Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [86]
In that instant, Vohanna lost control of me. She gasped, her coal-colored eyes flickering with a sudden lambent yellow. She drew back slightly from her table, wings snapping in the air. The battle simulacrum froze in mid-movement, and my lips twisted in a savage smirk as my self-mastery flooded back and I whispered into the sudden stillness.
“Greetings, Vohanna! Shall we chat again about killing me?”
The toir’in-or stones still kindled in my palm but the pain was bearable and I was not about to release them when they had just saved me from Vohanna’s mental chains. Instead, I used my left hand to pluck Bryce’s sword from my belt where I had thrust it in beside my own.
With the tip of the blade, I pointed at the small replica of Hurnan Jystral’s crippled warship where it sat stilled within the frozen weave of the simulacrum.
“If the woman I love is not dead aboard that ship, Vohanna,” I said, “then I might suffer you to live. But you will stop this attack immediately.”
Vohanna did not speak. All the taunting sensuousness of her manner was gone, and it seemed that what she had left was only the hard kernel of hate that filled her heart. I’d not even been alive when first that hate coalesced, but now I was the lightning rod to which it leaped.
The witch closed her eyes, and when she opened them again an instant later her sockets had emptied of flesh and filled with stone—with twin toir’in-or of perfect black. On the table before her, the other milkstones rattled in their matrix like dried acorns in their gilded metal cups.
Vohanna reached one hand toward me, to swat me like a fly. Her fingertips gathered light, pulled it in from the air like streamers of bright ribbon. The matrix table jiggled; the whole room went hot with a surge of static electricity that played over the walls like knots of St. Elmo’s fire. The black toir’in-or in the witch’s eye-sockets flushed with sick scarlet, darkened, then flushed again like the beating of a rotten heart.
To use milkstones is a matter of carefully attuned rhythms and harmonies. To break those harmonies is to beg disaster.
In the moment before Vohanna unleashed her power upon me, I tossed the milkstones from my right fist into the air, dropped my right hand to join my left upon the sword, and slashed the blade across with all my strength. The steel tip caught one stone; the edge caught the other. A backlash of molten energy slagged my blade to the quillions in an instant, but the two damaged gems whipped toward Vohanna at incredible speed.
The Witch tried to dodge—didn’t quite succeed. One stone smashed her in the chest; the other hit the wall of the sphere behind her head.The world went white.
The sword-hilt cooked in my palms, but before my reflexes could react to that pain the ruined weapon was torn from my grip as a shock wave rippled the air like water. The nexus of power that Vohanna had planned to release outward at me went off in all directions around her instead. A crescendo of sound and bright flame churned the matrix table into gravel, shattered most of the glass doors over the niches where the bodies stood, and exploded outward through the wall behind Vohanna. I was thrown down as that surging wave of power hammered me in the chest.
Where the witch had stood, there brewed a volcano of fire and light. Wolves of flickering red heat ate at the marble floor; the roof of the sphere vaporized and the top of the pyramid blew off as a radiant column of sparks sliced through it like a giant lance. The pyramid staggered as if its engines had stalled.
With my senses stunned, I scrabbled for Bryce and threw myself across his prone form as chunks of burning rock fell around us. No being made of flesh could have lived through that inferno, but in the next instant Vohanna came shrieking out of the chaos, her lucent wings on fire in patterns like moiré silk. She hurtled wildly at me, her