Glyphbinder (33 page)

“Kara?” His daughter coughed up blood as she spoke in a soft, raspy voice. “I had wondered what her name was. I’m afraid she’s moved on, old man.”

“Torn!” Melyssa snatched Kara’s body and held her close, staring into her wide blue eyes. Xander gaped at them.

“Lyssa.” Torn/Kara touched her cheek with one bloody finger. “I told you we’d see each other again. I promised, didn’t I?”

Melyssa hugged Kara tight, tears streaming down her wrinkled cheeks. “Stop apologizing. You were never any good at it.”

Xander tried to understand what had happened, and when he did he felt a chill grip his bones. “Where’s Kara? Where is my daughter’s soul now?”

Kara’s head tilted to the archway. “In there. With the Mavoureen.”

“Then get her out of there!”

“Lyssa,” Torn said. “Help me stand.”

Xander searched for help, breathing hard, but they were alone here. All of Kara’s friends were still unconscious. The Five were gone. There was no one left to save Kara but the three of them.

“Where’s Cantrall?” Xander took Kara’s other arm. Together, he and Melyssa helped Kara’s ruined body stand.

“The Soulmage?” Torn coughed up more of Kara’s blood. “I banished him the moment I entered this body. Last I saw, his spirit was tumbling into the Underside.”

“Good. The bastard earned that. Now how do we get my daughter out of there?”

“Help me to the gates,” Torn said.

They did that. Torn could barely keep Kara’s ruined body upright, but Xander and Melyssa helped.

“She’s a clever one, your Kara. Put me down.”

Xander helped them kneel. With Melyssa and Xander supporting her body, Torn used Kara’s bloody fingers to scribe a dozen strange glyphs. As he did so, he sang words that were incomprehensible and terrifying. Xander felt those words tugging at his soul.

When Torn finished Kara’s body fell against Melyssa, coughing hard. Xander clenched his fists. They had to get his daughter back. They had to get her out of the Underside before her body expired.

“What now?” Xander demanded. “How do we open the gates?”

Melyssa sighed and stroked Kara’s bloody hair. “You didn’t.”

Xander glared at them. “Didn’t what?”

“No. Of course you did.” Melyssa almost smiled.

“What did he do, Melyssa? What did you both do?”

Torn spoke through Kara’s bloody lips. “Your daughter knew what was at stake. Our world. She knew once I was back on this side, I could ward the gate in a way that makes it impossible to ever open. The Mavoureen will never trouble this world again.”

Xander couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. “No.” He had failed his daughter again, failed Ona. Failed everyone.

“I’m so sorry.” Melyssa hugged Torn as Kara’s body gasped, dying in her arms. “But your daughter just saved the world.”

THE SMELL OF BURNING FLESH seared Kara’s nostrils. Pain ate through her as she realized that flesh was her own. The pain stopped. Her flesh healed over like it had never been burned.

Kara fell to her knees and coughed up blood, staring at strange new arms. They were thin and covered with scars. She wore no shirt. She was flat chested, male, and standing in the Underside.

Kara looked up. She stood on a flat, round chunk of hard gray earth, floating in a vortex of purple clouds. The demons she had only imagined were all around her. They looked like dozens of shadows made of nightmares and spikes.

The foremost shadow shifted and changed, collapsing its disparate parts into a single, solid form. Kara trembled as she recognized its tree trunk legs, its impossibly huge head and eyes, its dark, scaled skin. It was Balazel.

“Why do you stop?” Another shadow coalesced into an ape-like form with a misshapen head and glittering white teeth. Davazet. “Make him open the gates.”

“He can’t,” Balazel rumbled in a deep voice. “This is not Torn any longer. It’s someone else.”

Kara pushed Torn’s body to its feet, staring at dozens of new cuts and thousands of old ones. How long had they tortured him here? She scribed Hands of Life with both bloody fingers. She wanted to hurt them like they had hurt her great-grandfather.

“Impossible,” Balazel rumbled.

Kara threw out both hands, tossing jagged icicles. They embedded themselves in Balazel’s glowing eyes. The great demon stumbled back, clutching its face and howling.

Davazet leapt at her, snarling. Kara smashed it to the earth with a Hand of Land she scribed so fast she didn’t realize she was doing it. Davazet pushed up, snarling, and then Kara scribed a Finger of Fire longer and hotter than any she had ever felt.

It slashed out like a whip and sliced Davazet’s legs clean off. The Mavoureen tumbled and blew apart, bursting back into a cluster of shadowy spikes. Those spikes shrieked and scattered in all directions. Running away, with the rest of them.

Kara could scarcely comprehend the awesome power inside Torn’s body. Only Balazel remained, crawling away. Kara stormed after it, grabbed the back of its massive head, and slammed it into the earth. Balazel’s cry shook the world around her.

“Who are you?” Balazel gasped as she forced its giant head back up. “How can you glyph without opening the gate?”

Kara looked behind her. There, a stone arch holding two oak gates sprouted from the middle of the flat gray earth, absent any form of support or wall. A thick mess of intertwined blood glyphs grew across each gate and bound them together.

Kara finally understood why the demons had been able to torture Torn so mercilessly. Her great-grandfather had used all of his strength to close the gates of Terras, first by scribing his glyphs, then by holding them shut. As she saw the wounds she had inflicted on Balazel melting away, she knew why Torn had never bothered fighting. No one could kill Mavoureen here.

“The gate is closed,” Kara said. “Torn is on the other side, in my body, and he’s reinforced the glyphs here with glyphs there.” She slammed Balazel’s giant head into the earth as hard as she could. “You’re never going to open those gates again.”

Balazel pushed up. Despite Kara’s best efforts, she could not stop it. She stood and backed safely out of the demon’s massive reach, scribing two more Hands of Land.

“Wait.” Balazel raised its hands. “I yield.”

Kara bit back disbelief. “You
yield?
”

“If what you say is true, there is no longer any point in fighting.” Balazel’s giant red eyes had already healed as it bared long teeth. “You stand now in the Underside. There is no permanent death here. Fighting accomplishes naught but futile pain.”

“Pain?” Kara thought about the seventy years this terrible demon had spent inflicting tortures on Torn and others. People like Aryn Locke. “Right. Futile. There’s really no point.”

She slammed both Hands of Land into either side of Balazel’s massive head, crushing it like a giant watermelon. Even as its body collapsed, twitching, she lifted it with Fingers of Breath. She raised jagged spikes from the gray earth and impaled the demon.

“Let’s see you regenerate out of
that
.” Hands and jaw both clenched, Kara strode back to the closed gates of Terras. Was she truly trapped here?

Torn’s blood glyphs pulsed with power. Although she would never see her family or the Five Provinces again, Kara felt a smile on her strange new face. She had done it. She had stopped the Mavoureen. Her world was safe.

Kara took one more look at the realm that would now be her home for as long as she existed. There was no true ground in the Underside. It was a void of purple, roiling clouds. Every so often, a tormented scream tore from one cloud or the other.

The only stable ground were small, floating islands of flat brown earth. They looked like chunks ripped out of the driest deserts in the Five Provinces. There were a dozen such islands in view now, and Kara wondered how she would reach them.

Then she remembered Torn’s body could fly.

She scribed a single Hand of Breath and lifted herself. The effort was as easy as breathing. She glided across the void to the nearest island, then the next, then the one after that. On that island she found a blood-covered man sitting chained to the earth. She descended and stared. His eyes were closed.

He had blond hair and two missing front teeth. He wore boiled leather with a lion crest. Kara had seen him before — no, Sera had seen him. He was Tarel Halen, the Mynt scout Jyllith fed to Davazet. His soul had come here after Jyllith glyphed him.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Kara said quietly.

Tarel’s eyes fluttered open. “Again?”

“I’m not here to hurt you.”

“That’s what they all say.” He closed his eyes and lowered his head. “Get on with it.” He trembled.

Kara scribed a Finger of Heat, melting the chains that bound him. She walked over and pulled him to his feet. He squirmed in her grip.

“Please!” He thrashed and cried. “Don’t hurt me!”

“Listen!” She pulled him close. “I’m not Mavoureen! I’m human!”

Tarel gaped at her. “You can’t be. You’re not real.”

“I am. So are you. You’re also dead.” She felt a lump in her throat as she stared at him. “I’m so very sorry.”

“Dead?” Tarel whispered.

“Jyllith fed you to the Mavoureen. Is that what sent you here?”

Tarel looked around, at roiling purple clouds and floating gray rocks. “I remember.” He took a breath. “That woman scribed something terrible on my chest. It ripped me apart, and then I came here. Where are we?”

“The Underside.”

“Can you get us out of here?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

Tarel nodded. He breathed. “Then end me.”

Kara stared at him. “What?”

“I can’t endure these tortures. I’ll take oblivion over that.”

“You can’t ask me to do that!”

“Please! Kill me!” He gripped her arms.

“I don’t know how.” Kara broke away. “But I’ll find some way to end your pain. I swear it.” She looked around, pondered, and came to a decision. “Tarel, I’m going to chain you back up.”

“What?” His face paled.

“How often do they torture you?”

“I don’t know. I’m not awake until they do.”

“Then we’ll wait until they come again.”

“You can’t let them hurt me!”

“I won’t. When they get here, I’m going to hurt them.”

He tried to run then, so she put him to sleep and reformed the chains that held him tight. She hated herself for doing that, for using him like this, but what choice did she have? She couldn’t let the Mavoureen continue to torture him. She scribed a simple astral glyph to hide herself and waited. She waited for some time.

At last a ball of black spikes zipped into view. It approached the island rapidly, growing in size. It landed and formed into a six-legged insect demon with giant mandibles. It resembled a dung beetle with spikes growing out of its shell. Its eyes glowed yellow.

Tarel woke and shrieked.

“Tarel.” The demon chittered. “It is a new morning.”

“Please don’t!” Tarel screamed. “Don’t—”

Kara slammed the beetle demon onto its back with a Hand of Breath, pinning it down with another one. She ground her teeth.

Tarel gaped at her. “You’re real!”

“I am.” Kara crushed the demon into the earth as it chittered angrily. “Stop that. Shut up. What’s your name?”

“How are you doing this?” the Mavoureen demanded.

Kara gripped one of its legs and snapped it off. The demon howled and writhed. She tossed the leg away and gripped another one, bending it as she had the first.

“I’m not sure you heard me. Who are you?”

“Aludan!”

“Where are your masters, Aludan?”

“In the Great Home! The fortress of Paymon the Patriarch!”

“Where’s that?”

“The Great Gray Steppes!”

Kara shook her head. The geography here meant little to her, but she had another way to find the Mavoureen. She snapped off another of Aludan’s legs.

“Stop!” it screamed. “Please!”

“You have four more legs.”

“Yes!”

“You’re going to lead me to this Great Home.”

“Lead you to—”

“Or I’m going to snap
all
your legs off.”

“Yes.” Aludan writhed, still trapped by her Hands of Breath. “I will take you to Paymon. Follow me. I will lead you there.”

“Tarel.” Kara glanced at him. “You’re coming with me.” She lifted them both in a thick Hand of Breath and let Aludan go. It darted off like a frightened fish, reforming into a ball of jagged spikes.

Tarel clung to Kara as they slid through the Underside after Aludan, following easily. Keeping pace.

“Who are you?” Tarel whispered.

Kara huffed. “I’m Torn, High Protector.”

Tarel didn’t ask any questions after that.

Kara had never truly known what happened to the souls the Mavoureen devoured. No mage did. Souls seemed to exist after the demons ate them, shadows of the people they had been when alive. Here they could be tortured endlessly. Like Aryn Locke.