“That asshole”—a man came from the other side of the hall, his armor equipped—“already slept and is ready for the day.”
“Goddess.” Grenn pointedly looked him over. “I guess it’s true what they say about going to bed alone.”
Tavit yawned. “I’ll tell ya the next time I do. Unlike you, though, I also take my job seriously.”
The girl studied Grenn’s face from where she stood. “That’s looking—better?” She set her tablet on the counter next to her and crossed her arms over her chest.
“It’s doing better even if it looks like shit,” Grenn said.
“Gods.” She winced. “And the circles under your eyes?”
Grenn pointed at his right. “This one’s because of the cut. The left”—he gestured ambivalence—“well, people still know how to fight in this town.”
“Got a third comin with us,” said Trent.
“Yep,” the girl said and gestured over her tablet with her index and ring fingers. “Just saw. Tavit”—who didn’t pay her attention when she said his name, so she raised her voice—“will get that ready for you.” She waited for the other stable hand to respond while he bantered with Grenn. “Tavit.”
“Damn,” Tavit said. He and Grenn watched Xenia navigate Grenn’s device. “And she’s the one doing all that?”
“Yeah,” said Grenn, pleased.
“Shit. Vel, you seen this?”
Vel stifled another yawn. “Haven’t seen much of anything this morning.”
“Shoot, I’m gonna have to go see old Luff, then.”
“Good luck,” Grenn said. “I don’t think he likes parting with ‘em.”
“Then how’d you get one, playa?” He bopped Grenn on his chest. “Or did Trent help ya out a bit? Ya know those girls last night seemed pretty impressed”—
“Believe or not, people like me, Tav.”
“Ha! Porker’s chance, am I right, Vel?”
“If ya weren’t so cute, I don’t think anyone would like ya, Grenn,” she said.
“Wow, piling it on.” Grenn raised a hand to his chest. “I’m hurt.”
“Ah, but you’re not sufferin for it,” Tavit said, chuckling. He headed for stalls further down the stables, Grenn in tow. “Thought we’d have more time with you here, man. Didn’t know the Tanvarn job was so important—shipping y’all out just as soon as you arrived.”
“Yeah it’s”—Grenn paused. “Something.”
“Don’t sound so enthusiastic about it.” Tavit stopped in front of a stall half a dozen down from Thena and Raverord. “Hey, Vel, Bertrin good?”
“If he’s the one you saddle up,” she said, swiping across her screen. “We checked him in a few weeks ago. He’ll probably like getting to shake himself out.”
“Hear that, boy?” Tavit pushed into the stall. “Master says it’s time for you to go. Done overstayed your keep.”
Vel rolled her eyes as she thumbed her screen.
“Anyway,” Tavit said, quieter as he spoke to Grenn, “you’ve been after that assignment for—what?—a couple months. What’s the problem”—he and Grenn spoke while they tended to Bertrin.
“Vel, could you help me with something?” Trent said.
“I can try.”
“Had an albune here before I left. Wonderin what happened to her.”
“What was her name?” Vel said, honestly interested. She rested her elbows on the counter.
“Powque. From Old Magornian. We all got one back then. Hardly enough albunes to go around outside the Order.”
“Even fewer,” she said. “I was a little girl at the height, but gods do I remember.” She shook her head. “The terror. Hope we can avoid all that this time—but I’m thinkin not.”
“Why?” Trent asked.
“Just a feeling. Albunes get calmer the more shit’s going on around them. It’s a diametric stress response. Pretty much no other animal functions the way they do. They calm themselves to preserve their energy for when they need it, and I’ve never seen albunes as docile as they are right now.”
“Huh.” Trent had never noticed.
“There’s one named Poke,” said Vel, “but I don’t imagine that’s how you spelled it if we’re looking for Old Magornian.”
“It’s fine. Figured it was a long shot at this point.”
“Yeah, the databases got overwritten, probably twice at least, since the War’s end. Sorry.” Before Trent said anything, Vel added, “Be right back.” She disappeared for a couple minutes. When she returned, she headed straight for the stall where Lorithena and Raverord stayed. The sleeves of her armor joined her gauntlets. “Got a quick look at the manifest. That Priest—Willa—is going with you guys? What’s the story there?”
“There isn’t one,” Trent said, petting Raverord, who still laid on the straw-covered floor. “We do what leadership tells us to.”
“I mean, shouldn’t the—Grand Master—have a say in that?”
“Things are different.”
“Different like how?” She walked around Trent to grab a brush and blanket, then headed for Lorithena, who already stood, waiting for her.
“Twenty years, give or take,” said Trent.
“Gotcha,” Vel said, unimpressed. She brushed Lorithena across the withers a few times, then scratched behind the albune’s left ear and down her neck. A cloying tone morphed her voice. “We got ya good yesterday didn’t we, girl, yes we did.”
The blanket fit well over Lorithena’s back. “It’ll be a godsend when we can accept ports again. I never look forward to this time of year—glad we’re already on this side of it. Goddess knows we can’t keep sending albunes everywhere with how fast they tire out.”
Trent didn’t want to suggest it might not be over—just getting started if the last War suggested anything. “Poor guy doesn’t wanna get up.”
“Rav.” Vel nimbly squatted next to the brown-furred beast. “Come on, boy. You’ll get all kinds of rest in Tanvarn—it’s not even that long a trip.”
The albune didn’t move. Fur over his nose blew away from his face as he breathed. He huffed.
“Thena’s going.” Vel lowered her voice. “Do you want her out there without you? What if she needs help? Are her legs really stronger than yours?”
Raverord cawed as Vel petted him and stretched his neck under her touch. When she stopped, he shook out his coat and stood, grunting each time he stretched out a leg.
“There ya go, boy.”
Lorithena vocalized a low rumble of displeasure. Vel replied with only a glance. Thena puffed.
“Sorry if I’m out of kind,” said Vel. She grabbed a blanket and tossed it to Trent, who unfolded it and centered it on Raverord’s back. “But watch out for that Priest who’s joining you.”
Trent kept his face free of emotion. “Any reason?”
Vel shook her head. “I just don’t like ‘em much. Ultra-secretive and everything. Especially”—she changed her voice, and Trent thought she sounded too much like the Undertaker—“Miss Ophel, thank you so much for being here today.” Her voice returned to normal. “Awful is right. Like the Undertaker isn’t priming her.”
She looked at Trent, who only listened. “Don’t think I’m envious or anything. Just something’s going on with ‘em—the Priests, I mean—and they’re playing it way too close, not letting anyone else in on it. All outside the Chamberlain’s influence, too. That’s the craic of the Towers at least.”
“The Chamberlain doesn’t control much,” Trent said. “That’s not a surprise.”
“But shouldn’t the king be, like, talking with him instead of the Undertaker? That’s the deal, isn’t it? Leadership from Karhaal, special relationship with the king and everything?”
Trent shrugged. “What happens when the king makes his own leadership because the proper one disappeared?”
“This,” Vel said, unsympathetic. She grabbed a saddle bag, lifted it onto Lorithena’s body, and stepped onto her tiptoes to get it fully over. The girl hadn’t apprec
iated what she’d said, but Trent kept her silence while they finished readying the albunes.
Eleven minutes later, Trent checked his watch: thirty-two minutes had passed since they left the temple. Vel secured the last of Raverord’s load to his back while Grenn consulted with Xenia over his tablet. Lorithena tossed her mane every minute, impatient to leave.
The doors opened for Willa just as Tavit came out of the stall with Bertrin, whose dappled coat sheened from deep red to a soft-yellow, even in the low light.
“Sorry,” Willa said. She wore her armor, and her air hung damp around her face. Her cloak hung off one shoulder, and she carried with her a small leather duffel and an over-the-shoulder carry-all. “Needed to check in with my roommate and teh—tell her I was going. Hope you weren’t waiting on me.”
“You didn’t know you were leaving before this morning?” Grenn said, suspicious.
“Not much before you guys did. Is this one mine?” She moved toward Tavit and Bertrin before anyone responded.
Vel passed a knowing look to Trent, and though he didn’t want to make the king a suspect in his mind, he liked nothing about the current climate at Karhaal. Tavit strapped Willa’s small duffel onto Bertrin’s side, then reached for her personal bag.
She placed her hand over it, took half a step back. “I’ll keep it on me, thanks.” She equipped a riding helmet—light-weight Karhaalian steel around the back of her head with a full-face visor—and wrapped her cloak around her legs and arms when she mounted Bertrin. Unlike Grenn and Trent, she more laid on the albune’s back than sat.
They left, and Tavit accompanied them out of the city. Children capered on a playground in a square not far from the western edge of town. Though they didn’t care about a few Karlians and a Priest, their parents and caretakers did, and they whispered to each other as the Order members passed. Blue circuitry-like lines still burned across a few of the old buildings.
At the outskirts, a mile past the city’s edge, where a final way station awaited those departing, they stopped, and Tavit addressed them: “To you, Mr. Geno—excuse me, Grand Master might suit you better—and you Miss Ophel, it was a pleasure serving you both.” He looked at Grenn. “Not you.”
Grenn guffawed. He raised his arm, and they knocked their forearms together, laughing.
“May the Light illuminate your paths and one day bring you home.”
Trent looked back. The obelisk stretched into the clear sky. Its point pierced the firmament miles above them, a reminder of the power at Karhaal that pushed against the evil that made to destroy this world. He’d never gazed upon with such a lack of surety, both in the world and of himself.
For the third time in as many days, Trent raised his helm and told Raverord to run. The albune obeyed, and they shot southwest.
3
Trent jabbed his hammer at Grenn in a lumbering blow. The young Karlian sidestepped and knocked Trent’s handle with his own.
“Good,” Trent said, stepping out of the pace. “Faster this time.”
They repeated the exercise. Grenn sidestepped and hit Trent’s hammer toward the sky.
“You’ve got to watch for openings like that. The demons won’t be this slow, but any advantage is better than none.”
Grenn leaned against his hammer, steadying his breath.
“Step through them all again,” said Trent. These had been basic movements during his time as a recruit.
Grenn held up his hand, unmoving. “What’s that last thing ya did?”
“The throw? They didn’t teach that as—what?—one of the first techniques you learned?”
Grenn shook his head. “I hadn’t seen that until you did it in the courtyard.”
“What I did in the courtyard was a little different, but the throw is just tossing your weapon away from you and lettin yourself catch up with it.”
“Seems useful.”
“It is. Now come on. Again.”
A ricochet of parries, a hammer throw, and a poke at Grenn’s left knee put the young Karlian on his ass.
Willa’s laughter filled the meadow from where she watched, by the fire they’d set up when they stopped. Her tablet rested on her lap, and she read and drew between watching them exercise.
They had journeyed far enough south and west through the Thirian Plains to get clear of the storm, and stars shone in the evening’s twilight as dusk settled over Larheamst. The air had warmed, almost guiding them by itself, only cooling now as the sun set. The scents of pine and mint drifted from the forest, and spring grass spread far and away from them underfoot. Lake Thiria, Trent remembered an old Karlian once calling it—vast grasslands that stretched farther than a man could see.
The southern tip of Crowe’s Weald pressed upon them with cordial darkness from the north. Bands of highly-intelligent roaming tigers still ruled the forest-country, and they traded well with the lemurs and residential serrens. A few miles southwest of them, the Forchapp River flowed toward Loch Nhao’md, bumbling and quiet. Fording it the next morning would be a simple hop for their beasts.
Raverord and Lorithena had curled up with each other between two trees a dozen meters from where Willa sat. Bertrin rested away from them, rolled onto his back, his legs splayed in the air. He kicked while he slept, cooing every third or fourth punt.
“Ha-ha,” Grenn said in mock once he stood.
“Again,” Trent said. “Before we lose the light.”
Trent worked through the movements with muscle-memory, and on the seventh, Grenn fell behind when Trent reversed a swing, came around from the left instead of the right, and swept his mace in an upward arc rather than down. Uniquity banged into Grenn’s armor again and again.
The young Karlian fell into a token defensive posture against the assault and raised a shield of Light that softened but didn’t block. After his penultimate strike, Trent threw his weapon behind the young man and chased it, then swiped Grenn across the back and knocked him again to the ground.
“Damn it!” Grenn pounded his hand against the dirt and grass. “How are you so fucking fast?”
Trent waited for Grenn to stand.
“You have to watch him,” Willa said. Trent hadn’t noticed before, but the Priest had a pretty voice, a singer’s timbre if he’d ever heard one. “Pre—predict his movements. Na—easy if you know where he’ll be.”
“What?” said Grenn on one knee.
“Most people fight with techniques and patterns. You just have to know ‘em, and you can gain an advantage.”
“Yeah, thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”
“I could show you some time. If you want.”
Grenn laughed as he got up. “If you’re so confident, why don’t you try?”
Willa shrugged and set the tablet on her drawing papers. “Okay.” She stood, notched the links on her forearms into place, and walked onto the makeshift training floor, feeling over her armor. Next to Grenn, she said, “You should move.”
“Are you serious? You’re taking him?”
She spoke with no emotional paint. “Yes. Now move.”
Grenn looked to Trent, who shrugged and said, “Let her do it.”
The young Karlian stayed in place a few seconds before he scoffed and walked toward the fire. Every few words he spoke came out as a curse, and when he sat, he beat his mace into the ground next to him.
Trent didn’t have time to consider what the Priest already knew, wouldn’t have known what to ask anyway. Already Willa’s hands glowed with Light.
“Don’t hold back,” she said.
“Sure.”
Trent feinted right and slammed his hammer into the ground. A fissure of Light cracked through the grass and dirt and blazed against the encroaching twilight. He followed. Willa’s magic played against him and slowed him near the end of his movement. When he made it through, out of time with his expectations, he swung wildly at her head.
She raised her left arm and guided the weapon past her in a fission of Light. Trent reversed and pulled the mace
toward her body, and this time, a burst of Light came from his blow when he struck her. Willa grunted. In Trent’s pause, she manifested a golden fist and aimed a right hook at his face. He leapt backwards to dodge and surged forward again.
Her blocks came sooner into each swing, and a dozen moves into the encounter, Willa found an opening on a short backstroke and shot a bolt of Ley magic at him from under her arm. Trent’s armor absorbed it and dissipated the energy across its circuitry, venting it into the air.
They hastened in step, and their skirmish became an arm’s race of acceleration. The faster flitted by the moment, and soon, when she didn’t dodge or simply move Trent’s hammer past her, Willa dead-stopped every hit he aimed with pinpoint precision, as though she could somehow predict his strikes.
He threw Uniquity behind her. She had already turned halfway by the time he caught up, and a ping rang through the air when her tail rapped against his swing. During the counter-momentum, with his weapon hanging to his left, Trent punched, and the jet on his elbow activated to throw his arm toward Willa’s body. She phased, and his suit raised an energy shield behind him, which he barely tucked behind in time.
Willa pushed him backwards with a roaring beam of Ley, hot as dragon’s fire and molten-white, so forceful it billowed her cloak behind her. She channeled just long enough for Trent to get a bearing on what to do next. But she let up suddenly and followed with a barrage of Light energy, which she let loose through a sweep of her right arm.
Trent raised his weapon in a cross over his body and pressed against Willa’s magic in the only way he knew: get more Light between himself and harm. Two bolts missed wide on either side of him and one grazed his right shoulder, but the other two hit the shield he formed. Their combined forces skidded him across the grass a few meters before he finally caught his feet under him.
A wind squalled from far south of them. Willa held her hands near her face, compelling her magic in whispers Trent couldn’t hear. The bolts flared and skipped past his hammer. Their heat radiated toward him as though he meant to siphon it. As he channeled, Willa’s face pinched against the effort, and for a second, the missiles stopped and shivered as smelted ingots, roiling against the opposing forces. But in the next, they burnished a golden-blue and slid smoother than they had before.
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