Iron Heart

by Nina Varela

  For some reason, Dinara’s smile slipped. “That’s what we thought,” she said. “But—”

  “Boss?” the boy with the hammer piped up. He was frowning, holding a lump of Tourmaline up to the lanternlight. “Can you come look at this? I can’t tell if this vein’s gonna be a problem or not.”

  “One moment,” said Dinara, then pressed the leather pouch into Ayla’s hands. It was heavier than Ayla might have expected, like whatever was inside was as dense as solid lead. “Take this. Just in case.”

  Just in case? “Is this a bomb?” Ayla squeaked, afraid to move even an inch. Beside her, Crier made an alarmed noise. “Should I really be holding it?”

  “Don’t worry,” said Dinara, sounding more amused than Ayla thought necessary. “It won’t explode unless you throw it.”

  “What if I drop it?”

  “That’s probably fine.”

  “Probably?”

  “Definitely. Definitely fine.” Dinara’s attention was already back on the boy with the hammer. “Ah, I should take care of this,” she said with one last smile, and headed over to crouch beside him, examining the cracked Tourmaline.

  Ayla stared down at the bomb in her cupped hands. “Probably,” she said again.

  “I’ll carry it,” Crier offered.

  Ayla shook her head. “If anyone’s gonna end up needing a bomb, it’ll be little old human me,” she said, brushing her thumb over the soft leather of the pouch. Was it a chunk of Tourmaline inside? It had to be. “No, I’ll carry it.”

  “Be careful,” said Crier.

  “Aren’t I always?” said Ayla, and Crier’s resulting glare was the strike of flint and fire steel: first heat, then sparks, then Ayla, the tinder, was aflame.

  They left the heartstone keep and started the slow, treacherous journey up into the Aderos Mountains at dawn. Dinara, compass in hand, took the lead. Fen and a few other rebels followed close behind her, then Ayla and Crier, then more rebels—the oldest ones—were bringing up the tail end.

  Ayla wished Rowan were here.

  Or Benjy. Or Storme. She felt so exposed, picking her way through the rocks, sun beating down from above. But she was glad to have Crier here with her, as time seemed to pull shut like a drawstring around them.

  The sun hit its zenith, and their procession reached a narrow pass between two jagged peaks. A footpath barely wide enough for a horse zigzagging down the near-vertical mountainside. Dinara and the others didn’t hesitate, sliding down a short shelf of rock onto the path one by one, a rain of pebbles marking each slide, but Ayla paused. There was nothing special about this pass—it was naked gray rock, dusty path, and the valley below. Dark green firs and stubborn moss clung to the rocks, the only color between stone and sky. At the other end of the valley, a thick fog was rolling in. Like white sea-foam. Nothing was obviously out of place. There were no columns of smoke; nothing to suggest they were not alone here. But something felt wrong.

  If there was anything Ayla knew to be true, it was this: she trusted her instincts above all else. Her mind was conditioned to overthink, to doubt—I’m being paranoid, I’m seeing things, I’m making it up—but her body was the body of her ancestors, everyone who had lived and died before her, and their instincts were recorded in her blood, her bones, her heart. Their instincts hadn’t let her down yet.

  “Crier,” she said, sensing Crier come up behind her. “Wait.”

  Crier stopped. Shoulder to shoulder, the two of them looked over the fog-obscured valley. Almost directly below them, Dinara and the others were winding along the footpath.

  “Be careful,” Ayla said quietly. She held up her arm so Crier could see the gooseflesh, the tiny hairs standing on end. “I don’t know what’s wrong. But something is. Go slowly, keep your eyes and ears open.”

  “I’ll go in front,” Crier said. “You stay behind me.” She was staring straight ahead, chin raised, jaw tight. Her eyes in the overcast light were a human brown, warm and true, the color at the heart of all living things, the color of fallen leaves and forest floors and floodwater in spring, when the rivers surged up and over their banks, crashing forward, uncontainable, carving new veins into an old world. Tendrils of hair had escaped Crier’s braid, curling at her temples and ears.

  “Hey,” Ayla said.

  Crier looked at her.

  “. . . Never mind,” Ayla mumbled. “C’mon, we’re falling behind.”

  The two of them slid down the shelf of rock to the path below, Ayla stumbling and Crier landing with infuriating grace, and hurried to catch up with Dinara and the others. The path was even more treacherous than it looked from above, the ground slanting downward. It reminded Ayla of the tiered garden at the queen’s palace, where she’d been reunited with Storme. Except these tiers were rocky and uneven, and if she took one wrong step she’d find herself tumbling halfway down the mountain slope. The path wended its way around boulders and jutting outcrops of rock, and their party walked it slowly and silently, all their concentration dedicated to not slipping. Dinara was in the lead, Crier and Ayla bringing up the rear. And the farther down into the valley they got, the louder Ayla’s instincts screamed at her: Turn back. Turn back!

  Up ahead, there were two tall column-like boulders that stood like massive gray sentinels on each side of the path. All of a sudden Ayla’s mother’s voice filled her head: a half-remembered story about a door to another world. Two stones as tall as towers, standing upright in the middle of a flat, barren ice field, as if a giant had plucked them from the mountains and dropped them there. From far away, the space between the stones didn’t look any different. You could see the ice field through them, an expanse of white snow and white sky. You could walk right up to those stones and nothing would seem out of the ordinary. But if you kept walking . . . if you passed between them . . .

  Ayla, a tiny child then, had asked: What? Mama, what would happen?

  Nobody would ever see you again.

  Dinara, at the head of the party, reached the stones, and Ayla came so close to shouting STOP. But of course Dinara passed between them without issue. Of course she didn’t disappear; of course she wasn’t whisked away to some unknown place. Ayla scowled at herself. She was almost seventeen—far too old to let herself get spooked by an old faerie story. She kept walking, forcing herself not to hesitate as she and Crier reached the two stones. Childishly, she held her breath as she walked between them, like how some people held their breath as they walked past a grave. But of course nothing happened. Ayla let out her breath. Their party had filed into a clearing of sorts, an area where the ground flattened out temporarily like the bottom of a bowl, the mountainside rising up on all sides around them. The air was colder here. Ayla saw that Dinara had paused, consulting the compass once again; the rest of them slowed to a stop, waiting.

  “Those stones reminded me of a story,” Crier said, coming up to stand beside Ayla. “It’s about giants who turn to stone in the sunlight and only awaken at night. As soon as the sun sets, they can move around and do whatever it is giants do. But they are most vulnerable in those moments of transition from stone to flesh, and therefore it is forbidden to enter their territory during sunset.”

  Skin prickling, Ayla tried to focus on the story. The cadence of Crier’s voice.

  “Wherever they stand as stones, the giants leave big craters behind. And there’s a rumor among the people of a nearby village that the giants’ craters are filled with gold and precious gems. One day, a man from the village sneaks into the mountains at sunset and watches the giants awaken. Darkness falls, and he hurries down to see the craters they left behind. Sure enough, each crater is filled with the giants’ treasure: piles and piles of gold and precious gems, items shimmering with magick, tapestries woven from the finest, most delicate thread . . . enough treasure to make everyone in the man’s village, and the next six villages, fabulously wealthy for the rest of their lives. But the man isn’t thinking about the people of his village. He is thinking only of himself. He fills his knap
sack with gold, but it’s not enough. He pours gold coins into his pockets, his boots, his hat. Overcome with greed, he loses track of time.” Crier’s storytelling voice was hushed, as if she wasn’t just recounting the story, she was there, watching it play out before her eyes, taking care not to disturb the players.

  “Go on,” Ayla said. Dinara and her right hand, Fen, were bent over the compass, conferring in whispers. The others were taking the time to drink from their waterskins, shake pebbles from their shoes.

  “Suddenly, the man realizes the sky is beginning to lighten. Sunrise is coming, and with it, the giants will return and settle back into their craters. Giants are creatures of habit, you see. More than that, their bodies form the topography of the mountains. If they moved to a new place each night, it would change the landscape entirely. Maps would be useless. Travelers would become hopelessly lost. So the giants always return to the same craters. The man knows he has only minutes before a giant the size of a house settles back into this crater and crushes him. Terrified, he tries to climb back up the crater wall. But, as you’ll recall, his knapsack and pockets and boots and hat are filled with gold. And gold is very heavy.

  “He begins to panic. He keeps trying to climb out, but he cannot lift his own weight. The obvious solution is to leave the gold behind, but the man has become blinded by his own greed. The idea of leaving the gold behind is preposterous. He won’t do it. He’d rather die. So the sun begins to rise, and he hears the giants returning. It sounds like an avalanche, their footsteps shaking the earth. And the man keeps trying to climb. He can see the giants now. He can see them finding their craters, settling in, the first rays of sunlight turning their skin to stone. And he keeps trying to save himself without sacrificing a single stolen coin.”

  “I hope the giant crushes him,” Ayla said. “Does the giant crush him?”

  “Yes,” said Crier. “The giant crushes him. He dies with his pockets full of gold. And at the next sunset, when the giant awakens and steps out of her crater, she sees the man’s body. She realizes what happened. And she mourns him.”

  “I like that story,” said Ayla. “It’s very—” She cut off with a yelp when Crier grabbed her wrist, yanking both of them backward. “Crier, what—?”

  “Dinara!” Crier screamed, her voice tearing through the silence of the clearing. “Dinara, look out!”

  The warning came just in time. Half a second later, something burst out from behind one of the rocks, a dark blur of movement so quick Ayla couldn’t immediately tell what it was. But then it made contact with Dinara—or rather, her sword—and Ayla saw it was . . .

  To be honest, she still wasn’t quite sure. An Automa? But wrong. Its skin was grayish and bloodless, somehow leached of color, yet its veins were clearly visible even from thirty feet away, snaking black lines all over its naked body. Its head was covered in bald patches, like clumps of hair had been violently ripped out. This had to be one of the monsters Storme had seen. One of the monsters Ayla had been sent away to investigate, what seemed a million years ago, before she’d been reunited with Crier and started off on the search for the Heart. A Shade.

  Dinara’s sword had pierced clean through the Shade’s torso, tip poking out the other side. Even an Automa should have been incapacitated by such a wound. But as Ayla watched, horrified, the monster started wriggling from side to side like a fish on a hook, hands coming up to grip the sides of the sword. Black blood ran down its wrists, down its front, and still it kept moving. Dragging itself backward off the sword.

  The rebels seemed paralyzed by shock. But then Dinara, wrestling her weapon out of the monster’s bleeding hands, yelled, “Ready your weapons, you fools!” and they sprang into action, just as another monster leaped down from an overhang of rock far above their heads, landing hard. If it were human, a landing like that would’ve shattered both its legs. But the Shade didn’t even pause before surging to its feet, lunging at the nearest rebel.

  “Crier!” Dinara yelled. She ran for them, circling the fight, and the second she was close enough she hurled something through the air: something small and metallic, flashing in the sunlight. The Iron Compass. It landed a few paces from Crier’s feet. “Take it!” said Dinara, even as she rounded on the second Shade. “Take it and run!”

  Crier didn’t hesitate. She snatched the compass off the ground and turned back to Ayla. “Come on!”

  “But the others—”

  “If you try to fight them, you will get yourself killed!” Crier said. “A dagger can’t stop them. The only thing that can kill them is fire, a lot of it. Enough to completely destroy their bodies. We can’t help, we need to run, we can’t lose the compass!”

  “The blue powder bombs,” Ayla said. “I have one, I can—”

  “Not yet. Not from here. Let’s go, I can hear more coming.”

  Ayla nodded and let Crier pull her out of the clearing, back through the two stone sentinels. The mountainside rose up on one side of the path, dropped down on the other, a steep, rocky slope. Crier paused for a second, head cocked, fingernails digging into Ayla’s wrist, and then veered to the left.

  “This way,” she hissed. “They’re coming from above.”

  They scrambled off the path, down the slope. It was a sheer drop, no tree roots or anything to hold on to, just bare, slippery rock. The slide was painful and undignified—Ayla’s palms were scraped bloody when they found footing about ten feet down, and so was her side where her shirt had ridden up a little. She flexed her fingers, wincing. “Ah, that stings.”

  “Sorry,” said Crier, and then—BOOM. The ground shook, pebbles rattling around them, and a cloud of blue smoke billowed up into the white sky the direction they’d come. A beat, a breath, and then another explosion, so loud Ayla clapped her hands over her ears. A great punch of thunder, echoing over the entire mountain and the valley below.

  “I really, really hope that was Dinara,” Ayla said grimly.

  “We should . . .” Crier reached up, touching the crossbow slung across her back. “Maybe we can get a good vantage point, take out the Shades from a distance.”

  Ayla nodded. “I don’t like being useless.”

  “You’d be more useless if you were dead.”

  “Still.”

  They picked their way sideways across the slope, gripping onto the rocks. Crier took the lead, her footsteps falling more surely, Ayla doing her best to step in the same places. More than once, Crier tested out a foothold only for the rock to crumble beneath her weight, shale sliding down the mountainside with a puff of pale dust. It took a few slow, painstaking minutes to make their way back to the edge of the clearing, this time coming up on it from below. The air smelled like smoke and sulfur, the atmosphere thick with it, nasty on the back of Ayla’s tongue. Blue smoke was still rising, and this close Ayla could hear the sounds of battle: human shouts and raw, monstrous screams, the occasional clatter of a weapon against rock.

  They inched closer, climbing up a jagged rock formation that joined with one of the short walls surrounding the clearing, the side of the bowl. Once, Ayla felt herself begin to slip, but Crier grabbed the back of her shirt before she could even cry out, holding her steady until she found purchase again. They dragged themselves over the crest of the rock formation, and they crawled up to the edge, about fifteen feet off the ground. It was hard to see through the smoke; Ayla blinked back stinging tears, squinting through her lashes. There—her eyes found Dinara, sword slashing through the air. There were over a dozen humans and only three monsters, and still it seemed an even match. Two humans had already fallen. Ayla saw them, dark figures slumped on the ground, dead or unconscious, it was impossible to tell. She wanted to help turn the tide, but there was no way to throw her powder bomb without hurting the rebels too.

  Beside her, Crier drew the crossbow. “They’re too fast,” she muttered, frustration bleeding into her voice. “They never stop moving. I don’t know if I can—I don’t trust myself not to hit one of the humans.”

  Sh
e lost her chance entirely when the world exploded into blue.

  The force of the blast knocked Ayla backward. She hit the ground hard, rock digging into her spine, ears ringing so loud she couldn’t hear anything else. The rebels wouldn’t have thrown a powder bomb so close to the others—had one of the Shades gotten their hands on one? Everything was blue smoke. It was too thick, an impenetrable wall of blue, as if Ayla had suddenly plunged to the bottom of the ocean. Where was Crier? Blind, half deafened, terrified that Crier was lying unconscious somewhere, Ayla felt her way sideways and down, fingernails scrabbling at the rock. Down, down—she slipped, stomach lurching, and slid down the rock face for a few breathless moments before catching herself again, finding hand- and footholds. The air was slightly clearer now, smoke dissipating, and she could make out a large roundish boulder about twenty feet down the mountainside. A potential hiding spot. Spiderlike, clinging to the rock, Ayla made her way down toward it.

  A flash of movement to her right.

  Then something barreled into her, knocking her off her feet for the second time in five minutes. They separated when they hit the ground and Ayla scrambled upright, searching wildly for whatever had attacked her. A Watcher? A confused rebel?

  Worse?

  Her attacker appeared out of the blue smoke.

  “You,” Ayla breathed. “I know you. Rosi.”

  Crier’s Automa friend, the one they’d visited on the mourning tour. Rosi. Ayla was frozen for an instant, and that was all it took. Rosi leaped for her again, and this time they didn’t break apart. Ayla couldn’t even scream, she and Rosi were rolling over each other down the mountainside, a wild, dizzying tumble, Ayla’s head cracking against a rock so hard that black spots popped up in front of her eyes. Rosi’s fingernails were ruined and sharp and she was clawing at Ayla’s skin, drawing blood, and then they came to a stop and Ayla was scratching, kicking, smashing the heel of her palm into Rosi’s face, mind blank with panic. Somehow, she managed to wriggle her way out from under Rosi, but only for a moment; Rosi grabbed her ankle, yanking her back. Rosi’s eyes were pure black, even where the whites should have been. Twin voids. Like the other monsters, her veins were raised and black. Her blue-black tongue lolled horribly, her teeth stained and mossy, awful awful awful, a living corpse. She jerked her head sideways and Ayla couldn’t help but gasp: part of Rosi’s skull was caved in, rotting skin peeling back around it, black blood welling up. She must have hit her head during their fall, even worse than Ayla.