darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,65
keep ahead of them for long, but I also knew that I didn’t have to. I just had to stay ahead of them long enough to—
CRACKOOOM!
How do you describe it when the world comes apart around you? When a dozen things all happen at once? When you see some, and only hear about others later? This is the dilemma of the storyteller, whether they live the moment or only tell it later.
Let me begin with the sound of shattering stone, with a great wall of falling rock that rolled past behind me like a waterfall gone mad—noise and dust and the world’s ending. My people had outdone themselves almost to all of our ruin. A curtain of stone three feet thick and thirty feet tall let go along a front a hundred feet long. It hit the trail right behind me and obliterated it along with the dead there as well as those both above and below. In that, my plan succeeded beyond my wildest dreams when nearly all the risen were ground into paste by the avalanche.
But it failed, too. None of us had anticipated the sheer amount of destruction it would bring, nor what that would mean to the line of my people clinging to the rock face above the fall. That whole section of mountain flexed with the sudden change in the weight of stone. Faran and Jax and Kumi managed to hold on, if only barely.
Javan and Siri could not. Kelos and Altia, well . . . Let me take the four of them one at a time.
Siri first, as she is dearest to me. Siri felt her one-handed grip slipping, and anticipated what was to come. She flung herself up and out, kicking off the wall and spinning wings of shadow. Making the choice to do it intentionally gave her the extra height and time she needed to turn and wheel neatly. Her sail-jump carried her around and down to land a few hundred yards farther along the trail as cleanly as if she’d planned it from the start. And that is Siri to a tee.
Javan’s fall was less graceful. He tried to hang on, but could not. He would have died had not Thiess realized what was happening before his partner did and acted to save them both. Thiess was one of the great gliders among the Shades; it was part of his reason for assuming the owl’s form as his use-shape. Javan’s sail-jump was nowhere near as neat as Siri’s, but he managed to glide down and around to a small ledge a hundred or so feet below the trail where Siri had landed. From there it was only a matter of climbing up to rejoin us.
Kelos? Kelos had a good enough grip to hang on if he chose, but he realized what was happening as quickly as Siri did and he made a different choice. When he explained it to me later, he said it this way: “I saw that the whole section of the mountain was coming apart, and I realized what it meant for you with the dead only inches behind you. So, I decided to fall upon them like lightning from above. The only thing I regret is calling out your name when I leaped—I fear that’s what made up Altia’s mind.”
Altia. Oh, my poor girl. I owe you my life and I will never have the opportunity to repay you. Altia’s magical power was everything that Jax had claimed and more. She was also smart and quick on the uptake and she had nerves of steel under that naïve front—or so I must assume. Because she saw what Kelos was up to, and also that it wouldn’t be enough. Not if the mountain fell on me, too. So, she let go of the wall, and she rode the avalanche down, using that enormous power of magic to steer the fall away from me and from Kelos, at the cost of her own life.
Jax watched the whole thing, watched as her favorite student chose to save my life at the cost of her own. There wasn’t a thing she could do to stop it. When she told me about it later, her voice broke as she described the power and control it had taken for Altia to turn that gigantic mass of stone away from us . . . and Jax’s voice never breaks. I do not think she will ever forgive me for what happened there, though she