When it straightened, it still wore a bestial face, but its eyes were alive with intelligence. It rose to its hind legs, lean and muscular and spikily pelted, with claw-tipped hands instead of paws.
The Sky horse backstepped, split hooves clicking on the stone road. Darilan tightened his grip on the reins. “Can you speak?” he said.
“Yes.”
Half-cough, half-growl, the word came roughly from the creature’s throat. It paced forward and the horse shied back again. Darilan let go of Serindas and held up his empty hand, and the wolf-creature halted, still eyeing him dangerously. It did not stand like a man, but on its clawed toes, with its stiff tail keeping balance from the back.
“What’s the problem?” Darilan said.
The creature showed its teeth again. “You say kill him.”
“You didn’t object earlier.”
“Thinking.”
Darilan snorted, and saw the skinchanger’s ears twitch at the sound. “Following me all this time, just thinking about whether or not you cared? You shouldn’t. You don’t know him. I’ll be doing your people a favor if this works.”
“Not trust.”
“So you think I won’t follow through?” The skinchanger nodded its huge, shaggy head, and Darilan allowed himself a modicum of relief. “Well, don’t worry,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do that will make things worse.”
The skinchanger’s ears laid back, and it sneezed in disbelief.
“Yes, jinxing myself. But it’s the truth. If he’s even still in Thynbell, he won’t be there for long. They’ll send him to the Palace and then your precious spirit will be dead. Bad for you, bad for me. With my plan, things will just be bad for me. So cheer up and get out of the way.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
“No.” The skinchanger took another step forward, and this time the Sky horse lowered its little horns instead of backing off. An eerily human chuckle came from the skinchanger, and it said, “Ask why you betray.”
“I went over this with Lark,” Darilan said, annoyed. “You were there.”
“No. You say ‘because friend’.”
“And that’s why. What does it matter to you, wolf?”
“Arik.”
They have names? “Fine. What does it matter to you, Arik? I bare my withered little soul and it’s just not good enough?”
“’Maker’s game’,” said the skinchanger.
Darilan stiffened in the saddle. “I don’t know what you mean.”
The skinchanger pointed its muzzle at his arm and he realized that he had his hand on Serindas again, the hungry pulse of the blade insinuating itself into his consciousness. For a moment he thought he could do it: pull the blade and fling it into the nosy beast’s face, let it drink its fill and silence the questions. Skinchangers weren’t supposed to question. They were animals.
He saw the skinchanger’s ears flatten back, like it had sensed his thoughts.
Relax. You don’t need a fight right now, not with a creature that could rip you limb from limb. You have a mission, and it doesn’t know what it’s asking.
“What game?” it said.
“Nothing. I’m on your side in this. I know someone in Thynbell who can get me in, and then I’ll open the way for the Corvish if they can help. If not, I’ll do it myself. That’s all.”
The skinchanger cocked its head, pale eyes narrowed slightly. “What game?”
“No game. No game, all right? I’m not playing around. I will kill him. I’ll kill anyone who tries to stop me. I don’t care what happens after that. Do you understand?”
For a long moment the skinchanger just watched him, ears perked but somehow dubious. Then, slowly, it nodded. “How help?”
“I don’t know. You should’ve gone with Lark to the Corvish. Can’t have a huge wolf following me through town, I don’t need that kind of attention. Just…stay in the woods. Keep watch for crows or something.”
The skinchanger sat back on its haunches, still watching Darilan narrowly. Then, with a huff, it leaned down and stretched its long limbs, and the crunch of changing joint-structure started again. Darilan winced as he watched the spine pop back into lupine alignment. It did not look pleasant.
With a final inscrutable look, the wolf turned away. Darilan tracked it to the edge of the woods, then kicked his heels to the Sky horse’s sides and let it have full rein.
No more delays, no hesitation. No thought for consequences.
It was time.
*****
From the trees atop the hill, the wolf watched the Hunter go. Then slowly, almost casually, it began its own descent to the city.
Chapter 18 -- The Flight
“Cob?”
He opened his eyes and blinked in the sunlight. A boy was crouched before him, brows furrowed under his knit cap, and for a moment Cob could not put a name to the face though it was desperately familiar. Round and fair, with a worried look…
Lerien.
“…Lerien?” he echoed.
The boy brightened, a grin replacing his frown. “You had me worried, bonehead. Went off the path and everything. Feeling all right?”
“I…” Cob blinked slowly. His head felt foggy. He looked down at his mittened hands, then past Lerien to the stones that loomed around them.
Cliffs. They were on a rock outcropping, Cob with his back to the cold wall and Lerien just beside him, and ahead Cob saw the chasm and the cliff-face across it and knew that they were in Senket’s Scar. They were in Kerrindryr, on one of the narrow paths that ran between the village of Risholnis and the Silver Falls, far above the river.
Of course I’m in Kerrindryr. Where else would I be?
Cob shook his head vigorously, puzzled by the thought. He looked himself over again. Nothing seemed to be wrong; no pain, nothing missing. Ice and mud on his clothes, but that was normal. “I went off the path?”
“Yeah. Slipped,” said Lerien, still crouched beside him. “You still wanna go on, though, right?”
“I…”
Cob bit his lip abruptly. He did not want to say ‘where were we going?’ Lerien would laugh at him. Lerien was his only friend, the only one who came up from town to where he and his parents lived in the cliffs over the valley. The only one that would brave Cob’s father.
“Yeah. ‘Course,” he said instead, and fumbled at the wall for a grip. Lerien stood as he did, and he tested his legs and found them sturdy.
I slipped?
“C’mon,” said Lerien, beckoning as he shimmied down the side of the outcrop.
Cob stood for another moment, looking back the way they had come. Risholnis lay there, pressed like a thumbprint into the cliffs—a montane valley connected to the rest of the world by a single bridge. Its entry was near-invisible from this vantage, but the bridge hung like a cobweb-strand across the wide chasm. Cold mist veiled the depths below.
In the other direction, half-hidden by the curve of the Scar and the shimmering mist, he glimpsed the waterfall. It rose much higher than their path, an icy cascade born of the High Country glaciers, and something shone there in the cleft it had cut. Not the shine of sunlight on ice, but…
“C’mon, Cob!”
Cob rubbed at his nose with his mitten and sighed. He felt like he had forgotten something important.
“C’mon, you sluggard!”
With a grunt, he turned from the view and slid down the rock after Lerien, rejoining the fair-haired boy on the ledge below. Lerien grinned sharply and started ahead, one hand on the cliff wall and one trailing through the cold mist that drifted by on the updrafts. Cob followed. The rocks were mostly free of ice, the sun almost warm on his brow, and he knew it was late spring. Not the best time to explore, but better than watching the goats.
“If you keep sluggin’ around, the firebird’ll be gone before we get there,” Lerien said over his shoulder.
Firebird. Of course. That glow in the cleft was the firebird; he recognized it now. What Lerien had as
ked him out here to see. The firebird trapped by the ice, finally fighting free.
His heart lifted at the thought. They were going to help the firebird get free! Be heroes!
His steps had lagged, but now he picked up the pace. Through his thin-soled boots he felt each bump and jag of the path, and walked them with practiced ease. For years he had clambered up and down the cliff-sides above the valley, following the goats in their wild wanderings. A flat path, no matter how narrow, was no problem.
I’m eight, he thought, then wondered why he had thought that. Of course he was.
Of course he was…
He stopped suddenly and shook his head, and the world whirled around him. A phantom sensation crossed his brow as if something had been stuck there. When he opened his eyes, he saw mist drifting up like streamers from the ravine. Long white streamers.
Blinking, slightly dizzy, he reached out and watched them coil around his hand.
“What?” he murmured. The white mist twined through his fingers, ghostly.
He looked ahead and saw that Lerien had halted too. His friend was just watching him, silent, one hand on the wall and the other at his side. Above and beyond him, the cleft of the waterfall glowed like a frozen sun.
Mist trickled along his mitten and up his sleeve like tiny seeking fingers. His skin prickled and he tried to pull back.
But it was no longer ghostly. It locked around his wrist in a cold band and yanked, and if his other hand had not convulsively gripped the rock wall, it would have pulled him right off the ledge. As it was, his heels slid and his shoulder twinged painfully in its socket, and he yelped in surprise.
And saw the ravine. No longer an endless misty depth, it seethed now with white streamers that rose like an incoming tide. From end to end, empty air solidified into cords that reached blindly toward him.
He tried to recoil but the streamer kept pulling. More of them crept over the ledge to lash for his legs. His fingers tightened on the rock but he felt them slipping, the mitten not aiding at all.
“Lerien! Help!” he shouted, frightened.
His friend did not move.
Gritting his teeth, he clung to the rock. His shoulder felt like it would tear off, and the streamers pulled one leg free of the path, dangling him over the white tide. “I wanna stay!” he yelled at the motionless boy. “I’m sorry I strayed! I wanna go with you!”
Lerien bowed his head and turned away.
Confusion and hurt roared up, momentarily stronger than the fear. Cob fought the streamers, struggling to watch Lerien even as they hooked around his neck and turned his face away, but between one blink and the next, the boy was gone.
“No!” Cob shouted. His fingers snapped free of the rock and suddenly he was falling, the ledge flashing by darkly as the whiteness spun him and drew him down.
A shrill cry split the air.
Wings passed his face in a rush, white against white. He felt the bond on his wrist snap, felt the streamers tear from his limbs, and suddenly the world swung again. The white river became the sky.
He plummeted like a stone from it, watching wisps flail after him too slowly—watching a white shape dart among the threads, screaming like a raptor. Wind tore at his back, stealing his hat and mittens and swirling them brightly against the blankness. He saw his hands, for a moment small as a child’s before they lengthened and roughened and grew scars.
Pike me, he thought as his memory returned.
The white shape flashed by again, diving down. A large ringhawk, unusually albino, its talon- and wing-markings standing out boldly. He turned after it and saw the darkness below, an endless plain of swamp and muck and black ruins. Familiar desolation.
The hawk flared its wings and he spread his arms in response, and felt his feathers catch the wind.
So now I’m a bird, he thought, the panic fading. How did that happen?
Far below, a white speck moved against the darkness. The ringhawk banked toward it and Cob followed suit.
As he descended, the terrain became clearer. Boggy marshland split by a ribbon of bulwarked earth: a raised road. Upon that road marched an army of brutal figures, massive and dark-skinned and clad in hides and painted wood. Their polished tusks gleamed in the weird sky-glow.
Ogres, he thought. He had never seen full-blooded ones before. As he cruised over the ranks, dodging pennants and spears, he saw other creatures striding among the ogrish soldiers. Foxes and wolves, stags and great cats, heavy-flanked boars and plated bulls—some bipedal and draped in armor, some four-footed like beasts. Serpents and crows spied from atop the pennant perches.
They took no notice when he passed.
Far ahead, the land buckled upward. A cluster of red rock spires rose from the wrinkled mountains. Varaku? he thought, but there was no Rift beyond them. The mountains they perched on were soft and low, well-worn, not at all the high plateaus he remembered.
And if it was Varaku, then this swamp should be badlands, with the Losgannon River cutting straight through. Instead, there was nothing but bog.
Ahead, the ringhawk fluttered to rest upon the white figure. He cast aside the questions and swooped after it.
Only when he drew close did he realize that the figure was another ogre. He banked away quickly and came back to circle, staring down.
It—he—strode at the head of the column, a massive bone-tipped spear slung across one shoulder and the hawk perched on the other. Even from above, Cob saw his protruding tusks and the jut of his deep red jaw. The white came from the ogre’s incongruous armor: heavy, patterned plates of ivory as impressive as that of a Jernizen knight, with backplate and spaulders curved together to form stubby, winglike filigrees.
Something about it was familiar, the armor and the ogre both. Cob swooped another circle over them and wondered why not even the white ringhawk seemed to notice him now.
“They are memories,” came a gravelly voice from below. “You and I alone exist.”
Cob wheeled about, surprised, and found an ogre watching him—a female, tusked and heavyset like her companion but rounder of features, ebon-skinned, crowned with a headdress of beads and braids. Serpents draped her shoulders and entwined her arms like living jewelry; beneath them she wore black armor etched with patterns of fur and scales.
She raised her hand toward him and reluctantly he fluttered down to perch, feeling tiny. His claws barely wrapped around her first finger.
“All have returned to the spirits now,” she said quietly, nodding toward the dark army. Her voice was like grinding stone, throaty and deep and sad. “My friends, my allies. And my Kirhuua.”
Cob followed her gaze to the ivory-armored ogre, then looked up at her. Who are you?
“I am Vina Treakhaher, wise woman of the river-waders. I have called to you before, but only now do you hear me.”
Called…? he thought-spoke. This felt like a dream—maybe a nightmare—but he was surprised to realize he was not afraid. He had not been dragged in by those dark gauntlets like every time before; instead, it seemed, the roles were reversed. Isn’t this a dream?
“No, child. You have not truly dreamed since we came to you. The enemy drew a veil across your mind that we have struggled to pierce. Before now we could merely whisper.”
But… Cob thought back to Bahlaer, to the blood and his blackout and Lark’s words. But you’re the Guardian. You controlled me.
Vina smiled—a crook of her lips around the tusks that deformed her mouth—and shook her head. “The abomination, your…friend… He called upon a power that put your soul to sleep, and awakened a splinter in your place. They have done many terrible things to you, Ko Vrin, but while we can not fight past the veil upon your mind, we can certainly overpower a mere splinter.”
A splinter? I don’t understand.
She looked past him again, to the ivory-armored ogre and the hawk on his shoulder. She still marched with them, the dark army filling the road behind her with its heavy grunts and footfalls, the rustle of armor and breath. �
��A piece of a soul, struck from the whole and forced into another,” she said. “A spy, a saboteur. A whisper in the mind.”
Cob blinked. The ringhawk? …Lerien? He’s my friend.
“No, he is not.”
But he helped me. Just now, he fought off those tendril things.
For a moment, Vina was silent. Then she nodded slowly, frowning around her tusks. “True. We thought that you would be lost to us, but it brought you here. Unexpected.”
Where’s ‘here’? How come we can talk now?
“This is my memory,” she said, sweeping a hand out to indicate the vast expanse of swampland and the red mountains. “The piece of me that remains. Long ago I returned to the spirits, and my bones to the earth, but my time in service to the Guardian lingers.
“We speak because you are in the depths. Awake, you live on a sheet of ice above a lake; perhaps you see things stirring below, but they can not touch you.
“Asleep, you are in the water. The Imperials’ veil holds you like a net close to the surface. We have reached for you, tried to tug you down to us, but it resists—and so do you. It is not wrong to do so; we are not the only dark creature waiting in the depths. We are not the only force that would pull you under.
“But you do not need to fear us. If you let yourself, you can breathe underwater. See in the dark.
“Now the net is torn. The enemy hurt you mortally and you have fallen deeper than sleep. But the enemy’s minions reweave the net, and your friend, your hawk…it meant to lure you back up to the trap. I do not know why it changed its mind."
Cob tilted his head. So I’m hurt? Am I dying?
“No. While they fight to mend your veil, we mend your body. We are bound to you and will not see you die.”
And Morshoc…did I kill him?
“You severed his connection to that puppet body. He is not so easily slain.”
He’s… He’s your other half, right? The Ravager. But you helped me fight him.
The Light of Kerrindryr (The War of Memory Cycle Book 1) Page 44