by J. F. Lewis
I can tear this down around their pointed ears or stake my claim and establish my people’s part in it, Tsan mused. What would it be like to bask in the sun again, as a free people united with the other races Uled made? More importantly, who could stand against us if we did form a permanent alliance, an alliance opening a corridor for a relationship with the Dwarves . . .
Will we be getting Jun cannons, too? she wondered. And lining the Fortress proper with bone-steel? How had they had the time for that?
She chuckled lightly at the thought.
“You are impressed,” One-Headed Kilke observed.
“Imagine what we would have found in another year,” Tsan answered. “The Aern would have always made valuable allies, but their loyalty was, alas, never securable, due to our maker’s enslavement of their race.”
“I agree,” Kilke said, “but free will won’t change their taste for Zaur flesh. What makes you so willing to trust them and—?”
“The Aern were always trustworthy. Now, however, we have a common foe and the excuse of an ancient enemy’s obvious defeat to seek alliance without losing status.” Tsan sighed. “But then you knew that, or you should have. A little unsure of yourself now that my mind is off limits?”
Kilke did not answer.
Drawing nearer, the new dragon smiled as an arrangement of elves rose into the air in glittering breast plates over Aeromancer robes, battalions of dragonflies on parade. Fewer of them than she had expected. The Aern truly had slain a prodigious number of the pesky elves. Another excellent reason to have expanded the walls far enough beyond the disrupted area that had caused so much trouble for the cursed pointy-eared things and their precious magic.
Someone saw through our reasons for forcing them here and made impressive adjustments. Tsan considered Warlord Xastix’s original timetable and growled. We would not have been ready to launch the full attack for another few weeks. These walls would have already been up and, far from the decimated downtrodden wretches we had expected to encounter, they would have been ready and waiting.
“We still would have won,” she hissed.
“Of course,” Kilke’s cooed soothingly. “Of course you would have won.”
Each branch of elemancy made its presence known by deployment of its practitioners . . . Very uneven numbers, Tsan noted. Between the ranks of elemancers, the warsuits and their Aern moved in unison: side by side as distinct combatants, then united together as one Armored, then side by side again.
The sight that made her chortle, however, was two females: an Aern and an elf, both of some import, sitting together on a large blanket well outside the walls. Walls whose gates stood wide open.
They were chatting happily together, one eating a plate of grilled vegetables, the other consuming large quantities of steak prepared in various manners: raw, grilled, steamed, smoked, and boiled (perhaps?). A human attendant stood at a respectful distance, dashing forward to refill the elf’s cup or replace a dirty plate with a clean one.
Clever little things, Tsan thought. Now if only—
Curious, she came in for a landing, her claws rending the earth. She resisted the urge to scorch it as well, settling for an impressive plume of smoke from her nostrils. Raising herself up to her full height, she spread her wings and stared.
“Warleader Tsan,” the Aern said, standing, “I am pleased we have this opportunity to speak. I am Rae’en by Kholster out of Helg, First of One Hundred; and this,” she indicated the elf with the curious facial anomaly, “is Queen Bhaeshal, leader of the Aiannai. Would you care to join us? Bash and I were not sure whether you would prefer beef or pork, so we’ve arranged for both.”
*
Is she sniffing us? Rae’en held still despite her natural urge to unsling her warpick and drive the sharp end as deep as she could get it into the dragon’s throat. Warleader Tsan loomed over her, throat coated in blued metal, with the severed head of Kilke dangling over the center of the carpet.
“Zaur glean an impressive amount of information from scent and vibration.” Queen Bhaeshal rose in genteel fashion, turning about once for the dragon to study her. “Is it the same with dragons?”
“My sense of smell is indeed keen,” the dragon said, “but I can only speak for myself. I have met no other dragons.”
This is crazy, Amber, Rae’en thought at her Overwatch. I don’t know why I let you and Bash talk me into this plan of attack.
Because you knew it would work, Amber thought.
Well, the dragon certainly seems surprised, Joose thought. You have to give Amber that much.
Just because it is a good plan, M’jynn thought, doesn’t mean it is a sane plan.
“Would you like to meet one?” Bhaeshal asked.
“Is that a polite way of asking me to leave this world?” Settling down on her haunches, the dragon drew back her head, peering down at the queen with half-lidded eyes. “Or are you merely attempting to determine the extent of my knowledge regarding Coal’s demise?”
“Did you say you preferred beef or pork?” Bhaeshal asked through a smile.
*
Moving like a unit, eleven warsuits jogged across the expanse of purple myrrh grass. Four of the empty warsuits (they all had names, but Cadence had not asked what they were) ran farther out from the others: one to the relative northwest, another the northeast, their partners taking up matching positions to the south. Six others ran in a uniform circle of protection around the three young Overwatches, and the young Armored Aern now known as Kazan Eyes of Vengeance (as Cadence understood it).
At the center of the group, both Cadence and Randall Tyree rode on Alberta, Tyree’s horse; two of the Overwatches were running alongside as Alberta alternated between a rack and a trot. Of the three of them, Cadence was certain Alberta was having the most fun. Her saddle bags and the provisions the Zaur and Vael had provided were being carried by the warsuits, and Cadence could have sworn the horse thought riding at the center, under escort, was her just due . . . as if this were all a parade for Tyree and his noble steed.
They’d left the forest behind in the early morning, eschewing the opportunity to stop by Silver Leaf City and heading by a more direct route, stopping only to rest Alberta. Kuort, their dead rescuer from back at the tunnels, did not rest when they did, continuing at a steady four-legged lope. They would pass him, then, while they rested Alberta, he would overtake them again.
He did camp with them whenever they camped for the night, but even then, he did not sleep but sat a stone’s throw downwind of them, keeping watch.
“We need to hurry,” Cadence said into Tyree’s ear.
“Why?” Tyree asked, turning his head toward her. “Do you think we’ll make any difference if they wind up fighting the dragon?”
“I don’t know that it has anything to do with the dragon,” Cadence answered. “All I know is that we have to be there to protect something.”
“You mean you know-know,” Tyree asked, “or you just have a hunch?”
“It’s more than a hunch.” Her head still hurt, had ever since she had incinerated the dead and held back the smoke with her power. Master Sedric was unreachable, so she could not even ask how Caius was doing. What was he learning? Was he talking yet? Crawling? Master Sedric could have answered those questions, but when she tried to sense him . . .
Closing her eyes, Cadence let her head rest on Tyree’s shoulder. All around her, the only thing she could feel with her Long Speaking ability was the edge of the crazed dead thing whose mind drove the restless corpses. A day ago, she had been convinced it was Kuort’s presence that threw things off, but when he was far away, the suffocating pall of Uled hung like a curtain, blocking out other minds. It was almost as if one or more of the Long Speaker’s Spires had been destroyed. Pushing harder, she yelped as a vision cut through the static.
Wave after wave of dead Zaur poured out of a stone ring engraved in symbols she had never before seen. They overran warsuits, Aern, humans, and elves . . . all who opposed them. Vill
agers ran, but none escaped the crawling mass of rot that spread across the world, engulfing everything, even the mighty Junland Bridge. Head throbbing with intensifying pain, Cadence attempted to pull away from the vision, but it held her tight, a fist clenching her hair forcing her head under into to the pool of foretelling.
A tree. Small. Humanoid, but rooted—a topiary? Clouds of energy parted at its will . . . and it had a strong will; she could feel it riding alongside her mind.
When clouds parted, the tide turned, but only for a moment. A dead thing, unlike any Cadence had thus far beheld, flew through the stone ring, its skin a mess of scales and flesh slopped together by a mad artist. It smiled a rictus grin, revealing the teeth of an Aern. A tiny force tried to hold it back but could only slow its advance. Fire, ice, and shards of deadly red-and-green rock filled the air, pulping the tree and its ineffectual defenders.
“I don’t know how to stop it,” she whispered. “I don’t even know how to describe it.”
“You don’t have to,” Tyree said, his voiced strained, his skin damp with sweat. “I think I caught most of it.”
“Do we really have to protect a tree?” Cadence asked.
“Somebody certainly does,” Tyree said.
PART THREE
THE PORT GATE DILEMMA
“In the time before the Aern or the Zaur served the Eldrennai, Port Gates enabled elven dominance throughout the known world. Even Dwarves were wary of the devices that enabled the chosen elemancers of the king to reach out, establishing a foothold in every corner of the Last World, until it seemed a new age with a united empire that would reign forever, turning the tide against the spread of the splintered human kingdoms and breaking the hold of the Issic-Gnoss upon the frozen wastes.
How must it have felt then, when the first curious beings of the Never Dark forced their way through, igniting the Demon Wars and rendering the use of the gates a dangerous proposition at best . . . knowledge of the close-held secret of a Port Gate’s destruction transmuted to a necessity for all elemancers. From that moment to this, the number of gates in the Last World dwindled, increasing again only on one notable and terrifying day that came close to destroying all. Even in death, my father seemed intent upon shaping the world in his own distorted likeness.”
From the preface to When the World Was Small by Sargus
CHAPTER 22
THE FORGOTTEN GENERAL: BORDERLANDS OF THE NEVER DARK
Stretched out along the border between the edge of one world and the next, the Eldrennai Army formed a line of battalions and companies impressive in both their numbers and general lack of supplies. Deployed in a show of force unseen since the Demon War centuries before, they drilled and practiced, learning through trial and error the way magic responded in this strange world of rapidly shifting temperatures and landscapes. The Never Dark’s few constants, the ever-present light and the mountain range beyond which, somewhere high and far, the illumination’s source seemed to lie, felt like falsehoods, too, but they were not.
Foul Beak sniffed and adjusted his position. Clad in his Ghaiattri leathers, hooded, and crouching at the edge of an outcrop of rocks along the mountain ridge, with cave mouth at his back, the elf breathed in a long, deep breath, testing the air and catching only the faintly sweet scent of nearby demons. Scoffing, he set his right hand on the hilt of his rough-hewn blade of bone, keeping his left hand free to cast, but he did not shift his gaze from the foolish assembly in the distance below.
An Eldrennai army of this size had never before been seen on this side of the Port Gates, which served as tenuous doorways between Foul Beak’s home and the place in which he now dwelled. Near thirty thousand elves were arrayed in a series of regimented camp blocks, each sleeping roll regulation distance from its neighbor, as if a tent were in place. Some had the skill to work crystalline shelters, using the same magic that let Crystal Knights summon the armored coating which was their namesake, but geomancers would have no luck working with the ground here, as close to the Gates as they were keeping.
Along edges of the Never Dark, the Mountains of Shade created a wide swath of land called the Darkening Mile. Grass and proper trees grew there in full eternal bloom when viewed from the mountains—which betrayed the falsehood of their existence. The first few hundred yards around each Port Gate were barren and cracked, the ground a thin layer of gray-brown dirt above a layer of stone the color of obsidian and as hard to work as an Aern’s bone-steel. From that perspective, they might see the eternal bloom occasionally, but terrain that close to the space between dimensions was, strictly speaking, more material than that which lay in farther lightward in the heart of the Bright.
There the fully grown Ghaiattri, shimmering beings of light long having abandoned the violence and folly of their material youth, lived in company with a truly insane dragon. It was more comfortable out here in the physical, but it was dreary beyond endurance to dwell so close to the illusions of home: the trees, the grass, even the air held a proper scent here. Why the leader in his Ghaiattri hide plate (crowned helm, he noted) kept his army close to the more familiar geometries of the Darkening Mile made a certain sense to Foul Beak, but if they didn’t move farther in, they’d never accomplish whatever it was they wanted to accomplish. Not unless all they wanted was to guard the Port Gate.
Further in, the erratic temperature, weather, and terrain changes they surely saw and felt from their perspective were less easily handled with magic. It was the gates that were to blame. Hasimak had introduced immutable alien stone to a place where the physical was meant to be fluid and ephemeral. He hadn’t known it, of course, but he’d discovered his error in time, Foul Beak was certain of it. He’d likely faced the same moral dilemma himself. To destroy the Port Gates would be the more sensible course of action, but Foul Beak needed them as surely as the army in the Darkening Mile did.
They were the only way home. Without them, future demon wars couldn’t happen. The Ghaiattri would no longer be able to play merry hells with mortals who stumbled across a piece of the world crystal. No invasion route to Barrone would exist. And yet . . . they were the only way home. He felt so close after all these years.
True, Ghaiattri had tried to force the gates before, even managed brute breaches of them at times, but the demons had quieted since the destruction of several Port Gates, so Foul Beak discounted that one. The demons, if one wanted to persist in calling them something they clearly weren’t, were content, for the moment, to observe the newcomers, following Foul Beak’s suit.
Well, except for a few of them.
Bones still vibrating from his most recent visit into the Bright, Foul Beak removed his Ghaiattri leather gloves and squinted at his hands. The bones still luminesced through the skin, but the flesh itself had grown opaque once more. With his thumbs, he popped in unison the third knuckles on the fingers of each hand, from index to baby finger.
“Noise and sensation instead of sparks,” he murmured to himself in High Eldrennaic. “Physical enough for all sorts of things again.”
“Stay here much longer, and it will have to feed,” squawked a nearby voice.
Offering a habitual rude gesture, Foul Beak did not look in the spy’s direction. The cursed Ghaiax were impossible to avoid in the mountains. More advanced along the path to eventual enlightenment than their larger brothers, the Ghaiattri, the Ghaiax were less obviously aggressive, less, well, evil. Farther along the path to understanding the light and abandoning their physical forms and becoming true Ghaia, the Ghaiax were nonetheless not to be underestimated.
I spy on them, he thought. They spy on me. And we all spy on the new arrivals. We should start a quilting circle and be done with it. At least then we’d have something useful to show for our efforts.
Spying was the favorite pastime of the winged pests.
At first, Foul Beak had surveilled his fellow elves in measured lengths of time to see how long they would survive. If he were to be honest with himself, he would have had to admit he was impressed at the
ir ingenuity. They were faring much better than the brash young prince he’d had to rescue . . . however long ago it had been.
Well . . . not had to rescue. Almost hadn’t. But the stamp of Villok had been so clear on the youth, he hadn’t been able to watch him die.
Still, after the prince had killed three of the Ghaiattri, it had not felt just to let him fall prey to the remaining five . . . and with Shidarva’s power lacking in this godless realm, who else was there to be the hands of justice and retribution?
“No one, but me,” Foul Beak whispered.
He had been sorely tempted to nurse the boy back to health in the Never Dark, rather than returning him insensate to the Dying Light via the Port Gate, but . . . the Ghaiattri flame seemed to have caught within him. Keeping him here could have been . . . dangerous . . . or transformative. Foul Beak did not know which would have been worse, but a complete transition had proved nigh-impossible to reverse, so he’d erred on the side of keeping the prince an elf.
On the shifting terrain below, the Eldrennai broke camp again. The scouts they’d sent out to explore the surrounding area had not come back. Foul Beak nudged with his boot the unconscious form of the one he’d rescued, eliciting a change in breathing but not consciousness. The stupid soldier had burns from Ghaiattri fire across his back, but he would likely live. Sniffing the wounds revealed no sign of taint, so there was that in the lad’s favor, too. This close to the Dying Light, what the foolhardy Ghaiattri called Barrone, and Lambent called the Last World, things were dim enough for him to remove the smoked-glass lenses that shielded his eyes on forays further into Lambent’s domain. The Bright.
Lambent . . .
What kind of name was that for a dragon? Or its realm? As if anyone could see the beast and fail to recognize him by his true name. No, Lambent was no name for a dragon. Zohar was a better name, a majestic name. If Zohar’s dark twin, Abyssimus, were to play such games, people would call him Void.)
Not that Foul Beak is my true name either . . .