The Unmaking (The Last Days of Tian Di, #2)(75)
~~~
“What’s happening to her?” Rom asked his mother, horrified. The sky was full of screaming ravens. Eliza knelt in the sand in a cloud of beating wings, her hands clenched around the head of the felled Kwellrahg, her eyes rolled back in her head. She was gasping for breath as if someone was strangling her, her body rigid and shaking. Choked words burst out of her intermittently. The wizard knelt by her, eyes closed, brow furrowed, while the Sorma looked on in awed silence.
“She is working Magic,” said Lai.
“Stop her,” said Rom. “It’s hurting her!”
The Sorma looked uncertain. Rom pushed past them to his daughter, tried to catch her by the shoulder and shake her free. A charge like electricity surrounded her and sent him stumbling back, rattled to his very bones. The ravens swarmed about him, shrieking angrily. He could not lay a hand on her.
“Eliza!” he shouted. “Come back to me!”
She was choking now, not breathing at all, her arms and hands twitching in tiny spasms, as if something unseen was squeezing out her last breath.
“Eliza!”
He felt a hand on his trouser leg and looked down. Rea had crawled after him from the tent and he hadn’t heard her. She looked up at him, hollow-eyed.
“Don’t distract her,” she said. “You can’t help.”
Rom stared at his wife and then back at his struggling daughter. Again, he thought, once again I am of no use at all to Eliza.
~~~
The snarl of darkness swallowed Eliza, pressing hard on her heart. Inside it, she could feel the deep Magic, too intricate, too complete for one such as her to unravel. Always, in the end, she came up against her own limits, and that was where she would remain now. In the place where she could do nothing because she was not strong enough. The thing carried her beyond space, to a place that was not a place but rather collapse. I’m going to leave you by the river, little girl. What river? A thick darkness that will carry you between the paws of the Guardian and then no more, no more, no more. She is almost relieved. Look at that unhappy man in the desert, he is worried about his daughter. He doesn’t understand how vast it is, what a brief sliver of life we have in any case. Her tooth snags what feels like a loose thread, she takes it between her teeth and pulls. I won’t go to the river. You were not Made perfect. She is only a Sorceress after all, strong though she may be. I can unravel you. The thing twists about her neck like a noose and hangs her from the top of the universe but she doesn’t need to breathe anymore. She only needs to pull the thing between her teeth until the noose loosens, comes at her like a snake. They fall into the wizard’s Magic and he holds them fast as they struggle there. She pulls the name, she pulls it and pulls it, beyond endurance, this is all there is. And, at last, a slackening, a kind of surrender. The Kwellrahg gives it up with a groan or a sigh. The young Sorceress lies flat on the sand, hands still gripping it, and the ravens cover her like a blanket. No, she cannot sleep, not yet. She hears her own voice again, good, she knows the words, she knows them, they are part of the fabric of everything. She takes the name and gives him another. Then he belongs to her.
~~~
“Silver is the best conduit,” said Lai. In a basket they had tens of silver needles threaded with silver fine as hair. The ends of these threads were wound through rough gemstones.
“What will the stones do?” asked Eliza.
“They are not all stones,” said Lai. She picked up a rough shard of something black. “This is petrified wood, for calming fear. Here, amethyst and jade for quieting and soothing. Lapis for cooling and drawing out heat. For quieting temper, coral. Serpentine is for healing. We are ready.”
All night the Sorma toiled on the thing Eliza and Uri Mon Lil had named the Urkleis. At times he began to struggle or groan but Eliza stopped him with a sharp command and he obeyed her. With the silver needles and silver thread, the Sorma bound his torn flesh and broken bones. Each needle in the end found its way to his centre and was driven into the black rock Nia had made, the life-giving core of the Urkleis. The healers burned herbs and sang as they worked. The Urkleis became more and more docile, until at last as dawn broke he moved not at all. As the positive and soothing elements the Sorma introduced flowed through the beast, the flesh and bone began to fall away from the centre. Soon his body was a burning heap. Eliza reached into the fire and took out the hard rock, the thing Nia had made and that she had renamed. She removed the silver needles and put it in her pocket.
“Bury the body with the gems, somewhere safe,” said Eliza to her grandmother.
“It shall be done,” said Lai, and the Sorma said “Arash.”
Chapter
19
Tariro greeted the human visitors graciously and granted them permission to visit her mines. She had never seen humans before and she was interested but not much impressed. The man was unpleasant to look at, ill-shaped, with lines on his face and tufts of grey in his hair. She assumed this was the result of his age; she had heard that advancing years ravaged human bodies and minds in terrible ways, making them weak and confused and prone to illness until they died and decayed. She did not like the boy, either. He pushed his hair out of his eyes and looked wary, without showing any of the amazement that was written so clearly on the faces of the other two humans. There was something not quite right about him, though she could not put her finger on it. The man and the girl, to her satisfaction, stared in awe at the giant carved pillars soaring skyward to a vaulting roof, at herself seated on an ornate throne at the top of a flight of marble steps, gleaming with jewels, her fine dress spread out around her, the cliff plunging behind her. But though she found herself disliking the old man and the boy, it was the girl she watched anxiously as the little group made their way down the mountainside. If human age was a horrifying sight to the ageless faeries, human youth was tantalizing. This girl was in the full bloom of it, fresh-faced and glossy-haired, glowing with that strange combination of fragility and passion that marked all mortals. There were many songs and stories about Faeries who fell in love with young mortals and, although the lesson was always that these unions ended badly, their attraction remained undeniable. There was something so moving in their inevitable deaths, and they seemed so very much of the earth, so real. She saw Jalo’s pleasure in this young girl, the tenderness of his gaze on her when she curtseyed awkwardly to Tariro. They were to leave tomorrow – good. She could not allow her promising younger son to fall in love with a human girl.