No Flame But Mine by Tanith Lee Page B

very dark but neither of them conjured a lamp.
    The stair kept creaking, swaying a little.
    Thunder-stones – these were the things that fell, a sort of lightning. He had read of them in old manuscripts, never entirely assured of their nature.
    Visible through a freshly made aperture in the wall by the stair, another shaft shrieked by. It had a broken and terrible shape, all angles. Now the strike was only a street or two away. Their own building recoiled at the blast, and he heard some other neighbouring architecture sharply snap, the crush and push of stones plummeting.
    Down the shuddering stair they eased. This house could offer no refuge. But where they went to next he had no idea. He had cast a cordon of force about them, which to some extent held, but loose plaster and chips of brick pierced it nevertheless. As with the ice-avalanche that had encased him here something in this weather shorted out other powers, considerable though they might be. In all his life he had never witnessed a storm of this character, and only the sheet lightning of a brief thaw, or the flicker of northland lights reported to him, at all resembled thunder-stones.
    Reaching the house doorway they lingered. A curtain of vicious hail deterred them from any further step.
    The other occupants of the house he supposed were out. In the alley Thryfe detected a dead man under the glistening heaps of hail, a dead animal and a smashed cart.
    A woman was leaning from a window across the alley, waving her arms and whimpering in panic. It was this property they had heard crumble; part of the lower storey had collapsed, only a stair and wall holding up the higher rooms.
    Jemhara called to the woman above the drizzling spat of the hail. ‘Come down. Throw yourself out – I can guide you to the ground. You won’t be harmed—’
    â€˜I’m afraid—’
    â€˜Do you know me? I’m Jemhara the mageia, Aglin’s friend. Trust me – I will guide you down.’
    Thryfe thought perhaps she could not. Her powers too might be impaired. He put his hand on her shoulder to warn her of this, but in that instant the sky directly over them opened a violet seam. He saw it descend then, a solitary thunderbolt, its evil zigzag of frozen brilliance and the blind white revelation thrown out all about it. It dropped towards them single-purposed on a tail of frayed splitting silver.
    Thryfe hurled Jemhara back into the well of the stair, and from his guts drove out a shield of energy that seemed to rip his bones and blood out with it. The doorway and frontage of their shelter turned opaque – but exactly then the lightning bolt met the street.
    Curiously mellow, this near explosion, and dim …
    Far off the muted flutter of fire.
    Jemhara. Her cool hand, healing flowing from it like wine through glass, and he the glass.
    He pulled himself up. Jemhara supported him. Strange, how strange. He had felt the pressure of the ring he gave her, there on her middle finger, pressed into his forehead.
    Despite the thaumaturgic shield all the façade of the house was down and lay across the alley. The hail, quieter and almost delicate now, was pattering like white rice over it. The opposite house where the woman had cried had mostly tumbled and was burning with a blue flame.
    His hearing came back with a shock, and he could see.
    He held her and Jemhara lay against him.
    They seemed to be beneath a bowl of nothingness, but it was neither temporary deafness nor their own protective power. Arrows and pins of lightning still howled earthwards, but no more landed here. Their trajectory had changed.
    An irrepressible notion seized him. The bolt had looked precisely at them, studying them both with some implausible and non-existent eye. It had indeed come searching for them; or – it had come searching for her . He had used his magic as a rank beginner would, unkempt, injuring himself – his solar plexus, the inner core of his brain, felt