In his hands were the delicate, transparent threads he'd stitched to the Seal to aid him in pulling it off. It glowed on his skin now: the second-largest, the one that had been easiest to bear. On the spirit-side, his lower-right wing twinged in anticipation, drawing an answering clench in his belly. Soon he'd have that smallest pair free, and could fly again without magic.
Very soon.
The tunnel entrance grew closer with every step. He'd dismissed his little light; there was enough from stars and moon beyond, and from the magma he could feel already seeping into the caldera. The wraiths would provide some light too—a fact that had always amused him. They were beings from some far-flung star, capable of bending space and perceiving the depths of time, yet they could not figure out how to conceal their radiance except in flesh.
Still, even if they'd been capable of it, he would have sensed them. Their resonance shivered the air, a constant subaural harmony that the Ravager let him hear. There were at least ten out there, enough to take him on his best day—which this most certainly was not. But the heart of the mountain beat hard beneath his feet, strengthening with every step he took toward the Seal-point. He was not alone tonight.
Close to the tunnel-mouth, the stone was hot enough to warm him. He sucked in a breath of sulfurous air and tasted acids, toxins, vapors of all kinds. They couldn't harm him, not now; his human blood would reclaim him eventually, but at the moment he was far more fire than flesh.
It felt good to bask in the baking heat, to let the smoke pervade him. The last time he had touched his ancestral source, he had been in a corpse-body, immune to the intoxication that welled up in him now. It had been fortunate then; looking back, he knew he would have destroyed all of Valent in a frenzy and then regretted it. Here, though…
Here, he could drop all pretense and just kill.
Even that plague on his nerves, Kuthrallan, had hidden away from this. It was his night, his playtime, and as he stepped out from shelter to start down the rocky incline, he felt a giddy flame kindle inside of him. It had been so long.
The caldera stretched below, a seething plane of red-orange and tarry black that could swallow the whole of the Crimson camp. His arrays gained power with each step toward that melting shell, the wheels at his back turning fiercely. A dome-like bulge rose from the center of the field like an island in a dark sea; that was where he had to go.
His steps quickened. As he leapt from hot basalt to magma-shell, he glimpsed the wraiths above: pale streaks rising from the rim of the caldera, white or pinkish or, in one case, teal-blue. Something stung him about that last, but he didn't have time to consider it—not with joy like a sunrise in his chest, infusing every inch of him with effervescent light.
Distantly he realized he was laughing—high, breathless. His thoughts ran like quicksilver, the Seal peeling from his flesh under the dual pull of his hands and its home-point. Beyond the target that was the dome-swell, the sense of the Seal's weight went down, deep into the belly of the earth like an anchor, and a little part of him recognized that if he held on for too long, he would follow it. Magmatic blood sang through carbonized veins, demanding to return to its source—to be reborn without this cage of flesh.
He wasn't stronger than the Fire. Some day, he knew it would take him.
But not yet.
His stride lengthened as his legs changed, lower body going molten as he raced up a newborn lava flow. The dome was cracking, hot gases rippling across the surface as he ran, and above the wraiths circled—trying to pick him out from the masses of stone and magma-light. Only the teal-colored one seemed to track him, a bright flare taking aim.
He felt the tingle of the leader-line and leapt forward, breaking from it. Teal energy punched into the lava at his heels. The dome rose beneath him, shuddering like a beast trying to dislodge a rider, but he was fluid now, plasma—he was a part of it, its surface an extension of his claw-tipped feet, its apex his only gravity. His hair streamed back from his face in a blue-orange banner of sulfurous flame.
The Seal pulled and he responded, no longer a man but a force. What hit the ground at the peak were not hands but talons, and as he released his burden to the keeping of the Fire, his wings flared forth: the lowest pair, still skeletal but all he currently required. His eyes, twin spheres of cold flame, traced the impact of the Seal as it sank into the depths.
And saw the rebounds of its power, the shuddering ferocity of Aekhaelesgeria's awakening. Reaching out, he clutched the first waves with his will—not to control or command, for even with the fire in his veins, he was not strong enough to harness an eruption.
Just to influence its vectors.
As the dome disintegrated into smoke and flame, as his wings caught the first updraft and shoved him free, he pulled at those lines of force and direction and saw the great blast of molten rock punch the wraiths out of the sky.
*****
Cob felt a rumble and looked up to see the top of Aekhaelesgeria disintegrate.
Even in the dark, it was unmissable. A gout of blackness, a flare—and then a pillar of fire eradicating the night, the flat line of the mountaintop shattering beneath it. He clutched at his ledge in horror as another pre-shock rolled through the stone like a whispered warning.
Then the air-blast hit, hot and hard. Had he not been sitting, it might have knocked him right off the mountain, but instead it just shoved him down like a huge, angry hand. From below came a splintering chorus as ice-heavy trees snapped like matchwood; behind, in the cave Arik had chosen as their shelter, the big wolfman whimpered.
He had followed Enkhaelen's directions; they were two peaks westward, on the south face just above the treeline, Aekhaelesgeria barely in sight. The slope above them had been peeled of rock and snow by a recent avalanche, but as the main tremor hit, Cob sensed more stone begin to move up above. Limbs like jelly, he forced himself into the little cave.
Even in that shelter, the volcano-light reached them clearly, painting sky and land a hideous guttering orange-red. Patches of snow were already sliding off the slopes across the valley; downed trees made silvery-black hashmarks on their lower flanks.
Another blast came, bone-shaking despite the distance. A streak of fire descended upon a faraway ridge—then another, and another, advancing outward as the ground shuddered heavily.
It went on for an eternity, each booming pulse worse than the last. Cob stopped looking outside; there were fires glinting down below now, and smoke on the wind, and grit and pebbles sifting past their small cave. The volcano roared like a beast in pain, furious, endless. He couldn't imagine anything had survived.
Only when lightning began to crack through the smoky sky did he stir. His nerves were numb, hearing down to a dull rush, but lightning was one of Enkhaelen's tricks, so perhaps…
Peeking out through stinging eyes, he saw the volcano crowned in a pillar of smoke and lightning, the whole of the sky blotted out by its wrath. Fire still surged in its throat, but not like before; now it was a duel of air and electricity, white veins dancing through the clouds a dozen times for each blink.
Among them darted smaller lights—barely flecks against the brilliant lances of the sky, but conscious, intelligent. Wraiths. Enkhaelen. From this distance, he had no clue which was which.
And so he huddled at the edge of the cave and watched, trying not to see the dim red lines on the volcano's slopes or the barrenness of the hills and peaks around it, the stark absence of snow, the faint rushing sound from down below. Localized thunder shook his own peak now and then—some cliff giving up the fight, some thick snowpack surrendering—but he couldn't think about it, could only watch the darting shapes as, one by one, lightning struck them down.
Then they were all gone, leaving a dull orange streak in the sky. For a moment, it corkscrewed wildly, then seemed to catch its balance and turned.
Away from the volcano. Toward Cob.
Startled, he heaved to his feet, forcing his jellied legs to obey him. “Arik,” he rasped, barely
able to hear his own voice through his thunderstruck ears. The wolfman was at his side in a moment, and together they watched the streaking light grow, until they made out the jagged wings and the smoke that boiled from it.
Those wings beat once, laboriously, as if trying to correct its trajectory—then disintegrated into motes, turning its glide into an angled plunge. Cob cursed; it was too low and too far leftward, about to paste itself into the rock wall.
Something lightning-like burst out then, spidery limbs repelling it from the stone, and it clipped instead of crashed—then slammed into the slope slightly further on, drawing a black furrow across the face of the rock.
By the time Cob and Arik reached it, it was completely dark: a cinder in the shape of a man.
Chapter 15 – Ticks and Leeches
Mariss Ysara Enkhaelen floated low through the trees, scanning the debris-pocked slopes around her for signs of passage. The comet that was her father had careened in this direction, then vanished. No light showed here now but the volcano's reflected rage.
It still roared behind her, thickening the sky with ash and pelting the trees and her wards with hot shards of tephra. She doubted it would stop soon; there had been a tension in the mountain even before her father had set foot in the caldera, a strain that she had felt in the bone-deep part of her that was element, not flesh.
She could have pursued him into that lightning-stitched cloud, but the first blast of heat and rock had wiped out her wards and convinced her that no, she did not wish to duel her father in his element. Her dress was shredded on one side, the skin beneath likewise, forcing her to shed the damaged bits to stop the bleeding. A human would be dead—half crushed, half roasted—but she had her silver and her magic to fall back on, so she was just annoyed.
And eager. The haelhene had taken themselves out of her way by chasing; she'd seen them fall out of the cloud one by one, to slam into the mountainsides or the churning mud below. With luck, they would stay there until Master Caernahon's agents came to excavate them.
She would face her father alone.
Cold air gusted over her shoulders as she went, ameliorating the heat at her back. Downslope, a formerly frozen river gushed with grey-black water and debris, washing higher and higher with each moment, but it wasn't a danger; the blue-green pane under her feet kept her aloft like a gliding bird. Her eyes—far better than the haelhene's this close to the earth—scanned the cliffside critically. Patchy snow, bare stone, broken trees…
A black streak.
She bared her teeth and flexed her skinless right hand to begin the formation of her rapier. A spell-duel was inevitable, but at the end she wanted him at sword's-point, bowed and broken. Wanted to watch him die on her blade.
Then she'd claim the Ravager, and…
What? Open the Seals for Master Caernahon? He'd lied to her—said that her father was in hiding when really he was roaming the Palace. He'd kept her away from her mother's sword too, only for it to be stolen by that boy. She couldn't put into words how angry that made her.
Maybe Caernahon should be next.
She skimmed smoothly over rocks and fallen trees, then up the sharp incline to where the streak stood stark against the lighter stone. The scent of char filled her nostrils, not quite the overcooked-meat stink she'd caught from herself. It would take months—and food—to re-flesh what she'd lost, an irritatingly human need she wished she didn't have.
The streak ended in a small crater, with flash-melted rock curved around an empty space. She scanned the surroundings but all the snow had been blasted from the area, leaving bare stone dusted by fallen ash and no clear sign of tracks.
“Can't have gone far,” she muttered to the wind.
The ground shivered below her ward as another thunderous roar went up from Aekhaelesgeria, the ashen sky flaring a momentary red-orange. She reinforced the protections at her back; there would be more excreta coming soon, as whistling shards of volcano-glass or scouring particulates or tree splinters and grey sleet.
In these conditions, what would he do? He could fly, but he had crashed. Did that mean he would walk? Or curl up in a cave? She couldn't imagine him taking shelter; in her mind's eye he still stalked molten across the caldera, laughing hideously, his limbs attenuating as he picked up speed. Had he sprung from here into the heights? Was he looking down at her right now, contemptuous, amused?
Her hand clenched around the first nubs of her rapier's hilt. It grew sluggishly, too much of her silver compensating for the failure of her flesh for it to just shoot out as normal. Would he laugh at that too? Would he be disappointed in what he'd made of her?
Agitated, she looked up, around, down—everywhere she could see without summoning her own light. She didn't want to tip off any haelhene who might have escaped. But the moon was trapped in clouds, the volcano now the only light in the world, so finally she floated lower and summoned a white wisp close to the ground. If he had flown away, she'd lost him—but he couldn't have. He was hurt.
He was here, somewhere.
Fallen rocks. Blackened bushes. Splintered trees. Mud.
Footprints.
Catching her breath, she skimmed closer. They were shallow but fresh, the mud still in the process of freezing over. Something was wrong though, and as she lowered herself beside them, she realized they were far too big. She could fit her boots into them with space to spare—and her father was supposed to be a small man. Slight. There were paw-prints as well, perhaps a wolf's.
Shapeshifting? Or some minions?
Wait.
That boy. The one with her mother's sword. And a friend, apparently.
Her eyes narrowed, a tremor of rage running through her. Then it cooled, crystallized, and she exhaled slowly, the pieces falling together in her mind. Lifting off again, she sent her wisp-light to chase the ragged tracks, and pursued it as her sword regrew.
*****
Cob carried Enkhaelen across his shoulder this time, while Arik had the packs and sword, the stink of char too much for his sensitive nose. It turned Cob's stomach too, but he could bear it; knowing that Enkhaelen would survive made it just tolerable enough to keep the nausea down.
His first moments standing over the downed necromancer had been all horror, a throwback to more than one funeral pyre. But the lantern had shown raw pink cracks in the blackened coating, and when he'd turned the body, he could see the marks of the Seals still pulsing in that narrow chest—four left, green and brown and grey and blue.
So this was purposeful. Had to be. And though Enkhaelen was unconscious again, he had all his limbs and no obvious wounds, his body radiating heat through the dark crust.
Still, his flight had been all too visible, so they were running now.
It was miserable going. The ground kept shuddering beneath Cob's feet, displacing pebbles and sheets of ice and keeping his shoulders permanently braced for impact. If he'd been barefoot and able to concentrate, he thought he'd sense an avalanche before it hit, but like this—detached from the rock, terrified beyond words—he could only pray. To what god or power, he didn't know.
The trees groaned and swayed horribly around them, shedding ice in all directions. His boots crunched on shards, lungs filling with tiny flecks of it. Volcano-light pushed his shadow ahead of him with each distant roar, conspiring with his lantern's flame to make him see gaps and steps where there were none. At any moment he expected to slip and break his teeth on a rock.
The peak Arik had chosen gave them some shelter, at least. Their destination lay westward, upward, through tilted valleys and past crumbling peaks to the edge of the Rift. With luck, that constant incline would slow or divert any flood or ash-cloud that pursued them.
There was nothing they could do but push on.
His focus so fixed on the treacherous path, Cob didn't register Arik's first shout. He barely heard the second, and tried to look back, only to be slapped by a gust of ice and ash.
Something glowed through it, teal—
A hand of fo
rce picked him up and flung him forward. He hit the rocks shoulder-first, the lantern smashing to shards and flinders, and lay there a moment in pain-blind shock. Something yanked at his burden, pulling it half-away before he managed to grab on; as it dragged him along, he hooked futilely at the rocks with his feet but found no purchase.
Beyond, he heard Arik's snarl, then the scrape of teeth on metal and a horrible crunch. Arik yelped in pain. The pull, momentarily arrested, returned in force.
“No!” Cob shouted, clinging desperately as the blanket began to unwind. “Pike off, let go! Wraithy sons of shits—!”
“Not a wraith,” came a cold voice from behind a barrier of blue-green radiance. Sleet stinging his eyes, Cob could barely discern an outline, and couldn't see Arik at all in the thickness of trees and ashfall. “Not a son either. Give me my father.”
“Mariss?” he blurted, stomach lurching. The last time they'd met, she'd put a sword through him. He'd only beaten her with a combination of the tectonic lever, the Guardian and the Dark.
“Yes. And you are...” The bright barrier thinned enough for him to see her face—hawk-nosed, hard-featured, as dusky as him. Her narrowed eyes were the same shade as her magic. “Not the Guardian? What happened to you, boy?”
The blanket-wrapped bundle still hung between them, suspended in a fine network of blue-green threads. Cob held tight to what he could, teeth gritted; just because she'd started talking didn't mean she wouldn't put an energy-bolt through him or try to fly away. As brief as their prior meeting had been, he could tell she was much like her father.
“Doesn't matter,” he growled. “I can't let you take him.”
“How in the world would you stop me?”
That stung. Even with the Guardian, fighting her had been chancy; she'd nearly pulled the spirit right out of him. Now, with no tectonic lever, no sword…
Something tugged at his belt, and he found himself suddenly aware of the long dagger sheathed there, its black hilt close to his hand. Darilan's akarriden blade, Serindas. It could cut magic, bone, steel. All he needed was to draw it.
The Drowning Dark (The War of Memory Cycle Book 4) Page 42