Lot waved one knobby-knuckled hand at me and let out a snort of derision. “Donnnnn’t worry, boy, I’m not so closed-minded as that farrrrrrce of a meeting would have had you believe. I am, however, cautious. As much as Vassssa is a fool, he had a poinnnnt when he spoke of the Eater-King. Gods have come downnnnn to Ravanur before, and many of them have been ennnnnemies to our people. Thissss one, however, interests me.”
I felt my brow furrow. “Does that mean that the metal god isn’t dead?”
“On the contrary,” the Elder answered, grimacing, his fangs peeking out from between his lips. For a split second, something like grief crossed his face. “I sent one of my better Sssssstormcallers out there to kill it, and she has not returned. I believe her to be dead. In addition, other rangers have reported that there is a ssssstrange storm raging at the location that you reported to be the god’s campsite. It’s massive, larger even than one of the usual sssssurface blizzards, and it isn’t moving.”
I just sat there with my mouth open, struggling to process what the Elder had told me. A Stormcaller was dead, the god I had seen was still alive, and there was a super-storm just sitting there on the surface? Finally, I got my voice to work properly again and asked, “What does this have to do with me? You had me released from prison- I doubt you would have done so, much less summoned me here, without reason.”
Lot's thin lips peeled back from his gums in a corpse's smile, revealing uneven, chipped teeth. The expression was deeply unsettling to behold, and I swallowed hard and struggled not to look away. "I already told you, my boy. I need more information about thisssss metal god. One of my children has already died, and I cannot afford to ssssend another. You will go, and learn all you can about this god and this stormmmmm."
I felt my face grow pale. I was a hunter, and a good one. I could track anything across Ravanur, above or below the ice. But this was outside of my expertise. Gods were another thing entirely from mortals. According to the stories, they were proud, vicious, and vengeful. Their strength and power made them cold to the suffering of mortals, and they killed as easily and thoughtlessly as one of my kind might breathe. I wasn’t afraid of death at any rate, but I did not feel qualified for this. A Stormcaller or maybe a priest. However, a Stormcaller had already died, and Vassa was an idiot. This was going to be my task, whether I liked it or not. I squared my shoulders and stood, taking the lithe, ready posture of a warrior, driving the doubts away from my mind. “I will do this, Elder Lot. Count on it.”
“Of course you will,” Lot said, absentmindedly, already back to reading the scroll in his lap. The interview was clearly over. I turned to leave, but just as I reached the door to the hut, the Elder spoke, stopping me with my hand on the lintel. “Avoid Vassa’s priests. Go see the Deepseeker for the proper equipment and leave the village as unobserved as your arts will let you manage. And if you learn something important, come right back to me. Don’t report to the council about this again.” I didn’t answer. I simply swept through the door, expecting to come face to face with Nissikul. However, she wasn’t there, as I emerged into the fungus-lit expanse of the village. See the Deepseeker and get out of town unobserved- now that would be something of a challenge. I loved it. Challenge accepted.
…
Getting my hands on my furs, pack, and gear was actually the hardest part of the task. Normally, I would have simply walked into the Huntmaster’s Longhouse, found the alcove where my equipment was stored, and left, all the while exchanging pleasantries and the latest gossip with the other rangers. This time, however, I was to avoid being noticed, so I had to take a different approach. I ended up crawling through the smoke-hole in the longhouse roof and creeping through the rafters. I stayed shrouded in the haze until the place emptied and most of the other rangers left to attend to their various duties. It took me only a few minutes to don my armor and gear, and then I was back in the rafters and slipping out amidst the smoke. After that, getting to the Deepseeker’s hut was a simple matter of leaving the village and circling its edge in the reverse of the route that Nissi had taken to lead me to Elder Lot.
The Deepseeker's hut was as isolated as the Master Stormcaller's home. Unlike Lot's house, however, the Deepseeker's residence was as scrupulously neat as if it was seemingly new. Fresh, even glistening hides had been expertly cleaned, tanned, and stretched to cover the structure, which was built with the same kind of geometric perfection that I had only ever seen in the grain mill. This made sense since the Deepseeker had constructed the mill as well. The hut looked purpose built, fashioned with exacting detail in accordance with some plan I couldn't grasp just by seeing it from the outside. I approached the hut, and I noted that there was a small bone post beside the door. An iron hook was implanted in it. A little silver bell hung from the hook and a tiny, fur-headed mallet to strike it with. I lifted the mallet with my thumb and forefinger, while my gloves made my moves clumsier than usual, and struck the bell twice. It let out a piercing chime with each strike, though the second one seemed to hang in the air longer than it should have. A moment later, the Deepseeker's gravely, amused voice rumbled, "Get in here, boy, before someone sees you."
When I entered the Deepseeker’s hut, I found him bent over a sturdy, immaculately constructed workbench, made from a smoothed block of stone, with legs shaped from burug chitin. He had a pair of spectacles on his nose, though these had far too many lenses attached by various articulated brass arms. The magick he was manipulating today was larger than any blessing of his I had ever seen. It seemed to be a breastplate, made from a metal that seemed too dull and too dark to be copper, but too red to be anything else. It was etched with strange, branching symbols, as all of his work was. Some of those sigils, particularly those surrounding the stylized heart embossed over the plate’s left breast, seemed to glow with an inner light, lit by a power I did not understand. “Elder?”
The Deepseeker met my eyes, and gave a wide, threatening grin, revealing fangs as long and sharp as mine, even yellowed as they were with age. “It took you long enough to get here, ranger, though I suppose old Lot did set you a pretty challenge. That man always did like his theatrics, eh?”
Pretending that the elder didn’t deeply unsettle me, I shrugged noncommittally and said. “It wasn’t a difficult task, just something of a tedious one.” Suddenly curious, I continued. “Do the Elder’s disagree so much about the metal god that this sort of subterfuge is necessary?”
The Deepseeker grimaced and gave a half-shrug of his own. “Palamun only knows what goes on in Vassa’s thick skull. If he doesn’t know about what happened- about that storm sitting still on the surface- he will soon. And when he does, I can’t guarantee that he won’t declare a holy pogrom on the metal god and all its creations, whatever those might be.” The Elder seemed to shudder at this, and his face twisted, changing all at once from bemused calm over to an incandescent rage. His eyes now burned with inner fire, his lips curled to display his fangs and his expression clenched into a mask of hate. I didn’t react. The best way to handle the Deepseeker’s strange rages was to wait for them to calm down, and not draw attention to myself or them. The Elder continued speaking through clenched teeth. “One of our Stormcallers is missing, probably dead. We cannot risk another attack on that thing until we know what it can do. You are going to find out what it can do, find out how we can kill it, and you’re going to keep this whole thing a secret from Vassa and anyone else until you know all of these things. Do you understand boy?” The last word was accompanied by a spray of spittle, and a glare that could have boiled the flesh from my skull.
I stood very still. The Deepseeker’s rages could very easily become violent. “Yes, elder. It will be done as you command.” The elder snarled and snatched the breastplate he had been working on off of the worktable, turning on his heel and flinging it at me backhand as he stalked away. The armor struck me in the chest, painfully, but I caught it and kept the pain of the blow off of my face.
"Take that and get out," the Deepseeker gro
wled. "It will keep you warm for two months. Don't break it, or I'll break you," I didn't say anything in response. I simply fled the hut with the elder's latest blessing and then put as much distance between him and me as I could, in just a few moments. When I was far enough outside the village that I could no longer hear the sounds of the crazed Elder smashing things in his tent, I crouched behind a boulder a short way down the slope and rearranged my furs so I could put the armor underneath them. To my surprise, it wasn't actually heavy and didn't really impede my movement at all. Even though the elder had made it, it was of unbelievably high quality. Judging by the lengths to which the two elders had gone, this mission was of critical importance. The Erin-Vulur needed to know more about the god now living within a whirling storm on the surface of Ravanur. It might be another predator, like the Eater-King, but then again it might not. If it were benevolent- even slightly so, it was important that we learned what it wanted- why it was here, on our world. If Palamun had sent this god as a messenger, its mission could be of vital importance. It could change everything about the future of my people.
I left the village, avoiding the high traffic civilian roads- those led deeper into the surrounding ice, anyway- and I found one of the least used ranger paths out of the Erin-Vulur tribal home. The path led into a tunnel, which snaked out and up, taking me along a route that would lead me ever further away from the village. Each of these tunnels had iron hatches in them at several points, to deter potential invaders from other tribes, but it had been a very long time since the last tribal war, and longer still since the Erin-Vulur feared invasion. I found the iron hatch and fished around inside my furs for the key, which I wore on a string around my neck. It didn’t look much like a key, appearing instead to be a featureless cylinder of the same iron as the portal, but it contained some of the Deepseeker’s magick. As long as I held it, the key would work in any of the ranger’s doors. In the hand of any other, it was little more than a useless lump of iron. I slotted the little iron cylinder into a matching groove in the door and was answered with a satisfying clunk inside the thick portal. I leaned forward into the portal, and it scraped open, clearing a thin build up of shaved ice out of its path.
I stepped through the portal and closed it. I was now standing in a tunnel barely wider than my shoulders, a rough-hewn, ill-maintained straight shaft through the ice. Driven into the walls of the shaft, there was a ladder line of iron spikes, set at half-spear intervals. I sighed, rolled my shoulders to loosen them, and began to climb. At least I didn’t have to climb this one by axe.
The surface was just as unforgiving as usual. The ceaseless, scouring force of the furious winds made me stumble as I came out of the ranger tunnel onto the featureless surface of Ravanur’s icy skin. I slid the concealing imitation boulder back into place, covering the tunnel from prying eyes. I then reached into a crack in the side of the rock and hit a hidden switch, causing the securing bolts to fall into place, fastening the cover to the hidden iron ring at the mouth of the tunnel. Periodically, a storm would rip the top off of one of our tunnels, but short of that kind of force, the secret routes of the rangers remained so, secluded and hidden from any who would wish to do our tribe harm. I wondered then if the metal god was a good or a bad one. If it was a malicious god, according to the stories, it could make me tell it all of my secrets- like the locations of all the entrances to the home of the Erin-Vulur. I shuddered. Hopefully, it was a good god, but if it was a bad one… I resolved then that if the metal god turned out to be an enemy of my people, I would force it to kill me in battle rather than be made to betray my tribe.
I unfolded my map and looked at it for a while, noting the position of the burug I had killed relative to the location of the village. It was a day and a half’s walk from here, though if I found an old burug tunnel, I might be able to follow its relatively smooth contours toward my target, and bypass some of the difficulties of overland travel. Bringing up the recent burug paths I knew about, I mentally overlaid the paths onto the map and selected the one I was going to take. A day and a half. Just a day and a half until I stood face to face with a god and the world changed forever. Was I ready for something like this? Shaking my head, I hiked my pack up further on my shoulders and set off for the burug tunnel. There was only one way to find out.
…
I had no problem finding the home of the metal god. Roughly two days after I had set out from the tribal village, I got out of the old burug tunnel I had chosen to follow, preoccupied with my own thoughts. The tunnel had been utterly free of any sign of the great insect that had made it, and that didn’t make a lot of sense. Though the massive adult burug that had made the tunnel had been slain, typically within those tunnels a ranger would find burug eggs or larva. Even this far from the village, they would be exterminated outright, but there was no sign of that either- no shattered pieces of chitin, no flash-frozen blood or ichor, no grooves in the ice from heavy blows. This tunnel had emptied and stayed empty. There weren’t a lot of things that scared a burug; they weren't really smart enough to actually know fear. For something to drive away all of the juvenile insects that should have been here… A rumble of thunder vibrated the ice beneath my feet, and I looked up, out through the open mouth of the tunnel. In that moment, I knew exactly what had scared the beasts away.
The sky in front of me was covered by a solid column of black, hundreds of spears wide and three times as high. It was lit from within by brief, startling flashes of blue light, occasionally spitting out a bolt of searing blue that gouged up great chunks of ice and flung them high into the air, only to be caught in its lazily rotating mass and swallowed. I was standing inside a great storm. Green lined clouds stretched in concentric circles past me, seeming to extend out to the horizon. The wind whipped around me, howling for my blood. Its rage blew me back and forth as I got to my feet. I kept one arm thrown across my face to protect it from the flying ice. I quickly tugged a scarf across my mouth and nose and crouched to preserve my balance against the rushing violence of the storm. I understood now that the pillar of roiling blackness that I was looking at was the storm wall- the place in the heart of a great storm where the violence of the wind was the strongest. I knew that the eye of the storm would be a place of calm, near serenity, shielded from the tempest’s own rage, and I was sure that if the god I had seen was inside the storm, then the eye was where he would be. I just had to get inside. It was strange that the god had chosen a blizzard to be its ward; every Erin-Vulur ranger had to reach the eye of a blizzard before he was considered worthy of his ink. I had crossed a storm wall before- every one of my comrades had as well, some of us multiple times. Surely a god would have known that. Was this some kind of test? If it was, I was ready for it.
I reached inside my furs, into a pouch I kept tucked under one of my arms for safekeeping. Inside it, there was a set of goggles, with thick lenses shaped from precious quartz that the Deepseeker had found under the buried peak of the Erin-Vulur village. I strapped the goggles over my eyes to protect them and put the pouch back within my furs. Next, I spread protective balm over any of my skin left exposed, from a clay jar I kept in my pack. This would keep the storm's cold, harsher even than the ambient cold of Ravanur, from leeching heat from my body. A powerful enough storm could freeze even someone protected by powerful Deepseeker magick if they weren't careful, and the strange breastplate I wore under my furs would do nothing to protect me from a lightning strike. Even though I was experienced, every time I crossed through a storm, I took my life into my own hands, and a storm shaped by the hand of a god was no exception. No sense in waiting around. I checked the claws in the tips of my boots, drew out my twin climbing axes, and sprinted toward the storm wall, diving to the ground as I drew near to the roiling barrier. As I dropped prone to the ice, I slammed down my axes, getting a grip with the sharp points, and scrabbled with my clawed boots, getting purchase against the ice. Lying face down like this, made it less likely I would be ripped up by the storm, and hopefully it would also
protect me against the chance of a lightning strike. I pushed with my feet, reached out with one hand, slamming my axe down hard a few hand-spans further, and then dragged myself forward. It was like climbing, a little more dangerous though, and my body fell into the familiar seeming rhythm with ease. Within moments, I was fully surrounded by the storm wall.
The time I spent within the god's storm wall was like a fever dream. Sensations passed across my body in waves, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. I was cold, even with the blessing I wore, and the wind seemed to be trying to rip the hides off of my back. I was in total darkness, concentrating on the indistinct impression of the little bit of ice in front of my goggles and not daring to lift my head. Each breath was a labor, as most of the air was sucked away from my mouth before I could take it in. I had to expend precious effort to remain calm in the face of it. Every so often, lightning would play across the inside of the storm wall, and a nightmare skyscape would reveal itself to me in the afterimages burned into my eyes. I saw towers of clouds growing upward to the unseen heavens before they were smashed into curling wisps by icy boulders, flung by the storm like they were pebbles. Through it all, through the light, and impact, and the terrifying, all-encompassing noise of it all, I persisted in my driving rhythm, dragging myself ever further into the storm wall.
I don't know how much time passed, but abruptly, with little warning, the noise dropped from bone-pulverizing to merely deafening. I had done it; I had breached the god's storm wall. I was exhausted and sore, so much in fact, that I didn't hear or feel the heavy footsteps approaching me, until something seized me by the back of my furs and lifted me off of the ground like I was an infant. I yelped and tried to fumble for a spear, but my captor simply shook me, enough to rattle my brains in my skull without killing me. I immediately stopped struggling, and instead, I twisted in the massive grip- and then froze.
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 35
