The Stormbringer

by Isabel Cooper

  “Your…soulsword, they were calling them in my time. It holds a spirit, yes?”

  “Yes.” Darya laughed again, with no more amusement in it than the time before. Her face itself was no paler than it had been when Amris had first seen her, but color had drained from her lips.

  Amris could do nothing about Thyran’s return, not just then, but he offered what reassurance he could think of. “Have no fear—I know that they go willingly. I don’t think you a necromancer.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “That’s very good. Because the soul in mine is Gerant.”

  “I—”

  He didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t even say that much, in truth: the sound emerging from his open mouth meant nothing to him. Meaning itself was a slippery concept right then.

  “Gerant.” Amris clung to the name and all the images it brought up, memories that were more solid in that instant than the hall of dust and roses surrounding him or the strange woman standing there. “Gerant?” It was a question that time, as he looked at the emerald in Darya’s sword and tried to reach out with his mind.

  Sympathy softened Darya’s expression. “He says… Well, he says hello,” she told Amris softly, “and he loves you, and he’s very glad you’re alive. Only the Sentinel bonded to a sword can hear them, mostly. I’m sorry.”

  “No,” said Amris, with no thought behind the words. He wasn’t entirely certain he could think; his mind felt numb, frozen. “No, of course. I presumed…foolish of me. I’m glad he…”

  What was he glad about? Was he glad at all? Should he be? Part of him rejoiced at Gerant’s presence, while the rest said that such joy was selfish, when his lover could have been in Letar’s Halls long ago rather than trapped in a gem. “I hope he’s well,” Amris finished, flat, uncertain, and embarrassed.

  The slight pause before Darya responded was nothing Amris would even have noticed normally. Now it stretched out into the edge of a razor. When she said, “Generally, yes,” he heard it in Gerant’s voice, at those moments when he’d combined thought with dry humor, and fought not to flinch.

  “Though he admits the situation isn’t ideal,” she added, with a gesture around them. “And I agree. To say the least.”

  That brought back some perspective. For the first time since Darya had mentioned Gerant, Amris really looked at her, seeing the lingering animal panic she’d first quashed and then pushed aside for his sake. “Forgive me,” he said. “There are larger stakes, I know, and I’d give much if I had any knowledge that would help.”

  “We know he’s back now. That’s a hell of a lot more than we did ten minutes ago, and might help the whole world.” Darya glanced past him, down a long hall lit only by spots where the crumbled walls let the sunlight in. “If we can find a way out.”

  * * *

  It was never supposed to last this long, Gerant mourned as they started walking. We thought if we separated Thyran from his forces, it would be enough of a blow that our armies could drive them off. Then we could go in, bring Amris back, take down Thyran’s defenses at our leisure, and kill him.

  “Decent plan,” said Darya, before she’d thought. Other Sentinels were used to conversations that sounded one-sided, outsiders found them odd regardless, and until Amris gave her a questioning look, it didn’t occur to her to explain. “The plan you two had originally. And Mater Whoever-She-Was, Gerant said.”

  “Kasyila,” Amris replied absently. “Among others. I admit I can’t regret it, nor find fault, given what we knew then.”

  “It kept Thyran off our backs for a hundred years. That’s not nothing.” She thought she was being sincere. It was hard to know. Darya had used up all her day’s ability to feel, she was sure, between sympathy for Amris and Gerant and…terror didn’t entirely cover her reaction to Amris’s news. The creature under the bed is back, and he’s got friends.

  They passed an open door, and Darya poked her head in hopefully, but inside was only a small bedroom, likely for a servant: no stairs, just one tiny window. Not even a child would fit through it.

  Action was settling her mind, letting her think past the fear. “Going by the finger, assuming it rotted like most things,” she said, “then he’s only been back for a few months. Three, I’d say, at most.”

  “Do you know where he might have gone from here?”

  “Probably north. He’d find plenty to work with there.”

  “The Twisted?”

  “Many things, but them too. We’ve never been able to get farther than this. I’m the first to go as far as Klaishil, for that matter, though there are stories about a city that appears in the summer. Even I wouldn’t have come except I was hunting, and I wouldn’t have been able to find the place if not for the goat.”

  “Goat?”

  Darya remembered the reason she’d come to the city in the first place. If she’d been distracted by anything less than the potential end of the world, she would’ve been embarrassed. “Right. We have a stop to make on the way out. I need to kill something.”

  You can’t be serious.

  “Of course I’m serious. I have a job to do. This thing’s eating people. And an hour more isn’t going to make a difference, not when Thyran’s been free for the better part of three months.”

  If both of you die, and nobody’s left to take word back to civilization, it very well will make a difference.

  “He doesn’t have to come, and a fucking cockatrice isn’t going to kill me,” Darya snapped back.

  Well, overconfidence will certainly be an asset in the battle.

  “Look—”

  Amris cleared his throat. “Cockatrices are as I remember them, yes? Large, winged, not so smart as a man but smarter than an animal? Poison breath?”

  “Right. Smart enough to be mean, mostly. And I don’t need to worry about the poison.”

  Only the claws, and the fangs, and the size.

  She was about to say that she’d bound herself to a sword, not a mother, when Amris sighed. “It gives me no joy to contradict you, love,” he said, which sounded damn odd when he was looking at the hilt of her blade where it rested a little above her waist, “as I believe myself to be doing, but I think we should slay the creature ere we leave. I wouldn’t leave anything more intelligent than a beast here where it might bear tales, nor would I want a creature so malicious waiting at our backs.”

  Gerant said nothing at first, then: You’re… He’s…better with tactics than I am. Very well.

  Given the circumstances, Darya wasn’t inclined to gloat. “I’ll be careful,” she said. “Honestly, this time.”

  “How do you come to be unbothered by poison?” Amris asked, in an obvious attempt to break the tension, but one that Darya silently thanked him for.

  “The Forging—wait.” As they left the room, she glanced back at him over her shoulder. “You said the Order was just starting when you…in your day. No magical enhancements yet?”

  “A few of us had enchanted weapons or armor. Did such things become more commonplace over the years?”

  “Not much,” said Darya, “maybe less, from everything I’ve found. There are soulswords, of course, but most wizards don’t remember how to make magic stick to objects without some part of a person being in there too. Or so I hear.” The only wizard she really talked to was Gerant, but she’d brought back enough tiny novelties, still powered by wisps of enchantment, to draw some conclusions. “We stick them in ourselves instead. As you might have noticed,” she added, gesturing to herself with her free hand.

  The other hand she kept on her sword as they walked down the hallway toward the older pile and the hole above it. Lots of things could come in through a hole.

  “I had noticed, and wondered, but combining magic with flesh was not an art any had mastered in my time. We had Letar’s healing, and Thyran and his patron had their…arts…but that was all. Even lesse
r living things, animals and plants, resisted change. Gerant was one of the first to manage it,” he added with a fond, sad smile. “None had seen anything to match those guardian roses.”

  He was the one to give me the notion, said Gerant. He’ll not tell you that, but he was quite the gardener. Good with all sorts of growing things, really. People never expected it from a warrior. Without lungs, he still sighed. Go on.

  “I’m sorry,” said Amris at the same time. “I ask and then interrupt. Please go on.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I expected worse.” He hadn’t said any of the normal things, now that Darya thought about it—hadn’t even asked what are you when he’d first seen her. “Anyhow, when we’re old enough to choose and we want to stay in the Order, there’s a trial. The Forging, because we’re the gods’ weapons. If we survive, the gods give us gifts, or the magic shapes us—there’s a lot of talk either way, when the wizards are drunk.”

  At her side, she caught Amris’s smile. “Often that happens.”

  Some of my best discoveries came out of drunken wagers, Gerant added.

  Darya grinned too. “It’s different for each of us,” she went on. “Almost always changes the way we look, improves our sight and hearing, makes us faster and stronger and quicker to heal. Usually we get a major blessing from one god, and a minor from another. Some get two minor gifts. I think it comes down to how much reshaping you can endure.”

  “It sounds a fearsome thing.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Well,” said Amris quietly, “there is that view of the matter, yes.” He was silent for a while, as they passed fallen rose petals and crumbling walls. “And one of your gifts was to take no harm from poison.”

  “Poram’s blessing, most likely, unless I got two from Sitha—you find poison among the wild as much as among men, and the other way around.” She paused before the other end of the hall, where the midafternoon light streamed through onto tumbled masses of stone. Slowly, patterns resolved themselves, and connections became apparent. “And my second gift means you should follow me.”

  “Sitha’s as well, you said?”

  “Aye. I can see the safest way to use anything made by man, even if it’s ruined.” Carefully, she climbed onto the first bit of broken masonry. “That’s safest, mark you, not a promise of safety. I can’t make any promises here.”

  * * *

  Even if Darya hadn’t warned him, Amris would’ve been loath to feel fully confident in the route: her gift showed as the safest path for her. He was taller, likely half again her weight by himself alone, and wearing another stone of beaten steel. Thus, he followed faithfully but slowly, waiting always for the signs the pile would collapse under him, trying never to rest his weight in one place fully or for too long.

  Ahead, Darya never paused very long either, but from her, it appeared less a matter of caution and more the innate nimble leaping of a doe. Neither her weapons nor the haversack on her shoulder seemed to impede her. Against the faded, dusty stones, she was a slim patch of darkness, and the sunlight drew bright-green flashes from the emerald set in her sword’s hilt.

  Gerant.

  He’d talked sometimes of the potential for gems to hold human souls, just as he’d spoken of other forms of magic—spells to shape plants, the nature of divination. With his colleagues, the discussions had been long and theoretical, often verging on argument and sometimes passing that border. To Amris, Gerant had spoken more simply, translating his enthusiasms for a lover who lacked most of the context for them. Just as Amris had talked of new recruits and well-made swords, of the conformation of horses and the weather for planting. When it came to other subjects, they’d met on equal ground.

  Tears stung his eyes. He let them fall, blinking them away only when they impeded his climbing. Darya kept her silence, and indeed Amris had no idea whether or not she noticed. She looked back rarely, and his face was wet before long regardless; both the weather and the work were hot.

  It was a strange, piebald sort of mourning. Gerant had lived long enough to see theory become practice, and was not wholly gone—but never again would Amris drop a kiss on the back of his neck as he sat bent over his notes, or stretch out in front of a fire at night with his head in Gerant’s lap. That was ended, as done as was the world Amris had known. And if humanity had survived, enough for hunters of the Order to be searching ruined cities, still some of Darya’s speech suggested more danger and less grace in the world that remained.

  Gerant, as he existed now, was a creature of that world as much as Darya was: her partner, perhaps her mentor, and certainly, from the way she spoke of him, her friend. Even in mourning, Amris was glad of it. The light in Darya’s verdant eyes reminded him of Gerant’s enthusiasm over a new sculptor’s work, or a well-done landscape, and after their quarrel, she’d spoken with kindness and understanding. Amris didn’t doubt they worked well together.

  “There,” said Darya, rousing him from his thoughts. She’d pulled herself out of the hole and up onto the domed roof of the building. As Amris emerged too, she gestured to a nearby rooftop. The bulk of the dome blocked a direct view, which was fortunate. Even so, Amris could see a circle of filth and carrion atop that roof, and the massive scaled bulk upon it, its comb dull red against the gray-black of its coils.

  His first battle in a hundred years waited. The danger would almost be a relief.

  Chapter 5

  There was a rhythm to her kills. There always had been; they were like the dances she’d learned as a girl. If the creature and the situation differed, those were just changes in the tune and the order. The figures stayed the same. Darya had never seen that so clearly until she reached the top of the rubble, saw the cockatrice waiting for her across several hundred yards of stone and air, and felt the comfort of an old pair of boots even as her blood started racing with the nearness of combat.

  “I will be careful,” she promised Gerant, as she took her bow and arrows from her back. It was an admission and an apology too; she didn’t know how much of her confidence earlier had actually been the urge to escape from the world-shattering to the familiar, but her thoughts had not been as clear as she’d assumed.

  You’ll be effective, he said, doing his part in the language they’d developed over the years. You always are.

  Darya smiled and turned to look at Amris, the new element, neither a fellow Sentinel nor a hostage to be rescued. Once in a while, she’d worked with packs of soldiers or guards. He felt different. “You’ll want to duck down once I start shooting. Weapons ready, but generally just try not to be a target.”

  “My strength has returned quickly,” he said. “I can yet fight.”

  “Your lungs won’t stand up to poison, I bet, and after it breathes, I usually finish too quickly to need help,” said Darya. The string went easily onto her bow and twanged with a rich, supple sound when she tested it. “But if you see a chance and take it, gods know I won’t complain.”

  “Can you spare more of…” He gestured to the boot where she’d put her flask. “That substance?”

  “Lignath. Or rotgut, as you choose.” Darya passed it over, a little surprised. It wasn’t uncommon to need false courage before a fight, but Amris hadn’t seemed the type. Then again, it was his first battle in a hundred years.

  Next, he surprised her more, drawing a faded scrap of cloth out of his belt pouch and pouring the lignath onto it. “It smells somewhat of fish,” said Amris, surprised and not thrilled by his discovery.

  “Probably is. Or maybe pelican. Good idea,” Darya added. “I keep forgetting you’ve done this before.”

  “Fought cockatrices, yes, and other poison beasts. I wouldn’t call this”—he waved a hand at the ruin, and her—“a familiar experience.”

  “Variety broadens the mind. Ready?”

  Yes, said Gerant.

  Amris saluted with the hand not holding the cloth,
then drew his sword and sank behind the dome.

  The cockatrice bent its head, plucking a final shred or two from the remains of its prey. The curve of the thick neck was like a column of dirty smoke on a windy day: burning far less cleanly than a wood fire and less honorably than a cremation ground. Darya drew back the arrow and then loosed.

  Join hands.

  As the string snapped against her glove, she was grabbing another arrow, not bothering to look where the first had gone. She knew it would hit. She also knew it wouldn’t kill the thing. The scales on a cockatrice were as good as armor or better, and she was no longbowman of Myrias, whose arrows could punch through shields. Her bow was small and portable, made for hunting of all sorts.

  Her arrows would hurt, and they would annoy, and cockatrices, like everything the Traitor God had made, gave in easily to their anger. That was what Darya counted on.

  Corners cross.

  Another arrow, and the monster rose shrieking into the air, spotted the source of its pain, and dove at the speck that stood by the dome, clear and dark against the pale stone. Its wings beat the air, shedding gray-black feathers onto the rock below, and its leprous beak opened wide, showing yellowing teeth that no real bird had ever grown.

  Lead down.

  The cloud that poured out was a sickly pink with green undertones, like rotting flesh. It flowed over Darya, and while it didn’t hurt her to breathe, still the burning-hair scent of it turned her stomach. She swallowed and tensed, ready, and the cockatrice dove closer, thinking to finish off its prey. More feathers fell around her. She saw the edges of the monster’s scales and the malice in its tiny pink eyes.

  Balance and swing, circle and close.

  Darya leapt, up and forward in a neat arc. With one gloved hand, she grabbed the cockatrice by its comb. That gave her a grip and something to push against. She pulled her sword back, twisted her hips for more power behind the blow, and then thrust straight for the thing’s chief artery.