The Origin of Storms--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Three, page 46
Her throne knelt. It bowed down, though somehow her chair stayed level. The genuflection brought the brow to earth, so once she stood, she had only to step down to stand on the flagstones. There was no snow anymore, and even the glistening wetness was steaming off the ground.
“Oh, screw it,” she said. She stripped her gloves off, one by one. “Ravana’s as good as dead. And me … I quit. The beast can spin its own lies and fight its own wars. I repudiate it.”
The monstrous throne shuddered. Without straightening, it collapsed like an arch with the keystone pulled, slumping into a horrible pile of bodies. Ravani stepped back, as if it now disgusted her. She just looked like a woman now. The echoes of other beings, other possibilities around her faded one by one.
The Gage thought of lights flickering out in the windows of a distant city.
The Wizards and the Dead Man came up behind her, picking their way around the small mountain of dishonored dead. The Dead Man looked as if he were about to grasp Ravani’s elbow, but perhaps he caught the air between the sorcerer and the Gage. His hand dropped back to his holstered gun.
A scurrying sound reached them, like the skitter of crab feet on rocks. The Gage wished he had eyes to close, or that he could not see behind himself as plainly as in front. There was an object cresting the next hill to the south of them. A thing like a storm cloud walking on legs of rain and lightning—but solid, quite solid. And coming from the direction of the poisoned desert where the dragons had fought and died. And rendered their mortal energies bound up in the fused glass they left upon the murderous plain.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Ata Akhimah. “What the hell is that?”
“The Many-Legged Truth,” the Gage replied. “You didn’t answer who sent it after me. You, was it? Or the other one?”
“You see, the thing is,” Ravani finished, as if no one had spoken in between, “I can’t fight the beast. It won’t let me. And the beast? It can fight its own wars.”
The Gage turned, his foot dragging an arc of sparks behind him. The grease in his joints was loose and fluid in the heat. Sparks landed in the gaps, and between two ticks of his gears, he was wreathed in a thick, greasy fire.
He began down the hill toward the walking city, which was running before a poisoned wind.
Said he, “So can I.”
* * *
The wind was enough to bear the weight of Sayeh’s arm when she lifted it. She was glad of the goggles Ata Akhimah had given her, and glad to have had Mrithuri’s spares to offer to the anchorite. They flew side by side, shoulder to shoulder across the bearded vulture’s pale neck. The naked sun burned her skin where cloth didn’t cover it. She wished for a hat, not that a hat would have withstood the wind of their passage.
She was aware of Vara’s mind and intention, his confusion at finding himself so vast. She felt the wind moving the surfaces of his feathers. It was not so different from riding inside Guang Bao.
The sun did not dazzle the vulture’s eyes, so Sayeh closed her own.
“Hold on,” shouted the anchorite. “This will be unpleasant.”
Sayeh, watching with Vara’s sight, did not see what happened on his back. But the sky tore open before him, as if somebody had punched a blade through paper and ripped it wide. Beyond lay cold blackness strewn with icy stars. “Hold your breath!” the anchorite called.
Sayeh, hastily, did.
At her urging, Vara plunged into the gap in the sky.
After the heat of the revealed sun, the cold struck her like a wall. She managed not to gasp. Her eyelashes tugged as rime tried to stick them together. Vara’s squeal of protest sounded thin and cold, his wingbeats muffled.
There was no up, no down, no sense of gravity. The stars wheeled around them as if they fell, but Sayeh had no sense of spinning, of momentum. It was as disorienting as being tumbled by a wave. She buried freezing hands in her armpits and tried not to lick her lips.
How long could she hold her breath? How bad would it be if she didn’t? Vara was breathing, but she could feel the cold, thin air searing even his nostrils. Sayeh went lightheaded.
The cold stars spun.
37
Kyrlmyrandal wheeled at the apex of her thermal. For a moment, Himadra knew what it felt like to be a thunderhead, spilling off the top of the updraft, swept sideways in the wind. He held himself stiffly upright, grateful now for the cold that numbed him, pressing his arm against the stabbing ache in his chest for support.
From what he could see from there, the Good Daughter seemed briefly to be gaining ground. While the beast was distracted—clawing gobbets out of its own self and hurling the dragonfire-touched stuff into the ocean—she was holding her own, winning back a step or two. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised the fight was in such close equilibrium. The Good Daughter and the Bad Daughter were sisters, after all.
The Bad Daughter’s incandescent spear flickered in her grasp like shafts of sunlight falling through leaves. It fell here, then there, without seeming to pass through the space between. As Kyrlmyrandal folded her wings and fell into her next pass at the beast, Himadra saw how the spear’s shining point scored the basalt plateau where it missed the Good Daughter, leaving smoking gouges behind.
The Good Daughter danced and parried, blades in four or six or a dozen hands, her impassive face with its shining eyes the image of Nizhvashiti’s. Himadra could just make out the tiny form of the Godmade inside her, its hands resting on crossed legs, its head bowed motionless. Each of the goddesses had come into the world through a physical avatar, but while the Bad Daughter had apparently subsumed and remade Chaeri’s body into her own enormous form, the Good Daughter seemed to be reaching through her ansha.
Himadra’s chest stabbed with every breath. Wetness bubbled into his mouth. He knew without wiping at it that it was blood.
The beast loomed large beneath them. It turned, eyes like cinders burning deep in ash, and one arm as long and gray as a stormfront hurtled toward them.
The dragon’s ribs swelled as she drew in a huge breath.
“I hope you have a plan!” Himadra yelled, and blood blew back on his goggles. He didn’t try to wipe it away, knowing that would only make it worse. The wind drew each droplet into a hairlike streak.
Kyrlmyrandal’s answer was to backwing suddenly, with a force that rocked Himadra against the belts. Something small in his wrist snapped, and his left thumb too. He screamed out loud at the tearing sensation in Kyrlmyrandal’s wing, a pain that overwhelmed his own. More blood blew into the wind and was whipped sideways this time. Kyrlmyrandal hung in the sky, starting to sideslip as her torn wing luffed.
She threw her held breath out like a singer exhaling from the diaphragm. He felt her body collapse, constrict from back to front, even with the wooden saddle isolating him. The heat from the blue-white flames leaping from her jaws washed back and sizzled his beard. His skin drew tight. He shielded his face with his broken hand.
Kyrlmyrandal’s flames seared down, met the beast’s arm, and consumed the entire thing. It bellowed again, a sound Himadra thought would render him deaf for hours. His ears rang as if he had stood too close to a cannon. He held on to straps with his right hand as Kyrlmyrandal spiraled down and away toward the water. She did not beat her wings. Himadra could feel, through her, the wind rippling the edges of the tear. She fell like a leaf, controlling the limping glide, slipping back and forth as the ocean rose up to meet them. The beast turned, raging, its remaining limb clawing toward them. Kyrlmyrandal dodged the blow at the cost of altitude, jarring Himadra against the straps once again. He was too lost in her pain and his own to know if the jolt did any more damage, but it sure hurt.
The beast splashed in pursuit. Kyrlmyrandal arrowed toward the mountain, still high enough to clear the peak, but Himadra imagined that even if she could survive a flight through the volcano’s seething ash cloud, it would cook him alive.
Well, if that was the cost of defeating the beast, he would take it. It would be quicker than waiting for his lungs to fill with blood.
A little faith here, Kyrlmyrandal said inside his head, but he thought she sounded worried.
Then the sky in front of them tore open.
* * *
Vara fell out of darkness into blinding, endless blue. The heat of an Uncauled Sun whisked away the frost riming Sayeh’s lashes and rimming her nose. Her lips cracked and bled. She looked over at the anchorite. The old woman shaded her eyes with her hands. She had pulled her veil aside, and her peach-smooth face was split with a wondering grin. “I always wondered if I could do that,” she said happily.
Her smile melted. “Oh. That’s bad.”
Sayeh followed the line of her gaze. Off to Sayeh’s side of the great bird’s neck, a smoking island loomed, molten rock plunging down a cliff into the steaming ocean like the opposite of a waterfall. Titanic figures battled on the mountain’s flank, one with swords flashing and parrying the blindingly bright spear of the other.
Above them, but rapidly descending, was a speck Sayeh recognized as Kyrlmyrandal. And beyond her was a towering blackness, a twisted thing of smoke and lightning so huge, it seemed to swallow the horizon.
“Oh,” Sayeh agreed. “What are we going to do?”
* * *
A bearded vulture half as big as the dragon burst through the rip in the sky. The tear healed behind it. Himadra caught a glimpse of two figures on its back. Surely, Mrithuri could not have come there.
Kyrlmyrandal fluttered downward like a shot hawk, and Himadra kept his eyes open and prayed. The Good Daughter’s blades danced and wove, deflecting the point of her sister’s spear into the mountainside, into the beach, into the sea. The Good Daughter seemed to be bleeding now, if gods bled—a line on her cheek dripped light, and light ran down her shoulder and the length of one arm. The Bad Daughter seemed untouched, and she was laughing. The sound rolled over Himadra like the sound of a storm beating a hollow roof. It took the heart right out of him.
What did it matter? His body was failing. Kyrlmyrandal was falling from the sky. Even if they made it down and survived the landing, they were out of the fight. It was done—
The clamor of the goddesses in combat grew over the roar of the volcano and the roar of the beast. The beast splashed back toward the island, each step like a tidal wave, pursuing Kyrlmyrandal. Its single arm lashed out and fell short of Kyrlmyrandal but missed the vulture by almost no margin at all. Enormous feathers spiraled toward the water. The bird squealed and beat higher.
Suddenly, Sayeh was in Kyrlmyrandal’s awareness beside Himadra. He felt her gasp, her body contracting as she assimilated both his and Kyrlmyrandal’s pain.
“Ah,” Kyrlmyrandal said. “I thought feeding him dragonbones would be interesting.”
“You’re hurt,” Sayeh said unnecessarily. “No, never mind. The anchorite can open dragon-gates.”
“The Good Daughter is losing,” Himadra said as her sister’s spear-tip pierced her thigh. “Can you open the door they’re standing on? Send them back where they came from?”
In the brief pause, he could only assume that Sayeh was conferring with the anchorite. She said, “It’s already open. I suppose that’s how they got into the world in the first place. She also says there’s another small door just above the place where the lava is coming from—”
“Where does that go?”
“Ansh-Sahal,” Kyrlmyrandal said. “Our friends went through it not long since.”
“You didn’t tell me that!” Himadra gasped. It was hard to breathe. Filling his lungs might as well have been stabbing himself in the chest. Things bubbled and shifted inside him.
“The anchorite thinks she can make it big enough to trap the beast back in the Between Places. If we can decoy it there,” said Sayeh. “No, I’m sorry. She’s not sure she can, but says she’s willing to try.”
Kyrlmyrandal had found the updraft alongside the volcano’s plume. Himadra understood now what she had meant when she said to trust her. Her damaged wing had enough lift to keep her in the air, even climbing a little, as long as she balanced on the hot, rising air. It hurt, but what was pain?
“What are the downsides?” Himadra asked.
“She says—” There was a pause where Himadra could only assume she was asking the anchorite his question and receiving an answer. “She says the beast is powerful and might damage the Between Places and things that intersect them.”
Like the cloisters and the dragon-gates. Probably other things, too.
A warm breeze that reeked of brimstone tickled in his hair. No rush of wind now: they were rising with it, part of the thermal.
Sayeh continued. “And it might just tear through the other side of the door.”
“Where our friends are.”
“You’re the warlord.” Her mental tone was full of complicated emotion. Resentment, resignation. She’d never forgive him, but she was willing to respect his skill.
It was probably more than he deserved.
“It might give the Good Daughter a fighting chance.”
Kyrlmyrandal spiraled behind the column of ash. When she emerged, the beast was that much closer. It noticed the god-battle still in progress on the shoulder of the mountain. The Good Daughter, gleaming with silvery starlight, had rallied. Step by step she beat her sister back. The beast swung around and reached its clawed hand toward her.
Kyrlmyrandal bellowed, a warning that stunned Himadra’s already-ringing ears. The Good Daughter parried with a sword like the hook of a quarter-moon. But the distraction was enough.
Her sister stepped inside her guard and grasped her wrist as she was off balance. With a twist of her hip and a dropped head, the Bad Daughter hurled the Good over her shoulders and into the mountainside.
Trees splintered; the mountain shuddered. A gout of lava sprayed from the open vent. Himadra saw the shimmer of the dragon-gate the anchorite meant to open as a pale silhouette against red-black fountains.
The Good Daughter dragged herself back, trying to sit upright. Could a god be stunned? She struggled; that much was obvious. And her sister and the beast bore down.
“Do it,” Himadra said.
Kyrlmyrandal folded her tattered wings and fell from the rising column of air like a stone. The beast reached back, winding up to slam its remaining fist into the fallen goddess. The dragon zipped past its chest, slashing a stream of blue-white flame behind her. Himadra knew it was foolish, but he bent as close to her as saddle and harness would allow, as if lying along the neck of a horse as it charged through trees.
Now there was a wind.
They plunged toward the cliff face, toward the caved-in place where the volcano vented. Their path—their dive—seemed as if it would plunge them directly into the glowing spray. That would be a faster death than a collapsed lung too.
Himadra gritted his teeth and held on. They skimmed over the shining doorway, the beast’s clutching arm snatching after Kyrlmyrandal’s tail. The lava fountained—and again the hot air caught them, sent them up like a seed puff on a child’s breath. A child’s breath, if that breath were searing. Himadra’s skin stung and contracted as if from the burn of a too-close fire.
One of the figures on the vulture’s neck pointed toward the mountain, and behind them the door tore open wide. A cold wind ripped the veil of heat away, so bitter and unexpected that Himadra yelled out loud—a reflex he regretted, because the pain made him cough and the coughing filled his mouth with blood.
Kyrlmyrandal sailed out over the cliff edge, into the plume of steam from the lava pouring into the sea. It billowed around them. She turned on her good wing, rising. Himadra saw the beast’s legs and lashing tail as it vanished through the rent in reality.
“I think I’m done.” Kyrlmyrandal sank rapidly, wobbling on her downward trajectory. “This wing has given what it had.”
“We’ll do what we can,” Sayeh answered.
Himadra didn’t answer. He saw the ocean rushing up at them, the silvery sands of the beach. The long combers rolling over shallow water—
They hit with a splash that threw rainbows into the air. The dragon found her footing, folded her wings—as best she could—and breasted toward the shore. Her long body didn’t drag only because it was floating until the last few steps. She crawled a little way above the high-tide mark and let herself collapse into the warm sand with a sigh. Her tail still dangled in the water.
Himadra fought with his harness one-handed. The cracked thumb was swollen stiff, and moving the wrist brought sharp tears to his eyes. Somehow he pushed leather through buckles, helped as the sun warmed and softened it. After some time, Kyrlmyrandal recovered herself enough to raise one forefoot and lift him gently down between thumb and finger without stabbing him with her talons.
“We’re alive,” gasped Himadra, sprawling on the warm sand. The sun would begin to bother him soon. But for now it was a blessing. Lying flat on his back, his thigh straight, his pelvis cradled by the beach, he almost felt he could draw a full breath.
“Who’d have thought it?” the dragon said.
The mountain jumped. The sand under his back shuddered. He didn’t know if it was the goddesses still at war, or the volcano. Either way, there was nothing he could do about it.
“It might not be for long,” he cautioned.
Kyrlmyrandal snorted. “Let’s enjoy it while it lasts.” She craned her long neck up at the cliff. “I don’t think I can climb that.”
Himadra closed his eyes. “We did what we could. It’s somebody else’s problem now.”
38
The throne held Mrithuri like an embrace. Its power ran through her, filled her up. The snakebite had only been a foretaste of true strength, true clarity. This—this was what she had been born for.
This was what she had been made for.
She basked in it for a moment, knowing the urgency of action but feeling no anxiety about it. She would be in time. She was the empress in truth now.
