blue fire pushing through Cylene and along the conduit. Screaming and cursing, Keppia vanished from sight.
Amid the exhausted cheering, Lenares heard Mahudia speak. “Goodbye, child,” she said.
“Goodbye?” A cold premonition bit at the cosmographer and she suddenly found it difficult to stand. “Why goodbye?”
“If your sister is to live, Lenares, the conduit must remain open. Keppia no longer animates her body, after all. But if we leave the conduit open at this end, Keppia may return at any time to possess her anew. We can’t guard the conduit forever: the newly dead want to pass on. So I will wrap our conduit around Cylene’s, ever tighter, tighter”—the thin cord vibrated as she speaks—“until the merest trickle of magic flows down to Cylene.”
“Will you still be able to speak to me?”
But the question was wasted. She knew the answer already, knew she had but moments left with her mother.
“I am the conduit,” Mahudia said, her voice growing fainter. “You must let me go, beloved daughter, so I can make Cylene safe. Don’t weep, girl; you still have memories of me, and soon you will have your sister. She is special, Lenares, just like someone else I know.”
Don’t weep, she says. Lenares could do nothing but weep as she took the end of the tether linking her to Mahudia and held it loosely in her shaking hand. Lose a mother, gain a sister, overcome a god. The latter a great victory, and yet it felt so much like a defeat.
She opened her hand.
CHAPTER 13
THE LIMITS OF LOVE
NO ONE HAD THE ENERGY to take to the road the next day, or the one following. Smoky, haze-filled days, the weather humid, the air heavy, tiredness draped over their shoulders like a damp cloak. The travellers spent their time foraging for food, sleeping off their magic-induced weariness and trying to understand what had happened.
Lenares received more praise than she ought for the banishment of Keppia, but less sympathy than she deserved for the loss of Mahudia. None here, save Torve, had ever met the Chief Cosmographer, and most seemed to regard Lenares’ explanation of Mahudia’s role in Cylene’s rescue as some sort of made-up story, an attempt to avoid the limelight. Their behaviour made Lenares angry: her mother deserved unending praise for her brave sacrifice, but no one seemed to care.
They cared far more about reports that Umu knew what had happened to her brother. Lenares remembered the moment when Keppia had cried out for his sister’s help and had looked imploringly at the trees at the roadside. A few of those people who had remained on the open road, too frightened to follow Lenares back to the village and her confrontation with Keppia, reported seeing a small, rotund man limping through the trees. Their descriptions matched that of Conal, the Falthan priest.
So close, some said. We could have defeated them both in one day.
But the people who said this were not magicians, nor were they friends or relatives of the eight people who had died that afternoon, drained of their essenza by Keppia in his quest to free himself. They had no appreciation of the cost the battle had incurred, nor did they realise, according to Kannwar, just how lucky they were, how lucky they all were, that Umu had fled rather than attack.
“She did not accurately assess our condition,” the Undying Man had said. “Had she done so, she could have destroyed us all.”
“If she saw Keppia’s failure,” Moralye asked, her brows knotted in thought, “is she likely to try to force us into liberating her in similar fashion?”
“I think not,” the Undying Man had replied, as if conversation between himself and a Dhaurian scholar, his fiercest of enemies, was the most natural thing in the world. “She is likely to find another way. We need to recover our strength and confront her before she grows too strong.”
“What will she do in the meantime?”
“You know the answer to that, scholar. She will slaughter as many people as possible in an attempt to widen the hole in the world even further.”
“Such an action will yield unpredictable results,” Moralye commented. “Phemanderac taught us about the Wall of Time, and his thesis was that the Fountain of Life weakened it in and around Dona Mihst, meaning exposure to the eternal void lengthened the lives of those dwelling there. He argued there may not have been a simple correlation between exposure to the Water of Life and the age to which men lived.”