Althyof twitched, as one who is dreaming about falling might, but he didn’t wake. The words at the edge of my hearing became more insistent, and perhaps a little louder.
“Yek air Hank neelithi runeskowld,” I chanted. “Vakna, Althyof! Klustathu echki lenkur! Vakna, Althyof! Hunsa seemtalith til ath sofa! Vakna, Althyof! Klustathu athayns ow mik! Vakna, Althyof!”
The Tverkr grunted, and his hands twitched.
I looked up at Veethar and shrugged. “There are only so many ways I can think of to say: ‘ignore the call to sleep.’”
He shrugged, chin dipping toward his chest. “Maybe a triblinkr isn’t enough.” His words slurred, and his eyes rolled.
“Stay awake,” I snapped.
“Trying…” Veethar swayed and his mouth cracked open in a huge yawn.
“I’ve never sung a trowba. Althyof warned me not to attempt too much.”
Veethar nodded, and then his eyes rolled up in his head, and he crashed to the ground. I looked around, and those that hadn’t fallen out of their saddles lay slumped over the necks of their mounts, asleep. Even the horses seemed to be asleep.
From Owsakrimmr’s gift of the runes, I knew the mechanics of performing a trowba. The knowledge of which steps supported which runes spun out in my mind in infinite variety. My eyes had that gritty feeling I got right before I slept after a bout of insomnia. I could picture all the runes I needed and could repeat the lines I’d chanted earlier, varying their placement as I saw fit. I could cast the runes as I sang, as I danced. My jaws cracked open in a huge yawn.
When the pitter-patter of approaching spiders echoed from the surrounding trees, I began to sing, and a moment later, I added the steps of the dance. I focused on Althyof, dancing in a circle around him. In the distance, the thunder of approaching hooves sounded. I repeated the lines I’d chanted a moment before, varying them according to some internal lyricist that seemed to know how the placement of the lines would bolster the effect of the previous or next line. At my feet, Althyof stirred.
The commands to sleep grew louder, more insistent, and my feet stumbled and skipped as if I danced over uneven ground. The lines I sang became hard to get out.
I glanced down, hoping the Tverkr would be awake, but he wasn’t. Not yet, but his feet jerked in time to the rhythm of my trowba, and his lips twitched in time to the lyrics.
I stumbled less, and his feet moved with more sense of purpose. The words flowed from my lips, and his lips formed words, though without sound.
The hooves were closer, their thunder vibrating the ground I danced on. I glimpsed purple and white spiders loitering in the trees at the edge of the clearing we’d stopped in.
The commands to sleep, to rest, to dream, grew more insistent yet; they became harsh, grating along my auditory nerves, trying to distract me from my trowba. I kept singing, kept dancing.
Althyof’s eyes snapped open. He leapt to his feet, springing up like a twenty-year-old gymnast. His voice sang out, perfectly in time with mine, and he was dancing and singing my trowba.
I felt light on my feet—no aches, no pains. I hadn’t felt this way since before I caught up to the Dark Queen, and she had laid her damn curse on me.
Althyof drew his twin daggers, their cadmium red auras bright and blinding, and he took charge of my trowba and began to change it, to alter a word here, change a step there. I could see what he was doing in my mind’s eye: altering the trowba so it would affect everyone in the party instead of just him. His changes didn’t throw me, however. Instead, it was as if I knew what he would sing, where and how his next step would land before he did it.
I remembered his story about leading a cadre of runeskowlds and their warrior support teams, how everyone’s trowba merged with the others to increase the strength of and lengthen the range of the kaltrar. I hadn’t really understood that part of the story until I was doing it—hadn’t understood the give and take of sharing a trowba with someone, hadn’t understood the power of it.
After a few minutes, the others came awake. Althyof and I kept dancing, kept singing the trowba, and the spiders kept skittering in the trees while the hooves kept thundering closer. Althyof increased the cadence of the trowba, dancing faster, and adding swirling spins, his daggers thrusting out away from the group. In the woods around us, the spiders hissed.
I drew Kunknir and Krati, emulating his thrusts. After a moment, the pistols took on a cadmium red aura, and when I thrust them away from the party, bolts of red light shot away like bullets. In the trees, I heard the telltale whoosh and crackle of spider blood igniting.
As we danced, a pressure of sorts built from the north, as if something were pressing against us, trying to shove past us. I made a face at Althyof, and he nodded once. A horse neighed somewhere off in the trees—closer than I expected—and Slaypnir lifted his head and snorted through his nose. From their saddlebag perches, Keri and Fretyi’s ears were up, and they both set about barking as if the sky was about to fall and trying to lurch free of the saddlebags. Jane lifted them free and set them on the ground, and they ran in circles, snarling and snapping their teeth.
“Weapons!” snapped Meuhlnir. The party sprang into motion, donning shields, drawing weapons. They put Sig in the middle and formed a circle around him. Jane looked at me, with sleep-slurred eyes, unsure what to do with me dancing around and singing like a broken-down lounge act. The other skyuldur vidnukonur stood apart from the men, forming a line facing north.
“Stand with us, Jane,” said Sif. “We form the Wall.”
“The wall?”
“Yes. We interlock our shields and stand together, giving the rest an extra moment to vefa before the enemy charge is upon them. Once I yell ‘break,’ fall back with us, a step at a time, moving as one.”
“Got it.”
The Svartalf from my dream rode a magnificent black horse out from the trees. When he stepped out of the woods, he was chanting a kaltrar: …Svefn…Kvild…Truhmur, but when he saw Althyof and me dancing, he grinned a nasty grin and stopped. His general proportions matched that of Althyof and my Alfar companions, but he seemed different…more asymmetrical. His skin was the color of thunderheads during a summer storm, but his eyes were a brilliant amethyst that seemed to glow in the darkness of the Great Forest of Suel. He glanced at the Alfar and nodded. “Cousins,” he said.
Yowtgayrr hissed, and Skowvithr spat toward him.
Althyof broke off the trowba and laughed. “What, no ‘Cousin’ for me?”
The Svartalf curled his lip and looked away.
Meuhlnir peered into the woods behind the magnificent black horse. “Have you come alone?” he asked, his voice incredulous.
The Svartalf shrugged. “You should be asleep. And without the Abomination over there, you would have been.”
Althyof laughed brightly. “Ah, there is the greeting I’d expected! But I didn’t thwart you. It was my apprentice. You should consider returning to your master for more teaching.”
The Svartalf sneered but still refused to look at Althyof.
“You should speak,” growled Mothi. “Your name, and a reason I shouldn’t kill you.”
The Svartalf’s gaze snapped to Mothi’s, eyes narrowing. “I am Ivalti. As to your last question, allow me to spare your life, Isir. You couldn’t kill me.”
Mothi growled and took a step, but Meuhlnir put his arm in front of him. “No.”
“Wise of you,” sneered Ivalti.
“At least, not yet,” said Meuhlnir.
“Who among you is the umsikyanti?”
“The seeker?” I blurted.
Ivalti’s bright eyes tracked across the small clearing to meet my own. “You,” he rasped.
“Me?”
“Dressed in raven feathers or in armor, I see you now.” His face scrunched into angry, hateful lines. “I will do what Queen Hel would not—or could not. If I kill you, maybe she will end this idiocy and reopen the preer, and I can go home to my sons.”
The look in his eye was some
thing I’d seen many times before, and I knew what it meant. I jerked Kunknir and Krati up and fired twice from each pistol. Ivalti jittered and shuddered a series of steps like something out of a Japanese horror movie, screeching in the Gamla Toonkumowl, and the rounds stopped in midair and hung there like so many fishing weights on a string.
“At least you had the cardinal virtue to attack me alone, rather than all at once. Do the rest of you dare such decency and honor?” The Svartalf’s expression twisted, making it plain what he thought of us.
“Ha!” spat Skowvithr. “A Svartalf asking for grace! I’m surprised you know the meaning of the word, stuhchkprayteenk.”
The word meant “mutant” and Ivalti reacted as if the Alf had spit in his face—coming up on the balls of his feet, cheeks suffusing with hot, angry blood. “Be careful what you say to me,” he hissed.
Althyof laughed without mirth. “Alfar and Svartalfar… Talk, talk, talk, when the situation calls for killing.”
Ivalti snapped his gaze to meet the Tverkr’s. “Then please, protidn aydn, begin.”
“Broken one?” Althyof laughed again, this time with derision. “Is that the best you can do?” Without giving the Svartalf time to answer, Althyof spun into motion, the grace of his movement a glaring contrast to how the Svartalf moved. He began singing a trowba, daggers weaving complex patterns in the darkness of the Forest.
With one last glare of pure hatred at me, Ivalti snapped his head away to track Althyof, while lurching into an arrhythmic dance, shuddering one direction, then jerking in a counter-direction. He drew a jagged, black weapon, that appeared to be the bastard combination of a short sword and a double-bladed axe. He held his other hand splayed, palm out. His kaltrar was as nonmetrical as his graceless dance—looking clumsy compared to Althyof. As he sang, a black mist coalesced around the blade of his weapon, covering more and more until the blade disappeared.
They circled each other, testing and probing the other’s defenses. Contrary to the Svartalf’s idea of honor and grace, I moved to join Althyof, but he waved me back, glaring at me for good measure. Althyof’s tune changed, becoming strident and changing to a harmonic minor key, notes seeming to jangle with each other, and crimson energy blasted across the space separating him from Ivalti.
The Svartalf uttered a series of harsh noises, more like coughs than words, and the crimson wave parted around him and tore into the trees, destroying everything in its path. A smile lingered on Ivalti’s face, and Althyof treated him to a grudging nod.
They continued circling around and around each other, eyes fixed on their opponent, songs combining into an earsplitting bruit. Pratyi made a disgusted noise and clapped his hands over his ears.
The differences between the Tverkar art and the Svartalfar variant enthralled me. They seemed to work on the same principles, runana stayba, kaltrar, and dance; though the Svartalf seemed to detest rhythm and lissome, flowing grace—which seemed to fit everything else I knew about them. At times, thinking about the Svartalfar, Tverkar, and Alfar as genetic cousins made my mind reel. They were all so different from one another.
Ivalti spat his lyrics at Althyof and swung his weapon in a flat arc but checked his swing a third of the way through. The black mist that covered the blade sprang away from him, leaping like a leopard in full attack. The blackness swiped at Althyof.
The Tverkr rolled his eyes, and as if it were no more important than a buzzing fly, slashed at the shadow backhanded with his left-hand dagger. With a pop and a puff of smoke, the shadow fell to the ground. When it hit, it dissolved as mist burning away in the morning sun does.
Althyof’s trowba morphed yet again, and he syncopated his lyrics, leaving small gaps where only the shuffle of dancing feet and the harsh sounds of the Svartalf hung in the air. After a moment, Althyof added new sounds—new syllables, I realized—into those spaces, creating a complex meter between the original lyrics and the new. His whirling increased, adding a hop or a leap here, three quick steps there.
He was building a counter-melody with the new syllables he inserted between beats of the old lyrics. The melody and counter-melody built toward a climax, and Althyof was whirling like a devil, daggers slashing and sweeping red streaks through the darkness.
Ivalti seemed taken aback, and he backed away, weaving a defense with harsh, guttural cries, and jerking, stuttering steps, eyes widening. He backed to the edge of the trees, confining his “dance” into a claustrophobic area of about three yards square.
Althyof, on the other hand, leapt and spun, sliding his feet, taking more and more of the clearing as his own. What had been the counter-melody subsumed the melody, and the rhythm changed, punctuated by a shouted rune.
I’d never witnessed Althyof do anything such as this before, not in all the combat, the enchanting of items, nor in the command of Friner, the massive red dragon he’d bound. The new melody soared, and what was now the counter-melody dropped. I understood what it was to be a master of the runes for the first time.
Althyof swept by me, a smile on his face. He wove his steps back and forth between the rest of us and Ivalti, who was almost cringing against the edge of the woods. The Tverkr spun toward Ivalti, increasing his volume until he was shouting. When he cavorted in front of the Svartalf, he came to a jarring stop, the last syllable echoing through the trees.
Ivalti barked three runes and took a step back in a tangle of limbs, but he’d already backed into a tree and could retreat no further. Althyof lunged forward and plunged his daggers into Ivalti’s chest and neck, pinning him to the tree.
“Who’s broken now?” he spat and jerked the daggers out. Ivalti crumpled to the ground, eyes wide with shock. Charcoal-colored blood poured from his wounds, puddling at his feet.
“Cheat,” Ivalti whispered and fell forward on his face.
Althyof stooped and swept the Svartalf’s black runed cap off his head and wiped his blades clean on it. “Fool,” he spat and dropped the cap on the body.
“What just happened?” I asked.
“He may have been a runeskowld of a kind, but he was too arrogant—or too foolish—to maintain his physical safety.” Althyof looked up at me and shrugged. “He relied on what he assumed was a superior form of rune casting. I relied on guile. Guile won.”
“Are there more coming?” asked Jane, peering into the Forest.
“I don’t think so,” I said. I recounted the dream of flight I’d had on that first night, and how the warriors had laughed at or ignored Ivalti.
“We can’t proceed to the north,” said Frikka.
“Prophecy?” asked Meuhlnir.
Frikka shrugged and jerked her chin in my direction. “Ask him.”
“It was a dream,” I said after a moment’s hesitation. “Though I don’t think it was a troymskrok.”
“A what?” asked Jane.
“A meaningless dream.”
She looked at me as if I had sprouted a second mouth. “And you believe your dreams can tell the future, now?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know if I’d go that far, but something is happening. Anyway, is it so hard to believe after everything else?” I gripped her finger—the one on which she wore the platinum ring—and waggled it back and forth.
“I… No, I guess not.”
Mothi sighed with a deep frown. “We won’t be hiring a boat in Pitra, will we?”
“It seems not,” said Meuhlnir, looking as grim.
“The land route, then,” said Veethar with a broad grin.
“Now, if only you can arrange matters so we make the rest of the journey underground,” said Althyof as he slapped me backhanded across the belly.
With renewed vigor, Veethar led us northeast, and in what seemed like a short time, we emerged from the Great Forest of Suel on a narrow plain sandwiched between the foothills of the Dragon Spine Mountains and the Pitra Empire. Meuhlnir pointed due north. “The bay you flew over in your dream, Hank, lies that way—perhaps another day’s ride.”
“We’re not goi
ng there, are we?” asked Sig. “The place with the bad army?”
“No, Son. Meuhlnir’s giving geography lessons.”
“From here, we continue northeast as far as we can. If we keep the mountains in sight, we will skirt the bay with room to spare.”
“Can we sleep now?” asked Sig.
“Let’s get a little farther away from those spiders,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, stifling a yawn.
We rode for another hour or so before we stopped to set up camp. It was four hours earlier than we would have stopped otherwise, but after the ordeal in the Great Forest of Suel, not even Meuhlnir complained about the wasted daylight.
We lounged, napped, and ate the afternoon away as if we were waiting on permission to go to bed. Even the pups spent most of the afternoon with their chins on their paws.
When the sun finally set, I crawled into the bedroll I shared with Jane and fell asleep.
Forty-two
I stretched my wings, marveling at the feel of the cool, night air lifting me heavenward. Now that we were away from the Great Forest of Suel, the sounds of nocturnal creatures, great and small, going about their business filled the air. I flew with the wind, soaring and diving—frolicking—in the currents of crisp fall air. The ground raced past beneath me, foothills becoming flats, flats becoming marsh, marsh emptying into the bay shaped like a three-leaf clover. The bay containing thousands of dragon ships.
On the beach, most of the host of men, Svartalfar, trolls, and demons had departed, leaving only the drunkest, the sickest, or the soundest sleepers. The instinct to shriek my rumbling cry was strong, but I remembered the black-clad Svartalf who pointed at me—Ivalti—and though I knew he was dead, I didn’t want to risk being seen by another of the twisted runeskowlds of the Svartalfar.
I banked east, peering ahead along the shoreline. The moonlight glinted off mother-of-pearl embedded into the coquina beach—and in the water trapped in thousands upon thousands of footprints embedded in the loose sand.
Blood of the Isir Omnibus Page 79