Shattering the Ley Read online

  And collided with a servant carrying a large wooden crate.

  The crate fell, jostled from her grip, the woman biting back a curse as she tried to catch it. It hit the amber floor with a loud crack and splinter of wood, one side splitting and spilling a few long, white, tapered candles across the floor beneath the guests’ feet.

  “Clumsy oaf!” a lord said as a candle rolled to a stop by his foot. “The Baron should dismiss you immediately for that!”

  “I apologize,” the woman said, ducking her head before kneeling and scrambling to pick up the loose candles.

  The lord snorted, then caught Allan’s dark frown. A look of horror crossed his face and he slid away without glancing back, lost in a heartbeat.

  Allan knelt down, grabbed one of the escaped candles, and handed it over to the servant. She’d already gathered up the rest, stuffing them back into the box. “I didn’t see you,” he said as she took it. “I hope that lord didn’t upset you.”

  “Oh, certainly not,” she scoffed, waving her hand. “I deal with that every day.” But Allan noted she was trembling as she stood, crate balanced in her arms so that none of the candles would fall out. He stood as well.

  With a careful look, she said, “You’re new to the Dogs, aren’t you?”

  Allan stiffened. “Since the spring.”

  She smiled at him, one hand brushing her black hair back from where it had fallen forward over her face. “I thought so. You wouldn’t have stopped to help if you weren’t. Or been concerned if I’d been upset.” Her pale skin shone in the amber light, a small scar near the corner of one eye. A single gold hoop earring dangled from her ear. Her servant’s dress was amber, like all of the rest, simple but elegant, designed to blend into the background of the tower itself. But Allan couldn’t take his eyes off of the fine lines of her face.

  When the moment stretched too long and her brow wrinkled in slight confusion, he glanced down toward the crate, frowning at the contents. “Why are you carrying around candles?”

  She laughed, the creases in her brow vanishing. “They’re for the guests. I need to hand them out before the sowing begins.” She motioned toward the rest of the room and Allan saw other servants dispersing through the crowd. Nearly everyone accepted them with a small giggle or gasp.

  “How quaint!” a woman nearby exclaimed. “The Baron must have something special planned.”

  The man beside her snorted and took his taper reluctantly, holding it as if it were a particularly virulent snake. “I hope he doesn’t expect us to actually use them. I haven’t held a candle since I was a child.”

  Allan turned back to ask the black-haired servant what the candles were for—Hagger’s short briefing hadn’t mentioned them—but all he caught was a flash of her hair as she vanished into the growing crowd. He swore under his breath, pushed forward after her, but she was gone.

  Before Allan could begin a more serious search, a respectful hush fell over the room, the music cutting off sharply. He spun toward the darkness of the windows, expecting to see the first part of the sowing, his heart quickening in his chest—he’d wanted to be at the edge, where he would have the best view—but the windows were still dark. Nothing appeared to be happening outside at all.

  Then he noticed that everyone’s attention was focused inward, toward the center of the room.

  He shifted forward through the still crowd, until he saw where the guests were parting to allow three Prime Wielders to pass through. The men strode forward with purpose, ignoring everyone—lord, lady, and servant alike—intent on the closed doors opposite the entrance that led to the restricted higher levels of the tower. Their black robes swished about their feet, their hands hidden in the folds of the robes in front of them. They ranged in age, although the youngest couldn’t be less than forty, his hair streaked with gray.

  They passed through the room without a word, only the youngest glancing to one side, catching Allan’s gaze, his mouth pressed tight, face lined with intense concentration. As they reached the far doors, opening them and slipping through, one of the guests stepped forward as if to follow them, eyes filled with hatred, then halted abruptly as if catching himself. The man—dressed in a loose green shirt with white ruffles near the neck and sleeve—darted a glance to either side to see if anyone had noticed. The silence broke, the quartet launching into a new aria, conversations resuming with a low murmur that steadily rose back to the same level as before, nearly everyone eyeing the doors where the Primes had gone. The man in the green ruffled shirt cast one last look around, then smiled and began speaking to a woman in a white gown who was holding a bamboo fan.

  Allan’s hand slipped toward his sword hilt before he remembered he was wearing the ceremonial uniform and didn’t have a sword, only a knife. He settled back, shifting as the guests drifted around him, keeping the man in the green shirt in sight while he listened in on conversations. But the man appeared to be just another guest, talking to numerous courtiers, flirting with the women, joking with the men. Yet Allan couldn’t help feeling that he was moving with purpose, that he was maneuvering himself into position for something.

  The man had stationed himself near the center of the wide bay of windows, Allan a discreet distance to the left, when a woman beside Allan gasped and held out her left arm. “Look! It’s starting! The Wielders have started the sowing!”

  Allan frowned down at the woman’s arm, where gooseflesh had broken out, the fine hairs standing on end. The woman next to her shuddered.

  “I feel it, too!”

  “I only feel a prickling at the base of my neck,” a man said with a disturbed frown.

  The first woman smiled and said, smugly, “Some of us are more sensitive to the ley than others.”

  Gasps and small shrieks echoed throughout the room as the guests quieted, most edging toward Allan’s position. Allan snorted in derision and glanced down at his own arms surreptitiously. He hadn’t felt anything, but he couldn’t explain the gooseflesh on the woman’s arm or the reaction of the other guests either.

  And then it didn’t matter, because the white ley globes hovering above suddenly dimmed. Men cursed, glancing up, and someone cried out, voice strained with fear.

  “What’s happening?” someone asked.

  A man standing to Allan’s right answered, voice calm, as the ley globes flickered again. “The Primes. They’re using the energy of the Nexus to sow the tower. It’s interrupting the general flow for the network that feeds the city.” He held up his candle. “That must be why they handed out these.”

  As he spoke the last word, the ley globes died completely, the entire room plunging into darkness. More than a few of the gathered gentry shouted in consternation, cursing or muttering under their breath. But even as Allan’s eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness, he caught the flicker of flames spreading throughout the room. Servants appeared with lit tapers held protectively behind cupped hands, extending them to those who had taken candles. The tension brought on by panic subsided, women chuckling shakily as they used their own candles to light others, a few of the men looking sheepish as the flickering orange light—so different from the steady white of the ley globes—began to fill the room. The flame made the amber of the walls and ceiling glow as if lit from within, pulsing like a heartbeat. Lords and ladies marveled at the transformation in the room, voices hushed as they held their candles aloft, faces suffused with childlike wonder.

  Outside, in the darkness beneath the tower, the first glow of ley light pulsed upward. Another gasp spread through the room, this one solemn, and everyone, including Allan, shifted toward the glass windows. Below, the ground between the myriad towers that made up the Grass District glowed with ethereal ley light, concentrated beneath the faceted glass structure that was the Nexus. Except the light of the ley was too fierce, too intense, obscuring the Nexus itself, as if somehow the light had broken free and spilled out into the surrounding land.
The Dogs had cleared the paths and roadways below earlier in the day, setting up a restricted zone around the Nexus. Allan checked to make certain the doors leading out to the balcony were closed and locked. As he pressed closer to the glass, he noticed other people outside on the balconies of the towers across from the Nexus and shook his head. Idiots. Hadn’t they been warned? They were too close to the ley!

  Then, a gout of light shot upward from the Nexus, like spume against a cliff, or the jets of water in the fountain at the base of the tower. It was followed by more, each higher than the last, until they rose higher than the windows of the Great Hall. Across the way, the figures on the balcony outside panicked, most fleeing inside their tower, but not before one of the spumes cascaded down over the ledge, catching two people in its light. It poured down from the balcony like water, leaving two bodies crumpled behind it.

  The activity of the light shifted, the focus of the energy concentrating toward a section of Grass that had been cleared and prepared for the new tower.

  When the first thick tendrils shot forth from the ground, those pressed closest to the windows jerked backward, stumbling into the people behind them. The vines grew unnaturally fast, stretching into the sky, twining around each other as they rose. Leaves burst from nodules, unfurling in the space of a heartbeat; leaves so large they’d engulf the entire room of lords and ladies whole. The foliage began enclosing the tower, forming its walls, the head rising into the night sky like a bud on a flower. Allan watched in awe, struck dumb by the sheer immensity of it, the raw power he could see but couldn’t feel. Nothing like this had ever occurred in Canter; nothing like this ever would. This was why he’d left, why he’d journeyed to the city, the hope of joining the Dogs burning inside him. In Canter, the most he could hope for was life as a guard for a local merchant. In Erenthrall. . . .

  In Erenthrall, he could be anything he wanted.

  “Sacrilege!”

  Allan turned as the shout broke through the awe that held the group at the windows. He glared around at the surrounding people, most still transfixed by the sowing of the tower, their faces awash in the white light from the Nexus below. But near the center of the windows, people were stepping back, eyes wide in shock.

  “It’s a desecration!” a man’s voice bellowed, roaring out above those gathered. “It’s blasphemy! We are cavorting with a power that we cannot control and it is not natural!”

  Allan shoved forward through the press of guests, thrusting lords and ladies alike aside as a sickening sense of foreboding drove daggers into his gut. Men cursed and stumbled out of his path, wax splattering from their candles, and women shot him black looks. But he focused on the window, where the crush of people had opened up into an empty circle. He couldn’t see the man, but he could hear him as the tirade continued and he knew who it was, knew it even before he caught sight of his green shirt.

  “The ley was not meant to be harnessed,” the man cried, his voice rising. “It was not meant to be leashed. We are subverting a natural power, one tied to the earth. Even our ancestors knew this! We can see it in the stones, in the sacred grounds that our ancestors worshipped! They revered this power, gave it the respect it deserves! We abuse it!”

  Allan reached the edge of the circle where the press of bodies became too great for him to charge through. He barked, “Dog! Out of my way!” and tried to press forward, but the lords and ladies didn’t move. He could see the green-shirted man now, could see him as the deranged man paced back and forth before the window, the white blaze of the ley behind him as it fountained higher, the writhing vines of the tower struggling upward. He flung his arms wide, and as he did, Allan caught sight of something odd beneath his loose shirt. But the dagger the man suddenly produced distracted him, filling him with a sense of dread. He didn’t have time to wonder how he’d managed to get the blade past the guards, didn’t have time to react at all. The man’s face was strained with righteous anger, eyes blazing with rage as he gestured toward the sowing with the blade in his hand.

  “This is the latest desecration, the latest folly of our Baron! The Wielders pervert nature to our needs, twist the ley to their own purposes, suppress the land and its natural laws to build this city, to give us comfort, to provide for us, and it is time to stop! It is time to halt the sacrilege! It is time to return the ley to its proper course!”

  Allan heard someone shout his name over the man’s fervor and caught sight of Hagger and two other Dogs on the far side of the room, farther away than Allan and trapped by the crush of bodies. Hagger’s face was livid with pure rage. The Dog snapped his hands in a short, final gesture whose message was clear: “Stop it! End it now!”

  Allan spun back to the green-shirted man in time to see him slash down across his own chest with the dagger.

  Women screamed, two fainting, and men cried out as liquid spilled outward, splattering the floor, drenching the front of the man’s body. The crowd surged backward and away, the space between the man and the lords suddenly widening. Allan was thrust back, someone’s elbow catching him hard in the side, but with a deep, low growl, he roared again, “Out of my way, damn it!” and grabbed the man before him by the shoulders, hauling him back and to the side. The man fell with a harsh, panicked cry, taking two more guests with him, but opening up a space into the circle. Allan leaped over the fallen lord, even as the green-shirted man lifted his head and arms skyward, even as the sharp scent of oil slammed into Allan’s nostrils with gagging force and he realized that the liquid coating the man’s front wasn’t blood.

  “For the ley! For the Kormanley!”

  Allan surged across the small space between the lords and ladies and the green-shirted priest of the Kormanley. But the priest ignored him, caught up in the rapture of the moment. He fell to his knees, reached down with his free hand, grabbed one of the white tapered candles that the servants had handed out earlier, and brought the dancing flame to his chest.

  Allan heard the whoosh of the fire as it caught in the oil, felt the heat of the flames burn his face as the man was engulfed in the space of a breath. The man screamed, the orange-red fire of the oil in sharp contrast to the still seething white fire of the ley outside the tower windows. Allan counted one heartbeat, two, felt the air sucked from his lungs by the conflagration, noted that the newly sown tower had almost neared completion outside, its bulbous top slowing in its ascent, the leaves folding gently to the tower’s sides—

  And then he tackled the pillar of flame the priest had become.

  Fire seared his face and hands as they crashed to the amber floor and rolled. He tasted smoke and ash, felt heat through the layers of his uniform, smelled burned flesh and grunted at the beginnings of pain, and then he stopped trying to breathe, held everything tight—his eyes, his chest, the body of the priest—as he rolled back and forth on the floor trying to smother the fire. Screams and shouts filtered through the sizzle and snap of flame. The buttons of his uniform heated up and burned into his skin. His lungs began to ache for air and he caught himself trying to whimper as tears squeezed from his eyes.

  And then someone was beating at him with a heavy cloth. He heard Hagger bellow, “Let go! He’s almost out!” and he broke free of the priest and rolled away with a gasp, inhaling harshly. The air reeked of char and oil, but he didn’t care. Hagger smothered him in a heavy tapestry—one of those from the walls—but turned toward the priest, leaving Allan to put himself out. He’d barely moved when the servant from earlier knelt at his side, grabbing the tapestry with two hands and beating it against him where his clothes still smoldered.

  “Stop,” Allan murmured. When she continued, her motions frantic, her eyes too wide, he grabbed one of her flailing arms and said, louder, “Stop!”

  She tried to pull out of his grasp, then caught herself, some of the panic draining from her gaze.

  “I think I’m out,” he said. He tried to smile, but winced and groaned instead. His skin felt waxy
and hot in patches, and his entire body throbbed.

  The servant snorted, then dropped the tapestry.

  “He’s out, too,” Hagger said. “Permanently.”

  He stood over the priest’s body, glaring down at the man’s shirt in disgust. Kneeling, he pulled back the charred remains of the clothing, some of the skin peeling back with it. He grimaced.

  “He had skins tied around his chest,” he said, lifting one of them so that Allan could see, “filled with oil. He intended to kill himself.” He glanced around at the guests, all staying a good ten paces back, some of the women sobbing into their companions’ shoulders, others tending to those who’d fainted. All of their faces were grim or troubled. In a voice pitched so low only Allan and the servant could hear, he said, “And perhaps kill some of the others as well.”

  Then he stood, moved to stare down at Allan. He considered him for a long moment, his face unreadable, then nudged Allan’s still smoking arm with one foot.

  “Perhaps you’ll make a Dog after all, Pup.”

  Three

  THE ROOM FULL OF DOGS, Wielders, and assorted servants and dignitaries stilled when the double doors that had been opened wide the night before to allow the guests into the hall were flung back by Baron Arent Pallentor. He paused in the entrance, accompanied by Daedallen, captain of the Dogs, and Prime Wielder Augustus. The Baron’s eyes swept the room once, passing over Allan without hesitation, settling on one of the numerous higher-ranking Dogs in the center of the windows where the charred remains of the Kormanley priest still lay. As the Baron strode forward, flanked by Daedallen and Augustus, Allan shifted forward, but Hagger’s hand closed tight on his wrist. Allan winced. His skin was raw from the burns he’d received trying to subdue the priest. His uniform had protected most of his body from serious damage, but his face and hands had been exposed. As he grimaced, he could feel the tightness of the skin beneath his jaw and across his left cheek. The healer that had been called had rubbed in some type of unguent that would help, but he’d said there would be scarring. Allan’s hands had fared slightly better.