A runner left and came back impressively soon; she signaled to the warmaster. It seemed like the Guardian had honed in the Unseen Flow more easily than she had, but that was to be expected. Colibrí wasn’t even a spiritseer.
Warmaster Jhul nodded and gave a signal. As one, spears tipped with hard black bone began moving forward, and behind them followed their warriors.
They found the first patch of Stillness in less than half a notch.
It at first seemed to be sitting in plain view, an expanse of lifeless gray hollowed out into a lattice of sinew. Warriors scowled, angered to see so much corruption in the open, and then their spiritseers came forward. Those among them wearing violet glanced around as if peering at something only they could see, but the other spiritseers were nodding as well. Several drew their Flowing Blades and raised their free hand—
—and a swarm of halja appeared from out of nowhere, just like when Colibrí and Narune had been ambushed.
The halja spun around with slow, uncaring confusion—anything but predators in waiting—and then it might as well have shrugged before wading into the Islandborn warriors.
No commands were given, no conchs sounded. The Islandborn already knew what to do; they fought. Silent, with nothing but the rustling of leaves and the collective gathering of breaths.
If anything, it was the sheer number of halja that caught them by surprise, and even as they fought more pushed through the corrupted land as if it were a fleshy membrane.
Colibrí joined her fellow warriors, feeling complete for the first time in Cycles. She had grown, like her son, knowing she wanted to be a warrior, driven forward by Yabisi’s faith in her and the promise of becoming one of her sentinels, then eventually, her champion.
Colibrí stepped across the root-roads, ears flat, and lashed out with her spear to kill an Empty Tiger. Motion surrounded her like the Jurakán that swelled close, and she moved to wherever the winds of war were slowing. Empty Victory and Empty Fury stood among the enemy, and these halja stole lives from them, but luckily there were none of the more sinister breeds.
She moved to fight the greater halja with the most veteran warriors, acknowledging, with mild amusement, that she was even one of them. It was true that she had spent more time at the Primordial Wound than most warriors, and her feats were many, but she hadn’t ever placed those truths above fellow warriors.
Through it all, Yabisi’s two sentinels followed her stubbornly, their spears no less responsible than hers for the thick plumes of dust in the air. She expected nothing less, as the cacica’s sentinels had few peers other than the warmaster and spiritseers themselves.
The battle took an eternity, but was over in a heartbeat, and they all stood catching their breaths. They drank wordlessly, checked their wounds, carried away their injured and left their dead to the forest; the spirits of the fallen were already gone, so all that was left was the soil and water they had borrowed from the land in the first place.
Then, they worked on the Stillness.
It was warrior’s work, and they were all familiar with it. The sinew broke without too much effort and didn’t grow back almost instantly like it did at the Primordial Wound. Between all the gathered warbands, they were quick to free the root-road and middle layer from Stillness.
Colibrí wiped sweat from her brow as she watched Warmaster Jhul signal for his scouts; they’d do a quick search in the layers above and the forest floor below. Once he was done, Jhul sent runners to exchange information with the other warband clusters.
“Stillness along every point,” a returning runner announced as she fell to a knee before the warmaster. “Reports say a great deal of halja at them all, but no corruption too deep to cleanse. None of the scouts have seen Peacemaker, and the warbands eagerly await your command to spring forward on the hunt once more, Warmaster.”
Warmaster Jhul turned to Colibrí and she nodded. Jerrico came up then with his artifacts, his already pale face even whiter. He had helped a little with stray halja, but he had told her earlier that his destructive sorcery lacked the finesse to use here, what with all the scattered warriors and the shifting root-roads and their layers, so he mostly sulked and protected his artifacts.
“Those… were all halja?” the foreigner asked as he adjusted his constructs. “Saints find me. I’ve… I’ve heard of knights going on long quests to find one. A few have told stories of slaying a nest of the animal-like ones, which would be a handful at best, but…”
“What would your precious knights have done at this sight?” Colibrí asked as she put her hand on the device.
The magus considered her question, then laughed and said, “Probably shit themselves to death, but not our Conquistadors. They would have had erections breaking through their stone armor, men and women both.”
Colibrí gave a short laugh as she tuned into the Unseen Flow, then they were off.
They followed it like they would a river, and within another notch, they found another nest down on the forest floor. A second battle raged here, fiercer than the first, and their blood soaked the detritus. In the end the Islandborn survived yet again and set to work on the Stillness itself. Runners moved along the root-roads like ants, silent and confident. Again no sign of Peacemaker, but Colibrí had an itchy feeling that he was watching anyway.
Warriors reported to Jhul, and again they spoke of similar battles along the line of warbands.
“This seems to confirm your suspicions,” Warmaster Jhul said to her and Jerrico as they stood in the near total darkness of the bottom layers. He had allowed the use of coral lanterns, but most of them were red and had only been fed enough to give off a faint glow.
“In hindsight, it should have been obvious,” Jerrico said with a huff and thump of his staff. “But then, hindsight always is. Even a practiced magus would have done this to ease their burden, especially here where the Flows are deep. No need to fuss with Drawing—no, señrosa, just spellcraft, right there, with all the raw material you can ever need. Might not even need to tighten everything properly, because the spell could sustain itself using the natural currents. If this Peacemaker truly can’t use the Flows directly, then all that would be even more useful. But now I’m fairly confident that he can.”
Curious, Colibrí turned to him. “Oh?”
The magi nodded. “The Unseen Flow is far from my favorite, but once your spiritseers more or less ‘point out’ the illusion, I can examine the craftsmanship myself. It’s excellent stuff.” He paused and gave them a look as if he pitied them for simply not knowing. “This isn’t a hastily crafted spell. It’s dense, well-woven, long-lasting, yet subtle in a way beyond how the Unseen Flow naturally is. Whoever made it knows the Flow very well, and are experienced with its intricacies. That much at least I’m confident of.”
“But?” she asked, sensing his hesitation. Her tail curved like a half moon when Warmaster Jhul looked from her, to Jerrico.
The magus grinned and tugged on his ridiculously unnerving plume of face-hair. “But… this would take a significant amount of time even for someone like myself. We found, what, over almost a dozen shrouded nests already, each with illusions also caging halja? Kayuya—or is Mother the proper address? Er, whatever. Kayuya Colibrí, my dear… what we’ve seen alone would have taken me half a year—er, what you call a Cycle.” He gave up and passed a hand across his face. “If he truly used the Unseen Flow indirectly, then this kind of craftsmanship would have taken Cycles of nonstop work, and I’m not counting the time needed for the Stillness to root or halja to be herded over.”
The warmaster stared at him, but Colibrí wagged her tail, thrilled. “So, were you Peacemaker, would you describe our work as disheartening?”
“Disheartening?” High Magus Jerrico laughed and raised his eyebrows. “If I had learned about losing the first set, let alone that you discovered my little trick, well… I’d probably just slit my throat out of sheer frustration.”
Good, she thought. No wonder he was so quick to hunt Narune and
me.
“Maybe Peacemaker gave up, then,” Jhul said.
“I definitely would have,” the foreigner said with a shrug. “But anyone who’s already done this much must be stubborn beyond definition—or desperate, I suppose.”
They resumed their hunt, moving closer to the heart of the forest where the Primordial Wound waited. They found another stretch of corrupted forest, and again another swarm of halja, more than there should ever be this far from the Wound. What had Peacemaker been thinking? What was his goal?
They halja didn’t offer any answers as they were slaughtered. Afterward, the Islandborn worked apart the Stillness until their bodies ached and their breaths were ragged, then continued. Predators tried them every so often, and Jhul received a report that an oubao moin—a many-limbed, dripping mass that was not unlike an umoth of the forest—had descended from the canopy and eaten through an entire warband before being forced back.
Another blotch of Stillness greeted them deeper in the forest, where the air was heavy with Flow. This time, Empty Hunt and several rarer breeds like Empty Hunger struck early, and this time, the monsters worked together with eerie precision.
An entire warband lay dying before the battle even began, and Colibrí herself just barely managed to avoid an ambush by Empty Hunt working in unison from roots above them. The battle left her covered in scrapes and bruises, her left hip bleeding from a wound that would leave a beautiful scar. She was already exhausted, but that was just the normal state of a warrior.
Seeing the halja suddenly working together, however, made her wary, and her attention eventually turned to the foreigners. She spotted Jerrico glancing around in confusion from across the battlefield. He raised his staff and the air around him erupted in a spray of fire, turning the Empty Hunt cords spiraling toward him into ash.
“Show yourself, magus!” he cried with breathless fury. “Enough with deception and luring your monsters toward us!”
It must be Peacemaker, Colibrí thought—he had realized the importance of the artifacts. She ran toward Jerrico, Yabisi’s sentinels at her heels, and joined the foreign warriors as a swarm of lessor halja and Empty Victory leaped over from a nearby root. She whirled and spun like a stormdancer, snarling like a coyote, her ears flat, her tail streaming out behind her.
It was their most gruesome battle yet, but they made it through.
Everyone kept their heads high and went to work on the Stillness without complaint, but the warbands as a whole were bleeding and growing tired. Colibrí couldn’t blame them There were already too many halja in the forest; it was obvious Peacemaker had been preparing for them.
Colibrí told Jhul what she had seen. He immediately assigned a warband to help protect the foreigners, only to learn that several of Jerrico’s apprentices had been slain during other battles across the advancing line of warband clusters.
They were slowed by several notches while Jhul rearranged their strength and count of artifacts, and were ambushed in the middle of the process, costing them even more warriors. Warmaster Jhul kept a detached calm through it all as he listened to reports that had made even Colibrí wince.
When Jhul noticed her staring at him, he smiled without humor. “The more fiercely your enemy struggles, the deeper you know your fangs have sunk.”
They continued on, the notches and eventually days blending together. They slept little, harried by near-constant halja ambushes now, and worked apart Stillness even after their limbs had become numb with fatigue. Even the wounded demanded that they be dragged onto the stillness so they could stab at the corruption with their knives, proud to unmake even the slightest chip.
Menders and spiritseers of the Verdant Flow tried their best, but allowing a body to return to the fight wasn’t the same as healing it, which needed as much time and nurturing as growth. But the warriors waved away the dutiful warnings of the healers and did as they were shaped to do.
Colibrí stood beside them. It was among the most miserable moments of her life, but she felt purpose in a way she hadn’t for some time. Even so, it was hard on all of them, her included. She marched while her muscles screamed as loudly, as the Jurakán pounding her head. She ate on the move, and pissed wherever the stream wouldn’t get in the way.
They made good progress and the warriors endured nobly, knowing they were heading toward allies at the safeholds surrounding the Primordial Wound, and Warmaster Jhul had even sent out runners early for spare fighters from the warbands there.
From there… well, they would have to see. There was a whole other half of the island to clear, and now she—along with the warmaster, she noticed—viewed the deepness and careful insertion of this much infection as nothing other than a nightmare. They would have to thoroughly scour the outer islands too, and they would likely need to continue their careful sweeps for a long time. The coming Cycle wouldn’t be easy for any warrior, and that was already assuming the upcoming storm season proved merciful.
And then Peacemaker came to them. Their foe emerged from the gloom beside the warbands, his silhouette eerie beneath the gloom of a sky still pushing out its litter of storms.
They had been moving in exhausted silence along the root-roads, taking turns on watch so some of them could close their eyes for a while, sleeping on their feet, but even they snapped their spears up at his approach. A wave of raised spears passed silently across the root-roads.
Peacemaker looked...well, disappointing. Humanoid and wearing a poncho like hers, but all of his flesh seemed wrapped in cloth and his face was obscured by a smooth, featureless mask with no eye holes. Everything he wore was the same gray as halja sinew, but he didn’t look like a halja at all.
Colibrí snarled and moved forward. Peacemaker was already looking directly at her—well, they assumed it was him, but really, who else could it be? “You come to surrender?” she asked him.
He inclined his head. “Possibly.”
She let out a short laugh, then froze, her tail mid-snap and her ears erect. “Eh?”
“I did not choose my name without reason,” he said, looking like a gray specter in the shadows. “I wish to negotiate with you. Alone.”
“No,” she said immediately.
“The Guardian may join. She’ll assure you’re not influenced or deceived by my sorcery.”
A thrown spear whirled through the air and through Peacemaker as if he really were a specter. He turned to glance in the direction from where it came from. Colibrí did too, and saw a warrior with a bandaged chest snarl from beside Warmaster Jhul.
“It’s an illusion,” she told the warmaster. “Don’t bother.”
“Yes,” Peacemaker said with a laugh. “A precaution. You’re all shaped for war, after all.” He glanced right at Jhul when he said this.
Colibrí eyed him for a moment, thinking. “You truly want to speak with us?” she asked.
“I do.”
“And if we can’t come to an agreement?”
“Then you and I will go our separate ways and we’ll meet at the Primordial Wound to end things as the Islandborn always have.”
“Colibrí, you and the Guardian are our best method of finding the corrupted gardens,” Warmaster Jhul barked. “I will not allow it.”
Peacemaker dipped his head. “You’ve already undone most of my work, and even if she dies, there are two Halfborn safe at Kayuya Village, and far more magi where your Casteónese came from.” They all narrowed their eyes at Peacemaker, who bowed apologetically and then sighed. “Very well. If the Guardian swears an oath for my safety, I’ll come amongst you, instead. That way, even should I draw halja into attacking, Colibrí and the Guardian will be at the heart of your warbands.”
At this the Warmaster Jhul hesitated and glanced over at Colibrí.
“Very well,” she said to Peacemaker, and threw her free arm out to the side, her tail mimicking the gesture. “I suppose we could use a break before we finish you. Allow us a moment to fetch the Guardian, then I’ll give you one notch. Agreed?”
Chapter 28
Narune’s gaze narrowed at the six spiritseers arranged in a semicircle. All of them were novices, like him, and each of them wore the colors of the Flows of Creation; red for the Radiant Flow, umber for the Deep Flow, blue for the Unbound Flow, green for the Verdant Flow, violet for the Unseen Flow, and there, at the center, Ixchel bearing the amber color of the Celestial Flow.
Stormwater fell between them and the sky rumbled.
He turned to look at the cacica. “What do you expect of me?”
“To defeat them, of course,” she said easily. “I want to see the weapon you were meant to be, but with the control we need. Defeat them and I’ll consider you and your mother a risk worth exploring. This… this is to show me there’s even a point.”
“What if I injure or kill them?” Narune asked, the wording deliberate. He knew she would expect him to win without harming them even though it was all but impossible.
“Then you will have murdered your kin, and you will be judged for it.” Cacica Yabisi shrugged in the rain and cast her gaze across the Proving Grounds. “This isn’t a Ritual or sanctioned contest. But they don’t have the same restrictions.”
Narune’s eyebrows raised in surprise, but it was Kisari who cried out in shock. He and the cacica turned to face her, and, after looking abashed for a moment, Kisari gave the cacica a hard stare.
“This goes beyond unfair,” she spat. “This is cruelty. You’re leaving him outnumbered and unable to kill his opponents, but don’t put the same weight on them?”
“Yes,” Cacica Yabisi said with a look at Tessouat. “And if he loses himself, the elder here will kill him immediately.”
Cradle of Sea and Soil Page 29