The Turquoise Tower (Revenant Wyrd Book 6) Page 6

When Sara arrived there were already several sorcerers and other wyrders shifting the blocks around with tendrils of wyrd. Large pieces of mortar were being lifted out of the gap, freeing those people trapped within and carrying dead or injured horses and pack mules out of the carnage.

  “Direction, please,” Rowan barked when they had come to a halt at the top of the stairs that started at the bottom near the wreckage and ended at the top of the bridge, directly beside the sunken area.

  A short plump man with unruly white hair came rushing over to them. He was huffing and his face was an unhealthy shade of red.

  “At the moment we are lifting the stones, one by one, trying to get the people out.”

  “That’s too dangerous,” Rowan said. “That rubble is stacked in there, one wrong shift and it could cause it to crumble completely.”

  “We’ve gotten most of the survivors out. The other ones are just here on top.” The man pointed down and Sara saw the bloody, broken bodies of people amidst the stones. They weren’t moving. Likely he wasn’t worried about further falling stones because there wasn’t anyone left alive in that hole.

  “No, there are others,” Azra said, pushing her red hair out of her eyes. “We have two friends at the very bottom of this mess that we don’t want smashed to jelly on the cobbled lanes of the bazaar.”

  The man blanched — Sara could tell because his face momentarily returned to a healthy shade.

  “What do you suggest?” the man asked, wringing his hands together.

  “We need to network our wyrd together, form it into a web, and lift the entire mass out of there,” Rowan said. “We will need a place for all the debris. Where are you currently putting it?”

  The man pointed further north and Sara could see rocks floating over to the large park at the base of the Falls of Nependier. “For now, that’s the largest open space we have.”

  “Alright. Us Guardians are used to working together. Give us a couple more strong sorcerers and we will get this accomplished.” Rowan straightened the wrap of green wool around her body with a sniff. Sara could feel the weave of orange wyrd slipping across Rowan’s body as she called upon her power. They had all worked their wyrd together many times, and so they understood the flavor of their individual wyrd. Linking their will together was no harder than clasping hands.

  Grace came huffing up to the top of the stairs, resting heavily on the railing when she crested the top. It took a moment for her to catch her breath.

  “Next time,” she said in a serious voice. “You might consider helping me out? I know you could have made me travel just as fast.”

  “Mag,” Sara said, ignoring Grace and going to the Realm Defense Counselor.

  “Yeah, I saw her along the way, I thought you could use her.” Grace waved her hand dismissively and went to the edge of the hole to study the wreckage. “Not many survivors,” she commented.

  “Are you able to help us with the rubble?” Rowan asked Grace. “You do control earthen wyrd, right?”

  “I can try,” Grace nodded. “My wyrd isn’t as strong on earth that is out of its natural habitat. These stones don’t have a lot of their natural energy in them. What do you need?”

  Rowan seemed to be considering what exactly Grace could do. “Can you make the stones attracted to one another? Link them in a way so they can’t shift out of balance?”

  “Like lode stones?” Grace furrowed her brows. “I’ve never tried it.”

  “Try it now,” Rowan said. Another sorcerer came up to her then and Rowan moved away.

  Sara watched the look of concentration come over her sister’s face and waited with bated breath while Grace worked. Finally, after Rowan had assembled a small troupe of sorcerers to help the Guardians, Grace’s face took on a relieved look.

  “Alright, I think that will do,” Grace said.

  “Do you have to hold it?” Sara asked before Rowan could.

  “No,” Grace said. She motioned to the stones below. “I just asked them to stick together.”

  “And that worked?” Rowan asked.

  “Seems to. I felt them respond.”

  “Alright,” Rowan said loudly. The assembled sorcerers stopped what they were doing and turned to her. “We have a group of sorcerers who are going to help lift this mass out of the way. We need the rest of the wyrders to help the constables. Seek out the chief and tell him you’ve been assigned to him.”

  As a procession of wyrders headed toward the stairs, Rowan turned back to her group.

  “Sara, would you like to lead this wyrding?” Rowan asked.

  Sara nodded. Rowan wasn’t as good at teaching these techniques.

  “Alright, get in a line,” Sara instructed. The sorcerers obeyed, and Grace stepped away. “Has anyone worked with meshing energies?”

  A few nodded, but most of them shook their heads no.

  “Ok, we’ll work like this. Link hands with the person beside you and pulse a little of your wyrd into their hand. Get a feel for the wyrd flowing through you, taste the difference of your own, feel the rhythm and the personality.” Sara joined the line and closed her eyes. She felt Mag pulsing her energy into her own palm, and felt the nervousness of the counselor. Sara pulsed back, and there was an answering recognition from Mag’s wyrd.

  “Now, once you have a good hold on the wyrd of everyone here, let your mind drift. I’m going to implant an image into my wyrd; you should see it. I want you to put your wyrd into the working, strengthen the vision as it comes to you, put all of the wyrd you can muster into strengthening the image.”

  Sara didn’t waste any time. She conjured the image of a network of wyrd, braids of all of the colors of wyrd of all the sorcerers present. She wove the wyrd underneath the wreckage of the bazaar. She felt all the minds of all the sorcerers gathered placing their wyrd into it, and as they worked, different threads of certain colors strengthened their glowing in Sara’s mind.

  “That’s good, keep going,” she encouraged. It took a while for all of the threads of wyrd to be of the same strength. She couldn’t instruct them further until all of the binding webs were the same. If one was weaker, it could cause the entire network to fail.

  “Alright,” Sara said as the last thread glowed in tandem with the rest. “Now, on my mark, we’re going to lift that mass out of the hole. Ready? Go!”

  Each of the wyrders assembled lifted with their minds, and the rocks below groaned with the pressure of the wyrd. Now was the part of the grouping that took more of Sara’s strength than any others. As the mass of stones lifted clear of the hole, floating in a tangled heap in front of the line of sorcerers, Sara directed a thread of wyrd into the mass, and pushed with her mind in the direction of the park.

  The mass started to move haltingly through the air, but move it did. Cheers rose up from below, and Sara felt some strands of wyrd faltering.

  “Steady, just hold it strong,” she cautioned. “Don’t pay attention to them, just listen to my voice and follow my instructions.”

  The shuddering in the weaving stopped. But then, just as the mass of blocks was halfway in its journey, a violent wave of malevolent wyrd shifted the assembled stones in their wyrded womb. The stones knocked together cacophonously.

  “What’s going on?” Rowan asked, her voice strained from the concentration. Other wyrders, however, weren’t able to hold the weaving, and Sara watched as some strands of wyrd snapped, and the stones shifted dangerously.

  “I’m not sure,” Sara said. She retracted her intent of moving the mass, and instead sought out the shadow of wyrd that rippled through the rubble. “Something dark.”

  There was a hint of paranoia in the wyrd coming from Mag’s hand.

  “Mag?” Sara whispered to her friend, but as soon as she said it there was an unholy blast of wyrd, and people screamed.

  Sorcerers along the wall fell to their knees screaming as the tendrils of their will were snapped from their working and burned down the channels into their bodies.

  The debris of the
mass shuddered and then exploded outward, shining an unholy black.

  “Darklight!” Rowan said. “MOVE!”

  But not everyone was fast enough. Sara knew what was happening. Somehow the darkness of Mag’s past wyrd had slipped into the working, corrupted it, and charged each and every stone with its power. As stones rained down around the city Sara watched in horror as people, buildings, swatches of grass, and segments of bridges vanished beneath the weight of individual boulders, carried beyond the Black Gates by the alarist wyrd that infused every piece of debris.

  Sara didn’t know what to say. She stood, transfixed at the destruction. Gaps in roads appeared, whole groups of people vanished, no doubt mindless of the horror raining down on them.

  “No,” Mag cried, falling to her knees. The wind tore at her dress, and carried screams to her ears. “What have I done?”

  “Alarist,” Azra seethed. “Guards, take this woman to the dungeons!”

  “No!” Sara said, stepping in front of Mag. “I can explain. It wasn’t intentional.”

  “How do you explain this?” Rowan asked, waving her hand out to the destruction. “She did this, didn’t she?”

  “How do you know it was her, and not something left over from the fallen angel?” Grace asked, stepping up beside her sister.

  “We were linked, Grace, we know it was her,” Rowan snapped.

  “Oh,” Grace said, looking to her sister. “I’ve got nothing.”

  “I can explain,” Sara said.

  “Then you had better start,” Aladestra said, stepping up to the top of the stairs.

  “Lily, come away from there,” Shirley called to her daughter. The neighbor’s dog wasn’t something she wanted her daughter around. There had been too many reports of the mutt attacking people. She couldn’t take the chance that they were only rumors.

  Her daughter skipped back across the street toward Shirley. She relaxed back in the chair, looking up at the cloudless sky and basking in the warmth of the winter day. It was unseasonably warm in the Holy Realm today, and she was taking advantage of it before the extreme cold of mid-winter set in and chased her indoors for months.

  Confident that Lily was out of trouble, playing with something in the snow, Shirley turned back to her book and kept reading. Quickly she was drawn back into the adventure and romance the pages of the book promised. A smile spread across her face with every page she turned.

  She hadn’t realized how much time had passed until darkness started to fall. With a sigh, she marked her page and looked up to her daughter. But there were people in the street, pointing up at the sky. A cry went up from farther down the street, and Shirley watched the crowd thin as people ran to their homes, shutting themselves inside.

  “What in the Realms?” Shirley said. But before she could look back up, Lily screamed out in pain.

  The book fell from her lap and into the snow as she trampled over to her daughter. “What happened?” Lily was holding her hand to her chest, so Shirley struggled it away from her and looked at the festering bite.

  Shirley saw the thin strand of white mucus on her daughter’s thumb and reached for it, but it was too slick for her to get hold of. The tendril spasmed and slipped out of Shirley’s grip, vanishing into Lily’s thumb.

  Lily whimpered.

  “It’s okay,” Shirley said. “Come on, let’s get inside.” She helped her daughter to her feet and steered her toward the door of their house.

  But they weren’t to make it. Overhead the darkness condensed, and the sound of clattering wings accosted her ears. Shirley stopped and looked up as the plague of locusts descended on the small town of Terranceville. She batted at them and stumbled through the biting insects. She pulled Lily along behind her, and her daughter stumbled with her mother, screaming at the fire each infernal bite brought to her flesh.

  Shirley could relate. She felt the bugs biting, nesting into her skin, wriggling their way in deeper. She fell to her knees, pushing her daughter before her and toward their house. Lily had to live, even if Shirley didn’t. It was that thought that prompted her to her feet. She grabbed Lily and darted toward the house.

  They never made it. Within seconds the town was decimated under a swath of locusts. An hour later, the town in ruin and all of the people dead, the locusts moved on.

  As the sun was setting that evening, Shirley began to move once more. This time not with life, but in death. Her body shuddered, jerked, and yanked up into the air, listing to the side, her footing unsure in her death. She turned south-east and began walking.

  Soon the entire town had reanimated and were lumbering along behind her, one thought shared among them, urging them forward, calling them to their destination: Lytoria.

  High in her tower balcony Mag was afforded a glorious view of the city’s sparkling lights, the towering heights of the mountains, and the constant rush of the waterfall. From the street below, the evening bustle swelled up to her ears. In the distance were shouting workers and the noise of their toil. Mag knew she wasn’t shuttered in this out-of-the-way room because she was an honored guest, but instead she was under a kind of arrest. Guards were posted at her door, and her balcony had no way of escape, unless she wanted to plummet a couple hundred feet to the cobbles below.

  If she had access to her wyrd she could have flown perhaps, lightened the air around her, causing her descent to be slowed. But she didn’t have access to her powers. The iron bands around her throat and wrist were wyrded in such a way as to stop the flow of wyrd through her body. She didn’t know the implications; would she start aging? The last time she’d been under arrest for the use of her alarist powers, the bands had caused her to age. It was a small secret among wyrders that certain things could make a sorcerer appear older than they were: too many close calls to what would cause a mortal death; other wyrding; corrupt wyrd worked for too long; and certain kinds of imprisonment.

  These bands were similar to the ones that had aged her in the past, before she had turned over a new leaf and given herself back to the Goddess.

  A gentle breeze played through her short black hair, and she let the wind carry away the worries of the day. But as her mind drifted, she couldn’t help but feel the pulse of alarist wyrd within her. She had tapped into something old and dark during the battle with the chaos dwarves. Something she hadn’t used in ages, but had to call upon for help when nothing else would save her people. Now the power was with her again, calling to her, throbbing through her body like a lover’s touch. If she listened closely enough, she could almost hear the power whispering through her mind with the perverse language of Chaos. It reminded her of screams, of thousands of tormented cries for help.

  It made her blood run cold.

  The thought of the Guardian’s Keep made her think of her family. Her mind turned to her husband and her children, and the danger she faced. Never had Mag thought they would have to live without her, being a sorceress and all, but with what had happened today. . .

  Her eyes drifted to the destroyed bazaar, and though she couldn’t see it from this vantage point, she tried to find the place where they’d pulled Dalah and Rosalee out of the wreckage. The accident had made very real the danger they were all facing.

  Against her will, her eyes also traveled to the places she could see where the darklight-forged rubble had landed around the city. A tremble crept up her back. Never before had her wyrd worked against her like that. Even when the Well of Wyrding had been corrupted, she hadn’t had to face the threat of her alarist power coming out.

  But now she was facing something she’d never thought she would, after starting her new life and turning her back on her old ways: death. True death for a sorcerer. Beheading. Suddenly the iron band around her throat felt heavier, like the blade of an executioner’s axe.

  Her husband was a sorcerer, but only one of their three children were. The heartbreak of being a sorcerer parent was watching your child grow old and die.

  Mag sighed, and tried to push the troubled thought away.
Dark thoughts allowed the alarist power she had reawakened a tighter hold on her. The darkness of the power would feed off her need, off her despair, and offer promises of things it could never make good on. And then you were addicted.

  The work crews were toiling away at the bazaar, even in this late hour, shouting commands and floating large chunks of debris out of the way with wyrd. But as she watched, a shadow grew in her mind. She could see it out of her peripheral vision, down in the street. At first she didn’t pay it any attention, but as the darkness in her mind grew, her alarist wyrd responded.

  Her first thought was Wyrders’ Bane, but Angelica and Jovian had transmuted that. No, this was different.

  Lazily she let her gaze drift to the darkness, and when her eyes fell upon the figure, swathed in black, her heart knew fear. There was something familiar there, something reaching out to her from her past.

  The tortured screams Mag had come to associate with her darklight wyrd echoed into her mind. Underneath the tormented cries was the perverse, twisted language of Chaos, calling out to her blood, infusing her with power.

  Mag closed her eyes and started to pray, willing the power of the Goddess to protect her, but if there was any answer, Mag didn’t feel it. All she did feel were the eyes of some predatory animal on her. When she opened her eyes and looked down, she saw a glint of amber from within the shadowed hood.

  And just like that, the figure vanished, along with the pull on her alarist wyrd. In a whisper the voice of Chaos left her awareness, and Mag was once more able to breathe comfortably. A peace infused her mind when the figure left. But she knew, without knowing how she knew, that it would be back. This wasn’t the end.

  A knock on her door made Mag jump, and a startled cry drew the attention of several passersby below. She turned around to the shadowed room as the guards opened the door, and her blond charge, Astanel, stepped inside the chamber.

  “I’m surprised they let you in here,” Mag said, stepping from the chill night air and into the room. She shut the balcony doors behind her and the small fire began to warm the room almost instantly.