Reaping the Aurora

by Joshua Palmatier

  “He’s standing next to Devin, their Baron.” Bryce’s voice was laced with contempt. “You have to concentrate. Your eyes will slide right off him. Focus on the strange empty space to the Baron’s right.”

  Lienta squinted, then he gasped. “How did he find a Hound?” His voice trembled, a hint of panic underneath, tightly controlled.

  “I see you’ve heard of them.”

  “Of course I have! Baron Arent threatened the Temerites with them repeatedly, and we saw what damage they did to the Baronies during his rise.”

  “Then you know that this changes everything. No matter how secure you thought you were behind these walls, you aren’t.”

  “There’s only one of them,” Boskell scoffed. “And we’ve held this Baron off before.”

  “One is all Devin will need, if he’s foolhardy enough to unleash him.” Allan rested his hands on the parapet, watching the Hound closely. “I wonder how he’s managing to control him. Is it because he calls himself the Baron?”

  Lienta stared at Allan. A moment later, his eyes narrowed with a decision. “This isn’t your fight,” he said. “Boskell, escort them back to their wagons and let them go. Then send word to the Matriarch. Tell her to prepare to abandon the embassy. Spread the word along the wall. We’ll hold the wall as long as possible, but if there’s a breach, we’ll fall back to the embassy and get the Matriarch out of here.”

  “We can help—” Allan began.

  “Don’t argue,” Lienta snapped, then caught himself. He took a deep breath, then reached out and clutched Allan’s shoulder, looked him in the eye. “If you waste any more time, you won’t be able to escape before the Rats close in on the western wall. So go. Now.”

  Allan gripped Lienta’s shoulder and nodded.

  Then Boskell gestured impatiently. “Follow me, and don’t slow me down.”

  They raced down the stairs, Boskell shouting orders as he went, men sidestepping or flattening themselves up against the walls until they broke out onto the street beyond. Boskell’s pace increased after that, Allan huffing before they’d gone two blocks. He heard a shout from behind and glanced over his shoulder to see Dylan flagging, his limp from the crippled knee slowing him, but Bryce shouted and waved Allan onward, falling back to help the Wielder. They followed the wall, Boskell pausing only to pass on Lienta’s orders, cutting across a few blocks only when they neared the corner.

  The western gate was a roil of activity, Boskell charging into the center of it, leaving Allan to plow through a square packed with at least fifty Temerite soldiers hastily preparing for a fight. Gaven and the enforcers were watching nervously from the edge of the wagons, the enforcers in a loose, protective circle.

  “Gaven!” Allan shouted as soon as he caught sight of them. “Get the wagons ready to roll! We need to move fast!”

  Gaven began to scramble into the driver’s seat, shouting to the others.

  “Where are Bryce and Dylan?” Bryce’s beta demanded.

  “Right behind me. The Temerites are going to open the gates and let us out, but we don’t have much time. The Rats are coming to attack the wall.”

  The beta nodded sharply, the rest of the enforcers ranging themselves in front and alongside the wagons. Gaven slapped the reins, the horses lurching forward, picking up on the tension.

  Ahead, Boskell gestured toward the men operating the gates and they began to swing open. Allan glanced back and caught Bryce dragging Dylan through the last of the Temerites and tossing him into the seat beside Gaven before charging toward Allan.

  “We’ll only open the gates wide enough to let your wagons through,” Boskell said, coming up on Allan’s other side.

  “Right. Gaven!” Allan motioned to the gates, already wide enough. Bryce’s beta and two other enforcers ran through the gates—

  And then a spear sprouted from the beta’s throat. He reached up to clutch at it as he staggered backward, blood coating his hands and sheeting down his neck. He fell, another spear clanging against the half-open gates. The two other enforcers retreated with a bellow of warning, and then a familiar ululating roar rose into the air, sending a shudder down Allan’s spine. Rats began pouring from the buildings beyond the gate, heading toward the opening in a wave. Boskell screamed for the gates to be closed. Temerites rushed toward the opening as Gaven yanked the wagons to a halt and the two enforcers outside rejoined them, turning just inside to help the Temerites. Ten Rats made it through the gates before they thudded closed, the Temerites converging and dispatching them without mercy.

  Boskell ordered those on the walls above to fire into the Rats as they pounded on the doors, men already moving to add braces and bar them closed. Then the Temerite beta turned back to Allan, a grim look on his face.

  “Now we are allies. How is your Needle going to help you now?”

  He stalked away, barking orders as he headed toward the roof and top of the wall.

  Three

  KARA APPROACHED FROM BEHIND the slew of enforcers standing guard over Father Dalton and his retainers, but halted a few paces back from where Commander Ty stood watch. They were arrayed along the length of one of the temple’s tiers, oil burning harshly in the two urns set to either side of the ledge where Dalton stood above the crowd of worshippers gathered in the plaza below. Kara didn’t understand the significance of the two fires, although she admitted that the flames thrashing in the breeze and the thick black smoke that rose from them—thicker than it should be—added a dramatic flair to the sermon, even at midday.

  “Korma has blessed us all, for we were the ones chosen to destroy the tangled web of ley Baron Arent Pallentor and Prime Wielder Augustus used to ensnare and enthrall us and bind us to the city of Erenthrall. We were the ones chosen to break their hold on us, and their insidious hold on the ley, and return the world to its natural order. We were the ones chosen to pick up the strands of that destruction and repair the damage the Baron and Prime Wielder did to nature.”

  Kara suppressed an urge to roll her eyes at Father Dalton’s proclamations. But the followers shouted in response as he paused, half of them kneeling, most with arms raised up toward the edge of the tier and the thin black spire of the Needle beyond. Dalton stood at the edge of the platform of stone that jutted out toward the crowd. He was dressed in loose white robes that flapped in the stiff breeze coming from the northwest, the sun almost blinding as it hit the cloth. The symbol of the Kormanley—a thick black vertical line with a thinner diagonal cutting down from the upper left, merging with the first line, symbolizing convergence and a return to the natural order—was emblazoned on the front of his robe, although Kara couldn’t see it.

  She must have made some noise—a snort of derision or annoyance, perhaps—for Commander Ty glanced back, his frown falling away as he recognized her and turned, positioning himself to her right.

  “Come to see the show?” he asked.

  “I didn’t realize he would be here,” she said. “I don’t remember a request for a sermon today.”

  “It wasn’t planned much in advance. He asked for it this morning. I didn’t see any reason not to allow it. He’s been remarkably compliant with our demands, more so than I expected.”

  “He has,” Kara said, crossing her arms over her chest and staring at Dalton’s back. “So why the sudden request this morning?”

  Ty cocked an eyebrow. “Suspicious?”

  “Always, when it comes to the Kormanley. And especially Dalton.”

  “I’ve heard you have reasons.”

  “Many.”

  “So far, it’s been disappointing. He’s stuck to his usual script. ‘We are the chosen. Korma will protect us if we trust in the ley and steer clear of the path taken by Baron Arent and Prime Augustus.’” He halted. “I would have expected a few snide comments about how we’ve seized control and have kept him more or less imprisoned since the attack by the Gorrani, but he’s kept h
is sermons focused on Korma and the ley.”

  “He knows that you’re watching and listening, and he was never stupid. If he tries anything, he knows you’ll drag him from his perch and lock him in his rooms. He’d have no contact with the people then.”

  “You don’t honestly believe we could do that, do you?”

  Kara sighed. “No. His followers would scream bloody murder and we’d be worse off than we are right now.”

  “Glad to see you haven’t lost touch with reality.” He changed the subject. “So why did you come up here, if not to hear Dalton preaching?”

  Kara turned to stare out over the small city that surrounded the Needle and its temple. The first tier was high enough she could see out over most of the nearest stone buildings—only two or three stories high—to the surrounding stone wall. Between the buildings, where streets ran directly from the temple to the outer perimeter, she could see the tents that filled the area between the buildings and the wall. The temple had been built hundreds of years ago; no one was certain exactly when. Before the rise of the Barons on the plains, certainly. It bore the markings of pagan religions in the myriad sculptures of birds and animals that alternated with the stone urns around the edge of each tier. This first tier also contained a massive mosaic of colored stone, centered around a circular sun. Hernande surmised that it was built before the Barons seized control of the caravan routes here, when the tribes of the plains roamed back and forth with the seasons, migrating with the game herds. This site must have been sacred to them, because of the ley node at the center of the temple. It had certainly been a place of worship; based on his investigation of the writings and the sculpture, the nomadic people had stopped here to pray to the gods of nature, sensing the power of the ley that was concentrated here, even if they didn’t actively use the ley itself. The University mentor thought that the node they’d discovered in the caves near the Hollow a few months before was older—the drawings on the cave walls appeared far more archaic in nature and design, possibly even from before written history—but the stellae surrounding the Needle itself contained the same Amanskrit writing as those in the caves. For some reason, the node here had become a central focus of the nomads’ worship, while the other node had been lost.

  Kara breathed in deeply, let it out in a long sigh.

  “I came up here to relax,” she said, scanning the horizon beyond the city. The plains stretched off into the distance in all directions beyond the walls and the low slope of earth that ringed the shallow depression that the Needle sat in. Only the large jagged crevice that had opened during the massive quake that had struck during the Gorrani siege marred the view, slicing through the city from the southeast, south of the temple, to the northwest. It had breached the walls on both sides and swallowed a section of the buildings of the outer city, but left the temple intact, with only minor cracks in the foundation. It stretched at least a hundred yards out from the city to the northwest, twice as far as to the southeast, and was so deep no one had yet reached its bottom. Not that many had tried. Smaller cracks had appeared in the surrounding plains, but nothing as wide or as long as the one here at the Needle. “The openness of the plains and the sky overhead is soothing.”

  Ty surveyed the same view as Kara, hands on his hips. “I suppose.”

  They stood in silence for a moment, Kara mentally blocking out Dalton and the echoing roars of approval from the crowd below. She’d become fairly adept at ignoring him and his Kormanley followers in the last month.

  “I take it that the progress with the new Nexus and the healing of the distortion over Tumbor isn’t going well,” Ty finally ventured.

  Kara’s shoulders slumped as she turned away from the view, the gaping wound in the earth that split the city suddenly too much of a reminder of what they risked if she and the other Wielders failed.

  “We’re still working on stabilizing the ley as much as possible.”

  “We’ve certainly had fewer quakes recently, especially in the last several weeks.”

  Kara nodded, now facing the two upper tiers of the temple and the thin black spire of the Needle reaching toward the thin clouds drifting above. The sun blazed overhead as well, the summer heat faintly sheening Kara’s skin with sweat. “We haven’t needed to make many adjustments to the ley lines bypassing Tumbor. Most of our corrections have been to the crystal panes in the Nexus here as we attempt to maximize and balance the ley lines coming from the north, south, and east. Correcting the crystals doesn’t seem to produce quakes, only shifts in the ley lines themselves.”

  “Then you are making progress.”

  “Yes. We can’t do anything about Tumbor until the ley is as stable as possible.” She tried not to let any of her uncertainty seep into her voice. She and the other Wielders were working blindly, reacting solely on instinct and whatever Marcus had learned from Prime Lecrucius before he’d been forced to kill the Prime in order to halt the wall of ley that had annihilated the Gorrani forces surrounding the city.

  “And you’ll be able to heal Tumbor as you did Erenthrall?”

  Kara faced Ty, fighting back the stone of self-doubt that had lodged in her chest. “We have to. The ley structure we’ve cobbled together right now won’t hold forever.”

  Commander Ty’s brow creased, as if he could hear the self-doubt in the roughness of her voice. “What about the mentors from the University? I thought they were going to work with the Wielders, as they did in Erenthrall before the Shattering?”

  “We’ve been meaning to, but we haven’t quite found the time. Besides, we have only three experienced mentors, and none of them worked actively with the Primes before the Shattering. They were all teachers at the University, theorists. They never applied their theories to the real world. That was someone else’s job. So, like the Wielders adjusting the crystal panes, we’d be learning as we go.”

  Ty would have responded, but Father Dalton’s voice suddenly rose in pitch, catching their attention.

  “But we cannot be complacent,” he shouted down at the crowd below. “Our work here is not done. The ley is not yet settled. The land is still angry at the abuse it has suffered. The wounds we see from our walls—these rents in the earth that we have grown used to over the past month—they are but warnings! They foretell what will happen if we do not continue to repent of Baron Arent’s sins, of Prime Wielder Augustus’ transgressions.”

  Commander Ty took an uncertain step forward. “This is new.”

  The roar from the crowd below swelled, men and women proclaiming they would not be complacent, that they had not forgotten the quake that had nearly destroyed them a month before. Most of them believed that Father Dalton had saved them all. He’d predicted how the Gorrani would be defeated and had been visibly calling upon Korma to protect them when the quake struck, even though it was Kara and the Wielders hidden in the depths of the Nexus who had truly ended it by healing the distortion over Erenthrall.

  But none of that mattered to them. As far as the masses were concerned, it was Father who had saved them.

  And now their Father held his hands up and said, “I have had a vision.”

  The crowd below quieted and Commander Ty swore, hand falling to his sword as he stepped forward. But Kara caught his arm, held him back.

  “We have to stop him,” he snapped.

  “You can’t. It’s what he wants.”

  She jutted her chin in Dalton’s direction, and Ty spun to see the Kormanley priest looking back over his shoulder to see what Ty would do. The enforcers were asking for direction as well, fidgeting where they stood.

  Ty fumed, but allowed Kara to restrain him.

  Dalton smiled, the expression turning Kara’s stomach, then returned his attention to the crowd below. She let her hand drop from Ty’s arm.

  “I have had a vision!” Dalton repeated in triumph. “I have seen a black stone, cracked near its center, sitting in the sand. To t
he south of the stone, the world shimmers with auroral lights. To the north, it roils with black clouds lit from within by three piercing lights. From the aurora slithers a giant snake. From the clouds, a feral dog. And above the black stone, the two meet, serpent striking with poisonous venom, canine snapping its jaws closed on scales with a snarl. The two struggle as the black stone trembles in the sand beneath and blood rains down over all, until the stone cracks completely in two and is washed away in a flood and the three piercing lights wink out, casting everything in darkness.”

  The crowd below gasped in horror, a few wailing and falling to the ground. But then someone from below shouted, “What does it mean?” someone else picking up the cry with, “Yes, Father, what does it mean?”

  Father raised both arms again and waited until the crowd had quieted.

  “Unless the ley is healed and the land restored, the three piercing lights—the Three Sisters”—here he pointed toward where the three piercing lights of the distortions over Ikanth, Severen, and Dunmara to the north rested above the horizon like stars—“will quicken and destroy us all.”

  “Do you believe him?” Cory asked.

  “About the Three Sisters?” Kara snapped as she paced back and forth along the length of the massive table that Father Dalton had had set up in the orrery. The ley-powered globes of the planets orbiting the sun hovered overhead, their colors casting the room in vibrant hues, but the table had been set to one side, lit mostly by the sunlight coming through the windows. Marcus had wanted to abandon the room after they’d seized control, but it had proved too convenient for their occasional meetings. Instead, Kara had enlisted the help of the servants and the enforcers and had cleaned the room, removing the detritus that had piled up in the corners and at the base of the walls as the paint had peeled and flaked away. The walls had been scrubbed and the wood paneling had been treated with oils. The room still appeared faded with age, but it was an improvement. “No, I don’t believe him. I don’t even believe he had a vision. I think he’s finally realized how he can attack us without being blatant about it.”