The Bonds of Stone, page 27
A life chosen, just like those in the Vis outer villages. Quiet struggle, yes, but in that quiet a dignity, an independence.
She smiled. Wax would’ve lost his it a place like this. Too little action, too little drama.
Would she?
“If we’re lucky, we’ll have today,” Ami continued after her latest mouthful. “We’ll need to take what we can from here and move on.”
“To where?”
Ami’s eyes winced, flicked towards the door and its view of the slate sea beyond. “That’s the real question. We can try to circle the isle, see how far we can get before they catch us.”
“There’s a plan.”
“A bad one, I agree. There’s another way, but I like that even less.”
“Do tell.”
“Make our way up the crater wall and down the other side. Evade detection as long as we can. Get to the Aegis and plead for her protection.”
Ami returned to her soup, fished out another spoonful. Sawi had eschewed the utensils, drank from the bowl itself like everyone on Vis. Those free hands now found more warmth beneath the blanket’s folds, where nobody could see her fingers kneading.
“The Aegis doesn’t know who I am,” Sawi said. “It won’t—“
“I know it won’t work. They’d kill us. The Aegis doesn’t have power anymore. None that really matters anyway.”
“So what, did we do all this just to get an extra day tacked onto our lives?”
“Wouldn’t that be worth it?”
Sawi shrugged, “Guess I was hoping for more.”
Her own death remained a concept Sawi refused to consider. She’d come too close in that Najahn tower, and now that she’d found a slip of hope, going back to that terrifying miasma was a trip she would never, ever take again. Better to find her final destiny believing she’d stay alive. Better that.
“There’s one other,” Ami said. “One as likely to kill us as anything else, though maybe not by a Najahn blade.”
“You keep hinting at these things, Ami. Spit it out.”
“It’s because I don’t like the idea, and I’m trying to find another one.” Ami set the soup aside, remained hunched near the fire. “The mosses and supplies these towns survive on don’t just come from the ocean. I know, because I’ve lived on this isle for too long. I’ve walked it enough times.”
“Again, you’re talking around the point.”
Ami shot Sawi a glare, “Is everyone on Vis so rude?”
“We’ve got things to do.”
“There’s caves, then. One just up the slope from here. They’ll have barricades put up stall fiends, but we can go past them. Escape into the tunnels.”
Sawi laughed. A dire chuckle. “You must have the worst ideas of anyone I’ve ever known, Ami. Every single one’s going to get us killed.”
“Not for certain.” Ami shook her head. “The more I think about it, the caves make the most sense. We know they sprawl beneath the isles, the tunnels connect them all. It’s how the fiends get around. We could get to Tamas, Kance, or even Vis. After a few hours down there, the Najahn would never find us.”
The Dark Below. A whisper relegated to higher powers whenever Sawi heard it back home. Fiends lived there, strange things unseen and unheard. The domain of the Najahn, the Aegis, and the foolhardy. The one time Sawi had come close to the total darkness had been in that pool, that last innocent moment with Wax before the monster, before Svarde, before all this.
Could she face it again?
“There’s no ships?” Sawi asked. “What about running across the ocean ice? I’ve heard—“
“You’ve heard about games and dares from people who die trying. Besides, it’s still early Winter. If enough ice forms between Noctia and Tamas to try it, we’d have to wait another month. That won’t happen.” Ami stood, brushed off her ragged clothes, the blanket. Waved at the sole townsperson, an older woman, keeping watch. “The more I think about it, Sawi, there’s no other option. I’m heading for the caves. I’d suggest you come with.”
“We have nothing, Ami. Nothing. How’re we—“
Ami fished in her faceplate, popped out the light red Foti ruby. “This.”
An hour’s demonstrating the skar pulled half the town over in wonder, procured in trade fresh satchels, dry (as much as anything here could be) clothes, and provisions. Ami chose a vicious, serrated harpoon while Sawi, without much confidence, took a large knife meant for filleting massive fish. Fresh water poured from rain barrels and melted snow topped off new water skins. New coats, new boots, all made with animal skins thick and warm completed the ensemble, a heavy selection that had Sawi questioning how they’d manage to march anywhere for long.
“You’ll get used to it,” Ami countered, and because Sawi saw no alternative, she didn’t push back.
All that for a single skar, the ability to start a fire, heat a home, melt a stone with a little thought and focused effort. Both Ami and Sawi demonstrated the stone’s ability, focusing it as best they could on small actions for the townspeople, like heating soup or melting away an icy patch on a path. In its whispers, the Foti skar seemed less enthused about these mundane uses, but the stone was a stone, it would serve.
“Don’t get excited with it,” Ami said as a final warning after a lunch-time break. “You could hurt someone, yourself, or destroy a home. Work with it slowly, let it teach you, and don’t be stupid.”
“Helpful, Ami,” Sawi muttered, adjusting her satchel yet again.
How people went on long journeys with such heavy loads . . . On Vis, you could forage enough to not need so many supplies. You could never swing the vines with a pack like this.
“They’re making the trade,” Ami replied, nodding as one townsperson, eyes closed and holding out the skar in a clenched fist like the stone was some deadly device, made the air shimmer with sudden heat. The watching townspeople cheered, whistled, clapped the man on the back. “Just trying to keep them alive.”
Whether Ami’s rapid education would suffice, Sawi wouldn’t know. They started up the rocky cliff in the afternoon, leaving behind the buzzing town and the sea’s salty spray. Their new clothes kept the cold at distant remove, Sawi even starting to sweat with the climbing effort. Ami led, her harpoon’s butt end serving as a pocked metal walking stick. Silence settled, punctuated only by seabird cries and the scattered noises back towards the town.
Yet, far from the quiet the previous night, when death seemed so close, Sawi did find that hope. One skar, one trade, and they’d gone from ruined to having a chance. As for the caves, the jittering edge the idea brought to her nerves, Sawi would confront that when they stepped inside those awful tunnels.
She would face her fear, and—
“Stop,” Ami said, just before Sawi would’ve walked right into her. “Something’s off.”
“Everything’s off, Ami.”
“No.” The Guardian looked left, right. Hesitated. “The cave’s just ahead, but something’s not right.”
“Some mystical Guardian sense telling you this?”
“Ever feel like you’re being watched?”
Sawi started to answer, to say that something was always watching you in the jungle, only for Ami to snake an arm back and pull the Vis to the hard ground. With the pack, Sawi hit hard, a curse bubbling up and dying down as a black dart whistled by overhead.
“What was that?” Sawi said as Ami shirked off her pack in a smooth motion, the Guardian swinging the satchels before her like some makeshift wall.
“Death’s opening move,” Ami replied. “Draw your knife, Vis. We’ve been found.”
Chapter 45
A Fight In Fire
Svarde and the Dead King made the impossible charge. Flanked by flimsy corpses, the pair barreled like a spear’s point towards the tunnel and the crackling flame. For Svarde, the reasoning lay simple: Kivi was back there, and dying beside his ferrite was worth more than a lingering decay without her. The Dead King’s motives were a mystery, but perhaps he was tired of his time in the endless dark.
Regardless, the massive lord and his equally massive blade made the first contact against the fiends, a wide crosscut slicing through a spinning flail and drawing a line across the fiend chest behind. Svarde, searing warmth on all sides, broke for a third construct, metal wheels and gears sliding its turret their way. He jumped, digging his axes, recovered from their first victim, like claws into the burned black armor plating on the thing’s front. The barbarian’s own leathers sizzled at the touch, an unwelcome sensation Svarde ignored in an end-over-end climb up the rolling thing’s front.
The turret sat before him, nearly Svarde’s height and ready to box him over with its smoking nozzle. Svarde ducked the rotating cannon, hacked at it once with an axe and found his weapons lacking. The rebound, the sparks, brought on a wince, a second’s splash of the world around him as Svarde tried to find a next move.
The fight embroiled seven fiends around the twin machine carcasses murdered in the initial assault. Those fiends whipped their flails, swung their four-armed fists, or kicked at the smaller, withering corpses. Yet those same bodies, when they could, picked themselves back up, found broken spears, stones, or shattered chain links and charged back in to poke, stab, or simply dive on the fiends. Distracting, at times deadly, the Dead King’s shamblers spared the pair’s lives.
At least for the moment. Even as Svarde broke for the turret’s link, where the cannon connected to the bulky round top, the cavern brightened with new flame. The glow’s source, caught in Svarde’s view by chance as he charged the turret, seemed the same as the other fiends, only larger and clad in what appeared to be flowing rubies, a crimson garb melting and re-forming itself. The monster filled the tunnel’s width, bore twin, shorter flails in its two larger arms, and, with the dazzling display crossing its obsidian crown, seemed to be directing the assault.
“There’s our goal,” Svarde muttered, ducking again beneath the nozzle as the construct swung it back. A desperate defense, better against, say, those larger fiends than the smaller human. Not that Svarde was complaining.
The turret’s home offered a plated door across the top, nearly blocked by hardened ash. Svarde saw no way to open the thing, figured his own assault was lost, until a scurrying, stone form snorting her way up the construct’s rear birthed a grin.
“Kivi!” Svarde shouted to nobody, to everybody, a familiar wellspring of the sort that’d come up every time he, Ami, or Catya beat the odds rising up in his scalded heart. “Have any appetite left?”
The ferrite, claws doing a better job than Svarde’s axes, joined the barbarian on the construct’s top. The machine, deciding the pair couldn’t be whacked by its gun, refocused its efforts on the Dead King, who was busy putting the final stab in yet another fiend. The nozzle began to glow its pre-pouring orange, only for Kivi to dash around Svarde to the cannon’s joint with the machine’s body. The ferrite opened its stone jaw, bit down, and gouged out the metal.
And drew the wrong attention.
A fiend, just into the larger cavern and sweeping itself free of clinging corpses, turned, whipping its flail in a clearing swipe towards the ferrite. Svarde, bellowing a Foti curse, leapt at the strike, swinging both axes to catch the chain with body and edge. The barbarian’s weight, his blow’s force, bent the blow into a skittering bounce off the machine’s front plate, the flail’s metal head wedging itself against the turret, trapping Svarde against the construct.
Ribs may have broken, bruises and burns came through his melting leathers, but Svarde had passed beyond pain.
The machine trembled, what air Svarde could see shimmered. Kivi took another massive bite, the metal shards flaking around them.
An obsidian skull, ablaze with glittering stars, leered into Svarde’s view. The monster tugged at his flail, prompting a gasp from the trapped barbarian as the metal bit into his waist. Svarde tried to work his axes at the links, found them of little use with his arms stuck. He settled instead for another rasped curse, a sweaty glare at a fiend who no doubt didn’t care, didn’t understand.
Kivi bit again.
The construct fired.
Orange, red, black exploded in an arcing spray, one without direction, without intent. It splattered before Svarde, caught the reaching fiend in its obsidian face and sent the monster backward into a heavy fall. Glowing bits laced the tunnel’s ceiling, burning through hanging rocks to send them plummeting towards the ground. Some caught the Dead King and his current target, driving both into a stalemate as they assessed their newest injuries.
And Svarde, watching all this, found himself spared as the cannon lay to his left, the rivulets from its failed fire going far overhead or dribbling straight down into a ruined stream.
The barbarian laughed. A harsh cackle. A success, a minor victory in what seemed to be a lost war, but one he would claim nonetheless. The laughter turned genuine when Kivi, that invincible lizard, rolled down near him, steaming and covered in the glowing orange, her sapphire eyes as bright as ever.
She bit into the chain once, twice, three times. Snapped the links. Svarde pushed them away, tried to stand, and found he could not. Burns criss-crossed his waist, and anything beneath that lay numb, in pain so far beyond his comprehending that his mind shut it off. He seemed to be blocking more than that too, as Svarde found himself unable to pick up his dropped axes, hands no longer able to move well enough to form a grip.
As sure a death sentence as anything.
“Run, Kivi,” Svarde gasped, only to see the ferrite, stumbling now as the cannon’s gout melted further into her stone shell, knock her head against Svarde’s side.
He rolled against his own will, pushed by the ferrite along the machine’s front plate. The cave thundered, crackled again as the monstrous fiend and its ruby raiment found the fight against the Dead King. A battle the old Guardian would have to fight alone.
“I’m not going to—” Svarde started as the ferrite shoved him again, his voice cutting off as a newer, smaller form cut into view.
“Quit talking,” Maena snapped. “For once, you’ve got a good excuse to stay quiet.” The Rana captain, balancing as clean as ever on the dead construct’s sloping front, slipped her shoulder down for Svarde to ride on. “My worse half wouldn’t let me leave without saving your dumb self, so let’s not disappoint her.”
Worse half?
Svarde had questions, couldn’t voice the answers as their bedraggled trio shambled off the construct’s front and broke to the cavern’s far side, heading deeper into the large chamber and away from the losing war.
The Dead King’s remnants were now truly that, battling a lost cause with their battered dozen against half that many fiends, with more burning bastards coming up the tunnel behind their apparent leader. The Dead King seemed to be standing yet, playing a desperate defense against the larger demon’s twin flails, those flowing strikes bashing the great blade like a devil’s drum. Screeching metal, sparks, and the endless furnace searing the air sizzled in Svarde’s cooked ears.
“Here’s the plan, Foti,” Maena said, continuing to keep them on the cavern’s outside wall. “We get back to that city, hole up behind that gate, and pray Jochi gets here in time to save our skins.” She looked at him, Svarde meeting her eyes with his crusty face, and she swore. “You look like shit, Svarde.”
He tried to smile, found his lips too crusted to move beyond a shiver. Kivi snorted, weak and desperate.
“Don’t tell me we’re not going to make it,” Maena said, beginning the desperate heave across the cavern’s center, over bodies burned and broken through uncounted decades. “I didn’t come back just to die here.”
The Dead King didn’t hear her, but they heard him. A wrenching yell, one both surprised and, Svarde thought, relieved. Their eyes turned his way as the great fiend broke the Lost King’s guard, slipping through with a flail’s strike to smash the old Guardian’s sword arm to the side. A second, wild swing cracked the Dead King’s thick helmet with enough force to throw the soldier back into the cavern. The helmet shattered as the Dead King struck the rocky floor, his hand flying behind, the great blade whistling through the air to slide along the stones.
“Well, if that isn’t the worst luck,” Maena muttered, continuing to pull.
As the Dead King lay there, the cavern seemed to quiver, a sensation Svarde didn’t understand until he noticed the bodies, those that yet stood, those that crawled along the ground, and those that tried and couldn’t, crumpling into that final stillness. Leaving only the fiends at the tunnel’s entrance, their brutal burning figures, watching, as if suspecting a trap.
“C’mon,” Maena cursed again, “can you not help me at all?”
Stride by stride, with Kivi lifting Svarde’s feet in a gentle bite, they made their way across the cavern. Svarde himself found his breath coming short, his eyes growing spotty, the pain dwindling away into an icy end. He wanted to tell Maena to drop him, to let him go, but he couldn’t say a damn thing, could only stare in blurred silence as they passed by the Dead King’s body.
The shattered helmet showed a face so pale with time, skin pallid and beyond death, already shriveling with decay’s dam broken. The man’s eyes closed, wrinkled, shrunken. A long barred peace?
No. An ill rest, one Svarde figured would be better brought with fire’s finality than waiting here in this broken cavern. That, at least, these fiends could deliver.
“Ah, damn it,” Maena said, drawing Svarde’s fading glance up. The fiends flared, their leader breaking into new sparkles across its obsidian skull. Burning feet strode forward, fanning into the cavern, with the ruby-coated leader angling straight for their trio. “Sorry, Svarde. Tried, but I don’t think we’re going to make it.”
