Hinterland

  Tylar nodded across the deck. “Inform Captain Horas. Help guide him to the spot.”

  As the boy left, Tylar turned to discover that others had gathered here, the remainder of their party, drawn by their approach into Saysh Mal.

  Krevan’s woman, Calla, had entered and stood at her leader’s shoulder, staring out toward the spread of misty jungle. Though she still wore the gray cloak of her guild, she had shed her ash for this voyage, a rare sign of trust. Tylar had been surprised to find her skin as pale as milk, softening her considerably, until you looked into her eyes. They remained as hard as agates and as sharp as the daggers at her wrists. She may have washed her face, but she was still a Flagger at heart.

  Filling the doorway was the last member of their party, the loam-giant Malthumalbaen. Tylar had spent the previous morning talking to the man. While the giant’s tongue might be thick and coarse, there was a quick wit about him—though perhaps tinged a bit more darkly by his brother’s passing. Still, a certain easy companionship developed between them, a balm for Tylar’s own misgivings. Perhaps sensing this, the giant had filled the emptiness with tales of his brother’s exploits, mostly involved with the bottomless pit that was his brother’s belly.

  With everyone gathered, Tylar spoke to the group. “Once we land, we’ll leave the mekanicals stoked high in case a hurried departure is necessary. Krevan and I will inspect the state of the immediate area. The rest will remain with the ship.”

  Malthumalbaen spoke from the doorway. “Mayhap I should go with. A strong arm may serve where a quick sword fails.”

  Tylar bowed his head at the offer. “I would prefer that strong arm guard the ship and those inside.”

  Other objections were voiced Tylar held up his hand and dismissed each in turn. “Lorr, I know your skills at tracking, but even in the best of moods, the Huntress has forbidden the Grace-bred from her lands. Calla, your gray cloak is no match to our shadowcloaks. And Dart, I will be bringing more than just Rivenscryr.” He patted his belt, where a diamond-pommeled sword was sheathed, a shadowknight’s blade. “And I have a tiny repostilary of your blood should it prove necessary to anoint the Godsword.”

  He turned to Rogger.

  The thief held up his own hand. “I’m fine with staying inside the flippercraft.”

  “Keep the skull hidden,” Tylar said.

  “What skull?”

  Tylar rolled his eyes and swung back forward. The ship sailed over the treetops, skimming mists. He stepped over to join Captain Horas and Brant.

  “The Grove lies below the castillion. On its east side. See the shadow cast by the rising sun?” Brant pointed to the marker. “That’s where we want to go.”

  As the pilot corrected their glide, Tylar’s gaze followed where the shadow pointed, farther off to the west. The blaze of the morning sun stretched across the valley to ignite two of the tallest peaks in the western range, pinnacles so steep that even the creeping vines could not scale them. The bare rock, rich in salts and crystals, captured the sun’s rays and ignited with fire.

  Brant noted where he looked. “The Forge,” he said. “The two peaks are named the Hammer and the Anvil.”

  “With the fire between,” Tylar said.

  “They flare at sunrise and at sunset,” Brant mumbled, plainly drawn into old memories. “In the forests near the Forge—that is where the rogue god burnt to ash.”

  Tylar tried to spy the spot, but the ship rolled back around, putting the Forge astern.

  It took another quarter bell to reach the ancient pompbonga-kee. The mists below remained thick, gathered close around the leafy crown of the forest. The tree’s shadow stretched across the white shroud.

  Brant spoke in low whispers to the captain.

  Horas was not so quiet. “And you’re sure there is an open glade below? We’ll be dropping in blind.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “The boy’s right,” Rogger said, sneaking up behind them in his soft boots. “A great big empty hollow full of weeds and low scrub bushes.”

  Brant glanced to him, pained. “Last I saw it, the hollow of the Grove was a rolling meadow of green grasses and flowers.”

  Tylar cut in. “Either way, it is the only open space within a hundred reaches of the castillion.”

  Both Rogger and Brant nodded.

  “Then take us down, Captain Horas. Right through the tip of the tree’s shadow.”

  By now, everyone had gathered to the rails on either side of the pilot’s spar. Captain Horas called orders to his four-man crew, the additional hand gained in Broken Cay. The pilot worked wheel and pedals, deftly adjusting the aeroskimmers to float them over the shadow, and slowly they sank into the mists.

  Sunlight lost its sharp glare, then grew ever dimmer. It was as if they were descending into a twilight sea. Still, the water in the mists captured enough of the surface brilliance to bathe the ship in a suffusing glow. Around them, shadowy giants appeared ahead and to both sides.

  “The Graces,” Brant announced. “The giant pompbonga-kee that make up the Grove.”

  The captain shied from these ghostly behemoths, blindly feeling for the glade’s center.

  Finally, the potbellied keel of the flippercraft dropped below the cloud layer. There was little time to react or call out further orders. The ground rose quickly, appearing suddenly.

  The pilot hauled on the wheel to raise the aeroskimmers high. They did not want to break any of the control paddles. The Eye fell toward the field below.

  Tylar captured only a harried glimpse of the hollow. Cloaked in mist and shadowed by the height of the giant sentinels, the Grove remained in a perpetual gloom. All he managed to see was a strange bristling across the slopes of the bowl. Then the Eye slammed into the ground with a teeth-jarring bump, burying the view in tall grasses.

  Tylar heard a slight crackling as they hit, like the snap of branches, but there was no pop of plank or loud crack of broken paddle. Everyone was silent for a long moment, as if unsure they were still among the living and afraid to ruin the illusion.

  Then Captain Horas barked an order, readying his crew to check the state of the flippercraft.

  Tylar forced his fingers to loosen their grip on the railing.

  They’d made it.

  Krevan caught his eye. “We should not tarry. Our arrival will not go unnoted for long. The quicker we’re out and lost in shadow, the better we’ll know what we face.”

  As a group, they vacated the captain’s deck and retreated to the rear. Krevan crossed to the side hatch and began unscrewing the latch. Faces sought portholes. Tylar joined them.

  He pressed his forehead against the frame of one of the tiny windows. The mist seemed to have been sucked down with their passage. There was nothing to see beyond a swirling murk.

  Frowning, he returned to Krevan, who shouldered the hatch open and flipped down the small ladder. It struck the ground with a rattle, then settled.

  They listened for a long breath. The world beyond lay quiet. No trill of birdsong. Not even a buzz and whir of winged nits and natterings. Had their landing hushed the realm?

  “Ready?” Krevan asked, pulling up the hood of his cloak.

  Tylar nodded.

  The pirate leader climbed down and jumped lightly to the ground. Tylar followed, hesitated a moment, recalling how Keorn had been burned by his trespass. Then he also stepped down and joined Krevan.

  As he landed with his left foot, a sharp complaint rose from his knee. He hopped off it and tottered a step.

  “Are you all right?” Krevan asked.

  “A stone,” he muttered, covering the twinge.

  The ache slowly subsided in a couple of steps, as it had over the past two days. While normally he would have dismissed the cramp as merely some turn of his knee, the pang here was doggedly familiar, echoing back to when the same knee had once been frozen and cobbled from a poorly healed break.

  It was disconcerting.

  He opened and closed his fist. His little finger, still
wrapped, was slowly on the mend. Maybe a bit crooked, but it would leave no lasting weakness.

  As the ache faded in his leg, he pushed back these misgivings for another time and faced the flippercraft. “Keep guard on the door,” he called quietly to Malthumalbaen, who stood at the threshold.

  The giant nodded.

  Tylar turned away to find Krevan had already drifted off, shadowy in the mists. He limped to join him, drawing on a trickle of darkness into his cloak to steady himself.

  Ahead, the pirate had stopped, his back to Tylar. A growling sound rose from him, angry, offended.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Krevan stepped back to reveal what his large bulk had hidden.

  A shaft of peeled and sharpened wood rose from the ground, planted deep in the loam. Impaled upon it was the head of an old woman, her gray braid black with her own blood, tongue lolling out, skin mottled with rot. Flies and worms squirmed and crawled across her flesh. Her eyes had been pecked or gouged out.

  Only now did Tylar note the reek hidden beneath the decay of leaf and a heavy dampness to the air. Details grew as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. To either side, he noted more burdened stakes.

  Aghast, he backed a step toward the ship.

  The mists slowly rose, swirling back up. Bits of dust and dried grass drifted down, cast high by their hard landing. The view opened. Tylar remembered the strange bristling he had noted as they fell out of the sky. He now understood what he had glimpsed. Climbing up the slopes in widening rings were hundreds of stakes.

  All bearing aloft their ripe and rotted fruit.

  “No…” Tylar mumbled.

  This was far worse than any uncontested fire. A ravening darkness shadowed this realm fully. He recalled Rogger’s story of tanglebriar. He stared at the field of sharpened stakes. Seersong had indeed taken root—and here was the thorny growth that sprouted from that seed.

  “Her own people,” Krevan said in disgust.

  In step, both men retreated toward the flippercraft.

  Then Tylar heard a whistling to the air. Flashes drew his eyes up. Streaks of flame shot through the mists like trailing stars in the night. They arced out from the shrouded forest, climbing high, then angled back downward. Score upon score blazed through the murky clouds.

  “Arrows,” Krevan said, twisting to grab Tylar’s shoulder and pull him toward the flippercraft.

  Too late.

  Fire fell out of the sky and pummeled the flippercraft lying at the bottom of the sea of mist. The impacts sounded like hail on a wooden roof. But it was flame, not ice, that rained down upon the beached flippercraft. Not a single arrow missed its target.

  Shouts arose from inside the ship.

  But before Tylar could even call to the others, a second volley of flaming arrows filled the sky with their streaking brilliance. A moment later, amid the shocked cries of the others, another round of flame beat down upon the back of the craft, already aflame.

  Again, not an arrow fell astray.

  If it was madness that truly ruled here, it had honed its marksmanship.

  The fires spread rapidly, sped by some alchemy imbued in the oil of the arrows. Flames ran like fiery snakes across the hull.

  “Get the others out,” Tylar ordered Krevan. There was no use attempting to escape by air. The flippercraft would burn down to its mekanicals by the time they cleared the mists.

  Unless he did something about it.

  Tylar wiped his brow, then slid out a dagger. He drew its edge across his palm and drew a fiery line of blood.

  Sweat to imbue, and blood to open the way.

  He would fight the flames with his own humours. He pictured ice, as frigid as the cold that had stolen Eylan from them. He built the blessing in his bloody palm, prepared to use his sweat to cast it upon the craft. He would freeze the flames from his ship.

  He raised his hand—but before he could slap palm to wood, an arrow struck exactly where he had intended to place his hand. The thunk of its impact startled him back a step. It was as if the arrow had sprouted out of the hull, rather than being shot from afar.

  The feathered end quivered at his nose.

  But that was not all.

  Skewered on the shaft of the arrow was a raven, one of the messengers he had sent ahead.

  Here at last had come his answer from the Huntress.

  A threat by marksmanship.

  At any moment, an arrow could be sent through his own heart.

  He lowered his arm.

  Krevan came dashing out, leading others from the ship.

  “Run!” the pirate shouted and pointed an arm up the slope.

  Before Tylar could even turn, the top of the flippercraft exploded away in a great gout of swirling flame. A wall of heat knocked them all off their feet. Krevan was the first back up, scooping Dart under one arm, dragging Brant by an arm.

  “Go!” he shouted.

  They were all running as fiery planks fell, raining down into the loam. It was sheer luck that no one was struck. Once clear, Tylar counted heads. Too few.

  “Horas? his men?” he asked.

  Krevan shook his head. “The arrows…bore a dark alchemy of loam, anathema to air. Captain tried to tamp the mekanical. Save the ship.”

  The pirate turned to Tylar. Fire shone in his eyes, burning with the promise of revenge.

  As if challenging this threat, laughter carried to them, floating out of the mists above, as if from clouds themselves.

  Brant stepped to Tylar’s shoulder. “The Huntress,” the boy said, naming the true source of the amusement, hidden up in the mists, aloft in her castillion.

  Her words echoed down to him, powered by Grace.

  “Welcome, Godslayer…welcome to Saysh Mal!”

  15

  A SCRATCH AT THE WINDOW

  “ARE ALL THE TOWNSFOLK SECURE?” KATHRYN ASKED.

  Keeper Ryngold nodded. “We’ve turned the Grand Court into a makeshift inn. The accommodations in the amphitheater will be nothing more than a stone bed and a blanket, but it’s warm and out of the winds.”

  They spoke in private outside the door to a gathering room midlevel in Stormwatch. She heard the murmur of voices beyond the door. She was to meet this morning with representatives of the retinues from the various realms. It was her current role here in Tashijan. No more than innkeeper, settling disputes and addressing concerns of those under their roof.

  Warden Fields had even banned her from the strategies in the fieldroom. If you see little reason to keep me abreast of your plots and plans, then there is little reason for me to do the same. Normally a castellan could not be so easily cast aside. As they usually arose out of the Council of Masters to fill that high seat, a castellan had the backing of all the masters with their alchemies and knowledge. No warden would dare treat a castellan so dismissively.

  But Kathryn did not have the support of the Council of Masters. If anything, she had gained their enmity as well. Especially Master Hesharian. He had been more purple of face than even Argent, and had offered no objection to her being shut out of the fieldroom.

  Still, it could have been worse. She could have been locked up for treason. After Tylar and the others departed by flippercraft, she had stood behind her decision. If the storm gods wanted the Godslayer, then better Tylar be sent away. His flight might draw off attention. She justified her secrecy by relating what Tylar had found in their cellars, evidence of some collusion between Tashijan and the daemon army below. It was beyond mere chance that Mirra nabbed the skull shortly after those in the fieldroom learned of its existence. Even Argent had glanced around the table then. He was no fool.

  So she managed to keep herself free of bars and locks.

  But little else.

  In fact, she had been the last to learn about the emptying of the town that huddled outside Tashijan. Argent had sent a good portion of his knightly force beyond the walls to shepherd the people inside. The townsfolk swelled into Tashijan with stories of the storm closing down upon their ho
mes, whispers of strange beasts seen behind swirls of snow, of bodies found frozen and ripped.

  Upon hearing this, Kathryn had gone under cloak to see for herself. The storm had tightened down upon the shield walls of Tashijan, swallowing up the outer village. There was a savagery and fury in the winds, almost tasted on the tongue. And despite the additional burden and loss of life, the raging uplifted her spirits.

  The anger here could mean only one thing: Tylar and the others had escaped. The storm god tore into the town in his fury, closing tighter around Tashijan.

  But so far that was the only change. Over the past three days, the siege had stretched with a deceptive calm. Argent had fires blazing again throughout the lower levels of the tower. He had even bricked up the tunnel behind the Shield Gong in the Grand Court as it stretched down into the Masterlevels. Yet there had been no further move by Mirra.

  It was as if both sides were holding their breath, preparing for a final assault. But how would it strike? In what form? Or would they be merely starved out? Pondering this worry…

  “How are we doing on food and fresh water?” she asked the keeper of the towers.

  “Lucky the warden had planned a grand series of feasts for the regent’s knighting,” Keeper Ryngold said with a tired grin. “Our ice lockers and foodstores were heavily fortified prior to the attack. We’ll make do for the moment, but the townsfolk will stretch us thin.”

  “We’ll have to manage.”

  “Of course,” he said with a nod to the door, “you’ll have to convince our esteemed guests inside there that the heft and variety of their meal boards may be less than they are accustomed to enjoying.”

  She sighed. “I’ll do my best.”

  With a slight bow, Keeper Ryngold departed. She watched him move down the hall, admiring the man’s fortitude. In many ways, here was the true warden of the towers.

  And at least he was still speaking with her.

  She turned back to the door, took hold of the latch and her patience, and pushed into the crowd inside. The gathering room was one of the teaching halls, lined by two long tables, with an elevated stage at the front. Lamps flickered along the walls.