Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 01]

by Glenraven (v1. 5) (html)

  Yemus crouched over his board, whispering unintelligible prayers. Matthiall rested a hand on his shoulder and said nothing. The two men, Machnan and Kin, watched without daring to comment.

  And Aidris pointed a finger at Sophie. An arc of brilliant red light shot from it, and the simulacrum of Sophie crumpled to the ground and lay still.

  "No," Yemus whispered.

  "No," Matthiall said.

  But the unmoving form lay sprawled at the edge of Aidris Akalan's camp, and a faint black mist curled up around it and surrounded it.

  Yemus dropped to his knees and stared. "No." His voice was pleading. "Please, no. Not dead."

  He felt Matthiall's hand tighten, then release. "It's all over before it began. We've lost. My omens said we could not win without both of them."

  "As did mine. Aidris wins, and we are destroyed."

  Fifty-nine

  She was already dead. Callion stared into his viewing bell and slammed a fist into the table, furious. Dead. His omens had assured him that if he threw her to Aidris, she would create enough confusion that Aidris and her flunkies would fail to notice his actions. They were supposed to take time to figure out what she was, and even longer to try to use her to get to him, before they finally killed her. He had intended to use that time to create a path from his domain to the throne room of Cotha Maest.

  He closed his eyes and connected himself to the web that enclosed his domain. Now he wouldn't be able to get past Cotha Maest without alerting her to his actions. Aidris was still working on his gate, and she was getting closer. The Kin spell-magic was slower and weaker than the Aregen power-magic, just as the Machnan life-magic was weaker than the Kin magic; each creator race had made its creations less powerful than itself, thinking in this way to maintain control. Good theory, terrible execution, he thought. Because the "weaker" Aidris was about to come bursting through his door into his private domain, and all her greasy hordes were going to wash in after her, and by sheer numbers they would overwhelm him. Just as they had overwhelmed and destroyed so many of the Aregen.

  He'd dropped Sophie at the edge of the Alfkindir camp. He'd felt a brief flash of power leaving his domain when he did, but that power wasn't part of Sophie; she had no more magic about her than her friend Jay. The power was connected to something else, something unrelated. And when he searched for the source of it near the place where he'd dropped Sophie, thinking that perhaps he'd sent one of his artifacts with her by accident, he discovered nothing but a book that she'd evidently had with her. There was no source of power—nothing that he could turn against Aidris Akalan.

  He was furious. She shouldn't have been so fragile. Aidris shouldn't have been so efficient. Now he was going to have to change his plans, all because the two of them couldn't do anything right.

  Sixty

  free I am free I am free

  lighter than air—as light as light—floating

  no one can make me go back there, back to the darkness, back to the pain

  free I'm free I'm free

  Mom?

  free I'm free I'm free and nothing can hurt me anymore…

  Mom? You're here? Already?

  Karen?

  The lightness still filled her, but Sophie no longer felt so giddy, so far from pain and suffering. The voice she'd heard sounded precisely like Karen's, but Karen was dead. Dead. And Sophie discovered that although pain had grown distant and fuzzy, she was still capable of feeling it. She felt it then.

  Mom! It is you!

  Sophie saw light shifting within the light, and suddenly she saw her daughter, not the way she had looked as a child, but unmistakable nonetheless. She ran toward Karen and embraced her; the two of them stood wrapped in each other's arms for time that could have been a moment or an infinity.

  Oh, baby, how are you?

  I'm fine, Mom. I've been waiting for you…but I didn't expect you yet.

  Sophie laughed, swelling with bubbling effervescent joy. Well, I'm here.

  Karen nodded, solemn and somehow not exuberant the way Sophie would have expected her to be. I know. I just don't know why. I don't think you're supposed to be here yet.

  Sophie tried to imagine why she shouldn't be with Karen, and she couldn't. She tried to recall what she had been doing just before she found Karen, or where she had been, or how she had come to be where she was. All of that was a mystery.

  I've been watching you, Mom. You were starting to do better. You were ready to live again.

  Sophie looked at her daughter. You were watching me?

  Always. I wanted you to be okay, and, finally it looked like you were going to be.

  Sophie thought, and then she nodded. Yes. She remembered that after all. Something had made her decide she wanted to live. She'd been struggling with her love for Mitch, but that struggle seemed so silly to her; all of a sudden she could see that she loved him more than she had the day she married him. She could feel her love for him, adult and solid and clear. She'd been confused about her friend Lorin…but why? Lorin was her friend. They'd known each other before, and would know each other again. But in this lifetime, they were going to be friends. Just friends.

  How could things get so muddled?

  And Karen had been watching over her, worrying about her, because she had let herself wander in the darkness, because she had refused to live her next day and her next; because she had, instead, hidden herself in the blanket of her pain and refused to go on. She'd known Karen wasn't gone, that death hadn't destroyed her daughter. Why hadn't she trusted what she knew?

  Because I was afraid, she thought. Afraid to live. But I changed all of that.

  How did I get here? she asked Karen.

  Do you remember Glenraven? Do you remember Callion?

  Suddenly Sophie did remember. He poisoned me. He killed me.

  I know. But they still need you, Mom.

  They…?

  You know who.

  Sophie realized that when she thought about it, she knew the truth of that, too. A lot of people needed her. Mitch needed her. So did her friend Lorin. The child who was waiting for her to be ready so that he could be born needed her. People in Glenraven needed her. She had so much she had to do…so much living. So many things left undone.

  But she was dead.

  That seemed to be an insurmountable problem.

  Sixty-one

  Jayjay tried to rub her eyes, but her hands wouldn't move. She blinked instead, struggling to remember where she was and what was going on. Nothing made any sense.

  Her arms were over her head. She tried to move them again, and finally realized that rope bound her wrists. The import of that sunk in and she shivered. Tied up was a bad sign. What had she done to get herself tied up? She tried to yell, and the sound came out muffled and unintelligible. Jay realized the awful taste in her mouth was a gag. She couldn't move her legs, either. Rope again.

  And she felt like hell; weak and sick, nauseated, chilled, with her head throbbing and her sinuses blocked so that she almost couldn't breathe. She felt like she was getting a fever. Maybe she was coming down with the flu.

  Maybe she was coming down with plague, considering where she was.

  At last she got her eyes open in spite of the caked, gummy matter that held them shut.

  Callion stood over her, smiling an unpleasant smile. "You're awake at last. The antidote worked. Good. I was beginning to fear that you would die, too, in spite of my best efforts, and I can't afford to lose you."

  Too? Who had died? "Hwww vwwww?" she asked through the gag. It didn't sound too much like "who died" but Callion evidently got it.

  "Aidris has already killed your friend Sophie." He shrugged, which involved an awkward movement of his badgerish shoulders. "It doesn't matter. I didn't need her anyway."

  He turned his back on Jayjay and began doing something at a workbench covered with vials and canisters and an entire row of hard blue flames that shot steadily from the tips of coils of copper tubing. Another creature who looked ver
y much like him stood off to one side, his gaze flicking from Callion to Jay and back.

  Dead? Sophie was dead? Jay tried to get that thought clearly in her head, but her mind refused to accept it. Sophie was her best friend in the world, the person who had shared some of the biggest moments of her life. Sophie couldn't—simply could not—be dead.

  Aidris. Aidris Akalan had killed her.

  Callion turned back to Jay. "I do need you, however. According to every oracle I've been able to consult, you're to be the next Watchmistress of Glenraven. Since I have no wish to see my world fall to ruin in the hands of an outsider such as yourself, I'm going to have to bind the two of us together. I'll make you my eyra, the way Matthiall intended to. That will make me Watchmaster, and return control of Glenraven to the Aregen, which is where it belongs." Jay wished she could see his face. He clinked glass against glass, shook powdered something into a beaker, poured awful gloppy green stuff on top of it, then watched while the resulting mess changed from green to dark blue to black and began fizzing toward the beaker rim.

  Sophie was dead?

  Callion took a glass rod and stirred his concoction vigorously; as he did, he spoke again. "Once you and I are established in Cotha Maest, I'm going to have to figure out what to do with you, of course. I can't kill you, any more than I can kill Matthiall now that he's bound himself to you. Once I unbind the two of you, he'll die. Who knows, maybe I'm mistaken and maybe he's dead already. It isn't important. He's dead or he'll die, and that's just one problem out of my way. But you…you're a disaster; you have no more magic in you than dead rock, and you're to be the next Watchmistress. I can see it. You'd erase the last of Glenraven's magic and turn our world into a carbon copy of your own stinking Machine World."

  Jay tugged at the ropes that bound her wrists, trying not to make any noise. She needed to get away, to find Sophie and Aidris Akalan. Fury burned in her; Sophie didn't deserve to die. She had a life ahead of her. She was starting to find her way back from the dark place she'd been. Jay was going to make Aidris pay for what she'd done.

  And she didn't dare sit still for Callion, either. He'd said he was going to break the bond between her and Matthiall, and that when he did, Matthiall would die. A part of her—the rational, Machine World part—insisted that was so much bullshit. The other part of her, though, the part that had immediately embraced Glenraven and called it home, said that it was nothing but truth. If Callion somehow broke the mystical bonds between them, Matthiall, whom she loved, would die.

  No. That would not happen.

  But Callion had bound her too well. As she fought, she felt the ropes tighten until she had to quit. They had completely cut off her circulation to her hands and feet.

  "Maybe I can wall you up in the Aptogurria," Callion said. "Or maybe I should simply kill you. The Aregen, after all, are not bound by the Kinnish oaths taken during the binding of eyran." He added something else to the mess he was mixing, and it changed from black to water clear; bubbles rose in it and sparkled against the sides of the beaker and fizzed out the top.

  Callion turned and grinned at her, his needle teeth gleaming. He held the beaker in one hand and lifted a metal rod from the line of flames with the other. Its tip glowed so hot it was almost white.

  "Take the cloth from her mouth, Hultif," Callion said to the other Aregen who stood, watching. "She's going to drink this for me, and then she's going to bind herself to me willingly, or else I'm going to put her eye out with this." He waved the metal rod and his grin got bigger. He stared into Jay's eyes. "I want you to remember that for my purposes, you don't need eyes, you don't need ears, and you don't need a tongue. If you want to keep them, you'll drink this and not give me any trouble."

  The other Aregen still stood off to one side, watching the two of them. Callion turned and glared at him. "Hultif, hurry up. We don't have much time before Aidris Akalan breaks down our door."

  Hultif sighed and nodded. "Right." He came toward them and Callion returned his attention to her. He brought the poker close enough to her face that she could feel her cheek drying from its heat. When she winced away, he chuckled.

  Jay caught movement from the corner of her eye, and saw the Aregen whom Callion had called Hultif bringing a club down on top of Callion's head. Callion cried out once, and as he did, searing pain flashed across Jay's cheek. He'd dropped the poker when Callion hit him, and it was burning a hole in her face. She screamed through the gag and thrashed, trying to move her head away from the horrible burning agony, trying to stop the pain.

  Callion dropped out of sight, thudding to the floor.

  "Hold still," Hultif said. He threw the poker across the room, then grasped her forehead firmly and turned her face toward him. "That left a nasty hole. I can see bone."

  The pain was so fierce it was blinding. She tried to see him but red haze clouded her eyes and the agony stoppered her ears.

  He said, "Hold still a moment; I can make the flesh grow back together." Hultif rested his claws on her burned flesh and for a moment the pain grew worse instead of better. Tears ran down her cheeks and she sobbed. But then the pain eased off; in another moment it was gone.

  "That's left you with a scar, I'm afraid," the Aregen said. "I couldn't make the injury go away; I could only make it heal faster. The Aregen deal in power. The Machnan were the healers, but they have no magic left." He reached behind her and untied the gag and pulled it from her mouth.

  "Thank you," she tried to say, but her mouth was so dry the words didn't come out.

  Hultif worked at the ropes.

  She sat up as her hands came free. As the blood rushed back into them, she rubbed them together, trying to ignore the pain. She said, "Is what he said about Sophie true?"

  "Yes. Sophie is dead."

  "What about Matthiall? Is he still alive?"

  Hultif sighed. "You want the truth? Probably not. He's Kin—Old Line Kin at that—and Callion threw him into a Machnan tower while he was helpless. The Machnan in there probably killed him the second he materialized."

  Jay gritted her teeth and nodded. Sophie dead. Matthiall gone. The wolves at the door, so to speak; Aidris and her monsters waited just outside the domain, and they weren't waiting passively, either. They were battering at the door and apparently having some success at it. Hope was gone, Glenraven was doomed, and she was going to die.

  But, by God, she wasn't going to do it alone.

  "Get me to Aidris."

  He was untying her ankles. He glanced up at her and shook his head. "No point. We've already lost. The oracles were very clear on that; unless you and Sophie confronted Aidris together, you couldn't win."

  "I don't give a damn whether I win or not," Jay said. "I know I can't win. I'm going to kill her for what she did to Sophie."

  "She'll kill you. As soon as she sees you, she'll feel Glenraven's touch on you. She'll know you were destined to be the next Watchmistress, and because you're a rival, even though you're already beaten, she won't waste any time with you. She'll kill you as fast as she killed Sophie."

  Jay could move her fingers again. She swung around and grabbed the little monster by both shoulders and shoved her face close to his. "Watchmistress? I'm not going to be anybody's Watchmistress. Don't you understand? This isn't about that anymore, if it ever was. I know I'm going to die. But she killed my friend, and she doesn't get that one free."

  Hultif shook loose from her grip and blinked up at her. "Perhaps I can see what Glenraven wanted with you. But this is pointless, and I will not waste my time with pointless things. You have no magic, you have no talents, and you cannot hope to defeat the strongest Kintari Glenraven has ever seen. That is fact."

  "Then why did you bother to help me? If you're just going to stand there and piss and moan about how helpless we are, why didn't you let your uncle or whatever he was force me to marry him? I suppose that's the correct analogy—marriage. At least he had a plan. At least he wasn't sitting here with his thumbs up his ass waiting for the end of the world."
/>
  Hultif barked; Jay realized that sound was his laugh. "No," he said, "my uncle never sat around with his…with his thumbs up his ass. So you want to do something?"

  "I'm going to do something. You're going to show me how to get to Aidris, and I'm going to take her apart."

  The little monster began to smile. "Well, if we're going to die making a great dramatic stand, I'll help you. She killed my entire family when I was an infant at the breast, and kept me as her slave for over a hundred years. I always intended to be the one who killed her."

  "So let's go."

  He nodded. "Indeed. Your belongings are in the corner there. If you have any weapons, I suggest you get them. You'll need them."

  Jay had the sword Matthiall had given her, and the knife she'd been carrying around with her since she'd first arrived, the one she'd gotten from Lestovru. She strapped on the sword, then put on the dagger belt too, thinking that it was probably silly to do so; she had damned little experience with one blade, and none at all fighting with a sword and a main gauche.

  "That's it?" Hultif raised the spots on his furry forehead where eyebrows would have been on a human. "Those are your weapons? Two sticks?"

  "That's all I have."

  "Well, maybe someday fools will write songs about how I diverted the evil Watchmistress with my magical talents of setting fires and summoning snow and creating a fine banquet out of trash while you attacked her with your two sticks. I'm sure they'll say we died bravely," he said. "Though I was hoping I wouldn't die at all." He sighed deeply. "Let's go."

  Sixty-two

  Sophie stopped communicating with Karen when she realized a silent crowd had gathered around her; they were people only in the way that shadows were people. They had shape and movement, but no depth or life. They fit the dark, empty nothingness of the place where she and Karen had met—fit the place and made it more forbidding and bleak than it had been. They were, she thought, appropriate denizens of the realm of the dead; they made no sound, but their presence seemed to weigh down the air she breathed and cast a cold, penetrating chill through her blood and bones, leaving her trembling even though they had not touched her.