by Tammy Salyer
But, like the wash of wystic lore from the Scrylle, she could not control it. And this vision did not seem to be her own. She knew she was under the sway of the usurper, like a puppet. He had taken her sight to use for his own purposes.
As if a witness to a crime she could do nothing to stop, she observed from the void as her own eyes swept the interior of the ruin. In moments, they fixed on the seal of Lífs on the floor.
Himmingaze, Balavad intoned. It would be wise of you, Knight, to remain there until I arrive.
Abruptly, she was blind again as the Verity abandoned her mind. For half a heartbeat, all was the blackest black inside her head, then with the violence of a thunderclap, she was flung back inside her skin. The sensation jarred her so roughly that she fell forward, knocking the Scrylle over and the Fenestros free of its mount.
The cold of the chamber washed over her hands and face. She rolled faceup, grateful to be back to herself, back in her body, and free from the deluge of the Scrylle lore.
But what have I done?
Looking into the Scrylle had made her defenseless and opened her weak mind to the enemy. Now he knew—he knew. She had hoped to find something that would help her and the rest of the Knights, but instead she had led their enemy to more weapons against them.
The thought made her sick. Climbing woozily to her knees, she reached for the pillar to pull herself to her feet. Rising made her head swim, partly from the aftereffects of having just been assaulted by a maelstrom of foreign lore, partly from having been vandalized by a Verity, and partly from simple horror at her own ignominious, destructive feats.
Frantically, she lurched outside, craving the sharpness of the cold rain to slap her out of the panicked paralysis. At the base of the steps to the temple, she looked upward into the strange, foreign sky, the light now dimming toward full night. Without thinking, she channeled an anguished cry through her Mentalios, a cry for help, a cry for the one person she knew who might.
Stallari, where are you?
Expecting no response, she hung her head, letting the frigid rain seep into her collar and once again dampen her skin, as well as her spirit.
Mylla, do you hear me?
The sound of Ulfric’s voice through the Mentalios washed over her head like a warm breeze. It had to be her imagination, didn’t it? Wishful thinking? But it had been so . . . usual. His voice as she’d known it now for hundreds of turns around Halla.
Stallari? she tried, hoping her hopes were not shattered. Another trial of her spirit at this moment would utterly defeat her.
Then her vision blurred for a moment and her knees buckled, dropping her onto the sharp, unforgiving rocks. I’ve used too much strength. First looking into the Scrylle, and now channeling thoughts so far. It’s taking too much of a toll. If I continue, I’ll weaken too much.
But she couldn’t simply remain silent, not now, not after finally hearing Ulfric again. This was her last chance to help Ivoryss and Vinnr. To help the Knights. And possibly, if she wasn’t too late, to help Lock.
The pain of knowing she could fail tore into her.
Mylla, do you hear me?
Stallari! Where are you? She gasped as dots danced before her eyes.
He responded immediately. We are both in Himmingaze, the realm of the Verity called Lífs. Are you in a ruin of white stone with a soaring archway overhead?
Yes, yes! Lífs’s temple. On an island. The effort it took to say that much forced her to crumble forward, and she caught herself on her hands before pitching face-first into the ground. The dots danced in front of her eyes again, and she blinked several times to clear them. As she was doing so, she caught sight of something in the air near her. Straightening back up, she looked to her right. Within the swirling dark violet sky, broken by fat raindrops that struck her head and ran into her eyes, she thought she could see something floating in the air over the water. It moved swiftly, undulating like a pennant in a calm but steady breeze, but much larger. Even as it rippled through the rain, she could see it was very long, at least three times her height. She squinted to try and see it better, but the dastardly rain only got in the way.
Lightning flashed. And she saw . . .
Oh Verity’s stars, what—
Chapter 41
The Knight and Jaemus had switched seats to allow Jaemus full control as they approached Isle Stonering. He landed the Octopod at the single flat space at the north end, the same place he’d originally set down. Despite Aldinhuus’s obvious urgency, distress even, Jaemus found himself with little to say. The encounter with the Verity had left him too rattled to maintain his normal streaming monologue or dialogue, depending on the availability of another with whom to chat.
A celestial being. A real celestial, a skywalking star sprite. He rolled this thought in his mind, twisting the description, changing the tone with which he said it to himself, trying every permutation of the idea he could think of. Because the truth was, it was impossible that a celestial power beyond that of nature itself existed and created, well, everything. But the truer truth was, he’d just met said power—and he actually believed it was real.
A maker of everything that is or that can be thought of. Not just nature, but nature’s creator.
And the funny thing was, every new description he came up with seemed equally correct. They all fit because everything, by definition, was part of a Verity’s milieu.
“Open the hatch, Bardgrim. We can’t waste a moment.”
The Knight’s fraught tone cut through his reverie. That was another thing. Something had agitated the spit out of the man just a short while ago, and they’d come close to burning out the Octopod’s engines to get here. He hadn’t shared what it might be, and Jaemus, admittedly, had reached his maximum tolerance for weirdness for the time being. He was willing to let it go.
They ring-shaped exit hatch retracted and the ladder automatically began unfolding. Before it finished, however, Aldinhuus jumped down and ran off into the dark rain—leaving Jaemus alone.
“Watch out for the—” he began before it struck him. After all Aldinhuus’s threats and bluster, he’d just left the door wide open for Jaemus to escape.
It only took him a breath to realize, however, that he wasn’t going anywhere, not after what he’d experienced. He had too many questions, which may as well be chains tethering him to the Knight. No way could he leave without answers. No way.
Climbing down more cautiously than Aldinhuus had, he stood with his back to the ladder for a moment, squinting into the glittering dark. Fleeches inhabited the waters around here. And now without his goggles, they would be ten times harder to see.
Despite his caution, he could barely make anything out past the Octopod’s muted lights. The only sound was the steady wet patter of water on hard rock. Aldinhuus had disappeared into the miasma.
He spared a thought for the shelksies aboard but didn’t bother going back for one. The projectiles had no effect whatsoever on a fleech, and they were too fast to target anyway. Picking his steps carefully, he paced toward the temple’s entryway, calculating how much time they had before Cote and the Glisternauts would arrive.
This concern was wiped from his mind the moment he rounded the front of the temple and saw what had been his worst fear since childhood lying before him.
“What is it?” Aldinhuus asked, his tone almost conversational.
They stood before what was clearly a woman’s body, though she seemed bulkier than was common in Himmingaze. Where in the Cloud could she have come from? It wasn’t at her body, however, that the Knight’s question was directed. It was the layers upon layers of iridescent fleech scales wrapped around her.
“Oh, water and lightning . . .” Jaemus managed to whisper before his stomach did a violent flip-flop, half from revulsion, half from fear. The fleech’s mouthpart had attached to the woman’s neck, leaving her head exposed. Her open eyes were rolled back, rainwater collecting in their whites and leaking over the edges, as if her corpse still cried.
Aldinhuus had him by the collar with one hand before Jaemus was even aware he’d moved. “What is that thing, Bardgrim?” he demanded.
“It’s a fleech. If you knew that woman, forget her. She’s already dead. They attach to their victims and digest them from the inside out. Almost impossible to kill. And where there’s one, there’s others. We have to get inside.”
The goggles remained fixed on his face for a moment as Aldinhuus read his expression for the truth, then he released him. “Stand watch,” he commanded and released his kinky stones.
“Stand watch, yes, I’ll just . . .” he heard himself saying, but his feet had other ideas. He slowly began backing toward the steps to the temple, hoping but doubting that Aldinhuus would either follow or forget him. He had the intestinal fortitude to withstand threats by otherworldly warriors, conversations with celestial beings who weren’t supposed to exist, even breakups with his beloved, but he could not handle a fleech. He just couldn’t.
His heels struck the bottom stair as the Knight unleashed his bombardment of glowing cerulean stones. They moved so swiftly that their lights left trails that stayed aglow after the stones’ passage, turning the entire area around the fleech and its prey into a bright-blue enclosure. Most left divots in the creature’s thick scales, but it didn’t move, seeming not to notice. Aldinhuus controlled how hard he struck, obviously not wanting to perforate both the monster and the woman it held. But Jaemus knew their resilience. He also knew that half of their strength came not from resilience but from quantity. He stared wildly about, knowing that more were coming, or maybe were already—
“Here!” he screeched, toppling onto his hind end as a pale ribbon streaked directly toward him from the sky.
He watched, frozen, as the mouthpart of this second fleech widened on its approach to his throat. Frantically, he squirmed backward up the steps, smelling the rot escaping the thing’s maw just before it struck. Couldn’t have just kept my mouth shut and not told Aldinhuus about the other Verity stones, could I?
Reflexively, he flung his arms up in front of his face in a futile attempt to protect himself, his eyes squeezing shut. Just before the strike, something wet but much slimier and heavier than the rain drenched his arms, some splattering onto his cheek. He opened his eyes. Aldinhuus now stood with arms and legs wide, waving his hands in two directions, one toward the fleech he’d just diverted but which was now coming in for another attack on Jaemus, the other sending stones into the hide of the one eating the woman. The airborne fleech dove and writhed, but each time it got near him, a kinky stone would pierce it and divert it from a direct course. It wouldn’t survive that for long.
Jaemus’s gratitude lasted only a breath before he spotted one, two, maybe five more coming out of the Glister Dim sky. “Friend, if you’ve got any more of those up your sleeves, now would be the time to use them!” he yelled, pointing into the approaching barrage.
The Knight followed his gesture and let out a grunt at the sight. “Bardgrim, grab her and pull her inside. I’ll hold these off.”
“ . . . Uh. Grab her? With that thing wrapped around her? She’d dead!”
“No, she isn’t. Do it! Now!”
Even had he not been terrified almost into paralysis, he wasn’t the strongest man in the world, and she looked heavy, though he knew fleeches themselves to be deceptively light. But he also knew fear had a way of giving people strength, and he could hardly leave the poor woman—the poor Vinnric woman, for what else could she possibly be?—to die horribly in the never-ending Himmingazian rain.
He rushed to her body, refusing to look into the sky and watch the approaching murder monsters. Unwilling to get near the fleech’s mouthparts, though he knew it would not unlatch until it was full, he grabbed the woman’s boots extending from the bottom of the tight coils. In the process, he also got a handful of the thing’s scaly hide, and his stomach lurched with disgust.
As he began dragging the woman—and Cosmos clutter she was indeed heavy—he yelled, “Come on, Aldinhuus, use that light shield to protect us!”
Aldinhuus did not seem to hear him. Jaemus could see the man had his hands full, but he absolutely did not want to be left alone with a fleech and what was most assuredly a dead woman inside the temple while the Knight met his doom outside. Because, he had to be realistic, that’s exactly what was about to happen.
Just as he twisted his head aside to see how much farther he had to go, something slammed into him from behind. No, not something. He knew what it was. The fleech whipped its coils around him faster than lightning, and its mouthpart would have attached to his neck, but he dropped the woman’s legs and got his arms up just in time.
Did he scream? Did it matter? This was the end. He smelled the dank scent of the remnants of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead sea animals that had been the monster’s last meals, and his brain decided against taking a deep breath for another scream. Not that it would have helped. Despite the monster’s lightness, it was too strong for him. The mouthpart strained against his upraised forearms, making a squishy sucking sound, and its scaly body tensed around him, squeezing harder the harder he fought.
With his last bit of air, he offered a guttural roar to the fates that had forced this fine mess on him and squeezed his eyes shut. He’d seen all he wanted to.
Chapter 42
The flying maggot-like fish continued their onslaught in such numbers that Ulfric was having trouble keeping them at bay. He flung a formation of stones just in time to knock one away from his face before it latched on, but more followed. And more. There had to be a dozen in the air, and they were tough. Tougher than a full-grown chelbiefin shark.
Risking the quickest of glances rearward, he saw the engineer dragging Mylla toward the shrine at an agonizingly slow rate. It was a good thing he turned when he did—just in time to ward off another of the things that had been aiming directly at Bardgrim’s back. But the next instant, a scaled tail snaked past Ulfric’s defenses and wrapped around one of his ankles, yanking hard. His stance, as hardy and unrelenting as a mountain, barely budged, and he stoned the thing liberally before it let go.
A few had lost the fight, and their corpses plunked to the rocky ground. But more came. From behind him, the engineer yelled out, and Ulfric knew it as the sound of defeat.
I can’t beat an ocean of these. I need assistance.
Where were his dragørfly allies? What had he done to call them before that he wasn’t doing now? And then it came to him.
Ripping free the eye shields, his vision instantly morphed into the otherworldly sight he was barely getting used to, and his mind again loosened, as if more than he was present. Just as it had the first time he’d needed aid, a stroke of blue light blossomed in the air around him, and when it cleared, a legion of his dragørfly allies abounded. Assistance had arrived.
The flying soldiers glowed with a piercing spark that lit the area all around them. As a single formation and with almost mechanical precision, they swarmed the attacking sea monsters and clasped on to them. The fleeches writhed and twisted in whip-crack contortions, looking as if they were being gashed by daggers from whatever the dragørflies were doing to them. With their assault diverted for the moment, Ulfric turned just as a fleech attached itself to the engineer’s neck and pulled him to the ground. Ulfric loped to his aid and directed the klinkí stones in a concentrated onslaught just below the thing’s mouthpart. Mylla might be able to survive whatever these creatures did to their victims, but Ulfric had a feeling the Himmingazian was made of less stern stuff. Within moments, the fleech was in two pieces, and Ulfric gripped the head and yanked the mouthpart free.
“Are you all right, Bardgrim?” he yelled, keeping his defenses focused on the writhing mob surrounding them.
There was no response for a moment, then: “I think I’m ruined from eating fish for the rest of my life.”
He glanced back and saw the engineer extracting himself from the dead fleech’s loosened coils. “Help me. Grab her
other foot,” he commanded, squatting and taking one of Mylla’s boots. “Quickly!”
Holding back the diminished fleech attacks with one klinkí-stone-wielding hand, Ulfric tugged Mylla with the other. With Bardgrim’s help, they entered the shrine and slammed the heavy doors closed.
Bardgrim released a boot and fell back against the wall beside the entryway, breathing hard. Ulfric quickly performed the same beheading on the fleech attached to Mylla and soon had the thing free. Bending down, he slid his arms beneath her armpits and dragged her free of the dead monster.
“Mylla,” he muttered, looking into her lifeless face. To his weirded sight, her eyes seemed to gleam with a white-gold light, and the air immediately surrounding her skin, as cold as the rain, shimmered with minute flashes of the same light. Oddly, a color he’d never seen before, and for which he had no name, something that was gold and silver and purple all at the same time, sparked from the aura surrounding her too. He couldn’t identify it, or what caused it, but chose not to dwell on what it might be. The important thing was, she wasn’t dead, her Verity spark sustained her. But it was weak, and it would take time for it to renew itself and grow stronger.
But she was here. Somehow, she was here. For a moment, his pride at her strength and resilience swelled, much as it did when Isemay showed him one of her many accomplishments. The sharp pain in his heart was unexpected.
The interior suddenly lit up brightly, stunning him for a moment. He blinked and pulled the eye shields back over his eyes. “What are you doing, Bardgrim?” he asked after turning and seeing the source of the light in the engineer’s hand.