The Seeker - Isobelle Carmody [80]
“No!” I cried.
His brows drew together in triumph. “Tell me where the map is or I will kill him,” he whispered. I wrenched my mind from Rushton’s with a scream.
“Vega, get a knife,” Alexi instructed. He looked back at me. “Tell me or he will die.”
“Elspeth!” Rushton shouted.
In that moment, the block that separated me from Marisa’s thoughts was as thin as a web. I saw right through it and knew where the map was. It was hidden in plain sight, carved into the front doors of Obernewtyn. Then, as my mind began to buckle under the assault of the machine, I saw a vision of a dark chasm in the ground from which rose a thick brownish smoke, and I knew I was seeing the very place indicated on Marisa’s map.
Terrified at what else I would see, I found the strength to block the vision and push Marisa from me.
“Very well, kill him,” Alexi snarled.
I threw back my head and saw Madam Vega’s hand raise the knife. “No!” I begged.
“Tell me,” Alexi whispered.
“We come,” said an unknown voice in my mind. Startled, I realized Rushton’s friends must be within the stone hillock.
“Tell me!” Alexi shouted.
I hesitated. I could not tell him where the map was. That was too high a price for either my life or Rushton’s.
Alexi’s eyes narrowed, seeming to divine my thought. “All right. Do it.”
Madam Vega lifted her arm slowly.
I heard running footsteps, and at the same time, the machine seemed to be overheating. There was the sound of an explosion, and a shower of sparks fell on my boot and onto my bare and grazed knees. I jerked and kicked as best I could.
Vega’s hand paused before the downward blow. She looked at Alexi, and he nodded.
There was a terrible pain in my legs and feet, and I could smell smoke.
Then something inside my head crackled violently; a power stirred in me completely unlike any other ability I possessed. All at once, I knew that Rosamunde had spoken the truth: Jes had killed that soldierguard, and I knew how.
Whatever I had roused came from the deepest void of my mind, like a serpent uncoiling to strike. I felt a sense of exaltation at the knowledge that I could control such a terrible power. Madam Vega drove the knife downward, but I struck first, swatting her hand away and plowing a terrible furrow through her mind. She screamed horribly.
I felt flames burning my legs and feet. The smell reminded me of the day my mother and father died.
Dimly, I saw people running and shouting.
“Is she alive?” asked a voice I knew but could not recognize.
Am I? I wondered, and a dark wind swept me away.
27
“YER NOWT WELL enough!” Matthew said stubbornly. The look on his face told me what I already knew. I looked haggard even after all this time.
“It might be better …,” Dameon said diplomatically, but I would not let him finish.
“Stay here and miss this mysterious meeting? Not on your life,” I said. I sat back after that outburst, feeling the now-familiar weakness roll over me. It was still incredible to think the machine had taken so much from me. That, and unleashing the strange power I had tapped in myself. I had been unconscious for days after.
“Ye look different,” Matthew said. And I felt different, stronger somehow, despite my physical weakness and the scars. Even now I could feel the tingle in the depth of my mind that told me the power was there, waiting.
“So you would be different if some machine had been inside your head,” I snapped.
He grinned.
“Where is Rushton?” I asked casually.
Matthew looked quickly at Dameon, but the empath’s face remained as inscrutable as ever. I felt a stirring of resentment that Rushton had not come by to visit. Matthew had told me that Louis and the others had freed Rushton and he had beaten and smothered the flames that had engulfed my lower legs. Both Alexi and Madam Vega were dead—Alexi with an arrow to the heart and Vega without a mark on her. Louis guessed she had fallen and hit her head in the commotion. Ariel had fled, and had surely perished in the savage blizzard that had come that night.
It was known now by all those