She made a face and stomped a tiny blue foot.
Too late for the proo trick… A kaltrar? I racked my mind for something appropriate, but all that came to mind was the triblinkr that would release me from this form.
A triblinkr! I thought. I could bind her! The only problem was that I only knew a few basic triblinkr and the ones I’d read in the grimoire—well, the ones I recalled from that reading anyway—
A familiar, yet unrecognizable, voice entered my thoughts, reciting words with a harsh insistence, and along with the sound, the vision of golden runes flashed through my mind. I listened a moment and smiled.
The little blue woman stepped back, fear showing in her face. She held her hands up as if to ward me off.
I chanted the triblinkr aloud, unable to keep the smile from my face. It’s perfect!
She stumbled back as the effect of the triblinkr took hold. Her eyes widened and took on a wild cast. Her head darted this way and that as if to listen to sounds only she could hear. Her eyes snapped back to mine, and the smile on my face melted away as I realized what the full force of the triblinkr did.
Her eyes shone with anguish and insanity.
She turned and ran off through the woods, cackling or crying to herself in fits and starts.
I wanted to take it back, to remove the curse of insanity laid on the woman by my triblinkr, but if I did that, she would report my position to the others or turn on me with violence. Either way, my hard-won concealment would end, and if that happened…all would be lost.
I turned and ran the other way. Once I was deep enough into the woods, I chanted the triblinkr that would reverse my Plowir Medn disguise, not able to stand wearing that blue skin anymore. It felt…greasy, wrong.
As the prayteenk wound down, an emotionless exhaustion overcame me. I wanted to sit down, to lie down, to take a nap. As insidious as depression, a delicate debility drove me to my knees. Gasping like a beached fish, failing to fight the feeble feeling.
I kept moving, walking on my knees until the strange lethargy drove me to drop my hands to the forest’s loam and continue on all fours. Lifting my hands to move them forward felt more and more like lifting large blocks of stone, and I gave up on raising my knees altogether—sliding them through the loose top soil like an infant learning to crawl. My head lolled, hanging down between my arms. The asthenia reminded me of the time we spent riding through the Great Forest of Suel while Ivalti tried to sing us all to sleep.
Anger ripped through me, and I lifted a hand smeared with dark dirt and slapped myself. The sharp, stinging slap had almost no impact on my sluggish thought processes.
Jane had been trapped with me back there in Suel’s malignant forest. Maybe she would get away unscathed this time.
I crawled with my eye closed, my mind drifted like silt in a slow-moving river, and I snapped my eye open. I was lying on my back, staring up at the trees, with no memory of stopping to rest or of turning over on my back like an up-ended turtle. All the colors had drained from the world. The parts of the sky I could see through the canopy of the trees darkened as if night were falling. I considered pushing myself up to my feet, or at least rolling over and hiding my face from whatever was coming, but all that seemed like too much effort, and I closed my eye again, instead.
Moments later, I lost consciousness.
Fifty-one
I soared high above the carpet of ash boughs that stretched as far as I could see in every direction. I let loose a mighty crrruck. No sound came back—not even my own voice echoed through the thick, cold air. The whole world lay still as if I flew through a massive Polaroid picture, rather than an actual place.
I turned this way and that without conscious thought, enjoying the cold wind that ruffled through my feathers. The wind seemed inexhaustible, and it required almost no effort on my part to keep myself aloft.
I flew and flew, gazing down at the verdant scenery, the unbroken carpet of lush greenery. Occasionally, I looked around for a white speck, a white-feathered companion. Where are you, Kuhntul?
I flew and flew, scouring the world for any other living thing, for any sign of life, other than the incessant ash trees.
After an interminable time of flying toward a horizon devoid of detail, a bump lunged toward the sky. I turned toward the lump, assuming it must be a mountain.
It wasn’t a mountain though. It was a tree. A huge tree that towered above the forest below it.
Wait a minute… I thought. That’s…that’s… Iktrasitl!
The cold, calm air disappeared, replaced by hot, violent updrafts that carried a vile black smoke heavenward. Midnight-violet clouds rolled in from the horizons, traveling at speeds no natural cloud could attain, slamming over my head like the door to a prison cell.
A hot wind blew in my face, and no matter how fast or how hard I beat my wings, my forward progress diminished until maintaining altitude grew difficult. Gone was the verdant carpet of tree boughs—a sea of smoldering tree trunks, acrid smoke, and desolation had replaced them.
Something below me hissed, and the sound poured dread into my soul. The sound came at such volume it seemed to issue from the planet itself, but my fearful glance showed me a pair of blistering, acrimonious orange-red eyes.
I struggled on toward the World Tree, toward the heart of the Conflux, trying to not think of how big the thing below me must be to have eyes the size of Volkswagen Beetles. The monstrosity below me hissed again, and I felt the vibration of the sound in the bones that supported my wings.
I was afraid to look at the thing again, and yet my eyes seemed drawn to it. Details emerged as it moved—shadowy viridian scales wrapped a big tubular body bereft of arms, legs, or wings. The dragon opened its hinged jaw revealing a mouth full of sharp, blade-like teeth and ebony velvet skin. It hissed, and its long tongue snaked forth and licked the air.
I forced my gaze away, back toward the massive tree I was fighting to reach. Open flames licked the land below me like a lover’s caress. Smoke and soot swirled in the updrafts, and with a crash of lightning, it began to rain.
The water rolled off my feathered back, leaving an oily, stinky residue. As the rain continued to fall, I grew heavy with the oily gunk, and my flight became erratic, labored. My breast hurt with the effort of flapping my wings, of fighting the weight and wind, but the dragon kept pace below me, hissing and hissing.
Iktrasitl loomed closer, clothed in darkness. Tindur! Tindur will help me fight this thing below me. Tindur and Ratatoskr! Even as I thought it, I knew it for false hope. There was no fighting the lidnormr that followed my flight from below. I struggled to maintain altitude, struggled to stay aloft, and fought my way toward the great ash tree.
I’d almost reached it when something fell on me from above, wrenching my wings toward the sky, burying hot talons into the muscles of my back. I screamed as we plummeted toward the gaping maw of the dragon below.
Fifty-two
When consciousness returned, I discovered someone had trussed me up as if I were a turkey about to go in the oven. My cloak lay on the ground beside me as did my hat and gun belt. My shoulders burned with agony, and my joints shrieked with the pain of my forced position and my dark, ever-present curse.
“The small one wakes,” said Owraythu in a cold voice.
“Good. This one has business with him. He owes this one something.” I tried not to look, but it was as if my eye had a mind of its own and my gaze snaked up from the ground and traversed Mirkur’s glossy black form to where his eyes should have been. Owraythu stepped to his side and whispered something.
I tore my eye away from them and scanned the surroundings. We were back in the glade, and the surrounding forest simmered with small fires. Jane lay on the ground a few paces away, looking pale and drawn, with no sign of the cadmium red healing aura, but also no overt signs of traumatic injuries. They had dumped Sig in a heap beside her, unconscious but appearing unhurt. Krowkr lay a distance away, like a toy cast aside.
My gaze drift
ed around the glade, picking out the unconscious forms of my companions, all unconscious, most injured. All except the Alfar, the puppies, Hel, and Luka.
Oh, and Kuhntul was still missing.
Plowir Medn stood in a vast ring around us, placid and arcadian, some smiling, some looking bored. At least their hideous chanting had stopped.
I flopped around until I could roll into a sitting position, forced to lean forward awkwardly due to the tight bindings that held my hands behind my back. “Look,” I said, addressing the ground between my knees, “This is unnecessary. We—”
“Cease,” snapped Owraythu.
“Halt discourse,” said Mirkur.
“Yield,” said Owraythu.
I repressed a shout of frustration and sighed instead. Twisting my wrists, I tested the bindings that held me—they were tight, and only got tighter as I moved.
The two Plauinn continued to whisper, glancing at me once in a while.
“What is it you want? What do you really want?” I asked, irritation edging my voice with a harsh overtone.
“Where is she?” asked Owraythu.
“Who?”
She scoffed and stomped her foot. “You know the one I seek!”
“Well, I’ve been dreaming about a big ugly snake, so I can’t tell you anything.” I glanced at Mirkur. “That was a dirty trick, by the way. Not very sporting…knocking us all out the way you did.”
A small smile wrinkled his shiny black face.
“I wonder if—”
An ear-splitting scream cut me off. It came from the trees outside the circle of Plowir Medn, and as one, they turned their tiny blue faces to the forest. Something crashed in the shadows, and the ones closest to the sound took up defensive postures.
Hel? Luka? I wondered.
Then she stepped out of the forest, naked and covered in bruises and abrasions. Her blue skin looked dull and dusky. Her eyes spun and danced like things gone wild, and when she saw the Plauinn, she screeched like a cat in heat and raised her clawed hands.
It was the Plowir Medn woman I’d driven insane back in the forest. My guts grew heavy, and my heart sank to see what the triblinkr had wrought in her. Beyond reason, beyond rational discourse, she charged at Owraythu, hands raised, teeth bared.
I couldn’t stand it. Enemy or not, I’d done this to her. I had to set things right. I murmured the beginning of the triblinkr I’d used to drive her insane, lifting the curse.
Mirkur’s head snapped toward me at the first syllable. He lifted his hand and pointed at me. “Cease!” he commanded.
I shook my head and continued mumbling the words.
“Then suffer,” he sneered. He made a jerking hand motion and pain erupted from my guts as though he’d driven a massive fish hook through my abdomen and jerked.
I screamed, but continued the triblinkr through the pain, through the screaming. At the end of it, I only screamed.
The insane blue woman stopped her charge and stood up straight, glancing around in confusion. Owraythu glared at her, menace vibrating the air between them. She said something in the spidery language of the Plowir Medn, and the blue woman had time to shriek before she imploded to a dot the size of a penny before disappearing completely.
Agony ripped through me like a forest fire, and I rolled to my back, ignoring the burning, screaming pain in my arms and shoulders. What I saw was almost enough to distract me from the pain.
A white streak descended from the top of Iktrasitl. It was like watching a bolt of lightning arc to the ground in slow motion. Neither the Plauinn nor the Plowir Medn noticed.
Not until it was too late.
As the streak neared the ground, I made out the details: white wings that mirrored the raven-colored wings Jane called up at will, streaming white hair and white clothing, and a golden-white sword that seemed to hold the light of a sun at its tip.
Kuhntul.
She dropped behind Owraythu, her feet making almost no sound as she landed. She swung the sword tipped with brilliance as a golfer might, and the blade dug a furrow through the earth.
No, through Owraythu’s slowth. As the leading edge of the blinding blade sliced into the massive slowth, Owraythu screamed at eardrum-piercing volume, and it was unlike any scream I’d ever heard. As the terrible edge continued on its path, Owraythu froze in mid-motion, her mouth open, her tongue arched with the force of her scream. The blade arced on its inexorable course, and Owraythu began to disintegrate, starting from the smallest parts of her human form—finger tips, toes, tip of the nose, and ear lobes.
Mirkur cried out and took a step toward Kuhntul, but the Plowir Medn uttered three harsh syllables while staring at Owraythu with horror-struck expressions, and with the horrible popping noise, they all disappeared, Mirkur included.
The sword continued its cut and Owraythu continued to fade from existence.
When it was all over, Kuhntul stood alone, staring at me with eyes that glistened with tears. “It is done,” she whispered.
“Is she… Can she come back?” I asked.
Kuhntul shook her head and glanced down at the brilliant sword she held. The blade glowed with sunlight, and with something more, with a power that shimmered along its surface like molten gold. The hilt was wrought from platinum and gold and looked familiar, though I couldn’t place it. “She will never come back,” the Tisir whispered. “Even now, her matterstream manifestation is de-coalescing, losing cohesion.”
“You… That cut… You mean you’ve killed her?”
Kuhntul’s gaze swam back to my own, and there was pain in her eyes. She swallowed and closed her eyes. “Yes.”
“I…I didn’t know a slowth could be severed in that manner,” I murmured.
“It can’t—not by normal means.” Kuhntul glanced down at the somehow-familiar sword again. She shook it, as if to shake off the blood, then slammed it into a sheath at her waist I’d never noticed before, but which looked as if it shouldn’t—couldn’t—be anywhere else.
I swallowed and rolled to my knees. “What about…” I jerked my hands, causing shooting pains to tear through my shoulders. “Could you?” I asked.
She came to my side and cut the ropes holding me, but she used a dagger instead of the beautiful sword.
“Thank you.” I glanced at where Mirkur had been. “What about him?”
She shook her head. “With beings as powerful as Plauinn, I must strike when they are unaware. I had to choose…” She shook her head as though to fling away the memory of what she’d done. “I chose Owraythu for…personal reasons.”
“Personal reasons?”
She stared at me but said nothing for the space of ten breaths. She glanced away and said, “I could not kill them both. Mirkur lives, but as with most beings in the underverse, he can’t come here at will—to travel as a dreamslice reflection. The Plowir Medn are his only avenue to this place, and they won’t risk him—”
“Wait, they couldn’t come here on their own? How did—”
“The Plowir Medn brought them. And they took their ‘Dark Lord’ away from danger. They don’t know that I must strike from stealth to kill a Plauinn this way.”
“Won’t he tell them?”
Kuhntul shook her head. “They are very stubborn, the Plowir Medn. Set in their beliefs, and as long as they believe he is in mortal danger, they will not bring him back. Besides, to them, Mirkur is a god, and he won’t want to lessen their belief in his omnipotence. He’ll spin a tale that I merely caused Owraythu to return to the underverse or some such lie.”
“So, it’s finished? We’re safe?” The way she looked at me made me feel as though I was about four years old. And stupid, at that. “Of course not,” I sighed. “How do we fight him?”
Kuhntul dropped her head, shielding her face with her long white locks.
Hel and Luka stepped from the forest, hand in hand. They’d both reverted to the bodies they’d been born in, and neither of them bore any wounds—of course not, they’d already healed with the m
assive regenerative powers of the oolfa.
I heard puppies yipping, and two varkr pups appeared mid-leap, tails up and wagging as they sprinted over to lick my face. After a heartbeat of that, they turned and went to minister to Jane and Sig.
Yowtgayrr and Skowvithr became visible on the other side of the glade, but instead of smiles, each Alf’s face was a study of concern, wariness. Their eyes were on Hel as she strode toward us, swishing her hips and smiling.
“Thank you, Tisir, for ridding the universe of that bitch,” she said.
I shook my head. The humility, the friendliness, the gratitude, that Hel had shown as we fled from Owraythu seemed forgotten, and the sneering tones and expressions of the Dark Queen were back in place. Luka stood on her right side and a step behind her.
The others stirred, each waking from whatever nightmare Mirkur had sown within them. Veethar sat up and glanced at the forest. A long sigh escaped his lips, and he shook his head at the destruction Owraythu and Mirkur had wrought. He turned my way. “I dreamed about your lidnormr, Hank.”
“You, too?”
Hel’s sneer transformed into a nasty grin, and I didn’t like it. Not at all.
“Hank,” she said. “Do you remember what we discussed up on Iktrasitl’s branch?”
I grimaced but nodded. “Yeah. We discussed healing Osgarthr.” I shrugged. “Sort of.”
“You asked who will lead the Isir, and I said we would decide it as such things have always has been decided.”
I scoffed and looked down at the ground beneath me.
“You asked me if there hadn’t been enough war among the Isir.”
“Yes, and there has!” I snapped. “Somehow, I don’t think you see it that way.”
Behind Hel, Luka growled and glowered at me, but Hel chuckled. “It’s okay, my Champion. Some men cannot be broken of their bad habits. You must make allowances…for those who may join you.”
“Never! I will never join the Briethralak Oolfur!”
Hel shrugged. “It’s not a requirement, mind you. But, I do agree with you. There has been enough war.”
Blood of the Isir Omnibus Page 138