Mirror Sight (80 page)

T
he dragon from the Great Mounds soared through the dim sky above, its scales luminescing in moonlight as it attacked the engineers, archeologists, overseers, and slaves operating the drill in the Old City. Heward Moody was killed by a single slash of talons, his steam engine knocked apart by another. Steam scalded the dragon. It bellowed in pain and pumped its wings, lifting it vertically into the sky. From a generous elevation, it stooped into a dive, preparing to obliterate any thing and any human left standing at the drill site.

B
elow, in the tombs, the dust circulated in ever-thickening clouds, and more rubble collapsed from the ceiling and walls.

“Chelsa!” Joff cried.

“Give me a moment,” came her muffled reply from the other side of the cave-in.

Joff could not know of the dragon attack above, he only knew the danger underground, and when he no longer heard the chew of the drill, and yet the tombs still shook, his fear mounted.

The last thing he expected to hear from Chelsa was laughter. Not hysterical laughter, but the hearty laughter of someone who had been told a good joke.

“Chelsa?”

“Joff,” she called. “I have found it, the antidote to the emperor’s weapon, and—”

He never heard more for layers of bedrock and earth, weakened first by the destruction of the castle and Sacor City one hundred and eighty-six years ago, and then by the drill, collapsed. Dirt and rock and tombs crashed down atop Chelsa and Joff. Chelsa’s people would never know of her discovery and how close she came to averting the destruction wrought by the emperor’s dragons.

I
t was no longer just a sense of discord Karigan felt from beneath the net that still trapped her, but the palace shuddering. Wall-mounted artifacts crashed to the floor. Cabinets and display cases toppled over. Above the din, she heard Dr. Silk cry out in dismay as he attempted to rescue teetering urns and busts. The lights blinked and the walls around them groaned.

The remaining guards retreated as a heavy scrolled cornice smashed to the floor around them. They ran for the museum entrance.

“No-no-no!” Silk cried.

Cade leaped to Karigan’s side and hacked through the net. They pulled severed strands apart until she was able to slip free, even as a heavily framed painting crashed to splinters beside her.

Karigan prepared to go after Silk, but Cade caught her arm and pulled her back as more ceiling and a portion of wall caved in before them. Cade guided her through a haze of dust to the room of the moondial.

She coughed and waved dust out of her face. “Silk,” she said.

“Forget him.”

The room of the moondial remained strangely serene, Lhean gazing at the phases of the moon. A few panes of glass from the dome had shattered on the floor, but there was little other obvious damage.

“Lhean?”

“Galadheon,” he said. “You are the blade of the shadow cast.”

The riddle! How did Lhean know the line?

His eyes were fathomless as he gazed at her. “The threads of time are in flux,” he said, as if knowing her thoughts.

Eletians did not necessarily perceive time in the same linear fashion as mortals. If time was in flux, that was good, wasn’t it? They were already changing this future.

“What does he mean,” Cade asked, “that you are the blade of the shadow cast?”

A growing rumble and more quaking caused a couple more glass panels to crash to the floor. The four statues of the cardinal directions swayed on their pedestals.

“I am the gnomon,” Karigan said faintly, “just like in Castle Argenthyne.”

Lhean nodded. He held his hand out to her, and she walked toward him as if in a dream, Cade close behind her. Lhean centered her on the full moon.

“Stand close,” Lhean told Cade.

“What—what now?” Cade asked as the world shook itself around them.

“Yes, what now? I haven’t my moonstone—it’s what cast my shadow in Castle Argenthyne.”

Before Lhean could answer her, a drone filled the air.

E
zra Stirling Silk shook himself out of the pile of rubble and dust that had collapsed on him. He felt around for his specs, but could not find them. The ancient urn he’d been trying to protect was in pieces beneath him, and indistinguishable from the ruin that surrounded him. His museum . . . The artifacts he had so lovingly collected. He rubbed his temple. It throbbed terribly. He must have been knocked unconscious for a little while. Where were his guards? His prisoners? The sputtering light seared into his sensitive eyes and revealed in brief flashes the catastrophic damage to his museum.

Above the sounds of destruction, he heard a familiar drone. The drone of hummingbird wings.

He squinted in the direction of the aviary. Support beams had dropped from the ceiling and broken through the cage and mesh.

The drone increased in volume, the sound of furious hummingbird wings working. Had they been fed today?

He glanced here and there, the flashing light burning his eyes, making it more difficult than usual to see. Wings buzzed past his ears. He scrambled to dislodge himself from the rubble so he might escape, but no sooner had he regained his feet than he lost his balance and fell to his side. He twisted to look up, and for a moment, the light dimmed to almost dark, and he saw their auras aglow, a great cloud of blood-red hovering over him, the whir of their wings nearly deafening.

When the cloud plunged down on him, he could only scream.

K
arigan swatted at hummingbirds with the flat of her swordblade. Cade pulled one out that had lodged in his arm. Lhean struck and caught one out of mid-air, but others circled around and hovered over them. Karigan’s leg buckled when a beak impaled her behind her knee. She cried out in pain and yanked the bird out, its feathers greasy with her own blood. She staggered to her feet and tried to brush several off Cade.

“Vien a muna’riel!”
Lhean suddenly shouted.

The shock of silver light spread to every corner of the chamber and sent the hummingbirds spiraling away through dust and debris into the other exhibition hall.

The three stood there silently, breathing hard, and blinking in the intense light.

“How did you—?” Karigan began.

“I remembered how in Blackveil, Telagioth commanded the lumeni along the Lighted Path to illuminate,” Lhean replied.

“It scared the birds off,” Cade said. “The light.”

Karigan squinted toward the display case that held Silk’s collection of moonstones, but it was too bright to look at directly. Was hers, she wondered again, among them, or locked away in Silk’s office, or . . . ?

“Do you not see, Galadheon?” Lhean asked. “We’ve our silver moonlight to reach a piece of time. You but need to lead us across the liminal line.”

Could it be true? Was this enough to send them home to their own time?

She glanced at Cade. “Do you really want to do this—go to my Sacoridia?”

“More than anything.”

Karigan smiled, but tried to contain her excitement. After all, this might not work, and she’d be stuck here for the rest of her life. The rumbling and shaking of the palace made her think that the rest of her life might not be that long.

Lhean re-positioned her so now, with the brilliant silver light of the moonstones knifing past them, her shadow crossed the phase she assumed to be the ice-glazed moon. The three of them linked arms, Karigan in the middle.

“Call upon your ability,” Lhean said, “so we may cross the threshold.”

Karigan took a deep breath, and even as the palace was racked by more quaking and glass panels shattered on the floor around them, she grasped her brooch and faded. All went gray. Along with the noise of destruction, she heard the grinding of the winged statues rotating until they gazed down upon her, Cade, and Lhean.

The crossing of this threshold stretched her, threatened to tear her apart. To one side, the side Lhean clung to, she sensed a summer night’s breath of air, fresh and alive and familiar—home! To her other side, Cade’s side, was a maelstrom, devastation, the future she was attempting to escape.

Lhean hauled on her, but she could not move. She was anchored. Her sword slipped from her grip and arrowed back into the future. Her bonewood vanished, too, but into the past. Cade’s hold on her threatened to yank her arm out of its socket. He was wavery in her vision and was in danger of being sucked into chaos like her sword had been.

No!
She tried pulling harder on him, but she only edged closer toward chaos herself.

“Galadheon!” Lhean pulled back on her, her shoulders being wrenched out by opposing forces.

“Karigan!” Cade shouted, his voice distant. “You must go home.”

“Not without you! I will not leave you!”

“I am holding you back—I am not allowed to cross.”

“No! I won’t—”

“Karigan,” he said, “I love you.” He let her go. He fell back into the maelstrom and vanished.

“Nooo!” she wailed and reached after him, but Lhean held on to her. “Let me go! Let me go!”

“No, Galadheon. He would no longer remember you.”

Lhean drew her back toward the familiar, the chirruping of crickets, the embrace of a summer evening, a cobblestone street underfoot, a familiar series of rooflines: the city that was no longer Gossham, but Corsa. Home. She breathed deep of it.

But before she could even drop her fading, she was grabbed again, torn from Lhean’s grasp, from her world, and hurled into the heavens, among the stars, the planets, undulating masses of celestial clouds. She spun out of control, catching glimpses of tiny silver shards that glinted in starlight and pursued her like a comet’s tail.

Why? What had it all been for?

The spinning eased, and as she traveled, she thought she saw a crystalline staircase, a lone warrior standing on the landing, with her sword at rest. Forms vast and filmy moved about the heavens—celestial hunting dogs, great eagles, winged horses. Gods strode across the stars.

She plunged. She was falling, falling, the silver shards changing course to follow as though she and they were inextricably linked. She remembered the silent laughter of the mirror man. She’d been presented three masks, had been forced to choose. She had rejected the three and chosen his. He had called her bluff.

She fell at a great velocity, stars streaking by. The sound of immense wings sweeping the air came to her, and
he
caught her once again, Westrion, the Birdman, god of death. He cradled her to his chest as he had before, slowing her descent. The mirror shards slowed with them.

“Why?” she asked him. “Why do you do this to me?”

His raptor’s visage remained impassive as one word thundered in her mind:
AVATAR.
Then he flung her away, and she hurtled from the heavens and into the world.