by Kari Cordis
“But why are they older?” Rodge cut in. “I’d think you’d want the youngest to play that role—ow!”
Having elbowed him sharply, Loren gave her an ingratiating smile. “Ignore him,” he advised.
“They do seem older, don’t they?” Roxarta mused, toying with the thin bread. “But you must consider what their lives have consisted of…year after year after year after decade after century…centuries and centuries of nothing but killing. Of swinging your blade and taking life—even if it is for a good cause, think of doing nothing but that until the Ages are but a day and the world is covered in bloodstains. It is a great, grave, hard thing that Il has asked of them, and they have never faltered, never complained. Even now, they are out on watch when they should be resting, should be doing nothing but sitting and being revered…”
“There are two hundred years between Ashaura and Jordan,” she concluded matter-of-factly, “but it might as well be two thousand.”
The inevitable silence fell. The northerners found themselves consistently lacking in the conversational skills needed to move easily over these little bumps in reality. No doubt following that line of thinking, Rodge asked in a voiced that inferred as-long-as-we’re-talking-nonsense, “Is there really such a thing as a Phoenix?”
“Mm,” Rox asserted around a mouthful of bread. She swallowed. “Not one of Laschald’s more carefully thought-out projects.”
“Do they really catch fire?” Loren asked eagerly.
She nodded. “He made them with glands that excrete a flammable oil—that’s why the Tarq are so fond of them—and then had to use a compound related to the fire-shedder of Merrani to keep them from being burnt up.”
Everyone around the fire was looking at her like she was crazy. “Being birds, of course, they’re instinctively terrified of fire, so when they spontaneously combust, they go shrieking off in flight, which just fans the flames. They’re miserable creatures…live in endless terror of their own plumage.”
The reemergence of Cerise and a damper version of Selah was greeted with profound relief just then. Rodge and Loren politely said nothing, but, really, there wasn’t much improvement in Selah. Her thick, dark hair had grown out quite a bit in the months since Crossing, but the tangled wad it had been in had apparently required rather drastic and irregular trimming. At least there were no sticks in it anymore.
They were up late that night, catching up. Rox did not stay long, and the night was mostly empty of the other Whiteblades, as if they were giving them all time to get reacquainted. Selah hadn’t changed at all, Ari thought warmly as they bedded down. The mountain nights were cool, so they all slept close to the fire, and as he watched the light play over her calm, steady face, he felt such a rush of thankfulness that he fell asleep with a smile hovering around his lips.
His little brown wren amongst all these brilliant hummingbirds.
Ari rode in a dream of delight the next few days. Selah was lent a sweet-tempered strawberry roan and they rode close together, sharing stories and talking so exclusive of the rest of the party that sometimes they lost sight of them altogether and rode barely in front of Rox and the herd. His life seemed to even out, Il was a little more real, the sun shone a little brighter, and everything made a little more sense.
He had to pause in the rather personal recounting of his dream of Roxarta one day, though, as they came up on the rest of the party. They were gathered around Dorian, now mounted on an opinionated mare that shone like ripe wheat in the sun. She was frowning down at Tamaren, who tended to run reconnaissance and apparently didn’t have happy news.
“Half a day?” Dorian repeated. Tamaren, expertly resheathing an axe behind her back—Ari had never got the hang of that back brace—nodded.
“I am most reluctant to cross that Pass until needed,” Dorian declared almost under her breath. “There is no more vulnerable spot save the ride into Zkag itself.” She decided suddenly, “We’ll wait on this side for Rheine and the others—and pray Il they get here soon. Bring it in. We’ll stick to a 50-yard perimeter.”
One of Tamaren’s tawny eyebrows rose, her golden-green eyes sliding to the group surrounding Dorian.
“They can be quiet,” Dorian said.
Suddenly, the shrill cry of a falcon on the hunt shattered the air. Tamaren was gone like a wisp of smoke, and Dorian whipped around to stare intently at the trail leading south.
The boys had figured out a lot of the bird calls—they even knew some of the individual Whiteblades’. Voral’s was a kestrel. But they had never heard this one. Ari looked to Traive, who was frowning and looking very alert.
“What is it?” he said urgently, beginning to feel a little anxious.
“Attack,” Traive told him in an undertone. “Cyrrh knows that call well…it has saved many a Sentinel.”
“Let’s get back into the trees,” Dorian suggested, still staring intently to the south.
They were in a large glade here, the undergrowth much thinner on the west side of the Tamarisks and the trees spreading out over park-like grasses. Ari didn’t go very far, making sure Selah headed deeper in but not wanting to miss anything that came down the trail. The Whiteblades were rarely alarmed, so to see Dorian so tense…his heart was thudding with anticipation and he almost jumped when Jordan suddenly appeared, flying over the little crest in the trail.
“Minotaur,” she said, eyes wide in wonder, and was gone, dashing into nearby cover.
Dorian had one instant, her face blank with puzzlement, before the golden mare under her suddenly neighed in alarm, throwing her head and pivoting. She took off at a run just as a creature out of impossibility rose suddenly up over the crest. And rose, and rose. Ari felt his mouth go dry as it paused in its headlong motion, silhouetted on the crest a good two man-lengths tall. It looked like a monstrous, over-sized bull, with two long, wicked horns extending from its poll and eyes of devilish red.
Another of Raemon’s creatures? He gazed, wide-eyed, leaning out of the saddle to see better around his selected tree trunk just as his gelding got a good look himself. The brown immediately objected, bolting so quickly that it resulted in an unfortunate parting of ways. Without much dignity, Ari thudded onto the ground, scrambling quickly to his feet with his heart thundering in his chest and the sound of his horse—along with Rodge and Loren—galloping away in the background. The bull-thing turned its big head slowly, its gleaming eyes alighting right on him.
Like yet another bad dream in the whole series of them that was making up the past few months’ adventure, the creature snorted and proceeded to paw a furrow in the ground that could’ve hid Sylvar. And then, lowering its massive head with unmistakable intent, it charged. Ari couldn’t believe how fast it could move. It was the size of a small mountain and seemed to cross the open space between them in a wink of an eye. Desperately, Ari threw himself to one side, but he didn’t have much practice at hunter-prey relationships of this sort. It was too soon, or the creature was more agile than his hurried calculations had accounted for; it altered its charge effortlessly, bearing down on him like a Merranic-sized nightmare. He saw with great clarity the details of his final moments: the sharpened, steel-tipped horns, the dark mahogany-colored curls on its poll. That head was wider than his whole body and probably weighed as much as Banion. And it was all so close and moving so fast that Ari felt a horrible, squeezing sense of inevitability take him over.
Then, suddenly, from literally under its nose, he was whisked perpendicularly out of its path and it brushed by him, yard after yard after yard of massive, muscled, reddish-brown body, hooves thundering on the soft grass.
“Perhaps,” Rox said thoughtfully, releasing his blouse so he could stand, “not quite so blatantly brave.” She smiled up at him as he leaped agitatedly to his feet. His eyes were wild, the bluish-green irises a flare of breath-taking color around the pinpoint pupils, his deep red hair on end and looking like a fire out of control. She chuckled. “Dorian’d have kittens.”
He followed he
r, a little shaky, in the direction the bull had taken. You could track it easily, by the sound of its own passage and by the screams and cries as various people made its rather startling acquaintance.
By the time they’d caught up with it, it looked like a pin-cushion. It had been barely out of sight for more than a minute or two, but arrows now protruded from it everywhere except the enormous, red-eyed head, which it was throwing around as it sought out new targets. It charged and whirled and stormed through the trees with such magnificent power that Ari found himself admiring it even as he dashed around trying to make sure his friends were safe. The bull had temporarily plunged out of sight when it let loose a deep-throated bellow that shivered through his entire skeleton. He sprinted toward the sound and came up behind it just as it lowered its head and prepared to charge.
“What is it?” Cerise shrieked off to his right. She had a borrowed bow out and was shakily trying to notch an arrow.
“Just kill it,” Selah advised her calmly, at her elbow. “We’ll name it later.”
The bellow had pinpointed the creature’s location to all those having trouble finding it, and it seemed like the area was suddenly nothing but Whiteblades. A veritable storm of axes, spears, arrows—anything metal and projectile—flew through the air as it charged, and a great crowd of the girls darted and flowed and ran liquidly all around as they followed it.
The bull was cornered, finally, after what seemed like only minutes with all the adrenaline flowing, but was probably well over an hour. His great, glossy flanks backed up against a wall of red rock, long, tufted tail lashing, he shook his huge head and tore up the grass with his hooves, bellowing with a sound like a challenge from the very bowels of the earth.
Whiteblades surged and flowed around him, shooting or throwing steel and then sliding away before he could make a target of any of them. Several were trying to scale the sheer rock behind him, and Verrena took off on her black to seek out a way to the top.
“KILL IT!” Dorian cried commandingly as it stopped swinging its head and lowered it for a charge. It was honed in on Rodge, who was staring at it unmoving and open-mouthed from his terrified pony in the surrounding trees.
“Oh,” Voral said, as if enlightened. “Kill it. That’s what we’re trying to do here.” Only a few yards from Rodge, she pulled her two-handed greatsword from its back sheath, tossing it in her hands like it was a toothpick, and as the bull-thing glared at her and Rodge from its seething red eyes, she said softly, “Come taste some steel, you son of a bull.”
He dug into the soil, propelling himself forward in a magnificent, lunging sprint, and she threw the greatsword, tip-over-grip, right at him.
It whistled faintly as it flew, a gleaming, deadly splinter of metal traversing the sudden silence, until it sank to the hilt in that colossal chest. The creature threw his tremendous head up, stumbled, and then went down in a great cloud of dirt and grass, his weight plowing him to a stop within a yard or two, despite his momentum. There was no thrashing, no bellowing or pitiful moans…just utter, complete silence.
Voral, totally fearless, walked up to it and booted it experimentally in the muzzle while the northerners were still trying to draw a ragged breath. When it’s enormous shoulder muscle spasmed, they all jumped, but that was the only move it made.
“That,” Loren said in the silence settling over the killing ground, his voice awed and unsteady, “was a beautiful throw.” Even Banion murmured something complimentary in the restrained murmur of conversation that followed.
“He was dead before it ever reached him,” Voral said as they all drew warily closer, surrounding the small mountain of his body. Ari couldn’t see over the great chest, even prone on its side, until he got close. Then, peering over, he could make out what everyone was staring at. Low down in its chest, sunk to their fletching, were three arrows so close together that two of them had splintered. They were the only things moving in all that tremendous hulk of flesh, and they were trembling in unison with the rhythm of his heartbeat. Even as he watched, the clear, sharp movements faded, merged, then grew still.
“Nice shooting, Huntress,” Voral said quietly into the almost reverent silence. Ariella reached down and very carefully withdrew the arrows, and a faint, regretful sadness seeped into the charged atmosphere.
Verrena’s stallion galloped up and she slid off easily as he went by the group. Breathing a little hard, she came up to the audience watching the corpse, looking over it as curiously as any of them. As the girls began to slowly replenish their arsenals from the depository of his body, she said, “If that was a horse, I’d say he’d been saddled.” She pointed to the faint outline on the glossy mahogany of his hide.
“His horns have been tipped, too,” Ari added, suddenly remembering.
“And his hooves,” Jordan added, pointing one out. “We never did get down there…” she said regretfully. She raised her head, looking south, and several of the other girls did the same.
Melkin and Traive exchanged a look at the other end of the bull. “There are lands south of the Sheel?” Melkin asked alertly.
No one said anything, and were it not for the breeze stirring their bright hair and the edges of their clothes, the Whiteblades could have been statues. Finally, as if breaking a spell, Voral said, “We don’t know—we never got down there.”
The girls roused from their contemplation, whispering off in various directions, and Dorian said, “Let’s move camp downslope and another hour in.” The northern party reluctantly started drifting back to the trail and, hopefully, some of their absent horses.
The bull was inevitably the topic of conversation around the fire that night. Ari personally thought it was perfectly satisfactory as a mystery and was ready to move on—perhaps to a nice secluded talk with Selah under the trees. But Voral joined them right after they’d finished eating, sprawling out at the edge of their circle in unmistakable indication that she was going to stay. She’d sat right next to Cerise, which didn’t make for a very flattering comparison. Cerise looked scrawny and shrunken and shrewish next to all that robust vitality. The warrior sat there, joking with the boys, her carrot-top head of hair catching the firelight, until Cerise interrupted with faint scorn, “Are you really trying to make us believe that you have no idea what that creature was—that in all your hundreds of years of living and vast accumulations of knowledge—”
“Chunks and cinders, woman,” Voral interrupted in a drawl, “life is not that serious.” Smiles erupted around the fire, and Rodge choked on a piece of biscuit.
The Cerise of old would have been spitting fire, but this new one just surveyed the red-headed girl coldly. “It seems odd that a woman claiming to be so devoted to Il should have such foul language.”
Voral winced and leaned back on her arms. “I’ve gotten a lot better,” she said heavily, so disarmingly honest that it rendered Cerise temporarily speechless. “Row says I have a deeply entrenched cognitive malfunction,” Voral admitted. “I don’t even think about it…it just sort of comes out. I don’t even mean anything by it. Usually.”
“You’ve had all these hundreds of years to work at it, though…” Cerise said snidely.
“Leave it alone,” Banion rumbled. Not only was Voral one of his favorite—that is to say, least-hated—Whiteblades, but Merranics were cheerful and imaginative cussers themselves, without the least regard to sensibility, circumstance, or gender.
Voral was thoughtful, head tipped back in perusal of the starry night, but she said after a minute, “Part of the problem is that it just doesn’t seem to matter, when you get right down to it. When you’re alone with Il, when He fills your mind and soul and you can’t even breathe for the enormity and the purity…well, a little discourteous speech is the least of your failures. There’s just so much else wrong, so much rottenness—all the way to the core of your being, that…well, like I said, nothing in the day-to-day trodding out of this life seems like it’s all that important. You either focus on Him, or you go mad.”
>
There wasn’t much Cerise could say to that. Ari felt a grim satisfaction; served her right for bringing up Il.
They waited, the mounting tension maddening, especially given the pace of their adventure so far. Voral taught the boys a scandalous card game and Traive helped them practice with their axes, but Ari was still so restless he was ready to trot off to Zkag right then and there. That was part of what made it hard…here they were, within spitting distance of their goal, of meeting the Empress, of doing something dastardly (he hoped) to the Ruby god—this would be the single most exciting, dangerous thing he’d ever done, and as full of dread as it made him, he still itched to be at it.
Sometime in the afternoon he overheard Dorian say, “Does it smell like rain?” All the northerners turned to look at her in surprise, not only because they were traveling on the lip of the greatest desert known to man, but because the skies were crystalline blue and clear. Every Whiteblade in the immediate area, however, most sharpening arrow tips, nodded.
“‘Twill be quite a storm,” Tamaren said, adding with a look at the northerners, “Perhaps a shelter?”
Dorian agreed and didn’t have any trouble getting the bored northern party to help cut pine and cedar boughs and wend them into a sort of roof back in under the trees. In the process, Ari and Selah discovered a pretty little meadow surrounded by the leftovers of a few rare deciduous trees. The trees had lost their leaves already, a reminder that it was deep into autumn farther north, but it was still so picturesque that the two snuck back after the shelter was complete and most of the others had swooned into afternoon naps.