The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  The trees to the south were now a single thing, a black mass of twisted limbs and dead leaves that formed a rolling black land that could have been the dunes of the west, where her sister had gone. Above them, the sky was not so black as it had been in the days before, the clouds too cold to clog the currents this far north. She blinked as a new light greeted the midnight blue and gossamer white, and then glanced back at the others to see if they saw it too.

  Linn stepped away, splashing into one of the shallow, rock-laden pools and ignoring the sharpness of the cold as she moved away from the shelf and the obscuring light from their fire. She angled her chin straight up and followed the faint ribbon of red and yellow that shimmered above and traced it northward, spinning in a slow circle until she faced her companions again.

  When she saw it, the sight nearly brought her to her knees.

  North, far enough above the lonely shelf that no arrow could ever reach it and yet low enough to seem possible to touch, a green river of light stretched out of the blue-black. The stars behind and around it were washed out, and flickers of yellow and gold danced along its edges. It rippled through the curtain of the night like a snake, like a drake from the oldest stories, and it was brightest at its tail.

  She heard footsteps in the rough and felt Kole’s radiant warmth as he approached. He followed the direction of her gaze and turned to look, and she heard him release a breath of awe. Soon, the others joined them, and they stood in a jagged constellation and gazed up at that emerald-gold band for minutes that stretched beyond an hour.

  Linn would remember that night ever after. She would remember who she had stood with, and what it had felt like.

  She barely slept that night. She guessed none of them did, not truly, but when the magical light was washed away with the coming of the day, she felt refreshed like no rest could ever bring. She thought they all did, as they skirted the borders of the shelf, looking for a way up they could not find.

  When the sun was at its height, they came to a place in the east where the shelf had experienced a crack. The stone face bore a jagged scar that reminded Linn of the Deep Lands. Still, it looked too slick and sheer to climb.

  Baas stepped forward, moving with purpose. He stood beside the gap in the stone and pressed his hand to the wall. He seemed to lean in, and Linn heard distant thunder coming close. It seemed to come up from the depths, like a great worm burrowing in the earth. Shifa heard it too and voiced an argument as the others watched, and then a crack split the air, and Baas stepped away as the wall shook and began to crumble.

  He wore a self-satisfied grin as he put his balled fists to his hips and turned toward them, and they smiled back, Misha giggling like a girl as the smooth and jagged walls to either side of the split broke apart on a delay and caved in.

  When the smoke and glittering dust cleared, Baas bowed before them and started forward to climb the loose stair he’d made.

  “And just when I thought he might be out of tricks,” Jenk said, following with Misha on his heels.

  Kole brushed by Linn’s shoulder as he followed and gave her a wink. “What Sage did he merge with, I wonder?” he asked, and Linn had to smile.

  At the top, the land looked much the same as it had below, albeit with a steady incline as it stretched away to the northeast, curving around the base of those towering white mountains. The frost was thicker and more wont to catch them slipping the farther they walked, and while Shifa had at first seemed overjoyed to have a new place to find her scent, soon enough she was retracing her prints in the glittering surface of frost.

  They came to a raised ridge that hung over a wide, shallow bowl. There was grass in the center and boulders all around. The miniature valley stretched for leagues, the gray stone rising higher onto the next swath of flat and speckled white to the north. As she stood on the edge, Linn could feel the way the wind moved around the place. The others noticed it only after they slid down the smooth embankment and landed in the soft, seemingly fertile center.

  “It’s warm,” Jenk said, testing the still air with his hand. Linn thought she could see a slight shimmer to it, as if heat rose from the ground. She scanned the wide, shallow depression and focused in on the smooth, curved walls that served as a barrier to the higher plains.

  “A comet’s nest?” Jenk asked and Baas shrugged.

  “Could be,” Linn said. “Either way, the air doesn’t quite reach down here.” She lifted her fingers above her head and motioned for the others to do the same. When they did, their eyes widened, even Baas’s, as the tips of their fingers brushed against the cold, whistling breeze.

  “It’s like a pocket of spring hiding just beneath winter’s notice,” Misha said.

  “How profound,” Linn teased, and the Ember settled on a smirk in the place of a scowl.

  “Green,” Kole said, nodding at the patches of moss and scrub.

  “Honestly didn’t think I’d miss the stuff, Center being what it was,” Misha said and Linn grunted her agreement.

  Shifa barked for them to get on with it, and so they did. They moved in a haphazard clutch, stepping over the small mounds of grass and yellow petals. There were no pools like there had been behind and below, but the ground was spongey and soft. It squelched when their boots pushed it in, and each step brought a welcome scent bubbling up from the porous earth that mixed salt with sweet metal. Even manure, though there were no animals in sight.

  Baas frowned in concentration as they passed through the rounded boulders that reminded Linn of his shield, and the others watched him, curious. Shifa sniffed at the bases of a few and voiced her complaints, but Kole reassured her.

  Linn only noticed when they were moving through a more narrow alley between the oddly regular stones how warm it had got. She pressed her hand to one of their surfaces and closed her eyes. It was warm. More so than the air around them. She heard the others stop up ahead and motioned Kole over.

  “Here,” Linn said, nodding toward her hand, fingers splayed over the stone that was slick with perspiring dew. “Press here.”

  Kole gave her a strange look but followed suit as the others looked on. Linn removed her hand and adjusted her bow as Kole placed his where hers had been.

  “Close your eyes,” Linn said. “See what you feel.”

  Kole did, with a slight tilt of his head that Shifa mimicked. In a flash, he withdrew his hand as if he’d been burned, his look wild and seemingly afraid. He stepped back from the rounded stone and pulled Linn back with him, and she set her feet and reached her consciousness out to the wind passing directly above them. She felt it like a cool and pleasant shroud, or a blade just within reach.

  The others regarded the two of them as if they were daft, Shifa most of all, and when nothing untoward happened, Linn relaxed and straightened, eyeing Kole with the same teasing curiosity as the rest of them.

  His cheek twitched as a bead of sweat was turned to mist the instant it broke the surface of his skin, and his eyes darted to the corners, frowning toward Linn as she took him in, his warrior’s stance and his right hand creeping toward the hilts of his Everwood knives.

  It took him time to relax.

  “You told me to touch it,” Kole said, admonishing even as he sounded embarrassed. He made as if to move off, but Linn caught him by the shoulder, stifling a small laugh.

  “What spooked you?” she asked, trying to sound genuine.

  He eyed the others and then turned toward the stone, glancing quickly at its fellows that dotted the landscape around them and made small moats of muddy water at their sodden bases.

  “Warmth,” he said, shrugging. “And … I thought I felt a heartbeat.”

  In other company, it might have sounded like madness, but these fighters knew enough of things from other realms that they took Kole at his word. At least, Misha did. The Ember pulled her Everwood spear around her back, the green and yellow tassels catching the
wind as the tip broke the invisible surface of the still pocket they stood in now.

  “What are you going to do, Ve’Gah?” Jenk asked, bemused. “Challenge the rock to a duel?” He swept a hand out to encompass the stones all around them. “We are vastly outnumbered, in case you hadn’t noticed. If it comes to a fight, I don’t like our chances.”

  Something in the words, if not the way Jenk said them, called up a flutter in Linn’s chest. Or perhaps it was the way Baas stood, suddenly rigid. The Riverman stepped in front of Misha and eyed the stone beside him with budding recognition.

  Shifa barked and leapt from the place she’d been standing, whirled on the stone and gave it the full ire of her voice. Her white-tipped tail was puffy and her fur made ridges behind her ears and down the center of her back. Kole was never one to discount the hound’s misgivings; he drew one blade and ignited.

  And then Linn heard it. Or felt it.

  It was a deep rumble that sounded not unlike those Baas could make when he made a trench or brought down the walls of a cave. It was like the sound a demon might make, or an earthquake, and soon there were others that joined the first, as if it were a cacophony of low, moaning voices. It sounded like wind burrowing underground.

  There was a buzzing that rose from underfoot, and now Shifa was in a full panic as the flames along Kole’s Everwood danced and flickered, their hue morphing from orange to red and back as the Ember’s emotions flared, his control settling as his attention shifted. Linn lost her balance as the ground bucked beneath her, Jenk’s and Misha’s blades flaring brightly to life in a wash of heat that made the stagnant air spark. Her back came up against the side of the boulder she had touched and she spun away from it with a yelp, pulling her bow from her back, feeling at once foolish and afraid as she reached up and began to call a small cone of cold wind down.

  The air quickened around her, tickling her skin with its shocking coolness, and she spun it faster and faster until it covered her like armor. She was growing more comfortable wielding the stuff by the day, and soon she had the image of a lancing arrow shaped in her mind. She saw it blasting through the focal point of her great silver yew bow and splitting the stone from crest to base.

  As soon as it had started, everything stilled. The ground ceased its quaking and the air swirled with Linn’s wind and the collective heat of three Embers flaring. Linn felt her heartbeat slow as the rumbling passed. Jenk was the first to relax and douse his flames, though Shifa was as irate as she had been moments earlier. More so.

  Without warning, Baas raised a wide booted foot to waist level and brought it down with an emphatic crack that raced to the surrounding walls and shot up into the churning air above, echoing like a portent.

  They waited with baited breath, Linn keeping her windy cloak away from Kole’s fire to keep from burning herself. Misha paced in their midst, eyeing them and the stones around them like a caged cat.

  And then the stones began to move. Each had come up to the height of Baas’s chest, and now they grew by half again, or seemed to. Linn stepped back and felt something hard brush against her backside. She spun, working to keep her wind about her. She began to reach higher, skyward, searching for moisture in the air, but it was dry and no storms were in sight. It would take some doing to call one, she knew. Besides, what could lightning do against stone?

  Was this some Sage’s trap? Golems lying in wait for them in some low, forgotten valley?

  As the boulder before her tilted and rose with a belching protest from the sucking moss and mud, it tilted sharply, and Linn thought she saw scales and fur beneath it. The stone began to spin, and when its raised side came around to meet her at eye level, she lost her breath as she met the chestnut eyes of the beast that wore the very earth as its shell.

  She saw the rest of the stones shivering and rising around her companions and was thankful when Misha did not spear the beast that examined her right away. Shifa barked and howled, an edge of panic to her tone as the stone giants took them in with flat, bored expressions.

  They were like turtles, or cows. They had short, squat hooves that sank in the soft ground, and their brown, scaled skin was speckled in gray hair, sparse and tangled like a boar’s. Their faces were wider than a horse’s but more flat, and their wide-set eyes were bisected with ridged stone crowns that stretched back behind their curled rams’ horns under the bases of their earthen shells.

  The one before Linn snorted, its breath mixing with the cold air she pulled down from above in a steady stream that had become a small torrent. It winced, eyes widening as it tested the breeze. And then it reared back and rose on hind legs that must have been immeasurably strong to lift its wide bulk. The others moaned, and Linn recalled the dull sounds they had heard, seemingly from the earth itself.

  The beast crashed back down and stamped, gouts of steam escaping its huge, hair-laden nostrils. It shook its horned head, and Linn did not know if it meant to threaten her or not. She took a halting step back and came up against Kole’s back, realizing too late that she would catch the fire of his blades in her swirling embrace.

  The flames passed in front of her and the bull—which must have been the leader of the herd—bellowed like the white horn of Hearth as the flames passed a foot from its snout. Linn felt the sting as the fire engulfed her stream and she jutted her bow skyward, sending the tail of flame up, where it collided with the cold currents and made a crack like thunder. Kole pulled the fire along his blades back sharply.

  Linn thought for certain the beasts would fall upon them, then, stamping them beneath their massive hooves and rending them with those rough horns. She thought perhaps Baas would survive the first few moments, but these beasts were massive, and strong, and many. Even one of the Rockbled must fear their weight and presence.

  Instead, the stone-backed bull flinched at Linn’s accidental flare and pulled its neck back ever so slightly, like a turtle retreating into its shell. Linn straightened and relaxed her bow, nodding for the others to do the same.

  Misha’s spear still guttered, and the cows around her snorted and stamped, while others watched the bull in front of Linn and waited for him to make his next move.

  Baas stepped between the Embers and brushed Linn aside, gentle as he was large. He held his great stone shield before him and then made a show of sweeping it around and resting it atop the hooked metal catches on his dented armor. The bull watched him. Baas reached out, steady, and the bull gave another quick nod of its head, warning him away but refusing to back up another inch in front of its herd.

  When Baas’s hand touched the stone atop its brow, the beast gave a stamp and lowered its eyes, and Linn thought it might bowl the Riverman over. Instead, it stilled, its breathing going quiet as Baas concentrated.

  Whatever passed between man and beast, Baas did not say. Not later that night nor any time in the days that followed, even as Jenk prodded and Kole tried to ask in more subtle ways. Perhaps it was a language of stone that only the Rockbled spoke. Perhaps it was little more than a passing thing, and they had come upon peaceful beasts that startled easily but angered slowly.

  Either way, the stonebacks did not rend them apart and settle atop their bloody bones in the mud.

  Misha doused her spear only when Baas nodded at the bull and stepped away. Linn and the Embers followed Baas, and she shared a wide-eyed look with Kole that he returned with the hint of a smile.

  They were almost through the herd when something caught Linn’s eyes. Something in the midst of the swaying, churning stoneback shells. She split off from Kole, brushing aside his reaching hand as he made a grab for her, and the cows parted to let her pass as she kept the one in her sights.

  “Linn …” Kole drew it out in a low warning as he, Jenk, Misha and Baas reached the northern slope, but Linn kept her eyes ahead, stepping gingerly between the pawing behemoths and pulling just a touch of that cold wind with her that made their noses twitch and ey
es water.

  She reached the one she’d wanted. It was large and had milky eyes in the place of chestnut brown. Its sparse coat was nearing baldness, and its armored brow was cracked from long-ago battles, or age. But it was the shell that had caught Linn’s eye, and as the old veteran regarded her with those milky orbs, she stepped around it and breathed out.

  “Here!” Linn called back, startling the younger animals. The others threaded their way between the herd, Kole keeping a cautious eye on the larger horned males that stamped at their passing.

  When he saw it, he gave Linn a squeeze on the shoulder.

  The black hand was pressed in just as it had been on the dry, gray bark of the trees to the south. It was a child’s hand, and it told them they were heading in the right direction.

  “Good to know,” Misha said dismissively. She moved out of the herd once more, eager to get as far from the giants as possible, no matter how gentle they might appear.

  “Risky,” Jenk said under his breath. Linn turned to see him scratching at the blond rough on his chin.

  “What is?” she asked as Baas rejoined Misha and Shifa on the outskirts of the shallow bowl. Kole eyed Jenk steadily. He shifted to them, jolted back into the present. He nodded at the old bull’s shell and the black mark upon it.

  “All of the signs to this point have been clear,” he said. “Prominently placed and near impossible to miss. This one,” he shook his head. “We might’ve missed this one if not for Linn’s eagle eyes.”

  “It’s a good thing we have them, then,” Kole said, but Jenk’s observation, however plain, jarred something in Linn. She frowned and Kole looked askance at her.

  “What are you thinking?” Kole asked as he sheathed his knives in their oiled scabbards. His black armor caught the light of the midday sun and turned his shoulders white like the bleached peaks that loomed to the northwest.

  “Jenk’s right,” Linn said, ignoring the Ember’s satisfied expression. “The Shadow girl is leading us, and of her own accord.”