, or for her to hesitate and perhaps reconsider. She plunged her mind into Lámh Shábhála, forcing herself deep into every last crystalline recess of the great stone and taking all that was there into herself. When she was full, when she and Lámh Shábhála were the same vessel, she turned to the wall that Kekeri and the others had fashioned to replace hers. “Now,” she thought to Kekeri. “I need all of you now,” and she opened herself to their power also.
. . . hearing Kayne cry out in alarm and distress, hearing Cima do the same in his own tongue, feeling the lash and torment of the power, tasting the blood in her mouth, smelling the scent of storm and lightning and rain, seeing the blinding radiance even through closed eyelids . . .
The power lacerated her hands as she held them out, shattering bones and shredding muscle and sinew. She forced her mind to hold Lámh Shábhála, to form it, to place it where it must go. Then, praying to the Mother that she had done it right, that she had seen the correct pattern for the energy, she let it go with a great cry, the last sound she would make.
Sevei, with her final thought, was surprised at the resplendent ferocity that she released.
“Sevei!” Kayne shouted, but there was nothing he could do. He started to draw in a breath, to move to her, to stop her, but the light . . . the light was nothing he’d experienced before. The glimmering wall she’d erected across the battlefield coalesced and merged with Lámh Shábhála. He’d once seen the sun emerge full from behind fast dark clouds, gleaming low behind a lake in Céile Mhór and the orb and its reflections from the water so bright and piercing that he’d thought for a moment that he’d been blinded, even though he immediately averted his eyes. The corusca tion of gathered mage-energy here made that a twilight in comparison. Crisp black shadows were thrown behind every object, radiating out from the center of the Bán Cailleach. Kayne’s slitted eyes could barely see her. Her body was consumed in this new sun, and then . . .
The light burst outward, and he felt the impact of its heat and saw its fury even through eyes quickly closed and shielded. Kayne shouted into the thunder of the explosion, his voice lost in the clamor.
And as suddenly, it was flashed past him, racing east like a backward sunrise. He could follow the pure, unfettered radiance as it moved over the Finger and into the misted distance of the horizon. The echoes of the moment roared in his ears; the afterimages danced and swayed in shifting curtains in front of him. He blinked and pawed at his eyes. Around him, he could hear the others calling and shouting, as bewildered and lost as he was.
“Kayne!”
“Aunt Edana.” He saw her, or at least a form obscured by blotches of purple and green that looked somewhat like her.
“What happened, Kayne? Where have they gone?”
“Who?” he asked, still rubbing at his eyes. As his vision cleared, he found his breath gone.
There were no Arruk here except the dead. The rest, all of them, had vanished. The passage where they’d crawled in their thousands was empty. Except for the reminder of the slaughtered corpses, they might never have been there at all.
And the Bán Cailleach—Sevei, his sister—was gone as well. On the trampled ground where she’d been standing a moment before, a green stone lay.
Kayne reached down and picked it up.
As his fingers touched the stone, he heard a voice. “Remember for me,” Sevei said. “Remember . . .”
PART FIVE<
br />
DECISIONS
59
Bethiochnead and Cnocareilig
AFTERWARD, THE PEOPLES of Talamh An Ghlas and Céile Mhór would talk of the Day of the Brightness. Traveling much faster than the fleetest horse could run, the Brightness of the Pale Witch raced over the mountains of the Finger, and the clans shut their eyes and cried out at the manifestation, but it did not touch them. For them, there was a moment of terrible disorientation and blinding light, and many would say they felt a hurricane wind and glimpsed figures hurtling by them, wailing in the tongue of the Arruk.
It is said that when the Pale Witch’s Brightness reached the ruins of the Bunús Wall, the stones that had fallen leaped up on their own and set themselves back into place, the creatures carved into their granite faces came alive as the intense light touched them, and their voices joined the thunder of the Brightness’ flight, and the Brightness shouted back to them as it rushed toward Céile Mhór.
Where the Finger joined the long flank of Céile Mhór, the Brightness lengthened and turned south. It swept down over the towns and villages that the Arruk had taken from the Thane’s people, and where the Brightness passed, there were no Arruk left behind. It swept them up, growing brighter and taller and larger as it moved. Above the Brightness, the mage-lights swirled in the sky as if night had come, and there were those who said they saw dragons wheeling above it, or black-furred seals riding in it as if the Brightness were an ocean wave. There were those who say they saw even stranger creatures in the Brightness—creatures that were yet legends of old times.
One thing is certain: the Brightness reached the ancient fortifications of the Uhmaci Wall, all the way at the foot of Middle Céile, before the sun set that day. There, the Brightness bloomed like an awful flower, and it raised the Uhmaci Wall that the Arruk had torn down, raised it higher and wider than it had been before. Then the Brightness collapsed, spreading out over Lower Céile before fading entirely at The Feet. As the Brightness moved through Lower Céile, it left behind the Arruk it had gathered up, all of them alive and whole, though blinded for a time.