“You have Conlan . . .”
“Conlan will be fine. I will be fine. You will be fine. Everything will be fine.”
I would go to hell for making promises like this.
An armored bus emerged from behind the curve of the road and headed for us. The People’s mobile HQ.
It sped to us and came to a stop. The doors swung open and Ghastek stepped out, followed by two Masters of the Dead and a dozen journeymen. I recognized familiar faces: Kim, Sean, Javier . . .
“We’ll burn the bus,” Ghastek said over the snarls.
The undead attacked the bus, pulling the reserve gasoline containers out of the back and dousing the vehicle with it.
The two giant animals were still fighting. It took everything I had to not run over there and help.
One of Ghastek’s undead grabbed him, wrapping its arms around his legs. The second picked up the first and raised Ghastek to the pillar. He raised his hand to her cheek. His fingers stopped just short of touching.
“Let me go,” Rowena told him.
“Never,” he said.
“Ready,” Javier told me.
“Carlos!” I called.
A short merc turned toward me. I pointed to the gutted bus. “Torch it.”
Carlos leaned back and flexed, bringing his arms together as if he were squeezing an invisible basketball. A spark burst into existence between his spread fingers and spun, growing, twisting, turning into a flame, first reddish, then orange, then white. His hands shuddered. He grunted and launched the fireball at the bus.
The more of yourself you give to the fire, the louder the call will be.
The armored vehicle exploded.
I reopened the cut on my arm and thrust it into the fire. Heat cooked my skin. My blood boiled into the flames, turning them red. Pain hit me, and I sent it into the blaze with my magic, opening a pathway across thousands of miles. The fire roared, bloody, and I screamed into its depths.
“FATHER!”
The blaze snapped, a glowing silk curtain pulled suddenly taut, and my father appeared within the flames, eyes blazing with power.
“WHAT?”
I pulled my arm out of the fire and cradled it. It hurt. God, it hurt. “Help me.”
He stared at me. He chose his own age, sometimes young, sometimes older. Today he wore the face I knew, a man in his late fifties, full head of hair, wise handsome face that could’ve belonged to a teacher, a prophet, or a king. He’d let himself age like this because he wanted to look like a man who could’ve fathered me. He had still kept it, even two years later.
“Please help me.”
“YOU ARE ASKING ME FOR HELP? WHY SHOULD I HELP YOU, SHARRIM?”
My father was proudest of me when I managed to beat him. Weakness and begging wouldn’t work. I had to be smart about this.
“Do you remember the ashes of Tyre?”
He looked behind me. His gaze swept over the grave of Kings Row and halted on Rowena inside the pillar. A muscle in his face jerked. Something sparked within his gaze. He buried it before I could pin it down. What I said next would determine if Rowena lived or died.
“He says you killed his brother,” I said. “This is a demonstration of his power. He doesn’t think our family can match it.”
The flames went out. The bus lay before me, suddenly cold. My arm hurt.
It hadn’t worked. He’d abandoned me. I’d banked on his pride and lost. I turned away.
A draft touched my cheek. Next to me Roland lowered the hood of his plain brown robe and looked at the pillar. The undead scattered. Ghastek stood alone by the pillar, his chin raised, his eyes defiant. The rest of the People huddled in a clump to my right, putting me between themselves and my father.
“Have you thought of a solution?” he asked, as if he’d just given me a complex mathematical problem and was curious if I could solve it.
“I can take control of the pillar, but that will require breaching it, and any breach will break the protective envelope around her. If I attempt to claim the protective envelope around her as my own, it may disintegrate and she’ll die.”
He nodded, his handsome profile slightly curious. “Continue.”
“My best option is to freeze her into stasis with the spell of Kair, while I claim the land. The spell of Kair would hold her separate from our reality.”
I wouldn’t be able to hold it for longer than an instant either. I didn’t have enough practice.
“Claiming would allow me to instantly disintegrate the pillar before it burns her, but claiming is a two-step process: the initial pulse that disperses from me to the boundary and the return pulse that travels from the boundary back to me. In the space between the two pulses, I’m powerless. The spell of Kair requires a constant flow of magic from the mage. It will collapse. The first pulse of claiming will disrupt the magic net that’s keeping her alive right now. If she’s out of stasis between the two pulses, she’ll burn to death.”
And I had just told him that Erra was teaching me. I would worry about it later.
My father crouched and picked up a handful of ash. “When their kind scorch the land, they wound it. Are you prepared for what will follow if you claim it?”
I had no idea what would follow. “Yes.”
My father nodded. “Three seconds. That is all you have.”
Three seconds was an eternity longer than I would’ve lasted. It had to be enough.
I had only generated a powerful claiming pulse once, and I’d required a tower to do it. Erra had been having me practice claiming small chunks of land, a couple of feet here and there, and then letting them go, and it required a lot of preparation.
All I needed was a twenty-yard circle around the pillar. That would contain any veins of magic stretching from the pillar. I could do this. I just needed an anchor. Claiming required an anchor, whether it was a tower or a nail thrust into the ground. I needed a conduit for my power.
I didn’t have anything.
Wait. I had my sword. I grasped Sarrat with my left hand and knelt, holding it straight up.
Slowly, deliberately putting one foot in front of the other, Ghastek walked away from the pillar to the group of People waiting on the side.
My father raised his hands. Light stabbed from them. Words, ancient and beautiful, poured out of his mouth, moving the magic itself. It was beautiful. It was poetry and music wrapped into a song of pure power.
I stabbed Sarrat into the ground and fed every drop of me into it.
A pulse tore out of me, a crimson wave of light rolling through the land. There was a pause, a single heartbeat that lasted for an eternity. Silence met me, and then, in the distance, I heard a noise, like a tornado coming from far away. It grew, deafening, overpowering, and slammed into me, jerking me off my feet. I hovered three feet above Kings Row. My skin turned to ash. Flames burst inside me, incinerating me. My body burned.
Neig had drained the land of its magic to make the pillar. It needed magic to survive and it was taking mine. It was pulling the magic out of my veins.
The agony drowned me. It hurt. It hurt so much. The land would consume me.
Rowena.
Through the bloody haze covering my eyes, I reached toward the smudge of magic burning in my mind and struck the pillar.
My vision cleared for an agonizing moment, suddenly razor-sharp, and I saw Curran lock his huge fangs on the back of Moccus’s neck and bite through it. The great boar gasped and went limp, finally at peace.
The pillar shattered, the molten liquid spilling, each drop turning into a perfect globe of glass, suffused with stolen magic.
Don’t panic, Erra’s cool voice reminded me from my memory.
The glass was mine. I crunched the droplets with my power. They broke as one, then again, and again, raining down in a glittering waterfall, and I crunched them again and again, feeding their magic back into the land while a crystal rain fell onto the soil, slipping into the earth.