Mistress of the Wind (Arucadi Series Book 1)

by E. Rose Sabin

  The dog wagged his tail. His tongue lolled foolishly. He made no move to rise and go anywhere.

  “Some help you are!” Kyla looked down at the infant in her arms. “You said you could still influence Ruffian!”

  Twilight had faded quietly into night, though here in the clearing moonlight provided some illumination. She couldn’t stay here; it wasn’t safe. Where could she go? What could she do to protect herself and, now, an infant as well?

  How could Claid have done this? She should ask him to resume the mindstealer form, but her stubbornness rebelled against it. “I think you did this to force me to follow Alair’s plan, by getting myself captured by mindstealers or by becoming so desperate I’d agree to the idea. Well, I won’t.”

  Holding the baby in one arm, she took off her cloak and spread it on the ground. She laid the baby on it. Ruffian rose and ambled over. He sniffed the child and wagged his tail.

  “Ruffian likes you better in that form, that’s clear.” As she spoke, the dog settled down beside the baby. “Maybe he will protect you. He doesn’t show any sign of wanting to help me.”

  Kyla put on her backpack and gazed at the extra books. “I can’t keep carrying those with me,” she said. “I’ll have to leave them.”

  The baby broke into loud cries. She snatched up the books. “Oh, all right, I will bring them. Hush!”

  Baby Claid quieted and gurgled contentedly.

  Kyla stood looking down on him. “You won again, but you’re not going to like what I have to do. Unless you shape yourself into something that can protect us from the mindstealers, I’ll have to try to ride the wind tonight. I don’t want to see you as a mindstealer, nor an animal. Change to something I can talk to. Now.” Hands on hips, she waited, looking down at the infant.

  He cooed and waved his hands Could it be some kind of changing spell?

  No, the child just found and sucked on his fist.

  She’d waited long enough. Whether Claid could not change or was merely being stubborn she didn’t know, but she couldn’t stay here through the night, and Ruffian didn’t seem disposed to guide her anywhere.

  She glared at Claid. “You can’t protect me in that form, and Ruffian only wants to sleep. I’ve got to get far away from here and leave no trail for mindstealers to follow. Wail if you want. It’ll do you no good.”

  She rearranged the items in her pack, trying to fit in the books Claid had carried. She got in the three he’d taken out, but no matter how she arranged and shoved, the other three would not fit.

  “Since you won’t let me leave these, you’re going to lie on them.” She picked up the baby and sat on the cloak, holding him in her lap on top of the books. “Sorry if that’s a bumpy bed, but it was your idea.”

  She pulled Ruffian close to her, stretched out her legs on either side of him, and lifted his head and paws into her lap beside the baby. “You aren’t going to like this, either,” she said. “I hate it myself. But with mindstealers around, I don’t dare wait until morning. I can’t think of any other way to get far enough to be safe. I only hope I can hold on to you and not get you killed.” She stroked the dog’s head.

  Then she sat up straight and sang.

  Her fear and her anger infused the melody, gave it depth, and wove into its weird harmonies a tension, a recklessness, that brought the wind screaming down from the Starmist Mountains. Fierce and frenetic, it roiled around her. Ruffian whined and pulled himself higher into her lap, resting his head on the baby. She clung to dog and child as the wind lifted the cloak. This time she kept her head and continued to sing, including in her song a plea to be carried to Waddams. She wouldn’t be welcomed there, but she had to see for herself that the town had survived.

  Trees became a dark blur. An instant later she looked down on a tapestry of treetops. Clouds shredded as they tore through them. The baby wailed; Ruffian quivered and whimpered. Kyla’s stomach lurched as the wind spun her about, dropped, lifted, and tipped her this way and that.

  Screaming its laughter, the wind capered over the woods, setting the trees dancing. It careered over the hills, gathering in its wake a train of rain squalls. After drenching fields and meadows, it cavorted through darkened, tightly shut villages. One of them could have been Waddams, but in the darkness and with the wind’s speed she couldn’t be sure. The wind swooped down to frolic over rooftops, prying shingles and shutters loose and sending them flying. It zoomed over more hills and, to Kyla’s horror, coasted at dizzying speed down the slope of Rim Canyon. She sang frantically, trying to change its direction, to no avail. It brought her to rest, drenched and shivering, on the boulder-strewn canyon floor.

  She groaned and lay where the wind left her like flotsam. Both Ruffian and infant Claid were so still she probed for breath and heartbeat. Reassured by the rapid rise and fall of Ruffian’s ribs and the slow but steady heartbeat of the babe, she shoved the three books from beneath Claid, and wrapped the cloak about her and dog and baby. Not knowing what else to do, she hugged them both and fell into an exhausted slumber.

  The baby’s loud cries awakened her. Stiff and sore and cold, she struggled to a sitting position and looked around. Above her the morning sun painted a gold rim along the canyon’s edge, but the light had not yet driven the darkness from the canyon floor. Ruffian lay beside her, a black hump against the graying light.

  Baby Claid had soiled her cloak, dashing her hope that he would not have the needs and behavior of a normal child.

  She unwrapped the squalling infant, lifted him from the reeking cloak, and rocked him, heedless of the filth. The child refused to be soothed or to suck the finger she put to his mouth. “You’re hungry, I know, and I have nothing to feed you. I warned you of that. You’d better take a different form and find your own food.”

  The baby’s screams only grew more insistent. Laying the baby down, Kyla fished her windspeaker’s shift from her backpack, regarded it ruefully, and tore strips from around its hem. She also took her canteen from the pack. A narrow stream ran through the center of the canyon. She filled the canteen, then dipped the torn cloths into the water, returned to the baby, and put a twisted end of rag into his mouth. As she’d hoped, he quieted and sucked greedily, giving her a chance to use the other cloths to clean him.

  The reprieve wouldn’t last long. The water would do nothing to relieve the baby’s hunger. She’d find nothing else to offer him here, nor would she find anything for herself and Ruffian. She could only hope that the wind would respond to her singing, lift them out of the canyon, and carry them back to Noster Valley.

  Quickly she sponged off the cloak—no time to wash it properly. With the infant temporarily quieted, she called Ruffian, again arranged dog, books, baby, and herself on the damp cloak, and sent up a loud, clear wind song.

  Pouring her heart into the song, she cajoled, promised, pled. The air at the bottom of the canyon remained still and colorless. Ruffian grew restless. The baby dropped the cloth and broke into loud wails.

  If she could get no help from the wind, she’d have to locate another way out of the canyon before they all starved. That meant she’d have to have her hands free for climbing. Tearing more strips from the shift, she made bindings to strap the baby to her breast. With the pack on her back and the crying infant strapped in front of her, she regarded the three books that wouldn’t fit into her pack. She’d brought them so far, but she had done so at Claid’s insistence, and she owed Claid nothing after what he had done—was doing—to her.

  Yet of all that had once been hers so little remained. To leave the books behind would be to cast away part of her identity.

  Ruffian had gone to the stream for a drink and was scouting about among the rocks. She called him to her. “Old fellow, I’ve put you through so much. I don’t know why you stick with me. Now I’ve got to ask for one more thing.”

  The dog wagged his shaggy tail. She wrapped the last remnants of her shift tightly around Ruffian’s midsection and inserted the three books beneath the wrappings so tha
t they were held tightly against his sides and back.

  “There,” she said, stepping back to look critically at her work. “If Claid really can influence you, he’ll keep you from losing these.”

  Ruffian tried to shake off the burden. When Kyla was satisfied that the binding would hold, she called him after her and set off to find a path up to the rim.

  There had to be a way out.

  Wary of falling rocks, she cast frequent glances up the sheer slope. All the rocks that blocked her path had at some time come crashing into the canyon from above.

  Rough and uneven, the high canyon walls looked as though they’d been gouged out by angry giants. Sharp edges marked many of the striated layers, but these looked too brittle to offer handholds or niches for climbing. The stranger who had bought her parents’ home must have had special equipment and exceptional skill if he had made the perilous climb. How could she, with neither training nor tools, and a dog and a baby to hamper her, possibly scale the wall? Yet the pretty gold disks in her pack offered hope that a way up might exist.

  As time passed, Kyla became inured to the baby’s thin, piercing wails. The constant crying must be sapping the child’s energy. From time to time she offered him the wet rag, until he refused that inadequate sop.

  Ruffian plodded beside her, tongue lolling, patient and stoic beneath his burden of books. The brassy sun glared into the canyon, and its heat, trapped between the canyon walls, turned the place into an oven.

  The sun’s position directly overhead told her it was noon. She took refuge in the shadow of a large boulder. Ruffian sat panting beside her, his eyes fixed on her with a mixture of bewilderment and trust that tore her heart. She drank from her canteen and poured a bit of water into the dog’s panting mouth.

  The baby had finally fallen quiet; probably he had bawled himself hoarse. She offered him a water-soaked rag, and he sucked on it listlessly.

  When the baby dropped the rag, she caught it and pushed herself away from the rock. Ruffian lumbered to his feet and plodded along beside her. The baby whimpered, a more pathetic sound than its loud squalls had been. Alair had said Claid couldn’t die, but in this form he seemed so fragile, so vulnerable, Kyla found herself forgetting it was no mortal child she carried.

  Ruffian trailed dispiritedly at her heels, taking no apparent interest in his surroundings. The canyon’s monotonous sameness made Kyla feel she was getting nowhere, the small stream, the rocky canyon floor, the high, striated walls unchanging. Only the sun dipped lower, stretching out the shadows but not lessening the heat it poured into that deadly chasm. Occasionally she went to the stream to refill her canteen and drink.

  By late afternoon the baby was silent and Kyla was plodding along dispiritedly, scarcely noting where she walked and paying no attention to the dog. The sound of a loud splash alerted her to his crossing the stream. With an energy she wouldn’t have believed he could still possess, he ran to the wall on that far side. His ears cocked, his tail stiffened, he sniffed the air, and barked.

  “What’s wrong?” Kyla scanned the area, trying to rouse her dulled senses to a semblance of alertness.

  She saw nothing, but Ruffian dashed along the canyon wall and clambered up onto a pile of rock, barking furiously.

  Kyla forded the stream at a narrow point and followed him to the base of the rock pile. “Come down here,” she called, worried that the awkward burden tied onto him would unbalance him and cause him to fall.

  Instead, he climbed higher and leaped from the top of the pile toward the canyon wall. He landed on a ledge hidden by a trick of the light, looking like only another band marking a new stratum in the varicolored layers. Ruffian’s walk along it resolved it into an upward sloping shelf. At its end a dark stripe might mark another such ledge sloping upward in the opposite direction.

  Desperate to get out of the canyon, she decided to follow the dog. After all, Claid had said he would cause Ruffian to guide her.

  Climbing awkwardly because of the double burden of backpack and baby, she scrambled up onto the rock pile. The leap that had been easy for Ruffian looked impossible to her. She had to try. She put the baby down, took off her backpack, and tossed it onto the ledge. Then she tied the baby onto her again, positioned herself carefully, flexed her knees, and sprang. For a terrifying instant she teetered on the brink of the ledge. She pushed herself forward and clung to the rock wall, sobbing with fear.

  When at last she stopped trembling, she edged along the narrow path. Ruffian gave a welcoming bark and wagged his tail. He led the way, more sure-footed than she.

  Claid must be directing the dog. That thought gave her the courage to reclaim her backpack and balance precariously on the edge while she maneuvered the backpack onto her back, a difficult feat that made her still more certain that Claid was keeping her from falling. Armed with that certainty, Kyla followed Ruffian even when the shelf shrank to only a handbreadth wide. As best she could with the baby bound in front of her, she hung onto the wall and inched along, not daring to look down. “Don’t squirm,” she told Claid, and he must have understood. He lay unmoving against her while she climbed.

  She feared that at any time their perilous path would reach a dead end, but it did not, and after what seemed hours of arduous climbing, they stepped off it onto the firm ground at the top of the canyon. Shaking, she stared down at the distant canyon floor. The stream was a mere thread of silver shining with the sun’s reflected light in a dark, sinuous chasm far, far below.

  The baby whimpered and Ruffian gave an echoing whine.

  “I know, boys. You’re hungry. So am I. But together the two of you got us up here where we have some hope of finding food.” She turned away from the canyon to see what sort of land lay beyond the Rim.

  The high ground at the canyon’s edge sloped downward to a sunken plain that stretched to a horizon lost in a gloomy haze. Shrubs on the slope leading down to the plain had a yellow, sickly look, and the few trees were mostly dead branches with pathetic tufts of browning leaves clinging like bits of flesh on a bone. Clouds of black smoke rose from several points to float above the haze and mingle with it, and she thought she glimpsed occasional flickers of flame. Whiffs of an acrid, sulfurous smell rode to her on an alien wind.

  “What is this place?” she asked her two speechless companions. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  LINE’S END

  The sun, a baleful red, hung low on the western horizon. Should she find a place to spend the night and wait until morning to start down to the plain?

  No. She and the baby needed food. Maybe she’d find a farmhouse or hunter’s cabin where she could get a meal and shelter. Ordering Ruffian to heel, she headed into the gray pall.

  She plodded on in the dim light. A low rumble in the distance brought her to a stop. Thunder? Maybe the thick haze was only a low-lying storm cloud.

  The ominous roar grew louder, closer.

  It was no storm. As the booming sound came nearer, jarring clanks as of metal striking metal mingled with it. With a hellish shriek and the clanging of a bell, a huge iron monster seethed out of the gloom and bore toward her, smoke belching from a tall cone rising from its long snout.

  Ruffian crouched beside her, threw back his head, and howled. The baby bawled. The dreadful din of the monster swallowed up both protests.

  Kyla sank to her knees in terror. Ruffian pressed against her, still howling. Light streamed from a single eye positioned in front of the smoke-cone. A fearsome grin of iron teeth curved below its snout and swept the ground in front of it.

  The creature veered and clattered past in a cloud of smoke and cinders, spitting sparks, swaying, huffing, and clanking. Kyla gaped at a line of huge metal-wheeled boxes pulled along behind it over two parallel iron strips.

  The dust and smoke of its passing left her coughing and choking. A stray spark set a nearby bush ablaze. The fire could spread rapidly through the dry vegetation. Kyla clambered to her feet and ran. As the
monster hurtled away, Ruffian recovered his courage and bounded off after it, barking furiously. Kyla whistled, but the dog probably couldn’t hear over the din of the departing horror.

  She crossed the two iron strips and paused to touch them. Hot! Were they the monster’s spoor, left behind as it churned forward? Or had the wizard who’d created the monster set them in place as guides to keep the thing on its intended path? Almost hidden by drifting sand, thick planks crossed at regular intervals beneath the iron strips, supporting them. That was curious, but with night closing in around her, there was no time for a close examination.

  She headed away from the fire in the direction the monster had taken. Its tracks provided a trail to follow in the waning light, though she feared the monster might return or another might come charging after the first. The trail might lead to the dwelling of the mage who had created the thing and who must be far greater than Alair, and therefore even more arrogant and dangerous. Kyla wanted no encounter with such a person, but if she wandered off into the darkness, she would become hopelessly lost. It would be best to put a safe distance between her and the fire, and then stop until morning.

  Ruffian barked in the distance. She whistled for him again. The clangor had faded away; he should be able to hear the summons, but the barking grew fainter. She shouted for him and walked on. He’d find her when he was ready.

  She patted the baby, who had again fallen silent after the passing of the creature. No infant could survive long without nourishment. She had to find milk for it tomorrow, and food for her and Ruffian. She’d nothing but a few berries since leaving Alair’s house. Even if it meant confronting a haughty mage, she could not go a third day without food.

  A noise behind her sent her whirling around. Head down, ears flat, Ruffian slunk to her, burs clinging to his coat. She bent to give him a comforting rub. The girdle of books was loose, and one book hung halfway out. Only luck (or Claid?) had prevented its loss.

  “I’m not mad at you for wandering off and not coming when I called you, but I would have been upset if you’d come back without these.” She removed the cloth girdle. “We might as well stop here. I can’t go any farther tonight.”