A Respite From Storms

by Robert J. Crane

  “I don’t think …” Alixa began.

  “Do not suggest to me you have lost heart, girl!”

  “I have plenty of heart! It’s just that my heart believes we should—”

  “Leave Baraghosa unchecked? Let him have his way with the world, wreaking devastation on all the lands he touches?”

  “I never said—”

  “By letting him walk free, you are complicit in the very destruction he rained down upon you,” Huanatha said fiercely. “Do you wish to enable a murderer?”

  “I just think the Emerald Fields are the best place for us,” Alixa said. She spoke quickly, all her words blurring together in an effort to stop Huanatha from cutting over her.

  “And the best place for Baraghosa’s head is atop a pike! Let it be ours!”

  “Yeah, see, I didn’t really sign up for a battle with a sorcerer! I left Terreas for some seed—”

  “A quest which has led you here, has it not? To this very moment?”

  “I AM NOT ON THIS HILL BECAUSE OF DESTINY!” Alixa cried back—and though the roar of the wind fought to quiet her, she was louder, her face screwed up as she forced every bit of volume from her lungs. “I AM ON THIS HILL BECAUSE I AM STUPID ENOUGH TO BE LED PLACES I WOULD RATHER NOT GO!”

  A sneer broke into Huanatha’s voice. “You do not wish to cut off the sorcerer’s head? Have you no shame?”

  “I believe what Alixa is trying to say,” said Kuura swiftly, “is that she is worried about the outcome of our battle. We are but four—”

  “Four people with vengeance in our hearts!”

  “Yes, yes, b-but just the four of us, against a sorcerer …”

  “You have a fine axe in your hand,” Huanatha growled. “The girl has a pair of daggers. Jasen has a sword—and I wield Tanukke, Blade of the Victorious!” She withdrew it from the small loop which affixed it to her waist. Brandishing it skyward, she loosed a battle cry: “Your blood will wet this blade, Baraghosa!”

  “We are unpracticed,” Alixa huffed. The trek kept her breathing hard, pumping her legs to keep up with Jasen and Scourgey as they led the charge. “We are not fighters, any of us.”

  “I am a warrior, girl.”

  “Fine—any of us except you.”

  “Alixa is correct,” said Kuura, probably nodding his head along madly. “We have not gone to battle before. Skirmishes, yes, but—against a man of magic, who could spirit us over the cliffside with just a wave of his hand?”

  “I have seen Baraghosa do no such thing,” said Huanatha.

  “He has brought storms upon us, storms that are not like any other this world has ever seen,” said Kuura.

  As if to underscore his words, the first bolt of lightning split the air. It flashed, blinding them for the barest fraction of an instant. Coming down practically above them, it forked, jagged tips of electricity licking the conduction rods.

  Jasen pictured Baraghosa within them.

  He hoped the sorcerer had been struck down by the blast. But he did not believe that he would be; and in any event, if Baraghosa were to be felled this night, then it must be Jasen to do it. Not inclement weather, nor any of the others by his side now. Scourgey herself could not leap up and tear out his throat.

  Jasen—and Jasen alone—had to kill Baraghosa.

  Could he stop any of the others from landing the killing blow?

  Kuura and Alixa, he did not have to worry about. But Huanatha—she was as determined as Jasen was. Fueled as he was, her own desire for vengeance would surely propel her at Baraghosa with Tanukke drawn as he surged in for his own killing strike.

  There was no choice for it: he would have to be faster.

  The cliffside fell away. Then they were climbing the pathway around the thick spire, like a tall, pointed shell, with its crystal extrusions. The lightning was coming quicker now. Striking directly above them, every white-hot arc that rent the air crashed against the conduction rods. They were no longer sheltered from the wind, and it whipped all noise from them, even as the thunderous explosions boomed. The very earth rocked, as if every strike of lightning did not just hit the conduction rods but was channeled through them, so that it felt as if the explosions were going off under them or beside them in the cliffs themselves. If two strikes should come down at once, surely it would blow this spire of twisted cliffside apart.

  Up, up they went…

  Rain sluiced down, violent and powerful. Kuura and Alixa shielded their faces from it. Backs bent, they could not see farther than the ground five feet ahead of them.

  But Huanatha set her face, striding through it unperturbed. And Jasen cast his glare heavenward, pummeling droplets be damned. He stared up, watching as Baraghosa’s lights bobbed, knowing that in another two turns … now just one turn of this pathway … he and Jasen would see eye to eye again. Despite the furious winds, those lights simply bobbed lazily in the air a hundred feet up or more, like a kite riding a breeze.

  Jasen had hated them all his life, hated what they heralded.

  That paled in comparison to his hatred now. Jasen realized that what he had known then was only a dislike—an intense one, to be sure, but a dislike nonetheless. Only with Terreas’s destruction, and the death of his father, did Jasen know true hate. It burned through him, consuming every fiber of his being. It ate at his thoughts, a black fog that descended and directed all thoughts to itself, pushing him in one direction only. It could not be banished; at best it slunk back to the edges of his mind, where it twisted upon itself in dark waves, hating him, hating him, hating him.

  It bayed for blood, like the scourge out in the rye fields, watching Terreas, waiting for an imbecile to climb the boundary and stumble out into their midst.

  Jasen would satisfy that hatred if it cost him his life.

  The pathway twisted around, taking the city out of sight. It rose, a thinning line, the last twenty feet to the field of conduction rods laid out atop it.

  A crack of lightning split the air. It exploded on the rods, leaving a brilliant streak of white light burnt across Jasen’s vision. The stench of gunpowder, but a hundred times more intense, filled the air, then was whisked away.

  And still Baraghosa’s lights danced their lazy dance.

  Ten feet away.

  Jasen’s chest burned, his legs. His whole body seemed to be on fire inside. He’d pushed it, and dimly he knew that: his breathing was ragged, and half the wet on his face was not rain but sweat.

  No matter. He was here now.

  And he was here: the last of the path fell away, and the conduction rods came into view, a whole field of them. The air crackled with electricity, a palpable charge that tugged at every hair on Jasen’s body. Some of the conduction rods—those that had been struck, surely—glowed.

  Another bolt of lightning exploded. Jasen heard the sound before his brain processed it. Just two rows away, toward the cliff edge, its end split into tendril-like jags that licked across three conduction rods.

  He was blinded for a second—

  He blinked through it.

  And there he saw him: body too long, and somehow bone dry even in the wailing storm, clothes untouched by wet and the wind. His back was to them. But Jasen recognized him, recognized too the hands, lifting something gleaming between fingers that had grown an inch longer than they ought have.

  Baraghosa.

  Jasen squeezed his grip on his blade’s hilt.

  Finally, he was here. The time had come—to kill him.

  20

  Lightning cleaved the air apart. Forks boomed against the tips of the conduction rods, tongues of electricity licking them for only a fraction of a second, but long enough to rend the air with bone-rattling explosions. The world went almost white in those moments.

  Baraghosa stood untouched amidst it all, the inclement weather appearing to bend around him, as if even the rain dared not touch the sorcerer.

  Jasen should storm for him now, strike while his back was turned. The ferocity of the unloading heavens, with the
deluge of rain and near-constant lightning, would mask the sound of his approach. Baraghosa would not know until too late, when he felt the sting of a blade through his back, saw it pass out of his stomach, bloodied, growing longer by the inch as Jasen shoved deeper with it—

  But now he saw him—now he saw this man who had wrought such utter devastation on his home, destroying near every part of Jasen’s life in one cataclysmic event—Jasen could not kill him in shadow.

  Baraghosa had to know why he was dying.

  He had to see Jasen’s face as it happened.

  Another flash of lightning, blinding.

  After those explosions, a wake of silence seemed to follow.

  Into it, Jasen bellowed, “BARAGHOSA!”

  The sorcerer turned, eyes searching—

  Jasen’s rage grew hotter still, scalding in its intensity. His muscles seemed to seize. Wind and rain and thunder forgotten, comrades behind him lost too, it was just him and the sorcerer now—an old man with his sallow face, and Jasen, hand locked tight on the hilt of his sword, so hard that none could pry his fingers open to part him from it.

  Baraghosa saw him—saw all of them—and a look of confusion bloomed across his features. Yet it was only momentary; and as he found Jasen again, at the fore, an amused sort of understanding replaced it.

  The anger roiled in Jasen’s chest.

  “I see how it is,” said Baraghosa easily.

  Damn him. Damn him to the fires in the inferno he had unleashed over Terreas.

  Jasen said through gritted teeth, “I’ve come to kill you.”

  Lightning rent the air again. It crackled, suffused with static, lifting the hairs on the back of Jasen’s neck, on his arms. Deeper, it penetrated, right to his very muscles. Like pouring grease onto a fire, it energized him in ways the rage and adrenaline alone could not. And when the moment came, it would power him, power his thrusts, his stabs, and grant him the strength to push the blade through where muscle and sinew and bone would threaten not to yield, that it might keep this man held together as Jasen fought to split him in two.

  “All of you?” Baraghosa asked. He waved a hand across them, over-elaborate in his sweep.

  “You have wronged many,” Huanatha growled. “Now your treachery comes back to you.”

  He laughed—and somehow, though it was a quiet sound, little more than a breathy hah that might be whispered to oneself while reading a faintly amusing story, it was loud enough that Jasen heard it over the storm.

  Like the way he spoke in the meeting hall in Terreas, he realized: quiet, yet audible to all.

  Jasen saw a glimpse of it: the hall, in the light of dawn, peaceful and serene with its cloying candles, burned down low in holders. Then it was buried in a mound of slag as the mountain was torn open, and the sky was suddenly full of ash, so much more choking than any overly pungent candle.

  He clenched his teeth, ground them.

  “You’re a murderer,” he said—but lightning struck again, behind Baraghosa this time. It forked, arcing across five conduction rods at once.

  The boom came immediately. It was deafening.

  Baraghosa said, “You’ll have to speak up; I’m afraid I did not quite catch that.”

  Taunting. After everything he had done, he was taunting Jasen. Jasen seethed for a long, long moment. The black hatred churning inside him had reached its boiling point. It could go nowhere else: overspilled into all of him, it had but one last direction to move: outward.

  He opened his mouth.

  “ARGH!!” he screamed—

  And he flung himself across the space, raising his sword from its sheath.

  If the others came with him, he did not know. Perhaps they did; or perhaps they knew that this was Jasen’s fight first and foremost, whatever grievances with Baraghosa they had themselves and held back.

  Whichever it was, Jasen did not care. Fire burned in his chest, fire for revenge, for atonement—and he would cut the sorcerer down, now, here, on these clifftops as the heavens unleashed their lightning in a terrifying tumult.

  Baraghosa stared as Jasen sprinted through the conduction fields, screaming at him, screaming a battle cry that would be the last Baraghosa ever heard—

  Then, at almost the last moment, when there were only ten or twelve feet between them—

  Baraghosa lazily reached into his long, flowing jacket, a deep midnight blue almost the color of the sea at twilight.

  From it he withdrew a small cane. Half the size of a man’s walking stick, one easy pull on the gilded orb handle extended it to full size—

  If he believed that a piece of wood would stop Jasen, he had another thing coming.

  Jasen drew his sword back, preparing to thrust—Baraghosa’s face was close now, closer than Jasen had ever seen it, sallow and waxy and looking as if it had been compressed at the cheekbones and grown slightly too long in the other direction to compensate—

  He was smiling, very slightly.

  When Jasen’s blade pierced his stomach, that smile would be gone.

  He flew, the last steps closing, Baraghosa hardly moving …

  Then the sorcerer slammed the cane against the earth.

  It was as if he had tossed a rock into a pool of water—or that perhaps a rock had fallen from the very top of a mountain and landed in a pond at its base. A shockwave went out from it, invisible—it slammed Jasen hard in the chest.

  His cry cut off as he was tossed backward, off his feet—

  Then he crashed sidelong into a conduction rod. There was a second crash, bewildering—he could not figure this one out, could not figure anything out at all for a few moments—

  Then his eyes opened. The world was topsy-turvy. A conduction rod pointed up directly overhead into the brackish mire that was the sky.

  The second impact had been the fall, he realized dimly.

  Alixa appeared. “Jasen!” she cried. Scourgey followed her a moment later. She whined—

  Lightning boomed across the conduction field, throwing the world into bright relief. Alixa and Scourgey were shadows for just a mite of a moment.

  “Are you hurt—?” she was saying, though her words seemed to come from very far, as if he’d sunk his head into a pail of water.

  He pushed up. Alixa tried to hold him down; so too did Scourgey, it seemed, as she pressed low to him—yet he muscled past her, moved Alixa aside with a hand to the shoulder.

  “You can’t!” she said—

  But he was already past.

  Somehow, the sword had not loosened itself from his grip. How that had happened, he couldn’t be sure; the crash was a blur, one he could not sort through, for it seemed to be an instantaneous thing even though he knew it was not.

  Later, perhaps, he would thank the ancestors that he had not fallen and impaled himself upon it.

  Baraghosa merely watched.

  Jasen strode for him. Twenty feet, he’d been separated from the sorcerer.

  This time he would not allow himself to be bested.

  “You killed my family,” Jasen growled.

  “Is that so?” He sounded almost bored.

  His words made Jasen’s anger well up again. He broke into a run, crying out again, raising the sword—

  This time Baraghosa sidestepped at the last moment. Jasen cut out with the blade, cleaving the air the same way the lightning strikes were ripping it in two—but Baraghosa was not touched.

  Instead, he jabbed out with his cane again just as Jasen pivoted—

  This blast caught him side-on. He stumbled back, forced six feet away before his legs could not keep up with his staggering lurch anymore and he fell.

  Baraghosa ambled toward him—

  Midway, he jabbed out with his cane, sideways and behind him. “Stay back, girl,” he warned—Alixa jerked backward as though she’d walked into an invisible wall. Another thrust with the cane on his other side—”And you, old man.”

  “Leave the boy alone!” Kuura cried.

  Jasen pushed back onto his feet
.

  He tasted blood now. It was in his mouth, but didn’t come from his lip. A cut on his face, maybe? He didn’t know. Wouldn’t reach for it to feel—though the rain did not make sourcing the wound possible anyway. No, he just gripped tight his blade, adjusting his feet to shoulder width.

  Distantly, he was aware that he was shaking—and not from cold.

  Baraghosa strolled easily to him, watching Jasen through beady eyes. They were off-white, yellow with age, the irises discolored and faded.

  An arm’s length away from Jasen, he stopped.

  Close enough to strike again.

  Jasen held firm, waiting for the right moment.

  “The boy from Luukessia,” Baraghosa murmured. “Have you really crossed the sea to battle me?”

  Jasen set his jaw. “Yes.”

  A moment—and though the downpour carried on, for that long second as Baraghosa considered this, it felt as if all the world had gone silent.

  Then Baraghosa said, “Very well.”

  Jasen lunged, swinging—

  Baraghosa lifted his cane. He jabbed it out at Jasen’s chest—

  It did not touch him, but an explosion of force hit him, square.

  He cried out as the sheer power of it flung him back. This one felt was as if a wave comprised of half the sea had ploughed into him. He flew backward like a cannonball, conduction rods hurtling past in a blur—

  Then he crashed against a rod, almost at its very top. His arms and legs snapped backward—he screamed, at least inside—

  The sword flew from his grip.

  Then he was falling—

  He landed on his feet, but his legs hadn’t the strength to hold him and sagged immediately, as if they had no bone in them at all. White hot pain tore through him again, another pulse of it that overrode his senses, threatened to blind his vision and mute his hearing.

  He was down.

  He swam there—

  A boom of lightning brought him up again. He lifted his head—it was so heavy all of a sudden—to see Alixa charging a long way off, a dagger in each hand—

  “No,” he tried to say. But he could not.

  She stabbed out, a mad, frenzied look of fear in her eyes. Behind her, Scourgey lunged too, leaping skyward—