The Serpent and the Shattered Sword, page 3
Another came, only a shadow until the final moment of his return. Flynn took her other shoulder, dragging her forward, together. Her periphery revealed the fire sword, and the frosty tips of Emile’s hair.
“She’s mine!” a voice cried out from behind them, weak, but commanding. “How dare you take her from me!” The open wounds in Alira’s neck seared into her skin as he spoke. Though her mind screamed, it was too painful to cry out from her lips as the memory of teeth biting into her once more.
Swallowed by a hill rising from the snowscape, she was thrown inside its icy jaws. A trident was thrust out overhead and between her saviors, piercing the hide of menacing yellow eyes in the night.
A howl. An escape. And the caving of rock overhead.
The way was shut.
There was a nostalgic comfort to be found in sitting around a crackling fire, one accompanied by the smell of wood smoke. Alira leaned toward the blaze, only to be dragged back by the throbbing ache in her stomach. She pushed her tunic aside and revealed the bruise: a purple blotch, ringed in sickly yellow.
“We thought you to be dead.” The familiar, reassuring voice of her Lochlannion companion said as he sat next to her. Though it gave her a start, as quick as her heart jumped, her anxious worry evaporated.
“And I, you,” she told him, pushing herself up to rest against a wall of rock stacked behind her.
He untied a waterskin, warmed by the fire, and pressed it into her hands. “Apologies for it being nothing more, but it’ll keep you warm until we find you something to eat.”
Disoriented by the residual of the punch to her stomach, Alira hadn’t realized it growled with emptiness alongside the pain of the impact. She hadn’t eaten anything more than the hardtack stores Emile packed before leaving the lowlands. The bits of dried fruit the Evenglacians left behind before departing were spent after the first day.
“I believe this journey is damned,” Flynn told her, stirring the waning embers with a stick, one of the last bits of kindling he’d stashed in his pack. Even the broken shafts of arrows taken from the lower guardhouse, evidence of an Evenglacian massacre, were burned to maintain a pathetic level of survival. Only the arrowheads tied into a bundle beside him, remained.
Soon, the ancient weapons would be returned to where they came, and brought to the feet of the Receiver, with many questions needing to be answered.
“The resistance is an omen,” she told him, running her hands against one another, trying to coax out a trace of the heat deep inside herself. The faster she rubbed, the more her hands burned. It was an uncomfortable sting, but welcome. “We’re not supposed to be here, Flynn.”
“But we are.”
The sparks of the fire no longer rose above their creation, its embers needing every measure of heat to feed the last wisps of its life. It, like she, starved. Dying, though, of the two, it would face the quicker death, and she’d be the one left to the unrepentant cold.
“And it’s because we are here that we need to keep going. The night waits to close in on us, as the wolf waits at our door. Everything desires us, all but this barren land. But as they wait for us, so too does what we seek. Just below.”
It was the first moment her head perked up with good news since the departure of the Kelesians in the lower valley. “We’ve found it? Clerracia?”
“I’d prefer to say, it found us. A ledge skirts the exterior, leading down into the crater.”
Alira hopped up, wincing from the shooting pain in her stomach as it caught up with her. “But how?”
“The world is strange. Though it sought to drive us away, we happened upon it. Emile and Teora are outside looking it over. You should see it, Alira. There’s nothing like it.”
She braced herself along the cavern wall, hobbling toward the light ahead. Beyond the mouth of stone, clouds had parted, revealing a rare sky of blue. Distant, but home-like.
Emile turned at the crunch of her boots. He caught her arm, steadying her under the weight of armor and pain.
“You ready, blondie?” Teora shouted, grinning wide. She took Alira’s other side, slipping a careful hand against her ribs. The pain lingered, but when they stood atop the cliff together, it vanished beneath what she saw.
A tomb of ice and memory sprawled below. Wind screamed across its heights, rattling towers that pierced the low-hanging clouds. Its walls reached for the sky, frozen, but unbroken, as if the Clerracians were still down there.
The city waited. Empty, yet alive. Preserved in frost. It guarded its last secret, though the wielder of that final piece of the Illuri was gone. Only her tracks, leading down from the ledge, betrayed her intention. The ancient road clung to the rim of the crater, cracked, and snow-choked.
“I lost her yesterday,” Flynn told them, standing opposite Teora. “I tracked her boots to this cave during the night, but when I awoke, there were only her footfalls.” He kneeled, brushing his hand atop the tracks, erased from the night before. “There were answers she needed, only those she could find. I guess she wasn’t willing to be a burden. But her desires outweighed waiting for you, and so she left. I knew what hunted you, and wouldn’t leave you to die, so I waited.”
“He led you to us?” Emile asked.
“Yes, the howling was so loud even I was startled by it. I knew you were close and gave everything I had left to come to your aid. There was nothing I could do for your sister, Alira. But I could save you.”
“Then only one course lies before us,” she replied, lifting herself off Emile and Teora’s shoulders with a painful groan. “We have to find her.”
“Our answers lie before us, with no other step in our path to take,” Flynn told her, nodding toward the mountains surrounding the city claimed by ice, buried in the crater below.
“And it’s there,” Alira replied, “that we stand.”
Chapter II
Leave No Trace
EERILY SILENT. IMPOSSIBLY devoid of life. The weight of death and decay–what every civilization fears most–hung over the glacier, and even the Fates could not turn away. High above, the wind swept across the ice, its bellowing current breaking into a cascade of arctic air that slipped down to Alira’s exposed neck. It slithered past her collar and along her spin, forcing the hairs there to stand to attention.
A grave. That’s all this place was. Beneath the snow, hidden from view or lost to time, lay the bodies of thousands. Perhaps tens of thousands. Those who refused to abandon their city had taken up the role of its eternal keepers. Fortunate were the eyes of the Fates not to have witnessed their tragedy, yet every step toward the looming gate dared Alira to join the dead in their silence.
The hour’s march passed strangely quiet. Flynn and Emile rarely wasted breath, but it was Teora’s silence that unsettled Alira. The Pirate Queen wasn’t one to keep her thoughts to herself–unless shame from the night before still gnawed at her. Being carried from danger like a frightened child wasn’t an image Teora would suffer gladly.
“Or, it’s possible the frozen wastes have done what none of us could,” Siblina interjected, a note of disdain in her voice. “Keep her mouth shut.”
That isn’t very ladylike, Alira thought, unable to hide the smile the Goddess broke, echoing her own feelings–those she often believed manifested Siblina’s thoughts as her own.
“In earnest, can you remember a time when we went more than five minutes without her opening her mouth?”
She’s not the only one.
“I can still hear you!”
“Ugh,” a voice let you in disgust only two sets of feet ahead of Alira. “We’ve been walking this whole damned day away. Are we almost there?”
See what you did? Alira thought, trying to get Siblina to own up to the energy she’d released into the world.
“It’s only been the better part of an hour,” Emile told her, controlling her rising distress. “I’m sure if it’s getting tough for you, we could have you carried. You seem to be quite familiar with–”
“Look, Red!” Teora said, moving the quickest Alira had seen her all morning. Drawing a feigned bolt slinger from her waist, she had a finger pointed at the King of Talliers faster than Alira could blink. “It might be nice and all, being comfy and cozy being the Fate of Flame. In case you haven’t noticed, I got the water goddess. Water and cold don’t work so well together, understand?”
“There, don’t you feel better?” Flynn asked Teora as he patted her on the shoulder, passing further on down the trail.
The quick rush of blood did wonders as her pale cheeks flushed red. Whether it was a meteoric rise in temperature, or an embarrassment from Flynn pointing out the obvious, Alira couldn’t tell–positioned behind the group.
Even in her newfound laughter, there was a sympathy she’d harbored for Teora. None of them had breathed without watching the white wisps of air rise and evaporate as they’d escaped. The days were met with painful frost, bleeding into nights of suffering, and survival.
“You’re welcome,” Emile told her, moving her finger away from his face and giving her a bump with his shoulder. Alira knew he’d only had her best interests at heart, and the bit of chiding to elicit a measure of anger helped thaw the ice in her veins.
“You too, blondie?” Teora asked, seeing the smirk on Alira’s face. “Think it’s funny, do you?”
She shrugged her shoulders, both for her sake and the Goddess who brooded in her mind, waiting for the moment Alira would let her wrath loose on Teora. But she’d learned how to handle it, always remembering what Keola said. In a huff–having been ignored and invalidated–Teora stormed off, careful to keep her steps in line with the men in front of her.
“Well done,” Siblina said. “Not how I would’ve handled it. I guess a firm hand wasn’t needed, though you can’t say she didn’t deserve it.”
Alright, cut it out, Alira thought in response.
They’d lost enough time to the episodic bickering that the sun shifted toward the tops of her shoulders. Not wanting to lose the daylight, she needed to press forward. It was one thing to be trapped in the endless expanse of the glacier.
It was another to be stuck in the city of the dead.
She drew in a deep breath, repairing the layer of frost on the inside of her throat, with its icy sting sliding down into her lungs. In need of a moment to bask her face in the sunlight’s warmth, specs of falling snow grazed her cheeks, tickling the point of her nose. Yet there were no storm clouds overhead, and no discernible kicking of the breeze to usher the fallen snow across the open landscape.
It had to be–
Her hand shot to her waist, reaching for Tempest as her eyes were jarred open. Amid the commotion, Alira was drawn to the clatter of ice and rock tumbling down. Broken off and jarred loose from above.
A watcher.
A predator.
Her eyes caught the movement of blackened claws as they slipped back over the edge, doing their best to stay out of sight. In the joyous reunion she’d experienced in finding Flynn, the thought of Craven strayed from her mind–the longest it’d been freed of his memory since he tasted her. Her hand released the hilt of her sword, letting it fall with a metal clunk as the weapon hit its terminus in her scabbard.
“Catch your breath. First, we enter the city,” Siblina told her. “Then we trap the beast. We make it talk–”
And then we kill it.
She was the last to descend, the other three waiting just outside the monstrous triple archway. Atop it brooded every manner of horrific monster, those pulled from the nightmares of young children, and set above the gatehouse as the city’s guardians–protecting it from those who would tarnish the Clerracian legacy.
Deep in some forgotten crypt beneath her feet was where she imagined it waited, hidden under the layers of stone and ice that accumulated. A frosted shield that kept the prying eyes and ignorant minds of others away. Though perhaps having made the journey to the world’s end would earn an adventurer, the honor of taking what they please.
“What is this?” Flynn asked, looking up at the pillars of stone towering into the sky. Round rocks, hewn from the mountains of the north, and laid in with curved grooves, terminating in the stone platform above.
“It is the Gate of Valtisthar, the first lord of Clerracia. Constructed as a testament to his lover, Chiara.”
The response came from above in sheltered darkness, having been spoken from a set of eyes perched atop a broken pillar. Though startling at first, a comforting friendliness returned as a shadow in black dropped behind them, heeled boots clacking against the rough stone.
She withdrew a tattered book from beneath her cloak and flung it at Alira, not stopping to recognize their presence. “The personal journal of the Magistrate, a look at the last days before the fall of the greatest civilization known to this planet.”
“Zahra, you’re–”
She brushed past Alira, disregarding any need for pleasantries, or apology for the Fates she’d abandoned in the wild. Zahra traced her hands up and down the pillar, trying to recall a memory she didn’t have, from a dawn she never saw, or a path she’d never walked.
“This is all that’s left now: shadows and dust. The journal speaks of this city’s fall, yet it cannot relate its grandeur. That,” she said, winking at Alira, “will be for us to discover.” She turned her head over her shoulder, the strange iridescent glint still in her eye. “Aren’t you coming?”
Zahra led them forward, through the umbra of the gate, in footprints that had already ushered forth. The paths had wandered up to frozen doors, and back away. They traverse the mounds rising between the streets of the boulevard.
What a marvel it must’ve been in its day, Alira thought.
Light snow fell from the heights of the crater above. Winter’s waterfall, in what would be the autumn elsewhere. Light, and airy, it cascaded downward, settling into its rest on their shoulders as flakes turned into droplets and ran down their armor. Domes were scattered across the barren city, indistinguishable between a dwelling and a mound of snow.
As she wandered forward, following Zahra’s silent lead, Alira’s attention was captured by the expansive courtyards of each district. Large squares were broken off from the main road, and separated from one another, with large buildings erected in each center.
“We were militant once. All feared the Grand Army of Clerracia, and so they were forced to live in harmony with us. It was the grand center of the north, its crown jewel, as you’ve heard it called.” Zahra approached the steps of the central building off the open square to the right of the City Gate. “It was here that I happened upon it. The journal, lying dormant in a building purposed for administration.”
“And the others?” Emile asked, alluding to other buildings of the same intricate construction.
“Responsible for a distinct part of the city,” she told him. Pointing in different directions, to the sectors–as she called them–Zahra outlined the city, and each sector’s responsibility to the greater purpose of the realm. “Logistics, treasury, weaponry, manufacturing, all integral, but none more important than command.” She nodded to a grand building encased in silver that stood at the exact center of the city.
“You talk like you know this place,” Teora said, pushing her way through the group toward Zahra. “Two nights in, and you’re an expert. It’s hard to believe, given there’s not much to go on.”
Alira noticed the narrowing of her eyes, understanding her sister’s annoyance at the question. She shared her sister’s anguish, not wanting her understanding to stop. For it was here she stood, in the place no story spoke of in anything other than reverence and mystery. A legend, with no one left to speak its name. The journal would have to be enough, and the words of its long dead scribe, sufficient.
“Much can be gleaned from the book she holds,” Zahra replied, pointing to the arms of her sister. “It alone is our guide here, lest you wish to conjure the dead.”
The crunch of snow beneath heavy boots wasn’t enough to cover the gulp Teora buried deep down in her stomach. She shook her head, enough that the hat atop her rigid brown hair almost toppled off.
“Then I’ll continue,” Zahra said coolly, ignoring her. Teora kept her eyes down, cowed by Zahra’s Clerracian bearing. Without lingering in the administrative sector, Zahra led them back to the central street and halted.
“Each of you should come to know this place on your own. There are homes that haven’t been claimed by the frost. See for yourself the stories of my city’s people. They were legends, but human. No different from you, and me.”
“Then give us an hour,” Emile told her. “Nightfall is coming,” he said, casting his eyes up toward the sun, sinking to the far edge of the crater. “Shadow will fall faster than the night. We should make for the command building and set up camp for the night. Flynn, Teora, come with me. Let’s give them time to get caught up.”
Flynn didn’t wait for instruction. Alira watched him stride toward an open dome, his face unreadable, though this city was as much his birthright as Zahra’s. Emile guided Teora with him, hand firm on hers. She resisted, but allowed herself to be pulled away, never once meeting Zahra’s eyes.
That left the sisters, standing apart as the wind whipped snow between them. Silence pressed heavy. Her sister’s pursed lips told Alira she wouldn’t speak first.
“What happened to you?” Alira asked, drawing the hood of her cloak over her head before tucking her hands into the warm pits of her arms. The hood pressed against her face, and what should’ve been the warm, comforting feel of cloth was anything but.
“Do you remember, back then, before we left?”
Zahra took a moment, beset by confusion as she tried to recall a fleeting memory placed well behind her. Tirelle, the Heaven’s Fall, Talliers... Namelle. Before we left? The tree, before all of it.
“I remember,” she said, stirring a foot in the snow that was swept into a small pile against her boot. “You said you wanted to be with me when I sought this place. For it is my home and offers answers to my questions. Well, you are here. Do you still wish you had come?”
