Rath and Storm

by Peter Archer (ed) (retail) (epub)

  The sudden cries on deck startled me. There was a tone of panic unusual for any regular maneuver. I hadn’t even registered what was wrong when I heard a thundering, like cannons in a fight on the sea. There was a flash of indigo-white light past my porthole in the hull, and the screaming noise of an electrical bolt tearing the air. Both were gone before I had time to realize what they were and jump back. I dropped my manual and looked out the porthole. A ship, a flying ship like our own, swept at us from above and behind, like a drake driving an eagle to ground. But it did no such thing, just matched its pace to ours and settled overhead, so that I had to crane to see it through the porthole, and then it was no more than a huge dark shape overhead, hiding the brooding sky from my view.

  Weatherlight’s movement stopped suddenly, as if it had snagged in a web. I fell to my hands and knees, then jumped up, grabbed my knife and slammed open my cabin door to pause for a moment in the passageway. One crew member—Csaba, hair still wet from washing and twisted into a dripping knot—ran toward the aft hatch, strapping her sword belt as she came.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, but she said nothing as she passed, only threw me the savage expectant smile of battle fever.

  I turned to go to the infirmary. One cabin door was ajar, waving open and closed with the rocking of Weatherlight. It was Crovax’s room, and from inside I heard a keening sound, like the cry of a tortured animal. With one foot, I shoved the door open, knife ready.

  Crovax was there and the terrible hurt noise was coming from him. He clutched his head as if he had been stabbed there, and staggered across his room, slamming into furniture and walls as if he had not seen them. The only light in his cabin came from his porthole—the same bruised color that made me shiver.

  “Crovax!” I cried and caught his hands. “You’re wounded?”

  With the shriek of a madman, he pulled free and hurled himself away, into another wall.

  “Crovax!” I said more gently, fearing concussions, head injuries, damaged eyes. What pain could cause such a sound as this keening? I carefully touched his shoulder. “It’s me, Orim. Let me see.”

  He seemed to calm then, and let me pull his hands away from his head. The keening quieted to a barely audible moaning, carried on each of his panting breaths.

  Only then did I see his face. He was not injured, at least not by splinter or blade or any physical thing. But his expression was one of torment and betrayal and loss and horror. And, strangely, something else: love. It is the nature of a healer to view pain, even the pain that destroys souls, the pain of loss; but I have never seen such despair. This is not true. I have seen it once since. There will come a time for that in this telling, as well.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  His voice was as raw as an infected bite. “I saw her. Selenia. The angel.”

  “She’s here?” More screams aboveboard. I had to go, but I could not leave Crovax like this.

  “She led them here. She—” His voice broke on a sob.

  “What?” I said. There were noises in the hatchways now, but he continued as if he hadn’t heard.

  “This is Volrath’s attack. She is Volrath’s creature now.” His voice trailed into silence, but his lips formed another word. Betrayed.

  He spoke as if watching his life’s blood drip to the deck, but there was no wound. And others above decks were wounded, perhaps dying. The cabin door had swung shut, but I heard bare feet pattering along the passageway now. There were too many feet, and too small to be crew. His sword in its sheath hung over his cot. I snatched it down, unsheathed it and forced the dark-hilted blade into his hand. “Save your life, Crovax. And fight for us. We will talk later.”

  I pushed open the cabin door. Everything in Rath seems an oversized twisted version of something in Dominaria: the corridor seemed filled with goblins, but they were what Starke called moggs, oversized goblins ugly even by the low standards one brings to judging goblin appearance. They raced past, ignoring us. I led Crovax to the forward hatch. “Up!” I shouted at him. “Fight!” Obedient as a child in shock, he climbed and I followed him. I hoped the fighting would bring him back to himself.

  I am no warrior. Others can tell the tale of the battle between Weatherlight and Predator better than I. My first and only impression was of total chaos. Predator hung over us, linked by scores of grappling hooks and lines. Moggs swarmed down the lines and across the deck. Several Weatherlight crew members were down. I cast a hasty ward over those crew members closest to me, and braced myself against the railing near Crovax. Though he held his sword at the ready, his dark face was blank, as if surprised by a stab wound.

  My people were falling, slashed on knee or belly or chest by too many mogg blades. I tied tourniquets and held pressure bandages, and threw spell after spell at those I could not reach to help: even so I lost Vidats, and Ineka Termuelen and my countryman Ozel son of Suk, their lives slipping through my fingers, sand in the hot wind of Rath.

  And still the moggs came. I wept with anger as they killed and killed again. I had to use my knife three times against moggs who attacked me. I hated the feeling, the slide of steel into flesh, the slight resistance of tendon or the sudden halt against bone, and the sickening feel and sound when I pulled the blade free. I hated it but I did it: if I did not stop these creatures, I would not be there to hold my wards or heal my people’s wounds.

  Predator fired on us again. My ward had been set, and it glowed in my mind’s eye, but it was not enough. My hands trying to stop the bleeding from Bariel’s severed arm, I closed my eyes and prayed.

  There was the huge noise of Weatherlight’s metal hull torn by the electrical attack. The ship shuddered and slewed to one side until it hung nearly sideways. Crew members slid along the vertical deck, catching whatever they could. I lost my grip on Bariel and felt myself falling. There was not even time to scream before I felt a warm arm tight around my waist. I opened my eyes. With one hand Crovax had caught me in the crook of his sword arm; the other clung to the railing. For an instant our faces were inches apart: his eyes no longer had their drowned look. Weatherlight righted herself and he released me. “Careful, healer,” he said in his low voice. “They need you.”

  I started shaking. There was a shout from Predator, and the moggs returned to their ship, pouring from the hatches and swarming back up the ropes, loaded down with artifacts. One paused to swing his ragged blade at me but Crovax’s sword skewered the mogg, and he vanished from my sight. The lines that had connected the two ships cast free; but Tahngarth hung from one, swinging wildly.

  Even as I did what I could, I could not stop shaking. Crovax no longer looked numb, but his expression was more frightening, more horrible, than it had been, for now his eyes were the eyes of a damned man.

  They need you, he had said. As if he were saying: but I will not.

  * * *

  —

  We crashed in the Skyshroud, a forest of tall twisted trees and roots sunk deep in the ugly waters of the sea. The survivors came then, as they always do, those who could not walk carried by friends who left them in my infirmary and rushed back to their posts to do what they could to secure the ship and prepare for any attack that might come. There were not enough: some of the injured had fallen from Weatherlight when she had tipped to the side. But I cleaned and stitched shut ragged cuts and listened. The survivors struggled to make sense of what had been at the time no more (or less) than instinct and courage and fear. There was horror and the potent joy that comes from being alive when so many others are not. As I always do, I said the things that would help and comfort: time enough later to face the darker feelings, the shame and guilt that comes from survival.

  When I had done what I could, I walked on deck for a moment, longing to stretch my muscles and ease my eyes—longing for fresh air. I had forgotten the heavy sky, so close overhead it seemed I could touch it.

  Crovax stood by the rail, sta
ring out at the trees that surrounded us. I think he had not moved since saving my life. I saw his profile only. The planes of his face caught the colors of Rath. One hand held his ribs absently like a man suffering from heartburn, but blood dripped between his long fingers.

  “Crovax!” I said. “You’re wounded.”

  He glanced down as if surprised. I pulled his hand from his side and showed it to him palm-up. He frowned when he saw his blood.

  “When did this happen?” I asked. It had been some hours now.

  He shrugged.

  “Come to the infirmary. I will heal this.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Then I will look at it here,” I said. He stared out at Rath, but did not try to stop me as I eased off his leather and scale mail and the black-and-red silk tunic beneath. A ragged gash as long as my thumb angled along his torso; fresh as it was, its edges were already puffy. “What did this?” I asked.

  “A mogg.”

  “Then it’s infected. Goblin blades are always filthy; I can’t imagine the moggs are cleaner.” I always carry a flat jar of salve tucked into my belt. I pulled it out, and scooped up some of the green ointment. It smelled fresh and sweet and sharp, of calendula and bite-weed, of bright meadows a long way from Rath. Perhaps the crisp scent of more familiar lands awakened Crovax from his trance. He began to speak as I smoothed the salve into his cut.

  “Selenia.” he swallowed. “I loved her and never wanted to be away from her. How could I not love her?” He said, and his eyes blazed at me, anger and anguish in equal measure. “She was my angel, mine. I should have given her to my brother to guard the family, but I kept her with me. My guardian angel.” He laughed once, a single sharp noise like a crow when a hurled stone connects. “She watched well: no harm came to the family in the time she watched over us. But then she was gone. And I watched my family die, because she wasn’t there. They blamed me for it.”

  I sat silently. The fire in his eyes dulled. “I loved her. We talked, we were friends. She had no memories, so I gave her mine. And then this.”

  The only sound was the air hushing past Weatherlight’s hull: a sound so familiar to us that it was silence. I pulled a clean bandage from one of my pockets to tie over the wound.

  “I had hoped—I did not want a guardian,” he said finally. “Or not her. But she was lost to me. Stolen. But she is here!” He caught my hand as it finished tying, caught it between his blood-stained fingers, hard enough to hurt. I said nothing, only met his dark eyes as he looked down at me. “Can you understand? She was like light, like half my soul, guardian and companion and friend and true love. And she is here.”

  “Yes.” I pulled my hand free.

  And I did understand, though perhaps he did not yet.

  * * *

  —

  We traveled across Rath, on our way to Volrath’s stronghold. We had lost Tahngarth, dragged behind Predator and we did not know if he lived or died. I had not seen it, but Gerrard had fallen from Weatherlight during the battle with Predator; Hanna and Mirri retrieved him in the Skyshroud Forest, the interminable dark woods in which we crashed. We fought and then forged an alliance with the elves that lived there. The ship was damaged by the crash. We could still fly, but Hanna said the crystal that drove the ship would not be able to planeshift away from Rath. We took Weatherlight to a portal we had been told about, the only place that might permit us to escape. Ertai and I inspected the site, and he chose to remain there to open it for us. We sailed on through the Cinder Marsh, followed a plume of ash to the Furnaces of Rath. We were struck by an arc of lightning there. I fought to save the crew members injured by the explosion, but I lost them all. The Furnaces fought my healing spells, and when I tried to save Kadve, too injured to be removed from where she lay, creatures of shredding sinew and bone killed her and cornered us.

  Crovax carried a strange rage inside him. When he fought (which was often, for Rath is a hard place), he fought as if for his soul. I said nothing of the angel, but there were occasions, weary moments of waiting between disasters, when he came to sit with me in the infirmary or on deck. In difficult times, I find it soothing to take bright-colored silks and spin them into threads as fine as spider web; perhaps he found watching it as calming, for he seemed to seek me out just to watch the whirling of my heavy silver drop spindle.

  He never looked at me, but he would speak, confessing his secrets to the silver and silk as they spun. Sometimes he spoke of his estate, hidden in the shadowy swamps of Urborg: a proud but decaying place, haunted now by the spirits of his many ancestors who (he said) even in Rath whispered to him sometimes in the night, warning him of an undefined but horrible destiny.

  He also spoke of his father and his brothers. There is a poetry style in my land, where only half the poem is written down and the reader must speak aloud the missing lines as she believes they should be. There is great skill to reading this poetry, just as there is in writing it. I listened to his words, and spoke in my mind the lines he withheld from me. His father was distant and cruel; as his family died, one by one, they blamed him for their destruction. There were other secrets in his family, and I could imagine some of them.

  There were times he talked of the angel. He remembered her laugh, low and sweet as a bell, and her perfect face, wrinkled as she learned a game he tried to teach her. His face softened when he spoke of her. Perhaps he longed too much for her, or in the wrong way. Angels are made of magic and destiny, not flesh and blood.

  He never asked about my life, my family or past, too trapped in the misery of his memories to think of another. I did not mind—my old master would say that a healer’s strength is not in her mouth but in her ears. So I spun and I listened and gathered his tale to me, like the cold comfort of a thin blanket in a frozen time.

  * * *

  —

  The Furnaces were a maze of stalactites and stalagmites that clung to the low stone ceiling and the rough stone floor. Weatherlight slid between great pillars as broad as we were long and fought whatever came to us. After a time, the ceiling began to lift and the rock shapes grew less common. The sky of Rath had seemed heavy, but now we knew what true weight was. Whatever I did—even in battle, when lives hung perilously on my actions—I could not escape the unimaginable weight of stone hanging overhead. At times it seemed to squeeze the air from my lungs. We all felt this, all but Crovax, whose life focused down to a single blinding point: his angel.

  Even a league and more away, we could see Volrath’s stronghold. The roof over our heads raised still more and showed us that we were in the heart of a great hollow mountain. Pale cold light sifted down from above to silhouette the vast mass of the stronghold. The crew clustered on deck, swords and cutlasses ready for whatever trouble might come. We drifted forward, but no enemy ship rose to greet us. No one seemed to see us at all. We ghosted closer, and closer.

  The Stronghold loomed, a shape like claws and bones and teeth, like the standing tendons of someone pulled on the rack. Gerrard’s face was pale but set. Others faced their fear in whatever way they could. But Crovax stood by the deck railing, his lips pulled back to expose his teeth. It might have been a smile.

  The organic shapes began to make a little more sense. I recognized what might be walkways, and a bridge of spun stone that looked as fragile as a spider web. Closer, closer.

  Hanging in the outrigging, Mirri saw the guard before any of us. We were bare yards from the Stronghold’s side, looking for something we might tie to, a ledge or gangplank of some sort. Without warning, Mirri leapt across the space between Weatherlight and the Stronghold, sword pulled out, teeth bared in a nearly silent snarl. She landed on a narrow walkway—an arm’s length from a startled guard. The guard died before he had time to cry out.

  This was as good a place to land as any we’d seen. Hanna secured Weatherlight’s engines as Tice threw a rope across to Mirri. She tied off the ship, then leapt back. She
showed her sharp-toothed smile to Gerrard. “Best thing to hear from a guard? Nothing.”

  Gerrard sighted along his sword blade, then slid it back into its sheath. “Now we go in. Starke, you’re the only one who can lead us to Sisay.”

  The man flushed. “And my daughter. You won’t forget my daughter.”

  “We won’t forget her,” Gerrard said gravely, showing considerable restraint, I thought. Gerrard did not like Starke much, I knew. “Mirri?”

  She snorted, slapped her sheath. “Of course.”

  Crovax had not spoken to Gerrard lately. He had spoken to no one but me, really, but now he caught Gerrard’s arm. “Take me,” he said softly.

  Gerrard nodded. “Four is good.”

  I stepped forward. “I also will go, Gerrard.”

  He laughed that sardonic laugh of his. “Bloodthirsty, Orim?”

  I bit my lip. “What if someone is injured? Sisay, or you, or—”

  “No, four is bad enough. Sorry, Orim, but you’re no tracker. You would not get a thousand paces before you would hear some goblin screaming and run off to find out why.”

  I flushed. “Yes, but—”

  “You have an infirmary full of people.”

  “Only three—” I began.

  “No,” he said, suddenly captain. “Orim, you remain here with the ship.”

  “I understand,” I said, and stayed. I suppose it made sense. There were only four braving the Stronghold and over a score on the ship. But it was Gerrard and Mirri and Crovax leaving (and Starke). I was not happy with the decision.

  * * *