Oath Keeper

by Jefferson Smith

  Herself.

  They marched that way all day, slowly crossing the great white tundra known as the Cold Shoulder, the frozen domain to which the Dragon Methilien had long ago exiled the Miseratu, who were now, hopefully, behind them. Shivering in her kirfa, and leaning forward, squinting into the wind and the bright white snowscape in front of her, Tayna had nothing to do but stumble and think.

  She did a lot of both.

  Her body still ached from her stupid cremation hallucination. The cold continued to ease the worst of it, numbing her face and hands and feet, but it would be days before she would be able to move freely again, without her battered extremities throwing her off stride. Until then, that stride would remain a combination of lurching, stumbling, staggering, and other varieties of spasticness.

  As for the thinking part, most of that centered on what she would do next. Part of her knew that things were heating up in Methilien. Everything seemed to be about Angiron lately. First Prince this, and Contender that. And let’s not forget the whole dangly blue earlobes revelation either. Her own life had been sucked into a tight orbit around that creep. Tighter even than anyone who actually lived here. But marriage was the last thing she wanted to think about right now. She was still a kid, and a kid her age shouldn’t be worried about abusive, ego-maniac villain husbands trying to take over the world. She should be acting out, refusing to do the dishes, and rebelling against her parents.

  But first she had to find them. And so far, it had been non-stop husband issues that had been getting in the way. Even that word was a problem. “Husband.” There was no way it applied to her life. Not even a little bit. But English can be so unimaginative sometimes. Where was the word for “delusional psycho-stalker with a magically signed marriage license” when you needed it?

  Whatever word you called him though, he had been her biggest problem so far. But as she dragged her feet across the snow, with her shoulder lowered into the biting wind, it occurred to her that maybe things were changing. Angiron was a Contender for the Gnomileshi Crown now—maybe even King, for all she knew. So he was probably ten kinds of busy back there in Gnome Land, giving speeches and making up war slogans and stuff. Where was he going to find time to be chasing after a useless girl-wife like her? Especially one who worked so hard at being a pain in his everything? And from what he’d said on the Braggart’s Arch, he really was planning some kind of war, so that would only make him five times less patient than usual. All she had to do was keep her distance and stay off his radar, and she probably wouldn’t see him again for a year or more.

  And where could she go that wouldn’t be all tempty for Captain Creepy? Well, if he did start a war, that would happen in the Forest, against the Wasketchin, right? Certainly not up on the mountain against the Djin. Not even Angiron was stupid enough to pick two fights at once. So that meant the safest place for her to go, to keep out of Angiron’s reach, was also the most likely place to find her parents: on the Anvil, with Abeni. It was almost too convenient to be true, but at this point, any good news was a welcome change of scenery.

  Smiling, despite the twinge it wrung from her battered face, Tayna picked up her pace and stumbled on into the wind.

  * * *

  Late that evening, after the sky had dipped from gray, through soot, and had settled into the deep darkness of coal, Tayna heard a squeak of snow behind her and turned back to look. Abeni had given up his chant and allowed the Wagon to sink to the ground onto its runners. Sleepy time. Too tired to say anything, she nodded her agreement and trudged back across the snow to join him. There was no moon in the sky, nor any starlight to see by, and that totality of night made her feel oddly claustrophobic, even though she knew there was a vast, open plain stretching out in every direction around her. She found the edges of the Wagon as much with her fingers as with her eyes, and ducked down quickly beneath it to get out of the wind. Abeni was already there.

  As she crawled under the Wagon’s bulk, Tayna remembered another time and another place, when they had first set out from the Wayitam’s village. On those evenings, before Elicand and Shondu had been lost in the pocket, and before Sarqi and Zimu had been left in the clutches of the water sprites, preparations for night had been almost fun to watch. Soothing. A sort of ballet of the familiar—each of the sons of Kijamon tending to his own duties, each brother working constantly, yet simply, as they went about the practiced ritual of their tasks. And in no time at all, that ballet had produced a tent, and a fire, and food.

  But today there was no ballet. No food. No tent. There was nothing at all to organize. Today, preparing for sleep consisted of crawling under the Wagon and then trying to get comfortable. Sort of. That was all. Despite her half-hearted protests, Abeni insisted on wrapping his arms around her. Better that at least one of them be sheltered and warm, he said, but Tayna was too tired and sore to argue sincerely, so she slumped herself gratefully back into the warmth of his arms and closed her eyes.

  “The land rises,” Abeni said, as they waited for sleep to overtake them.

  “Does it? Hadn’t noticed.”

  “The wind rises, also.”

  “Noticed that part,” Tayna said, reaching up to rub warmth into her strange new earlobes. Apparently her magic ear extensions hadn’t come with the electric heating option. “What does it mean?”

  “Who can say?” Abeni said, shrugging against her back. “Perhaps it is nothing.”

  They lapsed into silence then, and before she knew what happened, Tayna and her earlobes were asleep.

  * * *

  Morning broke with all the subtleness of a train wreck. The sun just seemed to hurtle itself above the horizon, right into Tayna’s eyes. With nothing to eat and no camp to break, the pair of them were ready to get under way again in no time, pausing only long enough to stand and stretch a bit, and to pick up a few chips of ice to suck on. At least they wouldn’t die of dehydration before they starved.

  There was a moment though, when she stretched out her arms in the brilliant sunlight, and then froze. My knapsack! She glanced about quickly, but search as she might, it was nowhere to be found, and Abeni confessed that he had not seen it either. Not here, nor anywhere since he had awakened in this place. The last time she could remember seeing it had been on the Braggart’s Arch, and that meant it had probably been swept away when she’d hit the river. A dull ache throbbed briefly in her stomach, but what could she do? It wasn’t that big a deal, really. The only thing in it had been her journal. Her letters to Shammi. But as important as that had once seemed, she realized now that Shammi was just another one of those icons of childhood that fell away as you got older, like Santa Claus and sleepovers. Given everything that had happened to her recently, losing a powerless fantasy figure who never responded to your pleas for help was probably the least of her problems. Plus, the whole thing just felt a little silly now. She’d miss her journal, for a while, and the ritual of pouring her heart out into it, but that would pass. So when Abeni sang the Wagon back up into the air and they set out across the snow again, Tayna walked a little taller, realizing that an important milestone of her childhood had just been passed.

  Quickly, her thoughts returned to the present, and the problems that hadn’t gone missing. For one thing, she could see that Abeni had been right. As they continued to march, it became obvious that the land really was rising slowly ahead of them, although if that caused any problems for him or the Wagon, Tayna didn’t notice. And by the time the sun had risen midway into the sky, they had reached the brow of the long, slow incline, so it didn’t much matter, anyway. They’d been climbing steadily since sometime yesterday, and now from the top, she could see all the way to a new horizon, down a much steeper slope that dropped away in front of them.

  Or… Wait a minute. What the freakity frack is that?

  It had taken a moment, but Tayna now saw that there was no horizon. There was something in the way, spread out before them. Something huge—as perplexing as it was big. An enormous bubble of milky… sk
y-ness, stretching as far as they could see, to both left and right. But it wasn’t just below them—it rose up in front of them too, and beyond, reaching high up into the sky. High enough to have clouds drifting across its upper reaches. The slope of dirty, wind-blown snow they now stood on ran down sharply, but it stopped when it met the bubble. The great dome was so high that it had surely been visible for days, but they hadn’t noticed it because its whiteness was almost identical to that of the rest of the sky. It had only really become visible now that they could see the slight contrast along its base, where the shadows and ripples of the uneven snow halted abruptly. Even with that edge to start from, Tayna could only just barely follow its arc into the sky with her eyes. She looked back at Abeni, the question clear in her eyes.

  “Abeni does not know this thing,” he said quietly. He had ceased his chant and allowed the Wagon to settle once more into the snow beside them. “But he thinks it would take many, many, many days to travel around it. More days than any journey Abeni has ever made.”

  But there was little else to say, and so, with a hesitant shrug, Tayna stepped forward to begin the long descent that lay before them. Behind her, she could hear Abeni’s renewed chant as he sang the Wagon back up into the air to follow.

  By mid-afternoon, they had been walking downhill for half a day, with Tayna slipping and stumbling on the icier patches, and getting her foot caught in the wind-blown ruts and cracks that were too hard to see in the blank, gray light of the blustery sky. Abeni, meanwhile, plodded along behind her, as sure-footed as ever. Somehow it didn’t seem fair.

  Even after half a day of relentless down-sloping, it was hard to see any progress against the vast bubble of whateverness. Tayna had to keep turning to look back up the slope to reassure herself that they were actually moving, because the only thing in front of them that ever seemed to change was the apparent height of the bubble, which now loomed impossibly high above them. Like airplane high. Higher maybe. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. There was one other thing that was growing too. Her sense of unease. Even with confident, competent Abeni at her side, walking down into this giant crevice between the hill and the bubble made her feel… trapped. What if somebody was following them? They hadn’t seen any sign of skulking pursuit since they’d left the Miseratu things behind, but until now they’d been walking across huge, open expanses of whiteness. Now that they were descending into this giant ditch, her view was much more confined. And she didn’t like that feeling at all.

  The bubble now took up more than half the sky and Tayna found she couldn’t look at it. Every time she tried, her vision refused to catch hold of it, and her head swirled with vertigo. That made her stumble even more frequently, and twice she actually fell. Abeni’s chanting continued unabated though, and unlike her, he showed no signs of difficulty with his footing on the shifting slope.

  Tayna’s shins were now burning from the strain of all that walking—first uphill for days, and now downhill. Was there any such thing as a leg doctor? If so, she’d like one now, please. Or maybe two. Dr. Left and Dr. Right to O.R. please. To say that her calves and shins ached would be to misunderstand the meaning of the word “ache.” And it was different from the battered throbbing that had been her companion since the tailbox. She needed a new word. Crambarking. Her legs were now totally crambarking, and it was only because gravity gave her no option that she continued to flop one numb and burning leg in front of the other, step after step after crambarking step. She seriously doubted her feet would ever function normally again, but still, onward and downward they trudged.

  The swirling winds on this face of the slope drove the cold and the snow through the gaps in her kirfa, and even though her Wasketchin boots were warmer than they had any right to be, they still weren’t much use on densely packed snow. Wasketchin, it seemed, had never heard of treads for the soles of their boots. Probably because there had never been a winter in the Forest before, but that seemed like a pretty lame excuse now.

  Down and down they walked, steadily descending the slope, as the bubble wall grew higher and higher above them, with nothing to entertain or distract them other than the wind, which flung a continuing barrage of tiny ice darts into their faces. Still, despite the difficult conditions, there was no question of turning aside. The Wagon continued to point straight down the hill toward the place where the sky-bubble met the ground—a place that Tayna realized with a start had gotten noticeably closer.

  “We’re almost there,” she said, as much to herself as to Abeni. “It’s like, suddenly one parking lot away from us. Maybe two.” Tayna knew about yards and feet and meters and inches, and she could use them to measure shoes or hallways, but those measurements meant nothing to her for judging distances outdoors. And how big does a mile look, anyway? Or a kilometer? She had no idea. The only thing she could actually visualize that was large enough to be useful was the parking lot at the grocery store where Sister Disgustia had sometimes sent her when the Goodies were planning one of their special parties. And right now, by her official estimation, the base of the sky bubble was exactly two point three parking lots away.

  She paused to look back and check the ridge behind them again. Still clear. Still no tree-hags following them. No axe murderers or insurance salesmen either. It didn’t make her feel any easier about being in this ditch really, but one problem at a time. And for now, the giant bubble dome in front of them was the biggie.

  They reached the base of the slope more or less together. Abeni looked around with a puzzled expression as Tayna turned to look at him, but he did not stop his chant. It took a moment for her to realize the problem. The slope did not level out—it continued at a steady downward angle right up until it met the enormous bubble wall rising up out of the snow. So if he stopped chanting, the Wagon would settle to the snow and then slide downhill to strike the wall. He couldn’t turn the Wagon either. Not alone. Not even with her help. It had taken both Zimu and Sarqi working together, sometimes even requiring Abeni’s help, when they had needed to turn its great bulk in the forest. So here, on a slope? In the wind? This Wagon wasn’t going to be turning aside any time soon. Not for nobody.

  So it was Tayna who first went up and placed a hand tentatively against the bubble, while Abeni continued to sing. The surface was neither warm nor cold. Not rough, not smooth. Neither wet nor dry. It just was. Strange. Weird, even. Otherworldly. But it was strong, too. Tayna kicked it gently with a cold, snow-clumped boot. Nothing happened, so she kicked it again, harder this time. Still nothing, although she wasn’t even sure what she’d been hoping for. She tried slapping it with her hand, but that was a mistake. Nothing changed about the wall, but the cold had numbed her hands. She’d forgotten how sore they still were, and the wall was happy to remind her, so now the bones in the middle of her palm throbbed at the top of their lungs. Angry at her stupidity, Tayna slumped against the wall and slid down its slippery face onto the snow. She was completely out of ideas.

  In the end, Abeni just stopped chanting. The Wagon settled onto the slope with the usual sound effects of heavy things crunching on dry snow, and then it slid forward until it bumped rather loudly against the bubble, with a deep and heavy thud. But that was all. Abeni inspected the point of impact, satisfying himself that there was no damage to the Wagon, then he took several steps backward, up the hill, craning his neck way back, as though trying to see if he could see the top of the wall. But there was no top. The wall just curved away from them, impossibly high, yet still indistinct, as the colors of the wall and the sky faded into each other like milk into cream. After scanning the sky for some time, the big Djin smiled at her and shrugged.

  “It is very big,” he said.

  “Thank you, Commander Obvious,” Tayna replied, still rubbing at the sore fingers of her slap-hand. She had said little all day and was surprised now to find it somewhat easier to speak. Abeni grinned at her, ignoring her jibe, and came back down the slope to stand next to her. He placed his own large, dark hand against the whiteness
of the wall.

  “Very unusual,” he said. “It is like nothing Abeni has ever touched before.”

  “Is there a door, do you think?” Tayna got to her feet and took a few steps off to the side, trying to follow the smoothness of the wall with her eyes, hoping to see if there might be a crack or maybe the tell-tale bulge of a secret entrance. But there was nothing to focus on. A huge looming white nothingness—nothing to see, nothing to catch the eye—set against a huge sky of white nothingness, and framed against a white hill of snowy nothingness. It was almost like being blind, but in shades of swirling white instead of the blackness she had always imagined blindness must be like. So it was a relief when she turned back to Abeni and her eyes could once again find purchase on real objects with discernible edges and differing colors—things she could actually focus on.

  It wasn’t anything she heard or saw that made her look back. It was just a feeling. The low sense of dread that had been plaguing her all day suddenly fluttered at her mind—on the right side—and she turned toward it, looking up the long, icy slope. There at the top, framed against the sky was a tiny, black dot that winked out as soon as it had registered. Tayna twisted angrily at her wrist. They were being followed! And then a sick wave of recognition swept over her and she knew exactly who it was. “Run!” she cried.

  Angiron had found them.

  * * *

  Tayna had only just convinced her rubbery feet to get moving when the air beside her was split by a wild crackling sound and Angiron stepped out of a brilliant, yellow gleam. The tip of his long, white staff whistled through the air where her head had been. Then her husband stepped forward triumphantly, ignoring the fact that she had evaded his attack. He strode toward her with the white bone staff held high, and a gleam of metal under his other arm. It looked exactly like one of Regalia’s urns. But there was no time to examine it. Angiron had found her, and she was trapped.