Cal-raven glanced up to the canyon wall’s edge to see a man hoisting an enormous tree over his head. It flung sheets of flame into the sky. Then he cast it down into the swarm advancing on Tabor Jan. The blazing tree exploded into sparks, embers, and smoke. Viscorclaws scattered, leaping to the walls. Tabor Jan rolled into the smolder, bellowing, crushing the attackers into the embers.
Cal-raven and Jes-hawk seized the captain and dragged him from the fiery debris. The ruined tree was burning itself out, and the viscorclaws were shedding their charred limbs and tensing for another surge.
The figure then leapt from his high vantage point and dropped through the haze.
Cal-raven gasped. It wasn’t Ryllion at all. “Jordam!”
“rrRun,” Jordam barked, his shoulders hunched. His massive hands opened and closed like the mouths of hungry predators. “rrRun fast! Strongbreed!”
“What?”
“rrRun!” The beastman picked up the torches Tabor Jan had dropped, and he turned to face the viscorclaws.
Tabor Jan, painted head to toe in blood, reached up and grasped Cal-raven’s arm weakly. “I can walk,” he said through bloodied teeth.
As the crowd collected, Milora urged Cal-raven’s horse toward the king, her eyes on the beastman beyond him.
“Get back, Milora!” Cal-raven ordered.
“Master!” The combined cry from the sisters, Margi and Luci, seized his attention.
Jes-hawk was aiming an arrow at the top of the ridge ahead.
Time seemed to slow down. He felt his plans dissolving, his voice breaking. The people began to move like a herd of sheep, panic-stricken, rushing to one side of the canyon, then the other, then toward him.
Two lines of red-armored figures lined the edges of the canyon there, wielding enormous bows and thick wooden missiles.
The Seers have sent the Strongbreed. Again I’ve led my people to slaughter.
Cal-raven’s horse shrieked and fell, taking Milora with it.
The Bel Amican guards knelt down in a line, some aiming left, some aiming right, and launched volleys of arrows that clattered off the assailants’ armor.
The captain stepped in front of Cal-raven, and he tried to push him aside. “No, Tabor Jan.”
“I will not let them strike you,” he roared.
Cal-raven looked back. Jordam was in a frenzy, lashing at the viscorclaws with two heavy whips he had set ablaze. The crawlers seemed intent on getting past him, as if he did not interest them at all.
Jes-hawk staggered sideways into the king. The bristling shaft of a beastman’s arrow protruded from an eruption at his left shoulder. Cal-raven felt the wind of an arrow brush his face. Another ripped through the slack of his tunic sleeve.
A shock rocked the ravine.
Strongbreed, unleashing a unanimous snarl, dropped to a crouch in confusion.
Rocks and rubble rained over Cal-raven. Battered, he knelt, took hold of a stone, and unleashed a surge of stonemastery. The stone fanned out like a rain canopy, smoothing into a broad, curved shield, which he cast to Tabor Jan’s feet.
Blinking in surprise, the guardsman lifted it just in time to deflect a heavy arrow. “Cal-raven!” He pointed to the wall just ahead.
A cave was opening.
Margi and Luci, pressing their hands to the canyon wall, were boring a depression into the stone. Luci yelled, “There’s a break in the wall here! There are … echoes, master! Open space!”
Cal-raven spread another rock into a shield and dashed to the girls. With his free hand he leaned against the wall, groaning as he pressed what shreds of strength remained out through his fingertips. Stone melted away from him as if he were spraying flames into a snowbank.
It’s not enough, he thought.
An arrow embedded itself between his fingers in the softening stone.
Then Milora was beside him, her palms beside his. He was surprised at this but had no chance to make sense of it. Pressing with all her might against the wall, she uttered an impassioned cry. Cal-raven felt a shudder of power unlike any he had known in his training with Scharr ben Fray. The wall burst open, revealing a burrow that reached a large, echoing space beyond.
Milora stepped back.
“More,” Cal-raven shouted as his faithful defender Bowlder stepped between him and the attack. Together the stonemasters broadened the opening. As travelers began to crowd around them, archers formed a perimeter, raising shields and firing arrows outward and upward.
“It’s not enough!” Cal-raven said, for the passage was still too narrow for anyone to slip through.
An arrow struck Bowlder’s side, and he fell hard as a stone statue, growling like a wolf in a snare.
Another shock rocked the earth, and an avalanche of rubble cascaded down, catching an arrow midflight, skewing its trajectory. Cal-raven glimpsed Jes-hawk, his left arm hanging useless, trying to crawl toward Bowlder to draw him out of the arrows’ reach. He heard Hagah barking madly in the distance, and the sound brought a sob to his throat.
The Strongbreed howled, distracted from their purpose by something only they could see.
As Jes-hawk pulled Bowlder to the wall, Cal-raven pressed his hands to the stone and bellowed, blasting energy against it. The break opened enough for Margi and Luci. Shaking and crying, they climbed up through the burrow into safety. Working the stone from inside, they opened the tunnel further.
“Say-ressa.” The healer slipped in, carrying little Cortie in her arms, her hands already bloody from tending to the fallen.
Cal-raven would not even remember how he roared then, compelling everyone into the cave as heavy arrows clattered against their shields.
They crawled. They staggered. Abascar survivors, Bel Amican soldiers, and merchant strangers. They pressed themselves into the waiting cave as a storm of large, blind-eyed reptiles took wing and rushed into the air, awkward and frightened as moths driven from a cupboard.
Defending the travelers until the last was through the door, Tabor Jan spun around with a cry, falling hard beneath his shield, an arrow in his neck. Cal-raven cried out as if he’d taken the blow himself and dragged the captain back into the cave, tears blurring his vision. As he did, Luci, Margi, and Milora brought down a curtain of liquefied stone to seal off the cave.
“Wait.” He lifted the shield and dared to stick his head back out.
Jordam was deep inside a storm of flames, smoke, and scattering viscorclaws. There would be no helping him.
Feeling as though he was sawing off an arm, Cal-raven sealed the door.
In the torchlight they listened. Arrows thudded against the solidifying stone.
“Jordam!” Milora threw herself against the closed door. “We have to open it again.”
“No,” said Cal-raven, pulling her back, perplexed by the glassworker’s fury. “We stay here now. We save these lives. While we can. Until the Strongbreed are—”
The cave shuddered. Dust, stones, and shreds of root crumbled from the ceiling. Then a sound like a hundred trumpets resonated through the stone seal, followed by a deep reverberation. Those earthshaking drums rolled on and on.
“What in the name of Tammos Raak?”
And then there was silence.
“Are we doomed to hide in caves and cower through earthquakes?” someone cried.
They waited.
Milora, her face streaked with tears, walked back into the shadows. Cal-raven, Margi, and Luci quietly layered more stone over the door.
The company clustered in the dark, weeping and gathering around the wounded, where Say-ressa was already putting her hands on them and whispering.
Margi and Luci had collapsed against each other. Milora spread her arms around them like wings, and Krawg—old Krawg, still standing, unharmed—stood over them, his hands on Milora’s shoulders. “I’m glad now,” said Luci, “that Obrey didn’t come with us.”
Tabor Jan was choking as Say-ressa tried to stop the bleeding from his wound. Cal-raven knelt beside the captain and clasped
his hand. Tabor Jan squeezed back, faintly. Blinking through the gore, he sighed. “Tell me.” His voice was just a thin rush of air. “Tell me we’ll be there soon.” And then he closed his eyes.
Cal-raven tensed, but Say-ressa nodded her head. “He’ll live. In what condition I cannot say.” She turned to Jes-hawk who lay unconscious, his chest in spasms, his shoulder shelled in blood. Beside him lay Bowlder, his body unmoved by breath, a cloth already covering his face.
Outside, thunder rolled on.
“What is it?” fretted Krawg. “What’s happening out there?”
Cal-raven walked to the barrier and pressed his ear against it. He heard nothing. No viscorclaws. No striking arrows. He melted away a patch the size of his fist.
As tendrils of smoke drifted in, he heard a frantic barking. Incredulous, he began clawing at the stone to open a wider gap.
“Is he crazy?” said one of the merchants, standing up as if to stop him.
“Hagah!” Cal-raven shouted. “My dog is out there.”
He opened a hole the size of his torso, just enough to see a pile of Strongbreed bodies outside, their armor melted around smoking carcasses, sprawled across the floor of the ravine.
And his hound came leaping through, nearly knocking him to the ground in his joy. Cal-raven embraced the dog. “How did you survive out there?” Then he peered back out into the smoke-darkened day.
“Sing praises to the name of Tammos Raak!” came a cheerful voice. “His gifts have saved you again!”
Cal-raven crawled out into the open, stood, and fell back against the wall.
“That can’t be a dragon,” said a Bel Amican from the tunnel. “There are no dragons.”
A creature green as spring grass, with legs as thick as marrowwood trees and a body the shape of a long-tailed grasshopper, perched on the canyon wall, lashing its tail proudly. Shining, armored segments of its body swelled and scraped against one another as it inhaled and then sprayed an exultant geyser of flames into the sky. It peered down with eyes like glass globes. Then it thrust its head toward Cal-raven.
Clinging to a fringe of bristles behind the dragon’s twitching ears, Scharr ben Fray barked a command and then grinned at Cal-raven. “This is Reveler,” he said. “The first Fearblind Dragon to breathe fire in the Expanse since the dragons departed for the Eastern Heatlands.”
“You know its name?”
“She told me,” said the mage as if the answer must be obvious. “She also made me promise to deliver a feast the size of a cattle herd for all the favors she’s done for me.” He nodded to the woodsnout that was barking up at the monster. “And that includes snatching a very familiar dog from the middle of a viscorclaw swarm.”
The mage slid from the dragon’s neck, then made his way down to Cal-raven and embraced him.
“Teacher.”
“You’re going to get there, Cal-raven. Reveler and I had to burn half of Fraughtenwood to rid the region of Deathweed predators, and then we roasted what remained of the Cent Regus Strongbreed. But now the road is clear to Inius Throan. I can show you to the gate. And I’ve brought maps of the city and of more than that, Cal-raven. Maps to pastures. Maps to gardens. Treasures from the casket of Tammos Raak. Everything we need. New Abascar will rise.”
22
A FLEETING GLIMPSE OF DAYLIGHT
ith Batey’s strong cord leashes looped over their shiny white horns, the golden hermits paddled upriver, two or three to a raft. They moved with the solemn determination of sailors who, after dossing on the docks for days, finally return to the sea. Their bright orange eyes glinted as they strained the high stems of their necks, surveying the path ahead. Though their beaks were fixed in permanent scowls, they seemed happy to have company, their tails slapping the water.
Strengthened by the feast, hints of goldenwine sweet on their tongues, the travelers left their complaints behind. While thoughts of the deserters haunted their silences, when they spoke at all, they voiced all they longed to regain. They murmured the names of their loved ones. They talked about the salt sting of Bel Amica’s morning mist, the patterns of Abascar’s hourly songs. Autumn leaves. Snowfall. Children. Horses. Cake.
One man lay along a raft’s edge, reaching down and combing the silt along the bottom, scooping it up, letting it trail in silver lines through his fingers until his hand was filled with translucent gems.
“Imagine,” the Bel Amican whispered to one of his kinsmen. “Imagine what price these gemstones will bring in the market.”
Soon several Bel Amicans lay on the sides of their rafts, combing river sand for jewels.
The ale boy, intrigued, cupped a handful of water to his lips. “Yes,” he told Nella Bye, “this is the water Jordam would bring to help the beastmen. It’s the water that brought you back. The source must be close.”
The Abascar travelers were content to observe. When one sang the Midnight Verse, the rest wove new harmonies. The song, once a simple promise of dawn’s approach, was now infused with an aching dissonance that spoke of weariness and loss, which only made the chords of its hopeful refrain stronger, opening up deep reservoirs of longing.
The songs offered beauty back to all that the travelers saw until the boy wondered if the colors that surrounded them might be a response to their singing, just as the song itself was born of seeing daybreak.
What kind of house will these dreamers become? What will it be like to live among people who don’t fidget in fear of what’s around the next bend? What kind of melodies will they compose?
He guessed that they would make strange company. Mysterious. Aggressively curious. Scary. Ignoring urgent concerns, distracted by insects and clouds and children. Each would live with one foot planted in another world. No more worry about their reputation. No more sugarcoated persuasion. No more flourishes designed to solicit a shower of coins. Only riddles and play and prophecy.
He guessed that they would hear no more songs about a Keeper who granted wishes. Instead, they’d sing of magnificent creatures that lured people out of the dark, away from all they thought they owned, and showed them something grander.
As the song rose and fell, he noticed Mousey sitting alone on the back edge of the last raft, trailing her feet in the water. Her shoulders shook, and her head was bowed so that the mop of red hair concealed her eyes.
He rose and climbed gingerly from one raft to another to join her. She looked like a rag doll salvaged from the toy box of a violent child. Her arms were scarred with tattoos and crisscrossing scabs from fights and abuses. Her face was a patchwork of bruises, and her breathing was uneven.
He placed a hand lightly on her shoulder. She looked at him and laughed in embarrassment. “Sorry, there. I just … I just don’t know if I should be here. I don’t deserve to live in your new house. I’ve done things. I’ve … I’ve sold people.”
“King Cal-raven likes to give folks chances to change,” the boy replied. “He has friends who are beastmen, friends who are thieves. You won’t be unusual. Tell me what happened. How’d you get caught by shredders?”
She shrugged. “I found my partner’s secret stash of coins. Ya see, we’d been stashin’ away what folks paid us for … for our trade. We were gonna buy a place all our own on the islands. Get free of work. Free of danger. But then I found she’d been takin’ some and hidin’ it elsewhere. I didn’t say nothin’ until the day she pulled a charade, sayin’ we’d been robbed. I told her I knew where she’d put it. I left, carryin’ my half of it all. I just couldn’t believe she’d lie to me.”
Mousey rubbed her hands fitfully. “But we were slavers. Sellin’ travelers and wanderers for money. I was tired all the time for foolin’ myself that it didn’t matter. Kept blamin’ others, sayin’ that if I didn’t do this, somebody else would, so I might as well earn a living. Why should I blame Brown for what she done? Anyway, I went off on my own. And I think she got mad. Set the shredders on my trail.”
She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “We’d have made a
fortune on you if we’d nabbed you. Firewalkers are rare.”
The ale boy didn’t know what to say to that. So he put his feet in the water beside hers and watched the passing lights paint them different hues.
“Brown’s free of me now, anyways.”
“And you’ve got us now,” the boy said. “You chose a better way. Changin’ things for better is hard work. Like rowin’ upstream. I watched Jordam do it. He got stronger. So he could walk away from the Core.” He shrugged. “Maybe Brown’s free. But she’s alone.”
As they floated along in quiet, his attention drifted from the glowstones that fit together like puzzle pieces along the ceiling, to the arbors of ever-more-extravagant trees along the banks, and then at last to the raft on which he rested.
Mostly, the raft was a wide wooden door with a few gaps punched through it. Someone had patched a break with a wooden shield flecked with fading paint—an illustration of impossibly muscled warriors. The striped background suggested an unfamiliar flag. Perhaps this piece of pillage had come from House Cent Regus itself before the fall. Another gap was nailed over with a wooden plank—a game board marked with a path of squares that spiraled inward to a bright, star-shaped center.
Bound to the front of the raft, an angular piece of buoyant wood helped the float cut faster through the flow. It may have once hung on the wall of a school, for runes scrawled across it spelled out platitudes describing an honorable citizen.
He felt as if he floated on the wreckage of the history of the world.
“Do these colors exist only here?” he heard Irimus ask. “Or have they always been out there, and we haven’t noticed?”
“All I know is this,” said Nella Bye. “I can see clearly again.”
Later, as the boy drifted through memories of Auralia, Nella Bye drew him back to the immediate circumstance. “Are you seeing this?”
Trees crowded the river, their trunks of braided strands flexing with the currents.
“Yes,” he said dreamily.
“What if our kingdom has trees with roots that reach these waters? What kind of fruit will they bear?”