The Whitefire Crossing - By Courtney Schafer Page 0,121
to release it.
A lance of power speared into his mind with the force of a catapulting boulder. The shock dispelled the haze of disconnection enveloping Kiran. He gasped, abruptly aware of the sweat soaking his body, of Simon’s fiercely intent face hovering over his own.
And beside Simon, Iannis was contorted in agony, her wrist clamped in Simon’s hand. Simon was stealing her life, fashioning her ikilhia into a battering ram to smash through Kiran’s maze to his true memories beyond.
Simon’s blows shook Kiran to the core. Desperately, he held his focus. If he continued to resist, Iannis would die...but surely her life was an acceptable sacrifice, given the stakes? This wasn’t like Ruslan’s avalanche, where hundreds of innocents would have died if he’d chosen his safety over theirs—or even like Dev on the cliff. This woman was no ally of his. She’d shown no hint of compassion for his plight, and she was old, nearing a natural death...
If you let someone die to protect this memory, of all memories, then you betray everything I believed in. Alisa shimmered into existence beside Kiran’s focus sigil, her amber eyes accusing. Killing for your own gain is wrong—or did you lie, when you told Ruslan that? Are you truly the murderer he desired you to be?
Iannis’s breath was faltering, her face waxen. Power hammered Kiran’s mental walls.
I’m not a murderer, Kiran told Alisa. With a silent cry of mingled defiance and regret, he let the sigil blur into nothingness.
Simon’s presence burst from the dissolving maze, rifling through Kiran’s mind with chill, eager fingers. Memory welled up to drown him.
Kiran stood in darkness, his sight and hearing still cut off by Ruslan’s spell. Magic twined around his body, making his nerves prickle and the hairs on his arms stand on end. So much power! He’d never felt anything so strong before.
Hands lifted the fabric off his eyes. Abruptly, his vision cleared, though the world remained silent.
A staggeringly complex set of channels had been inscribed on the workroom floor, hundreds of silver lines twisting over and around each other to spiral inward to the center where he stood. The lines closest to him already burned with a sullen red glow, full of energy. Mikail stood in the channeler’s position on the far side of the pattern, his hands extended and his eyes shut. He was completely intent, so still he might have been carved from marble. Kiran couldn’t see the pattern’s anchor stone, his view blocked by Ruslan in front of him, but he knew the anchor must be massive indeed for a spell requiring so much power.
Ruslan dipped a needle-fine brush into a silver bowl of blood and traced sigils on Kiran’s forehead and arms. Kiran didn’t twitch, his muscles locked in place by the power coiling around him. Ruslan stepped back a pace, careful to avoid the channel lines, and studied his work. He nodded, satisfied, and stepped in close once more, this time opening the front of Kiran’s robe.
He drew a silver dagger, wet it in the blood, and cut a sigil into the skin over Kiran’s heart. It hurt, but Kiran kept his gaze steady as Ruslan worked. Ruslan smiled at him approvingly, and lifted the bowl of blood to Kiran’s lips.
Kiran drank. Underneath the warm, salty sliminess, magic traced fire down his throat. The power surrounding him flared up higher yet, pressing inward with a force that squeezed a gasp from his lungs.
Ruslan turned and moved aside, revealing the spell’s anchor point, an enormous chunk of glassy black onyx. And for an instant, Kiran’s mind refused to take in what he saw there.
It was Alisa. His beloved Alisa lying naked on the bloodstained stone, her wrists and ankles bound in silver chains, her tearstreaked face turned toward him. Her eyes were white-rimmed, her face drawn with fear, her lips shaping his name, over and over. As Ruslan crossed out of the maze of channels, Kiran’s sense of hearing returned.
“Kiran, help me! Please, Kiran—oh gods, why won’t you help—!” The ragged desperation in Alisa’s calls stabbed through his ears.
Kiran fought to move, to respond to her, to tell Ruslan there had been some terrible mistake. He’d known, of course he’d known that real magic involved blood and death, but Ruslan had always told him the easiest way was to use men sentenced as criminals by the merchant houses. “Thieves and murderers, they’d die for their crimes regardless. We merely give their deaths a purpose.”