by J. F. Lewis
The warsuits of the Lost Command confirm they have regained contact with their rightful occupants, Bloodmane reported. All Aern accounted for.
How? Rae’en had never heard Bloodmane sound giddy before.
Rivvek, Bloodmane said. An image filled the center of Rae’en’s field of vision. Rivvek in armor she’d never seen and covered in Ghaiattric fire, which rolled back on him even as it poured from his gauntlets, engulfing the Port Gate from the Never Dark side, doing something Rae’en had only heard of the demons themselves managing. An inelven scream poured out of the elf, as raw and disturbing as the magic he wielded.
Rae’en thought of her father emerging from the farmhouse where they had first encountered Cadence Vindalius and her son, Caius, the way he had looked before Bloodmane had managed to redirect most of the heat to himself, the way he had looked when the Ghaiattri fire had flowed along the link between Kholster and Bloodmane at Oot when they had had to hold off the invading Ghaiattri, the image of him burning and in such pain he threw himself into the sea to attempt to quench it.
His pain had not sounded anything like this Oathbre—like this elf’s, this elf who had her father’s scars on his back.
This explains what shattered Uled’s Port Gate and stemmed the tide of the dead flowing through it into Scarsguard, Kazan sent.
Did he . . . Rae’en stopped to compose herself. Is he still alive?
A new image replaced her center view, a beautiful Vael (quickly labeled as Kari, then amended to Queen Kari by golden script over her head) clad in white, the same color as her head petals, kneeling over the charred, naked form of the elven king. He lay on a carpet of new spring grass, bathed into mingled sunslight tinted amber by crystalline sap glass overhead. Several female warriors stood guard. Other unarmored Vael stood by, holding containers of strange-looking unguents.
Rae’en recognized the translucent white of Laughing Salve, but the others—a small clay pot of amber liquid, a dust the color of ground brown leaves, two jars of differing shades of green—were all unknown to her.
Under Kari’s instruction, the assistants tended the king’s charred skin while she held her hands, one over his heart, the other over his head, and did . . . something. Amber and green light poured from her hands, and her eyes glowed white, but what she was doing—well, it was magic—but beyond that . . .
As Rae’en watched through the eyes of an Aern named Vodayr, Kari gasped, jerking her hand away from Rivvek’s head. He stared with unseeing eyes open wide and milky, the whites an angry red.
“Gromma have mercy,” Kari whispered.
Another elf stepped into view, and Rae’en knew he must be General Kyland, Wylant’s father, because to have seen his daughter’s face and know it was to know his, too.
Blinking, streaming with a liquid only partly composed of tears, Rivvek’s eyes narrowed, appearing to focus on his surroundings. He stopped at a point between Kari and Kyland and wheezed.
“No,” he croaked, “not until I am finished.”
“You have finished, my king,” Kyland said. “Your work is done. We are back in the Last World and—”
“Uled.” Rivvek choked on the word. “He is not yet stopped.”
“The Aern—” Kyland began.
“Have missed a contingency,” Rivvek said, “and there is not much time.”
CHAPTER 36
BETWIXT
“You will not be able to make him what he was.”
Yavi sat, the stumps of her legs dangling over the edge of the stone island floating between dimensions, naked and more than half buried with mineral-rich topsoil against her back and covering all but her extremities. She looked down toward her absent toes and smiled.
I hope they grow back, she thought. They feel like they will. They will. I’m almost sure they will.
Dolvek’s spirit, the shadow which remained of it, paced nearby, responding to her unease.
“I will be fine,” she told it.
Yavi soaked up the nutrients, not even caring how or where Hasimak had gotten it all. She felt his eyes on her and returned the gaze. He did not look like he was an ages-old master of magic. Ancient, yes (an elf with wrinkles!), but in his clean robes, the way he held himself, the only sense of power she felt from him was one of wisdom and knowledge.
His spirit did not appear to match, until she caught sight of a—seam was not the right word, but it was the only one she had—seam in it, as if what she could see of him was only the surface, the first page in the book of him. A sense of depth, of vastness, hung there at the edge of awareness, flitting away from comprehension as if he had caught her looking and closed the book of himself.
“How do you do that?” Yavi asked, her voice cheerier than she had expected.
“I suspect you will never know,” Hasimak told her. “May I get you anything else?”
“You’re certain Uled’s third Port Gate was destroyed?” Yavi asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I’m okay for now.” Yavi traced a thick cord of spirit that ran under the dirt. She did not have to uncover her chest to know the thread ran into her heartwood; it felt . . . like the juxtaposition of a cool breeze under warm summer suns . . . the relief of a melancholy soul.
Hasimak turned to walk back to his chair.
“Unless . . .”
“Unless?” The wizened elf walked nearer, sitting beside her, folding his legs up easily, like a morning flower at night, as he settled on the stone with a grace that surprised Yavi.
“You said, I could not fix him . . .”
“Correct.”
“Can you?”
“Even I cannot make him what he once was.” Hasimak frowned as if the words were bitter.
“But you can make him better?”
“I could, possibly.” Hasimak’s eyes lit within, examining the spirit of Dolvek in a way that made the prince cower. “Yes, I could do much, but . . .” Hasimak shook his head slowly from side to side. “No. I decline. But you, it would be safer for you to sever the bond between you, that which helps him cling to the mortal realm. Let Torgrimm take him.”
“He can’t. Dolvek said he forsook Torgrimm’s protection. Surely you will help him some. Just a little?” Yavi waggled her ears at Hasimak as best she could despite the dirt and her prone position. “Please?”
“What can be done,” Hasimak said softly, “I shall help you learn to do.”
“Fabtacular!” Yavi chirped, as if she had not been wounded near to death as the world tried its best to fall apart around her.
*
Father? Vax asked.
Hold, Kholster’s calming voice said.
But Uled— Vax thought again.
Hold.
*
The dead tide had ceased, but the fight still raged. Cadence’s eyes snapped open, her pupils shining. She tried to rise in one smooth motion, stumbled, and growled when Tyree caught her. Expecting an errant grope from the man, Cadence furrowed her brow when it did not come.
“You holding it together?” he asked.
Zaur and Sri’Zaur still surrounded them, refusing to fully engage, but there were fewer of them than before.
“I thought you went—” Her eyes flicked towed the city walls.
“Went.” Tyree showed her the stains on his sleeves. “Showed the scaly people where to go. Came back.”
“Why back?”
“I’m not staying in there fighting angry dead guys.” The smile left his eyes, but not his lips. “Nothing in it for me. I can’t kill the dead. But I have been working on the reptiles in charge. We’re coming to an understanding. I can be very—”
“I need to get to Kazan.” Cadence gestured toward the wall. She could not make him out from where she was, but she knew he was there without needing to lay eyes on him. “They will win without me, but if I guide them, this will be faster.” And the faster I’m done here, the sooner I can get back to Caius.
“Is that all?” Smiling brightly enough to light a room, Tyree patted he
r on the shoulder. “Let me go talk to my newest scaly admirers. Oh, and revise my previous answer. I came back in case you had any errands for me.”
Gone in a wink and back in a trice, Tyree carried Cadence out onto the cold purple myrr grass where Kuort awaited on a Zaur mount.
“Point me where you need to go.” The black-scaled corpse held out a rotted paw.
Nearby two reptiles argued: the old Flamefang Brazz and a Zaur who argued with both tongue and tail.
You have to love Kreej, Tyree thought to her. Whether he winds up officially in charge or not, he can certainly read the moment. You’ll make it to Kazan.
The leather saddle creaked beneath her, and Kuort’s ghastly stench filled her nostrils as Cadence was lifted up into place.
“What do I hold onto?” she asked. In answer, his tail curved about her waist.
“I have you,” he said, and then they were off at a gallop straight for the wall of Scarsguard.
Her stomach churned, filled, it seemed, with tadpoles doing flips, but she forced herself not to vomit through sheer willpower. At the wall, the mount did not slow, lunging up onto the wall, its belly low against the stone, legs spread wide as it got its grip.
Gravity pulled back on Cadence, her body trying to slide backward, falling off even as she clenched her knees to the beast’s rough sides. Kuort’s tail drew tighter, vertebrae pressing through the scales.
She vomited once, over her shoulder, spattering their mount’s tail with bile and effluvia, then once more, her abdomen wracked with tremors as the beast bumped and thumped its way up the wall.
“It takes some getting used to,” Kuort said.
*
Kaze, Amber thought at him, and a part of him responded appropriately. He did not have the attention span to devote to knowing what he’d said. It was all he could manage to respond to her and to the others needing his attention. Flitting from mind to mind, building the maps needed by the army, combining the intel provided by each group of Overwatches at Fort Sunder (Scarsguard?), ensuring kholster Rae’en had what she needed for her local map (cobbled together from the vantage points of various warsuits though it was), and directing . . .
Devoting the whole of himself to the timing between Rae’en and Alysaundra had been such a relief, such focus . . .
Mind leaping from Aern to Aern, warsuit to warsuit, Kazan guided the battle against the dead. They had not fallen when Uled had. Not here.
Why?
It did not matter.
Dead fell. Newly dead rose to join the fight against the living.
A core guard of warsuits protected the still-growing Root Tree near the fish pond in a part of Scarsguard that lay beyond the former boundaries of Fort Sunder. It was safe for the time being, but the dead appeared to be drawn to it.
Distracted, Kazan directed a warsuit to kill a nearby Zaur as it prepared to strike, only to shift back in a split second later to countermand the order and redirect the attack.
Kazan, Eyes of Vengeance thought at him, and a portion of him answered Eyes as well. Embarrassing not to have the time to pay a substantive portion of his attention to his warsuit, but the battle . . .
Stop it, stupid. Cadence filled the whole of his vision, multicolored sparks twinkling in her hair and in her eyes, a frown on her face. She cut through his thoughts with her own, forcing his attention to focus on her, shoving the whole of him back into his own head like water into a bucket.
A cold like nothing he had experienced since he had been an Eleven shot along his neck and down his spine. Heat in equal measure ran from his belly button to his chest and settled there.
He attempted to ignore it, ignore her, but she was everywhere he looked and as his mind narrowed down to a single point of reference, he felt a sharp hard slap across his face, a heel grind into his foot . . . and then he was falling out of his warsuit, knees scraping on the ground as he fell.
“What in Kholster’s name?” he started, before yarping wetly between his outstretched hands as he caught himself. Bones and scale peeked out at him from the loose pellet and he yarped a second time.
He smelled Cadence . . . her scent, her humanness, felt her hand on his back, patting him like she was burping a baby human. He did not hear her, though. Around him M’jynn, Arbokk, and Joose stood by, along with the rest of Rae’en’s Core Overwatches aside from Amber and Glayne.
Cadence’s lips moved as did those of Joose. Arbokk’s eyes narrowed. His mouth moved, too, but Kazan’s ears were filled with the noise of thousands of little battles, of the temperamental wind storm rising up out near North Watch where kholster Rae’en was.
He yelped, when Cadence slapped him again, shaking her hand afterward as if the blow hurt her more than him. He did not hear his own yelp either.
You’re spread too thin and giving all of your attention to distant Aern, Cadence thought. If you keep doing it, you’re going to manage to lose this city in the process.
What are you talking about? Kazan thought at her.
You are ignoring the humans and elves, Cadence thought. He felt an unseen hand on the back of his head as he saw the battlefield in a more nuanced sense. Elves fought, but Aern did not reinforce them. Humans, Vael, Zaur, and Sri’Zaur all fought, but there was no communication between the allies and the Aern. Diving deeper into the minds of the army gave them great maps, but it closed all external lines of communication.
“Bird squirt,” Kazan said.
“Bird squirt indeed.” Eyes of Vengeance loomed behind him, gauntlet on his shoulder. “May I suggest the others . . . ?”
Joose, Arbokk, M’jynn, Glayne, and Amber, he thought, you all run the battle, and I’ll advise until my head is sorted. Amber, you take the Prime slot and swap off whenever you—Kazan laughed. Just handle it. You know what to do.
They did.
CHAPTER 37
OVERWATCH
Vander stood at Jun’s forge, the fires cold, the Builder absent. He imagined the place in full swing, the heat of it, the forge-lit shine of many metals. He had gone there on a whim, his flesh feeling exposed in Eyes of Vengeance’s absence. Pale light from dim Dwarven lanterns painted his bald pate in skull-colored tones. His eyes gathered shadows beneath them, the effect enhanced by the black sclera of all Aern.
My Beast’s right eye. Uled’s earlier words sent a shiver down him, out of place for one who experienced only the most extreme edges of winter’s spectrum. Smiling gap-toothed, he peered through the first of several tiny bone-steel disks, their edges sharp, serrated, at Kazan and Cadence.
So there was a limit to his replacement’s capabilities. Vander presumed the new Prime Overwatch would learn in time how to control his perceptions, to chase the edge of a perception cast too far afield. As soon as he mastered that one skill, Kazan would truly be his superior. Knowing the Army was in good hands, that his friend’s daughter would have the sort of Overwatch a good First deserved, lightened his heart.
“New ideas.” Vander’s whispered words echoed in the open space of Jun’s workshop. “We all need to keep improving, to keep growing.”
It had been worth a few teeth to test out his own version of Aldo’s myriad scrying objects. Deity opened avenues of creativity with regard to that subject that he had only nicked the skin on. Inspired by Glayne and his soul-bound weapons, combined with the recent encounter with Uled, Vander had created a handful of his own new “eyes.” Making them fly had been as simple as wanting them to be able to do it when he made them . . . and if something like Uled tried to seize one of them? Well, they were sharp for a reason, now, weren’t they?
Moving more of his Scrying Discs through the embattled city, he observed a family of humans huddling behind the flaps of a small tent. Children screamed as dead Zaur ripped through the canvas, the screams changing timbre as Villain, Jae’lyn’s Armor, a warsuit with a spiked surface, his helm a faceless thing of crystalline spikes, charged through the other side. An Aeromancer whipped the canvas away with her magic as a Geomancer raised a thin wall
of stone between the humans and the dead.
Acting in sequence, a Flamefang ignited the invading corpses with huge bursts of vomited fire, even as Villain dismembered the corpses with precise strokes from bone-steel hand axes, hurling the engulfed limbs into thick knots of the dead beyond his normal reach where Jae’lyn herself, Villain’s rightful occupant, her hair raised in a blood-spiked strip like a shark’s dorsal fin, fought side by side with dark-scaled Zaur, forcing the dead into tight clogs for easier kindling.
A particularly intact corpse leapt up and over its fellows. A glint of golden Life Forge shard in its paws, it struck toward Jae’lyn as she shoved three dead before her, using the length of her warpick, two handed, to increase her area of effect. Vander considered intervening, only to see a black-scaled Sri’Zaur bat the thing aside, stripping the shard from its grip and tossing it to an Aeromancer overhead, who flew off to distribute it to Coming Spring, a warsuit whose bone-steel plate was worked with multicolored enamel depicting roses and blooming plants.
Overwatches and Thunder Speakers shouted back and forth, relaying commands and updated information. Zaur and Sri’Zaur pounded out instruction with their thick tails or by having Zaurruk Keepers pound them out when they had time as they drove their mighty serpents inward, using their scaly armored bodies as living walls to control the streaming corpses they all fought.
“There is nothing the get of Uled cannot do if we work toward a single purpose,” Vander whispered, and he wondered how his Maker would feel to see the great unity his wretched divisiveness and evil had finally wrought: the birth of a new and brighter kingdom . . . in time, perhaps, an empire . . . with seven races working toward a single purpose.
Kholster, Vander thought, Scarsguard looks okay now that they are all working together again, better than ever, but the Vael—
Hold, Kholster thought. They have this.
And at Scarsguard, they did indeed have it handled. Vander could still see a hundred easy ways to make things work out more optimally for his former Overwatches and the army they served, but that was no longer his duty. At the center of the city, Kholburran, the new Root Tree of Scarsguard, had his roots sunk deep and strong, surrounded by guards of all races, no longer in danger.
