The Stormbringer

by Isabel Cooper

  Both Darya and Amris made disgusted noises at the thought. Darya didn’t stop there, but went on to invoke the anatomy of two different gods. Some of the sergeants Amris had served with could have taken lessons from her in profanity.

  That was a more pleasant memory than the next to arise. “They were beginning to do that,” Amris said slowly. “Nothing so large as a bridge, and I know not how long it took, but there was a battering ram at one of the last battles. Living, I suppose, though I hate to think of such life. Three or four men from the look of it, but…reshaped.”

  The creature had kept all of its eyes: two on the front, but the others dotted over it like knots on a log. It had walked on eight hands. Other details had gone unseen in battle, and Amris didn’t want to speak even of those he was sure of. He thought the words would foul the air.

  There was silence for a while, save for the birds.

  “Well,” Darya finally said, “even if they can do that for a bridge, I bet they can’t do it instantly, and it’ll cost them men. So to speak. Which means we’ve still hurt them, and that’s the important thing.”

  You mentioned grudge-holding sons of bitches, I recall?

  “Technically, I’m a grudge-holding bitch, and I don’t think I should speculate about my mother.” Darya brushed crumbs off her hands. “And now, if you’re ready,” she said to Amris, “I think we should get walking.”

  * * *

  A few hours later, Darya thought they’d covered about half the distance back to Oakford. Along the way, they’d also had to duck under low-hanging branches—Amris more often than she, and more arduously, given the armor—and fight past a small legion of brambles without the small consolation of berries, for all the ripe ones had been eaten by birds. Twice, Darya’s gift had guided them away from danger: a well-concealed badger hole in which one of them could easily have broken an ankle and a patch of grass hiding a mud pit that could swallow an unsuspecting person.

  That would have been an ordinary journey for her, though it’d been three or four years since she’d gone that long on foot, and hers were aching properly before sunset. She was used to not talking, too, though mostly because she’d been alone save for Gerant, and they knew each other well enough to spend long periods silent.

  She didn’t have to keep looking back to check on Amris, which was another benefit of the spell. Otherwise, she would have been glancing over her shoulder every few steps. As able as he was to take care of himself, there were spiders in the forest with venom that could disable instantly and a few creatures that could soundlessly drag a man off into the woods if they struck at the right time and in the right manner. But he was there and well, and that sense became a constant for Darya, like the weight of the sword on her hip and the presence of Gerant in the back of her mind.

  He felt more thoughtful than usual, though Darya had neither leisure, concentration, nor privacy to inquire more until they’d made camp for the evening and Amris was answering a call of nature. Then she seized the opportunity, but didn’t speak loudly. The man was still within the wards, though far enough away and trying hard enough for privacy that she didn’t get much sense of him through the spell.

  “Holding up?”

  Well enough. Better than both of you physically, since I have no actual physicality, and…surprisingly well, otherwise. Or perhaps my emotions simply haven’t gotten out of one another’s way enough for me to feel any of them devastatingly.

  “Either makes sense,” said Darya. “It’s not as if it’s a situation that happens often. I—”

  In truth, she wouldn’t have known how to proceed, really, if the subject at hand had been a death rather than the sort-of-reverse. She’d never had a family to mourn. When a Sentinel died, there was an official, rather mystic funeral and an unofficial, extremely drunken evening in their honor, and then the business of life the next day. She couldn’t get Gerant tipsy and pat him on the back. Nor did the respectful nod and Sorry for your loss, sir, that she used on civilians work.

  “I hope you don’t end up feeling too badly about it, in the end,” she said.

  Thank you. Of course, regardless, I’m glad we found him—and not only for humanitarian reasons. You work well together. It’s a pleasure to witness.

  “We all work well together,” said Darya quickly, “or we have done so far.”

  Chapter 17

  With each dawn, the world Amris had known dwindled in the distance. It became memory, half-dreamed, though as yet he had little to replace it with: a forest, a ruin, tales of horror, and a deadly sylph of a woman who carried his lover’s spirit. He’d known a whole world once, not long ago as he remembered it; he’d traveled its paths and seen its maps. Now he had only those few stars to steer by.

  “You hunt things like the cockatrice,” he said, scooping dirt over the embers of their campfire. “But you don’t know korvin. Have the Twisted come as armies before, even small ones?”

  Darya was sitting on a rock, braiding her hair. Her hands moved deftly, and her head not at all. “No. There’ve been some in packs, and some raiding parties—assuming those were all Twisted, and not other things that formed during the hard years—but nothing more organized than a band or two with a big enough bully at the head.” Nimble fingers tied a leather thong tight. “They come, they go. They don’t age, we’re pretty sure, and they don’t breed the way we do—er, mortals, I mean—although the big ones have ways of making more little ones. Did you know about that?”

  “To our sorrow, yes,” he said, and watched Darya to soften the memories of old horror. Nothing would banish them.

  “Right. So, there were a bunch up north after the storms. They fought among each other, they fought us. Once in a while they’d work together if one was powerful enough to make the others do what it wanted. We never thought there was more to it than that.”

  Not precisely, said Gerant.

  Seeing a woman look suspiciously at her own belt wasn’t the oddest thing Amris had seen since he’d reawoken, but it was incongruous nonetheless. “What do you mean?” Darya asked.

  We—the wizards, the Adeptas, the seniors—have been seeing hints for a while now. Remember that Twisted wizard we killed a few months ago, when we were retrieving that chalice a stretch westward of here?

  “Sure.”

  We’ve had five or six similar incidents in the last year. They’re seeking out enchanted items more and more often now. In fact, if I had to speculate, I’d say that’s how one of them came across Thyran in the first place. A few of the raids lately have also been different, more focused on taking beasts in quantity than on killing people.

  There was a pattern forming. We simply weren’t sure what it was.

  “And you mentioned none of that,” said Darya flatly, while Amris stood silent, dirt specks lingering on his hands.

  We didn’t know for certain. We had no means of finding out more except to wait for more information, or an opportunity. You know our limits. What could those in the field have done? We don’t even have the resources to reinforce all the fortresses all the time.

  “We could have known.” Her eyes were green glass.

  Why? So you could sleep less easily at night? When have you ever needed more context to an assignment?

  “There’s never been more—” Darya stopped herself as her voice started to rise, sucked in a breath through her teeth, and added, quietly, “as far as I knew. All right. We don’t have to fight about this now.”

  Amris could call to mind half a dozen similar moments in the tents of generals and the private offices of dukes: decisions made, decisions resented, feelings put carefully aside but not forgotten. He knew the reasons that command often kept knowledge from its troops, deliberately or not. At times he’d disagreed; at times he’d thought it for the best; at times the idea had been his own. He knew, too, the ire of men whose commanders had kept them in the dark when it had turned out
to matter, and had felt it himself. There was no side for him to take—and no need for him to take one. Over their partnership, Darya and Gerant had clearly found their own ways of fighting and making up. They needed no help from him.

  Amris was glad of it, and yet more alone for it, and neither emotion lessened the other.

  He brushed his hands off, let Darya turn to packing, and bent to his own supplies, meager as they were. After a while he asked, “Which of his creatures have you hunted? Are there many with wings, for instance?”

  “No. Cockatrices—I’ve gotten three of those. Flocks of skyrzaki, but it’s not like they could carry anything heavy. There are always rumors that Thyran or another cultist managed to twist a dragon, but nothing certain.”

  “Any sort of dragon was only a rumor, even in my time.”

  They’re only partly flesh in any case, Gerant put in, as deliberately calm as Amris and Darya. I don’t know that Thyran’s magic, or Gizath’s power in general, would have worked on them. I suppose one might be recruited, but I don’t know how.

  “It may depend on the dragon,” said Darya. “In all the stories I ever heard, they were like people—some good, some bad. Just different from people in the way they think. But I don’t believe it’s likely that they’ve got one.”

  “We have these small blessings,” said Amris.

  “Not much chance of others, it seems.”

  * * *

  Grass bent under Darya’s feet. Sticks crunched—occasionally, not often. She was good in the forest. Her precautions didn’t really matter, not with Amris doing his soldierly and heavily armored best, but habit was habit. Besides, caution took her mind off her anger, which kept her from fuming as much as she would have otherwise—though not, by any means, completely.

  The hell of it was, Gerant wasn’t wrong.

  She’d never asked for the bigger picture. The past was interesting. The present moment commanded attention, and was often thrilling. The future, beyond the next mission, was speculation, and she didn’t speculate, didn’t take an interest in speculating. If Gerant had spoken up a month ago and asked if she’d wanted to know what might be happening out far beyond the border, what the remnants of Thyran’s army might have gotten up to since the storms, she’d have shrugged: Get it off your nonexistent chest if you want.

  So.

  There was an irritating lack of rabbits, streams with fish in them, or even decent-sized birds—though Darya expected she might be eating crow before the day was out. It would have been nice to vent herself on a target, but then it would have been nice to have a horse, and not to have a resurgent army attacking in the near future, and to have an arse-high stack of gold and a goblet of chilled wine.

  She scowled at a beech.

  Could she, could anyone, have done more with the information? Darya didn’t know. She didn’t know that they couldn’t, was the point, and neither had Gerant or the rest of the Concilio Adeptas. If their theories had been common knowledge among the Sentinels, maybe someone would have had a bright idea about how to scout, or a better way to defend, or a method of assassination that would work.

  Maybe she was just looking back and thinking, If things had been different, things could have been different, which was a typical mortal thing to do—but she was mortal.

  That was the other part of the reason for her mood, Darya realized as she picked her way down a hillside. She was the outsider, ill-informed about the threat facing them, as well as the awkward spectator to a relationship formed, likely, more than seventy years before her parents had met. Reconciling herself to that was a light enough task when she couldn’t blame anyone for it. Gerant keeping information from her was just similar enough to sting—and just different enough that she’d howled about it.

  Darya started to sigh.

  She stopped her breath mid-exhale, froze in place, and peered through the trees and shadows ahead of her.

  There, still mostly hidden by branches, were shapes on the road. Two were horses. Five were not.

  Chapter 18

  Darya had been glad to be in the forest and away from Klaishil. When she figured out where Thyran’s scouts were heading, she changed her mind quickly. She’d have given any part of her body or soul to be back in a city, with its profusion of alleys to duck down and buildings to hide in.

  Without any power showing up to make such a trade, she fell back on her own senses and searched frantically for cover. A little way back along the path, up a small embankment, plants and saplings had grown around and over an immense fallen tree, making a small and uneven wall in the middle of the forest. Darya tapped Amris’s arm, pointed, then made a dash for it.

  From the moment she bolted, she didn’t feel a thing. It was only once she’d thrown herself to the ground behind cover, and really once Amris had settled himself beside her, that her face started stinging. Darya touched her forehead, then the bridge of her nose, then the side of her cheek cautiously, and winced each time. When she drew her hand back, it was faintly smeared with red.

  Brambles, said Gerant. I’d have warned you, but it seemed unimportant, and you were unlikely to heed.

  Both were true. Darya didn’t want to speak aloud, so she nodded. Then she lay on the ground, hand on her sword, listening to the sounds on the path and trying not to breathe loudly.

  As her vision cleared, she sighted gaps in her cover, spaces between the tree’s branches where the plants were sparse enough to give her some view of the path. She didn’t think she and Amris were visible from the path, even if the scouts did think to look up, so she adjusted her position enough to see through the space with the best view, leaving room to one side of her.

  The better view we all get now, the less we’ll have to explain later, said Gerant.

  Without a word, Amris took the rest of the peephole. Side by side, they waited there to see what came along.

  * * *

  Amris had never been a scout and rarely a sentry. Men of his strength were more useful on the front lines; men of his size tended to be easy to spot, no matter how much training they had. Since meeting Darya, he’d spent more time hiding and watching than he’d done since he’d hunted rabbits on his father’s farm, when he’d been a gawky, spotty lad and the name Thyran unheard save for gruesome tales in Heliodar.

  That boy had been better suited to the task. Better dressed for it too. Amris was doing his best to ignore his armor, which hadn’t been made to support his weight this way, and certainly not to do so comfortably. He used his elbows as much as he could, and even so suspected he’d be a solid bruise from neck to waist that night.

  There were worse fates.

  He felt the weight of the sword at his waist and knew exactly how long it would take him to reach and draw. He felt the damp earth beneath him and knew how long it would take him to be on his feet again—roll back and up, away from both the log and any weapons aimed at him, sweep a leg backward, fall into a defensive stance. He felt Darya beside him, both their bodies brushing against each other, and the lighter presence of the spell, and knew she could make it upright faster than he could.

  The contact was pleasant in a more than tactical manner, too, especially with danger heightening all Amris’s senses. Neither of them had bared much skin, and that was just as well; there was enough sensation where their clothed legs touched. After three days on the road, neither of them smelled wonderful, but lying close to Darya was far less of an ordeal, in some ways, than it would have been with anyone else Amris could think of.

  In other ways, it was more so.

  Danger stirred the blood. The body had no conscience. The rawest recruit learned both, and quickly, and with other company Amris would have been untroubled by the awareness of Darya’s body and her scent, the tingling warmth where they touched, or the stirrings of his body. Such things happened, even when one’s immediate partner wasn’t a supple woman with gleaming hair and an intr
iguing curve to her lips.

  That she was Gerant’s partner, and Gerant was to some degree in both their minds… That had him gritting his teeth and staring fixedly forward. If the spell had revealed his arousal to Darya, or if Gerant had sensed it, neither of them reacted. Certainly they both would know, as he did, how little such things meant in their situation, but still he cringed, and thought hard about cavalry maneuvers.

  Then he didn’t have to.

  Danger might excite, but the sight of the creatures coming down the path would have quelled the ardor of a sixteen-year-old in a tent of dancing girls.

  * * *

  The two on the korvin were twistedmen, creatures Darya had seen and fought before. Six feet high and roughly man-shaped, they were stretched, their limbs, neck, and faces all too long for their bodies. Each had a pair of outsized hands, with gnarled fingers tipped by three-inch talons, and close up, Darya knew, each would have three rows of black, razor-edged teeth.

  What most people would notice first was that they looked skinned. Or they were skinned, but stayed alive without being in constant pain, or were in constant pain and that was why they hated normal people—the debates got lengthy. Darya had mostly ignored them. She knew that the twistedmen were bloodred, that she could see the ropes of muscle shifting as they moved, and that the same unlucky bastards who saw the teeth could likely glimpse veins running through and around their bodies.

  Every so often, one would raid farms, stealing small livestock and children. Less often, a band of four or five would kill and eat larger prey. It always was a matter of eating—animals didn’t like them, and she’d never heard of a horse tolerating a twistedman as a rider. Thus the korvin, she guessed, though she’d never seen twistedmen bother with riding beasts before.

  The korvin was a blanched-white worm, eyeless as far as she could tell, with tiny legs sprouting from each side. The twistedmen perched on a saddle strapped between a couple of pairs of the legs. Each twistedman had an ax strapped to its back, and a couple of knives at its side. They glanced around occasionally as they rode, but generally took it easy, lingering well behind the two riders in front.