Revelation (Rai Kirah) by Carol Berg Read Free Book Online

victim’s madness was of such a cruel nature that I could not stomach letting it pass. Fiona agreed to go ahead, and I told myself she was a grown woman who knew her own capacities. But I was the more experienced partner, and I knew she would not refuse to weave if I was willing to fight. I should never have allowed her to weave.
     
    I stepped into a landscape of absolute darkness and bitter cold—signs of a drained Aife and always a terrible risk. Light, Aife! But the blackness did not ease, and I could not muster the concentration I needed for my other senses to compensate. I needed to move. To find light enough to see what I was doing. Run. Fly . . .
    I had one talent that no Warden in the living memory of Ezzaria had possessed. While beyond the portal I could trigger a self-transformation that gave me wings. No one understood how it was possible, and there had been a number of skeptics when I was eighteen and told of my first experience. But to me it had become a natural extension of my melydda, just as my sword had become a natural extension of my arm. Wings brought me power and mobility that made the difference in many demon confrontations.
    Fighting to discover what might be lurking in the darkness, I triggered the necessary enchantment, but just before the wings took shape, when I was the most vulnerable as the burning in my shoulders consumed my conscious mind, the demon attacked. I had no time to discern its shape. No time to shift my senses or regain my composure. I was too slow and too tired. I had to get out or I was going to die.
    “Aife!” I screamed as claws raked my flesh from three directions at once. The portal appeared, but the beast had dragged me farther away from it than I had expected. I wrestled loose and ran, the ground beneath my feet drumming with the monster’s steps. The darkness quivered with its stinking breath. Raw evil surged on every side, hatred that froze the blood and turned limbs to lead, sapping the will and drowning the soul in despair. My weakness was affecting Fiona, too, for the portal wavered, fading in and out of the darkness. “Hold, Aife!” I cried as the rectangular borders fragmented. I leaped for the dim grayness and landed facedown on the floor of the temple. One leg was on fire, ripped by the demon’s claws, but I could do nothing about it. I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to move again.
    “Stupid, stupid,” I said, shaking the darkness from my head as I lay there limp and exhausted, my heaving breath burning my lungs, the pall of grotesque horror not yet withdrawn from my spirit. “I’m sorry. Are you all right?”
    Fiona’s only answer was a quiet choking, and I raised my head enough to see. She was collapsed on her back beside the fire pit, as deathly pale as her white robes. I crawled over to her and rolled her onto her side, where she proceeded to vomit up the remains of our last hastily eaten meal. She looked very frail and vulnerable.
    I lifted her up out of the pool of vomit and carried her to the eastern steps of the temple where the morning sun shone hot and clean, then fetched water and bathed her face and dripped some on her lips. She would likely be incensed at my ill use of drinking water for washing, yet it brought the color back to her thin face. An enjoyable irony.
    “A nasty one,” I said when her eyelids flicked open. “You may write it down that I freely admit my damned foolishness in attempting it.” Which she would likely do, even though it would be her own admission of excessive pride in not refusing to weave.
    “Are you all right?” she said, sitting up under her own power and squeezing her eyes shut against the glare, even while trying to examine me.
    “Thanks to you.” When a Warden was in shambles, it was wickedly hard for an Aife to hold a portal. The alternative, of course, was to close the portal and leave the Warden behind in the abyss of a demon-possessed soul—every Warden’s soul-gnawing dread. “Whoa. Stay