Shadows (29 page)

His voice trailed away.

The beach was black with Watchers.

Pain and Fire

S
HOUTS RANG OUT. Two mounted Watchers galloped toward them, swords shining in the late afternoon sun.

“Back!” Mara screamed. “Warn them!”

Keltan turned and ran. Mara ran after him. “Watchers!” Keltan screamed. “Watchers! To arms!”

Mara fell farther and farther behind as he ran. She could feel the magic in the Watchers, the magic in the unMasked Army, magic all around her, tugging at her, slowing her. All she had to do was reach out for it, all she had to do was pull it to herself, all she had to do was turn and hurl it against the Watchers . . .

No
, she thought, sobbing as she ran.
No, I can't kill again, I can't . . .

She reached the unMasked Army. Families were scrambling north along the beach, running toward the men, who were drawing swords and nocking bows and running toward the enemy. She glanced behind her. Watchers boiled around the bend in the beach, the front rank, mounted, galloping over the rocks, splashing through the shallows. Edrik raced up, grabbed her, spun her around. “How many?”

“A hundred,” Mara gasped. “Maybe more.”

Edrik swore and pushed her aside, then ran on.

Mara, behind the line of armed men, turned.

“Loose at will!” Edrik bellowed, and bows hummed. Arrows flew, found marks. Three Watchers tumbled from the horses. Two died: Mara gasped as their magic slammed into her. She fell to her knees.

Oh, no
, she thought.
Battle . . . so many deaths . . . so much magic . . .

She shuddered with pain . . . but also with pleasure, enhanced by the knowledge that more would surely follow.
Kill more
, a part of her panted.
Kill more . . .

What's happening to me?

The mounted Watchers swept down onto the unMasked Army. Swords clashed. Men fell. Magic roared into Mara. She found herself on her feet again, screaming.

More Watchers died. Horses galloped through the camp, riderless. But now the main body of the Watchers came sweeping over the beach, shouting . . . but slowing. Out of bowshot, they stopped, black Masks giving them the look more of a horde of insects than of a force of men.

“What are they doing?” Mara heard Edrik say, but she already knew. She could sense it: a store of magic, and the Gifted to use it.

“They're going to attack using magic,” she said. It seemed that her voice went nowhere. “They're going to attack using magic!” she said, louder, and Edrik turned to look at her.

“How do you know?”

“I can feel it,” she said. She walked forward. She was hardly aware of what she was doing, only that the magic she sensed drew her.

“Mara, no!” she heard Keltan cry. She heard him running after her, felt him grab her arm. But she was full of magic from the men who had died, and she exerted just a little of it then, just enough so that his hands slid away from her as though she were a statue made of ice. She strode through the defenders of the unMasked Army untouched and to the front of the line. She waited.

It didn't take long. The ranks of Watchers parted. Three men strode forward, wearing Masks of red. Red, too, sheathed, not just their hands, but their whole bodies, turning them in her sight into walking flames of magic. She had never seen any Gifted draw that much magic to himself, and each carried, slung on harnesses, additional containers of black lodestone, open so that she could see the multicolored seethe of even more magic within them. But it didn't matter. She'd stopped a magical attack before, in the boat. She could do it again.

Then the attack came, and she found out how wrong she was.

To her Gifted eyes, the magic surrounding the three men suddenly leaped up, twining together into a vast, seething sphere of red flame, like a second sun come to Earth.

And then that ball broke apart into a hundred flaming spears that streaked across the beach toward the unMasked Army.

Mara reached for that magic, tried to draw it into herself . . . but she was already brimming with the magic of those who had died, and she suddenly discovered that her Gift had limits after all. Perhaps half of those flaming spears turned aside from their path and thrust into her. This time she was better prepared than she had been in the boat, and contained the magic so her clothes did not burst into flames . . . but the magic she took in filled her to the brim, filled her with so much magic she screamed. She could absorb no more, and so the remaining fifty spears slammed into the unMasked Army.

She heard screams, felt a wave of magical pressure as men, women, and children died beneath that hail of magic. The force drove her to her knees. She gaped soundlessly, burning inside; but she also felt fury, an echo of the fury she had felt when her father died. She had to get rid of the magic within her or die, and so she flung it, shrieking her hatred, at the ranks of the Watchers.

It roared across the beach like a wall of fire. Some of the Watchers, those with their own measure of the Gift, saw it coming and tried to turn and flee; others had no clue; it didn't matter, the magic moved too fast. Two score men screamed and died, burning, smoke and flame erupting from their writhing bodies. The stink of burning cloth, leather and meat spread across the beach.

But the three red-Masked Gifted were not among the dead. They had turned aside her magic with contemptuous ease, and already were drawing more from the urns they carried. Once more they flamed like giant, walking torches. The red, seething ball formed again.

Edrik had not been idle. He could not have seen the flaming spears of magic, but he had seen his own people struck down and had certainly seen the front rank of the Watchers burn and die. “Attack!” he screamed, and the fifty or so surviving men and women he had in arms rushed forward, swords drawn.

Mara wanted to scream at them to turn back, warn them of the magic about to tear them apart, the magic she could see and they could not, but she had nothing left, no breath to make a sound, no strength to use any of the magic pounding down on her like heavy surf from the dying people all around. The force of it had driven her to her knees; now she dropped to all fours in the rocky sand. It took all her strength just to raise her head to watch that hopeless charge.

Impotent, she awaited the final blow that would destroy Edrik's fighters and leave the women and children helpless . . . but then she felt a new force of magic, and recognized it at once as the same unbelievable power she had felt when the storm that had arisen so mysteriously had quieted just as mysteriously.

The Watchers' Gifted struck. Their flaming spears leaped at the unMasked Army—and just . . . blinked out. Mara could not see their expressions through their Masks, but she saw their jaws drop . . . and then that incredible magic spat their own magical weapons back in their faces.

The three Gifted died instantly, riven by javelins of fire, their bodies exploding into bloody chunks and gouts of red-tinged steam. Twenty Watchers behind them died, too. The magic from all of those deaths should have hit Mara like an avalanche, driven her into unconsciousness—but it didn't. Instead, she felt it sweep over her head like a giant bird passing in a rush of wings, speeding somewhere else . . . to
someone
else.

The remaining Watchers tried to flee. Edrik's men cut many down from behind. A few turned and fought, only to be overwhelmed. Flashes of magic struck down those who were out of the Army's reach. Not a single Watcher made it to the bend in the shore.

The entire battle had taken no more than ten minutes. Mara tried to get up, but instead fell over on her side and lay curled there, gasping. The shouts and screams and weeping from all around seemed to be coming from far away and have nothing to do with her. All she could think of was the rush of magic that had passed her by.

Where had it gone? And to
whom
?

Hands tugged at her. “Are you all right?”

It took her a long moment to recognize the voice—Keltan—a longer moment to register what he had said. She gathered the bits of her consciousness that seemed to have been scattered as explosively as the dismembered bodies of the Watchers' Gifted. “I . . .” She swallowed. “I don't know.”

Keltan pulled her upright. Her head swam and she leaned against him for a moment, closing her eyes. When she opened them again, she found herself staring at the beach, soaked with blood, littered with the corpses of the Watchers, smoke still rising from those she had killed. The sight was like a slap to her face; she jerked her head the other way, only to see still more bodies behind her, bodies of the unMasked Army, men, women, and . . .

Her heart broke in her chest.

Children. Not twenty feet away, a little girl, chest a smoking ruin, stared sightlessly at the sky. A woman cradled the body, weeping helplessly.

“How . . . how many dead?” she whispered. “Keltan,
how many
?”

“I don't know,” Keltan said. He sounded numb.

“Injured. There'll be injured.” Mara focused on that. She couldn't undo what had happened, but maybe . . . “Help me up!” With Keltan's assistance she managed to stagger to her feet, though she had to lean heavily on him to keep from falling. “The Watchers will have had more magic . . . a wagon, maybe . . . Ethelda can use it. We have to find it. We have to find
her.
” Almost dragging Keltan with her, she set off through the camp toward where she had last seen Ethelda, with Catilla.

She saw Catilla first. The diminutive old woman was kneeling by a body. Asteria knelt beside her, face in her hands, shoulders shaking with sobs. As Mara and Keltan approached, Catilla turned. The stark pain and sorrow on her face brought Mara up short. “Grelda,” Catilla grated, “is dead. I have known her since I was a girl.”

“I . . . I'm sorry . . .” Mara whispered. She put out a tentative hand toward Asteria. “Asteria, I'm so—”

Asteria only sobbed harder.

And then, looking past Catilla and Grelda's granddaughter, Mara saw another body, and her blood ran cold. “Oh, no,” she whispered. “Oh, no!”

She pulled free of Keltan and ran . . . stumbled, really, for her legs seemed to have no strength left . . . past Grelda's prostrate form. Like Catilla before her, she knelt beside a body: the body of a small woman, her lined face slack in death, her blue eyes open and staring sightlessly at the sky. Blood soaked her blue robes, which still smoked slightly in the late afternoon sun.

“Ethelda,” Mara whispered. “No . . .” She felt desperately for the slightest bit of magic in the body before her, any hint of life, but found nothing.

Ethelda was dead. She had died in the hail of magic from the Watchers . . . the magic
she
had been unable to turn aside.

The magic whoever had ultimately destroyed the Watchers certainly
could
have turned aside . . . if he or she had chosen to.

Cold fury filled Mara. She staggered to her feet. “Come out!” she screamed. “I know you're out there. Come out and face us! Show yourself!”

Catilla stared at her as if she had gone mad. Chell, fifty feet away, bending over one of his sailors who had suffered the same fate as Ethelda, straightened abruptly, his head also turning toward her. Keltan put a hand on her shoulder. “Mara . . .”

She shrugged him off and stepped inland, screaming at the forested hills. “Come out, damn you!”

And she came.

Mara felt the magic before she saw its source: a wave of it, a
wall
of it, magic such as she had never imagined, power such as she had never conceived. The magic had a center, a glowing, sunlike heart. It appeared out of nowhere, sudden as lightning, and she knew it had been hidden from her until its owner chose to reveal it, and that she could not match it.

Now that the source had been unveiled, she knew exactly where it was, would have known where it was with her eyes closed, and she faced that place, a forested fold in the hills that rose above the beach, a ravine down which the person to whom she had called slowly walked.

It was a woman wrapped in a coat of silver fur above boots of soft brown deerskin. Her head was bare, revealing long gray hair, loose around her shoulders. To Mara's eyes she glowed white from within, as though she were a clear vessel with the sun somehow trapped within it, like a living lamp.

Keltan gasped, and for a moment Mara thought he saw what she saw . . . but then she realized he was reacting to something far more physical.

The woman was accompanied by wolves.

There were thirteen of them. They had silver fur, the same silver as the fur of her clothes. They had green eyes, and grinning, fanged mouths from which hung bright red tongues. They seemed to be laughing at everything and everyone, laughing . . . and wondering what they would taste like. They would have terrified Mara if not for the fact their mistress was far and away the most frightening person she had ever seen.