Chapter 43
The police van rolled to a stop in the fire lane behind the concrete barrier of the Towers. I was handcuffed, shackled and gagged in the back guarded by no less than four Druz/human hybrids whose eyes glowed flame blue, hot and hard. In the ir possession were stun rods and they were afraid to use them. Still, they treated me with kid gloves and had doped me up, X-rayed, splinted, sewn and medicated me to the point of stupor. I‘ve almost felt human.
Druz technology has been used heal my breaks at a rate more rapid rate than my knowledge of human and Celene medical lore indicated. Therefore, I did not need heavy plaster on my breaks, but simple soft casts that Velcroed on. Walking was painful, but I could do it, and did not need the stretcher Martini had insisted they carried me on from the prison clinic to the van, although I was absurdly grateful that I did not have to limp that lengthy distance shackled like some serial murderer.
The nearest guard unlocked me from the cage and pushed me toward s the door with his massive hand. The rest of him was nearly 7 foot high and built like a WWF wrestler. And as ugly. I opened my mouth, he removed the gag and four stun rods met my flesh. "Not one word," he threatened, and I nodded. I couldn‘t, anyway. The Doctor had wired my broken jaw so tight I could barely swallow my food through a straw. I‘d lost weight in their care and clothes hung off my frame like a sack. I ran my tongue over what had been jagged stumps of teeth and was astonished that Brightarm had ordered them repaired also.
"You try to call the Seillach Pangarum and we will stun you, and then kill the lady," he threatened. I called him names under my breath and exited slowly and gingerly. Escorted me up the marble steps, I saw that they were pitted and broken, the doors hung askew. The lobby looked like a war zone. Gone were the bustling workers and in their place lounged Dursvan and Celene tactical forces fully armed and shielded. They made no move towards us, but followed with hard eyes as my guards marched me forward. The fountain sprayed, but where it had sparkled into a lazy pool with ferns and Koi fish now ran across the tiled floor to spill through cracks into the basement.
I looked up and where the tree should have been, a shimmering haze flowed from overhead, a beam of sunlight that came from a hole in the far off the roof. A giant hole that went as deep as it ran high where her roots should have anchored her to this world. Earth spilled over, gray and drained of life and nutrients.
I reached out a hand bound by cuffs and the tingle of chains brought in eyebrows raising.
Revenal Juris stepped out of the mist in sunlight, his face blank of any emotion it. I saw tenseness in his jaw. Besides him where the Dursvan generals, my bodyguards, and M urphy. To my right were the remains of dad‘s precinct team.
"Jade," Murphy burst out and tried to reach me.
"Where‘s the Colonel and the lady Zyperia?" Juris demanded.
"Where is the tree?" My lead jailer snapped. "We have brought you the String Bearer. Do you wish to see him die, because you think to cheat the master?"
"You destroyed the Tree when you attacked the Towers!" Selwyn shouted.
The Druz laughed. "The Tree cannot be destroyed, only moved and directed. By the String Bearer and the Seillach pangorum."
"Then where is it?" He turned to me, drawing a blade from his side and held it to my chest.
"Yes, String Bearer, where is it?"
I opened my mouth and shut it in frustration, shrugging instead. Behind me arrows of green flame shot overhead and a voice sho uted the words that brought the Seillach to power. My jailer dropped his veil and became both Druz and Colonel Brightarm. He shook me, opened my palms to stare at my bare hands with the coin‘s car. "How can this be?" He demanded furiously from me. Swords were drawn from scabbards around us, the sound like the shivering of a thousand bells chiming. Zyperia stepped onto the marble floor, and attacked. Brightarm knocked me to my knees, twisted one hand in my collar and charged to the side. Dragging me with him.
"Attack!" He screamed and Druz dropped from the sky in droves, pushed up from cracks in the floor, poured from every hidden corner to meet the Dursvan and Celene soldiers that had come through Zip‘s portal opened by her control of the coin.
"Jadewyn!" I heard and Brightarm dragged me under cover of a broken arch and made his way to the doorway of what had once been the Sanctuary. "What have you done?" He screeched, smashing a rod into my side. It jolted my insides to mush, and took away my ability to breathe.
My face flushed, and I was able to grind out between clenched teeth. "Gave up the power. The Tree resides no longer on this plane. Nor any other. Where she dwells, you cannot go. She is lost to you and your kind forever."
He growled, and pushed his way to my ribs and twisted. My last breath left my lungs; warmth filled me, turning to a chill that made my lips and fingers blue. My mouth filled with blood, coppery and thick. I couldn‘t swallow fast enough and began to choke on my own life‘s fluid.
The blue of his eyes darkened and then burned incandescent as he drank in my soul. My string unraveled, the one I had never searched out or wanted to read. My eyes closed as a twisted line ripped loose from my grasp, jangling in a wild discord among the countless others.
Vibrations ran along the bundle both forward and beyond, repercussions in the line of chaos that would be felt for millennium but not destroy this world, for I was no longer the wielder of the Seillach coin. My heart shuddered, limped and stopped. My flesh chilled, the green of my eyes glazed, my last breath swept over him like a cold shiver as he pulled the blade from between my dead ribs.