by J. F. Lewis
Wind stirred her head petals, freeing two that tumbled light and slow toward the sea. False Spring could not last forever, and each gust took a toll in yellow from Yavi’s head. This was a time for hard bark and inner sap, if she had ever lived through one.
She peered out at all of those human and elven corpses intermingled with the reptiles, relieved to see no Aern or Vael among them. Did their dead not walk? Yavi hoped not.
Behind her, a mistlike apparition kept silent watch.
“Lucky that fell where it did.” Yavi pointed down at long and fractured ruin. Fragments of the Long Speaker’s Spire that had once stood high above the cities lay broken across the spillways, the very tip only a hundred yards or so from the where the Little Sister Dock had stood before Dolvek had rolled up the rock, sealing the way.
“Yes.”
Yavi gripped the edge of the widows’ walk, the watch room at her back, with the bright-white glow of the lantern shining behind her like a diamond in the sunslight. Would her bow be strong enough to punch through the Port Gates’ surface, destroying the runes? She’d slipped a chunk of stone from the fallen spire into her pack just in case, but if it came down to that . . .
Gull cries split the air as brave, or incredibly desperate, birds swept down to tear loose flaps of skin from the moving corpses that lining the three main docks and the spillways, queuing up at the foot of three Port Gates upon which the thing which Warlord Xastix had become worked its spells. Yavi felt sorry for the warlord, to have been overcome by Uled, the Sri’Zaur’s body torn apart to build Uled’s grotesque current form.
“Now.” Dolvek’s susurrant voice cut through her thoughts. Several stones whirled past Yavi’s eyes like evasive flies fleeing a flailing hand.
“Fourth, twenty-third, eleventh, second, eighteenth, and thrive,” Yavi said as quickly as she could get the words out.
“Thrive?” Dolvek’s voice, quiet but disturbing, like the noise of rats chewing at the attic walls, made her uneasy even though she did not understand why. Was it because the sound of the waves should have washed it away, blocked it out, but did not? His voice operated on a different range than other sounds, something Yavi didn’t think she heard with her ears at all.
A smile broke the grim lines of his mouth, but he was still waiting for an answer.
“It was three or five,” Yavi said. “I didn’t get a good look at it, but I can do this, Dolvek. Can we just go already?”
“At your command, Yavi.” He offered a smile and an abbreviated bow. “Give the order and I am at your disposal.”
Dolvek shimmered, moving from standing to sitting next to her at the edge in one jerky transitionless motion. Up close, he looked pale, despite his translucent form, and Yavi wondered what his continuous use of elemancy was doing to his spirit. Where did he draw his power from?
His spirit was no more terrifying than any nature spirit, except for the disquieting feeling that he ought not be here. Torgrimm should have taken him. Dolvek said nothing more, but she sensed his impatience, borne not of a personal sense of importance but because they were running out of time.
Yavi’s focus shifted back to the army visible through him, across the port. Uled’s army was vast . . . and looking that way made her chest ache. Rank upon rank of the once-living inhabitants mixed with reptilian, human, and elven recruits had ceased their wandering, standing motionless in three large groups awaiting their master’s bidding, each prong ready to charge through one of the three Port Gates before them once they were operational. Three Port Gates.
“What if we can’t take out all three Port Gates?” Yavi asked.
“The Aern will think of something,” Dolvek said, “or my brother will.”
Below, the water looked stark and mysterious. The amphibious Sri’Zaur had swum away to take their positions with the rest of the army, abandoning their halfhearted attempts at seizing Yavi. She had not noticed when they left. That scared her, knowing such monsters could become so normal that she forgot about them, however momentarily.
A wave of sound echoed across the water with a thrum so deep the vibration left Yavi dazed for a five-count.
“What was that?” she asked.
“The beginning of the end of the ritual,” Dolvek said. “The Port Gates are nearly complete.”
*
Over the rise, close to the spot where the tower at North Watch had once stood, Zhan smelled the sweet-rot of the recently dead mixed with the salty tang of the sea, all overlaying the fire-pit aftertaste of a tower long since burned. Atop, of course, the reek of dragon and Zaur. The Zaur had tunneled under North Watch and destroyed it, as they had so many of the watch towers back when Warlord Xastix had been the enemy, before Uled’s distasteful magicks stirred the dead to his call. A vibration twin to the bone metal pin of Glayne’s which marked his spot amid the web of scars on Zhan’s back pulled at him in a straight line through the hill, a taut fishing line of awareness. More than two hundred warsuit-clad Ossuarians stood ready to take back those bones, but Zhan hesitated.
Keeper’s thoughts, silent, yet expectant, rang louder than words in Zhan’s mind.
“You think I should have accepted Kholster’s Rae’en’s offer of aid?” Zhan whispered, too softly for his troops to fail to understand the question was a private one, either to himself or his warsuit.
There are thousands of them, Keeper intoned. We seek the bones, not the battles. It feels as if, here, you seek both.
And you disapprove? Some communications were too sensitive to expect the troops to ignore. Their kholster . . . their Ossuarian should be certain of what he must do, presenting an unfaltering front of strength and guidance.
I would never disapprove of my rightful occupant so long as he seeks the bones and keeps them. Keeper’s thoughts came strong and unambiguous.
Then what—?
But you are questioning your own actions, Keeper thought back. You have done so ever since you misjudged the First of One Hundred. You feel you are not seeking the bones, but proving a point about the relationship between the Ossuary and the Army.
I am resolved in this, Keeper. Zhan fought the urge to glance about at his troops. He knew where they were, could feel them as acutely as he did the pins in his scars. They did not question. Not aloud. But . . .
I would submit that you are not at all resolved in this, maker. Keeper’s tone held no judgment, merely cold, calm, reflective observation. That is not, however, a requirement. Charge or stand. Swing or block. I will keep you as safe as I can, for your bones are my flesh and your flesh, my bones. I am yours to kholster. You are my rightful occupant. That which you bid me, I will do without hesitation, as have I always done.
Maybe . . . Zhan stood, knowing a single step would bring him within the enemy’s possible range of detection, his helm visible via their field of vision, estimated using the direction of a fragment of Glayne’s bone metal, the spot in Coal’s chest in which Zhan felt the metal, the terrain . . .
“Zhan,” roared the voice of a bellowing dragon, “are you going to hide behind that hill until the suns set, or are you coming for your precious bones?”
To Zhan’s left, Alysaundra cursed.
Tell the First of One Hundred that it is possible the Ossuary has erred.
*
Three new points of contact erupted in the half light, stirring the ancient elf from his torpor. Like all Port Gates, they sought their terminus. Once, Hasimak had thought of himself as the engine that drove the portals he created, but after long millennia he had learned the truth of things. Perhaps at first he had been the source, but a balance had tipped, maybe during the demon wars, maybe long before, when the gates had begun to sustain him. Beginning had become end.
Without thinking, Hasimak caught the miswrought strands reaching through the void between the Dying Light and the Never Dark, threading them through his mental map of vertices and connections, and realigned them with their brother and sister gates before it occurred to him that they were not his gates. L
ike a parent thrilled to see the return of a child thought lost beyond all hope of return, he had presumed older gates had been brought into alignment once again. But, no, this was . . . else. Foreign. False.
A red line of barbed energy grabbed at his core, some crude trap of a lesser practitioner—Ah. Of course. Uled—and he discarded the nasty little things and the others hiding within before he understood the trick of them.
“A distraction,” he chuckled to himself. “Needless, but clever in your way, aren’t you, lad?”
Was it wrong to be pleased at his pupil’s achievement? To view the beauty in the architecture of a mad elf even as he saw that it was evil and destructive?
New energy brought with it a rush of restoration, and within moments Hasimak stood whole and hale upon his floating refuge.
“Will you intervene?” Appearing after the voice, a Dwarf in shining armor manifested.
“Foreman Jun.” Hasimak acknowledged the deity’s presence with a slight nod. “I find your presence unexpectedly pleasant.”
“That was all—” Jun started.
“Unforgivable?” the wizened elf asked.
“I was going to say it was long ago.” Jun looked away.
“Not so long as all that.” Hasimak wrapped himself in lines of purple magic, using them to alter the remnant of the Tower of Elementals within which he stood, rendering it a proper balcony (if one ignored the fact that it was floating in nothingness) surrounding a modest one-room house with mage lighting both inside and out, the fixtures in the likeness of Coal breathing out.
Changing size and shape until it pleased him, the abode cemented itself when it had become a long rectangle, with square home in the middle, a fountain in the likeness of his last apprentices, the Elemental Nobles: Zerris, Klerris, Lord Stone, and Hollis, the Sea Lord, each holding a floating sphere representing the appropriate elements.
My poor students, he thought. My children.
Jun nodded sagely, examining the new isle.
“May I?” he asked.
At a nod from Hasimak, the deity added a dome of black on the underside of the island. Atop the isle, at what Hasimak now deemed the prow, Jun wrought a simple orb of the same black material inset on a white pedestal. Hasimak sensed the magic with both the dome and the orb. The dome could draw on the currents of dimensional energies within the Betwixt. The orb acted as steering wheel, guiding the island’s course with the touch of a hand and the will of an elemancer.
“I was not planning on travel,” Hasimak said, frowning at the Builder’s new additions. A means of propulsion created options Hasimak would have preferred to be without.
“You might change your mind.”
“I shan’t interfere, you know.” Hasimak summoned a tunnel and reached through it, drawing out his mattress and his books. They had been destroyed, yes, but not truly, because no matter ever is. “Not unless they truly need me.”
“They don’t?” Jun asked.
“The Last World has no further need of its sole surviving mortal immigrant,” Hasimak said. “My gifts are too destructive in their hands and, unlike the Dwarves, my knowledge cannot be so easily repossessed, should it fall into unexpected hands or be turned toward ends of which I disapprove; I decline to kill.”
Jun bowed his head.
“I do,” Hasimak said softly, “forgive you, however.”
Jun looked up, eyes brightening, tears streaming.
“My mistake with the Port Gates,” Hasimak continued, “though not as pronounced as yours with the dragons, has opened my eyes. We all fall prey to the call of fire to one degree or another. The only difference is the scope of our mistakes: the scale.”
“The dragons—”
Hasimak arched an eyebrow.
“After everything they did,” Jun said, “I still love every last one of them.”
“That’s a father’s job.” Hasimak peered into the void between worlds, his thoughts unknowable, his past untold.
CHAPTER 25
WE ALL HAVE SCARS
Three of the most powerful rulers in the entire world stared at Kholburran expectantly: Rae’en, First of One Hundred; Bhaeshal, Queen of the Aiannai; and Tsan, dragon and Warleader of the Zaur and Sri’Zaur. Kholburran swallowed hard. As he and his Root Guard had approached the main entrance to Scarsguard, the city that had sprung up around Fort Sunder seemingly overnight, two warsuits had escorted Kholburran and company to the picnic (was that the right word, for a meal in which a dragon was devouring an entire cow, al fresco?). Fifty yards away, the warsuits had instructed the Root Guard to wait at a remove from the three rulers, though, after some debate, Arri had been allowed to accompany him as guardian of his virtue. Even though Kholburran had known it to be a polite fiction on Arri’s part, it still stung a little. A boy-type person could not possibly be expected to take care of himself. Ugh.
“You’d think the Aeromancers would keep the sky clear so we could have a good view,” Kholburran remarked to Arri, noting periodic gusts of clouds or fog that obscured the elven elemancers as they performed impressive maneuvers in the air. Arri acted as if she had not heard him, however. She couldn’t take her eyes off the dragon.
And the dragon was impressive.
Nothing Kholburran had ever seen could match the liquid red of the dragon’s scales, the sheer size of her, the heat that emanated from her.
“Pleased to see you again, little prince.”
The SAME Tsan?! The voice was deeper, but definitely the same. Even so. How?
“You’re a dragon now?” Kholburran asked. “How did that happen?”
“Ahem.” Tsan blinked twice with exquisite slowness. “We are allies and so I shall make allowances. Do not inquire again. Have you met the First of One Hundred or Queen Bhaeshal?”
“No.”
“Rae’en.” The female Aern offered to shake his hand, altering the gesture at the last possible moment to be an appropriately nonrestrictive Vael-style hand shake. “You look a lot like my father, Prince . . . ?”
“Snapdragon—” Why?! Why had he said that? Kholburran fought the urge to slap his palm into his forehead and die of embarrassment.
“Prince Kholburran,” Arri corrected swiftly. “The other is a little nickname, referring to the way his dental ridges have thorns mimicking the canines of an Aern. I’m Arri.”
“And I,” said the third ruler, an Aiannai with an elemental foci like a mask across her features, “am Bhaeshal, but Bash is my nickname. You can use it if you like, prince, but then I shall avail myself of your nickname, as well.”
“Does everyone else have a nickname?” Rae’en asked.
“The Tsan’Zaur,” the dragon said, chortling. “My subjects think I have not heard them using the term to describe my unique metamorphosis, but they underestimate a dragon’s hearing.”
“I—” Rae’en gave Kholburran the strangest look he had ever received, like she was seeing him and seeing through him at the same time, her eyes tightly focused and then completely unfocused in the space of a heartbeat. “I must make our excuses, prince.”
“Make Prince Kholburran and his Flower Girls comfortable . . . clear them some space near the pond or something. You like dirt, right?” Rae’en waited a beat, but started talking again while Kholburran was still busy being stunned by the question and her casual use of the epithet ‘Flower Girls.’ “Get some tarps or something put up around them for privacy and so they don’t have to be gawked at unless they want to be.”
The warsuits who had escorted them, move forward to lead them away. As they did, Kholburran heard the three leaders speaking in hushed tones. He could have sworn Rae’en asked, “Don’t be offended by this, Tsan, but how fast can you fly?”
*
Two forms rode upon the wind, the ocean below reflecting one, blind to the other. As they split formation, Dolvek wove in and around snapping violet tendrils as Uled reached out to stop him. The dead prince did not know exactly what would happen if Uled got a tendril on him, but he presumed i
t would be unpleasant and final.
He fought the urge to look across the port and find Yavi, to follow her progress. They both had jobs to do, and she would not thank him if he came to her rescue but failed in his appointed task. Assuming he could actually manage it.
Dolvek had assured her he could, that he would have no more trouble destroying the stones than she would, but he could sense his physical presence diminish, the greater the distance between them grew. Within a few feet of her, he felt solid enough to do whatever he wished. His senses, though altered, could interpret the physical world effortlessly.
Yards away, the world became a twilight place, the corpses, the ground, the sky, all of one material, difficult to distinguish. Fortunately, magic and spirit shone more clearly. The Port Gates became radiant beacons, twice as bright as Yavi’s resplendent spirit at this range, Uled’s spirit and tendrils transforming into fluid shapes of atramentous shadow arcing through the liquid air.
Ahead, as if Uled knew Dolvek’s final destination, swarms of black surrounded the Port Gate. The message was clear: come near my Port Gate and I will end you.
How fortunate, Dolvek mused, that I no longer fear endings.
Three tendrils struck him in unison when he reached the Port Gate. Pain blinded him as he fought the ripping, tearing things, then, realizing his mistake, Dolvek reached out to the planes of elemental magic. He could not touch fire or earth, but air and water still heard him.
He stopped fighting, turning all of his concentration to the spears of ice he hurled at the Port Gate, reading the symbols in order and destroying them one at time, even as Uled shredded his soul. He did not falter or cry out; there was no time for either.
*
At North Watch, Alysaundra kept both eyes on the fight she was in, relying on Bone Harvest to track Zhan and let her know if he needed assistance. It felt great not having to keep such a close watch on Teru and Whaar. Battle was the one time she was convinced they could take care of themselves. In the upper right quadrant of her field of vision, Bone Harvest displayed Zhan’s position and status overlain with Keeper’s point of view. Surrounding her field of vision, gold symbols and minute directional arrows indicated the positions and distances of the other Bone Finders.
