Reaping the Aurora

by Joshua Palmatier

  DAW Books proudly presents the fantasy novels of

  Joshua Palmatier:

  SHATTERING THE LEY

  THREADING THE NEEDLE

  REAPING THE AURORA

  The Throne of Amenkor:

  THE SKEWED THRONE

  THE CRACKED THRONE

  THE VACANT THRONE

  Copyright © 2017 by Joshua Palmatier.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Jacket art by Stephan Martiniere.

  Jacket designed by G-Force Design.

  Book designed by Elizabeth Glover.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1766.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780756413309

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Version_1

  This book is dedicated to my agent, Joshua Bilmes, who took me on mid-series. May all of our hopes and dreams for my career come true.

  Contents

  Also by Joshua Palmatier

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART I: Tumbor One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  PART II: Erenthrall Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Acknowledgments

  PART I:

  Tumbor

  One

  “KARA WAS RIGHT. Erenthrall has completely changed.”

  Allan didn’t react to Bryce’s words. They were standing on the edge of a cliff looking down onto the city they’d once called home, although the majority of that city had sunk a thousand feet into the plains.

  Allan could pick out pieces he recognized: the shattered stubs of the towers of Grass in the center of the city, the districts that surrounded them, including Hedge where he’d lived with Moira and Morrell, and the glittering waters of the rivers threading through the destruction. If he shaded his eyes, he could see the twin waterfalls cascading down into the new depression, hazed by distance. After that, the rivers had mostly returned to their natural beds below, although he didn’t know what paths they were following once they converged and reached this side of the city. Based on the lack of water flowing through the river’s original bed south of here, he’d guess it had found an outlet underground. Or through the depths of the massive cracks that riddled the plains in all directions from where Erenthrall had once sat.

  But he wasn’t here to determine what had happened to the river.

  “What do you see?” he asked, cutting across the low conversations that had broken out behind him. He faced the rest of the scouting party sent by Kara, Marcus, and Commander Ty from the Needle. There were twenty of them, including Bryce, the Wolf pack leader Grant, three of Grant’s Wolves, nine fighters—a mixture of Bryce’s Dogs from the Hollow and Ty’s enforcers, although they all wore the enforcer uniforms now—the Wielder Dylan, and four of the common folk from the Needle led by Gaven. They’d brought four wagons with them. They were arrayed on a street that had once led straight toward the heart of the city, the remains of collapsed buildings of one of the outermost districts surrounding them.

  “I see a giant pit in the earth where Erenthrall used to be,” Grant growled. He stood a few paces behind Allan, arms crossed over his broad chest, his half-altered wolfish face twisted into a frown. His nostrils flared as he scented the air, one ear twitching. “This was caused by the ley?”

  “According to Kara, yes,” Dylan said. “The instability of the ley caused the quakes. Then, when the distortion over Erenthrall began to collapse, it destroyed a significant section of the earth. You can see it.” He climbed down from his seat on the wagon next to Gaven and stepped forward, limping only slightly from the knee injury he’d received during his last visit to Erenthrall. A few of those scattered around the broken lip moved forward as well. “See the ring that surrounds the city, where the buildings and streets appear to be churned up? That’s where the edge of the distortion was. It shredded everything in its path as it closed. The entire central part of the city would have been nothing but rubble, like that ring, if Kara hadn’t managed to heal the distortion.”

  “That doesn’t explain why the city sank a thousand feet below the level of the plains,” Bryce pointed out.

  “Kara said there were massive caverns underneath the city. The land was stable until the quakes, and then it was weakened further when the distortion began to close. After that, it was only a matter of time before the caverns collapsed, taking the city with them.”

  “I’d say the city survived the collapse rather well,” Gaven added.

  “There’s been additional damage—from the quakes and the collapse.” Allan gestured with one hand. “It looks like the southern part of the city suffered the worst. I don’t see many buildings left intact there. And the western sections had already been decimated by the fires immediately after the Shattering. But the northern and eastern districts appear to have been mostly unaffected.”

  Bryce swore.

  “What?” one of the enforcers asked. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that there’s a good chance that the Rats, Tunnelers, and Temerites survived the collapse largely unscathed. They may still be out there, although I don’t see any obvious movement from here.”

  “We wouldn’t,” Allan said. “The towers in Grass are blocking our view of those districts. And they’d be too distant, regardless. Even the towers are hazy from here.”

  “I don’t even see movement in the nearest streets below.”

  Allan dragged his gaze from the far towers of Grass to the districts beneath them. He stepped forward, a chunk of stone cobble at the jagged road’s edge dislodged by the movement, plummeting toward the city below. It was like looking down onto an eerily detailed map, the streets laid out in a grid, the blocks in between filled with debris. A few mostly intact buildings remained—a tenement here and there with a façade missing, a stone arch over a street, a toppled statue in a park or stone fountain in the center of a plaza. The sun was almost directly overhead, so there were few shadows. If there had been someone out in the open, close by, they would have seen them.

  But that meant little. There were still plenty of places inside of buildings for the survivors of Erenthrall’s second cataclysm to remain hidden.

  “I don’t trust it,” Allan said. “Not after what happened the last time we came to Erenthrall. I want everyone on alert. We’re here to
figure out who’s survived and what shape they’re in, nothing more. If we can avoid meeting anyone, that would be best.”

  “Who lived in this section before the distortion’s collapse?” Gaven asked.

  “The Gorrani.”

  Nearly everyone stilled. It had only been a month since the Gorrani who had lived near Tumbor had attacked the Needle and been nearly wiped out by Prime Wielder Lecrucius’ white wall of ley. Four thousand had died almost instantly, only a thousand escaping. They had retreated to the south, toward the Gorrani homeland, but it was possible that those who remained in Erenthrall knew. If so, they wouldn’t welcome anyone who wasn’t Gorrani, especially those from the Needle.

  Bryce stepped up to Allan’s side. “We have a more pressing issue than the Gorrani.”

  “What’s that?”

  The former Dog motioned toward where the roadway they’d been following through the outskirts of Erenthrall broke off a few feet from where they stood. “How in hells are we going to get down there?”

  It took them the rest of the day to backtrack far enough through what little remained of Erenthrall on top of the cliff to one of the cracks in the earth that was wide enough and with a shallow enough grade to accommodate the wagons. They camped at the edge of the crack, on the open plains, while Grant sent his Wolves down into the depths to scout out a safe path for the wagons. Once they descended into the depths, they wouldn’t be able to see whether they were headed toward Erenthrall or traveling toward a dead end.

  The next day, an hour after sunrise, they slid into the shadows, the walls of the crevasse rising up on either side as Gaven heighed the horses carefully over the rough scree. Allan couldn’t suppress a chill across his shoulders as they descended, shadows engulfing them, with only a thin band of blue sky overhead that narrowed the farther they went. Torches were lit and passed along the length of the small caravan, the Wolves leading them forward, bypassing larger chasms and offshoots in the maze of cracked earth. Without them, Allan would have been lost within an hour. Occasionally, clumps of dirt and dust cascaded down from above, showering them with grit, the earth still settling even after a month. At one point, they hit a section where the side wall of the chasm had collapsed and they were forced to wait while the Wolves found another way around it.

  By the time the crevasse widened and they finally emerged onto a rough slope of rock and earth that ended on a street filled with debris from the collapsed buildings on either side, Allan’s skin was prickling with apprehension brought on by the suffocating, confined space. He breathed in deeply as he stepped out into the open and rolled his shoulders free of the tension he’d felt escalating all day. The sun hovered above the western lip of the sunken city, still hours from true sunset but casting a long shadow across Erenthrall’s remains. Over half of the city was cloaked in an early dusk, only the jagged tops of the towers in Grass and the easternmost cliffs and districts still lit by sunlight. The edge of the crevasse was high enough they could see out over the rooftops of the nearest buildings, which were two or three stories high at most in this district.

  The first thing Allan noticed was—

  “Fire!” Dylan barked, then winced as his voice carried out over the nearest buildings and echoed in the chasm behind them. Bryce glared at him, along with at least five of the other Dogs and enforcers as they emerged from the chasm.

  “So much for remaining cautious,” someone muttered.

  Allan ignored the comment. “It looks like signal fires, clustered in an area to the northwest of Grass. It could be the Temerites, it’s hard to tell. Too distant for us to worry about now. I don’t see anything closer.”

  “The Wolves report no one in the immediate area,” Grant said.

  “Then we should set up camp here for the night. Bryce, see if any of these buildings are safe enough for us to shelter in. Find one easy to defend, if you can. Gaven—”

  “I know the routine,” the older member of the Hollow grumbled, already reaching behind him into the stash of supplies they’d brought with them. “Are we going to need a fire, or will we have access to the ley?”

  Dylan closed his eyes, brow creased in concentration, as the rest of those with them broke into action. Bryce was already ordering the enforcers and Dogs out into the surrounding area. Those there to help Gaven were digging into the supplies as well, even before Dylan opened his eyes and answered.

  “Like Kara predicted, now that the nodes that were locked within Erenthrall are open, the ley in the immediate area has mostly stabilized. I can tap into it and create a heating stone without any trouble.”

  “Then there’s no threat of a quake or any ley geysers?” Allan asked.

  Dylan shrugged. “The system isn’t completely stable. A few of the nodes were destroyed by the collapse of the distortion, but I don’t think we’ll have any quakes. Kara managed to secure most of the ley lines in the city from the Needle before we left. Anything we feel will be minor adjustments made by the lines themselves locally. It’s the distortion over Tumbor we’ll have to worry about. Any shifts in the ley there may be felt here as aftershocks.”

  “So it’s uncertainty as usual,” Gaven grumbled under his breath as he walked past Allan. Then, louder: “Dylan, get down here. I’m going to want that heating stone.”

  The ex-Dog spared one last glance toward the cluster of fires to the north before descending to the rubble-strewn street. The quakes had lessened since Kara had healed the distortion over Erenthrall and restored some of the ley lines, compensating for the sinking of the city, which had lowered nearly all the nodes. He didn’t understand how the ley structure worked, but Kara had obviously repaired a significant section of it. There was concern about the distortion over Tumbor, much larger than the one that had encompassed Erenthrall, but she and the other Wielders at the Needle were already considering how to heal that one. Once they freed Tumbor using the new Nexus they’d created at the Needle, they could repair the distortions over the rest of the major cities that hadn’t yet quickened and then bring the entire system back into some semblance of order.

  But that was the Wielders’ problem. Allan was more concerned with the dangers presented by the various groups who threatened the Needle and, to a lesser extent, the Hollow. Most of those groups resided here in Erenthrall—or they had before the city had sunk into the plains. But there were still the Gorrani and the group at Haven who had attacked the Hollow a few months before. Baron Aurek, the Haven’s leader, had been killed at the Needle, but his second-in-command, Devin, was still unaccounted for. Allan wanted to find out who now controlled Erenthrall and whether they were a danger to the Needle, and also what had happened to Haven, if possible.

  He halted in the center of the street and scanned the activity, Bryce’s men calling out to one another as they picked their way through the buildings, their attention mostly on the tallest—a three-story apartment building with only minimal damage along one wall and one corner of the roof collapsed. Gaven was already setting up a fire pit before it, Dylan concentrating on the flat stone he’d placed in its center, one hand splayed over its surface. A spit was being erected, others breaking into their food stock, pots in hand. The Wolves were pacing restlessly around Grant, who stood to one side, observing everything with his usual intensity. Since the Gorrani attack on the walls of the Needle, Allan had grown used to the pack leader’s brooding presence. He spoke little, yet noted everything.

  Allan headed toward him, satisfied everyone was busy. He raised a hand and called out, “Bryce!” motioning the Dog toward him for a small conference.

  The Wolves eyed them both warily as they approached their pack leader, one of them settling down by Grant’s side. The others continued pacing behind him.

  “Report.”

  “It looks like that three-story building will serve our purposes for now,” Bryce said. “The enforcers are searching it, looking for any signs of recent tenants. I’ve set
the Dogs up on patrol, about a block out from here. They’re checking the surrounding buildings just in case.”

  Grant rumbled, an impatient sound coming from deep in his chest. “What do you need from the Wolves?”

  “I know you’re here to find and recruit any Wolves remaining in the city,” Allan said, “and to find your wife, but I’m concerned about the Gorrani who held these southern districts. We haven’t seen any sign of them since we arrived. I’d like to know where they’ve hidden themselves.”

  “If they survived the quakes,” Bryce added.

  “I can search the southern part of the city with my pack tonight. We’ll look for our brethren and the Gorrani. We can cover more area without the rest of you slowing us down.” Grant hesitated, then added, “You haven’t forgotten the Wolves still trapped in the shard Kara mentioned?”

  “No, I haven’t forgotten. We’re going to see if Dylan can free the Wolves and the people still trapped there as soon as we know that the area is safe.”

  “Then we’ll be back before sunrise.”

  Grant spun on his heel, emitting a low growl, the three Wolves halting and listening intently before loping out ahead of him, vanishing into the shadows of the crumbling city without a sound. Allan and Bryce watched Grant’s back until he turned a corner.

  “Do you think he’ll find any other Wolves?” Bryce asked.

  “Yes. We know there were some trapped in the distortion—those who were following Hagger, for one. And I’m certain the auroral lights have transformed others since the Shattering.”

  “I’m surprised he didn’t have Morrell change him back to being fully human as soon as she arrived at the Needle.”

  Allan tensed. He still wasn’t comfortable with the idea that his daughter could heal others simply by touching them. Watching her change Drayden from Wolf form back to human had been disturbing, but he’d been able to ignore it by focusing on rescuing Kara and the others from the Needle. Morrell had only been at the Needle for a few days before Kara approached him about returning to Erenthrall with this group, providing him with another distraction.