Hinterland

  He motioned for the giant to pull the skiff farther back out of sight.

  Dart settled to a bench opposite him. She was staring as he rubbed his knee. “You’ll be killed,” she whispered, voicing his own worry.

  “The lass is right,” Rogger said. “You could barely drive the beastie off last time. Now that ghawl is wraithed and has the full might of the enslaved rogues feeding it.”

  “But I have the sword,” Tylar said. “Forged anew.”

  Dart met his eyes. “But a blade is only as strong as its wielder.”

  Tylar recognized an old adage drilled into every page and squire. It was probably one of the first lessons Dart had been taught by Swordmaster Yuril. He reached out and patted her knee.

  Leaning back, he faced the others. “It’s not like this is a battle we can walk away from.”

  Brant’s voice was grim. “Maybe Tashijan has already fallen.”

  Tylar shook his head. “Until I know otherwise, we must hold in our hearts that it stands.”

  He read the defeat in all their eyes as he stared across the boat.

  “I’m not saying I wouldn’t prefer a stronger body, but here is the weapon I must wield. If I could pull the naethryn from my body and cure it of the poison, I would. Until then, the stone helps.”

  Tylar remembered Perryl’s threat. You are riddled with the blood of Chrism. Nothing in Myrillia. Nothing in the naether can burn this poison away.

  “But why?” Rogger asked, drawing back.

  “Why what?”

  “Why does the stone help?”

  Tylar shook his head. “I don’t know…” He remembered how it felt when the stone ignited the sword, a sense of the world tightening and sharpening around him. “I think the stone rallies aethryn and naethryn together. Returning what was sundered. Meeryn’s aethryn must somehow support its naethryn.”

  “But not completely,” Rogger said, scratching his beard.

  “Not while it’s inside me. Like I said, if I could pull the naethryn out—”

  Rogger lifted a hand. “What if instead of pulling it out of you, we went inside of you? Right through that black palm print of yours.”

  Tylar frowned.

  Rogger met his eye and said one word. “Balger.”

  Tylar flashed back to being imprisoned in Foulsham Dell. The fire god of that realm, who had been curious about his mark, tested it with his hand. Instead of finding flesh, his fingers had fallen through the blackness. Balger had reached far enough in to get his hand bitten off by the naethryn inside him.

  “A god could take that stone,” Rogger continued, “and hand it to your naethryn. Then perhaps aethryn and naethryn could join more fully and burn the poison away, breaking its hold, like the stone did to the seersong in Miyana.”

  Tylar considered this possibility. Perryl’s words echoed. Nothing in Myrillia. Nothing in the naether. But what about something in the aether?

  Finally he shook his head. “Unless I can get one of those rogues to cooperate, we have no god to attempt it.”

  “No,” Rogger said, “but we do have a godling. And she is able to see farther into our mark than any of us.”

  Dart sat straighter, eyes wide as moons. “But I’ve touched his mark before. Nothing happened.”

  Rogger nodded. “But what about Pupp? He already walks between worlds. He delivered the stone to Tylar. Why not to his naethryn, too?”

  Dart shifted in her seat, slowly nodding. She patted her thigh, plainly calling her companion. “I think I can get him to do it.”

  Tylar held out little hope of success, but it would not cost much time to attempt it. For the plan he intended anyway, he wanted the flitterskiff pulled back a fair distance, back to the clear channel. So he had a few moments. He directed the giant to haul them back far enough until Rogger could ignite the mekanicals.

  While the two men worked, Tylar stripped open his cloak and parted the shirt beneath to expose the mark on his chest.

  “Let’s be quick about this,” he said.

  Dart held out her hand. “I’ll need the stone.”

  He nodded. He already had the sword pulled. Grabbing the hilt in one hand and the diamond in the other, he twisted them in opposite directions, popping the stone from the pommel. He felt the snap deep within him. Pain lanced out from his core and shocked through to the tips of his limbs. His sword hand spasmed, tightening again into a knobbed grip.

  Dart looked on with concern.

  Tylar passed her the stone, gone dull again. The sword’s blade had also blown itself out. She nicked a finger and daubed the stone. It flared again from rock to gem.

  She motioned with her other hand. “Lie across the bottom of the skiff.”

  Feeling slightly foolish, Tylar obeyed.

  Off to the side, blocked by the solid bench, Dart leaned down, reached out, and whispered. Tylar saw a ruddy glow flare up beyond the bench, bright in the darkness.

  Pupp.

  Over the bench’s edge, the creature rose into view, all molten armor and fire. He clambered to the top and stared down, the gem brilliant in his jaws, lit by inner fire.

  “Lie still,” Dart told him. “He’s not very comfortable about this.”

  Tylar remembered the burned stump of the squire’s arm—Pupp needn’t be the one worried here.

  Pupp lowered from the bench to Tylar’s shoulder. The nails of his paw sliced through cloak to skin, steaming hot. Tylar winced. Pupp crawled, belly low, toward the black handprint on his chest.

  Beyond Pupp, the others all gathered around.

  “You all might want to step back farther,” Tylar warned. He felt it inside him. A stirring down deep.

  Pupp lowered his fiery muzzle toward his mark. Somehow Tylar knew before the nose reached him. He tensed. He felt the naethryn writhe inside him, rising as Pupp lowered.

  Then the molten muzzle sank through his mark as if through shadow.

  Dart gasped behind him, echoed by the others.

  Then Pupp vanished from his chest, weight and burn gone.

  Everyone glanced at Dart.

  She pointed down to her legs. “Something spooked Pupp. Probably the naethryn. He’s hiding behind my cloak.”

  “But where’s the stone?” Brant asked.

  “He dropped it.” She pointed to Tylar’s mark. “Down there.”

  Tylar reached to his chest, to his mark, but found only skin and breastbone. He lay his palm atop it. The stone was inside him.

  Falling…

  He sensed the rock tumbling into a deep well.

  Then something rumbled even deeper inside him, a rushing up, a monstrous pressure building behind his rib cage. “Everyone! Get flat!”

  When the rising pressure struck the falling rock, the impact shattered through him. Tylar’s body leaped full off the boards, back arched, balanced on head and heels, arms out.

  Pain and pleasure trapped him in a clenched breath.

  He filled, swelling up, leaving no room for himself.

  Too large…

  Vision dimmed.

  Then finally, like a popped cork, the pressure broke through into this world. From his chest, smoke flumed with the force of a gale out of his body. Bones broke with the passage, unmoored, torn loose.

  He collapsed to the planks.

  Beyond pain.

  From his chest, more smoke sailed high. A storm of black and white, churning, mixing, coiling one to the other. Tylar noted wing and snaking neck, one black, one white, like two wyrms mating or fighting in midair.

  Aethryn and naethryn.

  Between them, a flickering lick of green flame danced and lashed, as if this were the fire that smoked them into existence. But Tylar knew it to be the burn of poison, Chrism’s hatred given form. The two wyrms writhed around this core of flame.

  At the very top of the column, a star glittered, reflecting the flame from a thousand facets.

  The black diamond.

  Slowly, as the two wyrms writhed, they smothered the fire between them, s
queezed and strangled. The flame lost its brightness, the fierce flickering slowed, and in another few moments, it expired with a final waft of putrefaction.

  With the fire gone, the smoke swirled with less violence, and the two creatures, both lost parts of the same whole, coiled and churned, trying to become one again—and failing—forever missing the third.

  Tylar heard two voices in his head, two expressions of grief, more thought than word.

  LOVE LOST HELP HOPE

  LOST LOSS PAIN FURY

  FREE FAITH LIFE WEEP

  FIGHT BITTER WEEP LOSS

  The litany flowed through his head, but was felt more with the heart, two views of the same pain and loss, neither able to get the other to understand, to comprehend, too foreign to the other, yet so alike.

  He recognized the first voice, one tinged with regret and hope. It had spoken to him before, revealing itself as naethryn. But the other voice was more embittered, laced with fury and cold inflexibility. He knew who the newcomer was, summoned by the stone, the smoky wyrm in white.

  Meeryn’s aethryn.

  Another voice reached him through his pain, one of urgency and plain word.

  “Bloody yourself, Tylar!” Rogger said. “Call back your dog!”

  As the thief placed a dagger in Tylar’s gnarled grip, he stared up. The whirl of two wyrms had become more heated as each tried to get the other to understand that which the other could not comprehend, so close but still sundered, the frustration building toward fury.

  Tylar dragged the heel of his hand across the dagger’s fine edge. He felt the bite of steel. Blood ran down his arm as he lifted it. He snatched at the smoky tether, feeling the fleshy substance, igniting fire under his palm. Then as usual, the brilliance shot outward and back, consuming the tangle and pulling it back. It fell back to him with the weight of water, crushing him to the planks, knocking the air from him.

  Then it was all gone.

  A hand reached out and snatched a rock falling from the sky. Brant had captured back his stone as it fell back into this world.

  Tylar sat up, inhaling a deep breath, his strength returned.

  No pain in his side. He used Rogger’s dagger to cut the wraps from his hand. The soiled scraps fell away, revealing straight and strong fingers. He flexed his fist and rolled to his feet. His knee—both knees—lifted him smoothly.

  The others stared at him.

  Cured.

  Off across the dark forest, a scream echoed.

  Rogger glanced back. “Looks like we’ve waked another beast.”

  Tylar bent down, retrieved the bladeless gold hilt, and held out a hand toward Brant. The boy passed him the stone. Dart had already freshened it back to a diamond with her blood.

  Tylar stared at Brant, the echoes of the aethryn and naethryn still stirring through him. He remembered Brant’s words when he held Keorn’s skull. With the stone at his throat, he’d spoken in two different voices, as if in argument.

  HELP THEM…

  LET THEM ALL BURN…

  FREE THEM…

  LET THEM ALL BURN…

  But they weren’t his own words. He knew that now.

  Through skull and stone, Brant had spoken with the voice of Keorn’s naethryn and aethryn. Two sundered parts just as conflicted. One seeking salvation, the other ruination. Naethryn and aethryn. Two parts of a whole.

  Tylar lifted sword and stone.

  He felt no such conflict within himself.

  He slammed pommel to diamond. The blade shimmered into substance. He heard the daemon’s cry echo away.

  He answered silently—I’m coming—and turned to the group.

  Though hale, Tylar was only one man against a host of ravening rogues and a wraithed daemon, leashed together for a common purpose—all set against him.

  And even with Rivenscryr, the hope for victory was slim.

  Still, Tylar remembered Dart’s earlier words, how a sword was only as strong as the man who wielded it. But what she had yet to learn was that a man was only as strong as those who stood by his side.

  He stared at those here.

  And he could imagine victory…against any odds.

  All was lost.

  Kathryn ran down the stairs as Stormwatch Tower quaked. The ice had reached their battlements. She had watched the outer towers fall, the wall tumbled and broken. Only one structure still stood.

  But for how long?

  Overhead, loud crashes echoed, glass shattered. Then an exceptionally loud boom rattled the stairs, deafening. But afterward, she heard a noise like a rumble of thunder, accompanied by a cacophony of rattling and smashing resounds. Something was coming, behind her, from on high.

  Kathryn drank more shadows and sped down for the next landing. Flying around a corner, she spotted two figures hurrying upward, slinking along one wall. They glimpsed her in a wash of shadows. The girl raised a fist to her throat. The boy stepped forward with a sword, plainly borrowed, from the way it shook.

  Raising an arm, Kathryn yelled, “Get off the stairs! NOW!”

  Laurelle responded immediately, despite her momentary panic. She grabbed the young wyld tracker’s arm and hauled him up. They reached the landing at the same time and ducked off the stairs.

  Not a moment too soon.

  An avalanche of stone bricks tumbled past in a deadly chute, rattling away, bouncing a few stones down the hallway. Kathryn herded Laurelle and Kytt back, then swept around with her cloak.

  “What are you still doing out?” she yelled, her ears ringing from the clatter of rocks. “Why didn’t you respond to the gong?”

  Laurelle strode beside her. “We were down below with Master Orquell.”

  Kathryn lifted a hand to her brow. “Yes…yes, Delia told me.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Where is the master?”

  “Dead. Sacrificed himself to stifle the witch’s power.”

  Kathryn remembered Mirra faltering, her staff’s green fire dying.

  Laurelle continued, speaking in a rush. “Then there were groundshakes below. The Masterlevels crumbled, and large sections collapsed. We ran. If it hadn’t been for Kytt’s nose, we wouldn’t have found a way out, but a part of the lower level had collapsed into the cellars. We were able to climb up.”

  Laurelle suddenly grabbed Kathryn’s sleeves. “We saw some of the black knights—but they ran from our torches.”

  Kathryn hurried them toward one of the entrances to the Grand Court. “They’ve been routed. But we have larger concerns.”

  Another tower-shaking boom echoed from above. It seemed Lord Ulf was tearing down Stormwatch, one level at a time, starting from the top.

  “I thought the groundshakes below had stopped,” Laurelle said, ducking a bit as the thunder echoed away.

  “They did. This is something even more dire.”

  At last, the doors to the Grand Court arched ahead, framed in black obsidian, topped by a faceted chunk of rock that represented the diamond on their sword’s pommel. She hurried forward and pounded a fist on the closed door.

  A commotion sounded and a voice called out. “Who goes there?”

  “Castellan Vail!”

  A moment later, a bar scraped, and the door swung open to a cavernous space, the tiered amphitheater of the Grand Court. Fires blazed. And the heart of Tashijan quaked with screams, shouts, crying, bustling. It was packed nearly shoulder to shoulder.

  Kathryn bulled a path to the stairs that led down toward the bottom of the amphitheater. Laurelle and Kytt followed in her wake. It was slow going.

  Then a pair of the knights joined them, shouting, “Make room for the castellan! Make room!”

  The seas parted, and they made faster progress down the crowded stairs. Still, fingers touched her cloak as she descended, hopeful, fearful. She had no time to reassure them—and at the moment, she wasn’t sure she had the strength to lie to them, at least not well.

  Below, Kathryn spotted Argent and Delia, along with the large mass of Hesharian and the bronze form of Gerrod
. Several other Council masters gathered around the central pit. Hearthstone, the fiery core of Tashijan. The ancient pit dated back to the time of human kings, but it had come to represent Tashijan’s flaming heart. The pit danced high with a fresh pyre, smoke spiraling with alchemies.

  “Make room for the castellan!”

  The shout echoed below. Faces turned.

  Gerrod spotted her first among the surging throng. He lifted an arm. She hurried down to him, leading Laurelle and Kytt.

  Reaching the floor, Argent came with Delia.

  “He comes,” Kathryn said, as more booming crashes echoed, like the footsteps of a god. “Keep the fires high. Our only hope lies in the heat of our alchemies bolstering this last picket, holding our fire against Ulf’s ice.”

  Gerrod nodded. “We’ve added loam alchemies to strengthen the walls, too, but—” He shook his head.

  She reached for his arm and squeezed, wishing it was not just armor that met her touch. “We will hold strong…and not just with our alchemies.”

  A violent quake rattled, sounding as if all of the tower above had crashed atop them. Kathryn looked up, willing it all to hold. Just a little longer.

  Large chunks of plaster and rock cracked from the roof and tumbled to smashing ruin among the tiers. People scattered, amid screams and blood.

  Overhead a massive block of stone broke free like a rotted tooth. It fell straight at them. Kathryn shouldered Gerrod to the side. Masters scattered. Argent grabbed Delia’s arm as she gaped upward. But she was still wobbly on her feet from the blow to her head.

  As Argent pulled, she tripped down to a knee.

  “Delia!”

  The stone tumbled at her.

  In a swirl of cloak, Argent clenched her arm in both of his hands and threw her bodily, wildly clear, spinning off a heel. He dove after her, but a moment too late. Even shadows were sometimes too slow.

  Argent leaped, but the chunk of roof shattered across his legs, slamming him to the stone floor. He lay flat, unmoving.

  “Father!” Delia cried and crawled over to him.

  An arm shifted, a hand wiped rock dust from the floor. Blood welled and spread from beneath the rock. Shouts echoed. Masters hurried forward.