Chao DeVoid's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Chao stood on the ice with the staff across his shoulders. The five hybrids had not moved. He should have moved first. He did not, because he could feel the leak. The memory he had thrown to the hunger-thing had left a hole in him. Where the burned city used to sit, there was now a wet, bright gap. Power slid out of it in small pulses, the way blood leaves a cut you cannot close. Each pulse pushed a thin ripple through the air around him. He could see it in the snow at his boots. Small circles, spreading out. A signal. If he cast anything, even a shield, the pulse would flare, and the hybrids in the pale armor would know exactly where the leak was thin enough to open him. One of them stepped forward. The center one, the one who had spoken his name. Chao did not raise the staff. He closed his eyes. He called for his wife the way a drowning man calls for shore. Not out loud. Deja lived under the skin of sleep. He pushed his need down into the place where thought thinned out and became image. She came fast. He felt her behind his eyes before he saw her. A weight in the back of his skull. Then a picture: a bare blue tree, branches like veins, hung with points of light. "You're bleeding," Deja said. Her voice was inside his head, flat and close. "Stand still." "They're twenty paces out." "I know. Stand still." The hybrid took another step. Chao kept his eyes shut. "Put the staff over the gap," Deja said. "Not against your chest. Against the memory. Where it used to be." He brought the staff down off his shoulders and pressed the swirling orb to the center of his ribs. It was cold through the leather. He felt the leak reach for it. "Now give it the tree," Deja said. "I'll hold it for you. You won't remember it after. That's fine. You never planted it." He understood. She was offering him a memory that was hers, not his. A patch, not a scar. Something the old gods could not trace to him because he had never lived it. "Do it," he said. The image of the pale tree moved from the back of his head down into his chest. The staff drank it. The orb dimmed, then steadied. The pulse in the snow around his boots stopped spreading. The leak sealed under the borrowed weight of a tree he had never seen. Chao opened his eyes. The hybrid in the center was six paces out, sword up. "Thank you," Chao said, to no one the hybrids could see. "Don't cast," Deja said. "The patch is thin. Run south. The throne is south." He swung the staff off his chest and drove it into the closest hybrid's knee. The armor cracked. He turned and ran.