Dragon Fly Page 6

Wilder fought back, but though her flight wavered, her wings skipping a beat, she held firm. Below, Rel had crawled over to Atla and started to pull him towards the cave-mouth. Outside, Realmspace boiled with far too many feral, predatory Wildren, and Pevan had a second to pray that whatever was keeping them out held.

  Chag cut past her, and she felt the pressure in her mind lift a bit as he brought his own will to bear on the Wilder. In his wake, the air twisted with potentially deadly vortices of abused Second-Realm logic. He started to shout something, but cut off as new chains lashed out from the coil still hanging on the wall.

  He twisted in flight and dropped into a sharp dive. A scream escaped Pevan as one of the chains almost tore his left wings off, and then she was charging down after him. She let her grip on the Wilder go and howled at it in desperate anger. The cave picked up the sound, echoing it back from every direction, the emotion piling in with it.

  Chag's form blurred, and by the time he hit the ground, flat on his back, he was human again. Re-echoing anger burned the fear out of Pevan, left her barely enough awareness to note the little man's eyes opening, alert and only momentarily stunned before she levelled out to scream again at the Wilder. It had curled in on itself before the rebounding torrent of Pevan's rage, huddling in an oddly floral shape on the wall.

  This time, her shout ripped through whatever kept the white cave word-safe, a punch composed of pure, black air that trailed rings of shockwave and drew a fresh moan from the cave walls. It faded as it struck the Wilder, but the creature still convulsed under the impact. Pevan gritted teeth a dragonfly didn't really have and accelerated.

  "Rust it!" Chag's shout rippled through the air behind her, but she caught his meaning. The Wilder hung on the wall as if it had been there a long time. She could feel its weakness, could forget that it was a weakness she'd inflicted. Concentrating so hard that she stopped breathing, she pushed her thoughts forward ahead of her, pushed the steel chain forward in time until its age matched how frail it had become.

  The Wilder fought back, and for a moment its image of youth - a fragment of a glimpse of the Gallery of Neonates, a rolling ocean of newborn joy and colour - stopped her mind, sapped at her determination to fight. She lashed out again with a snarl, and the dull, even grey of the metal grew pocked with brown marks.

  A flicker of motion gave her just enough warning to veer past the Wilder's next attack, only the slippery, frantic instability of the dragonfly's flight saving her from the burst of turbulence the Wilder sent at her. At the very limit of her wings' strength, every ridge in them burning like a salted wound, she brought herself around to face the Wilder again and renewed the pressure.

  Chag's mind joined hers in the attack, the sudden intimacy of his presence like an arm around her, bearing her up, carrying her forward. She seized his strength - there was less of it than she'd expected - and where her eyes ran across the Wilder, its pockmarks spread like plague sores. It gave a final, incoherent burst of Second-Realm communication that charred gouges into the roof above it and crumbled to dust.

  It took Pevan four attempts and another near miss with the cave's back wall to get her flight back to a hover. By the time she had, the three men were on their feet, all three hesitating half-way up the cave toward the mouth. The Realmspace there was distorted as if seen through a badly-ground lens, and the blur of colours beyond boded ill for an escape attempt.

  "Rel, status?" Pevan kept her voice as neutral as she could, her face pointed away from her brother, but already the cave was settling back down in the wake of the fight, and her words made no impression.

  She turned to look at him as he let out a long, grim sigh. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse and quiet. "Gonna need a good night's sleep soon. We're going back to the First Realm?"

  "If we get out of here." It was no surprise that Rel recognised her despite the dragonfly form. When he didn't jump to stupid conclusions, he could usually be relied on to think faster and more astutely even than was normal for a Clearseer. And he knew her very well. She went on, "Enough logic left for some Clearseeing?"

  He nodded, blinking. His eyes went wide as he embraced his Gift, and then he turned to study the cave-mouth. Beside him, Atla frowned up at her. "Pevan?" He, too, was hoarse, but he managed to imbue her name with a tide of confusion that actually did shake a final ripple from the rocks around them.

  "Yup. Find us a route out of here, kiddo."

  "Where... uh, where to? Gorhilt?" He swallowed and hugged himself. Inwardly, Pevan cursed. She couldn't blame the boy for being shaken, but the rest of the Separatists had to be somewhere, and it was only a matter of time before the ferals outside got in.

  "Ilbertin." Rel ground the word out like his teeth were millstones. "If they can't have me, they want Soan, the Clearseer there."

  "Ilbertin." Pevan wished she could close her eyes to picture a map, but the memory just about answered. "That's the Af Sherim, right?"

  Atla straightened, still pale. "I think I can find that."

  "Pevan..." For a moment, she took Chag's uneasy tone for a worry about returning to the scene of his most infamous crime, but then she followed his pointing finger toward the back of the cave.

  Fine rods of metal, silver, copper and brass, were spooling out from the back wall, writhing in the air like unearthed worms as the Wildren they constituted rearranged themselves. The motions seemed sluggish, as if something in the rock was holding them back, or the tension in the Realmspace obstructing them.

  "Get us a way out." Pevan put on her best Dora voice, every syllable laid like a brick in the sentence. She turned away from the men and dug deep into the well of the dragonfly's power. Heat filled her, and within, she found her anger again. There would be a reckoning for what the Separatists had done to her life. Behind her, Chag plaintively asked what he should be doing, and Rel snapped a curt response.

  The Realmspace of the cave dragged at the approaching Wildren, too close to its capacity to hold traces of emotion. If that capacity overflowed, the resulting storm of Second-Realm logic would be deadly to humans and Wildren alike, but the Separatists would do - had to do - everything in their power to prevent that happening. She could slow them down by making it harder for them.

  Blazing with Wild Power, her wings trailing flickers of jade-green flame, she charged, screaming. The stones of the cave howled, a sound that might have been the primeval ancestor of fingernails on a slate. Pevan envisioned a bubble of her awareness, her hatred, spreading out around the dragonfly, pressing up against the walls, filling the whole space with rage.

  On the back wall, the copper and silver were pressed back against the rock. The brass straightened out, though, its squirming reduced to a faint tremor. Where it stuck into the surface of her bubble, she felt a sharp pain at the front of her mind. She met it with anger, thinking of her charge as a hammer-blow, the Wilder a nail half-driven and in need of finishing off.

  Forcing herself not to cringe, she aimed her flight directly at the flat end of the Wilder's narrow body, flung her image ahead of her. The Wilder gave ground, slipping back inch after inch into the white stone. Ripples, sketched in rough greys, spread out across the wall, then vanished in confusion as they met others spreading out from the two pinned Wildren.

  The bubble burst. Pevan felt it like a stab in the eye, a flash of lightning drilling all the way through to the centre of her brain. She screamed and spun in flight, the aches of stressed wings all but imperceptible as her mind burned. Her lingering, attenuated sense of up and down vanished, and the shining, spiralling Wildren flashed across her field of vision as she tumbled.

  As conscious understanding gave way, allowed Second Realm logic its head for a moment, she found a fraction of a second for clear thought and flicked her wings. It was enough, just about, to assert the dragonfly form again and send herself zipping back up the cave, the pain of her broken anger beginning to fade back towards throbbing fatigue.

  Ahead, Chag turned to face her, clearly thinking to cover her someho
w. Out of the dragonfly form, though, he couldn't possibly manage enough power to make a difference. Could he? Atla crouched on the floor just behind him, and as she watched Rel leaned down to say something to the boy. The cave-mouth had darkened, and somehow that made it seem further off.

  A low rumble and a shake running through the ground announced the Wildren behind her getting free. Chag's knees buckled with the quake and he staggered backwards into Atla. The two of them went sprawling, Chag's flailing hand snagging Rel's sleeve and almost pulling him off his feet too.

  Pevan found she could feel the Wildren attack coming, overcharged Realmspace thrumming as silver spears flashed outwards towards them. The density of the air dragged the moment out. Desperately, she threw herself forwards, down towards her stumbling comrades. Instinct drove her to a futile attempt at Warding, the image of the Gift swelling outward and stalling the Wildren in their pursuit. Somehow, something did spread out of her, and she cringed, expecting any moment the agony of contact.

  Up at the cave-mouth, the feral predators finally breached the Separatists' defences.

  They poured in in a torrent, packed too tightly together probably even to tell themselves apart. Atla's scream vanished beneath the rising groan of the Realmspace. Pevan's ears