With no time to consider, I poured everything I’d just consumed into the connection between the white rock and the mass of stone on the surface. I wept with release as the energy coursed out of me, a force multiplier that amplified the white rock’s mass exponentially. It plunged even further, cutting through the pocked stone of the geo-vents like a drill head through the ice plains. A thunderous crash numbed my ears. Six sharp shots sounded, tiny and impotent in the midst of the chaos.
I closed my eyes, and for a moment I was a child, playing as my mother put new sheets on the bed. She’d throw the sheets in the air and snap her hands sharply, spreading the fabric with a crack and letting it bell out over me, tinting the sunlight and creating my own private wonderland. Lazy days with my mother had been few and far between. She’d been a cop, and that meant getting up and going after the bad guys.
I sat up, vision dancing with dark spots. Dust and dirt filled the chamber, choking me, and turning my friends’ flashlights into pale yellow cones that appeared almost solid.
Forearm pressed over nose and mouth, I struggled to my feet. The dust-filled air clung to my sweat-slicked T-shirt and eyes, turning to mud. My flashlight was on the floor, and I picked it up, swinging its beam, and finding the hole in the floor that I’d almost tumbled down into. I veered away, dizzy, struggling to breathe. Someone was at my side, and I jerked away, arms raised to defend myself. It was Guyer. She was yelling something and pointing. I looked, and grasped the sorcerer’s arm with my free hand.
Weylan stood at the edge of the precipice and peered down. His long fur dangled down past his drawn eye plates, hiding his expression, but his sly hands twitched and spasmed, like a child twining their fingers in nervous anticipation. Blood streamed from his shoulders; the sharp cracks I’d heard during the explosion had been Jax or Guyer opening fire, trying to stop Weylan’s last, destructive impulse. Maybe it was his bulk, or maybe it was the plain stubbornness of a man who’d lived for centuries, but he was still on his feet. There was a single wooden rod in each of his show hands, both of them snapped in half. He swayed on his feet, and first one then the other rod fell into the hole left in the boulder’s wake.
“Two rods,” I said, as Guyer tugged on my shirt, pulling me away from the hole. Weylan had held two rods because there were two remaining control points. The one we were in, and the one Vandie’s rhyme would have led us to if not for Serrow’s ambush. We’d stopped one, but not the other. The other . . .
I turned to Guyer and yelled, “The others! Gellica and Harris!,” but she was focused on Weylan.
When the first few single strands of fur began to pull away from his face, I knew that something was wrong. As the hole began to brighten, I stepped back, pushing Guyer behind me, as if I could do anything to save her.
The wind grew to a furious, unnatural howl. More of Weylan’s fur lifted away, and I remembered a demonstration in school, children pressing our hands against a metal ball while a static charge lifted the hair from our heads.
Weylan’s entire body floated, hovering over the hole, almost soaring as he stared down into the depths, eye plates wide open in a way that would leave him exposed to even the most simple-minded of predators. His outstretched fur rose and waved on the warm air flooding up from the hole, looking for all the world like Dinah McIntire’s tasseled red dress. With each rise and fall of his fur, he grew thinner, consumed from within.
“I am chosen,” he said. Then, screaming, “I am chosen!” He kept screaming, but the words switched to Barekusan, and the low rolling bass notes held no meaning for me. Before long I doubt they held any meaning for him, either. He hung in the air, emaciated and wild-haired, and then he was gone, sucked into the hole, disappearing like a spider into a vacuum.
There was silence, and then the red light extinguished.
“What was that? You want to tell me what the Hells that was?” Guyer screamed in my ear, her voice cracking, wheezing, as we both struggled to breathe.
I shook my head, too winded for words, too confused for explanations. She and I clung to each other, limping a slow circle around the room’s perimeter, trying to find our way out. A new ringing distracted me, the sound of a bell coming from her pocket. I thought it one more audio hallucination. But then a clear and familiar voice rang out from farther down the tunnels. “Guyer! Guyer!”
It was Harris, entering through the sinkhole we’d failed to stop. My light touched on him as he emerged from the same opening where Weylan had first appeared. He raised a hand and called Guyer’s name once more.
“Go,” I said to Guyer, and gave her a gentle shove in his direction. “Get help. I’ll find Jax.”
45
MY FLASHLIGHT BEAM SLICED LOW arcs through the dust, but I still almost missed Jax. I found my partner seated on his ass, his back straight and legs splayed out. “Carter?” He’d apparently lost his flashlight in the chaos, and he pressed a hand to his head as he spoke, glassy-eyed and confused.
I turned the light onto my face, showing him it was me. “Let’s get you on your feet.” I pulled him upright.
A new light appeared in the chamber. Harris and Guyer were already gone, so that left one possibility.
“Gellica?”
She was beside us in a rush. She gripped Ajax and
