Skyborn

by Cameron Bolling

  First, she needed a pickaxe. Carving the hollow deeper into the cliff face required the right tool for the job. But the nearest pickaxe that she knew of lay hundreds of miles away back in her village, and of course she hadn’t bothered to bring one with her. She hardly brought water, let alone the deadweight of her old mining tools. Something else would have to do. She sifted through her bag.

  Plenty of small scrap clinked around inside—she never found herself with a shortage of that—but nothing large enough to form the head of a pick. She dug deeper until her hand reached the bottom of the bag. Her fingers brushed something long and heavy, larger than anything else inside. She pulled it free.

  A bent pickaxe head balanced in her palm. For a split second she wondered why in the world she let such a thing weigh her down. Plenty of odd scraps found a home in her bag, but this certainly took the role for most useless. Then it clicked. Palila. The young girl from her village, the one whose father needed a new pick and who she gave her own to in exchange for this broken one. At the time, it seemed like a fairly silly gesture—she planned to free the village within just over twenty-four hours, making the pickaxe unnecessary, but she couldn’t voice that at the time. She kept the banged-up pickaxe head to maintain the image, and then forgot it in her bag. Even when she and Kella dumped the contents out and picked through them, she regarded it passively, sweeping it back into her bag without a second thought alongside all of the other, equally-useless bits of discarded metal. If she had remembered, she likely would have tossed the pick head aside—it sat heavy at the bottom of the bag, adding a good deal of extra weight she didn’t need to carry. Thank the sky she never did. Now, it served as a crucial piece of her plan. She just had to deal with the damage it sustained. Desperation cannot be picky.

  None of that changed that the head was without a handle, however. Nowhere around would she find discarded bits of wood, and certainly her bag couldn’t hold anything so long. Something else had to stand in for the time being.

  Stone wouldn’t work. To forge one from her metal scraps, she required a fire, which in turn demanded wood—not to mention time. An arrow shaft was too thin. She looked over her things.

  Her eyes fell reluctantly on her glider. The second of its kind, so recently completed. With a sigh, she extended one wing. A glider couldn’t kill Honn, but the pickaxe might. She didn’t have any other choices.

  One limb fell away with a few quick motions of her fingers, dismantling the frame and severing the cloth. When she finished, she held one wooden stick, perfect to serve as a handle. She removed the second half of the limb too and set both pieces on the ground beside her.

  Assembling a new pick was easy enough. The new handle fit into the slot on the head with only a small amount of reshaping, and then she bound it tightly with twine—certainly not something ready to stand up to years of wear in the mines, but enough to get her through the night’s task. As best she could, she bent the head back into shape, though little progress showed in the shape of the heavy iron. Its purpose was to be smashed repeatedly against rocks; if she expected to alter it by doing the reverse, she was sorely mistaken. It would have to do as it was. After crafting a makeshift harness for the tool out of some rope from her bag, she slung it and the second wooden stick across her back, then looked up to the cliff rising above her.

  The face didn’t run entirely vertical, which provided some relief, and it made more of an extremely steep slope if she had to label it. The bonus it afforded to her next task was slight, but still something.

  From her bag, she took what remained of her raider robe. Not even bothering to cut it, she wrapped the garment gingerly around her leg and tied it off tightly using the sleeves. Though it remained dirty and filled with sand, she could do nothing to change that. She shed no worry on the matter. A million other things were snapping at their leashes trying to kill her; what difference did another bout of infection make?

  Rising to her right leg and leaning her palms against the wall cast doubt into her mind. Already, her left leg howled, making her sway. Dizziness still wriggled its way into her mind in fits. Before her rose a cliff nearly thirty feet in height, and only one of her legs remained in functional condition. What made her think she had any chance of reaching the top? She cast a glance back at Pahlo’s grave. His words rushed back to her.

  Do you know what your problem is? You let your determination get the better of you. Every challenge you face, no matter how daunting or impossible, you tell yourself you can beat it as long as you force yourself to endure enough suffering. But that’s not how you overcome big obstacles. You do it with help.

  No one was around to help her now, not even the sky in her veins. She would do this the way she always had. One last time, she had to let her determination grab her by the scruff of her neck and drag her through as much as she could take, because nothing else fought on her side. Maybe determination had led her too far, but now it would carry her just a little bit further.

  She was Oleja Raseari, and if nothing else, she had determination. And that was enough.

  She grabbed the rockface in both hands and pulled herself up. Her arms shook. Her muscles ached. Pain and dizziness clouded her vision. She didn’t care. She could take it.

  Her right foot found purchase on the rock and then she moved her hands one at a time to new handholds. Over and over she shifted her holds, her left leg dangling below her, a burden far heavier than the weight of it alone. She gritted her teeth and kept moving. She would have time to feel the pain later, but not now.

  When she threw her first arm over the top and hauled her chest up onto the ground, the relief crashed over her and made her feel as if she soared around on her glider once more. She took several minutes to lie there, face-down on the hard stone ground, catching her breath and waiting for the pain to subside.

  Before she weakened the ledge, she needed to make sure she could guarantee which spot at the crevice’s edge Honn would approach. That meant covering up their trail and creating a new one, one obvious enough to lead Honn exactly where Oleja wanted him. Covering up their trail from before was easy enough, minus the fact that she couldn’t walk and had to drag herself across the ground wherever she went. Her bandaged leg only accumulated more sand that clung to the once-white fabric now saturated thick with blood, no longer retaining its original color besides in slivers around the edges and in places more thickly layered. Dragging her body across the path provided as good a way as any to erase the footprints in the sand, so long as she stayed smart about it and never applied so much pressure that her crawling became obvious in the loose patches of earth.

  Once through with that, she met up with the new end of their trail up the hill. She could not walk upright—not with two legs and a typical gait, and especially not with the four that marked the trail up until that point. More crawling and dragging was the best she could do. At the very least, Honn would be confused seeing the trail change so drastically. Curiosity made as good a bait as any.

  She dragged herself through the sand all the way up to the lip of the crevice, making sure to leave as clear a path as she could. Then came the hard part.

  Spotting a small ledge just down the face of the crevice side, Oleja eased herself over, right leg first, until she stood upon it. Seven or eight inches below ground level, the rock face gave way to open air. The hollow below dug inwards just over a foot. A good start, but not enough to pitch Honn into the abyss below, and nowhere near sufficient to get his sled too if she wanted such an outcome. She did, of course—fighting off eight coyotes in the wake of their master’s death sounded little better than fighting the eclipser himself. If she could kill all nine birds with one stone, she might just stand a chance. A chance for what, she couldn’t say. With her leg broken, leaving the desert seemed like a distant fantasy, but hope lived in her mind again, and it promised not be so easily evicted this time.

  Swinging the pickaxe while balancing on one foot, perched atop a tiny ledge thirty feet up, proved to be no easy
task. The first few swings came slow and awkward, breaking away only chips of the rock which skittered away and clattered on the stone below. As the hollow widened, leverage became easier to find, as she could lean farther in. When she could climb inside, the true speed of her work took off. Through her exhaustion, she forced herself to keep moving, keep swinging, burrowing deeper. Even after her arms grew numb and dull, she kept working. Fortunately, the stone was soft and crumbled easily—not like the hard stone of the mines back in the village—so the bend in the pick head did little to slow her as the stone chipped away beneath its strikes regardless. Hours passed. Oleja’s limbs and eyelids grew heavier. Dust and rubble clung to her clothes and skin, damp with blood and the few small beads of sticky sweat that appeared on her brow. She supposed the fact that any sweat at all dripped from her skin came as a good sign.

  Crawling back out of her hollow, she drew the second wooden stick from the sling on her back and propped it under the opening. It wouldn’t hold much weight, but it served as a safeguard to keep the ground from collapsing prematurely. Using her bow, she could shoot it and knock it aside from a position on the ground.

  She cast the pickaxe down to the bottom of the crevice. It struck the stone with a loud clang. Bearing its weight during her descent meant wasting her energy, and she was finished with it anyhow. With everything set, she scaled back to the floor of the crevice—easier by a slim margin, but still very nearly as painful as the ascent. Back on the ground, she had never been so happy to be at the bottom of a hole in her life.

  She drank from her waterskin, the last few drops trickling out onto her tongue. Another sip or two filled her canteen. She looked to Pahlo’s grave. A sad resolve washed over her. She would want him to do it if their roles were reversed.

  When she buried him, she never expected to be reacquainted with hope again before her death. Taking his water and food rations didn’t matter then. Now, it did. She had a shot at living to see another day, and when that day came, she needed to have all of her options on the table. Perhaps she couldn’t change her fate and she would die in that hole regardless, but a chance hung in her future, and she intended to make the most of it.

  “I’m sorry. I am so sorry,” she muttered as she shifted away the stones placed atop him by her own hands. She tried not to look at his body as she uncovered it; something about it felt wrong. With her arms so shaky and numb from hours of labor, moving the stones took an immense amount of effort. Even with that part of the task completed, his body still lay on his back, pinning his pack beneath him. She sighed and took a deep, steadying breath.

  “I am really, really sorry,” she said, and then as carefully as she could, she lifted his shoulder. All warmth had vacated his body, and his skin no longer felt like skin. A softness remained, but a sickly one. It sent chills through her. Using her knife, she cut the straps of his pack and slid it from beneath him as quickly as she could, then let him fall back to the ground, gently, to be at rest—and hopefully for good this time. Summoning her strength again, she heaped the stones back over his body to form a large mound. Breathing heavily, she returned to her things and dropped to the ground.

  One of Pahlo’s waterskins burst in the fall, but the other remained intact. Water sloshed around inside. She took the food from Pahlo’s bag as well and added his other supplies to her own. The tent poles were reduced to splintered dowels, no longer fit for further use, so she ditched the tent in its entirety. If she hoped to go anywhere—and she still knew not how far she could even manage to drag her failing body—travelling light would be a necessity.

  She made a quick meal and swallowed it down in haste, in equal parts due to her groaning hunger and her fears of being unready when Honn arrived. The meal marked the most she’d eaten in days, and her stomach expressed its gratitude as a brief and slight reprieve from its unceasing grumbling and moaning. Any ounce of strength she could amass made her better prepared. She hoped no fight would unfold and that her plan worked as intended, but if it came to a fight, she was prepared to go out in a blazing fountain of blood—both Honn’s and her own.

  With everything else set and her things collected and packed, she moved to sit by Pahlo’s grave down the crevice a dozen or so feet. Being beneath the collapse would be just as deadly for her as Honn, and she needed a better shooting angle besides. She settled in and placed her bow across her thighs.

  As she unlatched the cover of her quiver to draw an arrow, a thousand tiny splinters cascaded out and scattered across the ground, followed by snapped arrow shafts, bits of fletching, and arrowheads. One single arrow, still intact, fell into her lap.

  So be it. She only needed one shot anyway.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The hours ticked by in long, drawn out fits of restlessness. Sitting still didn’t come easily to her; the time spent waiting for Honn was the longest she had sat doing nothing in memory, and the flares of pain in her leg didn’t make it easier to sit and focus. Her attention wandered and hands fidgeted. She itched to pull her tinkering bag closer and set to work making something to pass the time, but she didn’t dare. Her mind needed to be focused and sharp. When Honn arrived, she had one shot. She couldn’t afford to be caught off guard.

  The hard stone ground quickly became the least comfortable place to sit. Each time she shifted, she somehow invited more sharp pebbles to wedge themselves underneath her. She entertained herself by collecting them and bouncing them off the far wall where they struck the stone with a high-pitched tick before coming to land on the ground amidst another shorter sequence of clicking sounds. Eventually, this turned into a game of seeing how close she could get them to a designated spot she shifted each time she found success, though the rules of the game were fairly fluid, with the only real objective being to keep herself engaged.

  Deep into the night she continued to wait. The sky grew a shade lighter after a time, though hardly enough to notice if she hadn’t been looking to everything around her in search of stimulation. Then, between the clicking sounds of her thrown stones finding new homes, a rumbling, scraping sound emerged. Quiet at first, it steadily rose in volume. Her heart beat faster in tandem with the rising sounds of metal sliding on stone, of dozens of padded feet on the ground, of barking and gnashing teeth. Oleja nocked her arrow quickly but kept her bow laid across her knees, her hands ready to raise it in an instant. Only one shot—both literally and figuratively. If she didn’t pull it off, she would be quickly acquainted with death. One shot. She could do it.

  Two snouts appeared on the ledge first, but nothing more. The attached coyotes stood just to the side of the weakest point of the ledge. They tugged at their harnesses but could not budge. Drips of saliva hung from their jaws and swung like pendulums as they threw their weight against the sled’s brake system, trying to get a look down into the crevice to where they could no doubt smell her. She doubted her odor was anything pleasant, but that probably only made her all the easier to sense. Rows of cruel teeth lined their mouths, glistening in the moonlight. Either one of the beasts looked happy to rip her to shreds given the chance. With luck, neither of them, nor any of the others, would ever get one.

  Footsteps echoed above the barking and guttural snarling, metal on stone, the sound of Honn drawing nearer. His gait sounded uneven—his wound still affected him. If this moment marked her end, Oleja would go to the grave relishing in the knowledge that the wound she inflicted on the hunter still slowed his pace. She had dealt back to him a small fraction of the pain his kind had put her people through.

  He still owed her a great debt.

  Armor glimmered in the low light—the first part of him to come into view. He held one of his swords in his hand, relaxed at his side. Visor up, the pale skin of his face lay exposed. His eyes roved the darkness, searching for movement. The toes of his boots came to rest just at the edge of the drop, directly above the weakened ledge.

  First, he scanned the bottom of the crevice immediately below him—a good guess, given the trail Oleja left, wh
ich indicated a wounded creature dragging itself to the edge. A fair analysis, and true of course, but while he likely expected to find her broken body crumpled dead on the ground, he was sorely mistaken. Because she was very much alive. And she was ready to end this.

  He scanned to the left and right next. Hardly a moment passed before he spotted her, but Oleja’s intentions were never to hide from him there at the bottom. When their eyes met, he grinned. She could tell his focus fell on her leg.

  “Looks like someone took a bit of a hard fall,” he said, his voice low and coursing with menace. “Where’s the other one? I know he found you again after your stunt back at the city ruins.” His eyes flicked to the mound of rocks behind Oleja, then up to something on the cliff face above her. He seemed to put the pieces together as amusement sparked brighter in his eyes. “Looks like he took the fall even harder.”

  Oleja’s knuckles turned white on her bow. She breathed a heavy exhale through her nose. He had no right to speak of Pahlo in such a way. His presence pushed them to go so fast, casting caution aside as they tried to outrun him. Honn carried the fault for Pahlo’s death. Now death would come to him in repayment.

  Thoughts of Ude flashed in her mind as she readied to raise her bow: the old man shaking his head at her on the last day she practiced with her bow. You cannot let your anger doom you.

  Honn still looked down at her. For only a second, she closed her eyes, releasing the anger crackling in her heart and letting it melt away as best she could. One steady breath filled her lungs, and then curled back into the dry desert air through parted lips. She opened her eyes.