The Floodgate - Elaine Cunningham [122]
Tzigone crouched down and began to sing the spell. All around her, the mountains echoed as Unseelie voices echoed her song. The Crinti in the valley below began to flee, but the circle that formed around the two jordaini held firm.
"Loyal, but not very smart," said a voice at her elbow. "The gate is thinnest there."
Tzigone whirled to face Dhamari Exchelsor, and her voice hitched in surprise. "Keep singing," he admonished her, "but hold off on the final gestures.
Your friend's life depends upon it."
The wizard rose. Light poured from him like a lighthouse beacon. "Crinti!" he called in an unexpectedly clear, ringing voice.
The shadow amazons turned toward this new threat. "Behind you," he said, sweeping one hand in a dramatic gesture.
Tzigone, still singing, following the direction. A shimmering veil was taking shape in the clearing. Beyond it, going back and back into some unfathomable depth, crouched a sea of shadowy forms with glowing black eyes. Dhamari took her arm and pulled her toward the veil.
"Let the jordain go, and we will hold back the dark fairies," Dhamari said as he and Tzigone moved to within a pace of the veil. "Kill him, and we will release them." As if to illustrate the point, he seized Tzigone's outstretched hand and held it close to the veil.
"Tzigone, don't!" Matteo pleaded, speaking between ringing blows. "No good can come from an alliance with evil!"
Dhamari threw his weight against her, pushing her forward so that her hand touched the veil in the final spell gesture.
Magic pulsed through her. Tzigone's vision went dark. Against the blackness she glimpsed a vivid, agonized image of herself, her body nearly as transparent as the crystal ghosts in Akhlaur's swamp. Her bones glowed blue, and the blood in her veins was black ice.
The moment passed as her natural defenses slammed back into place, but the damage was done. The veil began to become more translucent. The song of the Unseelie folk grew louder, triumphant, a chorus of evil punctuated by the percussion of the jordaini's swords. The Crinti fled, disappearing into the mountains like gray smoke. From the corner of her eye, Tzigone noticed a copper and jade elf, moving toward the spring with the stealth of a hunting cat.
The spring!
Magic rose from the water, tingling over Tzigone's sensitive skin like the bubbles from sparkling wine. Understanding came to her in a sudden, horrified instant.
Kiva had returned to the floodgate.
What her purpose was, Tzigone could not say, but one thing she knew: If the elf woman had her way, Matteo would die and Halruaa with him. Desperate but determined, Tzigone kept singing, but this time her song spoke of banishment, of dark enchantments broken and gates closed. Her voice rose over the Unseelie song like the battle cry of an unlikely paladin, and the two spells struggled for supremacy like the two battling jordaini.
Magic built in power, shaking the mountains and sending rocks tumbling down into the valley. Dhamari tried to pull away, but Tzigone held him firm. When the veil opened, she threw herself into it, dragging the wizard behind.
Her song twined with the magic spilling from the Unseelie court-a meeting of fire and oil. An explosion shook the mountains and tossed aside the only two people left standing in the clearing.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Akhlaur stood by the coral obelisk, gazing past the glowing structure to the invisible gate beyond. By his reckoning, the moon would rise full over Halruaa. It was a time of power, when spells were more puissant and hungers ran dark and deep.
A rumble of distant magic echoed through the water. Akhlaur threw back his head and inhaled deeply, like a sailor testing the wind for a coming storm. His senses, made preternaturally acute by his years in the Plane of Water, perceived the whirl of a distant, rapidly descending waterspout. Exhilaration rose in him like long-forgotten lust.
The spinning