Hinterland g-2

by James Clemens

  “I don’t understand it,” Gerrod mumbled. “But I mistrust this storm. Even my own mekanicals grew stiff when I was out there. At first I blamed it on the cold and dampness, but even once inside, out of the ice and snow, the sluggishness persisted.”

  He moved an arm, and she heard the wheezing struggle.

  “And your armor is driven by air alchemies.”

  He nodded. “Along with fire, too. I suspect the remaining fire alchemies are the only reason I’m still able to move at all. I plan on testing the flows within my armor once I return to my study.”

  Kathryn pondered all he had described. “So then what are you saying? You believe the storm is somehow siphoning air alchemies unto itself?”

  He shrugged. “It is air that drives every storm. And as strange as the weather has been of late, perhaps this odd blizzard may offer some answer as to why. Maybe some wild Grace is loose upon the winds, born out of this prolonged winter. Either way, until the storm blows out to sea, it will be death to fly into or out of Tashijan. And I’m not even sure it’s safe to travel afoot through the blizzard.”

  Kathryn watched the blanketing fall. “So no one should come or go?”

  Gerrod nodded. “I’m sorry to add another burden.”

  Kathryn rubbed a finger along her cheek’s lowermost stripe. “No matter. Better to know this now and proceed with caution. I will spread the word to the outer village and lock down our gates until we know more.”

  She had begun to turn away from the window when she noted something else in his eyes, a deep-set worry reflected in the pane.

  “What?”

  “The timing of this storm…” He shook his head. “Tylar’s knighting…everyone gathered here.”

  “Surely you don’t think it was planned. Not even a god can control the path of a storm.”

  He continued to stare through the window.

  “Gerrod?”

  He shook his head-agreeing, disagreeing, she couldn’t tell.

  She finally turned away, trusting Gerrod’s judgment enough to lock everything down until this storm blew itself out. But she refused to believe worse. There were limits to even a god’s reach.

  Gerrod spoke, as if reading her thoughts. “But what if it were more than one god?”

  She had no answer. All she could do was take precautions and hope Gerrod was wrong in this last regard. All she knew for certain was that no one should be out in this storm.

  “Colder than a witch’s teat,” Rogger grumbled.

  “And I’m sure you’ve had the necessary experience to make that observation,” Tylar said as he passed under the spiked portcullis and exited Tashijan.

  Rogger considered Tylar’s words. “That be true. But that Nevering blood witch was at least warm everywhere else. There’s nothing toasty beyond these gates.”

  The thief was buried under rabbit furs, a woolen scarf over his face. Behind him strode the Wyr-mistress, Eylan, in a heavy greatcoat with a collared hood. Tylar had tried to encourage her to remain behind, to guard their rooms, but Sergeant Kyllan had already secured the wing after all the talk of daemons.

  So as a group they crossed the bridge that spanned the frozen moat and entered the boarded-up bazaar that lay between the village and the thick walls of Tashijan. Normally it was a raucous strip of alehouses, inns, trading booths, and makeshift tents, brimming with the drunken, the slatternly, the wily, and the quick. It continually rang with shouts and screams and song.

  But no longer.

  Snow fell in a heavy hush. Even the winds had died down, though they could be heard whispering farther out, beyond the village, as if a great sea rolled and churned upon a beachhead. Closer at hand, the world had been drained of color and depth, leaving only a half-finished landscape, an etching of charcoal on white parchment.

  “Stay close,” Tylar warned as they trod through the ankle-deep snow.

  He lifted the lamp he held and opened its shutters to reveal a tiny flame, flickering like a frightened bird in its cage. The glow cast by the lamp hardly reached past his outstretched arm.

  He led them past the bazaar and into the narrow streets of the village. Here there were at least a few signs of life: the filtered glow through a shuttered window, the lone minstrel strumming a lyre from behind a barred door, the scent of woodsmoke from a few stone chimneys. But as they moved farther from the great shield wall of Tashijan, even these faded into darkness, cold hearths, and held breaths.

  “I don’t see anything untoward,” Tylar said, stopping and stamping his boots to clear the snow. But even he kept his voice to a whisper, suddenly wary of being overheard.

  Rogger shivered beneath his furs. “I’ve never felt a late-winter storm carry a chill like this one. Perhaps the rats merely had enough sense to flee to the warmth of our halls and cellars.”

  Tylar noted that Eylan had her face raised, nose to the air. She lowered her chin and matched gazes with him. Framed by the lynx-furred hood, her beauty warmed through the cold, a pretty trap intended to catch his seed when he was ready to bow to his oath. But beyond her high cheekbones, narrow flare of nose, generous lips, there remained something icy in her eyes, a reflection of the winter storm, reminding him yet again that she was of the Wyr, birthed under strange alchemies in an unending quest to instill godhood into human flesh.

  But at this moment he read something beyond the ice in her eyes.

  Fear.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “We should not be here,” she answered and turned to search beyond the last of the village homes. “The storm…the snow…it smells wrong.”

  Tylar tested the air, drawing a fuller breath through his nose. He scented nothing unusual in the crisp air. Just ice. His body, though, shuddered in its haste to warm the cold from his chest. And something else noted the chill, stirring away from it.

  Tylar rubbed at his chest, momentarily unmoored. Ever since the death of Meeryn, it had lurked inside him-Meeryn’s naethryn, her undergod-hidden behind the black palm print burnt into his chest, trapped in the bony cage that was his body. He had not summoned the shadowy creature since the Battle of Myrrwood, preferring to leave it undisturbed, perhaps even forgotten. But as it stirred now, the movement stripped Tylar of his delusions. All that was not skin or bone shifted inside him, illustrating again how little of his flesh was his own, leaving him feeling hollowed and empty.

  It took three more shallow breaths to resettle and moor himself.

  Rogger watched him, eyes narrowing as if sensing his unease. Then he merely shrugged. “We can always turn back. A warm fire and a nip of wine is more inviting than all this skaggin’ snow and wind.”

  Tylar shook his head. They had come this far. He wanted to see the true face of this storm. Its low moan swept to them through the remaining crooked streets. These last homes, farthest from the walls, were built less stout. Some were plainly abandoned long ago, while others leaned toward each other, as if sheltering against the cold.

  He led them again. The drifts grew between the streets. A wind kicked up, scattering dry snow that stung the face like sharp pebbles. They made a final turn between a set of abandoned stables. Gusts had already peeled away the roofs’ thatching and now tugged at the doors, rattling and banging them, like a dog worrying a bone.

  Past the last buildings, the view opened up.

  “Sweet gods above,” Rogger gasped. “Who stole the world?”

  He was not far wrong.

  Beyond the village, the storm swirled in a solid wall. The winds whipped straight across the hills, east to west, seemingly endless, with the force of a gale. Yet where they stood, only the occasional fierce gust snapped at them, warning them to keep back.

  “Looks like we’re stuck in the eye of a whirlwind,” Rogger commented.

  With Tashijan at its heart. Tylar risked another step out, searching, studying. “Why does the storm just hold out there like that?”

  Eylan answered. “It grows. Gathers strength to itself. If you listen, you can hea
r its hunger.”

  The storm’s moan stretched toward a wail.

  “No wonder the rats fled,” Rogger mumbled. “Mayhap we’d best do the same.”

  Tylar nodded slowly. He needed to alert Kathryn.

  “Too late,” Eylan said.

  Tylar had started to turn back toward Tashijan, but the Wyr-mistress’s words drew his eyes back to the storm. The perpetual white wall had developed dark streaks, like black ink dripped into swirling milk.

  “Something is coming,” Eylan said.

  Tylar even felt it. A sudden weight to the air.

  But before he could react, a wave of frigid air blasted out from the storm, an icy exhalation awash with hoarfrost. He stumbled back, his cheeks freezing. Ice crusted his lashes. His eyes ached, but even his tears froze. He could not blink, only stare into the face of the storm.

  And a face it did have.

  The oil-black streaks eddied out of the snow tempest, coalescing into a monstrous countenance, growing as tall as Tashijan’s walls, yet still vague and indistinct. Tylar suddenly knew that it was not oil nor ink that shaped this face, but Gloom, the smoky essence of the naether world, bleeding into Myrillia.

  Tylar murmured between frozen lips, “Run…”

  But the cold fought them: numbing limbs and heart, frosting cloaks to a dragging heaviness, freezing boots underfoot. Tylar grabbed Rogger and hauled him. One step, then another. Eylan followed, bent against a wind that wasn’t there.

  As they struggled, the timbre of the storm’s wail changed behind them. Or maybe it had always been there, hidden behind the wind. Either way, a lilting sweetness stretched to them, ringing with the crystalline shatter of ice. And behind it a voice…as misty as the swirling face of the storm…singing.

  Tylar slowed, straining to hear. He snagged up Rogger’s coat sleeve to stop him, to get him to listen, too.

  “Keep going,” the thief protested, twisting.

  Tylar ignored him and slowly turned.

  But Eylan was there at Tylar’s shoulder. She struck him with a fist, square in the face. His head rocked back.

  “Seersong,” she said through the ringing in his ears.

  Another wave of ice washed over them, worst by far than the first. It cut through Tylar as if he were naked. Again their boots were frozen in place. He felt his very bowels ice up inside him.

  A step ahead, Rogger cried out, grasping at his chest.

  Tylar fought to help him-but he had brushed too near a wall. His cloak had iced against the bricks, trapping him. He wrested against its clutch, but the cold had weakened his limbs.

  Eylan sank to her knees, clutching at her throat. Even the air had become ice, impossible to breathe.

  Tylar glanced back to the storm as his vision darkened.

  The countenance had grown more distinct-somehow familiar. Who…? But it had not yet fully formed. Song again distracted him, coming not from the face of the storm but behind it and all around, as if the storm were not snow but pure song itself. There were no words, but its sweetness was like warm wine poured into his frozen ears.

  Tylar gave up his struggle, happy to listen.

  But another was not.

  Deep inside him, beyond bone, his naethryn surged in a violent quake, writhing, as if the song burnt. Tylar had never felt it thrash with such force, as if struggling to claw itself free. It bashed against the cage of his ribs. But escape was impossible. The song would snare its trapped prey, and Tylar with it. There was only one key to its escape.

  “Agee…” Tylar moaned from between lips frosted with ice.

  It was all he could do. He was trapped between ice and song.

  But his one word was heard, caught out of the air by the same who had first spoken it to him. Agee wan clyy nee wan dred ghawl. It was ancient Littick, the tongue of the gods. Rogger knew its meaning. Break the bone and free the dark spirit.

  The thief was already on his knees, weighted down by the storm, face anguished. But one hand, the one clutched at his chest, shifted to a neighboring fold. To a hidden belt. A dagger appeared in the thief’s fingers as if born of Grace out of the very air.

  It was the last Tylar saw. Darkness folded over him as the song’s warmth washed the world away. Even the thrashings inside him calmed to its sweet lilt.

  Then the barest flash of silver cut through the darkness.

  The thrown dagger struck Tylar in the face-where Eylan had punched him a moment ago. But it was not the blade that struck him, only the butt end of its steel hilt. Struck glancingly from the side and broke his nose.

  Tylar’s face was too numb to feel it. But like a loosened pebble that starts an avalanche, the small break spread in a sweep of agony throughout his body. One leg broke under him, then the other. He toppled, only to have his arm shatter to the shoulder. Bones knit, callused, broke again, and reformed crooked. All his old injuries, once healed by Meeryn, returned in a blinding instant, leaving him the same cripple again.

  He writhed, and freed of its bone prison, his naethryn rose like smoke out of the black handprint on his chest, burning through cloak and cloth. It sailed high into the air, black wings unfurled, fraying with wisps of smoke, a neck stretched. As it settled to the snowy street, ice melted and steamed around its claws. Fiery eyes opened upon this world. Half wyrm, half wolf, it glared toward the storm.

  The pain warmed Tylar’s frozen form and melted his joints. He pushed to his knees, then stood, bent-backed and hobbled, a broken knight once again. As he straightened, he still felt the cold, but less so now, more like a dream one tried to remember upon waking.

  He stumbled over to Rogger, who was careful to remain ducked from the wings of Tylar’s dred ghawl, the dark spirit that was Meeryn’s naethryn. Sculpted of Gloom itself, it was deadly to touch, to all except Tylar. He remained tethered to the creature by a smoky cord that sailed out of the print on his chest. The edges of the cloak and underclothes still smoldered where it had burnt its way out.

  Tylar helped Rogger to his feet.

  “Next time I won’t challenge the wits of rats,” Rogger chattered.

  Tylar still heard the strains of seersong behind the falling motes of snow. But they held no power. Freeing the daemon had broken whatever spell it held upon him. Upon both of them.

  The naethryn hunched in the street, smoky mane flared in challenge toward the storm.

  Tylar searched closer, realizing someone was missing.

  “Where-?”

  Then movement drew his gaze farther down the street. Eylan was at the edge of the village, stumbling toward the storm.

  “Eylan!” he called.

  She continued, deaf to him. Tylar knew her ears were too full of seersong. She was Wyr, born of Grace, rich with its blessing or curse, susceptible like Tylar. She had resisted for as long as she could, tried to break its spell on him, and maybe even his nose. Had she known freeing his daemon would free him, too?

  But she had failed.

  Tylar stepped toward her, ready to drag her back. But hobbled and still half-frozen, there was no chance. A moment later, he watched her vanish into the storm. One moment there, the next swallowed away.

  No…

  Before him, the figure of the storm stared down at him, sketched in gloom by a wavering hand, cold and dispassionate. Then in a single brushstroke of wind, it all vanished, wiped away as if it had never been there, swept back into the storm. But Tylar still remembered, now and from long ago, from another life. He knew whose countenance had fronted the storm.

  It made no sense.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” Rogger said, tugging on his arm. “We must let Kathryn know what we face.”

  And who.

  “There can be no doubt now,” Rogger mumbled.

  Tylar turned to the thief. “What do you mean?”

  Rogger stared toward where Eylan had vanished, toward the storm that circled Tashijan.

  “We are under siege.”

  AN INOPPORTUNE SURPRISE

  “Not a sound,�
� Lorr breathed out.

  In the dark, Dart perched atop her step, with Pupp beside her. Brant crouched on the stair above. Below, the two trackers huddled over their dimmed lamps, their glow further shadowed by their cloaks. In the darkness, Dart noted that the light far below was growing fainter. The furtive voices faded with it.

  Whoever was down there was retreating deeper. Surely they were just masters, going about their usual secretive pursuits, buried away under Tashijan. But from the sounds of them, these skulkers were sunk quite deep.

  A spider thread tickled Dart’s cheek. She brushed it away.

  The air slowly stirred in the passage, flowing up, then down again, as if some great beast slumbered below, breathing in and out.

  The tickle returned-then she felt something scurry down her cheek to her neck. Skags! She swatted at it, shifting in disgust.

  The sudden movement almost dislodged her, but Brant caught her before she slipped from her stair and bumped into Kytt. Unfortunately the turn of her heel ground heavily upon an old lip of stone, and it broke away under her. A fist-sized chunk of rock bounced off the lower step and rolled down the ladder-steep staircase.

  Crash…Crash…Crash…Crash

  The echo faded into silence.

  No one breathed.

  Maybe the ones below hadn’t heard…

  But the quiet was too deep. The bits of whispers had fallen silent. And Dart could still discern the glow below, steady now, no longer fading.

  Keep moving away, Dart willed the light.

  Lorr made a motion, waving them off, back up the stairs, but before any of them could move, a new sound flowed to them: a hushed noise. No voices, no words. Just a fluttering raspiness, like a flock of bats taking wing at sunset. Sweeping toward them.

  The glow below suddenly vanished or was blocked by what rose toward them now, sinking all into an inky cavernous darkness.

  Dart’s heart rose to her throat, choking back a rising scream. She reached blindly for the wall to make sure she was still in this world.

  Even Pupp was a dull ember, as if fearful of revealing himself.

  Down two steps, Lorr hissed as the noise grew, plainly sweeping up toward them. He stood and tossed back his cloak to reveal the amber glow of his lamp.