Mage of Clouds (The Cloudmages #2) (57 page)

Keira cocked her head at the specter. “What do you mean? She knows this place; this is where we told her we’d be.”

Riata sighed. “Lámh Shábhála is still far away, but I can feel its pattern approaching and I know its power is not focused here but to the north. Is there still a flat-topped hill close to the forest, near the fens . . . ?”

“Aye, we know that place,” Owaine said. “Knobtop, near Ballintubber. Where the First Holder found . . .” Riata’s gaze turned to Owaine. He gulped at the sight of the glowing eyes. “... Lámh Shábhála,” he finished.

“Those names aren’t the ones we used,” Riata said. “But, aye, the Holder comes to where the stone was found.”

“Why would she go there?” Meriel asked Riata, but she was drawn by Keira’s face. It had gone nearly as pale and bloodless as Riata’s. Meriel found that her own apprehension at seeing her mam again had shifted; she was suddenly more frightened for her mam than for herself.

“So far away,” Keira said. “Something’s wrong. Riata, are you sure?”

“I can feel Lámh Shábhála as if I held it still,” he said. “I know where it goes.”

“We have to get there,” Keira said. “And quickly.”

“That’s twenty miles or more,” Owaine told her. “It would be midday tomorrow before we arrive.”

“If we walked, it would be,” Keira replied. “But we won’t walk. I just hope we won’t be too late.”

J
ENNA hadn’t seen Knobtop in nearly two decades, not since she’d fled Tuath Gabair with Ennis. As the icy cold of the cloch-world slowly receded and the fog of her passage faded, she found herself gazing at a landscape that didn’t appear to have changed in all that time. The faint lights of Ballintubber twinkled in the distance across the fens and the Mill Creek, and the high pasture of Knobtop looked as it had when she and old Kesh had brought their small flock of sheep up here to feed. The smells filled her lungs: the heather and grass, the moist richness of the fens, the western wind heavy with the promise of rain. The half-moon glittered once above before cloud hid its face and it might have been the same night the mage-lights had first appeared, when she’d found Lámh Shábhála here.

She was still clutching the stone in her hand. The effort of the long journey had taken nearly half of the stored energy from Lámh Shábhála; she glanced above, hoping to see the mage-lights, hoping that she could quickly replenish the cloch and not feel so vulnerable here, in the land where they still called her the Mad Holder.

A cold pattering of rain splashed across her cheeks and she pulled up the hood of her clóca. The voices of the ancient Holders yammered in the quiet:
“You’ve made a mistake, weakening Lámh Shábhála by coming to them. Soon you’ll just be one of us, another dead voice in the stone . . .” “. . . You’ve let sentiment rule you, and that’s always the downfall of a Holder . . .”

And Riata spoke also, comforting.
“Be vigilant, Jenna. You’re stronger than your enemy, even now.”

Jenna pushed the voices away until they were only the hush of the wind in the trees. “Meriel?” she called softly into the darkness. “Meriel, are you there?”

The answer that came was the one she feared. Still holding Lámh Shab-hala, she felt the hidden one with the ebbing remnants of the power that had brought her here, saw it in the landscape of her cloch-vision: a Cloch Mór, and a specific one at that—Doyle Mac Ard’s cloch Snapdragon. She could feel the pinprick presence of other clochs here, still unopened by their Holders, and there were more people with them: a dozen, perhaps more, all in the small stand of trees just down the slope.

Jenna blinked against the hissing drizzle and saw Doyle step out from the shelter of trees just down the slope; in her cloch-vision, the dragon walked with him, gold and red and snarling and looming gigantic over the high meadow. Jenna opened Lámh Shábhála, ready to pull the energy from it to take her away from here, but the attack came immediate and sudden. “Not this time,” she heard Doyle say.

The dragon belched fire. Its claws raked toward her, its barbed tail swung and she had no time to form the image of Dún Kiil Keep in her mind that would whisk her away. She could only defend herself. Jenna took the energy and reshaped it, screaming with frustration and fury and fear as she brought up a wall of bright emerald. The dragon’s fire splashed into it like a wave striking a rock. The shield shuddered under the impact of claws and tail, and Jenna staggered backward herself with the impact. Before the dragon could recover, she counter-attacked, reshaping the wall into a lance and hurling it full force at the dragon’s exposed chest. The lance struck the scales there, penetrating deep, and the dragon (and Doyle, down the mountainside) shrieked in pain as the lance exploded in a shower of bright meteors. The dragon reeled and faded. “Where is she?” she shouted at Doyle, on his knees in the grass. “Damn you, where’s Meriel? I’ll kill you right now if you don’t tell me!”

She shaped the power remaining in the cloch, ready to send it smashing down on him . . . but she felt two more clochs open: Sharpcut and Weaver once more, renewed and with new Holders. They were clumsy—she could feel the awkwardness and inexperience in the minds behind the energy, but they were fresh where she was tired and their clochs were full. Had they attacked together as one, as weakened as Jenna was, she might have fallen . . . but they didn’t.

Sharpcut sent its bristling spears toward her first, a hundred arrows streaking through darkness and rain as if shot from hidden archers, and she caught them with a wind from Lámh Shábhála and sent them rushing back toward the Holder before he could react. He tried to deflect them, but there were great holes in the shield he flung up and Jenna held them open, sucking the energy from the Cloch Mór. He went down with a cry and the light of his cloch vanished in Jenna’s cloch-sight. With a silent snarl, she turned to the other.

The Holder was a woman, she realized, and Weaver was already sending out its shimmering blue tendrils. They snaked around Jenna in her cloch-sight like the arms of some gigantic creature. Jenna sent her own streams of energy out to meet them before they could close around her, and she was nearly blinded as they met in an eruption of white light and noise. She was encased in cloch-light, and though the woman holding the Cloch Mór was more skilled than the Holder of Sharpcut, Jenna had held Lámh Shábhála for decades and knew the ways of the cloudmage far better. Rather than trying to block Weaver’s energy, she deflected it and let it pour into the shell about her, spraying outward like hard rain splattering on stones. The Holder faltered, and in the hesitation, Jenna imagined the shell, still burning with the power of the mage-lights, closing around the woman. She held up her open hand, squeezing it closed into a fist as in her cloch-sight she watched the cage contract around Weaver’s holder: tighter, tighter . . . Jenna felt the woman pushing back, loosing all the power within the Cloch Mór in one desperate burst. Jenna’s fingers opened, a burning agony radiating up her arm as if she’d plunged her hands into a bed of red-hot coals. She screamed away the pain, closing her eyes and pushing her mind deep into Lámh Shábhála’s crystalline core, pulling from it all the last dregs of power she could find.

Jenna’s fingers closed again. The fire around the woman contracted to a white-hot core, a sun that threw blinding light over Knobtop, a dawn of fury.

The sun went out. Jenna collapsed to her knees in the rain-wet grass, exhausted. Lámh Shábhála was nearly emptied.

Jenna heard the sound of bitter, ironic applause in the sudden quiet: two hands clapping slowly.

“I
am
impressed, Sister,” Doyle said. “Very much so. I swore after Inishduán that I’d never underestimate you again, but I see that I very nearly did.” She saw the corners of his mouth lift as he walked up the slope toward her. His head was bare to the rain, his dark hair, so like his da’s, clinging to his skull, neck and shoulders in wet ringlets. “Nearly. But not quite.”

“Where’s Meriel?” Jenna gasped, her throat raw. “Is she . . . ?”

“Dead? No. As to where she is: she’s somewhere in Doire Coill and not in my hands, I’m afraid. You can take that solace with you. Your daughter’s still alive.”

His hand went to his cloch. The dragon arose again, shimmering into existence to his side, horrible and leering, smoke writhing about its horned head. The creature’s wings boomed, sending a rush of hot air over her like the blast from a smithy’s forge. Jenna tightened her grip on Lámh Shábhála, reaching into its depths for what was left of its cold stores of power.

There was very little—certainly not enough to flee as she had at Inishduán even if she had the time to image a place close enough to here that the dregs of Lámh Shábhála’s power could take her there. She saw her defeat. The voices within her laughed or cried or wailed. Riata’s familiar voice rose above the babble.
“I’m sorry,”
the ghost said.
“I’m so sorry . . .”

The dragon roared. It lifted a clawed foot. She looked up at it, the talons flexing in the air above her. With a roar, the dragon brought the foot down and she emptied the cloch, trying to hold it back, but she could not . . .

It struck her, bright and hot and hard, and she heard her own wail as she fell away into darkness and oblivion.

His hands trembling, Doyle slipped Lámh Shábhála’s chain from around Jenna’s neck, lifting it over the golden torc of the Banrion and around her long, dark tresses of hair. He did it with surprising gentleness, seemingly almost sad as he saw her face, lost in unconsciousness, tighten in a rictus as Lámh Shábhála left her. Rain beaded on her cheeks. “I’m sorry, Sister,” he whispered, then his eyes narrowed. “This is for my da, who you killed with this very cloch. And it’s for our mam, too, because you killed her that same day with a far longer and crueler death. This is their revenge. I won’t savor the pain and suffering you’re going to feel, but it’s no less than you deserve. It’s no less than you gave Maeve.”

He rose to his feet over her.

He held Lámh Shábhála in his hand. It was
his
—emptied of its vast power now, but he would fill it when the mage-lights next came and take it as his own. It was his, as it should have been his da’s. He closed his fingers around it, grinning.

“Nyle!” he called. “Have the gardai tend to Shéra and Alaina, and I need you and two others to carry the Banrion. We’ll take her back to Lár Bhaile for Rí Mallaghan—he’ll be delighted to have the murderer of his mam in his donjons.” No one answered him. “O’Murchadha?”

But it wasn’t Nyle who strode out from tree shadow and mist. . . .

He saw the faint shape of wolves rushing from the forest, and he reached immediately for Snapdragon. As he opened the Cloch Mór, he could see them fully, glowing with mage-light: the spectral wolves from Wolfen, Ó Riain’s cloch. Doyle called the dragon, and its claws raked into the wolves, tossing them away as it roared and flamed. But though the wolves howled and screamed, they kept coming, more and more of them, veiled in dragonfire and smoke but always advancing, jaws snapping and slobbering, tearing great chunks from the dragon’s legs, leaping onto its scaled back, tattering the leathery wings to shreds.

He could not do this, not for much longer—he’d been terrifically weakened by the fight with Jenna, and Wolfen was fresh. Doyle shuddered; the dragon’s tail, lashing out at the blackness, struck him and sent him reeling backward. He closed his eyes, trying to clear his mind, searching with the Cloch Mór for some reservoir of energy, some hidden well he could tap.

There was nothing.

In desperation, Doyle took the power that remained, squandering it all in one violent counterattack. The dragon lifted from the ground, its wings restored, shaking away the ethereal wolves and sending them howling into the night. It arced its serpent’s neck and slashed down jaws wide at Ó Riain. But the wolves came rushing back, stronger than before, and they met the dragon, pushing it backward and down. They covered the golden scales, they tore open its belly and snatched up its heart, howling in triumph.

Doyle felt the dragon die as the last ounce of power drained from the cloch, and he felt himself go with it, the wolves staring at him as Ó Riain walked from the cover of the trees; the world narrowing as if he looked through a tunnel that was closing in on him. There was someone with Ó Riain, and that man wore the skin and head of a bear over him.

Doyle fell to the ground, fighting to retain consciousness. He heard them approaching. He waited for the wolves to come, for Ó Riain’s Cloch Mór to ravage him as he lay there helpless. It was too much effort to even blink away the rain that fell onto his face. But it was only Ó Riain’s face that appeared above him. “I must give you credit, Tiarna Mac Ard,” the older man said. “You were indeed a masterful cloudmage. Far better than me. But you never learned that it’s best to delegate someone else do your work for you rather than to do it yourself. Then, when they’re weak, you can take what you want.” He bent down, and Doyle felt a tugging on his left hand. He tried to close his fingers around the stone, but they refused to work. Ó Riain’s face returned. “So this is Lámh Shábhála . . . A plain thing to hold such power, don’t you think?”