As the fog surrounded him, he thought he could feel it penetrate past his skin, chilling his bones with an unearthly cold. An unsleeping malice.
PROPHET, thundered a voice in his head. I KNOW YOU ARE HERE. YOU HAVE IGNORED MY COMMAND. FOR YOUR IGNORANCE YOU WILL DIE.
The Sea Demon. It had found him!
Without a thought for his friends, without even a shred of dignity or honor, Gribly let his mind surrender to fear.
He screamed, and for the millionth time in his short, miserable life, he ran away.
He ran from danger. He ran from fear and pain. He ran from everything that hurt inside, that he had been bottling up and suppressing from Ymeer to Mythigrad.
Old Murie’s death. The killing he’d witnessed when Cleric Argoz took control of the desert city, and the scattered death and sodomy he’d seen in his life as a street thief. The death of Byorne. The death of Captain Berne. Elia’s family… massacred.
All because of him. And because of the ever-elusive, damnably mysterious sorcerer who wore his face! It was unbearable, so on he ran. And on and on the Demon’s rant pursued him, without ever pinpointing exactly where he was. The Demon felt him as he felt it, probably: nearby, unsettlingly so, but not close enough to see. If Demons saw.
He ran on and on, until he had outrun the evil fog and reached the hollow shells of the abandoned Reethe homes that been smashed by the Demon in its first attack. He ran until his face was bluer than cold and his body was crippled with cramping pains. He ran until he fell, then he got up and ran again.
He ran until he turned a corner in the silently screaming city and ran smack into a large, hideously hairy head infused with metal plates. His nose bled at the impact and he crumpled, crying from fear and shame. It was a draik!
He was going to die… He was going to die… It was going to kill him like the coward he was…
But it didn’t. And when it didn’t and he had lain there shaking for a minute and his nose had stopped bleeding, he looked up. And… he laughed. He laughed long and loud.
It was Steamclaw. The draik who talked. The monster who obeyed his command.
“I HAVE COME. THE SEA CANNOT STOP ME. I AM YOURS TO COMMAND UNTIL I PERISH.” His rasping, guttural speech still seemed unnatural to Gribly's ears. But it didn't matter now.
“You can't help, Steamclaw,” the thief told the beast reluctantly, “Not unless you know how to kill Sea Demons.”
There was a pause.
“You don’t know how to kill them, do you? You can’t!”
Another pause, and something suspiciously like a snort from the hulking, dripping-wet draik.
“You do? You know how to kill Demons?”
“I AM A DEMON. OR AT LEAST WHAT MASTER CALLS A DEMON.”
“But you know how- I mean you can- You can kill the Sea Demon??”
“NO. BUT I CAN SHOW MASTER HOW.”
“You can?”
“I CAN.”
~
“Calimá! Lei Tempstre nadt Calimálei!” Lauro heard Karmidigan shouting below. The Frost Strider was gesturing wildly to the conjured storm above. Thunder rolled and lightning flashed in the heavens, faster and faster, growing more wild every second.
With a jolt Lauro realized Karmidigan was talking to him. He swerved in mid-air, angling down around the luminous hulk of the Sea Demon as it thrashed its way up through the surface. It was so big…
“What? What?” he yelled, trying in vain to understand the nymph’s speech.
“Calimá! Lightning! Get out of the sky!”
Oh, the prince thought. That’s not-
Before he finished the thought, twenty hands slammed palm-down into the stone platform as the ten Frost Striders who had been conjuring the storm pounded the ground. Lightning streaked out of the sky in a thousand crackling arcs, and Lauro was caught right in the middle of them. He didn’t even have time to scream.
White flashed and heat washed his body in a roaring flood of pain. Instantly he jerked his head up and saw he was lying on his back near one of the ruined Shrine walls. What just happened? Wasn’t I flying? Where did everyone go? Why aren’t I dead? He struggled to bring his memory up to speed. He had been hit- then he had woken up! What had happened in between?
He raised himself up on his elbows and was surprised to find the pain in his chest was bearable. The world around him was chaos. The Sea Demon had risen out of the ground up to its waist now, and the Shrine was in ruins around it. The storm that had knocked him out of the sky was hovering at the Demon’s head, striking it with lightning and fire, crackling with the energies of snow, ice, and rain, smoke, mist, and wind. The hideous monster was striking at the clouds in earth-shattering anger, trying in vain to brush the insubstantial mass away like it would any normal, solid object. The Frost Striders had not failed, apparently.
The rest of the scene was almost as chaotic. Little white creatures scurried and hopped about at the Demon’s flanks, attacking it furiously with their claws and teeth like little insects on a hostile animal, even crawling up its slimy body in some places. What on earth they were, Lauro had no idea. Blast. His head was throbbing like an open wound. He put his hand to the base of his skull and felt wet, hot blood. Not good. He felt something else, too: a liquid coolness that seemed to be gathered at the center of his wound, protruding outward from the back of his head. What the-
He felt a blessed cessation of pain as his wound knitted itself back together seamlessly, leaving nothing but dried blood behind. The coolness left, and he turned his head to see what it had been.
Elia. The nymph girl’s face wavered in the light, and he could almost fancy he saw through it into the space beyond. Of course! She was in her Swimmer Form, translucent as the waves themselves. She had healed him, somehow. “Lauro?” her voice was high and tinkling, like a stream in the summer hills of the Greyfeld. “Thank the Aura, you’re all right!”
“How in Vast did you do that?” he gaped. “You just put my head back together like it had never been hurt!”
“In my second form I am much more attuned to the natural world,” she explained, casting a glance over her shoulder as she did so, as if any time the moment of respite might pass and an enemy see them. “Healing comes naturally to most Treele nymphs… or did. Thankfully your wound was not deep, or there would have been nothing I could do. I don’t know how you survived that fall.”
“My fall,” said Lauro, sucking his teeth regretfully and sitting up. “What happened? I just woke up here with no memory of how I fell.”
“The storm hit you, and you came flying out here. You should be dead, but you’re barely injured. I happened to be near and saw it. I’ve no idea where Gribly is, but I’m afraid for him. He may have been hurt or killed when the Demon broke through.”
“It doesn’t matter at the moment,” Lauro frowned, standing unsteadily up. Her mention of the younger lad irked him for some reason he couldn’t pinpoint. “What happened to you? Why are you in your Other Form anyway?”
“When the Demon broke through, I was knocked over by the shock, and for some reason it triggered the Change. The same thing happened to most of the Reethe- look! They’re in their Snow Forms now!” So that’s what the white creatures were… Reethe. Insane. They were actually trying to fight the Demon hand-to-hand.
“Blast!” he groaned, “Where’re the Frost Striders?”
“Behind us. Who do you think controls the lightning storm now?”
He turned and stared, open-mouthed. The stone platform was behind them, and atop it stood the ten Frost Striders, barely fazed, pumping their fists and shouting words of power into the air as they manipulated the elements to create the storm that harassed the Sea Demon. “Holy Sight!” exclaimed Lauro, “They’re unbeatable!”
“Not for long- look!”
He looked, and saw the Sea Demon claw great heaps of the ground up and hurl them up into the sky. Its sickly hue was growing brighter and brighter, shining with the power of the underworld that was housed within. “Oh no
!” Lauro cried, “That debris will come right down on us!” And it did. He dove sideways and avoided the deadly missile as it sailed down onto the platform behind. The second followed, and soon a third and fourth as the Demon smashed more and more of the ground in an effort to beat off the tormenting storm.
When the swirling snow finally cleared and Lauro was on his feet again, he shouted in anger and fear.
“Elia! Elia! Where are you? Has it hit you?” She was nowhere to be seen. “ELIA!” he shrieked, and leaped a heap of debris from the Demon’s reckless fury. The barrage from above had buried half the platform in snow and ice, but near the ground he thought he saw a bluish forearm and soft hand protruding from the pile.
“ELIA! NO!” he fell to his knees amid the thunderous sounds of battle and screamed her name again and again. He took the hand and felt a pulse- thank the Aura, if they existed! Stumbling to his feet, he yelled again, in the unlikely case she could hear him. She seemed to have slipped into her normal form again. “I can get you out! I’ll save you! Just hold on!”
He stepped back and conjured the strongest wind he could in a short time. Plunging his hands into the snow, he drove the wind into the miniature avalanche with all his might. Snowflakes flew and ice cracked, but Elia was not uncovered.
Nothing, or almost nothing. He would have to try again. Raising his hands, he swung them in a circle and swept up a handful of snow. The wind followed his motion, blowing at the snow with all its strength.
Still nothing.
“ARGH!!!” he screamed, and kicked the pile with all his strength, nearly two feet above Elia’s hand. The deepest reserves of his power and anger went into the kick, and in the farthest corner of his mind he felt an unseen, yet-undetected barrier shatter and fall into ashes.
A lightning bolt materialized out of the air and blasted the place where his foot struck the snow. Smoke sprung up and filled his nostrils; flames licked his boot for half a second and then vanished. The bolt had been small, but its energy tore open every nerve in his body and flung him back six feet.
Horrified, imagining he had killed Elia, he scrambled forward and leaped onto the pile, digging furiously. Most of the debris were gone: hurled away or incinerated by the bolt. In three seconds his fingers brushed her matted-wet hair; in five he had gripped handfuls of her dress and tattered Reethe cloak and was pulling her out; in nine he was laying her out on the rough ground and checking for signs of life.
She was breathing. She wasn’t dead! Her chest heaved in and out laboriously, and could have shouted for joy, as undignified as it would have looked. Her eyelids fluttered, then opened. Her lips parted; she sucked in air and seemed about to say something.
“You’re all right!” he grinned, “I can’t believe I almost…”
“The Demon…” she whispered hoarsely. “Oh Heavens… the Demon!”
He spun around. A series of blinding, sulfurous flashes lit up the leaden sky, illuminating the catastrophic scene at the center of the Shrine.
“It’s not possible…” he murmured. “It just can’t be…”
Chapter Seventeen: Stormheart
Perched precariously on Steamclaw’s back, Gribly raced into the heart of the battle. Hanging on for dear life amid the iron spikes and bristling hide of the draik, its words to him only moments before ran through his mind again and again.
Every creature of the Beforetime carries a Power within themselves. In some it is stronger, in some it is weaker. In all, it grants them life and strength most humans would consider unnatural. Defeat that Power, and the monster or Demon will die. Simple… except it’s not.
The draik’s plan didn’t sound easy. It called for climbing the Sea Demon’s back, boring inside its body, and finding its core, or heart of sorts, which Steamclaw insisted housed the Power that gave it life. It all sounded sick and impossible to Gribly, but he saw no other way to redeem himself. I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to. I’ll never be able to look Elia in the face if I run away now. Never.
So he was riding straight into hell, hoping against hope that he would somehow be able to conquer an enemy hundreds of times his size, simply because it thought he was some sort of prophet.
But then again, he had thought… it could have just been a mirage or a hallucination, but back outside the Shrine, he could have sworn that behind Steamclaw had stood a thin man in gray robes and a long cap. It couldn’t have been, but then… it might have.
The intensity of the emotions inside him drove out the cold and the discomfort as Steamclaw bore him through a hole in the Shrine wall and into the heat of the battle. He barely noticed the Demon as it fought the storm that its enemies had summoned. He barely saw the stunning sight as the Frost Striders brought more and more energy to the fray. He hardly felt the fear that enveloped the carnage-strewn field as the Demon wrecked havoc on the Shrine as its agony and confusion increased.
He didn’t see Lauro fall out of the sky, or Elia heal the prince’s wounds. He only saw the pulsating, sludgy side of the Sea Demon as it grew closer and closer… and closer. Gribly snapped back to reality when the draik spoke to him for the first time during the ride, with his mouth or mind, the thief wasn’t sure.
“THE STRUGGLE BEGINS, MASTER. IF YOU ARE NOT GRAMLING, AS YOU INSIST, YOU MUST HAVE AT LEAST HIS STRENGTH, OR YOU WILL DIE. HOLD ON… TIGHTLY.”
“Wait!” Gribly called, “You mean the Pit Strider’s name is Gramling?”
He never got an answer. The draik leaped into the air, farther and higher than any mortal beast could go, and dug its bladelike claws into the Sea Demon’s luminous flesh. A gruesome squelching sound reached Gribly’s ears, and the massive body steamed where the draik had landed. Its flesh or skin was like half-melted snow, yet it held together as if it were completely solid. The snowman from hell, Gribly thought, and the joke gave him a grim, sort of confidence.
“Let’s see what this rotten thing is made of, aye Steamclaw?”
No answer, but he thought he picked up a satisfied tone to the draik’s grunts as it clawed its way up the Demon’s dripping back. With every second that passed, he felt as if he understood the beast better. It was empowering and frightening at the same time.
The Sea Demon was utterly huge. Its true size wasn’t even comprehensible until one got close up, where it was apparent that the monster was almost as wide as the entire Highfast Shrine in Ymeer! Thank Traveller the Reethe place of worship was so much larger.
Agonizingly slow, the boy and beast crawled up the Demon’s back. It was tough going, and Gribly was infinitely glad he’d taken the draik’s advice and held on tightly. Strangely enough, the Demon didn’t seem to notice them, small as they were to it, but that didn’t stop the buckling and rumbling of the battle from almost throwing them off several times. Once, minutes later, when they were almost halfway up its back, the Demon shouted into his mind again.
PROPHET!
He cringed and almost fell off Steamclaw. The huge draik halted and slipped down the slimy side of the Demon for several feet. PROPHET? He asked telepathically. Gribly gritted his teeth, squeezed his eyes shut, and didn’t answer- he was riding out the wave of mental pain that always accompanied the Demon’s voice.
Finally the voice lapsed into senseless roaring and angry images, and Gribly realized it still didn’t actually know where he was. Good.
“Keep… going…” he moaned hoarsely, and slumped over a protruding metal plate on Steamclaw’s back. The draik probably couldn’t hear him over the noise of the fray, but it understood his intention well enough. Claws dug into sludge-like flesh, spikes poked holes in luminous gel, and teeth fastened themselves onto the vertical mountain of the Demon’s body. The climb began again, and did not stop until the unlikely pair had reached the place directly below where the titan’s massive shoulder blades should have been.
Gribly had the disconcerting feeling, though, that this creature had no shoulders, or head, or arms or even a body. It was as if the Power he was intent on destroying had taken the raw
elements of the world before it was fully shaped, and molded them into a rough shell for it to dwell in, the better to wreak vengeance on the world that had imprisoned it. It would at least explain why every movement of the Demon looked so unnatural; why it reminded him not so much of a giant as of a giant doll or puppet, moving to the command of unseen strings stretching out to the netherworld.
Steamclaw turned his head unexpectedly, twisting his metal-jointed neck at an odd angle to stare at Gribly with one bulbous, blood-red eye. The meaning was clear without words. READY?
I hope so. The thief nodded, gulping uncertainly. If he hadn’t known better, he would have sworn the blasted beast was grinning.
The heavy neck swung back, the thorny-hide back arched, and the draik opened its maw wide.
A deep-throated popping noise rose in the beast’s throat, then died on its tongue. “Nice try, Steamclaw. Is that all you can do- blow steam! Hah ha… ah…” Gribly shut his mouth when he saw the look the draik was giving him. It repeated the motions and tried again, roaring in frustration and anger.
Winter Warrior (Song of the Aura, Book Two) Page 13
