The Drowning City - Amanda Downum [110]
Asheris shuddered now and caught her shoulders. His magic rose to answer hers: a sandstorm, a whirlwind, smokeless flame. Two faces hung before her—the man’s, and a fire-crowned eagle. She closed her eyes before it dizzied her.
Her spells were failing. The heat bit deeper; her hair was burning. But the spells on the collar died too, slowly corroding beneath the entropy in her hands. Asheris caught her left wrist, gave a raptor’s shriek of rage and pain. She smelled her skin crisping, but she was already numb.
“Stop,” Asheris gasped. “Please.”
He was more powerful than she, but not more powerful than the force she called. Storms stilled, flame smothered, and in the end even stars chilled and died. She could stop his undying heart.
But she’d die first. Ice within, fire without, more than her fragile flesh could withstand. If she left herself open to the abyss too long, it would claim her.
The last of the ward-spells dissolved, leaving nothing but gold beneath her frozen fingers. Gasping, she broke the channel. The pain of it made her scream and she might have fallen, but her hands were locked stiff around Asheris’s throat. He cried out too and stumbled, and they both fell to their knees.
“Please,” he whispered, “please—”
She had exhausted her magic. His fire would burn her, and she had nothing left to stop it. But she wasn’t dead yet, and gold was soft.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered back, raw and ragged. Then she kneed him in the groin as hard as she could.
He groaned and tried to curl around the pain, but she forced him back, driving her knees into his stomach and tugging at the collar. Blood slicked her hands, hers and Asheris’s, as wire bit their flesh. Her vision washed dull and spotted as she began to feel the pain, but she held on, shaking like a terrier with a rat in its jaws. Metal twisted, bent, broke. Strand after strand. She sobbed with the pain, tears and sweat and blood from a bitten lip splashing Asheris’s face.
Snarling, he pushed her off and backhanded her across the face, sending her sprawling on the stones. She choked on her own tears and curled into a pain-riddled ball. She couldn’t stand, could only lie shuddering and wait for the death stroke.
But Asheris didn’t spring for her, only rose to his knees, trembling like a blown horse. One hand clutched his throat as he choked and gagged. She might have crushed his larynx. As blood filled her mouth and her cheek began to throb, she couldn’t quite care.
Then she felt the pain in her hands, and something else. Gold twisted around her claw-hooked fingers, gleaming beneath the blood. And in the palm of her ruined left hand lay a blazing diamond.
She forced herself to her knees, peeling the wire out of her hands; blood welled in the cuts, dripped to the ground. She and Asheris stared at each other through witchlight and shadows.
“Destroy the stone,” he gasped. “Imran wears its twin—part of me is still bound in them. I can’t do it, please—”
The pain on his face made her look away, pain and desperate hope. She couldn’t stand to hear him plead again. But she had no way to even chip such a stone, let alone shatter it…
She turned, clumsy, and stared at the orange light glowing from the mountain’s cauldron. Diamonds were forged in the earth’s fire. That would be enough to melt it.
She stumbled to her feet, knees buckling. Her arms were nothing but pain from fingertip to shoulder, and her face was already swelling from the blow. But she could still walk.
The stones shuddered beneath her feet. Beneath the keen of the wind she heard shouts and sounds of battle. The Dai Tranh must have broken the wards. They needed to be away from the mountain as fast as they could.
So she, like a fool, was climbing up it. It made her laugh, till her hand cramped around the stone and she whimpered instead.
The lake of fire was higher than it had been, great bubbles of flame bursting on its surface. The stench of sulfur and burnt rock choked her. She crouched on her knees at the lip of the crater, afraid to stand against the wind.
She spared a heartbeat to stare at the ruined