Relics, Wrecks and Ruins

by Aiki Flinthart

  “We argued.” The word was too small. As Mistress Blade, Nona was expected to understand every fight, but in this one, Ara could so easily reach past all her defenses and stab her in the heart.

  Ruli nodded. “For warriors the peace can be harder than the war.” She set a hand to Nona’s arm. “It’s difficult to let go of that time. To still have the memories and the anger but not have someone to fight.”

  Nona studied the deck. “It’s more than that.” Though Ruli was right—the peace they’d longed for was hard.

  “You argued about Clera,” Ruli said.

  Nona had hoped it wasn’t so obvious. “I didn’t know she—”

  “You never do.” Ruli shook her head, a wry smile on her lips. “Everyone else knew.”

  Clera had said much the same. After.

  #

  The wind was with Ruli’s ship The Pride of Ren, and the voyage proved short. A horse couldn’t have run the distance faster, Ruli claimed. Even so, the three scant hours managed to crawl by, each awkward silence stretching out for an age while consuming almost no actual time.

  Part of Nona wanted to grab Clera by the shoulders and steer her to Ara then demand she give a true accounting of their moment beneath the oak at the center of the novice cloister in the bright of the moon.

  Nona had already told Ara. “She kissed me! I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “You could have stopped her.”

  “She was too quick!”

  Ara snorted then and shook her head. “Too quick for Mistress Blade of Sweet Mercy Convent? Too quick for the Shield of the Chosen, who can pluck arrows from the air and write her name on a wall as she’s falling past it?”

  Nona had wanted to say that she was confused, taken by surprise, shocked. All of those things. She’d wanted to pile her excuses up until they made a wall so high that nobody, not even Ara, could see over to the truth. But the truth was, when Clera—the friend she hadn’t quit despite Clera’s betrayal against her and violence against those she loved—had stood on tiptoes and pressed her lips to Nona’s she had been swift but not so fast she could not have been evaded, and when their mouths met and their breath mingled, Nona had stayed, caught in the moment, for heartbeat after heartbeat, breaking away only when, after the passage of a full and achingly long second, a proper guilt flooded in to wash away a host of less worthy emotions and desires.

  “No.” She had pushed Clera to the length of her arms. “What are you doing?”

  “I’ve always wanted you.” Clera wouldn’t look away like she should.

  “You never said anything.”

  Clera laughed. “We were children when I left. Ara didn’t notice girls or boys until she was eighteen, so forgive me for not declaring my love when I was twelve.”

  “Love?” Nona knew Clera had endless girls in Verity.

  “Always.” Clera tried to step closer, but Nona had kept her at a distance that while not safe was at least safer.

  A sailor’s cry cut through Nona’s reflections. “Land ho!”

  And there in the gray distance, amid an ice-speckled sea, a dark fist of mist-wreathed stone defied the waves.

  “We’ll lower a boat,” Ruli said. “I’m keeping my crew at a safe distance.”

  “Can any of us handle a boat?” Nona glanced from Ara to Clera, thinking they were as out of their element as she was.

  “Of course I can, silly.” Ruli waved sailors forward to prepare the rowboat.

  Clera grinned. “You promised your husband you’d stay on the ship.”

  Ruli flapped a hand to brush the words away. “He knows my uncle was a pirate. He should expect me to lie.”

  #

  “Is it always this rough?” The smaller vessel lurched and rolled beneath them and the waves seemed much bigger now that Nona was within touching distance.

  “Every landlubber says that the first time.” Ruli grinned at her and bent her back to the oars. Despite the sea’s constant efforts to throw her off course, her strokes were slowly devouring the distance to the island’s rocky shore.

  “What the in the hells is that?” Clera, who had taken on a green tinge since joining them in the rowboat, released her death grip on the side for long enough to jab an accusatory finger in the direction of the island.

  “A big rock,” Ara replied through gritted teeth.

  Despite the ferocity of the wind out on the Marn, the island managed to shroud itself in an ever-shifting cowl of mists—testimony to the heat that had kept the ice at bay.

  “It was a…a thing…of some kind.” Clera scowled at the island as if the intensity of her stare could clear a path to whatever had caught her eye.

  “Well, you appear to have answered your own question, merchant.” Ara kept her gaze forwards. “It was a thing. Perhaps you can sell it and cover your costs for the trip.”

  Clera rallied as she always did when under attack. “I expect so. I’m a very good merchant though I’d have made a terrible nun.”

  “We can agree on that,” Ara said.

  “It was probably a monster,” Nona said, keen to steer the conversation away from conflict. “That’s what we’re here for. Let’s be ready for them.”

  Ruli lent her support between strokes of the oars. “I’m sure the abbess’s plan wasn’t to have the monster choke to death on an extra big mouthful of squabbling nuns and ex-novices. So, keep your eyes open. I can’t even see the island from here and I’d rather not sink on a rock before we get there.”

  #

  A short while later, Nona splashed ashore with Ara at one shoulder and Clera at the other while Ruli secured the boat. The mists rose from the dark grit of the beach itself. Nona dipped to scoop up a handful of the coarse sand. It was warm and steamed in her palm. The fog streamed out to sea, so thick that the ‘thing’ that Clera had spotted could be looming over them right now and remain unseen.

  “Stay sharp.” Ara drew her blade and Nona’s cleared the scabbard a moment later.

  Ara led the way up to the rocky slope, aiming for the interior. Properly, Nona should be in charge, but Ara had been raised to lead and instinct often carried her past the limits of convent ranks.

  A sudden change in the wind revealed the whole beach behind them for a few heartbeats before swirling in new clouds to hide it once more.

  “No monsters there,” Ruli said, joining them.

  “I know what I saw,” Clera said darkly.

  “What did you see?” Nona asked.

  “It was big.” Clera pulled a knife from her belt as if the matter were settled.

  They climbed the slope, winding through a tumble of jagged black rocks and following the contours of the land up a gentler, but still steep, hillside beyond.

  “Thank the Ancestor!” Ruli exclaimed as a shift in the wind revealed that the slope ended not far above them. “There is a top!”

  “Grass,” Ara commented, pointing at a patch of green questing up between the stones.

  They crested what turned out to be a surprisingly sharp rim and began to negotiate a winding path down the other side which proved considerably steeper than the one they’d climbed. The fog shrouding them made it impossible to tell how far they’d fall if they slipped. It was an unsettling feeling and Nona kept a close eye on Ruli. The others might be able to catch themselves if they tripped but Ruli lacked their quickness.

  “Careful here.” Ara slowed to descend a near vertical slope of wet rock that offered few ridges for hands and feet.

  “I’m always—” The wind gusted, parting the mists. Ruli shrieked, reaching for support.

  Something loomed over the women. A creature so large it defied reason. The black bulk of it wasn’t just larger than a house, it was larger than a roadside tavern with guest rooms and a beer garden. A sinuous tail snaked away down the slope while a neck so long and thin that it resembled a serpent lofted above them, supporting a blunt head not unlike that of one of the tiny lizards that haunted the cracks of the Rock of Faith, only vastly bigger. In fact, if not
for the four trunk-like legs, the creature might be mistaken for a colossal snake that had bloated its midsection by swallowing a whale.

  Nona sprang into action, dropping into the moment, moving so fast that Ruli and the monster seemed frozen in place. Only Ara and Clera could match her, Ara sprinting up the wet cliff to join her, Clera scrambling for cover and finding none. Fear didn’t enter into Nona’s calculations. Her opponent’s size simply wasn’t a factor when three of her friends stood at risk.

  She hurled herself at the monster’s chest, leaping high, driving forward with her ark-steel sword in search of some vital organ. The blade sunk in hilt deep and she applied her weight to drag it down in the hope of spilling the beast’s guts. But the hide that had offered little resistance to her thrust now battled against her slice. And did so with such stubbornness that even ark-steel only managed to cut a few inches down before becoming stuck and leaving Nona to hang from the hilt with her boots almost a yard from the ground.

  Nona set her feet to the monster, dragged her blade free and leapt clear, skidding to a halt in defiance of the slope’s steepness. Ara reached the spot where Nona had been and drove her own sword in as far as it would go.

  Something was wrong. Nona was used to leaving her foes standing while her speed defeated them, but this monster gave ‘slow’ a new definition. It hadn’t so much as twitched. It took all Nona’s restraint to stop her attack. She paused, there under the great span of the creature’s neck, its jugular far out of reach above her. Ara, too, must have sensed the wrongness and tugged her sword free without launching a flurry of new attacks.

  Ruli was still working to get her throwing stars from inside her jacket. Nona reached out to lay a hand over her friend’s as it emerged bristling with sharp steel. “It’s not moving.”

  Ara rapped her sword hilt against the nearest leg and was rewarded with a hollow boom. “It’s a statue.”

  “But what of?” Clera stood and straightened a little sheepishly. She looked up at the monster’s bulk.

  Ruli frowned. “Jula said there were giant creatures on Abeth eons before our kind. There are books that talk about finding their bones in the earth. Some of the drawings looked a bit like…”

  “But this was never alive!” Ara banged it again.

  The wind changed direction, howling across the slope. Nona caught Ruli before she lost balance. The blast showed them a great curve of the island. It seemed that the rim they had climbed and were now descending might encircle the whole of it. And below, dotted across the inner slope, positioned on ledges sufficient for their size, stood dozens of monsters. Some similar to their current foe and others far more fearsome, grinning at them through mouthfuls of teeth longer than sword blades. The fogs returned but took long enough to do so that Nona felt confident these beasts were also statues.

  “This is a crater,” Ruli said. “A volcano.”

  “A what?” Clera moved to Ruli’s side.

  “We need Jula here. She knows all this stuff,” Ruli said. “She’s read every book in the library. I only paid attention to the exciting bits. Fire mountains and ancient monsters. I remember that.”

  “It explains the warmth.” Ara resumed her descent.

  #

  Contrary to Ruli’s confident prediction, the crater did not narrow to some small, central throat from which the fires of all the hells spewed. Instead, it appeared to have been filled to the halfway point with a lake that had frozen, only the level surface that greeted them was neither ice nor water but some kind of rock. Pale grey, different to the black rocks of the crater wall.

  A thin layer of soil covered much of the crater floor surface, supporting grass and the occasional small bush that might well have grown in the months since the ice was melted away. In places, shallow pools steamed gently but the water that must surely have deluged the place had mysteriously vanished. As she led the way, Ara pointed to the mouths several narrow shafts, down which the water must have drained.

  The mists at the base of the crater were thinner and parted more often, offering views of what looked like a collection of buildings towards the crater’s center; enough, perhaps, to constitute a village.

  As the group drew closer to the first of these structures, Nona was struck by a sudden disappointment. “Ruins…”

  “What did you expect?” Clera asked.

  Nona didn’t have an answer. The mists and the monsters had made an unvoiced promise—or seemed to. She’d had no idea what was waiting for them, but she’d hoped for more than ruins.

  Closer still, and Ara threw up a hand in warning, stopping them in their tracks. “There. See it?” She pointed.

  A creature moved among the tumbled blocks of a shattered wall. Large but not so big that the monster statue they first encountered couldn’t flatten it with a single foot. Nona and Ara drew on the shadows that lurked beneath the mist, wrapping the stuff of darkness around themselves as they advanced on silent feet, both of them wholly focused now.

  The creature was nothing Nona had seen before or even heard of. It looked a bit like a thick-limbed dog or perhaps sheep, its blunt, simple outline promising strength. More importantly, the dull glint of its back, sparkling with droplets of dew, made it appear to be something constructed from metal. But unlike the monsters that had appeared to be flesh and yet were incapable of movement, this one was busy at some task.

  “It’s made of iron…” Ara pulsed the message noiselessly along their thread-bond. The first time she’d used it since Nona told her about the kiss.

  “What’s it doing?” Nona replied the same way, grateful for the intimacy.

  The creature hefted a block of stone nearly its own size, setting it atop another.

  “Trying to rebuild?” Ara asked as they narrowed the distance.

  It scarcely seemed possible, but the splayed toes of its forefeet were now acting like fingers, making deft adjustments.

  “Hello?” Nona shrugged off her cloak of shadows, revealing herself with just ten yards between herself and this new, smaller monster.

  The creature swung its blunt head her way, regarding her with the black eye set on that side. It looked like a polished stone rather than an eyeball. It watched her for a heartbeat before returning its attention to the wall, grappling a second block.

  “I said ‘hello’,” Nona repeated more loudly.

  “What are you doing?” Ara pulled her back. “You don’t know how dangerous that thing is.”

  “It doesn’t know how dangerous I am,” Nona retorted. But she let Ara pull her away. The iron dog-sheep ignored their squabble. At the rate it was going it might reconstruct the shell of the building in less than a day.

  “We should go around.” Clera surprised them both. She shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on nuns who had trained as Grey Sisters before taking the Red, but then again, she had spent years under the tutelage of assassins before her merchant career.

  Ara, ignoring Clera, nonetheless went around, aiming towards the more densely clustered buildings. Nona paused to wave Ruli on to join them.

  They passed buildings in various degrees of ruin and saw iron beasts of different sizes and design at work on reconstruction, all of them uninterested in the newcomers. One of them, twice the length of the first, pushed rubble about like snow before a broom. Others, considerably smaller, worked on more delicate tasks using thinner and more nimble digits.

  “The damage looks recent,” Ruli said.

  Clera nodded. “The thaw couldn’t have been gentle.”

  Ara paused to look up at a structure that the iron beasts were hard at work on. It appeared to be nothing more than a wall of crosshatched girders that supported a track to nowhere. A track that rose and fell with sharp turns and twists such that anyone who were to follow it would find themselves faced with one steep climb and rapid plunge after another. “There’s no sense to it…”

  A few dozen yards from the track, a roofless hall sported a score of mirrors, bigger than any Nona had ever seen, each as tall as
her, but none of them true. Clera snorted at a reflection that showed her comically fat, while Ruli laughed out loud at another that compressed her into less than a toddler’s height. Nona and Ara gazed unsmiling at their own distortions, giant heads bulging on tiny bodies or tiny heads on giant bodies.

  “Come on.” Clera’s words tugged Nona from her contemplations. She hadn’t been musing on tricks of the eyes—rather she wondered if the mind worked similar distortions. Did Ara see her so differently now? The mirror of her thoughts distorted beyond recognition by the ripples of a single kiss? She turned from the reflections and followed the others.

  Further on, the mists revealed the iron frame of a great wheel at least a hundred feet in diameter and supported vertically by a frame that would allow it to turn with its lowest edge just a yard above the ground.

  “Are those seats?” Nona frowned at what looked like benches set at regular intervals around the perimeter.

  “How does this not all rust to nothing?” Ruli asked in a more practical vein.

  As they watched, an iron creature that seemed designed along the lines of some large crab worked its way around the edge of the wheel, unrolling a bright ribbon of color as vivid as the finest silks from Alden.

  “What’s going on?” Clera made a slow turn, taking in the ongoing labors all around them.

  “There!” Ruli pointed to lights twinkling through the mist. Lights that Nona was sure had not been there moments before.

  “This is the work of the Missing,” Ara said. She and Nona had seen lights as bright as these in the Ark. Lights brighter and whiter than any flame. Though these ones also twinkled red and green and blue.

  “Duh.” Clera walked off towards the illumination.

  Nona hurried to stop her. She had heard of lights among the mists of moonlit bogs tempting unwary travellers to a slow death sinking in the mire. “Wait!”

  “You can’t wait forever, Nona.” Clera shook her off. “Sometimes you’ve just got to go for what you want even if you know you’re not going to get it. Even if it causes trouble and hurts the one you love.”

  Nona hesitated, unsure for a moment whether Clera was talking about the lights.