Time Spiral

by Scott McGough

  The planeswalker floated up next to her, his sheath of blue energy acting as a windbreak. The howling in Radha’s ears died off and she could hear Teferi’s voice clearly.

  “Do you feel it?” he asked. His eyes were bright and probing. “Does your barbarian heart fill to bursting with the fires of Keld?”

  Radha smiled at him wolfishly, pleased by his company for the first time. “I do,” she said.

  “Excellent. This is your first taste of Keld’s true strength, and if you come with me now and do as I ask, I swear to return you here. In less than a week, that mere taste can become a gluttonous meal.” He extended his hand. “Join me, Radha of Keld, and fulfill your true destiny.”

  Radha blinked in confusion. “But I’m here now.”

  Teferi’s confident expression cracked a little. “There is no more time,” he said. “I brought you here to experience the mountain’s power, not to complete the warlord’s walkabout. We have much to do and many other places to go.”

  “‘We,’ ’walker? There is no ‘we’ leaving this mountain, not unless you have a tapeworm.” She turned away from the hand he offered. When she spoke again, she tossed the words carelessly over her shoulder. “You have much to do and many places to go. I have a mountain to climb.” The wind kicked up again as she stepped out from behind his blue aura.

  Radha. The planeswalker’s voice roared through her head like a falling tree, drowning out the wind entirely. The mountainside became eerily still and quiet. Radha found it hard to keep moving, her legs growing heavy and unresponsive.

  She turned. Teferi still floated in his curtain of blue, but his eyes had gone bright white. Tiny jags of azure lightning radiated out from the tip of his staff. “I have been more than patient,” he said, “but this expedition is over. Come with me now, that we might begin another, far more important journey.”

  “Stuff you.” Radha concentrated and lifted her right boot off the ground. She pushed the foot forward, scraping up tiny ridges of snow, then let it thump back down.

  A blue streak crossed her vision from the left and the planeswalker was suddenly blocking her path. “Enough of this, child,” Teferi said. “Come with me now. You have no choice.”

  Gone was the odd-shaped hat and the colorful robes. Teferi was now clad in gleaming metallic robes of electric blue that gave off sizzling sparks. His face seemed leaner and less boyish, and his expression was stern. He stood confident, balanced and ready, his staff clenched firmly in his outstretched hand. The tip of the spinelike walking stick glowed silver-white.

  “I have escaped the bonds of time,” he said. “I have moved continents as if they were puzzle pieces in a child’s playroom. The ceaseless motion of the sea and the boundless sky are mine to command, as is a thousand years of history and exploration.

  “You are a warrior, Radha, but I am a planeswalker. Come with me freely or you will be bottled and toted like a store of fine wine, to be opened and poured out at my leisure. Either way, you will help me. There is no alternative.”

  Radha glared into Teferi’s milk white eyes. “Stuff you,” she said again.

  Teferi blinked. When he opened his eyes, they had lost their white glow. His gaze was no longer soft and friendly, but sharp, hard, and full of dire consequences. “Do not underestimate me,” he said, “or overestimate yourself. You are mortal. I am infinite. You cannot hope to stand against me.”

  “I can and do, you pompous ass. Did you really think you could bring me here and then whisk me away? That a taste of the mountain would be enough? You’re right about my true destiny; it’s is right here and I mean to claim it, right now. Nothing you can do to can keep me from it.”

  Teferi held her eyes. “Prove—” he said, but he never finished the two-word phrase that was an instant incitement to violence for every true Keldon.

  Instead, Radha sprang forward with one of Astor’s kukri daggers in her fist. She rammed the point of the heavy blade up through the bottom of Teferi’s chin and drove it in until the blade’s tip emerged from the top of his head. The planeswalker’s eyes vibrated in their sockets as his lips opened and shut soundlessly. Radha’s own eyes flashed and spat out twin plumes of orange flame.

  She yanked the blade free and watched Teferi fall. More fire flared around the edge of the weapon and Radha stared at it, half-hypnotized by its gentle flicker. When the flames died out she glanced down at Teferi’s body. Oddly, there was no blood, not from the wound or on the blade. She shrugged. Perhaps almighty planeswalkers didn’t bleed.

  Teferi’s blue barrier faded and the wind rose once more. Radha shielded her eyes with the hand that held Astor’s blade, scanning the bald man’s prone form for any signs of life.

  “Are you dead?” she shouted. She reached out and nudged Teferi’s leg with the toe of her boot. “Are you that easy to kill?” She stared for a moment longer, drew back, then kicked Teferi solidly in the thigh.

  There was no reaction. “You are dead, aren’t you?” she said. “You said you were infinite.” She spat on him. “Ass.”

  She was thoroughly annoyed. Teferi dressed like a drunken harlequin, but he had shown her strong magic in the valley and the Necropolis. She had half-believed he was some sort of demigod, but now she saw he was just another wizard who was best at shoveling words.

  Radha allowed herself a cruel grin. Maybe Teferi Planeswalker could only stop time, move continents, and control the oceans if his head wasn’t skewered clean through by Keldon steel.

  She squinted in the glare from Astor’s dagger, which was still tinged with a faint red gleam. She brought the kukri blade down, its inner light illuminating her face. On a hunch, Radha pulled out the second kukri and held it up to the first.

  As they had in the Necropolis, the blades spat fire toward each other and created a line of flame between their tips. Radha felt the mountain’s energy pouring into her, surging up through the soles of her feet. It flowed through her legs and spine, across her shoulders and arms, on into the twin daggers. Wild excitement rose in her once more and she clenched her grandfather’s weapons tightly in her fists.

  “Burn,” she said.

  The air around her burst into a cloud of fiery leaf-shapes. Instead of the cold green flames that she had been able to summon all her life, these were red and yellow-orange and they radiated intense heat.

  Radha’s full-throated laugh echoed up the mountainside. She wept, joyous, and the tears sizzled to steam as they ran down her cheeks. She threw her head back and howled, kukri-flame singeing the ends of her hair.

  She brought the daggers together with an icy clang. The fire flew from her, exploding outward and burning a wide circle into the snow. Teferi’s body remained as it was, unchanged and unmoving.

  Radha slipped both daggers back into her belt and faced down the mountainside. She no longer needed to reach the peak to claim her birthright, just as she no longer needed the long-winded planeswalker’s help. Astor’s daggers and the sacred ground had given her access to Keld’s true might. She had it—she could feel it burning inside her.

  The sharp wind still cut across Radha’s face, but she did not squint. She lit off down the mountain, her long, loping stride even more efficient downhill. The Gathans were nearby.

  Greht would be very surprised to see her again, and more so by what she had to show him. If she did not find Greht this night, she would still find plenty of false Keldon throats to cut until the warlord noticed and came to make her stop.

  Burning brighter and hotter than she ever had before, Radha went looking for the fight of her life.

  Clumsy, Teferi thought to himself as the kukri punched through the top of his skull. Clumsy, careless, and stupid.

  Of course he could not be killed by a blade, not even a well-made blade like Astor’s. His physical presence was little more than a full-body mask. There was no real heart to pierce, bones to break, or blood to spill. Stabbing a planeswalker was as lethal as stabbing a sack of flour shaped like a planeswalker—the damage was mostly co
smetic and easily repaired.

  His mistake here had been thinking like a barbarian instead of an infinite. In his defense, he was still somewhat giddy from the rush of information in the Book of Keld. The berserkers seemed so easy to understand when he had their entire history at his fingertips. Flushed with his newfound understanding of Keld, Teferi had erred by approaching Radha as a fellow warrior, by focusing his energies on physical intimidation.

  Planeswalkers were beings of mind and mystical power, but if they grew too fixed or comfortable in the body they chose, they could fall victim to that body’s inherent weaknesses. He had been in his familiar human guise so long that his consciousness had naturally settled in his head. When Radha spiked his brain, the wound was temporarily as debilitating as if Teferi had been mortal. Once the initial shock passed, his transcendent mind worked quickly to reform his body around the blade in his head, but until then he was by all measures beaten and bereft of life.

  Radha did him a favor by yanking the kukri dagger out. Teferi was aware of falling lifeless to the ground, but rather than struggle back to his feet without his full capacities, he chose to stay facedown and ponder as his nerve endings reestablished contact with his body. It was hard to think with his head as it was, and harder still with Radha taunting and kicking him where he lay.

  She had been much faster than he’d expected. She had a longer reach and a quicker hand, too. That was how she had managed to put him in this embarrassing position.

  But as Radha stretched her arms out and ignited Astor’s daggers, Teferi grudgingly admitted the real reason she had bested him: in their face to face, eye to eye confrontation, he blinked first.

  The Keldon ways of dominance and command were their own kind of language, one Teferi didn’t yet speak fluently. The Book of Keld gave him the form but he was lacking the substance. Intimidating berserkers wasn’t a matter of locking eyes and waiting for the weaker or less confident party to back down. It was more active, more aggressive than simply holding one’s ground … more like an actual attack than the prelude to one.

  Radha had been in the moment, ready to fight, kill, and die over their disagreement. Teferi had been thinking ahead, mapping out what he would do once Radha had been brought to heel. When she struck, he was surprised by her speed, but he had also been rooted in place like a mouse before the cobra, lost in the dazzling fury of the predator’s eye.

  The Keldon elf cried out, “Burn,” and the air around her went up in flames. Facedown in the dirt, Teferi still saw Radha clearly, still perceived the changes in her and Keld’s mana flow that allowed her to produce real fire.

  Now this is interesting, he told himself. Perhaps even worth a dagger in the head. Radha was drawing fire mana to her now as well as nature mana, but she still wasn’t drawing it directly from the mountain. Even here, at the source of Keld’s mana, she needed her grandfather’s daggers and her own mysterious energy supply in order to cast spells. Her connection to the land had not changed. From the savage look of triumph on her face, Radha herself had not realized this.

  As she turned and thundered down the mountainside, Teferi worked harder to recover. She would go straight to the nearest Gathan warhost to test her newfound abilities. Once there, she’d find what the Book of Keld made clear in a hundred different accounts of a hundred different wars: that a single warrior can win a battle, but you need an army to win a sustained campaign. Even the most terrible warlord with the most devastating spells could not expect to defeat a full Keldon warhost by brute force alone. If Radha had read the book, had even glanced at a page or two, she would not be so hasty to challenge the Gathans.

  Teferi continued to lie still on the cold, hard ground. Alas, he thought, some people insist on learning life’s hardest lessons for themselves.

  Radha found her quarry a short run from the mountain, a hastily assembled Gathan camp between two large ridges. It was clear they would not stay long. Five huge wooden carts were lined up and ready to move out at first light, each full of freshly cut Skyshroud timber. It would take less than two days to march to the sea from here, and Greht clearly intended to assemble his new fleet right there on the beach.

  There were a score of drivers and laborers huddled fearfully at the far edge of the camp. A huge Gathan overseer watched them with a long spiked scourge in his hand. Fire shot out of the lash’s tip when he cracked it, and he cracked it frequently and without warning.

  The overseer grinned maliciously. He had been driving them all night, judging from the way they flinched every time his whip arm flexed.

  Radha counted Gathans as they patrolled the camp perimeter and bullied the hapless draught slaves. There were perhaps a dozen of them, towering, swollen-chested, and heavily armed. They were a company of warrior brutes on a degrading, non-combat detail, and Radha could feel their foul temper and frustration hanging in the air like greasy smoke.

  There was no sign of Greht. Radha planned to change that by slaughtering his raiders, driving off his slaves, and burning his lumber while it was still on the carts. If missing two ships’ worth of wood didn’t bring the warlord himself to investigate, Radha would simply hunt down and destroy the next caravan that came through. And the next. Sooner or later, the Gathan warlord would have to personally investigate this significant break in his supply lines.

  Radha wrapped her hand around the hilt of Astor’s dagger, comforted by the sizzling jolt of heat it produced. The blades were so steeped in fire that they seemed to have retained some of it, yet they always cried out for more.

  She smiled thinly. Her grandfather must have channeled thousands of spells through them to make them this fierce, this hungry after his long absence. She narrowed her eyes and drew the second kukri. Astor’s power was hers to employ now, and the Gathans would suffer.

  She opened her mouth, clenched both kukri blades between her teeth, and bit down hard. Silent as a falling leaf, Radha crept along the ground in the shadow of the outer ridge. Her initial plan of murder, liberation, and destruction still appealed to her, but she decided to reverse the order. She would ignite the wood, scatter the slaves, then destroy the Gathans in the resulting confusion.

  She froze as a sentry walked past her, but the Gathan went on without raising an alarm. Radha worked her way along the ridge until she was near the center of the makeshift camp, only a short sprint from the carts.

  The sentry returned. Radha froze again as he walked past the edge of the command tent, waiting until he was totally out of sight.

  Then Radha rose up behind him like smoke. A heavy kukri dagger in each hand, she pointed their tips at each other and let out a soft, musical whistle. The Gathan whirled at the sound, his fist already closing around his sword, but Radha drove both daggers deep into his rib cage before his blade ever left the scabbard. Their faces stood level, barely inches apart as killer and victim stared into each other’s eyes.

  Radha twisted the blades up and heard two muffled cracks inside the Gathan’s chest. Sparks danced in her eyes.

  “Burn,” she whispered.

  The Gathan’s head fell back and he wheezed out a soft, hissing moan. Smoke rose from the wounds in his chest, clinging briefly to Radha’s clenched fists before they vanished in the breeze. A strong stench of burning hair and charred meat wafted from the raider’s gaping mouth.

  The Gathan sentry’s breath ran out and he slumped forward. It took a great deal of Radha’s strength to keep him from thudding to the ground, but she was able to guide him onto his side and still stay hidden. She knelt on the body for a moment to make sure no other sentries were coming then pulled her weapons free and quietly rolled the dead Gathan into the shadows.

  She crouched and circled around the back of the tent, keeping as close to the fabric walls as she could without touching them. The only Gathan who might see her now was the lash-wielding overseer. Once he was down, there was nothing between her and the wood on the carts. She would set the convoy alight in one or two key places and dash back to the slave pen. Before the
fire grew large enough to attract attention, she would cut loose the draught slaves then finish off the Gathans. They would be leaderless and confused as they were beset by fire, escaping prisoners, and Radha herself.

  She nodded. The first step was the overseer. He kept moving back and forth across the mouth of the pen, almost always facing the slaves. Coming up behind him was still risky since the cowering drivers and bearers would see her approach. Radha didn’t know how they would react, so she had to strike before something they said or did gave her away.

  Radha waited for the overseer to reach the far end of the holding area, then she darted toward the carts. She reached the first in line and crouched down behind its back wheel, shielded from the overseer and the command tent. Her breathing was even and her heartbeat was calm. She waited for a few moments to make sure no one had seen her.

  As she waited, Radha breathed in the rich smell of freshly cut timber. There was a great deal of wood here and she couldn’t help but wonder how Freyalise had allowed it to be taken. Greht’s hunger for ships was all-consuming, but it had only started recently. How was he able to harvest so much of Skyshroud so quickly, when the wood was so precious and the forest’s patron stood against him?

  Radha set aside that mystery for now. She crept along the line of carts, intending to set the last on fire, then the first, so that the caravan could not advance or retreat once the fight began.

  The last cart was very close the overseer’s stalking ground, but the Gathan himself was once more at the opposite end of the pen. The slaves would see her as soon as she stood up … if any of them retained the will to turn their heads. A few wore expressions animated by fear or nervous energy, but for the most part they were as docile as kennel full of old, incontinent dogs.