The Stormbringer

by Isabel Cooper

  So far, there’d been two of the walking dead—one with flesh, both in the rotted remains of armor—and a puddle of black ooze that moved on its own, not to mention the cockatrice she was chasing. Its trail had ended at the collapsed hallway, but then, the cockatrice had wings. Not being so gifted, Darya had to search for another route up.

  “Some days,” she grumbled, pulling herself along and trying to ignore the skull, “I think I should have sworn out at thirteen and gone off to be a pig farmer.”

  You’d be no good at it. Besides, just think of all we’re discovering.

  Gerant wasn’t wrong. The city, what was left of it, was beautiful. The years and the wilderness had done a lot of damage, but some buildings still spiraled to the sky, and even those that had fallen had come down in chunks of vividly colored marble, some inlaid with gold and silver; Darya’s prey had made its nest in what had clearly once been the wealthy part.

  One more wiggle of her shoulders and her head was past the wreckage. Darya drew herself out into a larger room, where moth-eaten tapestries still adorned the walls and a staircase of pale-blue stone led up—graceful, spiraling, and likely about as stable as a house of cards.

  As soon as she was free, she reached down, wrenched the skull—now mostly a jaw and a shattered braincase—off her heel, and flung it across the room. It did shatter then, and the sound was extremely satisfying.

  The staircase didn’t seem sturdier up close. She could actually see cobwebbed cracks in the marble, and three of the steps in the middle were sunken in, as though a giant had stepped on them. It was the best way up Darya had yet seen, though, and up was necessary if she wanted to catch her prey; the Traitor God and his minions hadn’t consulted her opinion in the matter of winged monsters.

  She put her weight lightly on the first step, held her breath, and waited for a crucial part of the stairs to come crashing down. When it didn’t, she continued to the next—cautious, wary, and yet full of the excitement that always gripped her at such times, when she pitted herself against the world with her life on the table.

  If you die here, said Gerant, I’ll spend centuries being extremely bored.

  “Should have thought of that…” The stair shivered below Darya’s feet, and she shifted her weight hastily to the side, her free hand on the wall. “Before you agreed to be in a soulsword.”

  The service of the gods is very demanding.

  “Don’t I know it.” Two more steps up, she leapt from edge to edge like a gazelle, catching herself on the wall when the unstable footing got the better of her.

  The hallway ahead stretched out clear for a while, barring a few armored skeletons that didn’t seem to be animate, then ended in a pile of rubble and daylight streaming through a gaping hole in the roof—ideal for Darya’s purposes. Vines covered the walls, blooming here and there with roses in a rainbow of colors: bloodred as Gizath’s wings, sunset orange, blue like the summer sky, darkest black. They were lovely. They also grew thickest over and around the rubble, keeping Darya from seeing past it.

  “I wonder if they’d eat me if I tried to take cuttings,” she said. “Seems a shame that none of the scenery in this place has been portable so far. The only ones to appreciate it are you, me, and the ooze monsters.”

  Gerant didn’t reply. The emerald glowed as usual, so Darya wondered if she’d stepped on some metaphysical toe. “Sorry,” she said, and took a step forward. They could talk about it at length later, when they were out of hostile territory, but the apology was important.

  Behind her, the world shifted.

  Darya had felt it change half a dozen times since she’d followed her quarry past the mist-cloaked walls of the city. She doubted a normal mortal would have, just as nobody normal would’ve been able to find the city itself. Even she couldn’t quite define the feeling: the closest she could come was a solid thock in the back of her mind, as though a phantom finger had flicked her there.

  So far, none of the changes had been directly dangerous. They’d all been damned inconvenient, though, so Darya didn’t even look behind her at first. “The stairs are gone, aren’t they?”

  In a sense.

  They were still, strictly speaking, present, she discovered. But they’d folded in half lengthwise, then curled up. Darya stood facing a marble snail’s shell, suspended in air in a way that hurt to look at.

  She raised her hands and let them fall back against her thighs. Even swearing was beyond her for a moment. Wheeling around, she started down the empty hall.

  After a few minutes of walking off her frustration, it occurred to her that Gerant was still silent, and that he’d sounded distant when he’d answered her before. Normally the instantly folding stairs alone would have sent him into a frenzy of theory: being dead hadn’t gotten rid of his wizardliness. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Do you know this place?”

  No, said Gerant slowly. Unless my memory or my logic has gone very badly wrong, it’s Klaishil, but I never visited. As he spoke, Darya felt his attention turning to the roses, as he looked not quite with her eyes and not quite with his own. I know the spell that grew those, though. It was one of mine.

  * * *

  The real distress in Gerant’s “voice” silenced all the smart replies that rose to Darya’s lips, from comments about his taste to asking whether he’d also made ornamental mazes.

  “I’ve never seen one like it before. Didn’t let this one get around?”

  I’d only just worked it out when the storms broke. And I had the help of Sitha’s High Priestess, who died in those storms. Nobody since has been able to bear so much of the Golden Lady’s power, and the spell wouldn’t work without it.

  The rubble was higher than Darya’s head, but the rose stems would work for handholds: she’d had worse pain than a couple of thorn scratches, and she’d yet to find the poison that could cause her more than a moment of discomfort. As she reached for the first, she saw that it was bent already, and by someone with at least as much strength as she had.

  She froze and listened. The hall remained silent, even to her enhanced hearing. Whoever had come that way was likely long gone.

  “You want to tell me about it?” Darya asked, when she felt safe speaking again. “If you don’t, I won’t ask about anything that won’t kill me.”

  It’s an enchantment of stasis, Gerant said. He didn’t hesitate—Gerant would never be hesitant, talking about magic—but he spoke slowly, as though he stripped all feeling from each word before he let it leave his mind. Beyond this, likely not far beyond, time has stopped. Those there when the spell was cast can’t be hurt, and they don’t age, but they… Sleep is the best word for it.

  “That doesn’t sound too bad.”

  I came up with it during the war. I was needed elsewhere, but I discovered how to put the spell on a physical object. A rose. I thought it made a poetic symbol. I was young. I gave it to my lover.

  “General Amris var Faina?”

  The very same. I thought he’d died before he could use it, when Thyran was destroyed.

  They’d talked about Amris a very little during their years together. Gerant had broached the subject rarely. Darya hadn’t pushed. She’d lost comrades and friends, but grief like Gerant’s was foreign to her, as it was to most of the Order, and she’d always known herself out of her depth in those conversations. She felt the same way now. “Should I—”

  All we can do is go and see.

  She climbed quickly until she could just see over the top of the rubble, then paused.

  Beyond, a man stood with a red rose in one outstretched hand. He was tall, lean, but muscled like a warrior, and both the sword in his other hand and the plate mail he wore bore out that impression. An ornately old-fashioned helm, rich with gold and set with sapphires, hid his face, but Gerant didn’t need to see it.

  Amris, he said, and his voice held more love and anguish than Dary
a had ever heard before.

  Chapter 3

  “What can I do?” The question felt foolish, and Darya didn’t know why. The spell was Gerant’s, so of course he’d know how to break it.

  Indeed, his answer was quick and sure. You have to be unarmed. Then you must approach him, very closely, and speak his whole and true name. Gerant hesitated, though not from any mistrust of her, Darya knew. Amris ap Brannon var Faina.

  It was only a description of the man’s lineage, but Gerant said it slowly, bringing it out from where he’d kept it close down all the years and putting it in front of her, who’d barely known him for ten—which usually seemed a long stretch.

  She went over the wall and down the other side, feeling helpless in a new, foreign way. There was no monster whose death would stop Gerant’s pain, or avenge it. She might be able to bring Amris back, but the years that had passed wouldn’t come with him. And she couldn’t simply wish Gerant the best, take her payment, and ride off.

  There was nothing for it but to fix what she could. Darya unbuckled her sword belt and laid it carefully on the floor. On top of it, she put the knives from each of her boots, the smaller venom-coated ones from each of her wrist sheaths, her short bow and her quiver.

  “Let’s hope he doesn’t kill me before I can explain myself,” she said, but didn’t get an answer. It was harder to talk to Gerant when she didn’t have the sword on. “Or that something else doesn’t before I can get armed again.”

  Glancing over her shoulder with every other step, she approached Amris. The burn marks grew fiercer in a circle around him: the wall behind was scorched black, and three broken arrows lay at his feet.

  Up close, closer than Darya generally got to anyone she wasn’t trying to swive or kill, she started to notice details: the dents in Amris’s breastplate and gauntlet, for instance, accompanied by smears of blood from a battle four generations past, and the copper-colored leather wrapping the hilt of his sword. His face, under the helm, was strong, with dark bronze skin, a sharp, square jawline and chin, thin lips, and a nose like a hawk’s beak; his eyes were the dark, misty gray-green of pine and spruce, with surprisingly long dark lashes. They were narrow, made more so by the fact that he was glaring—had been glaring for a hundred years.

  Darya inhaled, sounded out the words in her mind to make sure she had the name right, and then slowly spoke it: “Amris ap Brannon var Faina.”

  * * *

  The world was silent, and that itself told Amris the spell had worked—not that he’d ever doubted Gerant’s skill, whether at magic or anything else. It was a different matter, though, to be transported, in the space of two breaths and two words, from the screams and crashes of a pitched battle to utter quiet, save for a single voice.

  Because the voice wasn’t Gerant’s, nor any that he recognized, Amris’s reflexes carried him backward several steps and brought his sword up in front of him. He realized that the person who’d woken him was human and not Thyran, and hastily readied himself to defend rather than striking out, but it was a close thing.

  The woman hissed and darted backward herself, moving with more than human speed or grace.

  She was more than human. That became apparent as soon as Amris saw her eyes, unnaturally bright green and glowing in the dim light. Her skin was paper-white, her braided hair dark around it, and those could be human enough, but the eyes were a different matter.

  “Easy, there,” she said. Her accent stretched the vowels out more than Amris was used to, and the words came more quickly, but he could understand her rightly enough, particularly when she held up her hands, palms out. “I’m on your side.”

  Anyone could say so. “What side is that, pray?” Speaking felt odd. Gerant’s magic had kept his muscles from degeneration through however much time had passed, so he felt no worse than a little stiff, but just as sound had taken a moment to become words, Amris had to think at first: move the tongue this way for w, the lips and throat so for i.

  The woman shrugged. “The side that doesn’t love the Traitor. The Order of the Dawn, the Sentinels… I think we were starting when you—” She waved a hand.

  When he trapped himself in time in a desperate bid to stop the murderous warlord. “Yes. Only just.”

  Still Amris didn’t lower his sword: the woman aside, there was no virtue in dropping his guard before he knew the situation. He did let the rose fall from his gauntleted fingers, and used that hand to pull off his helmet, a necessary compromise between defense and intelligible conversation.

  The state of the hall became clearer to him as he did so—the years’ worth of dust and cobwebs, as well as the silence. The woman’s clothing—plain dark leather pants, jerkin, and gloves over a shirt of brown cloth—was plainer than he was used to, without even the embroidery that most peasants wore. Practicality, given where she was, or asceticism?

  “I should tell you two things right off,” said the woman. “You might want to sit down first.”

  Amris shook his head. “Best to face it on my feet.”

  “All right,” she said. “First, you’ve been…” Another vague wave of her hand. “Stuck. For a hundred years or so.”

  She’d spoken wisely when she’d advised him to sit. The knowledge traveled up through his feet as well as in through his ears, making the room spin around Amris, and yet it seemed not to reach his head or his heart. The sweat of battle was still wet in his hair, he still felt his cuts and bruises, and the rose on the floor was as fresh as it had been when he’d plucked it for Gerant.

  That reached head and heart both. Gerant was as human as he. Had been as human, rather—in a hundred years, a babe in arms would grow, sire or bear their own children, see grandchildren, and die, and Gerant had been a man in his prime when they’d parted. He’d be long dead by now.

  They’d both known that parting might be forever. Toward the end, any farewell might have been the last. Amris had never pictured it taking this form.

  “Here.” The woman took a small metal flask out of her boot and brandished it in his direction.

  The contents tasted roughly as they smelled. Amris had been a soldier long enough to swallow, nod his thanks, and trust that his throat wasn’t truly on fire. “Strong.”

  “I keep it to clean out wounds.” One eyebrow quirked, and her mouth twisted in a wry smile. “I’d say this counts.”

  “Truth.” A hundred years. A hundred years, and only now had somebody come to awaken him, but the hall was empty otherwise. “Before you tell me the second truth, lady,” he asked, “was there another man nearby? There, roughly speaking?” He gestured to the place where Thyran had been standing at the last.

  “No,” said Darya, peering at it, and then frowned. “But…wait.”

  * * *

  A small, uneven mound of gray powder lay heaped on the stone. Darya knelt and touched it with the tip of a gloved finger, feeling the texture as much as she dared. “Ash,” she said, “and—yes, bone. Bits of it. Wait.” There was a larger shape within the ash, but that wasn’t entirely why she’d stopped. As many shocks as it had gone through, her mind was still capable of calculation. “You’re looking for Thyran, aren’t you?”

  The question sounded completely absurd. Thyran had shaped, bred, or summoned an army of things, led them against humanity, and cursed the world to years of barren cold when he’d begun to lose. Thyran was the Father of Storms and Abominations. He wasn’t somebody people looked for.

  “Then you know of him,” Amris said, utterly serious.

  “Bad children and old wives everywhere know of him. The Order taught us a little more of the real histories.” Beneath the ash lay a long finger, five-jointed, with a black talon at the end rather than a nail. Burial in the ash had kept most of the insects away and held off some rot, but the finger was still fairly disgusting. She grimaced. “Was he human at the end?”

  “Mostly, in appearance,” Amris
said slowly. He knelt beside her, squinting in the dim light. “Far harder to kill than mortals, or even any of his creatures.” Slowly he breathed out, sending ashes scattering. “And one of his defenses was dark fire.”

  Darya glanced up and knew they were both remembering Amris’s own reaction to being awoken, and seeing the same scene—a man, or a once-man, not inclined to be nearly so merciful with any unknown force.

  “The messenger creature that came to wake him died, then,” Amris said, “but not with its task undone. Its master walks again, and I doubt that a hundred years have lessened his hatred for the world that would not order itself to his liking. I fear I bear much fouler news for you than you brought me, lady—for you and all who live now.”

  Chapter 4

  The woman swore, copiously, venomously, and with a command of profanity that would’ve impressed any sailor or soldier of Amris’s acquaintance.

  He knelt silently meanwhile, hands clenched against his thighs, as he tried to see a road forward, tried to see anything past sick, cold anger and the thought then it was all for nothing.

  Find out more, Gerant would have advised him. To the wizard’s mind, more information was never an ill, and either the facts themselves or the quest to discover them might show a way to proceed.

  A swarm of questions came to mind. Amris picked one: straightforward, polite, unlikely to further shatter his composure. “Forgive me. What is your name?”

  “Darya.”

  “I cannot say it’s a pleasure to meet you, but you have my thanks.”

  She nodded, a quick jerk of her head. “Couldn’t leave anyone stuck like you were, even if… Oh, hell. That was the second thing.” Darya was rearming herself as she spoke, with knives, a short bow, and a long sword that had a large square-cut emerald in the hilt. She looked down at the stone, gave a brittle laugh, and said, “I wouldn’t normally forget. It’s not a minor matter. I’m sorry.”