by J. F. Lewis
With her on his back, Dolvek flew lower, bringing the devastated land below into greater focus. Yavi had lost count of the towns they’d overflown, all apparently emptied, the inhabitants who did not lie in still-burning pits or chopped into pieces too small to be useful all marching with their dead master. Fields declared their passing with trampled crops and ruined pastureland, some burning, some ash. Yavi remembered thinking earlier when they had been forced to stop to let Dolvek recover that it might be hard to track them over the hard-packed barrens that dotted some portions of Holsven, but the trail was impossible to lose. Even a blind human could have tracked the army by the sound and the smell.
“I think he’s taking them to the Sisters,” Yavi spoke into Dolvek’s ear. Yavi had never been north of the Sri’Zauran Mountains or south of the Parliament of Ages before the Grand Conjunction, but Queen Kari had told her stories of the two ports that were one in all but name, where the borders of Holsven and Zaliz touched at the Great Northern Gulf and combined to make the only port larger than Na’shie in the whole of the Northern Human Kingdoms.
“Makes sense,” Dolvek said, before a coughing fit took him. His face and hands were mostly healed, the skin pink and new, but laughing salve was not a potion one could drink, and Yavi could hear a crackle and hiss in the prince’s lungs, though he tried to hide it. What would Kholster think of him now if the Aern could see the way the once-complaining prince ignored his own injuries, suffering in silence?
“Why don’t we walk for a little while?” Yavi asked.
He looked back at her as best he could, a request for clarification clear in his eyes.
“I wanted to soak up some more minerals,” Yavi said. “If you don’t mind the break.”
He scoffed, seeing the excuse for what it was, but Dolvek set them down on one of the few good roads, two tracks of rough pavement cutting from the Holsven side of the Rin’Saen Gorge toward the Sisters, where invisible political lines between nations divided the humans’ second-largest port city between Holsven and Zaliz.
“Uled is still dragging the huge chunks of stone he carved out of the mine,” Yavi said. She took her boots off and walked barefoot along the edge of the road, drawing in what minerals she could without stopping. No sense in making the excuse a complete lie.
All that got her was a nod.
“We could take a break . . .” Yavi offered.
“If Uled is attempting to create and open new Port Gates—” Dolvek took long rasping breaths in between every four or five words, his voice more growling and ragged each time he spoke. “—then I am the only living being north of King’s Watch who has any idea how to close them.”
“Why don’t we take a short break and you can give me my first lesson, silly?” Yavi waggled her ears at him, but his eyes were closed as he tried to slow his breathing and avert a coughing fit. Breathing around it, he called it. “Then there will be two ‘beings’ who know how it’s done?”
“Excellent . . .” Dolvek dropped where he was, eyes still closed. “. . . plan.”
Pebbles rose up from the ground, flowing toward him in orderly lines and sorting themselves by size and shape until he had the ones he wanted. With a shaking hand he dismissed the rest to roll away back to the spots from which they’d come.
He put them back, Yavi thought. I approve, but why—?
“Because,” Dolvek answered. He gazed at her through rheumy, bloodshot eyes. “Because I could tell it was what you thought ought to be done with them. Would you please ask any spirits in the rocks if they mind being marked with fire?”
“They’re really small.” Yavi squinted. “Barely sentient. If they aren’t going to be put back where they were, they don’t care what happens next.”
Eyes rolling up in his head, Dolvek teetered on the edge of a faint, before jerking himself straight and conscious again. One by one, he ran his fingers over the stones, shaping them further. Once they were a uniform shape and size, he scorched symbols onto each with elemantic flame. “Uled may change the order of their arrangement on the Port Gates, but the runic sequence for destroying a Port Gate is always the same . . .”
*
Barren as a looted tomb, Silver Leaf City’s current inhabitants reminded Kholburran of carrion birds picking at the leftovers of a once-vibrant animal. The thorn-fanged prince followed Arri’s lead as they crept across the invisible border between forest and town, hugging the shadows, as Arri gestured for two less-senior Root Guard who vanished more silently than the cold blowing wind to scout ahead. One flew over the rooftops in the grasp of a friendly spirit, and the other dashed around the edge of an empty storage shed.
“Where is everybody?” Kholburran whispered.
“Our last scout said lots of elves and humans were leaving the outlying areas and moving to be close to Fort Sunder,” Arri said even more quietly, making Kholburran feel too loud. “But they said nothing about Silver Leaf being this empty.”
As they moved along, the excellent night vision of the Vael showed Kholburran more than he wanted to see. Sickly or seedy-looking vagrants crept in and out of abandoned homes, thinking themselves concealed by the night. In the front room of one empty abode, two humans scuffled over a horse blanket, only to grow still and scared at the sound of a peg leg tapping on the scant porch.
“You have choices,” spoke a one-legged man. He leaned on his good knee, fingering a crutch of stained walnut idly as he addressed the struggling humans. Kholburran noted the way the wood had been carefully wrapped at a point halfway down the crutch, as if it were meant to serve as a grip. “You can come to the Briar and Bramble, tell me who you are and what you are about, and have a hot, filling meal. I can find a use for you, maybe assign you a steading. That—” He smote the air with a wave of the crutch. “—is your best and most pleasant option, because at the very worst it leaves you with a full belly and a warm place by my fire ’til morning.”
“What are you going to do if we don’t, fat man?” It was a thin and angry voice, but unafraid.
Kholburran’s head petals prickled as the fat innkeeper turned and locked eyes with him in the dark, offering a gesture and shrug that conveyed some mixture of “I’ll be with you a moment,” “Glad to see you,” and “I’m sorry you have to see this.”
“Well then, lad.” The innkeeper turned his attention back to the porch. “If you force my hand, we’ll come in and have it out with you the hard way.”
“‘We’?” The thin man laughed. “Who is—?”
“I’m Wallace, the Baker of Castleguard,” the fatter man in the abandoned home said with a cough. “My wife and three boys are upstairs, and I was taking them a blanket when this man objected.”
“Good to know you, Wallace,” the innkeeper said. “I am Jorum of the Briar and Bramble, and I may have use for a baker. If not, I’ll feed you and yours and set you on the path for Fort Sunder. It’s the capitol of Scarsguard, which is what the Grudgers and the elves they saw fit not to eat have decided to call their new kingdom. They might have a place for a man with your skill, and, failing that, it may be safe enough for you to head back home before long. Dienox is dead. Slain by the child of Kholster and Wylant, the Aiannai who slew Nomi and took her hair.”
“You lie,” said the first voice.
“Only to myself, and I’m trying to mend my ways there, too.” Jorum patted his abbreviated knee. “I even have a nice little reminder of what seeing the world through tinted lenses can earn a fellow.”
“But, Torgrimm,” Wallace began.
“Kholster put him back in his old job after his Prime Overwatch . . .” Jorum closed his eyes, trying to think of the name. “Is it Vunder, Kirsten?”
“Vander.” The correction came from inside the darkened home. Light bloomed within as someone unhooded a bullseye lantern, picking out a bloodied man in a coat of plates, still trying to pull the worn blanket from Wallace’s grip. He held up his hands to shield his eyes, and the woman chopped into his neck with a woodman’s axe. Kholburran only
saw her for a moment, short and stocky with graying hair, flowers on her apron. “Jim, leave that lantern and help me get him into pieces before he comes back angry.”
At a nod, Arri sent two Root Guard toward the house to aid Kirsten.
“You have Vael help on the way, Kirsten,” Jorum called out. “Don’t go trying to chop any of them.”
“I’ll chop you, if you don’t get back to the inn and check my stew,” Kirsten called. Her voice sounded harsh, but with an edge of affection. “And you just take Mr. Wallace and his family with you, while the ladies handle the women’s work.”
“Come on, lad,” Jorum smiled the words, patting Kholburran with the back on his hand. “We have goat that you won’t eat—it’s farm-raised—but I might be able to scrounge up a little something I was saving for one of your scouts, Miss Ella, on her way back through.”
“Was that all true?” Kholburran asked. “What you said about the gods?”
“True?” Jorum laughed. “I have to send a runner out to Oot noon and midnight just to make sure I don’t need to build a shrine to Kirsten. The fate of the world is twisting and turning, son. I just hope it’s like a kite on a string, getting ready to soar and not a fish on a line, heading for the pot.”
Jorum led them inside, out of the dark, and Kholburran tried to pretend he couldn’t still hear the sounds of the nameless man who’d died over a horse blanket being hacked to pieces across the street.
*
Dolvek stopped breathing deep in the middle of the next night. Unable to sleep, Yavi listened to the labored gristmill grind of his lungs and watched the air spirits swoop and dive. Angry and free, the spirits glared at her with blaming eyes, whispering to each other too galefully for her to understand. She felt the small pouch she’d made of her samir, which held the stones Dolvek had produced for her, and drew them out one at a time, trying to call out their order in the pattern of destruction without checking the numbers she’d scratched into the backs of them.
The symbols did not make sense, even with the mnemonic images Dolvek had taught her to aid in memorization. When his breath stopped, Yavi froze mid-pebble-check—the one that looked kind of like a little irkanth was fourth, wasn’t it?—head cocked and ears listening as hard as they could.
“Dolvek?”
Nothing.
As she leaned over him, a soft whisper told her to back away. She scrambled back, trusting the voice, eyes widening in shock when the body burst into flame, burning hot and fast, guttering black smoke and flame, consuming the body so swiftly the smell was more like ash than burning meat.
“Sorry,” the small whisper said. “I couldn’t let it get up and possibly harm you.”
Twirling toward the sound, Yavi spied the translucent spirit of Dolvek standing a few steps away, his eyes ablaze with flame. Behind and through him, Yavi saw a startled lizard inching away.
Looking back and forth from corpse ash to spirit, Yavi opened her mouth to ask a question, but could not find the words.
“Um . . .” Yavi hunted the right words or questions and settled on “How?”
“It does not matter,” Dolvek whispered. “Sleep if you want, and I will watch over you.”
“No.” Yavi rubbed her eyes. “I am so awake right now I might never sleep again.”
*
It should have been impossible for Yavi to appear more beautiful to Dolvek’s eyes now than she had before his death, such was the strength of his attraction to the young Vael. The purely physical and pheromone-enhanced desire he had felt upon first exposure had grown over the time they had spent together to a deeper appreciation, gratitude, and love he did not expect for her to ever return, especially now. He had stopped seeing her features and begun seeing more of her true self, the caring princess who endeavored to spare his feelings, his pride, even when he had been filled beyond bursting with baseless self-aggrandizements and willful ignorance.
Her bravery, her talent, the way she smiled at a person with more than her lips . . . The kindness of her voice, when it had not been earned . . .
Now he saw the spirit that matched such a person, her essence bright, beautiful, and overflowing with joy, the excess of which burst out from her, attempting to share itself with others, overflowing to refill their cups and banish sorrow.
“Can you hear me?” Yavi asked.
Above them, the tendrils of Uled speared the air, stretching past and through the Sri’Zauran Mountains, staining the sky. Ahead, a miasma of purple and black writhed and pulsed. Nothing good would greet them there, but it was the center of Uled’s power, and, like hints of silver, Dolvek found the tracks of the three great stones, the echoing images of their passage, echoes that could have only been present if someone were attempting to enchant them en route to their final destination.
“I can.” He nodded, conscious of being watched. Spinning to look behind him, a coldness touched him, the very edge of an enraged force trailing them from the south. Not Uled, but still dangerous and bent on death and inflicting harm, revenge. “I . . .”
“Dolvek.” Yavi’s voice, gentle and light, drew his attention back to her.
“May we travel as we talk?” Dolvek asked. “With my new senses, I can see the worlds of the insubstantial much more clearly than the material one. We are stalked from one direction and head toward doom in the other. If we hurry, the doom may only be mine . . . or ours.”
“Ours?” Yavi laughed. “Don’t you mean mine? You’re already dead, from the looks of it.”
“Yes.” Dolvek eyed Uled’s tendrils and shuddered. “But there are worse things . . . by declining Torgrimm’s collection, I am no longer granted his protection.”
CHAPTER 21
HOW TO GREET A DRAGON
The Tsan’Zaur, as her people had begun calling her, drifted in lazy circles as she spiraled down toward the newly expanded city below. Each orbit described a deliberate circle through the air, designed to display the sapphire expanse of her armored undercarriage and the shimmering red of her scales to any onlookers who had not run for cover at the mere sight of her. She roared once, twice, and let them dread the third even more by denying it to them.
Still miles away, her army marched on. It was larger than it had once been, as stragglers who had managed their own escapes felt the periodic call pounded out in Zaurtol as they traveled. Asvrin’s Shades, with their splinters of the Life Forge, had been a particular boon, but the Warleader presumed she would not require them . . . yet. Most valuable had been the news they had brought with them: the fall of Port Ammond, and the death of Coal. Asvrin, ever the clever the little agent, had even thought to visit Oot and verify things his assassins had spied out before their attack.
Even now, a pair of Shades lurked near the black mirror of the divine, sending out updates through echo tunnels on the third hour of every second day. A Sri’Zaur had become a dragon, yet two Aern, an elf, and an impossible half-breed had all become gods, with Two-headed Kilke an apparent member of their cabal. It was enough to make a mother proud. Even the backstabbing Dryga appeared to have risen to further prominence in his death atop the moving corpse of a once-great wyrm.
The world was in flux, crystalizing into a new structure with new opportunities for those who could work themselves into prominence within the new patterns as they solidified.
Even Fort Sunder had changed so much as to become nearly as unrecognizable to the dragon as she had become to it. The keep itself remained a brooding edifice of stone looming at the top of a tiered plateau, lording its presence over the Eldren Plains. Built up around it was a city proper bounded by walls of thick granite from the Rin’Saen Gorge and one of the Dwarven building materials about which the Zaur and Sri’Zaur were supposed to be ignorant: concrete.
Ha.
While reinforcing the relatively simple mixture with steel was quite clever, Tsan failed to understand why the mundane chemistry of it escaped the other races. Admittedly, getting the substance to set underwater had felt counterintuitive back in Tsan’
s newly remembered time as one of the more water-dwelling breeds of Sri’Zaur, but what impressed her now was the rudimentary aquaculture she saw taking place.
Small manufactured ponds stocked with fish marked sections of the earth dedicated to farmland. Improved drainage systems crossed what, from the odor of churned soil, seemed to be farmland whose winter crops were still going into the ground or had just been planted. It had been many years since Tsan had worked the mushroom fields or gone on farmland raids to the north of the Sri’Zauran Mountains, but she could identify rows of potatoes, spinach, onions, radishes, and peas being planted even now, in soil she suspected of being transplanted by industrious Geomancers.
Irrigation. Sewage pipes. All the intricate signs of Dwarven plumbing being set into the ground and run from foundation to foundation of buildings under construction and others merely planned, their future locations demarcated with little cloth flags and twine. Yes, the Aern had elves helping them, but they had a Dwarf doing the architectural design work. She spotted him waving a length of bent pipe at a distracted human farmer, who appeared to have plowed into it, because he could not take his eyes from Tsan.
“Why is the Dwarf so unaffected?” Tsan hissed to Kilke.
“Dragons do not attack Dwarves,” answered the disembodied head harnessed at her neck like a brooch or a talisman.
“Why not?” Tsan asked.
“One of my other heads would likely remember,” Kilke said, “but I do not.”
In less than a month, the Aern had established the bones of an impressive city. More permanent structures were still going up; tents of all shapes and sizes formed the bulk of the shelter within the newly encompassed area. The bones of the thing filled in and took shape in Tsan’s mind’s eye as she followed the natural course to what would eventually be the first monument to the death of the war between the Eldrennai and the Aern, if not the extermination of the elves themselves.
