Worldshaker

by J. F. Lewis

  Striappa looked back long enough to watch the spire fall in a flicker of slow motion, fading in and out of sight as if—

  No. There was no time to speculate.

  Master Sedric had given him a mission: get the child out of the city. Get the child to safety. Await further instructions once the child was safe. And so he flew and tried not to think of the body he’d seen in the afterimage, arms wide, amid the wreckage and the falling chaos, eyes closed in concentration as she kept the transmission river flowing on the swift trip down.

  *

  Burned out and abandoned, the farm looked safe enough to the young manitou. The dead—and there had been dead—lay cold in the ground, yet no rebuilding had begun, and the barn seemed vacant enough despite the smells clinging to it. Best of all, it was out of the rain. Water falling from the sky did not bother Striappa. A manitou of his clutch could easily shift from feathers to leather wings if flying lightly-boned, but the lightning disconcerted him. When his Long Skills were functioning he would have risked it, but the infant didn’t like flying through it all, and though the child did not cry, Striappa was mildly concerned about keeping the boy warm and dry.

  So, once the water had risen too much for him to shelter under the small, well-built bridge he’d found (and he didn’t much like sheltering that low to the ground in any case), he’d circled back to perch in the loft of the barn.

  Striappa had not meant to doze, but he had been tired and not entirely certain the bloody beak and the fading of his powers was not a sign of a head injury. He was surprised to hear little Caius’s burbling coo.

  Pain came next, sharp and sudden, burning him through the back and lungs.

  He slashed back reflexively, talons catching a dirty ragged shirt instead of finding purchase in the meat of Striappa’s killer. Shifting into a more land-friendly form hurt, but he had to defend Caius against—

  “Name’s Hap,” spat the hard-looking human with murder in his eye. He wore a coat of plates, with a layer of rags sewn over the top to make it look less like armor. Angry hanging-scars at his throat burned red from recent exertion. Little Caius hung in a sling looped under the coat, but over Hap’s shoulders. In either hand, Hap held cruel-looking daggers. Both bore blood. “My boy’s name is Caius. Where’s his mother?”

  “Hap?” Striappa squawked numbly.

  “Happrenzaltik Konstantine Vindalius.” The man gave a slight nod. “I have been your murderer this evening. Now where is Cadie? Slight little thing, three-colored hair. A crystal twist. Burned down that house fighting whoever killed my crew. She wouldn’t have left the child behind, and you’re here with the child. It doesn’t take a scholar to know one sun rises right after the other.”

  “Murderer?” Shifting came too hard. Things which should have melded together ripped and tore.

  “Shifting won’t do you any good now, you dumb squawker,” Hap snarled. “I cut you nice and proper cross your core muscles. What you’re doing will only make the wounds hurt worse and you die faster.”

  “Why?” Striappa managed, as the world began to blink in and out of focus, field of vision narrowing.

  “I was hoping you could tell me where the boy’s mother is. Cadence Vindalius.” Everything went dark, and Striappa felt himself drop to the dirty straw. “And barring that, a man has to eat.”

  *

  Striappa gasped as the pain vanished and he found himself back in the family nest he had missed since the great storm had wiped it away when he was little and they’d had to rebuild. When he’d been a hatchling, there had been no warsuit-clad Aern standing in it. Removing a helm that bore the likeness of a horned lion’s skull, the Aern looked down on him with a stern face, made less frightening by eyes with black sclera and jade-rimmed amber-colored pupils, which, though unusual, possessed and conveyed a sad understanding.

  “You’re an idiot, but you’re a well-meaning one, and you died in the keeping of an oath, so I have no particular disdain for you.” Kholster, the new god of death, ran a hand over his red hair, his forearm bending his wolf-like ears down each time he did so. “Do you want to go back and try things again, or do you want to be judged by the Bone Queen?”

  “I’m dead,” Striappa said, more awe in his voice than fear.

  “Yes.” Kholster bared his teeth, showing off his upper and lower doubled canines in a sarcastic grin. “And you aren’t the only one who will be dying tonight. If it helps at all, you seem a nice enough soul to me. Minapsis will not likely find you wanting.”

  “What will happen to the baby?” Striappa asked.

  “I don’t know, and you never will.” Kholster’s tone sang to Striappa of barely constrained impatience.

  “Is something wrong, sir?” Striappa asked. “You seem to have greens down your gob about something, if I’m using that phrase correctly.”

  “Yes.” Kholster held out his hand. “There are a great number of things going wrong right now. Come along. I fear one of me will be required in some tunnels very soon now, and if I’m needed I would like to go myself.”

  “You were mortal until recently, weren’t you?” Striappa obediently took the god’s hand. It felt like he had taken the hand of a statue that had decided not to crush all of the bones, but only just.

  “I was.”

  “The people who might need you, in the tunnels, were they friends of yours?”

  “One was,” Kholster said, as the world went all to stars and Striappa felt himself begin to flow from one place to another. “The others are friends of my daughter.”

  CHAPTER 2

  TUNNELS AND TERRORS

  Another blast of fire shot past Tyree’s head, scorching the stone beside him as he spun away from a freshly sizzling reptilian corpse. His mouth watered at the smell of cooking meat, proving that the human body doesn’t always have the best sense of timing or propriety. Worse than his body’s reaction to the scent of flaming Zaur was that the reptile in question kept moving toward him. It had lost all of its left foreleg but rose steadily on its hind legs to compensate before continuing in his direction.

  Farther along the tunnel, more dead Zaur and Sri’Zaur, their larger and more dangerous cousins, crept, crawled, and lumbered forward, their various fatal and post-mortem injuries illuminated sporadically by the inconstant light of a lady who equally appealed to and concerned Captain Randall Tyree.

  Even sweating and covered in lizard gore, Cadence Vindalius put ideas in his head which were of absolutely no use in a tunnel filled with the animated dead. Cloak forgotten, her cotton tunic clinging to her form, she conjured fire with her mind, sending off waves of power Tyree hoped would be sufficient to the task at hand. If she were a crystal twist, as he assumed (one of those Long Speakers who enhanced abilities by crunching god rock), Tyree could only imagine what Cadence might have accomplished if she’d had some of the crystallized deific essence handy. She was right deadly without it.

  “Either there is a lot I didn’t learn about these guys when I was their prisoner,” Tyree said, backpedaling away from his current opponent, “or I’m willing to bet something, somewhere has gone terribly, terribly wrong.”

  “It’s happening at Port Ammond, too.” Kazan’s voice came from just behind him, and Tyree turned to see the Aern, the only one of the young male Aern traveling with him who seemed completely unharmed, unsling his warpick. “No reports past the Parliament of Ages.”

  “How do you—?” But Tyree cut off his own question as the Aern brought the warpick down on the head of the reptilian corpse, crushing its skull.

  “Some Armored Bone Finders saw it happen,” Kazan grunted, as he jerked his warpick free and turned to face another corpse, “and it isn’t hard to know that no Aern past—”

  Tyree laughed. Bone Finders. Of course. Obviously if the Aern knew what happened so far away, there were other Aern at the Eldrennai capital to relay the information. Were they still at the capital, or had they left? The distinction might be important.

  “So was this Bone Find—�
� Tyree rolled back further, eyeing one of the moving reptilian corpses, looking for an opening.

  “Alysaundra, Teru, and Whaar—” Kazan’s head jerked back and stared at the rocky tunnel wall as if his gaze could penetrate it. “—were the Bone Finders, and they were at Port Ammond. Save that arrow for a moment, though. Do you know why the humans in the Guild Cities and at Castleguard have started fighting in the streets? They—”

  “Castleguard is too far away to care about right now,” Tyree said. “So are the Guild Cities. We humans fight for all sorts of reasons. I remember one time—” He feinted at the corpse with his dagger, but it didn’t take the bait. “when I was off the coast of—”

  “No one cares where you were,” Cadence broke in, as she shoved past the Aern and Tyree both. The purple ends of her tricolored hair flared as she drew on the Far Flame to set more moving corpses ablaze, scales reflecting the light, wounds painted in tones of black reptilian blood. “Do you know how to kill them yet?”

  Not yet, beautiful, Tyree thought, mostly to see if, even amid the confusion of combat, Cadence could pick up the stray thought.

  I can only hold them off so long, Cadence thought back at him.

  He grinned. The first in the long list of things Randall Tyree knew he needed to accomplish in order to survive was get out of the tunnel and, promptly thereafter, away from the dead things. The second was to get the beautiful woman to smile at him. Even if a smile was all the affection he ever got from her, it would be worth the effort. Such thoughts twisted his lips upward because he knew the need was only partly his own.

  He might never be a full Long Speaker like Cadence, but, with even his meager empathic gift, she transmitted her emotions too loudly to miss. She had a use for him. He felt that much . . . and though it did not appear to be the more intimate sort of encounter he might prefer, he was quite curious to know what she wanted and whether she would ever bring herself to order or ask him to do it.

  A dreadful wound that distraction would have bought him was avoided by years of training and instinct, as Tyree caught the sharply angled Skreel blade thrust at him by the quadrupedal Zaur corpse he’d been watching. He plunged both his daggers into its throat, cutting the head free of its thickly muscled neck with a deft application of butcher’s skill and brute strength belying his size.

  “See?” Tyree shouted. “Now why do some of them use their weapons while others are all claw, claw, bite? Am I missing something?” He threw his hands up in irritation. Reptilian gore, black and rotting, covered his hands and arms up to the elbow, staining his once-billowing sleeves. Nothing seemed to stop the cursed things. True, they could be diced fine enough that the wriggling pieces weren’t much of a threat, and they seemed to need their heads, if not their eyes, to see well, but, no matter what, they kept coming.

  I’m beginning to regret having ever worked for you, General Tsan, Tyree thought to himself.

  Who is General Tsan? Cadence thought at him.

  Somebody who owes me a ship, Tyree thought back. He looked around for the wide-brimmed hat he’d bought scant days before and spotted it impaled in the ribcage of a semi-bisected corpse. And a new hat.

  Kazan tackled two corpses, bowling them over and continuing his roll across and beyond the prone reptiles. He came up gripping his bone-steel warpick in both hands and used it to pulp one skull and then another, before a bipedal Sri’Zaur corpse with black scales sunk its teeth into his shoulder. Igniting as it flew backward, its fang ripping free of the Aern’s bronze-colored skin, the corpse slammed into a group of mostly intact Zaur, knocking them down like gruesome pins in a game of Dwarven bowling (minus the tricky row of five at the back). Dwarves! Eleven pins to avoid a composite number, when nine would have so obviously been—

  He had started forward to assist the Aern when a surge of emotion registered in his mind before the resultant sound reached his ears, and Tyree froze. His horse, Alberta, neighed loudly, farther back down the tunnel, an urgent, though not threatened, feeling of summons accompanying it.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he called back to the horse. “Quick as I can.”

  It didn’t seem fair that one of the Aern in the tunnel with him (M’jynn, wasn’t it?) got to ride on Alberta and stay so far down the tunnel. Not that life was fair . . . and, yes, M’jynn was missing a leg, but wasn’t a one-legged Aern supposed to be the equal of ten men? Tyree was sure he’d heard that somewhere before and, if not, he resolved to start that rumor as soon as possible to avoid any similar inconvenience in the future.

  Of course, if fairness were a consideration, fighting a patrol of seeming dead reptiles in a tunnel was a situation in much direr need of adjustment on the scale of injustice. Hadn’t some warrior or another already gone through the trouble of killing them all once? Shouldn’t Shidarva be looking into this? Not that there was any sign of the goddess of justice and retribution showing up to even out accounts. Not that Tyree expected her to actually appear. Gods, in his estimation, were rarely where you needed them and, if they were, they seldom shared your opinion on matters.

  More heat buzzed his cheek and then Cadence, of the tricolored hair and beautiful eyes, was at his side blasting the closest Zaur with her Long Flame. Tyree had never been envious of another’s mental abilities before, despite his only-minor touch of Long Speaker talent, but he’d have traded it then and there for even half of Cadence’s power.

  “Go back with the others and see if you can help find a way out,” she said, as she summoned another burst of power, this time the Long Fist, hurling a mass of shambling Zaur back.

  “The Aern can’t remember how we came in?” Tyree laughed. “I thought they were supposed to have perfect memories.”

  “We do,” Arbokk shouted, his mostly bald head gleaming in the light of Cadence’s flames as he ran back up the tunnel to take Tyree’s place. “But we were hoping there was a faster path to the surface.” There were still bits of charred hair clinging to the Aern’s scalp in places, but no sign of the multitudinous cuts and abrasions Arbokk had received in the last clash they’d had with the Harvest Knights before taking to the tunnels. Tyree still did not know all of it, only that the young Aern would have all been dead if Cadence had not somehow sensed their danger and arrived with Tyree to reinforce them at just the right moment. Tyree felt he had acquitted himself well, too, but none of that would matter at all if they died together in these blasted tunnels.

  Tunnels.

  Tyree ran through the tunnel system in his mind. An unwilling guest of the Sri’Zaur until he’d helped Wylant and Rae’en escape (or been rescued by them, depending on whom one wanted to believe), he didn’t know every inch of the Zaur tunnels under-running the Eldren Plains and the Parliament of Ages, but he’d seen enough to develop a firm understanding of the reptilian mindset that had been applied to their creation.

  “Give me a moment . . .” Tyree took off at a run, reaching out with his meager empathic gift to see if there were any other sentients in the surrounding area. Did his gift detect the corpses? He spun back in their direction. Anger hit him in a wave so strong he fell, landing palms splayed and bleeding on the stone. Not multiple minds, but one horrific torrent of hate and death and—

  “Angry dead guy,” he yelled, as he shoved the mind away from him. “Angry dead guy in my head, Cadence!”

  “But the spirits of the dead can’t accost the living,” Kazan said, blinking.

  Tyree tried to open his mouth to ask what that had to do with anything, but found himself able to do nothing more than strain against the clawing, grasping mind that was trying to seize the depths of him. Vast and ancient, it loomed over his consciousness, and if it had not been touching so many minds at once, Tyree doubted he could have put up even a token resistance.

  “Kholster wouldn’t let that happen,” M’jynn said.

  Joose, another of the young Overwatches, opened his mouth to speak, but Tyree couldn’t listen. He had to run away from that mind, but he felt like it was chasing him.

  C
adence, he thought. I can’t pull free. I—

  A wave of fire scoured his thoughts. The being’s hold on him snapped with a twang and, as he dropped away from it, he saw it clearly for an instant, a skull with bone metal teeth cackling in the ether. Tendrils reached out from it in all directions, taking root wherever they found purchase.

  Tyree? Cadence’s voice filled his mind, but instead of an answer he thought her his best idea for an alternate route to the surface as he fell face-first toward the stone, hoping someone had the presence of mind to catch him before he broke his nose or, worse yet, chipped a tooth.

  *

  Catching the man up with her mind, Cadence Vindalius had to wonder which god it was who found it so amusing to continuously force her to rescue so many able-bodied and presumably competent males who should have been able to look after themselves. If the god in question was Kholster, then he was welcome to whatever small amusement this provided. Without his merciful insight, she would have been either dead, dead and in his daughter’s belly, or still under Hap’s control until she’d crunched so much god rock that she’d burnt out her abilities or her body completely and he sold her off or left her for dead. If one of the other gods were behind her increasing number of rescues, Cadence hoped the deity in question got to experience a full divine arvashing at Kholster’s earliest convenience.

  The air, dry from Cadence’s constant use of her Far Flame, stripped the moisture from her clothes as she struggled to carry her unconscious fellow human and hold back the Zaur dead. She did not know if it was the increased body awareness from her studies with Sedric, headmaster of the Guild Cities’ Long Speaker’s College, or that being forced to go through god-rock withdrawal had just left her hyperaware, but she noticed when she stopped sweating.