Nissikul twisted out of my grip and scrambled back and away from me. I stood, quickly, preparing to fend off another attack. The magick in my chest was strong, but I didn’t know if I could stop her from killing me again- Stormcallers were fiendishly strong. I quickly took stock of the situation. Thukkar laid sprawled a spearcast from me, propped up on my pack. At least Nissikul had the presence to show that much humanity to the wounded soldier. Pain twisted his face, but his eyes were steady and intense as he watched us. We were all gathered on one side of the crevice, and the black ice bridge that had nearly killed me was gone. Nissikul crouched just out of my reach, clad loosely in my cape, the dagger held before her in a reverse-grip. I reached out to her. “Nissi, please. I don’t want to hurt you. But our people are in terrible danger, and Joanna is the only one who can save them.”
Nissikul shook her head, tears streaming down her face to freeze into icicles that dangled from her chin. “Of course you would say that, of course you would believe that.” She snarled and tossed her dagger at the cavern wall half a spear-length from me. It shattered into powder, blasting away a chunk of ice the size of my head in a muffled detonation and a flash of white light. “But my master told me that he had killed you when you attacked him, that he had stabbed you in the heart.” She pointed to my chest. “And that’s an exit wound.” She shook her head again. “I know my brother is far too skilled a warrior to be stabbed in the back in open battle. Only betrayal could have done that to you.” She shook, her fingers curled to brandish her claws. “And Palamun above, those warriors.” She looked over at Thukkar, lying half-paralyzed on the ice, and something inside her broke. She threw back her head and roared, and it was so loud I had to cover my ears to protect myself from the raw fury and pain blasting out in all directions. A great groan emanated from the walls of the glacial cavern around me, and shards of ice shook free from the unseen ceiling and fell, shattering as they struck the floor around us. I waited until she was finished and then stepped forward and enclosed her in an embrace. She was my sister, and she was alive. The rest of it didn’t matter for the moment. Spent, she rested her head against my chest and sobbed.
…
We camped there, by the abyss, and for the next two days, Nissikul worked her powers on Thukkar, crafting subtle, complicated magicks to try to restore his damaged spine. It turned out that his back was not actually broken, rather, it was badly misaligned, and the muscles all around his spine had been torn and destroyed. Her powers were not well suited to healing, she said, and she had to apply them carefully to restore the ranger’s ravaged body. For his part, Thukkar got over his hesitation to allow Nissikul to try to heal him fairly quickly, and soon, the two of them were chatting amiably while she worked. I spent most of that time ranging out in ever widening circles from our campsite, searching for signs of Joanna in the crevices, tunnels, and caves that I could reach. There was little for me to find, for the most part, though a frozen pool of some foul black substance that I found in one of the rubble-strewn caves drew me up short. I couldn’t figure out what the stuff was- it was unlike anything I had ever seen. I had the feeling that Joanna had something to do with it, but I couldn’t guess what connection there might actually be.
When I returned on the second night, bearing the day’s catch, I found Thukkar standing shakily, partially supported by a smiling, exhausted Nissikul. She had let the witch-ice arm lapse the previous day, and she looked nearly as frail as the battered ranger she was supporting. They both looked in my direction as I approached, each of them showing their teeth in hungry anticipation at the sight of the dukkar seal I had slung over my shoulder. I bared my own fangs in a possessive grimace, but I simultaneously smiled my eyes at them to show that I was joking. “I’m glad you’re both feeling a little better.” I noted as I approached. I noticed that Nissikul’s twisted leg had straightened itself out. It was still horribly bruised, but she looked less like a walking corpse than before. It seemed that no matter what her limitations were when trying to heal others; Nissi’s magicks had no problem taking care of her body, given that she gave them half a chance to work.
I strode into the camp and dropped the blubbery seal to the ice before them. It had been a clean kill- I had climbed down a deep crevice to find one of the places where the ice had turned to water, and held a scrap of meat above the surface. When the inquisitive dukkar lunged up to snatch at the morsel, I had caught it instead and broken its neck. They really weren’t the smartest animals that managed to live beneath Ravanur’s skin, but I was grateful that it had been there. There was little food down here unless one managed to kill a burug, and that was quite difficult if you didn’t catch it from above. We were lucky- our path had kept us fairly close to a mountain ridge, and so some of the heat of the great mother allowed for the sort of life that we needed, if we wanted to eat better than the occasional barnacle or rodent.
Nissikul helped Thukkar sit down, while I swiftly gutted my kill. My hunting knife was gone, along with the rest of my original gear, and while the Deepseeker had supplied me with a complete complement of ranger weapons, he had forgotten some of the little things. I made do with my claws, and despite some difficulty, I was able to field-strip the carcass in an acceptable amount of time. I tossed the liver and entrails over towards my companions, and busied myself draining the body and preparing it for travel. The dukkar I had caught wasn’t large, but if it was rationed, it would sustain us for quite some time. There was nothing to burn to make a fire, but in a pinch, my people survived just fine off of raw meat. We preferred it cooked, but when you walked the deep frozen paths of Ravanur, you didn’t have the luxury of being picky.
“So,” Thukkar said between mouthfuls. “Which one of your Elders is right?” Both Nissikul and I looked over at him quickly, frowning. He put up both hands, placating, the effect somewhat ruined by the blood spattering his hands and face. “Not to start any trouble, but Nissikul, your Elder isn’t exactly acting in good faith, and Volistad, the Deepseeker isn’t the most trustworthy type either.”
“I see what you mean about Lot,” I said, gesturing toward my own chest. “But why doubt the Deepseeker? He did save my life after all.”
Thukkar took another messy bite of his food and chewed contemplatively before continuing. “He did, but look at it from the outside. You were dead, and he revived you, so you would be in his debt. You would do whatever he wanted. He gave you all kinds of powerful weapons and tools, so that you would be overwhelmed, and wouldn’t question what he was saying.” The ranger pointed to Nissikul. “I’m not saying that Lot isn’t a bastard, but what if he was right about the Deepseeker? Even if he wasn’t right about your god, Volistad.”
I frowned and opened my mouth to protest that Joanna wasn’t my god, but Nissikul cut me off with an upraised hand. “That’s definitely possible,” she said. “I mean, he has been watching the Deepseeker for a very long time. I have been keeping an eye on the crazy old goat for him, and there is definitely something wrong with him.”
I snorted. “That’s just the way the Deepseeker is, though. And your master is hardly normal. Or does he talk like that just because he feels like it?” I smiled with my eyes to soften my words. “I mean, let’s be honest here, you Stormcallers aren’t exactly bastions of normal, rational behavior.”
Nissi stuck her red tongue out at me. “That’s not the same thing,” she said. “We are all a little strange,” she admitted. “But that comes from the-” she hesitated. “That comes from the ritual we go through when we earn our power.
“How do we know it’s not the same with the Deepseeker?” I asked, choosing to ignore Nissi’s discomfort over mentioning “the ritual”. I had asked her about it before, and she had never told me a thing. It was a secret. “He’s been around for longer than anyone can remember, and even the oldest members of the tribe say he was old when they were children. He deals with some powerful magicks, just like your people, and they had to have changed him over his long life.”
Thukkar c
ut in again, frowning with concentration. “But we know where Stormcaller power comes from. All Stormcallers possess in them the Breath of Ravanur, one of the great winds that bring the storms. Their power comes from the Great Mother herself.” He gestured to my armor, scrawled as it was with strange symbols and seals, glowing with strange arcane power. “But we don’t know where that comes from. The Deepseeker always just goes down into the dark and brings back his ‘blessings’, and we accept it because they keep us warm when we leave the village.”
“So?” I shrugged. “The power of the Stormcallers and the Deepseeker are both things we don’t understand. Why does it matter how they are made. We’ve seen what they do.” I gestured to Nissikul. “Stormcallers keep the wrath of Ravanur at bay when we go to the surface, and they reshape the ice to keep the village from being crushed beneath the glacier.” I gestured to myself, and then pointed to the glowing blessing that Thukkar wore as a thick cuff about one wrist. “And the Deepseeker keeps our people warm on our journeys into the cold.”
“But that’s not how it has always been,” Nissi whispered, staring down at her hands. “I actually know of a time when there wasn’t a Deepseeker.”
This time, Thukkar and I stared at her in astonishment. “What do you mean?” I asked. The Stormcallers were known to keep many secrets, and the way Nissi wasn’t looking at either of us, made me wonder if I wanted to know the answer.
Nissikul met my eyes. “I snuck into Lot’s hut a couple times when he was out training the new ‘Callers.” She grimaced. “Don’t look at me like that, I was curious. Anyway, I have read some of his scrolls, and there’s one written by the Elder before the one that trained him.” She paused for a moment, letting that sink in. The Stormcallers could live for a very long time, and if the writer of the scroll Nissikul had read had been the predecessor to Lot’s own predecessor, then this scroll was older even than our grandparents. No one in the tribe would remember anything about this- everyone who had been alive when that had been written was dead. Our people’s history was maintained by the Stormcallers. If they didn’t record it, it didn’t happen, at least in the long run. Most of us didn’t actually know how to read or write. Vellum wasn’t very common, and teaching every one of the Erin-Vulur to read and write would have been a waste of resources. Most of the rangers could read, but our ability to write was limited to whatever untidy scrawl was needed to produce our trail sign. I looked over at Thukkar and was pleased to see that he also seemed to have come to the same understanding of the situation that I had.
Seeing that we were both caught up with her, Nissikul continued. “The writings of Elder Averama said that there was some kind of horrible accident in the deep places beneath the mountain, back when the Erin-Caval still lived down in the depths beneath us- before the Eater-King came down. They had always been the ones to find the blessings that kept the rangers warm, back in those days, and they were usually rooting around in the dark down there. I think they considered it their people’s holy quest to find the Great Urn, the vessel that Palamun used to carry all the Erinye here to Ravanur. Anyway, they found something they should have left alone, and many of their people died in a mysterious plague. We sent rangers to investigate, and to help them seal away whatever they had found. In the process, one of those rangers went missing, and Averama thought he was dead.”
Thukkar and I looked at each other, frowning. The wounded man spoke first. “If this involved so many rangers, why don’t we know about this?” He looked over at me for support. “Our people don’t keep scrolls like yours, but our history is kept in song and story, told around our great hearth all the time. There are no stories about the world-shaking, and no stories about a plague among the Erin-Caval.”
Nissikul turned her palm up in a gesture of “who knows”, and took another bite of her food. She chewed and swallowed, and continued. “Averama doesn’t speak much about the ranger’s, except to note that one of them disappeared. She says that after Erin-Caval were safe again, the missing ranger reappeared, bearing bundles of strange metal things, dragging them up out of the ice. He had no memory of what had happened to him during the efforts to help the Erin-Caval, only that he had woken in a place deeper than he had ever been before, wounded, and surrounded by ancient metal magicks. He was able to make use of some of them to keep himself alive, and when he realized that he could use them to help our people, he brought as many of them back as he could carry.”
“The Deepseeker,” I said, understanding. “That lost ranger is now the Deepseeker we all know.”
Thukkar hadn’t stopped frowning. “But if that’s how it happened, why didn’t Averama accuse him of being corrupted then?”
Nissikul laughed, not entirely kindly. “You said it yourself. We Stormcallers are strange, and you all fear us. The Deepseeker brought back things to protect our people, better magicks than even the Erin-Caval could procure. In Averama’s time, no one but Stormcallers could stay alive on the surface for more than a day. When the Deepseeker appeared, he made it possible for you warriors to range much further, seek much better prey. The Erin-Vulur were able to take down many more burug since our rangers could follow the great beasts for much longer, rather than just waiting for them to come close to our village. We all ate better, and people were happier. Many more babies were born. Our tribe grew stronger, stronger than any of the other tribes. And Averama knew that without hard proof that the Deepseeker was corrupted, she could never accuse him, not without risking our own tribe turning against her and the rest of the Stormcallers.” Nissikul shrugged. “She never found that proof and neither did her successor. Neither did my master as far as I knew, though he tried very hard to find something he could use.”
We all sat there in silence for a while, contemplating what this all could mean. Finally, Thukkar spoke. “So we can’t really trust the Deepseeker because we don’t know where his power came from. And we can’t really trust the Elder of the Stormcallers, because he has lied and used us, and don’t really know what he wants.”
Nissikul sighed, using the corner of my cloak to wipe her mouth and hands clean. “So what can we do?”
I stood, looked out over the chasm, and said, “We find Joanna. If Palamun sent her, she might have some idea what we should do.” I sounded more confident than I felt. If the Deepseeker was corrupted, if he had always been corrupted, then what did that mean for my people? We had been using his blessings for three generations. And what did that mean for someone with one of his metal blessings beating in his chest instead of a heart? What did that mean for me?
…
Chapter Eleven: We Are Beneath
Joanna
I woke feeling more exhausted than I had when I had gone to sleep. I supposed that I hadn’t so much gone to a dream world as much as I had spent the night in a lucid nightmare. My body might have slept and recharged, but my mind was weary. I was tired of Chalice, tired of the ice and the cold, tired of my armor- but more than anything else I was tired of being afraid. I tried to cling to the cold, unflagging certainty of the tigress. I tried to remember the way I had been when I had lived on my own in the ruins, before I had been called Joanna Angeles. But the truth was, even then, I had been afraid. The tigress wasn’t fearless; she just knew how to handle fear through action, through cold calm. But this fear was worse than anything else I had ever experienced. It wasn’t the fear of going hungry or the fear of being shot. It wasn’t the sharp, immediate fear of seeing a hungry predator animal staring at me, or the sudden sinking, rational terror of hearing the old Geiger counter I had carried in those days start up its clicking litany. No, this fear was deeper, crueler, inescapable, and inexorable. The fear I felt now was more like the kind described in stories told by the survivors in the bad old days when the war still raged on- the kind of gut-shriveling existential dread that came from not knowing what was out there. I knew that there was something out here, something bigger, stronger, and probably smarter than me. I didn’t know what it wanted, didn’t know why it had chose
n to reveal itself to me. I just knew that it was there, it was Beneath me, and it could even reach up and touch me in my dreams. I needed off of this frozen hell-moon, but there was no way out.
I got up, checked my gear, and secured the data archives in a storage pouch by the weird burug heart that I was carrying. I didn’t know where I planned to go, but I needed to move. I couldn’t really go up- the Erin-Vulur were up there, and if our last interaction was any indication, they would probably try to kill me again, the moment I saw them. Sure, I could smack down Neolithic tribesmen by the handful, all day, every day until I ran out of nutrients in my suit. But the Stormcallers were something entirely different, and I was starting to suspect that there might be something more to this moon- and its inhabitants- than there seemed at first glance.
I could feel Barbas in my mind, an insubstantial itch just over my shoulder, like someone was leaning over and examining something I was working on. He didn’t speak, and I didn’t prompt him to. Our world had just become a little less safe, a little less sensible. Our personal private sanctum had been denied to us, and the substitute we had made, had been invaded, violated, and was no longer the same. My waking life was a struggle to survive a hateful, inhospitable environment, and now my dreaming world was a battlefield. We couldn’t leave. We couldn’t continue our work here. There was only one thing we really could do. We Are Beneath. “We need to go down,” Barbas declared, grimly. I only nodded, trusting that he knew what I was thinking. Whatever was down there, in the dark, beneath the glacier, it clearly wanted something with me- with both of us- and at this point, doing anything but descending further was just delaying the inevitable.
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 47
