Carol Berg - Daughter of Ancients

"I'm over here, my lord. All of a piece, I think." I crawled across the floor toward the mumbled curses and spitting. Indeed, I felt tangled and out of proportion, as if mind and body had been stretched as thin as silk thread, and then released to clump back together again in whatever way natural forces saw fit. To find myself with an extra ear or missing fingers would not have surprised me in the least. "Are you injured, my lord?"

The floor was littered with sharp fragments of metal and stone that I brushed out of the way as I crept through the absolute dark. I had already tried to make a handlight and could produce not so much as a spark. I tried not to think what that meant. I knew what Gerick had gone off to do.

The Gate fire had vanished in an eyeblink at the height of the earthquake. The Bridge had fallen, and we were left to be grateful the sky had not fallen in on us as well. Or the ceiling.

My stomach curdled at the thought of how deep under the palace we were, of the narrow passages that could be so easily blocked by rubble, or of the fires that had already raged through the palace when we raced down here to intercept Gerick. I hadn't expected to survive this long.

"I wish you would speak, sir. Ouch!" I stopped to extract a metal splinter from my left hand.

The spitting stopped. "Well, I've a knot the size of a turnip on the back of my head. My sudden meeting with the floor has knocked out at least two of my teeth. And I cannot seem to raise a light. What more can be said?"

Much more. But his breaking voice expressed it, not his words. The surrounding dark was despair.

"The Bridge …" I said.

"I've a gap in my soul the size of the sky. What am I to think?"

I was not a good witness. Having never felt the fullness of power, I could not miss it. But if this was the end of everything, the end of power as we had always been taught, it seemed odd that the skills innate to Dar'-Nethi bodies would be gone as well. Only true talent had been served by the Bridge.

Clothes and limbs rustled in the dark. Metal chinked softly. A whispered sigh came, not from the direction in which I was creeping—the direction of Prince Ven'Dar's coughing—but from behind me.

"Who else is here?" I sat up and spun in place, eyes straining to see in the dark, dizzy until I glimpsed a pale white glow. The light moved slightly and expanded, shining on silver ring mail… on bodies … on bloodied flesh banded by a gold armring …

My throat swelled. Gerick !

The light jerked and grew, illuminating the Gate chamber. Gerick huddled on the floor beside one of the great columns, eyes closed, trembling violently, so pale he was almost transparent. A blood-streaked, disheveled D'Sanya knelt beside him, one finger touching his shoulder, the white light streaming from her hands. And behind them . . .

"My Lord Ven'Dar! Do you see?" I croaked, not sure of my own senses.

"Aye." The prince, a mere ten paces from me, stood craning his neck to stare in wonder at the section of the curved chamber wall where the Gate fire had once burned. D'Sanya's light danced on a crystalline barrier comprised, not of one smooth face, but of pinnacles and facets, corners and ridges and man-high crevices that might have been the Gate's white fire frozen in time.

"He's so tired," said the Lady, her finger touching Gerick's damp hair. "He hurts wickedly and is so sorry, sorry, sorry. Will he die?"

"Don't touch him, witch!" I snapped, heedless of her power, wanting to strike her, wanting to weep, wanting to tear out my hair in confusion. What was she playing at?

D'Sanya flinched at my command and scrambled away from Gerick toward the crystal wall. But when she touched the translucent surface, she cried out and jerked away, clutching her right hand. Moaning softly, she retreated again and soon cowered on the floor beside the toppled bronze lion. Light still glowed softly from her left hand. I was astonished.

Keeping one eye on the Lady, I hurried to Gerick. Blood saturated his shirt and his bare left arm, oozing slowly from a wound in his shoulder close to his collarbone. A narrow leather belt and a wad of wet, bloody cloth hung tangled uselessly about his upper arm and his neck.

I touched his right arm. His entire right side spasmed sharply, but his eyes did not open and his trembling continued unabated. His skin was clammy. Reason told me to be frightened of the one who had wrecked the universe, but reason was upside down and inside out.

When the Gate fire went out, I had expected to die with it. But the uproar had been only beginning. Throughout the long hours in the dark, as the earth rumbled and groaned, as every deafening crash above my head threatened the end of all things, a certain warmth had spread from my head to my feet, a strength that held me together inside, an assurance that if I could just endure, the world would not collapse. Only now was I left cold and empty and truly afraid.

As I slit Gerick's soggy shirt, peeled the flap away from the sticky wound, and replaced the wad of cloth and the belt to keep it snug, Ven'Dar approached the princess. He moved slowly and crouched a few steps away as if not to frighten her. She looked mainly at the floor, only glancing at Gerick now and then.

"So we are not entirely incapable of sorcery," said the prince softly, taking her hand and examining it before laying it back in her lap. "Lady, what's happened? What did he do to you?"

"They were dying. I broke them and they were dying and I'm so sorry, so sorry. He"—she drew her arms tight and curled her legs underneath her, nodding her head toward Gerick—"held them. Loved them. Saved them. Don't let him die. He carried me through the wall."

"Who was dying?" said Ven'Dar. "I need to understand."

Though he had not raised his voice, she flinched and wrapped her arms about the bronze lion's neck, burying her face in her sleeves so we could scarcely hear her. "The worlds. Everyone. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I wanted to make things right. Don't be angry. Please don't punish me. They kept screaming and I wanted to silence them. But I just made it worse and worse. They won't stop screaming and Papa won't come."

"My lord, she's—"

"I see it." He laid his hand gently on her shoulder. "No, Lady, we're not angry with you. And there'll be no punishments. We'll find someone to care for you."

D'Sanya's light faded away, but the crystal wall still glowed faintly, as if it retained some memory of the white gleams. Ven'Dar walked over and touched it, snatching his hand back immediately. He examined its entire length, peering into its glassy depths, probing its cracks and crevices and smooth faces, finding nowhere he could rest even a fingertip on its surface. Worry had ground channels in his brow, but the reflection of the crystal wall revealed a growing curiosity on his countenance, not despair.

"I don't know what to believe," he said. "This is wholly unknown to me, and yet . . . But I cannot linger here. We must learn what's happened to the rest of the world."

He pulled a kerchief from his pocket and dabbed at blood that leaked from a bruised corner of his mouth. After stuffing the stained kerchief away, he held his hands out in front of him, turning them to one side and then another as if they were some oddments he'd picked up in the market.

"I feel so strange," he said. "None of the awareness of power I've had since I can remember. No sense of connection to the world. I can see nothing through this wall. I can't bear to touch it, yet it is not pain that repels my hand, but something more profound than enchantment. I can't say what. And I feel neither dead nor mad nor . . . empty … as I felt at first. Only different." He met my gaze, face alight with a hint of bleak humor. "Well, shall we see, then?"