“Why? How?”
A Ka’i-Nur warrior smashed his way through several warriors nearby and charged toward Keel-Tath. Raising her hand in a casual gesture, a blinding bolt of cyan flew from her palm. The warrior never even had time to cry out before death took him. His charred body, encased in white hot armor, fell to the ground in a smoking heap.
“The walls.” Keel-Tath struggled to focus on anything but killing, as if that were the sole reason for existence, the only thing that would satisfy her. “The walls are a barrier to our powers. They must also have shielded the crystal from me. Or me from the crystal.” She closed her eyes, trying to shut out the crystal’s silent call. When that was not enough, she gripped the blade of her sword with her hand, squeezing tight. The blade sliced through the leatherite of her gauntlet, biting deep into the flesh of her palm.
“Mistress! What are you doing?”
Ignoring her, Keel-Tath slowly drew her hand across the blade until it began to cut through bone. The pain was excruciating. She could not imagine how powerful must be the crystal if it was affecting her so by mere proximity. What would happen when she actually touched it? She had to control it, harness it to her will. You are the child of prophecy, she reminded herself, focusing her entire being on the pain of the blade against her palm. The power of the crystals, even that of the Ka’i-Nur, is yours to command. Bend it to your will.
“Beware!”
A pair of Ka’i-Nur had smashed through half a dozen of Keel-Tath’s warriors, slashing and hacking them to death like the killing machines they were. Drakh-Nur, Ka’i-Lohr, and Dara-Kol met them with swords red with blood. But the Ka’i-Nur, fierce veterans who had survived the war since it began, drove them back under a relentless flurry of blows from sword and battle axe. Ka’i-Lohr ducked in low, trying to take one of them in the leg and bring him down, and was knocked to the ground. His head slammed into the sand-crusted obsidian where he lay still.
Dara-Kol called for Sian-Al’ai, who was a whirlwind of death among the enemy warriors, but on the far side of the battle.
The two warriors came on, and were joined by three more, then even more as the ring of defending warriors surrounding Keel-Tath was broken, shattered. Dara-Kol was driven back, then bodily thrown to one side. Drakh-Nur crashed into the wave of attackers with mindless ferocity, his war hammer rising and falling, shattering bone and rending armor until a trio of Ka’i-Nur seized him and drove him to the ground in a frenzy of slashing talons.
Keel-Tath took a deep breath, releasing her grip on the blade. The battle that raged around her had frozen in time, as if time itself had willed it so. She saw Ka’i-Lohr, dazed and bleeding on the ground. Dara-Kol, also fallen, baring her teeth in rage as she raised her sword against the hulking warriors about to kill her. Drakh-Nur, his face slashed to ribbons, grappling with three of his ancient kin. Sian-Al’ai, her face contorted in fear as she watched the enemy converge upon her mistress, upon Keel-Tath, but was too distant to intervene. Beyond those dearest to Keel-Tath’s heart, many more of those sworn to her lay dead or dying in this accursed place, their spirits now silent in the Bloodsong.
Surrounding her now, closing in, was a tide of enemy warriors. She knew that they did not intend to kill her, for they could easily have done so — or tried — from a distance with shrekkas. It would not be mercy that stayed their hands, but some dark desire of Syr-Nagath.
It was a desire that Keel-Tath was not about to indulge. Syr-Nagath could never be allowed to gain the powers of the crystal, nor could she ever be allowed to hold sway over Keel-Tath herself. The result was too terrible to contemplate. She had to be stopped, and stopped now. The battle here had to be brought to a swift end.
Summoning the powers within her, she gathered the cyan energy in her hands until her flesh felt like flame itself.
Time began to move forward once again as she released the lightning pent up in her body. Cyan energy blasted from her palms, arcing through the air to strike the nearest of the Ka’i-Nur warriors. They danced a jig of death as their bodies exploded into flame. But the lightning did not stop with them: it spread from warrior to warrior, racing across the bloody courtyard like a plague. In but a few moments of thunder, every Ka’i-Nur warrior fell to the ground. Nothing was left of them but charred, smoking husks and molten pools of metal. Even the living metal of their swords had melted and died.
Taking a deep breath, ignoring the stench of burned flesh that filled the air, Keel-Tath went to Dara-Kol and helped her to her feet. Then they helped Drakh-Nur and, joined by Sian-Al’ai, they revived Ka’i-Lohr who, looking at the devastation around them, muttered with disappointment, “I missed it.”
With a smile, Keel-Tath embraced him, then helped him up. “Quickly,” she said to the survivors, all of whom gawked at the smoldering bodies around them, “we must get below. If we do not stop Syr-Nagath, all shall be lost.”
“You could simply go below and kill her,” Dara-Kol said carefully.
“Perhaps,” she said. “But I fear that the closer I come to the crystal, the more difficult it will be to…control myself. You and the others will have to protect me while I do what must be done.”
“It shall be so.”
Keel-Tath was about to say something more when a titanic wave of power washed over her. With a gasp of surprise, she collapsed to her knees. The earlier sensation she had from the crystal was but a shadow of what she now felt. This time, she did not fight it, did not seek to control it, but let it fill her, consume her. She had no choice, for its power was impossible to resist. She realized then that someone must have opened the vault where the Ka’i-Nur Crystal of Souls had been waiting across the ages. Waiting for her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Tara-Khan joined the others not long before they reached the bottom level of the great stairway. The Ka’i-Nur had fled into whatever rooms lay beyond the doors of each landing when the genoths had been released, but he was sure they would soon return, and likely in greater numbers. He could see with his second sight that Ka’i-Nur was far larger than anyone, save perhaps those few priests and priestesses from beyond its walls who had come here and seen with their mind’s eye, could have imagined. The fortress above, grand and imposing as it might be, was but a tiny hint of the frightening grandeur that lay hidden below the rock and sand of the Great Wastelands. Ka’i-Nur spread out for leagues in every direction, and in some places descended far deeper than where he now stood. They had certainly not lain idle over the millennia that had passed after their defeat at the end of the Second Age.
Looking about him, he saw that perhaps half of his host, including the stalwart Sar-Ula’an, with which he had begun the attack had survived. Most of the survivors were injured, and all were exhausted, spent. Yet each and every one grinned at him before saluting, their spirits buoyed by the simple fact that they had, miraculously, survived to reach their goal. None had expected to live this long.
“It is up to you, now,” Sar-Ula’an told him. “We shall hold back the enemy when they come.”
“There will be many.” With his mind’s eye, Tara-Khan could see the warriors massing several levels above.
“Then there will be more for us to kill. Glory shall truly be ours.”
Without warning, the ground beneath their feet shook and a tremendous boom echoed down the great stairwell. Dust and chunks of stone broke from the stairway, raining down upon them.
“To the walls!” Tara-Khan ordered. His companions spread out along the enormous circular vestibule, hugging the mineral-rich walls of polished stone while more debris fell, shattering on the red granite floor.
More booms were heard and the earth bucked beneath their feet, knocking them from their feet. Sending his second sight to the surface, Tara-Khan was astonished at the devastation as several starships exploded. He sucked in his breath as he saw Keel-Tath and a group of warriors, somehow shielded from the detonations, fighting their way through a mass of Ka’i-Nur warriors who must have just landed on the surface.
<
br /> He snapped his mind back to the here and now as whole sections of the stairway gave way in an ear-splitting series of cracks. A huge fissure opened in the base of the central column, racing upward as the huge structure began to sag.
Braving the hail of deadly debris, the eight surviving builders raced to the column. One was killed before she made it halfway, crushed by a huge stone that had tumbled down from the disintegrating stairway. Another was injured, his foot smashed by a chunk of rock. A pair of warriors and a healer dashed out and, after severing the builder’s foot to release him, dragged him to the base of the pillar. Biting back screams of pain, the injured builder put his hands upon the stone, as had the others, while the healer tended his wound. Together, the builders focused their will upon the great construct of obsidian and granite, and Tara-Khan watched in unabashed awe as the titanic column, tottering on the brink of total collapse, began to right itself and the widening cracks began to close. The builders were healing the stone just as the healer was repairing the wounded builder’s foot, sealing the wound and beginning the process of growing it anew. Far above, two more sections of the stairway collapsed, but the falling blocks of stone were caught by the levels just below…and they held. Before his very eyes, the stone was mending itself, as if the stairway were a thing alive. For all the powers he had inherited, Tara-Khan stood in silent awe of the builders as they quietly saved the lives of all their companions.
“Tara-Khan.” Sar-Ula’an gently touched his arm. “You must finish what you began.”
“Yes,” Tara-Khan told him, tearing his attention away from the feat the builders were performing. Recalling what he had read in the last of the scrolls during his time with Ria-Ka’luhr, he went to the part of the landing opposite the door that he knew led to the Books of Time, which itself had been sealed against them by Ka’i-Nur builders. Flowing through the dark polished stone in the section of the wall he now faced were thick veins of gold, glittering in the light of the torches ringing the chamber. “Stand back,” he warned, and Sar-Ula’an and the others who had come to gather around him moved away, their eyes wide with wonder.
Tara-Khan knew that what he was attempting should not be possible, for the scroll had said that only the blood of the chosen one could open the vessel containing the Ka’i-Nur Crystal of Souls. But having touched his soul, having healed his body, Keel-Tath was part of him, just as he was part of her.
Reaching out, he placed his palms where two thick veins of gold crossed. After a brief moment, his hands passed into the stone.
Nothing happened. Frowning, he pulled back his hands, wondering what he was missing.
Before he could do anything else, he heard a commotion somewhere far above them. Quickly casting his mind’s eye upward, he saw Syr-Nagath and a host of warriors coming down the stairway.
And above them, on the surface, he saw Keel-Tath. She has come, he thought with a tremendous sense of relief.
Turning back to the wall, he realized his mistake. The blood of the chosen one. Stripping off his gauntlets, he slashed both his wrists with his talons. Ignoring the cries of surprise from those who were watching, he again plunged his hands into stone.
His body spasmed as an arc of raw power surged through him, and it was all he could do not to open his mouth to scream. His hands were trapped, as if they had become part of the stone.
Around the chamber, the veins of gold began to shift within the rock, as if the ancient granite were nothing more than water. Slowly, then with gathering speed, the veins began to swirl toward Tara-Khan, toward his hands. The stone, at first cool to his touch, became warm, then hot. In but a few moments it began to glow with heat, and Tara-Khan bit his tongue at the searing pain.
The gold, as if molten, swirled around his hands in a vortex, faster and faster, until it formed a whirling disk half again as big around as he stood tall. The black stone around the edge of the whirling gold was now white hot, and the pain in his hands was every bit as agonizing as had been the Change, when the Desh-Ka Crystal of Souls had taken him.
The center of the golden disk suddenly fell away from him, drawn deep into the wall and beyond like a whirlpool. His hands, free of the molten gold now, were little more than seared flesh over blackened bone.
But his task was not yet complete. Throwing his head back and letting loose a scream of pain, he sent a torrent of lightning into the depths of the whirlpool from his tortured hands. It drank up the energy and demanded more, drawing it from him as if it wanted to suck his body and soul dry. He let it have everything he had to give, then gave it more. His legs nearly gave out, but he forced himself to stand, willed himself to let it take his life if that was what it wanted.
With a crack of thunder, the whirlpool vanished, the gold spinning away into darkness like a cloud upon the wind. The portal, whose edges remained white hot beyond the cyan lightning that still crackled from his burned hands, stood open. Upon a pedestal at the center of the great chamber that lay beyond was the Ka’i-Nur Crystal of Souls.
***
Syr-Nagath cursed as the earth shook so violently that she was thrown from her feet, her body slamming into the unyielding stone of the steps as the shaft was filled with an ear-shattering boom. More explosions rocked the stairway, and she suddenly found herself slipping into space as the stone beneath her gave way.
With a scream — not of fright, but of rage that she might die before achieving her ends — she fell into space…
…and was saved as one of her warriors reached out to snatch her hand. He himself was dangling from the shattered edge of the steps by his other hand until other warriors reached over to haul him up.
As they did, she looked below and caught sight of her prey, the honorless ones who had the temerity to have attacked Ka’i-Nur. They were not far below her now. She and her host had made good time after they had been joined by a pair of builders.
The stairway shuddered, and she watched in horror as the enormous stones of the central column of the level below her, like the spine of a great creature, snapped and broke. Shards of granite exploded out onto the gracefully curving steps, which themselves broke away, shattering themselves upon the next level down before flying off into space.
She gasped as those hauling her up began to lose their grip. Looking up, she saw the warriors trying to pull them up were now fighting to keep their footing as the entire stairway began to topple.
“No!” With a surge of fury, she pulled herself up by the hand the warrior was holding before stabbing him in the abdomen with her talons. To his credit, he did not scream, but tried to help lever her up. She used his body for handholds, sticking her talons in his flesh, pulling herself up hand over hand until she reached the warrior holding him, then repeating the process. The first warrior she had used as a living ladder fell away in silence, but she did not take time to grieve or honor his loss.
Just as she was sure the stairway was going to collapse, crushing to death those below who had besmirched the honor of her kind, the central column began to right itself, the fissures in the stone beginning to close.
“Their builders heal the stone,” one of her own builders panted, her own hands upon the column as she and the male with her sought to add their powers to that of the honorless ones far below. They had a common purpose in stabilizing the column, for if they did not they would all likely perish. Should the column collapse, the intricate structure of Ka’i-Nur that lay beyond and below the stairway chamber would be in great jeopardy.
“Let them!” Syr-Nagath spat as she grabbed the builders and dragged them from the stone, her talons digging into their flesh. Holding them near the edge of the broken stairway, she told them, “Build me something to help us reach the bottom level quickly!”
As the builders stared into the abyss, considering the command of their mistress, one of the warriors cried, “Mistress! Above us!”
Syr-Nagath leaned out so that she might see past the circle of steps directly above and nearly lost her head as a shrekka came hissin
g past her. Enemy warriors were now behind them!
Risking one more look, she caught sight of Keel-Tath, the white of her hair standing out against the black stone, staring down at her.
Darting back as another volley of shrekkas came whistling down, she turned to the builders. “Quickly!”
Their silent communion over, one of the builders knelt to the floor, placing one hand against the stone, while grasping the other builder’s hand. The second builder, leaning out over the broken edge of the steps, extended her free hand toward the open space between the spiral stairs and the wall of the chamber. Motes of dust and debris began to drift into the air beyond her hand, faster and faster, until a dense cloud was swirling just beyond her fingertips. The cloud began to compress, coalescing into a crystalline web anchored to both the edge of the stairs and the wall. The glistening threads crisscrossed until the gaps in the webbing were no wider than a finger’s breadth.
“Step upon the web,” the standing builder breathed as he continued to focus on his task. “But beware: you shall be exposed to the enemy for a time.”
Without hesitation, the warriors did as the builder said, and were immediately taken under murderous attack from above. The warriors used their swords and daggers to fend off the shrekkas and pikes thrown by their enemies as Syr-Nagath herself stepped upon the platform. It looked insubstantial, the clear filaments as fine as hair, but she knew that it would support the weight of all the warriors with her, and more.
A moment later, the platform dropped away as the thousands of crystalline strands holding it to the stairs and wall began to grow longer. Faster and faster they grew, lengthening with such speed that Syr-Nagath and her warriors were nearly in free fall, plunging toward the bottom level.
She looked at the astonished enemy above and laughed. Seeing Keel-Tath’s face again, she laughed all the harder.
Mistress Of The Ages (In Her Name, Book 9) Page 31