Deep magic second coll.., p.55
Deep Magic - Second Collection, page 55
part #2 of Deep Magic Collection Series
“I know it’s dark; hurry,” Neladi said.
She herded the pile of prized possessions back towards the stairs. Emmi, tucked into position, helped them into the gloom.
“That’s the last of them,” Neladi said. “Now make room for your—”
“Behind you!” Emmi screamed.
The floorboard strained beneath Neladi’s right foot.
Left ...
Neladi dodged to the side. She felt a spear tip whoosh past, piercing the air where her head had been. Her enemy cursed. Neladi steadied her feet and came round fast.
The saptor was a sword-length behind her, still off-balance from the lunge. In its eyes, it seemed resigned to its fate. Perhaps it had seen some of her earlier work on the way in.
Swift as winter—
Neladi parted the saptor’s head from its shoulders. In her mind, Baylian rolled his eyes and smiled.
Outside, the noise of battle grew closer. Neladi dived into the crawl space and secured the door shut. Emmi clutched her hand.
“Are they gone?”
“Shh!”
The floorboards moaned again.
Neladi waited for the sound to repeat itself, but the room was seized with silence. Even so, she could sense something moving around in there, its thoughts so frantic they were loud.
“Neli?” a voice whispered.
Neladi started.
“Ms. Neli, it’s me—Old Tom.”
Neladi exhaled. The sheriff’s feet pounded across the floor to the kitchen, and Emmi relaxed too. The vibrations were so distinct even she seemed sure he was alone. Neladi opened her mouth to call out.
But she was too late. Everything in the house suddenly quickened.
A screech.
A yelp.
A scatter of fevered steps.
The parade ended with two slams of the back door. After that, Neladi heard what may have been a scream.
She waited.
A few minutes later, the door handle rattled again. When it gave way, a storm wind burst into the house, masking the sound of whatever intruded with it. At least, it did until the same presence entered the room.
The saptor made no attempt to hide its approach, scraping its claws along the few planks of wood that stood between it and their hiding place. It paused near the hidden door, after which the scratching turned incessant. Neladi gulped, suddenly aware of the film of sweat coating her skin.
It knows we’re here.
She coiled her weapon above her, watching for a shaft of white at which to strike. But then, right when she was sure a scaled hand would appear, the raking stopped. Emmi and Neladi exchanged troubled glances. The latter lowered her sword.
“Okay,” she breathed. “I think this time they’re gone.”
The first thwack splintered the darkness, showering Neladi in woodchips and dusty light. Emmi screamed, hurried away from the spot where the axe had struck. The saptor roared as it wrenched the blade free.
“Get back,” Neladi said. She jabbed at the hole with her sword.
The saptor ignored their cries, swinging the axe as if it were possessed. The blows left a wood-wound large enough to squeeze a claw through. Neladi waited for just that, but then relief came when a second lizard rushed in from the street. The pair started to argue.
“What are they saying?” Emmi said, huddled in the corner farthest from the hall. Neladi scrunched up her face in confusion.
The saptors spoke in a harsh tongue, squawking at each other as their feud escalated. The more Neladi listened however, the more she realised not all of the words seemed so foreign.
And why should they be? she thought. After all, there was a time when we shared more than this wilful wasteland we call the Frontier.
Neladi dreamt about the history books in her father’s study, where pages whispered of curses and exile and a quarrel between two queens who were centuries dead. Then she looked at the monsters who’d invaded her hallway. It seemed so strange that of all the humanity they’d lost, language was the one thing they’d clung to. Neladi didn’t know why, but it made the oily blood that washed her hands weigh just a little bit more.
The saptors were interrupted by the single blast of a horn. The sound, high and shrill, echoed from somewhere beyond the wall. When it finished, the two serpents traded another few words, though it seemed the disagreement had been settled on their behalf. The pair of lizards rushed from the room. They didn’t even give the house a backwards glance, disappearing into the street bereft of the arms they came with.
Neladi collapsed to the cool floor and sighed.
“Can we go get my dolly now?” Emmi said, pressing an eye to the little window that gave a view of the room.
Neladi eased herself into a sitting position. She tried to read the expression on her daughter’s face, but it gave no hint of their ordeal. Emmi’s attention remained with Bunchy and the outside world.
Perhaps, unlike me, she’ll grow to forget this happened. Memory surely can’t make prisoners of us all.
Neladi lifted her sword again. “Okay, my sweet. But stay close to Mama. We need to move fast.”
As she reached for the door, Neladi wondered where they would go now that their refuge had been compromised. Even locked in the heart of the house, she could tell dawn was far off in the world outside. They would need to find somewhere safe while night hid the outcome of the battle. And so it was, as Neladi undid the latch, that she decided they had to abandon the Frontier.
The door didn’t give.
Neladi cursed and shoved harder, but again it refused to budge. She stared at the wood, dumbfounded.
“What is it, Mama?”
Neladi bit down on the inside of her cheek. She dropped her sword, threw all her weight against the door. As if expecting the move, the wood didn’t yield an inch. Neladi fell back nursing her shoulder.
“It’s stuck,” she said.
Emmi frowned and crept back up to her little lookout. After a moment, she grinned, and Neladi figured Bunchy still waited outside. But then, as though the little girl had glimpsed her own death, her face grew green-white as a corpse.
“Are they back?” Neladi whispered.
She heard the crackling sound before Emmi could answer. She also heard the screams, each of them so near they couldn’t have been from battle.
They’re putting the town to the torch.
A grey tendril slipped through the peephole. Emmi ducked away in fright, as if the touch of smoke alone would prove fatal.
“Come away from the door.”
Neladi levered herself against the low-hanging ceiling. Hunched, her head still brushed the worm-eaten beams, but she gained enough balance to aim a few well-placed kicks at the door. The wood absorbed the blows without even a whimper.
Sharp as blizzard breathing, the voice inside her head urged. Neladi fetched her sword.
“I don’t even know what a blizzard is,” she cursed.
Neladi drove the blade through the hole in the door, gouging it open. She ran the sword across the wood like a saw, until finally she’d made enough space. She squeezed her head free.
The house was drenched in flame. Fire drowned the floor, washed the walls, and fell in great drops from the ceiling, where black clouds plumed together. The blaze had already swallowed one saptor’s body, and now the second, resting on a bed of flames, cooked in its armour. Part of the roof above had caved in and made a funeral pyre.
We all return to ash, ash returns to—
Neladi heard the crack over the chewing sound of the flames. Emmi started to bang her fists against the door, and Neladi realised where the noise had come from.
“Push, Mama,” Emmi pleaded.
Neladi leaned into the door. She could see the axe blade that wedged it shut, but she didn’t dare reach for it, not now that the resistance had been broken.
A line of fire zig-zagged across the room. It scorched the stairs, sapped the defences further. Inch by inch, Neladi felt the gap start to widen.
“Push, Mama!”
Neladi gasped. Sweat mopped her face. Hot tears stung her cheeks.
“Push!”
Neladi’s throat burned. Her legs went numb from the effort. She cried out.
“Push!”
Her body spent, Neladi summoned up the blood one last time. She heaved everything against the door, and taken unawares, it began to crumble.
The carpet of flames drew closer. But not close enough.
First Neladi’s head was through, then her arms, then the rest came, and she was free.
She lay on the dusty floor, felt Emmi’s footsteps vibrate beside her. Air gushed Neladi’s chest, and shaking, she started to laugh.
III. Wind
Neladi stood in the ruin of the house, passed her eyes over what had once been a home. There, at the edge of town, the walls had come down, the roof had folded in, and whole rooms had simply vanished. Everything Neladi’s father had worked for. All of it taken by flame.
Neladi sank onto the half-scorched stairs. She perched on the fifth step, the last the fire had left them. The rest of them had gone missing, along with the floor above, so that now the stairs climbed into nothing.
In front of her, a few flakes of ash lifted in the breeze, twirled like dark petals in a garden, then drifted across the space that had once been the hall. They floated with a sort of reverence, the kind normally reserved for something both moving and standing still.
Mist. Neladi realised. That’s what I’m looking at. Black and indifferent mist.
She sat spellbound for a time, until her trance was broken by the sound of footsteps. Their owner grimaced as he limped onto the porch. What was left of the doorway bristled as though it didn’t recognise him.
“You could have at least cleaned up a little,” Baylian said, wincing as he crossed the threshold. His shield arm slept in a sling. The blood of a hundred dead streaked his face.
Neladi forced a smile. She rose from the stairs, heard the step groan beneath her feet. The damn step. The one that needed fixing.
Always strange to see what has survived when the long night gives way to dawn.
Baylian picked his way through the rubble, turning chunks of it over with his boot.
“You fought more than one?” he said, gesturing to a piece of blackened bone at his feet.
“More than one, less than three.”
“Your skill has not been blunted with time.”
Neladi shrugged. “I had you there to guide me.”
Baylian wandered closer. “How so?” he asked absentmindedly.
“Swift as winter wind,” Neladi chanted, as though it was a mantra, and perhaps it was. Even now, her husband’s voice spoke in her mind.
Baylian stared into memory. “Not my words,” he said finally. “Sounds like something from your prayers.”
Neladi spied the altar from out of the corner of her eye. Despite everything, it, too, had survived. Whether she’d relit the candle, though, she could not remember. Its flame flickered in her direction.
“Will you ever tell me how you made it off that wall alive?”
Baylian sighed. “I’ve seen twice too much to tell even half that tale now.”
Neladi wasn’t content with her husband’s answer, but she believed him. After all, he’d come home from the desert with nothing but a few breaths to his name. But this war had been different. Courage, hope, fear—Baylian had spent a life’s measure of all of them in just one night. At the Frontier, though, such debts never went uncollected. She doubted he’d ever be the same.
“Thank you for trying to escape,” he said, once he’d reached her side. “I doubt the decision to flee came easy.”
Neladi shook her head. “No, it didn’t. But when the hunter brings smoke to the warren, the rabbit no longer gets to choose where they call home.”
Baylian lifted his free arm and squeezed her shoulder. “That’s from one of my goodnight stories, isn’t it?”
“‘The Tale of Red Rabbit, ’” she said. Neladi read the stunned look on her husband’s face. “I listen,” she added.
Baylian chuckled. “Then you remember the part where the foxes nearly catch him?”
Neladi turned her gaze west, towards the market and the centre of town, where Emmi and she had fled the night before. There, a second force of Clawhold knights had rescued them, though winds knew where they’d come from. They’d ridden off after the Viper King’s remaining forces soon after.
“We were too few,” Neladi said, as that last memory of the night before resurfaced. “We were too few to have beaten them.”
Baylian dusted the ash from his hands. He pulled a folded envelope from his sleeve. “Come with me,” he said. “There’s more to this than meets the eye.”
Neladi followed her husband out into the street where the rest of the survivors had assembled. Very few families had made it through the night, and of the Frontiermen who’d manned the wall, there were fewer still. The handful of people left looked more like little tribes of nomads than the neighbours they’d been not one day before. The whole group traded whispers with silence.
“They still haven’t burned them?” Neladi said.
Baylian shook his head.
Despite all the blood the Viper King had spilled, there were only three corpses now to account for it. The rest had been burned at dawn, so early Neladi had feared the morning breeze wouldn’t be awake to claim them. Secretly, she had also feared she’d not get to say goodbye to the man she loved.
Neladi had not expected Baylian to still be there, alive, waving to her from across the street. Their reunion had been muted; she guessed he’d harboured the same doubts about his wife and daughter. Perhaps he also knew better than to celebrate. After all, they were the only family not to have lost someone.
Even so, as Neladi stared down at the three dead men, the shapes of their bodies outlined by peace-white sheets, she felt a great deal of sorrow.
Under the largest shroud lay Old Tom. Neladi had found him herself that morning, slumped against the backyard fence, smiling even in death. The saptor that had killed him had fallen next to him.
The second shroud, decorated in rose petals, covered the face of Captain Roy Edden. His mother hadn’t been there when Baylian pointed it out to Neladi the hour before, but now the whole family stood there. Most of the children were too young to realise he was gone.
Neladi had guessed Commander Furst lay beneath the final blanket, as he’d once been her third visitor, and her house tended to claim ghosts in three. Instead, it was Sir Kelvin—the guest Neladi had not let in, who was now stretched out lifeless on the sand. He’d taunted her from the same spot only days before.
Baylian stepped from Neladi’s side.
“Where are you going?” she hissed.
“To make things right.”
The murmuring stopped as Baylian stood out from the crowd. He raised his hand, which clutched the same crumpled envelope he’d shown Neladi. It flapped in the dusty wind.
“Well,” said Old Tom’s deputy, the hunched man whose name was Elred. “You have something to say?”
Baylian swallowed the lump in his throat. “Last night,” he started, “the Frontier lost many of its sons and daughters.”
A few people bowed their heads in prayer. Many more remained unmoved.
“Some of the Frontier lost their sons and daughters,” Elred said, his tone impassive, as if to give a voice to people’s distrust. He tapped the sand with his crutch, clicked his teeth at the same time.
Baylian held up his hand. “You have the right of me, Sheriff. My own family was spared.” He turned in a full circle, searched the eyes of the crowd. “But can anyone say I won’t weep for the Bellers’ twin girls, or that I’ll turn away Widow Eli if she comes to my door?”
Mr. and Mrs. Beller, who ran the best bakery in town, managed a smile. Eli, hair twice-white as snow, unfolded her arms and nodded.
“When I was presumed dead not a moon ago, I would have wished the same kindness for my family,” Baylian said. He walked past where Old Tom and Roy Edden lay, paused only when he reached the last shroud. “But Sir Kelvin wanted otherwise, and were it not for my return, they would have been shipped off as slaves.”
“Now hang on,” Elred said, emerging from the crowd. He waved away offers for help. “Sir Kelvin gave his life for the Frontier. The Aelia damn any man who curses him while his blood’s still warm.”
Baylian held his hands out once more. “I have not come to destroy the good name of a Frontier hero.” He opened the envelope. “I have come to vindicate it.”
The crowd exchanged troubled glances.
“This letter was written two moons ago by the hand of Sir Kelvin, who petitioned the Clawhold for help.”
Baylian passed the letter into Elred’s hand. The new sheriff glanced at the signature, rolled his eyes, and nodded. “Ya, it’s him all right.”
Baylian pulled another page from the envelope. “This second letter was given to me by Commander Furst. It was written in secret by Captain Roy and is the only reason any of us are still standing here.”
All eyes fell on Mrs. Edden.
“Sir Kelvin drastically underestimates the enemy strength,” Baylian read. “He refuses counsel from commanders and scouts alike and is confident he can win a great victory with the hundred soldiers the Clawhold have committed to provide us with.”
Elred’s face flushed. He held his ground, his two knees so stubborn that even wracked with age they refused to tremble.
“Captain Roy knew this, and still died defending Sir Kelvin at the gate,” Commander Furst said.
A few men beside him nodded.
“He saved my life,” one of the younger ones said, and the others voiced their agreement.
Baylian passed the letter into Mrs. Edden’s hand. She stared at it for a time, and not a single soul, living or dead, thought to try and rush her. Even Elred brought the champing sound of his teeth to heel. The Frontier was nothing but a mother and the hole in her heart.
“He saved us all,” Baylian said.
Mrs. Edden folded the letter and smiled.
Baylian glanced one last time at the crowd. “He was a true son of the Frontier,” he said. “Has he still brothers with strength left to bear him?”
