She sent that healing flood through her arms, out through her hands, and her life force merged with his. She absorbed some of his shock, reeled under the wave of agony that crashed through her, and her hands shook as it threatened to suck her under. But she refused to yield. She fought the darkness aside, sent more of her life force into him. Her training told her to stop-screamed that she must stop! She was pouring too much of herself into him, spending her own life force like fire, emptying herself into a cold, dark void of death. She knew that…and she didn’t care. He was the Emperor, her Emperor. She would die before she let him go, and she turned her back on her teachers’ warnings. She emptied herself against his pain and the savage injuries of his broken body.
And it wasn’t enough.
She could feel him slipping away, under her fingers.
“NO!” She screamed at him, but her voice emerged as little more than a hoarse, rasping whisper. Tears blinded her. “Don’t you dare go!”
She moved by raw instinct now and lunged for his feet. She jerked off his shoes, jammed both hands hard against the balls of his feet, locked what her instructors had called the “wellsprings of life” in the soles of his feet. Energy centers there drew energy in and let energy flow out. When death came, her instructors had said, a person’s energy bled away to nothing through those wellsprings.
“You may not leave!” she screamed at him, her voice stronger, and his soul hesitated, trapped by her hands and her will. “We need you,” she cried. “We need you too desperately to let you go! Oh, goddess…Shalana, give me strength, we need him. Please, Your Majesty, stay with us…”
A terrible spasm went through him. Then he started to shudder, violently. The shuddering lasted for several terrifying seconds. Then he relaxed with such suddenness, such totality, she thought for a moment he’d died, after all. She drew breath to howl in anguish, when a low, deep groan tore from him. He tried to move under her hands, and pain flared, cruelly. He cried out in agony.
“Don’t move!” she cried. “You have broken bones!” She didn’t dare release her grip on the wellspring points, but he was trying to move, trying to thrash around.
“Anbessa…” The name tore from him, raw with anguish.
She searched the terrace with a frantic gaze, trying to find someone-anyone-in an Imperial Security uniform. There were so many people running in panic-stricken horror, she could see nothing but total confusion. But then a face she recognized resolved itself from the wild melee and she screamed out a name.
“DARCEL!”
Darcel Kinlafia jerked around, yanked out of his efforts to help the dozens of injured, sort out the panic, by the sound of his name. The scream cut through the chaos and the confusion with an impossible clarity. He knew he couldn’t possibly have heard it through the chaos and the bedlam, but he didn’t need to hear it with his ears, for he Heard it with every fiber of his Talent and he wheeled, eyes searching for its source.
“Down here, Master Kinlafia!” Relatha Kindare shrieked. “Help me!”
His gaze dropped to the flowerbed. It focused on her-then on the shape she crouched over, in that flowerbed-and his face turned paper-white in the ghastly light of the burning palace. He charged forward, tossing aside tables, chairs, and people with equal abandon, and Alazon was right behind him.
“Find a healer!” Relatha gasped, as he slid to his knees beside her. “Please! I can barely keep him stable, I’m just a student, oh, Goddess, I’m so scared…”
Both Voices went glassy-eyed. It took her gibbering mind a long, horrified moment to realize they were sending out a broadband distress call. She tried to feel grateful, tried to hope someone would Hear in time, but the battle to force the emperor to live consumed her and despair tore at her as she felt him slipping away once more.
The Privy Voice came out of “send mode” first and her eyes focused on Relatha once more, huge and dark in her ashen face, glittering reflections of savage firelight.
“What can I do?!”
“Don’t let him move, don’t let him thrash around. He’s got broken bones. If he moves, he’ll tear things open, inside. And he’s asking for Anbessa.”
“Alazon,” Kinlafia said.
“Got it,” she replied immediately, and set a light hand on Relatha’s shoulder. “I’ll find out how the Grand Princess is. Darcel will stay with you.”
She disappeared into the wild confusion, but her husband stayed close by Relatha’s side, searching, for injuries. The emperor’s arm had a ghastly break, a compound fracture pumping blood, and Kinlafia’s face blanched even whiter. He ripped off the capelets of his formal court dress and used a strip torn from them to tie a tourniquet around the Emperor’s right arm. A jagged splinter of bone had torn through flesh and skin and sleeve. There was blood everywhere, so much blood…
“More cloth strips,” Relatha said, her hands still clamped like death on the soles of the emperor’s feet. “And something for splints.”
Kinlafia tore more strips from his capelets. His explorer’s good sense kept his nerves steady and the emergency medical training which went with it told his hands what to do, and Relatha held tight to Zindel’s life force, trusting him to staunch the wounds while she refused to let her emperor slip away.
Kinlafia bound Zindel’s right arm to his chest so he couldn’t move it, then smashed a tumbled chair to bits for splints to secure the shattered arm more securely. Then another chair went to pieces as he splinted the emperor’s right thigh and left calf.
He’d just finished that when several uniformed armsmen came running from another part of the terrace, and Relatha heard fire alarm bells clanging as fire wagons fought their way through the victory celebration crowds, trying to reach the burning Grand Palace. A ponderous crash marked the collapse of the Grand Imperial Salon, and she flinched as a fresh shockwave of heat, flame, and smoke belched across them. Cinders rained down like hailstones.
Every one of the armsmen had a gun in his hand.
“Get away from His Majesty!” one of them barked, and another reached down to snatch the emperor’s shoulders, but-
“NO!” Relatha screamed.
“Don’t move him!” Kinlafia snarled. “You’ll kill him if you move him!”
“The fire-”
“He’s got broken bones!” Relatha shouted over the roar of the fire. “They’ll slice open arteries if you snatch him up like that. I’m training as a Healer; I can sense the damage in there. He’s barely holding onto life, just from the physical shock. If I move my focus off the wellspring points, he’ll die! He needs pain medication, emergency surgery. God’s mercy, where’s the Imperial Surgeon? Any surgeon, any healer?”
Alazon Yanamar-Kinlafia shoved her way through the guards with kicks and curses.
“Let me through!” When she finally broke through the cordon they’d thrown around His Majesty, she dropped to her knees beside Relatha. “Dr. Sathron’s on his way from the palace clinic. He’s nearly here. I’ve called for a whole trauma team and an ambulance. Is he conscious?”
“Barely.”
The Privy Voice leaned across to speak directly into her ear. “Will it help him or hurt him to let him know Anbessa is alive?”
Relatha bit her lip and blinked helpless tears. He might be holding onto life just long enough to know his child was safe and would let go of the struggle and die if they told him. Or he might be reassured enough to ease the strain of terror and guilt, easing the stress on his laboring body, now that he no longer needed to fear for her life. She didn’t know, wasn’t trained, didn’t have enough experience.