Heroes Return (39 page)

And then everything stopped. Taro erected his own protections and I removed mine.

We stared at each other, gasping for breath. That had been weird. “I don’t know that I like that,” said Taro.

“If it keeps us and everyone else alive while we’re here, I’m going to keep doing it. Maybe it will feel less strange in time.” I was so relieved. I had found a way to make channeling in Flown Raven effective and bearable.

Taro was scowling.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Maybe you should be the Source,” he muttered. “You don’t need me for anything, do you?”

I stopped myself from sighing. “The spell doesn’t seem to work without a Source.”

“How kind of you to say so,” he said bitterly.

Ah, the hell with patience. “Taro, I know it’s hard for you to be here, but you can’t wear it on your skin like this. You don’t want to admit you’re having trouble with channeling. You feel this ridiculous resentment for Reid. You—”

“It’s not ridiculous!” he snapped.

Again, I just looked at him.

“He’s so smart,” he complained. “You have so much more to talk about with him than you do with me.”

“I do enjoy talking with him. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just because you and I love each other doesn’t mean we have to be all things to each other.”

His eyebrows rose. “You’ve never said you loved me.”

I frowned. “I must have.”

Looking amused, he shook his head.

“Oh. Well. I do. Love you.”

“Be still my heart, you romantic, you.”

A huge, groaning crack rent the air. I’d never heard anything like it, and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and sent a shiver up my back.

“What the hell was that?” Taro exclaimed. He went to the window, pushing at the wooden shutter. At first it resisted his efforts, and then it was flung up, letting in a blistery wet gale.

“Can you see anything?” I asked.

He backed away from the window. “Just a face full of rain.” He reached out to pull the shutter closed, and he was half-drenched by the time he managed it.

“Rain and wind don’t make that kind of noise.”

Something made that kind of noise again as we quickly dressed. It was a horrible, frightening sound, and I found myself breathing faster in reaction to it. We left our suite in search of Fiona, trying first her suite, then the nursery, and then the sitting room. We finally found her in the kitchen, dressed in a slicker and boots, speaking in whispers with Bailey and Tarce, who were similarly dressed.

“We have to wait until we know it’s stopped,” was her greeting to us.

“What is it?” Taro asked her.

“It’s the ridge. It’s shifting or collapsing or something. Bailey, round up everyone and have them dressed for outside,” Fiona ordered. “Tarce, go to every cottage in the village and bring every able-bodied person to the garden.”

“There’ll be objections to being out in this weather,” said Tarce.

“Too damn bad. We need them to clean up the mess this could turn into.”

“What do you think this might turn into?” I asked.

“I don’t know!” she snapped.

I thought it a valid question. What was happening out there? Why did we need to do anything?

But apparently we needed slickers, and when Lila showed up, Taro asked her to find some for us.

The groaning sounds continued, joined by a horrible grinding. It seemed like I could feel it, in the back of my teeth, and my mind developed images of the ridge tearing apart. Was that what was happening? Why? If it wasn’t a natural disaster, what could be causing it?

“Isn’t there something you can do about this?” Fiona hissed at Taro.

“No, damn it! I don’t know what’s causing this. For all I know, it’s the result of one of the earthquakes that hit before we were posted here.”

“It wouldn’t take this long to happen.”

“It’s rock. It’s heavy. Who knows how it reacts and how long it takes?”

“There are people who live on the other side of that ridge, Shintaro!”

“There is nothing I can do!”

Was there really not? He could move soil with amazing precision. The ridge was stone, which was a form of soil, wasn’t it? Why couldn’t he stop the ridge from doing whatever it was doing?

But I didn’t want to ask that in front of Fiona. She didn’t know about Taro’s other talents. And I had to assume Taro had already considered whether he would be able to do anything or not. I was pretty sure he would be willing to reveal his secrets, if he had to, to help people, if he could. He had in the past.

I didn’t know how long we stood and listened to the groaning of the ridge. It felt like an hour, at least, and all the servants were collected in the kitchen waiting for Fiona’s next order. Even the Guards had shown up, dressed to help. I was surprised to see them, though I supposed I shouldn’t have been. Just because I didn’t like them didn’t mean they weren’t decent enough human beings.

There was a pounding on the kitchen door. Fiona yanked it open. I didn’t recognize the woman standing out in the rain, but she wore a whaler’s slicker. “There are people buried under the slides,” she announced.

Fiona may have wanted to wait longer, to make sure the ridge had actually settled before venturing out over it—I know I wanted to—but there was no sign of indecision about her expression as she nodded. “The healer shall choose who will assist her with the wounded. Everyone else follows me through the ridge. We don’t stop until everyone’s accounted for.”

Everyone’s accounted for. Not, until we save everyone.

We filed out into the rain. I heard Browne call out a handful of names. I wasn’t among them, of course. We were joined by tenants as we moved through the gardens behind the house. There weren’t as many as I expected, even taking out the children and those who had remained behind to watch them.

When we reached the ridge, we met our first obstacle. The pathway through the ridge was filled with jagged slabs of rock. There was no way through or around them.

“You climbed over that?” Fiona asked the whaler. The whaler nodded. “All right, everyone up and over.”

“No!” one of the maids objected. “You can’t ask that of us! We’ll kill ourselves.”

Fiona didn’t even look at her. “Climb or find another position without a recommendation from me.” And with those words, she began the ascent.

I shared the maid’s unease. This was not a solid pile we were climbing. While the slabs were small enough that we were not scaling a sheer surface, it was not a settled pile of rocks, either. The surfaces shifted beneath our feet and every time they did, my heart jumped into my throat. While the pile didn’t reach the top of the ridge, it was high enough that my legs were aching and my palms were raw by the time I reached the top, and the climb down the other side was just as strenuous as the scale up had been.

There were already people working on moving rocks, and the groups pointed out the areas of devastation. A huge portion of the ridge looked like it had been gouged out by some external force, the rock sliding down to the base and tearing away the work and residential structures with them. Already, injured people were being strapped to hastily structured stretchers for transport over the pile blocking the path. Getting them to Browne was going to be a hell of a job.

“Roshni,” Tarce muttered, and he was running off toward the Wind Watcher’s tower. I ran after him, my mind full of images of Radia’s delicate form crushed under jagged rocks.

Running on uneven rock was difficult. The rain didn’t help.

The tower had tumbled to pieces like a child’s stack of blocks, the warning slab knocked clean over. Both such solid structures, it should have been impossible to damage them. Three people were already working on shifting the rock, using lengths of wood and long iron tools I didn’t recognize.

“Give me that!” Tarce grabbed one of those iron tools from the woman who wielded it. “Roshni? Roshni!”

“We’ve been calling for her, milord,” the woman said. “Haven’t heard nothing yet.”

“Does anyone know what floor she was on?” I asked.

“What does that matter?” Tarce snapped.

“It’ll tell us where to dig.”

“We’ve been digging at the base,” the woman said. “That’s been the deepest part.”

“That’s probably where she’d be at this time of day.”

“She might have been in bed,” I objected, but no one listened to me.

Tarce shoved the iron under a stone and pushed on it.

The woman left to get another iron rod, and I followed to get one of my own. They were long and heavy and difficult to manipulate in the rain. The iron bar wasn’t designed to be a lever. Forcing it under a rock was a challenge, and I wasn’t strong enough to shift any rock on my own. It took three of us to shift and push a single rock out of the way.

I felt the ridiculous urge to shout out at Radia, to tell her we were getting to her. I couldn’t imagine what it felt like to be buried under rock, possibly in agony, waiting for rescue. If she was even alive.

She’d better be alive. I didn’t know how well I could balance the death of another person I knew and liked, so soon after Dane.

But it was grueling work, and I didn’t have the stamina to toil at it for long. Others came to join us, and we worked in shifts. I was ashamed that everyone could work longer and with more vigor than I. I wouldn’t have thought my life was so sedentary, but the insides of my fingers were sore from rubbing against the iron, and every muscle from my hands, arms and shoulders to the small of my back was screaming.

And it seemed we accomplished little for all of our efforts. That we couldn’t even be sure we were digging in the right place added to my general anxiety. I wanted to call others to help us, to get us moving faster, but everywhere I looked, people were either digging in their own areas or getting the injured back over the ridge.

Had I somehow caused this, either by refusing to let Taro channel Flown Raven’s events while we were still in High Scape, or by my meddling with a spell earlier that morning?

I attacked the next stone with renewed vigor.

In time, we seemed to have moved a substantial amount of stone. At least, I was recognizing wood and stone from the structure, rather than what had slid down from the ridge. Those items were smaller and more regularly shaped, and therefore more easily moved. It was encouraging, and we moved faster.

“Radia?” I called. I couldn’t help it. I had been holding it in for hours. “Can you hear us?”

There was no answer.

More material was cleared away. The ceiling of the lower floor had collapsed in a relatively large piece and at something of a slant. An axe was brought in and Tarce tried to insist on wielding it himself, but he was tired and clumsy with it, and a whaler took it from him and turned the ceiling into kindling.

Radia was curled up in a corner that had partially withstood the onslaught. Her left leg was crushed under a rock, and she was unconscious. She didn’t stir as the rock was removed from her leg. Tarce knelt beside her, putting his face close to hers. “She’s breathing,” he announced.

Oh, thank gods. Thank gods. That would have been so wrong.

I couldn’t believe she had survived this. It seemed an impossible chance.

Of course, she still might not. Despite gentle attempts to rouse her, she didn’t wake, and she remained unconscious as her leg was freed and she was strapped to a stretcher.

I expected Tarce to follow her back to the manor. He did not. After determining there had been no one else in the tower, Tarce ordered us to other groups, joining one himself. No one’s day was over yet.

Chapter Twenty-nine

The rain finally stopped, which was one good thing to happen for us. Another was that the children had all been at the school in the village, so there were no small bodies to pull out of the rubble. But it was a grim, disheartening business finding the dead beneath the layers of rock. We found survivors as well, but those incidents decreased as time wore on, and our strength flagged.

I was so, so exhausted, and I didn’t know if I was even doing any good. I left my group to drink some water from a cauldron that had been set up near the shore for that purpose. I drank down a couple of cupfuls in hands shaking and chapped from my labors.

Taro was able to sneak up beside me without my noticing, but I was too tired to jump when he said, “How are you doing?”

“I’m pretty useless right now.”

“Aye, me, too. As is everyone else, from the looks of it.”

“How do we know if we’ve got everyone?” I asked. “What if people buried underneath have no one above-ground to say they’re still missing?”

“We’re not going to find everyone,” Taro said.

“We have to.”

“It’s not possible. Look at this mess. We are not able to shift it all.”

I glanced around and saw no one else close enough to hear us. Still, I whispered as I asked, “There’s really nothing you can do?”

He just glared at me. I supposed that had to be answer enough.

I looked at the groups still working on the rocks, knowing I had to get back to them and wondering how I possibly could. My limbs felt like noodles, my back was a mass of knots, my clothes were soaked with sweat and rain, and my eyes were rolling in grit.

I saw a figure far along the shore, walking away from where the groups were working and toward the bend in the ridge. “Is that Lila?” She was carrying a shovel. As far as I knew, there was nothing to dig around the bend.

Taro turned. “Where is she going?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are there more rock slides around there?”

“Really don’t know.”

“Let’s go check. It’s out of view. If we didn’t notice, maybe most others didn’t, either. Our help might be needed.”

I really didn’t know if I’d be of any use to anyone, but a bit of a walk might give me enough of a break and loosen enough muscles to accomplish something when I went back to work. So I nodded and we started after Lila.