The pillars of creation

Jermsen scooped Sebastian protectively into her arms as she fell to his side. "Sebastian! Can you move? Can you run? We have to get out of here.

He nodded. "Help me up." His voice was labored, his breathing shallow.

Jennsen ducked her head under his arm and strained with the effort of lifting him to his feet. With her help, they hurriedly worked their way toward the door. Behind, Adie lifted her hands again, her white eyes tracking Sebastian's movements, if not Jennsen's. Jennsen twisted sideways, putting herself in the way. A blast of lightning laced past, missing them by inches, blowing the heavy metal-clad door off its hinges. The door went skittering down the hall.

Jennsen and Sebastian scuttled through the smoking opening and hastened down the wide hall. Jennsen realized, as she watched the heavy doors crashing down the hall, bouncing off walls, tearing out great chunks of stone, that if something like that hit her, she would be crushed. She noticed, too, that her arm was bleeding from small cuts from the stone shards that had struck her. It wasn't magic that had done it, but sharp stone, even if the sharp stone had been sent flying by magic.

She might be in some ways invincible, but if magic toppled a massive stone column on her, she would be just as dead as if it had been pushed over by brute strength instead. Dead was dead.

Jennsen suddenly didn't feel so invincible.

At the first intersection, she took them to the right, getting Sebastian out of the line of sight of Adie's gift, and her weapons of magic, as quickly as possible. Jennsen could feel his warm blood running over the arm she had around him. Despite his injury, Sebastian didn't ask her to slow to spare him any pain. Together, they rushed through halls and rooms as fast as he was able, crossing the palace, going back toward where Jennsen had left the emperor.

"Are you hurt bad?" she asked, fearing the answer.

"Not sure," he said, nearly out of breath and clearly in pain. "Feels like there's a fire burning in my ribs. If you wouldn't have prevented her from hitting me square on, I'd be dead for sure."

As they moved through the palace, they came across a squad of their men. Jennsen collapsed next to them, panting, exhausted, unable to hold Sebastian up another step. Her leg muscles trembled from the exertion.

"We're leaving," Sebastian told the men, his breathing labored with pain. "We have to get out. The emperor is hurt. We have to get him out of here." He motioned in different directions. "Some of you go each way. Collect all our men. We need to get everyone we can to protect the em peror and then we have to get him back to safety. You two, you'll have to help me."

The bulk of the men immediately rushed off to their tasks. The two remaining behind threw Sebastian's arms over their shoulders and easily lifted him. He winced in pain. Jennsen led them through the palace, watching for the landmarks she remembered, desperate to reach Emperor Jagang and to get out of the death trap of a palace.

The Confessors' Palace was a confusion of halls, passageways, and rooms. Some of the rooms were huge, but when they came to such places, they went around, staying to the maze of passageways; Sebastian said they didn't want to be caught in one of those big rooms where they would be an easier target. Intermittently, Jennsen heard the awful thump of magic. Each time, the entire palace shuddered with the concussion.

"This way," she said, recognizing the yawning breach in the wall at the comer of a passageway strewn with rubble. That gaping hole through the outer wall, looking out to daylight and overlooking the lawns far below, was where the wizard's fire, meant for her and Emperor Jagang, had blasted through.

Five soldiers made their way down the hall from the other direction, climbing over the tangled debris, bringing a Sister of the Light with them. From behind, nearly a dozen more men appeared. Two Sisters, their faces streaked with soot, came through a nearby room to the side, followed by yet more of the assault force. Half the men were bleeding, but all of them were able to move under their own power.

Emperor Jagang was sitting up against the wall where Jennsen had left him. The deep jagged gash was partly being held together by the curtain Jennsen had wrapped around his leg, but the meat of his muscle wasn't aligned properly and the terrible wound clearly needed attention. It appeared that the healing magic performed by the Sister, just before she had been killed, still held, and at least the emperor wasn't still losing blood the way he had been.

The blood the emperor had lost left him weak-looking and pale, but not as pale as the faces of those who for the first time saw the seriousness of his injury.

One of the Sisters knelt down to check his wound. Jagang winced when she tried to better align the two halves of his split leg.

"There's no time to heal it now," she said. "We'll need to get him to safety, first."