Rainhorn (The Weirkey Chronicles Book 2)

by Sarah Lin

  Fiyu struck, a silent shadow blurring through the light cast by the lantern. Theo was shocked by how quickly she moved and so was Delarde, barely managing to dodge back from the dark cantae thrusting at his face. But even if she could equal his speed, she couldn't match an Archcrafter's force, so when he slammed his pike into the cave floor, she staggered back.

  Though Fiyu struck again, he was ready this time, sweeping his pike to drive her back. "Careful! You could hurt somebody with that..."

  Clearly Fiyu couldn't stop him, and she'd be throwing herself into danger once the other Deuxans got their act together and struck at her flanks. Theo didn't see many options, but at that moment Nauda came up beside him, new blood coating her staff as she gripped it.

  "I'm going to take down that cantae aura. You'll only have one second."

  With that, she struck alongside Fiyu, thrusting out her fork and catching one of the soulcrafters in place. She swept both to the side, driving him into the others, but Delarde was far too quick to be caught by such a maneuver. He rushed forward with a mad grin, his pike sweeping into position for a fatal thrust.

  Nauda let out a cry and cantae swept from her, not in an attack but nullifying the energy in front of her. For a moment, Delarde's burning cloak flickered out.

  Theo's hand was already up, sending cantae into his opponent's chest.

  Though Delarde let out a cry and tried to resist, his aura came back up too late. Theo's cantae created twisting planes of gravity trying to tear him apart from within. The Deuxan soulcrafter groaned and staggered, blood staining the front of his shirt and one of his arms going limp.

  Yet instead of falling, he slammed a foot into the ground and kept himself upright. Grinning through bloody teeth, Delarde managed to straighten up and raise his pike with his remaining hand. Though Theo tried to send another torsion burst, it deflected off his opponent's aura, even though it flickered weakly. The Archcrafter was only keeping himself standing with raw cantae, but he had plenty to spare.

  "Al... almost." Delarde grinned again, and swept his pike to gesture at his allies. "Stop staring and join me. This isn't a duel, it's putting the worms in their place."

  The group advanced, weapons rising and cantae bolts beginning to flicker in their hands. Theo could have tried a gravitational field, but had to assume that they would all have soulcrafted Esaire's defenses. Acting would only spur them to attack, and it would go poorly... he didn't have good options, Nauda was barely on her feet, and Fiyu...

  His answer was obvious, once he thought about it. Theo raised his hand to the side and used a cantae bolt to destroy the lantern.

  All at once the cavern was plunged into darkness, lit only by the unstably flickering light of Delarde's cloak. Theo couldn't see anything except the Archcrafter, but he heard a cry of pain from one side of the entrance. Delarde whirled to look, flaring his aura, only to find one of the soulcrafters lying against the wall, blood flowing from the new wound on his chest.

  "She's in the shadows!" Delarde called. "Don't give her any!"

  One of the other soulcrafters lit up in a defensive aura, desperately searching for an enemy... but it only illuminated him for a moment before Fiyu appeared behind him, driving her blade of dark cantae through his back. In the shadows, the blade surrounding her hand looked like darkness itself, and when the man's cantae died, Fiyu was one with the shadows, even before she drew her veil of stealth around herself.

  As one of the others let out a cry, dying in the darkness, the last soulcrafter rushed to go back to back with Delarde. It was a strategy, but not a good one. In the darkness, all Theo could see was the two of them illuminated by aura, so he slammed all his gravitational fields down on both of them, dropping the soulcrafter and even staggering Delarde.

  Though he still burned with an Archcrafter's cantae, his focus was waning and the blood loss was beginning to slow him down. His soulhome still overflowed with more cantae than he could use, but that was exactly the problem: it wouldn't do him any good if his body gave out before his soul did.

  An invisible blade suddenly sliced through the back of his leg and he went down with a cry. He tried to swipe backwards, but Fiyu was already emerging from the shadows in front of him, a hail of light slamming into his cloak, battering it down, throwing him to the ground.

  "Please, don't..." Delarde struggled to scramble backwards away from Fiyu as she walked toward him. "You've won, alright? If you let me live, the Armeau family will reward you... you'll get the bloodprice and the prestige of-"

  "I don't know what that is." Fiyu drove her blade into his face and the last light was quenched.

  Though he was now in total darkness, Theo could finally breathe easy again. Being completely unable to see left him unpleasantly vulnerable, wishing he had his old techniques, but Fiyu was the only one who could take advantage of it.

  "That was smart, Theo." Her hand patted the back of his before flitting away, nothing but a sense of motion in the darkness. "You too, Nauda. I could not have defeated him if he had been uninjured."

  "I'm glad this is good for you," Nauda said wryly, "but I could use some light."

  "Oh, of course. There was a second lantern, was there not?"

  Soon enough, Fiyu appeared beside the sleigh with the lantern's light flickering around her. Her smile was broad, even when she twisted the device to increase the light to flood the entire chamber. Nauda dropped into a seated position, letting her staff clatter to the floor again. Though her hands would recover, he didn't envy her all the torn skin.

  All around them, the chamber was filled with the bodies of soulcrafters, blood pooling around them. He'd assumed that Fiyu's blade was generated from darkness, but not realized that it might be designed for it. Combined with her stealth, it would make her a dangerous hunter on Ichil.

  Out of habit he looked over the bodies, wondering if they had anything useful that could be taken. Presumably they had a sled outside, at least. Yet when he counted them...

  "Fiyu, there's one more!" Theo was already running after the smear of blood that went around the corner. Though Fiyu looked surprised at first, she rallied her weary senses and then her eyes widened and she rushed after him.

  All of Fiyu's strikes had been fatal except for one, and the surviving Deuxan had managed to crawl his way surprisingly far. Theo spotted him outside the entrance and raised a hand to strike, but the last Deuxan let out a cry and his cantae exploded from him, lighting up the cavern mouth like the sun.

  For a moment, Theo was stunned by the foolishness of it. His dying cantae had been potent, but too far away to hurt them. Once, such a burst would have blinded Fiyu, but her soulcrafting and mask reduced it to nothing but a wince. There was no one outside to warn, just an empty sled floating beside the cavern, and Theo didn't believe any of the other Deuxans had remained...

  He understood just a little before he heard the roar. The enormous form of the eryo bounded over one of the nearby hills, rushing toward them.

  There should have been more than enough time to retreat, but they were both exhausted from the battle. By the time they realized that escape from the cavern was impossible and turned to run, the eryo was already almost there. As Theo sprinted back inside, he heard the sled be smashed apart into splinters. Even when they got deeper, he felt a massive claw scraping against the stone.

  When they retreated to the dead end, they discovered Nauda sitting there, watching them numbly. "I take it the eryo can't get in?"

  "Not as far as I can tell," Theo said, "but we're trapped inside."

  "That's fine. I just hope it stops roaring." With that, Nauda lay down and shifted into a comfortable position to sleep. Honestly, he couldn't blame her.

  Chapter 28

  Technically they could have started thinking of a solution to their predicament immediately, but after enduring so much, the group wasn't eager to throw themselves into yet another problem. Their cavern shook a few times as the eryo tried to find a way in, but when it failed, they decided to leave
aside that issue for when they were better rested.

  Nauda got her hands fully bandaged, while Fiyu curled up and slept, exhausted after the encounter. Theo was actually the one in the best shape, for which he felt vaguely guilty. He'd made the best choices he could, they just hadn't required as much from him.

  One night of sleep left everyone feeling much better, but it didn't fundamentally change their situation. Early in the morning, Theo ventured to the mouth of the cave to check, only to find the eryo waiting outside. It had again curled up on itself, forming the lumpy shape that had first made him mistake it for a building... but he saw one vast eye watching from between its claws.

  When he returned, he found that the other two had finished eating. Nauda gingerly set down her bowl and regarded him somberly. "Still there, I take it?"

  "Yeah, I think it's waiting. I'm surprised it would still come after us, given how small we are, relatively. What do these things eat, anyway?"

  "Soulcrafters." Nauda glanced toward the corner where they'd disposed of the bodies. "I can understand why they might pursue us this far, but I can't believe the last of them sacrificed himself just to trap us here."

  "Oh, you should believe it. There are a lot of Deuxan stories about mortally wounded soulcrafters killing their opponent with their last breath, poisoned lovers pulling knives, and so on." Theo sat down and looked between them. "The question is what we're going to do about it. Fiyu?"

  "I do not have an easy solution." Through her mask, he thought that her eyes were closed. "I have examined the caverns carefully and there is not another exit route. I am unsure if it is able to see through my veil of stealth, but testing that could be very dangerous."

  "We still have supplies, but I'm guessing that it's patient?" He glanced to Nauda, who only nodded, leaving them in silence. Setting aside the search for a solution, he decided that it was finally time to raise a different issue. "Nauda, exactly how do you know about a sublime beast like that?"

  Nauda stared back at him, resolute, but eventually eased back with a long sigh. "It would be easier just to show you, if we live through this. I became an adult in Nlukoko, but I wasn't born there. We're almost home. You'll see then."

  "Your home is right beside the gate?" Fiyu asked.

  "Not exactly."

  Since he had already trusted Nauda with his life, Theo decided that he could trust her with a few secrets. He was skeptical that they really required a demonstration over a simple explanation, but since she said it would be soon, he didn't even have to wait that long.

  Assuming they found a way to get past the eryo.

  Though Theo began soulcrafting out of habit, carving more on his feast table, it was just to keep his hands busy while he thought. Their group might barely be able to keep up with Archcrafters in some respects, but they had no chance of overpowering a Ruler-tier sublime beast like the eryo. Either they needed to find a weakness or they needed a path around it.

  The frustrating thing was that he didn't think his blueprint was flawed: when he reached Archcrafter, he could forge chambers that drew from his four cornerstone techniques to use gravity in truly devastating ways. But even if they had supplies to stay in the cave for a year, he didn't have the sublime materials to build chambers on his second floor, and that was setting aside ascension.

  Stopping his efforts temporarily, Theo walked to the sleigh and looked through everything they had taken from the Deuxan soulcrafters. They'd carried assorted money and weapons, along with some minor armaments and Delarde's pike. Those might sell for a bit of money, but they were unhelpful in the short term. None of the soulcrafters had been foolish enough to carry around sublime materials, and all those within their souls had been destroyed upon death.

  Beside their supplies, Senka still slept, snoring obnoxiously loudly. She hadn't even done anything in the chase or fight, so he wasn't sure what right she had to be so exhausted. At least she had consistently stayed out of the way when things got difficult.

  His gravitational fields had had some effect, but not enough, and... and abruptly Theo realized his solution. Using gravity against the eryo had been the only time when they'd been even close to matching its strength. Esaire with his resistance cloak had been a terrible matchup for him, but this sublime beast might actually be the opposite.

  It was far from his original plan, but Theo was going to ascend to Archcrafter.

  He eagerly went through his soulhome, putting away any minor materials left out and finishing off a few final details. Several of his chambers were completely unfinished and he needed strong sublime materials to serve as a focus for his techniques, but he could fix those problems later. The fatal problem at the moment was that he didn't have raw strength, and that was one of the few problems that could be solved with more intense cantae.

  Normally, it wouldn't be possible without a considerable amount of time building a temporary platform to ascend, but the first barrier was by far the weakest. The frame of his first floor was rock solid, with a suitable roof, so he had options. In fact, he thought back to some tricks he'd only discovered after they were too late to do any good and realized he had a clear plan.

  To start, he grabbed his supplies, climbed up to the roof, and examined the ridges marking the central chamber. He'd put those blocks in at the end, since he'd intended to remove them as an Archcrafter to allow the cantae to flow through the center of his entire soulhome. When he carefully pulled the blocks aside with his spirit, the singularity within roiled, but he was glad at how effectively it contained cantae, instead of wasting it into the air. The very concept was about trapping energy, after all.

  Still, he needed all of it for his ascension. Theo unrolled the Deuxan fairysilk and spread it over the top, pinning it down with excess sunbronze. That was enough to contain his cantae while he worked on the rest. The springy branches Nauda had used would actually be very helpful, just not in the way she'd used them.

  Though he wanted to rush, he forced himself to work methodically as he built a framework that could hold the fairysilk in place. It needed to be stretched taut, but not so tense that he risked breaking it. For a while he wasn't certain how to affix it to the stone and settled for chipping out a space of exactly the right size for the frame.

  Eventually he'd done what he could and just stood on his roof, staring at the limits of the sky.

  The barrier to Archcrafter was just pressure, and his willpower should be far stronger than when he had been a teenager, yet he remembered just how hard it had been at the time. Actually, he remembered more how hard he thought it was, but how much suffering had he really experienced back then? It wasn't a challenge he could take lightly, but would it really be an obstacle? He supposed he'd find out soon enough.

  First, he removed the silk frame and dropped down into the central chamber, spending a while meditating under the singularity. It didn't help directly, as far as he knew, just got him into the right mindset. He was his soulhome, he embodied gravity itself, he stretched far beyond these small bonds.

  Then he rose, thrusting his hands skyward, casting his will into the heavens. Willpower alone could never ascend, but his cantae floating upward became a hammer that beat against the barrier. It bent back, just a little, so he quickly scrambled up the side for his main attempt.

  Setting the frame into its position, Theo stepped out onto the fairysilk, knowing that it could take his weight but still apprehensive. It gave way beneath his feet but held, just as he'd hoped. Once he reached the center, he began to bounce - yes, he'd created a spirit trampoline. The method might not be dignified, but Theo would care about that when dignity helped him tear down the barrier overhead.

  Once he built up momentum, he truly leapt, throwing himself skyward - he was immediately caught by the pressure and pushed back down, but he'd been prepared for that. Theo hit the fairysilk hard, and for a moment feared its elasticity wouldn't be enough, then it flung him upward again.

  This time he struck the barrier even harder, driving his will
against the pressure, but it closed around him and threw him back down even faster than before. When he struck the fabric, it held, but on his way up he heard something snap.

  It had to be now. Theo sucked all the cantae within his soulhome into himself and made his body an arrow shot against the heavens.

  The pressure tried to stop him, but he snapped through it, exploding into new heights. As the gray clouds flooded downward through him, he was surprised that they resonated with his fundamental design. It wasn't just raw power, his soulhome had shifted to more perfectly embody the gravity he sought to control. Instead of plummeting downward, he descended at a fraction of normal gravity, the clouds whirling around him before they suffused his soulhome.

  This pleasure... so many other things about his time in the Nine had faded over the years, but the rush of ascending was completely unchanged. Theo smiled within his soulhome and opened his eyes in the real world.

  There, the other two looked at him in surprise. Archcrafter ascensions weren't overly dramatic, but sitting so nearby, they had no doubt felt the surge of cantae. Once he opened his eyes, Fiyu beamed and clapped her hands together once.

  "You're an Archcrafter now, Theo!"

  "I didn't think you'd built enough," Nauda said, "but I should have known you had a trick."

  He could only shake his head. "It really was just a trick, not something that will work in the future. I didn't even intend to ascend yet, but we need to get past that eryo."

  "More importantly, now we're waiting on Fiyu." Nauda turned to her with a playful smile. "Can we count on you to join us as an Archcrafter soon?"

  "Oh no!" Fiyu rapidly shook her head, apparently oblivious to Nauda's tone. "My first tier is not fully prepared. I will join you when I am ready."

  It was a warm moment, but Theo couldn't help but think about the fact that all these fights had delayed them for too long. They needed to move forward, and now he finally had the power to help them do it. When he got to his feet, the others understood and joined him.