“Yes,” he said. “No doubt the proo played a role. I believe his trap opened the proo and sucked a piece of one of the wild stathur into this place. Because the laws of the stathur differ from the physical laws of this place, the nugget of foreign stathur obliterated itself, the cabin, and everything within reach when the proo snapped closed. The shock wave killed the other karls and knocked us about.”
“How sure are you?”
“I’m guessing, of course. There’s no way to be sure.”
I grimaced and shook my head. “Is there another explanation?”
“None I can think of, but that means very little, Hank.”
Frustration bubbled in my guts. “So how do we choose between the two proo?”
Althyof glanced at the proo nearby. “I, for one, am not going through this proo. Not for all the silver in Osgarthr.”
We walked back to the stream. Jane saw to the injuries, which were mild compared to what we saw on the other side of the river. Yowtgayrr had his blades sheathed and helped the karls to their feet. Keri and Fretyi cavorted in the grass as if nothing had happened. I watched them for a moment, thinking of how they had acted when we’d first approached the cabin.
“He had someone’s scent,” I murmured.
“What was that?” asked Althyof.
Fretyi had been intent on what was inside the cabin, but Keri… Keri had run around the side of the cabin, nose to the ground. Keri had followed the scent trail of someone walking around the cabin. But was it Luka’s scent?
“When we first arrived, Fretyi sniffed the air from inside the cabin, but Keri ran around the side of the cabin with his nose to the ground.”
“Following a scent?”
I nodded. “I think so.”
“Perhaps he can help us choose.”
I walked through the water, not even noticing the chill. I scooped up Keri, feeling a twinge in my lower back as I straightened. They were growing faster than I could keep up with, and I kept underestimating their weight and size. Keri was marginally smaller than Fretyi, but he was already eighteen inches at the shoulder and must have weighed forty pounds. Keri lolled in my arms, looking back at his brother, and switched into full play mode and tried to eat my arm. “Come on, wolflet,” I said. “I’ve got work for you to do.”
At the sound of my voice, Keri broke off trying to rip my arm off and stared up at me, his gaze intent, as if he could almost understand me. He cocked his head to the side and yipped.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, turning and walking toward the spot where the cabin’s front door had stood. “Remember when you followed a scent? Remember that?”
Keri lay in my arms, belly toward the sky, paws folded across his tummy, head cocked to the side.
“You are too cute, you know that?” I asked and scratched his belly. “I thought varkr were fierce.”
He barked in my face.
I set him down on the ground, and he sat, looking up at me and wagging his tail. “Yes, very fierce, and I asked for it.” I pointed at the ground and tapped his nose. “Can you find that scent again?”
He cocked his head to the side, one ear flopping across the top of his head. He lifted a paw and clawed at the air.
“Find that scent, Keri,” I crooned.
He tilted his head the other direction, complete with more ear flopping, and looked at the ground between his front paws. He glanced up at me.
“Yes, find the scent on the ground, goober.”
He stood and put his nose to the ground. He sniffed in a circle, lifting his head once to bark at the proo and watch it for a moment as if it might move at any second. With the proo chastised, he went back to sniffing the ground, walking in widening circles. After a minute or so, he yipped with excitement and looked up at me, wagging his tail.
“Got it? Follow it.”
He wagged his tail, then put his nose back to the ground and raced around the cabin’s empty footprint, avoiding the bodies of the dead karls, and beelined to the cliff, right at the edge of the waterfall. He looked at me and barked, as if to say, “Hurry up, slowpoke.”
“It’s as though he understands you,” said Jane as I passed her.
“Maybe he does,” I said with a laugh. “An old dog to a young pup.”
“He’s beginning to,” said Yowtgayrr at the same time. “As he gets older, his understanding will grow.”
I stopped, surprised, and looked at the Alf, scanning his face for signs he was pulling our legs. He returned my gaze, the picture of placid calm.
“You’re kidding, right?” asked Jane.
“No. In time, Hank may grow to understand him…as with the bears.”
Krowkr’s eyes were about as big as I’d ever seen human eyes get.
“Next nickname will have something to do with bears, I’d bet my life-savings on it,” I muttered.
“Yeah?” asked Jane with a twinkle in her eye. “Pooh-bear? Teddy-bear?”
“Prooni,” murmured Krowkr.
I glowered at him, but he’d already turned away. It meant ‘brown bear.’
“Don’t give them any ideas.” Keri barked his “quit your yapping and get over here” bark. “It’s clear that Luka walked from the cabin to that grotto.”
“Or someone did,” said Althyof.
“He’s the only one I saw here.”
“And the frost giant?”
“Couldn’t have fit inside the cabin, let alone fit through the door.”
“The problems of the unnecessarily tall,” said Althyof. “My people solved these problems long ago.”
I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not. I rested my hand on the scroll case. With a glance at the karls, I motioned the others closer. “When we arrived, I suggested sending my animus across the proo to communicate with Meuhlnir and Veethar. You all convinced me it was too risky, and I agreed with you.”
“I don’t like where this is going,” said Jane.
“Indeed,” said Althyof. “Our arguments have not lessened in strength.”
“Here’s the thing,” I said, holding up my hand for quiet. “We are now faced with a choice: use everything at our disposal or proceed on a guess.” Jane opened her mouth to argue, but I shook my head. “No matter how well informed the guess is, it’s still a guess. Isn’t leaving a false trail to a deadly proo right up Luka’s alley?” Her mouth closed with a snap. “Thanks to this scroll, I can have a tripartite consciousness. I have used this ability in battle, and we’ve relied on it to inform our decisions. I don’t see a way around using it now, except to go ahead on the guess that the trail is real—something that seems infinitely more dangerous for all of you.”
“And to you?” Jane demanded.
I shrugged. “We don’t know it’s dangerous for me to jump through a proo as a raven. We are—”
“But you want to proceed on a guess in that case,” she said. “Why not in the choice of preer?”
I shook my head and held up my hands, palms up. “I have a feeling I can do this.”
“A feeling?” Jane threw up her hands and looked at Althyof. “Will you beat some sense into my husband?”
Althyof’s gaze bounced back and forth between us. “I’m…uh, that is…”
“There’s something else pertinent to this discussion. I’m low on ammunition.”
“Low?” asked Yowtgayrr. “Specifics?”
“Three magazines. Twenty-one shots from Kunknir, thirty from Krati.”
“And this is too few?” asked Althyof.
I nodded. “Yes, it is. If I only shoot when I have a good target—no distracting shots, no warnings—I could stretch it to three small skirmishes that end quickly. Anything more than that…”
Althyof’s eyes narrowed. “Did I not say this would happen? Did I not tell you to push that damn scroll from your thoughts?”
I blinked at his vehemence. “I’m not saying I have to use the scroll. But I can’t use my guns exclusively, and we learned back in Osgarthr that the bear-form has limits we can’t get aro
und. I’m just saying I have to do something to augment my abilities with the pistols. I can’t stand by while everyone else engages.”
The Tverkr’s face soured. “And what might that be?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps I can augment what you do. You could teach me the red dancy thing your daggers do.”
“‘Dancy thing?’” His face scrunched up and turned red.
“Yeah. The stretching and shrinking, and the way you send the power blazing away from them—what we did against the spiders in the Great Forest of Suel before Ivalti arrived. I don’t think there’s enough time for me to learn a melee skill to the point I could stand against Luka.”
Yowtgayrr pursed his lips and shook his head. “No.”
“There seem to be four choices to remedy my lack of ammunition—and these are in addition to the decision we must make about sending a raven through the preer. One, I can try to use the strenkir af krafti alone—use saytr I mean. Two, I can try my hand supporting Althyof as a novice runeskowld. Three, I can travel back to Osgarthr and have Haymtatlr either open a proo to Nitavetlir and hope Prokkr has finished ammunition for me, or open one to Mithgarthr to visit a gun shop. Four, I can read the rest of the scroll. I can tell Althyof what the kaltrar are, and he can advise me on whether or not they will kill me.”
Jane shook her head. “A little risky, risky, riskier, riskiest.”
“Hon, I don’t know what else to do.” I bunched my shoulders and winced at the twinge of searing pain that accompanied the movement.
“How about standing back? How about staying out of fights?”
“And we’ve been married how long? You know I can’t do that.” My hands fidgeted with the belt Prokkr had made me, twiddling with the flaps over the ammo pouches, drifting across the butts of my pistols, fiddling with the ingenious clamps that held the magazines ready.
“You could if I knocked you out.” She said it in a stern voice but couldn’t keep her lips from twitching with a smile.
“You know my head is way too hard for that.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” she said and gave up trying to keep a straight face.
“Let me see if I understand the choices you are giving us,” said Althyof. “Either you do something foolhardy, or I do something foolhardy, or you do something else foolhardy, or we abandon the pursuit of Luka.”
I frowned and looked down. “The way you say it makes it sound bad.” I peeked at him from the corner of my eye and saw the grin he suppressed. “I think the scroll is the best of those options. I promise not to try anything without talking to you first.”
“No. You will promise not to try any of them unless I give you tacit approval of the kaltrar you wish to try.”
“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”
“Say what you mean, Hank Jensen,” he said with a flinty expression. “Also, we will advance your training to cover more useful lausaveesa and triblinkr, and perhaps even a trowba or two, but—” He held up a warning finger. “—I will limit you to the kaltrar I choose for you, and you will perform them by rote. Do you hear, Aylootr? No improvisation.”
“You are buying into this nonsense?” Jane asked him, but he neither looked at her nor responded.
“I promise not to attempt any of the kaltrar in the scroll without your prior approval,” I said. “I promise to learn the kaltrar you teach me and perform them only by rote—no improvising, no experimentation.”
The Tverkr runeskowld grunted and nodded once. “Break either promise and our relationship as master and apprentice is over.”
“I understood that before I made the promise,” I said.
Jane stepped in front of me, blocking my eye contact with Althyof. “You made a promise to me eighteen years ago, Hank.” She held up her hand with the ring Althyof made glinting from her finger. “And we renewed those promises last year to my way of thinking. We’re either partners in this or all this is worthless.”
“We’ve always been partners, Jane. If you don’t want me to use this stuff, I won’t. I’ll figure out something else.” I rapped my knuckles against her shiny shield. “You could loan me this.”
She blushed, knowing full well what I meant by that. She’d stay out of a battle I was in about as much as I would sit out the next one we faced. “That’s different.”
“Is it?” I asked.
“It is,” she said firmly. “This shield can’t kill me.”
“Maybe not, but any battle you use it in could end badly.”
She shook her head. “These ‘choices’ you are talking about—”
“Jane,” I breathed. “I’m doing the best I can here.”
She closed her eyes and gave a soft shake of her head.
“I’ll tell you what, you decide what I do next.”
Eyes still squeezed shut, she sighed. “Oh sure, play the reasonable card.”
I gave her a one-armed hug and stepped away. I glanced at Althyof. “Should I read first or try to send my animus across one of these preer first?”
“The scroll,” he said. “Perhaps you will find something that makes risking yourself by traveling the preer irrelevant.”
I glanced at Jane and smiled. “Okay with you?”
“I so want to punch you right now,” she said, shaking her fist under my nose. But she smiled as she did, and that made the world a better place.
“Come here, Keri!” I shouted, and the varkr pup bounded toward us and, at the last second, pounced on Fretyi, and they dissolved into a rolling, yipping dust cloud. I sat on the bank and pulled my puntidn stavsetninkarpowk—the idiomatic grimoire I’d found in Kuthbyuhrn and Kyellroona’s room full of loot—out of its case.
Excitement bubbled in my veins, and nervousness roiled in the pit of my stomach. This would make the fourth time I’d read the scroll, but the first time had only bound the grimoire to me—and I didn’t even remember the kaltrar that had done the work. The other two times had occurred on the same day, the day of the battle at the Herperty af Roostum—the Rooms of Ruin. Both readings on that fateful day had given me powers I’d never imagined possible. I was more than a little scared, but, for the most part, I burned with curiosity.
Jane knelt next to me and put her hand on my shoulder. “Try not to die,” she said. “At least don’t die more than you can handle.” She smiled as she said both sentences, but I knew her more than well enough to hear the fear and worry in her voice.
“Will do. Have I mentioned that you are an insane person?”
“Only in passing, and I took it as a compliment coming from you.” She smiled and kissed my cheek.
Althyof cleared his throat. “Stand away, Jane. I’ll create a barrier that will mitigate runaway kaltrar.”
“What?” She scowled at the Tverkr. “You said—”
He smiled. “Only kidding. This is…well, not safe, but at least not stupid.”
“Thanks,” she said. “That’s reassuring.”
“You really suck at this, Althyof,” I said.
“At what?”
“Reassuring people.”
“Is that what I’m doing?”
I gazed up at him for a moment and rolled my eye. “That’s your answer to everything.”
“Is it?”
“Yes,” said Jane. “And you’ve taught the habit to the lunkhead here.”
“Has he?” I asked.
“Are you sure I couldn’t knock you out with my pretty shield? Just once?”
I grinned, trying not to let my impatience show on my face. The scroll felt like a brick in my hand rather than paper. Jane stood and walked a few paces away.
“Remember what I said,” she whispered.
I bent over the scroll and opened it. The other times I’d read from it, I hadn’t had time to savor the experience. I’ve always loved books—the smell of the binding, the feel of the paper beneath my fingertips—though my Personal Monster™ had stuck me with ebooks for the past several years. Peeling away layers of the scroll was similar to cracking open
a cherished book—it smelled like an old book, and the feel of the paper on which it was written sent little jolts of excitement through my fingertips and into my brain.
When I’d opened it far enough to expose the pages of the kaltrar I’d already read, I bent my head and closed my eye for a moment, just breathing, drawing my concentration and blocking out the sounds of the puppies playing, the karls chatting and moving around, even the wind.
When I opened my eye, the writing on the page wriggled and crawled for a heartbeat before the squiggles resolved into runes I could read and understand. My gaze raced over the kaltrar, an intellectual lust rushing to the fore of my mind. The runes ran by faster and faster as I read and understood the intent of the first kaltrar easily—to manipulate molecules in a wide area. If only I understood how to use something like that.
I went to the next kaltrar without pause and raced through it. My stomach turned as I understood the triblinkr reanimated corpses, either to speak or to rise by changing a single word in the chant. Memories of the truykar from the Darks of Kruyn shambled through my mind.
As I came to the end of that kaltrar, I felt strange—as if parts of my mind were being changed by the act of reading the scroll. The triblinkr I learned while in the Herperty af Roostum had changed me in fundamental ways—I knew that much, and I was okay with those changes, but these new kaltrar seemed to be of a different sort all together. I thought about stopping, about rerolling the scroll, putting it in its case and shoving it to the bottom of my pack.
Instead, I kept right on reading, page after page, kaltrar after kaltrar, reading voraciously. My mind seemed to swell, to expand to contain all the new ideas, the new knowledge of how things really worked… I raced to the end of the scroll and let it slide from my fingers into my lap. I sighed, feeling anesthetized, enervated.
“Well, you’re still alive,” said Jane. “That’s a plus.”
I summoned the energy to nod, staring into the distance, eyes unfocused, brain filled with white noise. The kaltrar I’d read felt like a tumor, like a mass of pick-up sticks wedged into my head, and I needed time to unwind them, to sort them out.
“Well?” asked Althyof. “What have you learned?”
I held up my hand. “It’s too much. What I read in the beginning—the first two or three kaltrar—they are still clear, but the rest…it’s a rat’s nest of ideas, runes, and…and…”
Blood of the Isir Omnibus Page 103