On the night of the twenty-seventh day, I received a message from my people. The air was at its coldest, and the Great Father's shadowed face was slightly smaller in the sky, the way it was in the middle of every night. My low, narrow wind-tent had been set up near the center of the camp, not close enough to the tower to touch it, but still a safe distance from the whirling chaos of the storm wall. I sat in the mouth of the hide and fur shelter, running a sharpening stone over my climbing axes when I suddenly realized that I wasn't alone. I sprang to my feet, stepping into a defensive stance, one axe held up above my head, the other waiting low. When I saw what had startled me, I sighed. It was shaped like a burug, scaled down so that its back didn't rise higher than my knee. And it was made entirely of ice. It was a Stormcaller construct, and it wasn't the first one that my sister had used to communicate with me. And I had no doubt that this message was from my sister because the little ice monster was doing somersaults to get my attention. Doubtless, she considered the relatively simple magick she was doing to be tremendously boring. She probably wasn't even trying to show off. I growled at the insect as it began to pirouette around me, clicking its crystalline mandibles loudly. "What, Nissi," I hissed at the thing. "Just give me the message already!"
The ice sculpture burug folded up, settling itself on the ice with its legs tucked up underneath its belly. Then, its mandibles spread open, and Nissikul’s bored, somewhat petulant voice came out of its mouth. It was as if a miniature version of my sister were living in the false creature’s mouth, and speaking for it in her voice. The whole experience was very strange. “Volistad,” she intoned, trying and failing to make her voice as imposing and regal as she could, like she was some kind of prophet from Palamun. “Volistad, ranger of the Erin-Vulur, you are hereby commanded to return to the nearest outpost of the Perimeter, where you will report on all you have seen to the Elder Stormcaller’s chosen agent.”
I frowned at the burug construct. “I assume you will be the Elder Stormcaller’s envoy?”
“Your assumptions are irrelevant!” Nissi drew out her words to mimic the affected speech of Elder Lot. “You willllll do assss you are toooooold!”
I snickered. “Please inform the master that I will meet his agent at Pyrinta Outpost in but a day and a half.
“Veeeerrrrry wellllll!” Nissi laughed, and then said something indistinct, and the burug collapsed into formless shards of ice. It was time. Time for me to return to my people and share all that I had learned of Joanna, the reluctant god who would change our world into a paradise. Time to show Vassa to be the fool he was. I looked over at where the god was sleeping, perfectly still in a sitting position, her back against the marvelous tower she had constructed. She would change everything for the Erin-Vulur. I crawled into my tent and fastened the flaps closed against the howling wind. I curled up into my sleeping furs, lying on my back to keep the Deepseeker’s blessing from digging into my side. I slept and dreamt of the new world to come, a world of warmth and ease, of food growing from the ground with ease, of fat prey to hunt, and a whole world without ice for me to explore.
…
When I woke up the next day, Joanna was already hard at work at her unfathomable tasks, carrying on an animated conversation with her attendant spirit. As usual, she was speaking far too quickly in her unfamiliar tongue for me to understand what she was saying, so I busied myself with rolling up my tent and repacking my gear, while I snacked on some dried dukkar jerky. Soon enough, the god noticed my preparations and stomped over, her strange, magickal armor giving off little insect buzzing sounds as she moved. “You are leaving?” She asked, in the tongue of the Erin-Vulur.
“I am,” I responded, checking my bowstring to ensure it was still strong despite the many days of disuse. I hadn’t had much time for practice. Satisfied, I slipped the string back out of its notch in the bow’s upper stave, leaving it attached and half strung, but slack. “My elder calls for me. He wants to know about you. He wants to know why you are here.” I was careful to speak my words clearly- there were still sounds I made that she could not quite differentiate.
Joanna made a forward rolling motion with her shoulders that it had taken days for me to recognize as some kind of shoulder-shrugging gesture that equated to my people's own "I don't care gesture" of twisting our hands from side to side. "I understand," she continued. "I hope you will come back. There is still much I wish to learn from you about your world." She halfway showed me her teeth, caught herself, and instead narrowed her eyes to mimic the way my people smiled. "Maybe your elders will let me come and see your village?"
"I hope so." In truth, I had no idea how the elders would respond. They had already tried to kill her once, and it hadn't worked. Finding out that she planned to change the face of Ravanur so completely might scare them, and I knew that Vassa, in particular, would be quick to leap upon the fact that Joanna denied her godhood. If my tribe reacted in fear, things might go very badly, both for the Erin-Vulur and for the reluctant god. Joanna had shown me a weapon attached to her tower that she called a "goss reyfel". Though the words meant nothing to me, I had seen the terrible power it commanded. One day, she had detected a burug moving under the ice toward her encampment, drawn perhaps by the storm, or the tower it protected. After briefly speaking to her unseen spirit, the god had dismissed the storm surrounding her tower, sending away the howling walls as if they had never been there. Then, before I could ask what was happening, the “goss reyfel” had made a loud barking sound, and nearby an entire mound of ice had shattered into powder. I heard the burug’s roar a moment later, and when I went with her to examine it, I was shocked to see that her weapon had ripped a hole large enough for me to crawl through yawning wide in the creature's back, exposing its steaming organs to Ravanur's ravenous cold. I imagined that weapon firing its deadly shot at one of my people and shuddered. Would there be anything left?
But my people were not an insignificant threat to the god, regardless of her weapon’s power. The Erin-Vulur were not so numerous as we once were, but we were still many, and our warriors were all the most formidable hunters on Ravanur. We had survived where so many other tribes had dwindled and died. We hunted and ate even the mighty burug, and we had laid low rival peoples of all kinds. We had even brought low false gods that had come down from the firmament, beings of unspeakable power that had sought the extermination of our entire tribe. We had strong blessings wrought by our Deepseeker and many Stormcallers who could shape the very winds of the world. If my tribe leveled its wrath at the god, many would die, but they would bring her down. I didn't want to imagine Joanna's armor shattered and that beautiful face crushed beneath a hammer any more than I wanted to imagine Nissikul split in half by a single shot of the god's divine weapon. It was my job to keep that horrible future from happening.
I reached out and placed a hand against her armored arm, aware even through the blessing that kept me warm enough to live, that the metal that protected the god was incredibly cold to the touch. It left my skin tingling where I had touched her and left steam hissing up in a handprint where I had made contact. "We… meet… again," I said, haltingly, in her language. "I… happy that… you… friend… mine." Then I shaped my mouth into one of her smiles, trying to ignore how strange and aggressive it felt on my face.
She smiled back, the expression much more natural to her. "Good luck, Volistad," she said in my language as I shouldered my pack and walked slowly towards the storm wall. A mere spear's length before the winds would have started pushing around me, the seething wall tore itself apart in a random gale, spewing fragmented ice in all directions. With the storm wall down, I could see that its passage had worn a wide, circular track into the ice all around the encampment, a trench at least two spears deep, and three wide. Such power, at the command of someone who claimed she wasn't a god. There was no way that could be right. Not even a Stormcaller was quite that strong, and they were somewhere between mortal and divine themselves. I set off at an easy, loping run over the ice, ga
thering my strength and leaping over the trench in a single long leap. I took the landing smoothly and fell back into the rhythm, one leg stretching out after another and carrying me away from the home of Ravanur's newest god. Before long, I heard a telltale whine and felt the winds shift around me. I turned back to see that the storm had whirled back to life from nowhere, Joanna's campsite obscured in a column of roiling, angry clouds and seething, crackling lightning. I shook my head in amazement and turned back to the path ahead of me. Just a day to the border of my people's territory, and then the moment of truth.
I couldn’t believe this had all happened to me. I was just like a prophet from the old stories, announcing a new savior to his people, only to be scorned and thrown in prison. But just like those apocryphal prophets, I would be vindicated when the god showed her true power and saved my people.
…
My passage back to my people’s territory was uneventful. I didn’t even see any other rangers out in the cold, not even to greet me as I emerged from the burug tunnel I had been using for swift travel and approached one of the gateways to our realm under the ice. I had even approached one of the more frequent entrances, an established way down to one of the pockets of livable space under the ice. It took me from a seemingly small crevasse in the surface of Ravanur's skin down into a wider passage that led to a remote, cratered mountain of a similar size to the one within which the village rested. In past times, this cavernous space had been another settlement in its own right, but there just weren't enough of the Erin Vulur anymore to fill it. The idea had been proposed to share it with another tribe of people like us, but too few of the Elders had agreed. They had refused; by the idea that the malicious powers below the ice could corrupt anyone, and we had no way of knowing if the unknown other tribes hiding beneath the ice were still the masters of their own minds or merely puppets for the dark ones. Personally, I thought it was just an excuse to avoid having to share power with a whole other Council of Elders, but being just a lowly ranger, I kept these thoughts to myself.
In the meantime, the former village had been converted into an outer outpost of our territory, an empty expanse of cold stone with a single longhouse constructed in its center. A few feeble pens of skinny vulyak and a single lonely dukkar wallowed in a feeble morass of slimy fungus circling it. The place seemed empty, except for the livestock, which was very strange. There should have been at least six warriors on duty, along with a ranger and a Stormcaller. It wasn’t a pleasant posting, but my people were typically dutiful and vigilant. Life within the skin of Ravanur demanded such devotion. The outpost was, nonetheless empty and I didn’t understand why. I approached the longhouse carefully, my hands at my waist, ready to draw an axe and fight if some mischief was happening with my people. The door to the longhouse was pushed aside, and I half drew my weapon, then sighed with relief and let it fall back into its carrying loop at my belt. Elder Lot himself stood in the door to the longhouse, leaning against one of his sigil marked staves and staring at me with his empty black eyes. “Come on, boy,” he grumbled. “Get innnnn here, I haven’t got alllllll day.”
Shaking my head, bemused, I followed the Elder Stormcaller into the longhouse, where I found a small stone platter of food waiting between two seats of piled furs. The Elder gestured for me to take a seat, and I sat. At further prompting, I selected a tender looking strip of roasted dukkar and began to eat. The Elder sat as well, and with little fanfare, selected a mushroom cap filled with vulyak cheese and took a bite, then he squinted his eyes in pleasure. After a moment of quiet, companionable eating, the elder leaned forward over the stone platter and said, “Alright then, Vollllllistad, tell me about this god of yourssss. Why is it here? What doesssss it want?” He gestured with a broad gesture to indicate that the longhouse was empty. I was free to tell him everything I had learned.
“Her name,” I said around a mouthful of succulent meat, “is Joanna. And she’s here to change our world into a paradise.”
Elder Lot tilted his head to one side and frowned slightly. "Issssss she now? Tell me mmmmmore?" So I told the Elder of all I had learned. I told him of the great tower that Joanna was building, and of her ability to gather and disperse the storm she used as her barrier. I told him about the strange suit of armor, and how she looked very much like one of us within. I explained to him all I had seen her do, from reshaping ice and metal with a wave of her hand, to the conversations I had watched her have with a spirit that I couldn't see or hear. I even told him that she claimed not to be a god, and explained what I could of her plan to ready the world for the arrival of her own tribe. All the while Elder Lot's expression remained the same, a neutral mask, his eyes blank pits of black from which I could glean no specific emotion. Finally, with little left to tell him, and less food left on the stone platter, I spoke of what I had learned of Joanna's language, and told him what she had said about the world she said she had come from, somewhere far out within Palamun's firmament.
The Elder stood his expression inscrutable. "Follllllow me, ranger." I did, thinking little of it. The Elder held open the hide flap door so I could step through, and followed me out. Then he stepped forward and led me back across the great crater that contained Pyrinta Outpost. We passed the animal pens and continued back off of the weathered stone and out of the outpost's pocket of relative safety and warmth beneath the ice. As we ascended the frozen tunnel to the surface, Lot spoke, his voice suddenly devoid of its usual affectation of random, drawn out sounds. "Volistad," he said his voice raspy and crisp. "You know the stories of the High Epic. You know that our tribe was not born here on Ravanur- none of the tribes of this planet, be they like us or not, were born here."
"Of course," I replied easily. "We were carried here in a vast metal urn by the Great Father, Palamun, to save us from the Dirt Eaters, who would have destroyed all the world in their wickedness."
“Yes,” Elder Lot said. “And as His chosen people, we were brought here, to a world that the Dirt Eaters could never infect, tame, and never destroy. We were protected from their wickedness by Ravanur.”
I knew the story. “But the Dirt-Eater’s foul gods had heard of this refuge, of the safety of our mother, Ravanur, and they came here first, already tainting the land, breaking Ravanur’s body that they might use her blood to power their infernal creations. It would not be long before even pristine Ravanur wasn’t safe from the Dirt-Eaters and their ilk.”
The master took up the tale again, a sad smile in his eyes as he glanced over at me. “And so, to save us, Palamun himself fought the Dark Ones, the gods of the Dirt-Eaters, and with the help of Ravanur, he badly wounded those false gods. But Ravanur was grievously wounded, and without her aid, brave Palamun could not fully slay the Dark Ones, for they were gods like him, and terrible in their evil power.”
We had reached the mouth of the crevasse that served as an entrance into the territories of the Erin-Vulur. Elder Lot stopped and put a hand on my shoulder. Knowing my cue, I continued the story. "So Ravanur poured out her grief, and her pain, and her rage, and she sealed herself in a tomb of ice while the Dark Ones were distracted. And there, beneath the ice, they sleep forever, frozen to Ravanur's breast." I frowned as I finished the tale. Something was wrong here. It had to do with this…
Pain lanced through my back and chest, so hard and searing cold that for a moment, I was paralyzed with it, unable to make a single sound. Elder Lot calmly circled around me and stood so that his deep, fathomless eyes bored into my own, his mouth twisted in a snarl that showed all of his teeth. "The rest of the story," he growled. "Is as follows: Palamun hid his face with grief for the sacrifice of Ravanur, and swore that her death would not be in vain. He placed the urn filled with his chosen people into the frozen skin of dead Ravanur, and when all the people called the Erinye emerged. He charged them with the defense of the noble mother's frozen tomb, in repayment for their salvation from the world of the Dirt-Eaters." I coughed, hard, and I felt hot blood bubbling up in my throat and beginning to crystalli
ze. It was then that I noticed that the protection of the blessing was fading, likely ruptured by whatever had hit me. My strength began to fail, and I slumped to my knees, my head lolling forward, and I saw that the pain in my back and chest had been caused by a spear of black ice, one of the enchanted weapons any Stormcaller could summon from the deeply buried heart of Ravanur. The Elder crouched before me, staring into my eyes. "I am sorry, ranger, but you were corrupted the moment you saw her. Otherwise, you would have known what she was- an agent of the Dirt-Eaters, here to change the world into one like their own." He seized the haft of the frozen spear, just behind the wicked sharp head slick with my rapidly freezing blood. The surface air was starting to claw past the Deepseeker's ruined magick, and I could feel the teeth of the ever hungry wind starting to gnaw at me, piercing my flesh and seeking my bones. It was so.... So cold.
The Elder placed one hand against my chest, almost gently, and with the other, he yanked the spear all the way through my body in a moment of blinding, tearing agony. I heard my bones crackle, felt my flesh rip where it had already partially frozen to the magickal weapon. The Elder tossed the spear aside and let me fall onto my back on the ice. "Rest now, ranger. It was not your fault you were taken, but you cannot be allowed to live. You cannot be allowed to infect any of the other children of Ravanur." Blackness was swallowing my vision, and I felt tears start up in my eyes only to freeze painfully. I tried to speak, tried to move, but I had already lost too much blood. The Elder placed a hand over my eyes and said some words I could no longer understand. I’m dying, I thought incredulously. I can’t believe it. I’m really dying. Defiant, I tried to hold on. Ridiculous thoughts, impossible plans shot through my mind as everything inside me turned numb and vanished from my perception. I would wait until the Elder left and then crawl to Joanna. I had to tell her, had to…
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 38
