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Besides, it was downright stupid to think that he’d come to this godawful spot just to fuck with me. Nor would he purposefully waste his time. With all that in mind, I settled in again and sought the resources that must be there.
And I found them via his aura. It provided the eerie reminder of the Rhyzkahl-powered nexus and, through it, the resonance of the super-shikvihr.
Once again, I traced the initial sigil, unsurprised as it hung in the air with a perfect golden glow. With methodical precision, I danced the first three rings of sigils, but by the fourth, method melted into pure flow. The whole of the shikvihr, all eleven rings, shimmered in my essence like a waiting blueprint.
Beeeeee the shikvihr.
I ignited the seventh ring and flowed right into the eighth. My mind no longer thought in terms of individual sigils, but of shaping potency to match the resonance of the internal blueprint. My arms curved through the air with my hands leading them in perfect trajectories, graceful and free as I circled and created. I felt every shift and nuance and flow with effortless perfection. For the first time ever, I truly danced the shikvihr.
With a flourish, I added the last loop to the final sigil of the eighth ring, then reluctantly disengaged from the process. Seven rings glowed brightly around me. The eighth was dim in comparison, still unignited. Hot damn.
I faced Rhyzkahl. “Okee dokee. I’m ready for the lordy mojo.”
Without a word, Rhyzkahl eased through the sigil rings to stand behind me. As he wove the rings together, I absorbed every subtlety of my creation. My awareness of the shikvihr grew until a sudden mental flashpoint of knowing it to be simply an extension and amplification of me. That was why each person had to dance their own shikvihr, and why only a handful of summoners had ever mastered all eleven rings. To have even a chance, you had to not only recognize your own potential, but accept and embrace it as well.
Rhyzkahl didn’t need to tell me when he was finished. I felt it in every cell of my body, then ignited the eighth ring in a flash of cerulean blue. The power infused me like a caffeine overdose without any of the jitters, and I did a fist pump of victory. It would have been easy to tell myself that the eighth ring was Rhyzkahl’s way of offering an apology for his various sins against me, but I knew it wasn’t. Nor did it need to be. We’d united against a common threat, and the rest didn’t matter.
“Dak’nikahl lahn,” I said. Thank you very much.
To my surprise he replied with, “Tahnk
si-a kahlzeb.” It was my honor, instead of the expected sihn for You’re welcome.
A pressure wave hit like a fist, sending us staggering and causing my ears to pop painfully. Less than a heartbeat later, the ground heaved, flinging us off our feet.
When the world stopped bucking, I struggled up to my hands and knees. Through the ringing in my ears, I dimly heard shouts of alarm along with the chatter of automatic weapons. I blinked to clear my eyes, only to see rakkuhr blasting from the rift like ash from an erupting volcano.
Rhyzkahl hauled me to my feet. “Xharbek has blown the valve rift wide open,” he said eyes blazing with fury—and a barely perceptible touch of fear. An angry scrape covered one side of his face from cheek to chin. He started toward the rift, support-dragging me along.
The crew working at the rift had been knocked to the ground and now clambered to their feet. Ashava was the first up and darted toward the spewing rift with a cry of dismay.
“Rhyzkahl!” she shouted, child-voice at odds with the power it held. “Help me seal the rift!” Sealing was like placing a patch. It wasn’t the same as permanently closing, but it would drastically slow the erupting of rakkuhr.
He released me and strode forward. “We cannot seal it until we ease the flow.”
Ashava narrowed her eyes. “We’ll form a shield to block the potency. The others can hold it in place while you and I create the patch seal.”
He swept an assessing gaze over the assembly as if checking his available tools then nodded. “It will require supreme effort from all to accomplish this. Let us begin.”
Ashava and Rhyzkahl took up positions on opposite sides of the rift, and the rest of us arranged ourselves to fill in the gaps—Idris and Pellini beside Rhyzkahl, and Elinor and me by Ashava. Yet worry dug at me like a tag on a new shirt. There was a flaw to the plan, or something we’d failed to consider, though I couldn’t pin it down.
The two lord-types wasted no time in weaving a tight mesh of potency that stretched at chest level across the rift. This would be the arcane shield to block the rakkuhr while they worked on the patch seal. The non-lords took hold of the shield’s potency strands, like holding the four corners of a blanket, then nearly lost control of it when Ashava and Rhyzkahl released their grip.
“We got this!” I yelled in hopes of rallying our little team. “Let’s take this sucker down.”
It was like trying to hold back the water blast of a broken fire hydrant with a baby’s blanket, but millimeter by millimeter we forced it downward until it was about hip height, low enough for the lords to work.
Rhyzkahl and Ashava began to create the patch seal out of layers of intricately interlocking potency. The rest of us hung on grimly to the shield strands, counting the seconds until we could release it. Supreme effort, indeed, but we were doing it. We were sealing off Xharbek’s big bomb.
The flaw lit up like neon.
“We’re forgetting the second bomb!” I blurted. Rhyzkahl and Ashava looked at me with confusion, but Bryce and Jill stiffened as comprehension hit.
“Son of a bitch,” Pellini breathed.
“What second bomb?” Idris demanded.
“It’s a classic terrorist move,” I said in a rush, already scanning the area. “Set a bomb, wait for people to come in and help the injured, then detonate the second and take out a bunch more people. All Xharbek had to do was wait until we’re all occupied and then do something bad—oh, fuck, that’s it right there.”
