by J. M. Lee
Bright chaos blasted his eyes.
The ravine was gone. In its place was unending white and gold sand, reflecting the light of the Three Brothers like fire. To their right, the sky ended in a cloud of gray dust crackling with lightning rolled like a monster with fire in its teeth. It boiled, unleashed and unconstrained like a whirlpool, in the wide desert.
Amri peered the best he could into the raging storm. The approaching sand clouds teemed with horrific golden creatures. Their diamond-shaped bodies were bigger than the skiff, the size of the three-masted Sifa ships, with rough, ragged manes and long barbed tails. The creatures crashed out of the sands turned up by the storm to the left and the right and all around them, snapping with enormous gaping mouths. It was only Periss’s and Onica’s shouting and pulling against the skiff’s side floats and boom that kept them upright.
“They’re darkened creatures!” Naia shouted. “Look at their eyes!”
As one of the Crystal Skimmers shouldered against the skiff, shrieking in a rage, Amri saw its eye—violet and electric, lens scarred by the crystal sands. Infected by the darkness spreading from the Crystal, even in such a remote place as the Crystal Sea.
As much as Periss pulled against the sail, the storm grew. Soon it would overtake them.
“But how? From the storm?” Amri cried.
“They came busting out of the sand-shield when we passed,” yelled Onica. “We would have made it around the storm if they hadn’t been in there! What were they doing?”
Periss stared into the flashes of magenta and purple lightning that cracked through the dark clouds. “This is no natural storm! It must have caught them by surprise, too—these are darkened beasts?”
There was no time to answer. A Crystal Skimmer rammed alongside the starboard float. The skiff shuddered, and Amri clung to the ropes and prepared for the small ship to capsize. Instead, the skiff took an unexpected and stomach-turning swing. Something dragged on the port side while the starboard float hoisted high in the air. Amri gasped in horror when he realized what had happened.
“The ropes are caught on the Skimmer’s . . .”
On the Skimmer’s what?
Periss raced upward, climbing the deck of the near-vertical skiff like a wall. The others wrapped their arms through the hand lines.
The Crystal Skimmer shrieked, jerking and bucking while racing along the top of the sand. As Amri squinted against the sand, he realized the Skimmer had a structure strapped to its back. Although mostly destroyed from the mad Skimmer’s thrashing and the storm, the parts that remained were clearly Dousan handiwork.
“Is that a harness attached to the Skimmer?” Amri shouted as Periss made it toward the top of the skiff.
“I know this Skimmer!” Periss said. “Hanja, listen to me! Calm yourself!”
“You can’t reach her, she’s seen the darkness!” Onica climbed swiftly past Amri, reaching the top of the skiff and making her way out to the float. She pulled a dirk from her belt. “We have to cut the skiff loose, or she’ll drag us to death! Amri, stay there! I’ll need you to grab me when we’re cut free. Kylan, you wait for Periss—Naia, hold the mast!”
Onica’s command was sterner than the storm, pushing aside all of Amri’s fears of the raging storm that had infected the Skimmers with its darkness. He focused on what she’d told him to do, hooking his feet in the rope loops and grabbing hold of the starboard side of the skiff. Onica dragged herself out to the float. Periss did the same on the bow end of the skiff, and Kylan struggled to make it to the edge so he could grab the Dousan when it was time.
Onica worked quickly, cutting away at the Skimmer’s harness where the float intertwined with it. As she reached the last strap and put her blade below it, she shouted at Periss,
“Ready?”
“On three! One—two—THREE!”
Their blades cut and the straps snapped. The Skimmer jerked away and the skiff shook, for a moment standing on its port side and skidding along the sand so quickly and wildly, Amri was sure they would tip or splinter into a thousand pieces. He reached for Onica and grasped her hand, pulling her toward him as Naia worked the sail, and the starboard float started to head toward the sand again.
Amri grabbed both of Onica’s hands in his.
“Gotcha!”
Just as the starboard float glanced off the racing sand below, another Skimmer burst from below them. Amri felt Onica’s fingernails rip against his palm as the Skimmer snagged her in its enormous mouth, tearing her from his grasp.
“ONICA!”
The skiff balanced, and Periss lunged at the boom, helping Naia turn the sail to whip back toward the Skimmer that had taken Onica, but the beast was already pulling away.
“Follow it!” Naia bellowed.
Through the wind and sand, they could see Onica dangling out of the Skimmer’s toothless mouth. She struck at its lips with her knife, but the thing was so mad, it didn’t seem to feel the pain. Periss threw himself against the boom, and the skiff whipped in an arc, nearly a tailspin, in its pursuit.
“I’m trying!”
The Skimmer raced through the sand, diving and leaping in massive, air-bound swoops as it circled the horizon of the storm. Periss wrestled with the ship, holding it as steady as he could against the buffeting, searing wind. The Skimmer lanced through the dunes like a fish bouncing through choppy water, in higher and higher bounds, riding the storm winds with its enormous fins.
“She’ll have to fly down to us,” Periss shouted as they flanked it, falling under its silhouette as it leaped overhead, crashing down into the sand only to shoot higher the next time. “It’s too high!”
“She can’t fly.”
The tiny, numb voice came from the folds of Amri’s cloak.
“What?”
“She lost her wings in a storm,” Tavra said. “She can’t fly.”
Amri stared up at the Skimmer and the Sifa girl in its mouth. Her efforts to pull free of the creature’s mouth had eased, one of her arms slack. Every time the Skimmer dived back into the sand, he expected it to leap out again with Onica lost down its throat.
“She can’t fly,” he told the others. There was no way they could hear Tavra over the storm. Naia’s face paled, and she tore off her cloak.
“I’ll go.”
“No! Naia, you can’t—the desert air will destroy your wings!” Kylan cried, grabbing her arm. She whirled on him, knocking him away.
“What am I supposed to do, let her die? At least I have them!”
But Kylan was right. Naia’s Drenchen wings, usually lustrous and shimmering, were dull and thin from the dry desert air. There was no way she would be able to hold a current.
“I’ve got it,” Amri said.
“But, Amri—”
Amri ignored his friends’ protests and raced to the floats, climbing along the arms that held them to the deck. He landed on the shuddering float and tugged, snapping off two of the guiding sails of bone and skin. In the ravenous storm, the two missing fins hardly made a difference. He slipped his arms through the first two rope loops so they fit along his shoulders and elbows, leaving the last loops for his hands.
“Tavra, do it! Do what you did before on skekSa’s ship. Take over my body so we can save Onica!”
Amri yelped and fell to all fours as the Skimmer thundered down beside them, nearly tipping the skiff on the wave of sand that flew from under its fins. The wind was so strong, it almost knocked him off the float as it hit the sails strapped to his arms. Amri grabbed the third rope loop on the sails, bracing himself.
No, not sails—wings.
“Amri, I didn’t do it on purpose before,” Tavra protested. “It was an accident! I don’t know how!”
“Well,” he growled, “you’re going to have to figure it out!”
He leaped and spread his arms.
The wind picked hi
m up like a hand, thrusting him into the sky. The gusts were like waves, coming from every direction, knocking him and twirling him higher and higher. He had no idea how to navigate, how to fall—how to fly. All he could do was try to keep his arms from breaking as the wind battered and beat him.
“You and Onica made a promise!”
“But I can’t—”
“Are you going to break your promise?”
Amri’s scream tore through his lungs, all the air evaporating from his body. He lost himself in the moment, blinded by the storm and the wind. Then a different kind of storm overwhelmed him as Tavra’s dreamfast crashed into his mind.
He saw Onica’s eyes, deep and green as the sea, wreathed in fiery hair thick with salt wind. They were in a storm, at sea this time. Onica clung to the little ship as it broke into pieces around her. Her wings, once green and amber, were in shreds at her back, pierced and battered by pieces of the ship and the unforgiving hail.
Protected below her was another Sifa with golden-red hair. Tae, safe in Onica’s arms, even as the wind and the sky drove lances of ocean water against them.
Amri was Tavra in this dreamfast. Prevailing against the storm. Untangling the two Sifa from the wreckage, spreading her wings just enough to ride the violent wind. Up and away, leaving the tiny vessel to be ravaged by the jaws of the storm . . .
Promise me, someday we’ll sail away.
Tavra and Onica sat together on a misty shore, watching the tide bring in shards of crystalline ice. The seafarer’s lantern glowed nearby, dimly lighting the fog that surrounded them like a protective blanket. They were hidden there, by the silver mist. Or at least they could pretend they were, just for this moment.
To a place where no one can find us. Where there are no Sifa . . . no Vapra . . .
Their hands touched palm to palm, fingers weaving together.
Where it doesn’t matter. Where we can just be . . . one.
Amri gasped, thrown from the dreamfast. He squeezed his eyes against the sand and wind, but the barrage had weakened. He wondered at first if the storm had let up, and opened his eyes.
The storm winds raged as angry as ever, but his arms moved as if he could anticipate them, flitting up and down along them as easily as slipping down a riverbed.
They were flying. He and Tavra, swooping and diving, racing along the invisible currents, light as a moth and fierce as a Vapra soldier. He barely felt Tavra’s legs where they pricked his skin, driving in, whispering to his body how to move: how to see the wind as a terrain like any other element.
“There!”
The Crystal Skimmer leaped through the sands just below them. Amri’s arms folded, and they dived . . . then Tavra spread their skiff-sail-wings and banked at the last moment, popping up on the draft that rolled off the Skimmer’s fins. Amri caught sight of Onica, hanging limply out of the Skimmer’s mouth.
“No!”
The willpower that had flooded his body with the wisdom of flight vanished. He grappled at the fur around the Skimmer’s mane, barely taking hold of it before his wings were ripped away by the sand and wind.
“Tavra, get it together!” he groaned. Hand over hand he climbed through the Skimmer’s mane toward its mouth. Onica was unconscious, one of her arms badly misshapen, blood streaking across her face and body where she’d been struck by the millions of grains of sand. Amri buried his face in the Skimmer’s mane as it dived, nearly losing his grip as the sand crushed over them, then gasping for air as it surfaced. He grabbed Onica and pulled her from the Skimmer’s mouth. Holding her tight and hoping for the best, he kicked away just as the Skimmer neared the sand again.
Every bone ached as they rolled to a stop. The storm roared above and all around them, geysers of sand popping up where the Skimmers charged in an uncontrolled stampede. Amri held Onica in his arms, unable to tell in all the chaos if she was even breathing.
He stood, tried desperately to find Periss’s skiff, but it was impossible. All he could see was gold and black, the storm and the din and the deafening howls of the Skimmers. He pulled Onica with him, trudging—any direction, it didn’t matter, he only wanted to be anywhere else. The sand burned his eyes, washed against his ankles, then his knees. He tried to listen, but its voices were too many. Millions of screaming sand-crystals, earth moving like water, singing in a tongue he couldn’t understand.
He turned as the ground shook. A Skimmer erupted under his feet, and Amri’s own scream was lost as the beast’s black maw swallowed them alive.
CHAPTER 16
Amri woke floating in a calm darkness and wondered if he was dead.
He saw lights. Little gold ones, flitting inside glass jars strung up by rope. Dousan rope, he noticed, and then he sat up. The ground under his hand was soft and damp, and it moved slightly when he touched it. The air was dank and smelled of fish and dust, and there was a distant groaning coming from somewhere.
The first person he saw was Periss, who said, “I guess you’re alive.”
“You did it!”
Amri grunted as Naia threw her arms around him. His body ached everywhere, like it was one big bruise, but the Drenchen girl’s embrace soothed the pain as quickly as if she’d used her healing vliyaya. Next to him, Onica was wrapped up to her chin in cloaks and blankets. Tavra held fast to a lock of her hair, dangling like an earring.
“Oh no . . . is she . . .”
He suddenly remembered the dreamfast he’d shared with Tavra. The memory of Onica and Tae in the little boat torn apart by the storm. How Tavra had saved them, fearless and strong.
Naia shook her head, and his heart calmed.
“She’s fine. She’s just resting now. She took a beating from the Skimmer, but I was able to heal her . . . Amri, you were amazing. Sandmaster Erimon said he’s never seen anything like it!”
“Sandmaster who?”
She pointed. Another Dousan, taller than Periss but with a familiar brow and similar tattoos, watched from nearby. Other Dousan lingered near the wall, curious but quiet. Amri rubbed his eyes and tried to stand. Erimon broke away from where he stood with Periss and the other Dousan to meet Amri. He clasped his shoulder.
“I’m glad you survived, my friend,” he said. “I saw what you did, out in the storm. It would have been a tragedy to lose someone with your courage. Where did you learn to fly?”
“It’s a long story,” Amri said. He blushed and wriggled out from under Erimon’s hand. “Um, so where are we, anyway?”
“Tappa,” Naia said with a broad grin.
“What’s a Tappa?”
A big gurgling groan rippled along the slightly shiny, viscous walls of the chamber, and Amri got a bad feeling. The surface under his feet shifted, and Erimon chuckled.
“Tappa isn’t a what, she’s a who. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Naia and Amri followed Erimon to a row of tall, narrow windows near the front of the chamber. The living chamber, Amri noted, as he watched the slick surface undulate with more and more fingerling cilia the closer they got to the doors. The exit holes themselves were lined with spongy frills like a mushroom. A rope net was tacked inside the chamber wall, folding out of the exit passage and onto the hull of the vessel’s—of Tappa’s exterior.
Amri grabbed the net and followed Erimon out into the open air. They climbed up the rigging to the platform lashed onto Tappa’s wide back. Other Dousan minded the rigging, one driver up at the front near Tappa’s nose with a long cane that he used to gently punctuate his shouted orders.
Tappa, the Crystal Skimmer, swam across the intolerable heat wafting from the sands, like a leaf on a river. The storm was behind them, rolling across the desert like a herd of great black beasts. Half the sky was light, the other dark, and it seemed no matter how fast Tappa raced toward the red mountains in front of them, the storm was gaining.
Erimon looked at the storm wall with them and grimac
ed.
“Our clan is divided into twelve groups—xerics—each led by a sandmaster. We rarely gather in one place, but Maudra Seethi summoned us. My xeric and I were headed to the Wellspring when the storm hit. A tail of it rose up from the sand and cut us off from one of the pods . . . the Skimmers spooked and dived. The ones swallowed by the storm must have seen something below the sand. It drove them mad.” He peered at Naia, then Amri. “But if your Spriton friend is the one who sent the dream on the pink petals, then I presume you already know this.”
“The darkened veins must have reached the desert,” Naia said quietly. “The Skimmers saw the pain of the Crystal and were consumed by it . . . This is horrible. I can’t believe it’s already spread this far.”
“So you received the message, then?” Amri asked Erimon.
“Indeed. It explained many of the dark days we have seen, here in the crystal sands. The storms, which once followed trails as regular as the stars and have coexisted with the Dousan for generations, are erratic and unpredictable. It is still difficult to believe the Skeksis are to blame, but there are few alternate explanations. It can only be darkening, as you said. Caused by what the lords have done to the Heart of Thra.”
Despite the fact that the darkening had even reached the desert, Amri felt a spark of optimism. The darkening might have come this far, but perhaps hope had, too.
“So you believe?” he asked.
“Yes, my friend. And I’m honored to have been the one to rescue you from that storm. I’m just glad Tappa was strong enough to look away from the darkening and endure so we could find you in time.”
Erimon glanced over his shoulder where Kylan and Periss were surfacing to the deck and added, “Periss can sail and read the skies, but not as well as he should. Our father always said he has many knives, but none of them are sharp.”
“Your brother?” Naia exclaimed. She coughed. “You two are day and night.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Erimon said. Amri wondered if Periss would have said the same. As if summoned, the younger of the Dousan brothers joined them, arms crossed and a grim knot in his forehead.
