The Dark Ferryman

by Jenna Rhodes

  He took another step. A shower of gravel rained down the side of the passage in front of them, a cloud of grit and dirt hanging in the air. They pushed through it, both of them coughing and blinking. He looked down the narrow passage of stone and saw a dark, spidery crack beginning to open up on the flooring. Not wide, but growing, heading toward them.

  A pressure beat on his eardrums. His hearing grew muffled and faint. Sevryn moved forward hesitantly, and his horse hurried to stay with him now, as though afraid of being separated.

  He’d been in places where the earth danced and the rocks heaved upward. Terrifying long moments when the world reshaped itself and even city walls could topple. This was not one of them. He realized that when the sky began to bleed colors and fell in on them.

  His only clue of warning came with that ominous rumble of thunder that beat on his ears like a great, bass drum, and then colors swirled out of the leaden sky and melted into Hunter’s Cut where they puddled onto the ground and the dirt and gravel greedily sucked them up. He’d never seen anything like it.

  Sevryn turned on his heel to go back.

  Behind him lay a great, dark, yawning void. It stretched wider and wider like the maw of a beast hoping to devour him.

  He had two thoughts. The first was to run like hell and the second, to hope that his horse hadn’t noticed it. He tugged on the reins and followed his first impulse. Auras hung before him, curtaining the passage.

  He pushed himself through them as though he ran headlong into a silvered mirror. Colors shattered, wailing as they did so, like a fragile, dying animal. Shards fell about him and melted as they touched, snowflakes too wet to hold their shape or substance. Rainbows hung from him and then gave way, their prismatic colors dazzling his eyes before they winked from existence. Behind him, at their heels, the void made a noise like a low, rolling thunder, a basso profundo growl.

  He held no concept of how far they’d come, or how far he’d yet to go. All he knew was that Hunter’s Cut was coming to a violent, terrible end, and he would be trapped in it. Whatever forces had created the Way and held it together now seemed to be unraveling.

  He stumbled, and his horse nearly plowed over him. He halted over Sevryn, trembling, nervous sweat dappling his neck, chest, and flanks. The beast rolled an eye at him. Sevryn put his hand up and cupped his muzzle to comfort him. He got back to his feet.

  “Come on. I’ll get you out of this.”

  His voice sounded dull and faint, barely audible to himself, but the horse flicked his ears and nudged him. Sevryn let him lick the salt off his palms before urging him forward. The cut had widened. Or rather, it had fallen up, a cracked eggshell stone and gravel, sloughing away as they moved through it. The void which had swallowed their back trail now entrenched either side of the remaining trail, and each sheet of granite that sloughed away disappeared into its maw of nothingness.

  He’d seen the chaos of the badlands. This was nothing like it. He’d looked into death itself, and not found it like this, although the River Goddess and the sword Cerat had held his soul then.

  No, he’d never seen anything like this.

  Beyond, a brilliant ray sliced across the melting colors of the sky. It looked as if the sun lanced through. He followed its point.

  He and the horse burst free of Hunter’s Cut as the ground beneath them gave way, and the abyss sucked them back in. Sevryn leaped from the saddle, grabbing for purchase. With screams of fear, his horse fought to scramble after him, his hindquarters sinking into nothingness. Sevryn set his heels and pulled on the bridle, grabbing a handful of mane and anchoring the beast. With a mighty heave, the horse found something to kick hind legs against and scrambled onto solid land, where he fell to his side, panting and trembling with fear. Sevryn looked back into the casade of black as it wavered across the firmament. In the river of nothingness, he saw Rivergrace. She stood in water to her knees, icy blue-and-gray water, one hand flung out in command. The river moved as she bade it, turning in its bed, against itself, rising in a curl of tide. Her face paled and her eyes of aquamarine, eyes of serene and gentle expression, went coldly silver as she faced raiders bearing down on her through the river. Sevryn would have gone back to her, through the Way, even as it twisted and died within itself, but Lariel rose between them. Sword in hand, her other hand knocking her helm from her head to free her sight, hair of platinum and gold cascading about her, the Warrior Queen swung, a great roundhouse of a slice. The blade whistled thinly through the air close enough to take his head except that he ducked in sheer instinct and the blade continued in its orbit, straight at Rivergrace.

  The Way collapsed, all darkness swallowing both women in a riot that spun about until he could see nothing of them but smears of riotous color, and then they were gone. The earth shook. With a great groan of stone on stone and wood creaking against wood, the mountain itself gave way in an avalanche of gravel and dust and dirt. On his knees, Sevryn watched the landslide.

  If anyone were to ask him how the world could end, he could tell them. It would end with the slicing of his heart in two with fear for his love. And then the world would collapse.

  In his wake, a crescent of darkness pulsed across the mountains, and Hunter’s Cut existed no more, something dread and terrible in its stead. He did not think anyone could survive a passage through that.

  A Way had ceased to exist. A twist in the laws of nature, had nature gone insane trying to unknot itself?

  Or had something even worse come to bear?

  What of Rivergrace? What had he seen? Omen or deed or his own deepest fear? He got to his feet and dusted himself off. He tugged on the bridle and his horse came to his hooves, shaking himself off with a tired whicker. Sevryn closed his eyes a moment, reaching within himself, taking himself back to the river where she dwelled, always drawn to water and where he’d felt her earlier. He had to know if she breathed. If she lived. If her soul still kindled a flame in this world. His body shook with effort as he reached for her. Search for the Way, Gilgarran had taught him, that is woven through all things existing. She was a Way unto herself, and he fought with every fiber of his being to find her. His own soul spun out, far and wide and away until he thought it would be the death of him, then he felt a flicker, a knowledge of Rivergrace. She lived, then. He knotted his fist and brought it to his chest as if he could hold her secure there, a whirl of water and fire, a sigil that represented her and no other. His soul came back wearily and he fell back, eyes snapping open.

  A rest for the horse and himself, and then he’d find his trail. They would move south and west, so he would ride north and west. The Vaelinars would return to Larandaril. When he got to his feet, he’d ride there with the paw of an enemy which should no longer exist, and tell Lariel of the destruction of a Way without cause, and he would claim his lover and then, and only then, could he put his world to rights.

  That battles had been engaged, he knew.

  Who or what set the rules of those engagements, he could not determine. Yet. But they would not take from him the one he loved, the one he would die, again and again, to protect.

  He would witness that to his final dying breath.

  Sevryn got to his feet, weak in every limb, but alive. He took the reins of his mount, chucked him under the chin and led the horse off to a patch of grass yet green, and then Sevryn gazed at the autumn sky to get his bearings.

  Chapter Nine

  SHE LIES IN AN EDDYING CURRENT under the surface of the water, gazing up. Frosty edges melt away at the banks framing her view, but the day is coming when the entire river will be iced over, even if only at dawn. Her blood cools even as the water does or perhaps, since she is a Goddess, the river only reflects the winter of her form. She ponders that for the most fleeting of moments. Once she would have known which it was. Now, she no longer does. Does she exist because of the river or does the river exist because of her?

  The current sluices upon the bank as she frets in her thoughts. The last vestiges of ice shred away free
ly, melting into oblivion as they go. She knows anger. It tastes like coppery iron on her lips. It sings through her body in miniature, fiery rivers of its own. It is foreign to her in that she does not call up the anger but it exists on its own. She no longer has control of her own existence. She has told the others of her predicament, or believes she has, and they have no care for her. They have their own concerns in the immortality of their world. Their creation is not as they willed it, and that weighs upon them all. They have pushed her aside as if she no longer matters in their pantheon. How can they betray her in such a way?

  She will storm. She will let the winds rise with her and push her along in a heady, out-of-control fury for ignoring her and her needs and fears and strengths and torrents of her element. But no. No, she will not storm in water. She has decided to withhold that, she remembers. Instead she will rain punishment upon their heads, those who ignore her. She forsakes them as they forsake her. That is a godly vengeance. Yes.

  She feels one of the people approaching the cove where she lies in her river. She feels the heat of the woman’s body, the echo of the coppery smoke lying upon her lips, the tumble of her thoughts as she stumbles toward the river’s edge for water. The Goddess floats upward toward the sky and the brightness of the sun upon the surface. It stokes the fire within her. She feels the lick of yawning need in her essence. It swallows her. They have done this to her. The one who used her has done this to her. She will not accept it one moment longer. She will take back what she is missing, bit by bit, flesh by flesh. This is one of the living who defies her, if not the one she seeks, still a breather of air and sunlight as the woman she hates is. It might even be the woman she seeks. The one who has stolen from her.

  She rises in the water. Need and anger cloud her vision. Is it the one or is it not? The smell of flesh and blood overwhelms her. She cannot tell! To hesitate is to lose her quarry, so she takes the Kernan who kneels at her side with buckets, seeking to fill them at the river. The woman screams and struggles within her hold. The Goddess thrills at the fight. It fills her emptiness. A rage erupts in her. She is not to be ignored or stolen from! Not by any flesh. Her fingers tighten like river-grown ironweed about her prey as the Kernan shrieks. She builds fangs and sinks them into the struggling, frightened woman. She drinks deeply of the iron-tinged blood. The flesh struggles. It cries out in abandonment as she rends it. She shakes it savagely with the teeth she has built for herself as the flesh begs her for mercy.

  The River Goddess has none. She has never had a need for mercy toward flesh. Her concern is the earth and the growing things which come from within it when she graces herself upon and through it. The struggle and fear of the being fills her as nothing else ever has. She revels in it. The knowledge that she has taken its life fills her even as she also knows that this is not the one she hates and needs. No matter. It fulfills her for this moment. She rends the being into shreds of lifeless matter and leaves it strewn upon the riverbank.

  The Goddess sinks slowly back into her waters. Confusion and a crimson tide swirl about her. She has lost the rhythm of her world and its cycle and her part in its concert, stolen by the very one who kept her safe for so many years, who kept her by the river and who took her intimately to its waters whenever the two of them felt the need. That was past although it is still in the now for this river goddess because it is like a dark pool, a quagmire in the bed of a gentle stream, that sucks down water and mud and stick and life into the nothingness of dead earth deep, deep below. When she considers this now, as she drifts back and forth, feeling the call of her lands for water, for rain, for stream and flood, she angers still. There is no calm for her. None.

  She drifts through the world, always in the now, uncaring of the concepts of yesterday and tomorrow in the river called Silverwing, and in all its tributaries large and small, and in the droplets of rain that run into those branches, and in the mists and fog off the river which carry her, scattered, back to the sky. She lives in the icy banks and the frosted rivulets, and in the downpours and floods. The only thing that can diminish her naturally is her own state of being.

  She had remade herself. Spun herself free of the cage of steel which held her and of the vessel of flesh which she found for herself to protect her essence sundered by the steel, and she had braided herself anew. Her fingers tremble and dance through the air as she remembers the moment of reweaving the strands of her existence. Yet a splinter of the Demon lies within her and because it does, she knows that a crucial element of herself lies within the vessel of flesh that must be reclaimed.

  The River Goddess dances on the bank of the Silverwing, like a will-o’-the-wisp, in angry confusion. She shakes at the chaos tumbling inside her ephemeral form. She has been stolen from. Betrayed. In despair and anger, she withholds herself from the cycle of rain, of tendering her care upon the lands which so desperately need her. She cannot spend herself; there is so little left. She will not evaporate into oblivion gently! She will rain fire upon the earth if she must to redeem herself. She will take back what the flesh owes her, if she must rend to bits every scrap of mortal walking within her realm. This she knows. She will lay them low to regain what she is owed.

  Homecoming was never what he imagined it would be. He had seen, in his youth, joyous welcoming at the door, or at the edge of the field or pasture, young ones running to see their father, to be hugged and swung about. Mothers with toddlers hanging on their apron, standing in the doorway, waiting to be favored with a flashing grin. Demonstrations of returning and the resultant happiness to be found in that action. Dwellers were the most conspicuous, but he’d seen the Kernans celebrate; even the arrogant Galdarkans had been known to show a sentimental streak now and then. Not one of those returnings had involved him, but he had watched, en-vied, hated, on the sidelines.

  Quendius pulled up at the stable yard, his horse grunting in relief to be shed of the burden of his weight and the aryn wood, and a Bolger hobbled over to take the reins. His leathern face grimaced as he gave a bob. “M’lord.” He did not look happy. No one enjoyed having the taskmaster come home.

  Quendius tapped the bundle of aryn cuttings. “Get these to the bowyer. I’ve taken an accounting, and it had better not be short. Master Narskap has a use for them.” Narskap was no less feared than he was in this camp, and with good reason.

  The Bolger made a chuffing noise and dipped his chin. He shouldered the bundle as if it were dry tinder wood instead of heavy and dense branches, and dragged the tired horse off behind him.

  Quendius shouted after him. “When did the howling stop?” He gave a glance to the tower.

  “Yes’erday.”

  Quendius nodded, and the Bolger resumed his trek. Quendius tilted his head a bit, looking at the fortress and tower. Perhaps it had only been in his imagination he’d been with Narskap when the River Goddess appeared, perhaps he’d already been on the trail and Narskap had communicated the need for aryn wood while he was about. He flexed his fingers as if he could grasp the elusive ability within himself that was almost a Talent and almost a curse. He could bridge distances. Sometimes. Not often enough to depend upon it or well enough to be entirely sure of where he would travel when he did. Close to his destination, yes, but not always there. There could be an advantage to it if he knew how to shape the fugues, but he did not. He imagined his ability as a sword, sometimes solid and sharp when he wished to swing it, but more times than not, insubstantial and limp. Had Kanako or Anderieon forged their Vaelinar destiny with a wet noodle? No. Nor could he. So the Vaelinar blood ran thin in him, good only to hate. He would not call it magic from his bloodline, he had none. More likely it was a result of the places he traveled across, the Scarred lands, the Mageborn blasted lands, and forces that stirred unpredictably there. He had seen nothing that he could reliably harness to his advantage. He slapped dust off his thighs.

  Bistel Vantane would see, when he rode the borders of his land and the lands adjoining that his precious aryns had begun to lose the war against the
plague of the Scars. A Vaelinar who harvested both men and grain, who reaped the blooded and bloodless, Bistel would have to make a choice. Would he go to Lariel’s side or would he make the borders his own private war, against an enemy unnamed and not understood but equally deadly. Quendius would be curious which the old man would choose. Bistel did not look old, but he was, enduringly, one of the last Vaelinar left from the first days, and that edge of prime existence he clung to would fall away as suddenly as if he’d plunged over a cliff. Quendius had seen it happen before. He enjoyed waiting to see it happen to Bistel.

  He sent word to Narskap’s tower that he had returned, and then went to his own retreat, and stood at the edge of a great table, mapped from edge to edge with what was known of these great lands and tapped his dagger speculatively at the map’s perimeter. Who would move where, and how soon? And would any of them look to the west?