Chapter 35
Kitai's head whipped around as the alarm bells in the Grey Tower began to ring. She paced over to the edge of the rooftop, peered at the tower, and snorted. "I told him so. You were there."
Isana hurried to Kitai's side. The younger woman stared intently at the Grey Tower and shook her head. "We must hurry."
"What's happening?" Isana asked.
Kitai seized her pack, shrugged into it, and jogged toward the other side of the building. "Someone is ringing bells."
Isana bit down on a sharp retort and instead hurried after Kitai. "More specific, please."
"They went inside only moments ago, and the alarm has been raised. The Tower's defenses and guards have been alerted. They can only get out from the roof, and they must escape quickly if they are to escape at all-which means we must hurry." She lifted a hand and pressed it gently against Isana's chest. "Wait here," the Marat woman said. Then she took a pair of steps, her legs blurring with sudden haste, and flung herself off the top of the building. She bounded gracefully through the air, a full twenty feet or more, and landed on the top of the aqueduct that coursed through this part of the city and passed near the Grey Tower.
Kitai turned as if she did such things every day and promptly produced one of the coiled ropes from the case at her belt. She flung one end, lariat style, across the gap between the rooftop and the aqueduct, and Isana caught it. She blinked up at Kitai. "What do I do with it?"
"Slip one foot through the loop, like a horse's stirrup," Kitai said. "Hold tight with both hands. Then step off the building."
Isana blinked. She glanced over the rooftop's edge. It was a seven-story building, and the fall to the street below would be quite sufficient to crush the life from a woman of far more youth and agility than she. "Um," she said. "And then what?"
Kitai put an impatient hand on her hip. "And then I pull you up and we go help my chala."
Isana felt her mouth open. Kitai was not a large person. Certainly, she looked athletic and strong, but it was a slender strength one expected in a dancer or runner. The Marat were a physically formidable people, she knew, but all the same Isana was several inches taller than Kitai and outweighed her. Could the girl support such a weight?
The alarm bells continued to ring.
"Isana," Kitai hissed.
"All right," Isana said, flustered. Then she stepped up to the edge of the roof and slipped her foot through the loop. She pulled the rope tight against her foot, clutching hard with both hands at the level of her stomach.
It was a very, very long way to the ground.
She closed her eyes and stepped off the roof.
She felt Kitai pulling the rope tight even as Isana stepped into empty air, so that she did not fall, so much as swing down in a great, broad arch. The speed of it was dizzying, and she felt a small scream pulled from her lungs in pure reaction. She reached the top of the forward arch and fell backward, clinging desperately to the rope, then forward again. She spun wildly a few times, and then Isana realized that the rope was moving upward in short, solid jerks.
She opened her eyes and looked up to see Kitai, a dark shape against the pale stone of the aqueduct, hauling Isana upward, hand over hand, her feet planted firmly on the stone of the aqueduct. She pulled Isana up over the lip of the stone structure, and Isana managed to sprawl onto it, trembling, her foot tightly pinched by the lariat.
"Come," Kitai said quietly. "Hurry."
Isana freed her foot while Kitai recoiled her rope, then set off at a lope down the length of the aqueduct, which proved to be nothing more than an elevated stone trough carrying a steady volume of water as great as the mill stream back on her steadholt. There was a stone lip a foot wide on either side of the trough in the center, and Isana stepped up onto it and followed Kitai as quickly as she could manage. She kept her eyes focused ahead, on the Marat woman's back. If she looked over the edge of the aqueduct and saw how easy it would be to plunge to her death, she might not be able to make her feet keep moving.
Great furies grant that the wind didn't come up.
Or that her feet didn't strike a patch of slippery moss.
Or that her hammering heart didn't make her head go light for a moment, her balance wavery.
Or-
Isana ground her teeth and focused on Kitai's back and on keeping her own feet in motion.
Kitai came to a halt several dozen steps later, spreading her hands as a warning to Isana. Isana stopped as well, and Kitai said, "It's ahead of us."
"Very well," Isana said. She slipped off her shoes, closed her eyes in brief concentration, and reached out for her connection to Rill. Then she rucked up the skirts of her dress to her knees and stepped down into the stream of water in the aqueduct's trough.
The current was a strong, steady pressure along her calves, though not nearly enough to take Isana from her feet, provided she kept them braced strongly. The water had flowed down to the capital from the mountains many miles to the north, and it was bitingly cold. As Rill manifested around her, Isana gained the insight of her fury's senses, and she was surprised at how clean and fresh the water remained, despite its long trip through the aqueduct's channel.
The guardian fury in the water ahead appeared to her as a sudden, ugly sensation of pressure. An invisible presence in the water, she could sense its malice and its desire to do violence to any intruders. The water ahead suddenly thrashed, then a bow spray of freezing droplets rushed toward her in a line, as if she was being rushed by an unseen shark.
"You'd best get behind me just to be safe," Isana murmured, and Kitai hurried to comply.
Isana had no idea where the designers of the Tower's defenses had found such a vicious fury-or worse, what kind of mind it would take to reshape a natural fury into a dangerous beast-but she had dealt with stronger furies in the wilds of the Calderon Valley. She stood calmly before the oncoming monster, and waited until the last possible moment to flick her wrist and send Rill against it.
Isana felt her senses join with her fury's, as Rill, her presence somehow warmer and denser than the cold animosity of the guardian, slammed against her foe. The water five feet in front of Isana erupted in a cascade of spray as the two furies wound around and through one another, currents of living water twining and intertwining like two impossibly elastic serpents.
Behind Isana, Kitai took in a sharp breath, but Isana was too involved in her connection to Rill to look back at the younger woman. Instead, she focused her senses and her will upon Rill, lending her own determination and confidence to the fury, fusing her thoughts and will with Rill's ever-mutable essence. One did not overcome a water fury by simple force of will, the way other furies might be mastered. Water furies could not be beaten down-only changed, redirected, absorbed. Together, Isana and Rill entangled the guardian fury, blended with it, and separated its cohesive essence, bleeding it away into the steady stream of the aqueduct, diluting it, while Rill's presence remained anchored to Isana's mind and will, holding its shape.
The waters thrashed for several seconds more, then they slowly began to subside as the guardian fury was dispersed into the current. Depending on how strong the guardian fury was, it could take anywhere from days to weeks for it to draw itself back into a cohesive being again-if it did so at all-but Isana felt no compunction about disabling such a dangerous being.
For goodness' sake, what if some foolish youths had gone running along the aqueduct purely out of the exuberance of their years, and not for any sinister purpose focused upon the Grey Tower? A fury like that could drown someone without enough power to fight it off, or strike out at an unsuspecting victim and send him tumbling from the aqueduct to the ground far below.
Isana sent Rill out ahead of them, questing around for any other hostile presence, but found nothing more than the faint traces that remained of the guardian. Then she turned to Kitai and nodded. "It's done."
Kitai nodded, her eyes aglow with interest-even, Isana realized as the young woman passed her, with admiration-and took the pack from her back, stepping to the other side of the aqueduct to stare intently down at the Grey Tower, whose roof was very nearly of an even height with the aqueduct, which passed within thirty feet or so. The roof of the Tower resembled a fortified parapet, complete with crenellations, and statues, ugly, lumpy creatures whose features were largely hidden in shadow, faced outward at the midway point along each edge of the roof.
"There," Kitai said. "Can you see the doors?"
Isana stepped up beside her and could indeed see the doors from the inner stairway to the roof, twin, flat affairs that lay flush against the stone, like the doors to the root cellar at the steadholt. "I see them."
"They must pass from those doors to the edge of the roof without touching the stone," Kitai said. "Any touch upon the stone of the building will rouse the gargoyles."
Isana nodded and bit her lip, judging the distance. "It's farther away than I thought it would be," she said.
Kitai nodded once and flicked open the other case on her belt. She withdrew a small, heavy-looking cloth sack from it, and a small steel hammer. "Can you do it?"
"Let's find out," Isana murmured. Again, she gathered up her skirts and stepped into the water, reaching out for Rill. "Be sure you stay upstream of me until it's time," she cautioned, and then she focused her attention on the water.
Thirty feet was a long way to throw something as heavy as water, and she had to do it in a constant stream if they were to accomplish their goal. The current in the aqueduct could not sustain such an effort if simply redirected. She would need more pressure to move the water that far, and so the first thing she did was throw out her left hand behind her, palm upraised, and willed Rill to block the stream.
The water instantly stopped flowing past her, and instead began to build up in the trough and then started to overflow it, rising up to the level of the stone lip of the aqueduct. Some of the water spilled over the sides to fall to the ground below, but she caught most of it, allowing the water to rise to fill the aqueduct to the brim for twenty, then thirty, then sixty yards behind her. The weight of all that water was immense, and Isana could feel Rill begin to strain. She waited until the pressure of the dammed stream rose to Rill's breaking point, and then she lifted her right arm, palm up, and opened a way for the water to escape- not forward and down the stream, as before, but arching up to one side, toward the roof of the Grey Tower.
The water shot forth in a geyser, rising in a beautiful arch that reflected starlight and the gleam of the many-colored furylamps of Alera Imperia. For a second, a ghost of a breeze pressed against the stream, and it fell short of the roof-but the breeze died again, and a steady spray of cold water splattered down onto the stone roof of the Grey Tower.
Isana felt a fierce smile stretch her lips, and she remained locked in that position, joined with Rill, sending the waters of the aqueduct rushing over the stone of the Tower, rapidly spreading and filling the parapet with a shallow layer of water.
"There!" Isana gasped. "Kitai, do it now!"
Kitai stepped forward, crouching down at Isana's feet, and with one gloved hand she drew from the heavy little sack one of the coldstones they had stolen the night before. She placed it on the floor of the aqueduct, just upstream of the point where the waters arched up to leap to the roof of the Tower, held it there with her gloved hand, and with the other swung the steel hammer sharply down.
There was a deafening crack and a flash of cold blue light, as the fire fury bound within the coldstone greedily sucked the warmth from the world around it.
Coldstones were expensive works of crafting, containing fire furies far more powerful than those found in furylamps or those used to manage the heat of a kitchen's stove and oven. They were specially bound, and though created to draw in all the heat they possibly could, the bindings placed upon them prevented them from pulling more than a tiny trickle into themselves at any one time. The result was a stone that leeched the heat from everything around it over the course of three or four months-the limit of the stone's construction. Placed in an insulated storage box, a coldstone could keep food placed inside it well chilled, even preserve ice over the course of a hot summer.
But in shattering the stone to which the fire fury was bound, Kitai had loosed it to sate its hunger for warmth in a single, unbelievably frigid instant.
The blue fire of the loosed fury's hunger lashed out through the water in a wave of chilly light. Rill and Isana prevented the cold from rushing back up the stream, and instead it followed the course of least resistance, leaping through the arch of water, freezing it to solid in an instant. The wave of frozen blue fire crashed down onto the surface of the Tower and spread out through it in a glittering haze, freezing the water there into a rough-surfaced sheet of ice.
Kitai let out a whoop of excitement and raised a triumphant fist. Isana, shaking with weariness, released the aqueduct's current, which immediately resumed its course in a surge that gradually began to sink back to its original levels. Her foot slipped, and she almost fell, but Rill swirled around her before she could, supporting Isana and helping her regain her balance. For a moment, the fury appeared in the only physical form Isana had seen it take, the shape of a face-a mirror of Isana's own features, when she'd first bonded with Rill as a gawky, thirteen-year-old girl-that appeared on the surface of the stream, smiled, then vanished once more.
Isana stepped wearily out of the water, her skirts soaked from her near fall, and stood beside Kitai. "Now what?" she asked. Her voice sounded rough, even to her own ears.
Kitai gave her a pensive glance, returned her attention to the building, then down to the grounds below, her gaze roaming warily. She reached into her case of coiled lines again and began taking them out. "We wait here. Once they come out on the roof, I'll throw them the lines, and they'll swing over, just as I did with you. Then we meet Ehren."
"What if..." Isana shook her head. "What if they're caught?"
Kitai frowned, her hands moving swiftly and steadily, preparing the lines, her eyes everywhere. "They are not caught yet."
"How can you know that?"
She touched one hand briefly to her chest. "I feel him. Excitement. Fear. Determination. Had he been captured, he would immediately begin blaming himself for failure."
Isana blinked at Kitai. "You know him well, don't you?" she murmured. Then Isana gave the younger woman a thoughtful and rather whimsical smile. "This must be what it feels like when I tell others without watercraft what it is like to sense other people's emotions."
"It doesn't feel the same at all," Kitai said absently. "With him, it is more nebulous, but... deeper, somehow. The emotions of others are flat, like a painting, perhaps. His are more rounded, like a sculpture."
Isana frowned over her words for a moment, then caught a sudden flash of emotion from Kitai-realization and chagrin. She turned to stare at the Marat woman. "Kitai," she said. "How could you possibly know that?"
Kitai stared at her, frozen for a heartbeat, her green eyes wide. Then she turned back to her tasks, biting her lower lip.
Isana stared at her in dawning comprehension. "How could you know the difference unless you'd felt it yourself," she murmured. "Watercraft. Kitai..."
"Quiet," Kitai said, her voice flat with worry, and nodded to the arched column of ice stretching to the Tower. "Someone will see that soon. Don't make it easy for them to find us and shoot us."
Isana would have been choked silent by the implications in any case. No Marat had ever used furycraft. No Marat could. And yet if Kitai truly had knowledge of watercrafting, it meant that she, alone of her people, could wield power through Aleran furies.
Kitai was the only Marat ever to form a bond with an Aleran, and that bonding, Isana knew, somehow shared portions of each being in it with the other. Walker, the gargant bonded to Doroga, Kitai's father, was uncommonly intelligent for a simple beast, and seemed to understand Doroga implicitly. Doroga himself was taller and more heavily laden with muscle than the Marat from the other clans, and Isana knew him to be almost unbelievably strong.
If his daughter had bonded with Tavi in a similar way, then her furycraft could only be the result of that bond.
Had Tavi found the strength inherent in his father's blood at last?
Isana's heart leapt, at once terrified and exultant. In her fear, she had attempted to hide his identity, and in so doing she had stunted the development of his furycraft. She had believed the damage permanent.
Had it been healed? Had her son been given a second chance, despite her errors? Might he have gained the strength that could protect him from the forces that would almost certainly attempt to destroy him once his identity was known?
For years she had despaired of Tavi's fate should his identity ever be learned, and her helplessness to protect him in the face of the vast powers of those such as Lady Aquitaine had been a constant, bitter taste in her mouth.
Now something strange and almost forgotten blossomed to life in her heart, flickering and small but bright against the darkness of her fear.
Hope.
"Kitai," Isana hissed. "Has my son come into his furies?"
Kitai turned to stare hard at Isana.
Before she could say anything, ice snapped and cracked with a sharp detonation, and the doors on the roof of the tower slammed open.
Araris came through them first, looking sharply around him, and even in the dimness, Isana could see the sudden gleam of his teeth as he smiled at the ice coating the roof. His gaze tracked the graceful arch of the column of ice back to the aqueduct, and he flashed his hand in a quick wave at them before turning back to the stairs behind him, beckoning.
Tavi emerged from the Tower, and hard on his heels was a monstrous figure straight out of a nightmare. The Cane, Ambassador Varg, she assumed, towered over even Tavi by at least a full yard, and its black-furred form was both lean and powerful-looking. The Cane emerged into the open air and paused for a moment, then threw his head back, lifted his muzzle to the sky, and spread wide his clawed arms. Then he shook himself, looking for all the world like a dog throwing water from his coat, and dropped into a relaxed crouch, following Tavi as the young man moved with wobbling haste over the ice to the edge of the roof.
Without a word, Kitai whirled the first of her lines and sent it zipping across the empty air to Araris. He caught the rope, and as Kitai played out slack, he sheathed his sword and set his foot in the loop of rope, just as Isana had done. Then he swung out into the open air, swung back and forth once, and began to spin gently as Kitai hauled him upward.
Isana glanced sharply at the young woman. Kitai had no more difficulty hauling up Araris, complete with his armor and weapon, than she had with Isana, and a second later, Isana recognized the slightly absent focus of Kitai's gaze. She had seen her brother's face holding the same expression, often enough, when he labored on the steadholt.
Kitai was using earthcraft to strengthen her.
Once Araris was up, Kitai flung the next line to Tavi. He, too, secured himself and swung out from the roof of the Tower. Araris, Isana noted, anchored the line behind Kitai, his intent face tracking the young mans progress while the anxiety and frustration he felt over being unable to get his charge to safety any faster pressed against Isana like a sheet of scratchy, sweat-soured burlap.
Then Tavi was clambering up onto the aqueduct, his face flushed with excitement. He gained his feet, glanced at Kitai, and said, "I don't want to hear it."
Kitai smirked but said nothing.
Isana turned to stare at Varg, who crouched at the edge of the room, red eyes gleaming in the dim light. "My word," she whispered. "It's... rather large."
"He is," Tavi agreed, putting a gentle emphasis on the first word. He glanced at Kitai, who was readying the last line, one braided out of several of her more slender ropes. "Even if we belay it, are you sure it will hold him?"
She paused to give him a brief and very direct look.
Tavi scowled but raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.
Kitai flung one end of the rope, which had been weighted with a heavy knot, out toward the far side of the aqueduct. The rope whiplashed down and around, completing a circuit of the aqueduct, and Tavi reached down to catch its weighted end as it came around, completing the circle. He passed it to Kitai, who knotted it off against the rest of its length, then flung the other end to Varg.
The Cane caught the rope, glanced at it briefly, and stepped forward to put one paw-foot into the loop on its end.
Then he whipped his head around toward the stairs.
Isana saw a half-dressed man rush up the stairway to the roof, bearing a spear in his hand. He looked around wildly for a moment, shocked at what he saw on the roof, but his eyes locked on to Varg, and he lifted the spear and cast it in one smooth, viciously powerful motion.
Varg twisted as though to leap aside, but his paw-feet slipped on the ice, tangled in the rope, and brought him down. Isana heard an ugly sound of impact, and a furious, inhuman snarl ripped through the night air.
"Varg!" Tavi cried.
The Cane regained his balance in an instant, and Isana could hear the claws of one paw-hand bite into the ice as he reached up and jerked the spear from his leg. It looked like a child's toy in the Cane's hands. Varg raised the spear to throw, but then seemed to hesitate for a second, and instead of casting it point first, he flung it in a sidearm throw, its heavy wooden shaft whirling.
The Guardsman tried to dodge, but it was the Aleran's turn to realize that the ice-glazed roof was treacherous. The man wobbled rather than springing aside, and the wooden haft of the spear hit him with enough force to physically throw him back down the stairway.
Varg spun and lurched toward the edge of the parapet, but as he tried to climb it and swing away, his wounded leg seemed to buckle beneath him. He flailed with one arm, trying to recover his balance...
... and grasped the naked stone of a merlon.
There was thundering detonation, like a miniature thunderclap, and the gargoyles on the roof leapt into instant, eerily graceful life.
The nearest wasn't five feet from Varg, and it leapt at the Cane. Varg fell back beneath it as it pounced, caught the vast weight of the gargoyle on his arms and his good leg, and flexed, still rolling. Such was the power in the Cane's enormous frame that the gargoyle was flung clear of the parapet and went sailing over the edge, thrashing wildly-until one of its misshapen limbs caught on the braided line that still dangled between Varg's foot and the stone of the aqueduct.
The weight of the gargoyle came down on the line, snapping it taut.
Varg snarled, scrambling desperately, but the ice shrieked as his claws were dragged through it, toward the edge.
The other three gargoyles flung themselves at the Cane.
Varg saw them coming and released his grip on the ice.