CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
With a start the Dreamer Shard awakened in a cold sweat, the beads cooling upon the surface of her glimmersuit. She grunted in pain as she sat up in her cot and tried to recall where she was.
Of course. They were travelling by road back to Bar-Khos after finding their skud gone from Juno’s Ferry. She recalled that they had stopped for the night in a lonely wayhouse by the roadside, halfway to the city.
In the darkness of her tiny room she gritted her teeth and clamped an arm around her abdomen. The cramps were so bad now that fear washed through her for a moment, for there was no doubting the savagery of these pains. She had been vomiting blood on and off for a day now. In a mirror in her room, her eyes had looked yellow and bloodshot. The worm was slowly killing her. Soon she would have to think about getting it out of her body.
Not long now, she told herself for reassurance. We’re nearly back in the city.
All she needed to do was return quickly enough to confront Seech while her focus remained acute, finish him with powers she knew were approaching their apogee thanks to the sensee bark she’d been given by the strange, blue-eyed Longalla man at the council, and then she could be rid of it. If only she could hold on until then.
Shard thought about getting up and fixing herself something for the pains. But then she realized that her glimmersuit was tingling across her skin, pulsing to a particular rhythm.
One of her vigils was trying to alert her to something.
As easily as she commanded her muscles, Shard called up a column of glyphs in her vision, each pulsing in and out of existence. Quickly she scanned through them until she saw what she was looking for.
Ah!
After all this time of doubting, one of the vigils she had lain around General Creed had finally been tripped.
In excited haste Shard cast the blanket from her naked body and swung her legs to the ground, warmed by the second skin that was her glimmersuit. In her mind she selected the glyph that was pulsing faster than the rest of them and closed her eyes, slipping free of her body and its discomforts.
She found herself floating in the darkened bed chamber of General Creed.
Easy now.
There – a shell of light dancing in the blackness over the sleeping form of the Lord Protector. A disembodied intruder, betraying himself without knowing it in a gentle halo of light, his aura unique to him alone, unmistakable.
Tabor Seech.
Back in the waking world, the scarring of her face itched from the immediacy of the man.
Carefully Shard whispered her tree of offensive glyphs into creation around the left edge of her vision, and then her defensive ones too along the opposite side, running through her head the order in which she would use them. They were symbols she had crafted herself, customized and refined like the glyphs she used within the Black Dream. With practised grace she swept them into different strings, preparing the order of her attack. Willed to life a pair of her fiercest barbed snares and filled them with burgeoning early life, making sure they were primed and ready to go.
Let’s have a peek at what he’s doing first.
Carefully she edged closer, as fully cloaked as she could maintain, close enough to see the glyphs that Seech was spinning out before him. The man had his own unique symbolisms too, impossible for her to read. But she could tell he was trying to crack into the Lord Protector’s sleeping mind.
She itched to launch everything she had at him, but something held her back. On a hunch, Shard raised the focus on her scanning glyph. Traced the faint web of energy sparking out from the light that was Seech, connecting with his glyphs and then wrapping around Creed himself. She increased the focus a little more, spotted a lone ghost glyph fixed to the body of Creed.
A leech, hooked up to the Khosian general!
Suddenly Seech’s spark danced upwards and swept around in a circle until he was close above her.
Shard? Is that you?
It was that damned sixth sense again, that connection between the two of them.
Do it now!
Shard launched her snares right at the dazzle of light, but it was too late.
A whisper of energy washed across her like ripples in water, and then Seech was gone.
She hung back, scanning around her, her suite of remaining glyphs throbbing like her fast-beating heart.
Next time, she promised fiercely.