Valkil found his door locked and went through his pockets looking for the key. He inserted it into the keyhole but then paused. The world seemed changed, as though the hall had suddenly bent at an uncomfortable angle so slight that it had been nearly imperceptible. Valkil’s keen sense for danger, which had served him well for his years of service, inclined him to glance once more at the window. An ominous dark figure, like a hulking man with spines standing up from its shoulders, blocked the light. It took deep, ragged breaths, and Valkil caught a whiff of its feral odor.
It charged him, going to all fours, and Valkil had barely enough time to reach for a sword at his waist that wasn’t there. When the creature lunged for him, Valkil saw it more clearly; its long jaw and pointed teeth, and the dark intelligence in its round eyes. He flinched as its claws came down, but the strike didn’t land. Instead, when he opened his eyes, Valkil beheld the shining window once more at the end of an empty hall.
“What was that?” Ahlaha had opened the door and she gazed on Valkil with concern.
“Did you see it too?” Valkil asked.
“See what?”
Valkil took a breath. The vision had been incredibly real but his good sense took over. “Nothing. I thought I saw an animal in here.”
“A therill?”
“How do you know that?”
“I heard you say something about it. You said you needed to follow the therill.”
“I did?”
Ahlaha’s brow furrowed. “Yes, you did. Just now. Are you feeling all right?”
Valkil laughed to himself. “I thought I was feeling just fine. But you’re right, I swear I just saw a therill in here. It came right at me. It’s nothing to worry about. There was a girl from one of the independent villages who came with tales of therill attacking them, and it must have gotten me imagining them.”
“Was it your imagination? Or something else? You seem pretty shaken up about it.”
“It must have been my imagination. Too much liquor the other night, I suppose.”
They entered the room together and shut the door. The world felt strange again, as it had when the therill had appeared in the hall, and Valkil quickly discovered the reason why; the bed had been replaced with a stone sarcophagus, its façade depicting a warrior clutching a staff. As Valkil watched, unable to look away, the sarcophagus lid slid open, releasing a cloud of gray dust. A skeletal hand emerged, holding out a long, wooden staff with an intricate, tear-shaped headpiece. The thin branches that made up the headpiece shuddered and moved, and Valkil felt another presence inside his head. It reached into his limbs, taking control of them, and he could only stare wide-eyed and helpless.
As quickly as the vision of the therill had disappeared, the sarcophagus and the staff vanished in kind. Valkil fell to his knees, and Ahlaha came at once to his side. “What is it? Val, you’ve gone completely white. Should I get a healer?”
“No, no,” Valkil took her hand. “I don’t need a healer. Just let me think for a moment.”
Even with the vision gone, the strangeness lingered. The world still seemed bent at an odd angle, and Valkil’s mind struggled to right it.
A voice with a strange accent whispered directly into his mind. “Follow the therill to me. Claim your destiny. Save this world as you were born to do.”
The room shuddered, and the sound of the stones in the walls grinding on one another grew deafening. Valkil put his hands over his ears until the sound and shaking stopped. When he looked again, the world had righted itself, and Ahlaha knelt beside him looking aghast.
“What is happening to you?” she sang.
“I really don’t know.” The mysterious voice’s words burned in Valkil’s mind, branded and indelible. “Claim your destiny,” Valkil muttered to himself. “Save this world.”
Ahlaha sat back. “Save the world?”
“I know it sounds crazy, Ahlaha, but I’ve just heard a voice that said I had to follow…”
“Oh, Valkil.” Ahlaha shook her head. “If this is all just a dramatic ploy to excuse you on some adventure, just say so.”
Valkil’s mind raced ahead of him. He imagined himself traversing the desert and mountains to Camarei’s western border, and holding his sword up to the sky with armies at his back. It was as much memory as fantasy. The idea of returning to his old ways had always lingered, but Camarei had long been at peace. There had been no cause worthy enough to bring the great Verdent Knight out of his peaceful retirement. The cause that now had adrenaline surging through his veins had chosen a strange way to call upon him, but it had struck the precise chord necessary to inspire Valkil to action.
With a grin, Valkil caught Ahlaha’s gaze. “What would you say to a bit of vacation?”
Skor-Adal III
Plotting and Planning
Zethyr and Aelida returned to Skor-Rek to gather what caliphs they could for their quest to destroy Zor and avenge Koera's missing family. Arvad remained behind with Krudah to tend his wound and begin strategizing for the forthcoming campaign. They sat cross-legged by their smoldering fire, brushing away the swarming insects with their black-gloved hands.
“There are caliphs who would follow you into Skor's great halls,” Arvad told Krudah, “but no more than we could count here on our hands. Aelida and Zethyr ask them to surrender their souls for vengeance, to trade a glorious afterlife for justice here and now. A generous estimate might put our numbers at twenty, yet scouting reports say the Zor number in the thousands. Despite the way the cult preys on our northern villages, the High Priest himself has never attempted to attack them, even with the entire Skor-Adal army to command.”
Arvad mulled over his own words, searching for answers. Krudah could have provided them, but his throat wound silenced him. Regardless, he trusted Arvad to work it out on his own.
At last, Arvad continued, “The High Priest thinks only of greatness. He has analyzed the potential war against the Zor from the perspective of one who has thousands of soldiers to dispense. We must look at our goal with a different view and therein find the route to victory that our Holiness has overlooked.”
Krudah grunted to get Arvad’s attention. He lowered a hand into the black sea of insects and it disappeared into their midst, swallowed up by their tide. Arvad nodded. "We can't take them all on. That's clearly impossible."
Content with that answer, Krudah withdrew his hand and shook it free of stragglers. Then he slammed down his forearms, imprisoning a number of insects inside and scattering all others. Wherever the trapped insects moved to escape, he cut them off. Though an intrepid few made it over his arms, most remained imprisoned.
Again, Arvad nodded. "Separate some from the others and even our odds.”
Krudah caught one insect, larger than most, and crushed it in his hand. Arms now raised, the insects that had been his prisoners fled.
“When we identify the one the others trust most, the keystone that the others look to for strength, we crush it. The group will lose itself to fear and flee before us.” Arvad thought a moment. “One difficulty will be the terrain. The Zor make their home in the flatlands, all bushes that scratch and catch. The cultists move quickly on the back of the crusex. We could try our hand at breaking them, training our own crusex, but the High Priest’s best men have failed. The animals cannot be tamed, not by us. Learning the Zor’s secrets in animal husbandry could be more difficult than killing their leader.” He searched Krudah’s face. “How do we do it? How do we fight a war that requires stealth and quick escapes when our enemy is faster and knows their realm far better?” Krudah shrugged. “Then we’ll just have to learn as we go. Improvise. We’ve encountered our fair share of challenges in the past. This one will not be insurmountable."
They sat together with only the droning of the surrounding insects between them until Arvad had another thought. “There is one other thing. The people of Zor’s cult, we could defeat with twenty caliphs. The cultists themselves, the whip-bearers, we could cut down in numbers thrice our own. But there remains the p
roblem of the Elite. They’re something else, if the stories are true. They say the Elites have the power to call down energy from the skies that brings instant death to all it touches and leaves behind only charred remains. How do we counter that?”
Krudah tapped Czallah where she lay beside him, and shook his head.
“You believe the scouts and their reports, then," Arvad said, "that the energy is attracted to metal. We must use our weapons when fighting the lesser cultists, otherwise we stand no chance against their numbers, but we’ll need to abandon them when we face the Elite.” He paused, thinking. “Do you think it will matter if we carry metal or not? If the Elites have unnatural powers, there is no reason to think we will be invulnerable to them, whatever we do.”
☆ ☆ ☆
The four spires of Skor-Rek rose from the flatlands like pillars to hold aloft the sky. Each had been named after a Skor-Adal god and each corresponding city quadrant had been devoted to realizing that god’s ideal.
Skor, the god of Unity and Order, ruled over the government quadrant where the High Priest made his home in the vast cathedral called Prid-Nuir. The district’s architecture featured sharp, precise angles and drab shades of gray and white; the only color allowed throughout the district was a light pink, considered the calmest of colors and the shade worn by all priests. Most of those who lived in Skor's quadrant either served the High Priest directly or managed some administrative aspect of the nation's business. Earning a role there was no easy feat; cycles of dedicated service at lower levels were no guarantee of advancement, often only given to those who knew the right people and made the right political decisions. The rewards were high, however, and after achieving a certain station, the nation provided all a priest needed to live a comfortable life - a near-impossibility for any other career in the order.
Chi was the god of necessity, oft depicted as a steaming, chomping, cutting mass of claws and teeth. In his quadrant, the lower castes of Skor-Adal made their meager living, building and farming and growing all the things the rest of the city's citizens needed. They wore gray tunics, plain and asexual. Though the priests spoke highly of them during impassioned speeches, in reality those of the Chi caste lived in poverty and received little aid from their rulers. This drove most youths into missionary service, where they could count on regular meals and some due amount of respect.
Dairre was the god of the missionary quadrant, where the people of Skor-Rek gathered no fewer than three times a day to bend the knee in fealty to the pantheon. Skor-Adal youths who chose the missionary life trained in the Dairre district until they had the skills to endure the dangers outside the city walls. Though strengthening youth for a lifetime of service to the state was often the accepted explanation for the missionary program, most people throughout Skor-Adal and even the rest of Nayera understood proselytization to be the true reason. Religion played little role in the cultures of bordering Mourisiel and Camarei so those individuals who sought the benefits of faith could often be turned to Skor-Adal by enterprising missionaries.
Finally, in Anyr’s quadrant, the vast, powerful Skor-Adal military trained and prepared for war. Anyr was the god of chaos and destruction but the people of Skor-Adal did not view her in a negative light. Rather, they viewed destruction that served Skor-Adal as necessary, even beneficial. The military had grown ever larger over the cycles since the last crusade, though there seemed to be no plans to move them out. The High Priest had kept the army sequestered; some thought it had been too long. Soldiers needed to fight, many citizens believed, or they would grow restless and turn violent against their own.
At the city center, citizens from all quadrants gathered to enjoy meals together in a garden called Axen-Dre. There, Zethyr weaved his way through rows of many long tables full of Skor-Rek citizens. He carried a bowl of jannir, a mind-altering delicacy most often eaten by Skor-Adal caliphs who believed that it stunted fear and enflamed bloodlust when consumed in large quantities.
Aelida waited at a far table against a wall hedged in by tall, spiny plants with two caliphs she had successfully recruited to the cause; Meon and Lassavasta, whom the other caliphs called Slither. They shared no words; Slither picked at her fingernails, Meon stared at the sky, and Aelida rubbed her temples, eyes shut.
When Zethyr arrived, he sat beside Aelida and set the jannir on the table. “I got this to share.” Aelida rolled her eyes. Meon and Slither, slouched in their chairs, didn’t move. "What, none of you like jannir all of a sudden? Are we Skor-Adal caliphs or no?" Zethyr took a jannir stalk from the bowl and popped it into his mouth. Immediately, his face flushed and he stifled a cough.
Slither grinned. “Been a span since you’ve had the jan-jan, eh, Zee-child?”
“It has,” Zethyr said. “An acquired taste I may have un-acquired.”
“Skor then,” Slither said, licking her lips. “The cure for that is to keep on, keep on going, they say.”
Zethyr reached for the bowl again. “That’s good advice, Slither.”
“You do him a disservice,” Aelida said.
“Who’s that on your tongue?” Slither asked, pointedly reaching for a jannir cap. She kept her eyes on Aelida while she slowly brought it to her mouth, then tickled herself and giggled when she popped it in.
“Never mind. Do what you will,” Aelida said. “But don’t let it go to your head before we’ve talked.”
“We’ve talked to everyone we trust not to tell and recruited everyone we can without making our purpose terribly obvious,” Zethyr said. “Even so, the rumors have probably started going around.”
“They have,” Meon mumbled. Her tongue had been cut in half during training years ago, the details still unknown to most.
“There, you see?” Zethyr said. “Word will get to the priests and generals before long. They’ll want to know where Krudah is hiding…”
“Zethyr…” Aelida warned.
“Right, right. Where he is hiding.”
“Oh, they’ll be wanting to know more than that,” Slither said. “Aik’s shore, they’ll be wanting to know how to take off our heads, and there’ll be a good bit of experimenting at that end.”
“So we go back?” Aelida asked. “Like this? Just the four of us?”
“The general plus Arvad makes us six,” Zethyr said.
“You want to go to war with six soldiers?” Aelida shook her head. “There’s no chance at victory that way.”
“There wasn’t never no chance of winning this thing,” Slither said. She slammed her fist on the table, shaking the bowl of jannir. “It ain’t the victory we fight for. Never was. It’s the ever after. Glory in the eyes of Skor, Anyr. That’s what we be seeking.”
“I'll gladly die for the glory of Skor-Adal,” Aelida said. “But there’s a lot of glory to be had in life, too. If I have to choose…”
“Ah,” Slither waved her hand dismissively and slouched back. “You want what Skor wants when it suits you. You want what you want otherwise.”
“I don’t believe there’s anything dishonorable about preferring to live.”
“Stop,” Meon said. “Think.”
“Say we go back,” Zethyr said. “What will they say? Just the six of us?”
“That we’re crazy,” Aelida said. “They’ll say to come back, to keep trying until we convince more caliphs.”
“Nah, nah,” Slither said. “They’ll say hurrah! Let’s get after them Zor-born!” She stabbed the air with invisible knives, face contorted.
Zethyr chuckled. "Four is all Skor needed to drive the islandic giants back to their homes in the sky. We'll have two more than we need."
“Fine.” Aelida glared at Slither, still engaged in imagined battle. “You and Meon go find the general and Arvad. Zethyr, you’ll have to go to show them the way. I'm going to stay here and keep after it. If I get more caliphs, I’ll catch up to you.” She slapped Zethyr’s hand away from the jannir. “Keep your wits about you. Don’t be a fool.”
“I was just going to pack some up to
take back to the general.”
“Don’t you dare do that,” Aelida said, pointing a finger. “Don’t you dare.”
“You know how he loves jannir.”
“Exactly. Don’t get him started back down that path. This time he’s spent away from the stuff is a gift. Let’s be sure it isn’t wasted.”
“It ain’t so bad, Ael. Try some!” Slither threw a handful of jannir at Aelida and adopted a defensive pose, waiting for Aelida’s assault. When Aelida only sighed and brushed the jannir off, Slither threw her head back and laughed.
Aelida slid her chair back. “I’ll catch up with you,” she told Zethyr. “Now get out of here with them.”
She stormed away, winding through the tables and chairs toward the Anyr district. Zethyr sighed and cast Slither an admonishing glance. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Nah, she’ll be rain.” Slither took up another handful of jannir, most of what remained, and pocketed it. “I say we do as she say. I ain’t seen Krudah in a time. Show us the way, Zee-child.”
Mourisiel III
Seeking Out the Resistance
Miles from Harivaz, a single narrow window peeked out from underneath a heap of snow. The room within was barren save for a block of Havok stone in its center and a table at the back with dried meats and blocks of hard cheeses. A staircase spiraled down into the darkness but someone had put up a wooden blockade to keep anyone from trying it. Similar ruins, ancient and long-buried under the snow, were common throughout the north, and adventurers often risked their lives at the chance of wealth brought up from the foreboding depths. Few had found anything of value in many cycles but a few exaggerated stories and whispers of legends in mead halls continued to inspire the intrepid and the desperate.
Against one wall, a woman sat with her elbows on her knees, head bowed, thick fur over her shoulders. Beside her lay an ornate bow wrapped in rich cloth, its arrows nearby in a rawhide quiver. Her pack reeked of raw meat, packed near to bursting with bloody animal flesh.
White Star Phase: Book One of the Ascendants Chronicle Page 5
