The Stormbringer

by Isabel Cooper

  “That way, then.” Amris pointed along a street that doglegged toward the setting sun. “We’ll find the temples. If any building still stands here, it’ll be Sitha’s, and if any is free of walking dead, it’ll be Letar’s. That is, if these are the sort I remember, though I’d think the Threadcutter would drive all of them away.”

  “Gerant says he doesn’t know how much power the temples would still have. They’re not likely to be defiled, unless Thyran and his crew stopped on the way out, but disuse isn’t great either when it comes to keeping a place sacred. On the other hand”—she shrugged—“the undead I’ve seen so far have just been lurching corpses. Mindless, drawn to warmth, eating things even though they can’t actually eat, and so on.”

  “Masterless forces,” said Amris, grimacing at the memory. “A few of Thyran’s lieutenants were skilled with the dead. One in particular.”

  “Lovely talent. Anyhow, without a leader, they’re not much of a threat. Nasty if they take you by surprise or you stumble into a nest, but I don’t mind clearing out a few to make camp. I just don’t want to run into one in the middle of the night.”

  She fell silent. The fading light picked out her pale face in sharp, severe profile; she could have been on a coin. Light and leisure let Amris notice that her skin wasn’t entirely white, but slightly iridescent. Faint rainbows flickered across it while they walked.

  “Is Oakford your home?” he asked.

  “Only the closest fortress. We’ve two Sentinels there permanently, plus a few more who come and go. Maybe a hundred regular army, one or two of Tinival’s paladins if they’re traveling through.”

  “You’re one of those who come and go, I take it.”

  “So long as I have legs. I’m based in Kvanla, by the sea, but—” Darya smiled sheepishly. “Truth to tell, I like it out on the edges.”

  The street opened up into a circle, and Darya gave a quiet whistle. While storms, war, and time had touched the temples, the contact had been a feather stroke compared to the fate of the other buildings. Three stood with smoothly curved domes and colored stone walls intact: the red and black of Letar, the Threadcutter; the blue and silver of Tinival, the Lord of Justice; and the many-hued gold of Sitha, the Weaver. In the middle of the plaza, a tall jade fountain in the shape of a pine tree gave tribute to Poram, ruler of the wild. Water yet ran up the trunk and fell steadily from the branches; below, a patch of grass and weeds spread outward through the cracked stone of the plaza, and the green was actually verdant, not the pale, whiteish color Amris had seen earlier.

  “Good idea,” Darya said, replying to whatever Gerant had suggested. Her voice had fallen to a hush, almost reverent. “Very good idea.”

  Chapter 8

  Old temples were familiar ground for Darya in one sense. The world had plenty of abandoned towns and cities. Naturally, most of them had a few places to worship. Most of the places where she’d been had been smaller, though, and the temples likewise. Most, too, had been more damaged; the gods’ power might have kept away the undead and let the temples weather the worst of the storms, but when mortal hands set fires or catapults launched boulders, the divine didn’t help very much.

  She gawked like a peasant girl at a fair, but she also went to the fountain, made a quick holy sign, and refilled one of her waterskins, then drank and splashed her face as well. The water tingled with more than cold as it hit her skin.

  “Honor to Poram, lord of the waters and wild,” said Amris, before he bent his head to take his own drink.

  He spoke sincerely, but the prayer had a practiced note to it. “Poetic,” said Darya, inviting more information but not asking. The man might not want to talk about the past more than he had to—and he would likely have to again before too long.

  “A common blessing in Silane,” said Amris, and then chuckled, “and I do mean ‘common.’ Like as not, I kept the habit as much out of defiance as any true reverence when I came among men of rank.”

  Plowboy, said Gerant affectionately. Despite all my best influence.

  “I’m not exactly a duchess myself.” Darya looked from the fountain to the temples, considering the line of three. “Sitha has my vote. I can fight undead, but I can’t do much if a roof falls on me.”

  “When you put it that way, I can muster no counterarguments.”

  And since I’d be the one trying to shield you from the roof, I’ll make third and all.

  They first entered a long anteroom, big enough for twenty or thirty people to stand at need, without furnishings or much ornament. On the walls, golden sconces shaped like spiders held burnt-out torches in their forelegs, and the maple double doors were carved with raised images of webs and looms.

  In the shadows of the far corners, shapes began to drag themselves forward. Bone and rusted armor scraped against the marble floor. Darya saw long yellow fingers, a burnt-black skull dragging itself along with its spine, and—“Three walkers.”

  “Two at the other end.”

  Without thinking about it, she’d turned away from Amris and stepped backward. Either he’d responded or had the same thought, for they stood back to back, each with a sword drawn. “We could go for the doors,” she said. “Get into the main room and shut them out.”

  “They’d only be here when we need to leave.” He was echoing thoughts she’d had herself, confirming but mostly making conversation, while the bones made their slow, grisly advance down the corridor. A helm on one of them still had red feathers. “The temple may yet stand, but the back paths could be blocked.”

  “Damn. Here we go, then.”

  * * *

  Amris recognized none of the armor. There were no faces left to identify: his right-hand opponent had only patches of dried flesh and skin clinging to its skull, and the one on the left lacked even such adornments. He was glad of it. Thyran’s monsters had been monsters, but the undead had often been friends and comrades up until their death.

  His first overhand strike beat aside a skeletal arm and smashed through several ribs on its way down. His opponent wobbled but kept coming, clutching at air with fleshless hands. Feeble sparks of grayish-pink light burned in the deep sockets where its eyes had been, and its jaw worked steadily on the air, teeth clashing and parting and clashing again.

  All of them did that, each slightly out of rhythm with the others. Clack CLACK clack CLACK clclcl CLACK.

  The sound of Amris’s sword hitting bone, and of Darya’s doing the same behind him, was the only source of relief. Darya wasn’t silent, as she had been with the cockatrice, but kept up a constant stream of muttered profanity, lyrics to the macabre concert the seven of them were putting on.

  Another stroke from him took the head off one of the skeletons. The body lurched blindly onward, still clutching. Its companion grabbed at Amris, but he hacked its arm off at the shoulder, spun, and split the headless one’s spine lengthwise at the same time as he kicked in one of its knees.

  “They’re brittle,” he said, stomping down on a severed foot. “I’ll say that in their favor.”

  “Like fine, disgusting porcelain.”

  A chop to the hip took care of the corpse that yet stood. The remaining arms and legs still twitched, though Amris noted with relief that the persistence didn’t extend to individual bones. “Or chopping firewood,” he said, and suited actions to words.

  “Gerant says that Optyras… I’m guessing he was the… Oh, piss off, you”—a smash did, indeed, sound like a milk jug falling onto a stone floor—“the proud father of these things. Gerant says he never did consider the future.”

  “Among his many other failings.”

  Amris heard a series of tiny crunches and very deliberate stomps. “Be fair, both of you,” Darya said. “I don’t think I’ve ever thought Will this body hold up against people with swords in a hundred years?” She stopped talking long enough for another crash, then added, “Yes. Yes, it is.”<
br />
  When the skulls were split in half and the hands had stopped clawing at the air, Amris said, “Hmm?”

  “Huh? Oh. Why I’m not a world-conquering necromancer. I lack foresight. And necromancy.”

  “Alas.”

  He cleaned off his sword and turned to meet Darya, who was doing the same. The exertion had left her flushed, and her pink face brought to mind the rose Gerant had given him. He’d left his old life with one lovely weapon from the mage, and it seemed he’d been brought into his new existence by another.

  * * *

  The doors weren’t locked. Darya almost fell when she went to try one and it opened easily, which Gerant found very amusing. She wished, not for the first time, that she could glare at a sword without feeling silly. She also wished Amris hadn’t been present to witness, or to put out a steadying arm.

  “Strange,” she said. “I’d have thought they’d barricade themselves in here, at the end.”

  The room beyond was a great hall, with an arched roof and carved pillars, a huge altar at the front, and pews carved of the same red-gold maple as the doors. There were many corners where bodies could lie, and maybe they did, but Darya couldn’t see any, nor did she hear the scratching sound of bones moving.

  “Not here,” Amris replied. “Here, there was some warning. Any who would leave the city, did. All who remained turned out to fight, and… I know not what happened to all of them.”

  The storms broke hard—likely, I now know, it was as soon as Thryan was no longer there to control them—and the city was at the center. Those who fled headed south. A quarter survived the journey. They said it was better to die of exposure—or attack—in the storms than starvation in Klaishil.

  “They left ahead of the storms,” said Darya. “Some of them made it.” She watched Amris take the news, face still. “One day,” she said, “I’ll get to tell you some good news.”

  With that, she left, not wanting to make him hide his pain in front of an audience, and went through the doors into the main room of the temple.

  Even Sitha’s power couldn’t protect a disused temple completely from every misfortune in a hundred years. Dust lay thick on every surface, the burgundy carpets were thin—moths and mice apparently did survive in Klaishil, resilient creatures that they were—and half the tall arched windows were broken.

  The last light shone in rainbows through the ones that were still intact, though. The stained glass picked out golden spiders and female faces in the corners. In the centers, larger pictures showed fields of wheat, smiling families at dinner, scholars bent over their books, a woman at a spinning wheel, and other scenes of craft and civilization. As Darya reached the altar, she saw the cloth covering it was still fine and richly embroidered beneath the dust, and the candlesticks atop it were delicate creations of branching gold, studded with topazes in the shape of spiders.

  “I’m bringing these back to the temple in Oakford,” she said as she reached for the first of them. “As a gift, not for sale.”

  “It would’ve been no place of mine to ask,” said Amris.

  “Well.”

  He was right, and he wasn’t, and it was awkward as hell to suddenly have a witness other than Gerant, who’d gotten used to her long ago. Darya looked down at the candlestick. It was important to pack such things with care.

  “And it would be a shame,” he added, “to let beauty be lost, when so much of worth has vanished already.”

  That, said Gerant, is why I loved him. One of the reasons; nothing has only one cause, as I’ve told you on an occasion or seven.

  “Without you,” Darya replied, only half-joking, “I’d be an uneducated clod.”

  Amris’s chuckle drew her gaze up to his face again. His eyes were soft, but he didn’t seem quite as sad. “He’s not changed very much with the years, then.”

  Piled up more knowledge, I would say, and only had one person at a time with whom to share it, but I fear neither time nor death has changed the essentials.

  “Neither of us is really complaining,” said Darya, which drew another affectionate laugh from Amris. This time, she felt as though she was part of the connection between him and Gerant, not in a limbo between translator and intruder.

  The inclusion was pleasant—too pleasant to linger in, or she’d come to expect it and start imposing herself. Darya fastened the flap of her pack and stepped back from the altar. “Moving on,” she said. “Unless either of you think we’ll be smote for it, I say here’s the best place to make camp.”

  * * *

  A hundred years before, Amris had knelt in front of the same altar and prayed for victory. Even then, most of the priests had left: fleeing the city, fighting with the army, reinforcing the walls, or helping with the wounded in Letar’s temple, where holy power had to be reinforced by human effort. Always tired, always hungry from half rations of biscuits and dried meat, a bandaged cut down one leg still aching, he’d looked up at Sitha’s gentle, contemplative face and wondered how much use she could be, even as he asked for her aid.

  The face was still there, carved in relief into the wall behind the altar. Now, her smile seemed more knowing. Amris didn’t think the gods would have been vengeful enough to punish him for his doubts, but perhaps she was saying And now you see or something similar. He knelt and prayed again. It could only help, and he had time.

  Darya was walking in a wide circle around the altar and the room beyond, one that covered as much free space as possible before bumping into the pews. She went slowly, with her sword naked in her hand and pointed toward the floor, and a line of green light appeared on the stone below it. As the circle grew, the light rose, slowly forming a dome half the height of the ceiling, until Darya came back to the point where she’d started and the structure closed.

  A faint green hue tinted everything, but the air felt no warmer or cooler, and a breeze still stirred it; it wouldn’t go stale on them. Amris rose from his prayers. “May I touch the circle?”

  “You can try, but you’ll go through,” said Darya. She sat, sword sheathed now, and Amris thought she was paler than usual. “It’s not really there to block passage for either of us. Gerant says it knows our souls.”

  “Is the casting often so hard on you?”

  “Not always.”

  “That is to say, not without a second person to include. Once again, I’m in your debt.”

  “It’s good practice.”

  Amris joined her on the floor. It was stone, but as it was also smooth and not freezing, he’d had worse, and it was good simply to take weight off his feet. He pulled off his helm and gauntlets, which was a greater relief, and began to undo the catches on his breastplate, while Darya divested herself of her simpler armor far more quickly. With supple grace and long practice, she toed off one boot, then the other, and leaned back with a contented sigh.

  “At times I thought,” said Amris, “that I could be dead three days and still enjoy this moment.” The last catch finally fell away. He lifted his armor off and took a truly deep breath for the first time in…in more than a hundred years. So it always felt, but the literal truth was disconcerting.

  “Here,” said Darya, holding out a small parchment-wrapped bundle. “It’s not much of a first meal, but you probably need it.”

  As Amris expected, the package contained a square of hardtack and two strips of dried meat. “Thank you,” he said, and was about to protest when he saw Darya take another such bundle out of her pack and open it herself.

  “I can hunt when we’re outside the city. Here, all we’re going to get is rats, and I don’t want to risk their meat in a place like this.” She held out a leather bottle. “Water?”

  He accepted and washed down his first few bites of hardtack. It tasted just as good as it had a hundred years before; for all he knew, it could have been made in his own time. Outside, the purple sky turned black, and the shadows inside t
he temple became darkness, lit only by the faint silver light of the stars.

  In that light, Amris looked at his rescuer—Gerant’s companion, the woman who fought monsters and talked of eating rat meat as though it was commonplace outside of sieges. She met his gaze evenly, and her eyes glowed in the dark.

  “I’d not bring this up at mealtime, nor just before bed,” he said, “but I fear I can’t choose my time. What has happened to the world since I left it?”

  Chapter 9

  “Good question,” Darya said. “Big question. Um.” It was also a question a more forward-thinking person would have been ready for. She took a bite of hardtack, which was good for stalling while she chewed. “All right. I’m going to start at the beginning, and this is going to be pretty general, and there’s a lot I don’t know. Probably a lot even Gerant doesn’t know.”

  “A first in both of our experiences,” said Amris. “Still, I’ll value what you can speak of.”

  Darya took a breath. “When you took Thyran out of the picture, it made the storms hit their hardest, right then.”

  That was not Thyran’s plan, Gerant put in, all the more emphatic for the dismayed expression on Amris’s face, and Darya repeated his words as quickly and as strongly as she could. We may not have been able to stop the storms at all by that point. What we did—what you did, was interrupt the building of energy. Darya felt him struggle to put it into words that nonmages understood. Those that came before fed into one another, and the whole effect was like drawing back an arrow. Removing Thyran, we forced the storms to loose when they were only half-drawn. Because of what they were, that was still enough force to damage, but it could have been much, much worse.

  Some of the shadow lifted from Amris, but not by any means all. “How bad was it?”

  “Bad.” Gerant didn’t add details. Darya felt him withdrawing from contact slightly, as he did when she took lovers or attended to other bodily needs. He didn’t go as far off, though, so she felt an echo of his memories as she spoke, filling in details they’d never talked about and she’d never wanted. “For a full year, blizzards worse than there’d ever been. Plants died. Animals died. People couldn’t grow anything, or hunt, and that wouldn’t have mattered because the cold would mostly kill you in minutes if you went outside.”