Upon the Flight of the Queen

by Howard Andrew Jones

  Ortok’s brows furrowed at that, but he asked no questions.

  Kyrkenall turned and considered the horizon. “Guess we’d better keep an even sharper eye out for surprises.” He walked over to Lyria’s right, slid his bow into the saddle holster, and dropped his arrow into his quiver.

  As he was doing that, Elenai couldn’t help noticing Ortok hadn’t moved. He continued to stare at the bones.

  “Are you going to be all right, Ortok?”

  “I am fine for now.” He turned abruptly and stalked back to the other side of the fire pit, kneeling once more in nearly the same place.

  Kyrkenall, now in the saddle, watched him. “That’s where the elders fell,” he said softly. “He must have lost someone he cared about here. I guess we should give him a little time … but…” He offered empty palms. “N’lahr is going to be hip deep in Naor battles soon and we need to find him his ko’aye.”

  “If N’lahr were here, he’d give Ortok more time.”

  Kyrkenall nodded distractedly.

  “Do you think we should give him an update yet?” She had reluctantly, and successfully, experimented with N’lahr’s shard on the far side of Vedessus. And she’d briefly tested the fragmented stone’s range yesterday, discovering the link was as strong as ever.

  Kyrkenall shook his head. “We still have almost nothing to report,” he said, and returned to scanning the distance.

  Partly to fill the silence, Elenai made a confession. “I know so little about kobalin and their habits. Is this a village? I don’t see any huts or anything.”

  “They don’t really have settlements. They get all they need from the land. They have favorite places to camp, and routes their tribes take, but they’re so resilient they don’t really feel the need for shelter.” He smiled thinly. “They make us look pretty soft.”

  “So do you think this is where his … mate was?”

  “I don’t think they breed for life. Maybe this was where his mother was, or some siblings.”

  “You think we should ask him?”

  He looked at her sidelong. “You want to talk to him about his love life or reminisce with him about his family?”

  “He seems pretty upset.”

  Kyrkenall sidled closer, his voice just above a whisper. “He’s kobalin. Don’t forget it. He might hunt with you, but keep your fingers clear if you hand him food. I still have no idea what will really set him off. Do you?”

  Elenai disliked the analogy. “He has a pretty strict code of honor.”

  “Seems so. But do you entirely know what it is? I don’t think I understand it.”

  She started to tell him she could hazard a guess about a lot of Ortok’s code. But she couldn’t really define its borders. And she realized that maybe she had become a little too trusting of him.

  It didn’t change the fact that she felt for Ortok when he walked back and climbed into his saddle. He fought to turn his horse around. “We should leave this place.”

  “Are there any other tribes in this fragment?”

  “Sometimes. But I think they would have cleaned this camp, if they had come. We will have to try elsewhere.” Ortok shook his reins and his incredibly placid horse started forward.

  “Great.” To Elenai, Kyrkenall said quietly, “I never thought I’d be so eager to talk to kobalin.”

  He’d already been caught off guard by Ortok’s excellent hearing before, so she was a little surprised that he started a bit when Ortok responded over his shoulder: “There are many surprises today. Mine are less pleasant than yours. But I do not wish to speak. It is a silent time.”

  Ortok’s pronouncement felt final and apt, and Elenai rather wished she’d been able to declare such a sentiment at certain times and have it honored so quickly.

  The kobalin led until they left the fragment, whereupon Kyrkenall rode up beside him. “With no one here, where should we go? I’ve got to find the ko’aye, and your people are our only lead.”

  Ortok gestured vaguely to the horizon. “There are little places before us. There may be hunting parties in any of them, if they have not been eaten by monsters.”

  “Any larger settlements?”

  “Eventually. But not so close to this one. We will find hunting parties first.”

  Kyrkenall struggled for a patient tone without entirely succeeding. “Which direction should we go to find a tribe? In case we don’t find a hunting party?”

  Scratching his elbow, Ortok looked off to their left. “A place of elders lies in that way. But they are hard to impress and dislike new things. They might send challenge to you and me. We might kill them, but that will delay speaking of ko’aye.” He considered the right. “We should go that way.”

  “So there’s another fragment out there?”

  “Sometimes. One tribe that often comes this way brags too much of things they have never done, but they gather stories. They may be useful.”

  “All right then. That way it is. And we can hope we’re still in the general direction of the ko’aye.”

  Ortok grunted assent and led them on.

  The shifts kept their peculiar twilight status even as the terrain grew rocky. Elenai scanned the sky, wondering if they might find ko’aye without assistance from kobalin.

  “How did you meet the ko’aye in the first place?” she asked Kyrkenall. “Did you have to be this far out?”

  “No.” Kyrkenall shook his head. “They were fleeing fragments closer to Naor lands.” Kyrkenall shifted Lyria around a conical boulder, then continued. “Naor kings hunt ko’aye. It’s a mark of honor to bring one down, even if you have to use a huge hunting party. Hunting like that doesn’t seem especially honorable to me, but it’s the symbol that counts, not the getting of it. Anyway, I was on patrol with Kalandra and we noticed a large winged birdlike lizard following us. It was a ko’aye named Drusa. She’d seen that we kept fighting the Naor, and winning, but was very wary of us. Kalandra, though, could be persuasive. She eventually coaxed it down to communicate.”

  “Is Kalandra the one who brokered the alliance?”

  “By and by. First the ko’aye started acting as long range scouts to help us hunt Naor. Then Aradel—who’d become friendlier with one of them than the rest of us—wanted to head up into the air with her. After a little while several of us were invited aloft.”

  “Who?”

  “Aradel, of course. Me. Kalandra. Temahr and N’lahr went up a few times. Oh, and Sergahn.”

  Sergahn, Elenai recalled, was a veteran alten from Asrahn’s generation who’d died near the end of the war. And the swordsman Temahr had been about the same age as Decrin of the Shining Shield. He had been slain by Mazakan.

  “The ko’aye can’t actually carry us very well,” Kyrkenall went on. “We’re a heavy burden. Varama engineered some saddles.”

  This was the first Elenai had heard of ko’aye saddles. “What do they do?”

  “She enchanted them so that they displace our weight—that way we only weigh about half as much to the ko’aye. You can ask Varama about the how of it sometime. Anyway, I was pretty friendly with Drusa, by the end. We got good at killing Naor together.”

  “How do you think we’ll be received?”

  He flashed a droll grin. “I don’t expect very well, do you?”

  “Do they hold grudges?”

  “You mean do they hold them longer than we would? Probably. They’re not very trusting by nature and they’re not stupid. They’ve no reason to trust us after what happened.”

  “What are you going to tell them?”

  “I’m still working on that.”

  As the endless day wore on, swirling violet clouds spun lazily to their east. They steered clear of the scarlet downpour drenching the lowlands and rode on through blue sands that gave way to orange and then amethyst grounds. Overhead the skies gradually transformed to a lighter gray. Still, the lands themselves showed no signs of dissolving away, as had so often occurred during Elenai’s first outings into the shifts. It was as tho
ugh the chaotic energies that lay behind the mad changes of the Shifting Lands were feeling more charitable this week, or less determined to kill.

  They took a brief rest on a tiny splinter of solidity and traded off napping, then plunged back into a landscape suddenly somber with browns and blacks. Even the occasional plant thrust up from the cracked soil was dull, with fuzzy gray leaves. Kyrkenall advised riding well clear of them.

  “There’s usually something wrong with the truly odd-looking plants out here,” he said. Lyria made no attempt to near them.

  “Poisonous?”

  “Usually. Sometimes you only have to touch them to get hurt, or even ride very close, if the wind blows the spores at you.”

  Ortok, who’d remained gravely silent, spoke quietly. “Some are good to eat. Not that one, though. You can tell by looking,” he added.

  Elenai had yet to see any plant she’d want to sample out here. “Why did Sartain make so many useless things?”

  Kyrkenall snorted and flashed her a knowing grin.

  His amusement irritated her. “I’m serious. Even if you believe what Kalandra said, and none of the Gods were gods, Sartain was still the one in charge of making things for the shifts. And most of it’s useless.”

  “There are many useful things out here,” Ortok objected.

  “He’s right,” Kyrkenall agreed. “And our legends got so many things wrong, what makes you think that part is right? Maybe Sartain was the best plant maker of them all, and the others killed him because they were jealous.”

  “How can you say that?” She blurted out. Sartain had universally been labeled a schemer, envious of the other gods. “He murdered Syrah, and nearly destroyed her creations in the process—we’re left with The Fragments! No one disputes that!”

  Kyrkenall shrugged off her outrage. “Are you sure that’s true? Maybe everything you’ve heard about the gods is wrong.”

  “You spend too much time with God talk,” Ortok offered. “The ways of Gods are unknowable. Their moods are strange. They play with the sky and the ground and the air. They play with our fates and give us different strengths and weaknesses. They are cruel, but they provide mighty challenges and great beauty. There is no more to it than that.”

  “There’s a lot more to it than that,” Kyrkenall began. He looked as though he was about to speak on, but raised a hand to warn silence, all pretense of humor vanishing from his face. He stared left.

  Distracted by her anger, at first Elenai thought the distance Kyrkenall contemplated was unremarkable. And then she realized a vibrant blue, multi-legged object was darting over a distant slope. She felt herself tense as it disappeared into the shadow of a hill. It wasn’t until she saw another scurrying after it that she realized they were all in mortal danger.

  A half dozen of the creatures scampered behind the first two, each running on multiple legs, heading toward where she and her comrades guided their mounts. The beasts at the rear were lit by internal energies so that they seemed alive with shifting stars and lightning bolts. The closest, only a half mile away, was mostly matched to the shadows it crossed.

  It was a pack of hunting lizards.

  Kyrkenall cursed and nudged Lyria. The animal bolted into a ground-eating canter. Elenai and Ortok followed quickly.

  “Can’t you shoot them?” Ortok demanded.

  “Harder than it sounds,” Kyrkenall shouted back.

  “No,” Elenai called to him. “They’ll hurt you back.” Didn’t he remember her warning?

  Picking up on the mood of their riders, the horses snorted nervously to one another and strove to keep tight together.

  She glanced over her shoulder as they moved into stubby brown-orange grasses. The lead creature hadn’t gained, but it hadn’t lost yet, either, and two others were just behind it.

  “Kill them from much distance,” Ortok urged.

  But Kyrkenall shook his head and kept them moving. He set Lyria and the pack horses he led into a gallop and pushed on toward a bluff, heading diagonally up the gentlest part of the slope. He slowed as he led them through a field of boulders and loose shale.

  Looking over her shoulder once more, Elenai discovered the creatures had halved the gap and raced only a few hundred yards behind. And unlike the horses, they appeared untroubled by the change in terrain. She remembered the monster that they’d fought at the tower hadn’t been able to climb very well, so perhaps the steeper ground would slow them up. She hoped so. She struggled to think of a magical attack that could destroy them without injuring herself.

  Kyrkenall reached the bluff and passed over.

  “This is ground to fight on,” Ortok said as his own horse labored after, and Elenai briefly wondered if Kyrkenall meant to do just that.

  But as soon as she reached the height and saw him heading into the hills beyond, she knew he’d kept his sanity. Ortok, though, was slowing, and shouted at them both. “Stop running! This is time for fighting!”

  The kobalin reined in even as Elenai called to keep moving. “No, Ortok!”

  He ignored her and slipped from his horse with a fistful of spears, the highly polished, lovingly fashioned weapons that were the pride of the elite order of Arappan warriors. N’lahr had personally presented them to Ortok from the Altenerai armory in Vedessus.

  She wheeled her mount with a warning cry to Kyrkenall, some small part of her wondering what those spear makers would think to see their weapons in the hand of an avowed enemy of the realm.

  Ortok stood on the edge of the bluff, and even as Elenai reined in, still shouting at him not to throw, he launched one, then another.

  She saw the first weapon sink into the lead creature. The second spear was still airborne when Ortok dropped with a groan in the instant after his spear plunged into the thick neck at the base of the lead monster’s skull. The beast squirmed a little and was still. Ortok, too, was inert. Below, the second creature was struck in its flank. It turned in a half circle to tear at the spear with its weird, side-hinged jaws.

  The other six monsters ran forward.

  Elenai considered and discarded the idea of wrestling Ortok onto his horse. She didn’t have the strength. She’d have to do something with magic.

  Wishing she felt more reluctant, she reached out to the hearthstone she’d kept quiescent in her pack and willed it to life. In a moment she smiled, even as the beasts climbed closer, for power coursed through her frame. A quick glance showed her that Ortok still lived, though his energies had ebbed to a low yellow.

  The creatures’ bodies leapt with energies, cauldrons of living force that threatened to boil over.

  She’d already rejected her first learned spell, to lash out with fear. She couldn’t be sure an emotional attack would even affect the monsters, and the assault would probably reflect back against her. And then, again with a smile, she realized that she’d overlooked the obvious solution. Seeing that the lizards had followed up the slope, she reached through the framework nature of the reality of the shifts and swept the final ten feet away into so much dust. In a single breath, the final distance to the bluff where she stood and Ortok lay had grown nearly vertical.

  The creatures milled back and forth along the bottom of the cliff, confused. The one Ortok had pinned was still unmoving, and she saw that its life energies had almost completely drained into the soil of the shifts. The other he’d wounded succeeded finally in pulling the spear out, then joined the others pacing back and forth along the bluff. Their behavior was reminiscent of ants she’d seen in search of a trail forward.

  She didn’t think that they’d hesitate long.

  Kyrkenall had returned and dropped to the ground to check Ortok.

  The lizards came to a decision at the same moment and began scrabbling energetically up the side of the bluff to the right side of the steeper grade.

  Elenai scoffed inwardly, then swept the terrain into its component pieces right beneath the creature at the head of the line. As the soil beneath it disintegrated, the animal slipped, struck it
s back against the creature just behind it, and plummeted to the soil twenty feet below. The others continued to climb.

  Growing both bold and a little desperate, she tore up the edges of the framework over which the soil was positioned and shook it like a rug. A couple of the creatures held on and the closest managed to get two legs over the top of the bluff, only three feet to her right. She had a very good look at the scaled jaw that opened sideways, for a cone-like tongue slipped out between rows of sharp teeth.

  No way was that thing getting anywhere close to her or her friends. She had already tested the fragility of the Shifting Lands here. Now she grasped at the tenuous soil with the full force of her powers and bent the form until it broke, almost as though she were grabbing plywood scenery in the theater and smashing it over her leg.

  She didn’t hear a resounding crack, but she saw reality beneath the creature give way entirely. As the thing was leveraging up over the edge it suddenly found itself falling through a gap opened in the ground and into the starless void over which the whole of the Shifting Lands truly lay. Elenai extended that tear and pulled with all of her might until all the beasts were falling away into darkness. They continued to move their clawed feet as they drifted, desperate to grasp hold of something.

  The cliff itself began to fall into the gap she’d torn and Elenai spent the next few minutes mending the destruction she’d wrought. After a time, the surface looked normal once more, even if the underlying structure felt flimsy.

  “I think that will hold.” She breathed with satisfaction. “I’m not sure I’d walk over it, though.”

  “I did not know you had powers so great,” Ortok said, reverence apparent in his voice.

  She hadn’t realized he was up, and she turned to see him sitting, his huge eyes blinking slowly.

  Kyrkenall acknowledged her accomplishment with a casual salute, then nodded to the kobalin. “She learns fast. Where did those things go, Elenai?”

  “Into the void beyond the shifts.” She sounded more certain of the destination than she believed.

  “I never have witnessed so much magic,” Ortok said. “All the colors flowing and churning. You were very mighty.”