Frostfell_ The Wizards - Mark Sehestedt [109]
Amira blinked. "Gyaidun? How…? What hap-?"
Turha looked as if she were ready to stab Gyaidun with her spear, and three of the surrounding elves grabbed at his arms and tried to drag him away, one of them shouting, "Hrayek! You have no place here!"
"Stop!" Amira shouted. "Let him be! Gyaidun how did you get h-?"
"He is hrayek!" said Turha. "He cannot be in our presence!"
Amira glared at the lady omah. "Then leave, damn you."
Turha turned to the Vil Adanrath warriors and said, "Get him out of here. Drag him if you must."
But Gyaidun held them off with his knife and club. "No time!" he said. "That bastard out there has some sort of link with Jalan. He knows everything you've planned."
This renewed Amira's panic, and she finally managed to tear loose the knot of her cloak and throw it to the ground.
"What are you doing?" Gyaidun said.
"I have to get out there!"
"Swimming? You'll never make it. The cold will kill you."
"What choice do I have?"
"Your magic," he said. "It brought you here last night. Use it to get us out there."
"Us? But Erun-"
"I know how to stop this!" he said. "But I have to get out there before it's too late."
The words of the oracle came back to her. She hadn't heard them, had been lost in some dark dream forced on her by the oracle. But the belkagen had asked the oracle, face to face, if the staff she'd given would save Jalan, and she had replied, No. That task is for another.
Hope and despair tore at her heart.
"Amira!" Gyaidun said. "Get us out there. Now!"
"I can't!" she shrieked. "Don't you think I've tried? Something is blocking the magic. Some counterspell-"
"Can you get us above it-out of range?" asked Gyaidun.
"In the water? But… the cold. You said-"
"Not the water!" He pointed to the sky above the distant island. "The air!"
"The fall will kill us!"
"You're a wizard, aren't you?"
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Isle of Witness
Lendri was still down. Not dead, but in such agony he could scarcely move.
The belkagen looked up to the pinnacle where the five sorcerers stood beneath the Witness Tree. The old elf's hands trembled, and his knees felt weak. The burden he had carried down the long years, the knowledge no living being should ever have, had come to him at last. Here it was. The fear hit him as it always did when he recalled the vision of Hro'nyewachu, but this time he did not let it weaken him. The fulfillment of his vision, the consummation of his mission, was here. The final reward. But as he'd told Hro'nyewachu, it could come only through pain.
"As are all things worth having," he said, remembering her words. "So be it."
The belkagen raised his staff, knowing the futility of what he was about to do. But instead of letting it weaken him, he accepted the knowledge and embraced it. Knowing the ending-or at least part of it-was oddly liberating.
"Jalan!" he shouted. "Hold on to something!"
The five sorcerers looked down upon him, and two of them began to weave their hands in their own summoning, but the belkagen was quicker. He raised his staff and said, "U werekh kye wu!"
The galeforce wind at his back switched directions and hit him from the left with a force beyond any hurricane. Waves broke against the side of the island, and the great mist tossed upward froze to ice and shot across the island like millions of tiny arrows. The wind caught in the cloaks and robes of the five sorcerers and they tumbled off the pinnacle. Four splashed into the water while Erun clung to the rocks like a barnacle.