by DM Fike
Sipho often talked about the ebbing and flowing of pith. I sort of understand it, since my own pithways have a rhythm to them, but how she could predict within the confines of an inanimate object how pith should react always blew my mind.
It made me curious about other things she might know about. “Sipho?” I asked slowly. “Have you ever heard of people outside of the followers of Nasci who worship her? Who want to help us?”
Sipho glanced at me in alarm. “No,” she said sharply. “Why? Did your augur mention something of this nature?”
“No,” I said, a little irritated at how quickly my line of reasoning had been blocked. “I haven’t had a chance to ask him about it yet.”
“Haven’t had a chance?” she repeated, confused. “Doesn’t Guntram know where you are?”
“No,” I admitted, careful not to give away too many details.
Sipho gasped. “If Guntram does not know where you are, you should go to him immediately.”
The thought of hauling my sore carcass out of the hot spring after such a short recharge made me groan. “I don’t know what use I’ll be in this condition.”
“You should let Guntram decide,” she insisted, shooing me toward my soiled hoodie and shorts in a pile on the rocks behind me. “Go on. Get dressed and find him. Can you find the way back to his general vicinity? I could send Nur with you to help track him, if necessary.”
I knew I wasn’t getting out of this. “Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled, pulling myself fully out of the water. I drew a quick sigil to instantly dry myself. No need for towels when you can manipulate water. “I’ll be fine without the kitty escort.”
I threw on my clothes and had hauled my sorry flesh halfway up the steps when Sipho called to my back, “Don’t forget to drop by the forge and pick up a new defensive charm. It may come in handy.”
I had no idea at the time how true that would really be.
CHAPTER 14
LOCATING GUNTRAM IN the thousand square miles of the Siuslaw National Forest would be no easy task. If he stuck around Mapleton, where I’d last seen him, it would narrow things down a bit. Yet, as I navigated through a rapid series of wisp channels pushing me farther toward the coast, I wondered exactly how I would find him. I didn’t have kidama ravens to send messages for me, nor did I have any idea where that herd of elk might have relocated.
As it turned out, all I needed was my sense of smell.
A few miles past Mapleton, deep in the woods, I caught a whiff of smoke. It jolted me to attention. Azar had banished the khalkotauroi, and I’d gotten rid of the fire demon. It was weird enough to encounter two powerful fire vaetturs in a row. There couldn’t possibly be another one on the loose.
Could there?
If there was anything I’d learned over the last few months as a shepherd, though, once you had certain expectations, something would smash them to pieces. I scaled a nearby mountain cliff, drawing a square with a triangle with my earth pith to allow my exposed fingertips to stick to the rock wall, making the climb easier. When I finally summited the top, my already whimpering muscles went into full-blown howling mode.
“This had better be worth it,” I grumbled as I scanned the rolling treetops.
A towering belch of black smoke arched up from behind a mountain on the other side of a small valley.
Great. I wished I had Guntram’s ridiculous air abilities and could force a stream of wind under my feet so I could glide over the distance. But I knew I’d probably land somewhere below with broken legs if I attempted such an advanced maneuver.
So I ran.
I took off down the mountainside, letting gravity pull me ever faster as I sprinted at a steep angle toward the creek at the bottom of the valley. I vaulted over the rocky shores, barely wetting my boots as I dashed back uphill at a much slower clip. Dodging foliage and sometimes scrambling on logs for balance, I made it to the next crest relatively quickly. I expected to find a decent swatch of trees on fire.
I did not expect the world’s largest bonfire burning inside a logging operation.
I’d stumbled across a clearcut patch of earth, this one much larger than the one near the khalkotauroi. It hurt my heart to see so many mammoth logging vehicles with talon-like claws, sawing blades, and bulging truck beds surrounding a gigantic pyramid made of generations of trees. Worse still to view that all ablaze, the logs green and wet on the inside, but their outer rims burning from our uncharacteristically dry spring. The cloud of smoke it made rose above the surrounding forest, giving off the ironic scent of pine and death.
And the cherry on top was the fire demon I’d thought I’d banished, more than twice as tall as before. It cackled with sizzling breath, waving its stumpy arms toward the blaze.
I cursed. So much for lightning getting rid of this thing.
Before I could move, I heard screams approaching rapidly up the mountainside. I crouched behind a bush just as a group of loggers in orange vests and hard hats came running past. One of them, the foreman by the black brick radio he carried in his hand, paused to wave all the others ahead. He brought the radio to his lips and yelled into it but received only static on the other end.
“We can’t contact HQ!” he yelled at the men. “Keep going! We’ll try again at the next ridge!”
Then he took the caboose and vanished with the rest of the loggers retreating into the forest.
I waited until I could no longer hear them before coming out of my hiding place. Apparently, the demon had interrupted a busy workday. This was nuts. The attack so close to Mapleton had been bizarre on its own, but I had never heard of vaetturs attacking humans directly. What was going wrong with the world?
I jogged down to the construction site, keeping inside the tree line and hoping to assess the situation before determining what to do. Near the edge of the clearing, a flurry of movement caught my attention. Behind the demon and the smoke, a skulking figure with platinum flowing hair snuck toward the demon. Darby. She dodged in between the machinery not far away, still out of the demon’s sight. She put her back against a vehicle’s boom, closed her eyes as if in prayer, and then, with a deep breath, her fingers flew as she generated a water shield as a defense.
“Oh no, Darbs,” I whispered. “You’re not taking that thing on alone, are you?”
But she did. In one fluid leap, she bounded toward the fire demon, water whipping toward her target in an attack. The demon spotted her immediately, sending up a wall of fire that absorbed most of the spray. Then the fire demon roared at her, flat legs pounding the ground as she retreated, but it was no use. The demon followed her, sending fireballs in her direction even as she ducked into a harvester cab. The vehicle’s window sustained a blast of fire, spiderweb cracks fracturing the surface.
She was trapped.
I jumped into the clearing, racing toward them. Darby might have been on the verge of full shepherdom, but I’d fought this monster before. She launched a second stream of water at the demon from around the cab, but I knew water wouldn’t hurt it. Sure enough, the demon broke through Darby’s stream without so much as slowing down. Darby’s eyes widened in terror when she realized she’d locked herself into a corner.
I latched onto my earth charm and, with my free hand, drew a square with a single slash underneath it. I let my entire stash of earth pith flow from my charm, through one arm and out the other. I flung it in between the fire demon and Darby, praying I would make it.
The dirt wall that shot up in front of the harvester slashed right through the demon’s extended fiery arm. It cut a few feet off as its fluid body slammed into the earth wall. The demon lost its shape in a fiery burst, but its momentum slammed into the solid dirt wall, which toppled. Rocks threatened to crush Darby in the cab.
“Look out!” I yelled, hoping my voice would carry over to Darby. I didn’t have time for a second sigil as huge boulders rained down on the harvester.
Darby, though, had earth chops in spades. She drew a rapid set of square sigils I didn’t recognize.
The rock exploded into dust, spreading out in a fine powder over the vehicle. I coughed as particles shot up my nose, coated my mouth, and even penetrated my lungs. I pushed forward anyway, creating an air bubble around my face in order to find my comrade in the rocky mist.
“Darby!” I screamed. “Where are you?”
After a few heart-stopping beats, someone sputtered on my right. I shot forward and found Darby on the ground, near the comically large tire of the harvester, covered in so much dust she looked like she’d just walked through an erupting volcano.
I cried out as I kneeled beside her. “Are you okay?”
She sputtered something into the ground, unable to form a coherent sentence.
I created a clean pocket of air for her as well. “Sorry about the mess,” I said as she hacked away into the crook of her arm. “I didn’t mean to gas you.”
“Need…” she wheezed, “distraction.”
“Distraction?”
She pointed over my shoulder, and I tracked her finger. The fire demon was nowhere to be found, but the blaze he had set in the logs continued to burn, somehow even taller than before. I cringed, wondering if the astronauts on the International Space Station could see it burning.
I drew a sigil for a ball of water, letting all my water pith pool to my palm. “It’s a bigun for sure, but we can stop the fire before it spreads,” I promised Darby.
But she shook her head violently. “No!” she cried. “Distraction!”
And that’s when Satan’s fiery BFF reformed. It built itself from the ground up, a small ball of fire enlarging like a balloon. As it developed limbs and fathomless glowing eyes, I knew we were truly screwed. It towered so high over us, it obscured the bonfire of logs behind it.
Then it drew its long arm and smacked a crane holding a fresh batch of trunks. It knocked one large caber loose, which came barreling toward us.
My muscles tightened as I spread both arms over a prone Darby, unable to defend herself. I took the brunt of the falling log, its curved side smacking me in the back. It hurt like hell as it hit my invisible defensive barrier, but fortunately the charm took the brunt of the impact. I would survive. The thin metal slat, however, did not, shattering into glittering metal splinters.
I no longer had any passive protection.
The demon snapped its arm back for a second strike on the crane, hoping to rain more logs on our heads.
An echo of Rafe’s conversation echoed in my brain. Suck out its fire pith and let the vaettur wither and die.
Backed into a corner and on the verge of getting pummeled to death, I would have tried anything. I turned away from a coughing Darby and raised my hands, palms out, to absorb pith directly from the demon.
It was a mistake.
Sharp pains ratcheted up and down my arms, as if my blood had solidified into a honey-like consistency but still tried to flow. The sensation spread quickly to my core, overwhelming all the other pith I had stored. I tried to breathe but couldn’t, gasping for air like a fish. It almost knocked me unconscious. I closed my eyes to refocus my mind.
But then the vaettur pith flow suddenly ceased.
A garbled cry of dismay filled my ear drums. Released from that terrifying energy I’d tried to absorb, I cracked an eye open to find the fire demon hovering right over us, limb ready to strike. By all accounts, it had us dead to rights, leaning in, my face only inches away from it. But instead it had stopped its assault.
Probably because its body had begun to fade.
Like messing with contrast on a screen, the fire demon lost its vibrant bright orange licks of flame, slowly melting into a shapeless white. Wisps of smoke seemed to pull the demon backward, from its elbows, knees, and head. It shrank, withering like a snowball left out in the sun, slow but inevitable.
As it diminished to only a few feet in height, the huge bonfire behind it reemerged into view. And that’s when I saw the other shepherds. Guntram, Tabitha, and Azar all stood at odd angles on lit logs in the dead center of that flame, their bodies emitting a strange glow although they remained untouched by the inferno around them. Azar stood in the center, the focal point of their magic, her red bracelet glowing almost white hot with heat. The three shepherds executed a series of sigils that I recognized as fire-based but had never seen before. A line of fire surged from the augurs straight into Azar, whose sigils siphoned the very essence of fire straight off the demon.
They were sucking the fire right out of their enemy.
The fire demon retained its humanoid shape right up until it stood only a foot tall. Then, almost like a crying baby doll, it vanished forever, having been sucked into the very blaze it had created.
CHAPTER 15
WE RETURNED AS a group to the homestead, completely wiped out. Even Tabitha looked like she’d been wrung out like a wet rag. No one even bothered to go to the lodge this time. As daylight threatened to give way to night, everyone headed for the hot spring, a pathetic group of battle-weary shepherds.
I mean, I totally understood why. After touching the pith from that awful thing, I felt like someone had taken a steamroller over me, then tazed me for good measure. I needed a recharge as much as everyone else who’d fought the fire demon.
And yet, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I grabbed Guntram by the arm. “So that’s it?” I asked him, trying to keep my voice down so only he could hear. “No debrief, no nothing. Just welcome home and forget the whole thing.”
Tabitha, unfortunately, had the hearing of one of her deer kidama. She turned on me. “You should be grateful to be back, haggard, after the stunt you pulled.”
I had no patience left for Tabitha’s lippy attitude. “Grateful that I saved Darby? Sure, you’re welcome.”
Tabitha bristled. “You did not save anyone. Darby was executing a distraction so we could mount an attack to defeat the beast. She would have done a fine job without you.”
I opened my mouth to protest but got some completely unexpected back-up. “No, Tabitha,” Darby cut in softly. “Ina did save me.”
This halted Azar as well, who up until this point had avoided the group’s bickering. “Come again?”
Darby straightened. “The vaettur had me trapped inside a metal machine. If not for Ina’s intervention, it might have killed me before you could finish your work.”
“I saw none of this!” Tabitha objected.
“You wouldn’t have,” I shot back. “That thing stood like a solid wall between you and us. Unless you can tell me you have some divine power to see through things, then I suggest you back off.”
Tabitha reddened at my harsh tone.
Darby paled. “I’m sorry, augur. You told me to always tell the truth.”
Uh oh. I wondered how many miles Darby would have to run tonight now that I’d shot off my mouth.
But Tabitha relaxed. She scooted over to brush Darby’s hair. “I am grateful for your honesty, always. Even more grateful that you’re alive.” She still looked like she wanted to strangle me, but she settled on pretending I didn’t exist. “Come, Darby. Let’s heal. Tomorrow will be another day for training.”
You could have knocked me over with the slightest wind gust. Tabitha not laying into me was akin to an apology, and she wasn’t even going to punish Darby for it.
Darby glanced back at me once as the Sassy Squad sauntered away. She nodded at me, which I didn’t know how to interpret. Relief? Thanks? Or a begrudging warning to stay back? I didn’t have an advanced enough degree in psychology to figure it out.
Azar made a motion to follow but paused to cock her head at me, a frown on her face. “And how about you, Ina? Will you join us at the hot spring?”
Guntram answered for me. “We have some things to discuss. Privately.”
Ah, there it was. Tabitha might spare me but not Guntram. I geared myself up for the inevitable shout fest.
Given Azar’s cool nature, I’d thought she’d steer clear of this kind of conflict, but she surprised both of us by saying, “Are you sure she sho
uldn’t soak first?” She stared at me pointedly.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “I actually got a dip in the springs before the fight.”
“If you say so. It’s just that something feels…” she let her sentence drift off, shaking her head. “Be well, Ina, and replenish yourself when you can.”
Then Azar walked away.
Guntram waited until Azar had walked well out of earshot before rounding on me. “That’s where you were? Taking a break here at Sipho’s while I searched the forest for you, believing you dead?”
I threw my hands up in the air. “C’mon, Guntram. It’s more complicated than that.”
“It’s always complicated with you. You had no business running off when we had real shepherd duties to attend to.”
“I saved a man and a dog from becoming burn victims,” I said through gritted teeth. “Wasn’t that our job?”
Guntram folded his arms. “The elk should have taken precedence, and you know it. Without my aid leading them through the fire, they would have died too.”
“But they didn’t die, did they?” I countered in triumph. “You did it all on your own. I saved creatures, you saved creatures, so why am I being read the riot act?”
“Because of shepherd code, Ina!” Guntram snapped, his face red. “We protect animals over people. Humans can take care of themselves. Nasci knows they’ve torn the forest to shreds with their wretched greed.”
I attempted reason. “I get why you’re mad at people in general, but think about what you’re saying. Do you really think even though there were two of us, and we both managed to save creatures of Nasci, that I’m the one in the wrong here? I should have let that geezer and his dog die because of what? A sense of priorities?”
Guntram rubbed his temples, clearly conflicted. “You couldn’t have known at the time whether we could have saved them both.”
A mirthless laugh escaped my lips. “Don’t try to pull the whole ‘you’re too inexperienced’ line on me. It’s getting old.”
Guntram’s jaw tightened. “What are you talking about?”