David: Savakerrva, Book 1

by L. Brown

  More enraged than injured, the two G’mach grappled Yellowhair into a chokehold, a gasping prelude to death and defeat. But if losing his life frightened the warrior, losing just made him erupt, and as his vaalik sensed its master’s fury, it released enough feral adrenaline to first overpower the G’mach, then throw them off.

  Alerted by plummeting shouts, Shark turned. Soft, his first reaction, the two First Progress’ were too weak to hold on. But when the glint of an X-blade caught his eye, when he saw Yellowhair six feet back, it wasn’t anger that lit the G’mach’s dead gray eye, but anticipation, the spark of imminent clash. Yet unlike other Zahlen he’d battled, killed with bullets and fire, he now, finally, could use his fists. A simple twist of his seventh finger locked his sleeve, and rising to a crouch, Shark assumed the stance for combat, hand-to-hand.

  But whatever fight he thought this was, it apparently was the undercard, not Yellowhair’s main event. Already leaping, jumping straight up, the Zahlen warrior clambered up the gunship’s sharp-angled flank and lunged out of sight.

  Abandoned at the altar of the great bloody brawl, Shark first roared, then unlocked his sleeve and blasted away.

  Shark’s fury alerted every gunship-clinging G’mach, but for some, it came too late. Lashed by the X-blade’s lethal arc, three more G’mach crashed to the trees, an ambush on a few that distracted the rest; and stilled, for a moment, the attack on the boats.

  “He’s aboard!” Dahkaa shouted, peering back through the trees. “Our brother buys us time, let’s hope it’s enough.” And then, to Garth, “You found the sound?”

  Flushed and gasping, Garth held the great splay of uvah horn. “It’s not the same, I can’t.”

  “You can and you must, it’s our only way down!”

  Confused by it — down? — Garth wondered what he meant, but shots derailed his thoughts. The attack resumed, G’mach weapon sleeves screeched from behind.

  Yet something wasn’t right, the shooting seemed to lag. Tracking the bullet impacts, Garth saw movement in a shatter of brush and trees, and then it burst forth, a long-haired silhouette.

  Gunship raid complete, Yellowhair chased the boats.

  “David!” Dahkaa rose to a crouch. “When you enter the cave, sound two short blasts, then one long, understand?”

  Garth looked up through the horns. “Cave?”

  “Two short, one long—” Dahkaa’s vaalik coiled his limbs. “And if I don’t come back—”

  “Come back from what, where—”

  “Be strong, Savakerrva, claim your throne!” Wincing from the vaalik, the bite to his neck, Dahkaa grabbed a Z-rifle and leapt toward the shooting, toward Yellowhair behind.

  A departure perfectly timed, Dahkaa left just as the iceboat shook from explosions, a smattering of shells shattering a cluster of trees. Tusk veered right and the other iceboat dodged left, but an uprooted trunk now flipped onto the latter vessel and smashed it in half, a demolition igniting hull-stored munitions into billows of flame.

  Shark and his frostbit G’mach cheered the explosion, just one iceboat remained. But by the tone of Atta Ra’s scold — gehr, he growled — lethal explosions were not the intent.

  Unaware of the boy’s status, if the young Savakerrva fled in the last boat or, somewhere in this Great Ice forest, lay bleeding, freezing, or dead, Atta Ra weighed the odds. Two chances in three said the boy’s boat had been destroyed, and though that certainly disturbed, would render his search and wait a waste, the remaining option unsettled. Could this Son of the King once more escape, and if so, would such an outcome add credibility to the Promise, lend proof to the myth? Was something extraordinary in this son of Kel Vek, some undefined physics at play? That was the hope, certainly, that defined the entire desperate Quest. But if the boy did know the way around death, could that knowledge be learned, could that secret be owned?

  Distracted by questions, by irrational hopes and rational doubts, Atta Ra glimpsed the end of the forest. But as the last iceboat emerged, he knew if the boy was on it, his escape stopped here.

  Miles wide and hundreds of feet high, a great gloom of rock blocked the boat’s path.

  Garth summoned all breath, then blew into the antler horn mouthpiece. Vision went dark, he saw a few stars, yet the horn barely wheezed.

  “Ch’toh!” yelled Tusk.

  Garth didn’t know the word, but hearing something new in the bold captain’s tone, he looked for it, the cause of his fear.

  No need to look far, the solid rock mound stood square in their path. A few bushes clung to its side, but without more cover, they’d have to turn back. Yet Tusk kept sailing, speeding straight in until he passed a last tree, a trunk marked with a slash. Then swerving in the slash’s direction, he aimed toward a hillside crevice, a black-shadowed cleft growing quite fast.

  Garth wanted to shout, tell Tusk to turn back, but perhaps this was evasion, some old iceboater’s trick? Perhaps, but when the dark cleft loomed and they still hurtled in, Garth curled up, just waited for the smash into granite and impaling by horn. Yet the smash delayed and the impaling never came, so wondering what happened, where his violent death went, he lifted his head.

  No longer ahead, the rock loomed all around, Tusk had steered through the cleft and into a cave. Stacks of green-glowing stones lit the dark, and just like light posts, they bordered the ice-floor path, a careening weave through hewn granite halls.

  “Uvah!” Tusk shouted, pumping his fist toward Garth.

  “Uvah!” echoed the warriors, and following their point, Garth spotted the cave’s end, a dead black wall seconds ahead. Shouts of uvah! now rising in swells, Garth pressed his lips to the mouthpiece once more, then flogged his lungs for every last breath.

  The uvah woke with a moan, a tenuous bleat with a hopeful rise that first quivered, then collapsed in a squeak. Garth gasped for air, had nothing left, so he never objected when the tiger-striped arm grabbed away the horn.

  Large and angry and apparently skilled, a Zahlen warrior blew three notes with gusto, two short and one long, a sonic fuse igniting a blast in the cave-ending wall. The flash blinded, clubbed the ears, but as the iceboat hurtled into the dusty roil, it never stopped, just slid right down into a black swallow of hole.

  The gunship stopped. Hovering before the hill of ice-glazed rock, every shivered G’mach searched for evidence of impact, some iceboat plank or bloody remains. Yet as wind howled and shivering increased, an unspoken consensus formed, the crash site lacked only a crash. But when Atta Ra’s muddled optics probed a shadowed cleft, it appeared the rock did not lack for a cave.

  Startled by it, this rat hole back door, Atta Ra never noticed the shapes, two storm-distorted forms now fleeing the forest. They accelerated fast, headed straight for the hill, but by the time they were spotted, both were sliding into shadow, the cleft of of the cave.

  Atta Ra could still stop them, could awaken his guns or order Shark to pursue, but the Wraith did nothing, just wondered where they fled. Did the rock hide something, a Zahlen ice drop?

  Rumored to exist, yet never before found, such passages seemed a marvel, a near-impossible feat for the wind-driven Clans. But as Atta Ra pondered, was assaulted by thoughts, it wasn’t a new-found respect for Clan engineering that fired his chains, no — it was the worry, the climbing probability the Son of a King had escaped.

  Again.

  Vexed by it, by a boy who continued to elude, Atta Ra also sensed other emotions, the reactions of those who clung to his ship. He couldn’t read their exact thoughts, but since brainwave telemetry swung between stunned and bemused, consensus suggested their leader had failed.

  Again.

  A jolt to the system, failure; at least to a Ninth Progress G’mach. Hadn’t happened for a while, had been a few years, so maybe that’s why Atta Ra snapped. He shouldn’t have, but with humiliation and anxiety in runaway flight, he needed a brake, a way to bend brain waves back to awe and respect and — more important, just wreak revenge. True, the progressed side of his
mind wanted the boy alive, but unlike the Quest, the call to violence was a visceral pleasure, one of his last. Which is why, by guttural command — Derr elz, he rasped — Atta Ra roused every conventional weapon under his ship’s cold metal skin.

  An eruption of cannon and ray and hyper-velocity shell, the blistering hail of hot joule and howling mass cleaved and sundered, turned tons of rock into windswept dust. Shark struggled to hold on, but as rock split ahead and shockwaves flattened the forest behind, he wondered, for the first ever time, if Atta Ra’s rage had the whiff of fear.

  Under the shatter and below the collapse, Garth slid toward death. Or so it felt, and though he’d survived iceboats and G’mach, he knew his demise had been merely delayed, that when he finished his trip down this black delirium of smooth-bore shaft, it would be his last.

  Swelling air pressure stuffing his ears, Garth felt the iceboat shiver like a coaster coming undone, and with plenty of warning, the boat keel cracked.

  Garth clung to a chunk of hull, a ragged sled spinning and shaking down the icy incline and deeper into the cold, black dark. All perspective lost, he shut his eyes and waited for the end, but then Tusk shouted, made him peek.

  A miraculous light at the maniacal end, a faint blue light grew ahead. But as illumination increased, the ice beneath changed from bobsled smooth to washboard rough, and though the increased friction slowed the remnants of hull, it also broke them apart. Garth’s tiny sled started to split; first into one plank, then two, and as wreckage and warriors cartwheeled past, he lost his hold, just tumbled and pitched until that promise of blue went black.

  Chapter 13

  Sky of Ice

  Numb to his senses and dull in his mind, Garth heard only water, a persistent slosh. And also, now and then, a steel creak came, a sound reminding of work.

  But Garth ignored, just held on to sleep. He held little interest in slosh, much less in work, and as bits of memory began to reform, as iceboats and klaxons and the J’kel in the trench flashed and glimmered and tried to come back, he buried them, locked them away. He wanted only sleep, a safe harbor from his present and past, so as the slosh and creak played on, the Son of the King just rolled into a ball, a bottomless, stuporous bliss.

  Asleep one moment, then slapped the next, Garth awoke to an ice-cold splash. Senses returned, came back fast, and as he coughed into consciousness and arrived dripping wet, he blinked into a place of chilled blue light and warm, squishy mud; and also, oddly familiar, a scent of cedars and fish. But as eyes slowed their shutter and his mind sluggishly spun, he noted he woke beside a river, a tepid flow ghosted by fog, by tendrils misting the trees. Curious trees, for though their blue-green boughs resembled pine, they seemed larger on top and thinner below. Thick along the riverbank, they hid whatever lay beyond, yet it wasn’t the trees that intrigued, for whatever this place — in this tranquil palette of an alien Monet, nothing compared to the barge.

  Waterlogged and rusty, too lazy to sink, the buoyant abomination insulted the eye just ten feet away. And wore, instead of paint, a spackled white splatter, a crusty proof of well-fed birds. A frayed line tied her to shore, and though listing a bit, she tilted a bit less with every gallon of bail, because seven men — warriors from my iceboat, by the look — scooped her watery innards with buckets that sloshed and creaked.

  Garth moved. Gingerly, at first, but since every joint worked, he wobbled all the way up. Achieving greater perspective, he noticed debris, broken bits of iceboat littered a muddy slope, an incline rising to the mouth of a cave. Tunnel? Whatever it was, it bored into a mountain, a slope lifting his gaze to scudding clouds under a cold, gray glaze. Wondering why such an ordinary sight so unsettled his nerves, he then realized where he’d been; and now, where he was.

  No longer underfoot, the frozen ocean arched overhead in a sky of ice.

  Cold water shocked again, seven bucketfuls splashed from the barge. But as he stood there and dripped, no laughter came, the warriors just continued their bail. Which confirmed, with every drip, he was just as popular as before.

  “Ket!” ordered a voice, and a rusty barge hatch slid back. “Ket-ah, ket!” Tusk shouted to Garth, and nodding ‘get aboard,’ he hefted out a heavy, corroded box and stacked it with a dozen more.

  Garth weighed his options, either stay in the mud or step on the barge. He groped for alternatives, some better way, but as he lifted his gaze from the alien pines to the sky of ice, he knew he was just a stranger in a land even stranger than before. Shivered and drenched, no alternative left, he mucked toward the barge and climbed aboard.

  Two muscled arms blocked his way. Striped like a tiger, some Bengal man-cat, a warrior looked down on Garth. And as Garth looked up, he eyed the Zahlen who saved them all, for had he not grabbed the horn and raised the notes that razed the cave wall, they would never have found this impossible below.

  Bengal offered a turtle shell bowl. A gesture, it seemed, roughly translated to ‘bail.’

  “So,” Garth began, and aware he could say anything, he did. “How come you waited so long to take the horn, genius; did you want to see me fail?”

  “Yes,” growled Bengal. “I did.”

  Startled by his comprehension, Garth wondered what to say. “You — understand me?”

  “No,” Bengal replied, “I don’t.” Tossing the bowl to Garth, he then resumed his bail.

  “But—?”

  “Up on the ice, you said you were not the Savakerrva,” Bengal continued, and just like Dahkaa, that same British tang colored his speech. “But to save you, we lost many men, so not only do I not understand you, I wish you were dead.”

  His welcome complete, Bengal splashed to the far end of the barge.

  Garth stood there, just watched him go, and wondered how it happened, how with so little effort on such a far-away world, he’d become the nexus of spite. Three iceboats lost, so many dead, and every life had been spent for his, for the absurd proposition the blood of his father made him something else. But he wasn’t, of course, and now, everyone new.

  “I didn’t ask,” Garth said, words that just popped out. “Never asked to be here, never wanted to come—” Scooping water, he started to bail. “But if you need someone to blame? Fine, go ahead. But the truth is, the fault is yours, every crazy alien thing you believe. But me? Want to know what I believe?”

  He bailed a scoop, then one more.

  “And if you just heard nothing? Then you’re right, that’s exactly what I believe, because me, as far as I’m concerned? Your legends and fate and Promise foretold are just a bunch—?

  A groan and clatter interrupted, machinery awakening from a long, rusty dream.

  “Bozah!” shouted Tusk. Chuckling a bit, inexplicably mirth’d, the captain screwed down a heavy wire on the box he’d just brought up, a two-terminal cube like a battery from a car. Garth saw it, heard the results, but he couldn’t quite believe these bailing barbarians had unlocked the electron; yet as Tusk connected two dreadlocked wires and juiced some unseen growl below, the foul scow… moved?

  A marvel, this motion. But though a few warriors grunted, though Bengal added a sarcastic bozah of his own, the chill didn’t change, the barge could sink from gloom. An event, Garth suspected, likely effecting a similar cheer. About to resume his bail, Garth paused a moment, cocked his ear to a distant ‘Mo-tahh!’

  Sounding surreal, a voice from beyond, it turned every head to the mountain behind, to the tunnel’s misty dark mouth exhaling two men with blades.

  Cheers erupted, bail buckets flew, and though Garth knew he’d still be reviled, he couldn’t stop his grin, his childlike jump when Dahkaa and Yellowhair clambered aboard.

  “You made it!” Garth shouted, trying to compete with the motor and cheers.

  “I had to,” said Dahkaa, wheezing from his run. “Who else would keep you alive!” And after clapping Garth’s back, he tapped his vaalik’s head. The creature released its bite from Dahkaa’s upper spine, then uncoiled his arms and legs to collapse, exhaust
ed, to the deck.

  “And you?” Dahkaa slumped beside his vaalik. “I see you triumphed as well; you opened the drop with the horn?”

  Garth hesitated, hated to kill this joyous respite. “Okay, well, what happened was—”

  “What happened, David, is you escaped. And regardless of how, call it luck or fate, the fact is, you live. But now—” Coaxing his vaalik back to its feet, he guided it to a corner. “Now, you must tell me what you think of our home; any thoughts about our land under ice?”

  Following his gaze to the mile-high freeze, an unimagined view never before seen, Garth’s every thought distilled to one. “Does it melt?”

  “Hah,” Dahkaa’s reply, too tired to laugh. “It never has or will, the Great Ice guards us, has forever blocked out the cold. And now, also Atta Ra,” he said with a yawn. “He knows we’re down here, but just like that ice in your sea? If it’s thick enough, it fogs his sight. So rest, boy, we’re safe. For the moment, all of us, we’re finally—?”

  Yellowhair dropped, just crumpled to the deck. No warning preceded, no shake or groan, but at least as shocking, nobody moved, not Dahkaa nor Bengal nor Tusk. All who’d just welcomed their comrade with shouts and embrace now simply stared, only Yellowhair’s vaalik came to his aid. But though the creature licked the warrior’s whisker-stubbled face, his master laid still.

  Tusk stirred first. But instead of dashing toward Yellowhair, he turned toward the tiller, and grabbing the worm-eaten wood, he steered downstream. Bengal picked up a rusty bucket, others did the same, and to the same slosh and creak, the joyless bail resumed.

  “What—?” Trying to read faces, Garth perceived only apathy, a stoic divorce. “Is he okay?”

  No one answered.

  “Well, do something!” yelled Garth. “Somebody help!”

  “We can’t,” said Dahkaa, his voice flat.