Dark Sun: Prism Pentad 5 - The Cerulean Storm (9 page)

“Borys sent them for Rkard!” she called, pointing at her son. 'Take him and go!"

Caelum passed their son to Magnus. The windsinger started up the road with Rikus rucked
under one arm and Rkard under the other, and the dwarf raised a hand toward the sun.

Neeva glanced over her shoulder and saw that the inixes remained a dozen paces behind.
Normally, the lizards would have caught her in a matter of steps, but with a heavy cargo
dray harnessed to their shoulders, they were not as swift as usual.

“Sadira will help me, Caelum. You go with Rkard!” Neeva commanded. She pointed at the many
fissures lacing the hard granite next to the road. “The scorpion that stung Rikus was
possessed by a wraith. There may be more.”

Caelum stopped short of casting his spell and ran after Magnus, positioning himself
between the wind-singer and the wall.

“Hurry, Neeva!” Sadira called, her hand still on the rope.
“I
can't cast another spell until I drop this one.”

As Sadira spoke, a flurry of gray forms streamed out of nearby crevices and streaked over
to her. Before Neeva could cry a warning, the wraiths attacked, their immaterial hands
sinking into the sorceress's flesh as though it were air.

A cloud of black shadow billowed from Sadira's mouth. Her glowing eyes flared white, and
her ebony body trembled with the pain of the onslaught. She did not release the rope to
save herself.

One more gray streak flashed up from the valley below, slipping over the side of the Cloud
Road to join the attack on Sadira. Neeva looked down and saw that the wraith that had
animated the merchant's corpse was gone. It had been waiting to join its fellows in the
assault against the sorceress.

The wraiths had played her for a fool, Neeva realized. They had never intended to take
Rkard, but had only demanded him so that the company would concentrate on protecting the
child. Then they had struck at their true target: Sadira.

Behind the sorceress, Magnus was rushing back to help, leaving Caelum to guard Rikus and
Rkard, whom he had dropped upon the Cloud Road. Neeva did not think he would arrive in
time. She kneeled and felt the roadway shuddering with the heavy footsteps of the inixes.

“Drop the spell!” Neeva yelled.

Sadira shook her head and did not release the rope. Her emberlike eyes burned with pain.
She flung her free arm about madly, trying to shake off a pair of wraiths clinging to it.
Her ebony body had turned gray in many places.

“I'm fine!” Neeva yelled. The warrior pressed her hand to the pulsing road, directly over
the rope, and called, “Save yourself!”

Neeva faced the inixes and found the huge beasts upon her. The first beast snapped at her
head. She ducked, thrusting her sword into the lizard's maw. The reptile closed its jaws
on the steel blade and whipped its head around, ripping the weapon from the warrior's
hand. The second inix opened its sharp beak, pushing the first reptile aside.

The surface of the road suddenly grew cold. It stopped shimmering, and Neeva knew that
Sadira had dropped the spell. The warrior felt the bite of the rope across her palm, then
she was falling. She closed her fingers around the cord, all that remained of Sadira's
bridge, and caught herself.

The dray dropped onto the rope, causing a sharp jerk, then tipped to one side. As the
wagon fell past Neeva, the second inix snapped at her dangling legs. She kicked its beak
away, and the beast was gone.

When the warrior looked back to her companions, a sick feeling filled her chest. Sadira
was engulfed in a swirling ball of black shadow and gray haze, just transparent enough to
reveal that she had risen no farther than her hands and knees. The sorceress's limbs were
all shaking violently, while her weakly glowing eyes stared blankly at the road's slate
surface.

Magnus stood behind her, singing an angry, tempestuous song, while a hot wind tore at the
gray wraiths in a vain attempt to rip the apparitions away. Caelum was cautiously
approaching the pair, taking care to keep himself between the wraiths and his son.

Neeva hauled herself toward her companions, traveling along the rope hand over hand. The
two wraiths that had been animating the inixes streaked up to join the attack. As soon as
they rose above the surface of the road, Magnus's searing windsong sent them rumbling away.

They circled back to approach from below the surface.

Neeva reached the edge of the gap and transferred her hands to the slate roadway. “The
last two are coming from underneath!” she warned.

Magnus's shoulders drooped, and Neeva knew that the windsinger's spell would not penetrate
through stone. Nevertheless, he did what he could to help Sadira, directing his voice down
at the surface of the road. The hot gusts simply curled up into his own face. As the last
two wraiths passed through the stone directly beneath Sadira and joined the attack, Neeva
pulled herself onto the road.

A groan of exhaustion escaped Sadira's lips, and the sorceress collapsed to her side. The
ball of shadow and haze settled over her like a veil, leaving nothing exposed except her
flowing locks of amber hair and her ember-like eyes, now blazing a sickly hue of
greenish-blue. The murky shroud turned completely black, then flashed to gray, and began
to alternate between the two colors at rapid intervals.

“We've got to do something!” Neeva said.

“We can't,” said Caelum. “The wraiths are swarming her spirit. Any attempt to drive them
away will harm her more than it does them.”

“Then we have to attack them another way.” Neeva stepped past her husband and took the
Scourge from Rkard, who still held the enchanted sword.

“What will you do with that?” asked Magnus.

“I
saw Rikus slice a shadow giant's hand off with this blade,” the warrior explained. “Maybe
it will work against wraiths, too.”

Neeva studied Sadira's flickering shroud for several moments. Finally, the warrior felt
confident she could predict the changes. She waited for the pall to turn gray and gently
drew the tip of the Scourge along the sorceress's shoulder, hoping it would slice through
a wraith's insubstantial body without harming Sadira.

A vicious screech echoed off the cliff wall, and a gray ribbon flew off the whirling mass.
It shot up the Scourge's blade in a pearly streak, then expanded to form a gray, cloudlike
mass around the weapon.

The warrior thought she had destroyed a wraith. The gray cloud slowly assumed a shape
vaguely resembling that of a human female. A pair of orange eyes appeared in the head, and
the hazy figure began to shrink. Neeva felt a searing sting as the apparition passed
through her flesh, then the sword's hilt twisted in her hand.

“Get back!” she yelled. “The wraith's trying to animate the Scourge!”

The sword wrenched violently against her thumb and came free. It did not fall to the
ground, but floated tip-down in front of the warrior. The entire weapon had turned gray,
and a pair of angry orange eyes burned out from the pommel. The point slowly began to rise
toward Neeva's heart. Caelum started to reach for the hilt, but pulled back when a line of
blue frost shot down the length of the blade.

The Scourge stopped rising. The steel began to quiver, filling the air with an eerie,
high-pitched wail.

“What's happening?” Neeva asked.

“The Scourge's magic is too powerful for the wraith,” Magnus replied, a note of urgency in
his voice. “Perhaps we should move-”

Before the windsinger finished, the sword emitted a blue flash of cold. The blade stopped
vibrating, and the shrill wail of quivering steel was replaced by a howl of pain. Ribbons
of gray shadow flew in all directions, trailing droplets of sleet.

Neeva and the others threw themselves to the ground. The Scourge continued to float,
wobbling madly. The blade flexed almost in two. It straightened with a deafening knell,
and the sword's shroud exploded into a cloud of gray haze. For an instant, the road seemed
very quiet. Then the weapon clanged to the ground, and the cloud dissolved into a squall
of ash-colored snowflakes. The tiny crystals did not even last long enough to fall. In the
blistering heat of the day, they evaporated long before they reached the Cloud Road.

Neeva retrieved the Scourge, then gasped in alarm. The sword was as cold as ice, but that
was not what troubled her. The blade had lost its silvery sheen. It was now covered with a
dull gray stain that made it look more like tin than steel.

“What have I done?” she gasped.

Magnus came and stood at her side. After studying the sword for a moment, he gently took
it from her hands. “The wraith's touch has tainted the blade.”

“Can we fix it?” Neeva asked.

“Perhaps, with time,” answered the windsinger. He kneeled next to Sadira, who remained
covered beneath the murky shroud that Neeva had been trying to remove. “But for now, we
have more pressing problems. The giants are still trapped at Pauper's Hope, and the Cloud
Road remains impassable.
Once
the sun sets, we can't stop them from rampaging-especially with Sadira and Rikus both
unconscious.”

“Rikus might be well by then,” said Caelum. “As for Sadira...”

“Even if we can help her prevail against the wraiths, I suspect she will be unconscious
until morning,” said Magnus. “Still, we can hope. I see nothing else we can do.”

“I do,” said Neeva. She turned and looked toward Agis's farm, where the Kledan militia was
awaiting their return. “Find me a runner who can show my warriors the way from the
Asticles Estate to Pauper's Hope.”

Magnus folded his ears in doubt. “Your men are brave, but are they a match for giants?”

Neeva shrugged. “I don't know,” she said. “But I've learned never to underestimate a
dwarf.”

Sadira had gone to the Gray.

She stood on a narrow stairway, looking out over an immense abyss filled with a haze that
stretched from far below her feet to the zenith of the sky. It was the color of ash and as
still as the midday sands. There was nothing else out there.

The steps had been carved from a spire of porous white rock that rose out of the gray murk
far below. The stairway spiraled up the pillar to Sadira's feet, then continued above her
head with no apparent end. The column simply grew smaller and smaller, until both the
stairs and its tip vanished into the ashen haze far above.

Sadira recognized the pillar as the Pristine Tower, but did not think for an instant that
she had truly returned to the distant spire of white rock. If she had, the sky would have
been yellow-green, with puffy silver clouds drifting past. Lush thickets of bogo trees
would have surrounded the base of the column, and in the distance there would have been
fields of silver-green broom-grass. Instead, all she saw was a sea of ashen haze.

The sorceress studied the area carefully, searching for the wraiths who had attacked her
on the Cloud Road. The Gray was their natural home, and the whole point of their ambush
had been to push her into the ashen haze. Here, the spirits of the dead were dissolved and
absorbed into the Gray, much as corpses on Athas were slowly obliterated by rot and decay.
Some spirits did not suffer this fate, however. They were sustained by a force even more
powerful than the Gray: their everlasting faith in a cause greater than themselves. The
wraiths had dedicated themselves to Borys's service many centuries earlier, and they were
such spirits. It was clear that they intended to use their special natures to force her to
fight at a disadvantage.

The sorceress was far from panicked. While she would not be as comfortable in the Gray as
her foes, she knew more about this place than the wraiths realized. If they expected her
to assume they had killed her simply because she found herself in the Gray, they were
badly mistaken. The Pristine Tower served as ample evidence that Sadira was alive. A
reminder of the most significant event in her life, the spire of white rock acted as a
lode-stone for her spirit, holding it together and preventing it from dispersing into the
haze. Before they could destroy her, the wraiths would have to drive her off its steps.

Magnus's voice began to toll out of the haze. He was singing a ballad with melancholy
strains as loud as thunder and as sweet as morning dew. Though she could not understand
the words, Sadira quickly realized that her friend was trying to help her find a way out
of the Gray. Unfortunately, the music came from all directions at once, from the front and
back, both sides, above and below, even from inside her own head. She cupped her hand to
an ear, trying to locate the source of Magnus's sonorous voice. It would have been easier
to chase down the wind.

The sorceress pulled her slender stiletto from its scabbard. A magnificent weapon with a
blade of etched bronze and an iron handle beset with tourmalines, it had been in Agis's
family for centuries. She fished a piece of twine from the deep pocket of her robe and
tied it around the crossguard. The other end she looped over her wrist, then held the
dagger out at arm's length and let it dangle from the string. She spoke a magical
incantation that would make it lead her to the source of Magnus's voice.

Sadira felt a strange tingle in the hand with the twine, and its ebony color began to
fade. The sensation slowly spread up her arm. What she could see of her flesh, from the
fingertips to the wrist, paled to its normal tawny color, and the dagger began to spin
wildly.

Though she had not expected the reaction, the sorceress was not really surprised by it.
Normally her skin remained black with mystic energy during the day, then returned to its
usual color the instant night fell. But in the Gray, day and night did not exist. Without
the sun in the sky, her spell had drawn its power from the only available source: her
flesh. Then, unable to replenish what it had lost to the spell, her arm had remained pale.

Of more concern to the sorceress was the dagger. It continued to spin madly, attempting to
point in every direction at once. Sadira watched the blade for several moments. When it
showed no sign of settling down, she decided that her spell had failed, and she caught the
hilt.