The Stormbringer

by Isabel Cooper

  As Amris and Darya rounded the corner, a girl in rough clothing paused in the act of forking manure from a stall, goggled, then popped her head back into the building. No more than a minute later, a man stepped out of the door nearest to the main house and strode toward them. “Those are not replacements,” was the first thing he said, “whatever else they may be. Ironhide was a damned good horse.”

  “I know,” Darya said, and ducked her head apologetically.

  This, then, must be Isen, of whom Darya had spoken earlier. He was a tall, thin man in the same rough clothing as the stable hands, with close-cropped brown hair and apparently more than his fair share of problems, of which Sentinels and their unexpected finds were currently the largest. “What happened?”

  “Tracked the cockatrice to ruins—no place for a horse.” As she spoke, Darya dismounted, and Amris followed her lead. “I left him on a loose tie outside, with water and plenty of grass nearby. While I was in the city, he got stolen.”

  “By what?”

  “I can’t tell you until I tell Hallis. I’m sorry.”

  Isen blinked rapidly. “That bad?”

  “Probably worse.”

  The yard was silent save for the horses, who didn’t know enough to speculate or eavesdrop. Isen sucked in a breath, puffing out his cheeks, and then blew it out in a sigh. “I should have expected it. I’d just gotten a foal from Seafoam. What are these things?”

  “Amris,” said Darya, with a slight smile and a gesture toward him, “and…twistedmounts, I guess is the best name for them at present. I wanted to get their gear off and give them water, whatever they are.”

  “Good plan. I’ll do it.” Isen raised a hand before either Darya or Amris could object. “You don’t have to tell me they’re vicious. And I know a damn sight better than you do how to handle temperamental beasts. Give.”

  He held out a hand imperiously. Almost by instinct, Amris put his reins into it. He fought the urge to salute.

  Tired from the journey, the horse did no more than take a half-hearted bite at Isen’s hand, one which the stable master—Amris assumed—dodged easily, and countered with a light smack on the neck and the first of a sharp series of whistles.

  “Come on,” said Darya. “He won’t know we’re alive until they’re dealt with, and we need to be in Hallis’s office by then.”

  “I heard that,” said Isen, but he didn’t look away from the horses.

  Amris started toward the path, but Darya caught him by the arm, then dropped her hand quickly. “Short cut,” she said, and gestured toward a door by the stables that Amris had overlooked—and no wonder, since it was far smaller and plainer than the double doors at the main entrance.

  It also wasn’t guarded or, as Amris shortly discovered, even locked. Darya simply opened it and led him into a low hallway made of rough stone. Torches on the walls gave off dim light and much smoke, more akin to the bonfires of wartime than even the farm of his youth, where tallow candles and oil lamps had been fit for peasants.

  Even light was different.

  Amris’s armor was heavy on his shoulders, and the hallway endless and featureless. Strictly speaking, there were doors, and smells and noise beyond them, but they were far away, perhaps not even real.

  “All seems worse the closer it is to being over, doesn’t it?” Darya asked. “Don’t worry. We’ll get cleaned and fed before the world ends.”

  * * *

  The problem with Hallis’s office was that it was up two flights of stairs.

  True, Darya had never complained about that, or even noticed it, on her previous visits to Oakford. True, she’d climbed higher in the ruins of Klaishil without minding the ache in her feet and the strain in her thighs. But when she’d been climbing around in the ruins, she hadn’t already been climbing around in the ruins—a concept that made sense to her weary mind—much less running, fighting, sleeping rough, and riding an oddly shaped horse-thing for three days.

  Now that she was out of immediate physical danger, the supports were falling out from under her body. Danger was still out there, and she still had things to do, urgent things, but that didn’t matter. Bodies were stupid. Even willpower could only do so much with them.

  She smelled like the horse now. Sweat had matted her hair to her head and her breeches to her legs. It stung the cuts on her chest, which were aching of themselves. Amris was limping slightly, though Darya suspected that wasn’t the cause of his set face.

  There was nothing she could do about any of it. If she turned her own mind away from injuries and weariness, from the immediate need to put one foot in front of the other, the new direction it took would be worse.

  Up two flights of polished granite stairs they went, passing servants who stared at them nervously and backed up, soldiers who tried to disguise their nerves, and Katrine, a tall, rangy blond Sentinel who gave Darya a sympathetic look but was too wise to try and stop her for conversation.

  After the landing, Hallis’s office was at least not very far: second door on the left, past a tapestry of an elven hunting party. She’d admired it the first time she’d been stationed at Oakford, and noticed it with some appreciation after that. Now the colors blurred in her vision.

  Lifting her hand to knock was a matter of intense focus. Thank the gods, she only had to do it once.

  The door opened nearly under her hand, and then Hallis was staring up at her. He hadn’t changed: still short and blocky, still dark-skinned and gray-haired, still wearing rumpled clothing beneath his green sash of office. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Many things,” Darya said. “I can explain a couple.”

  “Both of you, come in. Sit.”

  Darya was glad to, as soon as Hallis opened the door, and she suspected Amris was as well, though he kept up a facade of blank good discipline. The office was no fancier than became a bachelor commander of a remote outpost—dark shutters at the window, no carpets, a few candles, Hallis’s own wood carvings for the only ornaments—but it was comfortable, with a low leather couch rather than chairs in front of the desk. She sank down with a murmur of relief and closed her hands around a flask Hallis pressed into them.

  Drinking was blind reflex. The drink itself was cool, and tasted of mint and orange, with a powerful hint of spice behind it: fuiroig, a liquor the Criwathani used for energy. Two swallows and Darya no longer felt in danger of falling asleep, or like it was going to be too much effort just to move her mouth to talk. She passed the flask over to Amris.

  He was as good a place to start as any. “Sir,” she said, “this is General Amris var Faina.”

  There was more, but Hallis broke in, frowning, “I’m calling the Mourner, Sentinel. You’ve been out there too long. You, sir, what is your name?”

  “The lady has it right,” Amris said, “incredible as I realize it is. I’ll swear it so, under whatever oath you’d like or in front of a dozen priests of Tinival, but we have no time to explain in detail.”

  It was good that Hallis was also sitting down. His mouth opened and his hands clenched tightly on the arms of his chair. “You died a hundred years ago.”

  “No. I’m no ghost, Commander. A hundred years ago, I faced Thyran and, with the help of an enchanted object, cast us both outside of time. Then came storm and ruin, and I stayed as I was while the world moved, until Darya came seeking her prey and found me.”

  Despite the couch, Amris sat straight-backed, his hands folded before him. In profile, his nose was sharp, his jaw clean; he could have been the face on an old coin, shining through tarnish. He didn’t even slur his speech as Darya knew she’d done from weariness.

  A more worthy and high-minded person might have sighed with admiration. Darya felt the urge, and partly as a result also wanted both to kick him in the shin and to drag him off to bed. Thank the gods, neither was an option.

  Hallis sat back in his chair, st
aring at Amris. The office was warm and smelled of woodsmoke. A carving of an owl watched everyone from the mantel. Darya swallowed, tasted the last traces of mint and orange, and waited.

  “Found you, you say?” Hallis asked eventually, and Darya could see him approaching the question as she’d approached the horse-things, ready for the sudden kick or bite. There was no avoiding it this time, though, and she could see by Hallis’s face that he knew as much, only hoped in this last moment to be wrong. “You stayed in place? And you faced”—his voice dropped, veteran that he was, and Darya thought he wanted to look over his shoulder—“Thyran.”

  “Yes,” said Amris. “For just this reason, we demanded your presence so urgently. Thyran is active once more, Commander. I know no reason that he wouldn’t have all his old strength and malice. I know that he does have an army, and that already they move this way.”

  Outside, the sky was turning purple with evening and the smell of cooking meat was heavy in the air. People called to one another from elsewhere in the fort. The couch was soft under Darya’s thighs, the floor smooth beneath her boots.

  All of it felt like the mirror in her pack: pretty, unreal, and very easily broken.

  Part III

  Nature is change, and change is nature. Even the rocks shift, given time. Mortals and gods have the gift of directing their own transformations, and the perilous task of influencing the way others change.

  —The Lessons of Poram, Part II

  You yourself, Your Grace, have met with those who pursued fleshcrafting as a magic and those who sought its results. It has the dangers of any new craft, particularly one so tied to the body. What Thyran did to his forces—and to himself—was a different matter. Whether he worked with the help of the demons from outside the world or the power of Gizath alone, he stripped away the best parts of those who came to join him. They became mockeries of those they once were, and their spawn mocked all life. Worse, most of his closest servants chose that path.

  —The Letters of Farathen

  Chapter 25

  Hallis raised one of his hands. For a moment he seemed about to make a point, or reach for something on his desk. Then he stared at his own hand and put it back down, clutching the chair harder.

  It had been bad enough when she found out, Darya thought, and she’d gotten to do it in stages. She wouldn’t have said gotten to, like it was a privilege, until she saw Hallis get it all dumped on him at once.

  “How—” he began, and it was the gasp of a drowning man. “How far are they? How many?”

  “I’d say between two and four days out,” Darya said, after some quick and uncertain calculation and a glance at Amris. “No real idea how many. Sorry. But we ran across a few of their scouts on our trip back, and it seems like the monster I was hunting was a part of the army.”

  Briefly, she described the collar on the cockatrice, then the party of twistedmen and frog-mouthed creatures, and mentioned she and Amris had destroyed the bridge. “That might have done some good. There’s a lot I don’t know. Too much.”

  “Thyran was ever a creature of dark impulse,” said Amris, “but he’d never move against us without a fair-sized force.”

  Hope crept back into Hallis’s face. “Maybe he’s not doing so. The scouting party could’ve only been his creatures making sure we’re no threat to them.”

  Darya shook her head, though she hated to do it. “They already know that. You have raids here every, what, two, three years? And I was the first person to get as far north as Klaishil since the storms.”

  “Besides,” Amris said, “forbearance was never in Thyran’s nature. Neither would he have learned patience in our time outside of time, for it was as if we slept.” He sighed. “No, he’ll be angrier, if anything, and with more of a mind for vengeance. And if one of his underlings woke him, as I believe to be the case… Well, that suggests they wished for his leadership again and have the strength to back him.”

  “It could’ve been a lone fanatic,” said Hallis, and shook his own head slowly. “But we can’t count on that. All right. He’ll attack here, then. There’s no other route.” He glanced at the map on the wall, which showed the hourglass-center where Oakford stood between the northern forest and the lands of civilization, with high mountains to the east and the sea on the west. “Not unless he has an army of winged beasts, and then why send out horses? No, he’ll strike us.”

  Slowly, showing every year of his age for the first time Darya had seen, Hallis rose from his chair and crossed the room to kneel before a dark chest, which he opened with a silver key that had been hanging around his neck, under his shirt. Darya heard quiet clicks and thumps as Hallis lifted and replaced hard objects, the whisper of cloth, and the fluid ringing of metal.

  He came back to the desk with a small box, this one silver and ivory. Inside, nested in green velvet, were three robin-sized birds, each carved from light-blue stone swirled and flecked with white.

  To Darya’s surprise, the sight of them made Amris smile—and despite more than a trace of wistfulness about it, despite the circumstances, seeing that made her want to smile back.

  * * *

  The messengers were yet in use. More than that, they were much as Amris remembered them, if obviously rarer from the care with which Captain Hallis had stored his. For Amris himself, they’d been pretty commonplace, first flying to and from his commander’s tent and then, as his career had progressed, bearing messages to him. Some had been nuisance requests for information, or demands for the impossible; others had informed him of reinforcements or alerted him to a change in situation; a few, toward the end, had taken messages to and from his friends.

  He and Gerant had sent one back and forth every few nights.

  Less pain accompanied that memory than Amris would have expected. He wasn’t certain whether that made him resilient, callous, or just numb from weariness. Nor did he have time to consider the question, for Hallis moved quickly, opening the shutters and then taking the first of the birds in his cupped hands.

  “Captain Hallis greets you and requests aid,” he said, carefully pronouncing every word. “Reliable witnesses report return of Thyran and approach of Twisted army to Oakford. All available reinforcements needed.”

  Hallis spoke a few more words, even more careful with those than with the message. The bird lit from within, so that the aventurine of its body became transparent and it cast blue-white shapes on the wall behind it. Spreading stone wings, it launched itself from Hallis’s hands into the clear night sky beyond the window.

  The next two birds carried the same message and followed the same process. When the third had flown off, Hallis closed the shutters and sat back down, dropping his weight into the chair somewhat more heavily than he’d done before.

  “If I might ask,” said Amris, “where do they go?”

  “Affiran, which is where we’re likely to get aid from if any comes in time, though they’ll be half a week at best.” Amris nodded, recognizing the capital city of Criwath and glad to hear that it still was a potential source of reinforcements. Hallis went on. “Silane, which will try, but they’re farther away. And Heliodar, which… I’ll not even dream it.”

  “Do they care so little?”

  “Yes,” said Darya.

  Hallis made an equivocating gesture with one hand. “They’re unlikely to believe any story like ours without ten or so witnesses in person, and the ruling families won’t want to risk their soldiers for a possibility.”

  “That’s why you get the command post,” said Darya, shaking her head. “You can be a diplomat without spitting afterward.”

  Amris suppressed the urge to chuckle. “What are—” He paused. “Forgive me. I’ve no rank here, and no right to question your plans.”

  “Plans.” Hallis barked laughter. “The plans that come to mind are drinking ourselves into a stupor, slitting our own throats, and setting the place afir
e, or first one and then the other. You can’t know how—” He shook his head. “But we must make a stand, and if we’re to do so, I’ll want your thoughts above all, General. You’ve fought him and lived.”

  * * *

  “He is mortal,” Amris pointed out gently, and then had to amend his own statement. “At least, he’s no god. He can’t see save through his own eyes, his attacks take time and strength, and he can die.”

  “Can he?” It was a serious question Hallis asked—no childish seeking of reassurance, but a military man’s need to know about his enemy.

  Still, his fear was real and obvious, and Darya didn’t blame him at all. She’d grown up as a Sentinel-in-training, knowing about timelines and battles. She’d been able on some level to see Thyran as a petty, spiteful man, no different from the tavern wench throwing plates at the head of a faithless lover or the child breaking his toys rather than sharing them. Still she was terrified.

  For most people outside the Order and maybe the priesthoods—even for old soldiers like Hallis—this news would be like hearing of a mountain about to fall from the sky. Drinking ourselves into a stupor, slitting our own throats, and setting the place afire, Hallis had said, and she could only hope they hadn’t just caused thousands of people to start doing exactly that, once the birds brought their messages.

  There was a tightness around Amris’s mouth that suggested he was having some of the same thoughts. He answered carefully. “If my knowledge yet serves, yes. His death would be harder and more dearly bought than that of any man. He has spells and armies both at his command, and he’s reshaped himself with more care and skill than he spent on any of the creatures he made—but it can happen. I used the spell I did, not because it was the only possibility, but because it was the only certainty. Or so it seemed then.”

  Hallis nodded. “What were his numbers, at the end?”