Lance of Earth and Sky (The Chaos Knight Book Two) (5 page)

Vidarian smiled in spite of himself, liking the old man even if he was bringing bad news. “My name is Vidarian Rulorat,” he said. “I believe you were looking for me?”

“Well,” the old man said, eyebrows lifting as he turned and extended his hand. “I am indeed. Alain Malkor, messenger for His Majesty. It's an honor to meet you, I'm to understand.”

Vidarian clasped the man's hand in both of his own briefly, but shook his head. “I don't know about that. But you've been a long way from the Imperial City to do it.” He didn't quite let an edge creep into his voice. “The last representatives of the emperor I met were—not quite so friendly.”

“That's the way of it, isn't it?” Alain said, his voice so light Vidarian was sure he had no idea that his own fellow Sky Knights had attacked Vidarian and the gryphons. “But strange times are about, and stranger rumors. Half the Court of Directors dropping dead, beasts changing their shapes.”

“What?” Vidarian asked, his heart gone cold. “The court—of the Alorean Import Company?”

“You haven't heard,” the old man said, voice rough with compassion, and maybe a touch of rebuke. “This far out, I suppose it makes sense. But yes, damndest thing. Those old men were held together by their healing magic, you ken? Without it they keeled right over. Happened to a lot of people, but the gossip's about the rich ones, you know.”

Vidarian felt as though his heart had turned to lead in his chest.

*
Huh,
* Ruby said. *
Hadn't thought of that. Makes sense, though. Always knew something bad was going to come of using magic that way.
* Her tone had the edge of Sea Kingdom superstition, but Vidarian was in no condition to correct her.

“Shows the imperial family's wisdom, never going in for that stuff,” Alain said. “A man living six hundred years—hardly right. Maybe that's why he wants to speak with you.”

“The emperor?” Vidarian barely managed to tame his voice down from a squeak.

“Yes indeed,” Alain smiled, reaching up to pet the velvety nose of his steed, which seemed to have calmed down a bit. “I come with an imperial summons, didn't they tell you?”

“They didn't,” he said numbly, thoughts racing.

*
What are you going to do?
* For once Ruby didn't have a quick remark.

“I'll—leave in the morning, of course.”

*
My ship, and my body,
* Ruby growled, *
are in the other direction.
*

Would you have me ignore the summons, and have us all cut down by Sky Knights halfway there? Perhaps you think you'd have better luck asking one of them after we're all dead.
He hid the heat of his thoughts behind a false mask and gratitude for the messenger.

Alain smiled again and extended his hand, which Vidarian shook out of reflex. Then he mumbled an excuse, something about needing to pack. Ruby hadn't answered, and so as he retreated, Vidarian continued, guiltily,
The emperor can't want much, or he'd've sent more than a broken-down old warhorse to fetch us. We'll send word to the
Viere
as soon as we reach the city.
He turned to go find Thalnarra and Altair.

But just as he reached the edge of the campfires, someone else found him.

When he turned and saw her approaching, Vidarian froze. She was moving determinedly toward him, and still he found himself paralyzed. What were they, now?

“We should talk,” Ariadel said. Her face and body were still wan from illness, but there in the camp, speaking to him after so long a silence, it seemed she had never been more beautiful. Or more alive. He fought against his own reaction, but what welled up in place of that wordless gratitude was something less productive.

“I'm not going to apologize.” The words poured out before he could stop them. And once they were out, even with Ariadel's face flushing with anger, he couldn't take them back.

“What?” The question was pointed, absent any confusion, an invitation back from the brink. Part of him ached to seize it.

“I'm not going to apologize,” he ground out the words again, though the thunderous look she gave him warned him not to, “for opening the gate. For saving you.”

“That's not—” she began, then flushed again, too angry to speak. He nearly quailed; in spite of everything, he had never seen her this angry. “There's something else.”

He waited.

“I—” she looked up again, into his eyes, and for a moment they were themselves again, and whatever she was about to say was the most important thing he'd ever heard.

And then her face clouded over with the mysterious expression she'd had for the last two weeks, since the gate, and she was gone behind it. “I'm going with Thalnarra.”

He recognized a tack when he saw one, but knew that asking her wasn't going to get the answer now. And with that realization all the rest came crashing down on him again, the mess that he'd made of things.

//
What's this?
// Thalnarra's voice, all hearth-warmth and sweet spices, filled his mind. //
You're going with me? But I'm going with him.
//

“You are?” they said together, then exchanged another awkward look.

//
If he's going into the lion's den, he can't go with only the guardianship of this air-addled lightweight,
// she indicated Altair with a flick of her beak, who crouched near one of the campfires with a copious pile of huge fish. Altair didn't look up from his meal, but made what Vidarian assumed to be a rather rude gesture with the feathered tip of his tail. //
Besides,
// she added, her voice like a waft of cinnamon, //
we look better in pairs.
//

“That settles that, then,” Vidarian sighed, not unhappily. “If she's going with me…?”

“I'm staying here,” Ariadel said. “With the rest of the pride.”

“If I may—” Calphille said shyly, and Vidarian noticed her for the first time, framed against one of the fires. She was holding the wolf pup, to his surprise. “I'd like to come with you as well.”

Ariadel shot him a look that was half fury and half disbelief, then stalked off without a word.

He started to follow her, then stopped, three separate times before he gave it up. Calphille lowered the pup to the ground and it scrambled over to him, staying low and nervous. Vidarian held back a sigh. “We'll leave first thing in the morning.”

T
he next morning Ariadel was nowhere to be found. The camp was large, and the surrounding area even larger, more accommodating to a person who did not want to be found than to the one searching. His companions knew not to press him as Vidarian let the minutes of the morning slip away, but when the sun crested even the tallest trees surrounding the camp, and he had checked their supplies five times, he motioned for them to depart.

*
I'm sorry, old friend,
* Ruby said, with a quiet hollowness that reassured Vidarian in spite of his sadness. Her sympathy felt deep and real, less fractured than her earlier thoughts. He thanked her wordlessly as he headed for the skyship.

Alain, the messenger, had left at first light, aiming to get as far ahead of them as he could. “So they don't misinterpret the gryphons back home,” he'd said, giving Vidarian a chill, but certainly the old man and his horse would be glad enough to get some distance between themselves and the pride of giant predators.

Somewhat to his surprise, Isri had packed her own bag and was loading it into the
Destiny
.

“I hadn't thought to ask you to leave your people,” Vidarian said.

“And so you did not,” she replied, the tiny feathers around her beak lifting with mirth. When they settled again, her eyes were bright. “They are well equipped to attend to those still lost. With your help, we have already subdued the most dangerous of my brethren who remained within a day's flight. I do my people a greater service by meeting your emperor—if you will have me.”

“I am honored by your company, of course,” Vidarian said, with genuine relief. He insisted to himself that he had not come to rely on Isri, but the thought of her calming presence made the coming journey substantially more bearable.

At a fast pace it would take three and a half days by air, the gryphons said, to reach the Imperial City. It would be the farthest from the western sea Vidarian had been in all his adult life. Once, as a boy, he'd traveled with his mother to her family's holdings south of the capital, and so he had a dim memory of that rolling country nestled against the great walled city. Then, he had thought it a place of culture and excitement, of intrigue and luxury—but as the taxes grew and he took on the burdens of adulthood, it seemed only a far-away place that caused more problems than it solved.

Word of their departure had traveled around the camp, and the steady trickle of gifts, more than anything else, drove Vidarian at last to loose the
Destiny
from its moorings. The seridi had been extremely, if typically, thoughtful: travel rations for humans harvested out of the forest (he wondered, belatedly, what Calphille ate), dried venison bound in strips like firewood for the gryphons, a collection of medicines also distilled from the forest by way of their ancient knowledge, and even leaf-wrapped packets of meat softened with root vegetable mash and wild chestnut milk for the pup. The longer they stayed, the more elaborate the gifts became, which was as good a reason as any to be leaving.

The gryphons took off first, followed by Isri; only Calphille and the pup would ride with him in the small ship. Stuffed with one of his special meals from the seridi, the pup was dozing on the floor of the craft even before they'd taken off, and Calphille, for her part, seemed content to leave Vidarian to his morose thoughts, at least for the beginning of the journey.

Thalnarra, however, was not so inclined, and set upon him nearly as soon as they passed above the first cloud layer and leveled out into a gliding pace. He'd been unable to pull his mind from obsessive mulling about the consequences of his recent actions, and was hard-pressed to pretend objection.

//
Your elements,
// she began. //
They fight inside you.
//

It wasn't a question, but she seemed to want an answer. “They do.” They'd done so every moment since he rescued Ariadel and kindled himself on her lost fire, but the opening of the Great Gate had more than tripled their ferocity.

//
You were never trained in the proper control,
// she said, and the iron rust of her assessment was not unkind.

“I fared all right against you,” he couldn't resist reminding her. “And against Isri's mad brethren.”

//
Brute force,
// she replied, without sympathy or malice. //
And everyone for leagues senses your thrashing.
//

He kept a tight rein on a sharp retort, lest he prove her point for her. And clung to the reminder that the gryphons might be rough, but they were unfailingly true, more than his own people had been. That, too, stung. But he said instead: “Where should I begin?”

//
How does a fire start?
// Her tone was gentle, neutral. Too neutral.

He started to answer, but before the words passed his lips he realized the uncomfortable truth: he had no earthly idea, not where it counted.

//
There is an art to fire, and a logic. Contain it; think of it mathematically, but not by your simple sailing-merchant reckoning.
// She touched his mind more closely then, enough that he could suddenly feel the warmth of her wing muscles as they beat the air. Striking as that was, more so was the image she pressed on him—a formula, a garble of numbers and letters of the kind treasured by scholars. It meant nothing to him, and so she said, //
Think how a tree grows, how an avalanche begins.
//

Vidarian realized with a flush of sharp humility that he did not deeply understand either of those things. Thalnarra read the discomfiture in his thoughts and tried again.

//
Think how love kindles.
//

That, at the moment, he knew all too well. It began out of nothing. Troubadours sang of a “spark,” of mystical connection, but he knew it to be alchemical even without the learning of alchemy. It was potential, which was nothingness, and from that nothingness a curl of possibility, thin beyond realizing. Up it climbed while you were busy not realizing, until suddenly you were aflame, all at once, a burst of spectacular and devastating light, undeniable as rain or stone. In that moment it was as if it came from nowhere, but then the subtle and inevitable path revealed itself before you, right down to the beginning of all things.

//
That's it,
// her voice was a whisper, a thread of woodsmoke. //
Hold that in your mind. Understand it. Summon your power only when you have it carved into your bones. Practice.
//

Vidarian cupped his hands, then dwelt for several long moments on what she had said. He thought of his own acid emotions, his regret and longing. He stepped back from them, saw the avalanche, saw the tree growing. He did not breathe, but let the energy roll out from him, the barest possibility tipped only just into being.

A small, clear, bright flame flickered just above his palms. Unlike any other that he'd summoned, it wasn't torn from him all barbs and anguish. It simply was, a breath of possibility unfolding. And what was more, in that clean place of possibility and action, the weight of all his decisions seemed a little less heavy.

//
There,
// Thalnarra said, and warmth like fresh toasted bread radiated from her. //
You see there the heart of ephemeral magics. All is a process. A change of state from one to the next. Love and spirit, fire and wind. One thing always becomes another, and it does so in its own time. You merely suggest to it what it may become.
//

“Thank you, Thalnarra,” Vidarian said, cupping his hands around the warmth of the tiny flame. Then something else welled up within him, forceful and immutable. It pushed the tiny flame out of being, filling him with dread and dissonance. “What was that?” he gasped.

Now Thalnarra's voice was wavering hickory smoke. //
Your water sense. I have never seen one's element seem to have a will so outside of its wielder's control. But I had never met a Tesseract before you.
//

“What can I do?”

//
Only a far older gryphon than I might be able to tell you, and perhaps not even they. Practice.
//

Vidarian set his teeth, placing his fingertips together, calling back the memory of warmth. He began to practice.

The first fat drops of a cold rain broke him out of his reverie, the first real solace he'd had in days. A dull headache clung to the back of his skull and his eyes would focus only with deliberate effort. But where his mind faltered with exhaustion, his spirit rested for the first time in weeks, perhaps months. Still, exhausted as he was, he had no reserves with which to fend off the deep chill of the rain.

When he looked up over the bow, coal-black clouds rolled along the sky's edge, dampening Vidarian's spirits further. As if acknowledging his attention, an icy storm wind swept over the craft, flattening the gryphons' feathers and finding every nook and cranny in the small ship. Lightning flickered, echoing through the distant thunderheads, and from Vidarian's side, the pup lifted his head and let loose an eerie howl.

Was it the everstorm, the perpetual blizzard that hung over the Windsmouth? But no—they'd passed over those spectacular mountains not long after leaving the gate site, and the everstorm itself had dissipated (for esoteric elemental reasons the gryphons had argued over at length) with the gate's opening.

In moments the storm was upon them, flying with unnatural speed. As it drew closer, it raised the hair on the back of Vidarian's neck, and not out of merely electricity or fear. There was an elemental force behind the storm.

And that wasn't all. The storm did “fly”—it had a shape: a giant hawk with outspread wings, lightning crackling from its “feathers.”

The craft rocked suddenly, and behind him Calphille yelped as she grabbed for a handhold. Vidarian turned to assist her, clinging to his own seat, and saw the source of the impact: Isri had landed, not gracefully, on the port quarter.

“There is an elementalist at the center of this storm!” She shook water out of her eyes and arched her wings over her head to block the rain.

//
We noticed,
// Altair called, and Vidarian lifted himself slightly to look for either or both of the gryphons. At first they were nowhere to be found—then he saw the flash of a white wing, signaling Altair's presence several ship lengths away. He and Thalnarra had given the
Destiny
a wider berth when the storm hit, almost certainly to avoid being driven into the sails, or worse, by a blast of wind.

But how could there be an elementalist this high up? A gryphon?

“They are seridi, but my mind cannot reach them! Their defenses are formidable!” Isri answered his unasked question, an unnerving habit she had. More disturbing still was the thought of a seridi that could block her out,
and
create or control the storm at the same time.

Humans were rarely gifted with either telepathy or elemental magic, but Vidarian knew now that both the seridi and gryphons could carry them at independent levels of strength. Still, even for their kind, someone with Isri's mind-strength and Altair's elemental ability was extremely rare.

//
She is an electricity mage,
// Altair offered. //
A lightning-wielder.
//

“How do you know it's a she?” Vidarian yelled, in between bursts of thunder.

//
Electricity is a specialization within air magic,
// he said, tearing through a bank of cloud and coming into view only for a moment. //
And her energy has a female signature.
//

“Is she sane?” He clung again to the seat as the
Destiny
pitched. Calphille, pressed to the deck, cried out again, but held herself steady even with one arm wrapped around the wolf pup, who continued to bark at the sky.

“I cannot tell…” Isri began, then closed her eyes, head-feathers rousing. “She is Alar, storm clan!” Isri cried over the storm.

“Like the last one we captured!” Vidarian shouted back, and Isri nodded emphatically. “You said they were dangerous!”

Just then, the wolf pup ceased his barking but wriggled free of Calphille's grip and scuttled to the forward bow. He put his paws up on the rail and howled.

Three arcs of lightning shot down out of the thunderhead above them, striking the pup, who howled even louder. Vidarian was knocked back off his seat and into Calphille, blinded and senseless.