Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [140]
He slowly began to remember Hyrillka, how he had fought beside Imperator Rusa'h. Together, they had meant to overthrow Jora'h, the false Mage-Imperator, his own father. But they had failed. Thor'h remembered flying his warliners, expecting to die . . . then being captured, bound, humiliated. He remembered Designate Udru'h's cruel smile, his stony refusal to hear Thor'h's pleas.
Afterward, there had been shiing . . . too much shiing.
And then bliss.
And then nothing.
And now darkness. Utter darkness.
He did not know where he was. The walls were thick, and he found no way out. Groggily, as if from a great distance, he thought he heard the sound of scuffling feet, furniture being moved, but no one unsealed his chamber.
He could see nothing, could feel no light on his sensitive skin. His hands were unbound, and he touched his face. He reached out and struck a wall. The inky blackness all around him felt like a cold ocean filling his mouth, his nose, his eyes.
He screamed endlessly and flung himself at the walls, pounding until his knuckles felt wet with his blood. He couldn't find a door. The blackness was a crushing weight, literally killing him.
But first it drove him mad.
Howling, Thor'h battered against the black walls of his prison, shrieking until his vocal cords were torn and bloody. He continued to wail a husky, breathy sound of hopelessness as his mind broke apart.
No one heard him.
No one knew he was there.
And the lights never came back on.
83
JESS TAMBLYN
Eighty of the workers on Plumas had survived the disaster. The water mines, which had been in clan Tamblyn for generations, did not.
Frigid steam gushed from damaged conversion equipment. Life-support generators had failed, and the grotto temperature was already dropping to a deep bone-chilling cold. Only one of the artificial suns remained embedded in the ceiling.
Another thing broken, another thing lost. Jess looked at the crumbling ice ceiling, the shattered ground, the frost-petrified bodies of fallen miners and dead nematodes. This had been his family's sanctuary, their dream for so many years. He had first left Plumas because of his impossible love for Cesca, and he'd come back as a different person, a different sort of being altogether, with good intentions and dangerous delusions.
The tainted wental inside his mother had wrought all of this damage, but he was to blame as well. Sensing his dismay, Cesca came up to hold him. Her touch--which had been denied him for so long--now gave him strength.
Old Caleb clapped his hands with a gunshot-loud sound and shouted to all the survivors. "Come on, all together. We have work to do." Water miners scrambled to give first aid to the injured. The exhausted and brokenhearted Tamblyn brothers helped erect temporary shelters by shoring up partially destroyed living huts.
A huge chunk of ice fell from the ceiling and splashed into the metal-gray sea. Jess said sharply, "Cesca, we have to hold this place together until we can get the people away to safety. A lot of them are hurt." He held her tingly hand. "Let me show you how."
Focusing on the damage, shunting aside his grief and uncertainty, Jess showed Cesca how to use her newfound powers to seal the worst cracks in the ceiling, welding shut the fissures. With deep concentration and a sweep of his hand, Jess evaporated away mounds of fallen ice.
Since Jess could not touch any living person, he accepted the grim task of hauling the bodies of the dead to the edge of the now-calm sea. Before he touched any of the corpses, he paused. "And what if I infect them with a tainted wental?" After what had occurred with his mother, he was very cautious.
That will not happen here, the wental voices said in his head. It will not happen again.
He looked down at a pale, twisted man who had bled to death from dozens of lacerations; the blood was dark and glassy, already frozen in the ground.