In Siege of Daylight

by Gregory S Close

  “Now what?” he yelled, his voice barely distinguishable over the mad turmoil of the river.

  “One moment.” Her breath was short and labored. “Think I see… Yes! The boat!”

  “In one piece?” Osrith had assumed it was now sodden flinders and tinder wood, or far downstream, at best. “Where?”

  “Hard to see, even for me. Hold onto my ankles.”

  She climbed over him, and Osrith shifted his hand to grab her ankle as she stretched invisibly before him. He could hear her curse in frustration, straining against his grip to reach wherever she thought she saw the boat, and then finally she made a subdued sound of triumph.

  “Pull me back. I’ve got the tether. The current will take it as soon as it’s free. Be ready.”

  Osrith inhaled deeply and gathered his remaining strength. If this met with failure, he knew the river’s chilling, determined hands would pull him under and away from breath and life. He gripped the rock with his legs, pressing back against it as he pulled on her body, placing one hand above the other as he dragged her in by inches. As he reached her upper thigh, he felt her body tighten and pull against him. The boat was in the current, dragging them both back into the main channel.

  “The rope!” she screamed back at him, and he clutched up her body until he found it, wrapping its end around his wrist even as Symmlrey pulled herself up its length to the backward-facing prow.

  The boat dragged him behind, limp and gasping for air, and then he was being pulled aboard. He lay on the bottom of the boat, shivering and thankful for her aulden-sight, listening to the still raging river and their ragged breathing. Their packs, still secure to the crossbeam, were nonetheless half open and disordered; whatever contents remained were thoroughly water-logged. Osrith felt his way through them until at last he felt the warm touch of a moss-globe against his fingers.

  He brought it out, revealing his hand, the boat, and the battered form of Symmlrey in its faint lavender light. From what little he could tell, it seemed that the waterway had widened and stilled somewhat, though the current remained strong. Symmlrey knelt down before him where he rested his head against a sodden canvass bag, and panted with no attempt to conceal her exhaustion.

  “I didn’t… think we would… make it,” she said between breaths.

  Then, out of the black behind her, a hand twice again the size of her entire body emerged, the immensity of its outstretched grip dwarfing her slender silhouette. Osrith’s eyes widened, and his trembling finger pointed, but no words escaped his blue lips, only a low moaning cry. Symmlrey blinked, turned, and was knocked soundly on the head by the oversized appendage. She fell on top of Osrith, unconscious, blood streaming from her temple.

  Osrith cringed as the boat floated under the outstretched hand, but it made no further move toward him. As he looked closer, he realized the hand, and the arm it was attached to, were merely parts of a much larger whole. The body attached to the arm was thick, the head atop the shoulders long and severely featured. He had never seen one of the Old Ones, except perhaps in his imaginings, but he had no doubt that was exactly what stared down at him. Then, just as the fear had grasped him, it eased its hold. The andu’ai remained unmoving, expressionless, smiling blankly and unseeing as they drifted past.

  A statue, by Oghran’s Chance, he thought, only a statue.

  In his relief, Osrith almost let the possibility slip away, but for all his fatigue his first reaction was to survive. Sometimes his body acted before waiting for the convenience of his thoughts to guide them. Often enough, that led to trouble; but this day, as many previous, it likely saved his life. Stumbling on his knees, Osrith lurched to the prow, which still gazed serenely back the way they had come, and wrapped the tether line around one alabaster finger before the beckoning arm could leave them again for the concealing dark.

  Osrith stared up the girth of the thing, wondering what type of precious stones caused those narrow, almondine eyes to glitter like fire in the moss-light; what animal’s bones supplied the gleaming ivory of that needle-toothed smile? The construct’s base and legs were underwater, the river reaching up just beyond its belt, but the statue seemed unconcerned. Even in stone, the andu’ai had a wicked, knowing look about it. He thanked his luck he was born well after their time.

  “Damn it all,” he cursed with an accustomed bitterness.

  They had reached Oszmagoth.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  LIGHTS IN THE DARK

  ONLY the steady lapping of the river against the boat and Symmlrey’s shallow breathing marked the passage of time. Osrith found another moss globe intact and affixed it in the waiting duaurnhuun’s metal jaws. The other globe he kept near Symmlrey, for it provided a small amount of warmth with its light. She would live, but not without the affliction of a truly awful headache. He wrapped her head in damp cloth to stop the bleeding. She stirred but did not regain consciousness.

  Osrith rubbed the dark stains of blood from her cheek, noticing the smooth and gentle lines of her face. Symmetrical. Precise. But soft. Her beauty was so perfect that she seemed inhuman. She was, of course, inhuman, he reminded himself. She was a child of the fae. According to common myth, he should be ravaging her unconscious body even now, under the sway of her faerie glamour. He almost laughed, but he lacked the energy even to scoff. Maybe he was just too old or too bitter for her magic.

  Or too tired.

  Osrith realized then that one thing he wasn’t, to his amazement, was cold. The water had been like fluid ice over his skin not long ago, but he sat here, a mild wind ruffling his beard, without so much as a shiver. It took a moment for him to recognize that the breeze was warm, its scent tinged with sulfur.

  Naturally, he chided himself. Oszmagoth was in the bowels of Mount Tanigis, and Mount Tanigis was a volcano. Not so volatile as once it had been, but its heart was still of fire.

  That was good. He wouldn’t worry about dying of exposure, at least.

  Osrith saw no sign of Kassakan or Two-Moons within his small expanse of light. The lizard yet lived. He knew that somehow, somewhere, deep inside of him. He supposed she would have some meaningful explanation for that, being her j’iitai or some such nonsense. Relief though that was, there was enough else to worry him that it provided little in the way of lasting comfort. And there was no telling what had become of the old man.

  He looked across the wide rushing waters toward the nearest shore, trying to judge if distance or strength of current would preclude a swim to dry land. Both did, he concluded, at least for his less than impressive swimming skill – certainly not with Symmlrey to drag behind him and a moss globe in one hand. And there was still the matter of the dringli. They had passed beyond the party laying in wait at the top of the falls, but it was quite possible there were more of them in the ruins of the city. Aside from the grey outline of the shore itself, it was impossible to make out any detail of the ruins.

  And the srhrilakiin, he thought dryly, and the cave-manti, and gods know what else is down in this pit.

  A flickering light caught his eye from downstream, and Osrith threw a sack over the moss globe on the prow to veil its light. He picked through their weapons, and though most of them had survived intact under their protective wrappings of oiled cloth, his crossbow had suffered a splintering blow, possibly from the shifting weight of the axe next to it, and lay cracked and useless at his feet. His belt of throwing knives had fared better, and he slung it over his left shoulder. Even as a well-balanced hilt fell into his waiting palm, he knew it would be unnecessary, for as the light drew nearer it became clear the source was Kassakan.

  “Is that you, lizard?” Osrith asked, more as a greeting than a question.

  Her scaly head sliced through the water up-current with enviable ease, her ball of dweomer-light following above like a trained and loyal bird. Her eyes looked like deep, reflective marbles in the strange light, locked on Osrith and the boat as she swam steadily closer. She didn’t acknowledge his comment until one of her three-finge
red hands reached up to steady herself next to the battered riverboat.

  “How is Symmlrey?” she asked, only slightly short of breath from her swim “I smell her blood.”

  Osrith shook his head, pinching a grin out of the left corner of his mouth. “She’s fine. Took a slap to the head.”

  Kassakan nodded, and an unspoken question hung between them for a moment. “He could have washed up on the far shore,” she said at last, “but I didn’t see him on the near side.”

  “He could be dead,” said Osrith.

  “Yes,” mused Kassakan, taking her time with the word. She looked out past her floating light into the cowed but lingering dark and made a throaty noise roughly equivalent to a sigh. “Yes, he could be dead.”

  Osrith felt a small tug in his gut. Despite his lingering suspicion of the wilhorwhyr as a whole, he couldn’t fault the old man or the girl for much aside from stilted talk and dramatic speeches. He might not care for their dogma, but when it came right down to a fight, he would put his back against theirs without a second thought. Two-Moons was a good companion, a good man; it was a shame to lose him like this. But he was only one amongst many in Osrith’s memory.

  “Well, we’re in no shape to find him right now, alive or dead,” he muttered. “Can you tow us in to shore? We can look for him after we set up camp.”

  Kassakan lowered her eyes and nodded her serpentine head. “I think I can manage it. Hold on to Symmlrey.”

  Osrith balanced his weight on his knees and bent over the young Vanneahym to hold her in place at the shoulder. Kassakan took the tether rope between her rounded teeth and set off toward the near shore with a combination of powerful arm and tail strokes. She didn’t move with her normal undulating grace, but she still sliced through the water with considerable power and enviable ease. She reached the rocky shoreline soon enough, and after an additional moment of searching for a suitable landing, she heaved the riverboat onto dry land.

  Osrith stepped out of the boat, but instead of finding dirt or rough, natural rock, his feet fell on the cracked but solid surface of ancient pavement. He bent down to examine it more closely in the light of his moss globe and discovered it was some type of turquoise-streaked marble. A somewhat expensive and elaborate choice, if it covered the entire city floor, but then the andu’ai had taste that was nothing if not excessive. The rest of his surroundings were too dim to make out properly, but the shadows of crumbling ruins and towering columns lurked in every direction.

  “We’d best find shelter,” he suggested, pulling one of the reassembled packs from the boat. “I’d feel a lot better with a wall against my back.”

  Kassakan already had the remains of the other two packs over her shoulder and was removing Symmlrey from the boat like a newly hatched child. “I won’t argue with that, old friend,” she agreed, “but we shouldn’t go too far right away. Not if we have any hope of finding Two-Moons before sleep.”

  “Do you smell anything helpful?”

  “Strange scents. Old scents.” She raised her snout into the air, nostrils twitching. “The air is so thick with sulfur,” she paused again, then looked down at Osrith. “There is an unfamiliar scent close by – raw flesh and sweet musk. Acid. And something else, more distant, a wrong smell. But I can’t be sure.”

  “Wrong,” mimicked Osrith. “Shadowborn, maybe?”

  “Possibly. Something of Shadow, in any event. According to Vaujn, srhrilakiin would seem a likely assumption.”

  Osrith made a rumbling noise deep in his barrel chest and looked around with a wary glint in his eyes. “Well, that first scent sounds like cave-mantis, so be sure to sniff us away from any of them. I’d rather not end up as dinner for the local horde. And let’s just hope the wrong smell stays a distant smell.”

  Two-Moons coughed up another lung-full of water and then slumped forward, shivering on hands and knees in the total darkness. He was not cold so much as exhausted and somewhat bruised from his narrow victory over the river. He refused to embrace his hard fought success immediately, for he recognized that he was not yet out of peril. He remained alone, effectively blind, armed only with his long knife and a lifetime of experience, in a city legendary for its less than friendly denizens and cursed by the gods besides. Now was certainly no time to sit idly admiring his luck.

  Two-Moons forced his breathing to a normal, steady rhythm, and he listened. Past the hammering beat of his heart, through the rushing of the river behind him, into the stillness. A drip of condensation found a new home in a puddle not far away; a hiss of steam escaped from some volcanic vent in the ground to his left; and the nearly inaudible caress of wind kissed the rock. He almost crept forward then, but his instinct held him back, freezing his muscles even as they started to move.

  He furrowed his brow. Something about the wind, he realized, something about the wind was not right. He ignored the competing sounds that filled his keen ears, concentrating only on the wind. The wind that sighed like a breath against stone, perhaps fueled by the stirrings of the steam mixing with the cooler air of the cavern, perhaps from the falls. But the smell was not right for that. Perhaps….

  And then he knew, for the wind had done what no natural breeze could ever do – it stopped. It didn’t fade and go, it simply ceased, and Two-Moons gripped the hilt of his long curved knife tightly. This wind was nothing more than the feeble evidence of a creature in passing, a solid body displacing the air it moved through.

  Two-Moons reached inward to focus and then looked out with a perception more discerning than any physical sense, opening his mind’s eye to the intricacies of life and nature around him. He swallowed an audible gasp at what he saw. There was no life around him. Nothing, not even the fleeting echo of life existed here. Worse and still more unnatural than that absence alone were the holes that drifted about on the edge of his perception: holes in the fabric of creation that moved in silence toward him, stalking. Holes in life itself. Srhrilakiin or their ilk, and far too many of them. Over a dozen, at least, but his sense of them was nebulous beyond a few yards.

  He was not far from the river, and he knew that was his best, if not only, avenue of escape. These were beings of Shadow, shades of unlife who sucked at the marrow of the living world. To them, water was anathema, the very opposite of all they were – alive and flowing with life. Even in these times when the ancient magics seemed all but lost, the water-spirits still had power enough to halt all but the most powerful of the shadowborn.

  He might very well drown, and though he had no wish to die, neither did the concept terrify him. His wife had made the journey before him, as had one of his sons, and he knew that they would await him in the greylands. To all living things came death, and if there were no other recourse, he would accept his fate. Rather that than the horror awaiting him at the claws of the shadowborn. They would rip him to shreds, body and soul, and that fate he would not accept.

  Two-Moons knew he was no more than ten feet from the water, but in the few moments it would take to cover it, at least one of the beasts would have opportunity to attack. And where one saw opportunity, others would descend in haste. He would have to kill quickly if he was to avoid taking them on in numbers, and with just his knife to fight with, that would be difficult. Like all wilhorwhyr weapons, there was silver in the blade, but that would only allow the edge to penetrate their shadow; he would need much more to mortally wound them.

  Ingryst, lend me Your strength and Your light, he prayed, and coaxed the life force in his own being out along his fingers and into the knife beyond. With so little to spare, the effort was painful, but in the midst of the dark a thin sliver of light appeared, like a phantom blade floating suspended in midair. Its light was not bright enough to illumine even the hand that wielded it, but seeing any breach in the curtain of blackness around him lifted Two-Moons’ heart.

  And the srhrilakiin flew at him, their keening howls echoing in the lofty recesses of the Sunken City.

  Even blind, Two-Moons knew precisely where the river l
ay in relation to him, and he made for it directly. The closest of the srhrilakiin was on him less than a breath later, but Two-Moons could feel the creature’s unnatural presence, and his knife slid home more accurately than his mortal sight could ever have guided it. He felt the blade penetrate and focused his extended life force through the cutting edge. There was a momentary flash of white fire and an explosion of awful, thunderous pain – and then the shadowborn beast was gone.

  The effort had taken more of him, literally, than he had hoped. Two-Moons staggered and fell, still a few short feet from the water’s edge, as the others came to feed. He didn’t have enough life or iiyir left in him to fight them all off, but even knowing that, he could not give in. He struck out again and again with his long knife, and the srhrilakiin fell about him as the life in his mortal soul dwindled and drained with every blow. He felt their claws in his flesh, and their phantom claws digging deeper, as one after the other took a share of their meal.

  There was but a glimmer of Two-Moons left, little enough that many would already have fled their shells and been devoured by the srhrilakiin. But for the wilhorwhyr, there was just enough remaining to land one more blow before oblivion erased his soul. He drew a shaky breath, and screamed the name of his beloved wife that she might at least hear him before the nothingness robbed them of their long-awaited reunion.

  “Waeuu ne N’Iuk!”

  The cry rang out, smothering the gleeful shriek of the srhrilakiin for an instant before it was stifled by another, more powerful sound, a deep crack of thunder that shook the ground beneath Two-Moons as if the earth itself trembled in fear. Then the air burst into flame all around him and light poured into the darkness, filling it like an empty vessel, and the srhrilakiin scattered back to the shadows.

  Two-Moons held on to that last vestige of his being and nurtured it, too weak to move anything more than his head. A ball of blue-white fire three feet in circumference radiated cleansing light from above him, and he felt the hairs on his neck and arms stirring against his skin.