Threading the Needle (58 page)

“Any sign of Kara or the others?”

“None. Aside from the priest up there, I don't see any of the White Cloaks, unless they're in commoner clothing and mixed in with the crowd.” Glenn staggered as the earth lurched, a sharp wail of fear rising up from the crowd ahead. The priest raised his voice, as if volume would stop the quakes. “I only see a few of the White Cloak guards here, mostly up on the tier with the priest. The rest must be at the walls.”

“Kara will be at the node.” Cory pointed to the obsidian spire rising behind the priest. “She'll be at the center of it all, at the Needle.”

“Are you certain? She wasn't cooperating with the White Cloaks the last time we saw them.”

“She'll be there.”

Bryce, Glenn, and Allan shared a look.

“It's as good a place to start looking as any.”

“Right.” Allan glanced over their group. Only twenty-four left. Then there were the Wolves. He counted an even dozen of them, not including their pack leader. “Let's see if we can find a way into the tower.”

Kara fought her way through the pulses coming from Erenthrall, each one threatening to shove her back down the ley line to the Needle. The
farther she stretched from the Needle, the more she pulled at the combined strength of the other Wielders there and the energy generated by the Nexus.

But when she finally reached Erenthrall, she gasped. “Gods.”

“What is it?”

Even though she was hundreds of miles distant, Marcus' voice cut through her shock. She shook herself, began assessing the damage. “Erenthrall is in chaos. It's suffering massive quakes, worse than those we're feeling here. The ley system you and the other White Cloaks set up is gone.” She wished it were an understatement, but the nodes Marcus and the others had established had been ripped apart. Active nodes had gone dead, and inactive ones were now connected to ley lines that hadn't existed even a few days before. She scrambled from one node to the next, attempting to get an overall impression of what had happened, but it didn't make any sense.

“There's too much ley.” She passed through junction after junction. Some of the lines slammed up against the distortion, ley spilling up and out into the city. Others hit nodes and branched, surging around the distortion or arrowing off toward more distant locations like the Needle. All of them were suffused with ley, as if the system had somehow tapped into a huge reservoir—

Kara thought suddenly of the lake of ley resting far beneath the city. The Nexus Prime Augustus had created had siphoned off ley from that lake, and when the distortion had first formed as a piercing white ball of radiance over Erenthrall after the Shattering, it had fed from it. Kara had used it in her attempt to heal the distortion before it quickened.

But the distortion had cut off the lake from the remaining ley system. The main conduit to the lake lay near the center of the distortion, in the center of Erenthrall, in Grass.

Not anymore. Even as she dove down beneath the city, beneath the distortion, deep underground, following the ley lines there—those natural and those created by the Primes—she knew what she would find.

Near the bottom of the distortion, where the original conduit was blocked by the distortion, a secondary pool of ley had formed in a massive underground cavern. It was being fed by the lake deep below, had probably started filling up as soon as the distortion had blocked its original path. But the new reservoir had reached full capacity and had spilled over, searching for a new outlet.

It had found it in the shambles of the ley network the Primes had built around Erenthrall. Like water, it had sought the easiest pathways after it filled the reservoir to its brim, and the destroyed network was there, waiting. Now it was flooding the system.

Kara's body sagged in defeat. Rough stone pressed through her clothing, scraped at her cheek. “It's going to destroy us all.”

“Kara!” Marcus' voice was distant, which was odd, since her body felt so close. Her pulse thudded through her arms, her throat, hot and heavy. It roared in her ears. Her breath rasped from her lungs, choked with fine grit thrown up by the quake. Yet the screams and moans of the other Wielders and White Cloaks were muffled.

Then someone grabbed her jaw with one hand, fingers digging in, pain stabbing through the numbness. “Kara! Do something! The Nexus here will not hold much longer!”

“I don't . . .” She'd intended to say she didn't know what to do. The problem was too immense, like the quickening of the distortion after the Shattering. But she'd managed to do something then, even though it had only been her and four other Wielders.

Mentally, she picked herself up. Deep beneath Erenthrall, she stepped back from the wall of the ley line she'd clung to since discovering the secondary pool of ley and centered herself, forced herself to think. Not like a Wielder, but like a Prime.

There was too much ley. The system couldn't handle it, because the only parts of the system left in Erenthrall were the secondary lines outside the center of the city. These were the nodes that had powered the outer districts, the barges, the heat, the ley globes that lined the streets and lit the interiors of the buildings of those that could afford to pay for it. All of the major junctions and the Nexus itself were sealed up inside the distortion.

“There's nothing left that's strong enough for this much ley to anchor itself to.” She was aware that Marcus was still shouting at her, that the pit at the Needle was heaving under another quake, that part of the pit's wall had collapsed. “Everything that we could use to control the ley is locked inside the distortion.”

She turned from the awe-inspiring view of the secondary reservoir overflowing its boundaries toward the distortion overhead.

“It all comes back to the distortion. We have to heal the distortion.”

She still wasn't certain there was enough power in the Nexus and strength in the White Cloaks and Wielders remaining to do it, even with the reservoir so close, but they had to try. Erenthrall was being torn apart.

Far distant, in the pit at the Needle, she grabbed Marcus' arm. “I'm going to try to heal the distortion over Erenthrall. It's the only way to stop the surges coming from the city. We need the nodes locked inside. I need you to channel as much of the energy from the Nexus as you and the White Cloaks can handle to me.” She tightened her grip. “Send it even if it might burn me out.”

He tensed, ready to argue with her, the emotions felt more through her fingers than seen. Her concentration was on the distortion in Erenthrall, on its edges, on not allowing it to daunt her. Then Marcus breathed out, the air a gust in her face.

“All right.” His voice was laced with an old pain. “Give us a moment.”

He leaned in and kissed her, a light touch on her lips, and then he pulled out of her grasp. She focused on the distortion. She stretched herself outward, as she'd done as a Wielder before the Shattering, extending herself so that she could feel the edges of the fractured reality, the planes and facets, the jagged arcs of lightning and the brilliant-colored arms. As she sank herself into its surface, noting the fractures that were smaller and should be healed first, the intricacies of the shards and how one would collapse upon the other if healed too quickly, images of this distortion forming played across her mind. She'd been lying on the stone steps outside the Nexus, the Wolves led by Hagger closing in, all of her strength gone. Artras had stood over her protectively, dagger glinting in the distortion's pure white light above. Then that light had flickered. Its penetrating whine had cut off and it had collapsed down to a pinprick, then nothing.

And exploded outward, the thick arms swirling overhead, reaching greedily toward the city, reality breaking in an elegant, beautiful whirl of energy that had consumed all of them there on the steps—Allan, Artras, Dylan, Hagger, the Wolves, and Kara.

Then it had slowed and set, reality halting in their shard, time stopped. Only Allan had been unaffected. Without Allan, they would have all been lost.

How many others were trapped in the shards even now? It wasn't the
same distortion as before. There were ragged holes in the edges now, from where Kara and the White Cloaks had healed individual shards before realizing how useless a solution that had been. But they'd seen what had happened in a few of those shards—like the group that had hoarded their food supplies but ultimately killed themselves when they realized no one was coming to free them. Yet there were thousands of shards, must be thousands of people still trapped, still alive in shards where time had slowed or been halted.

Her goal since surviving the quickening had always been to free them, however possible. That drive had been forgotten as she fought to survive and the realities of the new world after the Shattering had taken over. Now she
had
to heal the distortion. Not simply to save those caught inside, but to save everyone else on the plains as well, before the fractured ley system tore the land apart.

She settled herself around the spherical distortion, drawing herself up around the edge where she knew she and the White Cloaks had healed shards. Those points would be the weakest, the most likely to destabilize the distortion and cause a catastrophic collapse as she worked.

“We're ready.”

She drew in a few deep breaths to steady herself. The ground heaved at the Needle again, but she ignored it. Through the ley, she could feel the earth around Erenthrall shifting as well, felt buildings collapse as fissures opened up through the streets. Strangely, the areas closest to the distortion were the most stable.

The distortion itself wasn't being affected.

“I'm ready.”

Far distant, Marcus said, “Now.”

Kara felt the wave of ley roaring toward her, channeled up from the Needle's junction, funneled through the Nexus, guided by the White Cloaks and Wielders down the ley line that connected the node to Erenthrall. She braced herself for its impact—

And still it nearly carried her away when it struck. She screamed. She knew she'd screamed, but the whitewash noise of the ley pummeling her drowned it out. With monumental effort, she seized hold of the power thrust upon her and focused it on the distortion. Her reach doubled, then tripled, expanding around the distortion until she completely enclosed it. But unlike her attempt to heal it before it had
quickened, this time she had no immediate support. There were no Wielders here to lend her strength or guide her. They were all intent on maintaining the new Nexus. So she drew upon all of her training as a Wielder, all of the intricacies of the clocks her father had allowed her to help repair before his death, and she began to work.

The rough edges where shards had already been healed came first. She held the rest of the distortion together as she began smoothing the edges down. Carefully, first one shard, then the next came free. The arms that were the backbone of the distortion trembled as each shard released, and she paused until she was certain she hadn't started a collapse. Then she continued, the energy from the Nexus still roaring through her. She handled it by dispersing it around the distortion, letting it flow out, around, and back toward her again until she could use it.

She'd already smoothed out three areas that the White Cloaks must have dealt with when she turned her attention to a new area. A small shard had been isolated from the rest of the distortion, and she realized it was the piece that contained the wagon and family being attacked by Wolves. They hadn't been able to figure out how to repair the distortion without also freeing the Wolves, and there would have been little chance they could stop the Wolves before they tore the family apart. So they'd left the shard alone, and then been caught up in the war between the Rats and the Tunnelers.

She hesitated over the isolated shard, afraid to heal it, since it would mean the family's almost certain death, then set it aside and returned to the distortion. She could return to it later.

She attacked the distortion again, running the ley energy over the fractures, the cracks slowly sealing, melding the shards back to reality as the fissures withdrew. Her confidence grew and she began to work faster, the ley pulsing around her. Without thought, she reached for more, drew ley from the reservoir that had overflowed and started the current crisis, integrating the two flows from beneath the distortion and the ley line from the Needle. She began sweeping over the distortion in waves, as if she were polishing it, the fractures thinning and retreating as she worked, but it was so large.

And the one engulfing Tumbor was even larger.

She refused to let the thought rattle her.

Everything was healing smoothly until another violent heave in the
pit at the Needle threw her body to the floor. Staggering pain sizzled through her shoulder and something cracked in her chest, a bolt of white-hot agony ripping through her lungs. She jerked back from the distortion involuntarily, her concentration broken. The disruption rippled through the ley—