The torch on the pommel, even in its protective casing, was no match for the sudden gust of wind; it flickered wildly and went out. The moon faded in and out of the swift-moving clouds, and the grass bent ahead of the wind in dark waves, making the whole hil side shimmer. She felt like a figure from legend, an avenging goddess. A heroine who would conquer death itself.
And who might ride like this again tomorrow, with her sister at her side.
No one but Kestin knew where she was going, or what she was doing, or how the world would change tonight. She pushed the horse forward recklessly, her breath whistling past her into the wind they made. Power and possibility thrummed through her, a heady feeling that made the blood sing in her body.
It took her a few false tries to find the cave entrance, in a darkness that confounded her sunlit memories; and a few more to retrace her steps through the caves she had last walked in the company of hostile ghosts. Now they were echoingly empty, hol ow and silent.
When her relit torch final y showed her the glint of metal dust on the rocky ground, her whole body was tense with impatience. It had taken her longer than she had thought it would. She fol owed the sparse trail to the spot where the Defender had confronted them.
Clarisse had taken them straight to him, so she had known where he would be. It must be close to the spel .
That was as far as her thinking had taken her. Somehow she had assumed the source of the spel would be evident once she got here; but as she turned around, the light of the torch il uminating patches of rock, she saw nothing she hadn’t seen last time. The dark passageway from which she had come; the clustered stalagmites; the bare patch of rock, deep in shadow, where the Defender had been . . .
Been what? She remembered suddenly how the Defender’s voice had come from behind them, startling even Clarisse. If he had been waiting for them, he should have been in front of them. So what had he been doing there? Darri frowned, picked up a loose rock, and threw it at the shadows.
It dropped right through the bare ground, leaving behind a faint ripple. After several seconds, Darri heard a thud far below.
The ground was stil and apparently solid. Darri tried not to imagine what would have happened if she had just walked straight onto it. She reached for a thin stalagmite, broke it of with a snap, and heaved with al her strength.
The crash below was much louder this time, the ripples more violent. Darri found an already broken stone, thicker and heavier than she could have wrenched of herself, and threw that, too. She was looking for another when the ground undulated violently and was gone.
Darri cautiously approached the edge of what turned out to be a craggy plateau, the edge of a sheer rock face at least forty feet high. She put the torch down. Below, the rocks she had thrown lay smashed into jagged pieces on the bare earth. The clif face below her was unnatural y smooth, with not a single crevice or ledge she might use to climb down. Across from her, the wal s were covered by a cascade of white rock, like a waterfal frozen in time. It drew her eyes down, to where spray should have crashed, far down below. . . .
Set in stone and earth. A cluster of stalagmites grew from the ground and from the wal , and met together in a swirl of colored rock, coiled together so tightly she couldn’t tel where one began and the other ended. The pink and red and mot led gray were twisted together, both beautiful and obscene. There was something distorted about it, connecting dif erent coils of rock in ways that didn’t make sense and that her eyes couldn’t fol ow. At first glance, its beauty took her breath away; after a few seconds, Darri felt nausea spiraling through her fascination. But it looked so much like she could make sense of it, if she just stared hard enough. . . .
“Look away,” Clarisse said.
Darri shrieked and turned. For a moment she could see nothing but the afterimages of coiling lines and serpentine rocks. She blinked hard, and her vision cleared. Clarisse stood a few yards behind her, her hair blowing about her face in a nonexistent wind.
“Hypnotic, isn’t it?” she said. “You would have stared at it until you died of thirst. It’s the spel ’s last defense.”
Darri couldn’t stop the shudder that rol ed through her. She turned her back on Clarisse, keeping her eyes averted from the structure while she leaned over the edge of the clif . “Thank you for warning me. Should I assume that you’re here to help?”
Clarisse laughed. “You should assume I don’t have the patience to wait for you to starve to death.” She took one step forward, leaned back slightly, and kicked hard at the smal of Darri’s back.
It was intended to send Darri over the edge, but Darri had been ready for an at ack. She ducked, and Clarisse’s foot skimmed along her back—painful y, but not hard enough to throw her of -balance. She stepped backward under the kick, grabbed Clarisse’s leg, and yanked it up, using Clarisse’s own momentum to throw the ghost forward. Clarisse flailed, screeched, and went tumbling into the cavern below.
After only a second she shot back up, her hair writhing around her shoulders, her eyes spit ing green fire.
Literal y. She looked like a demon, a creature of nightmares, but Darri wasn’t afraid. Her blood pounded through her.
through her.
Clarisse snarled, revealing pointed teeth, and flew through the air faster than any living person could have moved. Darri had no time to react before the dead girl hit her in the chest, and she found herself flying backward.
She stretched her body out instinctively, grasping desperately for something—anything—to keep her from slamming into the far wal . One of her outstretched arms hit a cluster of stalagmites; the rest of her crashed against the rock-strewn floor, skidding diagonal y as the impact threw her sideways. For a moment, half- stunned on the floor, her arm a vise of pain, she couldn’t move.
Then she heard Clarisse say, “Wel , that was disappointingly easy,” and she leaped to her feet. Her arm ached, but when she used it to push herself of the ground, it worked; so she shoved the pain aside, shoved the fear aside, and drew herself up.
The stitches of her sleeves were tightly woven, but they were just thread. With several violent yanks, she tore them from her gown and let them flut er to the ground, leaving her arms bare and unhindered. She drew her silver dagger and crouched.
“How quaint,” Clarisse said, and flew straight up into the air.
She probably expected Darri to run, but Darri had seen enough falcon kil s to know how quickly a swoop from above could outdistance a ground run. She flipped the dagger and threw it.
Clarisse dodged to the side. The blade hit the ceiling above her and plummeted. Darri ran for it, and Clarisse plunged down on her, turning solid as she went. They col ided a few yards from where the dagger lay, and Darri turned on impact, so that she fel on her back instead of her hands and knees. From that position, it was the work of a second to flip them over so that Clarisse was pinned beneath her.
Clarisse laughed in her face. “I could turn to mist and float right up through you, you know.”
“Then do it.” Darri tightened her grip on the seemingly solid wrists.
“So you can grab the dagger in the meantime?” Clarisse went translucent, but remained where she was, so that Darri’s hands went through her arms and hit the stone floor.
Darri lunged for the weapon; but she had to gather her feet under her first, and Clarisse didn’t. The ghost simply lifted up of the floor and flew sideways, spinning as she went, her gown twirling around her. One slipper-clad foot hit Darri’s already injured arm, and Darri yelped in pain and fel back—but not before she had reached out with her other hand, grabbed Clarisse’s hair, and yanked.
Clarisse faded at once, her hair turning to mist in Darri’s hand. But Darri’s yank had already jerked her of balance, away from the dagger. Darri rol ed across the rocky ground and closed her fingers around the hilt a moment before Clarisse rammed into her.
By now Darri had figured out that when Clarisse was solid, she was vulnerable. She struck with the dagger, put ing al her strength into it, and felt a surge of triumph as the silver blade slid into flesh.
But she must have missed—somehow—because next thing she knew Clarisse was standing over her, apparently unharmed, and laughing. The laugh enraged Darri. She rol ed backward and used her momentum to leap forward onto her feet, landing right in front of Clarisse.
“I apologize,” Clarisse said merrily. “But this is just so fun. And you stil haven’t realized that this bat le is not winnable.”
“It seems winnable to me,” Darri snarled. “You’re not very good at fighting.”
That was designed to enrage Clarisse, but it didn’t work; instead, Clarisse laughed harder. “It’s true. I had other skil s. Fighting wasn’t something I ever had to learn.”
“Too bad for you,” Darri said grimly.
Clarisse lifted her eyebrows. “It doesn’t mat er; I thought I had demonstrated that. Do you real y think you can fight a ghost?”
She lunged at Darri, who crouched, the hilt reassuringly heavy in her palm; but Clarisse surprised her by ducking low, going flat, and shooting forward right above the ground so that her arms went easily around Darri’s legs. No living person could have made that move, and Darri had no idea how to defend herself against it. She flew backward, her head hit ing the ground with a crack. The dagger flew out of her hand. Dimly, she heard it clat er on stone.
She rol ed to her feet, blinking away tears of pain, trying to think. Clarisse was right. How could she fight someone who could fly, who could move without fighting the pul of the earth?
Clarisse landed near the dagger. She lifted her eyebrows at Darri, grinned gleeful y, and used one foot to rol a stone over the blade.
The answer was obvious: she couldn’t fight. Instead Darri turned, almost blindly, to the precipice. There had to be a way down, something she hadn’t seen before; something she could find before Clarisse stopped her.
There was nothing she could do but try. Just run, and hope.
She lunged forward, and rammed headlong into a plate of iron.
Pain reverberated through her face and head, and for a moment she couldn’t see. Then her vision cleared and she gaped at the Guardian standing in front of her, right at the edge of the precipice, his eyeholes black and empty in his scratched-up mask. There was, she thought, a slight dent in his iron breastplate.
“My brother is dead,” the Guardian said.
Darri remembered the scream, raw and anguished, that had fol owed her down the corridor. She hesitated for a moment. Then she said, “So is my sister,” and dodged around him.
for a moment. Then she said, “So is my sister,” and dodged around him.
The Guardian grabbed her arm. His iron fingers dug into her skin, so painful y she bit her lip on a scream.
“Did you kil him?”
“I was with you,” Darri gasped, then realized that he wasn’t speaking to her. She twisted in his grasp and fol owed his gaze.
Clarisse’s form shimmered and changed, and then wasn’t there at al . A silver fog, shot through with flashes of light, coiled upward within the dark cave.
“I did,” her voice whispered, from within the fog. “I am the Defender now. Shal I cal you Brother?”
“I wouldn’t advise it,” the Guardian snarled, and let go of Darri’s arm. It felt numb, as if he had compressed her very bone; the imprints of his fingers were deep and white on her brown skin.
The Guardian reached up and, with one smooth movement, drew his silver sword. The blade flashed inches from Darri’s face as he held it in front of him. “That was a mistake.”
The fog swirled lazily. “Should I pretend to be afraid?”
“You should be afraid.” The Guardian took one step toward her. “Even my brother wouldn’t fight me.”
“And why do you think that was? Because he was afraid of you? Because he loved you?” The Guardian went very stil , and the fog writhed with Clarisse’s laughter. “You did think that, didn’t you? That there was stil feeling left between you, even after he had been dead for hundreds of years? He didn’t kil you for one reason only: because the magic that feeds the spel is channeled through your mind. If you died, there would be no new ghosts for him to add to his host, no way for the dead to eventual y outnumber the living. You are alive because you were useful to him, and for no other reason.”