Auralia's Colors

by Jeffrey Overstreet

  Krawg and Warney coughed dust. Warney had a gash just below his eye patch; half his face was a mask of streaming blood. He crawled out from under the heavy hut wall. Krawg helped him up, and they clung to each other’s sleeves, walking slowly away from their ruined shelter, through tangles of trees, past their fellow Gatherers weeping, wounded, and afraid. As though he had spread his arms wide to catch it, Haggard lay crushed beneath a tree, motionless.

  Krawg’s eyes were wide, and his mouth hung open. He had been inside the hut, snarling at the ceiling, calling for Warney to come down off the roof. His furious friend stood there in the dusk, chanting curses he had learned from his grandfather, determined to break a hole in the palace wall.

  First there had been a shudder. That brought Krawg to his feet. Then cracks spread like lines of spilled wine across the walls. And then the ground had lurched. Krawg grabbed his crutch and got outside in time to watch huge sections of Abascar’s wall tumbling down.

  “My great-grandfather’s curse,” Warney whispered after he had fallen. “Ballyworms, but I didn’t mean for it to be that bad.”

  Krawg, for perhaps the first time, didn’t know what to say. He turned a slow circle, staring from the horizon of smoke, sound, and fury to the forest where night settled, indifferent, into the wild.

  Warney shook his head. “Krawg, what’s become of ’Ralia?”

  28

  AT THE EDGE OF THE FEARBLIND NORTH

  C al-raven steered his vawn through a tangled patch of snaregrass, his bones jarred by each forceful stride. As he shouted, the forest stole his voice, twisted it, and thrust it back at him. The echoes sounded like distant, muffled cries.

  His troop had routed a wave of beastmen advancing on the river dig. Those monsters had turned tail and run, and half of Cal-raven’s troop had pursued them.

  But he had yet to reach the dig, where more of these bloodthirsty creatures had carried out this unprecedented attack. So he had circled back, leading the rest of his battle-eager soldiers.

  As Cal-raven crested the last hill above the valley of the dig, he saw, to his dismay, the gutted remains of the transitory tower gushing black smoke. Men with tusks and snouts like boars, heads and arms bristling with black, wiry hair, clustered at a ramp that led down into the tunnel.

  Brascles beat the air and ascended from their carrion along the edge of the trees, shrieking and reeling.

  As the Abascar vawns charged down the hill, the air rang with shouts, and half the company bore down upon the guards of the hole, forming a ring around the crouching, cursing, spear-wielding beasts.

  The rest of the riders circled the smoking tower. Cal-raven rode close enough to see, in the failing light, that heavy axes had hacked through the walls, opening the wooden refuge for torches that had quickly found fuel. Obscenities like nothing the men had ever heard from their prince echoed in the clearing but diminished into silence as he noticed his vawn was stepping around contorted, smoldering corpses. They were too late, far too late.

  The prince tried to ignore the scattered, bloodied shields and cloven helms. He drove his mount over smoking foliage where fire volleys from tower archers had fallen short.

  The tunnel workers would by now have abandoned their massive, wheeled digging machines, forgotten the goal of reaching the Throanscall’s flow. They would be fighting for their lives in the crowded passageway.

  Cal-raven and his men reinforced the advancing ring around the gaping earthen gate, shields steady, closing in. Three beastmen guarding the mouth of the dig spat, feinted, and withdrew, trapped and desperate. The creatures were not accustomed to working together; their self-interested wills were still too abrasive for such cooperation.

  Distracting the beastmen with threatening lunges, the inner circle of guards dropped to their knees to let the outer circle unleash a storm of arrows.

  Writhing, the beastmen pulled at the arrows, but the shafts were barbed. Cal-raven urged his men past. As they went, he felt a throb of fear. There were so few beastmen here. How many more were down in the dig? Had they ventured through the tunnels toward Abascar?

  Vawns craned their necks to glare at their riders, but the whips were convincing, and they lumbered forward, down the sloping ramp into the underground corridor, growling.

  He had to get to a highwatch in the woods and flag a signal to warn Abascar.

  “Prince Cal-raven!” came a cry from below ground. “You had better see this!”

  In the broad, low-ceilinged cave, bodies lay twisted, entwined in combat, blades still in hand, the shapes of men and beastmen paralyzed across the floor.

  But something was not right.

  “Master, they’ve lost their legs. All of them.”

  “No,” said Cal-raven slowly. “No, they haven’t. Something happened. Something…melted the floor. They sank into it.”

  Someone, he thought. Someone melted the floor. He waved his torch around, bewildered and afraid.

  Along an open swath of floor, he found what he had suspected. Long, frantic lines of script carved into the rock. He knelt over them and traced them with his fingertips.

  “Sir?” The dizzy, horror-stricken soldiers climbed from their vawns and walked with blades unsheathed, prodding at the corpses half-encased in the ground. “What happened here?”

  “Oh no.” Cal-raven stood, turned, and walked toward two of the half-sunk combatants. The armored Abascar body was Blyn-dobed, the dig’s foreman, dead in the arms of a corpse with broad and bristling shoulders. The prince reached down, grabbed the scruff of the monster’s neck, and jerked it back.

  The disguise slipped away in his hand. It was not a beastman at all but an Abascar laborer, his face caked in dark paint.

  “Grudgers.” Cal-raven sobbed. “Grudgers attacked the guards.” He looked toward the ramp. “This was not a beastman attack. The beastmen have just come for the spoils.”

  “Grudgers struck their own tower,” seethed Tabor Jan.

  Cal-raven picked up the crude, bloodied disguise. He prodded the grudger’s paint-smudged face with his boot. “They disguised themselves as beastmen to spread panic, to turn the guards’ attention outward while they struck from within.” His arms shaking, he dropped the disguise. “Abascar is turning against my father.” He looked toward the tunnel.

  “No, master,” said Tabor Jan. “Only a few misguided fools. But their resentment made them angry and strong. We’ll go back and find the rest of them. We’ll draw them out of the house by their roots.”

  “Cal-raven,” cried one of the shaken soldiers, “those were beastmen we filled with arrows, yes? Those are beastmen that your riders are pursuing southward. We saw them running. No grudgers move like that.”

  “Those were beastmen, yes,” Tabor Jan shouted. “They moved in like vultures, smelling trouble.”

  Cal-raven stared into the dark tunnel, the passage intended to someday carry a river. “I’ve got to flag a warning to Abascar. Grudgers may be plotting something back at the house. And even if I’m wrong, it’s likely that some of the beastmen have run into the tunnel. That will lead them back home.”

  “Prince,” said one of the soldiers, “these men, these…grudgers. They’re up to their ribs in stone.”

  Cal-raven glanced at Tabor Jan. “Scharr ben Fray did this,” the prince explained.

  “The monster,” gasped Tabor Jan. “He killed both the grudgers and those who struggled with them?”

  “Perhaps he had no choice. Perhaps he froze them in their fight, preserved them for us to find and judge. If he had not, we might never have known what happened. We would have thought—”

  “That beastmen did it all.”

  A rasping voice suddenly burst from the half-buried grudger, who lunged and grasped Cal-raven’s arm. The prince fell and fought to pull away. But then he saw the face of the man who had hold of him. It was Marv, the bearded digger who had warned him of the grudgers’ growing discontent.

  “Tell them,” the man hissed, his blood-caked nails digging into
Cal-raven’s arm. “Tell them at Abascar.”

  “What?” Cal-raven pried his arm away, brought his sword around, and pressed it to the grudger’s neck. “You want me to send a grudger’s message? I’ll be doing what I can to write your name in the book of the condemned.”

  “Tell them…” Marv was staring blankly at the cave ceiling, his vision already faded. “Tell the people of Abascar…” He fought for breath, clutching at his chest. “They were so obsessed with what others might think…that they forgot who we really are.”

  “And who are we?” asked Cal-raven.

  The man grasped at the floor. He released his grip; he released his breath.

  When Cal-raven and Tabor Jan emerged from the tunnel, the quiet around them seemed unnatural.

  “This storm,” said Cal-raven.

  “It still has thunder in it.”

  “I suspect so.”

  Tabor Jan cursed and steered his vawn around the sprawled body of a beastman. “What will you do?”

  “I must get to a highwatch.”

  “To send warnings back to your father? Good.”

  “And to call for another troop. We need soldiers to protect the dig until the tunnels can be collapsed. Unless my father persists with his plan. And you. You should—”

  “Comb the surrounding wood.” Tabor Jan unbelted his alarm horn and sounded three quick notes. Vawns and riders moved inward from the edges of the battlefield.

  “The dig is lost,” said Cal-raven. “If there are survivors, they are scattered, and the grudgers—”

  “They will have run.”

  “If you find beastmen—”

  “Kill them.”

  “And if you find grudgers—”

  “Kill them as well.”

  “No.” Cal-raven frowned at his guardsman. “Seize them if you can. Kill only if you must. We need answers.”

  They gazed into the woods, gathering their bewildered wits. Cal-raven posted several swordsmen at the mouth of the dig tunnel, instructing them to watch for beastmen until he returned with new orders.

  “Cal-raven,” Tabor Jan quietly asked, “do you suppose your father will think this through? Or is it too late for him to change how he governs?”

  Cal-raven shook his head. “We can only hope.”

  Tabor Jan sighed. “It will be a long ride back.”

  “And a tough winter ahead.”

  “Do you remember where the highwatch is hidden?”

  Cal-raven tried to force a smile. “Of course. Keep your horn at the ready. I’ll sound my own when the signal is sent.”

  “Cal-raven.”

  “Yes?

  “If you see any Northchildren—”

  “Don’t follow them.”

  The prince spurred his vawn southward, up the steep hill toward the trees of the Cragavar. He thought about his arrival back home and how it would not inspire the celebration his father had predicted. Instead it would worsen a season of trouble. He wondered where Scharr ben Fray had gone.

  Back in the woods, he found the giant cloudgrasper tree, reached into a tangle of roots, and threw a hidden lever.

  Ropes fell, fastened to a small wooden step. Without looking back, he threw the lever again, jumped for the step, and caught it. The lift carried him up swiftly through the air, coming to rest deep in the broad canopy of needled boughs.

  The hatch slammed shut, and he stepped off the swing to the platform.

  As the sun surrendered, it singed the horizon, like a gleam of firelight along an edge of polished steel. Mist began to rise from the treetops.

  That was when he saw the smoke roiling from House Abascar. That was when he saw its ruined silhouette.

  His father’s tower no longer speared the sky.

  The platform seemed to tip and slide away beneath his feet. He had the sensation of falling. But the platform was steady. His right hand curled around the hilt of his sword and drew it out; his left unbelted his alarm horn, but he knew no signal to suggest the horrors on the horizon.

  “Besieged,” he gasped. “We are besieged at Abascar.”

  Thunder in his head. A crushing band of thorns around his heart. Aiming the horn northward to the dig, he blew with such force that he knew Tabor Jan would bring a company to his aid. All Abascar soldiers within hearing would converge upon this place.

  He dropped the horn, stooped, and snatched the signal flag. He flashed it to any watchmen who might be left, to tell them that he saw, that he knew, that he was alive.

  It was all he could think to do. Summon all powers under his command and send them charging back to the house.

  “Help me on this dark day!” he whispered to the air. Grief had hold of his throat.

  He stood alone between earth and sky, vulnerable and afraid. He had never been in such distress, never felt so helpless. And he had never had reason to fear that the kingship would pass to him before his father became old.

  But he knew, somehow, it had.

  29

  A STORM OF REMEMBERING

  W hile silver ribbons gleamed in the calm night water, the raft had drifted to Auralia’s shores as though directed by an invisible navigator. And as the ale boy watched it arrive, while he and Auralia crouched by the water’s edge playing with color and fire, he had sensed it—a great change approaching. All the signs were present, the echoes of his first days in the world—fire, trembling, and change.

  The night the queen disappeared, he was in the motherly embrace of an old woman in the breweries. Men with torches had searched the whole house for Jaralaine’s hiding place. Fire, trembling, and change.

  The day Auralia walked into Abascar, bearing the burden of her labors: fire, trembling, and change.

  And now again he walked through a world out of balance. Change. Fire. Kneel and tremble.

  Incredulous but unharmed, he parted the smoke. He passed beneath the anxious gazes of dizzy, bleary-eyed survivors. He was a wraith in a nightmare, cloaked in ash, waiting for the quavering world to grow still again.

  His first impulse had been to flee, to return to Auralia’s caves. But she would not be there, and he feared the grief would overwhelm him. It was the one thing he wanted to do, to see her again. In this cataclysm, the dungeons might well have collapsed. But he had to know. Perhaps she had survived. Perhaps somewhere she sat in a cell, frightened, trapped, pressing her cloak to her face so she could breathe.

  He found himself stumbling in pursuit of the soldiers. The ruin of the main gate, the wreckage of the principal avenue, the houses made of flame…he witnessed wonders and horrors. When Ark-robin turned to urge them on, his teeth were bared through the bristling beard, his eyes gone crimson. It struck the boy as strange that he had spent his life trying to dodge the soldier’s frown, and now he was compelled to follow, if only because that formidable silhouette was the only familiar sight in this spectacle. Or perhaps it was because Ark-robin, unlike the others scrambling all around them, was running toward the fire. The ale boy knew he must follow. Into the fire.

  The fire held the answers to his questions.

  There were people everywhere, running, injured, crying, dying, or dead. Fleeing destruction and danger, clinging to each other, searching for belongings or family. Outlines in the dust, smoke, and falling night, traces of fear and desperation. Staggering toward the palace. Trudging outward, dragging lumpish bags of salvage. One shouldered a tall, golden candlestand. One clutched her silent, naked infant. One held another’s hand, but there was no person attached to it.

  Ash fell in a torrent, settling into patches of sunken earth and smoking craters. Fire licked at the edges of chasms, worsening the closer they came to the wall that had guarded the palace. The ale boy marveled as they passed the top of the palace watchtower, which had toppled outward. Along its length, the ale boy twice saw an arm protruding from piles of crushed stone.

  Eventually they reached the gate that had stood at the foot of the toppled tower. In some surreal act of defiance or ignorance, the gate still stood
.

  Ark-robin attempted to shoulder it open. It did not budge. But the ground had fallen in on both sides of the gate, and he could climb down on an accidental stair of spilled stones and move around it. He did and commanded his three soldiers to help the ale boy down and through the deep crevasses. The soldiers obeyed, but he could see in their increasing hesitation that questions were rising.

  Behind the gate, things were far worse.

  The ground was open before them, a great canyon, jagged about the edges as though the earth had been merely an eggshell, and something had hatched. Below, distant rumbles—a subterranean thunderstorm. Fires were scattered through the turbulent cauldron of smoke, burning at dizzying depths through the chambers of King Cal-marcus’s hollowed house. He recognized the color of marrowwood flame chewing at props that supported a few spans of the Underkeep ceiling. He recognized a different kind of fire burning curtains and garments and ropes. And yet another, a yellow fire, burning the oil from fallen lanterns.

  The ale boy could guess what had happened. He had spent a great deal of his short life below, wondering how the ceiling stayed up. The elaborate network of supporting columns always seemed a pending doom. All for the sake of hoarding and hiding treasure, for the secrecy of forging weapons, for the ability to move beneath the city and spy upon people in their homes. But something had upset the central braces.

  Colors like those he had shown Auralia by the lake were leaping into the sky, not from cups, but from fissures and collapsed buildings. The force of such a fire…he was weak-kneed for imagining. It would have moved swiftly. It would have smashed ceilings, melted floors, and ripped stone walls. As rooms above descended into rooms below, the burden would have increased…more fuel for the hungry fire.

  In rare moments when a breeze cleared the death clouds, Abascar looked like a shattered anthill. People rushed madly about through broken tunnels, but paths that had been passageways led to sheer drops. Deranged survivors clung to walls or crawled along what was left of the floors staring into a fire-sculpted abyss. Some tested their weight on the ragged walls, fumbling for a firm hold. A tunnel would collapse nearby, shaking the earth and stripping their grasp. He saw a solid wall of soil; arms and legs reached out in clusters as though pinned there in some sickening gallery.