Sword Sirens

by Edmund Hughes

  He looked over to Byron, and then to Ari.

  “Kerys isn’t going to be able to make the climb all that quickly,” said Ari. “But we all have ropes. We should take our time and do this carefully.”

  “Piss on that,” said Jarvis. “This isn’t a game, and we’re not on a team. Her wife body won’t help us survive, orphan. She’s dead weight, and you know it. Let her make the climb on her own.”

  “Suck on dirt, Jarvis,” snapped Ari.

  Jarvis shrugged and started toward the edge of the cliff, shooting an expectant glance over his shoulder at Byron.

  “He’s probably right,” muttered Byron.

  “Byron!” said Kerys.

  “Sorry, Kerys,” he said. “But we all have to look after ourselves now.”

  Jarvis had already begun descending the cliff face, and Byron slipped down to follow after him, struggling a little more than the other boy had. Ari drew in a little closer to Kerys, who looked like she was about to cry.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “And those bastards don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re probably too scared to think straight.”

  Kerys seemed consoled by his words, and Ari immediately set about digging through his pack. He found the rope and tied one end of it around his waist and the other around Kerys.

  “You’ll have to go first,” said Ari. “I can see a small ledge that the rope can reach. I’ll lower you down and then climb down myself.”

  “Okay,” said Kerys. “I think I can do that.”

  She was still wearing the gray dress that Ari had scrubbed clean for her earlier that day, and it was not the most suited garment for the type of climbing they were doing. Or any climbing, for that matter.

  Kerys managed to take some of the burden of her own weight off Ari by pressing her feet against the cliff as he lowered her, but ultimately, it wasn’t even necessary. She was tiny, and even laden with her equipment pack, her weight would have only been a serious burden for him if he’d let himself fall off balance.

  Ari came down after her, finding it more difficult than he’d expected. He almost slipped off the edge of the ledge as he dropped into place next to her, but Kerys caught one of his arms and hugged it to her chest, pulling him back.

  “It will only be a few more drops, I think,” said Ari. “Are you still doing okay?”

  “I’m fine, Ari,” she said. “Thank you.”

  He ended up having to lower her down the full length of his rope seven complete times, the last of which was against a cliff face so sheer that even the glowmoss couldn’t find purchase to grow on it. He struggled to find his own way down that stretch, and ended up half sliding and half falling down the slick rock.

  Ari stood next to Kerys as they looked back in the direction that they’d come from. The passageway leading toward the Hollow was so high up as to be virtually invisible to them. Had they stumbled into where they currently were by chance, they would have been facing a borderline impossible climb for the first thirty feet, continuing on from there up to a destination they couldn’t even see.

  “Hopefully that was the hard part,” said Ari. “Are you ready to keep going?”

  He frowned as he glanced around the cave they found themselves in. There was a mound lying in the corner, only barely illuminated by the spotty illumination of the patchy glowmoss. Ari took a few steps toward it before realizing what it was.

  “Kerys,” he said. “You might not want to come over here…”

  “What?” She ignored his suggestion, moved to stand behind him, and then let out a muffled scream.

  The skeletal remains of a man, or possibly a woman, were lying in a sprawl across the floor near the far end of the cliff face. Whoever it was had been dead for some time. Decades, if not longer. There was no flesh or skin left on them, though a few scraps of clothing still hung loose on their bones, remarkably well preserved.

  “Dormiar’s tears, Ari,” whispered Kerys.

  “It’s been years since this poor soul passed on,” said Ari. “They’re at rest now, Kerys. Probably found their serenity in the Endfate.”

  Ari didn’t actually believe in the Endfate, but he would have said just about anything to keep from having to see Kerys upset. His own heart was pounding a chaotic rhythm in his chest, and he couldn’t help but get the feeling that the skeletal remains wouldn’t be the last brush with death they’d have in the near future.

  “Who knows?” said Ari. “This could be someone who lived a long, fulfilling life on the surface. Maybe they were about to pass on from old age, and they decided to try to come back to the Hollow one last time?”

  “You’re spinning fantasy, Ari,” muttered Kerys. “It’s far more likely that this was one of the Chosen, like us, who just… slipped and fell. Died before ever making it out to the surface.”

  “There’s no way for us to know,” said Ari. “Regardless, at least now we have an idea of why the Chosen never try to return to the Hollow.”

  He looked over his shoulder at the sheer cliff face again. Kerys didn’t say anything, and after a minute or two, he set a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s keep moving.”

  “Hold on,” said Kerys. “We should put on our breath scarves now. There’s no telling how soon we’ll reach the surface.”

  “Good point,” said Ari. He pulled his out of his bag and tied it across his face. He had some doubts about how much good it would do against the mysterious “tainted wind,” but it was probably better than nothing.

  There was another passageway ahead of them, and it ran upward at a gentle slope. As they progressed further into it, the sides and ceiling pinched inward. Ari found himself wishing that he’d let Kerys go first as he struggled to slip through some of the tighter sections. He had to take his pack off his shoulders eventually, and one of the squeezes after that was so tight that he only managed it by pushing all of the air out of his lungs and wriggling like a snake.

  The passageway opened back up after that, much to his relief. They walked through the dark for a while, and Ari couldn’t help but reach out for Kerys every few seconds, just to make sure that she was still close by him. They rounded an s-turn and then spotted something in the distance.

  “Is that… glowmoss?” asked Kerys.

  “Uh…” Ari shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Whatever it was gave off a more intense illumination than glowmoss, though only in small pinpricks. Ari and Kerys walked side by side, drawn to the source of the light like moths to a flame.

  CHAPTER 7

  It was the exit. A thick curtain of vines had grown across the cave opening, but Ari made a hole through them so he and Kerys could slip past. What awaited them on the other side was enough to bring him to his knees, lost in a state of unabashed awe.

  Light. There was so much light. More than he’d ever experienced before, at any point of his life. More than what made sense. Ari felt his eyes burn from the intensity of it. It suddenly felt like he was spinning and tumbling head over heels. Kerys’ hand was clutching his shoulder, but after a couple of seconds, she abruptly pulled away from him.

  “Kerys!” he said. He reached a hand out to steady her, and then hesitated as he saw her pulling her breath scarf aside to vomit onto the ground.

  It was a response that Ari almost mirrored as he slowly examined their bizarre surroundings. They were outside the Hollow, midway up the side of a large hill. Or was it a mountain? He’d seen depictions of the surface before in some of the scrolls and paintings in the Hollow, but it was impossibly vivid in person compared to how it had looked in artwork.

  His eyes naturally tracked toward the source of the overwhelming light, and Ari had his first encounter with the fabled sun. It was too bright, like one of the occasional bonfires they’d have in the main cavern when they could properly ventilate the smoke into the higher caverns. No, it was even brighter than that, so bright that it scared him and hurt to look at directly.

  �
�Dormiar’s blood…” he muttered. Kerys was still retching, and he hurried to her side. “Are you okay?”

  She spat onto the ground, wiped her mouth, and pulled her breath scarf back on.

  “Not really,” she said.

  Ari would have laughed at that, had he not been struggling to regain his own composure. There was just so much wrong with what he could see of their surroundings.

  There seemed to be no limit to how far he could see into the distance. The ground was covered with vegetation. He knew what grass and flowers were, and they’d had dusk trees underground, but seeing all of them together at such insane densities was bizarre and a little terrifying.

  There was water, too, enough of it to form a thick, blue line that cut across the tapestry of the land. Ari had to take a deep breath to steady himself as he considered how much water that was. He then proceeded to have a brief instant of panic as he checked to make sure his breath scarf was still on and doing its job properly.

  “I… have no words for this,” muttered Kerys.

  “This is the surface,” muttered Ari.

  “Your mastery of the obvious is unmatched,” said Kerys.

  Ari let out a single chuckle and flicked her on the shoulder. The fear he’d felt when considering the surface back in the Hollow was still there, but it was now intermingled with other emotions. Awe. Disbelief. A large helping of curiosity.

  “That’s the sun,” said Kerys, jutting a finger upward. “Trees. Grass. That’s a river, over there, and we’re… on the side of a mountain.”

  “I can’t get over how bright it is out here,” muttered Ari. “How do people even sleep in these conditions?”

  He bit his lower lip immediately after asking the question. The last thing he wanted to do was give Kerys another worrying facet of the surface to fixate on. He was surprised when he heard her let out a delighted giggle.

  “It’s not always in the sky, Aristial,” she said. “It’s a celestial object. It travels, and when it’s not around, the land is as dark as any cave.”

  “I… knew that,” muttered Ari. “It’s just been a while since I’ve had my lessons about the surface.”

  Kerys laughed at him again, and then sat down on the rocky, sloping ground.

  “There’s so much color,” she whispered. “It makes me feel so strange to look at it all. Not in a bad way, though. The blue of the sky. The green of the grass and trees. I never knew anything could be so green, Ari.”

  He looked over at her and almost did a double take.

  It was the first time he’d really seen her since they’d stepped out of the darkness of the cave. Kerys… was beautiful. Her hair swayed slightly in the wind. It was dirty, but her golden blonde locks were still captivating underneath the specks of moss and dust that she’d collected during their passage.

  The skin of her neck and arms was pale, so much paler than he’d ever realized in the Hollow, but also flawless and unmarred. The grey dress that she’d been so proud of looked drab and muted compared to the girl wearing it. And her eyes. Her big, perfect, emerald eyes.

  Kerys glanced over at him, and he felt his face heating up as she held his gaze.

  “Are you ogling me, Aristial?” she said in a teasing voice.

  Ari rolled his eyes. “I just wanted to make sure that you weren’t going to throw up again.”

  Kerys made a face, though he could only see the section of it above her scarf.

  “Don’t remind me,” she said. “So, what do we do now?”

  Ari scratched the back of his head.

  “That’s a good question,” he said. “It’s hard for me to believe just how big this place is. I keep thinking about how many times the Golias Hollow would fit in just what we can see here, and it’s more than I can imagine.”

  “This is only a tiny portion of the continent,” said Kerys. “The land is curved, Ari, so we can only see the area nearest to us.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” said Ari.

  “It would, if you’d paid more attention during your lessons,” said Kerys.

  Ari briefly considered pointing out that he hadn’t had a family—or the stones—to pay for lessons beyond the few he’d had as a child but decided against it.

  “The continent is so large that it doesn’t make sense to talk about it in the terms we used to speak about length and distance in the Hollow,” said Kerys. “To walk from one end of it to another would literally take months, if not years.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Ari.

  “I had Mistress Ana show me some of the old maps,” said Kerys. “I can remember enough about what they looked like to have a general idea of where we are. The Golias Hollow is located on the southern half of Maiya, which means, well…”

  She hesitated and gave a small shrug.

  “I don’t think it means anything, to us,” said Ari. “Here. Let’s head toward the river first.”

  He pointed a finger at the unbelievably crisp, vibrant blue line of water in the distance.

  “Okay,” said Kerys.

  “I’ll go first,” said Ari. “Give me a shout if you have trouble keeping up with your tiny legs.”

  “Hey!” said Kerys. “My legs are dainty, not tiny!”

  Ari made slow progress as he led Kerys down the side of the mountain, more due to his own trepidation than the terrain. There was a cool, meandering breeze that reminded him of the way it felt to sit in front of some of the passageways back in the Hollow. He was enjoying it up until he stopped to consider whether it was the “tainted wind” they’d been warned about.

  He slowed to a stop after about half an hour as they made their way off the mountain’s slope and up to the edge of forest that encompassed the land around it. Ari was dumbfounded by the size of the trees. Some of them were higher than anything that could have fit into the caverns and wide enough around to seem like permanent features of the landscape.

  “We should be able to head through here,” said Kerys. “At least I think so.”

  She pulled back a branch and peered into the thicket beyond it, eyeing the dense foliage warily.

  “Right,” said Ari. “It should be fine.”

  He took the lead, biting back his own concerns rather than burdening Kerys with them. They hadn’t encountered anything all that dangerous yet other than the wind, which Ari was beginning to doubt as a real threat.

  With that said, he still wasn’t ready to let his guard down. As they slowly moved through the forest, Ari listened and reacted to every sound he heard in the distance. He wore his tension openly in his body language, and he noticed that Kerys was similarly wound up as they passed by an old, rotting, fallen log.

  “Listen,” whispered Kerys. “Can you hear that?”

  Ari paused and directed his attention toward where she was gesturing.

  “It’s the river,” he said, after a moment. “Come on.”

  They reached it as they passed beyond the next line of trees. Ari shook his head as he stared across the rushing basin of water, feeling awed for the hundredth time that day.

  “There’s so much of it here,” he said. “If there’d been something like this in the Hollow, the very idea of washing days versus bathing days would have seemed ridiculous.”

  The river was at least a hundred feet across and deep enough in the center that Ari couldn’t see the stones underneath. He made sure Kerys was still nearby and then crouched down on his knees at the edge, only then realizing how thirsty he was.

  “Careful,” said Kerys, as she watched him pull off his scarf. “Only drink. Don’t breathe.”

  “I think… it’s probably fine.” Ari took a small, experimental breath. “If there is something in the air, the scarves aren’t going to do much about it.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Kerys.

  Ari dipped his hand into the water, cupping some up to his mouth to take a sip. It was shockingly cold, and it had none of the chalky mineral aftertaste that had always seemed so normal back in the Hollow.
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br />   “I’m not absolutely sure,” said Ari. “But I don’t think we’ll get that kind of certainty on the surface. We just have to trust our instincts.”

  He nodded to Kerys and could tell from the expression in her eyes that she was still a little wary. She slowly pulled the scarf aside, revealing the pale skin of her cheeks and the deep red of her lips. Again, he found himself struck by how the sunlight brought out her natural beauty.

  “Quit looking at me like that,” said Kerys, smiling.

  “You had something on your cheek,” said Ari. “And—whoa! Check this out!”

  “What?”

  “It’s in the water,” said Ari. “Here, get down on your knees and lean forward.”

  He kept his face as stoic as he could as he watched Kerys drop down behind him and scan the riverbed for nothing.

  “Lean a little closer,” said Ari. “It’s right… there!”

  He brought his hand up, splashing a handful of ice-cold water into her face.

  “Aristial Stoneblood!” Kerys glared at him and then smiled as she reached her own hand into the water to retaliate.

  CHAPTER 8

  They rested for about an hour before moving on. Without any specific destination in mind, Ari decided that the most logical thing for them to do was to follow the river.

  At the very least, they wouldn’t have to worry about running out of water if they stayed near it. After a while, they found a place where the river narrowed slightly, and Kerys pointed out a clearing on top of a hill on the other side.

  “We should rest there,” said Kerys. “We can set up our kellowacks and prepare for the night.”

  “Right,” said Ari. He glanced up, noticing for the first time that the sun had progressed across the sky toward the horizon. It still felt as bright out as it had when they’d first left the caverns, but he trusted what Kerys had told him before about how that might change.

  “I think it might be smart for us to use the rope again, here,” said Kerys.

  “You might be right about that,” said Ari. The water wasn’t as deep as it was in other sections of the river, but it was flowing fast enough to make him unsure of how it might affect their movement.