Golden Tide (Song of the Aura, Book Four)

by Gregory J. Downs

  “Burn me in the Blaze,” Mudlo growled, “But I know a summons when I see one. He’s being manipulated by Sheolus just as surely as that bloody draik is!”

  Steamclaw. Lauro narrowed his eyes, watching the draik as it crouched near the throne, ready to pounce on them at the slightest sign of weakness. Mudlo had somehow managed to get his fire-hurler out, though it looked more than a bit singed.

  “Ready…” the prince growled, trying to blot out the blasphemous memory of the past minutes from his mind.

  “Rea…” began Mudlo, but Steamclaw sprang before he finished.

  Lauro hurled a halfsword. Mudlo fired his weapon. Steamclaw tumbled the last few meters, thudding to a bloody halt at the bottom of the stairs, smoke curling from one eye, a blade embedded in its side.

  “Can’t say I feel sorrowful over that,” Lauro said, chuckling darkly.

  “No,” was Mudlo’s grim reply. “But there is more than enough to sorrow over already.”

  Lauro nodded, feeling numb. Yes. There is. Far, far too much…

  The chamber was in an uproar. It sounded as if a storm had broken beneath the vaulted bridges. Sparks still jumped at random through the air, and Lauro could hear the grindings and clangings of vast machines coming up from below.

  Mudlo glanced over the edge of the bridge. “The workshop is rising, Lauro Vale. We’d best find a way out of this place before it truly does become our grave.”

  Lauro Vale. The way he said it reminded Lauro of Avarine.

  “I would have liked, just once more, to…” he whispered.

  “What did you say?”

  “…Nothing. Let’s go.” Mudlo replaced his fire-hurler where it belonged, but Lauro left his blade in Steamclaw’s corpse. No point in getting closer than he had to, and one would serve as well as two. The noises of machinery and devilry from below grew louder. The two companions began to jog, then run, then sprint as the noises grew ever more thunderous. Out of the corner of his eyes Lauro could see huge dark shapes rising from the magma. Cursing, he spoke to Mudlo as he ran.

  “Would the traitor… that burned fool… would he destroy his workshop to get at us?”

  “I… ah, doubt it,” Mudlo huffed, keeping his pace quick as they sped back towards the stone doors. “He won’t have to… the, ah, forge, should… ah, take care of us, itself!” The ranger’s speech was jolting and broken. Lauro frowned, thinking.

  “What exactly do you know about…” but he never finished the question.

  Gusts of flame leaped up to the ceiling on all sides as the bridge suddenly became a simple pathway among a forest of bristling machines. It was simple as a blink: one moment, there was nothing between the slim white bridge and the abyss; next, there were hundreds of interlocking metal platforms stretching in every direction, glowing with unbearable heat and dripping magma at every crevice.

  On every platform stood a machine or contraption of different shape and use. There were foundries and metalforges, casting molds and assembly lines, all mixed in a haphazard array that was both terrifying and astounding… All had simply sprung up at the will of the Red Aura. Lauro almost stopped to gape, but then the wind carried him a scent of death and rotting horror and blood-spilling like he had never before encountered.

  Every machine in the workshop slowly turned to point or lean in their direction. Lauro cursed and kept running. As they pulled up in front of the stone doors, Mudlo snapped a sentence in the nymphtongue that Lauro could only assume to be a prayer. Something black and misty was leaking out from between the almost nonexistent space between the doors, growing steadily by the second, sucking the bright red light of the Aura’s forge into a darkness deeper than night. And it was talking… loudly, in words his ears could not make sense of, but his mind understood.

  DRINK YOU EAT YOU BREAK YOU BITE YOU TURN YOU BLACK AND RED AND SUCK THE BLOOD FROM YOUR HEART AND SMASH YOU SOUL INTO SPLINTERS TO STICK IN THE SOULS OF YOUR LOVER AND-

  “No! Be gone!” Mudlo screamed, hurling himself madly at the doors, beating on the stone with his fists and even slamming his head against it. The mist was not hurt; if anything it seemed to be laughing as it nearly leaped from the door, into Mudlo’s body, disappearing in an instant.

  “STOP! BY THE AURA, STOP!” Lauro screamed, pulling his friend away from the door. But it was too late. Mudlo spasmed and contorted, blood seeping from where he clawed at his own neck.

  “It’s… pulling at me, Lauro…” he gasped hoarsely. “It’s going to rot me from the inside out… I’m going to… ah… AH… AHHHH!”

  The prince felt himself lifted bodily and hurled back by the frenzied ranger, who leaped over him as he fell, sprinting back along the bridge towards Automo’s throne.

  “Stop!” Lauro called desperately, scrambling to his feet. “We need to stop it together! Mudlo!!!!” Before he could start forward, one of the machines nearest the bridge lashed out with a long black chain attached to the arm of a crane. Lauro dodged the heavy weight, barely, and hacked at the chain with his glowing blade. The chain snapped and the weight flew wildly out to smash a long mechanical claw that had been about to stab Lauro in the back. “Bloody machines!”

  Five steps further, another machine attacked, and then another. Time seemed to slow, and the deadly inner silence of combat enveloped Lauro. The forge itself turned on him, pouring magma in his path, slashing and hacking and stabbing with movable machines, sending mechanical beasts with red eyes like a draik’s to swarm him as he struggled closer to Mudlo, who had collapsed beside Steamclaw’s body.

  Three machines down… then four… then seven… then twelve! Lauro knew he would have died seconds, then minutes, before… but the fiery wind that swept through the machines, empowering them, also empowered him. The Power of Sky filled him, protected him, and shattered him. He was unbeatable, but he was paying with the force of his life.

  “Come… on… only… paces… to… go!” He spat through bloody, ragged breaths. The machines closed in about him, chittering and hissing mechanical words that had no meaning, and the fear and rage swept over him like a hurricane his power could not hold a candle to.

  DRINK DRINK SAP GUT STEAL STAB LIFE DEATH WISPS DEMONS EVERYTHING WE KNOW… He could hear the evil babble of the monster that had taken Mudlo. Now he knew what the blasted thing was: a Wisp Demon!

  “ENOUGH!” Lauro screamed, shoving his halfsword into the stone of the bridge. It shattered in a flash of milliontide shards, each a bolt of the purest white lightning, hurtling outward faster than the eye could follow. The explosion radiated out from him, perfectly controlled in the midst of his raging emotion, incinerating the metal-and-oil abominations that dared attack him, while sparing Mudlo, who lay nearby. When the fizzling, violent mist of the Sky Stride dissipated, Lauro dropped the burnt haft of the weapon and stumbled over to Mudlo, falling to his knees. Nothing more moved to attack him. How many times will I lose my weapon before this nightmare is over?

  “Lauro…” moaned the ranger, trying to lift himself up and dropping on his face from weakness.

  “What… where did…?” Lauro began, sputtering.

  “I… forced it out… into…” Mudlo said, but his eyes jerked open and he writhed in pain. “Agh! It hurts… it still tears… my heart…”

  Beside the ranger, Steamclaw began to stir, a hideous whisper dribbling forth from the motionless jaws of the draik.

  “You have got to be joking,” Lauro snarled as the once-dead pit beast began to push itself standing again. No… that was not right. It wasn’t alive anymore… the eyes were jet black! But it was moving, and ready for a fight. “Blast!” Lauro said, pulling Mudlo out of the way as quickly as he could, with the ranger still limp and coughing his lungs apart.

  The prince only managed to drag his friend back ten feet onto the bridge when the Not-Steamclaw shook itself, moaning in a way that was all Wisp Demon and no draik, and then screamed. Not a howl, but a scream. An almost-but-not-quite human scream, that wavered, reached a crescendo… and died awa
y.

  Lauro stepped over Mudlo, planting his feet apart and nervously preparing to Sky Stride like he had never done before. Who knew what the draik could do now, with a new master in its head?

  “Just you and me again, Beast,” he snarled, remembering the dreadful night on the iceberg, what seemed ages ago. Only… he had lost, then, or would have without Elia. And Gribly.

  The Not-Steamclaw shrieked again, and charged. Lauro purged all thoughts from his mind, opening himself to the Power of Sky…

  …and felt nothing. The draik bore down on him, smashing into his chest at full tilt, batting him to the side with one armored claw. Pain burned in his side as he flew, crashing through a pile of metal devices heaped at random on one of the closest platforms.

  Light flashed, and Lauro felt himself slipping downward at a surreally slow pace. The world a blur of red and black, he lashed out for any kind of grip. His hand felt a hold, and the next second he jerked to a stop. The platform had tipped sideways, anticipating his arrival with the fiendish intelligence of all the other attacking machines.

  He hung over an infinite drop into boiling magma, suspended only by the thick metal cable he had been lucky enough to grab.

  With a seething, inhuman cackle, the Not-Steamclaw stalked to the edge of the bridge, eyeing the prince with those disturbingly lifeless eyes. Lauro’s mind raced frantically to find a way out of his predicament… but he could not think with those eyes! No Sky Striding at a time like this… and no way out.

  “Blast you, Automo. Blast you Wanderwillow and Traveller! You could’ve at least given me a chance to fix my mistakes!” Lauro howled his defiance to Fate, preparing to try a desperate leap for the edge where his enemy stood-

  -when Mudlo hit the Not-Steamclaw from behind in a blur of blue and gray, bowling him over the edge so quickly that Lauro barely had time to register the sight of the ranger and the draik hurtling past him into the fiery depths together.

  A flash of flame, and a wisp of smoke that died in the flaming winds that swept the abyss…

  …they were gone.

  Chapter Twenty-One: Return of a Thief

  Inch by burning, seething inch, Lauro pulled himself up to the tipping platform, scrabbling for handholds when he reached the top. His hand latched onto something, but it gave way just as the platform began to tip right-side-up again. Lauro leaped, sailing between fire and stone for a tense moment, before landing heavily and falling to his knees, the metal something still clutched in his grip.

  With the demise of the Wisp Demon, it seemed that the workshop had decided he was not worth the fight. Mere seconds after he tumbled onto the stone walkway, the platforms began to drop back into the abyss, pulled down by gravity as their pillars of fire rapidly receded.

  “May your soul shelter in the arms of the Aura, Medlore Hallifar Silverpaw,” Lauro breathed, watching the Red Aura’s forge fall apart around him, “and may you come at last to the everpeace of the Creator.” Climbing laboriously to his feet, the prince gazed down at the thing he had grabbed from the platform’s wreckage.

  It was a long, jagged piece of machinery, with two long shards of metal that resembled a blade, pressed together, and a sort of jumbled mechanical apparatus that looked vaguely like a crossguard, handle, and pommel. It was a sword, he realized. Providential. Simply providential.

  “You’ve taken something of mine, Automo,” he fumed, “and now I’ve taken something of yours.” Before he knew it, he was striding towards the stone doors again, all sorrow ignored beyond a wall of fiery, determined anger. “The prices have been paid, Traitor,” he growled, “but we won’t be equal until I’ve taken the Midnight Sword from you and cut off your head with it. That blade for your head, and this one for your black heart… a fair price, don’t… you… think!”

  With the last word he shouted, stabbing the mechanical sword at the doors. The Power of Sky surged in him, distant no longer, and lightning shattered the haughty stone portal into a thousand glowing pieces. There was no thought, no action: his anger simply blazed, and the obstacle was unmade.

  The red glow of the dying day flooded in, bringing with it the sights of war and mayhem. On the slopes of the Giant’s Mount, a force of golden golems and coal-skinned warriors did battle with men and nymphs in ragged coats, gaudy blades, and murder in their eyes. Beyond, in the waters around the Giant’s Isle, golden steamships spewed fireballs at a swarm of wooden vessels bearing black flags. Everywhere the Golden Nation fought, and everywhere its superior force was brought to bay by the overwhelming number of bandits and rogues who suddenly swarmed the island from all sides.

  “By the Aura,” Lauro breathed. Only one person could possibly have brought this force here. King Gram, Lord of Rogues…

  …or…

  “Gribly!” Lauro shouted, pumping his sword-arm in the air. “For the Prophet, and for Vastion!” He charged down the steps toward an oncoming surge of gold fiends, laughing heedlessly as lightning sizzled on the edges of his blade.

  The Golden Tide would be beaten back yet… and he would have his vengeance, if he had to tear down the Golden Nation with his own two hands to do it!

  ~

  Gribly hurtled down the tunnel, Traveller’s staff in his hand, lighting the way. It had led towards his destination unerringly, ever since he had left the Invincible, back in the cavernous bay where Berne’s Ghost Form had led them. The hybrid warship was fighting in the battle now, and he had no doubt it could single-handedly turn the tide of the sea-war.

  That is, if I can get to the root of this problem before the Red Aura destroys us all with his arrogance and idiocy. The visions had become clearer, the closer he came to wherever the staff was leading him. He could almost feel Fate unraveling, like a cluster of nerves being slowly severed, one by one, at the back of his neck. It hurt, like the pain of an old wound being re-opened, searing, and somehow giddy, too.

  “Where are we headed?” gasped Gram behind him, racing along as hard as his bulk allowed, sweating and panting and tossing his hammer from hand to hand.

  “To wherever the staff shows me, Father. I already said… wait. It’s here. Right beyond this door.” The door was solid iron, closed tightly with no way Gribly could see to open it. The staff burned like the day in his hands, easily illuminating the entire doorstep. “How do we get in?” he worried. “I can feel the suffering beyond it… This is where I’m supposed to be.”

  “Step aside, Boy,” Gram told him, “We don’t have time for delays, if your friend is really in there!”

  Gribly stepped aside. Gram swung his hammer, and the door shivered like liquid, rippling, cracking… and simply melting away.

  “How?”

  “Stone Striding, Boy. You don’t know everything, see? Metal has much the same substance as the rest of the Stone element, only far more complex. Beatable. Like everything else.”

  Metal and Stone… the same thing? That could mean such cataclysmic change for Striding… why doesn’t anyone else know? Gribly forced the thought from his mind. There wasn’t time now!

  “Into the Pit, then,” he said aloud, staring at the scarlet light beyond the door. “Are you still with me, Father?”

  “To the death,” the Lord of Rogues swore. The hammer glowed yellow-hot in his hands.

  Gribly charged into the darkness, staff aglow.

  ~

  Lauro stabbed his blade down between the Coalskin’s eyes, feeling no joy at the shock on its face as blood splashed and the golem it was controlling toppled to the ground. The prince leaped free before the wreckage could pin him, bounding over to where the golem’s victim lay in the shallow brine of a tide pool, his own blood coloring the water around him.

  “Wake up, Man! Don’t fade!” Lauro cursed, diving to his knees beside the pool, gripping the groaning pirate by both sides of his head. “LIVE!” screamed the prince, and lightning flashed from his palms, penetrating the man and sparking along the water where he lay, behaving like no lightning ever did in the natural world. “BE HEALED!
”

  The man woke, gurgling, from the near-slumber that would have ended in death mere seconds later. In seconds the healing was finished, and Lauro heaved the man out of the tide pool, pushing down on his chest and expelling water from his lungs. Soon it was over, and he allowed himself the smallest measure of relief. Another life saved. Another bit of vengeance taken on the Red Aura.

  “Th… thank you,” gasped the man, shivering weakly, but alive. His long dark hair was plastered across his face. He wiped it away, flicking his wrist to expel the water in a single glob of liquid that floated away on the breeze. A Sea Strider, then… and one not long used to the powers that were increasing in every Strider Lauro had met so far.

  “All for a friend,” Lauro responded, helping the man up best as he could. There was no need to mention Mudlo’s name… the world was chaotic enough already. This battle was tearing the Giant’s Isle apart. “What’s your name… Friend?” he asked the pirate.