Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [166]
‘. . . I only want to—’
‘Open the door!’
Briana put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Ianthe, please.’
That single touch was a spark to a flame. Ianthe spun round, her anger bunched like a fist inside her. She threw the witch’s hand aside and cried out, ‘Leave me!’ And in that moment something happened that she did not plan and could not control. She compressed all of her rage into a single, desperate thought, like a mental scream, and released it.
The wall-sized mirrors exploded. In the galleries behind, Ianthe glimpsed the witches reeling and clutching their heads. Many had bleeding, lacerated hands. Sobs, wails and groans came from their midst. Briana Marks took three steps back, her face white with shock. She wiped away blood from her nose and gaped at it dumbly. The Unmer man lay slumped forward in his chair, unmoving. Only the two Guild soldiers seemed unaffected. For a moment they looked on in stunned disbelief, and then one of them unstrapped a baton from his belt and came for Ianthe.
She cried out, raised her hands to defend herself.
He swung the baton, and everything went dark.
‘This is an Unmer infiltration,’ Commander Rast said, ‘The girl is a spy and an assassin, the explosion . . . clearly designed to distract our troops while she carried out her mission.’
‘Designed to distract troops by drawing their attention to the palace?’ Briana said.
The commander’s face reddened, and his lip-whiskers twitched. Murmurs swept around the table, vocally among the other Guild commanders and mentally among the Haurstaf contingent. Seven combat psychics were in attendance, led by Sister Ulla, although in light of recent events, the term combat psychic now seemed little more than an embarrassing misnomer. Ianthe had wrecked the minds of six of their best with one thought.
One thought. Briana was still reeling from the girl’s attack. The sheer scale of the power she’d sensed coming from Ianthe had shocked her to the core. It had been like catching a glimpse of a howling abyss, some raw, savage, primordial vortex of energy. Even now ripples still spread through the entire Harmonic Reservoir, that abstract plane the Haurstaf used to envision the telepathic network. Ianthe could not have generated such a force herself, Briana felt sure. The girl had to have accessed and channelled it – much as the Unmer channelled their sorcery – from somewhere else. They had been naive to try to bring her into the Haurstaf. This girl was on a different level altogether.
‘What about the eyeglasses?’ she asked.
Torturer Mara looked up. ‘A simple perception transference device,’ he said. ‘They appear to contain the mind image of an Unmer sea captain – one of the old Brutalist sorcerers who fought Conquillas’s dragons at Awl. One can look back through his eyes into past moments of his life, which is somewhat unnerving, but not particularly useful to anyone except a historian.’ He tapped his pencil against the table. ‘Nevertheless, two odd things about them have come to light. Ianthe had the focus wheel set to the present time, which meant she was essentially looking at the world around her through his perceptions rather than her own. The sorcerer’s image in turn must have been able to see through her eyes.’
‘Then she was spying,’ Rast exclaimed.
Mara snorted. ‘Spying for a ghost,’ he said. ‘And an impotent ghost, to boot. That Brutalist is merely an image, an optical illusion trapped forever within those lenses.’ He raised a hand to stop the commander’s objections. ‘If you listen, Rast, I have better ammunition for your cause. What’s more perplexing is that Ianthe managed to wear the lenses at all. Because the mental link happens both ways, she sees through his eyes and he sees through hers. But the Brutalist’s mind is essentially trapped in the past. He cannot perceive events in our present time without creating a paradox that the lenses don’t allow. Any attempt to do so produces an unbearable strain on the wearer’s mind. The human volunteers we used to test them could not bear to wear the blasted things for more than an