“All I want is the little girl,” Kyrioc tried to keep his voice steady, but the fury was draining away. Nausea flooded him and his hands felt shaky. “Tell me where they’ve moved those kids. Tell me where you’re sleeping now.”
The boy stood as tall as he could on the very edge of the cart bench. “I will never tell you anything.”
“Then pass this message on to your boss. Whatever she’s building, I can burn it down.”
He released the boy’s wrist, and the child sprang out of the moving cart. “Fuck you!” the boy screamed at the top of his lungs. “Fuck you!” Then he ran for his little knife.
Colors danced in Kyrioc’s vision. Maybe his wound wasn’t so minor after all. The woman snapped her reins to speed the cart along. “Son, you sound like you’re in some deep shit.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The year 395 of the New Calendar, eight years earlier.
* * *
The sun was setting in the west behind them, but the column of pale light blasting toward the clouds cast new, eerie shadows in the jungle foliage.
The glitterkind were still crying out their chorus of misery and distress. Though they spoke no words, Kyrionik thought they were sounding an alarm. He could feel their panic.
“I’m sorry,” he called to no one in particular. He wished he could undo the last six months. Sail to Harka as he’d promised, fight raiders from horseback, oversee the construction of a tower, and secure the peninsula.
But nothing could be taken back. Real mistakes could never be undone.
Aratill rushed toward him. “Your virtue! We—”
Kyrionik leaped up the stairs. Aratill was strong and steadfast, but he was not as quick as an athletic teenager determined to see the danger he had made.
Racing up the slope, Kyrionik grasped at tree roots and half-buried broken stones. Aratill had trained him to never use his weapon as a walking stick, but he did so now, jamming the butt of his spear into the dirt to propel himself upward.
He came to a bulge in the slope and saw Shulipik tuto-Beskeroth once again standing at the top of the stair, once again staring at something ahead. But this time, his ghostkind glaive was in his right hand, and his helm in the other. The force of the great gleaming torrent of light erupting from the ground made his braided hair fly out behind him.
Kyrionik came up beside him, breathing hard. The depression where the glitterkind lay was awash in a terrible white light. The column played on the glitterkind skin in a way that Kyrionik had never seen before, like brightly burning stars of every color. Rainbow beams shone onto the greenery around them.
It was beautiful.
Catching his breath, Kyrionik asked, “Your virtue, what happened?”
Shulipik turned toward him with an expression the younger man could not read. He seemed at once mournful, ecstatic, and transfixed, as though they were watching the end of a tragic play. He almost looked drunk with emotion. “Selso Rii happened, your virtue.” Shulipik glanced behind him. Kyrionik saw the man’s headless corpse in the green. “I lost track of him, and he secretly cut a portion of glitterkind flesh for his own pack. Look.”
He pointed to one of the creatures. Its left hand had been severed below the elbow.
“Too greedy,” Kyrionik said. This was why glitterkind magic was dangerous. Greed urged them to cut too deep, and…
And what? Would this column of light sound a warning? Summon help? Kyrionik wished he’d found someone to explain the real danger to him.
“There it is.” Shulipik put on his helm and buckled it. He peered into the center of the geyser of light and readied his glaive. “An ullroct.”
Aratill caught up to them. His helm was off and his bald head was bright red and streaked with sweat. Kyrionik felt a twinge of guilt at the effort he’d put the older man through. Aratill glanced at the geyser, then grabbed Kyrionik’s arm. “Your virtue, you must come away!”
A shadow formed inside the column of light. It stood ten feet tall and was barely a stick figure silhouette in the burning brightness.
Ullrocts didn’t prey on glitterkind. They were their guardians.
“Your virtue!” Aratill roared. “Come away or I will carry you!”
Shulipik spun and moved his face inches from Kyrionik’s. His eyes were wild and his smile terrifying. “Yes, little noble! Run away! Right now!”
Kyrionik bounded down the stairs, sudden fear driving him from both creature and warrior. Aratill fell in behind him, but could not keep up. Once there was some space between himself and his bodyguard, Kyrionik looked back.
Shulipik moved off the stairs into the trees by the side of the slope. Whatever was forming in that terrible white light, that renowned warrior hid from it.
Kyrionik did not have to be told to run. Aratill, his teacher, mentor, and bodyguard, caught up. If the ullroct pursued them—the word if felt like a kick in the guts; of course it would—it would reach the older man first. Kyrionik could not bear that. He did not want to hear him die.
Four soldiers came up the stairs toward them, and Kyrionik met them just above the ruined mill. The nearest one hoisted her spear. Kyrionik had seen her standing guard in the family compound many times. He didn’t know her name. “Oblifell sent us to aid you.”
Before Kyrionik could respond, Aratill caught up to them. “That thing up there.” He pointed up the slope. “Destroy it.”
The ullroct had come.
It looked gigantic, perhaps because it was so far above them. It was the color of rusted black iron, and its limbs were as slender as broomsticks. Its feet looked like bends in metal bars, and its hands were wire spiders. One of those spiders held a short length of iron, like a truncheon. Its torso was the shape of an oversized funeral urn—round and narrow at the bottom, round and wide at the top—but its head was as broad and flat as a gravestone. The daylight was still bright but no eyes or mouth could be seen there, yet its footing was confident as it descended the broken stair.
Its every footstep made the ground smoke, and every branch or bush it brushed against began to smolder. Its entire body was enveloped in tiny tongues of flame that were barely visible in the light.
A creature of iron and flame.
Aratill seized the nearest guard. “You swore an oath to protect this boy. Now do your duty and destroy that.”
The soldier looked Kyrionik in the eyes as if to measure what her sacrifice was worth. Then she charged up the stair, shield high and spear point ready.
A loud scream echoed from high above them, cutting through the droning cry of distress from the glitterkind. Kyrionik glanced up and saw Shulipik tuto-Beskeroth leaping from the stairs at the back of the creature. He hadn’t run away. He’d waited until it was below him so he could flank it.
Shulipik brought his ghostkind glaive down onto the ullroct’s shoulder with his entire body weight behind the blow.
It ricocheted off.
Shulipik fell against the ullroct’s lower back. It toppled, sprawling onto the hillside, spraying dirt and smoke. The soldiers arrived and stabbed it with their spears, but the points glanced off. Shulipik regained his feet and hacked at the back of the ullroct’s knee.
A weapon made of ghostkind steel, especially one of the long-handled glaives, could cut through shield and cannon to sever an armored limb, or it could split a steel helm in half.
Again, his weapon bounced off the ullroct’s body.
The ullroct didn’t appear to be moving quickly, until suddenly it did, grasping hold of the nearest soldier. It lifted the man, armor and all, and he ignited like an oil-soaked wick. The creature raised itself onto its knees, then threw the burning soldier over the treetops as easily as Kyrionik would hurl a loaf of bread.
Shulipik’s glaive was notched in two places. Kyrionik had never heard of a ghostkind weapon being notched—had heard it was impossible, in fact. The ullroct stood and raised its other hand. Its truncheon grew longer, becoming like a baton, then a singlestick, then as long as a quarterstaff.
“Y
our virtue, you must flee. They’ve sworn—”
The ullroct pivoted and swung its iron staff. Shulipik moved to parry, but he was too slow. The ullroct’s weapon sank deep, crumpling Shulipik’s breastplate like paper and smashing his ribcage like an egg shell.
“—to defend you, but you waste their lives if you linger.”
Kyrionik sprinted down the stairs again, goosebumps prickling his back.
The strange alien cries of the glitterkind echoed through the jungle. There could be no breath behind those voices, because they never paused.
The column of light must have been visible for fifty miles, and the wind blowing into his face smelled of smoke, which was all wrong but his thoughts were whirling and he couldn’t understand why.
Shulipik was dead. Everything had gone wrong and it was his fault. He should have kept watch over Selso Rii personally, should have ordered him back to the ship once he’d pointed the way, should never have come here not ever ever ever. His First Labor had failed, and the consequences he would face in Koh-Salash—humiliation, a reputation for recklessness that would make people think him unfit to lead, his mother’s political embarrassment—suddenly seemed petty.
The slope became steep and the stairway switched back. Kyrionik leaped through the bush onto the lower set, his thoughts racing. He would order the soldiers to drop their prize and strip off their armor. Their steel spears and swords were useless against the ullroct’s iron body anyway. He’d call a full retreat down the side of the cliff. The captain could cast her chamber pots into the shallow waters to drive off the hunting jellies, and his guard could swim to the ship.
The smell of smoke came more strongly. The wind was blowing into his face, but the ullroct was behind him. Had someone built a fire?
The stairs ended at the base of a broad tree that had grown between two ruins. Part of the underbrush had been hacked away, and Kyrionik pressed through the cleared path, raising his spear to keep the point from fouling in the underbrush.
In the center of the ruins of Childfall, brush and toppled trees burned in several places. Kyrionik suddenly heard shouting voices and the sound of metal striking metal. More smoke blew into his face.
He understood what he was seeing at the same moment he saw it before him. An ullroct was attacking the troops in Childfall.
Kyrionik glanced back. Smoke was visible through the trees. The first ullroct was still behind him. This must be a second. He vaulted over a fallen tree and saw the scene in full.
This ullroct was even larger than the other, standing nearly fifteen feet tall, but the flames on its body burned lower than the one upslope. Its iron staff was almost twice its height, and it swept the weapon from side to side, as though driving away wolves.
But it wasn’t wolves. It was Kyrionik’s guard. The glitterkind stretcher had been dropped a few dozen feet short of the fully constructed boom. The ullroct stood over the glitterkind the way a human warrior would protect a wounded comrade. It swung its staff once, twice, three times, missing the people but shattering a spear shaft and another time striking a tree trunk hard enough to make burning chunks of bark fly out.
Then suddenly Kyrionik saw them. Here and there, at the very edge of the plateau, lay wounded soldiers. A man with crumpled legs, a woman bleeding from the scalp, another woman whose right arm ended at the elbow. Once he saw the wounded, trembling and thrashing in pain, he saw the armored, unmoving dead, too.
The soldiers who were still standing, about ten in all, were trying to lunge close enough to the glitterkind to cut off a finger or a toe. They were trying to steal magic to save their comrades.
They leaped forward, only to dodge back as the staff swept by them. When the creature turned its weapon to the left, the soldiers on the right advanced. When it turned to the right, soldiers opposite tried to move in. But they couldn’t get close enough to make a cut.
Then, unexpectedly, the ullroct went too far to the left, pursuing one of the soldiers an extra step. On the opposite side, a woman bent low and lunged toward the feet of the prone figure, sword held high.
The ullroct spun with shocking quickness, and its staff extended almost as fast. A feint. It struck the lunging woman on the top of her shoulder.
The blunt end of the staff plunged into her, snapping the leather strap that held her breastplate in place. Her face went slack.
Someone screamed in outrage, and Kyrionik thought it might have been himself. The ullroct swung its staff and, with a sudden flick, flung her body away.
One of the soldiers tried to duck, but he wasn’t quick enough. The corpse hit him hard, carrying him over the edge of the cliff.
Morale broke. The other soldiers threw down their spears and ran. The ullroct pursued, slamming its staff down onto one of the fleeing humans, who died without a sound.
Shame and rage bloomed inside Kyrionik. These men and women were dying because of him. Because of his arrogance. He sprinted toward them with no clear idea of what he should do.
A soldier standing beside the boom shouted, then drew back his spear as if to hurl it at the glitterkind. The throw was another feint, but it was convincing enough that the ullroct stopped its pursuit to crouch protectively in front of the helpless giant.
The fleeing troops turned at the sound of the shout and saw that the spear wielder, having drawn the ullroct off, was facing it alone. He backed toward the edge of the cliff. Kyrionik suddenly realized there was a white plume on his helm.
That was Oblifell.
Its back to Kyrionik and the rest of the soldiers, the ullroct regained its feet. Oblifell edged away, stepping dangerously close to the edge of the cliff, then feinted another throw. The ullroct was ready to swat away any attack. Oblifell backed away two more steps, and the ullroct followed.
Kyrionik sprinted into the clearing, then leaped up onto the glitterkind’s torso. Selsarim Lost, it was still awake—eyes open, mouth gaping.
It did not move. When Kyrionik ran across its chest and planted his boot on its face, it did not try to bite him in half.
Just as the ullroct bent down to grab Oblifell in one of those spidery hands, Kyrionik leaped from the top of the glitterkind forehead.
The creature was too big and too far away to hit its back, but he landed against its legs, the edge of his shield driving in hard to fold its knee.
Up close, Kyrionik could see that the ullroct’s iron body was ridged in spiral patterns as though its limbs been formed by twisting them. What he’d taken for rust was actually patches of bristling hair, and that was where the flames seemed most fierce.
As they fell together, the ullroct’s fire engulfed Kyrionik’s shield, his arm, and the left side of his body. He was surprised that there was no pain, and then suddenly the pain was there, bright and hot and worse than anything he’d ever felt in his life.
The ullroct stumbled forward, close to the edge but not over it. It tried to right itself and the ground gave way. Without a sound, the creature fell out of sight.
Kyrionik’s momentum nearly carried him over, too, but something caught hold of his leg and yanked him painfully back. Oblifell dragged him away from the cliff.
There was a loud splash. The ullroct had hit the water, and a plume of steam billowed over them, blowing into the jungle. Had the water doused its fire and destroyed it? Was it dead?
Oblifell kicked the burning shield away and began to slap Kyrionik’s shoulder and rib cage. Mud. Oblifell was extinguishing the flames with sopping wet mud. Kyrionik jammed his burning left hand into the soil, flipping it over and back again to force cooling mud into the gauntlet.
A woman ran up with a bucket and began to pour the water into the gaps in his armor.
“Hold still, your virtue. We’ll get you out of here. By the fallen gods, I knew you had valor, boy, but… You! Draw your dagger, and—”
“No!” Kyrionik forced himself to sit upright. The flames were out, but his arm and side still felt like they were burning. “No one is to touch the glitterkind.”
>
The soldier stood nearby, dagger in hand. He looked from Kyrionik to Oblifell, frozen with indecision.
“Your virtue, your injuries—”
“Oblifell, an amateur’s cut is what summoned the ullroct. Besides, there are many hurt worse than I am.” He tried to clench his fist inside the gauntlet, but the pain was intense. He was going to be scarred for life.
Kyrionik stood, trying not to stagger from the pain. “We have to get everyone off the island. Can we lower the injured on the boom? They could be put in a skiff and transported to Fair Season—”
“Your virtue—”
“The others will have to strip off their armor and swim—”
“Kyrionik!”
He fell silent. Oblifell had never spoken his given name before.
“Your virtue, look!” Oblifell led him to the edge of the plateau.
Fair Season was aflame, its nose pointing into the air. A last pair of sailors leaped into the water, joining a half-dozen others swimming hard for the stair at the bottom of the cliff. Two were pulled under. Hunting jellies swarmed toward the others.
“It’s climbing back up!”
The soldier who had doused the fire in Kyrionik’s armor pointed down another section of cliff. At the same moment, Oblifell pointed in the opposite direction.
On the long slope at the northern end of the island, treetops trembled and shook. Something huge was tearing through the jungle, moving straight toward them. The jungle on the slope above also trembled as Selso Rii’s ullroct descended.
Three ullrocts. One creature could destroy them all, but they were facing three.
The sun touched the horizon. In that moment, a strange cry echoed out of the jungle. Kyrionik had never heard anything like it. It sounded like a flock of screeching birds mixed with chirping crickets, and it was deafening. That wasn’t a sound that could be made by a single throat, or even a dozen. That was the sound of hundreds of swarming enemies out in the jungle.
None of them were going to get off this island alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
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