“So what’re you sayin’, Manya,” challenged Ragnor, “that we’re done?”
“She’s wrong,” Elora said. “Thorn Drumheller offered help from the start, without being asked.”
“That he did,” agreed Torquil.
“They need to be told.”
“Trust Manya, child. She’ll make the point.”
“Why can’t I—?”
“It’s better all concerned remain ignorant of your presence.”
“Why?”
“Clan business. You’re an honored guest….”
“But I’m not ‘clan,’ ” she finished, to a nod of acknowledgment from Torquil. “Terrific,” she growled, waving her hands beneath her cloak in a moderately helpless gesture. She wanted them free, to help her express herself better, but they got tangled in the overlapping layers of cloth. “I’m supposed to be the solution here, Torquil. But how can I do that if nobody’ll let me?”
“Do you have a clue what needs doing, Sacred Princess?”
She had no answer, and instead vented her frustration against an increasingly common target.
“Damn Drumheller, damn him!”
“He did what he thought was best, Elora.”
“He dumped me, Torquil. He left me behind! Without a word of explanation.”
“You were ill.”
“I got better!”
“He had responsibilities. And I think you needed what we have to offer. A stable environment, a place to learn and grow among—”
“A family,” she finished for him, and couldn’t help the edge that turned those words into a slash keen enough to draw blood.
“There is that, yes. Is it so bad a thing to have?”
“Torquil, it’s something I’ve wanted my whole life,” she cried, “more than anything. But kind as you are, generous as you’ve all been, I’m not. You just said so. Not clan, not family, not really. I have no family, Master Smith. My mother died in Bavmorda’s dungeon, I don’t know who my father was. All my life I’ve been passed from hand to hand and mostly brought doom and disaster to everyone who ever offered me a kindness. Sometimes I think I’m better off alone!”
“That’s not true.”
“Then why did Thorn leave me?” As the echo of her cry faded she became aware of a burning in the back of her throat from vocal cords pushed past their limits, and of a sudden silence in the dining hall beyond.
“I told you, he felt it was for the best.”
Her reply was an obscenity that took them both aback, both the word itself and the uncontrolled ferocity of its utterance. Elora knew this, too, had been heard by the others and her face flushed argent rose with shame. Before anything more could be said—ignoring the hand that Torquil reached out to catch her arm, and the look of sympathetic anguish on his face as he snared a flash of her pain instead—she bulled past him, letting her feet take her as fast as she was able to the sanctuary of her own room.
With every step along the way, a terrible hollowness grew within her, right beneath her breastbone, as though heart and soul were being scooped right out of her. Each beat of her pulse summoned forth another image, of someone loved and someone lost, from the nurse who’d given her life to smuggle her out of Nockmaar, to the wandering warrior Madmartigan and his beloved Sorsha who’d fought beside Thorn to save her. All the folk of Tir Asleen and later of Angwyn, too many of them faces she’d seen only in passing, that had still become indelibly imprinted in the vaults of her memory. There were countless more, she knew, who’d fallen before Maizan steel, or perished from disease, from hunger, from the savage collapse of the world that had sustained them all their lives.
Everyone said she was supposed to put a stop to that. No one told her how.
She was sobbing when she pitched herself full length on her bed, caught up in grief so primal she had to give it physical release or else be utterly consumed. So she struck at her pillows, punch after punch after punch, hammering at the plush down with more force than she’d use to shape raw steel on an anvil, thankful that the outburst was so extreme that it left her no lasting recollection of whose images appeared to serve as objects of her fury.
Too much passion, too much intensity, far beyond what her body was willing to sustain for long. The sobs quickly became simple tears, the pounding arm too heavy to lift, red rage gave way to more coherent thoughts, which in turn toppled into a deep and blessedly dreamless sleep.
When she awoke, she wondered if this was what it was like to have a hangover. None of the pieces of her body seemed to fit together and all felt as clumsy as her thoughts, which had never come with more reluctance. Her cheeks were stiff with dried tears and her mouth tasted foul as she struggled to make herself comfortable amidst a wild tangle of bedclothes.
She wasn’t happy with her conduct, she was ashamed of the way she’d lost her temper with Torquil, thankful that the worst of the outburst had occurred in the solitude of her room. She hadn’t behaved so badly since Angwyn, and thought she’d grown beyond such rotten behavior.
“Old habits die hard,” she told herself in the merest whisper.
With her next breath, she smelled smoke.
She followed her nose, and poked an eye out through a crack on her pillow pile to behold the tiny fire elemental crouched on the footboard of her bed. It balanced sinuously on a stalk of molten fire that rose up through the core of the thick timber planking. That was the source of the smell, as the heat of the creature’s body charred the wood. Elora leaned her head over the side of the mattress, to see where the creature emerged from the bed, linked to a similar hole in the slate floor by the thinnest thread of iridescence.
The elemental had refined its imitation of human shape since their last encounter and Elora had the disconcerting sense of looking at her own self in miniature. The main difference was that her tiny double possessed a truly boneless grace that no being with a skeleton could ever hope to match. Its body didn’t bend at the joints so much as flow through a succession of gentle curves and its facsimile of hair, possessing a length and texture that made Elora groan with envy, stirred as though the liquid mass was imbued with a life and sentience of its own. The elemental looked at her with an expression of such profound earnestness that Elora had to stifle a chuckle in response. It reminded her too much of a puppy trying its level best to look grown-up.
She saw the elemental’s chest rise as it drew in a breath.
“No!” she cried, raising a hand before the creature in a desperate attempt to stop it before it could speak and torch the entire room. It was between her and the door, and there was nothing in reach even marginally capable of surviving that intense a blast of flame.
“Help,” was what it said, in a very small and tinny voice, but Elora didn’t hear. The elemental’s voice had been drowned out by a yelp from the girl that represented a healthy mix of startlement and pain as her palm was fractionally scored by its breath. The noise was mainly surprise. The actual experience wasn’t so bad, like being stabbed by the hot tip of a just-extinguished match.
Elora blew on her palm to ease the pain, then gathered herself to her knees at the midpoint of the bed, using her other hand to pull her hair out of her eyes and into some rude semblance of order.
The elemental watched her wide-eyed, with a stricken expression on its features. Whatever its intent, it wasn’t to do Elora harm.
“What did you say?” Elora asked.
“Help,” it tried again, and the young woman saw what had happened before. The outrush of breath needed to project that single word brought forth in addition a modest gout of superheated air, laced with flame.
“Offer or request?” Even as she spoke, the submissive curves of the elemental’s body provided the answer. It was a plea, as heartfelt and desperate as any Elora had seen.
“Help help help help help,” it repeated in a wild torrent of words, as if this wa
s the only one it knew and it wanted to use it to best advantage.
Wouldn’t have thought to see one without its mam being close at hand, Elora remembered Torquil telling her. And no mam worth the name would’ve let her bit come near the likes of you unattended. Too dangerous by far for both.
As quickly as she could, Elora exchanged nightgown for a fresh undershirt and shorts of cotton, followed that with a pullover shirt, a wool tunic, and her buckskins. Thick socks and her boots took care of her feet, gloves she tucked through her belt, making sure at the same time that both of her traveling pouches were securely attached. She gathered her hair into a thick ponytail and fastened it in place with a chased silver barrette. Lastly she grabbed her journey cloak, patterned wool that felt like it weighed almost as much as she did herself. The weave was as tight as looms could manage, to proof it against both wind and water. The cloak itself was so long she had to wrap it one full turn across her torso before anchoring it over her left shoulder with a brooch the width of her fist.
She was out the door and well on her way before she gave any thought to what she was doing, or where the elemental was leading her. It seared a tiny rivulet through the rock ahead of her, sometimes along the floor, sometimes the walls, sometimes the ceiling, always remaining close enough to the surface for Elora to follow its trail. She tried to keep track of the route herself, but soon discovered that she dared not take her eyes off her guide. The signs it left her lasted barely a heartbeat and the elemental never looked back to make sure she was there.
The foundries were sited mainly for convenience to the mines and the bazaar. The community itself was a fair distance removed, one entire peak over in fact, linked by an intricate labyrinth of tunnels. Some were wide enough to allow a wagon to pass—that was how goods were transported—but most of the rest were scaled down to Nelwyn proportions.
Hurrying along channels she’d never seen before, sometimes twisting through narrow spaces she was sure were designed to break her bones, sometimes crawling on hands and (thankfully) padded knees, Elora soon found herself without room to stand upright, much less the opportunity to draw a proper breath. She quickly left the familiar confines of the Nelwyn community and descended through the mine itself, into a darkness so profound that she had only the brief and transitory flash of the elemental’s passage to show her whatever perils lay ahead. She tried to reach the elemental with her InSight, at the very least to persuade the creature to slow down, only to discover that it had no true consciousness in any terms she could relate to. No thought, no mind, no awareness of anything beyond a fundamental terror, bonded to an equally basic certainty that Elora was the only entity capable of putting things to right.
Again, as her skull glanced off a nasty outcropping of rock, she blessed the common sense she’d learned from Thorn and Torquil that had prompted her to bring and wear her skullcap so that its padding would absorb the shock of every collision. She had no idea where she was, save that she stood well within a mountain. She suspected she’d traveled as far beyond the mine as it was from the Nelwyn community and had the further sense that without the elemental she’d be hard-pressed to find her way safely home. None of the tunnels she’d passed through were artificial, she’d been scrambling and slipping through natural cracks in the fabric of the rock itself, and drew analogies to the gullies and arroyos and valleys scattered across the surface. It stood to reason they’d find their echoes in the land below.
The elemental finally came to a halt, flitting back and forth beneath her feet like a firefly trapped in a jar, casting enough light to illuminate the hollow in which Elora stood. There was nothing pretty about the rock jumbled close about her. The weight of eons had compressed all delicacy from its substance, so that what remained was harder than anything she’d touched before. The seams between the strata were so tight there wasn’t even a trace of water, and the air possessed a mustiness that told her it hadn’t been stirred by any movement in the longest time.
“What is this place?” she muttered, more to herself than her companion. She felt a sudden twinge of apprehension at the thought the elemental might reply, even a single spoken word might warm the air enough to make it difficult for her to breathe.
The mountain groaned.
Elora felt it initially as a tremble beneath her feet, and her heart skipped a beat or three as panic labeled the sensation as the beginnings of an earthquake. Those were hard enough to face in the open. She had no desire to meet one with the whole of the world sitting atop her head. Then came a basso tearing sound that transmitted itself directly from rock to bones, making her bare her teeth in sudden, silent, sympathetic pain as phantom spikeblossoms bloomed along the currents of her marrow, from one end of her to the other. She’d beheld a thunderstorm from a mountaintop and always believed that to be the most majestic noise in nature, painting it in her imagination with the vision of a god striking out with his hammer, crushing utterly whatever it struck.
That was air, this was earth. There was no comparison.
The shock left her weak in the knees, but fortunately there was too little room for her to collapse. Her body folded until she found herself wedged tight against the rock. There she rested until breath and wits came back to her. She placed bare hands flat on stone, and forehead as well, and in that passive, receptive state, she heard the cries.
Wails of fear and torment. Rage at what had been done, was being done, would be done. Passion enchained, bound tight by spells so dark the stygian cavity where Elora lurked might as well be lit by the noonday sun, so fetid that an abattoir would smell sweet by comparison.
She blinked, and realized she’d bared her teeth again, only this time in a snarl. A stir of air tickled her cheek and with it a strand of heat, a scent of sweat. Elora levered herself up on an outcrop of rock, then another, found a side channel barely sufficient to admit her. She shimmied herself inside without allowing a thought of what might happen should she get stuck. She made her awkward way along and the gallery’s orientation rolled from vertical to horizontal. At the same time she also refused to consider stripping herself of any of her gear. Every piece had its purpose and she wasn’t willing to risk doing without.
Suddenly the stone beneath her fingertips lost all definition. For the barest instant it skibbled, as though every particle had become a separate entity like grains of sand on a beach, and each of those supercharged with energy. It crackled to the touch, the same as fur on a long-haired cat would when stroked. She snatched her hands away as best she could, and rubbed them together. They’d gone numb, she initially thought with cold, yet the skin felt coated with some oily substance that struck her as unutterably foul.
She could hear chanting, so distorted by the breaks and hollows and twisting byways of the rock that she couldn’t place its direction or its distance. Whatever the ceremony being performed, the mountain clearly wasn’t happy. If the earth’s reaction was anything like hers, this was no place to be.
Withdrawal, unfortunately, wasn’t an option. Even if retreat was possible, she doubted the hollow would prove a place of safety. The only route open to her was to forge ahead.
She sensed a distant thrum, a gathering of forces, and stretched herself to full extension, ignoring the pain of her back where it joined her pelvic girdle as she pulled her knees up flat to the rock on either side of her as far as she was able, fighting for purchase with toes and nails, hooking them into the most subtle flaws in the stone and praying nothing would slip loose.
There was a rumble in the distance, a grinding of stone on stone that quickly became a monstrous tearing sound, the tectonic spasm gathering force and volume as it rushed toward her. Once more, memory served her ill with a vision of the terrible wave that had almost drowned her and her companions in the Sunset Ocean during their flight from Angwyn. As then, she felt her senses battered and overwhelmed by a noise and an unstoppable power that beggared her comprehension. She heard herself scream, not the high-
pitched shriek of a girl but a bellow that began from the deepest point of her gut and met the mountain’s fury like an emplaced spearpoint would a foe’s onrushing charge.
The battle was joined and ended in a single instant. As the earth shook, Elora Danan found herself propelled forcefully into open space. It was an utterly graceless landing, the kind of belly flop that would have raised an impressive splash in water. Since this was rock, it merely drove every scrap of air from her lungs and bestrew her vision with all manner of garishly colored dots and slashes and swirls.
The chanting was louder, taking form on a multitude of levels, both as sounds cohering into words and as expressions of sorcerous energy.
The elemental glowed beneath Elora’s nose, heedless of the gimlet glare she cast its way. It had drawn itself into a little ball, a marble with a vaguely human face, shining as faintly as possible for fear of being seen. Elora knew this was as far as the little creature would go.
The oily quality to the stone she’d felt in the gallery had transferred itself to the very air, leaving her with the unpleasant feeling that she’d been coated all over with slime. Whether clothes or skin, she was slippery to the touch, and that forced her to move with exaggerated care, in case the slickness applied equally to the soles of her shoes and the rocks she walked on. She wasn’t so much worried about falling but rather, like the elemental, she didn’t want to be detected.
The closer she came to the source of the chanting, the more intense that concern grew. Even when he saw she had no talent for the Arts Arcane, Thorn continued teaching her all he’d learned himself, of magic, of sorcery, even of necromancy. He taught her to recognize spells and enchantments the way a hunter might “read” a trail, and all the ways he knew to counteract them. She confessed more than once that she didn’t see the sense of it; she couldn’t battle any sort of mage on his terms any more than she could face a warrior like Khory Bannefin with a sword.
He’d smiled, as though she’d just stumbled over some great, transcendent truth. “That’s the point,” he told her gently, though she didn’t really understand. Neither had he, in the beginning. “You don’t face someone like Khory with a sword, you find another way to win. You don’t fight a magus with magic, because you can’t. But you can use your knowledge to pick his own apart, to assess its strengths and flaws the way Torquil might a rock face to determine where best to cut. Like expects like, Elora. Warriors fight with blades, because that’s how they’re taught. Sorcerers the same, with spells. You find another way, you blindside them—the way the Deceiver did at Angwyn—and the day is yours.”
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