“I was,” he said grimly, suddenly understanding. “Yirth, can you set fire to something at a distance without having seen it first?”
The witch’s dark brows plunged in a startled frown. She alone of them, though she wore a man’s doublet and breeches for convenience, bore no marks of physical fighting. But under the crown of her tight-braided hair, her harsh face was set with fatigue, the ugly smear of the birthmark appearing almost black against her pallor. She looked older, the Wolf thought, than she had before she’d led the women through the traps into the Citadel. All her scars would be upon the fabric of her mind.
“I cannot set fire to anything at a distance,” she said. “I must see it to bring fire.”
The others stared at her, shocked at the limitation; the Wolf was puzzled. “You can’t—can’t bring fire to a place that you know in your mind?” he asked. “Can’t form it in your mind?” The act of bringing fire seemed so easy to him, though he had never done it—like turning away the minds of those who sought him, or changing the way he saw things, to pierce another wizard’s illusions.
She shook her head, clearly not understanding what he meant. “You can, perhaps,” she said. “But it lies beyond my power.”
So it was Sun Wolf, after all, who had to lead the small crew through the winding mazes, toward the Hole once again. Yirth followed them, though he had warned her against entering the observation room of the Hole itself; two or three of the freed miners helped carry the sacks of blasting powder. To Sun Wolf’s ears, the fighting was far off in the upper part of the tower and, by the sound of it, it was turning into the grim, messy business of mopping up, fighting in pockets here and there—the bloody scrag ends of battle.
Closer and more real in his own mind was the buzzing darkness that ate at the corners of his consciousness, demanding, insistent as a scarcely bearable tickling. He rested his hand on Starhawk’s shoulder for support and saw, almost disinterestedly, that his fingers were trembling. He was conscious in a half-detached way of the sun sliding down the outside walls of the Citadel, changing colors as it approached the ragged horizon; though, when he mentioned to Yirth this awareness of things he could not actually see, she shook her head and looked at him strangely with her jade-colored eyes. The Entity whispering in his mind was more real to him than his own body, more real than the stone halls through which he stumbled like a mechanical thing—more real than anything except the sharp bones of the shoulder beneath his hand and the cold, pale silk of hair that brushed the backs of his fingers when Starhawk turned her head.
Through the little window of the observation room, they could see that Altiokis was still moving. Rolling, flopping grotesquely, he would occasionally stagger to his feet or mouth at the window glass. The jewels of his clothing had caught on the rough walls and ripped as he’d moved, and fat, white flesh bulged through the rents. One eye was gone, the other already being eaten away from within; his face was starting to change, as the faces of nuuwas did. Sheera made a gagging noise in her throat and looked away.
Sun Wolf scarcely saw. He remained by the door while the sacks of powder were stacked in the room and in the hall beyond, where Yirth waited. There was enough powder to blow out the whole western wall of the Citadel. His gaze went past the window, past the darkness, to deeper darkness, where he could see the Thing moving.
The giggling, scratching sensation in his brain was almost unendurable. It knew him. Threads of it permeated every fiber of his consciousness; he had a momentary, disturbed vision of himself, visible in the shadows through the thick, black glass of the window, his half-naked body clawed and filthy, his wrists still weighted with the iron bracelets, the blood from the ripped flesh of them slowly dripping down his fingers; his left eye was a charred and gory pit in a face white with shock and strain. The other people in this vision were mere puppets, grotesque, jerking, and unreal as they stumbled about their meaningless tasks. The Entity—whatever it was—could no more see them than they could see it. They were only half-guessed shapes, more like monkeys than human beings.
He watched as one of the shapes shambled up to him and reached a fiddling, picking hand out to touch him.
He closed his eyes, and the vision dissolved. When he opened them, Starhawk was looking worriedly into his face. “Chief?”
He nodded. “I’m all right.” His voice sounded like the faint rasp of a fingernail scraping metal. He looked around him, fixing the room in his mind—the stone walls, the shadows, the grayish-white cotton of the sacks that he knew the flames would lick over when he called them, and the carved ebony chair, shoved unceremoniously into a corner.
Starhawk and Denga Rey supported him between them as they led him from the room.
“You sure this is going to work?” Sheera asked nervously.
“No,” the Wolf said.
“Could Yirth...”
“No,” Starhawk said. “We have enough problems without its getting its claws into another wizard.”
They turned a corner and followed a narrow passage toward the gate. With the smoothness of a door closing before them, the way was suddenly filled with armed men in black mail. The Dark Eagle stood at their head.
“I thought,” he said, smiling, “that we would still find you wandering around here. And Starhawk, too... You did bring your men, after all.” The Eagle’s swarthy face was grimed with blood and dirt in the torchlight, the swirling, petal-edged crests of his helmet torn and hacked with battle, their dark blue edges black in places and dripping; but through it all, his grin was no less bright.
“Let us out of here,” Sun Wolf said in a voice that shook. This is no time for fighting.”
“No?” One black brow lifted. “The nuuwa seem all to have gone crazy, but we should be able to drive them off the walls without much trouble. Altiokis should be pleased to hear—”
“Altiokis is dead,” the Wolf whispered, fighting to keep his thoughts clear and to keep the words that he spoke his own and not those that crowded, unbidden and unknown, to his throat. His harsh voice had turned slow and stammering, picking at his words. “His power is broken for good—there’s no need to fight—just let us out...”
The mercenary captain smiled slowly; one of his men laughed. Sheera made a move to draw her sword, and Starhawk caught her wrist, knowing it would do no good.
“Quite a convincing tale,” the Dark Eagle said. “But considering that I have here my lord Tarrin’s lady—no uncommon general, I might add, my lady—not to mention the witch who led the miners through the traps and into the Citadel—if my lord is dead, which I have yet to believe, the power he wielded will be up for the taking. We can—”
“If you can touch the power he had, it will snuff your brains out like a candle flame,” the Wolf said harshly. “Go down the corridor and through the door. Look through that pox-rotten glass of his—look at what you see. Then come back, and we’ll talk about power!” His voice was trembling with strain and rage, his brain blinded with the effort of holding itself together against those tearing, muttering, black roots that were thrusting it apart. “Now let us the hell out of here, unless you want that Thing in there to take root in my brain as it did in his!”
The Dark Eagle stood for a moment, staring up into Sun Wolf’s face, into the hagridden, half-mad, yellow eye that stared from the mass of clotted cuts, stubble, and filth. The captain’s own face, under the soot and grime of battle, was smooth, an unreadable blank. Then without a word, he signed to his men to let Sun Wolf and the women pass. The Dark Eagle turned and walked down the corridor toward Altiokis’ observation room.