A shadow swept over him and his boulder, accompanied by a downburst of hot, fishy air. Peeking up, he saw rubbery black hide slide by above, red vents flaring open in sequence. Beneath the front of it ran a row of fist-sized round eyes, yellow-rimmed—but they seemed not to see him, and though the thing's extended mouth-flaps twitched, it didn't react. Instead, it descended in the lee of the boulder as if it could only hover so high, long whiplike tail lashing slowly over his head. Cob glimpsed the rider on its back, white-robed against the black flesh and dimly luminescent through the cloth: a haelhene wraith.
Something tugged at his right arm.
He looked down at his empty sleeve and saw a thorny vine slide free, the bud at its tip opening into a tiny eye. “No,” he hissed at it, but it ignored him, and his arm cramped as more vines began spilling out.
“No!” he said more sharply. The vine-eye swiveled to examine him, bloodshot yellow even in the darkness; ahead, the raywing give a strange huff. Glancing there, he saw the wraith's hood turn toward him.
“Pike it,” he growled, and lurched up.
The raywing was already turning, its tail nearly taking Cob in the side. He hooked his bad arm over it for leverage and rushed forward, then heaved his legs up onto its back with the energy of panic. His good hand found purchase on its rubbery skin and then he was scrambling along the creature's spine, toward the wraith as it aimed a white-gloved hand at him.
A rock whistled from the darkness, striking the wraith in the hood without effect. Cob dropped flat as a pinkish-white beam sizzled the air a handspan from his head.
He got his feet back under him somehow and lunged, desperate to push the advantage—but it was already too late. The wraith's arm split into six, each a glassy white spear cored with rosy flame, and for a heart-stopping moment he knew he would impale himself on them.
Then his absent right arm surged forth in vine and thorn, wrenching him sidelong as it lashed for the wraith's unfurled substance. The wraith recoiled, a hollow sound of surprise emitting from its featureless mask, but not fast enough; red whips lashed around its shards and squeezed them shut just as Cob slammed into it bodily.
They went down hard on the raywing's back, Cob's arm pulled across his body by the tangle of vines, the wraith keening high enough to spike his eardrums. Cob hammered his fist into the wraith's mask in a frenzy, but it was like punching stone, and beneath him he felt it shift into something shatter-sharp. Pain lanced through his knees and shins.
Cursing, he wrenched off the mask. The head beneath had no more humanity than a kaleidoscope, already fracturing to extrude sharp spines, but in the center danced a bright pinkish light. Its essence.
He reached back for where he'd kept Serindas, only to realize he'd never strapped it on again. It was tied up in Arik's pack.
Pikes—
Vines flexed along his back and shoulder. His absent arm released the wraith, pulled back, then struck into the center of its unfolding face, thorny tendrils forcing the crystal spines apart. A rush of heat went up his phantom limb, and for a moment he tasted stellar fire in his sinuses, molten glass, rainbow light.
Then the vine-arm ripped backward, tearing the pinkish spark free of its cage. The crystal body froze, inert.
Gasping, Cob pushed to his feet and felt blood trickle down his legs from a dozen small cuts. The haelhene light jittered frantically within the cursethorn's grip, to no avail: thin tendrils wrapped around it until it was lost in their encasement, the weird flavors slowly fading from Cob's senses.
“Arik?” he called out shakily. Beneath him, the raywing shivered, and he frowned as he caught a whiff of ichor and realized that some of the wraith's splinters had pierced it too. “Shit, poor thing,” he mumbled, and tugged at the crystal corpse one-handed, but it was accursedly heavy and still dangerously sharp. His cursethorn 'hand' had already devolved back into strands and returned to the shelter of his sleeve, taking the tiny light with it.
A shaggy grey head peeked up over the hovering creature's wing. “Cob?”
“M'fine. The thorn, uh, ate the wraith.”
Arik's ears came up. “Good! I think. Are you all right?”
“I'm—“ Fine, he tried to repeat, but all of a sudden the word wouldn't come. Shudders ran up his legs and turned his guts liquid, and he swallowed down another bout of tears. With the rush of panic and adrenaline fading, he saw all too clearly how crazy that had been. How suicidal, if not for the cursethorn.
Cursethorn's fault, he thought, but it hadn't flung him at the wraith. Hadn't controlled his motions until that last moment when it became clear he had no plan.
You're not immortal, kid. You're not even useful except as a host.
Bitterness clenched in his chest, but he forced it down. “Good enough,” he managed for Arik's sake. “Here, can you help with this?”
The raywing stayed steady as the wolfman clambered up and helped him remove the crystal corpse. As the shards slid free, the cuts in the rubbery flesh sealed shut, seemingly glued by their own ichor; Cob wondered if that was natural or something the wraiths had bred or magicked into it. Every inch of the hovering creature's dark surface was firm and slightly undulating, a weird feeling to have underfoot, but as he sank into a crouch in preparation to drop off, he felt scar-tissue under his hand. Squinting, he saw hashmarks all over the creature's flesh, most pronounced along the wings to either side of where the wraith had been standing.
“Pieces of shit,” he muttered.
As he slid off, the raywing gave a strange warbling sound, like a question.
“Now bandages,” said Arik, and Cob allowed himself to be steered to a boulder and checked for injuries. His shins were covered in little stabs and slices, most already clotting but a few that needed binding, and he winced as they twinged under Arik's treatment.
As the wolfman worked, his gaze strayed back to the raywing, which warbled again. A pang of obligation pierced him. “What d'we do with it?” he murmured. “Can't just leave it. It's an animal, right? A hurt animal from far, far away.”
“I don't know.”
Cob squinted at its back, where a set of reins lay slack across the hashmarked scars, then got up despite Arik's protests. Cautiously he maneuvered toward its front, where one big eye stared fishily from the side of its weird curved maw. It focused in his direction, but he could tell it didn't see well in the dark.
“There there,” he said, awkwardly patting it above its fleshy brow. The reins were rooted barely a foot from its upper lip, right between the brows, and consisted of metal rings hooked through the flesh and a long band of silky material strung between. Dense scar tissue patterned the area around them, and callused spots a few feet behind showed where the wraith had stood.
“We should take it,” he said impulsively.
Arik cocked his head. “Over the Rift?”
“It can fly. Well...float. Sorta low. ...Maybe it's a bad idea.”
“They flew high when they had you.”
“True, but it wasn't eternal midnight then. Don't think it's made for night-flyin'. Might get hurt.”
There was a silence, then Arik said, “Wraiths might be able to track it.”
“Maybe, but otherwise it's gonna hover around all confused and alone and probably starve. It's already hurt, and this cold can't be good for it, and...”
Arik's ears flicked “We don't know what it eats, but...floating would help.”
Cob nodded, patted the creature again, then reached up to take the reins and start leading it. It made another curious breathy sound and floated a few inches after his tug, then stopped. He tugged again, but it didn't move, its eyes fixed vaguely upon him.
He frowned. “It doesn't wanna go.”
“Have to be on it? I doubt wraiths ever walk their mounts.”
That was a good point, but Cob hated to behave like the haelhene. It was hurt, and its scars said it had suffered even more from the riders on its back. Still, if it refused to move without someone on it, he had no choice.
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He climbed up carefully via the wing, then helped Arik pull himself and Enkhaelen and their baggage on, making sure not to tread on the sealed cuts. If they were thinking of diving off the Rift, they needed to know it could carry all of them before they tried. Fortunately, it didn't seem fussed, and when Cob set his feet in the callused spots and took up the reins again, it floated agreeably forward, making that deep breathy hum beneath his feet.
Bracing himself like that made the cuts in his legs ache. Grimacing, he lowered to a sitting position and tried again, and to his relief the raywing slid forward just as easily.
“Jus' be careful of its wounds,” he said. “Sure they're closed up, but...”
“They're already healing.”
Surprised, Cob looked back to see Arik prodding at a line of solidified ichor. Neither it nor the flesh beneath budged. The sight made him abruptly angry. “Definitely tampered with so it doesn't matter how much the wraiths hurt 'em. Pikers.”
Arik grunted agreement.
And so, in silence flavored only by the hum of the raywing, they slid slowly through the alpine night, keeping watch on the sky and the rocks and the forest while the strange beast rippled below.
It was a smooth ride, and Cob soon found himself nodding off, only to jolt out of it whenever the raywing went down a slope. No bumps, no impacts, just the vertiginous descent making him clutch hard at the reins and lean back in terror, until the creature leveled off its swoop with a few flaps of its huge meaty wings. For all that it couldn't see well, he got the sense that it could feel the ground below—perhaps through its cyclical downdraft breath.
Still. He didn't feel comfortable in the sky, and even less when falling.
Between the ashen clouds and his irregular naps, he had no way to track time. The raywing flew at a sedate pace but it was quicker than they'd walked, and its occasional plunge down a mountainside cut their travel down significantly. After a while, Cob navigated them out of the windy heights to follow the swollen flow of a river; though he'd rather not look down into that brown, debris-thick torrent, for the raywing it was like riding over a smooth road.
The sound of the water lulled him as well, until it rose enough to trigger an alert.
His eyes snapped open just in time to see the sky spread out before him, trees peeling from the verge on either side as dark water gouted off the rim of the Rift. A cry rose to his lips, but the raywing was already sliding past the edge—tipping—plunging into the void, and the wind snapped his voice away. He felt a clawed hand clench on his hip but couldn't look back, couldn't speak, just bent his head against the ripping air as the raywing free-fell toward doom.
Moonlight painted the rocks below. The clouds had ended while he wasn't looking, the Rift's natural updrafts a barrier against their ashen expanse, and both mother moon and child hung in the sky now, watching them plummet—
Then the raywing flapped, heaved, and lurched suddenly horizontal, its headlong dive turning into a glide that took it down so fast and low that Cob was sure the rocks would tear open its belly. Instead, it leveled off at a man's height, swooping around and over obstacles with terrifying flexibility. As the rush of the terrain slowed, Cob allowed himself to breathe, and glanced back to see Arik clamped belly-down across the raywing's back, eyes white-rimmed, Enkhaelen pinned beneath him.
Beyond and above—far, far above—loomed the Rift, twice-gilded by the moons' thin light.
Cob knew he should say something celebratory, but all that came through his teeth was a tight, traumatized wheeze.
Unperturbed, the raywing glided onward, descending the rubble-strewn foothills like a leaf on the breeze. Cob forced himself to focus ahead, but saw only rocks and snow, trees and snow, more rocks, more trees, even more snow, declining in steps toward a vast flat plain.
“I have no idea where we are,” he started, but then glimpsed something along the moonlit line of the Rift: a tower. Dark and star-tipped, it overlooked the rocky hills like a watchman on a wall. Squinting, he saw another beyond it, and then a third to his left, standing at the edge of the raging river they'd just plunged down. A fourth gleamed atop a spur of mountains further away—further south. With the Rift at his back, left was definitely south.
The world reoriented around him. They'd been in the Khaeleokiels, north of Wyndon and Corvia and far north of the Rift Climb. If they'd come straight west, that meant they were also north of Savinnor and the rest of Illane—and probably north of Averogne, the westernmost Imperial protectorate. Certainly this wasn't as thickly forested as Averogne was said to be.
If so, they were beyond the Pinch. In Gejara.
Don't be surprised, he told himself even as his nerves prickled. We started off in Gejara anyway. But one little village in the high foothills did not a country make, and he'd heard too much about the place to be eager. It was an ogre sanctuary, a treacherous Imperial 'ally', a mage-ruled spiritist horror-show….
Never mind that he was a spiritist now, sort of. Never mind that his companions were a skinchanger and a spirit-possessed mage, or that he'd met ogres earlier. Or that the Emperor was gone. The idea of approaching a Gejaran village on his own—or, Light forbid, a city—put a chill into him that even the wind had not.
Deal with it, he commanded, annoyed by the lingering fear. Light forbid nothing—you're not its servant anymore. You kicked it out. If anything, the Gejarans will celebrate you for that.
Well, minus the whole missing-sun thing.
Steeling himself, he turned the raywing north.
*****
Before long, glimmering lights showed on the horizon, more and brighter than he had anticipated. A city. For all his new-found nerve, he couldn't bring himself to approach it, but floated silently down toward a solitary lodge on the outskirts of a nearby town.
Though its windows were shuttered, smoke trickled up from the chimney at the center, sign enough of habitation. Cob reined the raywing past the windbreak-trees and toward the outbuildings at the back, hoping for a barn or hay-shed to shelter it in. He couldn't imagine it was made for this weather. Goats brayed in a covered pen as they floated by, and the familiar sound made him shiver.
There was indeed a shed, half-empty from the depth of the season, and with coaxing he got the raywing to glide in. It gave another warbling query as he slid off and found a tarp to throw over it. “Sorry about this,” he told it, and patted it awkwardly on the mouth-flap. A muted huff, then it went back to humming quietly, its vents blowing particles of straw in curious gyres.
Carrying Enkhaelen, Arik fell in line behind him, and he had a sudden moment of doubt. A beastman showing up in a spiritist city was one thing, but at some poor peasant's doorstep?
Then again, they were here to wake Enkhaelen up. Arik was hardly the weird part.
Rounding the front of the lodge, he went to knock on the door, then paused. It was almost twice his height and more than twice as broad: ogre-sized. The whole place was.
Taking a deep breath, he knocked anyway.
No answer came. For a moment, Cob thought it hadn't been heard, but then caught the low creak of floorboards and remembered the entry-chambers of the ogrish houses: some kind of defense against the Winter Graces. Frowning, he tried the handle and felt the latch lift unhindered. Beyond, moonlight showed him a room full of boots and another door. Once Arik ducked in, he shut the first and knocked on the second.
“Sorry t' disturb you,” he told the silent occupant, “but we need t'borrow your fire. I swear we're not the Winter Graces and we mean you no harm.”
A snort, then the sound of a bar being drawn. A moment later, the inner door cracked open to release a gust of warm air and cozy light, so welcome it nearly made Cob melt.
Framed in the entry was a huge stout woman, ruddy-faced, with white-streaked hair pulled back in a twist and held with long bone pins. She looked like she weighed enough for Cob and Arik combined, but carried it comfortably, patterned lounging-robe swaddling a motherly expanse of hips and bosom and belly. One ha
nd held the door, the other a sturdy wooden cane, ready to crack skulls if necessary.
“Ahra, sak dya-yon,” she boomed cheerfully.
“Er, Imperial please,” said Cob with a wince.
Her brows rose, and she bent closer with a tilt of her head, but then said, “Ah? Vell, get in, get in, hyou look like hyou been shat from an ox.”
Cob obeyed without comment. The broad chamber beyond was dominated by a central cooking area, including a huge brick oven; the rest was filled with cushions, blankets, tapestries and the occasional piece of wooden furniture, mostly trunks and counters shoved against the plastered walls. A dozen individuals sprawled among the comfortable mess, conversations stilled for the moment as they stared. All held a familial resemblance to the stout woman, either in their white-streaked hair or build or both, but several were redder. And everything—absolutely everything—was patterned, from the paint on the walls to the embroidery on the garments to the rugs that coated the floor.
“Akhet sak?” said a bald older man, blinking at them through glass circles wired over his eyes. He was very red and very ogrish, small tusks protruding between his lips.
“Sorry sir, ma'am, folks,” Cob mumbled. “We jus', uh, we gotta use your oven.”
“Oven?”
“Yeah.” Looking at the narrowness of that brick opening, Cob felt more ridiculous than ever, but he was tired and hurting and couldn't bring himself to care. “Sorry. We gotta stick m'friend in a fire to wake him up and we're all outta fire.”
“Hyou got to… This spirit business?” the stout woman asked, dropping the bar across the door. “Hyou look like spirit folk. No one else come in the deep dark to throw a man in a fire.”
Cob's shoulders sank in relief. He'd expected an argument, but it seemed what they said about the Gejarans was true. “Yeah. M'friend's got elemental blood, needs light and heat t' wake up. A little campfire won't do it.” It was hard admitting that much; the last thing he needed was for someone to recognize Enkhaelen, but nothing else explained their request. “If it's all right…?”
The Drowning Dark (The War of Memory Cycle Book 4) Page 49