His mind noticed a haze of darkness spiraling through the center of his artificial limb. He’d never seen that before….
One of Yasha’s arms snaked from behind, encircling Warian’s neck, the man’s elbow crooked below Warian’s chin. With the counter pressure applied from Yasha’s other arm on the back of Warian’s head, the supply of blood to his head was instantly restricted. Yasha was trying to choke Warian out. At the very moment Yasha began to exert pressure, Warian’s eyes bulged, and his head felt as if it had swelled to half again its normal size in only two or three heartbeats. Black spots swam before him. The effect shocked him as much from its suddenness as its unpleasantness.
Alarm skirled through Warian. He struggled in Yasha’s grip. His flesh-and-blood arm, quicker, more precise, and stronger than his prosthesis, flailed ineffectually. He tried to claw at Yasha, but he could barely think. Yasha’s deadly threat was more than a bluff. He must have had considerable practice choking people to apply the hold so quickly. If Warian didn’t pass out first, he was in for the beating of his life. Darkness beat in on all sides as his vision began to fail. Blackness crept into the edges of his vision—dark and swirling, like that he’d just seen tendriling through the interior of his arm.
He concentrated all of his faltering will on pushing the darkness away.
Warian’s crystal arm flared with amethyst brilliance. Warmth shot from his shoulder to his crystalline fingertips, a blaze of sensation where before he had felt only vague dullness. The arm fused more fully to him, spiking with sensation as never before, transmitting the sense of touch in a way he had not felt in all the seven years he’d worn it, since the mining accident. But he was still blacking out.
Warian reached up with his artificial limb, grabbed Yasha’s forearm that held his neck in a vice, and pulled.
A shape flew through the air and smashed into the far wall. It took Warian a moment to realize that the shape, now crumpled and unmoving on the floor, was Yasha. Lavender luminance lit the faces of stunned tavern patrons as they stared at him with wide eyes. The light in their eyes reflected the glow that pulsed and rippled out of Warian’s crystal arm.
“What the …?” said Warian, looking at his prosthesis with eyes as wide as any of those in the bar.
Bui the Hog, still in the grasp of her drunken belligerence, and still holding her improvised club, struck at Warian again. Her swing was strong but lacked its former deadly speed. In fact, Warian realized, everyone in the bar seemed to be slowed, as if the light from his arm had encased them all in a syrupy dimension of sluggishness. Or was the light propelling him forward into a faster plane of perception?
Warian swayed his body to be just outside the arc of Bui’s swing.
Bui moved in, assayed another brutal swing. Instead of stepping out of the way this time, Warian backhanded the oncoming wooden club with his prosthesis. The impact splintered the chair leg as it blasted out of Bui’s hand. The woman remained fully in the clutch of her rage. She lunged forward, trying to catch Warian in her reddened, vein-popped hands.
Warian ducked beneath her lunge. Again. And again. Wishing to end it, Warian stood his ground for Bui’s next lunge. As she rushed him, he reached out to tap her on the forehead—he was coming to understand that the strength and speed in his arm could be a deadly combination. Still, the impact was enough to tumble Bui to the ground, her head reeling.
Surveying the remainder of the tavern customers, Warian saw the dislike directed at him from the bar had transformed into fear.
“Don’t worry …” he began as the light in his prosthesis guttered out. The dull nothingness of the last seven years flooded back into the crystal, and his supernatural perception evaporated.
He sagged against a table but caught himself before falling to the floor. He didn’t want to advertise that the freak display of energy had dissipated, draining away as inexplicably as it had energized him.
More than that—weariness enveloped him as if he’d just run full out for a great distance. He couldn’t get enough air, his legs and arms wanted to cramp, and exhaustion made him tremble. Warian had to get out of the tavern while the onlookers remained cowed.
He stumbled back to the table where his card game had been interrupted. Shem backed away. With careful nonchalance, Warian slid the contents of the pot to his pouch. He looked at Shem. “I would have won anyway, if not for the distraction. I had a Bahamut in my hand.” So saying, Warian revealed the stern visage of the dragon and its thirteen points. With a shrug, he threw the card in with the rest of the coins. “It seems like a reasonable recompense for the transgression against my person. No harm done, I say.”
Shem nodded quickly, fearfully. “Right, right—no harm done!”
Warian turned toward the exit. A few patrons gathered around Yasha. One crouched, saying, “Yasha? You still with us?”
Warian’s feet propelled him from the tavern before he could discover Yasha’s fate. He didn’t want to know, especially if … well, he didn’t want to know.
Warian Datharathi rode east down the trade road on a newly purchased and outfitted horse the stableman had called Majeed. He rode south, rather than north toward Delzimmer. He traveled toward the port city of Cathyr, where he could catch a courier ship up the coast all the way to the Golden Water. Then, on to Vaelan.
The answers to his questions lay in Vaelan.
Despite his past vows, the time had come to return to the family business. Datharathi Minerals stood for all the rules and family expectations he’d left behind when he’d fled five years ago. He didn’t have a head for business, or a desire to acquire one. All the scheming between businesses to get the absolute best price on every wooden nail; the constant worry about whether Datharathi Minerals could retain its high standing from year to year; the making of less-than-honest deals with other businesses, trade guilds, and private regulatory councils, in pursuit of the almighty coin … it all turned Warian’s stomach.
He had his own way of making a living—gambling. Well, he supposed that some folk might see a parallel. But everyone knew the risks when they sat down at a table for a game of chance. In business, the risks were mostly those raised by underhanded dealings.
Warian sighed and patted Majeed. He didn’t want to return home, but something terrifyingly strange had happened with his artificial arm, the arm that had been a gift from his family. The prosthesis was carved from crystal mined from a secret lode that Datharathi Minerals jealously guarded. The proprietary crystal had an affinity for taking enchantment. The family business had made a handsome profit by selling small quantities of the substance to powerful and rich nobles and merchants in Vaelan and beyond. To Warian’s knowledge, no piece of so-called Datharathi crystal had ever before exhibited as startling a transformation as what had happened to him in the tavern.
Warian sighed as he weighed his decision. After he had lost his arm in a rock fall while inspecting one of the family mines, his will to fly in the face of family demands temporarily crumbled. The trauma of losing a limb shattered his confidence. Against his better judgment, he allowed Grandfather Shaddon to give him an experimental prosthesis. To Warian’s surprise, the false limb, the first of its kind, served him well, almost as well as a real arm.
Accepting the prosthesis was the only time he’d done as his family asked and found that the result was good.
Warian had been so overcome with relief after receiving the arm that he almost changed his mind about the business, and nearly accepted a position under his Uncle Xaemar, who sat at the head of the family council. If not for his sister Eined, who talked sense into him, Warian might have been sitting on the family council at that very moment.
After conferring with Eined late into many nights, Warian had skipped town. Eined had convinced her kid brother that he needed to see what the world was all about before becoming another cog in the Datharathi empire, however highly placed.
Thank the gods for Eined’s counsel. Free of Uncle Xaemar’s decrees, Grandfather Shaddon’s
schemes, Uncle Zel’s unscrupulous deals, and Aunt Sevaera’s crazy impositions, Warian realized life was a far more wonderful and wide stage than he’d previously imagined. Eventually, he cut his ties with the family permanently. He never returned to Vaelan. In all the time since, the only thing he’d missed was Eined.
Warian shuddered. And now someone lay hurt, maybe even dead, because of his arm. Had he killed Yasha? He’d never before taken a life. For a moment, he comforted himself with something his old sword instructor had told him: To kill a person is far more difficult than is commonly believed.
But what about when mortal strength was overcome by crazy bursts of potency and perception?
“Why did you wake up?” Warian addressed his arm, as he had done before. His prosthesis remained dull and barely responsive, offering no clues. He tried to will it back to life, yet nothing happened, as if nothing had ever happened. All his attempts to elicit a response from his arm since he’d fled the tavern had proven equally fruitless.
“It must be something they’re experimenting with back in Vaelan,” Warian murmured. Something he needed to know about, and soon. If he accidentally hurt Yasha, who might he inadvertently harm next? Or worse, kill?
Was Xaemar pushing Shaddon to empower the crystal lode with power in some mad scheme to propel Datharathi Minerals to the top of the trade empire in Durpar? Or was Shaddon, always a sneaky bastard in Warian’s estimation, pursuing some crazy plot of his own? A plot that had momentarily woken a dangerous strength in Warian’s prosthesis.
A strength, truth to tell, Warian wished to wield again.
Thormud Horn used his moon white selenite rod to scribe a circle in the fine gravel. His grimy hands, thick with the soil of the world he so cherished, guided the rod with supernatural grace and accuracy. So it was when the dwarf geomancer immersed himself in the medium of his expertise. Thormud’s constant companion, a tiny replica of a dragon carved in opal, roosted on the dwarf’s right shoulder. Its name was Xet.
Kiril Duskmourn took a pull from her hip flask. The whisky hit the back of her throat like smoke, cleared her nostrils, and trickled down to warm her stomach. She watched the dwarf continue his methodical inscription in the loose soil atop the mesa. Kiril had watched Thormud inscribe similar circles nearly every day for the last ten years, or so it sometimes seemed.
Kiril’s sword was rarely required to protect her employer, thank all the gods of Sildëyuir. Yet she maintained her vigil. Thormud’s coin was good, but more importantly, few of her own elf race (or any race, for that matter) would put up with her. Kiril’s excessive cursing and bouts of near-alcoholism were traits elves generally shunned. As a rule, elves preferred the fruit of the vine, not the distilled products of root and fruit. But who could carry such a burden as hers without some comfort? Kiril’s ill-famed blade was her strength and her curse, and the whisky helped her through. She doubted any of her hidden kin would last a hundred days, let alone a hundred years, with Angul strapped to a hip.
Kiril upended her flask, her eyesight threatening to blur and her hand shaking slightly. She’d reached an accommodation with her fate that suited her.
Thormud paused for a time, then he spoke. “Again, the prognostication fails.” Thormud’s voice was low and melodious, a voice that belonged to a trained performer on the streets of Gheldaneth, not to a crusty dwarf geomancer who lived alone in the Mulhorand scrublands. Alone but for his surly bodyguard and diminutive familiar.
“Again, you say,” said Kiril in a lazy, I-don’t-much-care tone.
Thormud looked at her, one hand rubbing the chin hidden below his black and gray beard. Xet loosed a call like a chime and launched from the dwarf’s shoulder into the hazy sunshine. A few rags of white cloud fluttered in the otherwise vacuous blue sky.
Kiril watched the tiny construct fly toward the edge of the mesa, then dip below its rim, out of sight. “Good riddance,” she muttered.
Thormud spoke. “Yes, Kiril. As you no doubt recall, all my recent prognostications have come to naught.”
Kiril sighed, then said, “And you still don’t know why? Maybe your wits are departing as age creeps up on you.”
Thormud considered and nodded. “I checked that possibility. Fortunately for your continued commission, I find my faculties remain as sharp as ever. The trouble lies elsewhere.”
“Trouble?” wondered Kiril, slightly interested despite her studied detachment.
“As you’ve heard me expound on more than one occasion, dear Kiril, the stone and mineral beneath the feet of all the quick green foliage enjoys an unhurried life all its own. Information flows through the earth in telluric currents and tides, but slowly.”
Kiril said, “I’ve noticed the slowness.”
Thormud shook off the elf’s subtle provocation. He continued. “Something has disrupted those currents. Something far to the southeast.”
“Disrupted currents of the earth? I’ve heard you yammer too much over the years not to learn a little—disrupting the flow would take a massive event, right? Another volcano? I hate those.” Kiril fingered an ugly burn scar on the back of her left hand as she spoke.
“No.” Thormud shook his head. “For all their fury, volcanoes are natural disturbances, and as such would only modify telluric currents, adding their voice to the flow of the earth. I’m experiencing outright interruption. Only something inherently unnatural, large, and powerful could disrupt my work.”
Kiril grunted.
The dwarf gazed into the headpiece of his selenite rod, his mouth muttering in time to some internal debate. The elf studied her employer, reading signs she recognized. A trip was in the offing, no doubt about it.
Thormud loved sight-seeing, especially when strange rock formations, lost canyons, earthquakes, and volcanoes were part of the expedition. The dwarf didn’t care for cities, or any of the artificial stonework or engineering of which his kin were so fond.
Neither did Kiril. Too damned many people.
The elf swordswoman glanced away, out over the wide lands visible from their lonely mesa top. Mulhorand was an empty land, especially east of the southern range of the Dragonsword Mountains. Kiril knew the dwarf had selected his stronghold, carved into the heart of a mesa, precisely for its isolation. Disruptions were few, and visitors unlikely. Thormud was able to devote all his time to his “delving meditations.” On occasion, his findings spurred a trip to confirm some theory the geomancer had cooked up. Kiril rarely appreciated the reason behind the trip, but she had to admit she enjoyed resting her eyes on new horizons every so often.
Kiril asked, “When do we leave?”
The lonely mesa was much tunneled and hollowed from Thormud’s long years of occupancy—the dwarf was a master geomancer. Libraries, halls, storerooms, galleries, and even balconies lay within the otherwise natural tower. Thormud hadn’t named his home, referring to it simply as “the mesa,” but soon after arriving, Kiril started calling the place “the Finger Defiant.” In his philosophical way, Thormud picked up the name and used it himself.
Ensconced within her own personal suite in the Finger Defiant, Kiril pondered whether she should actually go to the trouble of making up a pack. It wasn’t like her to err on the side of preparation. However, if they were headed toward Durpar, as Thormud hinted, not north or west across the Alamber Sea as in the past, they might be away long enough to require more than a single change of wardrobe.
She selected three outfits, all of which would fit comfortably over her mail of fine chain links. And an extra pair of gloves, of course. Not smart to be abroad without those. She always kept a pair folded into her belt. Midnight black and woven of fine Chessentan silk, her gloves were sometimes all that stood between her and folly.
Kiril had never been south of the Finger Defiant. She wondered what the wines, beers, meads, and harder varieties of spirit in Durpar might be like. Not that she was ever in danger of doing without. Kiril pulled forth her one constant friend during the last many years and heard the familiar sound of liqui
d sloshing within its metallic body.
The flask was forged of bronze, probably by elves outside her lineage. The greenish blue patina of verdigris obfuscated the deranged face carved into one side of the flask—some ancient god of the vine. She could never recall the god’s name—had she ever known it? In all the years she’d carried it, it had never failed to produce its potent drink. A bottomless flask to assuage her infinite shame.
Kiril took a sip for the road and stowed the container. The vitriolic taste wasn’t enough to deter her preparations, though, and she retrieved a well-handled skull from her shelf.
The skull was that of a child, delicate and elongated—an elf skull. Kiril kept it to remind herself of mortality, and as a remembrance of what stock should be put in ideology when reality intruded. It was incontrovertible evidence of the perils of wielding Angul. The peril, and the payment required—the cost of her own innocence. She would never forget.
A chime blared at the door. Startled, she nearly drew the Blade Cerulean, despite the fact that she recognized it. She fumbled the skull and it fell to the floor.
“Xet!” Kiril screamed. “You want to end up a pile of crushed sparkly dust? Surprise me one more time, I swear!”
The crystal dragonet chimed again and darted up the passage outside her door.
“Damned little shardling,” Kiril cursed. She’d gone more than a few months without loosing Angul from his imprisoning sheath. She didn’t want to start the trip by bringing out the sanctimonious blade. Angul was an unbending, saintly bastard in his steel incarnation—more so than he’d been in life, and far more powerful. Kiril swore again, but refrained from retrieving the nameless god from her hip. She’d blurred the edge enough for the moment. She could stand only so much unsteadiness and faded reality.
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