Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1)

by Michael Watson

  She then opened her eyes, drew in a ragged breath, and hauled herself up to safety. She crawled a few feet from the edge then rolled onto her back and lay still, muscles quivering from exertion and fading adrenaline. Her eyes followed the immense walls of the Rift up to the sky and blinked against the calming midday sun.

  “And that’s how you kill a wurm,” Tyrissa said between panting breaths. “Just like back home.”

  Tyrissa couldn’t help but laugh, the sound a manic mix of relief and exaltation that the riftwinds carried up and away.

  Tyrissa nearly collided with Kexal on her way back through the tunnels, running and burning off excess earth absorbed in the Rift. The Jalarni bounty hunter looked beaten and drained in the harsh light of his gloworb, but remained in a reassuring single piece.

  “Ty,” he said, “Where’s your new friend?”

  “Finding out what’s at the bottom of the Rift. How is everyone else? What about Vralin?” She already knew the answer to the second from the look on Kexal’s face.

  “Escaped,” he said with a sigh. “Slipped away from me not long after you wrangled that wurm out. Wolef and Garth got roughed up in a bad way, but Hali was able to work her miracles on them. It’ll take a couple days to get the three of them one hundred percent again. That’ll be just enough time for me to find us a ride south. We know where he’s going this time.”

  “Hithia.”

  “Yep.”

  Part Four

  The Ceaseless Gales

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Tyrissa hurried through the halls of the Grand Inn, though this time she had an invitation. The note simply said: ‘I win. Visit me this afternoon.’ and was signed in overly elegant script by Giroon the Great.

  Giroon’s suite looked like it had fought with a library and lost. Books and loose sheets of paper monopolized any flat surface that could hold them. Giroon sat at the back of it all atop the four-post bed, the curtains drawn up.

  “Welcome, Tyrissa. Look upon the chaos you’ve driven me too.”

  She couldn’t help but smile and say, “I like it better this way.”

  “It has its charms,” the bard agreed.

  Tyrissa made her way through the maze of tomes, taking extra care with her steps. Most books lay open and all were bookmarked with white slips of paper hanging out the edge like tongues. Giroon sat cross legged on the bed with a half-circle of books spread around him. Front and center was the red Zegun book from before, heavily bookmarked with slips of paper. On his left was a slender, new book, a blank journal, one page empty, the other filled with notes written in the same lightning and fire script that adorned Giroon’s arms. The last was an ominous black tome with a metal frame that looked like it belonged in an old Morg temple to the ten gods, to be opened for the rare occasion when tradition demanded a dose of authentic piety.

  “Come closer, our search has reached an end, though the path was as contorted as any proper plot should be. Are you familiar with the tales of Jerod the Just?”

  Tyrissa dug out the answer as she entered the bedroom. “He was one of the first Weapon Masters, the founder of the Academy of Crushing Tides in Felarill.”

  “Correct. Then you know that in the chronology of his exploits there’s a gap in his middle years where no tales of heroism occur, after his more popular adventures but before the founding of the Academy. He wasn’t inactive in that time and some scattered tales exist. They just weren’t popularized. He kept a journal, one that, while copied and spread, remained in obscurity due to how incredibly dull it was. I only read it on the long voyage between Zegun’da and Felarill and only after finishing everything else I had access to. Jerod’s journal largely detailed dry daily occurrences: walked fifteen miles today, killed a deer, and so on. But every few entries are long strings of internal thoughts over the leader of his party, a woman who followed a sort of divine guidance. He never referred to her by name, only as ‘The Witch’ or ‘Our Witch’ and made much of her ability to turn the elements to her will.”

  Giroon had clearly donned his storyteller mask and Tyrissa stayed quiet, listening as a student at the foot of the instructor.

  “Again, we have the witch key word and further mention of the ability to nullify or transmute or otherwise manipulate elemental energies. But Jerod’s entries are something of a dead end. He’s not very detailed when talking of his ‘Witch’, as if her abilities were commonplace to him. Perhaps they were. In any case, the journal is incomplete and the latter entries are lost.”

  “So, Jerod was a just a confirmation of what we already know.”

  “Yes, but some of the details led me forward. One reason this whole endeavor has been tricky is the nature of the nations and peoples of the North. Most of you are very… secular. Faith and religion is tertiary at best.”

  “No god or king but coin,” Tyrissa said, quoting the motto of Khalanheim. Reverence for her own ten gods of Morgale was more formality than faith, a habit of thought and source for profanity.

  “Indeed. The Khalans are the worst of the lot of you. However, religions have a proclivity to preserve select bits of lore, and as we’re dealing with a divine sort, or at least source, of magick, that is where I found our answers.” He laid a fond hand on the red book.

  “Beyond the Zegun legends and myths, this book contains what scraps we could preserve from other Western cultures and, here in the back, a translated excerpt from the Gospels of the southern continent. We used to have some contact with the South, but those ties have long since atrophied. They’re an extremely religious people. Even their traders were part-time missionaries and left behind copies of their holy text, translated simply as ‘The Gospels of Whomever.’ They’re presented as long form poems or epics. I approve of that much.”

  Giroon opened the red book to a marker near the back.

  “Forgive the rough wording, as the original was in Rhalvik, translated into archaic Zegun here and I’m reading it in Northern common. This is The Gospels of Azzir, canto three.”

  To shield the people against forces beyond

  He sent one of His blessed Daughters, half mortal, half divine

  Clad in samite and silks, wielding iron and silver

  With beauty unmatched, delivering justice unquestioned

  A bulwark against wildfire and flood, darkness and plague

  An Archangel made flesh.

  A bulwark against Fire and Water and Shadow and Death, wielding silver. Now they were getting somewhere.

  “Silver is our color.” Our color.

  “They sing her praises for…” Giroon flipped a number of pages forward, “a while. Here’s something later. Gospels of Azzir, canto thirteen.” Giroon recited:

  In death She left behind a legacy, an order of guardians

  Lead by a daughter blessed with her essence, her power.

  Their symbol a winged shield of four joined fragments

  Heirs of the Archangel, a chain that remains unbroken.

  “How old are these Gospels?” As she listened, Tyrissa brought out Tsellien’s cloak clasp.

  “They’re sourced to about a thousand years ago. Now, there was no mention of such a figure in any Western texts. We have the Shades to thank for that. They, ah, adjusted mythological cannon to favor their particular beliefs, purging most other faiths that came under their empire.” Again Giroon spoke of the Vitu as monsters and cruel conquerors, a view that didn’t at all match what Tyrissa had seen from Wolef. She never mentioned either the bard or Zegun’da to the Shade, fearing that he too would bring out that shared animosity and hatred between the two. She had no desire to see that side of him. She preferred to think it didn’t exist.

  “Age was the key to this search. Younger texts blur and reinterpret the old myths and tales to a modern point of view. Literal events become metaphors, and metaphors become canonical law. So I sought out purity. For all of this globetrotting through the myths of tales of every corner of the world, the answer came from your own neighbors and cousins, the Gurya
r.”

  “’Cousins’ is being generous,” Tyrissa said. “We’re little alike.” The Guryar were said to be even wilder than her own people once were, corsairs that plied the vast rocky shores between the Fjordland of Morgale and the northern reaches of the Rhonian Empire. Only the most daring merchants even considered sailing those waters. The ports of the Fjordland rarely saw foreign ships.

  “If you will, but the Guryar hewed closer to the old ways of your people in their reverence of your gods and faiths. To you, words like Valkyries and Elysium and the like are the fancies of children stories, old myths set aside long ago. There’s no trace of it in Khalan or Felarill legends.”

  Giroon laid a hand on the heavy black tome, its iron bindings worked into intricate linking hands and vines and shards of ice. “What the rest of the North has forgotten, the Guryar revere. I borrowed this book from a guild master of Khalan Imperial, an apparent fan of myths and religious canon. His collection was as divine as the subject matter, and he allowed me to peruse the contents in exchange for a small, private performance for his family. The priorities of the wealthy.”

  “Such lengths for a simple symbol,” Tyrissa said trying to be flippant to hide her building excitement.

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Giroon opened the metal hinge of the black tome and turned to a bookmark, a ribbon of worn silver fabric. Wordlessly, he rotated the book around toward Tyrissa. Upon the opposing pages were intricate illuminations. One was an expanded elemental wheel with ten partitions, two sections added for the Divine and the Infernal. At the center, a spear pointed at the Divine icon at the zenith of the wheel. It was the winged shield. The opposite page had the emblem in full detail, the four shield sections and wings of ten feathers, five on a side. Below the emblem was a banner with a word in old Morg runic. It took Tyrissa a moment to dredge out the translation.

  Valkwitch.

  “This is what you are Tyrissa.”

  “Valkwitch,” she said, trying to word out. “Kind of awkward.”

  “Yes, well, I suppose it’s based on Valkyrie but given that you aren’t guiding the slain warrior souls to the Elysium Fields they decided to switch it up. A witch takes one thing and turns it to another, which, as you’ve said, is what you do with elemental magicks. Yes?”

  She nodded, eyes fixed on the book’s illustration of the symbol. Her symbol.

  “Valkwitch it is then,” Giroon said, drumming his fingers against illustration. “I’ve identified your emblem and so I’ve won the challenge. As I always do.”

  Tyrissa ran a thumb over the cloak clasp. Losing never felt so good. She had something to call herself, a starting point instead of another dead end.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “If you want my advice, your best bet for learning more is to ask the Guryar yourself. They should be receptive to you if you bear that symbol. This book, while containing our answer, is light on the details and deals with faith over function. I will transcribe any relevant text for you, but the summary seems to be that your kind is meant to purge errant and destructive elemental magicks. The Gospels of Azzir confirm that view.”

  The stories of the savagery of the Guryar came to mind, used to frighten children. Then again, what did they hear of the Cleanse? Perhaps they were closer to kin after all. But that was a journey for another time.

  “You have a dramatic sense of timing, Giroon. A trip to Guryarund will have to wait. I’m headed in the opposite direction. To Hithia,” Tyrissa raised the clasp. “My predecessor was killed by the man we hunt, a Windmage. We’re going to bring him to justice.” Given how hard Vralin had fought in the tunnels, Tyrissa had a gut feeling that the only justice would come with his death.

  “Ah, the next chapter of your grand adventure, I take it?”

  “That’s right. Perhaps you could write a story about me sometime.”

  “Perhaps,” Giroon said, sounding serious about the idea. “Who is ‘we’, in this case?”

  “Myself, a pair of bounty hunters, and two other Pactbound.”

  “Working with your newly confirmed enemy already. What kind are they?”

  “They’re good people. At least… so far” she said, uncertainty creeping into her voice. Wolef did have a new wariness around her since that one morning, and Hali was always cold at best. Tyrissa didn’t want to think it was fear of her.

  Giroon’s voice hardened. “What kind?”

  “One is Life and the other Shadow.”

  “A Vitu?” A worried scowl crossed the bard’s face, the appearance of that hatred Tyrissa had tried to avoid.

  “Yes.”

  “Then he cannot be a good man, only an excellent facsimile of one. However, I suppose you’re better equipped than most to deal with a Shade, should his true nature emerge. Given what we know about your kind, these Valkwitches, that seems exactly what you were placed on this world to do: the sword and shield against rogue elemental powers.” The bard softened his expression. “Apologies,” he said. “I shouldn’t judge a man I haven’t met so harshly. Even if he is a Vitu. I wish you good hunting, Tyrissa. While you’re away, I’ll gather any more information that I can, though perhaps not as obsessively. Consider it a bonus for the satisfaction of the challenge.”

  Tyrissa thanked Giroon a hundred more times before she left the Grand Inn in a hurry. She had a couple more accounts to settle in Khalanheim before the hunt began anew.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Tyrissa knelt in front of a circle of wildly shaped rock, forged by Settan’s touch into a chaotic field of shapes, spines, and sinkholes, the topography of an entire nation rendered in miniature. The riftwinds flowed around her, seeping through her skin, flashing into the strength of stone. At this point she could almost call the process comfortable. As usual, the air of the Rift was warmer than the surface looming a thousand feet above.

  “Flatten it,” Settan said.

  This had become the normal opening exercise of their recent sessions. Tyrissa placed her palms on the ground and let two currents of earth magick flow through her arms and into the stone. She could feel the thousands of varied corners and spikes in the circle. Their jagged chaos was a cloud of sensation in her mind, a thin icing on top of the vast and steady presence of the plateau below. Letting the earthen energy flow outward, she willed for it to become smooth, to create order from chaos one disruption at a time. Two slow ripples in the stone expanded out from her hands and the rubble melted back into the whole, erasing that varied geography. After a minute, the circle was flat, with no evidence it was ever anything but. Tyrissa smiled to herself, raising her hands from the stone and wiping the sweat from her forehead. She sat back in exhaustion, feeling briefly hollow. Her skin tingled from absorbing the riftwinds, the transmutation process unceasing, and the earthen core bloomed from nothing once again.

  “Good. You’re improving,” her mentor said.

  Settan looked years younger than when she first met him, as if their regular sessions in the Rift had restored him and smoothed away the cracks and crags. Tyrissa was glad that she was able to squeeze in one last session with him. Difficult as it sometimes was, it was also relaxing, a way to clear her mind.

  Tyrissa gazed out across the Rift, eyes tracing the white and gray strata of the soaring cliff walls. All of it was created in a single stroke of magick run wild, an unhealable scar.

  “Strange that the Shapers Circle would be based here, right on the shore of an air domain,” she said, both fishing for anything Settan felt like sharing and filling the time as she regained her stores of earthen magick.

  “The Rift is not an air domain,” Settan replied, taking the bait. “Not exactly. Perhaps it would have been had the Ten Brothers not been created to stop the Rift’s growth. It is a… downstream effect of the Hithian Crater, which is a true air domain. The Khalanheim Circle considered moving after the Fall, especially since the city was split in half, ruined. They choose to stay, as we had a connection to this area long before t
he Fall and the Rift.”

  “A connection? Do you mean there’s an earth domain down there?”

  She knew she was pushing it a little far with that and Settan looked at not as a teacher to student, by as one element to another. As a potential rival, as the bear regards the wolf.

  “What harm is there in telling me? You’re free, right?”

  “The conditioning from twenty-seven years of loyalty isn’t so easily forgotten. Since I still have the Earth’s blessing, I feel I must keep some secrets. I owe the Circle that much, if nothing else.”

  He still felt a residual pull from his Pact, even when severed from it. Tyrissa nodded and felt slightly guilty over using every Pactbound she encountered as a subject to study. However, if what Giroon told her was true, she would need that knowledge. While she told Settan about their fight with Vralin deep beneath the city, she held back the revelation from Giroon’s research. She thought it better to leave him ignorant of that. Everyone needs a few secrets, after all.

  “Enough talk,” Settan said after another stretch of silence. “Are you ready?”

  Tyrissa felt a solid weight of earth in her and nodded.

  Settan motioned at the cleared space in front of her and said, “Make a cube.”

  Tyrissa placed her hands into the practice circle, and again sent in two currents of magick into the ground. She thought of Shaping as an inverse of the smoothing exercise and tried that in reverse. The rock rose and began to take shape, only to melt back into the whole with only a few pebbles for her effort. After three failures in a row Tyrissa slapped the ground in frustration.