Read Online The Unmaking by Catherine Egan - Free Book Online Page B

he brought forth another, then another. The sun set and he felt the pull to rest but he was too intent upon his task to obey it. It was the season of his ascendancy and he was strong enough to continue working his Magic through the night. The ghostly replicas filled the long passageways between the bookshelves, hundreds of them hovering at chest height in the air. Once he was finished he walked from the first to the last, examining each one closely. He set them into orbit and they began to spin and swirl and shift. Again, he went from one to the next and though he could not pin it down something unsettled him. There was a method to her assault on the barriers; he felt more and more certain. This was no game, no accident, no mere distraction. There was another puzzle now embedded in the puzzle he had made. She was cleverer than he was. She had understood perfectly the Deep Math of her prison. She was toying with it now in ways he did not understand and the fate of the worlds depended on his understanding. When dawn came he felt it like a tap on the shoulder and startled. He had no time to retire to his chamber, so he sat on the floor of the Library amid the barrier replicas and fell too quickly and uncontrolled into his trance.
    The world was a ruin. The black crab leaped among the battered rocks and the sky crumbled overtop of them. Fire fell like rain.
    ~~~

    Eliza looked up at the tatters of red cloud swirling in the sepia-coloured sky, that pitiless, unfriendly Tian Xia sky she had come to know so well. She was watching for something she did not see. Then she spotted it, falling fast towards her, a ball of light. In one fluid motion she pulled her bow taut and raised it to the sky, letting her Deep Knowing guide her arms and calculate the speed at which the object fell. She released the bow and the dark arrow shot through the ball of light, exploding it into a shower of sparks.
    “The aim is good,” said Swarn, who was standing back and watching with her arms folded. “But you lack force in all you do. You are precise, but weak.”
    They were standing in the middle of the dark marsh dotted with skeletal bracken. Swarn’s house was a little hump in the distance, not really recognizable as a house at all from where they stood.
    “It takes everything I’ve got just to fix on the right spot, aye,” said Eliza. She wondered if Swarn could tell she was wearing a bra. She wondered if Swarn was wearing a bra. It seemed unlikely somehow. Definitely not a bra with lace flowers on the straps.
    “Then you practice. Grow stronger. The aim should be easy by now, it should require nothing of you. When you face an opponent, you cannot just tap it between the eyes. You need to go right through the skull.”
    Eliza grimaced a little at that. Swarn bent and snatched up one of her long red spears. In her arm, lean and brown and muscled, it seemed to weigh nothing. She tossed it to Eliza effortlessly but Eliza knew enough to brace herself. The spear was enchanted iron and very heavy. Catching it nearly knocked her over.
    “You are using your physical strength again,” said Swarn impatiently. “You are a fourteen-year-old human child, Eliza! There are few beings as physically weak as you are. But you are not only a girl. You are the spear. You are the air. You are the ground. Are you not?”
    Eliza inhaled slowly and raised the spear over her shoulder.
    “Let it flow, let it flow,” chanted Swarn. It was a feeling Eliza loved – when she could muster it. She felt like rushing water, a force of nature, and the spear in her grasp was subject to this force, a twig in a torrent. She could exert on it the same power as the sun did over the planets. It would follow its course, unresisting.
    “Take care,” warned Swarn. She read Eliza’s feelings well, for Eliza was tempted to unleash this power she felt, to send the spear as far as it would go. But that was not the purpose of the exercise. She caught a flash from the corner of her eye