The red smoke rose to form shapes writ against the night sky. A cat. A bear. A stag. More. Wolf and dog, lizard and beetle, toad and bird and crocodile. A dozen shapes, until they ran together. An army of beasts. And still they grew, more and more forms taking shape before they blended into the mass arrayed against the stars.
Fear and awe stirred in Arak’Jur’s belly, given voice in gasps and screams from the crowd.
“We are coming,” another voice said. Ilek’Hannat, standing beside the fire, though the apprentice shaman’s words seemed to rise with the smoke, forming from the mouths of the beasts as he spoke them. “We seek the Ascendant of the Wild.”
“See what we face,” Ilek’Inari shouted, directed to the assembled six but loud enough to carry through the crowd. “The great beasts. And more.”
As he said it the smoke rippled, shifting from beasts to men. A thousand shapes of men and women, raising weapons, charging forward until they burst into wisps of red vapor. Screams rose from the crowd at the moment of impact, turned to sobbing as the images faded from the sky.
“How can we trust these sendings?” Ghella demanded from beside the fire. “The spirits have whispered of doom too long for us to believe it now.”
“It is true, honored sister,” Ilek’Inari said, sadness in his voice. “Some among the spirits of things-to-come are corrupted. But their corruption is a power unto itself, and on this, we have heard both kinds speak as one.”
“Death,” Ilek’Hannat said loudly, his words still echoing from the clouds of formless smoke in the air. “We demand it. The Wild is ours, and we will not surrender lightly. We see you, and we are coming.”
“We can fight,” Symara said. “Our people are strong. If these malign spirits seek to challenge our alliance, they will not find us cowering in fear.”
“Not us, sister,” Asseena said. “They are not coming for us.”
Corenna was already staring at him when the rest turned to where he stood.
“Arak’Jur,” Corenna whispered.
“Arak’Jur,” Ilek’Hannat repeated, the same whisper seeming to come from the smoke, a thousand miniature voices echoing his name.
Dread settled on him like a fog. An Ascendant of the Wild. He’d been named as much, at Nanek’Hai’Tyat. He hadn’t understood what it meant then, but hearing it now, with all the trappings of judgment, it stung deep. The crowd took up the charge in whispers, giving voice to their fears by speaking his name. An omen of fear, and death.
He’d believed it of himself since he became guardian, unforeseen, the mark of a curse. Now every eye of their alliance confirmed it. He’d wondered why Ilek’Inari had summoned every member of the tribes. Now he knew. They meant for him to leave, and they needed every tribesman to see the cost if he refused.
“Go,” Ilek’Hannat whispered. His voice before had been dark and terrible, booming like thunder through the shapes writ in smoke above the crowd. Now it was changed—different, somehow. Softer. Almost a woman’s voice. “Arak’Jur. Go and seek your strength, while you might still become my champion. Do not fear. You are—”
“—marked for death,” Ilek’Hannat finished, his voice returned to how it had been before. “We are coming.”
Ilek’Inari went to Ilek’Hannat’s side, and laid a hand on the other apprentice’s shoulder. The greatfire returned to an ordinary blaze, and the smoke cleared from the sky, its red hue dissipated into gray wisps swallowed by the light of the stars.
“We call for judgment from our elders,” Ilek’Inari said. “You have seen what the spirits foretell. But the decision falls to us, as leaders of these tribes.”
Tears ran down Corenna’s face, as she was the first to rise from her seat. “I won’t,” she said, first softly, for his benefit, then again, louder. “I won’t pronounce judgment, no matter the threat he brings on us by staying. He is our guardian. We couldn’t survive without him.”
He longed to go to her, to wrap a hand around her, to draw her close enough to feel her belly pressed against him, where his son or daughter grew within. Instead he rose out of turn to speak.
“Is this the spirits’ will?” he asked. “Is it their will for this alliance to be left alone, without a guardian, defenseless against the wild?”
The unspoken accusation ran beneath his words: that the apprentices had misunderstood, or been deceived by the corrupt spirits. He wished it were so, even as he recalled the memory of astahg fighting alongside the Uktani, or older, of ipek’a fighting alongside Arak’Atan. The great beasts were roused to the causes of men, or men were roused to theirs; the fact of it was plain, though the cause lay beyond his understanding.
“The foul spirits seek men and women of power,” Ilek’Hannat said, his voice returned to normal, without the influence of the spirits. “They demand that these men and women surrender to their will, or die.”
“Ascendants,” Ilek’Inari said. “Those with the beast magic of the guardians and the war-magic of the land. They are unsure why these gifts have merged, but they speak of a Goddess, who has need of their power, in times to come.”
The Goddess. He’d heard the spirits speak of her, of her need. He’d never understood, before.
“If you stay among us,” Ilek’Inari continued, “the beasts will come, and the warriors sworn to their cause. We may be weakened without your protection, but we have the women’s gift—”
“No,” Corenna said. “I won’t stay behind. If Arak’Jur is hunted, I will be hunted with him.”
Arak’Jur winced. He hadn’t yet considered what Corenna would do. The shamans fell quiet, glancing between each other, and the women. Symara had a single gift of the land, the weaving of stone from Ondan’Ai’Tyat, and Ghella had only the visions of Ka’Ana’Tyat, the Sinari sacred place. Neither would be enough if a great beast threatened their people. Even Ilek’Inari’s gift from una’re would fall short if valak’ar or kirighra came near the village.
“Honored sister …” Ghella began.
“Don’t ask it,” Corenna said. “My people were slaughtered, and I forgave it for the madness it was. But I will not abandon Arak’Jur to die, not when his child grows inside me. You cannot expect me to do this. You cannot.”
She showed ferocity in her expression, but he could see her trembling, and knew it for more than anger boiling in her veins. Madness had cost her every comfort in her life, all save his company. He understood; even faced with the prospect of banishment for the good of the tribes, he would not want to face the wild alone. Duty compelled him to go, and her to stay, but weighed against the death of a wife, a husband, a child, all other concern gave way to desperation. And from desperation, clarity.
“We are not the only people with the strength to survive in these lands.”
The words sounded foreign to his ears, even as he spoke them. The rest of the men and women around the fire looked to him with a blend of curiosity and confusion.
“I will not stay among our people,” he continued. “Not when my presence draws such strength arrayed against us. Nor will I ask Corenna to stay behind. I mean to face our enemies, to find the source of their corruption and root it out. For that I will need her strength. But I will also need surety of this people’s safety. And for that I turn to the fair-skins, whose barrier is proof against the creatures of the wild.”
13
SARINE
Approaching Lavendon Abbey
Near the Great Barrier
Sunset streaked behind them, painting the clouds a blend of purple and blue. Zi’s scales seemed to mirror the hues, flashing as he lay draped across her saddle. His pallor had recovered after the slaughter in the market, but he’d remained visible, sickly, and weak as they’d followed the roads north. For the twentieth time she questioned the decision to chase Axerian, and redoubled her conviction as she clung to her gelding’s reins.
The barrier had grown in the time they’d spent on the road, from a blue line shimmering in the distance to a towering haze, consuming half the sky in eit
her direction. Hard to fathom the barrier could be real, seeing it so close. A marvel of engineering, and it ran unbroken from the coastline here to the tip of the Thellan colonies in the south, beyond even the Gand territories. She might have appreciated it more if not for Zi, and for feeling like her backside had been beaten with reeds after two days in the saddle.
“That’s the abbey’s spires,” Acherre said, pointing to a dark shape silhouetted against the barrier’s haze. “Shall we make a race of it, the rest of the way?”
“No,” she said. “Zi does best under a steady walk.”
The reminder seemed to sober the captain’s mood, and Acherre nodded as she and her mount fell into step beside Sarine’s gelding.
“We’ll have to get you a proper mount,” Acherre replied. “A well-trained binder’s mount is worth a company of muskets, in the right hands.”
Acherre stroked her horse’s mane, and the creature whickered without missing a step. Their movements were as fluid as Sarine was sure her own were not, and if Acherre had any sores she hadn’t needed Life when they’d put in at a farming village the night before. Horses and riding had always had a certain appeal, a majestic cadence to it when teams of four or six drove carriages through the Gardens. She’d imagined riding one couldn’t be all that different from being driven by them, more fool her.
Another quarter league and the abbey resolved from silhouette to wood and stone. Her uncle’s chapel was a lavish affair in comparison, the Sacre-Lin’s stone and stained glass cutting a sharp relief against the dull brown rectangles clustered around the abbey’s spire, but any comfort would be welcome after a few days on the road. There were a dozen such abbeys placed along the barrier, charged with maintaining the Shelter bindings that kept it standing against the wild. With luck the priests would recognize Axerian from the drawings she carried. And surely even priests had to keep warm water on hand for a bath.
Acherre called something to her, muted and lost on the wind as the captain charged her horse forward.
Her gelding skittered to follow, caught between obeying her hold on the reins and charging alongside Acherre, but Zi was in no condition for a gallop, let alone a run, and for a moment her attention turned to struggling not to fall.
“Dead,” Acherre called back. “The priests. Their bodies … my Gods.”
Acherre had dismounted in the outer yard, and now hovered over what appeared to be three brown-robed figures sleeping beside a stone well. Sarine scooped Zi into her arms, careful to cradle him against her chest as she swung a leg over her gelding’s flank, dropping the reins as she all but jumped from the saddle, her mount as eager to be free of her as she was of it.
“The snake we saw in the market,” Acherre said. “It must have come through the barrier here.”
“I don’t think so,” Sarine said, nestling Zi into place across her shoulders. “It might be the snake, but the ones it killed were sickly, covered with rot. These are different.”
She pointed toward a man in priest’s robes, with pale skin, cold and gray, but where the man’s eyes should have been there were empty sockets, as though carrion birds had come and pecked them clean while leaving the rest alone.
Acherre nodded, pacing between the bodies. Another two shapes lay on the path from the well to the inner yard, and no doubts there would be more.
“Could it be the assassin?” Acherre asked. “These priests have been dead for days. If it was his work, he’ll have moved on. We should check the rest of the abbey, then do the same.”
She shook her head. “It isn’t like Axerian to kill innocents, not unless he sees no other way.”
Acherre raised an eyebrow. “You know him that well?”
“I …” she began.
The world lurched.
She stood on a field of ice, a rolling tundral plain beneath a darkened sky. Armored figures lay dead around her, piled deep and caked in snow and frozen blood.
Worry for Zi surged, and panic. But her emotions counted for nothing here; she tried to move, to shout, to fight and make it go away. Instead she stood, as frozen as the corpses, and heard a voice roaring with the fury of battle beside her.
Paendurion.
Fire crackled around him as Shelter shielded him from the heat, and he danced forward, toward the last man standing on the Regnant’s—her ancient enemy’s—side of the field.
Shelter dissolved the moment before impact, and Paendurion’s longblade clanged as it met his opponent’s folded steel. Her champion shifted his massive girth behind his shield, and his enemy twisted, evading his attacks, weaving purple lines in the air with the dessicated remains of his free hand. A sheet of glass turned Paendurion’s attack, conjured and shattering at the last instant, and the other man darted forward, striking with the sword in his hand and four new glass shards conjured in the air. Death tore them apart as they flew, and Paendurion rushed into the man, bashing through another sheet of glass with his shield.
Paendurion’s enemy staggered backward, weaving a barrier of light between them, and Ad-Shi gored him from behind. Spectral claws emerged from his belly, and the Regnant’s final champion died, gasping for air as Ad-Shi twisted her hands, rending his flesh to pulp.
A voice sounded in her ears: FOR THIS ONE, IT ENDS.
Paendurion dropped his sword.
“It’s done,” her champion of Order said, emotion welling in his voice as tears mixed with blood and dirt on his face.
It was.
Power flowed into her, a torrent of energy. A sea of possibility, already changing the face of the world.
“Forgive me,” Axerian whispered, and black claws tore into her from behind. Sorrow and shock overpowered her senses, and she screamed. Betrayal. The world shuddered, and she rushed to complete what she’d begun.
Air choked from her lungs, and tears soaked her cheeks. Sunlight burned on her skin.
Blue light flashed, and a sensation of … sobbing?
I can’t stop it. Zi’s voice, and she recognized the sobbing as coming from him, a tide of emotion and despair.
“Sarine?” Acherre asked.
A hand propped her up, steady on the small of her back, with another around her arm to brace her.
Her vision returned, shimmering from moisture in her eyes.
“No,” she said, rushing to cradle Zi from atop her shoulder. “Not another one. I’m sorry, Zi. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Zi writhed in her arms, constricting his body to dig his claws into her skin. She reached to shelter him by reflex.
“That’s what hurts you, isn’t it?” she asked. “Each time … each time I see these things.”
Yes.
She hadn’t expected otherwise. But hearing it tore her through the heart.
“I’m sorry,” she said, barely above a whisper. He felt brittle against her skin, like cold glass on the cusp of breaking.
Acherre walked a few paces away, giving her and Zi space as she inspected the priests’ bodies.
“I count seven, in the yard,” Acherre said quietly. “There may be more inside. And I need to check the barrier.”
Sarine said nothing, cradling Zi as she walked to sit atop the well. Emotion hadn’t helped him after all; his color had refreshed after the murders in the market, but he was still languid, as infirm as any poxy child. She needed answers. Without knowing what was wrong, she couldn’t begin to help him recover, or stop the visions. If the answer lay there, perhaps she could piece together what had triggered them. That was something at least.
NO.
The thought roared in her mind, as fierce and strong as Zi had ever sent, and a white shield flared to cover her left side, where a tiny lizard had clamped its jaws around her finger.
She leapt to her feet, shaking her arm to fling the lizard into the dirt, but Zi acted first, a wave of purple light flaring in her vision as the creature exploded into ribbons of gore and paste.
Shock glazed over her senses. The lizard had bitten her. Zi would never have reacted
so strongly against a common reptile; it had to be one of the terrors native to the New World. She stared between the empty-eyed corpses and the stain of brown and red Zi had made of the lizard in the mud beneath the well. He’d saved her life. Not that he hadn’t done the same a hundred times over with his gifts of Red and Green and Yellow, but it was something else seeing him act directly. And now he was frozen, quivering as he coiled around her forearm.
“Zi,” she said. “I …”
“Gods,” Acherre said, coming around the side of the abbey. “There are holes here all right, bores through the barrier wide enough to drive a cart through. Clean made, too, no sign of fraying or … what’s wrong?”
Sarine wiped tears from her cheeks, cradling Zi against her chest with her other hand. She was doing this. Her inattention had caused him to overexert himself, as sure as these Nameless-cursed visions were responsible for his sickness.
“A … a lizard. A beast. It attacked and Zi killed it.”
“A lizard?” Acherre asked. “Like the snake in the market, or something else?”
She stood, keeping Zi close to her skin. She wanted to cradle him there, hold him and assure him she’d find a way to make things right. But tears and weeping wouldn’t bring her any closer to Axerian.
“You said there were holes in the barrier,” she said instead.
Acherre nodded. “That’s right. Like nothing I’ve ever seen. Even with these priests dead, it should have taken longer for the Shelter to decay, and no binding unravels as clean as this.”
“Show me,” she said, and let Acherre lead the way.
They went around the abbey, where weeds had already started breaking through what had been well-tended grass and gardens. A wheelbarrow had been left full of mud, now leaking rainwater into a puddle in the dirt. Signs of well-tended grounds, interrupted by whatever terrors had come through the barrier that had been their most important charge. No chance the priests had let the stretch of the barrier right behind their abbey fall into disrepair. Yet as soon as she and Acherre rounded the main building, she saw the holes, clear as she saw the barrier itself. Two gaps in the blue haze, made with clean, fine cuts, as though the pearls of Shelter had been split with a razor’s edge.
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