Caught in Crystal: A Lyra Novel (40 page)

The blow knocked the Magicseeker’s feet from under him, and he went down. Kayl leaped over him toward Glyndon and Utrilo. At the same moment Utrilo snarled and twisted, wrenching his arm from Glyndon’s grasp at last. Still snarling, Utrilo brought his sword around in a vicious cut that caught Glyndon’s left arm just below the shoulder and knocked him backward.

Glyndon fell heavily, blood pouring from the deep wound. Kayl ran to him, knowing that the blood loss had to be stopped until a healer could see to him. Her hands went automatically to her waist, seeking something to tie around his arm, but she had removed her sword-belt earlier at Utrilo’s command.

“No!” Glyndon gasped as she reached him. “The Crystal!”

Simultaneously, a pure, ringing sound echoed through the Tower room. Utrilo had struck the crystal, but it had not broken. Kayl thought she saw the blackness flinch away from the sound, but she had no time to consider what that might mean. She forced herself to turn away from Glyndon, and saw that Utrilo had raised his sword for a second blow. She threw herself forward, knowing as she did that she could not reach him in time.

Suddenly Utrilo cried out and staggered. His sword came down in a crooked, glancing blow that sent another chime ringing through the room but did no harm to the crystal cube. Utrilo clutched at his thigh and glared at a small, blond figure that had darted at him from around the pedestal on which the Crystal rested.

“Little demon-spawn!” Utrilo spat. “I’ll kill you for that.”

Mark said nothing. He stood in a fighter’s crouch, watching Utrilo warily. His face was pale and there was blood on the small bronze-bladed dagger he held. He backed toward the doorway. Utrilo lunged forward, evading Kayl almost by accident. Kayl scrambled to change direction, hoping she could reach Utrilo before he reached Mark or Mark backed into the black thing that covered the wall. She heard Javieri scream from behind her, and the hoarse cries of the Magicseekers, but she did not turn to look. Then she saw a lump the size of a baby’s head bulge out of the darkness behind Mark, and she cried a warning.

Mark danced aside as a thick, black tentacle lashed out from the bulge, narrowly missing him. Utrilo started to move to his left to cut off the boy’s retreat. Kayl lowered her shoulder, took three fast steps forward, and hit Utrilo Levoil in the small of his back, throwing him toward the groping tentacle.

As Utrilo stumbled forward, trying desperately to regain his balance, the black tentacle whipped sideways. Utrilo gave a scream of terror as it wrapped itself around his legs; Kayl could see his armor smoking where the black thing touched it. The tentacle began to retract, pulling Utrilo off his feet and toward the wall of blackness. He slashed uselessly at the tentacle, then dropped his sword and clawed at the floor, trying to halt his slow progress toward the wall.

Kayl grabbed Mark’s arm and pulled him back toward the center of the room and relative safety. Utrilo screamed again, this time in agony; the black thing had eaten through his armor. Kayl plucked Mark’s knife out of his hand, hefted it briefly to test the balance, then threw it at Utrilo’s agonized face.

The knife struck cleanly through Utrilo’s right eye into the brain. Utrilo’s body convulsed once, then went limp. An instant later the black thing surged forward over the remains of the Magicseeker leader.

Mark shuddered and hid his face in Kayl’s side. Kayl drew him farther back from the advancing creature and glanced quickly around to see how her companions were faring. Dara was kneeling beside Glyndon, doing her best to stop the bleeding from his wounded shoulder. Corrana was staring, white-faced, at an area of the black creature near the doorway. One of the Magicseekers had a one-handed grip on her arm. His other hand held his sword ready, but the weapon faced the black thing, not Corrana. The Magicseeker’s sword blade was dark and pitted; he had obviously tried attacking the blackness with it at least once. Kayl saw no sign of Javieri or the other Magicseeker.

“Get back!” Kayl called sharply to all of them. “Back beside the cube. It’ll be safe there for a little while yet.”

She pulled Mark with her as she followed her own advice. “Stay there,” she said firmly, positioning him beside the Crystal. Then she turned to Corrana and the Magicseeker. “Help me move Glyndon.”

“What is that thing?” the Magicseeker demanded. He let go of Corrana’s arm, but his eyes remained fixed on the slowly spreading darkness.

“If we knew, maybe we could stop it,” Kayl said. “Come on.” She knelt by Glyndon, who was groggy but not yet quite unconscious, and gently slid her arms beneath his head and his good shoulder.

The Magicseeker did not move. “Maybe we could jump out the windows.”

“If the fall didn’t kill you, the creature would,” Corrana said. “It is no longer limited to the Tower.”

The blackness was oozing dangerously near to Glyndon. “I can’t move him alone,” Kayl snapped at Corrana, hiding her fear behind anger. “Or do you want to let that thing have him?”

“What’s the use?” the Magicseeker said. He started to sheath his sword, then looked at the blackened, pitted blade and flung it away with a curse.

Corrana gave him a long look, then turned and joined Kayl. She knelt and worked her arms carefully under Glyndon’s legs. Then, without looking up, she said in a low voice, “I couldn’t keep that thing from taking Javieri. I’ll do what I must to keep it from getting Glyndon as well.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” Kayl said. “Nothing seems to do any good against that stuff. Now lift, easy.”

Together, they slid Glyndon a little closer to the crystal cube, away from the encroaching blackness. “Again,” Kayl said. “I want him right at the foot of the pedestal.”

As they shifted into better positions for the next effort, the Magicseeker crouched beside Corrana and added his strength to theirs. With his help, they reached the base of the pedestal in one try. “Thank you,” Kayl said.

The Magicseeker stood up and turned away with a shrug. “It’s halfway around the room now,” he said, and his voice was unsteady. “What happens next?”

Kayl smoothed wisps of hair back from Glyndon’s forehead and rose. Mark and Dara moved closer to her, and she automatically put an arm around each of them. “I don’t know,” she told the Magicseeker. “It isn’t behaving the same way it did last time I was here.”

“How much time do we have?” Corrana said quietly.

“I can’t—” Kayl started, then stopped short as Glyndon’s hoarse voice broke in.

“Time,” said Glyndon in a pain-filled whisper. “The Crystal. You’ll have to use the Crystal.”

“What does he mean?” the Magicseeker demanded.

Corrana bent over Glyndon. “How?” she said urgently. “What did you do to use it before? Tell me, and I’ll try!”

“I don’t know,” Glyndon said. “I’m sorry, Kayl.”

“It’s all right,” Kayl said. She leaned closer, wanting to tell him while there was still time how much she cared for him, how much she had always cared for him. “I love you” seemed inadequate, too short a phrase to convey all the things she felt. “I love you,” she said.

Glyndon smiled. “I love you, too,” he said, and for a moment his voice sounded stronger. “Use the Crystal, Kayl. It’s the only way left.” Then his eyes closed and his head rolled sideways.

“Unconscious,” Corrana said before Kayl had time for more than a brief stab of fear. The Elder Sister looked at Kayl. “Well?”

“I’m not a magician.”

“At the moment, neither am I. But we have no choice but to try.” She gestured at the room, which was slowly darkening as the blackness covered one window after another.

“Mother.”

Kayl turned and saw Dara standing calmly with one hand resting on the Crystal. “Dara, get away from—”

“I’m all right, Mother, but I can’t do it myself. You have to help.”

Kayl hesitated, fighting her instinctive desire to pull Dara away from the Crystal, then stepped forward to join her daughter. She saw Mark standing beside Dara, his face blank and rigid with the effort not to disgrace himself by crying. Kayl felt Corrana beside her, and saw the remaining Magicseeker take up a position on the opposite side of the Crystal. Then her hand touched the cool, smooth surface of the cube.

For a moment, nothing seemed to happen. Then, with a suddenness that left her dizzy, she was part of the crystal cube. She tried to shake herself, to dispel the vertigo, but she had lost all sensation from her body. Dara and Mark were with her, linked to Kayl by blood and to the Crystal by talent and heritage. Kayl could sense Corrana and the Magicseeker as well, but not as clearly. They, too, had become part of the Crystal, but Kayl could tell that they were not as closely linked to it as she and the children were.

Wondering what to do now, Kayl tried to look about her. The effort set off something in the magic of the cube. Pictures began flashing before her, visions of strange people and stranger places. A tall woman with the hard hands of an artisan and golden skin knelt on a slender bridge made of crystal, hammering a band of silver into place along its edge.

A blond man in a ragged tunic cut and stabbed at a huge, gray-green creature that snapped at him with foot-long fangs.

A green-haired Neira boy swam cautiously through drifts of seaweed toward a delicate structure of coral and mother-of-pearl. A demon, dark-haired and human-looking, fought desperately against a faceless man in a dark cape, while behind him a muscular youth sent ravens into the battle. A human girl with the slanted green eyes of a Shee rode out of a snowstorm into a cave and collapsed. A black-furred Wyrd grinned fiercely and lifted a silver goblet in a toast to a Shee woman dressed in red silk. A slender woman with dark, fine hair raised a sword of fire in a triumphant gesture. A band of Thar raiders trudged across a wilderness of ice; a ship with blue sails ran before a storm; armies battled around the foot of a sinister black mountain; a strange, silver-hued moon cracked and broke apart….

Kayl recoiled from the flood of images. They stopped as suddenly as they had begun, and once again she was a disembodied part of the cube. Kayl shook herself, remembering the description of the cube in the Ri Astar Diary. “Whenever a man stared into it… he would see what the Crystal would show.” The writer of the diary had understated the effect.

Kayl had not simply seen pictures; it was as if she had actually been present at each of the places she had been shown. She wondered whether she could control the phenomenon if she tried.

From somewhere outside herself, the knowledge floated up that Kayl could, indeed, control the visions. She was startled at first; then another phrase from the diary drifted through her mind: “… if the watcher fixed his heart on some one thing, past or present, that too he would see pictured.…” Again, the diarist had apparently understated. The Crystal was not limited to visions; it could provide information as well. Kayl considered briefly, then filled her mind with the desire to know how Glyndon had used the Crystal to save the remnant of the first expedition, sixteen years before, and how she might repeat it.

Pictures began unrolling before her once more, painfully familiar yet oddly skewed. Kayl realized after a moment that she was seeing her first visit to the Tower, but from a viewpoint inside the crystal cube. She watched Kevran, Beshara, Varevice, and Glyndon arguing over the purpose of the cube; saw Kevran knock a corner from the cube with the hilt of his dagger; saw the black creature swallow Beshara and her demon; watched her younger self hacking uselessly at the oozing darkness.

A soundless, twisting explosion rocked the room, and for an instant time stopped. In that moment, Kayl knew what Glyndon had done, and saw as well the price they had all paid as a result. For Gadeiron’s Crystal was far more than a simple scrying tool; in the hands of a wizard, it could actually manipulate the past. Glyndon had not been powerful enough to reach very far back in time, but he had been able to change things so that they had never reached the Crystal room. Enough so that some of them had survived.

But the Crystal could not alter what had happened to itself. Kevran had kept the corner he had chipped from it, without realizing any longer what it was. All of the survivors of the expedition had kept two sets of memories, though one was buried deep in their minds. And Glyndon… Glyndon had remained unknowingly joined to the Crystal, unable either to use its power consciously or to sever the link. Kayl felt a pang of pity for him as she wondered why the Crystal had shown her all this. She was no wizard; she could take visions from the Crystal, and knowledge, but she could never use it as Glyndon had.

A mental nudge brought Kayl back to the present. Corrana was beside her, wordlessly demanding to know whether Kayl had found a solution to their problem. With a sense of surprise, Kayl realized that Corrana had seen and felt nothing of the vision Kayl had just had. She explained what she had learned, and its futility, and felt Corrana’s denial.

“Alone, you could not use the power of the Crystal,” Corrana said. “But with your daughter beside you, you can save us all. Hurry, before it is too late!”

Kayl started to protest, but the knowledge of the Crystal confirmed Corrana’s words. Dara was close beside her, and she could feel the power surging around them. All she had to do was reach out. Still, Kayl hesitated. If she repeated Glyndon’s spell with the Crystal, was she not repeating his mistakes as well? And she could not help feeling that trying to change the past, to go back to what should be memory, was a mistake. If she had learned anything in the last year, it was that. There must be some other way to get out of the Tower, some other way to destroy the black thing.…

Knowledge poured into her mind. With a violent pull, Kayl wrenched herself and the others free of the Crystal. She stood panting for a moment, watching the confusion on their faces give way to surprise. “What are you doing?” Corrana cried.

“Getting rid of that thing for good,” Kayl said, nodding at the wall of blackness. It had moved closer while they were entranced by the Crystal; on one side it was little more than two paces from the base of the pedestal that supported Gadeiron’s Crystal. Kayl set her shoulder to the cube and pushed.