Hunt for Valamon

by Mok, DK

  Olrios set a crimson glass tumbler in front of Seris, pouring in the milky contents of half a coconut. The other half went into Olrios’s own frosted blue glass, and the sorcerer took a deep draught. Seris glanced at the palms outside, then back to the gold-flecked tumbler in front of him, wondering if he was actually lying feverishly in a ditch somewhere, reaching for an imaginary glass of coconut juice.

  “I like your tower,” said Seris. “I thought sorcerers usually went for bones and obsidian, or marble and carnivorous vines.”

  “That’s because most sorcerers think it’s all about the power,” said Olrios, settling into a curved chair woven from dried reeds. “‘Look, I can construct a tower out of teeth and trapped souls!’ Sure, it’s impressive, but do you really want to live there? I’ve found that power is far less important than creativity. You can achieve things with skill that force would only destroy. One of my best spells was the one to keep the beard away. It made me look twice as old and half as sane. And what’s the point of being able to smite whole armies if you’ve always got food stuck in your facial hair?”

  Seris wasn’t entirely certain whether this train of conversation actually had any rails.

  “Um, yes,” said Seris. “I guess it could be quite unhyg—”

  “So what possesses a man to swim into a funnel cloud these days?” said Olrios suddenly, taking another swig from his silvery-blue tumbler.

  Seris hadn’t been aware that he was treading on ice until he realised how thin it was. However, as he’d discovered, diplomacy was sometimes less important than tenacity.

  “I want to know why you cursed the Kali-Adelsa.”

  Olrios smiled, but there was a hint of ice in his eyes, like the tip of a glacier floating in tropical waters.

  “I didn’t,” said Olrios.

  The sound of waves lapped softly outside.

  “But everyone says—” began Seris. “That is, the texts all say it was you. There were over a hundred witnesses.”

  “Actually, there were seven,” said Olrios, watching Seris casually. “And only three of them survived the fire. None of them with their minds intact.”

  “The fire?”

  Olrios’s eyes suddenly looked slightly out of place in his tanned, sunny face. As though something else were gazing out from behind the cut-out eyes of a portrait.

  “If you think the Kali-Adelsa is dangerous now, you should have seen her before I got to her,” said Olrios. “I didn’t cast the curse. I set the breaker.”

  Seris felt like he’d just unlocked the door to all the answers, only to discover that he’d merely unlocked the gate that led to the woods that hid the labyrinth that held the castle that guarded the room that held the key to open the door that was in a completely different dimension.

  “Sorry,” said Seris. “The breaker?”

  “The poor girl wasn’t given a curse. She was given a destiny. I just gave her a loophole.”

  Seris felt a little dizzy. He was probably dehydrated, and that glass of coconut juice looked awfully refreshing.

  “What do you mean, she was given a destiny?”

  “You’re probably too young to remember the Tide. When the sorcerers were given a choice—bind themselves to the empire or perish.”

  It seemed as though a shadow passed over the kitchen, and Olrios’s expression was carefully impassive.

  “Most of us perished,” said Olrios. “But not before a covenant was made among the last of the true sorcerers—the Old Kin—who walked the land before the power of the world was diminished. At the height of their reign, even the gods trod softly before them. And now, before their final fall, they drew together to cast a destiny of vengeance upon a newborn child, a girl.”

  As Olrios recited the verse, it seemed as though the words themselves were aflame in the air.

  The vessel for deliverance

  Walks alone until the day

  Her shadow falls on rising sun,

  And sinks a kingdom to its grave.

  This time, Seris barely noticed that the verse didn’t actually rhyme.

  “The Kali-Adelsa’s going to destroy the Talgaran Empire?” said Seris.

  King Delmar isn’t afraid of the curse, thought Seris. He must have known about the destiny.

  “The spell couldn’t be broken,” said Olrios. “The intensity of rage, the amount of power in it—it’s the stuff of the old days. The blood fury protecting that girl, you can’t create sorcery like that anymore. Those days are gone. And the girl…”

  Olrios shivered, his eyes dark with memory.

  “She was just an empty thing—a living shell of devastating power,” he said. “The spell turned those around her into automatons, keeping the babe alive while she drew the life from everything she touched. I found her when she was three years old, the same day as the first of Delmar’s assassins.”

  “The curse—the thing about the strength and the luck—that broke the spell?” said Seris.

  “No sorcery could break the spell directly. But I wove a loophole into her destiny, gave her back a fragment of her soul. I could only shift the power, so the strength and luck remained, at the cost of love and trust, to create a thinning where the spell just might break, given the right circumstances.”

  “How?” Seris leaned forward anxiously. “How do you break it?”

  Olrios leaned back in his chair.

  “I don’t know,” he said, lazily swirling the remains of his coconut juice.

  Seris stared at Olrios flatly.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “How do you heal people?” said Olrios. “Eliantora gives you a mental hug and suddenly people stop bleeding, but you have to go lie down. That’s the thing with sorcery. You invoke a request, and it takes a payment. It’s not always tidy, it’s not always clear, and it’s not always fair. I think you understand what I mean.”

  All Seris really understood at this point was that he’d just trekked across the continent and lost his shoes and probably his mind, to find that Olrios didn’t know how to break a curse that was going to consume an empire and possibly all the people in it.

  Olrios continued to swirl the juice around his glass.

  “Personally, I always figured a knife through the heart would do the trick. But don’t get so worked up about it. You won’t remember any of this once you leave anyway.”

  Seris looked at Olrios blankly, suddenly glad he hadn’t drunk any of the coconut juice. Although, when he fainted from dehydration, he might feel differently. Seris glanced at the driftwood door, but he knew you can’t outrun a sorcerer.

  “I’ve spent the last seventeen years hiding from…” Olrios seemed to be drawing a mental tally. “…everyone. So it’s nothing personal.”

  “And you’re just going to continue hiding. The curse, the spell, whatever is causing the destruction, is getting stronger. She turned a huge prison into sand, she almost drained the life from an entire Lirel village—”

  Olrios flinched slightly but kept his gaze on the window, his hand gripped around his glass.

  “Right now, Elhan—that’s her name, by the way—is headed for Algaris, and a war is about to erupt across the empire,” said Seris. “I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a whole lot of destiny about to go down. If you want to bask on your beach, that’s fine, but if you dare try to stop me from doing what I can—”

  Seris’s gaze was like an avalanche of bunnies—amusingly harmless until you realised just how much damage a hundred tonnes of rabbit could do.

  It made sense to him now, the power within Elhan, the waiting eyes—not the product of an eccentric curse, but the corrosive wrath and residue of the Old Kin. Their will, feeding off the life that Elhan should have lived. It brought to mind certain unsuspecting caterpillars—stung by a particular kind of wasp—who crawled into their chrysalides with a slight bellyache. And what eventually emerged was not a butterfly.

  He wouldn’t let that happen to Elhan. She deserved to emerge a butterf
ly. Or at least a happy moth.

  “Sometimes, it’s best to do nothing,” said Olrios quietly. “You can do things with the best of intentions and end up regretting that you acted at all.”

  “You can just as easily regret inaction.” Seris rose to his feet. “Even when there are too many, even when it’s too late, even when all seems lost, you keep going until you can’t. Through the blood and the grief, person after person, until you’ve done everything you can, because the worst thing you can do is not try.”

  Olrios turned cynical eyes towards Seris.

  “Even if you knew how to stop her,” said Olrios, “do you really think you have it in you to do it?”

  “Perhaps I won’t know until the moment comes,” said Seris. “But the important thing is that I try.”

  Olrios drained his glass, setting the tumbler on a crooked tea chest, the bolts long since rusted to grit.

  “Twenty years ago, I was faced with a difficult choice,” said Olrios. “I could fight alongside my kind and perish with them. Or I could… create a compromise where none existed.”

  A strange shadow seemed to tug at Olrios’s features, like a curtain stirring in the breeze, revealing disturbing glimpses of what lay behind.

  “I offered Delmar a way to bind the sorcerers who chose to submit to Talgaran rule,” said Olrios. “There were many who saw it as an unforgivable betrayal, many who still feel that way. But sometimes, you do terrible things because you believe it will cause the least amount of suffering.”

  “Do you feel it was worth it?”

  “I think it’s one kind of person who feels that it was,” said Olrios. “And another kind of person who feels that it wasn’t.”

  “And which are you?”

  Olrios gave a resigned sigh.

  “I suspect the more foolish of the two.” Olrios rose to his feet. “You should at least drink that juice before you go throwing yourself under the wheels of destiny.”

  The warhorses of Fey were legend. A good warhorse was your tracker, your soldier, your counsel. You couldn’t buy or sell or break a warhorse of Fey, and those who tried often woke with a horse-breaker’s rapidly cooling head in their bed and bloody hoofprints on the sheets. But now, the warhorses of Fey lived only in legend.

  When Fey had been invaded by Delmar’s army, all the warhorses fought until they fell. All but Ciel, who’d carried Haska and her mother to safety. And now Ciel was gone.

  Haska couldn’t begin to comprehend it, and she couldn’t afford to dwell on it now. Valamon was gone again, and although she wouldn’t admit it, Haska felt just the slightest bit relieved. Valamon had been right about one thing—petty vengeance wouldn’t bring back her family or her country. And the idea of a public execution had been steadily losing its appeal for some time now.

  Haska marched up the stairwell into the Tower Hall. No matter how many times she saw the crackling blue light, it still made her uneasy. Amoriel stood by the large, misshapen window, her hand resting on the sill. Threads of blue light bled through the stone, rippling through the walls and drawing into her fingers. Liadres sat on the floor beside a pale circle filled with intricate symbols, a stub of chalk in his hand. He was staring at Amoriel with an expression of unadulterated worship. Barrat stood by the door with his arms crossed, looking at Liadres with barely disguised contempt.

  “General,” said Haska. “Something wrong?”

  “No, Lord Haska.” Barrat turned his attention to Haska. “Lady Amoriel’s preparations are almost complete. I’m sure Liadres would be better occupied elsewhere.”

  “Liadres has worked hard for this moment,” said Haska. “He deserves to see this.”

  Haska glanced at Liadres, who sat erect and eager as a hound on the hunt. He was a strange boy with an odd mind, but without his contribution Haska doubted even Amoriel could have successfully transported so many living things across such distances. Just last week, with his newest algorithms, they’d managed to transport Brae to the Bloodcurdling Bogs and back. Admittedly, Brae had returned screaming about giant leeches and smothered in what Haska could only guess was monster-worm snot, but he’d been mostly alive.

  Barrat pushed aside his expression of disapproval and cleared his throat.

  Gods, at least he can’t tell me Valamon’s escaped again, thought Haska.

  “Lord Haska,” said Barrat. “It is my responsibility to inform you that the delegates are beginning to question your judgement. I strongly recommend—”

  “We’re not going after him,” said Haska.

  Barrat paused.

  “We assembled under this banner for the common purpose of defeating Delmar and delivering this land from Talgaran rule,” said Haska. “We go without the prince.”

  “And Ciel?” said Amoriel casually from across the room.

  Haska swallowed a lump in her throat. Her hand closed around the hilt of her sword, the steel as familiar to her as the mask on her face. Now all she had left of her land were her mother’s sword and her memories. They would have to be enough.

  “We leave for Algaris on your mark, Lady Amoriel,” said Haska.

  And then gods help us all.

  A veil of clouds obscured the stars, and Valamon leaned close to Ciel’s neck as she galloped through the dense trees. He had to say that escaping by horseback was much easier than trying to get away on foot. He was certain that, if he were running through the woods himself, he’d have crashed into several trees by now, but Ciel seemed to fly through the darkness with complete confidence.

  However, Valamon wasn’t completely clear on whether he was escaping with a horse, or whether a horse was escaping with him. He’d crept into the stables in the hope of finding a reasonably compliant steed, and had been happy to see a familiar face. Ciel seemed less than thrilled to see him, but she hadn’t bucked when he slid into the saddle. Nor had she moved. Ciel had simply stood there flintily for some time, deep in horse contemplation. Valamon had been fairly sure that one of the things she’d contemplated was rolling over the eminently crushable human sitting on her.

  However, she’d eventually shaken her neck and trotted out the stable doors, past lines of oblivious guards, and out towards the forests. Valamon was fairly sure any attempts at steering Ciel would not end well, but she seemed to be heading in the general direction he wanted to go.

  As they raced through the trees, Valamon could smell the faint aroma of spices and salt air, but it wasn’t until they began leaping over the swollen roots of the arbige trees that he realised where they were. Through the gaps in the clouds, he could see familiar constellations, and a thrill of recognition shivered through him. These were the forests just west of Horizon’s Gate.

  Valamon felt an ache in his chest. He was less than two days’ ride from home, from his family, from a world he hadn’t dared believe he’d see again. It made his decision all the more painful, but he’d made his choice. He might not be a leader, but he loved his people no less, and he was prepared to do whatever it took to protect them.

  Ciel stopped so suddenly that Valamon was almost thrown. He wondered whether this had been her intent, but then he noticed the chill sweeping through the trees. The clouds closed upon the stars and the darkness seemed to thicken. Valamon’s heart began to pound inexplicably, and Ciel trembled beneath him, which made him wonder if he should be even more worried. And then he saw it.

  It crept out of the shadows like a soulless thing, with eyes that chittered like a bucketful of bugs. It smiled at him with a face that didn’t belong on anything human.

  “Well,” said Elhan, “it must be my lucky day.”

  The staircase spiralled upwards in a frozen cascade of golden sand. Seris followed Olrios up the sunlit steps, glancing at the black-eyed gulls perched on the windowsills.

  “Do you even know where the Kali-Adelsa is?” said Olrios.

  “I think Elhan’s still looking for Prince Valamon, who should be in Lord Haska’s fort, which is supposed to be headed for Algaris,” said Seris.

&
nbsp; “That’s a fairly emphatic ‘no’.”

  “No, that’s three partial ‘yeses’. Can you find Lord Haska’s fort?”

  Olrios shook his head.

  “The sorcery protecting it is greater than mine. The transport spell you described sounds like nothing I’ve heard of. The energy required would be massive—certainly nothing a single sorcerer could achieve, unless they found a way to amplify and focus the power. But even then, living things are tricky…”

  Olrios seemed lost in mental calculations as he paused at a door on the landing, absently running a finger over the brass lock. There was a click, and he pushed through the doorway. If this were a normal tower, stepping through the opening would have resulted in a long drop to the beach below. However, as Seris peered in, he was unsurprised to see a long, narrow room stretching into the distance.

  The walls were hung with small, lusciously coloured oil paintings, each depicting an evocative landscape in charming detail. There were no windows in this room, yet each painting seemed illuminated by some unseen source of light.

  “Elhan’s convinced that Lord Haska is headed for Algaris,” said Seris. “I think that’s where I have to go.”

  Olrios strolled past the paintings, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

  “It’s too far,” said Olrios, more to himself than Seris. “I could send you to Thalamir, maybe even Tigrath…”

  “Uh, I’m not too keen on Tigrath,” said Seris. “You don’t have something like flying shoes, or even just shoes would be helpful—”

  Olrios’s eyes suddenly snapped onto a painting, then jumped back to Seris in a slightly disconcerting manner.

  “It’s been a while,” said Olrios, reaching into his shirt. “But it might be our best option…”

  He withdrew a golden tube engraved with elaborate flourishes. He pulled a roll of parchment from the tube and scrawled a few copperplate words. As Seris craned to read the inky letters, Olrios slotted the parchment back into the tube with a slap of his palm.