Shattering the Ley Read Online Free PDF Page A

Allan’s position. Allan snorted in derision and glanced down at his own arms surreptitiously. He hadn’t felt anything, but he couldn’t explain the gooseflesh on the woman’s arm or the reaction of the other guests either.
    And then it didn’t matter, because the white ley globes hovering above suddenly dimmed. Men cursed, glancing up, and someone cried out, voice strained with fear.
    “What’s happening?” someone asked.
    A man standing to Allan’s right answered, voice calm, as the ley globes flickered again. “The Primes. They’re using the energy of the Nexus to sow the tower. It’s interrupting the general flow for the network that feeds the city.” He held up his candle. “That must be why they handed out these.”
    As he spoke the last word, the ley globes died completely, the entire room plunging into darkness. More than a few of the gathered gentry shouted in consternation, cursing or muttering under their breath. But even as Allan’s eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness, he caught the flicker of flames spreading throughout the room. Servants appeared with lit tapers held protectively behind cupped hands, extending them to those who had taken candles. The tension brought on by panic subsided, women chuckling shakily as they used their own candles to light others, a few of the men looking sheepish as the flickering orange light—so different from the steady white of the ley globes—began to fill the room. The flame made the amber of the walls and ceiling glow as if lit from within, pulsing like a heartbeat. Lords and ladies marveled at the transformation in the room, voices hushed as they held their candles aloft, faces suffused with childlike wonder.
    Outside, in the darkness beneath the tower, the first glow of ley light pulsed upward. Another gasp spread through the room, this one solemn, and everyone, including Allan, shifted toward the glass windows. Below, the ground between the myriad towers that made up the Grass District glowed with ethereal ley light, concentrated beneath the faceted glass structure that was the Nexus. Except the light of the ley was too fierce, too intense, obscuring the Nexus itself, as if somehow the light had broken free and spilled out into the surrounding land. The Dogs had cleared the paths and roadways below earlier in the day, setting up a restricted zone around the Nexus. Allan checked to make certain the doors leading out to the balcony were closed and locked. As he pressed closer to the glass, he noticed other people outside on the balconies of the towers across from the Nexus and shook his head. Idiots. Hadn’t they been warned? They were too close to the ley!
    Then, a gout of light shot upward from the Nexus, like spume against a cliff, or the jets of water in the fountain at the base of the tower. It was followed by more, each higher than the last, until they rose higher than the windows of the Great Hall. Across the way, the figures on the balcony outside panicked, most fleeing inside their tower, but not before one of the spumes cascaded down over the ledge, catching two people in its light. It poured down from the balcony like water, leaving two bodies crumpled behind it.
    The activity of the light shifted, the focus of the energy concentrating toward a section of Grass that had been cleared and prepared for the new tower.
    When the first thick tendrils shot forth from the ground, those pressed closest to the windows jerked backward, stumbling into the people behind them. The vines grew unnaturally fast, stretching into the sky, twining around each other as they rose. Leaves burst from nodules, unfurling in the space of a heartbeat; leaves so large they’d engulf the entire room of lords and ladies whole. The foliage began enclosing the tower, forming its walls, the head rising into the night sky like a bud on a flower. Allan watched in awe, struck dumb by the sheer immensity of it, the raw power he could see but couldn’t feel. Nothing like this had