by S. W. Clarke
Hearing that name set Veda’s nerves tingling. “It was that painful?” She lowered the sack of oats. Agnar followed with his face.
“I was fine afterward, you know, but at the time I actually considered just tapping out of the testing, the pain was that bad.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Amy shrugged, yanked off another bite of the meat. “Pain passes, and you don’t remember the specifics of it. Especially when the highs you feel are like a forgetting drug. Don’t tell me what just happened wasn’t one of the most amazing experiences of your life.”
“I don’t know—it still feels like one of the worst.” Veda lowered her eyes to where the hestur fought to press his nose to the bottom of the sack. She pulled it away, tugged the tie closed. The hestur pawed one hoof through the snow, snicking his nose under her elbow and jerking it up. She turned toward Amy. “Why did Prairie shoot you?”
“Because I deserved it.” Amy pulled the canteen from the bag and lifted it over her face. A few droplets fell to her mouth.
A howl echoed across the lake, and the hestur pulled his head up, ears swiveling to listen. Veda didn’t know how wide the lake was around, but with a trail of Amy’s blood on the ground—
“We should go now,” Amy said, setting the remnant pork into her jacket and lifting out the compass.
Veda nodded, returning the sack to the canvas bag. She helped Amy get her foot in the stirrup, pushing her up onto the hestur. She swung up after, and as she took the reins, she noticed that her riding skill had risen to 4. The one upside of meeting a pack of starving wargs.
She pressed Agnar to a trot. They emerged onto a long downslope peppered with trees far into the incomprehensible distance. At the horizon, only clouds and haze. In the saddle before Veda, Amy stared at the compass. “More east.”
Veda tugged on the reins with her left hand. “How does it work, exactly?”
“Turns out,” Amy said, angling the face of it into Veda’s view, “It directs you toward the person in your mind’s eye. Watch: right now I’m imagining Eli. But see what happens when I think of Galen?” As Amy spoke, the compass needle swung from southeast to southwest.
“That’s…”
“Terrifying, right? Imagine if Wilt or Sarai Waters had this instead of me.”
“So we’re getting Galen first,” Veda said.
“Eli needs us more. If anyone can handle himself for a while, it’s Galen. But…”
“But Eli could be a cutthroat,” Veda finished.
“You two seem to like her, but Galen and I have played together a lot, Veda. I trust him more than you—no offense.”
“None taken. I trust him more, too,” Veda said, “but like you said: Eli needs us. And she saved Galen and me in the compass world—she didn’t have to do that.”
Amy sighed. “Now I’m regretting that speech about being kind.” At once, the compass swung back to the southeast. She was thinking of Eli.
“Are you sure?” Veda asked.
“Yes—but not at this pace,” Amy said. “We need to move.”
She was right; the countdown read 48 hours. Veda urged the tired hestur into a canter.
They rode hard, Veda trotting and then cantering the hestur when he pulled on the reins. They took the northlands in silence, passing from fresh-fallen snow and deep hardpack to a place where there was only snow and no hardpack; the sky remained clear and blue as they followed the compass needle, which took them south, south. The land was white and gradual, incremental pine trees frosted with snow, and they met no other creatures except a snow-rabbit that sat on its haunches, fled along with its bounding shadow at their approach.
Veda’s backside had long numbed, her thighs crying. But they couldn’t rest; at this pace they wouldn’t arrive at the midlands until evening, and that left them with less than two days to find the other two. She cast Minor Heal again as they rode, first on herself, then on Amy. She needed to outpace the cold exposure. “You sure you don’t want to stop for this?” Amy asked.
“No time,” Veda said, though she didn’t fully trust her balance. The golden light washed from her hand and into Amy, streamed behind them as Agnar pressed forward.
“That’s good,” Amy sighed. “Stuff’s like crack.”
Veda had come to understand something in the past day. First, that her mana replenished itself gradually after she’d used it, though she wasn’t sure of the exact rate. And it seemed to replenish even when she wasn’t sitting or concentrating on it, so it was a passive action. However, it did regenerate faster when she wasn’t so active.
Dusk fell, the temperature dropping with it, and Veda wasn’t aware of the rumbling until it had grown to be unignorable. The three stared out over the land ahead to where it seemed, of a sudden, to end.
“What is it?” Amy asked.
Veda surveyed in the dim light, and her eye caught motion in the snow off to their west. The press of it quickened as her eye followed it south, and she directed the hestur that way. After a few minutes they came to the spot where the northlands lost its chilling hold. Here the ice broke off in great chunks, flowing south atop the water’s surface. They watched, and after a time Agnar stamped in the snow.
Veda turned him south, following the river until the rumbling nearly deafened her and the ice swept by them with terrible speed, passing to the land’s end where water vapor rose into the air. Veda slowed the hestur as they came to it, and as Agnar stopped by the edge, Amy set her hand over her mouth.
Beside them the river flowed to a cliff, ice pouring over a wide rim that stretched far into the mist. Below, the shards broke, churned to bits by the water’s force. This was the waterfall from Brynhild’s map, the centerpiece of the great bowl that washed into the midlands. West of them, the other half of the bowl stretched as far as she could see, the snow giving way to the grey of a vertical cliffside. This was where the northlands dropped into the midlands, softened and gentled—if they could find a way down the cliff. Somewhere there should be a path down.
They rode east along its edge, Amy leaning north the whole while. “Can you walk him a little bit further from certain death?”
“We need to walk close enough to spot the path,” Veda said. “Are you really scared of heights?”
“You aren’t? You’ve been blind your whole life and now you’re walking a horse two feet off a hundred-foot drop.”
“When you’re blind there are a lot of unexpected drops.” She angled Agnar a bit further from the edge. “I guess it’s made me immune to that kind of thing.”
Amy turned in the saddle. “You’re supposed to be the soft rook. How did it get to the point where you’re reassuring me?”
Veda laughed, shook her head. “I’m still nervous about everything. You can’t tell?”
“It seems like when shit gets scary, you get cool.”
“If you’re calling me cool, I’ll take it.”
Amy turned back around. “I meant it both ways.” After a second, she pointed out over the drop. “Does that look like a path?”
Veda leaned forward, squinting; that might be a zig-zagging protuberance from the stone, or it might just be the striations of the rock in the low light. “Sort of. What do you say we find out in the morning?”
She felt Amy relax into the saddle. “A woman after my own heart.”
They camped under a trio of pines overlooking the cliff. Veda found flint and small pieces of tinder in the canvas bag, raised her face upward in silent thanks to Herathor as she gathered the driest needles from the low branches of the trees. After fifteen minutes she’d managed to create a fire, and an entire level later, she finally gained the Campfire skill.
The moon rose round and orange over their shoulders, and the two sat on fur skins eating pork and drinking from the canteens. Beside them, Agnar explored the remnants of the oats Veda had poured onto the ground. His saddle and bridle sat on the fur with her, his wet and sweated long coat exposed to the air.
Amy sat with the compass on
her flat palm. “See, now I’m thinking of you.” And Veda watched as the needle swung, pointed straight at her.
“What happens if you think of someone who’s not in the game?”
“Like my mom or dad? Let’s find out,” Amy closed her eyes. When she opened them, the needle sat unmoved, still pointed at Veda.
“They’re in the exact same direction?” Veda asked.
“That would be weird. Let me try someone else.” Amy concentrated, her face scrunching, but still the needle didn’t move. “All right, it might be broken now.”
“Try Eli again.” As soon as she’d said it, the needle swung back around to southeast, straight off the cliff.
“I don’t think it works unless what I’m thinking of actually exists here in Sicora,” Amy said.
Veda sat back. “Makes sense. Still amazing—we would never find them otherwise.”
“Amazing? You’re wearing a staff with a glowing green gem at the top.”
Veda’s eyes widened, and she scrambled up. “The flare. I forgot.” She trekked through the snow, and a good fifteen feet from the campsite sent up the flare from her staff. It flew high and brilliant in the black night, and Veda stared up at the green cinders as they rained back down over her. She thought of Wa’s story, the elves glimmering in the candlelight, and she knew it was a regret she would always, always carry. The old woman might have been a fabrication of the game, but failing her had been an education for Veda; the memory was as real as any from her actual life.
When she returned, Amy had wrapped herself in her skin, only her face visible. She’d left the compass on the ground beside her, its needle still pointed toward Eli. Veda sat staring at it for a time until the other girl’s breathing deepened, slowed. Agnar pressed his nose to Veda’s arm, and she set her hand on his chin, scratching until his lower lip quivered. Her eyes traveled back to the compass.
She lifted it with two gentle fingers into her palm; the edges and bottom were cold metal, the face printed with delicate and exact lettering: N, E, S, W. Its description appeared in her interface:
ITEM: Compass of Finding
QUALITY: Rare
STATS: None.
EFFECTS: Points in the direction of whomever you picture in your mind’s eye.
Veda closed her eyes. She had known the face she would imagine before she’d even touched the compass. It was the same face she’d imagined for the past year, though by now she wasn’t sure how accurate her imagination was. So she imagined her voice, her words, her sounds. In her hand, the compass began to vibrate, and when she opened her eyes, the needle had started to spin, slow at first and then fast. Within a moment it moved so fast the indicator had become a black blur that buzzed like a wasp, and across the fire, Amy sat up. She pressed her hands to her eyes, rubbing them clear. The two of them stared, silent, as the needle spun, spun, spun.
Twenty
An hour after dawn she went to send up the flare, but Veda hesitated; by now she’d begun to wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to conserve the staff’s power for a moment when they truly needed either the healing or the damage. She also hadn’t spotted a single cross-hatch on the trees in the times she’d remembered to look. Given the direction the compass pointed, Galen and Eli were either in the midlands or beyond, in the southlands. She decided against it, returning the staff to its sling on her back. And now, trudging back to their makeshift camp, she understood fully the gravity of the countdown and the journey left; Veda cursed herself for wasting so much time.
Amy lifted her eyes from where she’d been attempting to befriend Agnar, her hand still beneath his muzzle. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” Veda set her hand to the hestur’s warm neck.
“Was that profanity from Veda Powell?”
“Only directed at myself,” she said, bending to check the saddle’s girth.
Amy came around the stallion’s front end. “Why?”
“I’ve wasted so much time here. I should have found them both already.”
“How did you waste time? You survived death from exposure, waited in place until I found you—which saved me too, by the way—and then brought Herathor’s long lost wife back to him. He wouldn’t have given you the horse otherwise. Oh, and you saved our asses from wargs and navigated us to the midlands within like, a day.”
Veda shrugged, testing the tightness of the sacks on the hestur’s side. She always punished herself in this way; Amy’s version of events seemed a lot more accomplished. “Let’s not ruin all that by talking the morning away.”
Amy cast her eyes over the edge of the bowl. “Frankly, I’d rather do anything than descend into that.”
Because, as it turned out, Amy Park’s deepest fear was of heights.
The path down the cliff had first been hewn and then, over years, crumbled away so that much of it sat like a cornice—barely enough for two women and a hestur walking single-file. At dawn Veda had surveyed west for miles on Agnar’s back, but she could find no other way down. So she took the lead, Agnar’s reins in her hand, the hestur’s head low and docile behind her. Before she went, she turned a meditative circle. Goodbye to the roiling northlands, the dark clouds and torrents of snow, Herathor Strongarm. Ahead the sky was the color of a robin’s egg, as though the weather operated along the exact lines of the biomes.
Amy wavered at the path’s head, her arms folded as Veda started down. “Are you sure it’s the only way?”
Veda didn’t turn; she focused on every step and the wind up the cliff threatened to blow her hair into her eyes. “Yes,” she called, “unless you’ve found a magical quest device for flying.”
“You know, that’s actually my one VR dream,” Amy said. A pebble rolled past Veda, clacked down the rock face into the mist; the other woman had started picking her way down. “I just want to be able to fly—everywhere, all the time. That could happen, right?”
“Totally,” Veda said; for Amy’s sake, she tried to sound light, unconcerned. She had reached the edge of one zig in the path, and with aching slowness she led Agnar around and down. For how excitable the hestur had been a day ago, he now walked with perfect care, setting one hoof directly in front of the other. It was almost as though he’d walked this path before—and maybe he had. “Would you prefer a flying ability, or an item?”
“Oh, an ability for sure. An item can get lost, can break—and that’s the last thing you want when you’re in the sky.”
“A flying scrapper. I’ve heard of crazier things,” Veda said, and she stopped at the zag she’d just reached in the path. Behind her, Agnar’s head rose, and the two of them stared out into the mist.
“What’s up?” Amy asked; she was pressed bodily to the rock, her palms flat against it as she worked herself down sideways.
“You didn’t ask me about last night,” Veda said, “with the compass.”
“That’s because it was obvious.” Above her, Amy kept pressing her way down, one inexpert step at a time. “What’s not obvious is why you decided we need to talk about this on the side of a cliff.”
“Sorry.” Veda lifted her reins hand, and with a light tug she and the hestur started down again. But the two lines that had formed at the center of her eyebrows didn’t give way, and question after question formed in her mind, dissolved into others. She was enveloped by the mist by the time she had worked out that Amy, too, might have used the compass to imagine the same person. That Amy might have her own purposes, her own quest that Veda knew nothing about. And by that point, she could barely see Agnar behind her.
Veda lifted her face, her hair blowing up and past her. She couldn’t make out anything beyond the water vapor. “Amy?”
“I’m here—barely,” returned the voice. “I feel like I’m in a bad horror movie.”
“Yeah,” Veda said, and it was then—her hair in her face, the mist thick around her—that she took a step without first toeing out her path. Her foot missed, slipped down the misted rock, and then her body’s weight took her. She went air
borne, a yell guttering out of her throat before she hit the end of Agnar’s reins and gripped—hard. The hestur let a whinny, but he held fast as she swung from the strap of leather.
“Shit. Veda?” Amy yelled. “Tell me you’re not dead.”
“I’m slipping,” Veda rasped, throwing her free hand up to the reins. The mist slickened the strap, but she managed to get both hands on it. She kept losing purchase, regripped once, twice, three times. Her hands were going raw.
“I can’t see you. I’m coming,” Amy called. “Just hold whatever thing’s keeping you alive until I get there.”
“It’s the reins. Agnar,” Veda said, staring up at the hestur. “Up. Lift your head. Please.” At first he didn’t seem to register this—and why would he?—but he had readjusted his hooves, his nostrils wide with his breathing. She had no warning: one moment she was slipping, and the next the hestur drew his head in toward his legs and swung it up, yanking the reins up and left so hard that she was flung right up and into the rock. She hit it with so much force, her fingers scrabbling over the slick rock, that she slipped back down—this time without the reins.
She fell beyond Agnar’s reins, beyond his reach, breaking stone and pebble with her boots as she slid along the rock. Her hands gripped for anything, everything, the hestur’s white head disappearing above her until finally she caught on the tiniest outcropping with her left hand, and her fingers wailed—but they held.
Veda groaned, swinging her right hand up to catch the same grip, and Amy’s face appeared faint and distant out of the mist above her. “Holy hell,” she said.
“The rope,” Veda said, regripping with one hand and then the other.
“The rope?” She said. And then, “The Rope. The rope.” And Veda heard her rummaging in one of the canvas bags.
“Faster,” Veda said, the old wounds on her palms from her trip down the mountain twinging, reopening. She felt like she weighed a full kilo.
After five seconds or five minutes or five hours, the rope came whistling down to her right, a long and thick length of twine. “Do you see it?” Amy called. “I’m knotting it around the pommel.”
