Raven's Ladder

by Jeffrey Overstreet

  Ryllion walked in a daze, his future coming into view…until he saw two figures crowding the passage ahead.

  “Get out!” he barked. One turned back, startled.

  It was Gelina. Her wide, frightened eyes quickly narrowed. “Dreams come true,” she gushed. “It’s Captain Ryllion. Surely he’ll be my companion for the rest of this evening.”

  “If I ever touch you,” Ryllion scoffed, “it’ll be with a bludgeon.”

  Clad in similarly frail scraps of veil and strings of gaudy beads, another broad-shouldered figure cowered against the wall. This one moved in a cloud of the same dizzymaking perfume but leaned shyly toward the wall as if eager to let Ryllion pass.

  Ryllion seized both of the costumed seductresses and pushed them toward the smoky air at the end of the tunnel. “This corridor is forbidden for anyone but my troops. You hear? Get out. If I find you near these caves again, I’ll send you to Mawrnash. You know how they treat your kind there, don’t you?”

  He looked down at the other woman’s alarmingly thick and hairy arms, her large hands. Then he saw that those hands were holding the ring atop a birdcage. With one curling nail, he lifted the soft blue cloth that covered the cage. Inside, seven tetherwings chirped at him madly. “What,” he murmured, “is this?”

  “A gift,” laughed Gelina. “A gift from one of our customers.”

  Ryllion stared at the birds. Something about this bothered him.

  Fierce light and explosive noise from the harbor pulled his attention away. He watched as Helpryn’s Vision was reduced to floating, fiery scraps. But the proud Escape was safe, waiting for the queen’s morning voyage.

  He turned to the Abascar boy, who still stood dutifully beside the tunnel’s open mouth. “You keep watch,” he said to the boy. “I’m sending down more guards. And if I hear that you let anyone past, I’m going to feed you to the thing that took poor Broot. You understand?”

  Leaving the dock, the water, and the flames behind, Tabor Jan urged Gelina to hurry ahead of him. He could not get back to her chambers fast enough to she’d these veils, these beads, and this long, braided wig. He wanted to throw himself into the inlet and scrub himself with sand until every last hint of the rose-honey was gone from his skin.

  Gelina guided him through an alley and then up a rickety wooden stair in the back of the gamblerhouse where she lived.

  His throat burned from wearing Gelina’s perfume. But entering her rooms was like swallowing a torch. He could barely see through the incense haze to find his way among pillows, trays of perfume and lotion bottles, the dangling racks of silken costumes. Gamblers were shouting in the room below the feeble floorboards.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked, stepping behind a screen and tossing away strings of beads and layers of veil.

  He stepped behind another screen and nearly wept for joy at the sight of his watchman’s uniform. He heard fabric tear as he frantically broke free of his disguise.

  Before he could answer—and what would he have answered, considering all that he had seen and heard?—Gelina was regaling him with stories of her life. She spoke about the child she had brought into the world right here, in this closet she called a home. She had almost died, with the infant struggling beside her on the hard floor. But a stranger had heard her cries and come up the stairs.

  “It may be the only time a man came into this room out of pity rather than lust,” she sighed. “And such a strange man too. Smelled of earth and leaves and grass. He knew how to hold a newborn. Next thing I knew, it was morning. I was in bed. I felt no pain. My child was sleeping beside me. The stranger was gone.”

  As he fastened his trousers and buttoned his jacket, Tabor Jan asked, “What became of your child?”

  “Oh, I didn’t have any way to raise her. What a miserable life she would have had. I gave her to the Seers. They promised they’d find a home for her. Somewhere she’d be useful. They promised she’d become part of a grand endeavor and someday I would be surprised.” She looked at him searchingly. “Do you think I did wrong?”

  33

  WHAT CAME BY INVITATION

  Boots coated in the rivers sludge, Cal-raven stumbled in the damp of the low-ceilinged tunnel, landed hard on his hands and knees, and then was up and running again. As he rounded the corner, just a few anxious breaths behind his mother, his eagerness nearly carried him over a precipice. His heels slipped, shot out from under him, and he sat on the edge of an abyss.

  Glowstones in the steeply slanted walls pulsed faintly, green and yellow—just enough light to reveal the narrow stone bridge over the drop. He saw the queen pause between two flaring torches, halfway across, and look back. At first he thought she might wait for him. But she lifted a torch from its stand and ran on in search of the ale boy.

  You’re afraid of me, but you won’t leave me in the dark.

  Her strength bewildered him, for he was already out of breath. Had she spent years like this, running from one distress after another?

  He started across the bridge, but a sound stopped him. He dared a look over the edge.

  The menacing darkness swirled, a deep pool. Something down there was groaning, a sound that spoke of hopelessness. There seemed to be movement along the walls. Then he saw them—thick, living cords intertwining like roots, rising up from that bottomless shaft and then disappearing into the walls. From there he knew they were reaching out through the Expanse, a patternless web, twitching with something like life.

  He knew this sensation. He had felt it deep beneath House Abascar in the Underkeep. The terror that the miners abhorred.

  “Go back!” came a shrill cry. His mother had reached the other side of the bridge. “They need you.”

  He got to his feet and moved forward. “It’s you they need,” he called after her. “You’re their queen.”

  “Not anymore.” Her voice was a sad echo. “Abascar’s yours now.”

  “Mine?” He paused. “Do you know me, Mother?”

  She looked away. Sparks from her torch sprang free and drifted down into the shaft like shooting stars. “He’s getting away,” she whispered. “I cannot leave him.”

  “Don’t leave us again,” he pleaded. He immediately regretted it, for she hunched over as if a burden had suddenly become too heavy.

  “I can hold back the beastmen,” she said. “It will give you time. But if you follow me—”

  “I won’t leave without you.”

  His call fell like a fading spark. She was gone into the wall.

  Jaralaine arrived at a crossroads and found a Strongbreed host there, standing still like a forest of ragged trees. As two of them grasped her arms with their clawed hands, the other half-human creatures stared coldly through slats in their pointed helms, then looked down at their other prisoner with quiet contempt.

  Shivering in his tattered rags and embracing Jordam’s water flask against his chest, the ale boy looked at her and said, “Don’t be afraid. The Keeper is coming.”

  “My boy,” she said to him. “Still so full of dreams.” Just as she had on the first night she had found him, telling Auralia’s story to the prisoners, Jaralaine felt a thrill at the boy’s fearlessness. But she also marveled at his calm, for he did not thrust his courage in the faces of his captors. He spoke quietly as if offering them insight. “The Keeper brought me here,” he continued. “And I don’t believe I’ve finished my work.” His countenance was humble, his hairless head like a single red scar.

  “Do you have the colors?” he asked, a note of hope in his voice. “We need them now.”

  She was surprised, for she had forgotten the contents of that bundle she clutched so tightly. She did not draw them out, for her arms were held fast by the guards.

  One of the Strongbreed approached her. He did not say a thing, just stared at her in expectation. She gestured to the boy. “Bel Amican slave,” she announced with authority. “He got lost during the uprising. I’m taking him back to the slaves so he can serve the new chiefta
in. As I do.”

  The blank, blue stare from that helmet slit gave her no indication that the Strongbreed understood. After years of learning to understand and predict the beastmen, their enslavement to the Essence, their shows of power, she worried about these new invaders. They gave her no clues to their thinking. Where the beastmen could be swayed by appetite, the Strongbreed seemed immovable unless ordered by the new chieftain or the Seer. Even when the Seer was gone, they looked up as if listening to the crystal stones implanted between their eyes.

  “Let me take him to serve with the Bel Amican prisoners,” she insisted.

  No one moved.

  Three more Strongbreed stomped into the crossroads. They gripped the arms of her pursuer—the young man with the scars on his face, his red braids muddied with sludge from the river. He reminded her of Cal-marcus.

  One creature pointed a scale-gloved hand back to the tunnel from which they had come. “No,” she said, perhaps a little too quickly. “Not that way. These two belong with the Bel Amican slaves.”

  Ignoring her, twelve of the Strongbreed departed in single file, dutiful as drones, pushing the ale boy and the Abascar man before them. They left ten more with her.

  The boy looked back before he disappeared. “Thank you,” he called to her.

  “My boy!” Her knees buckled. “Let him go!”

  That man from Abascar—he, too, looked back. His hands were out, his fingers spread, and he fought as if striving to seize hold of the edge of the tunnel. Baring his teeth, he shouted, “Mother!”

  She turned away. “You’re killing me,” she said. She wanted to fall to the floor, but the guards dragged her, kicking, to her feet and pulled her backward into the larger corridor. And as they did, her breath caught in her throat.

  What were those figures who followed, who filled the corridor and pursued without making a sound?

  “Northchildren,” she whispered.

  The Strongbreed did not turn to look. They were not listening as they marched toward the new chieftain’s chambers.

  In the tumult of the marching Strongbreed, Cal-raven could hear the ale boy whispering just ahead of him. At first he thought the boy was trying to speak to him. He caught a murmured plea for help. And then he heard him say, “Keeper.”

  Even as Cal-raven strained against his captors’ grip, grasping for the wall, the edges of the doors, the floor, anything made of stone, he wondered why he was not crying out for the creature who had lifted him from the brambles at the base of Barnashum’s cliffs. That all seemed so far away now, so long ago.

  “Keeper,” he said. “Keeper, come. If you don’t hear the boy, then hear me.” Already he was surrendering the fight to grab the stone. “You sent Auralia’s colors to Abascar, to remind us of all we’d forgotten. To summon us home to Inius Throan. Come for us now. Save us and we’ll follow you.”

  The Strongbreed emerged in single file onto a path that was little more than a ledge above the abyss. The altered guard were taking them back down to the bridge, back to the river.

  A flare burned in the vast open space—the one remaining torch on the bridge. The bridge came into view. But the space was brighter now. He looked up and saw a faint shower of golden daylight from an opening far, far above.

  Shoved by the guard behind him, the ale boy stumbled onto the bridge. Cal-raven could see him tensing, trying to slow the march. He, too, knew that this was it—the place where things would have to change. The boy walked toward the middle of the span. There were seven, then eight, then ten guards on the bridge.

  Cal-raven hesitated, four steps from the span. He dug in his heels, pressing backward. The guards’ claws pierced his shoulders, forced him forward.

  Arriving at the middle of the bridge, beside the lonely, flickering torch, the boy turned suddenly, raising Jordam’s flask of water. “Before we go any farther, I think you should drink from this. It will help you see more clearly.”

  The Strongbreed paused as if trying to translate the boy’s speech.

  “It may save your life,” he added.

  The falling, golden light wavered, dimmed.

  The ale boy, inspiring no response from the Strongbreed, took a drink from the flask and then closed it tight. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s the only help I had to offer you. But now it’s too late.”

  Cal-raven looked up toward that distant window.

  Something was there. A shadow like the pupil of a bright eye.

  In the next few moments, much happened very quickly.

  The ale boy leapt to grab the heavy torch. He brandished it like a sword before a ceremonial duel, then held it high and poured the hissing oil over his head and shoulders. Fire engulfed him. He cast the torch away, raised his blazing arms, and ran back at the line of guards.

  The guards stumbled, roaring with voices that shook the bridge. They cast their spears aside and unsheathed long, curved swords.

  “Keeper!” the boy shouted. “Keeper!”

  “Keeper,” Cal-raven whispered.

  The shadow descended, fire lacing its fanged jaws, layers of wings unfolding to soften its descent. A long, reptilian tail whipped the air beneath it, and its talons were poised like those of a predator bird in a dive. The torchlight seemed brighter in the reflection of those scales on its belly, and its eyes were spheres full of whirling colors.

  In that moment of distraction, Cal-raven pulled his arms free of his captors’ grasp, dropped to his knees, and planted his palms against the span of the bridge. Immediately before him, three guards sank into softening stone, submerged up to their knees. Cal-raven lifted his hands and let the stone go solid again, leaving the guards trapped and helpless. As he stood, he dug a handful of stone free of the bridge, turned, and struck the helm of the guard behind him. The guard hurtled into the open space, flailing through the dark.

  Cal-raven heard the wingbeats, felt a powerful thrust of wind. The creature hung suspended over the bridge. It lunged, jaws open, toward the guards imprisoned in the stone. Flames rushed like a river from its tongue.

  Cal-raven dove off the bridge. He twisted as he fell, reaching out to sink his fingers into the wall of the abyss, digging himself a grip to break his fall. His feet swung over darkness, and he kicked himself a foothold. A wave of heat flushed through the wall. Strongbreed were screaming in voices that cracked stone. The smell of burnt hair and flesh flared in Cal-raven’s nostrils. One fell past him, fire spewing from the eye slit of its helmet.

  Then the creature turned and smashed the bridge with its tail, snapping its span like a twig. Cal-raven choked, astonished. The two halves, the guards—all of it fell in a blazing rain of ruin.

  And the ale boy was gone.

  Everything became still, the sound and trouble swallowed by the pit. The creature clung to the wall, upside down, like a massive bat. Cal-raven held to the wall, paralyzed.

  This? This was what had haunted his dreams? This was the power that had answered the ale boy’s call?

  From somewhere far below, that unearthly groan rose again. Anguish. Despair.

  The creature raised its head and took up a similar cry in answer, a word of such fathomless sadness that Cal-raven fought the urge to crawl into the wall and seal himself inside.

  But then, as quickly as it had struck, the creature set its eyes fixedly upon the corridor through which the guards had pushed the prisoners, a passage far too narrow for anything of such girth. And it leapt into that tunnel, slipping through as easily as a snake into its hole. A flick of its golden tail, and it was gone.

  Cal-raven clung to the rock and stared down into the dark. Gulping in deep breaths, he tightened his hold, driving energy out to his fingertips. The stone responded. Sculpting ridges, he pulled himself up, rung by rung, back to the ledge. He collapsed there and stared across the chasm. A jag of stone was all that remained of the bridge. It was the only path he knew that could take him back to the boats.

  Jordam opened his burning eyes.

  He was upside down again, su
spended by a foot, his arms dangling. He could hear the Essence spilling from his head, shoulders, and hands, splashing into a widening pool on the floor of the chieftain’s throne room. Rat-beasts licked their lips, ready to clean up the mess. He was cloaked, toe to head in a cast of the very stew he had refused himself for so long. Essence stung his nostrils, scorched his throat, smoldered in his lungs. The measure he had swallowed burned through his veins.

  “Jordam, Mordafey’s last brother.” Mordafey somehow flexed the muscle within that powerful branch that bound Jordam’s foot, drawing him close again. “Jordam tried to poison Mordafey,” he continued, narrating for the Strongbreed that guarded him. “Jordam spit a smelly poison into Mordafey’s face. Mordafey could not run. Mordafey fell again and again. Bel Amican hunter got close with his arrows. Too close.”

  Mordafey lay back against the rise of wavering arms that fanned up from the living throne, and he slapped at his bloated belly with his hands. “But Mordafey lives. Eats what he pleases. Maybe today, he eats his brother.”

  Jordam held his breath as Mordafey’s jaws opened. He closed his eyes, felt Mordafey lick Essence from his side. His thoughts were like pieces of hot, broken glass, and he struggled to fit them together.

  What was I doing? Why was I here?

  He knew this feeling—the heightening waves of strength, the desire to destroy. Soon thought would be extinguished. He would surrender to the call of action and the ecstasy of power. At this moment he was the most dangerous beastman in the Expanse.

  Mordafey laughed. “Good,” he said. “Jordam is a proper Cent Regus fighter again. Jordam is ready to rediscover what it is like to be powerful. Shall I pull the pin from your back, brother? Free your arms to move?”

  Pin?

  “Let’s test the last brother. Send you on a hunt. Go and fetch Skell Wra’s Treasure for the new chieftain. Bring her back here on a spear. Wait, no… She might be tough meat to chew. Maybe something softer. Yes. Like that boy.” Mordafey leaned forward, excited. “Jordam, fetch your chieftain that meddling boy. You let him get away from me. Twice. Show us you have learned your lesson, and Mordafey will make you a Cent Regus captain.” He shook Jordam like a toy for a hound. “Yesss. That would be a tasty finish.”