The Riders of Thunder Realm

by Steven Lochran

  After eating their fill of baked potatoes and roasted iguanodon in the empty dining hall, they retired to the drawing room to drink tankards of cider and swap stories around the potbelly stove. Zeke concentrated on keeping the fire fed with logs as the others told tales of home.

  ‘Do you know what the greatest challenge of living at Starlight Fields is?’ Drake said, swirling what was left of his drink. ‘I’ll give you a clue. It’s not the freezing cold and it’s not the nights that last for weeks at a time …’

  ‘The isolation?’ Joss guessed.

  Drake grinned as he shook his head. ‘It’s the mammoth dung,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what stink is until you’ve trodden in a fresh pile of that heaping mess!’ Joss burst out laughing. Even Hero guffawed. ‘You think that’s bad?’ she said, smirking as if they were playing a game of castes and she held all three kings. ‘We breed pterosaurs at Blade’s Edge Acres –’

  ‘Not the neatest of creatures, I take it?’ Drake asked.

  Hero arched an eyebrow. ‘Why do you think I wear this hat?’

  They were snorting in hysterics now. Everyone but Zeke, that was. He stared into the flaming guts of the potbelly stove and though he smiled it was distant, as if his thoughts were a thousand leagues away.

  Not that Joss was one to speculate. He’d been cursing himself for losing the Champion’s Blade ever since they’d fled Dragon’s Tail. Tonight was the first time he’d been able to slip out from beneath the cloud of that all-consuming worry. Though it came with some relief to laugh with his brethren, he could already feel himself falling under the cloud again.

  Perhaps Zeke was experiencing something similar. The Way was treacherous enough without having some masked maniac pursuing them, threatening them, maybe even bribing or blackmailing them. It was natural to feel disturbed by it all. Joss wondered if there was some way he could reach out to Zeke, to offer him some kind of comfort. But as the evening’s conversation petered out, Hero finished the last of her drink with one gulp and rose from her armchair. ‘Think it’s time I hit the hay,’ she burped, which prompted Drake and Zeke to also say their goodnights and retire to their rooms.

  Joss chose to linger behind, watching each of them leave. When he was sure everyone was gone, he ventured over to the illumivox machine that had been installed behind a privacy screen in the corner opposite the stove. Pumping a fistful of coins into it, he twisted the machine’s dials and jabbed at its brass keys, then awaited a response.

  ‘Round Shield Ranch,’ Horace Vahst’s face floated up before him in an electric cloud of pixels and static. Vahst’s expression quickly shifted from disinterest to disdain as he caught sight of whom he was addressing. ‘Oh. It’s you, Sarif.’

  ‘Can I speak to Edgar?’ Joss asked. Vahst just stared at him dumbly. ‘Edgar Greyson. Sur Wallace’s prentice.’

  ‘The albino?’ Vahst said, still uncertain. ‘Hang on, I’ll fetch him.’

  There was a clatter on the line as Vahst shoved aside the receiver and walked away from the control panel. As Joss waited, he thought about what he would discuss with Edgar. Should he mention his suspicions about his brethren? Their encounters with the enigmatic and seemingly supernatural Thrall? Most importantly, should he admit to having lost the Champion’s Blade? And what advice could Edgar possibly offer in the face of all that?

  He’d held the entire conversation in his head twice over by the time Edgar finally came on the line, breathless from having no doubt run all the way from their barracks. Joss thought again of the barred windows in his sleeping cell, their view restricted to the courtyard and the fortress walls. Whatever problems the open road had, it certainly beat being stuck back there.

  ‘Joss?’ Edgar asked uncertainly. ‘This is unusual. Is everything all right?’

  Joss paused. ‘Everything’s fine,’ he replied. ‘How’s the ranch?’

  They had a brief and awkward talk about clipping the claws of raptor hatchlings, before Joss bade him farewell and then headed up to bed. Whatever was yet to come, he knew he had to face it as he had every other challenge throughout his life. On his own.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  A FORGOTTEN ORDER

  THE next day was spent traversing paths overgrown with weeds and waist-high grass. The Spires were now so close that it felt like Joss and the others were in pursuit of a fugitive who was only one step ahead of them. Glory was within their grasp, if only they could reach it.

  The grasses finally receded as the Bladebound, sweaty and exhausted, came upon a long abandoned ruin. Though it was now little more than a pile of collapsed walls and staircases that led nowhere, each of the prentices knew exactly where they stood. The Forgotten Order.

  ‘What happened here?’ Zeke asked as they rode through the grounds, avoiding the weathered planks of wood that were hidden among clumps of grass, the only relics left of what would have once been many leagues of fencing.

  ‘Nobody knows for sure,’ Drake replied. ‘All the history books tell us is that it was the easternmost paladero order, an outpost established hundreds of years ago and lost not long after. Some say it was a blizzard that swallowed them, some say a blaze. Others believe it was a battle that wasn’t their own but that claimed them regardless, while the strangest stories have it as something else that came for them. Something inhuman. Any way it happened, there were no survivors left to tell the tale, and no other order has been built this far from Thunder Realm since. Save for those of us in the Northern Tundra, of course.’

  Joss looked around at the crumbling bricks strangled with creepers. There was an air to the place of an untended graveyard. He too had heard tell of the fate of the Forgotten Order, though there was an element that Drake hadn’t mentioned. ‘Their souls fled to Vaal …’ he said, breaking the silence that had befallen them.

  ‘Huh?’ Zeke blurted.

  ‘All the paladeros and prentices and fieldservs who lived here,’ Joss added. ‘When they died, their souls fled to Vaal, to join those who haunt the Ghost City. The Invisible Horde, they call them. The restless dead.’

  A shadow fell across Joss’s face, and he looked up to see the sun setting behind the bowed spikes of a ribcage that was large enough to serve as the frame of a storehouse. It was just one set of bones that lay scattered throughout the ruins, the bleached relics of what would have once been a large herd of livestock, but unlike the remains in the undercity catacombs none of these had been artfully arranged. As with everything else here, they had been abandoned to time and lost to memory.

  The Forgotten Order’s grounds curved down a hillside, leading into an expansive valley that was ten leagues wide or more. On its furthest edges, past the tall grass riddled with rusted weapons of a long forgotten war, stood the black mountain peaks known as the Spires. And nipping at their ankles was Vaal, once the First City of Mortals, now an apparition in the distance.

  ‘Close to a day’s ride, I’d say, and foolish to attempt at night,’ Hero said, using her binoculars to survey the surrounding landscape.

  ‘We should camp here and set out before dawn,’ replied Zeke.

  ‘Maybe we should ride back up the hill and camp there,’ Drake suggested. ‘We’d be too exposed here, surely. And the morning fog …’

  ‘Don’
t be such a milksop, Drake,’ Zeke said with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘If Thrall or any of his cronies are following us, we’ll spot them coming down the rise and then we can make a quick break for it across the field. Don’t you agree, Joss?’

  No, I don’t, Joss thought. But Zeke sounded so confident, and the last thing Joss wanted to do was contradict him now that he was talking again.

  ‘Sounds reasonable.’ He shrugged, and left it at that.

  ‘Reasonable?’ Hero repeated in disbelief. ‘Were you knocked on the head at some point and I failed to notice? You always camp on high ground. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘Do that and we’ll find our throats slit in our sleep, I guarantee it!’ Zeke said, quickly growing ill-tempered.

  ‘We can keep a watch, like always,’ Drake replied in an attempt to pacify him.

  But Zeke wouldn’t listen. ‘We’re camping here,’ he said, slinging himself off his cycle and landing with both boots planted in the thick clay. ‘End of story.’

  Sensing there was no use in further argument, Joss and Drake both dismounted to start setting up camp. Even Hero begrudgingly lent a hand, though she couldn’t resist muttering the occasional complaint under her breath.

  Soon enough they were sitting around a campfire with their tents raised and their evening meals cooking. Whatever camaraderie they’d shared at the inn the previous night seemed to have faded. Instead they sat there silently, watching as thousands of fireflies drifted into the valley. It looked as if loose stars had floated down from the heavens to dance through the fields, the sight enough to leave Joss with a profound sense of serenity despite the earlier tensions.

  That serenity was disrupted by a loud smack as Hero hurled one of her zamaraqs into a nearby tree, marched over to yank it free, then stomped back to throw it again. Again and again she did it, until she’d grown discontent with merely hitting her target and instead pulled another zamaraq from her bandolier to toss it in a wide arc. The swirling blade traced a large circle before turning back towards its owner, flying straight for Hero’s head. Just as it was about to hit her, she reached up and plucked it nimbly out of the air.

  ‘Wow,’ Joss exclaimed. ‘How’d you do that without cutting yourself?’

  ‘Practice,’ Hero replied, then spun on her heel to embed this zamaraq in the tree alongside the first. Now satisfied, Hero strolled over to tug the blades from the tree and wipe the sap off them.

  ‘I’m surprised you don’t carry any of those,’ Zeke said to Joss, pointing at Hero’s zamaraqs. He was sitting at a distance from everyone else, his knees drawn up in front of his face with his arms wrapped around his legs.

  Joss scrunched his nose. ‘Why? I’m not skyborne.’

  ‘Because zamaraqs were originally a Kahnrani weapon,’ Zeke replied, as if the answer should have been obvious. ‘Kahnra?’ he repeated when Joss looked at him in confusion. ‘The empire to which Daheed originally belonged? None of this means anything to you?’

  ‘Can’t say it does,’ Joss muttered as he flushed with embarrassment.

  ‘You can read all about it on my Scryer …’ Zeke said, pulling the circular device out again and firing it up. The projector illuminated their faces as the air filled with images of spinning zamaraqs, foreign flags and maps that Joss didn’t recognise.

  ‘Have anything loaded up on there about tracking Questing Birds, do you?’ Drake asked as he slurped on a can of steaming soup.

  ‘Quetzalcoatlus,’ Hero muttered around the packet of tyrannosaur jerky that she was tearing open with her teeth, her zamaraqs stuffed safely back in their pouches.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Technically they’re called quetzalcoatlus.’ She plucked a strip of jerky from the packet to chew on. ‘Questing Bird is just a nickname.’

  ‘Have you ever seen one?’ Drake asked.

  ‘Not in person. But I’m sure Prince Pretty Boy over there would have an image on his doohickey.’

  Zeke scowled. ‘Prince Pretty Boy? Really?’

  ‘All right. Have it your way,’ Hero said, then added with a teasing smile, ‘King Pretty Boy.’

  Both Drake and Joss chortled at the joke, small as it was, while Zeke just sighed, shook his head and brought up the image of a Questing Bird on his Scryer. The pterosaur was huge, its head topped with an aerodynamic fin and its wings bristling with red feathers. The recording let out a high-pitched shriek that startled the animals as they munched on their evening feed.

  ‘Strange to think all our futures depend on one creature …’ Zeke said, staring up at the projection.

  ‘One creature and its eggs,’ Drake added.

  ‘They nest in high peaks,’ Hero said through mouthfuls of jerky. ‘If we search enough towers in Vaal, we should find what we’re looking for.’

  ‘And if we don’t?’ Drake asked. ‘I can’t fail at this. All I’ve ever dreamt of is being a paladero.’ He said it in such a way that his longing was obvious, especially to Joss. It was the same longing he himself had felt ever since his days at the Orphan House.

  ‘And you think the rest of us haven’t?’ Zeke snapped, the light fading from everyone’s faces as he switched off the Scryer.

  ‘I’m sure you have,’ Drake replied gently. ‘But I only know the journey I’ve been on. I can’t speak to yours.’

  ‘Maybe you would, if you bothered to ask,’ Zeke huffed, and looked away. His fists were clenched and his elbows were drawn in close to his body as he rocked back and forth. It was only a small action, but it was persistent enough to make him look like he was trying not to explode. Whatever had been agitating him the night before was now back with a vengeance, and Joss was no wiser as to what that might be.

  ‘Something to share, have you?’ Hero said, dusting the salt off her hands as she set her jerky aside.

  Zeke was still turned away from them, his rocking growing more pronounced. Joss wanted to reach out to him somehow, to find a way to calm him, but he felt stuck. Surely Zeke couldn’t be this upset from Hero’s teasing. There had to be something else that was troubling him, something more.

  ‘What, you want me to bare my soul all of a sudden?’ said Zeke. ‘Why should I bother? I already know what you think of me. I doubt anything I have to say would change that.’

  ‘Try us,’ Hero replied, staring him down.

  Zeke paused. Then he hunched forward, pointing an accusatory finger at Hero. ‘You look at what I have and where I come from and you just assume that everything’s been so easy for me. But you don’t know my father, and you don’t know my family. I have four older brothers, and each of them is more petty and vindictive than the last.’

  ‘Worse than Luther?’ asked Joss, recalling his unpleasant encounter with the elder Zadkille back in the Gauntlet.

  ‘Luther makes the others look like the Sleeping King’s own holy messengers …’ Zeke said, drawing back again. ‘But he’s still a paladero, as are all my brothers, as is my father, as was his father before him, and on and on until the dawn of time. Do you know what it’s like living in a shadow that vast, that all-encompassing? Do you have any idea of the weight that a name like “Zadkille” carries?’

  ‘My heart bleeds,’ Hero sneered. �
�At least your father was there.’

  ‘And yours was where exactly? Or does your lack of a family name mean that you were divinely manifested to make the rest of us look bad?’

  ‘My father’s in prison if you must know,’ Hero said, then immediately clamped her mouth shut.

  ‘I knew it!’ Zeke said as if he’d achieved some kind of victory.

  Joss glared him into silence before asking Hero as gently as he could, ‘Is that true?’

  She gave the barest of nods. ‘He was a thief. As was my mother,’ she said, the words spilling from her. ‘But they were my family and I loved them. The only family I had. The only family but my uncle. He had taken his vows as an attendant at the High Chamber in Skyend. Because I had nowhere else to go when my parents were sentenced, the court decided I’d be sent to live with him.

  ‘Not that my being family made any difference. He treated me like any other foundling, ordering me to cook and scrub and sweep, and refusing to acknowledge me beyond that. The only time I had to myself was in the evenings, just before bed, when I would lie out in the lavender fields surrounding the High Chamber and watch as the skyborne paladeros from Blade’s Edge Acres flew overhead. And every night, before I fell asleep, I would promise myself that one day that would be me up there, soaring high over the clouds …’

  She had shifted from chewing her jerky to chewing on her fingernails and spitting between sentences. ‘So excuse me if I find it difficult to feel sorry for the heir to the Zadkille fortune, who’s never had to struggle for a damn thing his whole life. If you fail at this, you can still go back to your manor home and all your money. I don’t have that luxury.’

  Zeke’s eyes narrowed as he scowled at Hero with open contempt. ‘I’ve had just about all I can stomach of your constant –’