by J. F. Lewis
A breeze, sharp and hard and brief, spat comingled freezing and blazing hot winds across his back, but it had been many moons indeed since this place could catch him unawares. A casual flare of elemantic might shielded him from the worst of it, and he channeled what he couldn’t block completely into twin bursts of ice and fire, which he hurled at one of the nearby Ghaiax watching him. Curled horns dimmed their usual light to express displeasure, but the crystal-scaled creature with its sharp-angled wings didn’t bother going through too much of a display, merely snapping its beak in disgust.
“Not fair, Foul Beak,” the wolf-sized Ghaiax croaked in Low Tongue.
“Oh, fair am I?” Foul Beak pulled back his Ghaiattri leather hood to reveal short-cropped black hair and the vaguely pointed ears of an Eldrennai. He glared over his lenses, revealing sapphire-colored eyes that caught the light and seemed to shine, amplifying that which it took in and reflecting it back. “Fair in appearance if not in deed or word. My tongue, though, of itself is attractive enough, yet the sounds it makes are no more fair than you.” It took a little magic to allow Elven lips to produce the correct trills and squawks of the Never Dark’s primary languages, but it was worth it to watch them tremble with rage as he insulted them in High Tongue, giving any polite messages he was grudgingly forced to relay only in Low Tongue. “I find, in fact, that you serve no purpose useful to any being other than to block the light which should so freely shine. Why do you yet thrive? Does death not crave your company more than I? He surely does, for anyone must, by definition, be said to crave it with greater appetite when compared to my own desire for the continuance of your presence.”
Insults were a little forced in High Tongue, but it was one of the few true pleasures left to Foul Beak since he had gathered all but the last of his sheep together. Even now he could feel the Ghaiax’s kin probing his cache and seeking a way into the cave, but once he’d managed to master enough of the dimensional magic with which Hasimak had forged the Port Gates, shielding the cave had been easy . . . And it had only taken a hundred years. Or was it two?
“No!” He barked the thought away. Keeping track of time, thinking about it, had proven dangerous. Too dangerous in this timeless place, where the light neither dimmed nor moved except as it approached the border between worlds. Beyond the edges of the Darkening Mile, the sway of time held but loose rein upon any elf.
One hundred years. He drove his palm into his temple. Today. Tomorrow. Even the next. It will always have been one hundred years. Time has no reckoning until we return.
“Foul Beak’s thoughts are jumbled,” the Ghaiax croaked.
“Yet his magic—” Foul Beak lashed out with a thin plane of violet power, bisecting, then quartering, the beast. “—remains sharp—” He killed another of the beasts clinging to the rocks of the Shade Mountains about him. “—and bright—” Another fell, this time into unequal pieces. “—and perilous.”
As one, the remainder of the flock took wing, providing blessed solitude (the injured elf scarcely counted) if but for a scattered handful of moments. Drumming the fingers of his left hand on the stone outcropping of his overlook, Foul Beak used two small rings of purple magic like the ends of a telescope to magnify his view of the army below.
“Not a Bone Finder among them,” he spat. “How the hells does King Villok expect me to reach the last one without one of Zhan’s Ossuarians?”
You will find a way, General Kyland, the memory of the king’s reassurance echoed in his mind. You always do.
“I haven’t failed yet, my king.” Taking a moment to straighten his armor and clean his smoked lenses, the Eldrennai called Foul Beak by the denizens of the Never Dark and General Kyland by the elves and Aern who had served under his command (including, to his simultaneous pride and chagrin, his daughter, Wylant) rose into the air on a wave of dimensional magic and arced toward those assembled below. It was clear enough they were no trick of the Ghaiattri or the light-bending Velliahnt. So what in Aldo’s name did they think they were doing here?
“Time,” he muttered to himself, “to see what the king has sent me.”
*
Sweat ran down Rivvek’s back underneath his Ghaiattri hide plate as he listened to another report telling him what he already knew. They had been there for days and Rivvek was no closer to finding the Lost Command than he’d been before he’d marched through the Port Gate. They weren’t coming back. Not even when he’d sent a group hand-picked by Jolsit, himself a veteran of the Demon Wars, an elf who had been brave enough to tackle a Ghaiattri back through a Port Gate at Port Ammond what seemed like years ago now, but which could only have been a matter of weeks.
Jolsit’s near self-sacrifice had averted the beginning of another demon war when, to transport the Aernese warsuits under General Bloodmane’s command to multiple striking positions at once, they had risked opening the Port Gates within the Tower of Elementals.
Suddenly the blazing heat beating down on them from, well, from no suns Rivvek could see, was swept away. In its place, a frigid chill settled over them as the grass beyond the barren areas surrounding the Port Gate wavered and shifted, becoming a field of snow with columns of ice and stands of evergreens replacing what had been there only moments before.
He’d expected an army of the curly-horned demons to swoop down on them, wielding Ghaiattri Fire to burn them all to cinders, a swarm of unescapable death, in retaliation for their incursion in the Never Dark. But . . . nothing. Nothing close. Around him Pyromancers swapped out with Aeromancers and Hydromancers who’d been doing their best to ablate the heat, but there were fewer of them. He wondered why it was that Pyromancers and Geomancers appeared to have been more likely to be accepted as Aiannai by the Aern than Aeromancers or Hydromancers. Pyromancers tended to fight toward the front of the battle, as did Geomancers. Was there some inherent advantage for Aeromancers and Hydromancers when it came to command that meant an elf wielding fire or earth was more likely to have fought alongside rather than be in command over Aern?
It was worth taking time to do a full review of the matter with Sargus, if they ever made it back. Back. How were things going back there? He had been forced to take more than half of the trained soldiers and elemancers with him through the Port Gate. For every elf he’d taken with him who did not possess the power of elemancy, there were two who did. And only seven Artificers. It seemed those who shared Sargus’s discipline were even less likely to have been in a position to offend the Aern by “holding the leash.”
“We’ve tried scouting—” Jolsit began as he approached.
“But you’ve found nothing resembling what I saw when I went the Port Gate a century ago,” Rivvek cut him off. “And the scouts haven’t returned and we are still sitting on the doorstep counting down the hours to doom.”
“Sorry,” he said in response to Jolsit’s silence. “I didn’t think it would look this different. I—” —didn’t expect to still be alive.
“If it helps, Highness,” Jolsit offered, “the combat training is going better than expected for those lacking recent martial experience, and the landscape is definitely an incentive for the veterans to knock the dust off their skills as well.”
“Did . . .” Rivvek tried to concentrate, to bring the mind that had been able to see a strategy to save the bulk of his people from the Aern and implement it to bear, but he was so tired. He had been so used to stacking up the trignoms on the game board of his mind, to running things through the probability matrix that was the collection of mathematical constructs the Gnomes worshipped as the Great Destiny Machine, but . . . “Did you get the organization issue sorted out?”
“Yes, sire.” Rivvek could hear the elf’s smile in his voice even with the horrible helm in place. “We’ve settled on forty-two battalions of approximately six hundred and fifty elves. I’d hoped to—”
“A moment.” Rivvek cut him off, gesturing to a figure in the sky. But it was unnecessary. Rivvek had seen the approaching creature only a few heartbeats before
Jolsit spotted it, a possible benefit of the Ghaiattri plate armor they both wore and the way its crystal lenses distorted the images around them. Back home, it allowed glimpses through the barriers between dimensions, illuminating the use of magic as well. Here, it also allowed glimpses of the world they’d left behind. Jolsit looked back toward the Port Gate at the ghostly image of Fort Sunder, hoping for a glimpse of Sargus in the hallway, working furiously on plan after plan at the desk he had moved out into the hallway, or building works of artifice to assist in the coming battle. Sargus had not been there for a day or so.
Rivvek turned his attention toward the incoming figure once more. It was wreathed in lines of purple, blue, and red. The slight demonic-looking thing glided on wings of amaranthine light. Light that bore more than a passing resemblance to the magic Rivvek had seen Hasimak use back at Port Ammond when he attempted to hold off an entire invasion force of Zaur . . . and succeeded.
“Pyromancers—” Rivvek began.
“I think it’s an elf, highness,” Jolsit hissed. “That’s not its hide. That’s armor.”
“Elementalists hold,” Jolsit ordered at a nod from Rivvek. Echoing cries of “Hold” went down the line in both directions. At a further gesture from their king, the troops parted to make way for the new arrival.
Draped in armor that was to a scout’s leathers what the king’s own armor was to a Castleguard Knight’s suit of plate, the elf landed lithely, the surroundings shifting as his boots touched the ground. Replacing the icy landscape, an idyllic scene of tall grass and trees with leaves a vibrant green erupted, flowing out from the new arrival’s position and bringing with it a cool breeze that smelled of spring and approaching rain.
Over the toe of his boots and at the tips of each gloved finger, demon claws were affixed with processes Rivvek could not readily determine, as if the under edge of each threatening talon were fused with the leather. Short bone spurs curved up from a thicker ridge of pad-like plating at the knees and elbows. Bone weapons hung belted at the elf’s waist, but what caught the king’s eye the most was the symbol etched into its broad chest plate: three towers lined in amber-hued resin. It pulsed with red, blue, and purple in sequence as if in response to his gaze.
The elf smirked beneath smoked lenses made not of proper glass, but some type of clear crystal, held in place with frames of Ghaiattri bone, worked thin like wires. Pulling back his hood to reveal close-cropped raven-black hair, the elf sniffed deeply, as if trying to catch the scents of those assembled.
His laugh took all assembled by surprise.
“He’s gone mad.” Jolsit stepped forward interposing himself between the elf and his king. “Stand back, sire.”
“Mad, Lieutenant Jolsit? No,” the elf barked. “Impatient, perhaps. Fatigued beyond measure, I assure you, but I am in complete command of my faculties, just as, one presumes will be imminently evident, I am of this army.”
“I don’t know how you know my name, but how dare—?” Jolsit drew his blade. The oddly outfitted Eldrennai smiled, baring his teeth in a very Aern-like manner, to reveal a mouth full of bone-steel dental replacements, not the haphazard sort of thing that sometimes happened on the battlefield when a soldier lost a handful of teeth and ordered an Aern to replace them, but a fitted affair . . .
On the trignom board in Rivvek’s head, a handful of the three-sided tiles settled into their places for this variant. A new game. Those teeth were a very rare decoration, a military one, one of the most intimate the Aern could, as slaves, bestow.
Rivvek brushed aside Jolsit’s blade with a one gauntleted hand.
“What,” he asked as he removed his helm, “can you tell us about the state of the mission, General Kyland?”
CHAPTER 23
CONJUNCTION
Irkanth roars echoed against the distant butte upon which Fort Sunder sat. Shrieking shade-beast cries told the story of a hunt underway. Kholburran could not tell who hunted whom, but lay back on the cold ground, myrr grass tickling his bark, and tried to puzzle it out. Anything to block the sounds of the girl-type persons arguing felt a worthwhile pursuit. All had seemed fine; they had been approaching Fort Sunder and then Gilly, the advance scout, had come running back to make them crouch at the base of the butte instead of walking on around the main entrance. He wanted to go inside, see where real Aern had fought demons and won, where real warsuits walked and talked, beings who had predated the Vael, the Twin Trees. If there was a dragon, he wanted to see it, too. Besides, he could barely make out the fortress through the fog or clouds, or whatever they were, ringing the top of the butte.
“What makes the clouds so thick?” he asked, but the others ignored him.
“There is a dragon, Arri!” Gilly thrust her palm toward the senior Root Guard’s chest, a mimed push emphasizing the strength of her opinion. “A dragon no one has ever seen before is leading an army of Zaur. We should go back to Silver Leaf and wait to see whether or not there will be a Fort Sunder to visit when the Zaur are done with it.”
“The Zaur are now our allies.” Arri’s gaze flicked to Gilly’s open palm, and she thrust her fist into it, daring the other Root Guard to close her fingers around it. “And the prince may go where the prince wishes.”
How could so many people be both staring intently at and pretending to ignore the same spot? Kholburran held his breath. Surely Gilly wouldn’t go so far as to challenge—
Gilly jerked her hand away, growling like an Aern.
Kholburran felt Arri’s eyes fall on him, the heat of her gaze making him sap. He could end the argument, but he did not want to do it. If Gilly did not listen to him, if she was angry enough to oppose him directly, she would leave Arri little choice but to strip her rank and eject her from the prince’s guard. Being kicked out of the Root Guard did not mean the end of a Vael’s life or career, unless it happened during a Root Taking . . . then it was banishment at best, mulching at worst.
Refuse to serve the Root Tree in life and you could nourish his growth. So he looked at the fortress, looming silent over the plains, and tried to count the plumes of smoke rising from forges or cooking fires.
Another hundred count, he told himself, maybe a thousand count, and then I’m going to run for the rock face and scale straight up to the fortress. Then they can either help me or stand back and gawp. Maybe that will keep Gilly out of trouble.
“Arri,” Gilly said, “you have to listen to reason. Ancient custom doesn’t get to lead the hunt in wartime.”
The whorls of green on Arri’s bark lit up bright enough to blind even in the daylight. Her newly regrown arm lanced out, fingers splayed, grasping, just short of Gilly’s chest.
“LISTEN?” Arri’s trembling wood formed the sounds without need of her throat lips or vocal cord. “NO. YOU MUST HEAR THE ONE WHO TAKES ROOT.”
Twitching ever so slightly, Gilly’s Heartbow slipped its string.
Gilly dropped in supplication, and the trembling of Arri’s bark ceased. Arri caught herself, stumbling, but not falling. Was that a smile?
“Prince,” Arri’s said, her voice sharp and fierce, “are we going back or going forward?”
*
You are never going to believe this, Kazan thought to Rae’en. Look who the warsuits spotted on the trail to the main gate.
A group of Flower Girls and a Flower Boy popped into her mind’s eye. Zooming in more closely on the boy, she hesitated. Eyes a solid and startling jade peeked out from a face that was her father’s wrought in bark and leaves. Were there such things as Vael Incarna? Yavi had looked similar to Wylant, but a younger version, with head petals. Her demeanor had felt like such a long spear’s throw from the real Wylant that Rae’en had scarcely felt the need to make note of it.
Rae’en smiled at the approaching Flower Boy. He had fang-like thorns where an Aern would have doubled upper and lower canines. His head petals grew short and spiky, the floral equivalent of a Hulsite mercenary’s haircut. No beard, though.
She squinted. A warpick—a wooden on
e—hung from his back in the Aern fashion. With a few facial tattoos, he might have passed for Irka from a distance. Her brother was forever messing about with his hair, so much so that the head petals could have been an affectation.
Why does that one have whorls and such? Joose asked.
None of us have ever seen anything like them, Amber thought. I have to say I like the looks of the male, though.
“News from afar?” Warleader Tsan looked up from her light meal, the half-crushed head of a pig visible at the rear of her maw.
“Guests.” Rae’en nodded in the general direction of the newcomers. “Vael.”
“How wonderful.” Tsan shifted her bulk, settling lower to the ground but not following Rae’en’s gaze. “Have you met the young prince before? He is quite charming.”
How did—? Rae’en started. Oh, Zaurtol. Can you spot the scouts?
Found them, Amber shot the images to Rae’en, highlighting their outlines in silver. Scales changed colors as the trio of scouts moved. Rae’en started at the sight of the breed that had killed Vander, Okkust, and the others. They’re keeping pace, but just watching.
Rae’en growled.
CHAPTER 24
THE PRINCESS AND THE GHOST
Two spots of ash, reptilian smears of carbon and bone, marked the concrete steps of the Little Sister Lighthouse roughly thirty miles from the mine where they had faced the golem and hundreds of miles from home. The centuries-old structure stood squat and inelegant on the Dwarf-made isle due north of the conjoined port cities where Holsven and Zaliz met. Long ago, both cities had no doubt had separate names, but if there had been any living residents who remembered them, they now marched to the beat of Uled’s mad drum. Only one living sentient existed within the fallen port. Below Yavi, impossible to miss from her vantage at the edge of the lighthouse’s widows’ walk, corpses lurked. Dead Sri’Zaur with gills and webbed paws swam laps around the scant isle and the bulwark against the dead Dolvek had created. His Geomancy had shifted stone around the lip of the isle, forcing it to billow out like a mushroom cap, creating an overhang the dead could not climb.