The Whitefire Crossing - By Courtney Schafer Page 0,167

bring death to innocents. Mindburning might be as good a punishment as any for the agonies Alisa had endured, and the lives he’d stolen at the convoy.

He braced for a mage to approach him, memories of Simon and his silver knife churning in his head. Instead, Varellian and the other mage councilor stopped just beyond the four mages already surrounding him. Up in the galleries, some twenty mages remained, evenly spaced around the rails.

“Do not speak,” Varellian said. “When the ritual begins, drop your barriers.”

Kiran glanced around, confused. No channel lines marked the floor. Without them, surely the Alathians would need blood or physical contact to work the spell?

A low-voiced, droning chant started up in the galleries. It began simply, in unison, but soon voices diverged, following ever more complex tonal patterns. All around Kiran’s feet, sigils lit with a soft, ethereal glow far different than the harsh fire of activated channel lines.

Gradually, so gradually that at first he thought he imagined it, power rose to coil around him. The song above continued, wordless but compelling.

Realization dawned. The Alathians were patterning the spell with sound rather than channel lines. Instead of earth power, the Alathians used their own ikilhia, each person contributing a small piece harmonized precisely to all the others. The technique was brilliant, yet he couldn’t fathom how so many mages could mesh so well and deeply with each other. It had taken him years to learn to join minds properly with only one other at a time.

Magic pressed softly but insistently against Kiran’s barriers. He came to himself with a start, fear burying curiosity. Every instinct screamed danger. He gathered his courage and dropped his barriers, one by one.

The Alathians flooded in. They swept through his memories, searching, digging. Flashes overwhelmed him: Ruslan, furious at the border; Dev, blood on his mouth as he grinned; Simon, mocking him as he lay helpless; Pello’s sharp, cold eyes as Kiran ate the drugged food; Lizaveta pressing their cut hands together; Mikail, shouting at him as Kiran turned his face to the wall; Alisa, love shining in her eyes, her mouth so sweet and tender on his.

He struggled, drowning, but the Alathians forged on, further back: Ruslan, stroking a hand through Kiran’s hair in casual affection as he traced out a pattern; Mikail, grinning at him in excitement when they cast their first seventh-level spell; Lizaveta, cuddling him in her lap. They went all the way back to his first memory, of Ruslan kneeling before him, his hands on Kiran’s small shoulders, telling him he was a very lucky boy and would be part of Ruslan’s family now.

The Alathians tried to go further still, only to come up against the wall that had long blocked Kiran from any earlier memories. They fought to breach it, pushing until he cried out in pain, but the wall held firm. At last they retreated and he thought the ordeal would be over—until their magic swelled, forcing its way deep within to build a solid, shining cage around the fire of his ikilhia.

He fought in earnest then, unable to help himself, tearing at the barrier. But his effort came too late to prevent their casting. The cage shrank in on itself, inexorably crushing his ikilhia into an ever-tighter knot. He gasped for air that would not come, waves of fiery agony pulsing through him. His last thought as his resistance failed was of Alisa, straddling the guardwall of the Alton Tower with her arms spread wide to the setting sun, her eyes shut and her voice lifted in a chanted lament as the winter wind tore at her hair.

***

(Dev)

“What’s the gods-damned Council doing now?” I demanded of Lena for the tenth time. Stuck in a locked room with nothing to stare at but gray stone, two ancient wooden chairs, and Lena’s solemn face, my nerves buzzed like a swarm of angry stinkwasps.

Lena gave a faint, put-upon sigh. “I told you, the ritual takes time. Our magic is different from what you see in Ninavel. Less showy and more subtle.”

“You mean, slow as a hamstrung dune tortoise,” I muttered. Simon had only needed minutes with Pello to search his mind. Then again, apparently he hadn’t done such a great job. But either the Council was examining every one of Kiran’s memories ten times over...or their spellwork held a darker purpose, for all Lena’s insistence otherwise.

Damn it, I couldn’t even pace to pass the time. After I’d tried that and nearly fallen flat on my face,