Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [83]
I tried the door again. It was still locked. The holes were of different sizes, set in a tantalizingly familiar arc above the bane’s eyes. I frowned. A thought occurred to me and was gone just as quickly. I couldn’t grasp it. A key of some kind was what I needed. Or four keys maybe.
I sat Bryce down, leaning him back against the door. His breathing was steady but his head lolled. Already, he had been unconscious longer than I would have expected. It was almost as if his mind were in hiding, as if he were in some kind of coma. But there were other things I had to worry about at the moment.
It seemed likely that my brother had possessed something to unlock the outer door where he’d ambushed me. Perhaps it was the same thing I needed here. I checked his belt and around his neck, felt in his pockets and took off his boots to shake them out. There was nothing remotely like a key anywhere. I straightened, my mind sliding toward despair.
Bryce’s hands rested on the floor beside his thighs. The false one twitched, chinking like metal against the stone. I felt my eyes go wide. Four holes! The thought that had tickled my mind a moment ago returned now to hammer me. Bryce had only four digits on his mechanical hand—three fingers and a thumb.
Grabbing my brother’s shoulder, I dragged him unconscious to his knees and held him there, then grasped the fingers of his right hand and thrust them at the holes in the door. They fit! A rapid series of clicks sounded within the sphere’s walls and I jerked Bryce’s hand back just as the portal folded inward.
Through that opening I glimpsed multicolored lights that bloomed and flitted and burst. The very air throbbed in that place, and my heart and mind throbbed with it. Before me rose ten black steps that glittered with mica, with dark, metallic rails on both sides. I couldn’t see Vohanna but knew she was there beyond those steps. I smelled the acrid tang of her sorcery, heard the sickly sensuous murmur of what was still, recognizably, her voice. And in the shivering air I could feel how drunk she was on the power of the milkstones.
The hair curled and leaped on my body.
I had seen what intoxication with the toir’in-or could do to a being. In the underworld mines of the Klar slavers I had seen it—when the Thye Vessoth priest known as Nethcormundis had tried to slaughter Rannon and myself. Steel had stopped that sorcerer, but I didn’t think steel alone would be enough this time.
There was one other weapon I could use. Possibly.
I laid Bryce on the floor and drew from his boot the antler-hilted dagger that was sheathed there. What I contemplated now might kill my brother. But it seemed to me that death was even more assured, for both of us, if I did not act. Nestled against each of the carotid arteries of Bryce’s throat, just above where the bone of the clavicle ran, there lay embedded a milkstone. I touched one. It felt warm and oily.
Milkstones are power. Though I do not understand the laws governing that power, I know that the crystalline structure of the stones can be used to amplify and direct thought just as a properly constructed amphitheater can channel and enhance sound. The results can be—in the hands of an adept—sorcery. And yet, to use the stones is a matter of carefully attuned rhythms and harmonies. Breaking those harmonies is...dangerous.
Pinching one of Bryce’s milkstones between my thumb and fingers, I pressed the sharp tip of the dagger to the flesh just underneath it—and hesitated. I recalled what had happened at Kellet’s Bay when Diken Gray had cut a fleck of toir’in-or from Eric Ryall’s brow. The blood had clotted almost instantly and the wound had sealed over as if the human body were rejecting the alien taint of the stone. But would that happen here? And what if I sliced too deep and nicked an artery?