Shadowdeath wind episode.., p.16
Shadowdeath Wind: Episodes & Excursions: Book 1, page 16
The forest belched up three wheelers, one of them large and wagon-like with a person in the back hanging onto a mounted weapon. They bounced onto the Trail some twenty paces from Robin and blocked his route. Men and women spilled out and fired weapons. It was like yellow festival lights strung across the Trail. Robin’s head went back, and Ronan thought he—or it—was finally stopped, but no, he could hear laughter. Robin calmly slipped a fat-headed bolt into his bow and fired it pointblank into the wheelers. The explosion raised a flaming curtain of earth and metal and bodies. Robin Devenrath slid through it and started to gallop toward them. The ground shook with increasing fervor as he approached; weapons fire fell off to sporadic pops. The creatures of Legion erupted from the tree line. Grisail fighters were tossed about and shredded on trunks and horns and razor talons. The horde formed up behind Robin and followed.
“Ow!” Ronan grabbed at the burning Telluron through his shirt, pulled it away from his chest. Dizziness swelled in him, and he staggered against Rissa, whose strong, steady grip only accentuated the land’s secret motion. He sensed how it ceased at her fingertips, turned back within him, gathered in the Telluron. He understood then that a fetish wasn’t a focus of your power, but of the elementae, and the essence of the Form was, as Orlèan had said last night, in a witch’s ability to interpret and manipulate that fundamental force. The Mistbridge Clan uttered arcane, complex verse to focus their “power,” and the Stonebows had developed elaborate dance steps, their fetishes sewn into veils of bold colors. Such efforts to focus or center yourself were wasteful, to say the least. Ronan realized then that most of what the Sacred called the Form was nonsense. And the worst part of that realization was that he couldn’t do much with the sudden insight, lacking the ability to gather the elementae, which was further aggravated by Orlèan’s suggestion that Ronan’s potential was beyond all that.
Robin Devenrath du Göthaen reined in Lupo next to the smoldering wreckage of Rissa’s wheeler. Lupo’s brown-and-white coat was splashed with red, and his head hung, a gruesome font of pink froth swinging from his mouth. Ronan realized that the horse too had to have been taken to survive its wounds thus far. Wind ripped the smoke toward the trench, carrying with it the panic and frenzy from the camps beyond the woods. Legion gathered behind Robin like a roiling wall.
Robin’s jaw hung by a wide flap of twisted skin hairy with muttonchop, his striped scalp furled up in a clotted wave, his leathers were riddled with red bursts, a bloody left fist gripped the crossbow, half his right hand was missing, yet the two remaining fingers hooked the reins, and just above his nose, a thumbnail-size crater marked the entrance of a bullet. Ronan’s jaw hung too, in horror. He wondered what a bullet impact might sound like and shivered; another detail unsung by the bards.
“Give me the boy,” the thing said, though the words didn’t come from Robin’s ruined mouth. The voice was as silken as nausea, and it held every nightmare Ronan ever had.
“Eat the grass out of my horse’s shit,” Jons suggested.
Laughter crackled like fire, iced the wind, and chilled the earth through the soles of Ronan’s boots. The beasts of Legion exploded into a manic fury. Drool whipped the air from gnashing jaws, and eyes of every shape and color projected a battering hatred. The shit-sweet death stench of the horde swirled about the scene as they mobbed up to Robin and held there.
“What is this?” Rissa wondered.
“They seem to be waiting,” Jons said. “On Robin.”
Robin struggled with his mutilated hand to grab the last explosive bolt beneath his left arm, succeeding only in generating gobbets of blood with each pantomime.
“Look at that,” Orlèan said, “I was right.” His smirk sneered brighter than Ronan had seen it in a long time.
Jons sneered, “Kudos, witch.” He loosed the argenta bolt, which passed straight through Robin’s chest and ruptured the bulbous body of a spider-thing behind him, sending a spew of pinkish custard snotting onto the ground. The thing collapsed and several other creatures fell upon it to feed.
“By the bitch’s tits!” Jons reached for another bolt.
“Robin’s the only thing keeping Legion from devouring us,” Ronan said. “If he dies or the possessor flees, or whatever, we’re finished.”
“Perceptive, little one,” Robin murmured.
Orlèan stroked his braid, fingered his fetish, seemed at a loss. “Why do you want the boy?” he asked.
“Conversation, witch?” Jons growled. “You plan on boring it to death?”
“Look around, Gallowglass!” Orlèan said. “Death is the operative word here.”
“I smell weak magicks,” Robin said, but its laughter rang with frustration. His right hand inched toward the last bolt like the limb of a decrepit crone.
By the velvet buzz in his feet, Ronan knew Orlèan’s hearth held the elementae to bursting. He had never seen Orlèan work the Form, and the intense look of concentration sharpening his features, which once would’ve beguiled Ronan, now seemed silly. “Do it,” he whispered.
“Silence… Are you a typhon?”
The two fingers gripped the bolt, lost it, feebly gripped it again. “Name-calling?” it said. “How quaint.” Its voice was neither male nor female, and carried with it a sultriness like the evening breezes in the northern coastal deserts. “I am Jöten Primebrood, Created by Daeva Deathrage, mastered by Tabarath Smaw. I was sent to retrieve the boy and the Telluron, for he would try to stop the Renaissance should he take his place as part of the Five. My kindred ride even now to stop the others. Mere pawns of pawns! Who know nothing of the right of things save the twisted lore passed down by the Liar! For the crimes of Greysoul Jack, you all must pay, and the cost is dear to stand against the righteous. Very dear. Right, Orlèan Runechild? Whether Taylor Devenrath du Göthaen was what you say he was or not is irrelevant, even if you could prove it, you still murdered a man without direct provocation. As a practitioner of the Form, you must live—and die—with it.”
Orlèan tipped his chin. “The boy is foremost.”
“The boy is mine.”
“Come and get him then,” Orlèan said. “Seems craven to send a surrogate.”
“What is that noise?” Rissa asked. “Gallowglass, you’re singing like off-key chimes played by a drunken priest.”
“What?”
“It’s the Telluron,” Ronan said, “and the argenta.”
“How useful.” Rissa re-aimed her weapon. “If you are up to something, witch, besides discourse and lame insults, do it now.”
“I am,” Orlèan said through his teeth, “but I must focus.”
“You don’t need to.”
Orlèan twitched, but he kept his eyes forward. “What would you know?” he growled.
“I know you don’t need to focus,” Ronan said. “Not like you think. Can’t you tell?”
Robin now held the bolt. It dangled there, indeed, without much menace. Then he dropped the crossbow.
“See,” Orlèan said, “now what can he do? I just need a moment to focus.”
“He can arm that head,” Jons said. “Look—”
Robin fumbled with the base of the explosive, curling his two right fingers around it and twisting. With its ratcheting sound, Jons cursed.
“If he drops it, it’ll go off,” Rissa said, examining the height of the trench behind them. “And we’ve got nowhere to go.” Wheelers rumbled in many directions, their noise tangling in the forest, blurring with the seething Legion’s rising clamor as it ebbed away in recognition of the danger.
“Now,” the sickening voice said, “give me the boy and you are free to go and die in the coming fire.”
“Just use it, Orlèan!” Ronan hissed. “It’s there, it’s ready!”
“Shut up! You’re ruining my—”
Robin raised the bolt.
The Telluron flared, argenta keened, the land swayed. So easily, Ronan touched the fetish’s power, simply because it was what he wanted; it felt like he caressed an angry swarm of bees.
“Do something!” Rissa yelled.
Rumbling became a roar, and a wheeler popped out onto the Trail in a thundercrack of broken tree limbs, flying greenery, and war cry, to be inundated by the creatures of Legion. For the briefest moment, Ronan saw Robin’s attention waver. And he reached. Through the Telluron, where a whirlwind of elementae battered him, and into Orlèan’s fetish, where he was battered anew by a rage that wasn’t so much hateful as self-protective. Now it was like gripping the swarm as he ripped the elementae away from Orlèan, whose surprised gasp was more a soundless screech. Instead of hurling it at Robin, which seemed the logical thing, Ronan’s will turned down.
And deep down, where his will thrust the furious elementae, the land sighed and shifted. Buckled. Shattered. Exploded.
SEVEN
“Fuck me with Future’s steel prick, I still can’t believe it.”
The Emerald Trail was a tan band, waggling eastward through the forest, which spread north and south, a velvety blanket that dwindled to nap and tufts before giving way to the brutal starkness of the Fracture. From that new height, the Fracture’s name was writ large in the scarred faults and volcanic ruins that tumbled out to the horizon. To the west, they could see the wispy dust tail of the Grisail traveling toward the steep switchbacking canyons of Tom’s Key. Below them a churlish sheet of steaming brown water curled like a plantain, further disturbed by a white geyser pumping skyward at one end and at the other, a twisted monolith, spitting flame up its length in furious corkscrews.
“Such poetry, Gallowglass, truly captures the magnificence of Ronan’s work.”
Gallowglass favored Rissa with a blistering glare at which she smiled like a bird-fed cat.
“It’ll take us most of the day to get down,” Orlèan said. “We should leave now and ride through the night.”
“Is Ronan up to it?”
“You can ask me, Rissa,” Ronan said from atop Vampyr, where, instead of the new vista, he watched the three of them. His already-ravaged head and jaw throbbed from his fall, but the disturbing, buzzing headache and queer disorientation had faded, leaving him exhausted. Leaving him trembling. The Telluron, however, continued its heated and irritating drone, singing in Gallowglass’ argenta weaponry.
“I know, I know, it’s just that you are not well.”
“I’m well enough,” he said, though his every muscle felt as if it were trying to take flight, and a black, anxious mood had descended on him. The shaking did not seem to be abating despite Orlèan’s promise. As one of the Sacred, Ronan had grown up around the Witch’s Shiver; it was, for many witches, a natural death. Right now, he quaked like a witch in the final throes of the malady. It took years, not moments, of working the Form to be so stricken. But then, he had just raised a mountain.
The ground continued to quiver and sway, a motion everyone now felt; whether it was the land’s instability or its attempt to stabilize, he didn’t know. So much he didn’t know. He leaned on the pommel of Taylor’s sword, sheathed in a saddle scabbard, and eyed the purple lump on his hand where a falling stone had struck it.
Nowhere in the lore could he recall such a feat; Rissa had found nothing in Grisail Memory. It elated him, frightened him, made him hungry for more, and sick to think about it.
“Well enough?” Orlèan said, smirk flying high. “Let’s go.”
“We must first name this… this place,” Gallowglass said. He leaned too, on a crooked staff fashioned from a tree limb. A small boulder had rolled over his ankle.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“No, Orlèan,” Rissa said, “Jons’ right, such magic is worthy of recognition.”
“Brilliant, so the four of us will know what this monstrosity is called.”
“You need to steady down, Orlèan,” Rissa said, sliding Gallowglass an exasperated roll of the eyes.
“No,” Gallowglass said. “What he needs is just the opposite—a ruckus.”
“Oh, yes.” Rissa cackled and whirled her rifle with surprising nimbleness.
Orlèan managed somehow to look even more awkward than usual.
Ronan’s eyes slid off them and, for the first time, really registered what he had done. By wishing it done. Or not exactly. By wishing for help of any kind, begging the elementae to do something. He’d lost control the moment he’d emptied Orlèan’s fetish. He recalled the weird persistent nonpain, the sensation of release. They’d all been knocked to the ground and pinned there by the incredible shaking. The mountain, the flat-topped monolith, had breached the earth like the whale he’d once seen dancing the Swansea in the Southard Gulf. And in its godly climb, cloaked in billowing gouts of dust, the mountain had plunged them into a netherworld of earthen clockwork, a berserk reckoning of time with each broken stratum rising skyward.
It had consumed Harmatia, lifted and dumped all of the Blue Sisters into the one long lake now swirling frosted turquoise and afire below. After the initial upheaval, which had resulted in Gallowglass’ smashed foot and sundry nicks and lumps, it had pushed the Taelemonites and Rissa almost gently up the Trail on a rocky ripple where they watched the land transform amid the bellow and a hail of hot rock and ravaged forest. Robin Devenrath du Göthaen and Legion and gods knew how many Grisail, most of the immediate forest, and a portion of the Emerald Trail had vanished, maybe crushed, swallowed, or drowned in the mountain’s birthing. When finally the land had stilled, the silence that descended had been the most complete and roaring quiet Ronan had ever heard.
In a matter of hours, the blue-grey rock and loamy black soil were painted over with baby weeplings, tiny heads swaying in the dusty breeze. On that breeze, Ronan tasted the faintest scent of Legion.
“Ronan’s Fist,” Rissa whispered.
“Hmm?” Jons looked at her.
The Dagian Guard pointed a finger at the monolith. “The monstrosity.”
“Ah.” Jons nodded in appreciation. “I think that suits it well.”
Beneath a cinnamon sky, Ronan let his body quake. He was so tired. “Orlèan’s right,” he said more sharply than was comfortable for him. “The time for such nonsense is over.”
But Orlèan’s mouth twitched into a sideways pout, his head tilting to the side. “I suppose I agree with Jons…” he murmured. “Ronan’s Fist.”
“And that’s what you want, Ronan? To go? Ride all night with our injuries and no food?”
“You’re among Taelemonites, Rissa,” Ronan said. “Such inconveniences will not stop us. You can do as you please, in fact, you all can. I’m going east.”
“Of course,” Orlèan said, “I am going with you.” The man was angry. Whether for not performing or for having the elementae usurped from him, Ronan didn’t know. And he didn’t care. The time for nonsense truly was over.
“We’re Taelemonites, right?” Gallowglass said and lofted a broken war cry into the new valley, almost losing his staff.
“Must I really ride behind him?” Rissa asked, adding, “On this beast?”
Ronan fought Vampyr to make him turn, then walked the huge black charger past Juno and Riko. He could do with some more of Orlèan’s tisane. He started to descend the new mountain’s weepling-covered trail.
The Telluron keened softly. The land moved for everyone with a low, gritty shifting and secretly in Ronan’s heart with its true dance, and it seemed the too-green weeplings danced with it.
Interlude II
The Tabernacle, in the Valley of Judges, About Two Years Ago
Shunk!
“… say all the Cardinal Fugues are open.”
“Who’s they?”
“First time in a thousand years. Huh? You know, ‘they.’ ”
“Right… Sir, meal time.”
Ski-i-ff…
“They’ve sent ready platoons to each—”
Shunk!
Sounds padded across the clean black like the steps of ghosts. Kai Ferracane moved from meditation to consciousness. For a moment, under the cold glare of humming lights in his cell in Iso Block, Subbasement C, of the Tabernacle, he mourned friends and innocents and hated himself.
They said Kai Ferracane, now known as the Monster, formerly a singleton operator attached to the Dagian Guard Covert Activities Tactical Teams, had started a war five years ago that had killed a million civilians of the Seven Valleys. That, in desperation, he had killed thousands of his own comrades. They said.
In front of the shut slider at the bottom of the cell door stood his evening tray. Snotty gruel, lumps of something dark, puddled on a soft plate. A slab of hard bread soaking in it. A soft liter bottle of sweetwater on its side so it would fit through the slot. They underfed him as part of the program, so he ate it all, ignoring the smell and taste, the texture, and he drank all the water. He slowed his metabolism and scavenged food wherever he could find it—there was no shortage of spiders and waeflies; he’d rationed a litter of scrawny mice pups for couple of weeks.
His cell was damp despite environmental control, and always lighted. A square of thick chewed-up foam filthy with years of human oils and other effluvia to sleep on lay in the opposite corner of a stinking vacuum pit toilet. A tiny black marble in the high grey ceiling recorded everything. Ventilation whispered through the porous grey walls, and the cheap light bars murmured like midden flies as they blasted away the shadows. Kai often heard the nightmares of other Iso inmates over the incessant hump and crank of the water purifying plant that drew on Gen-Pop labor.
He wore coarse pants of blue canvas, which bunched up on blacksteel ankle cuffs (which matched the ones on his wrists), a flimsy blue shirt, and flimsy slippers. No cinches, no string ties, no zippers, buckles, or buttons. Nothing with which to hurt himself. Nothing with which to hurt others. But he could strangle himself, or someone else, with his pants. If he wanted. Not to mention what he could do with just his body. If he wanted.
