Darkness Rising (The Endless War Book 2) (20 page)

This time, Ciara felt the surge of power from her j’na that was much like what she’d experienced when summoning the draasin.

“Yes, you have learned more than you realized.” Olina stopped and leaned on her staff. “The technique is different, but I recognize the teachings of Rolan in the way you press, mixed with Uyrea in the speed. I never was able to master those techniques, which is why I followed Polis.” She lifted her staff again and pressed it deeply into the ground. The grasses around them flattened as if a massive hand pressed down atop them. “Whoever your father might be, it is clear he studied in Hyaln.”

Olina started away, leaving Ciara standing with her j’na still pressed into the mud. She pulled it out, the end caked with black earth, and trailed after Olina. “Then why did he send me here? If he knew how to summon the draasin, why did he refuse to teach me?”

Olina paused long enough to look over at Ciara. “You continue to think he refused. From what I can tell, you learned much. Perhaps not the same as you would had you studied in Hyaln, but you have learned the beginnings of how to call to the draasin. Others will follow.”

She started toward the hillside. “Perhaps you should return to him. You have a technique that I could never replicate, which makes teaching it difficult.”

“That’s the problem,” Ciara said. “I
can’t
return to him. The draasin brought me here. I can only believe that they brought me to learn from you.”

That had to be the reason. Otherwise, why would the draasin have taken her away from her home and brought her to these strange and wet lands where there was nothing familiar?

Olina leaned on her staff and looked over the town of K’ral. Ciara stopped next to her, waiting for the old woman to say something, perhaps to tell her some secret. But she said nothing.

From here, K’ral was a large town, much larger than her village, and dozens of people moved through the early morning streets. Smoke trailed up from chimneys scattered throughout the town, and the scent of baking bread rose over the wet earth and green aromas that filled her nostrils.

“This land is my home now, but it wasn’t always that way,” Olina said. “When I trained in Hyaln, I was one of the wise, skilled in ways that even the enlightened were not.” The smile slipped on her face and she shrugged. Her fingers trailed along the length of her jainah, almost a caress. “None of that matters anymore. I am to serve K’ral.” She tipped her head back and turned to Ciara. “I cannot say why you have been brought to us. Perhaps the draasin know more and could answer were they to return, but it has been many years since they have answered the call of anyone in Tsanth, even from the Hyaln. And maybe that is the reason you are here. Perhaps you are meant to help Tsanth find the draasin again.”

Ciara couldn’t take her eyes off K’ral. “I need to get home. I need to help my people, my father…”

“You are here now, Rider. This can be your home.” Olina started down the hillside leading into K’ral.

Ciara hesitated, holding tightly to her j’na before following. The soft ground squished beneath her foot, and Ciara knew that this would never be her home. Somehow she would have to find a way to reach the draasin again, discover why they had brought her here, and then… Then she needed to return to Rens and find out what had happened to her people. But how, since Olina seemed unwilling to teach?

A
lena had made
it to Rens, immediately feeling the sharp change of the heat that overwhelmed her, nearly sucking the breath out of her lungs. She’d been to Rens often enough since coming to the barracks, and each time, she expected it would get easier, but it never did. Rarely did she come alone, as she was now. When she hunted with Calan, he always enjoyed the search for the draasin, and she had made a point of coming with him, not willing to let him hunt without her.

Cheneth had paired the hunters, and Calan had chafed under the dictum that he work with Alena. She had made a point of trying to prove herself, knowing he would only judge her on how successful they were in their hunts. Alena had done all she could to stop him from actually harming the draasin, but that had grown increasingly difficult over the past year.

The shaping she’d attached to Volth had drawn her here, but she didn’t know why. Where was he?

All around her was more of the same bleak landscape Rens was known for. Not all Rens; there were parts, mostly those that Ter had taken long ago, where grasses grew long and tall, where the spindly icanth trees grew in great rows, holding water like long reeds, and where water actually flowed. Those places had become part of the rest of Ter, absorbed like so much else.

Alena had always felt there was value in Ter taking on more land. The order provided a lawfulness, and the warriors kept peace. But over time, her feelings on that had changed, tied to the conversations she’d shared with the draasin.

Ter had attacked in Rens because of the draasin, with the order intending to keep the people of Rens safe from the draasin, but it had soon become something else. Alena hadn’t been a part of the order then and wasn’t sure what she would have done had she been asked to help with those earliest invasions. Would the draasin have reached out to her sooner? It hadn’t been until she had gone to the barracks, until she was faced with the possibility of attacking them, that the draasin had first spoken to her.

Alena well remembered that first time. The voice had exploded within her mind during a hunt. Wyath had led her, guiding her as she crept up on the draasin, intending only to see one of the creatures, not to actually attack. When the voice had come, she hadn’t known what it was.

Wyath had. That had been when Alena first knew she was a part of something more, when she learned that there was something beyond even the wisdom of the order.

Joining the order had been a difficult decision for her. Growing up along the border with Tsanth, she had a different appreciation for other people than what she’d found within Ter, different than what she’d seen from others within Atenas, and that was supposed to be a place of learning, a place where scholars studied and understood the elements, but Alena had discovered there was much they didn’t understand.

She pushed away thoughts of Atenas and focused on finding Volth. That blasted man had to be here somewhere. Her shaping told her he was near, but she couldn’t find him. She didn’t find anything really. Nothing but heat and the sun.

Why had she been drawn here, then? What had pulled her here of all places?

Maybe the connection hadn’t worked as she intended. That would be unusual. It wasn’t a particularly difficult shaping, requiring only a mix of earth and air to follow, but it was possible that Jasn had discovered it and modified it somehow.

No, she didn’t think he had.

Then where was he?

She shifted her focus to earth, listening for a change, but found nothing.

Not earth then, but could she find him with water? He was tied to water almost as tightly as she was tied to fire, so if she listened with the right sensing, she might be able to detect him.

Alena focused, straining for water. In these lands, there was no water.

That wasn’t right, she realized. There was water, but it was faint and trapped deep beneath the earth just over the ridgeline. Alena lifted to the air on a shaping of wind and came to land in the remains of an old village.

There was nothing else there, nothing that would tell her where to find Volth, but that didn’t change the sense of water.

She searched among the rubble, looking for why she would be drawn here as she followed the shaping to him. The rock reminded her of an old Rens village, and from the way it piled into a heap, swept over by dust and time, she figured it had been gone for years.

Running a finger through the dust, she paused. Not years. The dirt around here had been swept, but not by wind and time. It had been moved by an earth shaping, one crafted with subtlety and meant to mask what had happened.

Her heart quickened and she strained again for water. The sense of it was there, but it was weak and distant, not at all enough to signal that someone lived.

There had to be another way to search for him. Earth and water sensing weren’t working, but would fire? Alena was better connected to fire than the other elements, and the connection to the draasin had strengthened that bond, adding to her skill.

Holding fire, she stretched out, using a trick she’d learned when searching for the draasin. It involved focusing on differences in temperature, something that required a subtle touch. Out here in Rens, there was no real difference in the temperature, nothing but the steady heat. But that wasn’t where she detected the hint of moisture. Shifting her focus to reach beneath her, she used fire sensing to delve beneath the ground, sweeping out in a wide arc all around.

There she detected the variation in temperature, and the change was marked. Massive heat existed beneath the ground. She should have been able to detect it more easily than she had, but she’d been so focused on using a combination of water and earth that she hadn’t.

What was this place?

Not only had there been an earth shaping that attempted to obscure it, but there was enough fire beneath the ground to indicate one of the draasin.

Blast! What if
was
one of the draasin?

But one of the draasin wouldn’t be trapped beneath the ground. Something else, then.

Alena had to know. Using earth, she poured a shaping into the ground, pulling aside rock and lifting it atop the rest of the rubble of the fallen village. It moved slowly, and the effort of the shaping was taxing, draining her quickly. There was no finesse to moving rock like this, nothing but brute-force shaping.

The farther she went, the more certain she became that there was something deeper in the ground. The earth began to press up against her. No, that wasn’t quite right. It pressed up to
assist
her. Alena grabbed the rock and pulled, moving with more and more speed, unmindful of the waste of shaping energy. It would take her time to recover, and it might be that she didn’t have time to spare, but whatever—or whoever—was beneath the ground was her focus now.

A wide cavern opened up beneath her. With a blast of earth and wind, Jasn Volth surged toward her. Blood poured from a deep gash on his head, but that mended as she watched. One arm twisted strangely behind him, bent at a painful angle that rotated around, healing as he came to land on the ground next to her.

She had known he had skill with water shaping, but skill enough to heal himself like this? Who had such ability? Focusing inward with this intensity wasn’t possible! But then, what Jasn did wasn’t necessarily shaping, was it? The elementals healed him. Hadn’t he said that when he was in Rens, he had
wanted
to die but couldn’t?

“How did you find me?”

She felt the shaping he held, a dangerous collection of earth and wind. After tearing rock from the ground, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to defend against him if he tried to throw her into the pit she’d opened. Unlike him, she didn’t have any ability to heal herself.

“I tied a shaping to you when we were at the Sanash in case you decided to disappear.”

He frowned, his brow furrowed. “Normally I’d be upset, but seeing that I wouldn’t have managed to escape without your helping, I don’t think I have that luxury.”

“What happened?”

He glanced at the pit. A shaping she didn’t recognize washed away from him. “We came to Hessan, mostly for me. I wanted to see it, to determine what steps to take next. Someone had been here, but I wasn’t able to tell who. When I went into the building”—he looked at the pile of rubble, his frown deepening—“the wall collapsed, burying me. It was all I could do to hold the earth in place so that it didn’t crush me.”

Alena considered how much earth and rock she’d moved. That should have been enough to crush someone. How had he enough strength to hold it in place?

“You shouldn’t have been able to hold that much.”

He grunted. “Don’t sound like you’re disappointed,” he said. “And I wouldn’t have been, but I used one of the marks like Wyath placed in the barracks. The kind that seal in earth.”

Alena tried to hide her surprise. Using an earth seal, or any seal for that matter, was not a trivial shaping. The shapers who managed to do so had studied and trained for years before succeeding, and mostly on shapings that weren’t so critical. Never would a shaper have
started
with a shaping designed to keep them alive.

“It didn’t hold
quite
as well as I hoped,” Jasn went on. “That’s why I have this.” He pointed to his head. “Had, I guess.”

“You said ‘we.’”

He nodded. “Bayan was with me.”

“Where is she?”

Jasn shook his head. “I thought she went to find help, but seeing as she’s not with you, I’m not sure.”

“She wasn’t with you inside the building when it collapsed?”

“Not inside. And I couldn’t reach her afterward. I think she tried…”

Jasn went to the edge of the pit and stared down into the earth. Alena stopped next to him, wondering what drew his attention. She would think that after escaping from the rock, he would want nothing more than to leave it alone.

“There’s something else, Alena.”

“What?”

Jasn pointed. “Down there. Don’t you sense it?”

She frowned and realized that she did. The massive swell of heat was still beneath her. She had found Jasn, but that had been more chance than anything else. What she’d sensed had reminded her of the draasin.

“I always wondered why they came here, why the attack was so powerful for a place like this. It was different than so many of the others along the border of Rens. The attacks this deep were always more ferocious.”

“What are you talking about?”

He smiled tightly. “Now I think I understand. It doesn’t change the fact that so many died, but at least I understand.”

“Volth?”

“That’s what you’re sensing, Alena,” he said. “Down there. The heat. I sensed it as well.”

“The draasin?”

“Not the draasin. Eggs. This is their nest.”