“I’ll protect you,” she murmured. She pulled a tiny thread, and the candle winked out.
5
Zilok Morth
Zilok Morth floated far out over the True Ocean, so high that the waves were nothing but a white-capped floor of blue below. The gray maw of the Godgate swirled overhead. It hungered for him, groaning with its need because it had nearly had him. That seething, sucking terminus had almost gotten what it wanted when Zilok made his colossal mistake.
Almost. But almost was not enough. It was never enough. The Godgate almost devoured his soul. Zilok almost killed the Wildmane. That ironic sting quivered in his soul like needles stuck into skin.
I failed, he thought for the thousandth time. He repeated the words over and over in his mind. He would continue repeating them until they didn’t hurt anymore.
I lived for hundreds of years, and yet still I’m a foolish boy. I had him. I had Medophae on his knees, and, in my glee, I rushed to the prize too quickly. I overlooked details. I was blind to my danger.
He had thought of everything. The plan had worked. He had stripped the god Oedandus from Medophae, turning him mortal, killable. The arrogant bastard had not even known what had hit him in the middle of Ethiel’s palace, but then he’d somehow slipped through Zilok’s fingers, running away before he reached his quarry.
Then again, with the spine horse upon them, Medophae and his little bitch of a threadweaver squeezed through that portal. Both escapes were so small, so seemingly inconsequential, so easily remedied. Finding and killing a fledgling threadweaver and mortal swordsman was child’s play. Zilok had done that over and over again in his long, undead life.
There should have been no need to rush, but he had anyway. Zilok had heedlessly chased after, terrified that if he did not find and slay Medophae quickly, the dullard would slip away again or, worse, find a way to reclaim his god.
And Zilok blinded himself to his true danger: Vaerdaro.
Zilok had underestimated the feral god’s bond to the Sunrider. Zilok hadn’t imagined Oedandus possessed enough intelligence to reveal secrets to the Sunrider that would give him an advantage. That was stupid. Arrogant. Short-sighted.
I failed, he said to himself again.
The Godgate pulled at him like never before. The part of Zilok’s mind that wallowed in the catastrophe wanted to give up. This pitiful lack of will caused the hooks in his chest to tighten as though lashed to a team of draft horses, dragging him upward toward the Godgate.
But Zilok refused to be foolish twice in such a short time. He fought his depression, called upon his years of experience to remember that failures brought wisdom. Failures sharpened the blade. Every stroke of stone on steel was a failure until the edge was, at least, deadly.
Zilok’s nemesis remained. Medophae was a murderous splotch of injustice on Zilok’s life, and that, by itself, allowed him to resist the Godgate’s pull. Zilok would catch Medophae, would punish him. He would make Medophae confess each of his offenses and beg for forgiveness with blood and screams.
That would be how Zilok’s story ended, with victory, not a whimper of failure. This loss was just one more stroke, one more scrape of stone on steel.
Now say it again. Say it one more time, and then be done.
I have failed.
He felt the metaphorical stone grind to a stop against the edge of his plan.
Below him, after his long flight, he saw the tiny island of Dandere. Medophae’s birthplace.
It was a speck of a thing, far out here where even the great whales and the goddess Saraphazia did not bother the humans who lived here.
This was his mighty, sharpened blade. These people, plucked from the mainland thousands of years ago by Oedandus himself, were ruled by a royal line that possessed the god’s own blood. This was how Oedandus had recaptured a bit of his sentience within Medophae when he arrived on the mainland, by burning into this royal blood.
The Dandenes were simple folk, with a tidy society ruled by a tidy king. The island was bountiful, and gave her people all of their necessary food. They had no natural adversaries. Life was peaceful, and they occupied themselves with architecture and art, discovering culinary diversions, crafting buildings for the beauty of it, painting with pigments drawn from the island’s flowers and coral reefs. These people were imbued with none of the powers rampant on Amarion. There were no threadweavers here, and there was no damned Wildmane. The GodSpill in the tapestry of the island was rich, perhaps secretly the reason for the Dandenes’ need to create and build, but none had guessed that the power could be tapped to create the wondrous.
And most importantly, this was a place where Oedandus, in his threadbare state, could not reach. The god had been stretched and bound over the entire continent of Amarion by his enemies long ago, and he could not reach beyond it more than a dozen miles from the shore.
Zilok smiled inwardly. This place was holy, to him at least, as it would never be tainted by Oedandus. And when he brought Medophae here, there would be no escape for him.
But before he focused on Medophae, Zilok must remove every trace of Medophae’s own tainted blood on Amarion, and that meant gutting every descendant of the Three Mothers of the Sunriders. Then, he would bring Medophae to this place. And once Medophae’s corpse decorated the shore of his homeland, there would be no more Oedandus. The god would once again be reduced to a blithering idiot, with no more power than an angry wind.
Where you were born, Medophae, so shall you die. The last strike will be mine, and I will finally ram this sharpened sword through your guts.
6
Stavark
The sun touched the tip of the great peak of Karak-Kin. What the humans called the Spine Mountains loomed over Sylikkayrn. Slashes of orange streaked across the sky. They would deepen soon to red, then purple. Stavark loved sunsets. He always had. He remembered far back into his childhood. Before he could even walk, Stavark had waited and watched as the sunsets bloomed and faded.
He took the moment. The elders taught that one should start within the present and radiate outward, like the ripples from a finger touching water. It was a tenet at the heart of his people’s spirituality, but it was something they so rarely did. Stavark liked to imagine that the syvihrk once believed in it and followed it religiously, but the Riddak Kira—when the foolish human threadweavers had stolen the maehka from the lands—had changed the syvihrk. In the end, these spiritual practices had given way to anger and resentment in the face of hardship.
But Stavark believed that remembering the wisdom of his ancestors was the most important during hardship. It was not the time to abandon wisdom. While his people had forgotten this, Stavark would remember. He could do that.
He put his concerns aside and took the sunrise into himself. He let the image soak into his mind so that he might call it forward during the times when he was not so strong. He paused for beauty, praised it, saved it.
The smells of the forest filled him. The quiet sounds of his people going about their business felt warm within him. He loved them beyond measure, even though they did not understand him, even though perhaps some of them truly hated him.
He reached out and touched the maehka, which now filled everything. It tingled in his fingertips, urging him to use the silverland that gave him his speed. He could not feel it as the Maehka vik Kalik did, of course. He did not see the tapestry of the gods, but if he concentrated, he could feel the tingle of the maehka that had been released. It rose to a crescendo, and he began to shake. That familiar ache began behind his eyes, and he blinked and looked at the sunset once more. Glorious crimsons and rich purples filled the sky. The land around him magnified. Colors jumped forth with startling brilliance.
This was what he had always wanted. This was what Orem had promised after he had stumbled into Sylikkayrn, injured, close to death. Reluctantly, Stavark’s parents nursed him back to health and when they did, Orem told of the frightful creatures he had seen. He told of how maehka was returning, thin and sick
ly. He told of how the syvihrk must help return the balance, else all the lands would be lost.
And Orem kept his promise. Though Stavark had not been there to see his plan’s culmination, the maehka had been released. He had felt The Wave as he struggled back to Sylikkayrn from Denema’s Valley. Everyone had felt it.
Now it was Stavark’s turn to keep faith with his companions. He had returned home to heal, and to keep his promise to his parents. He had fulfilled that obligation, reporting to his mother and the council. The syvihrk were now more informed than all of the humans in Amarion, but now Stavark must leave again.
When Stavark left with Orem the first time, his parents shunned Orem as the cause, said he was no longer welcome among the syvihrk. They said he had abused his welcome, filled their son with poisoned ideas. Since Orem was the first human allowed in Sylikkayrn in more than a hundred years, his betrayal weighed heavy. It made many of the syvihrk feel that they had been right about humans all along, that humans were faithless betrayers.
His parents had ordered Stavark not to go, and when that had failed, they had pleaded. But Orem’s quest was what Stavark had been born to do. And now they had succeeded.
But it wasn’t over. He could not celebrate while he did not know the fate of his companions. Orem, the Maehka vik Kalik, even the Rabasyvihrk, they might all be in danger. Now that Stavark was healed, he must return to the human lands and find out what had become of them.
These were his debts, and he must pay them. A true syvihrk always left more than he took.
He heard a light footstep behind him, and his reflective moment ended. He wrapped the picture of the sunset, the feel of the trees, the richness of the newly returned maehka, into his heart and kept it safe.
If the newcomer had been a human, Stavark would have assumed the person was trying to sneak up on him, but the syvihrk moved elegantly, quiet as a breeze. Without turning, he could guess who it was. She had followed him around since he had returned to Sylikkayrn.
“You will not obey your mother,” Elekkena said. “She begs you to stay, but you will leave anyway.”
“I have a debt.” He turned and looked into Elekkena’s dark silver eyes. Her jaw was low and square, unusual for a syvihrk, though common for a human. Her thick silver hair fell in waves down the sides of her face, hiding that wide jawline unless she pushed it behind her ear, which she did frequently.
Elekkena and Stavark had many things in common. She held moments, like he did. One-on-one or in groups, she was mostly quiet, then all at once she could be jarringly outspoken. Both of them had been on long journeys recently, and both had returned at almost exactly same time. All of these things made them oddities. Outcasts.
She had gone on a day hunt one year ago, just before Stavark had left with Orem, and she’d never returned until now. Her parents had thought her dead. She did not talk about what had happened on her two-year odyssey, but there was a story there.
Her silver eyes—so dark for a quicksilver—never left him. He liked that about her. She looked at him as though she had nothing to hide. Most syvihrk did not hold Stavark’s gaze for long. Humans looked away even quicker.
Except Orem. He had never looked away. He had always looked everything in the face.
“And your debt is more important than your mother’s wishes?” she pressed.
“Only when my mother’s wishes are unworthy of her.”
She arched an eyebrow. “That is boldly said.”
He sighed. “I don’t mean to be bold with it. It is simply true. She hides, but it is not the time for the syvihrk to hide.”
They spent a long moment staring at one another. He was calm. She was calm.
“I will come with you,” she said.
“No. It is my debt, not yours.”
“We are syvihrk. Our debts are shared.”
“No,” he said.
“Now whose wishes are unworthy of him?”
He opened his mouth to speak, but right words did not come to him, so he said nothing. He waited for them.
“You will need help,” she said.
It was a lie to say he would not need help, and lies were seeds that blossomed into self-deception.
“Not from you,” he said, trying the words, but they didn’t feel right, either.
“How do you know?”
He felt the need to break eye-contact, and it was like a breeze that ruffled his shame. In that instant, he knew she held the wisdom. Pride controlled him. He saw it clearly, and was angry with himself.
He let both emotions slip away. They flowed into the maehka all around him and dissipated. He returned to the moment and set his pride aside. Right actions radiated from the center. When the center was agitated, right actions fled.
“Very well,” he said.
“You are leaving today?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You will talk to your mother again?”
“Yes.”
“I will wait here.”
He nodded and left her there in the trees. As he neared Sylikkayrn, several syvihrk watched him. He was the rebellious, human-loving son of Syvihrk Sallark. His mother was foremost among the elder syvihrk who made decisions, when there were decisions to be made.
Sylikkayrn was not like the human villages Stavark had spent so much time in over the last year. Humans felt the need to push the living land away from them when they established their spaces. He had never understood that. Why push the lands away when you could coexist with other living creatures? They chopped down trees to make space for their square houses or their mighty square castles. They beat ground flat and lifeless to make way for their wagons and horses.
Syvihrk cities were different. An unaware human could walk straight through the middle of Sylikkayrn without ever realizing he was among the syvihrk. Several hardy human adventurers had done this over the years since the Riddak Kira. The syvihrk, hidden by their rapport with the trees surrounding them, often gathered to watch when a human came through.
Soon, Stavark came to a brief meadow. On the western edge of the meadow, moss covered the crags of a great cliff that rose into the sky, higher than any human castle. A thin waterfall cascaded down the cliff, birthing a brook that meandered through the forest. The sky was dim now, and the shadows deepened. In the day, this place filled with light. Stavark had climbed that cliff countless times and splashed through that brook as a child. This place was the entire world when he was a youth. Now it seemed like a very small corner of life.
At the northern edge of the meadow, if one had the eyes of the syvihrk, one could see Stavark’s home, and immense killik tree. Fully thirty feet in diameter, it rose almost as high as the cliff to the west. When Stavark was a child, he made a game of climbing to the highest branches and jumping to the cliff. Given the choice, any syvihrk would live within a killik tree. Before the maehka had been taken from the lands, syvihrk and killik trees cared for one another. The syvihrk made sure nothing harmed the trees, ensuring they had all the sunlight and water they could want, and the trees made room within their bole for the syvihrk to live.
But when the maehka left, the killik trees died, as did most of the syvihrk. Almost all of the great trees rotted away and sank into the ground within the first few years. A few still stood, smooth husks of their previous grandeur. Only the wisest and most important of the syvihrk were allowed to live within them.
Stavark closed his eyes and took another moment for himself. As before when he left with Orem, there was a good chance he was going to die on his coming journey. Also as before, he knew deep within himself that no other decision could be made. Stavark’s life was bound to Orem’s, to the Maehka via Kalik’s, even to the Rabasyvihrk’s. He must part with them in knowing agreement, or know for certain that they were dead. That was the way of the syvihrk.
As always, it saddened him that his mother failed to see this.
But he took his moment and memorized his home.
As he approached the darkened archway, a sliver
of green caught his eye. At the crest of the arch, a tiny bud had sprouted. He paused, stunned.
“So,” Stavark whispered, “like the syvihrk, you have waited for the maehka to return.” He reached out and put a hand against the smooth wood. “Like the syvihrk, you will live again. Thrive, beautiful tree. Thrive...”
Stavark took the moment, then went inside.
His mother, Sallark, sat in the community room, waiting for him. Mother often entertained large groups of syvihrk in his house. There was a raised dais in the center of the room so that she could be seen and heard by those encircling her. She sat upon that dais now. Her long braid of silver hair curved down one shoulder and piled in her lap like a coiled rope. Her eyes were a dark black. When one of the syvihrk went blind, the silver of their eyes faded to night. Stavark’s mother had been blind as long as Stavark could remember. There were many rumors of how she had lost her sight. Stavark had heard them all. He wasn’t sure he believed any of them, and Sallark never talked about it.
They paused like that, Stavark watching his mother calmly from the entrance, his mother facing the doorway. Stavark knew that his father was nearby, but he would not show himself, not until his mother had spoken her peace. The bole was intensely quiet. Stavark did not shift, did not proceed further, and he did not sit down. His welcome here was conditional, and he would not dishonor himself or his parents by pretending that he belonged.
“You do not have the feel of one who intends to stay,” his mother said at long last.
“I must go again. I have debts.”
“You have more debt to your people than you do to humans. Some would question whether you consider the humans more important than the syvihrk.”
In the quicksilver language, syvihrk meant “the people who love beauty.” It was the word they used to refer to themselves, as all syvihrk bore an intense love of beauty and harmony. It shamed Stavark that his people did not believe this extended beyond their own race. Once, they had.
The GodSpill: Threadweavers, Book 2 Page 5
