Kings or Pawns (Steps of Power 1)

by Sherwood, J. J.

  “Nazra!” he called again, a broad smile sweeping across his face. “Come.”

  The winter wolf pushed off the earth and bounded across the snow in long, rapid strides, skidding to a stop in front of him and coming to sit in a great wiggling mass of impatience and affection. Jikun crouched down before her large form and reached out a hand to stroke the long, thick, white fur of her chest.

  “Good girl,” he purred in response, tapping his knee softly. She leapt from her sitting position, licked his face once, and tore off to the fence of ice from which he had entered. He chuckled slightly. “Impatient, aren’t we? I didn’t say we were going on a hunt.”

  Nazra froze, her ears becoming stiff and attentive, her eyes round, blue reflections of the sky. Her tail hung still.

  Jikun walked up behind her and unfroze the fence, passing through the newly made gap and gesturing to Nazra to follow. He closed the hole behind them. A hunt was the intention. But first… Jikun’s eyes flickered back toward the market. Curiosity: the curse of the elves. Damn it.

  “Nazra, come,” he muttered below his breath, retracing his steps to the doorway where he had encountered the child. Her footsteps were invisible in the snow, so light and small. But Nazra’s eyes dilated as she sniffed around the doorway. “Find the girl,” he ordered, pointing toward the market.

  Nazra bounded off, vanishing behind a few buildings every so often and reappearing eagerly to ensure her master had not lost her trail. But Jikun could see her massive paw-prints embedded in the snow. Unlike the child, the wolf had not driftwalked her bounding march across town.

  Jikun’s brows knit in amusement as they turned toward the north end of the city: away from the market. “As I suspected,” he mused. After so many years in the strict regimen of the army, being involved in such a frivolous task seemed relaxing.

  Was it worth the hassle just to tell the child off?

  Absolutely. And perhaps he would march the misbehaving girl home to her worried mother, who would be undoubtedly grateful for the assistance…

  Though it would hardly make amends for the terror he had caused the city in his youth.

  “Nazra, good girl,” he praised as she wound them between the frost-covered buildings and through the gardens of flowers that were just beginning to pry open their icy petals. They passed beside the Temple of Lithriella, a crescent-shaped building glittering at its towered peaks as sunlight filtered through her structure of solid ice.

  “Further?” Jikun inquired, his amusement fading to raw curiosity. Beyond the temple grounds flowed the expanse of a field and the grounds of the palace. The former was flat and sprinkled with patches of purple flowers. The latter was towering against the mountain face, made entirely of ice and turmazel crystals, glittering in purples, blues, greens, and whites—silent, dark, and still in the early dawn.

  Yet there was no sign of the child. If he had been as gifted at drift-walking at her age, he may have staved off a good flogging or two.

  Nazra had moved out into the field, her nose lowered to the earth, raising her head thoughtfully as she looked on ahead. She had turned slightly to the right of the palace, to a thick icefall that crashed into a frozen lake and vanished under the earth. There, to the right of the fall, Nazra concluded her hunt, sitting down before it and waiting patiently for Jikun to reveal the secret beyond.

  Jikun studied the scenery. There was a small pool of ice in the snow, pressed against the face of the mountain where a long-since frozen waterfall cascaded into its depths. It was still. Unmoving. The face of the mountain was solid and unmarred, just a frozen fall against stone. Jikun stepped forward and rubbed his chin, running his hand down the side of the ice where a poor repair job had been fashioned after obvious deconstruction.

  Someone had broken the fall. Why?

  He let the ice melt before his hand until a hole formed large enough for him and Nazra to pass through: a hole that led right through the falls and into a cavern of the mountain beyond.

  “Lithriella wing me!” he heard a surprised voice exclaim from shortly ahead.

  Jikun hardly absorbed the blasphemous curse as his eyes quickly adjusted to the sight before him.

  Three children sat in front of the back wall of the shallow cave, their bodies half turned, their eyes wide. But Jikun hardly noticed them. What they had gathered around, Jikun had never seen the like of in all his travels throughout Sevrigel.

  “What is that?” he demanded, finding that his voice came out strong and fierce in the small cavern. It revealed nothing of his unsettled nature or caution.

  Nothing of his fear.

  Before the three children was a small hole in the earth—no more than a foot wide in either direction. Like the chasm before Kaivervale, this hole emitted rays of blue light which lit the cavern fully around them. Where he had expected stone at the back wall, a thin layer of ice shimmered softly.

  And behind the ice wall…

  A great eye. Over a meter wide and nearly as tall—nearly the size of each child crouched before it. It stared unseeing back at them from beyond the layer of ice. Frozen. Still. Unmoving.

  And yet, so animate.

  Nazra let out a low growl, her lips curled against her bared teeth.

  The three children spun fully around, wide-eyed and frightened. The girl dropped the stone she had clutched in her hand and it rolled to her right with a soft grate against the ice. “How did you find us?!”

  Jikun’s eyes flicked downward at the broken silence and he pushed his fear away. The aura in the room was almost tangible. Something of fear and death. He stepped forward, coldly knocking the girl aside and picking up the stone.

  He raised it in his white-knuckled grip while he ran his free hand across the ice covering the eye… The ice that had been recklessly chipped.

  Behind him, the children were silent, frozen beneath his stern movement.“How did you find this?” Jikun suddenly snarled, rounding on them. “What were you doing?!”

  The three responded at once, blaming someone else accordingly as they made a scrambling, terrified retreat toward the icefall. Nazra blocked their flight with a resounding snap of her jaws.

  “One of you,” Jikun barked. “How did you find this?!”

  One of the boys stopped, biting his lip. “I found it, General Taemrin, sir,” he swallowed. “You always find a cave behind the falls, don’t you know? And we thought it would be our secret place… Like in The Tales of Rukalain or Twin Nights…”

  Jikun dropped the stone into the chasm at his feet, disregarding, in his focus, its chilling similarity to the Tuserine outside the city walls. “Do you know what this is?” he demanded, pointing at the eye behind him.

  The three children exchanged glances. “A dragon?”

  “The Mother of the Thakish?”

  “A demon?”

  “Worse,” Jikun hissed in reply. “If you free it, it will rip you from limb to limb and drop your bones into this hole. And no one will ever know what became of you. Do you understand me? Do not ever return here! Do not breathe a word of this. It will remember who awakened it.” He snapped his fingers and Nazra stepped to the side to let the children run, screaming and crying, from the cavern.

  Jikun turned back to the wall, no sympathies given, and rested a hand tensely on his wolf’s head. “Gods only know what that thing is,” he breathed nervously. A dragon? The Mother of the Thakish? A demon? Emal’drathar grant them protection from any of those beasts.

  Nazra bared her teeth at it once more.

  “Come. There is nothing more to do here…”

  Jikun turned from the pale yellow eye and stepped out from the cavern.

  “Jikun, what are you doing?”

  Jikun straightened abruptly as his eyes readjusted to the morning light now peering up over the Turmazel peaks. “Kaivervi. Jekum. Lais. Nalaen,” Jikun greeted them in turn.

  Lais cocked his head in unison with his wolf as he gazed at the hole in the falls, piercing grey eyes alighting with curiosity. “Yes,
what were you doing?”

  “We almost left without you,” Nalaen continued reproachfully, huffing out of her plump frown. “I did tell Merkan I would be back before dinner.”

  Jikun glanced at Nazra as her composure relaxed and she ran to join the four other wolves. He exhaled heavily and gestured silently behind him.

  “What?” Kaivervi’s brow knit as she studied his face. Silently, she stepped past him and ducked into the hole in the falls.

  “By the goddess of Darival,” he heard her voice echo in horror from within.

  The other three immediately shoved past him and vanished through the hole.

  “Jikun! How did you find this!” he heard Nalaen’s high voice gasp.

  “What in Ramul is it?” Lais breathed.

  Jikun remained where he was. Saebellus’ beast had unnerved him. Frightened him even, as it should. But this creature, even in death, was comparable in the aura it produced. “I don’t know what it was; it was discovered by a handful of children,” Jikun responded. “I have felt something like this before in my war with Saebellus. But nothing of this size. Only the gods know how long it has been there.”

  “Perhaps since Izre froze Darival?” Jekum theorized, reappearing from the cavern, somewhat paler than usual, even given his alabaster complexion.

  Jikun turned in stern admonition for the ridiculous theory. “That’s mythology, Jekum. There are no gods.”

  Jekum scowled. “Keep your skepticism to yourself. That’s not important right now. I mean hundreds of thousands of years.”

  Lais, Nalaen, and Kaivervi appeared behind him shortly after, Nalaen closing the hole in the falls with the artistic perfection not achieved by the children in their attempt to protect their secret. “Whatever it is, it’s better off left where it is.” She shivered, tossing her light blue hair across her broad shoulders. “To think it’s been there that long and no one knew…” A shiver ran up her stocky body, but it was not the cold that made her shake.

  “We’re not going to tell anyone?” Lais frowned, his thin lips drawn slightly in anxiety.

  Jikun regarded him coolly. Even having been away from home for the last three years, he knew better than to suggest such a notion. “Do you really want to have people poking around that… whatever it is? Gods know someone’s curiosity will win over his reason. And if not us, the Sel’vi will hear of it. And they will come and they will explore it. You know the stories of the Black Iron Dwarves.”

  He saw the four of them glance at each other nervously. Jekum and Lais grimaced as one.

  “Dig far enough and you will not like what you find,” Kaivervi responded with a curt nod, as though for a moment any one of them could forget the lesson. “Whatever it is, it’s buried beneath this mountain. Lithriella’s blessing that you found this before the children caused trouble. Better we leave it there. We’ll make sure no one finds it.”

  “Well, currently, your challenge is keeping the mouths of three children shut,” Jikun replied, smacking his thigh to get Nazra’s attention. “And I suspect that is challenge enough.” He stepped away from the fall, Nazra leaping several feet ahead. “Are we going on the hunt?”

  He watched the four of them draw their eyes away from the falls.

  “The thakish have been unnaturally vicious as of late,” Nalaen nodded as she focused in on his words. “We’d better get to it. Better to cull their numbers quickly before matters become much worse.”

  Jikun fell into step between them as they moved away from the falls, but he found that his mind had wandered once more from the hunt, shifting past the great eye to the Beast. Was this the curiosity Navon felt when he delved into necromancy? Was this why he pursued his questions so persistently?

  Did he not also feel the foreboding that lay in their answers?

  *

  Jikun tightened his grip on the scruff of Nazra’s neck as he lowered his body down over hers. He could feel her muscles tense beneath him.

  “Do you see it?” Kaivervi whispered beside him from the back of Husakai. Her cerulean eyes were intense, her high cheeks purple in the cold.

  Jikun pulled the focus off of her proximity and followed the narrowed gaze of her wolf out across the vivid white glare of the tundra. The world was silent and still—not even the wind dared breathe across her surface.

  “I don’t see this one…” Nalaen murmured from his other side, her breath rising in a soft, white cloud above her thick lips as she gave a soft exhale.

  Jikun studied the snow before him. The white thakish were skilled hunters, digging themselves into the tundra with their four powerful front legs and burying themselves back in with a handful of flexible finger-like structures on their backs. Their fur was as white as the snow itself, so even a failed bury was difficult to spot. And a successful hide was nearly impossible: just the tip of the thakish’s white nose and solid white eyes would remain above the surface.

  And they were infinitely patient.

  Jikun’s eyes slowed across a slight dip in the landscape.

  “Ten meters, slightly to your left,” Kaivervi continued.

  Jikun could see Lais and Jekum nod as one. “I see it,” they replied in unison.

  Jikun’s eyes swept the tundra at her description and paused. Yes, there—nearly impossible to distinguish in the landscape. It stared directly at them in perfect stillness, waiting for one of them to wander close enough to its fanged jaws.

  “I’ve gotten quite poor at this,” Jikun muttered shamefully. Gods, just as his father had said, southern hunting was embarrassingly easy compared to this. “That would definitely be a dead elf and wolf on my part.”

  “That’s why you never hunt alone,” Jekum replied with a smile, raising his spear slightly. “Lais. Nalaen.”

  Jikun watched as the two formed a wide circle around the thakish, coming to stop a good breadth behind it.

  “Get ready,” Jekum ordered.

  Kaivervi moved forward, nudging Husakai toward the waiting beast.

  “You just freeze it, don’t you?” Jikun inquired, confused by the unfamiliarity of the hunters’ movement.

  “We try to,” Jekum replied. “But lately it hasn’t been enough. You should see how they’ve changed over the last few months…”

  Jikun’s brow knit. What drove the thakish’s new aggression? He watched as Kaivervi halted five meters from the beast and raised her hand before her fur-bound chest. In instant response to her command, the snow around the creature’s body liquefied and began to refreeze.

  No sooner did this begin than the tundra around them shook.

  Nazra had seen this many times before, but still, she reeled back cautiously, snapping her jaws and shaking her great head. Jikun’s body tensed as one with hers.

  The thakish burst from the icy water in a single, high leap, sending snow and ice from its thick fur to shower across the tundra, letting out a shrill cry of fury as it landed beside Kaivervi.

  Jikun’s eyes widened at the distance it had covered. ‘What in Aersadore…?!’

  As though of one mind, the wolves of Nalaen and Lais dashed forward in response, their riders’ hands clenching the fur at their scruffs, legs pressed into their sides.

  Jekum raised a wall of ice before Kaivervi to give her a moment’s retreat, but as though it had been made of glass, the beast smashed through it with the single force of its weight, sending wolf and rider tumbling away.

  “Kaivervi!”

  Jikun watched as the two spears of Nalaen and Lais buried themselves deep into the haunches of the beast. It let out a shrill roar of fury, but to Jikun’s horror, it did not turn to the two elves behind it, as Jikun remembered their behavior’s usual predictability. Instead, it leapt forward, front legs crashing into the earth beside Kaivervi, crushing Husakai beneath its front left leg as easily as the snow beneath its right.

  “HUSAKAI!!” Kaivervi let out a cry of anguish and terror that resounded across the tundra like a crash of thunder. She scrambled backward, throwing up a desperate wall o
f ice before her as she reached back toward some semblance of fleeting safety.

  “Nazra, go!” Jikun ordered abruptly. He heard a shout of protest from Jekum as he lurched forward, tearing across the tundra toward the thakish. He loosed his spear, embedding it into the skull of the beast above the eye, causing it to toss its head in pain. It shifted its body away from Kaivervi long enough to identify its new attacker.

  “Jikun!” he heard Jekum bellow again in desperate command. “Don’t!!”

  Jikun stopped beside Kaivervi, leaping from Nazra’s back and scooping up her spear in a single, fluid motion. He launched it into the creature’s middle eye. A series of walls formed before him as Nalaen and Lais circled back toward the front.

  For a moment, the thakish was lost behind the façade of safety. “Are you alright?” Jikun asked as he pulled Kaivervi to her feet, eyes scanning her body swiftly for injury.

  He could see her lips tremble as they parted for a response, her body balancing against him as her mind reeled from what had just occurred.

  Her eyes scanned the ice behind him in desperation.

  “He’s gone,” Jikun interrupted her harshly, pushing her toward Nazra with a disconnect he willed would snap her instincts to return. “Go!”

  Kaivervi climbed onto Nazra’s back, jerking her scruff to the left, and turned back toward Jikun. “Come,” she ordered, extending her hand.

  “Nazra, go!” he barked before Kaivervi had a chance to protest. He saw her face flicker in surprise as the wolf tore away on command.

  But Jikun knew: Nazra couldn’t carry the both of them. She was not as large as Jekum’s or Lais’ companion. He swept his hand near the snow at his feet, a lance of ice forming in his right hand as he moved. He felt the earth around him tremble as the thakish slammed through a wall of ice layered before the next. He saw the taloned toes of the beast grip the top of the final wall before him, and the silhouette of the creature slid away from the earth.

  Jikun stepped backward swiftly, raising the spear at the ready.

  “Jikun!” Lais shouted from his right, his deep voice twisted high in terror and desperation. “Gods, what are you doing?! You’re going to get yourself killed!”