The Stormbringer

by Isabel Cooper

  Her sword went an inch into the cockatrice’s neck, then met solid steel.

  The impact screamed all the way up Darya’s arm, rattling her bones and numbing her hand. She clutched her sword harder, compensating for her body’s wish to do the opposite, but that was all she could make the arm do, and the cockatrice whipped its head sideways, trying to throw her off into the abyss of ruined buildings below.

  “No,” she snarled, and sunk her fingers harder into its flesh. Up close now, she could see patches of scales and skin peeling away from its neck, revealing metal beneath, and she would have asked several questions had she not been preoccupied with survival.

  The cockatrice was hard to grip, though. The comb slid between her fingers, half-rotten. It was not what Gerant would have called a tenable situation. Darya could feel his magic working desperately, increasing her shields as much as he could—which might still not be nearly enough to let her survive the kind of fall that waited to her left.

  When the neck whipped to the right, Darya held her breath and jumped again.

  She landed hard against one of the broken walls and managed to jerk her sword up in front of her. It seemed to weigh twice as much as normal, but she slashed out as the cockatrice tried to grab her with one of its foul yellow claws, and the steel bit deep. Yellow blood came oozing out. The cockatrice shrieked again and retracted the claw—then grabbed Darya from behind with its tail, pinning her arms to her sides.

  It started to lift her into the air, and squeezed her in the process. Darya’s ribs creaked under the pressure, but that was far from her main concern. She could just swing herself far enough forward to kick its body, and did so desperately, putting all her weight behind the blow and aiming at the place where its wings joined to its back.

  The hit was a solid one, but the cockatrice’s reaction seemed all out of proportion. It reared its head back and howled, releasing its hold on Darya. She fell to the stone, able to control her impact more this time, and puzzled until she saw Amris, raising his sword for another blow at the monster’s wing.

  As he made contact, Darya darted around him, moving as fast as the cockatrice could swivel its neck. Face-to-face, she snarled an oath as she stabbed again, aiming for a spot under which she was pretty sure there was no metal.

  Her blade thrust smoothly, almost neatly, into the cockatrice’s right eye. Darya stepped forward, driving the sword in and easily dodging the snapping beak now that the creature was half-blind. Another cloud of poison, that one a last desperate measure, surrounded her; she ignored it, hoped Amris had gotten his cloth up in time, and kept going, breaking through eye and brain until the tip of her sword lodged against the cockatrice’s skull and yellow ichor was oozing out onto her shoes.

  Then, with a quick backward roll, she withdrew her blade. The cockatrice pulled back as well, but feebly: the last twitching responses it could muster before death. The wings beat a few times, and then it fell with a thump that rattled the whole building.

  * * *

  After the shaking had passed, when Amris was certain the dome was in no danger of collapsing on his head or Darya’s, he rose from his crouch and cleaned cockatrice blood from his sword. He had missed no part of that; the stuff was glutinous and as putrid as the creature from which it had flowed.

  “Have they grown thicker scales, all of a sudden?” he asked.

  Walking toward the fallen cockatrice, Darya shook her head. “No. It was metal. Watch.”

  There were few things Amris would have liked less, but for the sake of information, he paid attention as Darya slit open the flesh of the cockatrice’s throat, then, with puckered lips and held breath, peeled back the meat and the skin to show iron. It hadn’t even rusted.

  “By the gods,” he breathed.

  After the moment of faraway-looking silence, which he’d learned meant she was listening to Gerant, Darya said, “Growing flesh around metal is beyond anything the wizards have ever heard of.”

  “See how far it goes. If you wouldn’t mind,” he added, pulling himself back before he could slip into old habits. The woman wasn’t one of his soldiers. “I would, but the blood is poisonous as well, or was in my day.”

  “Oh, good things never change.”

  She began to strip meat from the monster’s neck with the swift, economical movements of a skilled butcher. Halfway through, she added, “Thank you for stepping in back there.”

  “It was the least I could do.” He watched her work. “Have you been all your life with the Order?”

  “As much of it as I remember.” Darya didn’t look up, but it didn’t seem as though she was hiding from his questions, only giving her mind utterly to the business at hand. “I was two years old when they took me in.”

  Amris realized he was still polishing his sword, mostly so he’d have a means of occupying his hands. He resheathed it and asked, “Is that the usual custom?”

  “More or less. You get a few younger. People get careless about herbs, a woman dies in birth and nobody’s around to take the babe on, that sort of thing. Once in a while, older orphans come to the Order, or kids whose parents can’t feed them anymore, but they say it’s impossible to survive the Forging if you don’t start training before you’re past ten or so. Your body’s too fixed.”

  “Dearest gods,” said Amris. He responded not to what Darya said, but to what she revealed: a band of metal about twice the width of his hand, looped all the way around the cockatrice’s neck and etched with many strange figures. “It has a collar,” he said.

  “Not common in your time, huh? Not in this time either. I could almost feel sorry for the damned thing”—she paused—“especially as Gerant knows how it’d be done. Has a theory, he wants me to say, so you don’t think he’s been going around doing it himself. Ugh.”

  “My sentiments precisely. When did this creature settle here?”

  “Couldn’t say that for sure, but animals started going missing about a month ago. A shepherd boy vanished ten days back. It probably ate him, but the locals thought it was wolves and set a watch. They sent for me when someone saw the cockatrice grab a watchman. These things usually expand their hunting grounds gradually, so I’d say two months.”

  “And you say Thyran would have been brought back no more than three months ago.”

  By the way Darya’s lips thinned, Amris suspected she was thinking as he was—or that Gerant was, and speaking with her. “Either his flunky did this and rode the thing in,” she said, cleaning her own blade and backing away from the cockatrice, “or Thyran woke up, summoned it, and slapped on the collar.”

  “Both, perhaps. He was ever ready to make use of the tools at hand,” Amris replied grimly.

  “Must have had another ride out, then.”

  “Awake, he could transport himself easily enough to one of his places of power. But he chose neither to take it with him, nor to leave it loose to pillage more freely in the countryside.” Beyond confirmation, Darya’s nod of agreement was a relief. The world was still alive enough to offer better prey than being tethered to an abandoned city would allow. “Why?”

  Realization flashed in Darya’s eyes, bright as Gerant’s emerald for a heartbeat. “Watchdog,” she said. “They had to leave you behind, alive. He set a watch in case you woke, escaped.” Slowly she looked around them, turning her head from shoulder to shoulder, and although she’d never appeared truly relaxed in the short time Amris had known her, her frame strung itself like a bow again, as it had before the fight.

  He was in accord with her, body and mind alike. The sun was slipping down the sky above them, gilding the ruined city with, suddenly, too much light. There on the dome, Amris could see the vast expanse of shattered buildings that lay between them and the forest. The sky was too wide, the air too open. Anything could see them.

  “Can he speak to it across distances?” Darya asked. “Or would he have felt its death?”
>
  “I don’t know,” said Amris, and the words echoed across the rooftops.

  Chapter 6

  “You know,” said Darya, “people of your day didn’t put nearly enough stone ornaments on their buildings.”

  A distinct fault of ours, and our eternal shame.

  “My home had plenty, for it was proud of its stonework,” was Amris’s reply. “I admit that’s of little help to us just now.”

  Darya peered down over the rooftop. Below, all was smooth stone by design, unstable masonry where time, war, and weather had done their work. “You should’ve sent some builders up this way. Damned lack of foresight, I call it.”

  Joking only helped so much. The back of her neck itched, the target of imagined scrutiny. Had the building been half its height, Darya would have jumped and damned the consequences, trusting her reflexes and Gerant’s shields. She unfurled her hands and tried to breathe in patience. Another quarter hour would likely make no difference in whether or not Thyran knew Amris was alive or not, killed them or not, brought an army swarming across human lands or not—

  Patience was not working.

  Tie the rope to a leg, said Gerant.

  “Huh,” said Darya, and took a coil of rope out of a small bag on her belt. When she walked over to one of the cockatrice’s protruding claws, her intention was likely obvious. Amris didn’t ask, at any rate, though his silence made her unsettled enough to explain. “This thing’s heavier than both of us combined. And it’s maybe less likely to change shape when we’re midway through climbing. Did this place do that in your day?”

  “Change shape?”

  “Mm-hmm.” She told him about the stairs as an example while she tied the knots.

  “No,” said Amris when Darya had finished, blinking but not looking completely nonplussed. He, like Darya, was probably running out of surprise. “I would have remembered.”

  I think, Gerant said cautiously, that the spatial distortions are over. They were likely a product of the spell, one I didn’t intend, or of having it half-broken for a while. Now that you’ve lifted it fully, I expect that stairs and walls will remain in place.

  “Well.” She filled Amris in, adding, “So all I need to worry about is a bunch of undead and oozes. And not getting my rope back. I’ve got more, but I paid a silver coin for this.”

  “Perhaps you could add it to your account, next to the goat,” he suggested with a smile.

  It was a nice smile: not a flashing grin, but genuine, crinkling the edges of his eyes. Nice eyes, too, when he wasn’t glaring. The contrast with his dark eyelashes was striking, and Darya knew she shouldn’t have been noticing any of that. The man’s lover had been her companion for the last ten years, he was in her sword, and while he couldn’t read her mind, he got echoes of her senses.

  Darya would have apologized, but that would have only drawn attention to her gaze—particularly as she’d have had to speak aloud and then explain herself.

  “It was a goat, yes?” Amris asked. Clearly she’d gone too long without responding. Oh, she was doing wonderfully today.

  “It was,” she said. “With a bag of colored powder tied to one leg, so it’d leave a track when the cockatrice grabbed it. Got me here, and after that, there were only so many places to go. So.”

  “Tying things to legs seems a winning tactic of yours.”

  “This one’s Gerant’s,” she said quickly. “Let’s hope it works as well the second time.”

  * * *

  The descent went slowly. Amris passed darkened, broken windows and walls with cracks spidering through them, briefly resting his feet or his grip on the remains of a windowsill. Always he was aware of the weight of his own body, and of his armor beyond that.

  About half again his height from the ground, the rope ran out. Amris tucked his head downward and let go; the fall was hard, particularly in his armor, but he picked himself up with no more than a few bruises and pulled twice on the rope, their signal in case Darya couldn’t spot him on the ground. He couldn’t see her any longer, certainly.

  The place he’d landed was an alley, once likely a route for servants to enter the great houses and tradesmen to drop off goods. Shadows were thick on the ground, as was wreckage. Plants had grown up through some of the fallen stones, and all of them were a feeble, sickly green from lack of light.

  He waited with sword drawn, listening to his breathing slow back to normal and watching the shadows for motion.

  * * *

  He’s safe. Gerant said it like a prayer, and then, more like himself as Darya knew him, Well, he’s down.

  “If he was fighting Thyran,” Darya replied, “he’ll put paid to any walking corpse or bit of ooze easily enough.”

  Starting downward, she stared into the windows as she passed them. In the midst of dust and darkness, the graceful lines of statues and vases revealed themselves. Half-rotted tapestries disclosed the shape of a unicorn here, a pair of intact woven eyes there. Darya had no chance to salvage anything she saw, but she could remember beauty—and there might be other journeys, if the world survived.

  That coda chilled her, and she suspected it was going to become common.

  “How quickly did things start going wrong, back then?” she asked. The outline of the war she’d gotten from her tutors had been sketchy. Thyran had come with an army and storms, people had stopped the army, and the blizzards had hit regardless, though maybe not as badly as they might have otherwise. Sentinels-to-be had needed to know the sort of monsters the army had left behind. History was history. “Did Thyran just fly in on the back of a storm with his creatures below him?”

  Gods, no. There’d been five years of fighting before the blizzards started. Some said only four—there was a harsh winter before, but still winter and less dramatic. And, to be fair, the monsters may have been attacking before then as well, but put down to stories of drunken soldiers and old wives. It was only in the second full year that I became at all involved.

  “That’s a comfort.” Beyond the latest window, a shadow moved, small and close to the ground. Darya hurried past the windowsill and then paused, watching, until the source revealed itself as a legless torso, mindlessly dragging itself up and down the hallways where it had died.

  “Never thought those things would be a relief,” she muttered, continuing downward.

  Comparatively, they’re harmless. Only flesh.

  “So am I.”

  They descended a few more feet in silence. Then Gerant asked, Why a comfort?

  “Huh? Oh, because it means we have plenty of time.” Gerant’s silence did not bode well. “Don’t we?”

  I can’t say for certain. Divination was never my specialty, and it’s tricky even for those who master it. But…it’s likely that delay was because Thyran had to discover the methods of causing the storms and creating his armies, as well as gather the resources to do so. Now he knows what he’s about. And some of the creatures that followed him still remain, despite your—our—efforts.

  “Well, shit,” said Darya.

  Just so.

  The rope ended before it hit the ground: a distance, but not a fatal one. Darya glanced down, preparing to jump, and blinked as she saw Amris reaching toward her. “Ah. Um.”

  Do it. He can take your weight, and that’s six feet and a bit less to fall. There’s little point in you breaking a bone out of pride, especially now—and I’d rather not use power to shield you when I don’t need to.

  She couldn’t very well voice her other objections. If she did, Gerant would have doubtlessly said that sparing his feelings wasn’t worth a broken bone, either, and Darya abstractly agreed. Still, she cringed before she let go of the rope and tried not to feel the warmth of Amris’s arms—one at her shoulders, one at her knees, large hands and nimble fingers curving around her body. Silently Darya thanked the gods for both of their armor, which made a considerabl
e leather-and-plate barrier between their chests.

  “Thank you,” she said. She looked into his face for that, and so she noticed his eyes again, and the sheen of sweat on his dark skin.

  “Glad to be of service,” said Amris, sounding only calm. That should have been an unmixed relief. That it wasn’t entirely, made Darya want to slap herself.

  While he set her down, carefully, she delivered a short but firm silent lecture to her body, to the effect that there were plenty of attractive men two or three days’ ride away, and none of them had been the great dead love of her sword-spirit’s life. Then she stretched, trying to shake off lust along with cramped muscles.

  Chapter 7

  Klaishil had been smaller in Amris’s day.

  That wasn’t strictly true, or factually true at all. If any person had stayed in the city after the last battle, it hadn’t been for long. Certainly nobody had lingered or returned to build. All the same, a smallish city had become an unending maze.

  In part, that was due to Amris’s state of mind. The more practical side was that he and Darya couldn’t walk across the city as he had done in the past. Dodging around crowds and carts didn’t compare to picking their way across small, unstable heaps of stone, nor to backtracking and trying another road when fallen stone blocked the path they’d been taking.

  After one such retreat, Darya frowned upward at the purpling sky. “I don’t think we’ll make the forest by dark,” she said, “and I want to pass the night under wards—gods know what comes out in this place once the light fades. Watch for a place that’ll do.”

  “Have you any particular requirements?”

  “No. A roof would be nice, if you can spot a place that’s not big enough to have hidden undead and won’t collapse on our heads.”

  Amris tried to picture their road in what he knew of the city. “Which direction are we going, generally speaking?”

  “West. Southwest. My horse is there, and he can carry two back to Oakford, though he’ll not be happy about it. That’s our nearest outpost.”