Sword of Fire and Sea tck-1

by Erin Hoffman

  “You'll find all manner of strange characters in these mountains,” Luc said, as their horses picked their way over a particularly intricate length of trail. The beasts were smart, thank Nistra-Endera must have known they would need to be for this territory. Vidarian's horse, according to the labeling on his gear, was called Feluhim, another Ishmanti word that he didn't know, but Luc, being from that sun-blasted place, did: it meant loyal son, but most often was used for horses, strangely. “We're on the fringe of civilized places. My father used to say, if a man lives where no others will, there's a reason why, in the man and the place.”

  After the waypoint, they had moved again into the mountains, where they gauged the passage of time more by the phases of their hunger than by the light, which was fickle and pale. Steep walls rose to either side of them, and twice they had to detour around rockslides, adding hours to their days. The gryphons made ready use of their claws and talons in scaling rocks and boulders, but the horses needed clearer trails lest they risk slips and broken legs. High overhead, the perpetual storm that hung over the Windsmouth was their constant companion, now and then casting down a thick blanket of snow that further obscured the ground. The everstorm, as it was called by the Invesh guards, was what kept the gryphons from bearing them south by air-it was massive, beyond Altair's ability to tame, and extended so far to the north and south that any gryphon that had ever attempted to fly over it had never been seen again. All this the gryphons did not admit easily, and the storm was one of the few things Vidarian had ever seen the creatures universally respect.

  And so they picked their way through the mountains by foot, holing up in caves when the storm grew fiercest. On their fifth morning in the mountains, they reached a split in the trail. One path descended-according to their maps, it traced a route to the southeast by way of descending altitudes. The other path led higher into the mountains.

  “And here we part,” Luc said, “for your path is stranger than mine.” He smiled jauntily at this. They had not disclosed their final destination, nor their intent, but he'd seemed to divine something of both without being told. “Your journey leads up,” he said, and pointed to the trail that wound up the mountain. “There is a waypoint, the last known to the empire, at the top. I believe it's kept by water priestesses,” he nodded to Arikaree, who returned the gesture with some diffident surprise. “There ends my knowledge.” He clasped each of their elbows in turn, the parting gesture of the Ishmanti-Vidarian knew it from etiquette books, but had never experienced it. “I hope that we meet again. I'd like to know what lies beyond that mountain.”

  “We hope to tell you,” Vidarian said.

  “If you ever find yourself in the west sea, ask for me,” Ruby said, as she clasped Luc's elbow-clearly comfortable with the gesture in a way that obliquely irked (but didn't surprise) Vidarian. “I don't know how we'll get by without your brew every morning.” Now that she was on solid ground, Ruby seemed to be recovering more every day, though the presence of the poultice at her side kept them from forgetting her injury.

  “I'd be honored to trade with the famous fleets of the West Sea Queen!” Luc exulted, and Ruby colored with satisfaction. The two had taken to rising earlier than the rest of the party, and Luc seemed to take particular pleasure in introducing Ruby to the various blends he kept with him, including those housed in vials Vidarian knew he didn't share with the rest of them. A developed palate, he claimed, was needed to appreciate them. He removed one of these from his wide-sleeved multicolored coat and presented it to Ruby with both hands. “You must take this as a token of my goodwill for our future business,” he said.

  Ruby accepted the glass with reverence, turning it over in her hands and watching the flakes of bark rotate within. “No, you mustn't,” she demurred, then squinted more closely at the vial. Her breath quickened ever so slightly. “Is this-?”

  Luc winked, then stepped back and gave a sweeping bow to the three of them. “Farewell, friends,” he said, then turned to mount his horse, a rugged roan that had fared better in the mountains than the taller horses Endera had provided. It seemed to eat anything, including the daily mouthful of kava bark fed it by its master. Luc clicked his tongue at the string of verali that bore his goods, and started down the long trail.

  They ascended the mountain slowly, stopping frequently to water the horses. The air grew thin as it had when the gryphons had flown high over Cheropolis; Vidarian had never climbed a mountain so high.

  By midday, another of the mountains’ heavy weather patterns began to move in, an arm reaching down from the everstorm. A familiar chill settled wetly into the air, and by late afternoon snow was falling in earnest, thick clumps of it that piled on their shoulders and quickly began to accumulate on the trail.

  A thin light high above them at first seemed a mirage, but proved otherwise as they drew closer to it. The storm thickened and thinned by turns, obscuring the light, but as they reached a plateau on the trail they suddenly found themselves faced with a tower of stacked slate. A glittering limestone monument was thickly engraved with the emblem of the northern water priestesses.

  “What is a water priestess doing so far from sea or river?” Ariadel asked, shaking snow from her hood.

  // We are being surrounded by water, // Arikaree pointed out, snapping at a particularly large clump of snow as it spiraled toward the ground in front of him. // Water is having many domains, and each be holding a secret of elements. //

  // This branch of the everstorm is perpetual, // Altair added. // It is a peculiarity of the Windsmouth. A relic, some say, of the long magic days. //

  “PrimeAdepts,” Vidarian said, and Altair made a soft clicking noise in his throat, a gryphonic note of assent.

  They banged on the heavy door to the tower, and shortly were answered by a short woman clothed in teal velvet. She waded out into the knee-high snow and led them to another door in the side of the mountain, which proved to be a warm and comfortable barn carved out of the stone. The verali and horses huddled inside without much prompting, and were soon settled with water and warm bran mashes.

  The tower itself was considerably more spacious than it seemed from the outside. In a large vaulted receiving room at the base there was more than enough room for the gryphons, and after accepting an evaporation treatment from Thalnarra, each of them curled up on the plush carpets while the water priestess prepared tea.

  Her name was Ilisia, and she was very strange. Twice she called Ariadel by the wrong name, despite polite correction, and during their short visit she seemed to forget what she was doing midtask at least four times.

  // We go into the mountain, // Arikaree said. Ilisia seemed to be able to keep track of his words a bit better than the rest of them.

  “Ah, yes,” she said, her eyes disappearing into the wrinkles of her face as she smiled. “You will open the dragonspine. They've been speaking of it.”

  “Who?” Vidarian asked, but Ilisia only smiled as if he'd said something in another language she didn't understand.

  “What is it you study here?” Ariadel asked finally, when any logistical questions proved impossible-and this, as it were, opened the floodgates.

  “Study, study,” she said, as if repeating a child's rhyme. “We study inevitability.” Her eyes went vague, and for a moment she closed them in ecstasy. When she opened them, there was neither white nor pupil, but a glassy blue-green as of the western sea in summer. Something churned with recognition in Vidarian's blood, and her voice pounded between his ears: “The world passes away,” she said, hollow and full all at once, “knowledge fades, runs together. The world is connected, streams like invisible water-our minds melt together, carried by waves, all thoughts become one-all returns to liquid.”

  The route through the mountain, Ilisia insisted, was not up, but down. She seemed to have some trouble keeping track of opposites-up and down, left and right, living and dead-which wasn't the best for endowing her proclamation with confidence. But up was the everstorm, and that, at least, w
as indisputable.

  After they loaded and pulled the reluctant horses and verali from the warmth of the mountain stable, Ilisia led them behind the tower. There, a gigantic pair of stone doors were set directly into the slate wall that the tower's materials had been carved from. By its position, it seemed that the tower existed to guard this entrance, but, to Vidarian's surprise, Ilisia pulled the doors open without ceremony. A small, cold breeze wafted up from the opening, which revealed a dirt path that spiraled down into darkness.

  A thin howl echoed through the mountains; a wolf calling its brothers and sisters in celebration of a kill. But Thalnarra's hackles lifted at the sound, and Vidarian turned to her. “What was that?”

  // A wolf, only, // she said, though her hackles remained up. // Surely no concern to us. Though you should mind the meat-creatures. // The image in her mind of a “meat-creature” was an amalgam of horse, cow, and verali, and he was unsettled again at the reminder that she likely considered Feluhim a snack candidate at best. He had no special love of horses, himself (though he certainly preferred them to verali), but the thought of eating the tall dark horse that he fed bits of dried apple to every morning turned his stomach.

  “Down you go,” Ilisia said cheerfully, then turned and shuffled through the snow back toward the tower without another word. The horses, however, were not convinced by her cheer, and balked at the mouth of the trail. Altair stalked behind them and hissed, but this only worsened matters, eliciting a shriek of fear and anger from Ruby's horse that further spooked the other two. Finally, Ariadel pulled the head of each horse, one by one, down to her eye level and rubbed between its eyes, murmuring. The little shapeshifter skittered out from her hood and changed into the kitten, leaping onto Ruby's horse and purring. This was enough, at last, to convince them-and none too soon, for all three snow-sodden gryphons were looking increasingly carnivorous by the minute.

  Ooh, it's dark down there, the Starhunter whispered just as they crossed the threshold, and Vidarian shivered in spite of himself. He'd learned by now that her absence was always more ominous than her presence, and that if she vanished from his mind, it was only to await a more opportune time to disturb him. The shiver, and his wave of anger at her, rippled through his mind and heart, where it resonated off of the rubies and sapphires. Their answering swing of energy was wilder this time, stronger, and he fought to throttle them down.

  He didn't realize he'd been holding his breath until a wave of dizziness made him gasp. A thin bead of sweat crept down around his left eye, and he shook his head.

  “That was her, wasn't it?” Ariadel asked quietly, walking beside him. The stone tunnel gave a hollow echo to her words, carrying them ahead and down. Behind her, the still-nervous Feluhim jerked on his lead, and she turned to soothe him, while Vidarian's heart skipped a beat as a thousand very bad ways to explain the Starhunter flickered through his mind: She's a voice in my head, I see her in my dreams, she doesn't like you very much.…

  So honest, though. The Starhunter giggled. Don't you want to be honest?

  “Yes,” he said instead, through clenched teeth.

  “How…does she speak to you?” Her voice was strained, but he recognized a thin line of determination between her eyebrows.

  “Like you used to” would be another wrong answer, and it made the Starhunter chuckle again. “Invasively,” he said. “Annoyingly. She-says confusing things.”

  “Like what?” was an obvious question, and he cursed himself for walking into it. Then he wondered why the thought of describing all of it terrified him so.

  Maybe Lord Tesseract Vidarian Rulorat is not so noble as he wants everyone to believe.

  “She makes you angry,” Ariadel offered, rescuing him from repeating things he didn't want to voice. He realized she was trying to understand, had striven to accept the existence of something she had always been told-by people she trusted-was impossible.

  Vidarian nodded. And now that they were discussing the goddess riding in his brain-“Thalnarra,” he said, sweating again as he forced his voice to a controlled tone. “You and Endera knew about the Starhunter. Why hide it from everyone else? From Ariadel, from me?”

  Altair clicked his beak in disapproval, a sound like bone cracking that made the horses jump again as it echoed. But Thalnarra's voice was nonchalant. // Mysteries and layers of the priestesshood, you'll have to ask Endera, not me. Gryphons have known of the Starhunter since she was locked behind the gate. //

  “But gryphons mistrust humans with a great deal of knowledge,” Ariadel argued, and the bitterness in her voice refuted any reply before it could be spoken. Thalnarra gave none.

  They descended the cave trail in silence, the gryphons’ spheres of light racing forward and back to light their way.

  Hours were difficult to count down here, as they had been above, and the slow spirals of the trail added to the hypnotic lull. Vidarian would have walked directly into the sudden wall that loomed up in front of them, his thoughts far from his body, were it not for Arikaree's rough squawk of warning.

  This set of stone doors, like the walls around them, were sandstone, the slate having been left behind long ago. The gryphons’ colored lights cast everything in a dull orange hue, but the rock itself was a dull yellow, thick with dust that obscured the detailed carvings that covered every inch of the doors’ surface. But the sinuous path that they described could be little else.

  “A dragon's spine,” Ariadel said, reaching out to brush dust from the door. It gave way in a powdery flutter that made her cough, baring an intricately carved scale like that of a giant fish.

  The rubies and sapphires had been humming in Vidarian's mind, and as he brought them from their pouches at his waist, they flared so brightly that he nearly dropped them. Ariadel shielded her eyes beside him, and he squinted as he raised them to the doors.

  He drew his hands back as if burned when a shudder rippled through the stone, but it came from the doors only, and so, after a quick look back at the gryphons for agreement, he touched the stones together again. A triangle of energy loomed up before his senses: earth from the doors, earth from all around them, fire and water from the rubies and sapphires. “It needs air,” he realized, and reached for the crystal whistle at his neck-

  // Fool, you'll kill us all, using that down here, // Altair hissed, and Vidarian tried to mask how the gryphon's warning stung. He dropped his hand, and Altair added his own energy to the pattern on the door.

  That's four, but you need one more… the Starhunter whispered. Vidarian's stomach dropped-

  And the doors opened.

  They stood and watched the opening, breathless, but in spite of the infusion of magic needed to open the passage, there was no revelation beyond the threshold-only another trail, this one leading upward. The horses didn't balk this time, and seemed only too pleased to begin climbing rather than descending.

  The path up to the surface was shallow and broad; the spiraling path beyond the spine must have brought them down from much of what they'd climbed over the past many days. At long last, they stepped into sunlight- not the bone-rattling cold of the everstorm, but long-missed sunlight, streaming down from a vaulting blue sky. Trees, vivid green and lush, lined the edges of the clearing at the cave's entrance. Pockets of snow dotted the ground and the trees, giving evidence that they hadn't entirely escaped the weather, but for now, at least, the sky was clear.

  They waited until everyone had emerged from the cave to attack.

  Feluhim screamed-no gentle warning, this, but a shriek of total herbivore terror that rattled Vidarian to his bones. Wolves-creatures he had read of but never seen-poured out of the forest from all sides of the clearing, lunging toward them.

  Thalnarra and Altair loosed battle cries in answer to the horses’ screams of fear, and leaped over them, taking to the air just long enough to flare their wings and dive upon the wolves. Arikaree, no raptor, reached out with his senses, an arm of water so strong and pure that it stunned Vidarian to see-and then he pl
unged it into the nearest wolf, extinguishing the flame at its heart without so much as slowing down. The wolf dropped, dead, and its companions wailed in grief and fury.

  The wolves split immediately into groups, most harrowing the two gryphons that reared and slashed, while pairs of them darted in toward the horses and humans. Vidarian's sword sang from its sheath, marking a deadly arc in the air that gave them pause, and as he fed it with his mind, it incandesced, a flowing flame that rushed hungrily for their life-energies. Behind Ariadel, Ruby moved to draw her sword also, and managed it, though not without a grunt of pain.

  A strange whisper, wordless or incoherent, a language Vidarian couldn't understand, rippled through the wolves, and he shook his head, sure it was an illusion.

  Oh, how interesting, the Starhunter observed, and in his mind she was casually eating while they battled for their lives, something that filled his head with the scent of melted butter. They weren't like this when I was here before.

  He snarled at her, in thought only, but fear and curiosity beneath it made him wonder what part of this could be new to a goddess. And what were these things?

  The more they whispered, the more he thought he could almost understand them, and even as another wolf leapt into his blade, only to be impaled at the shoulder, words with their lunges came clear: Ours, ours! Ours, curseyou. Curseyou! Ariadel lifted her hands beside him, and the next wolf that leapt up to take advantage of his bound sword cried out in agony as its fur burst into flame.

  One of the verali had collapsed under a pile of wolves and lay thrashing on the ground, but at least ten dead wolves joined it in repose, and suddenly the rest decided with one mind to abandon the fight. They turned and fled into the woods, yelping, howling, their minds whispering those strange mad epithets.