Truthseeker

Thirty-Two

Lara felt them like the earth hadn’t let her go. Wounds opened up across her skin, great bloodless slashes that rent her to the bone, for all that her eyes saw no such scours. Cramps seized her kidneys and fluttered with agonizing intent, as if her body was trying to reject a wrongness it had no understanding of. Every instinct said to curl down around her own pain, to wait it out, but the part of her that still held a fumbling grasp on intellect remembered what the nightwings were, and how to fight them. Breathless with hurt, she forced her eyes open and staggered to her feet.

New sunlight cut through the distant mountains, illuminating their hollow until it became a cup of fire. Nightwings flooded it, marring its brilliance, but even their numbers were unable to disguise how it sliced apart the world. Lara stood bathed in brilliance, and knew that the handful of men and women who fought with her looked like warriors of legend in its light.

Beyond that slash of daylight lay the rest of the world, bathed in comparative darkness and on the verge of never waking from that night. Lara knew it with a clear thunder of truth: they would defeat the nightwings here, giving all to do so, or something would tear in the fabric of her own world, and might never be mended again.

She didn’t know she spoke, only heard the words linger on the brilliant sunrise: “Changes that will break the world.”

As if she’d called them, the nightwings came to her.

They burned bright, their once-black shadows gray with distance from their own world and reflecting pale gold with morning sunlight. It made them worse somehow, made them seem more solid and more real than they had been when she’d wrestled one to the ground in the Barrow-lands.

The Barrow-lands were a place of magic, she thought, the idea unexpectedly clear in the face of demons swarming toward her. They were lands of mist and magic and insubstantiality, of illusion and impermanence. A scrying spell might open a window to another place, might permit people to speak to one another, but it lacked the physical presence of her own world’s telephones and video cameras. Those things remained, here, always ready for use, but another spell would need to be cast, another whole communications array built, for a second “call” to be placed in the Barrow-lands.

Reversed, that could mean the nightwings grew evermore material the longer they remained in her world. The short exorcism hadn’t worked on them. Maybe that failure was as much an increase in their reality as the brief exorcism being only the beginning of her world’s version of a spell.

Crystal thoughts, all of them, more standing out in her mind as sudden epiphanies than as any progression of logic. The nightwings were on her, vicious screeching bats whose claws tore her dress and, she was faintly aware, her flesh as they attacked. One hit her chest-on, driving her backward, and lightning exploded from the clear morning sky yet again, rupturing the thing that attacked her.

Sudden blazing anger ate away her fear. This was her home, and she wouldn’t surrender it to nighttime monsters from another world. Nightwings were ephemeral things in the Barrow-lands, but the idea that they could survive and breed in her world rang violently true. She swung with her crowbar, feeling satisfaction as it crunched into thin bone and cartilage. Somewhere nearby Kelly was shouting, the trooper was firing his weapon; somewhere there were screams, and she thought that all the nightwings hadn’t come for her, after all.

Lightning split around her again, crashing into the mass of demons. They fell, making a brief clear space around Lara: clear of demons, clear for thoughts, and only then, finally, did she realize where the attacks were coming from. She swung around in the little space of safety he’d made for her, voice breaking as she cried, “Dafydd, no!”

Too late: too late; much too late. Dafydd stood in a ring of crackling electricity. No, didn’t stand. Floated, as if the air itself was so ionized it had to lift him a few centimeters above the earth. He drifted in a half-circle, staff held tight in both hands, as though he drew power from it. He did: Lara was certain of it, and doubted even its power could sustain the Seelie prince for long. His hair, his fingertips, his very breath seemed alive with voltage, and as Lara watched, another burst of power erupted from him. He sagged, strength waning, and Lara ran forward even knowing there was no more chance she could reach him than the nightwings could; the Tesla cage surrounding him was too dangerous. But there were fewer of the monsters than there’d been: a few dozen now, where there had been uncountable numbers before.

It was enough, Lara whispered to herself, and willed it to be true. Dafydd had depleted their numbers enough: they could end it without his help. “Dafydd, stop! We’ll find a way to finish them! Stop!”

Song poured off her as she shouted, conviction in her voice turning the words white with power. Dafydd’s crackling electricity was puny next to her own relentless outpouring of strength; next to a determination so profound it made her courtroom demonstration seem like child’s play. She spoke the truth with the will to make it real, and her world, her own thick and slow home, whose own magic was so long-muted it barely existed any more …

… responded. Sluggishly, yes, but it responded, shifting to align itself with the command Lara laid out. Find a way to finish them. So vague, so terribly vague, but her world’s magic was so long-quiet that she felt that delicacy and fine-tuned requests would go unheeded. There was no time to cajole, not with her friends and the others losing the battle. Dafydd blazed where he hung in the air, coils of electricity still snaking toward the nightwings, but with each monster’s attack the cage that held him faltered a little. The trooper had run out of bullets and raced for his car with a swarm of nightwings after him. The paramedics, like the ranger, were down, but Kelly had a tire iron to match Lara’s crowbar. She stood within the safety of the Corolla’s open door, bashing every nightwing that came near.

Only Lara was out in the open and still standing. The nightwings were gathering; her power, blazing though it was, only needed to miss one of them and she would fall. She could feel something still changing in the world, acquiescing to her demand, but her heart’s acceleration beat a story that the world would answer too late. That was the price of old magic, of power called in a place that no longer recognized its own strength: it could only rise in its own time, and she had no time left.

She only saw it from the corner of her eye, the small gesture of Dafydd raising his head, and panic soured her stomach. She knew, she knew what he intended, because she would have done the same: would have gathered all her power to her with the same gesture he did, crossing his arms over his chest as he offered a brief, but not regretful, smile. He would burn himself out to save them, as Lara would have done in his position.

As she would have done, and in so doing, would have rendered it all meaningless.

Lara threw the crowbar at him.

Cold iron smashed into his web of lightning. Electricity crashed toward it, ionized air losing its tension. Dafydd fell, knees crumpling as he hit the earth and lost his grip on the ivory staff. The crowbar itself dropped to the ground a few feet away, not close enough to have touched him, but close enough to disrupt his power, to ensure he couldn’t use the last of what sustained him and die trying to save a scattered handful of mortals.

Relief ricocheted through Lara’s heart, then turned to dust as Dafydd ap Caerwyn collapsed into insensibility.

She barely knew she moved, and though she wanted to go to Dafydd, a different need sent her elsewhere: to the worldbreaking staff, lying alone and abandoned just out of Dafydd’s insentient reach.

Power cascaded through her as she scooped it up, turning her body rigid with pain and excitement. The staff sang, an unholy shriek of exultation: its very purpose was chaos, and it had been bound too long by an order. Released, that power could do what she needed it to: defeat the nightwings and save Dafydd. Save her world, perhaps, and the truth of that burned through her until she lifted the staff and drove it into the earth.

The world cracked, rivulets of light slicing out from Lara and bashing into the ground. She heard it more than saw it, an endless tumult of bells, as though she’d been caught in a tower as the church below tolled out a greeting to the first light of morning.

Asphalt tore beneath her, a long jagged line opening up. Music poured out, rising into the sky, and the rip followed it, splitting apart earth from heaven. It rushed toward a vanishing point, toward the ball of fire just over the horizon, like a road reaching for the roof of the world.

Oisín’s voice danced through the music, whispering “Truth will seek the hardest path.” Lara, staring at the ripped hole in the world, thought she’d never seen a path that looked harder. She jolted forward, forcing her knees to unlock. Her ankle bent to the side, a reminder that she wore strappy sandals. She scrambled forward regardless, afraid that if she paused, the shredded earth would close again, and whatever answers lay on the road before her would be gone forever.

A nightwing screeched, the sound harsh against truth’s music. She swung with the staff, and the nightwing exploded on impact. Lara ducked as another flew in, and felts its claws snag at the back of her dress. She would have to start wearing sturdier clothes than her favored linens and silks if she was going to live under constant attack. Leather, at least, or perhaps Seelie armor, simply as a matter of course.

She recognized the calm, wry idea as panic’s close sister, something irrelevant to focus on so her fear seemed less important. She threw herself forward, feet clumsy as she tried to clamber up the path of light and music soaring into the sky.

Shock jolted her heart as hard as the ground jolted her foot as she slammed downward through the path. Lara tumbled forward through insubstantial light, catching herself on her hands and rolling to gape in offense at the shining road that wouldn’t support her weight. A nightwing backwinged above her, falling like a bird of prey, and brilliant gold from the sunrise glittered just at the top of her range of vision. At least she would die with the light in her eyes, if she had to die at all.

She was looking for a phrase, a way to shape truth, to save herself, when a black-clad warrior spilled down the path of light and eviscerated the nightwing as he passed.

Watching him, Lara knew she’d never really seen someone fight before. The battle with the Unseelie had been too busy, too crowded, for her to watch any one person, and her other encounters with violence—mercifully few, excepting the past week—had been either brief or laden with magic, neither of which allowed for a man with a sword to do what he did best.

He was Unseelie; he had to be, if the armor of hammered midnight meant anything. He wore a helm, obscuring his face even if his back hadn’t been to her, and the blade he used was liquid gold in the sunrise. The nightwings came to him like moth to flame, drawn by a likeness or by the path of light he’d entered on. They came to him, and they died.

There was no pattern, but there was grace and surety of movement to their dance. He seemed to know where they would strike from, always twisting or stepping away. Flame, weak in the morning light, washed off his armor when they spat it. At that, a handful of them scattered, screaming defiance, then rushed at each other, colliding in a spatter of dark above the ruined highway.

A single creature rose up where there had been many, and others retreated to dive into its blackness. It contorted as they crashed together, gaining strength and size until it became a sinuous black serpent, winged and fork-tongued and spitting fire. Clawed feet burst out of its chest, and it coiled its tail beneath itself and used it to spring forward. Lara screamed and skittered backward, but the Unseelie warrior met the creature with a leap of his own.

They came together in a clash, armor and cartilage rattling. Fire gouted over the knight’s head, the monster’s flesh absorbing his sword’s blow. Absorbing in part, at least: a howling nightwing fell away and the whole of the thing became fractionally smaller. Lara, wide-eyed, sought her crowbar and found it lying almost directly beneath the conflict, alongside Dafydd’s too-still body.

Sickness grabbed her belly, but she pushed onto her hands and knees, crawling forward as the battle fell to the side, both combatants requiring the earth for leverage. They struck again, metal shrieking as the giant nightwing’s claws dug into armor, but a second wounded nightwing fell away. Lara closed her fingers around her crowbar and edged closer to the fight, swinging with both it and the staff when one of the smaller monsters came close. Her hands were icy, so thick she could barely feel either weapon, but she would not leave their rescuer to fight the amalgamated nightwing by himself.

He was the answer to her determination. How, she didn’t know, but she had no doubt that she’d called him. That the staff had torn her world asunder and ripped open a road between the Barrow-lands and here because she had spoken truth. She’d promised their little army would find a way to defeat the nightwings without paying a cost in Dafydd’s life, and a chaos magic had responded. The earth still rattled and shook around them, and she no longer knew if it was the staff’s work, or the battle with the nightwings.

One came too close to her and she rose up on her knees, smashing it against the asphalt. Kelly, sounding miles away, let out a triumphant shout and tore toward the fight, joining Lara in crushing slices of midnight the warrior hacked off the larger beast.

They were mindless, Lara thought, driven only to destroy. They weren’t by nature cooperative, not from what she’d seen in the earlier battles, and yet they had twice now joined together to make a single creature more dangerous than they were individually. Something had to be guiding them, using creativity and cleverness to turn many small demons into a single vast one.

She whispered “Amazing grace” and turned her gaze from the falling bits of monster to the larger one still battling the Unseelie warrior. Song settled in her blood, focusing her power to know truth, to hear it, to see it, and their master came clear.

He rode the giant nightwing, ghostly expression full of the mixed concentration and glee of a bronco rider. His features were smooth, beautiful as all the Seelie were, but looking on him made her eyes hurt, as if she was looking at something that both was and wasn’t there. She dropped the crowbar and clawed her hands around the staff, trying to draw more of its strength into herself so she might see more clearly, but that, it seemed, was not one of its gifts. Only destruction, and perhaps healing. No amount of pouring herself into the song, seeking truth, would alter that.

The nightwing changed shape as she struggled to see its master more clearly. New heads sprang up as the knight cut pieces away, until it was a hydra, all heads and almost no body. Kelly still smashed the injured nightwings with her tire iron, and finally the warrior struck one head off and a new one didn’t arise. A second head fell, and the rider’s face contorted with rage. He glanced up, seeking escape. Lara bellowed, “No!” with all the energy she had left, and for an instant he met her eyes and froze.

Then the hydra leaped forward, striking directly at her. Lara fell back, swinging with the staff, but the black knight was there, skewering the hydra’s breast. Ichor sprayed out and another head fell before the thing dissolved into a handful of weak and broken nightwings. Kelly jumped on the closest ones, pounding them into the asphalt, and the Unseelie warrior dispatched the last two or three with less vigor, if no less thoroughly. Lara collapsed onto her elbows, wheezing with relief as their rescuer stood still a long moment, clearly searching for any further danger.

Then, breathing hard, he pulled his helm off and Ioan ap Annwn turned to offer Lara a hand up.