The Unmaking (The Last Days of Tian Di, #2)(53)

Nia knelt on the ground and cupped her hands together. She whispered into a small opening between her thumbs. Eliza could not hear what she said and yet she felt it, a pure horror and a vengeful rage. She was half-relieved every time Uri Mon Lil’s concentration faltered and the spell spat them out. Then she would look into the wizard’s terrified, bewildered face and explain, as best she could, again and again and again. Nia’s hair began to fade and whiten, thin lines spidered across her face, and always she remained in the same posture, whispering hoarsely. The inaudible words radiated an unendurable level of pain, wrath and fear.

Then Nia opened her hands and a rough ball of what looked like black metal lay cupped in her palms. Kwellrahg, she named it. She pressed it to her chest. Her flesh and bone opened up around it and closed over it. Kwellrahg, she said again, hoarsely, and the monster on the ground came to life, surging up and then crawling down her throat, shrinking as it did so, passing into her like a horrible shadow. When it was done she stood up unsteadily. Her face was drawn and hollow-eyed, her white hair lank and wet with sweat, but she was lit from within somehow with a pale light of triumph. With a shriveled, shaking hand she undid the locket around her neck, opened it, and looked into the tiny mirror. She breathed deeply as her youth and beauty were restored to her. Then she turned her head and looked, or so it seemed, straight at the girl and the wizard spying on her much later through the book. And she smiled.

Eliza lay in the snow by the burnt-out fire. She was soaked through with sweat that was fast becoming cold. She saw the dragons moving together on the opposite side of the bank in the dark. Shivering, she pulled herself together and rekindled the fire. Uri Mon Lil was sound asleep and she left him that way for a while. Her mind felt as if it had been shoveled out. It was a tremendous effort just to think.

Had Nia known they might be watching? If so, why had she left the Book of Barriers behind? Perhaps she had wanted Eliza to know what she now knew – Nia had Made the Kwellrahg, true, but she had Made it out of Rea’s flesh and bone, Rea’s terror and fury in defeat. It was possible that killing the Kwellrahg would hurt Nia in some way, though she couldn’t be certain. It was also possible that it would hurt Rea, or worse. Rea was weak and could not take much.

The military was hunting the monster right now under General Malone’s orders. She had to go to the desert; she had to stop them. But she felt helpless, too helpless to move. The day’s Magic had emptied her. She watched the stars and tended the fire until a faint light appeared on the horizon to the east and she ached with the desire for sleep. Uri Mon Lil was always very frightened when woken and she thought hazily that it must be awful not to know who or where one was. She left him with the book open before him and slept dreamlessly.

She woke when the sun was already high in the sky. Ka’s dragon was keeping the fire alive with his breath. She was terribly hungry but so worn out from the previous day’s Magic that it took her a long time to charm a single black trout to leap out into her hands.

After they had eaten, she brought Uri Mon Lil up to date. Panic was closing on her now. The Kwellrahg was bent on destroying her mother and so she had to protect her mother from it. But harming the thing could harm her mother. How could she fight a foe she couldn’t hurt?

“You say this is the Book of Barriers?” said Uri Mon Lil, flipping through the empty pages. “Pity there’s nothing in it. It feels as if it must have been powerful, once.”

“You can feel that?” asked Eliza, interested. “That’s more than I can. I spec you must be a prize strong wizard when you have your memory.”

“According to my book, I was,” agreed Uri Mon Lil. “But there’s no way of knowing how much of that was self-aggrandizement. I don’t know if I was the type of wizard to brag. I should hope not but there’s no way to be certain, is there?”

One of the ravens perched in the trees swooped low over Eliza’s head suddenly and landed next to her in the snow. She had almost forgotten about them. Uri Mon Lil paid no attention to it and continued chattering about what wizardry might do to one’s ego. Eliza looked at the bird and the bird looked back. There was something in those small black eyes that she recognized.

“There are rather a lot of those birds around here, aren’t there?” commented Uri Mon Lil, looking at the trees along the river, dark with ravens. He shuddered a little, for it was an unsettling sight.

Eliza reached for the bird, touched its feathers, its beak. For one giddy moment she felt herself within the bird, looking back at a puzzled, frightened girl. At the same moment, she and the bird spoke. In unison, they said, “The Sorma.” Then the bird took off and Eliza was returned to herself.

“That was odd,” said the wizard, frowning at her. But Eliza’s mind felt like a flower opening suddenly. A sense of what to do next began coming to her in fragments.

“Are you...all right?” asked Uri Mon Lil, looking carefully at Eliza and then anxiously consulting his book for anything on possession by ravens.

“We need a barrier spell,” said Eliza with sudden urgency. “And we can retrieve it from the memory of this book.”

“Oh good,” said the wizard brightly. “How will we do that?”

“With the same spell we used yesterday, aye,” said Eliza.

“Ah,” said the wizard. “And what spell would that be?”

“Dinnay worry,” said Eliza, taking the book from him impatiently. “We’re quite good at it together.”