She felt a distance spring up between her and Karen, a sudden frightening, painful void that yawned as large and hard and ugly as the death that had separated them the first time. "What's wrong?" she asked her daughter out loud.
Karen looked at her mother, eyes searching for something she didn't seem able to find. "You don't have much more time."
"Time? For what?"
"To decide."
Sophie felt lost. "Decide? What?"
"I can't tell you."
Not I don't know, but I can't tell you. "You know, don't you?"
"Yes." Karen nodded. "I know, but I'm not permitted to interfere any more than I have already."
Sophie looked at the shadow-drawn specters who waited and watched. "They're part of it."
"Yes."
"Can you tell me who they are?"
Karen held still, her head tipped to one side as if she were listening to a voice that only she could hear. Perhaps, Sophie thought, she was. After a moment, Karen nodded. "I can tell you. They are the souls of still-living Machnan, voluntarily held captive so that they can save their children from a terror that has oppressed their people for centuries."
"They have something to do with me," Sophie said. It wasn't a question, but Karen nodded when she said it.
"They do."
Sophie looked at them. She thought, I was chosen for Glenraven. Maybe because I had something to give to it, but I've gotten something in return. I've found the will to live again. I have something to go back to that I didn't have when I left. I have hope again. Karen isn't gone forever; death isn't the end of everything. I can have the courage to love again.
She considered destiny. Maybe it was real; but if it was, it wasn't the way some people painted it. Destiny didn't demand. It asked. It knocked. It offered, and if she wanted to, she knew she could turn her back on it. The souls of the Machnan were part of her destiny, but she understood that she was free to refuse them. They couldn't make her do whatever it was her destiny called for. She tested her theory.
"I could go with you, couldn't I? I could choose to die."
"Yes," Karen said.
"I could go back, too, without making any promises to anyone."
"Perhaps. That is certainly less likely."
"But I have a chance to do more. I have a chance to help these people. To help them help their children."
Karen nodded again, not saying anything.
The souls of the Machnan stirred, and in their almost-empty eyes, Sophie thought she could see faint flickerings of hope. Hope.
She thought she understood. She could give the Machnan their lives back the way Glenraven had given her life back to her. This was her destiny, and it was a destiny of love and compassion. She remembered the pain of loving Karen even before she was born and fearing for her future, of wanting the best for her and knowing that no matter how much she wanted the best, Karen would know pain and suffering. Sophie's destiny touched on the still-heavy anguish of losing the daughter she loved, and on the empathy she felt for these mothers and fathers who would barter their souls to save their children. She knew—knew—how that felt.
She could feel their love and their pain and she could do something to make a difference.
Karen rested her hands on Sophie's shoulders and leaned forward to stare into her mother's eyes. "It's time. You have to tell me…what are you going to do?"
Sophie felt her daughter's hands on her shoulders and remembered the way those same hands had felt when Karen was tiny; she remembered chubby baby fists clutching her finger, holding on so tightly. She remembered Karen's first smiles, her first steps, her first words. Many of the frightened souls who clustered around her knew those same feelings.
"I'm going to find a way back," she told her daughter. "I'll miss you, but I'll see you again someday. Now, though, I'm going to do what I can to help these people. I don't know what I can do, but whatever it is, I'll do it."
Sophie heard movement from the silent watchers; no longer silent, they were walking toward her from all sides, their shadowy forms nebulous, their faces full of hope.
Paper-dry voices whispered. "We don't know what you'll do, but we will try to take you back to do it."
"You can get me back to my body? You can make me live again?" Sophie asked, watching the shadow shapes drawing closer.
"We think we can," they said. They surrounded her, and as they did, Karen backed away. Sophie reached for her daughter, but Karen kept backing up. "If it hasn't been too long."
"Not yet," Sophie whispered.
"Now. There isn't any more time." She smiled, the smile that Sophie could never forget, had never stopped seeing. "But I'll still be here when you get back."
The souls of the Machnan began to flow into her, and she felt herself filling with a tingling, throbbing power; she felt the way she had felt when she touched the book, but the sensation was a thousand times stronger.
"We were the book," the souls whispered inside her head. "When you touched it, you felt us." They kept on melding with her, and she realized there had been more of them around her than she'd been able to see. Dozens became hundreds, hundreds became a thousand, that thousand multiplied, and the ranks of the bodiless souls thinned at last.
And the strangers' souls that melded inside of her soul whispered into her mind, "Now we try to go back."
Sixty-three
Aidris chanted. This was the old way to magic, the Kintari way. It was slower and weaker than the Aregen power magic she'd used to summon the Watchers, but it was her magic. She didn't have to consume the magic of others to do it. She didn't need anything but herself, and her concentration.
Her concentration had been hard to maintain.
What with the hiss of the endless pouring rain, the pitiful excuse for a Machnan wizard popping out of the gate at her, and enemy fighters approaching through the forest from the northeast, she'd lost her place in the spell twice, and both times she'd had to start from the beginning. She was out of practice; for almost a thousand years she'd done Aregen magic, achieving through sheer power what she now had to accomplish through finesse.
She'd lost some of her touch.
Her guards crouched just outside of the rain shield she'd spelled around herself with their ears cocked to the northeast, listening to the sounds they'd identified as approaching troops. Machnan, they'd said, moving forward on horseback. Then the distant shouts began; the first clashes of metal on metal, the first screams, the first howls of triumph. The elite warrag guard stood and quivered, hackles raised and bodies leaning forward, and their eagerness to charge into battle conveyed itself to Aidris even through the fine sweaty haze of her concentration. She kept the rhythm of the chant, though, and felt the subtle web of power build.
Then in the distance a warrag howled in anguish, and the four who guarded her reacted instinctively; they responded with howls of their own.
For the third time she stammered to a halt and felt the building energy shatter and scatter around her. She turned on her guards, fury locking her muscles into knots and twisting her hands into claws. "Go," she snarled. "Get away from me. Set your watch someplace where I cannot see your mindless faces or hear your animal voices. You stinking, sniveling, worthless wastes of flesh; go prove your mettle out there."
She pointed and the warrags tucked their tails along their bellies and slunk out of sight in four directions, to set up their watchposts. Worthless animals. The Kin had erred in creating them. They were too emotional and too attached to each other.
She wondered if she could undo them. As she dropped herself back into the half-tranced state of mind she had to maintain to weave the final component of the gate-opening spell, she thought that once she had concluded the business of this night, she would look into destroying or redesigning the warrags.
Sixty-four
"That helps a little," Jay said, watching the guards slink out of sight.
Jay and Hultif crouched just inside the opening in the gate tree. They could clearly see
and hear the woman who stood on the other side, chanting and drawing diagrams in the air with her fingertips.
"Yes. But they're quick."
"I've fought one before," Jay said. "I know how fast they are."
Hultif turned and stared at her, surprise on his face. "Did you win?"
"We survived."
"That's as good as a win."
They watched Aidris begin her spell again. Behind her, lying crumpled on the ground against a tree, Jayjay could see Sophie's body. No obvious injury pointed to the cause of her death. Jay could see no blood, no scars, no wounds. But she could no longer pretend there was hope. Sophie was dead. And her killer still lived.
Sitting, watching Aidris, Jay had an idea. "You can make it snow, huh?"
Hultif jumped at the sound of her voice, and the fur on his body stood straight out. In other circumstances, it would have been comical. He nodded, though, and smoothed his fur down. "Sometimes I can even summon a very good ice storm, though it does help if the weather is already miserable."
"Yeah," Jay said, watching the woman. "I'll bet that does help. So how long would it take you to get us some snow?"
"With it raining like this? Oh, I can change it to snow in merest minutes."
Jay nodded. The plan grew. "And you can start fires and make banquets. That's it?"
Hultif chuffed softly, and Jay read the sound as irritation. The peevish sound of his voice when he answered her told her she'd guessed right. "I'm very young, and mostly untrained. I can read the future too, though not when I am personally endangered. As I am now, for example." He cocked his head to one side and studied her. "You're very critical for someone who has no magic at all."
"I'm not critical of your magic. I was just wishing you could blast death rays from your fingertips or something like that."
"Sorry. No death rays. Had I been able to do that, yon bitch would have died at my hands long before now."
Jay nodded and considered for a moment his statement about looking into the future. "So you can't see the outcome of this?"
He glanced sidelong at her and said, "It doesn't take magic to see that. Fools could predict this outcome."
They were going to die. Right. Jay balled her hands into fists and glared at the hag on the other side of the opening.
"So if we're going to die anyway, why can't I just jump through the gate and run her through?"
"Before we can physically pass through the gate, we must open it. She will feel that; she cannot help but feel that, linked to the gate as she is. She will have the moment that it takes me to open it to prepare herself, and in that moment we will lose our surprise." He sighed. "And she is by far the better wizard of the two of us."
Jay nodded and thought for a moment. "But you can do your spells through the gate, can't you?"
"Yes."
"You could make it snow, or maybe set her on fire?"
"Yes."
"Okay. Can you start the fires quickly, or does it take you as long as it would to make it snow?"
"I can create the power spell so that it lacks nothing but the initiation word. Then I can hold it in readiness, and once cast, I can cast five or six more times before I have to stop and rebuild the spell."
"Fine. This is what I think we should do, then. You'll make it snow. If you can do ice, do ice. That ought to distract her. Then set a fire behind her—you can keep a fire burning in the rain?"
"Of course I can do that."
"Of course you can. Right. Endanger her with the fire, enough that she has to turn around to deal with it. While she's fighting that, you open the gate for me, and I jump through and kill her."
Hultif said, "You're asking me to do three things at once. Maintain snow, maintain a fire, and open the gate."
"You can't do that?"
"No one could do that."
"You can't make the snow keep itself going? That snow could provide us with a lot of cover. And it should be an obstacle to the rest of her people, especially if you can give us ice, too."
Hultif rocked back and forth on his haunches, muzzle tucked down to his chest. "Hmmmmm. Hmmmmm." He looked up at Aidris. "Snow first. Then the gate. Then the fire. I will throw it at her as you go through. For short spells, if I have the temperature low enough, the snow will maintain itself."
"Fine. Then let's go, before she gets through the gate."
Hultif squinched his eyes shut and continued to rock and mumble and growl. Jay watched the torrents of rain that streamed down the tree trunk that made up the other side of the gate. They were water, and they stayed water, and she began to think that he'd been exaggerating his abilities. Then all of a sudden the hiss of the rain became the pounding of hail, mixed with freezing rain and a blizzard of snowflakes.
Aidris screamed in frustration and stared up at the sky. "What, by the demons of the Rift, is the meaning of this?"
Jay unsheathed her sword. "Yes."
The snow came down harder, and the ice and hail kept falling too. Banshee winds tore through the forest, blowing the flakes in spirals and swarms; green leaves and dead branches, ripped from the high canopy by the hailstones, created a secondary curtain of debris that further lessened visibility. The roar of wind and hail and icy rain drowned out Aidris's furious shouts, and the ever-thickening snow erased her, too.
"Now the gate," Jay said, and Hultif opened his eyes.
"Oh, my heavens," he murmured. "I wasn't expecting that." Then a smile stretched across his muzzle and all his needle teeth gleamed. "But of course. Every time she broke her concentration, her spell scattered, but the energy from it didn't go anywhere. It was just out there, building and building." He rubbed his paws together. "Oh, lovely. The serpent bit her own damned tail."
"Get the gate," Jay repeated.
Hultif nodded, and Jay saw the inside of the gate begin to glow with a warm golden light. She'd forgotten that. The golden glow would show up on the other side, too—maybe even through Hultif's blizzard. Probably even through his blizzard.
"She's going to know I'm coming through. Be quick with the fire or I'm dead before I can get to her."
"As fast as I can."
Jayjay had her sword in her right hand and her dagger in her left. She climbed into the crotch of the gate tree where the two main trees split and crouched there. She decided she would jump out, duck, roll to her left, and come up to the side of the Watchmistress. Maybe that would be enough to save her.
Maybe.
The snow and sleet and hail kept pounding against the invisible barrier between her and Aidris. Then, without warning, the storm slammed into her. Blinded, she jumped, rolled and turned, and blinking furiously, stood, turning to the place where she thought the Watchmistress would be.
She couldn't see anything.
Sixty-five
Hultif couldn't believe he'd managed such tremendous snows. He wondered if he could create as impressive a fire; wondered if the Watchmistress's stray magic would feed a conflagration as well as it fed a storm. With the gate snapped shut behind him and Aidris effectively locked out for still a while longer, he began casting a fire spell.
But before he could release it, he heard quick, stealthy footsteps behind him. He spun in time to see his uncle swing a massive hammer at his head.
He shrieked and leapt to one side. "Uncle! No! We can still beat the Watchmistress. Don't!"
He dodged as Callion, with blood running down his face, snarled and swung the hammer again. "You interfered, boy!"
"But the omens, Uncle. I checked the omens, and if you had followed through on your plan, we would have been doomed. You could not have won!"
Callion leapt and swung the hammer overhand; the massive metal head whistled past Hultif's ear and crashed into his shoulder as Callion slammed into him.
Hultif heard bones breaking as he toppled to the ground. He screamed and kicked out with both legs, flinging his uncle off of him. He rolled to his right side and with his good arm pushed himself to his feet. His left arm hung uselessly.
"Glenraven chooses the Master of the Watch," Hultif said, stalking toward his uncle. "And Glenraven didn't choose you."
"Glenraven doesn't know what's good for her anymore. The realm is dying, and this idiotic choice is nothing but the sign of her spasming death throes."
"And your subversion of Glenraven's will is going to bring our world back to life, Uncle?"
He backed, his eyes shifting rapidly from side to side as he looked for another weapon. "The Aregen are the first Masters. We rule by right—and the time has come to reclaim our right."
"No. The time has come to let Glenraven breathe. Aidris tore open the Rift and bled her nearly dead, but Glenraven isn't dead yet. If that creature can let her heal, then I support her."
"You're a fool, and the child of fools. You're blinded by sentiment and tales of the glorious old days. I say we must create the glorious new days."
He tripped over a root and sprawled backward. Hultif hesitated for a second, looked back toward the gate tree where Jayjay had vanished into the storm, and turned to leap.
But Callion was no longer on the ground. He was no longer in sight.
Hultif spun, trying to find some sign of what had become of him, and felt a sharp tug as his uncle, who had somehow gotten behind him, grabbed the hammer away from him.
He charged immediately, ramming his head into his uncle's chest and clawing for his eyes with his good hand. The pain in his left shoulder, where the hammer had crushed bone, was a constant searing agony. He knew, however, that because he was fighting and moving, it wasn't as bad as it would become when he was still. He didn't give in to it.
Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 01] Page 30