The oldest of the three was a man whom Heyou didn’t know very well and whom he watched carefully as the human shook his head, his expression miserable. He was upset—Heyou could feel that—but he was also a strange male. Heyou had learned to like men, but it was still on a case-by-case basis, and he didn’t really want any of them getting too close to his queen. Neither did any of the other battlers who waited in the room.
Daton felt them all watching him and shuddered before he answered. “No, my lady. Justin says he saw them rowing to a large ship with three sails, but by the time I got there, the ship had put out to sea. We don’t even know where they came from. We decided to come back here as fast as we could.”
“The docks don’t keep records?” Solie asked.
“No, my lady. At least, none they’d admit to.”
Solie closed her eyes for a moment. “There has to be someone who saw her. Did you ask around?” She was sounding more exasperated by the moment, and Heyou hissed. Daton started in terror, and the boy beside him gasped.
Only the girl was able to look Solie in the eye. “You think it’s our fault or something?” she snapped. All the battlers growled, but she ignored them. Everyone knew that women were safe from battle sylphs. “What were we supposed to do—go looking for her and end up getting kidnapped ourselves?”
“Try telling that to her father,” Solie said dryly.
The girl flushed. Her name was Loren, Heyou remembered belatedly, and she was actually a friend of the queen. He knew her sylph much better. Shore cowered next to her master, staring at the ground.
You saw what happened? he sent. The little sylph looked up at him, her emotions miserable. She’d run from the danger; that much was obvious. But why shouldn’t she? She was never made for fighting.
They wanted my master. I took her and ran. I could only carry one. Shore sent Heyou the emotions she’d felt at the time, the feelings she’d picked up from the men, and Heyou sighed. There wasn’t much there. Most of the battlers knew Lizzy quite well, but they could only track their own masters or the queen. Had it been Solie who’d been grabbed…
Well, if it had been Solie, all of the kidnappers would already be dead.
“I want her found,” Solie was saying. “I want everyone on that dock questioned and the harbormaster to give some answers. Someone has to know where that ship is going!”
“You want us to go back?” Daton asked uncertainly. Beside him, the boy swallowed, staring at the floor in fear. Loren just sniffed.
“No,” Solie replied flatly. “I don’t plan to send you at all.”
They crested the peaks of the mountains against which the city of Para Dubh sat, making no attempt to hide their presence. Sixteen strong, they swooped down over the buildings, a flock of lightning-streaked black clouds with red eyes, and teeth formed of electricity. They kept their auras tightly contained, but those who saw them still screamed in terror. Most didn’t know what they were—most had never seen a battler in his natural shape—but given their speed and the fact that the smallest was nevertheless larger than a peasant’s cottage, fear was a natural reaction.
Mace felt no surprise. Humans were always afraid of his kind—not that it mattered to him. He was created to protect the hive and his queen. Added to his responsibility were the human friends he’d made, and Lily, his master and lover, who bossed him around in front of everyone else but smiled at him in private. She’d been very much in agreement when he told her of Solie’s command: if Lizzy was to be found, he was to find her.
As with the other battlers, it was an easy order for him to accept. He liked Lizzy. While most of the humans in the Valley had grown used to his kind, only a few nonmasters didn’t retain a small undercurrent of fear in their presence, and Lizzy was one of them. She even entered the chamber the battlers shared to relax, visiting regularly to play and talk. The thought of someone having taken her angered them all.
The city sped by below, buildings dotting the slopes of the mountains almost like the combs of a beehive. Mace rather liked the look, but he didn’t slow. Instead, he angled out toward the wharf, the others flanking him and falling back to form a huge V. They rocketed over the docks, spreading out to cover them all, and Mace changed shape, landing heavily only a few feet shy of one end. This was the dock across from a statue of a man on a rearing horse, just as Loren and the boy had described.
Mace straightened and turned, looking at the white-faced fishermen who’d been unloading their catch. “A girl was taken from this dock three days ago by men with tattoos. Tell me where they took her.”
The fishermen glanced at each other and then went diving in a panic off the side of the dock.
Face twisting in annoyance, Mace changed form and went to retrieve them.
The battlers landed everywhere, demanding answers of Para Dubh’s terrified dockworkers. The responses they received were mostly useless, the men pleading for their lives instead, terrified of these shape-changing inquisitors. Finally, many of the battlers lost their tempers and lashed out with their hate—which made things even worse. They found no one on the docks who remembered a blonde girl being grabbed by a group of tattooed sailors.
Mace ordered his fellows next to inquire of the nearby women, but none of these had been present, and most were just as terrified of the battlers as the men. Which made the trip a failure. Angry and frustrated, Mace stood on the dock and stared out over the ocean. Whoever had taken Lizzy, they were far away now. There were ships close by. His battlers were flying around them, demanding to know if the crews knew anything, but none was the craft they wanted. Mace had little doubt that even if his contingent spread out and tried to find the boat, they wouldn’t. The ocean was a big place, and they had no way to track her. If only it had been Loren they grabbed, they could have followed Shore to her.
He’d been harboring wonderful ideas of what he was going to do to the kidnappers, and his fist clenched briefly. From now on, no woman would leave the Valley without an escort—Mace didn’t care what they said. But Solie would never stand for it. Lily would never stand for it…He blew out a breath. Battlers couldn’t guard every single woman in the Valley, just as they couldn’t guard every single sylph. “Dammit,” he muttered.
Behind him, he felt hate. It wasn’t from one of his fellows. Mace knew all their energy patterns well. These were bound battlers, driven nearly insane and hating all the time, punishing their male masters even while they served.
Mace turned, calmly watching the creatures approach. Unlike the battlers of the Valley, who took human forms that would appeal to their female masters, these wore twisted shapes. Designed to frighten, they boasted oversized teeth and claws, vile and hideous. Mace just snorted, unimpressed. He’d been trapped like that himself, forced to look like a suit of armor at the whim of a sadistic dandy. He would free these creatures if he could, but to do that, they’d have to be subsumed into his hive, their energy patterns changed to match his queen’s, and that could only be done in Solie’s presence.
Their masters walked well behind the battlers, of which there were four. Mace looked at the men directly, not terribly interested in talking to anyone who’d trap one of his kind, but Solie had given her orders. They couldn’t be at war with the entire world.
“We’re from Sylph Valley,” he told the men loudly. “A girl was kidnapped from a delegation sent to this city and taken away on a ship with three sails. We’re looking for anyone who knows where she might have been taken.”
The four battlers stopped, snarling and frothing like misshapen dogs. Their masters looked at each other uncertainly, and in that time the other battlers Mace had brought landed around him, taking on human shape or floating overhead in their natural form. The bound ones glared at them, their envy obvious.
Their masters saw immediately how bad the odds were. One battler was enough to destroy the city. The entire kingdom of Para Dubh had eight. Sixteen had to be beyond their comprehension.
Sylph Valley hadn’t done anything about their most immediate
neighbor, preferring to set up trade agreements with Para Dubh, though they had no formal alliance and were watching very carefully to be sure Para Dubh’s battler population didn’t suddenly increase. Solie felt that forcing any sylph into slavery was evil, and that what was done to bind battlers was an abomination. Mace agreed with that assessment, though he had no urge to do anything for these. As Solie said, they couldn’t be at war with the entire world. Of course, by sending Leon and Ril to get information on Yed, fully intending them to do sabotage if they could, she was walking a fine line that would eventually erupt in conflict. Especially considering the attack by Eferem six years ago. But a smart general picked his own battles in his own time.
Mace watched the men confer. They were afraid. He could tell that even without his kind’s natural empathy. The men knew they couldn’t fight off this contingent, outnumbered as they were, but they had to save face—hopefully without turning the city into a crater.
“We had nothing to do with a girl being kidnapped,” one of them said.
“We know,” Mace replied. “She was taken by men wearing loose clothes and tattoos, men from a boat. We came here only in order to start looking.”
Two of the battler masters continued to watch him carefully, but the one who’d spoken nodded. “Men with tattoos and a three-sailed ship?” he mused. “They could be from Meridal. A lot of the sailors from there have tattoos, and a lot of Meridal merchants use triple-sailed schooners. They’re just about on the other side of the world, though.” He frowned. “To be honest, it makes sense. They kidnap and sell girls, the bastards. They agreed not to do it here, though. They want our trade more than our women.”
The battler master was clearly horrified by the idea of slavery, though Mace reflected with disgust that the man’s attitude did not extend to his sylph. Mace waited, hoping to hear more, digesting the idea of Lizzy being sold and the massive amounts of violence in which he’d like to engage. “Where would they go?” he asked at last.
“South,” was the answer. “If they are from Meridal, if they grabbed a girl, they’d head out to sea and sail straight there to sell her. They have air sylphs to help push their ships. They would be hundreds of miles away by now, and once they got there they could sell her in a dozen different cities.” The man’s frown deepened. “If they grabbed one girl, they might have grabbed a dozen. You going after yours only?”
Mace shrugged. “We’ll bring back any women we find.”
The battler master nodded. He obviously didn’t want them there, but he was diplomatic and grateful for help against slavers. “Good luck in your search,” he told them, then turned and walked off, his battler heeling. Acting as though sixteen foreign battlers on their docks was nothing to be worried about, he headed back the way he’d come, leaving the fishermen and merchants to gape and stare, afraid to return to their work but even more afraid to protest. The other battler masters regarded him with surprise for a moment before hurrying after him.
Mace looked at his flight, sixteen strong. He looked out at the ocean, huge and inscrutable. He’d never seen so much water. “Spread out,” he told them. “Find her.” The battlers roared, flashing up into the air and away, spreading out across the waves and racing the winds above, hunting for any ship that had three sails and a crew of men with loose pants and tattoos.
Mace watched them go, shifted to smoke and lightning, and then rose into the air himself. He soared straight south, shooting over the whitecaps as quickly as he dared. Battlers were powerful and they were angry, but they weren’t limitless. The ocean was huge and heavy, and the only energy they could feed from in this world came from their women. Without Lily at his side, Mace could only go so far, and he was already tired from flying so quickly over those mountains. Push too far, and he wouldn’t have the strength to get back. If that ship was hundreds of miles away, driven by winds harnessed by air sylphs, they might never find it at all. They might search a hundred years and never even see a glimpse.
In the end, he was right.
Chapter Four
Ever since his injury, when he’d been torn in two by another battler in defense of the hive, Ril had needed to sleep. Before that, in fifteen years of slavery he’d slept no more than a dozen times, each briefly. Now he slept as humans did, lying insensate and feeble as a corpse every night. Useless.
He’d never been much of a dreamer, even with his increased need for slumber, but now he woke from nightmares he couldn’t understand or remember, shuddering from confusion as images of a small, confined space shivered out of his mind, replaced by a woman shrieking. Every instinct told him to get up, to shift to his natural form and attack whatever threatened, but as he went to do so, he gasped in pain, his entire body rebelling. Agony like a thousand burrowing maggots shot through him, and he fell back against his bedroll, shaking. He could shift shape, if he accepted the pain, but to return to his true form was beyond him now. With his mantle tattered, he couldn’t hold his natural shape anymore, not without help and not without even greater pain. He’d fall apart into nothingness if he tried.
Ril sat up, staring around him as a mix of different emotions flooded in from the others. It was past dawn, past breakfast, and his companions were awake. Leon was standing over a small campfire and waving his arms wildly, cursing and yelling at Gabralina to calm down. The blonde was dancing around madly, screaming.
“A bee!” she shrieked. “It’s a bee! Kill it! Kill it!” She flapped at a tiny, buzzing form and leaped back. Still swearing, Leon waved it away, his emotions frustrated and angry.
Awake now, Ril lunged out of bed, tossing his blanket back as he bolted across the clearing. Leon saw him coming just as Ril launched himself. He hit the taller man hard, knocking them both to the ground. Rolling, Ril forced his master underneath him and threw up a solid wall of force, ignoring the pain it caused.
The clearing exploded. Ordered to hold in his hate aura, Wat had still moved to defend his master. The full power of his blast slammed into Ril’s shield, washing over it and past, vaporizing trees and bushes, obliterating their camp and the horses that had been tethered beyond. An instant later it was gone, and Ril had a moment to wonder if the idiotic battler had destroyed his own master in the attack, thereby banishing himself back to their original world.
Apparently he hadn’t. Ril heard her crying as he rolled off Leon, shivering in reaction. Once, he could have held that blast back easily. Now he was useless.
Leon pushed himself upright, checking on his battler first before looking over at Wat with raging eyes. The sylph stood with Gabralina in the center of a circle of destruction nearly five hundred feet across, cooing. Except for a patch of grass right under her feet, everything around them was simply gone, blasted right down to the bedrock. The girl stared around in amazement, absently stroking her battler’s arm while he held her. Taking that as an invite, he started to lick her neck.
“Wow,” she managed. “You really killed the bee.”
“And everything else, too!” Leon shouted, his face red. Wat glanced over, glaring, and Leon visibly forced himself to calm down. “That wasn’t necessary, Wat.”
“She was under attack,” Wat protested.
“It was a bee,” Ril said, staring up at the sky that had been half-obscured by trees until now. It felt good to just lie still for a minute. He could get up later. “That was overkill.”
“What’s overkill?”
“When you obliterate everything within five hundred feet to protect your master from an insect the size of a thumbnail.” Leon shook his head and looked down at Ril. Thank you, he mouthed. Ril just shrugged and closed his eyes, dozing.
“I don’t like bees,” Gabralina said innocently, smiling at her battler. “You’re so smart!”
A moment later, Leon had to go over and pull them apart.
The day was almost lost. They were two and a half weeks out of the kingdom of Yed but still more than a week and a half from home. Worse, to Leon’s intense discomfort, they were within the b
orders of the kingdom of Eferem, whose king he had once served. Alcor was still on the throne, but with his priesthood nearly destroyed and six of his battlers lost—three subsumed and three destroyed in the conflicts six years ago—he was afraid of challenging Sylph Valley. Instead he cowered in his castle, his battler Thrall always at his side. Leon knew the man was power hungry and paranoid, but his fear controlled him more than anything else and he wouldn’t risk another attack. Not unless circumstances changed. That wouldn’t stop him from wanting to see Leon’s head on a pike, though.
They were still at the southern end of the kingdom, well away from the main city, but Leon didn’t want to stay there any longer than necessary. Especially not after Wat’s little episode. They’d moved a few miles farther, but that blast zone was right by a well-traveled road. It couldn’t help but be noticed, and Alcor did still have battlers. Leon wouldn’t trust Wat against one, and he wouldn’t risk Ril. They had to wait before they made a run for it, though, at least long enough for Ril to rest.
The battler lay on his side at one end of the clearing, wearing the shape of a lean roan horse, his rusty red coat sleek and smooth. He was breathing regularly. Changing form was horrible for him, but he was fine once the work was done. Leon had suggested he sleep for a while, and Ril hadn’t protested. He was tired after holding off that blast and changing forms. Leon was unsurprised. Once he got Ril home, they were both going to take a very long break.
He was looking forward to that—and more especially to being rid of Gabralina and her moronic battler. Leon knew the girl had undergone a terrible shock and was still nervous, but she’d been whining about the loss of their supplies all afternoon until he’d finally threatened to paddle her if she didn’t stop. That had shut her up, but now her feelings were hurt and she looked almost ready to cry. Wat stood nearby, staring at Leon blankly.
“Wat, will you please turn into a horse?”
The Shattered Sylph Page 4