The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

For a long time she lay in a state between sleep and waking, kept alive by bitter seaweed and an astringent juice brought to her by the brothers. At intervals she explored the passageways that led out of the cavern, using a trail of pebbles to mark her path, but even with her salamander eyes to guide her she at length came to labyrinthine tunnels without any illumination whatsoever, and so she returned, always, to the cavern.

It wouldn’t have mattered anyway even if she had found a path that led to the surface. She had a task she had to complete.

When she slept, or lay in a stupor, the old ones spoke to her; what a person might say in an hour took them days or even weeks. She couldn’t be sure.

She held on. She would have one chance. She might never again see those she loved, but what did love matter when weighed against duty? She knew how to seal off her heart; she did so now, so that sentiment would not distract her. That skill she had learned from Anne.

Now.

The tremors came constantly, as if the Earth were adrift on a vast sea like a ship rolling and yawing on the waves. Deep in the Earth the old ones worked their ancient magic. They could not touch Anne; they could not even move, it seemed, but they had other means at their disposal. They channeled the deep rivers and spoke to those who had the patience to listen and the ability to travel.

We. Are. The. Children. Of. The. Cataclysm. We. Are. Guardians. Of. Our. Own. Children. We. Are. Born. Of. Stone. And. Dragon’s. Blood. And. Human. Flesh.

She roused as the sting of magic melted down through the Earth from the land above, winding her in a ghostly net of blue-white fire. She staggered up to her feet. Gnat and Mosquito lifted their heads to stare at her with flat eyes.

“Go far out to sea with your kinfolk,” she said to them. “You will not survive if you remain close to shore.”

They looked at each other. The eels that were their hair twitched and writhed, hissing, as though motion were speech.

“Go,” she repeated.

They dragged themselves to the flooded passageway, slithered in, and vanished, leaving her alone. She knelt, pressing palms against the ground. She let her awareness fall as the net of magic twisted along her body and snapped in her hair, making it stand on end. She pierced with her mind’s eye far down into the molten fields lying beneath the grinding crusts of stone. Where rivers of fire flowed, she swam, making her way out of the eddies of viscous pools into faster-moving streams so red-hot they melted their own path through rock. These rivers raged at flood stage, pushed and prodded by the Old Ones in their circles. Beneath the seeming solidity of the ground, a tumult of liquified stone seethed and boiled.

As night crept westward across the land and the stars rose, the weaving caught within the stones of seven circles, the great crown that spanned the northern lands and the Middle Sea. The net of the spell blazed. Through that net she saw the shadow of the Ashioi land manifesting out of the aether not as a stone drops from on high but shifting out of one aetherical plane of existence back into the world of mortal kind. Through the widening gaps aether poured down into the world below, invisible to mortal eyes but blazing with power that Anne and her cabal gathered into their loom.

She heard Anne’s voice reaching out to the rest of the Seven Sleepers who wove the spell: Meriam, Marcus, Hugh, Severus, Abelia, Reginar.

“Now!”

A surge of emotion coursed through that net, its own kind of magic that works against those who oppose the one who is about to win: Anne knew that she had triumphed and that her enemies had lost. The warp and weft of the spell wove together into a vast glittering net that interpenetrated aether and Earth.

“Now!” echoed the Old Ones.

Now.

The Old Ones had searched and commanded, and at the three northern crowns their agents leaped into action. To the north, ice wyrms consumed Brother Severus. To the northwest, an Eika prince called Stronghand cut down the clerics gathered at the Alban stone circle. To the east in the wilderness north of Ungria, Hugh—nay, it was not Hugh at all. Hugh had set another in his place to absorb the backlash he knew was coming, a tattered, mute cleric named Zacharias. That other man flung himself bravely into the crown, knowing it would kill him, but by tangling the threads he knotted them all across the northern span of the weaving. One side of the spell began to unravel.

Anne did not falter. She was stronger than Liath had imagined any mortal could be.

ch light beckons, and yet gulfs of emptiness swell between the great wheels. This is the Abyss, into which all humankind falls in the end.

Let it go.

Death comes to all creatures, even to the stars.

He let go. He fell.

3

NOW.

For a long time she lay in a state between sleep and waking, kept alive by bitter seaweed and an astringent juice brought to her by the brothers. At intervals she explored the passageways that led out of the cavern, using a trail of pebbles to mark her path, but even with her salamander eyes to guide her she at length came to labyrinthine tunnels without any illumination whatsoever, and so she returned, always, to the cavern.

It wouldn’t have mattered anyway even if she had found a path that led to the surface. She had a task she had to complete.

When she slept, or lay in a stupor, the old ones spoke to her; what a person might say in an hour took them days or even weeks. She couldn’t be sure.

She held on. She would have one chance. She might never again see those she loved, but what did love matter when weighed against duty? She knew how to seal off her heart; she did so now, so that sentiment would not distract her. That skill she had learned from Anne.