Holder of Lightning (73 page)

. . . light blazed all around her, suddenly. A half-dozen flares of power, multihued and dangerous, Mac Ard among them. Jenna reflexively threw up shields as they attacked as one, and she was suddenly contending with attacks from all sides, the snarl and blinding light of mage-energy pound ing at her. Mac Ard sent his fire; she caught it with Lámh Shábhála and threw the flame toward the great glowing wolf that was leaping toward her. Spears of golden sunlight cascaded from the shield, but she couldn’t respond fast enough to the others. A stream of rich azure slithered through, burning her while a funnel of utter black whirled above, its mouth twisting ravenously. She could feel the power of Lámh Shábhála being leached away by the tornado . . .

. . . the war-keening had died. Around her, the soldiers milled, confused and stymied. Rams were brought forward to break down the gates, but archers on the walls cut down half the men wielding them. The gates shuddered with the impact but held. MacEagan’s lava-creature—bright in the growing darkness—came lumbering forward to smash open the iron-barred wood, but the mage-demon, returning to the battelfield, met him, the two struggling before the gates so that none could get past. The moving shadows of their contest played over the faces of the soldiers, and Jenna could see the despair and resignation there. Jenna knew that the gates must go down now or they must retreat. To stay would mean being decimated by the archers on the walls and the Clochs Mór . . .

. . . This was the end, Jenna realized, even as she fought the Clochs Mór arrayed against her, even as she tossed wild power around her and threw them all momentarily back. She was stronger, aye, but they would bear her down under sheer numbers. The Inish hope had been that the army could gain the keep, that sword and spear would cut down a few of the Mages or cause them to look elsewhere. Mac Ard’s cloch attacked her again, and this time she could not push it aside. The force struck her, enveloping her in fire, and she screamed as the blow sent her reeling backward and her freshly healed wounds ripped open again. Unseen hands caught her and held her upright, but they, too, shouted in pain as they touched Mac Ard’s blaze. Jenna held Lámh Shábhála aloft in futile defiance, gathering power in the fist of her mind and sending it smashing down to where she sensed Mac Ard standing—but the other clochs interposed themselves, shunting the energy aside or absorbing it themselves. She could feel their realization that victory was to be theirs, that they were enough to over whelm Lámh Shábhála. Their colors circled her, like hungry wolves harrying an injured but still dangerous storm deer stag. They would come in for the final kill now, and Jenna found that the anger inside her, even toward Mac Ard, had dissolved into resignation. She hadn’t wanted this fight in the first place, and people all around her were dying, all because of the cloch she held . . .

. . . the men around the mage-demon hacked at it, but it kicked them aside as if they were bothersome flies. It leaped upon the lava-creature, and Jenna saw its clawed hands grasp the glowing head and twist it. A sound came like stones splitting, and MacEagan’s cloch-created creature was gone. She saw MacEagan, several yards away, collapse as Alby wailed, dropped his sword, and sank down alongside him, cradling the unconscious tiarna in his lap. The mage-demon began rampaging through the Inishlanders closest to the gate, and Jenna saw men starting to retreat in panic into the gathering night, pushing back against the ranks behind them . . .

. . . her cloch-vision was filled with the lights of the Tuathian Holders. She gathered a shield around her; they broke it down. Lámh Shábhála was weakening now; she was using its stores quickly. She could prepare a final stroke, perhaps aiming it at Mac Ard, or she could simply allow it to happen—quickly and hopefully without too much pain. The mage-demon had fastened its eyes on her, and was plowing through the soldiers between it and her . . .

. . . now. It’s better that we die now,
she told herself and her unborn child.
If we die, this ends. The Tuathians will have what they want, and Inish Thuaidh will have to retreat and then negotiate for peace, but the battle will end. In the final tally, we will have saved hundreds of lives. Won’t that be better . . . ?

. . . but there was something else in Lámh Shábhála’s vision now, moving swiftly toward them from the tumbled rocks at the feet of the mountain close to the keep, and there was the sound of rocks clashing together in furious handclaps, a storm of sound, and mingled with it a musical warbling that Jenna remembered well. She blinked, won deringly.
The Créneach . . . !

In their valley near Thall Coill, she had never seen them move this quickly. They were surprisingly graceful despite their size and appearance, their craggy bodies sliding among the amazed Inishlanders. The mage-demon howled, fluttered its leathery wings and flung itself at them; one of the Créneach slapped at it with a bouldered hand and the mage-demon shattered like glass. Several more of them went to the gates of the keep. The archers sent a hail of arrows down at them, but the shafts clattered and broke on their smooth, dark skin. The Créneach placed their hands on the great doors and their fingers seemed to sink into the wood as if the oak were no more substantial than newly-churned butter: they ripped the gates open, splinters and shards of reinforcing metal flying, the portcullis torn out and flung aside as if it were made of sticks. The Inish troops cheered; they began to surge forward again. A ferocious battle was quickly underway at the ruins of the gate as the defending soldiers within came forward to meet the Inishlanders.

“Holder of the All-Heart!” Jenna heard Treoraí’s voice, mingled with the warbling sound of its true language. “We tasted the need of the All-Heart, and so we came.” Jenna wanted to answer, but the clochs had not forgotten her with the appearance of the Créneach; as she heard the call and felt Treoraí’s presence approaching from behind her, they attacked again as one. Forms and shapes and colors swept over her like a tide, too quickly for her to do more than glimpse them. A dire wolf flew at her; she split it asunder with a blade of energy; lines of bright color wrapped around her like a snake; she tore them away. The yellow dragon coiled above her; the black funnel began to draw power from her; Mac Ard’s fire spitting at her like great glowing meteors.

In the cloch-vision, an ebon wall interposed itself between Jenna and the others. They shattered against it, energy flaring in a mad explosion. For a moment, the wall held, but the massed clochs continued to strike, battering it. With her own eyes, she saw Treoraí shamble forward to stand facing her, and she heard the shrill trill of Treoraí’s voice. “The Soft-flesh must give in to the heart that you hold in your hand,” it said. “Find Céile inside. You must—”

“I can’t,” she told Treoraí, not knowing if the Créneach could hear or understand her. “It’s too late.”

“If not for you, then for the life you carry,” Treoraí answered. “You can, if—” Its hand plunged into its own chest, ripping a fissure in its body, and emerged again hold ing a tiny blue crystal. “Give this to her . . .” Treoraí’s voice went silent as the clochs broke down the wall. Jenna heard the sound of falling stone; before her, the bodily form of Treoraí collapsed into a heap of rocks and boulders. The crystal fell to the ground.

The Clochs Mór surged toward her.

60

The Gift of Death

T
HEY hammered her down. They took her cowering to her knees.

Jenna shrilled her pain to the world, nearly losing her grip on Lámh Shábhála as she fell. Her own sight was gone now; there was only the terrible light and agony of the cloch-world, and she sank down inside Lámh Shábhála as she had with An Phionós at Bethiochnead, desperately seeking a place to hide from the assault. The voices of the Holders shrieked at her or laughed or shouted contradictory advice.

She burrowed deeper, seeking escape. The Clochs Mór followed her. She tumbled into a crystalline, twisting well. The faces of the ancient cloudmage Holders flashed past her: the Daoines, then the Bunús Muintir, then tribes and peoples for whom she had no names at all, falling deeper into the past. And there, at the bottom . . .

Lámh Shábhála throbbed like a live thing, waves of colors pulsating around her. This was the place she had glimpsed during the Scrúdú, the place she’d not been able to reach. She went toward it as the Clochs Mór continued to pummel her, and again she was held back. “No . . .” a voice whispered.
“You’re not allowed here. You have not passed the test.”

“Then I’ll die!”
she shouted back.

The voice sounded amused.
“We thought that no longer mattered to you.”
The energy of the Clochs Mór crackled around Jenna, and she pushed back at them. She could feel the baby in her womb, frightened and in pain because Jenna was in pain, suffering because she suffered. The voice at the heart of Lámh Shábhála seemed amused.
“So that’s why you fight, even though you still don’t understand. What have you brought me?”

Jenna could only shake her head in confusion and terror.
“I don’t know what you mean? The cloch?”

“No. There, in your hand.”
Jenna could see blue light radiating from between the fingers of her left hand—the crystal that Treoraí had pulled from itself. She held it out, felt the presence take it from her. The light danced away in darkness. “Ah, such a gift . . .” The voice seemed to sigh.
“So my children ask me to help you. How can one refuse one’s own . . .”
The voice faded, and Jenna thought it had gone. Then the feeling of nearness crawled over Jenna’s skin again.
“All the hearts of my children connect to the mage-lights through you. You fight yourself when you fight them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I will give you a gift for the sake of my children, though I don’t know if you are capable of using it. This once, in this moment, you must accept what they give you,”
the voice answered. It was sounding fainter now, and Jenna felt herself being pushed away, rising through the levels of the cloch once more back to reality. “Accept it . . .” the voice said again, a whisper.

Jenna lay like a broken doll on the cold ground before the keep. The power of the Clochs Mór played around her, keeping away the Inish soldiers who were trying to reach her and pull her free. The pile of stones that had been Treoraí were at her right hand, and the mage-lights had appeared in the sky above. She could feel the threads con necting all the clochs na thintrí: running through Lámh Shábhála and into the sky, creating loops of energy, endless circles and spirals . . .

“This once, in this moment, you must accept what they give you . . .”
That’s what the voice of Lámh Shábhála had said.

Jenna let the shields fall. The energy poured into her and through her. She marveled at the feel of it. She seemed to have been thrown entirely away from her body into some new reality where she was with all the clochs, and their energy filled her, but it no longer hurt, not with the mage lights in the sky. Instead, she had become a vessel, and they filled her to overflowing. She held the power in her hand.

She rose. She found five of the Clochs Mór and took hold of them.

She thought.

The wind blew cold and salty. The mage-lights flared and vanished, but their radiance seemed to remain, illuminating the cliffside and the weathered, ruined statue of Bethiochnead.

Six people stood there, each with a cloch na thintrí in his or her hand, all of them battered and bruised and bloody, all but one of them with confusion on their faces.

“Where are we?” Banrion Aithne asked. She stood next to MacEagan and Máister Cléurach, both of whom stared up at the statue. “Holder, did you do this?”

“Aye, I did,” Jenna answered. “I think I did. I’m not entirely certain.” Power filled Lámh Shábhála as it never had before, so potent that her body seemed to vibrate with it. She felt like a piece of parchment trying to hold back a frothing torrent.
Is this what it would have been like if I’d passed the Scrúdú?
she wondered.
How can anyone handle this?
The energy buzzed in her head, making her giddy and delirious. Her face burned with it so that she was surprised that she wasn’t literally glowing. Her voice seemed too loud and too fast. She wanted to laugh. “Banrion, Tiarna Mac Eagan, Máister Cléurach, this is Nevan O Liathain, the Ta naise Ríg, and Tiarna Padraic Mac Ard. And
this,
” she swept a hand about to indicate the cliffside on which they stood, “is the place they call Bethiochnead, in Thall Coill.”

Before she’d finished talking, she felt O Liathain’s Cloch Mór open; before he could use it, she clamped an ethereal hand around it, letting the power flow not to his stone but to her, the Tanaise Ríg gaping in astonishment as nothing happened. The feel and color of the energy was all too familiar to Jenna, and she did laugh now, high and mania cal. “Why, Tanaise Ríg,” Jenna said. The power of his cloch wriggled in the grasp of her mind, and she saw him grimace in pain and cry aloud, falling to his knees. “So it was
you
who wielded the mage-demon. I should have known. I’m sorry, I really can’t allow him to walk here.”

Mac Ard and O Liathain were truly frightened; she could see it in their faces. MacEagan, Aithne, and Máister Cléurach seemed bewildered, uncertain of whether they should attack the Tuathians or wait. Jenna could feel all the clochs; she held the strings to them in her mind like puppets, but they were puppets who had wills of their own and who fought the control. She could not hold them long, not when the energy ached to be used, rattling the bars of her mind. She heard her voice again. “Tanaise Ríg, you were right to name me the Mad Holder. You were right to call me dangerous. But you want to know why you’re here now, don’t you?” Jenna realized she was babbling, but she
had
to talk, had to find some way to dissipate at least some of the energy or it would consume her utterly. “That’s simple enough. I will have an end to this war. Now.”