Skyclad (Fate's Anvil Book 1)

by Scott Browder

  “Oh, man ,” purred the glowing woman. She patted her rune-covered abdomen, the slight bulge from gorging on so much food already fading and her magical presence growing even more intense. After a languorous stretch that had more than just the Swift Waters Guild representative drooling to witness, Morgan sat back up. More accurately, the stone beneath her shifted to lift her up to a sitting position, arms sculpting themselves from the ground as the newly formed chair adapted to the contours of her body with perfect precision. Several men, and a handful of women, stared from other cookfires scattered about the clearing at the center of Castra Pristis. Foz and the other beastkin were unphased, unlike their human counterparts.

  The Tribes have no taboos about anything as silly as nudity, recalled Terisa, eyes lingering on Foz for half a heartbeat.

  “She’s not actively trying to show off,” muttered Nessara to her left. “I think she genuinely just doesn’t care she’s naked. ”

  Chadwick broke in at that moment, grinning like a schoolboy and unable to contain himself any longer. “I can see her—”

  A leathery rasp and a flicker of movement from across the campfire presaged the arrival of a gleaming dagger, stuck in the ground and quivering a hair’s width from the man’s toes. “You can see her what ?” Foz rumbled, staring at the man as Terisa stifled a laugh.

  The man shuffled his boot away from the knife, gulping as the blood drained from his face. “Uh! I can see her loofah!”

  “Oh! You mean Lulu?” the [Skyclad Sorceress] replied brightly, grinning at Chadwick.

  “Not as oblivious as I thought,” mumbled a grinning Nessara.

  The woman made no effort to cover herself or even shift to sit in a manner more befitting a lady, merely held out the puffball and continued, “Don’t you like my Lulu?” she said, staring at Chadwick. The scrubby seemed to puff up from the attention. “She’s so soft, and pink, and likes to be stroked, just like this!”

  The loofah seemed to preen, wurbling with contentment and, unlike its mistress, totally oblivious to the wordplay as the woman petted the puffball with a gentle circular motion. Terisa lost her composure and burst into raucous laughter, nearly falling off her own stool as the guild representative turned several different shades of red. Anger fought for a place next to embarrassment on the man’s face and he eventually rose to his feet, stalking away toward his own wagon.

  “Finally,” said Morgan, suddenly more serious. “I know I’m naked, and I don’t really mind people looking,” she said as she patted herself between the legs to make the point, “but there’s no excuse for rudeness, and he’s been creeping me out since I got here. I thought I was going to have to set him on fire to make him leave.”

  “Can drag him back here if you still want to do that,” Foz rumbled with a conspiratorial grin.

  “He’s rude, crass, and immature,” Terisa admitted after regaining her composure, “and I would have barred him from the trip, but the Swift Waters Guild provides the lion’s share of funding for the Expedition every year. Supplies aren’t cheap, especially the quality and quantity of healing and Mana potions we require.”

  “Meh,” said the Sorceress with a dismissive wave of her hand. “If he wants to perv on me from a distance , let him. At least Biggles here doesn’t have his eyes falling out of his head.”

  “As a healer, I’m more familiar with the uglier side of bodies, particularly the insides. And as a necromancer, of course,” he mused, pouring another round of kaffen for everyone around the fire. “Working with both the dead and the living lends itself to a certain immunity to being distracted by bodies themselves. I prefer my plants and garden at home.”

  “Speaking of healing…” Terisa left the question hanging in the air unfinished.

  “The unstable magics will fade over the next few days,” the necromancer replied. “Miss Dana was appropriately chagrined over what she called radiation, but that’s already been absorbed by the ambient Mana in the atmosphere. I hope she doesn’t sulk overmuch, but one really shouldn’t make a habit of detonating mana crystals. Miss Morgan here,” he nodded at the Sorceress, “already took care of the corruption at the blast site when she covered it with burning earth.”

  “It makes sense there’d be gaps in what people thought to inform her about,” Nessara said as she sipped her own mug. “It’s not like there’s a guidebook for Worldwalkers.”

  “Hah!” Morgan exclaimed. “That would have helped more than you know! I might not have ended up naked if I’d found something like that. Instead, all I got was eagle poop when I landed.”

  The Sorceress turned wistful for a few moments after that, emotions flickering across her face too quickly for Terisa to track. “Yet you survived the wilds alone. Not many can say that, even those of us with levels and experience the first time we come here.”

  “Yeah. And it’s not like I didn’t have help. Lulu can take care of herself better than you would think,” she said, giving her poofy passenger a pat. “And I did meet one other person, a witch who turned into a raven.”

  Foz sat straighter then, keen interest shining in his eyes as he spoke up. “You met the First Raven? The secrets of full shifting have been lost to the Children since the time of Ka’Na Oko. Long have we yearned for the old knowledge.”

  Morgan shuddered at the memory. “Yeah, that’s her. Apparently my distant ancestor too, and not a nice lady. Not mean, exactly, but I guess you’d say, very old-fashioned. You guys might get along better with her than I did.”

  Clanks and mechanical rumblings heralded Dana’s return as she exited the side door of her workshop, the triple-carriage now reassembled into its original form. The Engineer no longer looked as dejected as she had after getting lectured by Nessara, and a Morgan who’d been literally on fire at the time.

  “Okay,” Dana said as her suit shifted from two legs into a configuration that left her sitting level with everyone else. “I see where my math went wrong. I had no idea converting mana crystals to energy would be different than regular matter, and that there’d be an amplification effect that nearly tripled the yield.”

  Foz served her up a plate with an amicable grunt of approval. “Long as you know to be more careful from now on. Everybody survived, this time.”

  “You get the energy from the matter and the residual energy of the Mana stored in the crystals, and the effect is more than the flat sum of both,” Nessara said in a more kindly tone. “Normally you just detonate the crystal and shatter it to pieces, but your containment field held the energy in one place and forced it to annihilate itself.”

  “It’s all good, though,” Morgan added before sipping more steaming kaffen from her crystal goblet. “It won’t matter in a few days anyway.” Points of faint purple light flickered along the lines of her tattoos, tracing outward from the sigil on her chest as if the magic pulsed with her heartbeats.

  For all Terisa could sense, that was exactly what was happening. The woman’s eyes, clearly naturally brown, were shot through with flecks and streaks of bright violet and deep indigo, and even her fingers and toes were tipped with glimmering crystal in place of keratin. Striking doesn’t even begin to describe this creature, thought the Huntress. I’m not even sure she still counts as human… “What do you mean it won’t matter in a few days?”

  The Sorceress looked at Terisa, resting her chin on her hands with her elbows on her knees. “Because there’s something big coming up the ley line that passes near the fort, and it’ll churn up the magic around here anyway.”

  “Could that be the Wanderer you and Kojeg talk about, Terisa?” Dana had eaten with haste, washing down her food with a mug of kaffen.

  “Possibly. Probably,” the Huntress amended. “It’s definitely a migration year, and if he’s heading this way, it would explain the stampedes and the different creatures on the move outside of their normal territories.”

  “Moghren did tell me The Titan wanders,” Morgan mused. “Have you ever seen him?”

  Terisa nodded slowly, de
ep in thought. Foz spoke up on her behalf when she seemed reluctant to speak.

  “Long time ago. Her first trip out here, back when the old badger Kamaga led the Expedition.”

  “Half of us didn’t come back from that trip,” the Huntress whispered. “He didn’t seek us out, but some hot-headed fools thought to reap a bounty in crystal from his hide. Kamaga got the younglings out.” Terisa shuddered at the memory. “He wasn’t picking a fight then, and I doubt he is now, but if the Wanderer is coming this way, this year’s Expedition is done. We head back tomorrow.”

  “Chadwick will be incensed!” Nessara said. “All those resources waiting out there? Swift Waters does pay a fortune for crystals for their Wavecutters, though, so he’ll still make a profit, considering how Dana ended the stampede.” The mage stood to go spread the word, knowing it was pointless to argue with the Huntress.

  “I want to know more about the Wanderer,” Morgan said as the mage walked away.

  “Why? He’s ancient, powerful beyond belief, and has only left the Wildlands once, to my knowledge, in all of living memory.” Terisa slid from her stool to a crouch, drawing a stick from the fire to scratch the charcoal tip against the stone. “He’s bigger than a troll, but smaller than a hill giant, and more dangerous than either one.”

  Morgan shook her head. “Are you sure? I don’t feel danger. My instincts would tell me… No, he feels familiar, his magic similar to my own. When did he leave the Wildlands?”

  “That was before my time, but I have Kamaga’s journals back home at Expedition. He just walked down from the pass one day, with several children on his shoulders.”

  The Huntress continued to draw on the ground with the burnt stick, the others around the fire falling silent in the fading light of dusk. Kojeg had sat up to listen, nursing a mug of Biggles’ specialty kaffen. Dana sat quietly next to the naked Worldwalker, and Chadwick returned with Nessara, but remained respectfully subdued.

  “According to Kamaga, a pack of local thieves and bandits had gone from robbery to…darker things. They killed a dozen or more people in the mountainside territories outside of any nation’s borders, and took captives.”

  She kept drawing, deep in memory of old tales. “Apparently they thought they could hide in the Wildlands and have fun with the women. The kids they were going to sell to smugglers bound for Deskren lands; they pay gold for young classless. But the Wanderer wandered and found them. Apparently he has a soft spot for children. They told old Kamaga he “ate the bad men” and carried them out of the wilds.”

  “That sounds almost noble,” Dana said.

  “It may be,” Terisa said, adding more lines to her drawing, focused on the memories. She’d read the journals only after her own experience, seeing the massive creature from a distance herself, and what she was drawing had been burned into her mind. “But he shakes the earth when he walks, disrupts magic of any kind. He’s heavier than he looks, and sheds crystals with every movement, as his armored form bends and cracks with every step.”

  Morgan looked up at that last detail. “I’ve found these—” she seemed to struggle for the words, the loofah wurbling gently on her shoulder. “I call them graveyards, massive skeletons in the middle of shattered earth and stone, with crystals scattered everywhere. Lots of them all over the Wildlands, from what I can tell.”

  “They look chewed on, don’t they?” the Huntress asked, still distracted by her improvised artwork. A circle, unfamiliar runes inside it. Above the circle, three lines formed an unfinished triangle somehow reminiscent of a bird’s wings, with a fourth line connecting it to the circle. To one side, a curved, double-headed arrow opposite a bar and circle. The details of the design were lost to her memory, but the outline was sharp.

  “Yeah, chewed and crushed,” Morgan agreed.

  “According to old Kamaga, he guards these lands, but why and against what, not even the [Oracle] will admit to knowing, if she does know.”

  Dana had been watching Terisa etch shapes onto the ground, and suddenly her interest sharpened to an almost frightening intensity, her body growing tense. “What are you drawing?” she asked slowly.

  “When the Wanderer brought the children to the city, he didn’t talk, but everyone saw him, and several people drew sketches. He looks as a man does, vaguely, but bestial and twisted. Bark and vines seem to grow from his muscles, and crystal armors his hands, back, legs, and head.”

  Terisa added a few more lines to her drawing and sat back as Morgan stood and stepped around the fire to join Dana. Both simply stared at what she’d inscribed in the dirt.

  “That’s the sigil burned into his chest,” Terisa finished, “like armor over his heart.”

  “No,” muttered Dana, “that can’t be. It doesn’t make sense.” She glanced up at Terisa, intensity burning in her eyes. “Those artists—that can’t be right.”

  Likewise Morgan was affected by this foreign drawing. “There’s no way—”

  “I know that symbol,” Dana declared. “That’s the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor. The official emblem of the Marines.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Are you trying to tell me a Devil Dog is a Worldwalker? And has been here thousands of years?”

  Morgan stood there beside Dana, regarding the symbol and its runic inscription. She gestured, and the stone on which the symbol lay pulled itself up, the design gleaming in the firelight. “…Is it possible?” she asked, her voice a whisper. She looked at Terisa, and where Dana’s expression held intensity, Morgan’s held longing. “Can…do Worldwalkers always stay…in their own times?”

  “Guild records go back over a thousand years,” Chadwick volunteered, slight confusion in his voice. “Some Worldwalkers have claimed to arrive from different times, and from different worlds. Some aren’t even human.”

  “Using magic to adjust time is…difficult,” Nessara supplied. “Speeding up or slowing down an area, or even a single person, requires rare skills and lots of Mana. But…travel between worlds, how and why Worldwalkers get here…I can’t tell you. Nobody knows, not even the [Oracle].

  “I do,” Morgan replied firmly. “They don’t always stay in their own time. This proves it,” she insisted, pointing at the symbol.

  “How can you say that?” Dana scoffed. “I could be wrong, or it could be just a coincidence! Time buggery means paradoxes!”

  “Not if it’s a one-way trip,” Nessara said, leaning wearily on her staff.

  “Yes,” Chadwick said, rubbing his chin. “If you accept that you can never return, then the past becomes your new now, and paradox is avoided. Only the System itself could ever muster the energy for it, though.”

  “Say what you like,” Morgan said, her shoulders hunched. “I have all the proof I need. Believe me or not, I don’t care.” Morgan’s finger took fire, and she reached toward the image.

  “You aren’t making any sense!” exclaimed Dana, as the Sorceress began to draw with her finger on the strange runes in the circle in the image.

  Morgan spoke, cutting Dana off. “Marianne.” She moved her finger clockwise to the next series. “Michael.” Her finger moved. “Mitchell.” Her finger moved once more, hovering over the fourth and final inscription, before letting her finger fall against it. “And…Morgan,” she finished with a sigh.

  “I’m Morgan Mackenzie, of Clan Mackenzie. If this is in fact inscribed on his chest, then the Wanderer is…has to be…my dad.” She shook her head. “He put our names inside the ‘globe’ of his eagle, globe, and anchor after mom died. Michael and Mitchell are my older brothers.”

  “So you’re staying to meet the Wanderer instead of coming back to the lowlands with us?” Nessara’s gaze burned with an intense curiosity, and her posture suddenly became inexplicably nervous.

  “And I’m staying, too,” Dana interjected “If he’s a Marine, I can talk to him. Even if he can’t talk.” Dana’s suit reconfigured once again as she spoke, returning her to standing on two legs.

  “You don’t have to—” Morgan got out before the
Engineer cut her off.

  “No,” Dana said. “If he’s really been here for hundreds of years—”

  “Thousands,” the Sorceress interjected.

  “Thousands of years, then. If he’s been here that long, you’ll need help, or at least just someone else around to talk to and help out. I screwed up with the almost-nuke, but I can do this.” She thumped her metal leg. “I have experience with PTSD.”

  “I won’t mind the help,” Morgan agreed, “and I have a safe place near here. Well, it took me two days to get here from there. Nothing can challenge me in my valley; I claimed it the hard way. I think that’s where he’s headed, anyway, if he follows the ley lines.”

  “If the lass goes with ye, I’ll be comin ‘long too,” said Kojeg. “I’d still be hammerin’ blades at the Great Forge and hating every minute were it not for the girl.”

  “If Kojeg and Dana are staying with you, the rest of the Expedition can make it back through the pass without me.” Terisa nodded at her husband and the necromancer. “Foz and Biggles can handle it, along with Nessara.”

  “How unfortunate,” Chadwick said. He stepped closer to the fire, and something in his manner and posture screamed at Terisa, though she couldn’t put a name to it. With her instinct to warn her, she reached back to draw her bow, but was stopped when Nessara touched her arm, paralyzing her body and holding her fast. She couldn’t even move her eyes, but could see the mage’s blank, empty expression as she regarded Chadwick. At the same time, a pulse of energy rippled out from his body and the others around the campfire dropped as if knocked unconscious.

  Kojeg slumped back against his log. Foz fell back onto the ground, and Biggles crumpled, spilling his pot of kaffen. Dana’s suit kept her upright, but her head drooped, mouth slack. Only the [Skyclad Sorceress] remained standing, although she swayed on her feet. Terisa’s innate resistances and much higher level had protected her from the effect, the slight wave of dizziness barely noticeable, compared to her cramping muscles.