The Riven Wyrde Saga boxed set

by Graham Austin-King

  Sabeth, however, was alone and the cuts she made were the actions of instinct let loose. Despite this, they proved a useful distraction. Thantos waited as the cat grew more and more frustrated, its large paws slashing futilely at the air behind Sabeth as she darted around it, under it and through its legs.

  The cat reared up in a rage, batting at the fae’reeth with its forepaws, and then Thantos struck. He lunged in and rammed both of his knives into the base of the cat’s throat. Blood ran in torrents as the cat lurched backwards, forcing itself off the blades. The shadowy mist flew in again from where it had trailed out through the trees, surrounding the cat, but Thantos did not back away. Instead, he struck again, slashing and thrusting with the horn knives, as Sabeth thrust her thorn-sized blade into one of the creature’s glowing eyes.

  Silence fell as the cat collapsed. Its body was a bloody ruin, a mass of cuts and hideous wounds. It was a gruesome sight, evidence of a fight of necessity become a slaughter, a killing devoid of grace or beauty.

  Thantos wiped his knives on the thick moss and glanced at Sabeth. “My thanks, sister. Your warning was timely.”

  “It seemed appropriate.” She shrugged, licking the blade of her small knife.

  The satyr looked at the body of the shade-cat again. Their mother would have been delighted to receive the pelt, but it had been sliced to ribbons. He shrugged away the loss, met Sabeth’s eyes with a nod and moved away from the corpse as they continued to follow the trail.

  As they left, the earth near the body of the shade-cat heaved, as the roots from the nearby trees began to burrow through the blood-soaked earth, drinking greedily and worming their way towards the corpse, until they could thrust themselves deep inside of it to reclaim the nutrients.

  ***

  Ylsriss swatted away the branches that seemed determined to bury themselves in her hair, and tried to see through the undergrowth to where Joran was up ahead.

  “Joran, damn it, wait for me!” she called out. He probably wouldn’t hear her and she doubted that he’d stop if he did. He had been like a man on a mission since they’d seen the wall.

  She rushed on, stumbling over tree roots which had been half-buried by fallen leaves. What if she’d lost him? What if she was alone? The idea came to her unbidden, but she stopped dead for a moment as it struck her. A haste born of fear spurred her onwards and she cried out his name again, an edge of panic touching her voice.

  The slope was fairly gentle, but she hadn’t been expecting it, so when the root caught her foot, she fairly flew before hitting the ground and starting to roll. The runeplate slammed into the base of her skull as her pack was thrown forward on her back, and she cursed as she came to a halt at the bottom of the small hill.

  She pulled herself up onto her knees as she spat the leaves out from her mouth and probed gingerly at the back of her head, checking her fingertips for blood.

  “Joran!” she yelled, anger in her voice this time. She spotted movement in the trees ahead of her and forced herself to her feet. The pain was a dull ache now, more remembered pain than anything else, but it was enough to maintain her sour mood and fuel her irritation.

  He stood beside a towering pine. The tree had grown far taller and broader than it ever would have done in her own world. She called out again as she approached, but he ignored her until she reached for his arm.

  “What is it?” she demanded, his silence telling her more than words might have done.

  “Look.” He pointed down through the few remaining trees. The stones were cracked, and grass and ferns pushed their way through the gaps between them, but they had clearly been part of a road at some point.

  “It’s just a road,” she said, with a frown. “I know we haven’t seen one here before, but …”

  “Not the road. Look!” He pointed again and she followed the road with her eyes. She'd taken it as a break in the stones, but now she saw it clearly – it was a ravine. It slashed through the forest, extending out of view in both directions, and cutting directly across their path. She sucked in a breath and took his hand as they walked down towards it.

  It took longer than she’d thought it would to reach the edge, though she stood a good way back from it. He held onto her as she looked down, as if fearing she’d fall. Ylsriss was grateful despite her amusement. If anyone was likely to not take a danger seriously, it was him. She was never likely to be at risk of falling. The sides fell away, revealing rocks and tree roots, before extending down into the darkness.

  “How deep do you think it is?” he asked, in a hushed voice.

  “Too deep for me,” she said, with a shudder. “It's too wide for us to cross too.” The far side was at least fifty feet away.

  “So now what?”

  She looked at him curiously. He’d taken the lead since they’d fled the camps, guiding her through the woods long after they’d left the lands he knew.

  “Left or right, I suppose.” She waved her hands vaguely. “It has to end at some point, or at least get shallow or thin enough for us to cross it.”

  He peered through the trees in both directions before looking back at her, his eyebrow cocked in a silent query.

  “Left, then,” she decided. “I imagine either direction is as good as the other.”

  He nodded and set off, heading slightly away from the edge of the cliff. She didn’t blame him. The sight of the empty air beside her was enough to make her skin crawl. She'd always hated heights.

  “Can you still feel it?” she asked, raising her voice so he could hear her.

  He glanced back. “Feel what?”

  “The Touch.”

  He waited for her to catch up. “Not really,” he replied, falling into step beside her. “I can remember the feeling of it, of almost worshipping them, but it’s almost as if it happened to someone else now.”

  “At least we know it can be broken,” she said, ducking under a thorned branch. “Can you remember much from before?”

  His confused look prompted her to continue. “You never really spoke about your life before you were taken. It was hard to get any kind of detail from you. I thought it might have been the Touch. I suppose I’m asking if you remember anything more now?”

  “I do,” His words were slow as he tried to grasp the memories. “It’s very strange. Everything has a dreamlike quality to it.”

  “How so?”

  “Jumbled.” He laughed suddenly, the smile looking out of place on his face for some reason. “That’s not the best explanation, is it?”

  She grinned and shook her head.

  “The memories have no sense or order to them, like how a dream jumps about from place to place. I can remember being cold. I was on a fishing boat. I was wrapped in furs, but I was still cold. I remember the smell of the sea and the taste of salt on my lips. I can even remember the feel and the smell of the fish as we tipped them out of the nets. But I have no idea what fish tastes like. Isn’t that crazy?”

  “Give it time,” she said, reaching for his hand. “You’ve been here a long time, most of it under the Touch. It will probably take a while for your mind to recover.”

  “You make it sound like I’m crazy.” His voice was steady, but his eyes had grown hard, accusing.

  “You’re not crazy, Joran. I think I’m going to lose it soon though, if we don’t get something to eat other than stale oatcakes!”

  Their laughter was forced and false to begin with, but it felt good and genuine laughs followed from both of them. They fell silent for a while as they walked, looking through the trees from time to time to be sure they still followed the edge of the chasm.

  “Joran?” she asked, quietly. “Do you remember your mother?”

  He looked at her with sympathy. Her tone had been light but he’d clearly seen through it. “I’m sorry,” he replied. “I don’t. Not really. I remember the idea of her and sometimes I think I remember the smell of her. Sort of a combination of baking bread and flowers.” He shrugged and looked over at her. “It’s been su
ch a long time though. I’m sure it will be different for you and Effan.”

  “Don’t,” she said, glaring at him.

  “Don’t? Don’t what?”

  “Don’t humour me, Joran. Don’t patronise me.” She spoke softly but the irritation was plain in her tone. An angry dog waiting to be set free.

  “I wasn’t,” he protested, holding his hands up in front of him. “I…”

  “You what?” she snapped. “You told me you’re sure it won’t be the same for me. How is that not patronising, when you can’t know anything of the sort.”

  His voice stumbled into silence and he looked down at his feet as they walked, thinking carefully before he spoke again. “I’m not trying to humour you, Ylsriss. I suppose I’m just hiding from the truth. I’m lying to myself as much as I am to you. The chances of us getting home are tiny. You must know that as well as I do. The chances of finding Effan aren’t much better. And even if we did, would you even recognise him? It’s been...what...the best part of eight months or so since you saw him? It could be even longer.”

  She drew her breath in sharply and opened her mouth to retort before forcing it closed again. He was right. After so long, Effan would bear little resemblance to the baby she’d had stolen from her. With a whole world to search, would she really be able to find him? “The lies we tell ourselves,” she whispered to herself.

  “What?” Joran looked at her, catching the edges of the whisper.

  “I was talking to myself.” She gave a humourless laugh. “I said these are the lies we tell ourselves. The things we need to believe to stay sane, to keep going.”

  His smile was tinged with sadness. “So we’re both crazy then, in our own ways.”

  “I suppose everyone is.” Her gaze slipped past his face, drawn by a flicker of light from the ravine.

  “What?” She ignored him and pushed past him towards the clifftop. He followed in silence, confusion stilling his tongue.

  Ylsriss clung to the tree. It was a good five feet or more from the edge of the cliff, but the drop was terrifying and she gripped the rough bark, digging her fingernails in.

  The flash came again, yellow-white, and reflected up from the rocks on the far side of the ravine. She forced herself to let go of the tree and dropped to her hands and knees, crawling towards the edge.

  “Ylsriss, what are you doing?” Joran asked, amusement in his voice. She ignored him and lay on her belly, squirming closer to the edge until she could peer over it. The ravine wasn’t really worthy of the name any longer. Ylsriss could see the bottom of it clearly, no more than a hundred feet or so below her. The sides that sloped down towards the centre were no longer the sheer face they had once been. It would be a tumbling fall that would probably kill any but the luckiest of men, but it was far better than the endless drop into darkness that she had seen earlier.

  There was another flash and she looked to the left. A huge metal bar, pitted with rust, reached from one side of the ravine to the other, some fifty feet away from her. Far below it, a jumble of stone blocks and columns lay broken and collapsed against each other. Rusted rods of iron jutted out of them, as though they’d formed a net and the stone had been wrapped around them.

  A small section of pipe protruded from the wall of the ravine amidst the tumbled blocks and, as she looked, sparks erupted from its mouth in a burst of yellow and white.

  “What in the world...?” Joran's voice made her jump. She hadn’t heard him approach.

  “What is that thing?” she asked.

  “I have no idea. I know one thing, though,” he replied.

  “What?” She already knew what he was going to say and the thought filled her with dread.

  “It goes in the right direction. We can use it to get across.”

  “You have got to be joking me!” She pulled herself away from the edge and up onto her knees as she stared at him in dismay. “It’s not nearly as deep as it was. It’s probably coming to an end. If we carry on, we could cross it much more easily.”

  “We don’t know that, Ylsriss,” he replied. “It could just as easily drop down again. We could waste days walking in the wrong direction, looking for a way across that isn’t even there.”

  “How would we even get down there?” she asked. She felt sick to her stomach at the thought of crawling across the beam.

  “It’s not that far down to it and the edge isn’t a sheer face, like it was. If we got some vines, we could probably just slide down to it.”

  “Probably?” Her voice was shrill with fear and he gave her an amused look.

  “There’s another very good reason for going down there, Ylsriss.”

  “I haven’t heard the first good reason yet, but go on.” She folded her arms and hugged herself tightly, as if the air had suddenly become cold.

  “That’s rust on that thing, and rust means iron or steel,” he explained.

  “So?”

  “The fae can’t abide the stuff. There was an old man in a camp I was in, years before you arrived here. He had found a sliver of iron in the woods. It looked like a bit of nail to me, but I never thought to question what it was doing there at the time. I remember he was acting so strangely. He was so excited about it. He kept wanting people to hold it at first, then he was talking about making a spear with it.”

  “What happened?” Ylsriss asked.

  “He’d only had it about an hour before they arrived. Three fae, they just appeared at the edge of the camp with horn bows. They didn’t speak, or warn him or anything. One minute he was rushing about, trying to get people to touch it, the next he had three arrows in his face.”

  “What?”

  “They killed him, Ylsriss, just for having a tiny scrap of the stuff. They made one of us scoop it into a little pouch for them and then they took it away without a word. They wouldn’t touch it or even go near it. They treated it like it was a live snake or something.”

  “What do you think it was about it?”

  “I have no idea. But if it can make them so scared that they need to hunt a man down just for having it, then I think we should get some if we can.”

  She drew in a long breath, then looked helplessly at him before shaking her head. “I can’t do it, Joran. I can’t climb across that thing. Not for iron, not for anything. Not if there might be another way.” She stopped him as he was about to speak. “Just give me one more day, okay? One more day to see if we can find a different way across? We’ll carry on the way we’ve been going and, if we don’t find anything, then we’ll do it your way.”

  He looked at her in silence. She was pale in the fading twilight. The sun couldn’t be more than half an hour away, but her skin looked bloodless as she bit at her lip and pleaded with her eyes.

  “Fine.” He gave in. “We’ll give it a day. I want to go slowly though. I’ll use the time to try and hunt something.”

  She gave him a wan smile of thanks and he led her off through the trees, keeping the ravine in sight as a point of reference. The woods came slowly alive as the sun rose. Despite the fact that it was only in the sky for an hour, birds became more vocal and the distant rustles made by animals in the undergrowth became more obvious.

  Joran walked with his bow in hand, arrow nocked and held ready, though the string was relaxed. He'd instructed her to follow him, telling her it was so they didn’t disturb any game before he had a chance to shoot, but she was making so much noise she doubted it would make a difference.

  He managed to move almost silently, keeping to moss or exposed tree roots. She’d listened attentively as he'd explained the best way to avoid making noise but it didn’t seem to work for her. She had an undiscovered talent apparently, or maybe she was just destined to be a city girl.

  Joran froze ahead of her and sent an arrow flying into the trees. There was a muted crash, then he flashed a grin at her and ran ahead to collect whatever it was he’d shot. For a moment, she was shocked by just how boyish he seemed, worse than ever. By the time she caught up with him, he
was holding a fat bird in one hand. He waved the body at her like a grisly trophy, before stuffing it into a sack he’d pulled from his pack.

  They moved more swiftly after that. Joran had pulled the pack open slightly to allow the sunlight to hit the runeplate and warm it. It would be good to get some meat again. The oatcakes that they'd brought with them had long gone and the rest of their supplies were almost exhausted. Although they’d managed to forage some berries as they travelled, it was not enough.

  The sun fell swiftly and they slowed as the light faded. It was always hard to adjust to the twilight again and she made more noise than she had before. She was concentrating on trying to keep quiet, looking down at the ground ahead of her, when she sensed Joran stop.

  “What is it?” she asked finally, unable to bear it.

  “Come and see this,” he called back, a frown of confusion on his face.

  She hurried to his side and then stopped. The ground fell away ahead of them, dropping down in a steep cliff. Beyond the cliff was nothing but skies and wisps of cloud, as if the land simply ended there. She looked to the left and right of her, tracing the cliff with her eyes as it extended out of view in both directions.

  “Shit.” She spat and sat on the thick grass that grew between the trees and the edge of the cliff. He stared off to the right, stepping closer to the edge, then his eyes bulged and his mouth fell open.

  “What?” she asked, although part of her didn't really care.

  He pointed wordlessly and waved a finger ahead of him at the cliff as he looked at her. “Seriously, Ylsriss, look at this.”

  She sighed and pulled herself back to her feet. The cliff that sank away below them was a combination of white stone and small patches of exposed earth. For the most part, it extended down away from them in a steep slope before dropping off into darkness. Far to the right of them though, the bottom of the cliff was clearly visible. Where the ground should have been at the base of the cliff, there was nothing, a twilight expanse filled with wispy clouds. Another sky extending out from underneath the ground on which they stood.