Neeva’s mouth went dry as she realized that not only did her attacker resemble the creatures she had encountered during the war with Urik, it was one of them. Before their deaths a thousand years ago, the wraiths had served as knights in Borys’s campaign to eradicate the dwarven race. They had even fought at his side when he had used the Scourge to mortally wound the last king of the dwarves, Rkard. Now, having returned to their master’s service, they had come to destroy Rkard’s namesake and heir, her young son.
“This time, Rkard shall not fall!” Neeva yelled.
Still holding the corpse’s forearms trapped beneath her elbow, the warrior plunged the sword in her free hand into its stomach. The weapon sank deep and true, the tip driving up into the heart. Blood, cold and dark with death, oozed from the wound.
The dead thing simply raised its arms and clasped its hands around Neeva’s throat. The cold fingers sank deep into her flesh. Her temples began to pound, and she felt dizzy. Her vision narrowed to a tunnel, a hissing roar filled her ears, and her knees grew weak.
Leaving her second sword buried in her attacker, Neeva snaked her hand over one of his arms and under the other. She clasped her hands together around the pommel of her other weapon and pivoted. The motion sent the dead merchant swinging toward the side of the road, and the warrior used all her strength to pry the thing’s arms from her throat.
The corpse’s grip broke, and it soared away, tumbling over the edge of the road toward the red sands below. After the body hit, a gray shadow drifted away and began a slow rise back toward the road. The warrior watched the wraith long enough to be sure the thing would take many moments to reach her again, then turned her attention to a more immediate danger: the inixes.
The gray-mantled beasts were only a dozen steps away, scrambling forward as fast as they could pull the heavy wagon. Their eyes sparkled with gemlike light, one’s red and the other’s yellow, leaving little doubt in the warrior’s mind that the beasts were also controlled by wraiths.
Neeva turned and ran. Had the things been normal inixes, it would have been a simple matter for her to find a vulnerable spot and kill them both, even with her small sword. But, animated as they were by wraiths, the only way to stop them was by cutting their huge bodies to shreds or pushing them off the bridge, and she would need help to do either.
“Borys sent them for Rkard!” she called, pointing at her son. “Take him and go!”
Caelum passed their son to Magnus. The windsinger started up the road with Rikus tucked under one arm and Rkard under the other, and the dwarf raised a hand toward the sun.
Neeva glanced over her shoulder and saw that the inixes remained a dozen paces behind. Normally, the lizards would have caught her in a matter of steps, but with a heavy cargo dray harnessed to their shoulders, they were not as swift as usual.
“Sadira will help me, Caelum. You go with Rkard!” Neeva commanded. She pointed at the many fissures lacing the hard granite next to the road. “The scorpion that stung Rikus was possessed by a wraith. There may be more.”
Caelum stopped short of casting his spell and ran after Magnus, positioning himself between the windsinger and the wall.
“Hurry, Neeva!” Sadira called, her hand still on the rope. “I can’t cast another spell until I drop this one.”
As Sadira spoke, a flurry of gray forms streamed out of nearby crevices and streaked over to her. Before Neeva could cry a warning, the wraiths attacked, their immaterial hands sinking into the sorceress’s flesh as though it were air.
A cloud of black shadow billowed from Sadira’s mouth. Her glowing eyes flared white, and her ebony body trembled with the pain of the onslaught. She did not release the rope to save herself.
One more gray streak flashed up from the valley below, slipping over the side of the Cloud Road to join the attack on Sadira. Neeva looked down and saw that the wraith that had animated the merchant’s corpse was gone. It had been waiting to join its fellows in the assault against the sorceress.
The wraiths had played her for a fool, Neeva realized. They had never intended to take Rkard but had only demanded him so that the company would concentrate on protecting the child. Then they had struck at their true target: Sadira.
Behind the sorceress, Magnus was rushing back to help, leaving Caelum to guard Rikus and Rkard, whom he had dropped upon the Cloud Road. Neeva did not think he would arrive in time. She kneeled and felt the roadway shuddering with the heavy footsteps of the inixes.
“Drop the spell!” Neeva yelled.
Sadira shook her head and did not release the rope. Her emberlike eyes burned with pain. She flung her free arm about madly, trying to shake off a pair of wraiths clinging to it. Her ebony body had turned gray in many places.
“I’m fine!” Neeva yelled. The warrior pressed her hand to the pulsing road, directly over the rope, and called, “Save yourself!”
Neeva faced the inixes and found the huge beasts upon her. The first beast snapped at her head. She ducked, thrusting her sword into the lizard’s maw. The reptile closed its jaws on the steel blade and whipped its head around, ripping the weapon from the warrior’s hand. The second inix opened its sharp beak, pushing the first reptile aside.
The surface of the road suddenly grew cold. It stopped shimmering, and Neeva knew that Sadira had dropped the spell. The warrior felt the bite of the rope across her palm, then she was falling. She closed her fingers around the cord, all that remained of Sadira’s bridge, and caught herself.
The dray dropped onto the rope, causing a sharp jerk, then tipped to one side. As the wagon fell past Neeva, the second inix snapped at her dangling legs. She kicked its beak away, and the beast was gone.
When the warrior looked back to her companions, a sick feeling filled her chest. Sadira was engulfed in a swirling ball of black shadow and gray haze, just transparent enough to reveal that she had risen no farther than her hands and knees. The sorceress’s limbs were all shaking violently, while her weakly glowing eyes stared blankly at the road’s slate surface.
Magnus stood behind her, singing an angry, tempestuous song, while a hot wind tore at the gray wraiths in a vain attempt to rip the apparitions away. Caelum was cautiously approaching the pair, taking care to keep himself between the wraiths and his son.
Neeva hauled herself toward her companions, traveling along the rope hand over hand. The two wraiths that had been animating the inixes streaked up to join the attack. As soon as they rose above the surface of the road, Magnus’s searing windsong sent them tumbling away.
They circled back to approach from below the surface.
Neeva reached the edge of the gap and transferred her hands to the slate roadway. “The last two are coming from underneath!” she warned.
Magnus’s shoulders drooped, and Neeva knew that the windsinger’s spell would not penetrate through stone. Nevertheless, he did what he could to help Sadira, directing his voice down at the surface of the road. The hot gusts simply curled up into his own face. As the last two wraiths passed through the stone directly beneath Sadira and joined the attack, Neeva pulled herself onto the road.
A groan of exhaustion escaped Sadira’s lips, and the sorceress collapsed to her side. The ball of shadow and haze settled over her like a veil, leaving nothing exposed except her flowing locks of amber hair and her emberlike eyes, now blazing a sickly hue of greenish-blue. The murky shroud turned completely black, then flashed to gray, and began to alternate between the two colors at rapid intervals.
“We’ve got to do something!” Neeva said.
“We can’t,” said Caelum. “The wraiths are swarming her spirit. Any attempt to drive them away will harm her more than it does them.”
“Then we have to attack them another way.” Neeva stepped past her husband and took the Scourge from Rkard, who still held the enchanted sword.
“What will you do with that?” asked Magnus.
“I saw Rikus slice a shadow giant’s hand off with this blade,” the warrior explained. “Maybe it will
work against wraiths, too.”
Neeva studied Sadira’s flickering shroud for several moments. Finally, the warrior felt confident she could predict the changes. She waited for the pall to turn gray and gently drew the tip of the Scourge along the sorceress’s shoulder, hoping it would slice through a wraith’s insubstantial body without harming Sadira.
A vicious screech echoed off the cliff wall, and a gray ribbon flew off the whirling mass. It shot up the Scourge’s blade in a pearly streak, then expanded to form a gray, cloudlike mass around the weapon.
The warrior thought she had destroyed a wraith. The gray cloud slowly assumed a shape vaguely resembling that of a human female. A pair of orange eyes appeared in the head, and the hazy figure began to shrink. Neeva felt a searing sting as the apparition passed through her flesh, then the sword’s hilt twisted in her hand.
“Get back!” she yelled. “The wraith’s trying to animate the Scourge!”
The sword wrenched violently against her thumb and came free. It did not fall to the ground but floated tip down in front of the warrior. The entire weapon had turned gray, and a pair of angry orange eyes burned out from the pommel. The point slowly began to rise toward Neeva’s heart. Caelum started to reach for the hilt but pulled back when a line of blue frost shot down the length of the blade.
The Scourge stopped rising. The steel began to quiver, filling the air with an eerie, high-pitched wail.
“What’s happening?” Neeva asked.
“The Scourge’s magic is too powerful for the wraith,” Magnus replied, a note of urgency in his voice. “Perhaps we should move—”
Before the windsinger finished, the sword emitted a blue flash of cold. The blade stopped vibrating, and the shrill wail of quivering steel was replaced by a howl of pain. Ribbons of gray shadow flew in all directions, trailing droplets of sleet.
Neeva and the others threw themselves to the ground. The Scourge continued to float, wobbling madly. The blade flexed almost in two. It straightened with a deafening knell, and the sword’s shroud exploded into a cloud of gray haze. For an instant, the road seemed very quiet. Then the weapon clanged to the ground, and the cloud dissolved into a squall of ash-colored snowflakes. The tiny crystals did not even last long enough to fall. In the blistering heat of the day, they evaporated long before they reached the Cloud Road.
Neeva retrieved the Scourge, then gasped in alarm. The sword was as cold as ice, but that was not what troubled her. The blade had lost its silvery sheen. It was now covered with a dull gray stain that made it look more like tin than steel.
“What have I done?” she gasped.
Magnus came and stood at her side. After studying the sword for a moment, he gently took it from her hands. “The wraith’s touch has tainted the blade.”
“Can we fix it?” Neeva asked.
“Perhaps, with time,” answered the windsinger. He kneeled next to Sadira, who remained covered beneath the murky shroud that Neeva had been trying to remove. “But for now, we have more pressing problems. The giants are still trapped at Pauper’s Hope, and the Cloud Road remains impassable. Once the sun sets, we can’t stop them from rampaging—especially with Sadira and Rikus both unconscious.”
“Rikus might be well by then,” said Caelum. “As for Sadira …”
“Even if we can help her prevail against the wraiths, I suspect she will be unconscious until morning,” said Magnus, “Still, we can hope. I see nothing else we can do.”
“I do,” said Neeva. She turned and looked toward Agis’s farm, where the Kledan militia was awaiting their return. “Find me a runner who can show my warriors the way from the Asticles Estate to Pauper’s Hope.”
Magnus folded his ears in doubt. “Your men are brave, but are they a match for giants?”
Neeva shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ve learned never to underestimate a dwarf.”
FIVE
THE GRAY
SADIRA HAD GONE TO THE GRAY.
She stood on a narrow stairway, looking out over an immense abyss filled with a haze that stretched from far below her feet to the zenith of the sky. It was the color of ash and as still as the midday sands. There was nothing else out there.
The steps had been carved from a spire of porous white rock that rose out of the gray murk far below. The stairway spiraled up the pillar to Sadira’s feet, then continued above her head with no apparent end. The column simply grew smaller and smaller, until both the stairs and its tip vanished into the ashen haze far above.
Sadira recognized the pillar as the Pristine Tower but did not think for an instant that she had truly returned to the distant spire of white rock. If she had, the sky would have been yellow-green, with puffy silver clouds drifting past. Lush thickets of bogo trees would have surrounded the base of the column, and in the distance there would have been fields of silver-green broomgrass. Instead, all she saw was a sea of ashen haze.
The sorceress studied the area carefully, searching for the wraiths who had attacked her on the Cloud Road. The Gray was their natural home, and the whole point of their ambush had been to push her into it. Here, the spirits of the dead were dissolved and absorbed into the Gray, much as corpses on Athas were slowly obliterated by rot and decay. However, some spirits did not suffer this fate. Some were sustained by a force even more powerful than the Gray: their everlasting faith in a cause greater than themselves. The wraiths had dedicated themselves to Borys’s service many centuries earlier, and they were such spirits. It was clear that they intended to use their special natures to force her to fight at a disadvantage.
The sorceress was far from panicked. While she would not be as comfortable in the Gray as her foes, she knew more about this place than the wraiths realized. If they expected her to assume they had killed her simply because she found herself in the Gray, they were badly mistaken. The Pristine Tower served as ample evidence that Sadira was alive. A reminder of the most significant event in her life, the spire of white rock acted as a lodestone for her spirit, holding it together and preventing it from dispersing into the haze. Before they could destroy her, the wraiths would have to drive her off its steps.
Magnus’s voice began to toll out of the haze. He was singing a ballad with melancholy strains as loud as thunder and as sweet as morning dew. Though she could not understand the words, Sadira quickly realized that her friend was trying to help her find a way out of the Gray. Unfortunately, the music came from all directions at once, from the front and back, both sides, above and below, even from inside her own head. She cupped her hand to an ear, trying to locate the source of Magnus’s sonorous voice. It would have been easier to chase down the wind.
The sorceress pulled her slender stiletto from its scabbard. A magnificent weapon with a blade of etched bronze and an iron handle beset with tourmalines, it had been in Agis’s family for centuries. She fished a piece of twine from the deep pocket of her robe and tied it around the crossguard. The other end she looped over her wrist, then held the dagger out at arm’s length and let it dangle from the string. She spoke a magical incantation that would make it lead her to the source of Magnus’s voice.
Sadira felt a strange tingle in the hand with the twine, and its ebony color began to fade. The sensation slowly spread up her arm. What she could see of her flesh, from the fingertips to the wrist, paled to its normal color, and the dagger began to spin wildly.
Though she had not expected the reaction, the sorceress was not really surprised by it. Normally her skin remained black with mystic energy during the day, then returned to its usual color the instant night fell. But in the Gray, day and night did not exist. Without the sun in the sky, her spell had drawn its power from the only available source: her flesh. Then, unable to replenish what it had lost to the spell, her arm had remained pale.
Of more concern to the sorceress was the dagger. It continued to spin madly, attempting to point in every direction at once. Sadira watched the blade for several moments. When it showed no sign of settling down, she dec
ided that her spell had failed, and she caught the hilt.
As the sorceress started to slip the weapon into its sheath, the tower lurched beneath her feet. Sadira stumbled and nearly pitched over the side but managed to drop to her hands and knees in time to keep from falling. Her stomach rolled in one direction after the other, and a sick, queasy feeling rose into her throat. Although she saw no hint of motion when she tried to fix her gaze on the haze around her, she felt like the spire was spinning as wildly as her stiletto had a moment earlier. By plunging her dagger into a fissure and twisting the blade against the edge, she barely managed to keep herself from flying off the steps.
For a long time, all Sadira could do was cling to the hilt and pray the blade would not slip from the crack. If she lost contact with the Pristine Tower, she feared that the haze would begin to eat at her spirit and that her life force would seep away. Even if that did not happen, the wraiths would certainly find it easier to prey upon her as she drifted aimlessly through the Gray. Perhaps they were even responsible for knocking the tower into its crazy spin.
Magnus’s voice began to waver, growing much louder each time the gyrating tower pointed in a particular direction, fading to a mere whisper when it pointed away. At first, the volume increased every few seconds, but gradually the rotations slowed, and the spire continued to point in the same direction for a little bit longer, until the sensation of movement ceased, and the song came to the sorceress’s ears from one direction only: the top of the stairs.
Sadira breathed a sigh of relief. The wraiths had not caused the wild spinning after all. The dagger had been unable to point in a single direction because doing so would have led her not to Magnus’s voice but away from the tower and into the dangers of the Gray. Instead, her spell had reoriented the whole tower, so that the exit lay in an obvious direction: up.
Listening attentively to Magnus’s beautiful song, Sadira peered under the collar of her robe. The flesh of her arm had paled clear up to her shoulder. The sorceress guessed that the magic energy in her body would be completely drained after five or six more spells—even less, if the spells were powerful ones. After that, she would have to find a different source for her enchantments. And in the Gray, she doubted that she would find any plants from which to draw the mystic force of life.
The Cerulean Storm Page 7