Skyclad (Fate's Anvil Book 1)

by Scott Browder

  There will be consequences, warned one familiar voice: her direct predecessor and the previous [Oracle]. We will be quite busy in the coming years, as will whoever takes up the Mantle if you should fall.

  I’ll still be busy even then, you know! Rella smiled inwardly as the others laughed.

  “Mister Hett,” she said out loud. “If I could have your assistance? Our other guests are almost here, and we must hurry so the Duke can make for Expedition.”

  “I’ll be taking our new friend Descroix here when I go. His insights and knowledge of the enemy will be invaluable.” The Duke looked at her as if daring her to challenge him, but Rella had seen this outcome and had no issues with it. For what she was about to do, executing the man would have been nearly as pointless as watching the other rulers squabble over who deserved the honor of playing headsman.

  “As long as you take responsibility for him, he’s yours,” she replied. “No one will bat an eye if something happens to him elsewhere under your watch.”

  “Fair ‘nuff,” he replied with a nod, replacing the darkened steel helm on his head.

  Rella returned to her current business, her will twining together with that of her sisters dwelling within the Mantle. Threads of silver light spun from her fingertips, weaving a net around the collar. No single mind could have traced the delicate patterns, but thousands of minds handled it together almost like an afterthought.

  She let the Threads of Fate sink into the metal before tossing it to the ground between herself and Hett. With a careful, flicking motion of the dagger, a single drop of Descroix blood fell into the web. No turning back now! She felt almost exultant, despite the pain she knew would come later.

  “What was done so long ago, one single act cannot fully undo. But now we set our feet upon the path of justice! Let it be declared from the steps of every Temple and the heights of every Tower: by the power of this Seal, I declare a bounty upon this Golden Shackle! Let any who destroy these blasphemous chains gain a Level as their reward!”

  As her ringing voice faded into silence and the light of the Seal flared into brilliance, Rella fell back into Sophie and Sonya’s waiting arms. Her legs felt weak, and she could no longer hold herself upright. She felt herself being lowered to the ground, her every breath a battle with exhaustion. The Seal’s light crawled along the pavilion’s flagstones, threads of silver and gold reaching and then climbing the massive columns that encircled the Gathering. At their apex, the light dimmed for a moment before pulsing outward in a massive wave that threw off the coming storm’s shadows as it spread from horizon to horizon.

  “Mister Hett!” she wheezed with great effort. The Duke, and all of the kings and queens, stood in shock. Experience bounties had been declared from time to time in the past: rare, yes, but often enough to be known. A Level Bounty had never been mentioned in any records written anywhere, and Rella knew her declaration had been the first in the history of Anfealt.

  The old man needed no more prompting: he unstrapped his axe and raised it high, the blade flashing in the light before he brought it whistling downward to slam through the collar, burying itself in the stone with thunderous impact.

  He froze in place as golden light rippled from his head to his shoes. His hair, gone past white to the yellow of the last days of old age, began to darken. His shoulders stooped less, and his legs grew slightly straighter. He took a deep breath, his chest still heaving, but without the elderly rattle he’d had before. The regen from gaining a level wouldn’t stay with him for very long, not at his age, but Rella knew he’d have several weeks of feeling young once more.

  “Ninety,” he spoke, no longer rasping or drawling his words, “three.” He continued, turning a slow circle to eye the monarchs upon the hilltop, stepping back toward Rella with a truly frightening grin. “Do you know what you’ve set in motion, girl?”

  “An ending,” she whispered. “Long overdue.”

  Howls interrupted them then as Rella thanked the others within the Mantle for helping her finish her tasks in time. A rush of wingbeats filled the evening air, along with snarls, yips, growls, and roars. From the north and the west they came, and blades were bared as startled guards and rulers withdrew as one to the other side of the pavilion to flank the [Oracle] where she lay, propped up on the ground.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered to Sonya and Sophie, but it was the Battlemaster who heard her first and called for everyone to halt. His booming voice cut through the chaos, and he turned back to her.

  “Who—what—? There are thousands, hundreds of thousands!” He seemed truly unsettled for the first time since he’d appeared in Rella’s Sight.

  “They are—” she began to respond, but was interrupted by a reverberating growl that shook the stones.

  “We are the Children of the First Beast. The Alpha has come, and we have followed.”

  The voice came from all around the pavilion, from hundreds of different throats. Some chirped like birds, some yowled like cats, others growled or yipped. A massive shadow strode into the circle of stones, a canine silhouette thrown against the flagstones. It shrank as its owner drew closer to the center, eventually shrinking to match the size of its owner: a young man dressed in hide breeches tied with strips of leather, barefoot and bare-chested. His unkempt hair drifted in the autumn breeze, and the jagged scar across his chest stood out, raw and red, against his otherwise pale skin.

  “Hello, Adrin Holt,” Rella managed to say with something that almost resembled a reasonable volume. “Or should I call you The Hammer?”

  “They call me the Alpha, but it’s nice to hear my name.”

  “Who are you, boy? And why are you here?” Hanz rasped, unfazed and unintimidated, or at least old enough to not show it.

  “I’m Adrin Holt, and I’ve brought the Children of Ka’Na Oko to repay their debt to the [Oracle].”

  “This is the Gathering of Kings,” Mette interjected, her voice carrying a hard edge. “The beastmen have no part of it, or of the Deskren!”

  “They have millions of our brethren in chains; you know we have a part of that,” the young man replied, “but the Debt was old before there were kings to Gather.” The man turned back toward Rella, where Wyatt had placed himself with shield up. Adrin made a strange bow, dropping halfway to one knee and turning his head to the side as if baring his throat. “Lady Prophet, we have come to repay the Debt.”

  “I see you, Adrin Holt, and I see the Children of Ka’Na Oko.” She weakly nodded her head toward Jacob Ward. “This man marches against my enemies. Will you, as well?”

  Jacob, who’d been carefully surveying the massed shapes outside the Gathering, turned back to the pair as he was addressed, laughing and shaking his head wonderingly. “How many did you bring?”

  Adrin glanced at him with a shrug. “All of them.”

  Epilogue: Winds that Whisper

  Morgan Mackenzie savored the sensation of the valley winds against her skin. The trip back to her valley had taken almost two weeks, and would have taken much longer without The Titan to help clear the path for the wagons and Dana’s mobile workshop. One disadvantage to her father’s current form she now understood to be similar to her own reliance on food: he had to eat a lot, and frequently. Fortunately, Maxwell Mackenzie had been an extreme example of pragmatism even on Earth, and he wasn’t picky about the origin of his nutrition.

  The Titan’s eating habits had been disturbing, at first, for the travelers with the Expedition to see. The vines that trailed down his back writhed and roiled as he lumbered along. Trunks he uprooted and cast aside to clear the path caused hordes of smaller wildlife to flee, and his vines danced a remorseless rhythm. They speared outward as if they had minds of their own, lancing into [Tyrannorabbits], [Murdersquirrels], and dozens of other species Morgan hadn’t yet learned the names for.

  The Titan had fed as he walked, Morgan riding on one shoulder. She’d stood tall, balancing herself against a massive spike of crystal, reminding her of the times she’d pe
rched on her father as a child, laughing gaily. Time had changed them both—him more than her—so the nostalgia was short-lived, but welcome. Their trek hadn’t gone uncontested, either. Even with the massive form of The Titan leading the way, smaller creatures fled and larger creatures were drawn to his hulking form.

  Such larger creatures had suffered the same fate as their smaller brethren, finding their way into that impossible, ogrish maw with the same ease he consumed everything else. Morgan now understood all too well why so many hordes of beasts fled his wake to cause what the others had told her was known as a “migration year”.

  Letting the Expedition into her valley had been a bit of an ordeal: The Titan’s prodigious caloric needs had faded upon crossing the threshold of her magical barriers, once she’d convinced him not to just walk through and wreck her enchantments. It seemed he simply needed energy, and the prodigious concentrations of Mana in her valley worked just as well as meat to sustain him. He’d stood near the shore of the small lake, looking at her spire for what seemed like hours, vines and roots working their way into the earth. She watched with no small degree of nervousness; if her workings reached down too close to the ley lines, she knew he’d tear it down. So it was to her relief that, with a bassy rumble, he’d finally declared it good before lumbering down the shore to wallow in the mud.

  “Is he using a tree for a backscratcher?” Dana had asked as she approached, still looking green around the gills from the excess Mana in the atmosphere of Morgan’s valley. It had been almost a full day, and most of the Expedition still hadn’t acclimated. Biggles had informed her that it would likely pass in a few more days’ time, especially as the work began on the airship.

  “Yeah, he is…” Morgan responded. “Are you sure you want to do this? Build them a flying ship, I mean…”

  The metal-clad woman looked back down the valley, where several dwarves were overseeing the construction of scaffolding from fresh-hewn timber. “I’ve been thinking about it,” she said, unfazed by the more serious turn of the conversation. “It changes a lot of things, but I realize now, it was inevitable. There are more Worldwalkers than just you and me, and it was only a matter of time before we started to really shake things up.”

  “Why does that make you so sad?”

  “It means I can’t go back to Thun’Kadrass,” she explained. “You’re good with magic, and the one they call The General is some kind of military officer, I’m sure of it. There’s no telling what The Twins, The Hammer, or The Shadow can do, but sure as shit, you can bet The Dreamer is gonna give stuff to the Deskren.”

  Morgan thought in silence for several moments. “But you build things, weapons, and now a flying ship. Everyone will want you.” Another thought came unbidden. “And me, too.”

  “They’ll want to control us, and if they can’t do that…”—Dana frowned—“they’ll want to kill us. The ship is merely the beginning of an arms race. Magic and science together? There’ll be no way to just skate by once things get rolling, Morgan.”

  “Can you do it? Can you stay ahead of this arms race?”

  Dana shook her head. “It’s not about staying ahead. That’s only possible in the short term. Once we fly across the mountains, it’s game on . A few years, maybe a decade. Two decades would be some really long odds.”

  “Not following you here,” Morgan said, shaking her hair back to make room for a wurbling Lulu, who had just hopped back to her shoulder.

  “We don’t have to stay ahead forever. After things trickle out, and the other nations get a hold of it, they’ll start iterating on my work, and it becomes quantity over quality.” The Engineer spoke absentmindedly, sketching on a clipboard while she rambled. “The real trick is to stay alive and free until we’re less valuable to the different nations, and that’s gonna be hard until that iteration starts happening. It means becoming powerful enough that nobody can challenge us head on, and doing that fast.”

  “And the airship is the first step?” Morgan asked.

  Dana raised a finger. “Ships, plural. I’ve done some research, and you’d think a magical world would have this kinda thing already.” Dana drew more lines on her parchment with broad, swift strokes, filling out a design Morgan couldn’t quite make out. “This is just the first one, a working prototype—big, ugly, and slow, but I can get us off the ground. You can make witchwood really strong with simple enchantments, and I think we can even use the leaves to weave the gas bags.” She paused in her efforts, glancing up at Morgan. “Flight is one of those things, y’know? It’s like the wheel, or electricity; it’s one of the big game changers, when you can point to the timeline of history after the fact and see huge jumps in civilization and progress.”

  “And war, too.”

  Sighing, Dana went back to her clipboard. “Yep, and war. Sad thing is, war and conflict drives the most progress, and the nations are going to war whether we help out or not. It’s not just the tech we give away that’s going to change things, either. Just by seeing a flying ship, others will work to copy it and learn how to do it. Same with anything. If not the dwarves or the northern countries, the Deskren will, for sure. We have to deal with them, even if it means arming everyone else.”

  Morgan shuddered her agreement. “Those collars are sick. Disgusting!”

  “So, yeah,” Dana said, flipping her clipboard and parchment around. On it was a rough sketch of an ugly, boxy-looking barge of a ship with several globes that resembled hot air balloons nestled in a row down the center, like peas in a pod. “It’s big , nearly six hundred feet long, to get all of us on board with the necessary supplies and food. It’ll be slow unless we catch a good tailwind, but I can get us out of the Wildlands, and then we need to find a way to not get stuck working in a shop for some king or queen while I work on better designs.”

  “I can help you work out the enchantments, and my dad can drag as many trees as you need up here. But I think I’ll be leaving in a week or two, especially after this little chat…”

  Dana’s mouth dropped open, and she tapped her clipboard with her pen. “What? We just got here, and it’ll take a month just to lay the keel and frame out the structure! We need you!”

  “Once the magic is worked out, you actually won’t need me, and there’s something I need to do,” the Sorceress answered, her words punctuated by the chill northern winds.

  Dana simply stared, at a loss for words, before Morgan continued.

  “It’s time for me to get some wings of my own.”

  * * *

  Over a thousand miles away from one very naked Sorceress and her newfound friends, a massive, inky-black shape descended from the evening sky. A giant raven, talons outstretched, flapped its wings with lazy nonchalance as it dropped the last few feet to the flagstones of an ancient courtyard before the feathered shape dwindled, resolving into the form of an old woman leaning on a gnarled wooden cane. Smaller feathered forms flapped and screeched, fighting for space to perch upon the surrounding stone rooftops and the few sparse trees populating the bits of bare earthen gaps in the paving stones. Moghren chuckled, pacing forward with her stick for balance as she approached a stone table nearly thirty feet across.

  Shadowy forms darted back and forth above the courtyard, filling the air with their mournful cries. Shards of midnight drifted down like dark snow in their wake to land on the table. “Yes, little ones,” the old crone said, “we know she’s coming back.”

  Upon the table lay a framework wrought in sinew and bone, to which Moghren added a small piece pulled from a satchel at her waist. It had been an engaging task, consuming the bulk of her attention over the past summer. The fruits of her efforts lay before her, and she paced a circle around the table, observing it.

  “Learn and grow, we told her,” she said to her companions.

  Around her the ravens cawed, and eerie echoes of her words were cast back at her from the shadows. Far from being unsettled, the woman seemed to draw comfort from the sound. From another pouch she produced a tiny bone n
eedle, wickedly sharp, and threaded it with a strand of inky-black hair from her own head. She worked through the last light of the day and well into the night as the two moons rose in the east, casting dappled shadows across the table. One by one, more feathers joined those already stitched to the framework, slowly revealing itself to be a pair of great wings. She stepped back some hours later, looking at the nearly finished appendages.

  “It still needs…something more, I think.”

  With a blur and a wave of power, a giant raven stood where the woman had been. A few moments of cold regard through inhuman eyes looking down at the construct of bone and feathers, and the oversized corvid shook its head before burying its beak in its own feathers. A few jerks of its head and a mighty, disgruntled caw later, several feathers fell, many times larger than those gifted by its smaller relatives. Another shiver of power rolled through the courtyard, and Moghren once again stood in the same place, stooping down to reverently retrieve the feathers from the ground.

  “A gift, a price, and a bargain. Which do you think she shall choose?” she wondered, returning her attention to the wings.

  The croaking and caws of the ravens were her only answer, but Moghren thought that was well enough.

  * * *

  Belka Torm cast an apprehensive eye toward the clouds far to the northwest, weighing his options as his hired hands readied the wagons and prepared to break camp after another night on the road. They’d left Fort Expedition in haste when word of the approaching Deskren had reached the city. They’d been on the road for just over two weeks with no sign of Deskren forces, but still, he slept with one eye open. He likely wouldn’t rest well until they crossed the border into Forvale and pulled his wagons in behind solid stone walls, but even that was doubtful.