The Stormbringer

by Isabel Cooper

  “It wasn’t this bad when I came out,” Darya said.

  Of course not. One woman is a good deal less strain than an entire scout pack.

  “A pity,” Amris said, “that it didn’t collapse under them. Even if it would have been harder for us—and even now I have my doubts about us crossing.”

  “I don’t know of another way over, and we don’t have time to go looking. But I’ll go first, and I’ll throw the rope back to you after.”

  That had to suffice. Amris watched Darya, measuring every step of her light boots against the stone, and prayed to Sitha, who kept the world in order and loved the works of men’s hands.

  Darya went slowly and with care, but she never stopped until she’d planted her feet firmly on the solid ground of the other side, and Amris had changed his prayer to one of thanksgiving. Then she threw him the end of the rope: a well-practiced overhand toss that sent yards of glittering silk soaring through the air before falling solidly into Amris’s outstretched hands.

  “I can pray for you, if you want,” she called to him, tying the other end of the rope to a tree, “but I’m probably not as good at it.”

  “Intent matters most,” Amris said.

  And if the gods have ever been inclined to answer prayers, this would be the moment most in their interest.

  “You either make a good point or you’ve doomed us all with overconfidence,” said Amris, and set foot on the bridge.

  He was not such a strain as he had feared. The stones shifted occasionally, and he was very glad that he had the rope to hand, if only for his own peace of mind, but he never felt himself to be in real danger. It was almost a pity, Amris thought as he walked forward, coiling the slack rope over an arm. The weaker the bridge was under him, the more likely it would fall apart under the scouts as they returned, not only killing those creatures but delaying the army. Feeling the stones under him, though, Amris thought they’d hold together fine under more weight from above—

  —and he didn’t stop when he had the idea. That was never wise. But as soon as he reached the other bank of the ravine, he stepped to the side, shaded his eyes, and took as close a look as he could manage at the bridge’s underside.

  “You have a plan,” said Darya, when he turned back to her.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “And a risky one.”

  “My favorite kind.”

  * * *

  “You’ll tell me,” Amris said, looking over his shining-if-somewhat-battered pauldron at Darya, “if your gift gives you any warning, yes? One of us must live to take word back.”

  “Yes, I’ll save my own neck purely for the greater good,” she said, rolling her eyes, “what with you twisting my arm about it and all.”

  In fact, she had her mind focused on Sitha’s blessing as much as on what she said, which likely meant that the sarcasm came out a shade dreamier than she’d meant it to. The bridge was holding under their combined weight as they walked side by side, Darya alert for the prickling, itching sensation at the back of her spine that meant the ground ahead was unsafe, Amris peering down over the side of the bridge.

  They didn’t go very far out before he put a hand on her arm to stop her. “Here,” he said, and pointed. “Mark you the stone one layer down, the one that’s almost a triangle?”

  “I see it,” she said. It wasn’t the most damaged, but there were definitely pits enough in the surface and a deeper groove around it than the masons had intended. She checked the cords that held her sword in its sheath and tried not to look past the stone into the ravine. There was a river down at the bottom; she could see light on flowing water. It probably wouldn’t help. “Gods bless our endeavors, especially the ridiculous ones.”

  She wiped her palms on her tunic before grabbing the knife out of her boot, and her pulse was loud in her throat and her ears. The feeling was familiar. It wasn’t even unpleasant, not to her. All the colors in the world were brighter at such times. She could hear every bird calling in the trees, and the laughter of the river below as water ran past the rocks.

  This was being alive.

  “Ready?” she asked both of her partners.

  I can shield you at a moment’s notice, with all my strength, Gerant said. That will have to suffice.

  “If you are,” said Amris.

  Darya knelt, then dropped to her stomach, flattening herself on the stone. One wriggle took her chin out past the edge. Another brought the stone to her shoulders. Amris’s hands closed over her ankles: large, strong, solid, and warm through trousers and boots alike.

  When the edge of the bridge hit her lowest rib, she started to lower herself down, clinging as best she could to the bridge for as long as she could. The smell of wet stone was strong in her nose, mingled with an acrid, chalky odor from whatever went into the mortar, which almost immediately got under her fingernails.

  Amris was bearing more and more of her weight as Darya went down. Habit had her drawing breath to call and see if he was all right, but before she could speak, she realized that she knew he was. She felt, at a distance, the stance in which he’d braced his legs and the strain in his arms and back. It was present, but not overwhelming.

  She crawled downward a little more, until the triangular stone was at her eye level. Amris’s hands around her ankles were the only thing holding her, and the blood had begun rushing to her head in earnest.

  “I’m going to be dizzy as hell, if I survive this,” she said.

  You could so easily have left off that last part.

  “Have confidence in your old lover, hmm? He won’t let me fall.” Still, she braced herself against the bridge with one hand before she started digging at the mortar with her knife. Thrills were one thing; foolishness very different.

  Mortar came away in chunks, crumbling beneath her knife and falling down to the river. Darya didn’t watch it, but worked fast, reaching as far back between the rocks as she could manage. When she was done, she’d dug a gap around the stone—only a little wider than her hands, but clear beyond the base of the stone where it met the rest of the bridge.

  “Tell Amris I’m starting the next part,” she said, “and to get ready.”

  The hands around her ankles tightened, which was good. The next step meant putting away the knife and taking out her rope, a series of maneuvers that shifted Darya’s weight back and forth so she felt briefly like a swinging pendulum.

  Amris’s grip never wavered.

  “Good man,” she muttered.

  Very much so, said Gerant, although I admit this particular skill never came up between us.

  “Don’t make me laugh right now, or we’ll all go into the river.”

  Scraping layers of skin off her knuckles and working half-blind, she wrapped the rope around the stone, crossed it, threaded it underneath and behind, and brought it around to the front, where she tied three knots. That was as secure as the damn thing was likely to get—and she sensed that Amris’s strength was starting to give out.

  They’d still need that strength for the next part of the plan.

  “All right,” she told Gerant. “Time to leave.”

  It was a moment before Amris started lifting her. During it, Darya stared down at the river, too tired for either fear or excitement. Her vision had started to blur from being upside down so long, and her hands had started to hurt with the irritating, insistent pain only minor wounds ever managed. She didn’t want to fall, but she couldn’t manage to care either. When she started moving upward again, she felt vague relief, but at a far distance.

  She did rouse herself enough to take her weight as soon as she could, and the amount of strength she found surprised her. Where fear for her own life didn’t do the job, apparently fairness to a companion did. Traveling alone as much as she did, Darya thought, she might have missed a few things.

  It was a disconcerting notion. She didn’t have much of
her mind leftover to think on it, though, preoccupied as she was with finding handholds and balancing, relieving Amris of as much of his burden as she could without overbalancing herself. When she was half on the bridge, Darya’s mind had collapsed down to movement, and the world was a blur in front of her.

  When she made it all the way up, the world went black.

  * * *

  Amris was not a man to panic. War had taught him early to suppress many of a human’s basic drives, as it did most soldiers: not much chance of charging a line of pikemen, were that not so. Fear was a series of nightmares for a week, but a distant thought at the moment when steel met flesh, or when a plan encountered complications, as plans did.

  In the moment when Darya collapsed on the bridge’s surface, he felt almost as much fear as when he’d lain on a battlefield and seen an ax approaching his head, or when he’d looked through a spyglass and seen an unexpected cavalry troop cresting a hill. The spell that linked them kept that fear, and the grief and guilt that threatened to accompany it, from reaching their full potential, but it took him a moment to remember that connection, and to know that what he’d taken for wishful thinking was right: she was well, only dazed.

  Even with the spell, it was unsettling to see her lain out against the stone. Every minute of their acquaintance until then, she’d been so full of vitality, so certain of herself in the face of surprise and catastrophe, that Amris had almost come to think of her body as the same steel and crystal that housed Gerant—or of Darya herself as not quite real, a spirit come to guide him into the new world.

  Kneeling beside her, turning her face upward, he knew her as mortal flesh and blood, as real as any of the soldiers he’d fought with and just as capable of death. He had time, while he bathed her face and wrists with water, for that realization to sink into his gut like the dull-but-full-force impact of a practice sword.

  Easy, love, said Gerant, calling to mind nights when Amris had come to bed after writing letters to the families of the fallen. You’re doing as well as any man can, particularly any man in your shoes right now. Darya’s fine—and she’s remarkably intelligent, not that I’ll admit that when she wakes up. You couldn’t have convinced her of any plan that was truly unwise.

  “Thank you,” said Amris. “I’m…happier to have you here than I probably should be, considering theology.”

  I’d be here regardless. We may as well rejoice.

  Amris laughed, and looked down at Darya. Her eyelashes lay in long fans against her cheeks—which were too red, but growing less so. He ran the wet cloth across her forehead again, and she made a pleased noise, immediately followed by a groan as she cracked open her eyelids.

  “Good thing we didn’t eat much,” she said. “Sorry about that.”

  “The apologies should be mine,” said Amris, and he handed her the flask he’d been pouring from. “Drink. Are you… That is, I know you’re well, but—”

  Darya laughed rustily. “Spell makes it hard to ask the polite questions, doesn’t it?” She took a long drink of water. “I’m well enough to get off this bridge, if you’ll help me walk at first. Blood was in my head too long, is all, and then reversed.”

  “It was good work down there,” said Amris. He got to his feet and helped Darya stand, wrapping his arm around her waist; she made a pleasant weight against his side.

  “And yours at this end,” said Darya. “Now let’s see if it bears out.”

  * * *

  The rope played out long enough for them to reach the other side, and to get a few feet downward from the end of the bridge. “No saving it this time,” said Darya, who couldn’t resist the urge to give it a final pat. “At least it’s going in a good cause.”

  “We can all hope our ends serve such purpose.” Amris took up the end of the rope she passed him. Just as long as they don’t all happen here, Gerant put in.

  “If I was going to die on this bridge, I’d have done it already,” Darya said.

  Would you care to tempt fate any more? At least Amris has some sense of caution.

  “The idea was mine, remember?”

  And I am corrected. You’re both absurd. I must have some sort of destiny.

  “Lucky you,” said Darya, chuckling and trying to hide the small surprised thrill she felt at being grouped with Amris.

  The man in question stood right behind her, arms coming past hers, and only a little air separated her back from his chest. A glance upward gave Darya a good view of his jawline, straight and stern and faintly stubbled. A spreading warmth began to make itself known in her body, and she had the urge to lean back against him.

  Darya looked quickly toward the ravine. “Ready.”

  “One,” said Amris, on a slow breath out that Darya copied. Harmony could only help. “Two. Pull!”

  She braced herself against the ground and yanked with all the strength she’d regained in their brief rest. Recent aches reawakened in her arms. New ones were born. Darya gritted her teeth. To either side of her, Amris’s arms clenched, thick with muscle beneath his shirt. He breathed steadily, purposefully, but heavily, and a grunt of effort escaped him.

  The stone shifted. Darya felt it: the jolt from below, the rope’s sudden increase in slack. Sweat was starting to run down her face, but she ignored it and dug in harder, turning a little to get power from her hips. Rock groaned against rock.

  More movement, and the edges of Darya’s vision were going white. More still, and Amris was sounding like a smith’s bellows, and she likely wouldn’t have been any better, could she have heard herself clearly. One last bit of strength, and momentum suddenly took over.

  The rope spun downward, yanking both Darya and Amris forward until Darya thought to open her hands. “Let go!” she yelled, and with that jolted Amris out of the half trance they’d both been in.

  “Get back!” he yelled in return.

  The rope was hissing downward, plummeting with the stone. Darya looked up from it and saw the bridge trembling. One support wobbled like a drunk. Mortar fell into the ravine, followed by another stone.

  Side by side with Amris, she sprinted away from the bridge on legs that felt like wet bread. The ground below them shook with the impact of more rocks, and when Darya briefly glanced behind her, she saw bits of the bank crumbling and falling as well. She didn’t witness the bridge’s collapse, but the thunderstorm roar of it deafened her. It kept going well until they reached solid ground and she collapsed beneath a tree, too exhausted for relief.

  Chapter 16

  “How did you know to do that?” Darya asked.

  They’d gotten enough of their breath back to sit up and were drinking water in shallow sips. It seemed a good time to eat, so they’d gotten more bread and meat out of Darya’s pack, but neither of them had the appetite to do more than nibble just then.

  Between the sweat, the strain, and the panic, Amris’s whole body felt raw. All he wished in the world was to lie down where they were, in the shade of a large pine tree, and sleep for another hundred years or so. There was a certain peace in that feeling, too, though duty kept him from succumbing to it. He’d pushed his body too far for his mind and heart to keep bothering him.

  “There are—were—many stonemasons in my homeland,” he said, “and many of my friends were so apprenticed when I was young. And then I learned a great deal when I was in command. It is, after all, far easier to defeat the army that can’t reach you, or that’s just had half a hillside collapse on it. I was no engineer—but I listened to mine. Well enough, it seems.”

  “Will they be able to reach us?”

  He sighed, wishing he could give her the news she would have most liked. “Eventually. Thyran’s troops had winged creatures among them—I cannot believe the cockatrice was the only one left—and they can carry the others over the gap. They may have magic too, and if need be, there is likely a route around, though it will take them far ou
t of their path.”

  “Yeah,” she said, regretful but resigned. “I halfway guessed that. If they were the sort to cut their losses and go home, they’d have done that a hundred years ago. Grudge-holding sons of bitches.”

  Not that vengeance isn’t holy, in its way.

  “Persistence is unholy in my enemies,” said Darya. “Oh well. We bought ourselves more time, and I won’t complain about that. It was a good idea.”

  They didn’t only put him in command for his pretty face.

  “Not only,” said Amris. Darya’s praise, and then Gerant’s, brought a smile to his face and gave him a surprising amount of new strength. He took a bite of his dried meat with more enthusiasm than before, and this time he savored the taste, or what taste there was.

  A bird was calling steadily in the forest beyond them, a high-pitched and slightly aggrieved sound: What? What? What? What? What? Other, more melodious songs joined in, but that querulous note was dominant. It was unfamiliar, too, though that didn’t mean a great deal. Amris had never been the sort to learn birdcalls.

  “How long, do you think?” Darya asked.

  Amris calculated, wishing again for terrain maps and scouting reports—well, they were the scouts now, even if they hadn’t been sent out as such. “It depends a great deal on their forces,” he said finally, “but I’d wager we’ve gained two or three days. More if they can’t fly and must go around to an alternate path. Fewer if they have a mage who can simply make another bridge.”

  Probably not. Such a spell would take a day or two itself, and that’s assuming they fuel it with sacrifice. A week, otherwise. Gizath’s powers wouldn’t be of any assistance, unless—Gerant’s mental voice fell into a speculation Amris knew well, tinged only slightly with horror—that is, a tree might be warped against itself to make a bridge, by one who truly had both skill and power in that kind of art. Or several creatures.