Atlas Never Shrugged Page 5

out in time to keep her upright, and the ground chose that moment to give another heave, slamming into her knee. The fiery edge of the pain told her there’d be blood, and probably a hole in her stocking. She plowed into Pevan with a grunt. Say what you like about her choice of allegiance, you couldn’t fault the girl’s technique. Her feet barely shifted with the impact, her shin like an iron fence-bar against Dora’s shoulder.

  Still, the collision distracted her enough to buy Dora a moment. Head still reeling, she grabbed Pevan’s ankle and lifted as best she could. Dora’s elbow ground into the rough concrete, but Pevan staggered back a step. Dora curled up and tried to lever herself to her feet against the Gatemaker.

  The result was that she ended up with her face buried in Pevan’s blouse somewhere just above her waist while the girl stumbled again. Dora grunted, pushed away and got herself squarely upright.

  “What the hell do you think you’re playing at, Pevan?” It was no challenge at all to find the anger to put real heat into the words, but even shouting, Dora felt as if she spoke into a blanket, the noise from the waterfall smothering all other sound.

  Pevan heard, at least, and the question seemed to snap her out of her blood-lust. She steadied herself, her posture angular and stiff, and glanced over her shoulder. Behind her, Rel was still gliding casually around the forest of motion that was Keshnu’s wild assault. Pevan cleared her throat, not quite meeting Dora’s eyes. “You weren’t here to see, Dora. We came down here just after the quake started, and Keshnu was doing... something to the Abyss.”

  “I’ll bet he was.” Dora folded her arms, clenching her jaw to harden her face. This was more like it. She was back in control. “He was trying to stitch the Realm back together.”

  “Rel said-“

  “Rel be damned!” Dora slashed a hand through the air between them, then caught herself as Pevan flinched. Keep control. Anger was good, but too much would rule her, open her Sherim. No telling what that would do to the Abyss. “You took his judgement over mine. When has that ever been the right thing to do?”

  Pevan looked away, lips twitching, scowl sullen. Dora took the opportunity to look up at the Abyss. Or rather, at the wall of water filling it. She couldn’t see the strains pulling on the rock this close up, but she could feel them, slung like great ropes along and around the cracks.

  She pointed up into the darkness at the top of the cascade. “Look at it, Pevan. Look up there. If Keshnu were causing this, wouldn’t it have stopped by now?”

  The girl glanced after Dora’s finger, then back at the floor. She muttered something.

  Dora rolled her eyes. “If you’re going to doom the entire Realm, the least you could do is face up to it.”

  “I-“ For a moment, there was a spark of anger in Pevan’s eyes, a glimmer of light in her aura, but both faded as she dropped her head back down again. When she looked up, her eyes were watering. “What do we do?”

  Rel was showing no signs of wearying. How long had he been fighting? If Pevan had brought him here near the start of the quake, it must have been the better part of half an hour. The Clearseers' fighting style was efficient, and Rel was a consummate master of it. Keshnu would be tiring, too.

  Dora turned the full force of her glare on Pevan. “Can you get Rel away from Keshnu?”

  “I can.” The words came hard and flat, clipped short, from somewhere behind Dora’s back. She spun to find Taslin standing there, in plain trousers and a loose blouse instead of her normal elaborate style. The Gift-Giver was ready for combat, her eyes fixed on the fight. Her eyes didn’t even flicker to Dora as she asked, “Can you hold the Realm up, like you did before?”

  “I’ll try.” The strain on the Abyss seemed so much worse this time, the crack that much wider. With her Gift still dormant, Dora could barely even understand her memory of what she’d done.

  Again without so much as a glance, Taslin stabbed a finger at Pevan. “You. Dora will need support while her mind spreads out. Find some of my kin and bring them here. They should all be approaching the surface entrance to the caves by now.”

  Pevan opened her mouth, then closed it again. Dora shot her a glare and a nod, then grabbed her belly as it heaved; Pevan dropped out of sight through a Gateway. Somewhere up in the darkness, something cracked, loud enough to break through the endless din of the waterfall. A moment later, the floor bounced, but Dora managed to keep her balance without leaning on Taslin.

  The Gift-Giver said, “Be as quick as possible. I suggest you sit down before trying anything. Last time you almost fell.”

  Dora swallowed and managed to croak, “Good luck.” She lowered herself down to sit cross-legged. The concrete sent a low hum up through her spine, an oddly warm sensation. In the back of her mind, the Gift waited. Dora turned her thoughts toward it and felt it pick up the vibrations of the world.

  Taslin burst into motion, her human form blurring at the edges and leaving a trail of violet mist in her wake. Her movements became fluid, all semblance of a skeleton disappearing as she cast off First-Realm limitations and enveloped Rel and Keshnu. Whatever technique she thought she’d found for fighting a Clearseer, Dora could make no sense of it.

  She put the Gift-Giver out of her mind and grasped her Gift. Time was of the essence. Letting her eyes half-close and her vision blur, Dora slipped a crack between the halves of her Sherim. Her logic strained at the inside of her eyes for a moment, then split, the fuzzy image of the fight and the curtain of falling water coming apart. Light filled her, a mix of amber and a Second-Realm colour that brought with it the high shine of polished brass.

  There was no time to relish the power, nor the shivers of blissful tension fluttering up and down her arms and deep into her chest. Deep in her abdomen, a fire took root that threatened to force a shout of pure joy out of her. In the whirling chaos of her visual field, she saw the ghosts of the Second-Realm patterns that were ripping the world apart, great gruesome pulsating tubes that showed the unruly forces rippling through the rocks of the Abyss.

  She was as ready as she could make herself. With less effort than a single coherent thought, she moved her consciousness out into the middle of the Abyss. Stone vanished behind torrents of water in every direction – even bursting with Wild Power, Dora didn’t dare look straight down at the Realmlessness. Above, she could feel the cracks spreading through the ceiling along ancient fault-lines, burrowing up towards the sky. The sides of the chasm seemed miles apart, so far had they shifted.

  As slowly as she dared with the walls of the Abyss standing almost at right-angles to one another, Dora began to spread her Wild Power over the rock. It pooled on the surfaces like thick honey, seeping into cracks and crevices, spreading steadily out as she increased the flow. Gently, the shape of the rocks impressed itself on the contours of Dora’s mind. The rock absorbed the force with a low moan, deep below the threshold of bodily hearing.

  The not-yet-sound spread out along the length of the Abyss, radiating into the roots of the mountains to the southeast and spreading through the whole First Realm. Other things – trees, buildings, even people – took up the vibration in sympathy, bone-deep where the shaking of the Realm hid it. Dora did not relent. However much the additional strain told on mankind, it was nothing to what would happen if the Realm snapped.

  Dora spread herself yet further, opening her mind until she became nothing more than an aware conduit for Wild Power. The haze of intoxicated, feverish bliss washed away rational thought even as the slabs of Realmstuff she held began to lift back into place. Her grip spread downwards as well as along the Abyss walls, but she barely felt the sickly, slimy caress of the Realmlessness.

  On the ledge, tiny by comparison with the scale of the forces Dora managed, the cloud of violence and desperation where Taslin and Keshnu surrounded Rel thinned. Dora’s breath clouded the air in front of her, the golden haze of her power in it cancelling out Rel’s aura. He danced, slow and smooth, at the centre of a storm of purple and grey, his movements so precise, so careful, t
hat he almost seemed to be conducting the cloud rather than reacting to it.

  Taslin’s joining the fight didn’t seem to have slowed Rel at all. He was magnificent, invulnerable, everything his Gift and his devotion had always promised. Dora could remember when Federas had boasted Temmer and Dieni among its Gifted, and Rel outmatched them both just as much as he outmatched Taslin and Keshnu.

  The boy she had helped train, sheltered from the furore when he’d fled his mentor, worked and fought alongside for half a decade in the crucible that was the defence of Federas, had become the greatest Gifted Dora had ever seen. Hybrid logic and altered perception showed Dora Rel’s emotions, but she didn’t need to see them to understand the savage pride surging through him.

  He deserved it. All his anger, everything that kept him childish and petulant when off-duty, came back to that last undignified clash with Ciarive. The cantankerous old Clearseer wouldn’t believe his eyes if he saw what Rel was doing here. Rel might even have earned an apology, except for the fact that he was fighting on the wrong side.

  Keshnu was fading, the grey cloud of his being streaming away into rags. Where the tendrils touched the torrent of water still pounding down only inches from the ledge – Dora could do nothing about that – they were