The Ashes of Worlds - Kevin J. Anderson [111]
“I am the Hyrillka Designate,” Rusa’h roared, flames flickering from his mouth.
Ridek’h flinched but did not back away. Though he expected to be incinerated at any moment, he would at least speak the message he had come here to deliver. “If you were a true Hyrillka Designate, I would not need to come here in order to beg for the lives of the Hyrillkan people.” He spread his arms and added an accusatory tone. “Look around you at the empty city. All Ildirans have fled Mijistra. Is this how you lead, how you represent our race? The people of Hyrillka — supposedly your people — are being decimated by the faeros. Have you visited the burned refugee camps to which they fled for safety? Have you touched the blackened bones of your own former subjects?”
Rusa’h seemed to waver. “The faeros do what they must.”
In that answer, the boy Designate received his first inkling that the faeros might not be entirely under Rusa’h’s control. This startled him. He had believed, perhaps falsely, that the fireballs were in the madman’s thrall. But what if the fallen Designate did not have as much power over the fiery creatures as Ildirans had all assumed?
“Why are you allowing so many of your people to be killed? Would a true Mage-Imperator allow it?” He took a step closer, defying the heat. “Neither is this how a Designate cares for his subjects. Why do you not protect them?” He stood there before the flaming man. “Both as Designate and as Mage-Imperator, you have failed them absolutely.”
Ridek’h had intended to challenge the faeros incarnate, to anger him and make him think. He realized he had succeeded in at least one of these goals when the fires around Rusa’h intensified with rage.
The hovering fireballs plunged down toward the Prism Palace.
* * *
78
Osira’h
With her special sensitivity to changes in the thism, Osira’h felt the disruption from Mijistra like a roar in her mind: vibrations, stresses . . . danger. She knew that Designate Ridek’h had arrived at the Prism Palace and confronted the faeros incarnate.
She raced down a mine shaft to gather her brothers and sisters, but they had sensed the threat too and were already running toward her. No one but the half-breed children of the green priest Nira could turn the thism against the flames that Ridek’h was facing.
Everyone else had already given up on the young Designate, assuming him to be dead. Adar Zan’nh and Prime Designate Daro’h had set events in motion that could not be halted. Tal O’nh was on his way up to the orbiting shipyards with a very small crew; together they would create an incredible diversion that should buy Adar Zan’nh all the time he needed to get his ships away unharmed.
“Concentrate!” Rod’h urged.
“We need to protect Ridek’h long enough for him to get away,” Osira’h agreed.
With his impetuous mission to Mijistra, the young Hyrillka Designate had unwittingly done his part in the bold and risky plan to rescue the Mage-Imperator, and now the half-breed children would not let go of him.
Sitting in a circle on the stone floor, the children joined hands and cast the thism net in their minds far and wide to create a sort of shield for the young man. Riding the thism forward, they found Mijistra, the Prism Palace . . . and brave Ridek’h, as he faced the flaming fury of the mad Designate, whose heat made the air blister and shimmer.
While he had the boy trapped, Rusa’h attempted to rip away his soulfire and add the fresh life force to the growing faeros — but Osira’h and her siblings cut him off. Combined, they protected the young Designate’s thism and all the threads that surrounded him with a sort of mental insulation, making him impervious to the first wave of attack.
Rusa’h blasted his victim, but he was unable to crash through the unexpected barrier. When the mad Designate could not seize the soulfire he wanted, he was momentarily stunned. But if the faeros incarnate should choose to lash out with physical, incinerating fire . . .
Run! Osira’h shouted to the young Designate through her