As the water closed behind her, the world went absolutely silent. The sudden disappearance of the gentle roar of the rain felt as jarring as a missed step. Yaki moved to the pole and another appeared, protruding from the narrow stone walkway. The poles were plain and smooth with a hole bored through the tops, as if waiting for a rope to be strung between them, a little less than two feet apart. As Yaki worked her way from pole to pole, she had to conclude that two people sharing a crystal would have been nearly impossible. Ishe’s head would have been mere inches from the ceiling of this bubble.
Ahead she barely made out the outline of Simon’s bubble through the foot of murk between them.
Suddenly, the distance between them closed and the wall of water between them opened. Simon held his palm out to hold up.
“Grief sleeping on path,” he whispered. “We go around. Tell Gama. Careful, though; bubble will get tighter. He will have to stoop.”
“What?” Gama asked from behind her as the ratman was once again engulfed by the river, although the wall of water between them was thin enough to see through.
Yaki repeated what Simon had said.
“Why do I have to stoop?” Gama asked as Simon took the pendant and held it above his shoulder so that they could see its light. He shuffled over to the side of the path.
“I don’t—”
Simon stepped from the path and disappeared in the murk. The blue light of his crystal barely penetrated the water. Yaki went to the edge of the stone walkway, and the crystal on her breast trembled. Her bubble of air compressed as she stepped onto the sand, to the point that she had less than a foot of air around her. Holding her crystal aloft so Gama could follow its light, she urged it not to crack. Between the tightness of the bubble and the loose sand beneath her feet, she moved as if she wore a sheath dress, keeping her legs tight together. Heat edged back into her consciousness as she checked to see if Gama’s light was behind her. It bobbed along.
Something stirred in the murk to her left, and a creeping sensation spreading up her neck set her lungs to bubbling, charging up for a fire blast. Ahead, Simon’s light waved frantically. Taking this as an urge to hurry, Yaki redoubled her pace.
Simon’s light winked out.
“You dirty egg-cruncher!” Yaki didn’t bother to translate the stream of draconic curses that poured through her mind as she charged, pulling her sword from her bag. Her little crystal emitted a high-pitched buzz of warning as her fingers brushed the walls of her bubble. Blackness in front of her solidified, and the water parted across an expanse of wet slickness. She drove the shortened rapier into the flesh to the hilt with an overhand strike and jerked the blade downward, opening a wound as long her arm.
The Grief’s scream made the water shiver around her as the creature pulled back into the blackness like a burned limb.
Simon’s light reappeared not too far away. Two large steps and their bubbles met. The ratman’s eyes were both open and wide. “What you do? They’re com—”
Yaki didn’t need his explanation. He squeaked as she grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and threw him across her back. “Hang on,” she hissed. The dreadful creeping sensation flooded her back. She could feel the Grief’s attention focusing on her. They were crystals but dark and cold. One warm crystal approached at a stumbling run. Yaki spun as Gama burst into her airspace, sword drawn. Swinging her arms low, Yaki swept his legs out from under him, scooping him up into her arms.
“W-what?” Gama managed to stutter as Yaki whirled around and started to run. Heat pumped into her legs as she ran downriver. The pathway appeared far sooner than she anticipated, the stone pole lashing into their expanding bubble with the speed of a sword strike. Yaki twisted Gama out its way, taking it across her hip. The pole snapped.
The injured Grief circled overhead as Yaki overshot the path, and her boots carved furrows in the sand. Gama weighed nothing in her arms, Simon little more than a clutch across her back. Two steps brought her back on the pathway, and she sprinted down it.
Gama squawked as curled his head up to avoid it being rapped against the poles. Both he and Simon were shouting, but Yaki couldn’t hear them over the boiling in her chest. Her head was abuzz with this new sense, the awareness of the crystals, both the tools in their bubble and the dark ones within the Grief diving at her from behind, closing far faster than Yaki could run.
They burst into a larger pocket of air. Yaki had no time to ascertain that she had even run in the right direction; she threw down Gama and whirled around.
The Grief burst through the dark water, its sludgy flesh opening into a maw lined with human jawbones as if they were individual teeth. The grotesque collection of smiles widened in a soundless roar as its tiger-size bulk hurtled through the air.
The heat within Yaki rose and erupted from her mouth, feeding the Grief an entirely unexpected meal of a spear of fire. The black flesh ignited in a rush, flames engulfing the monster entirely before it hit the ground as a writhing mass before Yaki. She danced back as a flaming limb struck out at her.
A larger water crystal pulsed not too far away. It happily complied with her request: a wall of water struck the Grief from the side and swept the thing away, leaving only the stink of its foul smoke in their air pocket.
Both Gama and Simon clambered to their feet, coughing.
“Come,” Simon wheezed.
Yaki found herself shaking off a daze. Did I— And then she immediately found the answer as the hunger hit. Yes, I did.
As they entered the archway, Simon babbled. “…usually, we wait for Grief to move, but we’re in a hurry. Good we have strong captain, eh, Gama?”
“Yeah.” Gama’s eyes blinked unsteadily at Yaki behind droplet-spattered lenses. A hooded Enshadowed had shrunk back against the wall and stared at them with undisguised fear. They stood at the bottom of a stairway nearly identical to that on the other side of the river.
“Give Simon back pendants.” He held out his hand. “Gotta return them. Simon will command Lazy Lion if things go bad.”
“You’re going to go back into that?” Gama handed over his pendant. “Are you mad?”
“Simon be fine. Wait a bit and then Grief go back to sleep. You go up stair and take right tunnel. Follow left wall. It will take you to low market.”
Yaki took the pendant and held it out to Simon but didn’t let it go as his fingers closed around it. “No dying,” she told him firmly, her tongue working over the sounds. “Captain’s orders.”
“Aye, Captain.” He smiled and pulled the pendant from her grasp. “Go; the Lady slumbers now but she know what I see and say. Especially here.”
Nodding, Yaki grabbed Gama’s hand and pulled him toward the stairs. Simon was right; Lady Night would be more than a little miffed that their little heist had enabled Yaz’noth to attack the city. Every moment in the tunnels was borrowed time. They needed to get aboveground before the debt came due. “Come.” She shoved a coil of golden wire into her mouth and began to bound up the stairs.
Chapter Thirteen
Spirits are defined by rules; a fire spirit that refuse to burn would no longer be a flame.
Seek Fire, Chief of the Turtle Clan of the Low Rivers Tribe, Lorekeeper
The throng funneling onto the bridge had thinned slightly by the time Drosa and Ishe stood among them. The morning sunlight had already banished the creeping cold that had started leaking from the bones in her arms the moment she had set foot on that stairway. Upon learning that the ratman had meant to lead them beneath Grief-infested waters, Drosa’s eyes had met hers, and Ishe found herself in total agreement with her fierce expression. They’d get into the city along with everyone else.
“These crystals see into heads?” Drosa asked not for the first time after Ishe had explained what it meant to be put to question.
“We’re fine. We’re here to help,” Ishe said. “We don’t wish any harm on the city.”
Drosa’s fingers tightened their grip on Ishe’s hand. “And to steal ship,�
� she hissed.
A small snigger escaped Ishe’s lips. “Don’t think about it like that. We’ll do whatever we have to save the city, even if we have to grab a ship.” Ishe gave her a grin and a helpless shrug. A gentle breeze blew across the crowd, and it teased the tips of her long ears and swirled about the whiskers at the end of her nonexistent but completely real muzzle. Tell her, her body and the world sang, Tell her who you really are now. And it how wonderful it is.
A shadow passed over Drosa’s expression, and her eyes narrowed. “What is that?”
“Nothing.” Ishe said, and instantly, she became nothing. The breeze died; her sensations snapped back to their human limits with a suddenness that made her stumble.
“Are Grief talking to you still?” Drosa stood on tiptoe as if the new angle could glean a better view of her soul. “Eyah saw shadow in you. Comes and goes, he say.”
“No. It’s not that.” Ishe reached for a plausible excuse but found nothing but the truth. I am the Coyote. The words ached to be spoken; they promised to make everything better. Yet Ishe remembered the snarl in Drosa’s voice when she had called Coyote the Destroyer. Yaki could understand—she had deals of her own—but Drosa, who walked with a shaft of sunlight on her shoulder, what would she do when she learned who Ishe had pledged to become?
Their silence seemed to muffle the surrounding crowd as they slowly shuffled onto the length of the bridge. The crowd slowly sorted itself into three lines. At the head of each stood a priest armed with a jagged crystal of curving thorns in the palm of one hand. Each peasant seemed to wilt as they stepped up beside the priest. A few inaudible words were exchanged before the crystal briefly oriented toward the peasant’s heart who wobbled briefly before the priest dismissed him with a wave of his hand.
Taller than most of those in the crowd by a full head, Ishe could watch the gestures of all three priests as they drew closer. Which one would be less attentive? The middle one who practically talked with his hands, or the one seeming to gesture only with the direction of his nose? If she could only hear what they whispered…
“They worship Sun yes?” Drosa broke the silence between them.
“Uh…” Ishe pulled herself out of the garden of doubts she had been sowing in her head and glanced up at her lover, following Drosa’s eyes to the emblem of the imperial sun that shone above the gate. “Yes.”
Drosa gave a small nod and her hair dimmed for a moment; the area around them brightened as if the sun had peeked out behind a cloud, yet nary a cloud drifted through the clear blue sky.
“Why?” Ishe asked as the light faded back to that of midmorning.
Drosa gave her a cool look and said nothing. Five people away from the priest, Ishe didn’t have enough time to puzzle out the meaning of that expression. Instead she focused on the fact that she was there to help. Not to steal the ship. Ask for it. Sucking a breath between her teeth, she began to flip the thoughts over and over in her head. That confidence she had felt when she stepped onto the bridge stayed beyond her grasp. By the time it was her turn to step in front of the priest, sweat had begun to gather within her gloves, squishing out among her fingers.
The priest regarded her clothing with interest, deep-set eyes tracing from her boots to her head. Ishe’s stomach wrestled with her mind as she fought to focus on what she would say.
“Do you enter to harm the city or anyone who dwells within it?” he asked, twisting the crystal in his palm toward her.
Ishe opened her mouth and flicked the no from her tongue. Stealing a ship wasn’t hurting the city, right? And as thought ran naked across her mind, the crystal’s dark surface brightened.
The priest’s gentle smirk fell as his eyes were drawn to his truth crystal.
Ishe’s vision became a searing white. Voices called out in alarm. Familiar fingers closed around Ishe’s palm. “Move!” Drosa hissed, pulling her forward. Blinking, Ishe allowed Drosa to tow her behind as the world manifested itself as a sea of indistinct shapes that Drosa threaded them between.
The line of blue shapes they moved toward resolved into the city watch, standing with mouths agape as the pair passed through them without resistance.
Ishe risked a glance over her shoulder and nearly froze in place herself. There on the bridge stood a massive man of shining golden light; he wore the robes of the high priest, but on his head, a massive rack of antlers framed the icon of the Emperor, a golden disk surrounded by eight points.
“Where we go?” Drosa asked as Ishe wrenched her eyes back to their path. A sea of stunned people stared up past them in the city’s entry court. Drosa had gotten them fifty feet from the wall, but now people were so densely packed, they could no longer thread between them.
“Wait,” Ishe urged, seeing little other option besides grabbing people and hurling them out of their path. Instead, she pulled Drosa close and turned to watch the giant composed of sunlight who had pressed the palms of his hands together and smiled beatifically down at the people. “Can you make it talk?”
“Eyah is not wind,” Drosa snapped, her hair had gone dark.
Instead the giant mouthed a single word, beware, and faded away. The crowd muttered, shaking itself from the daze. Questions flowed among the people like ripples.
All of the priests and many of their guards had sunk to their knees. Ishe navigated them into the crowd, zigging into a flow of people who had not witnessed the display.
Only once they had pulled into an alley beyond the watch gate did Ishe allow herself a sigh of relief and relax her bulk against a wall.
Her exhalation turned into a rush when Drosa drove her elbow into Ishe’s stomach. “Ooof!”
“You can’t lie to stone! You think you lie to me?” Drosa’s eyes blazed with an angry light all their own.
“I didn’t—” Ishe started to protest, but Drosa locked her hands around Ishe’s neck, preventing her from rising fully.
“I see shadow in you! It not nothing! It hid well but Eyah is light! He see shadow in you more and more. Not in arms like Grief. You laugh not-Ishe laugh. Tell me.”
Ishe tried to look around Drosa’s stare, but she moved so close, the deep wells of her eyes were all she could see.
The excuses that were bubbling in Ishe’s mind dissolved to sprinkles of ash. “You won’t like the answer,” Ishe said.
“I don’t like you hiding shadow in you. Tell me what is.” Drosa’s words carried the edge of an ultimatum, and Ishe felt the jaws of the situation close around her as surely as a steel trap. And somewhere off in the distance within her echoed a snigger.
“Promise me—” Ishe tried.
“No promise. Tell me.” Drosa’s words were unyielding iron.
Ishe steeled herself as she had for Yaz’noth’s punishments, preemptively wincing for the torrent she knew would be coming as she whispered. “I am the Coyote of wind and storm.”
As the words left Ishe’s mouth, a hidden part of her opened; the world blossomed into her senses, but that world contained nothing but Drosa. Her weather-beaten scent, the curves of her face, the individual pores of her nose, the striation of brown and amber contained within the iris of her eye as it widened involuntarily at a rush of fear that swallowed her anger. Drosa toppled backward as if her legs had forgotten they had knees.
Ishe made to grab her hand, but she jerked away as if Ishe were made of snakes. Drosa landed on her ass and scooted away from Ishe until her back ran up the opposite wall of the alley. For a moment, she was a deer frozen by the eyes of a predator. “The Destroyer,” she finally breathed moments later.
“He…” Ishe started, and then corrected herself. “I am more than that. This is a new beginning, a chance to create new stories.”
“You killed the world to hide your sins.” Drosa drew her knife. “Flea-bitten god. Leave my Ishe. Now.”
A prickling sensation spread down Ishe’s neck and across her shoulders as the Coyote’s hackles rose, the animal aspects hardening in response to Drosa’s threat, becoming more real. Ishe
felt lips peel up from fangs and an extension of her spine bristled as it raised from its resting place. “No. I only denied Coyote for your sake, Drosa. Can you forget my name now that you’ve heard it? The name I took to bring us through that storm alive?” Ishe found herself chuckling. Yaki had accepted what she had become, more or less. Now that Drosa knew, there was no reason not to take the power that Coyote offered, or to perceive through the wet towel of human senses.
Drosa gathered herself into a fighting stance, her own oddly shaped teeth bared. “Coyote is a coward’s god. Spit on his name and cast him out, Ishe.”
Ishe’s sudden confidence wavered as she stood out of range of Drosa’s knife. “I can’t do that. I agreed to carry his name.”
“What good is an oath to a Coyote?” Drosa snarled.
“What good is an oath to a pirate, a thief, and a thug? I’m those things too, with or without Coyote.” Ishe watched as uncertainty crept into Drosa’s eyes. “My words matter to me as much as they did before. There are many Coyotes, Drosa; you only knew the one. Get to know a second, please.” Ishe marveled at her own speech, spun of her own emotions but strung together by the presence inside of her.
Spreading her hands, Ishe stepped into Drosa’s reach, tilting her head up, exposing her throat. The blade came up, its edge kissing her skin. Ishe closed her eyes. “Please give me a chance, Drosa. Help me save this place.”
They shared a breath. The blade withdrew, yet before Ishe could so much as smile nervously, pain bit into her nose and jerked her down to her knees. Opening her eyes, she saw Drosa’s hand floating nearly a foot from her face, fingers clamped down on her invisible muzzle, nails shining with sunlight stinging the spiritual flesh to the point Ishe had to blink away hot tears. “Never lie to me.” Drosa’s breath hissed into Ishe’s long ears. “I give you one chance more than I should, Ishe Coyote.” Her nails twisted, drew a yip from Ishe. “Swear to me on your mother’s spirit.”
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