Captain's Fury (Page 91)

She opened her eyes and looked up to see Kitai, a dark shape against the pale stone of the aqueduct, hauling Isana upward, hand over hand, her feet planted firmly on the stone of the aqueduct. She pulled Isana up over the lip of the stone structure, and Isana managed to sprawl onto it, trembling, her foot tightly pinched by the lariat.

"Come," Kitai said quietly. "Hurry."

Isana freed her foot while Kitai recoiled her rope, then set off at a lope down the length of the aqueduct, which proved to be nothing more than an elevated stone trough carrying a steady volume of water as great as the mill stream back on her steadholt. There was a stone lip a foot wide on either side of the trough in the center, and Isana stepped up onto it and followed Kitai as quickly as she could manage. She kept her eyes focused ahead, on the Marat woman’s back. If she looked over the edge of the aqueduct and saw how easy it would be to plunge to her death, she might not be able to make her feet keep moving.

Great furies grant that the wind didn’t come up.

Or that her feet didn’t strike a patch of slippery moss.

Or that her hammering heart didn’t make her head go light for a moment, her balance wavery.

Or-

Isana ground her teeth and focused on Kitai’s back and on keeping her own feet in motion.

Kitai came to a halt several dozen steps later, spreading her hands as a warning to Isana. Isana stopped as well, and Kitai said, "It’s ahead of us."

"Very well," Isana said. She slipped off her shoes, closed her eyes in brief concentration, and reached out for her connection to Rill. Then she rucked up the skirts of her dress to her knees and stepped down into the stream of water in the aqueduct’s trough.

The current was a strong, steady pressure along her calves, though not nearly enough to take Isana from her feet, provided she kept them braced strongly. The water had flowed down to the capital from the mountains many miles to the north, and it was bitingly cold. As Rill manifested around her, Isana gained the insight of her fury’s senses, and she was surprised at how clean and fresh the water remained, despite its long trip through the aqueduct’s channel.

The guardian fury in the water ahead appeared to her as a sudden, ugly sensation of pressure. An invisible presence in the water, she could sense its malice and its desire to do violence to any intruders. The water ahead suddenly thrashed, then a bow spray of freezing droplets rushed toward her in a line, as if she was being rushed by an unseen shark.

"You’d best get behind me just to be safe," Isana murmured, and Kitai hurried to comply.

Isana had no idea where the designers of the Tower’s defenses had found such a vicious fury-or worse, what kind of mind it would take to reshape a natural fury into a dangerous beast-but she had dealt with stronger furies in the wilds of the Calderon Valley. She stood calmly before the oncoming monster, and waited until the last possible moment to flick her wrist and send Rill against it.

Isana felt her senses join with her fury’s, as Rill, her presence somehow warmer and denser than the cold animosity of the guardian, slammed against her foe. The water five feet in front of Isana erupted in a cascade of spray as the two furies wound around and through one another, currents of living water twining and intertwining like two impossibly elastic serpents.

Behind Isana, Kitai took in a sharp breath, but Isana was too involved in her connection to Rill to look back at the younger woman. Instead, she focused her senses and her will upon Rill, lending her own determination and confidence to the fury, fusing her thoughts and will with Rill’s ever-mutable essence. One did not overcome a water fury by simple force of will, the way other furies might be mastered. Water furies could not be beaten down-only changed, redirected, absorbed. Together, Isana and Rill entangled the guardian fury, blended with it, and separated its cohesive essence, bleeding it away into the steady stream of the aqueduct, diluting it, while Rill’s presence remained anchored to Isana’s mind and will, holding its shape.

The waters thrashed for several seconds more, then they slowly began to subside as the guardian fury was dispersed into the current. Depending on how strong the guardian fury was, it could take anywhere from days to weeks for it to draw itself back into a cohesive being again-if it did so at all-but Isana felt no compunction about disabling such a dangerous being.

For goodness’ sake, what if some foolish youths had gone running along the aqueduct purely out of the exuberance of their years, and not for any sinister purpose focused upon the Grey Tower? A fury like that could drown someone without enough power to fight it off, or strike out at an unsuspecting victim and send him tumbling from the aqueduct to the ground far below.

Isana sent Rill out ahead of them, questing around for any other hostile presence, but found nothing more than the faint traces that remained of the guardian. Then she turned to Kitai and nodded. "It’s done."

Kitai nodded, her eyes aglow with interest-even, Isana realized as the young woman passed her, with admiration-and took the pack from her back, stepping to the other side of the aqueduct to stare intently down at the Grey Tower, whose roof was very nearly of an even height with the aqueduct, which passed within thirty feet or so. The roof of the Tower resembled a fortified parapet, complete with crenellations, and statues, ugly, lumpy creatures whose features were largely hidden in shadow, faced outward at the midway point along each edge of the roof.

"There," Kitai said. "Can you see the doors?"

Isana stepped up beside her and could indeed see the doors from the inner stairway to the roof, twin, flat affairs that lay flush against the stone, like the doors to the root cellar at the steadholt. "I see them."

"They must pass from those doors to the edge of the roof without touching the stone," Kitai said. "Any touch upon the stone of the building will rouse the gargoyles."

Isana nodded and bit her lip, judging the distance. "It’s farther away than I thought it would be," she said.

Kitai nodded once and flicked open the other case on her belt. She withdrew a small, heavy-looking cloth sack from it, and a small steel hammer. "Can you do it?"

"Let’s find out," Isana murmured. Again, she gathered up her skirts and stepped into the water, reaching out for Rill. "Be sure you stay upstream of me until it’s time," she cautioned, and then she focused her attention on the water.

Thirty feet was a long way to throw something as heavy as water, and she had to do it in a constant stream if they were to accomplish their goal. The current in the aqueduct could not sustain such an effort if simply redirected. She would need more pressure to move the water that far, and so the first thing she did was throw out her left hand behind her, palm upraised, and willed Rill to block the stream.