Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4)

Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4) Page 389

She had other names for the stars.

“Heed me, that which opens in the east.

Heed me, that which closes in the west.”

Did he hear other voices, an echo of her own, singing along the gleaming spell, tangled in the threads of light woven through the stone loom?

“Let the shaman’s beacon rise as our weaving rises.

Answer our call, Fat One.”

As she wove, she wept. He saw it, then, the cluster of seven stars he knew as the Crown of Stars but which she called the Shaman’s Headdress. As it rose in the east, she caught its light in her mirror. That light tangled around him, and he grew so dizzy that he would have fallen over if the hounds had not shouldered under him to hold him up. Above, stars wheeled slowly, ascending out of the east, climbing, climbing, until he realized that the spell had woven around him as well, that they were caught inside it as time passed, as the night wheeled forward from dusk to midnight. The Shaman’s Headdress crept up the sky. The battle raged on, torches blazing along the walls, the cries of the wounded muffled by the throbbing ache in his temple where a bruise swelled. A child screamed, sobbing frantically.

“Let what we have woven come loose. Let each on our place hold the pattern.”

She sang their names, her voice unbearably beautiful as it echoed along the glittering threads of the spell. “Spits-last. Falling-down. Adica. Hehoyanah. Brightness-Hears-Me. Two Fingers. Shuashaana!”

It was midnight. The Dragon rose in the east, and in its wings rose Jedu, the Angel of War, near to the pale rose star of the ancient one, the Red Sage, known as Aturna. The Lady of Plenty, brilliant Mok, set in the west as the Penitent laid down his heavy burden, touching the horizon.

The Crown of Stars reached the zenith, high overhead, crowning the heavens. Below the earth, unseen, the sun reached nadir.

“Let the weaving be complete!” she cried, her voice joined to six others, resounding, triumphant.

Light flashed in her antlers and ripped through her like lightning.

“Adica!” he screamed, leaping forward, but the hounds knocked him flat or maybe it was the ground beneath his feet shaking and shuddering that threw him down before he could reach her. Light exploded before his eyes. A howl of fear rose from the throats of the Cursed Ones. Their attack faltered and they broke, running.

But it was too late.

Magic tore the world asunder.

Earthquakes ripple across the land, but what is seen on the surface is nothing compared to the devastation left in their wake underground. Caverns collapse into rubble. Tunnels slam shut like bellows snapped tight. The magnificent cities of the goblinkin, hidden from human sight and therefore unknown and disregarded, vanish in cave-ins so massive that the land above is irrevocably altered. Rivers of molten fire pour in to burn away what survives.

Fire boils up under the sea, washing a wave of destruction over the vast whorled city beneath the waves, home of the merfolk. Where once they danced and sang to rhythms born out of the tides, corpses bob on the swells and sharks feed. Survivors flee in terror, leaving everything behind, until the earth heaves again like a fish thrashing in its death throes. The sea floor rises. Water pours away into cracks riven in the earth, down and down and down, meeting molten fire and spilling steam hissing and spitting into every crevice until the backwash disgorges steam and sizzling water back into the sea.

The caves in which Horn’s people have sheltered flood with steaming water. A storm of earth and debris buries Shu-Sha’s palace. Massive waves obliterate a string of peaceful villages along the shores of Falling-down’s island. Children scream helplessly for their parents as they flail in the surging water.

White fire spears up into the dragons which, launching into the sky in alarm, have barely gotten into the air above the fjall where Spits-last and his kinsfolk stand in the midst of their stone loom, one old wisewoman by each stone and the crippled sorcerer in the middle. Screaming rage and pain, the dragons plunge, but before they can reach the safety of the earth their hearts burst. Blood and viscera rain down on the humans desperately and uselessly taking shelter against the stones. The hail of scalding blood burns flesh into stone, melding them into one being.

A tsunami of sand buries the oasis where the desert people have camped, trees simply flattened under the blast of the wind. The lion women race ahead of the storm wave but, in the end, they, too, are buried beneath a mountain of sand. Gales scatter the tents of the Horse people, winds so strong that what is not flattened outright is flung heavenward and tossed roughly back to earth, so much fragile chaff. All the trees for leagues around Queens’ Grave erupt into flame, and White Deer villagers fall, dying, where arrows and war had spared them.