The Wings of War: Books 1-3: The Wings of War Box Set, Vol. 1

by Bryce O'Connor

  “Drangstek.” Carro nodded. “It’s true, they did, after Metcaf came under attack, but Stullens and Drangstek are close—closer even than Azbar and Ystréd—and it was the very earliest weeks of the freeze when their combined forces pushed north. Beyond that, Stullens and Drangstek had more ties to Metcaf and Harond than typical. Drangstek and Harond were both fishing communities. They traded boat timber, metals, tools, and even workmen on a regular basis. Stullens and Metcaf benefitted from their respective proximity. In comparison, Ystréd is a tiny municipality, too far away to be worth any notice, and Azbar is the opposite, a titan of commerce, capable of complete independence from Northern trading due to its general monopoly on border exchange.”

  He grimaced at some thought. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Quin Tern made an attempt to unite the forces of the other towns to him, while he lived. It might have been worth the attempt.”

  Raz spat in the grass. “Tern was smart enough to make the attempt, but cruel and greedy enough to have then used the army to his advantage. I can practically guarantee he would have left Ystréd to its fate to start with, as it’s further north than Azbar and in the direct path of the Kayle’s march south. I admit I hope your council doesn’t intend to use another town as a sacrificial pawn in its plans.”

  “I can think of one or two members who might consider it.” Carro grimaced. “But the majority? No. It would never be allowed. Still, that brings me to my other concern: even if the towns would be willing to band together and form a standing force capable of stopping the Kayle, the Laorin wouldn’t be the ones to raise the ‘banner,’ as you called it. The Priests and Priestesses of Laor won’t fight the Kayle. They can’t. You know this.”

  Raz raised a brow at that. “All I know is that you can’t kill,” he said, crouching and leaping the eight-foot span of a wide frozen stream as Carro began crossing the uneven ice carefully, Gale following dutifully behind. “What was it that Talo intended to do, then? When you said he would be herald to the towns, coordinating them?”

  “He would have been the intermediary,” Carro responded, reaching the far side of the stream and leaning his staff against a nearby tree momentarily to turn around and guide the stallion the last few feet by the reins. “The peacekeeper, for lack of a better word. The Laorin might take the side of the valley towns in this war against the Kayle, given Baoill's atrocities, but they are absolutely neutral when it comes to matters between the towns themselves. Talo would have been the arbiter, the known and respected face and name, who could ensure the fairness of whatever pacts and alliances had to be formed. He would have eventually drafted the Priests and Priestesses as well, but as healers and negotiators, not as soldiers. War is unavoidable, in this world. We of the faith will struggle mightily to ensure that Laor’s great gift of life is not spat on by man, but when we inevitably fail in this task it is up to us to take on the secondary duty of saving as many as can be saved. Syrah and Talo weren’t the only ones to have worked with the mountain clans in their day. Others have as well—if with less success—and were taught the tribal tongue by the clans. Even more—myself included—have a good grasp of the mountain tongue gained through practice. We can serve as translators, as mediators between forces seeking terms, or surrender. Important roles in a war between people who don’t have a common language.”

  Raz didn’t disagree. He had an odd thought, in fact, at the Priest’s words. It rose, as abrupt as a snake preparing to strike.

  “A pity no one has thought of that to the south,” he muttered as they took a decline of hard, mossy-eaten earth.

  “Why is that?” Carro asked curiously, using his staff to steady himself as he descended uneasily down the hill.

  Raz shrugged. “The atherian. The others of my kind. Southerners themselves don’t keep them, but plenty are enslaved all the same and carried off down to Perce and the Seven Cities.” He grit his teeth in sudden anger. “I hate slavers.”

  “A barbaric practice,” Carro agreed with a sort of tired resignation. Then, out of nowhere, he gave a mirthless laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Raz asked him.

  “I was going to joke,” the Priest said, still smirking wryly as they reached flat ground again, “that if you find some way of ridding us of this damn Kayle, oh great ‘Scourge of the South,’ that I’ll bloody well make it my life’s purpose to learn the lizard-kind language for you.”

  Raz chuckled. “You volunteering to be my… ‘arbiter,’ was it?”

  The Priest smiled, the first real one he’d managed all morning. It was a hard grin, lined with sadness and grief, but there was at least some small hint of true amusement there.

  “Raz i’Syul Arro. You find a way to free the North of Gûlraht Baoill, and Lifegiver take me if I don’t volunteer to be anything you damn well need, boy.”

  CHAPTER 21

  They spent a pleasant morning joking and devising cruel ways to rid themselves of the offending Kayle—or as pleasant as they could manage while trying to shed the weight of Talo’s death, even for a time. They’d eventually concluded there was realistically nothing either of them could do or come up with in their present situation, trekking steadily northeast through the Woods, and so their conversation took the amusing turn towards venting their grief and frustration in Gûlraht Baoill’s unfortunate direction. With some coaxing—or perhaps just succumbing to the need to think of anything but the man he had been forced to leave behind on that frozen lake—Carro had shed what remained of the stiff shell of authority and piousness he had held since Raz had met him. Though this may have been due to the Priest’s need to simply confide in someone—even if that someone was the Monster of Karth—Raz came to suspect, as the morning went on, that he had finally won the man over entirely in some form or another. Maybe when the head of the great ursalus had fallen to the ice.

  Or maybe it had been when Raz’s blade had ended Talo’s pain with a merciful rapidity Carro could never have managed…

  Regardless, the man that emerged—though obviously heavy with sadness and sorrow—turned out to be an excellent travelling companion, capable of crassness and amusingly vindictive thoughts Raz would not have credited him with the day before. When Carro had suggested tying the Kayle up, dropping him up to his neck in a barrel of water, and letting it freeze overnight outside before seeing how far the man would bounce down the side of the mountain, Raz had actually laughed aloud. The sound, so odd to his own ears, had frightened a pair of ravens slumbering on a branch high above them and sent them off with shrill repeated caws that imitated dull, fading echoes as the birds sped off southward through the trees.

  They continued on like this for several hours, content in the distraction from less pleasant ponderings. They became so engrossed, in fact, in a particular conversation in which Carro was giving Raz his most blatant opinion of some of the members of the High Citadel’s council, that Raz almost missed the first true patches of dim light that cut down through the canopy of the Woods. When he noticed them, though, he saw too that the snow—only frosting or thinly layered on the forest floor over the past ten-day—was growing steadily thicker as they walked. Within a quarter hour, in fact, it was piling up in heavy mounds beneath trees that seemed to be shrinking before their very eyes the further they pressed. For several minutes Raz was taken by the bizarre impression of sudden, immense growth, as though he and Carro were sprouting to gigantic proportions with every step they took. The blue-green evergreens of the Arocklen had towered over them so absolutely for so long that seeing these odd, diminutive specimens start to surround them was as incredible an experience as entering the Woods in the first place, if less mystifying.

  And then they stepped out of the final edge of the forest, and Raz’s awareness of his own size and meaning was flipped yet again on its head.

  They’d missed the trail, he realized at once. At some point, likely distracted by conversation, he, Carro, and Gale had crossed the narrow strip of worn earth, already hard to make out in the undergrowth and frost o
f winter. They’d continued on—very likely too far east now—until the Arocklen came to an end, spilling them out once more into knee-high snow, the sky a blur of greyish-white as more fell heavily around them. There was no wind for the moment, though, and so the flakes descended in lazy, enticing patterns, accentuating the sparse examples of trees that still lay before them, jutting from stony ground at increasingly higher points as the ground rose in a steady incline, steeper and steeper until Raz felt the earth were trying to fold over itself.

  When he looked up upon the Saragrias Ranges in all their colossal glory, Raz forgot any forged concept he’d ever had of his own worth in the world.

  He had been aware of their presence since before they’d entered the Woods, of course. Though Talo and Carro had never been able to make the ranges out, Raz’s sharp eyes had trailed their outline often for the final hours before reaching the tree line. He’d wondered—offhandedly, at the time—what manner of creation could be so large as to tower imperiously over the earth. It had been a question born of impressed curiosity.

  Now, it was a question reincarnated from shocking wonder that oddly toed the line of something very much like fear.

  The mountains were prodigious crafts of some god or another. That was the only way Raz could categorize them so that the Saragrias became fathomable. He didn’t know what or whose gods, but he didn’t really care one way or the other. They rose—even more teeth-like now that he could see them up close—to pierce the very sky. The lowest peaks among them he could just make out through the snow, scraping at the storm clouds as a far-off wind blew powdered white streams from their cliffs and into the air in constant, tumbling currents. Their sides, pockmarked with ledges and pockets of huddled pines, swooped upward and overhead, grey against the contrast of dark stone and snow. High, high above, white capped the very top of each, like a series of wintery crowns that gave the ranges nothing short of the bearing of kingly titans suspended over an endless empire.

  But that was only the smallest of them. The largest, thrusting up from the land here and there between the bands of the mountains that seemed to extend ever northward, did not toy with the sky as their shorter cousins did. Rather, those colossi, behemoths of stone and earth, were swallowed by the heavens, their great peaks sometimes vanishing into the clouds long before Raz could make out so much as a hint of capping snow. Lacking their white crowns, Raz couldn’t help but wonder if their heights ascended into a world beyond the one he knew so well. Did they thrust all the way up into the night sky, perhaps? Did they rise to stand as proud sentries for the Moon’s nightly traverse?

  For the first time in what would become a great many times, Raz pondered if climbing to the top of the greatest of those peaks might allow him a glimpse of the souls that had long left him for the brightness of Her Stars…

  “Well… Unfortunate, but I guess it can’t be helped.”

  Raz blinked, tearing his eyes from the mountains to look around at Carro. The man was gazing up at the line of the Saragrias as well, but with such an utter lack of awe that shocked Raz so deeply, it almost made him sad.

  “W-What’s that?” he asked faintly, struggling to pull his mind back from the tops of the Saragrias and down to the real world. Carro looked around at him, brows furrowed in concern.

  “You alright, boy?”

  Raz nodded, getting a grip on himself. “What’s unfortunate?” he asked again, extinguishing his torch in the snow so he could put a hand out to pat Gale’s neck as the horse limped closer to him.

  In truth he did it more to support himself than anything, feeling slightly dizzy standing there in the shadow of the mountains.

  Carro watched him a moment longer, the look not leaving his face. Eventually, though, he answered. “We’re too far east. We’ll need to double back. Not for long, though. I know this place. We’re within the harvest radius, so we’re not far.”

  “The what?” Raz asked.

  “The harvest radius,” Carro repeated, turning around already and making back towards the trees. “Each summer, the residents of the Citadel descend every few days to forage and hunt for food. In a couple of months the Woods supply most of our needs for the freeze, though game gets scarce quickly. The harvest radius is just the space of several miles about the base of the pass where this happens.”

  “Clever,” Raz responded, giving the mountains one last long look before grabbing the doused torch from the snow again and following the Priest back into the relative cover of the trees. He didn't know if he felt safer, hidden beneath the branches, or saddened as they moved away from the ranges. “I hadn't considered that. I suppose it can’t be easy to grow food through such a winter.”

  “We make do with hardier varieties,” Carro told him as the light began to fade overhead. “The kitchens plant potatoes and some other vegetables indoors. Enough to last the freeze. Game is dressed and frozen in outer rooms and sheds, ones that aren’t heated. It’s hard, some years, but we make it through without anyone starving.”

  “Indoors?” Raz asked, equal parts perplexed and intrigued at the multitude of particulars Carro had just revealed. “You can farm without the Sun? And unheated? What do you mean? Come to think of it, how do you live up there without every one of you freezing your balls off through the winter?”

  Carro chuckled. “With a lot of effort and even more help from the gifts Laor has granted us. Planting is simple enough. We can manage the soil and water on our own, but for light we have to rely on the magics. Heat, though, is more complicated…”

  For the next half hour or so Raz listened in rapt attention as Carro began to tell him of all the marvels of Cyrugi’ Di that Talo had never seen to reveal. He described the great system of copper piping that channeled steam and hot air through the walls and floor of the Citadel throughout the year, fed by massive furnaces in the bowels of the temple. He talked of the wonders of the library, making it out to be a cavernous expanse of endless knowledge, all bathed in the painted history of the faith across its grand domed ceiling. He told Raz about the classrooms, the practice chambers, the dormitories, and the dining hall where men and women of all ranks and ages ate and conversed together when time allowed. He even spoke of Priest-Mentors, of the ceremonies of consecration, of graduating from the position of acolyte and earning one’s staff, as well as the rare ritual of Breaking—the process in which a member of the faith was stripped of their powers and cast out, leaving them marked with a great scar across their face.

  This last bit of information had tugged at Raz’s memory, though he didn’t quite know why.

  “Why would a Priest be Broken?” he asked—his first question since Carro had started on about the Citadel and the faith. “Is it a sacrifice? Or—?”

  “No sacrifice,” Carro answered him, scowling a little at the suggestion. “Laor requires no such barbaric offerings, like those demanded by the Stone Gods. No… Breaking of Priests, Priestesses, or even acolytes only occurs under one circumstance: the throwing aside of vows, the violation of our most cardinal principal.”

  Raz understood at once.

  “Killers,” he said tonelessly.

  “Killers,” Carro repeated in agreement. “Or those of the faith who—through action or inaction—knowingly partake in the deliberate death of another…”

  He trailed off, and Raz noticed that the man had suddenly paled.

  “What is it?” he asked, concerned.

  “Nothing,” Carro said quickly, seeming to shake off some overbearing thought. “Nothing worth dwelling on, at the very least.” He licked his lips. “As I was saying, Breaking is our faith’s most extreme form of punishment. I’ve only witnessed it once, performed on a girl only a few years older than Syrah. Her powers were ripped from her, she was relieved of her acolyte’s robes, and then carted to Ystréd within a week. There she was left with the gold for food and lodging for a single night.”

  “Harsh,” Raz said, impressed by the unmerciful nature of the act. “I wouldn’t have expected it from your k
ind.”

  “The Laorin have no clemency for betrayers of the faith,” Carro said, his voice hard as they pushed through a particularly heavy thicket of underbrush. “Least of all heartless, cruel creatures like Lazura. Do you know what she did? She—mmmph!”

  Raz practically lifted Carro off his feet, the hand that had been holding the torch wrapped firmly about the Priest’s mouth, the torch itself falling with a hiss against the icy ground. As the man struggled in his arms, his shouts of surprise and pain as his broken arm was pressed against his body muffled by the leather and steel of Raz’s gauntlet, Raz stomped out the flames with the pads of one fur boot and dragged Carro back into the bushes. He ran into Gale’s chest as he backed up, the stallion fortunately having not pressed through behind them yet, and the animal nickered loudly in surprise.

  “Shhhh,” Raz hissed to both of them, eyes wide as he willed them to adjust quickly to the limited light of the Woods.

  At once Carro stopped struggling, recognizing the tension in Raz’s bearing. Raz let him go, and the Priest blinked the pained watering of his eyes away as they crouched in the dark in front of the horse.