The Sceptre of Storms

by Greg James

  This is where we were born, where we will die.

  We will be here always, in the mud and its waters.

  We are one with this world, and it is one with us.

  We will be gone soon and soon we will be reborn.

  The people below fell under fire from Dracken, scattering with screams and bloodied clothes. Hot traces of flame tore out again. Hats fell in shreds of straw, limbs seeming to clutch and twitch. Old men, women, and children died. And the water of the fields became raw with colour. A lone buffalo stood alive, tugging at its yoke. Lifeless hands clenched tight around the ropes that had once guided the beast. Sarah closed her eyes for a moment as the oxen began to low and cry. A lowing of her own was building in the back of her throat. She could feel heat steadily swelling under her skin, urging her to do some real damage. But the ring on her finger burned bitterly cold and the heat died down. She turned her eyes back to the browns and greens spreading away to the horizon, thickets and small groves arising here and there like dark beauty marks. The huts and houses of the land’s people. The murky serpents of rivers and their canal offspring, threading the land with lifeblood. It was all so old, had been here for so long. She looked back, out over the spread of the fields, taking in the quiet of the groves below. They had gone from silence to a scream, and then to silence again, as if the war was only a momentary disruption—something to be patiently outlasted, not won. The morning was growing brighter, yet a grey drizzle was falling too.

  The land will still be after the war is over, she thought, the rivers will still flow.

  Paradise will be here again, one day.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The tower in her dream was a thing of echoes. A lonesome hooning sounded from it, and Sarah stood listening to the sonorous song of the crumbling horn of stone. There were no houses near to the tower. It was a thing alone, a beacon of solitude, hemmed in by a wasteland of ugly hills, quivering trees, shattered rock and excavated mud. She set out, crossing the coarse wastes surrounding the tower's base. She felt a gust of fetid wind tugging at her clothes, whispering to her in warning astral tones, but she was not so easily deterred. Coming to the tower, she found that, while there was no doorway, decay had left certain openings she was able to squirm through. Then, she was through and inside, climbing the spiral staircase that wound around and around the tower’s interior. She came across a number of curious eldritch signs carved into the bare stone. They made her think of Medusa and the serpents in her hair. Running her fingertips over the cryptic depressions made her start as wet electric shocks passed through her, coursing down to her toes. Words woven of gold and silver took shape behind her eyes. She recognised these as words she would need to know when she came to the top of the tower, for they were a prayer to the thing she sought to call back into this world.

  There was a nocturnal rustling, followed by a weird whooping call, and then a fluttering, as if from colossal moth wings. Sarah stepped away as the air whistled and parted violently, and it came soaring up, out of the black space below. Thin and faceless, its skin was the colour and texture of spilt ink. Its pterodactyl wings were beating it into sure flight with its long-nailed hands thrust out, and the scorpion barb of its segmented tail trailed, swaying close to her, the hook of it glistening with a noxious bead of benighted venom. Then, it was gone. Only a scented violet mist trailed in its wake. When the tower was once more quiet and the air settled, Sarah continued her ascent.

  Atop the tower, Sarah stood with a twinge in her heart but no more than that. The words of the prayer were acid on her tongue. She slipped out of her shoes, letting her bare soles earth her to the tower and drawing upon its forlorn depths of fettered power. Closing her eyes, she spoke, feeling winds lashing her as she did and then circling her, in orbit around the tower.

  So called upon, it came. Out of the night and at one with the storm, a boiling black froth of protean cloud edged with silver. Its depths were streaked and screaming with a thousand lost faces, maybe more, all of them singing the same desolate, wordless song as the tower. Sarah found that she was singing, too, though she was cold and the wind of the storm cut her to the bone. The soles of her bare feet were tickling with lines of electricity as her heart began throbbing in time with the febrile humming of the tower. She called out to the spreading storm above, which now hung so low overhead, waiting, eager, fierce and intent on her, its diminutive summoner.

  As the last words were spoken, as was promised, Sarah was taken up, disappearing completely into the churning black belly of the storm-bred colossus. She cried out, not entirely in pain, as she was absorbed into Ka’aron, the First Wayfarer, and as she saw and felt as he felt.

  It was the purest ecstasy.

  Sarah penetrated to the heart of the storm and it was the most beautiful space she had ever seen. It shone with all colours and hues, and some she did not even know. It was quiet here, at the eye, and she watched as the storm cast a haze of ethereal rainbows over the mournful face of the moon.

  To forever be one with the Thirteen Worlds. Now, she too could see the shores of other realms and places: emerald cities with chittering insectoid shamen; the fungal people of the starless and outermost Thirteenth World; the undimensioned void beyond. As one with Ka’aron, she could fly from world to world to behold places, experiences, and sensations never meant for those of us who only walk across one world.

  A revel of vampires drinking from dusty wine bottles, supping at crimson contents she did not like to think about. A ghoulish seductress slithering into the bedchamber of a sleeping suitor, her eyes shining silver, her hair writhing with the life of the grave, spiders, worms, maggots, and white lice. A tentacle-headed toad-thing squatting, enthroned in an oozing chamber of knobbly stone, the walls awash with sea foam and decorated with angular glyphs. It bore no eyes, this thing, rather a number of glistening fleshy tentacles, strung through with seaweed, hung loosely like a beard.

  And then, she saw a drab, dirty, windowless cell. By the light of a guttering oil lamp, she could make out a face. It was of someone gone utterly mad. There was nothing romantic, melancholic, or fantastic in that haunted face. The eyes were lolling orbs. The mouth was a cavern of disintegrating yellow teeth. The despair lined into the flesh of the grey face was indecipherable and intricate. It was a black, indescribable labyrinth that made the face seem like a mere mask drawn tight over an echoing, endlessly sad space.

  The face was her own.

  It was the face of someone who had lost the Flame.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The screams of Dracken startled Sarah from her dream-infested sleep. Clinging to the Batracca’s back, she looked over her shoulder and saw the things circling in closer. With dawn’s sunlight knifing at her eyes, she raised a hand to obstruct the glare so she could better see the creatures that were closing in.

  Leading them, she recognised the true form of Malus himself; glistening like rotten fishscales, the Necrodragon was bearing down on them, his eyes shining death-bright and his wings beating with the tempo of an oncoming storm. He let out a magnificent roar as he pursued them, a number of Dracken above and below.

  Sarah shook Sinh’s shoulder. “We have company.”

  The Cham looked back over his shoulder and his large, pale eyes widened at the sight. “The Dragon of the dead! What hope can we have against him?”

  Still, Sinh pulled hard on the reins and lashed them against the Batracca’s neck. Sarah felt the animal’s protesting cries but knew that their lives depended on the Batracca now. She could feel the heat in the air from the gouts of fire spat by the Dracken. Looking back, she saw Malus bearing down on them but not yet opening his mouth to let loose his fire—the kind that had burned through the walls of Highmount and turned the stones into precious gems.

  This is a game to him, Sarah thought. He wants us to exhaust ourselves trying to escape from him.

  He roared over the rushing wind, “You will not survive me again, O Flame. You were fortunate in Yrsyllor. You had help fro
m someone. But there is no help here. Only death by fire.”

  So saying, his jaws slung open and Sarah saw the flames beginning to gather in his throat. They would be incinerated in moments. Sarah could feel Sinh muttering prayers to his ancestors. His hands were slack on the reins, as if he were accepting his fate.

  Sarah was not.

  She reached around Sinh and snatched up the reins, twisting them hard and making the Batracca wail as she steered it in a loop and brought it face-to-face with Malus and the approaching Dracken.

  “Sarah, what do you do?” Sinh yelled.

  “Not now.”

  She whipped the reins and drove the Batracca forwards, just as Malus and the Dracken spat out searing tongues of fire.

  “Get down, Sinh!”

  The flames passed over them as they clung close to the Batracca’s back, feeling its sweat and the trembling of its panicked body. Sarah stroked it a little.

  I’m sorry, but you would not be alive if I hadn’t done this.

  They flew underneath the bleached white belly of Malus and heard his frustrated bellow as he realised what she had done. Sarah turned her head and saw Malus and the Dracken falling in behind them. She had saved Sinh and herself once, could she do it again?

  She looked ahead.

  Great thunderheads were gathering, strobing with lightning and rumbling with a thunder that equalled the rage of Malus as he approached from behind them. Sarah gave the reins back to Sinh and nodded ahead. “We’re dead if we don’t go in there.”

  Sinh nodded in agreement, although Sarah knew they could die in there just as easily. But there was just a chance for them—the slightest. And she had learned that you had to take such chances, even when every nerve in your body was screaming not to.

  ~ ~ ~

  Sarah could barely see a thing. The black, white and grey vapours of the clouds billowed into her face, making her eyes sting. She could feel that they had slowed down, and that even the sensitive eyes of the Batracca and of Sinh were struggling to cope with the damp and heavy atmosphere. It was also hard to tell if Malus and the Dracken had followed them into the storm. There were roars, bellows, and astounding echoes in here, too, but none were distinct enough for Sarah to tell if they were still being hunted.

  Lightning lashed down ahead of them and Sinh tried to ease the Batracca away too late. The startled animal shrieked as the sudden light blinded it. Sinh let the reins slacken and let the Batracca glide on slowly until its eyesight cleared and it could see again. Sheets of lightning flashed and flickered all around them. Sarah peered into the murk, hoping to catch a glimpse of tell-tale shadows so she could know if Malus or the Dracken were there. They were made of sterner stuff than the Batracca, but she also knew that the Necrodragon had a malicious streak. He could be waiting outside the storm, waiting for them to fall, struck by lightning, into the sea where he could fish them out as a cat might a drowning mouse.

  Their only hope was to fly on.

  Time passed and the storm seemed endless, until a rumbling of thunder threw the Batracca into a panic. Shrieking, it fell into a downward spiral. Sinh shouted and screamed and hauled on the reins while Sarah clung on for her life. The fall seemed to last forever too, and the colourless clouds streaming by made Sarah feel as if she were weightless and floating rather than tumbling towards the ocean waves. Then, slowly, Sinh was able to calm the Batracca and bring it back to a level bearing through the clouds.

  It was then that the clouds split open and the shadow of Malus fell over them. Crowned by lightning, his roaring underscored by the thunder of the storm, he hung in the air with the Dracken circling his flanks. He let out a gust of scalding, pale fire that was quickly extinguished by the lashing rain of the storm.

  Malus growled, lunged forward, and snapped his jaws shut.

  Sarah cried out.

  Sinh was gone.

  She watched Malus twist his head from side to side, swallowing the struggling form of the Cham boy. That wasn’t meant to happen. It wasn’t fair.

  “You bastard!”

  His eyes were on her as she grabbed at the reins to steady the Batracca. Sarah watched as the Necrodragon’s great eyes narrowed. The next breath would be a torrent of fire that would not be dampened into smoke by the rain. She could feel the Batracca shaking from her weight on its back, from the miles it had flown, from the cold and the wet that were tiring it to the point of exhaustion. There would be no manoeuvres this time to save their lives. As the jaws of the ancient Dragon opened, Sarah fingered the ring on her finger and cursed it.

  Without it there, she could have done something.

  She could have summoned the Flame.

  I could have saved Sinh.

  The lightning came out of nowhere, converging on the Dragon and his Dracken. Searing fingers of blue and white pierced each and every one of them. Sarah could smell burning meat and bone as they shrieked and twisted in the air. But more and more lightning continued to strike around them, blasting them until their wings were torn into rags and their bodies were charred. They fell, plunging into the lower belts of the storm, and were lost to sight.

  Sarah stared after them with wide eyes.

  What had just happened?

  Something like what happened in the garden of stone animals in Yrsyllor. Something is watching over me.

  What could it be?

  There was no time for that now.

  She took hold of the reins with numb fingers and made the Batracca fly on. She looked back a few times into the storm, imagining she saw someone there. All she would have to do is turn around and she would be able to save Sinh. He hadn’t been eaten alive. It couldn’t be true. Not really. As the storm began to ease and they flew into lighter layers of cloud, Sarah realised that the rain was no longer hiding her tears.

  Chapter Thirty

  The island of K’th’li’li was a darkness at first that became steadily more defined as the Batracca came closer and as the fog shrouding its shores became thinner. The cliffs of the island were sheer and towered over the interior so much so that Sarah could make out nothing but this oppressive, grey craggy mask obscuring the rest of K’th’li’li from sight as the fog had obscured the island itself. As the Batracca swept over the soaring cliffs, Sarah beheld K’th’li’li—the first time the land had been looked upon by human eyes in centuries.

  A sinister enchantment to the vista was revealed as the island’s dull grey covering was rolled back. The symmetrical flow of the warty hills and the even patterns of the soft, tumour-like trees suggested the interior space before her had been shaped and moulded by a guiding hand. But it was not a kindly hand.

  As the Batracca began to descend, Sarah could see great webs strung across the spaces between trees, over the mouths of caverns, and even glimmering below the harsh stone lips of chasms. The silvery threads caught the light of the sun to resemble fine layers of skin stretched across diseased and rotting flesh.

  This was the Kingdom of Webs.

  Sarah had to fight the urge to pull on the Batracca’s reins, to turn it around and fly away. A humid heat rose up from below and made sweat blossom across Sarah’s brow as her mount came down to earth. Looking back over her shoulder, she felt as though she could see through the rock of the cliffs and out to sea where Sinh had fallen, inside Malus, into the waves.

  There’s nothing I could have done to save him, she thought, but I still should have been able to.

  She got down from the Batracca and stroked its muzzle. It made a soft grumbling in response and blinked at her. Its eyes darted about as if it sensed something shifting in the dank, moss-encrusted land around them.

  “Rest here. I’ll be back for you,” Sarah said, kissing it on its fuzzy cheek.

  ~ ~ ~

  Sarah walked through the Kingdom of Webs, feeling as though the bulbous hills were watching her. Even the stones scattered along the path seemed to be mottled and leprous. Everything here was touched by a creeping sickness it seemed, and that idea made her skin start to
itch. In the Western Wastes, there had been a feeling of desolation in the air, but here, all she could feel was that life was a seeping, mouldering thing that existed only to spread and absorb and consume the surrounding landscape. There was abundance here, rather than emptiness.

  No wonder they built those cliffs so high, she thought.

  They wanted to make sure this stuff didn’t get out.

  The tower was here, somewhere, and inside it, the Sceptre of Storms. Sarah did not know why she still believed the words of Mistress Ruth, someone who had betrayed her, but she did.

  She could have killed me, Sarah thought, but she only cut me off from the Flame with this ring. She’s not like Malus, I think, not all bad.

  She had the dreams to follow too. Like memories, they burned in her mind and seemed to guide her feet across the spongy ground. As she pressed on, she felt her skin prickling, as if she was being watched. But there were no Fellfolk here or any other subjects of the Fallen One.

  What could it be?

  Sarah spent the rest of the day wandering the island, looking for the tower, but she could see nothing.

  A tower shouldn’t be too difficult to find, she thought. But as the day came to an end, she was tired, thirsty, and hungry and she had found nothing. She crept into a hollow in one of the hills and curled up for the night to sleep.

  ~ ~ ~

  Suddenly, Sarah was awake again, and she could not see. She could not move either. There was something sticky all over her. She tried to move her arms and to kick her legs, but they were glued together. She tried to call out, but her mouth was covered by the same substance. It tasted bland and bitter on her lips. She was moving, she realised. She was being dragged along by her ankles and bumping over grass and rocks. She could still feel the biting cold of the ring on her finger, dampening the Flame and not allowing her to draw upon it to save herself.