Of Fire and Night (27 page)

65

CESCA PERONI

S
till struggling to understand and use the new powers infusing her healed body, Cesca reeled with the outbursts of elemental power ricocheting around the ice cavern. The entire grotto had become a war zone.

Karla Tamblyn regarded her son with a stony face and blazing eyes. Her reanimated body seethed with destruction, like bottled chaos. Cesca had seen her only once before, long ago, when Karla had come to Rendezvous on clan business. She had been a confident, unshakable woman who balanced the abrasiveness of her husband, Bram. Now she was something else entirely.

“Jess, I can feel the power. She’s not even human.”

“I know what she is,” he said.

When Caleb Tamblyn called out for help, Karla turned toward the older man, extended her arm—and shot knives of ice through the air at him. Jess moved in a flash to intercept the projectiles, using wental power to save his haggard uncle. The deflected projectiles smashed against the frozen walls.

Cesca sought strength and answers from the new energies within her. The strange insistent voices shouted inside their heads.
We feared a tainted wental would arise. Some of our energy trickled into her cells, separate from us. The corrupt wental reanimated her body, yet it remains imprisoned within her, unable to propagate. A terrible mutation, surging with power. Now it is trying to break free, destroying her and remaking her at the same time
.

Jess staggered closer, holding out his hands, as if he could reason with his mother. His voice croaked as he called out her name. “Karla Tamblyn! Remember who you are.”

Cesca shouted, “Fight the chaos inside yourself—”

Karla’s expression rippled from distaste to hatred, then fury. “I remember.” She unleashed a second rippling blast that pounded her son with ice and cold. Jess shuddered like an anvil struck with a sledgehammer. “
My little boy
.” She ignored Cesca completely.

As Jess reeled back, struggling to recover from the blow, Cesca cried to the wentals, shouting into a howling wind. “You couldn’t
tell
this was happening here? You couldn’t sense it all along?”

The tainted wental is not part of us. Her energies flow in black currents. She wishes only to destroy, to embrace chaos and increase entropy
.

“Unless we stop her,” Cesca said.

The woman moved forward, her legs pillars of ice, but each footstep burned a mark into the frozen ground. She raised a fist to deal her son another blow. Jess was already doing his best to prevent further destruction.

Cesca wouldn’t let him fight alone. She summoned the tingling power within her tissues and deflected the blast enough for Jess to recover. He joined his power with hers and turned it against his mother.

While Karla staggered in the backlash of the strike, Cesca turned to see a new threat coming directly at her. More than twenty slithering nematodes flexed scarlet bodies and flashed diamond-chip fangs, rushing to attack her.

When she had seen these creatures long ago at Ross’s funeral, the prehistoric worms had seemed hauntingly beautiful, graceful denizens of Plumas’s primordial sea. Now they were demon soldiers controlled by the Karla-thing, intent on keeping her apart from Jess. In a hypnotic, serpentine movement, the nematodes swarmed to surround Cesca.

She faced the scarlet worms, knowing she had to keep these creatures away from Jess and away from the other victims in the grotto. She already saw far too many bodies sprawled among the wreckage.

Though not yet familiar with her new powers, Cesca fought back in any way she could manage, learning from the wentals as she went. First, she imagined her method of attack, concentrating on the energy of lightning and cold water—and the wentals responded by flowing through her, out of her hands, out of her mind. Cesca blasted two nematodes and froze a third one solid.

As Jess squared off with his mother, the tainted wental seemed to be dredging up words, memories, ransacking frozen cells within Karla Tamblyn’s preserved brain. “You . . . Ross . . . and Tasia—your little sister.” Her voice seemed to come from somewhere else, certainly not from her heart.

As more nematodes swarmed out of the sea and onto the ice pack, old Caleb came forward in a foolish attempt to protect Cesca. “Get away, you slithery things. Go back to the depths!” He stabbed his makeshift spear hard enough to puncture one of the nematodes. Several more raced toward him.

Cesca intercepted them with a blast of power, which distracted her from the dozens more swarming around her. She shouted at Jess’s uncle, “Caleb, go stay safe so I can concentrate!”

When the old man looked at her in surprise, she wanted to shove him away with both hands, but her energized touch would have killed him. That thought led to a new idea—perhaps the discharge would also destroy the worms. She reached out to the nearest nematode and touched its slimy skin membrane, but there was no deadly release of power. The creatures, controlled by a spark of Karla’s wental energy, were immune.

Hundreds of nematodes swarmed closer, hissing and hooting. She tried to fight them but could not focus her mind to summon her blasts quickly enough. The water elementals themselves were preoccupied with the more important conflict against the tainted wental.

Karla let loose an incredible flurry of blasts, and Jess could barely block them all. His mother hurled random bursts at the ice miners, at the few still-intact dwelling structures, at the machinery, then pummeled her son, driving him back with the sheer power. Cesca could see the anguish behind his eyes when he had to fight back, when his mother attacked him.

While Cesca’s attention deflected only for a moment, four worms wrapped around her legs. Others sprang with incredible speed, tangling themselves like heavy ropes around her arms, her waist. Tightening. More swarmed forward faster than she could destroy them. The primeval creatures covered her chest, her shoulders, her neck. Cesca struggled, but the scarlet worms had supernormal strength. Like pythons from the jungles of old Earth, they flexed their skin membranes and pulled themselves tighter, contracting, crushing.

And she couldn’t move, couldn’t fight.

66

JESS TAMBLYN

J
ess clenched his fists at his sides as if to contain the elemental creatures within him. They seemed as uncontrollable as the tainted wental inside his mother. He could barely hear anything over the uproar in his head, over the clash and clamor of destruction.

When Karla spoke, the words emerged from the familiar face he had missed so much, but his mother’s voice was a hollow, alien sound. “Jess . . . why are you afraid of me? Don’t you remember?” She walked forward, and steam swirled around her like the smoke from a wildfire. Overhead, the damaged ceiling continued to crack. “My little boy.”

His mother’s reanimated body seemed to be growing more accustomed to speaking, though each word was flat, without any spark of emotion. “I remember the padded sweater I made for you when you were nine.” Her static-charged hair was calmer, her face more peaceful, as if the memories helped his mother wrest brief control over the possessing energy within her. “I remember your compy EA . . . Did you give that to Tasia? Where is Tasia? Where is Ross? My children . . .”

Even surrounded by the horrific turmoil, with slithering nematodes and crackling explosions, Jess recalled the years his parents had spent together, how they’d raised their family beneath the crust of Plumas. Karla had taught Jess how to drive a surface rover when he was only twelve. She had shown him how to operate pumping machinery, how to hook hoses to Roamer ships and fill their tanks with pristine water.

Jess shouted out loud, realizing what had happened. “She was frozen, trapped in the deep ice for all these years. There must have been some small spark of life still within her. Suspended animation. When I touched her, started to thaw her, I must have released power into her somehow. And now a tainted wental has control of her.”

No life remained. She was dead. She remains dead
.

“I don’t believe it. There’s something still inside of her!” Jess faced Karla, willingly taking the brunt of her attack. “Mother, listen to me. Please!”

As Karla took another step closer, the wental voices thrummed insistently.
She is not truly your mother. She is not alive
.

“But she remembers me.”

The tainted wental is accessing chemical signatures frozen in the tissue of her brain. Your mother is no longer there
.

He could not escape the thought of those previous tainted wentals—the Ildiran septar who wanted the power to fight for his Mage-Imperator, and the Klikiss breedex who wanted to conquer encroaching hives.
He
had simply wanted to bring his mother back out of her icy tomb, not to bring Karla Tamblyn alive again. Some strange spark from him had caused this corruption.

We must remove all of the tainted water from her
.

The wentals surged out of him, becoming a mist of droplets in the air. The energized moisture began to swirl around Karla like a scouring blast of abrasive hail. Jess’s body shuddered. His teeth chattered.

“Bring her back! Save her. My mother’s still in there, somewhere.”

She no longer exists. Do not be fooled. We must withdraw every droplet, every molecule.

Jess could not fight what they were doing. The wentals simply used him as a conduit, channeling themselves through his body. He silently called out for his mother to hear him, to exert control over the tainted energies.

Feeling a strange urgency, sensing that Karla was trying to distract him, Jess forced his body to turn. To his shock, he saw dozens of the attacking nematodes wrapped around Cesca. She moved, struggled . . . still alive!

But when he tried, he couldn’t move to help her. The wentals inside his body guided his every action. Though desperate alarm erupted within him, the wentals were using his body as a weapon. Their weapon.

“Save Cesca! Help her fight!” Jess said through clenched teeth.

The tainted wental has not propagated inside the worms. As Karla Tamblyn resists us, her control over them weakens
.

Jess managed to stretch out a hand, but Karla fought harder, demanding his attention. “Cesca! Keep fighting!” He couldn’t break his concentration away.

From somewhere within, Cesca found a focal point, drew upon her own wental energy. She released the power in a dazzling explosion, frying, freezing, and detonating the nematodes swarming around her.

Then she stood free, her dark hair snapping about, her eyes crackling with power not unlike Karla’s. Sparkling, she stepped forward, ignoring the torn scraps of dead worms strewn across the ice.

When she grabbed Jess’s hand, an increase of power rushed through his head like a torrent of water over a cascade. An incomprehensible sound came from the combined wentals, and something expanded. He and Cesca moved in unison, guided by the forces inside them. Jess felt as if something essential were pouring out of him, something he hadn’t even known was there. The wentals drew upon that.

The desiccating cyclone increased around Karla Tamblyn’s trapped body. She held up both pale hands, defending herself with bursts of lightning, waves of cold, and geysers of water that spun in a howling storm. She let loose wild destruction in all directions, bursting against anything that could be shattered.

But in a rush the combined wentals began withdrawing the contaminated moisture from Karla. Her waxen skin glistened with droplets that wept from her pores only to be whipped away by wind.

Seeing what was happening, frantic to find another way, Jess tried to hold the wentals back. He wanted to persuade them to save his mother, rather than annihilate her. Previous battles with a tainted wental inside the Klikiss breedex had broken an entire planet, and the possessed Ildiran septar had wrought as much destruction as a full-fledged battlefleet.

The wentals had to contain Karla here, even if it meant the obliteration of Plumas itself.

His mother’s ivory-cold body shuddered as more and more of her flesh’s water was stolen away and purified by the unified wentals. Jess moaned as the water elementals continued. He couldn’t stop them.

Karla’s expression changed, softened, became human again, actually . . . maternal. A trick? “Jess—you know what you have to do.” She had ceased blasting the grotto around her, stopped her assault on him and Cesca. Instead, his mother seemed to be withdrawing into herself, blocking the tainted wental, lowering its defenses.

She was doing it on purpose. Jess saw it. He knew that this was
real,
a genuine glimpse of his mother. With the last ghost of her memories, she fought the warped elemental presence. Karla understood the horrific damage she could cause—and refused to continue. Yes,
that
was his mother. He was sure of it.

But the wentals had told him that was impossible. Jess knew what he saw, looked into the sudden flickering
humanness
that appeared in tiny static flashes in Karla’s eyes. How could the wentals be wrong? And if they were wrong in this, what other errors might they have made? The sudden doubt in his heart seemed as damaging as a tainted wental could be.

And so he drove it away. He had already made his decision. He had thrown his lot in with the water elementals, had accepted the loss of his own humanity to join them and fight their battles with them. He could see the damage this warped life force was causing, and he knew what tainted wentals had done in the past. He knew she had to be stopped. Here.

Without tearing his eyes from his mother, Jess ceased resisting the wentals’ efforts from within him. He threw all his energy into the grim task, and drew on everything that Cesca could give him. He could feel the strength of Cesca’s human heart as well as the unearthly power inside her.

The subsequent blow hit Karla like a cannon blast. She accepted its desiccating power with a hint of a relieved smile. Her skin wrinkled, turned leathery, and began to collapse in upon itself. Her face mummified.

The unnatural storm built to a higher pitch, until finally his mother cracked into a spiderweb of fractures, as if she were an ancient crumbling sculpture. Karla Tamblyn dissolved into spangles of dust that swirled in the remnants of the harsh winds.

At last, the wental storm dissipated, leaving nothing at all where Karla had been—neither the tainted wental nor the woman who had been his mother.

In the background, the Plumas water mines roared with venting steam, tumbling ice, and gushing water, but compared to the storm it sounded like a vacuum. Mindless again, the remaining nematodes flopped away to drop into the iron-gray sea.

Eventually, surviving water miners crept out of their hiding places. The wounded groaned for help. His three uncles ventured from their shelters. “I don’t understand what I just saw,” Caleb said. “I’m not sure I want to know.”

Jess couldn’t speak. He should have left his mother entombed in the ice where she’d died long ago. Because he had disturbed her—and because he could not control the wental energies within him—he had caused this disaster.

“It’s over,” Cesca said to the shocked miners, as if remembering her role as Speaker. No one here had even seen Cesca since the destruction of Rendezvous, and they certainly didn’t know what had happened to her. “You’re safe now. You can start putting things back to normal.”

Old Caleb looked at the devastation and blinked his bloodshot eyes. “Normal? With the drogues attacking gas giants, and the Big Goose hunting us down, and now
this,
it’s been a long time since anything’s been normal.”