Against that,Ulamir said faintly,I cannot protect you for long.
“I know,” she replied, watching Thyran, saving her strength. The air near him started to flicker orange-gray. His one good eye was fixed on her chest. She doubted he was appreciating her figure.
If Vivian had been certain it would work, she’d have used her lethal blessing. Gods knew Thyran had been amply hurt—but he hadn’t died of it. He could have wards, and if the spell didn’t kill him or leave him unable to fight, Vivian would be left defenseless.
So she kept Ulamir in reserve, and he didn’t suggest otherwise. She shifted around Thyran, staying on the defensive, aware of the power he was gathering as well as how long the two of them had been bathed in light. Their shadows stretched, distorted, on the shining glass below them.
Thyran stabbed a finger outward just as the world went dark again.
Vivian dropped, deliberately this time, flattening herself against the ground. She listened as the spell went over her head, then sprang to her feet.
The pattern began again: strike, dodge, attack, retreat, every move in either pitch blackness or bright glare, with the mirrors sending the light back to blind the unwary. Vivian got another scratch in, this one directly above Thyran’s hip. A little while afterward, a burst of pure pain tore through one of her legs for a few seconds as she failed to evade a spell and Ulamir blocked the worst of it.
She couldn’t win. She and Ulamir both knew that. Thyran was not one of his minions, whose stores of power had been relatively limited. There was no outlasting this man, except in one sense, and that had nothing to do with anybody currently in the fight.
So when Vivian saw Thyran look past her toward Olvir, she broke her own rule and talked during a battle.
“You’re losing, aren’t you?” With satisfaction, she saw him turn his full attention back toward her. The single eye narrowed. Vivian continued, circling sharklike around him. “That was why you summoned the storms last time. You weren’t confident in your army. I wouldn’t have been either. And that’s why you did it now.”
“No matter,” he rasped at her. “A tool is a tool.”
Vivian shrugged. “An ineffective one.”
He held up his melted hand.Earthquake, said Ulamir, and Vivian jumped into the air a second before the ground where she’d been standing shook, then split. Another too-regular crack shivered through the mirrors, this one wider than the others, but she landed easily out of range.
“You killed some of us,” she said, taking a step toward Thyran. “Many, I’ll grant. But we survived. We rebuilt, and the ones who died left their marks before they went to Letar. They didn’t know that was what they were doing, maybe, but they accomplished it anyhow. And now we live because they left caves, or we learn because they told stories, and the seeds that the wind carried have become trees to hold it back.”
Thyran lashed out with more grayish fire. “Amrischeated,” he snarled as Vivian scrambled away from the blow. “It won’t work this time.”
The power raked down her side, a ladder of pain that Ulamir could only partially shield. Vivian felt it eating into her arm, saw her skin ripple and bleed.
She caught her breath, looked up at Thyran, and said, “Then we’ll find another method. We’ve known what you are for a hundred years. You can’t surprise us any longer, you stupid, petty little man—and neither can your stupid, petty little god.”
Fury split Thyran’s jaws and creased what skin he had. He gave it physical form with a gesture, sending a barely visible ripple through the air toward Vivian, who tried to spin away again.
It was Thyran’s blood that hindered her, slick on the surface of the mirror. She didn’t fall, she mostly evaded the spell, but in catching her balance, she was a few seconds slow with her right leg.
That was enough. Vivian saw Ulamir’s light flicker around her, fending off the very worst, and heard his anguished mental cry as he came to the last of his strength. Then agony consumed her as her leg broke from the inside out in half a dozen places.
Vivian had the presence of mind to bite down on her scream. Her teeth drew blood when they sank into her lower lip, but they trapped her cry, and the pain served as some feeble balance to the overwhelming anguish spreading through her leg. That equilibrium let her pull herself onto her left knee and hold Ulamir up in front of her.
She couldn’t die on her feet any longer, but she’d come as close as she could.
Chapter 40
The splintering was so profound that Olvir briefly forgot who and where he was.
Impressions came to him, flashing like the bursts of light in the outside world: the knife in a pool of blood, a scream so full of pain and rage that human ears couldn’t have withstood hearing it, and a dark-haired woman who threw herself at a blond man, grabbing for his throat. The two of them appeared more solid than the ground where they fought. Grass and earth faded as the gods struck it. Other shapes, less constant ones, took their place.
He was watching from the outside now, not only as Olvir but as the fragment itself. That was another break, one that hurt the heart as badly as the shifting landscape hurt the mind. In the second when he’d raised the knife, Gizath had cast aside the part of him that might have been better. It lay invisible, bleeding in its own way.
Olvir called to it.
The voice of his soul was quiet compared to what the fragment had lost, but it was there, and Tinival’s will was behind it. From the moment of heartbreak eons past, the power responded, joining the imperfect version that had taken form in Olvir. United, they filled him.
And having seen the world shatter, he could now figure out how to fix it.
There, in the present, Vivian knelt, holding Ulamir up in one last and lovely gesture of defiance as Thyran gathered force to strike the death blow. Olvir sensed her pain and ached to set it right but turned his attention to the warlord’s ravening soul.
