The Stormbringer

by Isabel Cooper

  Those two went on horseback, though the horses themselves weren’t what Darya was used to—their fur had an oily sheen, and their hooves looked sharper than normal—and she saw no sign of Ironhide.

  Like the twistedmen, the riders had two legs, two arms, and heads. They also had skin, but it was leprous white with gray splotches, and while their arms were too long for men, their legs were comparatively short—ape stock, Darya thought, and then saw the flat, wide-mouthed face of one, and thought there was likely a bit of frog in there too. As the twistedmen did, they wore leather armor, but Darya saw no obvious weapons, save for more knives at the belt.

  Those are an innovation too, said Gerant, distant and dry but still obviously horrified. Whoever Thyran left in charge, they’ve kept themselves busy in his absence.

  * * *

  Immediately Amris started making a mental list: all the wizards capable of such creation, or all those that had been alive and free when he’d gone into stasis. It was a short list, and an alarming one.

  It was also pointless just then. He knew not how that battle had ended, and had no chance to ask what Gerant knew of the people involved; neither of them knew what apprentices those living might have taken over the years, nor which other wizards of such inclination might have come up with the frog-mouthed scouts on their own. There was no good in such an organization of thoughts, save that it distanced himself from the things on the road.

  No matter how often he’d fought Thyran’s foot soldiers, they made his skin crawl, and they were the least—and least horrible—of his creations. Gerant and others had debated whether the horror was intentional, or whether the result of turning flesh against itself was always horrible. Amris had simply met the consequences and slain them with none of the vague sorrow that had usually come with a human opponent, only a sense of relief when a thing that should never have existed had at least stopped moving.

  He didn’t know if the new creations were worse. Worse was a word that quickly lost its meaning when the Twisted were concerned. They were unfamiliar, and that would have been a bad omen, even if they’d had the beauty of the gods themselves.

  Breathing as silently as he could, holding absolutely still, Amris waited. The creatures below spoke a few words to one another in squelching voices, but they were too quiet and too distorted for Amris to make out at his distance. He glanced over to Darya, and she shook her head.

  They kept riding. That, above all, was paramount. The new creatures, the ones on horseback, vanished into the tree line. As the korvin and its occupants followed, Amris followed every step of its legs on the path. The twistedman at the front made some jest, and its companion laughed, a sound like ripping flesh.

  Amris had spent years fighting them, and still the noises they made sank claws into the back of his mind and pulled. They weren’t called twistedmen for their shapes alone.

  But then they, too, were gone. The forest swallowed the last of the korvin’s legs and its sting-tipped rear.

  Darya held up an open hand, then began to fold down her fingers, one at a time: give them time to move on. Take no action they might hear.

  The hoofbeats, the wetter sounds of the korvin’s legs, and the occasional laughter of the riders faded very slowly. Birds began to sing again. The other sounds of the forest resumed. Through the spell, Amris and Darya each felt the other’s tension—the strain of holding still, the anticipation and the dread.

  Before Darya closed her hand entirely, Amris knew enough time had passed. She didn’t relax, truly, but he felt the sharpest edge of her awareness easing a trifle. He stretched his legs, preparing to rise.

  The leaves above them rustled, too heavy for a creature of the forest. A shape dropped just in front of Amris; before he could do more than see it, long fingers had closed about his neck with the strength of iron. The monster in front of him grinned, mouth peeling back to the sides of its gray-white head.

  “I smelled your blood a league off, meatling,” it breathed at him.

  From his other side came the sound of a blow and a grunt from Darya. Amris got a hand around the hilt of his belt knife, but the hands at his throat were already turning his armor against him, crushing the metal into his windpipe and the great vessels of his neck. The strength was already going out of his arms as he drew. His first strike, he feared, would be his last, and even that most likely in vain.

  Chapter 19

  Cold passed through him. It came not as a wind from outside, but upward from his guts and his heart, drawn along his spine. Then it was gone in the final desperation of his lunge.

  Before his knife had so much as touched the outside of its armor, the scout burst.

  No blood spurted, nor did the thing cry out. It simply fell outward into pieces, with the only sounds first the crack of bones and then the muffled thumps of flesh against dirt. One hand dropped from Amris’s neck. He reached up blindly, staring instead at a lump of meat on the ground with the broken ends of ribs sticking out of it, and pried the other away. Breathing was not yet a simple matter, not with his armor broken as it was, but he could manage it again.

  Full awareness took him once more at the wet thunk of a blade entering flesh. Drawing his sword now that he had range, Amris turned and saw the other scout falling to the ground in front of Darya, while she smoothly pulled her sword out of its chest.

  The gem was dim.

  His mind held only himself and Darya, one more than Amris was used to, but was still screamingly empty.

  Ice went down his spine. “Gerant—”

  Darya’s eyes widened, but she stared at Amris rather than down at her sword, which made him reluctantly believe her quick response. “Is fine. Will return. This happens. What about you? You sound like you’ve been dead.”

  “Have I not, in a sense?” he asked, giddy from many sources of relief and shock alike.

  “This is a fine time to get metaphysical.”

  “Some would argue there’s no better,” Amris said, and then, more soberly, “but truly, lady, I think no more than my voice will suffer, and that not long.” He waved a hand at the corpses. “Their fellows are a greater worry. Before long, they’ll know the riders’ mission failed, and come back this way.”

  “True.” Darya wiped her blade and returned it to its sheath, then looked up at Amris with a wolf’s smile. “Wouldn’t it be nice of us to save them the trip?”

  * * *

  Amris smiled more grimly than any man Darya had met. His face was made for it, all leanness and sharp lines. The height and the armor didn’t hurt either. Even amused, he always looked like he had his mind on some greater purpose—but when he drew his sword and nodded in answer to her joke, Darya recognized the anticipation in his grin.

  “Shall I take the vanguard,” he asked, “or be the unexpected reinforcement—or would you rather take them together?”

  “Shame to waste a big shiny target and a lot of cover. You think you can hold them off long enough for me to take a couple shots?”

  “I’m certain of very little in this time and place,” said Amris, with another, more ironic smile, “but that I’d vouch for in any company.”

  “Good enough for me.” Darya peered up into the trees until she saw what she was searching for. “Go on ahead, then.”

  “And you?”

  “I may not have arms like those things”—she jerked her chin toward the dead scouts—“but I manage.” With that, as she’d been planning, Darya leapt up and pulled herself to the lowest-hanging branch of a nearby oak. It took her weight easily, and so did the one above it, and she didn’t need or want to go higher. She had to keep Amris in her sights, after all.

  Before she swung herself over to the next tree in line, and before Amris headed back up along the path, she saw him give her an ancient warrior’s bow: sword in one hand, the other at shoulder height. Darya laughed under her breath and flicked a salute back at him, bu
t she didn’t have time to notice whether he saw or not.

  She was off.

  The forest at the side of the road spread out before her, a green and crowded road in itself. Undisturbed age had let the trees grow close together, particularly at the height she’d reached and upward. Light-footed, Darya ran down the branch she’d chosen, circled the trunk, and dashed outward along a second limb, following the course of the road back the way the scouts had gone.

  Sitha’s blessing was no good among the trees, since mortal hands hadn’t done much for their creation. Darya trusted in her training and in being generally light and nimble. She listened for the creak that would tell her a branch was breaking, and paid attention to the feel of each one through her boots, but did so at the bottom of her mind, where it was as much instinct as actual knowledge.

  Patches of sun below her glinted now and again with metal. Amris was there, moving up on the target as they’d agreed. A spare thought crossed Darya’s mind: the hardship of running in metal armor, after all they’d done that day, and the hope the man wouldn’t simply collapse.

  All else was the moment: the smell of pine sap and the richer green scent of the oak leaves she crushed when she grabbed the next branch. Bark scraped her palms. She paid no mind to the pain. Darya looked, leapt between trees, and barely let her feet hit a slender limb that wouldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds under her weight—but she used it to push off and grab the next in line, pulling herself up and over once again.

  When she glimpsed the twistedmen and the korvin up ahead, the moment shifted from motion to stillness. The music paused.

  Bow to your partners.

  The branch of her current fir wasn’t wide enough to lie on, but she could, and did, drop and wrap her legs around it—she was far enough up that they wouldn’t be visible from below. Slowly, not wanting to dislodge herself or shake the trees enough to draw the scouts’ attention, Darya lifted her bow from her back, brought it around, and drew an arrow.

  Looking down, she saw she was just in time.

  * * *

  Naturally the twistedmen knew of Amris’s approach well before he reached them. As Darya had said, he was a “big shiny target,” and a large man in plate could never run with anything approaching silence. By the time he saw meat-red flesh and the blanched white of the korvin up ahead, they’d already turned to face him.

  Awareness was fine. Suspicion wasn’t. Amris froze in his tracks, then pretended to stumble backward, giving his best impression of a man who’d fled from the frying pan and only now saw the flames licking around him.

  “What are you?” he gasped, a bit of bad theatrics that also helped him catch his breath.

  The twistedman closest to him laughed in its flesh-shriveling way. “Look,” it said around its mouthful of teeth. “One of them got away.”

  Amris barely caught the motion behind it, and was fortunate he had. The flash of steel in the air would never have been enough warning. As it was, he sidestepped just enough that the knife tore through his trousers, cutting the skin beneath but doing no worse.

  A proper hit would have skewered his knee. The twistedmen hadn’t lost their taste for games with their prey, it seemed.

  The knife-thrower hurled a second blade, aimed higher. Amris ducked and spun sideways again, heard the clang as it bounced off his pauldron and felt the impact as a blow to his shoulder. Rising, he saw the twistedman vault from its seat on the korvin. It pulled the ax from its sheath and started charging; its fellow dug a pair of spurred boots into the worm beast, which shrieked protest but squirmed forward with the same uncanny speed that had been the doom of many infantry during the first few battles.

  Amris set his feet, raised his sword, and prepared.

  The arrow streaked from the trees and into the unmounted twistedman, hitting just between shoulder and neck. If the monster had been unarmored or human, it might have been a fatal shot; as it was, the head sunk deeply into the leather and likely into the meat beneath. Force and pain stopped the twistedman in its tracks. It screamed, a sound as horrible as its laughter.

  Amris dashed toward it. The armor would make him pay later, but he’d learned to put off such prices, especially in the maelstrom of battle, and the edge of his blade swept down into the whole side of the creature’s neck before it stopped howling. Neither howling nor the neck lasted long: the twistedmen had thicker skin and stronger spines than mortals, but Amris was familiar with both and knew their weak spots.

  He was spinning before the thing’s head had finished falling, needing no noise to tell him the korvin and its rider would have changed direction as he did. With the edge of his sword, he caught the twistedman’s ax in its downward swing. The korvin gave the low buzz that was its cry of alarm, and reared backward, away from Amris’s return stroke. He saw a few arrows stuck in its hide, but the beast didn’t pay them any mind.

  * * *

  Stupid giant worms: too many legs and hides like leather, or maybe just no vital organs to speak of. Darya might as well have been shooting a hay bale for all the good her arrows did after she hit the twistedman.

  It was time for a change of plan. Shouldering her bow, she sighted down through the trees once more, noting the positions of beast and rider and Amris. This time, though, it was no arrow she was aiming.

  She dropped through the branches and onto the korvin with bared steel and a scream that came from the bottom of her lungs and echoed through the forest. Only part of it was her deliberate attempt to throw the twistedman off guard. The rest, despite everything, was exhilaration.

  The sound caught even Amris by surprise. He was too good to let it throw him off guard, though. His face said what the hell clearly, but he was still moving when Darya landed, using the moment to dash forward and lop off a couple of the korvin’s legs.

  Meanwhile, the twistedman got its ax in the way of her sword rather than its neck, like she’d intended. Darya’s blade bit hard, but the thing didn’t die or even stop fighting. It halfway turned in its seat, spine far too flexible, snarled, and took a swipe at her with its free hand. Talons tore across Darya’s chest, not fatal but still painful.

  “Piss off,” she snapped back at it, whipped her sword around, and took its arm off at the elbow.

  Drop hands, promenade forward.

  She didn’t actually drop Gerant, but she didn’t try another swing because the range was too close. While the twistedman was holding up the bleeding stump of its arm and shrieking, Darya slipped a knife out of her sleeve and into her hand, then shifted her weight forward. She was inside its guard now, and while Thyran’s creations were well protected, his foot soldiers had the same setup in their necks that humans did.

  A quick snap of her wrist, a spray of blood that she narrowly avoided getting in the face, and that job was done. She scooted forward and knocked the dying creature to the side with shoulder and hip—she’d stopped hoping for dignity five years back—then kept moving up. “Where’s the brain on this thing?”

  “It has none!” Darya couldn’t see Amris, and his voice sounded muffled, but then the korvin reared again, remaining legs pawing the air. She grabbed at the saddle, holding on tightly as the thing crashed back to the ground.

  It went still. She blinked, clearing her vision, and saw Amris withdrawing his sword from the monster’s side.

  “The heart,” he added, “is the vital spot.”

  Chapter 20

  “He’s all right,” Darya repeated.

  She was wiping blood off her sword, and Amris, unsurprisingly, was watching her while trying to look like he wasn’t. “The deadly blessings, they’re like casting spells—though the sword-spirit doesn’t have to have been a wizard in life, and Gerant says there are other differences.” Darya waved a hand, bloody rag flapping with the gesture. She’d known what the power of her sword could do, and what happened after. That had always been enough for her. It’d have
to be enough for Amris, at least until Gerant woke up again.

  “But they take the same sort of effort, though the caster has no body left?”

  “More or less. I can’t explain it, but then, it’s not as if magic uses anyone’s muscles to begin with. And they don’t sleep, Gerant says. They go…not to Letar’s halls, but elsewhere, or to a different part of this world, a place that’s not a place. I’m sorry… I wish I’d listened more.”

  “No blame attaches to you, or no more than ever did to me. In such conversations as these, Gerant would resort to drawing figures for me more often than not.” Amris got on with such cleanup as he could manage, and really did sound reasonably casual when he asked, “How long will he be so away?”

  “Usually a few hours.” Darya resheathed her sword and wiped as much of the blood from her own person as was possible. “The cold doesn’t usually kill like that, though, and never when he’s hitting two at once with it. Either having two of us connected helped, in which case he might be back sooner, or he pushed himself harder than he thought he could because your neck was on the line, which means later.”

  The worry line on Amris’s brow reappeared. “If he drew on such reserves, are you certain it did him no permanent harm?”

  Darya tapped the emerald. “This would’ve chipped. Cracked, if it was really bad, though I’ve never heard of anything that severe. They’re a lot harder to hurt than we are, even with magic.”

  “Does the reverse hold true? That is, should the sword or the gem come to harm, would the spirit within feel it?”

  “Not the sword. They stay sharper longer than the normal sort, and they’re a little tougher, but they still have to be taken care of, and most of them don’t see active service for more than a couple decades without needing major repairs. A lot like their wielders, actually.”