by J. F. Lewis
“It isn’t Rivvek,” Kholster frowned. “Not yet.”
“Then who?”
CHAPTER 27
PORT GATE PROBLEMS
Each rune surrounding the gate of stone lit up in sequence, their light a blazing white so bright the stationed Aiannai elemancer had to look away. He felt a sharp pain in his neck, and then one of the Armored was helping him up. He did not recognize this one immediately. The bone-like design of its warsuit was reminiscent more of a Bone Finder’s.
Around him, the docks of Port Ammond as they had been when he’d been a child were in full bustle of a delivery. Fishmongers were yelling. Aeromancers sent the more unpleasant smells away with gusts of magic, while Aern patrolled methodically. Lamps blazed with mystic light even during the day, and the scent of each shop matched the desired odor for which its owners paid the schools of elemancy.
Veiled Vaelsilyn flitted to and fro, running errands for their masters; and, as he turned his head to check them, he saw the three royal towers shimmering white, sparkling in the light of the suns.
“Oh.” He looked more closely at the warsuit that held his hand. It was as if Bloodmane had been reforged in a skeletal likeness of its former self. “Kholster?”
“He has taken up other, more rarefied duties.” The being removed its helm, revealing smiling elf-like eyes so ancient and kind, the guard felt no one could look into them and fail to recognize the deity with whom they were being confronted.
“But I thought he’d killed you, Lord Torgrimm.”
“Nothing so final.” Torgrimm smiled. “There was a fundamental imbalance in the heavens. Righting it was far from comfortable, but—” he touched a faint scar at his throat “—it had to be resolved or it would only have gotten worse. There are very few mortals to whom the gods may turn when their own affairs need sorting. Kholster was one of them.”
“Was?”
“Was mortal,” Torgrimm clarified, “but remains a being to whom gods and mortals alike may turn.”
“So I’m dead then?” The guard looked around. All the hustle and bustle had ceased shortly after he’d turned his attention from it, his surroundings fading to a hazy blur as if to indicate they should no longer concern him. He turned back to Torgrimm.
“Yes, Rasternat, son of . . . Ah . . .” Torgrimm looked down and away, breathing out softly, before meeting the elf’s eyes again. “Sore subject there. Apologies.” He held out his hand. The elf looked at it as if it might crush him. In one smooth motion, Torgrimm stepped completely clear of his armor, the warsuit gliding free of the god—or the god of the warsuit, the elf could not determine which. Hand held out in welcome, Torgrimm looked down at the hand then back up at the elf.
“Sorry,” Rasternat muttered, then took the god’s hand. It felt warm and calloused.
“That was not so bad now, was it?” asked Torgrimm as he lead the soul away. “Tell me. When you were younger, you dreamt of the White Towers, but at school you had thoughts of your soul flitting off to become one with the elemental realm. Did you ever come to a firm decision on which one suited you more?”
“I get to pick?” Rasternat asked.
“Not exactly.” Torgrimm’s chuckle came warm and reassuring, washing away all worry. “But I am married to the goddess who makes those decisions, and while she keeps her own council on such matters, I can always put in a word, if it eases your mind.”
*
Clad in curdled flesh, part scale and part elf, the scar-skulled abomination with bone metal teeth clapped its twisted hands, with claws clipped short on one hand but ragged, elongated nails on the other. Uled’s army measured in the hundreds of thousands, but Vander noted the fretful desperation with which he strove to push his influence farther abroad, touching as many of the dead as he could. Animals, Vael, and Aern did not rise, yet humans, Zaur, and elves did.
He’s raised a Port Gate of his own devising, Vander thought to Kholster. I missed it until he activated it. I’m sorry—
You aren’t the god of secrets, Vander, Kholster thought back. Besides, my daughter is capable of handling Uled’s army, if anyone is.
But she’s not at Fort Sunder.
The First of One Hundred is anywhere there are Overwatches, old friend, Kholster told him. Where is she physically?
Vander transmitted the sight of Rae’en on dragonback, approaching North Watch from the southwest. Bloodmane’s mane of red trailed wind-blown behind her, the awakened embodiment of wrath. Testament glowed with the light of the suns and the iridescent luster of Tsan’s scales.
Poor Zhan. Kholster sighed.
Because she’s coming to his rescue?
Because he wishes he were better than she is at kholstering. . . . And he may have been, for a few days, but Rae’en is her mother’s daughter. She has no equal. I doubt even I would have thought to mount the dragon. It’s an image neither the Army nor the Ossuary will ever forget.
Her triumph, Vander thought, and his misstep. I hadn’t looked at it that way.
Of course you didn’t hunt down that trail, Kholster taunted. You’re nicer than me and Zhan, and you have never felt the burden of authority in quite the same way as either of us.
I kholstered the Overwatches, Vander objected.
And if they dared argue with you, to whom did you refer them?
Ah. Vander did not like that analogy, but he could not disagree with it.
*
Arri’s ears twitched up, pinnae widening at a sound Kholburran did not hear. Silhouetted by the second sun, eyes wide and mouth open to increase the range of her hearing, she reminded him of the little animals they’d seen when cutting cross-country to Fort Sunder. She lacked the fur and the black nose, but the concentration and attentiveness were much the same.
Kholburran sat at the center of a small patch of ground, which had been cleared for them by the Aern, wiggling his toes in the dirt. There had been a different kind of grass here once, myrr grass, bright and lively, but it had been trodden to death by the refugees and construction crews. They had seeded some other grass in its place, some domesticated variety an elf from Port Ammond had brought with her. It was hardy and would thrive, but its light green did not belong here. It should have been purple or a deep red.
While the enclosed space the Aern had provided was open to the sky and the soil, it had four thick cloth walls, practically tarps, that hid Kholburran and company from view of the humans and Aiannai, though scent and clamor passed through. Was this supposed courtesy at all dissimilar from making his Root Guard wear samir? Walling them off completely was just a really big version of the traditional beaded veils used by girl-type Vael when visiting Eldrennai . . . Aiannai . . . to avoid any unfortunate complications their attractiveness could facilitate, wasn’t it? It was made even more ineffective by the way the Root Guard perched atop the scaffolding that held the tarps, clearly visible to any who looked up as they passed.
He understood how attractive girl-types were to elven men, but his own resemblance to Kholster had brought him an odd combination of pleased, amorous, forlorn, dismayed, and even angered looks. Rae’en’s reaction . . . He’d only met her briefly before she and the dragon dismissed him to deal with some emergency, but, at the sight of him, she’d had a combination of emotions he could not read. Bemusement? Nostalgia? He put it out of his head and concentrated on the soil. There were good minerals in it, but traces of an enigmatic other substance that he had never before encountered. He knew he could draw it into himself but worried whether it was safe.
A fish leapt, striking the water of a newly dug pond nearby. They’d put his little enclosure close to water. Kholburran could sense the fish . . . they felt far from home, but life was resilient. Life had to be resilient, lest Gromma turn her growing and green aspect from it, leaving it to rot, her second realm of influence.
Perched atop scaffolds the Aern had placed as bunks along three of the four walls in order to accommodate both Kholburran and his Root Guard in the small enclosure, other Root Guard k
ept watch (against what, he had no idea, what with so many Aern, warsuits, and elemancers about). The wood had been chopped recently enough that the girl-type-persons had been able to coax it back to life, but it would only die once they left. If they left. This place . . .
“I don’t see how you can touch that soil with your bare bark,” Faulina said as she came in through the flap of the one wall that had no bunks, a brace of rabbit dangling from her wrist. “It feels sick and dead.”
“It feels alive to me,” Kholburran said. “Just a little overwhelmed, I think. There is a . . . a magic in it I can almost see.” He nodded toward the dirt. “I can most certainly taste it.”
“Taste it?! It is a broken and twisted magic,” Faulina said. “It—”
“Hsst!” Arri glared at them.
“I was just thinking, Arri, you look like one of those—” Kholburran began. He looked up as he spoke, intending to say more, but the look in her eyes stopped his tongue.
“Xalistan guide me,” Arri breathed, more whisper than shout. Eyes widening even farther, Arri unslung her Heartbow, the whorls of Warrune at her throat and on her arm growing in illumination. “This is bad. Weapons at the ready, Root Guard.”
“What is it?” Faulina drew her weapon, as did the others. “I don’t—” Her voice stopped, ears flaring wide.
“We’ve got to go, Kholburran!” Arri snapped. “Now!”
“Why?” He made no move to leave, pricking up his ears in the same way Arri had in hope of an explanation. Kholburran could not hear it yet, whatever it was, but he felt a dark pressure pushing in at him, a virtual scream from the very soil at the soles of his feet. Leaving felt wrong. This place . . . it needed him. Not only in the short term, like helping a sick Vael hunt for a few days until she recovered, but a true setting down of roots and tending to the land. Repairing what ill had befallen this place and left such a stain. The Vael prince dug his toes into the dirt.
*
Screams became the natural currency of breathing for the untrained and unprepared of Scarsguard. Rae’en, en route to North Watch, watched through eyes of her Overwatches and cursed.
If we turn back, Bloodmane thought at her, we will merely ensure that we have failed the Ossuary AND the Aern at Fort Sunder.
Maybe not. Rae’en unslung Testament. On dragon-back, North Watch and Fort Sunder are not more than a few candlemarks apart.
Are we turning back, then?
No. We save Zhan and his Bone Finders as intended, then head back to Fort Sunder if they need us.
She growled, angry at the indecisiveness she felt.
“Problem?” Tsan-Zaur asked, massive head tilting so a single immense eye could focus on her.
It may be unwise, to share with her—
Because they only respect the strong, Bloodmane, Rae’en thought. Yes. I know that, too.
Had that been too harsh?
But thanks for bringing it up, Rae’en added. If I hadn’t known, we’d have struck bad stone for certain.
“Fort Sunder is under attack,” Rae’en told the dragon. “It’s under control, but I wanted to be there to face Uled myself.”
“Queen Bhaeshal can see to them. She seemed moderately competent. We left her plenty of troops. Let the drones earn their meat, kholster Rae’en,” the dragon said with a laugh. “It makes them feel as if they are useful. We can’t seize all of the glory for ourselves.”
*
At Fort Sunder, the dead issued forth from the newly reopened Port Gate. New recruits in the form of human corpses from the cities north of the Sri’Zauran Mountains led the charge, wielding weapons of the northern militia and clad in armor marked by mortal-wound-dependent levels of repair. Spreading along predetermined courses, the fort’s repurposed layout slowed them, but the dead knew no sense of impatience, basking as Uled was in the warmth of superiority.
Having surrendered most of the housing within the fort proper to those who were less used to sleeping in the shelf-like berths to which the Aern were so accustomed, no warsuits stood immediately to hand to stop them, no Aern to stem the initial flood. Aiannai and humans joined the ranks of Uled’s army in quick succession, the fallen rising up to accompany their recycled comrades, swelling the ranks of the deadly and decaying. Weapons in better repair than their wielders recruited eagerly, and hidden amid those who slashed with steel were a handful who wore rotting scale, their foreclaws gripping shards of the Life Forge.
*
Breathing heavily, Hasimak, the former High Elementalist, floated between dimensions as he draped across a padded chaise, half-propped up on his right elbow, with his pale skin bathed in the violet light of the place betwixt. Even refreshed, the ache of consciousness weighed on him. Sleep called him with a volume it had never possessed in his youth.
“He’s sending them through,” Jun told him. “Uled is.”
Eyes rimmed with etheric dust and crusted with sleep examined the structure of the newly opened Port Gate with a critical eye. He traced the pathway Uled had fashioned with his hasty gate, the gate Hasimak himself had rendered functional without thinking. Even so, it had not been made well enough to long withstand what Uled was doing.
Why use one Port Gate to connect directly with another when one could—
He saw the logic then. Flawed, but functional, he could not help but wonder if the design flaws within Uled’s newest gates could truly have been so purposeful or— But they had been. He saw it all, saw the unthinkable, which no doubt had seemed natural as breathing to Uled.
Made from stone improperly tempered and possessed of trace impurities, the foreign gate could not last more than one or two openings, but then again Uled might only need it to survive a single protracted use.
“What are you thinking, child?” the tired voice asked the student who could not hear him. “Why this? And why do you think no one will arrive with writ of debt in hand, an expectant glare in their eyes?”
“You think he has not thought this through?” Jun asked.
“He has, but he has underestimated.”
“Whom?”
Hasimak’s eyes pored over the ravaged ghost cities Uled had left in his wake, from little mining towns like Immar to the Sister Ports of Essingway and Saraj. Whole populations lined the streets leading up to the already crowded docks, ready to enter Uled’s final gate and vent his wrath upon the surviving elves.
The most intact dead were first, but Hasimak choked at the sight of juvenile corpses and less intact elder ones waiting near the back. He had seen too much in his many millennia of life to feel the kind of outrage appropriate to the matter, only sadness that his former student could have sunk to such a low. The creation of this aberrant step, neither life nor death but life-in-death . . . it had merit as an intellectual exercise, but to have acted upon it? Uled never had understood the sometimes subtle difference between could and should.
“This should never have been more than a theory, Artificer,” Hasimak prayed. “Why have you allowed it? Why not intercede?”
“Don’t call me that.” Jun’s voice came husky and low.
Hasimak’s eyes narrowed.
Steps have been taken, a gruff sad voice spoke in the elf’s mind.
“Steps?” Stirred by the unexpected reply, Hasimak felt a surge of will rise up from deep within. With eyes ablaze in mystic light, he rose from his reclined position, banishing the sleep from his eyes and mind. “Am I one of those steps? Do not tell me that once more you expect me, to—”
Jun laid a calloused hand on the elf’s robe-covered shoulder.
“Rest, Hasimak.” The Dwarf sighed, looking at his feet. “I expect nothing. I only build now. That and only that.”
“Then what steps—?”
“They weren’t mine,” Jun said.
“Even so.” Hasimak seized upon the wild instability of the new Port Gate and channeled a stream of its energy into himself, altered it and fed it back.
“Meddling?”
“Stopping him and closing the gate w
ould be meddling.” Hasimak tweaked the Port Gate at Fort Sunder, leaving it reinforced, but the flawed gate even more prone to collapse. It would last while open, but once closed, Uled’s Port Gate would crumble . . . possibly explode. “I am merely acting as a natural limit.”
“What do you think of your student?”
“Clever. Fascinating. Wholly devoid of conscience.” Hasimak narrowed his eyes. He knew how he sounded, but he could only bring himself to judge the magic itself, not its originator. We are too much alike. “Monstrous and abhorrent.”
He glanced casually at the Dwarven god but did not let his gaze linger. A Dwarf in shining armor, over-sized hammer in his left hand. Nothing had changed. With a snap of his fingers and a small expenditure of magic, the ancient elf created a crystalline lens the size of a small carriage, using it to view Uled more clearly.
“And even the closest kept of your secrets, my old teacher, has surrendered itself unto me!” Uled’s mad cries echoed through the crystal. “Beyond death. Beyond gates. Beyond bounds! I am your superior, Hasimak! I have existed beyond you and beyond my beast.”
Hasimak frowned.
“Disappointed?” Jun asked.
“In whom?”
“Your student.”
“I pity him,” Hasimak said.
Jun raised a bushy eyebrow and snorted at that.
“How tortured he must be,” Hasimak said eventually. “It pains me to know he will never understand his failure of morality.”
“Some would say he should be punished,” Jun said.
“Understanding would be eternal punishment, Jun.” Hasimak banished the lens with a wave of his hands. “Trust one who did and does and always shall.”
CHAPTER 28
ROOT ROT REBELLION
Kholburran sprang up on one of the scaffolds, warpick in hand, and looked out.
