The Ventifact Colossus (The Heroes of Spira Book 1)

by Dorian Hart

  “Sure, though they tend to be extremely difficult to cast, not to mention the ethical concerns. There are spells that can compel a person to take certain actions or not to take them. There are also spells that can erase or modify people’s memories. Serpicore mentioned once that that class of magic is illegal in Charagan, and so he had no plans to teach them to me.”

  She held up the red rug. Tor was going to love this. “As for the prayer mat, it’s not a prayer mat. It’s a flying carpet.”

  Tor’s face lit up like a sunrise. He grabbed the rolled-up carpet from Aravia and dashed to the back yard. A minute later his voice shouted, “How do I get it to fly?”

  Aravia and the others joined him on the lawn. The carpet was small—barely five feet long and maybe three feet wide, thinly woven from red and gold silk threads. A gaudy fire motif was prominently featured in its design, and a row of orange tassels lined one of the shorter edges. Tor had it rolled out on the grass and was sitting cross-legged on its center.

  “This carpet is called Vyasa Vya in the ancient tongue of a people called the Delfirians,” she said. “That means ‘Burning Sky.’ It was used several times for reconnaissance during a war against Bederen, a kingdom bordering Delfir, but a Delfirian scout flew too low and was killed by crossbow fire. Bederen and Delfir must be places beyond the Uncrossable Sea. The spell didn’t tell me how it ended up in Hodge’s trunk.”

  Tor gave her an impatient look. “But how do you make it fly?”

  “I was getting to that. Someone seated on the front center of the carpet can control and steer Vyasa Vya by gripping the orange tassels and issuing mental commands. It has magical safeguards to prevent you from—”

  “You mean I just have to think about flying?” Tor gripped two tassels in front of him, and before Aravia could explain that the carpet would default to hovering if the tassels were released (unless the driver had issued specific instructions to the contrary) or that kinetic buffers would prevent someone from falling off during all but the steepest banks, the carpet had shot upward fifteen feet and zipped to the far side of the lawn. It flew speedily but not outrageously so—maybe half as fast as a galloping horse—and trailed intertwining snakes of dark gray smoke behind it.

  “Not much use if you need to be stealthy,” said Dranko.

  “It’s a flying carpet,” said Aravia, smiling at the sight of Tor zooming around the yard. “How can you possibly complain?”

  Tor let out a whoop and flew higher, until he was above the yard’s lone tree, a thirty-foot maple. Was there an altitude above which Abernathy’s magical screen wouldn’t prevent the rest of Tal Hae from noticing the carpet, even if it was flying directly above the property?

  Tor brought Vyasa Vya down in a steep dive, smoke streaming from its back edge like a tail of fuzzy ropes, and pulled up where he started, not more than eight inches above the grass. He didn’t rock forward despite his sudden stop, as the carpet magically siphoned away his inertia. Surely there were practical lessons she could learn from its function, particularly vis-à-vis flying or levitation spells.

  Tor leapt from the carpet and wobbled a little on his feet. “That was amazing! And think about how much easier this will make our lives.”

  “It’s too small for all of us to ride at once,” said Aravia. “If more than four people sit on it, it won’t fly.”

  One by one they took Vyasa Vya for short flights above the back lawn. Ernie never went higher than the top of the fence, and muttered something about not caring for heights. Only Kibi abstained, grumbling about a general mistrust borne of magic’s muted effects on him. “Last thing I need is for that crazy thing to malfunction while I’m flyin’ twenty feet off the ground.”

  Aravia found it trickier than she expected when she took her turn. The carpet more or less obeyed her mental commands, but her unusually keen mental focus proved an impediment. Every time there was the slightest discrepancy between what she wanted the rug to do, and what it did, she would think about the minute series of adjustments that would correct the problem. This caused Vyasa Vya to jitter and twitch beneath her, creating a feedback loop of correction and overcorrection that the carpet seemed to resent.

  The carpet’s speed and maneuverability were the same with four passengers as with one, but with five Vyasa Vya refused even to lift from the ground. Tor was far and away the most accomplished at controlling their new toy, and by unspoken agreement he was allowed to roll it up and tie it onto the bottom of his traveling pack.

  Aravia did some quick distance and travel-speed calculations. “If we don’t mind being separated for a bit, a single driver can shuttle us in two groups. As long as the carpet goes faster than three times the speed of our walkers—which it does—we can get to the Norlin Hills in a day and a half.

  Kibi looked distinctly displeased. “How’s that work?”

  “Tor can fly three of us northward for an hour, drop us off, and fly back. He’ll pick up the other two and bring everyone together. We’ll keep repeating that until we’ve arrived.”

  “Do you need to rest before we set out?” asked Morningstar.

  Aravia was confident that all would be well. “No. I know my last spell went spectacularly awry, but it wasn’t very taxing. And I remember that spot at the edge of the Mouth of Nahalm where we lowered ourselves down, well enough to get us there. We waited there for hours.”

  “I seem to recall you using the phrase ‘fatally messy,” said Dranko. “Not that I didn’t enjoy your flying caltrop extravaganza just now, at least until Kibi ended up with a holy Kivian ritual object lodged in his arse. But ‘at the edge of the desert’ sounds suspiciously close to ‘out over the desert’ if you miss. What are the odds of that?”

  Aravia ran through the likely scenarios in her head. “Minimal.”

  “But not zero,” said Dranko.

  “I know what I’m doing! Also, do you think it was a coincidence that Sagiro just happened to beat us to the punch by a day or less, after the Eyes of Moirel had been scattered and lost for centuries? Whatever source of information Bumbly has been tapping into about where his brothers are, Sagiro has it too. He’s probably on his way to the Norlin Hills right now. The Green Eye just told us time was short and implied that failure would result in the world being unmade, which sounds just as bad as it being conquered by Naradawk Skewn. We can’t wait until tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  IF ANYONE WAS likely to wind up head-down in the Mouth of Nahalm, it was Kibi. Thus far he had been afflicted with an unaccountable time delay each time Aravia had magicked the group from one place to another, and who was to say a similar thing couldn’t happen in terms of a landing spot? He asked Aravia if maybe she didn’t have a more inland place she recalled well enough.

  “Sorry, Kibi,” was her answer. “From now on I’ll make a point to memorize the details of places we may want to teleport to someday, but I wasn’t thinking about that during our stay in Sand’s Edge. Maybe I could get us into the recruiting hall where we were attacked, but the risks would be even greater. My mental map of that room isn’t as sharp, and there might be people in there who want to kill us.”

  In the end they put it to a vote, and though Kibi argued that Aravia should be as rested as possible, he was outvoted four to two. Only Ernie agreed with his caution.

  “Then pack up!” said Dranko once the matter was settled. “Looks like another day on the job for Abernathy’s Magic Rock Collectors.”

  “I got to do one more thing before we head out,” said Kibi. He borrowed the Greenhouse’s second-sturdiest iron cook-pot, and this time filled it with water before dropping in the Eye of Moirel. Then he scooped up some sandy soil from around the back door and filled the pot until the Eye was in the center of a sludgy mass. After securing the lid he dropped the pot into a third iron trunk in the basement, apprehensive at the rate he was inviting the Eye to punch holes through their collection of chests, not to mention the closet doors.

  “Now stay put!” he admonished
. “I’m tryin’ to keep you safe like you keep askin’ for, but this is the last time I’m goin’ to all this trouble. Next time you get yourself loose, I’m just gonna toss you in a cheap vase and have done with it.”

  * * *

  They checked on Abernathy one last time before they departed, but the wizard was still out cold. The old man’s face was healing (Dranko having cleaned his wounds and applied ointment to his burns) but served as a grim reminder of how dangerous their lives had become. Eddings was keeping him watered and promised to keep a constant eye on him while the company was away. Aravia gathered everyone, and Dranko suggested that they rope themselves together.

  “Just in case Aravia’s off by a few feet, and some of us end up over the edge,” he explained.

  “That’s extremely unlikely,” said Aravia. “Just relax.”

  Dranko was talking good sense. “I’ll be more relaxed if I’m tied on to the rest of you,” Kibi said.

  They did as Dranko suggested while Aravia rolled her eyes, which set Kibi to worrying that making Aravia impatient wasn’t improving the odds of a safe landing. But the wizard lass did her hocus-pocus and all was well. There was a jarring displacement and unnerving sense of being unhinged from the world, and then he stood, solidly, at the lip of the Mouth of Nahalm. No one was dangling over the edge.

  “You get lost again?” asked Dranko.

  Kibi glowered. “That’d be more funny if it didn’t feel like someone steppin’ on my stomach.”

  “Let’s get moving,” said Aravia. “The best way not to get lost would be to head due north until we strike the Norlin River, then follow it up into the hills and look around for a ruined castle.”

  Kibi looked on uneasily as Tor unfurled Vyasa Vya with a deft snap. “I volunteer to go in the second group,” he said quickly. Even though they had agreed that the carpet would fly close to the ground (unless they needed aerial reconnaissance for some reason), an unreasoning terror gripped Kibi’s heart when he imagined rising up away from the solid earth. Could the others see how nervous he was?

  Morningstar offered to keep him company. Ernie, Aravia, and Dranko climbed onto the back of the carpet while Tor took the pilot’s seat and gripped the tassels. Kibi’s stomach lurched just watching the damn thing rise up three feet and hover, rippling like a wind-blown sheet hanging on a drying line.

  “I’ll be back for you two in an hour,” said Tor. He was grinning back at them even as the carpet sped away. The last thing Kibi heard was Aravia admonishing Tor to watch where he was going, and in minutes the only sign of his departed friends was a lingering trail of charcoal-colored smoke.

  “Guess we might as well walk after ’em,” said Kibi. “Shave some time off the trip.”

  Morningstar nodded and the two began to march. The terrain was dry and brown, flat brown earth and stunted brown scrub stretching on for miles. The few straggly white clouds did nothing to dim the sun, and Morningstar tugged her hood forward to shield her face.

  “As the year gets on,” said Kibi, “you’re gonna start bakin’ in that black robe. Oughta get yourself a sun hat.”

  “Good idea,” said Morningstar curtly.

  Kibi didn’t have much experience with Ellish priestesses. There weren’t any in Eggoggin, and not that many in Hae Kalkas either, the nearby city where he picked up supplies now and again. He’d heard all sorts of rumors, of course, about them secretly being evil witches and drinking blood and such, but never put much stock in them.

  Morningstar wasn’t very talkative, which suited Kibi just fine. He wasn’t much for conversation himself and didn’t know what to say that Morningstar would find worthwhile. But Morningstar had been unusually withdrawn the past day or so, like she had gotten word that a relative had died. Maybe she’d received some new piece of bad news from her church. As they kicked their way through a rocky field of weeds, she looked almost dazed.

  “Anything botherin’ you, Morningstar? Seems like you got somethin’ on your mind. We got some time to kill before Tor gets back.”

  Morningstar didn’t answer or break stride or give any other sign of having heard him. He could take a hint and didn’t press, but she spoke up a minute later.

  “Kibi, you’ve said a few times now that you don’t believe in destiny. Why is that?”

  “That’s an easy one,” he replied. “What on earth did the Gods put us here for if our choices are decided ahead a’ time? Seems more likely they let us live our lives out the way we want.”

  Morningstar smiled, though only the corner of her mouth peeked out from her black hood. “I do believe in destiny, but not that it’s an immutable future that we’re forced into. I think destiny is more like a…a place, a city on the horizon where the Gods want us to wind up. And if we make the best choices, our lives will finish there, even if we didn’t realize that’s where we were headed the entire time.”

  Kibi thought back to the Seven Mirrors, when he held the Eye of Moirel in his hand. All the stones know your name.

  “But that ain’t destiny then,” he said. “That’s more like the Gods making a wish and then hopin’ it comes true. But you must know as well as anyone that the Gods can’t muck around with our lives down here, not directly.”

  Morningstar smiled again. “Kibi, can I tell you something in confidence? Something I don’t want the others to hear just yet?”

  The question made Kibi feel distinctly uncomfortable. “I suppose, but why me?”

  “I don’t know,” said Morningstar. “Maybe because I want to tell someone, and you’re…well, you’re…”

  “I think I get it. I’m quiet, and I ain’t interested in gossipin’ like some a’ the others. And we ain’t talked much since we all got together, so I ain’t got no basis to judge you. Is it somethin’ like that?”

  Morningstar stopped walking, looked at him, and laughed. “You are quiet, but when you do decide to speak, it’s worth listening to. You should tell us what you think more often.”

  Kibi blushed. “If there’s one thing our little band don’t lack, it’s opinions. Figure it’s better to keep mine to myself unless I think someone ought to hear it.”

  “I admire your attitude,” said Morningstar. “So may I share my secret with you?”

  “All right.”

  Morningstar started walking again, quickly, and Kibi hustled to keep up.

  “Ell showed me my destiny a couple of nights ago.”

  Kibi patiently said nothing.

  “She sent an avatar to my dreams. The avatar told me I had been chosen to be a Dreamwalker, something that hasn’t happened in many, many years. It’s complicated, but when people dream, they leave behind the places that they dreamed. The red-armored man who nearly killed me, he’s made himself at home there, and I’m supposed to do battle with him. The avatar is training me, since battle there is…strange. She called me Child of Light and Daughter of Dreams.”

  Kibi rolled that around in his head. “And you’re certain that weren’t just an ordinary dream, where you dreamed it weren’t ordinary?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. The avatar returned last night. And yes, I know you think I may have dreamt that as well, but trust me, I understand dreams.”

  Kibi didn’t doubt Morningstar believed what she said, but he couldn’t help but wonder.

  “Did your avatar friend tell you anything more specific? Like when your battle is gonna happen? Or what mischief he’s gonna get up to if you don’t beat ’im?”

  “No, not yet. But it explains so much. Why I was born so…different. Why I was called to the sisterhood when no one believed I would be. Even why I’m so mistrusted. Child of Light would sound like a heresy to the sisters of Ell.”

  Kibi scratched his head. “Why don’t Ell just send dreams to everyone, then? Lettin’ ’em all know that you’re a Dreamwalker, up to somethin’ important, and they shouldn’t hold it against you?”

  “You said it yourself. The Gods don’t meddle directly. Ell gives some of us Seer-dreams, but those are ambiguous fore
tellings, not directives. The avatar is already treading a thin line with me.”

  “So you’re a Dreamseer and a Child of Light? Sounds like Ell has heaped a lot a’ responsibility on your shoulders. Guess it’s a good thing Abernathy put you someplace with friends to help you out.”

  * * *

  Tor returned for them three miles out from Sand’s Edge. Kibi spotted the carpet flying high overhead, hundreds of feet up it looked like, a tiny orange kite with a smoky tail. What happened to staying close to the ground? The boy descended with alarming speed and landed deftly just a few yards away.

  “Hop on!”

  Morningstar climbed up, but Kibi balked, terror rising in his throat.

  “I ain’t sure I can do this,” he muttered.

  “Come on, it’s fun,” said Tor.

  Kibi could think of a hundred words he’d choose before “fun,” and Tor’s enthusiasm only increased his discomfiture. The boy should be thinking about caution, not fancy flying maneuvers.

  “You promise to keep as low to the ground as possible?”

  “If you’re sure that’s what you want.”

  Kibi stepped onto the carpet, heart hammering crazily. “Yeah, I’m sure,” he whispered. As his back foot left the ground a vertiginous wave of nausea swept through him. His head pounded in time with his thumping heart. Morningstar’s voice sounded far away. “Just go, as quickly as you can. And stay low, like Kibi asked.”

  Vyasa Vya lurched and sped. Kibi kept his eyes closed and curled himself up on the back of the carpet. He fought down the instinct to roll off on purpose, thinking that the pain of his landing would be far preferable to the horrible revulsion of being so removed from the ground.

  As the wind rushed through his hair and fluttered his beard, he tried to recall having this kind of sickening sensation in the past. As a stonecutter he had spent a decent amount of time up on ladders, or on the high roofs of buildings, without suffering any of the ill effects of vertigo. But the ladders and buildings, they had always been on the ground themselves. Unlike the carpet…