Before me lay shafts of light. The remains of the circle were just there. I blew out breath again, steeled myself, forced my way through. Momentum dropped me to hands and knees in pale sand. Chest and back stung from bad scrapes, but as I started to move, pain in the kidney area flared so excruciatingly that it dropped me face-first into the sand.
The picture in my head was what Wahzir had told me. The organ rots inside you. It poisons the blood. The kidney rotting, spreading poison throughout my body.
“Not now,” I murmured. “I have things to do…” Gods, it hurt, and so badly the sweat rolled off my body.
I lay there with teeth gritted, fists clenched, breath hissing into and out of my mouth. When at first the pain began to diminish I didn’t believe it. But slowly it lessened, degree by degree. Sweat dried. Breathing steadied. I could lie there no longer.
I eased myself up to a sitting position. About a foot away lay the blade portion of a broken sword. Close by lay the other half: hilt, pommel, grip, and approximately a foot of amputated blade.
Samiel.
Not far from my broken sword lay Del’s Boreal. Named blades. Blooding-blades, keyed by us in the blood of a living being. I had come home from Skandi brimming over with magic foreign to my bones. Foreign to my blood. I, a mage, annealed and tempered atop a towering spire of stone on ioSkandi, island of the mad.
No time. I needed this done.
I reached, took up the blade half. Moved a little farther and took up the other. It was dead in my hands; sundered, stilled, damned.
Sand and blood caked my chest. For a moment I held both halves in one hand, then scraped a swath of blood from my skin. I painted both halves with it. I closed my right hand over the grip. The left over the blade. I thrust both into the air, pointing up, out of the chimney, pointing to sun and sky.
Come, I told it. Come home.
The interior of the chimney exploded with light. Bursts like shooting stars raced up, raced down, spun themselves around the interior. A whirlwind of light painted the chamber, spinning, spinning, spinning. It never had disappeared. Never dissipated. It would not desert its host. But it was wild. It was angry.
Come home, I said. You are needed.
A whistling began. Each time a burst of shooting star was born, sound accompanied it. A high, keening sound, loud with its whelping, trailing off as the burst grew a tail and shot through the air—up, down, around. A deep throb came into the chamber, trembling beneath my legs. I reared up, braced myself on knees and calves, let my head fall back as I thrust the two broken halves even higher into the air. Up to the sky. Up to the stone-blocked sun.
The chamber was wreathed in light of a hundred colors. The whirlwind spun, humming. The newborn bursts streaked in numberless directions, shrieked, fell into the whirlwind, added meager light to the whirlwind glorious in power, in the spinning of its children. It climbed the broken walls of the chamber, spun high, higher than my head, higher than Samiel, whirled up the chimney. The keening of its song, the humming of its power, the deep throb under my body grew in volume. And the whirlwind spun down. It dipped, touched, pull sand into itself. Glittering crystal sand. I tasted its grit in my mouth. Heard the added song, the almost-painful throb.
It had not been this way when I broke it. Maybe because I had killed the sword by forcing everything into it.
Bursts exploded into existence, tiny, brilliant shooting stars, alive with light, with sound. Each reveled in freedom briefly, then fell into the whirlwind to add one more blazing streak.
And the whirlwind, built with light, pregnant with its children, spun itself down and down, over my body.
Inside, all was quiet. Light spun and spun, but didn’t touch me. Sound pulsed in me, but I couldn’t hear it. All was still. All was silent. I knelt in the chimney with broken Samiel in my hands, offered to the light.
Come home, I said. Come home where you belong.
The whirlwind spun itself up. No longer was I shielded. I felt the stinging of the sand, saw the blazing of the starbursts, heard throb and roar and hiss. A keening, half-mad song of magic’s grief, mourning its desertion.
The whirlwind climbed. It jerked both halves of the sword out of my hands. They were spun into the whirlwind, flashing in meager sunlight bleeding down through fissures and holes. Though half-deafened by the wind and its wailing, I thought I heard a click. Metal on metal. Tumbling down from the whirlwind, wreathed in light, Samiel fell. I realized I was there in its path and threw my self aside as the sword came down and planted itself in the sand, whole once again.
The whirlwind spun and spun, climbed to the sky, fractured into fragments. In countless colors light rained down with a hundred thousand voices. It struck me: painless. Bathed my face. Ran off shoulders. Rolled down back and flanks. And the lights winked out.
Sand and dust settled. I was blinded by darkness at first. But vision cleared, and once again the sun crept through crevices. In its touch, Samiel’s new-made blade was blinding.
I stood up. I reached out, closed my hand around the grip, and pulled the blade free. It slid easily from sand, shed glittering crystal, was clean and bright and whole.
But Samiel wasn’t the magic. Samiel was merely the harbinger.
The sun was banished. Darkness reigned. And from every crack and crevice, every slot and fissure, light crawled out. It ran down the chamber walls, welled up from the marriage of stone to sand. Magic pure and potent. Power incarnate.
“Oh, hoolies,” I said. “This is going to hurt.”
Light crawled across the sand, trickled down the walls. I watched as it quested in the sand, like a puppy hunting milk. I stood there, waiting, breathing noisily. Then I drove Samiel, blade first, deeply into the sand. I sank down slowly. Gripping Samiel was all that kept me upright.
Come on, I said. Take me.
Light came. Touched. It crawled all over me, bathing naked flesh. I felt it creep slowly into every pore. My mouth, my nose, my ears. Lastly, my eyes. Tears ran backward. I tasted them in the back of my throat.
Magic kindled. Deep within my soul, within my sense of self, the spark grew larger. Breath blew upon it. Tinder caught. The fuel of my body burst into conflagration. I threw back my head and screamed. A hundred thousand voices sounded.
My flesh was unmade then knitted back again. Skin sloughed away, taking with it scars and the aches of age. Heat wreathed my bones, then transmuted into ice.
Take me, I said. Come home to me.
Joyously, power leaped within me.
I was what was needed.
I knew when all was done. I had ten fingers again.
I stood. Pulled Samiel from the sand.
“Bascha. I’m coming.”
Chapter 42
WHEN I GOT BACK DOWN TO THE MODEST MUDBRICK houses, I found Alric sitting on a bench outside his doorway. He kept his bandaged leg stretched and cradled his splinted arm. Tied to a leg of the bench was a buckskin gelding.
I stopped dead. “Not your horse! Alric, I don’t know if he can make it back. It’s hard riding I’m doing.” And harder yet because of time lost in the broken chimney.
Alric’s eyes were on the hilt sticking above my left shoulder. He looked at me, his expression oddly blank. “You didn’t have a sword when you went up there.”