“Bastion certainly does not.”
“No one does, except you. And your lover.”
How does he know about Rol?
As if he could read her mind, he added, “I’m a spymaster. If there’s information to be had, I’ll have it. I know what you want out of this life, Oriana of Liosis. Believe it or not, I want the same.
“I did not swear fealty to Valios. I did not swear fealty to Aven Klouth when I helped him take the throne. And I do not swear fealty to Bastion Rook. I swear fealty to Avestas. I desire the best for her.”
Oriana tongued her cheek. Tiny clams burrowing beneath the sand tickled her toes. “Is that why you allied yourself with a warring king who wants to decimate the East?”
“He furthers my goals, just as Farris furthers yours. You and I would make a formidable pair, Oriana. In fact, I—” Horace turned his head up toward the sky.
A green-scaled dragon swam through a haze of mist and low gray clouds, happily flapping its wings as the youthful ones always do. Oriana waved at Gamen, who was on the saddle. Or at least she assumed it was Gamen; the dragon—Gorm—was his, after all.
Gamen did not return the gesture. He instead pointed, then patted Gorm on his thick leathery skull. The dragon arced around and aimed its nose at Oriana.
That’s Gamen, all right, Oriana thought. The thick swaths of flowing black chest hair gave him away every time.
“An impressive beast,” Horace said, a rare affect of joy in his voice.
“They grow bigger,” Oriana said. Then, for added effect, “Much bigger.”
Grom came in much too fast and without any semblance of precision. As young dragons are wont to do, he came down hard and ungracefully. He would have tossed Gamen thirty feet into the air had he not strapped himself to the saddle.
“Ori!” shouted Gamen, despite him being no more than fifteen paces from where she stood. He sounded out of breath, as if he had sprinted down from the Crags to reach her. “Thought I’d have to wake you. We’ve”—he glanced at Horace, pausing—“got a… problem. Need you to come to—” Another look at Horace. He scratched his scruffy cheek, saying nothing more.
Horace offered him a diplomatic smile and returned his attention to Oriana.
“Think about it, will you? I won’t burden you with the hows and whys; you’re clearly too busy. But if I’ve at least piqued your interest, come see me. I leave the city in three days.”
With that, he touched her shoulder and ambled back toward the walls of Torbinen.
“Get on,” Gamen said. “We got big problems.” He swallowed heavily, breathed hard. “Emphasis on big.”
Oriana hiked up her smock. She bounced one foot on a stirrup and launched herself into the empty space of Gamen’s saddle. She wrapped her arms around his bare, sweaty waist; sometimes she hated the fact he refused to wear shirts.
Oriana should have been more concerned. Gamen was self-sufficient. He never sought her help unless he absolutely needed it.
But Horace Dewn… while he no longer had her ear, he still preoccupied her thoughts. Queen of Haeglin? It sure sounded a step closer to her goal than twiddling her thumbs in Torbinen. But how? And why? Also, she’d promised Farris the aid of her dragons.
Days like these—the ones whose dawn is spoiled and rotten—sometimes get better. This would not be one of those days.
Gorm took her and Gamen to the Pinnacle, a fat stretch of land that thinned severely into an arrow tip and reached a mile or so into the ocean. It’d been there, seven years ago, that Oriana had received her whelps and the abdicating sorcerers from the Conclave.
Since setting up in Torbinen, Oriana and her sorcerers had maintained a small enclave at the tip of the Pinnacle. The reason for its existence was twofold. It allowed a private and expansive area in which to train the younger dragons for flight, and it ensured a quick escape in case Farris turned on them.
Oriana had thought tragedy might have struck one of her dragons, but Gamen reassured her they were all accounted for.
“Touren was paddlin’ the new boat out there,” Gamen explained as Gorm landed, “making sure it was sealed nice and good. Rudder smacked an assload of rock. What we thought was rock.”
He jumped off the saddle and extended a hand, helping Oriana down into the cold, wet sand. On a makeshift dock that wobbled with each gentle cresting wave stood a handful of sorcerers. One in particular was trying to lasso what appeared to be a partially submerged boulder.
“Got her!” the sorcerer said. He’d snagged the looped rope around a branch of rock protruding from the boulder, or whatever lay beneath the water. He heaved and reeled, but the thing didn’t budge.
A couple sorcerers lent their muscle, but that proved to be about as successful as a murder of crows lining up to shove an ox across a field.
Gamen started toward the dock. “We’ll take the boat out. Rudder’s busted, but that doesn’t make it inoperable, just a pain in the arse.” He turned back. “Coming along?”
Oriana cocked her head like a puppy hearing a strange noise. “It almost looks like an arm. The thing sticking out of the water there.”
Gamen wiped a hand down the back of his neck. His mouth opened, as if he was about to speak, but he closed it without saying a word. Then, after a moment of consideration, “Think I heard thunder. Best get out there ’fore lightning strikes. Death by frying doesn’t sound too enticing.”
Oriana followed him to the dock, keeping to herself the many questions in her mind. Gamen seemed disturbed, which made her disturbed. It wasn’t like him to fret over… well, anything, actually. Gamen was a man who could be told he had two hours left to live and he’d give you a shrug and tell you that’s the way it goes.
How could you unsettle a man like that? Or, perhaps the better question, what could unsettle a man like that?
Oriana was unsure if she wanted to know the answer. But curiosity is an awful thirst to let go unquenched, so she stepped onto the rectangular boat made of logs and waited for Gamen to untie the clove knots anchoring the boat in place.
He handed her a paddle. “If you don’t mind. It’s a bitchin’ thing to do it yourself without a rudder to steer.”
Oriana didn’t mind. She never did consider herself prim, proper and unwilling to get her hands dirty. Or in this case, wet.
With synchronized dips and raises, she and Gamen paddled gently away from the dock.
“All right,” Gamen said, standing. “Ease up.” He moved to the front of the boat, paddle in hand.
The jutting rod of rock, or branch of rock, or offshoot or—in Oriana’s mind—arm of rock drew close. Gamen toed the edge of the boat, then stabbed the paddle blade into the craggy object, stopping the vessel’s momentum.
He waved Oriana closer. “Stand up here and you’ll see it—well, I guess him—in all his glory. Or terror. Might be a better word, that.”
Oriana tried preparing herself for the worst. She found that difficult because she was unsure what the worst could be. A hundred possibilities presented themselves, from the realistic to the outright banal.
Not one of those possibilities included what she actually saw.
The Glass Sea is pristine, a great body of water untouched and unspoiled, and one can gaze into its shallow waters and see the bottom and all that exists in between. When Oriana witnessed what lay between, she felt her guts lurch up into her throat.
It was larger than life. Which is to say it was larger than any life form Oriana had ever seen.
It resembled that of a giant from folklore, legs the size of ancient tree trunks. Head the size of a boulder, shoulders so vast you couldn’t leap from one to the other even with a running start.
It’s a statue, Oriana thought. She almost said it, too, but the little voice inside her head—the one that reels back in your stupid and inane thoughts—told her that this was no statue. Statues couldn’t bend like this.
“Is it dead?” Oriana asked.
“Either that,” Gamen said, “or sleeping. Best
hope it’s the former. You ever hear of anything like this?” Oriana shook her head. “It wasn’t here nine months ago. Promise you that.”
Oriana reached out and touched the giant’s arm. “Do you know what I thought when I first learned that Baelous existed, that Avestas wasn’t the only land in this world? I thought, we aren’t alone.” She swallowed, gently scrubbed her fingers against the rocky limb. “I have that same thought right now.”
CHAPTER FOUR
There are some places where life is not intended to flourish, and this was one of them. But life, by its very conception, is stubborn and will do whatever it pleases. This explains why fibrous green plants armored with barbs grow in deserts and moss creeps up mountains sheathed in ice.
A better and simpler explanation existed for why the village of Yaervel had been founded and why its people remained: greed. Among jutting hills on which the village stood, palisades driven deep into snow and ice, within those walls, beneath the frosted soil, lived a god.
The people of Yaervel had filled their coffers with the coin of pilgrims coming to see the god, desiring his wisdom. Like those before him, Gynoth also desired wisdom. But he would not be paying for it.
He was led into a room illuminated by blue wintry frost, courtesy of the chunks of ice and snow that formed a dome. His escort, a tiny woman in furs, released her grip on his arm and positioned herself before a fat dais upon which sat a steel throne. It appeared as uncomfortable as a hunchback is misshapen.
A man with horns stitched into his forehead sat there crookedly, chin on his enormous fist. His name was Prawg. He had several iron bangles pierced into his nose and drooping from his ears. An amber stud the size of a thumbnail had been punched into his cheek.
Gynoth began counting silently. One.
“We eyed the Man of Death near Dredge Pass,” the woman hissed, as if her voice was steam whistling from a hot kettle.
Ten.
The man on the throne wiggled his tongue between his lips in a manner befitting an ogre. A very unsightly ogre whose social graces were deplorable even by nonexistent standards.
“The Man of Death,” he said, each word rumbling in Gynoth’s soles. “What’s it been? Nine months?”
“Seven,” Gynoth said matter-of-factly. Thirty.
The ogre snorted something yellow and green and perhaps bloody out of his nose. “You had me convinced you were a smart one.” He pointed a knotty, slightly crooked finger at Gynoth. “Big brains in that small skull of yours. Here you are, though, so I guess not.”
Seventy.
Gynoth grabbed a nearby chair chiseled from a block of ice, turned it around and sat. He propped his arms up on the frozen backing. “I’m only a man who wishes to speak with a god.”
“You’re not a man at all,” Prawg said between teeth chipped, splintered and rotted.
Gynoth lifted his brows, intrigued. “I could show you, if you’d like. Take me to Quarth.”
Prawg roared with laughter, slapping his knees. The iron rings in his nose jangled as he rocked back, and the smile on his face faded. “You’ve got a better chance of dining with the old gods beneath the sea.” A grin crept across his lips. It was a grin intended to be unsettling, Gynoth guessed, but all it produced from him was a yawn.
“I want his wisdom.” One hundred fifty.
The ogre leaned forward, his big, thick nose twitching in apparent fury. “And I want my brother back. Can you do that?”
“No,” Gynoth said.
Time heals all wounds was a proverb that, like most proverbs Gynoth had heard, turned out to be false. It’d been seven months since Gynoth had led his army of dead onto the frozen shores belonging to Tamris Odorn, Prawg’s brother and patriarch—former patriarch—of the Odorn family.
It was hardly personal. Gynoth simply needed muscle, and the risen who had sworn fealty to Gynoth provided that. Prawg never had quite forgiven him.
Prawg sniffed. He wrung his leathery hands. “You have no power here, necromancer. Wherever your army is, I will kill them.” He stood, pounded huge fist into another. “I will murder them. And this time, it will be forever… because I will murder you too.”
Three hundred. “You have the high ground,” Gynoth agreed. “And I see you’ve consolidated your power well in this region. I wonder if the Shulls and Droushs remain.”
“They do not,” Prawg said pridefully.
Three hundred forty. Gynoth folded his hands. “There’s a storm coming, Prawg. And I’ll need every being I’ve ever brought back from the lonely solitude of death to stand toe-to-toe with this storm. I cannot risk losing even one soldier. So I didn’t bring them.”
Four hundred.
For all of Prawg’s outwardly fiendish characteristics, he was not a fool. Maybe he wasn’t sharp—his brother certainly hadn’t been—but he seemed to understand that Gynoth would not have arrived unarmed, without the backing of his risen, and having brought with him no plan.
Four hundred thirty. “Take me to the god of wisdom. I advise you to do so before I reach five hundred. I’m at four hundred forty-one now.” Prawg looked at him with one creased eye. “Four hundred forty-five.”
“What do you want with a mad god? You’re despicable, but not naive. Not like the gullible and dirty-faced who make their pilgrimages here, thinkin’ Quarth’ll give ’em the answers to life.”
Gynoth stood. He swung the chair back to its original location. “Answers. Four hundred fi—”
Prawg loomed over him, his shadow of blubber swallowing Gynoth entirely. “What happens at five hundred?”
Gynoth blinked. “Death.”
Prawg swallowed. “It’s what you command, but you won’t do us all in. No, I promise you that.” The ogre had the intention of intimidating Gynoth, but he sounded timid and unsure.
“And… that’s five hundred.” A distinct whoosh made him smile. “Dragons obey their masters very well.” He held a hand out toward the flapping canvas door of the domed room. “After you.”
Prawg didn’t move. Not at first. But when he heard trumpeting horns, his eyes widened and he ran.
Gynoth followed lazily behind.
Outside, circling in a sky that was permanently marred with cold gray clouds, were thirty dragons white as bone.
“My brother died at your hands,” Prawg said, following the arcing flightpath of the dragons. “And so it is with me.”
“Allow me a word with Quarth,” Gynoth said. “And you can live forevermore.”
“They’d think me a coward.”
Gynoth listened to the roar of his dragons. “You would rather depart this world?”
“As a warrior,” Prawg said. His voice had fled back into domed structure of ice.
Gynoth turned, curious. He shook his head in disappointment as Prawg came at him with a double-headed ax. The patriarch must have known he couldn’t have possibly closed the gap between himself and Gynoth in time.
But he nonetheless heaved the ax up onto his shoulder. And he ran, gnashing his teeth and letting loose a war cry.
Gynoth withdrew into the realm of death as necromancers are wont to do. Physically, he remained in Yaervel, standing before an iced dome—an idle figure awaiting to be cleaved in two by an angry, vengeful warlord. But mentally and spiritually, he rummaged around in a realm where death and all of its embodiments resided.
When Gynoth returned, Prawg was but a short distance from cleaving him in two. Gynoth shook his head, frowning as Prawg lifted the ax high and with a twisted face prepared to bring it down into the necromancer’s skull.
A barbed root, partially rotted and wholly diseased, surged upward through the frozen soil. It burst through thick layers of ice and heavy, compacted snow. Prawg felt the ground rumble. A blink of his eyes later and the barbed root spiraled up through his spine, blending his innards like a fine a custard.
It lifted him high into the air, over the roof of his domed abode. His ax tumbled from his grasp and fell at Gynoth’s feet.
Gynoth clicked hi
s tongue in tsk-tsk-tsk fashion. “Here lies Prawg, just as foolish as his brother.” He turned then, facing a village from where arrows flew and people scattered in fear. A clutch of cadaverous dragons descended upon the land and wrought destruction and chaos.
He walked amid screams and pleas for the gods to intervene. It was unfortunate, perhaps, that Prawg had been so stubborn. But Gynoth would bring these people back to life; they would serve his army well. In the meantime, he had a god to talk to. Answers to gather.
There was a storm coming. Gynoth hoped it hadn’t already arrived.
CHAPTER FIVE
Elaya hauled herself up sagging stone steps, carrying two armfuls of dry twigs. The stairs spilled out onto a landing hemmed in by ruined walls. She dropped the tinder onto a neat pile of thicker branches that had been sawed into short, squat pieces.
“Your turn,” she said to Kaun, sitting herself on a ledge of sandstone. Beside her sat Valterik and Tig, and a few feet away slept Adom and Paya.
Elaya had returned to their campsite from the day prior. It was an ancient fortress, reduced to dilapidated ruins littered with pillars chopped off at the knees and busted staircases. Still, some of the floors remained and provided for a high vantage point from which the Eyes could spot intruders.
While Kaun knelt and prepared to get a fire going, Elaya swung one leg across the other and yawned. “The Mutator,” she said. “Sounds scary. Should I be frightened?”
Valterik rummaged in the pockets of his robe, muttering to himself. He finally produced a small leather pouch, dipped his fingers inside and held a pinch of what looked like herbs to his cherry nose. He shrugged and packed them into a simple pipe.
“I shouldn’t think so,” he said. “Did you know these ruins were once the hideout of Aleer, when the Gang of Six turned against him?”
Elaya didn’t know that, and while the lore might have been interesting, that wasn’t what intrigued her. It seemed an awfully big coincidence for Valterik to bring up the name of the very god for whom the Eyes were named. She thought this was his subtle way of informing her he knew far more about them than they knew of him.
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