The Unmaking (16 page)

“What do you think I’m going to do to you?”

“I expect that you intend to kill me,” he replied.

“And is there anything you’d like to say before I do? Any regrets you’d like to express?”

“I could not have predicted your nature,” Kyreth said coldly. “I did the worlds a great wrong, unknowing.”

“You did the worlds a wrong? What about
me?
What about my
mother?”

“How little you understand,” said Kyreth. “I had a vision. I knew the Mancers could be greater than we were. The Shang Sorceress has always been our greatest asset, our warrior. But imagine a Sorceress protecting either side of the Crossing! Two lines, the Shang Sorceress and the Xia Sorceress, guided by the Mancers. We should never have allowed our influence in Tian Xia to lapse. What I did was for a greater good, or would have been, if only you had been other than what you are. My single regret is that I did not see sooner what you were destined to become and snuff you out.”

“Well, never mind,” said Nia with a sigh. “I’m more interested in your suffering than your repentance. I wonder if you’ve ever known true fear? When I was just a small thing, you were all I knew of the world, and you meant me ill. Shall I show you what I mean?”

Now he felt her hands on either side of his face. His strength and certainties poured out of him like blood from a cut vein. He sank to the cold floor. Her voice seemed to come from the stone and the mist, a thousand voices in one, whispering, “Fear was my first lesson, my only lesson from you. I am its master now and will teach you to crawl before it. You will live in that moment when fear reaches its most terrible crescendo, the moment it turns your blood to ice, from now until your death.”

As she spoke, terror swept through him, a mad, reasonless dread. He pressed himself against the wall, clawed at his chest. He could not see, he could not
see
what was coming, his matchless foe, his undoing. He tried to scream. His mouth opened wide but no sound came out of him.

“I am done with you,” said Nia.

She turned and left the tower, breaking into a run halfway down the steps. She boarded the boat and was seized by a shudder that shook her from head to toe. Her tiger came and pressed against her. She buried her hands in the soft white fur of its neck.

“Go,” she said to the Boatman. “To Tian Xia.”

The Boatman obeyed her, as he had done centuries before, when she was just thirteen years old, crackling with a power that could no longer be contained and never to be mastered again.

Chapter

~9~

N
ell ran down the stairs
, jumping over Marti and Alban in their sleeping bags, passing her snoring father on the sofa, and out the battered screen door into the backyard. Charlie lay where she had seen him fall, breathing in shallow gasps. Something was wafting out of his chest like smoke.

“What’s happening to you? What’s the matter?” She knelt over him and put a hand to his clammy forehead.

“The Sorceress is free.”

Nell’s stomach executed a highly uncomfortable somersault.

“Where’s Eliza?” she asked. When he didn’t answer immediately, his head lolling to the side, she asked again, “
Where IS Eliza?”
and shook him by the shoulders, which made him gasp. A plume of the smoky substance poured from his chest. Nell pulled herself together and ran back inside for towels and water. She pressed the towels to his chest to try and stanch whatever was leaking out of him and raised him up so his neck and head were on her knees. She held the glass of water to his lips and he drank from it.

“She’s nay hurt,” he managed to say when he could speak again. “With any luck she’s gone to Tian Xia...for help from the Triumvira.”

“Why didnay you go with her?” demanded Nell. “You’re hurt! You could have gone to the Cave, aye!”

Charlie shook his head and swallowed some more water. “No time. I would have...slowed her down. Couldnay have made the Crossing...like this.”

“What happened to you? Why did you come
here?
”

He tilted his head back so he could look right up at her. “I’m dying, aye,” he said. “I didnay want to be alone.”

She looked down at Charlie, at his face white with pain but so very calm, and the moment seemed to stretch on forever. Then she tore her eyes away and looked up at the stars. Her mind worked quickly. A doctor would be useless and the doctor on the island was a drunk anyway. The Sorma might be able to help but then again, they might not. And how would she get to the desert, how would she find them without Eliza? Although she did not remember the Crossing to Tian Xia herself, she had forced Charlie and Eliza to tell her about it many times, how she had almost died on the way and how the healing cave had restored her to perfect health. The cave had healed Eliza’s arm too, which had been crushed by a hound of the Crossing. The cave could save Charlie now.

“You’re nay going to die, Charlie,” she said firmly. “Just hold the towels to your chest and wait here.”

“Dinnay go,” he pleaded as she shifted him off her lap and back on to the grass. “It’s all right, I’m nay scared. I’ve been around forever. Long enough, aye. I just didnay want to die in some dark corner without any friends.”

“Charlie,
stop it
. I told you, you’re nay going to die. Just wait. I’ll be right back!”

“Nell!” he called after her, but she was off, running out the back gate and down the road to where Ander Brady and his mother lived.

The streets in Holburg were generally empty after eight o’clock and it was past midnight now. Everybody was sleeping. Her bare feet slapping against the road was the only sound besides the crickets in the gardens. When she reached Ander’s house she ran straight up the front steps and rang the bell several times, then pounded on the door for good measure.

A light went on in one of the rooms and a few moments later Ander appeared at the door in his pajamas, looking sleepy and confused.

“Nell?” He squinted at her in the dark of the porch.

“I need help,” Nell told him. “I need the helicopter and I dinnay have time to explain.”

He frowned and rubbed his chin, then ducked his head at her and sniffed. “You’ve been drinking!” he said, appalled. “Your parents let you drink?”

“I dinnay think they really remember how old I am,” she said impatiently. “Mister Brady, please listen to me. You know what we saw on the news, General Malone talking about Tian Xia attacks?”

Ander shook his head. “Come on, Nell. I’ve got to get you home.”

“Aye, yes, walk me home, quick,” she backed down the steps as he put on a pair of shoes and a light jacket over his pajamas and followed her. “So you remember what General Malone was saying?”

“Uh huh.” In spite of himself he had to stride along very quickly to keep up with her.

“It’s worse than they know. The Xia Sorceress is free. And – lah, it’s complicated – but there’s a being here now who is
good
and he’s been hurt very badly. Di Shang doctors wouldnay be able to help him. I dinnay think even the Sorma could help him. But there’s a place in Tian Xia that...heals beings when they’re hurt or sick. And I need to get him there, aye.”

“Do your parents know you’re running around drunk in the middle of the night?” asked Ander.

“Of course they dinnay know!” snapped Nell. “Are you paying attention? There are ways into Tian Xia...a lot of ways, aye, and there’s one not far from here. The only way to get there fast is to fly, but this being, he cannay fly now, because he’s too badly hurt. But you can fly the helicopter, nay? The one for emergencies? You flew Missus Brock to the mainland hospital when she had a heart attack!”

They had reached the back gate.

“Let’s get you inside,” said Ander wearily.

Nell dragged him by the hand to where Charlie lay in the grass.

“You’re back,” said Charlie with a faint smile. “Good. Who’s that?”

“Mister Brady,” said Nell. “He can help us.”

“He’s hurt?” Ander asked, kneeling swiftly. “You didnay wake up your ma?”

“She cannay fly a helicopter,” said Nell.

Ander took the towels gently from Charlie’s chest and looked for a long moment at the rippling fusion of gleam and gloom that bled from the wounds.

“What in the name of the Ancients is that?” he muttered.

“He’s a Shade,” said Nell, pressing the towels to the wounds again, though it did little good. “It means he can change shape. He’s good, aye, and he helps humans. He helped to get rid of the Cra. But now he needs help. I’m nay drunk or crazy and I know exactly what to do. I just need you to fly the helicopter.”

“Nell,” said Ander, but she didn’t let him finish.

“Whatever you’re going to say, save it. I dinnay care. You’re just trying to think of what you should do and he’ll die while you wonder. We have to help him. I’m going inside to get a couple of things and when I get back, you need to carry him.” Nell ran back into the house. Ander looked down at Charlie again.

“I cannay just take the helicopter,” he said to Charlie apologetically. “I dinnay understand what’s going on here. We should call somebody, I spec. Dinnay know who, though.”

Charlie didn’t waste his strength talking to Ander. He was trying to hang on until Nell reappeared.

It was a testament to her family’s ability to sleep through anything that none of them woke as Nell tore through the house. She filled a school bag with bread and cheese and apples, two bottles of water and a half-empty bottle of brandy. Then she fetched her maps of the caves in Holburg from the stacks of papers in her bedroom. The tunnels had been built during the war for the islanders to hide in in the case of a Tian Xia attack. As children Nell and Eliza had known the entire complex by heart and had mapped it out. She placed these old penciled maps on the kitchen table with a note for her family,
Please check in on Missus Brady. Hide if you need to. Back soon
. Then she went back up to her room and added to the bag of food her three most prized possessions. These were the First Place Medal in the Kalla District Mathematics Competition she had won last year and the birthday presents Eliza and Charlie had given her when she turned fourteen. Eliza had gotten hold of a signed Cherry Swanson album
(Any friend of Eliza’s is a friend of mine! Cherry S.,
she had written), and Charlie had brought back from Tian Xia a shard of black rock, embedded in which was the fossil of a tiny dragon no bigger than her hand. All of these she put in the bag. She ran back out to the yard, where Ander was massaging his temples with his thumbs and Charlie was quietly dying.

“Do you have anything valuable on you?” she asked Ander. “That watch! Is it valuable?”

“This?” He looked at his watch in surprise. “I dinnay spec so. It was my father’s.”

“Perfect,” said Nell. “Pick him up. We have to hurry.”

“Nell,” said Ander again.

“Pick him up!”
Nell all but snarled.

Without really knowing why he was letting a fourteen-year-old girl with alcohol on her breath boss him around in the middle of the night, Ander did as she said.

“Praps we should stop by the doctor,” he suggested, following her out the gate.

“Dinnay be stupid,” said Nell angrily. “You know just as well as I do that a doctor cannay heal a wound like that. We’re saving his life.”

Somehow that settled it for Ander. He had his doubts that Nell knew what she was doing, but she seemed to think she knew, at least. He himself hadn’t a clue, but he held that action was better than inaction. And so he found himself wrapping the thing in blankets in the back of the helicopter, loading up with extra fuel and climbing into the front with Nell.

“I dinnay think you should come,” he told Nell, knowing perfectly well it was useless.

“You’ll nay find it without me,” said Nell.

Ander put on his aviation headset and gestured for her to do the same. They fastened their seatbelts and he opened the throttle all the way. The helicopter had not been flown since Missus Brock’s heart attack four years ago. It had been old and unreliable even then. But the rotary blades began their slow spin and, as they spun faster, the helicopter began to feel light, swaying slightly and giving a couple of awkward jerks. Then it lifted off the ground and Ander powered it forward. They skimmed along the alley for a few seconds then swooped upwards, leaving Holburg behind them.

“South!” shouted Nell, pointing.

In the back of the helicopter, Charlie tried to say Nell’s name but the noise drowned him out. He couldn’t hear his own voice. He could feel his life draining out of him. It seemed such a waste of effort, roaring off in this noisy machine. He just wanted her to sit with him while it all faded to black.

~~~

As Charlie was making his final desperate, wounded flight over the archipelago to Nell, powered only by Swarn’s potion, Eliza was a few hundred miles southeast of Kalla, breaking into the Republic’s top military command centre.

Flying across the country on Ka’s dragon, she had tried to think of the ways it might be possible to get in touch with General Malone. She concluded that face-to-face was best. It could take hours or more to convince somebody to let her speak to him. Once he saw her he would remember her and would listen.