Servant of Fire (The Cloud Warrior Saga Book 7)

by D. K. Holmberg

  The hounds were different. At first, he didn’t know why. Fire would not be enough to restore them. Tan tried each of the elements, moving on to wind, and then water, before realizing that earth was needed.

  Why should the hounds be similar to kaas?

  Tan added earth to the shaping, binding it to the hounds. With the added element, he was able to draw them into the fire bond. They came slowly, and Tan had to strain, forcing him to draw upon ever more elemental power around him—not more strength of fire, but of earth.

  He reached deep within the earth, drawing from the elemental that he sensed there. Something stirred, leaving the ground shaking, the only other movement around him. It would not be enough. Tan strained, stretching out with earth sense, reaching for Ethea and golud that would be found there. The earth elemental sent a rumbling answer and added to what the earth elementals of the Sunlands could offer.

  Then he felt something change.

  It came slowly, with terrific effort. Earth mixed with the fire burning within the hounds, both slowly fusing, as the twisted fire that raged through them eased, replaced by a simmering flame of true fire.

  The fire bond shifted, welcoming them.

  Tan sagged, dropping to his knees. Everything surged forward again.

  A dark shadow swept toward him, lifting him into the air. The shaping had drained him, leaving him too weak to resist. If he were attacked, he would not be able to fight back.

  Rest, Tan.

  Honl?

  You drew too much; you risked too much.

  What did I do?

  Listen to your bond and you will understand.

  Tan focused on the fire bond as Honl held him in the air. Issan lurched forward, stumbling toward where Tan had been. Fur stood off to the side and craned his neck until he found Tan wrapped in the shade of Honl. Cora crouched on hands and knees, staring at the hounds with rage in her eyes.

  A dark shadow drifted across the ground. Tan didn’t need to look up to realize that Cianna and Sashari flew, rejoining them.

  All of this he saw as well as sensed within the fire bond. There was something else, something burning differently than he would have expected: three hounds, burning with a controlled heat of elemental fire, but fire tempered by the strength of earth. The combination reminded Tan of kaas, but the hounds were less of fire than they were of earth, and more than simply hounds.

  They are elementals? he asked Honl. Did you know? This last he sent to Asboel.

  The draasin crawled toward the front of Tan’s mind. Tan sensed a hesitance from him before he answered. Not before you restored them. I did not think they’d survived.

  Asboel had known.

  This was another experiment? Tan asked.

  Asboel breathed out heavily. He reached through the fire bond, touching the hounds. As one, they turned their eyes to the west and north, toward Ethea, where Asboel remained hidden within the den buried beneath the city.

  Not the same as kaas, Asboel said.

  The elementals gradually restored Tan’s energy. He assumed control of the shaping and lowered himself, reaching the hard-packed earth and avoiding the sharp needles from a cluster of brush. The hounds sat, watching Tan. Bright intelligence shone in their eyes, but the dark malevolence was gone. More than that, he heard them in his mind, the heavy, rolling sound more like earth than the hot breath of the fire elementals.

  Issan stared at the hounds and then at Fur before finally turning his attention to Tan. “What did you do to them?”

  Tan inhaled deeply and reached to pull Cora to her feet. Cianna had Sashari land behind them. Tan registered Sashari’s surprise at the sudden connection of the hounds to the fire bond, a connection that was more solid than what the lisincend managed.

  “The same as I did with you,” he answered. “They are restored.”

  Issan stretched out a hand, and one of the hounds sniffed at it before briefly baring its fangs. Issan took a step back.

  Fur approached warily. “I think that I am pleased I did not attack you,” he said.

  Tan braced his hands on his thighs and chuckled.

  “You will heal the rest?” Fur asked.

  Tan looked from Issan to the hounds. The process would take significant strength on his part and would keep him in Incendin longer than he intended, but how could he refuse, especially now that he understood what the hounds were? If they were the result of the kingdoms’ experiments, he had no choice but to do all that he could to heal them. And with the lisincend, they might have enough strength to truly oppose Par-shon.

  “I will heal the rest,” Tan said.

  6

  He Who Leads

  When Tan finished healing the last of the lisincend, he sat along the bank of the stream, letting the cool water run over his hand. The nymid swam within the stream, working up his arm and around his neck, bolstering his fading strength. Warm wind gusted around him, and Tan allowed the elementals to help restore him. Even the distant sense of earth elementals aided him. He had called upon them more than expected.

  Cora crouched near him, eyes fixed on the sky. The sun had shifted, now nearly reaching the horizon as day changed over to night. Within Incendin, the fading sun didn’t mean the air would cool. The ground radiated nearly as much retained heat as the sun. Cora breathed slowly, but Tan sensed the tension within her.

  Cianna remained atop Sashari, circling above the Incendin waste, watching over him as she had during the day-long shaping.

  “I cannot believe the strength you display,” Cora said after a while.

  Tan breathed out shakily. The effort of healing the lisincend—most were like Fur, the traditional lisincend that the kingdoms had known and feared for years, though a few winged lisincend remained—had taken significant strength. Drawing from the elementals around him had helped, but it still left him weakened. Physical tiredness mixed with mental fatigue, and his head felt like it was in a fog. He could easily shape fire now, but the lisincend had required shaping fire and spirit, and with strength that he rarely used.

  The other shapings had gone better than with Issan. Most reacted to the shaping with a stunned confusion, but they recognized that fire pulled on them differently within moments. Only one other lisincend had the same anger at being taken from the call of fire that Issan had displayed. Fur had some history with that lisincend as well.

  “It’s not all mine,” Tan said. He stretched out his hand, letting water pool there. The nymid collected in the water, leaving it tinted with a faint, shimmery green. He felt the sense of them at the edge of his mind but didn’t call to them. The connection to them was different than what he shared with Asboel, or even what he shared with Honl.

  The wind elemental remained. Honl swirled around the nearby trees, fluttering at branches and pulling on the long needles. How had he known when to come? Where had he been in the time since Tan had last seen him?

  He still didn’t know what it meant that Honl had changed, but there was no doubting the change that had taken place. Once, Honl had been like all the other ashi elementals, little more than a translucent, warm wind that blew around him, able to take on a more meaningful shape, but barely anything that he could see. Over time, Tan had managed to see Honl more easily, but now it was something different. Ever since Tan had saved him from kaas’s attack, Honl had transformed, as if the act of combining spirit and wind had turned the elemental into a new type of creature altogether. He feared what it meant for his bond pair.

  “The nymid?” Cora asked. She put her face close to the water in his cupped hand and then, surprisingly, dipped her face down until she could take a drink. The nymid receded from her and allowed her the water.

  Tan let the water dribble back into the stream. “The nymid. The draasin. Ashi,” he said, glancing toward Honl, who still swirled. There was a slight tug on the connection between them, but little more than that. “Even the earth elementals of these lands.”

  “The Sunlands do not have elementals of earth,” Cora said.r />
  Tan tapped the ground. Deep within the earth, he felt the rumbling sense of whatever elemental called these lands home. Kaas slithered through as well, but he did so where the earth elementals here allowed. Before the bonding to Fur, kaas wouldn’t have asked permission to pass, simply devouring elementals as it came through. The bond had changed that much, at least. And now the hounds. They were fire and earth, like kaas, but in a different proportion.

  “The elementals live everywhere. Most simply don’t know how to reach them.”

  “When I first spoke to saldam, I thought I’d imagined it,” Cora said. “There were stories of shapers able to speak to the elementals, but none had done so in centuries. Most thought the ability lost.”

  “I spoke to the nymid first,” Tan said. “They saved me when Fur hit me with a shaping.”

  Cora stiffened. “And still you work with him?”

  “Fire consumed him then,” Tan said. That was what he had to tell himself; otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to find it within him to work with Fur, and the kingdoms—and all the elementals—needed Tan to be able to work together with Fur to withstand Par-shon.

  “I thought you spoke to the draasin first.”

  Tan smiled, thinking back to when he’d first met the draasin. “When I spoke to the draasin, I was trying to reach for the nymid,” he explained. “I still didn’t understand the connection, only that I had spoken to them and that they had helped. Without the nymid, I would have died. There was something else in the lake, frozen deep beneath the surface. When I reached it…”

  You were strong even then, Maelen.

  You nearly destroyed my mind.

  Asboel laughed.

  “That was when you discovered the draasin?” Cora asked.

  “They were kept there, held by the nymid and golud and possibly ara. The others had agreed to their task, but not the draasin.”

  Tan wondered now if the others had been forced as well, but differently than the draasin. The shapers of that time had harnessed the elementals, and they could have used that harnessing to require their assistance. Otherwise, why would they have agreed to serve?

  “She remembers,” Cora said.

  “So does he.”

  “I can’t imagine what they experienced. What must it have been like to remain trapped as they were?”

  “It should not have happened,” Tan said.

  And yet, had it not, the draasin might well have been hunted to extinction by the shapers of that time. If they had, the world would have lost out on the great elementals of fire, leaving it somewhat lessened.

  He hesitated, the reason that he’d come looking for Cora returning to him. “You know that I answered the summons to reach you, Corasha Saladan. I could reach through the fire bond, but that would place the burden of my request upon the draasin, and that should not be the reason for me to come.” He sighed, thinking that Roine might not appreciate what he said next. Theondar would have understood once, but he had changed and become the man known as Roine, much as they had all changed. “There are so few of us remaining.”

  Cora frowned. “So few of who?”

  “Warriors. The kingdoms have two. The Sunlands?”

  “Only me,” she said softly.

  Tan had suspected as much, but he hadn’t known for sure. “There is much that the warriors can do if we worked together,” he suggested. “In the archives of Ethea, there are many ancient texts. There are some that speak of a time when the warriors worked together, regardless of nation. They served a different purpose.”

  Cora’s eyes closed. “They were known as the Order of Warriors,” she said. “Your archives are not the only places with writings of the past. But much has changed since then. Our peoples are too different. The Order became something else, and the kingdoms claimed their Cloud Warriors.”

  When Tan had been a child, he had never thought to even meet one of the fabled Cloud Warriors. They had last served the kingdom the generation before him, back when his parents would have been at the university. To most, the last of the kingdoms’ warriors had died when Tan was young. Theondar and Lacertin had remained, and now there was Tan. None had known that Incendin had warriors of its own.

  “Must they be changed so much? We have worked together before, even if we didn’t know that’s what we were doing at the time.”

  Cora traced a finger along the ground. Earth responded to her shaping, cascading into a mound of dust around her. She swirled this, turning it into a funnel, and then released it away from her. “I wish that he could have lived to see what you’ve accomplished,” Cora said.

  With the mention of Lacertin, Tan touched the sword sheathed at his side. He’d originally carried Lacertin’s, but it had been lost in Par-shon. “It’s because of him that all of this is possible,” Tan said. “Without Lacertin, we wouldn’t have secured the artifact, and we would not have uncovered Althem’s plan.”

  Red rimmed Cora’s eyes and she squeezed them shut. “He didn’t know about Par-shon. The First would not allow him to be involved in the shaping.”

  Tan had wondered if Lacertin had known. If he had, he might have encouraged a different tactic with Althem. Perhaps then he might have recognized the need for what Althem planned, or at least part of it. Maybe Althem had intended to realign the lisincend with fire. With the artifact, it might even have been possible.

  “I wish I could have known him better,” Tan said. “How much would he have been able to teach me?”

  “Now? Not as much as you might think, Tan,” Cora said.

  Earth sensing told Tan that Fur approached. The lisincend towered over Cora, his long shadow stretching across the land. “He betrayed the Sunlands as he betrayed the kingdoms. A man such as him deserves no mourning,” Fur said to Cora.

  Her face remained neutral at Fur’s comment, but her fingers reached for her sword and squeezed. Tan didn’t think Fur noticed.

  “You have done what was asked of you,” Fur said to Tan.

  Tan stretched and sat up, leaning toward Fur. The work had been difficult. The complex shaping required to pull the lisincend back into the fire bond had not grown any easier, but he became aware of a deep power each time he succeeded. It was as if fire itself appreciated the shaping. “And now will you do what was requested of you?”

  Fur lowered himself to his knees. The heat that usually radiated from him had eased, lessening the soft glow to his skin, making the scaled surface of his black hide seem more like the draasin. “The Sunlands will stand before Par-shon, Warrior. We do not need the kingdoms’ request to keep the Sunlands safe.”

  Tan took a deep breath, drawing in the warm air of Incendin. Sitting by the water had left him feeling strengthened; some of the weariness had washed away, as if the nymid had bolstered him even more. “Tell me, Fur, how is it that the Sunlands withstand Par-shon?”

  Fur crossed his arms over his chest. For that moment, heat flared, leaving his skin flashing orange with heat. It surged against the fire bond as well. “There is a shaping of fire that we mastered long ago. For many years, it has served to hold Par-shon away from our shores.”

  Tan thought about Doma and wondered if they could be taught a similar shaping. If Doma managed to use water in the way that Incendin used fire, could they keep Par-shon from attacking, or was it already too late? Maybe there was nothing that could be done to keep Doma truly safe.

  “What is this shaping?” Tan had sensed part of it while in the Fire Fortress, but not enough to truly understand. Not enough to be able to recreate it.

  Fur sniffed. “Only those who truly serve fire can use this shaping.”

  Tan smiled at the lisincend. “You think that I don’t serve fire?”

  “I no longer question you, Warrior. It is the rest of the kingdoms I question.” He leaned back, resting his thighs on his heels. “I never thought a time would come when I would consider a Warrior of the kingdoms worthy of fire.”

  Behind him, Cora laughed. “You have him wrong, Fur. Tan is not of t
he kingdoms.”

  Tan glanced at her and frowned.

  Cora only shrugged. “Deny it if you wish, but you serve more than the kingdoms. If all you cared about were the kingdoms, you would have abandoned Doma.”

  “My cousin was there,” Tan reminded her.

  “And you would not have aided the Sunlands. You claim you do so to unite us against Par-shon, but you serve a different master than King Theondar.”

  Fur’s mouth tightened, and heat flared from him briefly.

  “Theondar might dispute the idea that he’s a king,” Tan said. “But I’ve never denied the fact that I do what I can to help the elementals. That’s what the Great Mother called me to do. That’s why I’ve been given the gifts that she’s granted.”

  “You think to rule all over us all then, Warrior?”

  “I’m not meant to rule,” Tan said. “Much like the elementals were not meant to be forced to serve.”

  Cora snorted. “See, Fur? I have told you that he is a strange one. He has the power to rule, but thinks that he should not. Imagine what would have become of the Sunlands had you—”

  Fur cut her off with a soft snarl. Cora fell silent, but a hint of a smile played across her lips.

  “What else would you have of me, Warrior?”

  “You know what I have asked, Fur. There is nothing more.”

  “Nothing? You asked only that we oppose Par-shon.”

  “Which means that you no longer attack the kingdoms. You will leave Doma and her shapers alone. You will not cross into Chenir. Par-shon is the enemy. Meet with Theondar and convince him of your intentions.”

  Fur looked at Cora. “You are wrong, Corasha Saladan. Now he seeks to lead.”

  “Attacking each other only weakens us all, and most of us have been weakened enough the way it is. We need our shapers and the elementals to stop Par-shon. I will see the forced bonds removed and the harnessed elementals freed. I will see an end to the rule of the Utu Tonah.”