I pushed down the latch as we rumbled along the drive. As the door swung open I leaned out, feet in the coach and body braced on the door. The coach came to a halt just out of sight around the last curve of the drive from the House.
I hopped out. The coachman touched the brim of his cap in salute. The eru leaped onto the roof of the coach in a tremor of unseen wings. I wrapped the shadows around me and ran alone up to the House.
45
Four Moons House resembled a princely palace, with a broad forecourt, a grand portico reached by a series of stepped terraces, and an imposing building anchored by round rooms at either end and wings stretching behind to enclose interior gardens. A curtain-like shimmer of heat pushed smoke skyward from the back of the building. With cracks and bangs, windows, walls, and furniture shattered, broke, fell as the flames ate forward through the structure like a fiery leviathan devouring its helpless prey.
A troop of soldiers stood on the portico facing toward the House, their rifles trained on the doors to prevent anyone inside from venturing out. Six young fire mages were ranged along the steps, each with a cold mage huddled in front being used as a catch-fire, although it seemed to my eye that they weren’t trying to raise fire as much as simply control the six magisters. Most likely there were other fire mages elsewhere around the estate. I had no idea how many had followed Drake and how many had been left behind with Camjiata’s army.
About thirty people, mostly women, knelt on the highest terrace. White-haired elders and slender youths were treated with equal disrespect. I recognized Serena among them, but I did not see Vai’s mother or sisters.
Drake stood like a hero on the topmost step. Wrapped as I was within the threads of the worlds, I could easily see the geometry of his fire magic, the way he cast threads of backlash into all thirty of these mages. He had not the cacica’s skilled and delicate touch. In her hands catch-fires were lit with a nimbus glow as the threads of their magic spun north to the far ice and through the spirit world and back again into the mortal world. These catch-fires blazed too brightly, flooded with more power than they could channel even though it was shared between them.
Only one mage still stood, braced upright by sheer force of will.
The well of Vai’s power shone as radiant a blue as the sacred wells of the Antilles. Given so much fuel to burn, Drake’s fire raged. He was pouring his fire into the palace and his backlash into the thirty cold mages. Even split among them it was obviously too much for them to handle, for many were too young or too ill or too elderly to sustain the heat. Vai was pulling streams of backlash out of them and into himself, to stop any one of them from flooding and thus dying.