Winter Warrior (Song of the Aura, Book Two) (15 page)

   
“Ei Lekion…” breathed Elia, a tear sliding down her cheek. It was one of the few times Gribly had seen her show emotion. He guessed ‘Lekion’ meant ‘Demon’.

   
Bodies floated, smashed and bloody, in the steaming pool; some small, some large.
That blasted thing is huge… shriving huge…
Gribly thought. His body felt numb and he wondered absently if Lauro had seen it. The thing had to be almost twice the size of the demon that had smashed the
Mirrorwave
! Elia was crying without a sound next to him.

   
He reached out and wrapped his arms around her. “We’ll kill the bloody thing if we have to melt it down in inches,” he assured her.

   
“But what if we don’t make it out?” she whimpered. No, not exactly… it felt stronger than that. Whispered, maybe.

   
“Then I want you to know… That…” Gribly stopped his mouth from running off with him almost too late. He had been going to say…

   
“That
what
?” Elia whispered. He let go of her and stepped back, taking her hand.
Oh, forget it...

   
“That I'll miss you most if we die,” he said quickly. Before he lost his nerve, he leaned in, darting a quick kiss at her cheek, then let go of her hand and walked away. To his surprise she said nothing, but simply followed him in silence.

   
Finally she broke the silence. “It comforts me to know it.” Gribly looked back at her hesitantly, and saw the hints of a blush on her face.

   
Feeling something similar creep up on him, he turned away again, not sure if he'd made a good impression or bad. “Let’s see if we can find the prince and make something of this mess. Perhaps the Ice Demon has gone already.”

   
They both knew it couldn’t be true, but they agreed anyway and headed further into the ruined city; skirting the blood-tinted mist and the footprint and the pool, searching for any sign of Lauro as they jogged inward. After the first series of booms and flashes there was no immediate sign of the Demon, but shouts and cries of
“Lekion!”
and
“Achillais perlei Suthway!”
echoed around the strangely quiet streets. Despite the spreading news, they saw no survivors and only a few corpses before they reached the Reethe fortress.

Chapter Eleven: Footprints of Doom

   
Lauro kept his legs in constant motion, soaring through the air faster than any bird could fly. It felt almost like swimming, but quicker and smoother through air than water. The wind whistled coldly over and around him, whipping the stringy, bedraggled hair on the top of his head back across his exposed neck and shaved temples. He hadn’t the time to fix his warrior’s topknot, and likely never would.

   
Faster, Vale, faster!
He heard his father call gruffly out through the halls of his memory. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation. Lauro increased his speed, lowering his brow and bulling forward through the sky. The Reethe city sprawled out beneath him, high and silent.
It’s so odd… there ought to be more sound. Where’s the battle? Why aren’t Elia and Gribly following? Why did I leave so quickly? What is happening here?

   
The scene below and around him blurred with the speed of heated or cooled air. His power was increasing like it had while battling the draik. Steamclaw was Gribly’s ridiculous name for him. It sounded absurd and childish, as one might name a pet. Lauro had never had a pet. He passed on into unhappy memories of his childhood, only to be brought out of them again by a gigantic spurt of white flame that shot up from the royal palace, which he’d almost passed over in his breakneck flight. A gust of hot air blew him off balance and he spun upwards into the clouds.

   
The watery vapor soaked him for the second time that day. Windmilling his arms and drawing his legs up to his chin, he managed to steady himself, but there was little wind up here to stride with. He hadn’t intended to go so high… hadn’t ever gone to this height before in all his life. If he wasn’t careful he could fall to his death.

   
An off-key crackling caught his ear. He descended slowly to the fluffy grayness of the cloud below him, taking a moment to view his surroundings. Everywhere were pillars, hills, and walls of gray cloud, and coming from all of them was that unsettling noise. He drifted into a position parallel with the nearest cloud and reached down to stroke it. Blue sparks arced up to his fingers and sent a jarring jolt up his arm and into his body.

   
“AGH!” he shouted, involuntarily kicking his legs and sending him skimming across the cloud’s edge. More jolts came. “AGH! AGH! AGH!” He tumbled over the edge of the fluffy mass and fell out of the sky, biting his lip in pain so hard it bled. As he plummeted, he caught glimpses of bigger, brighter arcs of light zipping from one cloud to the next. Snow began to fall in tufts as he wildly moved to stop his fall. What little he knew of weather told him this was no natural storm, and he would be dead if he didn’t get away in time. Flash after flash lit the underside of the ominous cloud-head, and he fell faster than ever.

   
“Blast,” he muttered. He stopped fighting his momentum and instead used it to flip himself upside down, speeding towards the city below him unbelievably fast. It was lucky he did, for a few seconds later a brilliant flash lit him from above and deafened him with its sound. Small pellets of hail pelted him as he fell faster… and faster…

   
Just as he was close enough to the inner buildings of the city, the wind around him became sufficient for what he wanted to do. Pushing his arms in front of him in a diver’s stance, he suddenly spread them wide and bent them in L shapes: the universal sign to STOP. If the wind obeyed him, it would form a cushion large enough and strong enough to stop his fall. A difficult trick, but a useful one. He’d never done it himself before- only witnessed it.

   
The wind in his vision turned from deep red to glowing blue and formed a cohesive bubble of wild energy underneath him. His head was whipped to the side and his body flung out spreadeagled on the air-cushion, which spun him around in endless circles until he thought he would throw up from dizziness. But he
had
stopped falling.

   
With a few energetic strokes he brought himself to a sort of standing position, and found himself hovering more than a hundred feet above the shattered hulk of the fortress that had formed the central hub of the city. Directly below him was the roofless skeleton of a Shrine. It had been the main target of the Ice Demon’s attack, it seemed- the roof had been blown off, two of the corner-towers crushed, and the walls half melted into steaming slag. It made Lauro sick to see the ruined place of worship.

   
But there! Down among the wreckage! Nymphs! Ten of them stood on a wide, snow-frosted pedestal, moving and motioning. Frost Striders! They paid no attention to him, but a group of nymphs in dull armor and shabby weapons were frantically pointing and yelling in their heavy native tongue.

   
“I am a friend!” Lauro shouted down to them. A large, hard ball of ice soared up at him from the group, turning off its course and getting flung with a
crack
into the east wall of the Shrine. Chunks of ice and stone fell in a small avalanche; Lauro’s cushion had shielded him. The prince cursed. His clever bit of striding was rapidly weakening and wouldn’t stand another hit. It appeared there were more Frost Striders among the nymph soldiers, and evidently they hadn’t heard him. “I AM A FRIEND!!!!” he shouted above the roaring wind. The storm above him flashed again, and as he ducked in surprise at the sound, another ball of ice broke through the air-cushion and clipped his leg.

   
He yelped in pain and fell the last hundred feet. He missed the edge of the broken wall by a mere foot and slammed unceremoniously into its side, throwing up a small explosion of snowflakes and rock shards. His heels scraped the hard packed surface and he fell like a rock to the top of a large pile of debris.
WHUMP.
The breath was knocked out of him and he tumbled down the snowy side, bouncing from boulder to icy boulder like a rubber ball rolling and bounding down cold, rough stairs.

   
Finally he crashed to the ground. Snow blurred his vision and melted in his mouth. He choked and spat, rolling painfully over. The sky was gray as ever, and the snow just as cold. Nothing about his situation had changed, other than it hurt more now. The Frost Strider who had blown him from the sky ran up warily and stopped a few feet from him, hands forward in a defiant stance.

   
“Do not move, Strider. I will kill you before you can fly again.” The man’s voice was heavily accented, but at least he spoke the commontongue. “Sit up. Slowly. Do not try to stride.”

   
Lauro obeyed. He was too breathless to argue and too tired to fight- besides, he had come here to help these people, not attack them!

   
He scrutinized the Frost Strider from half-lidded eyes. The man was muscular and pale-skinned, of middling height, and he wore a warm white tunic underneath curious, silver-plated armor. His boots were tough and shod with iron, and his under-cloak had a great, fur-lined hood that was thrown back from his head. He had a short beard and mustache of jet shot through with silver, but his skull was shaven clean. The only other hair on his face were his bushy eyebrows; the same color as his beard. His ears were large and pointed like every nymph’s.

   
Lauro Vale knew a warrior when he saw one. This was most definitely such a man, even if he bore no weapons that the prince could see.

   
“Do not rise,” the Frost Strider commanded. “State your intent. Why have you appeared in this dark hour? Are you in league with the Lek… the Demon?”

   
“Of course not!” the prince snorted. “I am here to help! My companions and I have traveled far to warn you of war… though I see that it is unnecessary now. If you’d be kind enough to not smother me in ice and snow, I may be able to help you.”

   
“I see no companions,” was the simple reply. The Frost Strider kept one eye on Lauro and used the other to glance at the sky. The weird half-gaze disturbed him, but something else had occurred to him as well. Something about this nymph’s speech… he was royalty of some kind, or Lauro didn’t know what was! The prince began to speak, using the superior tone and proud demeanor he had almost-unconsciously suppressed since meeting Gribly.

   
“My companions are not able to fly, as I am. They are not wind Striders. One is a nymph like your noble self: a Wave Strider of the Treele tribe. The other is a human boy, a Sand Strider and… and a prophet.” The description of Gribly came unbidden to his mind, from what the boy had told him earlier. It evidently startled the nymph, whose hostility instantly lessened.

   
“You… I see.” He shifted his stance to be more welcoming, even reaching out a hand to help Lauro up. “I have mistaken you. You are a friend, I see. Welcome to the Shrine of Mythigrad, stranger. I am Karmidigan, Frost Strider and Sworn Warrior of the House of the One.”

Chapter Twelve: Winter's Warriors

   
Gribly and Elia encountered three more footprints of the Ice Demon. They avoided each, though it took them longer to reach the Reethe fortress because of it. The time was eaten up by Gribly’s thoughts as he berated himself.
Shouldn’t have told her all that. Should have kept it hidden.
But his mind was conflicted.
She didn’t mind. Just brush it off. You’ve got worse things to worry about.
In short, it was driving him crazy.

   
“I wish there was sand somewhere in this forsaken city,” he grumbled to Elia. “I feel like useless baggage in every battle, with you and Lauro doing daring deeds all the time while I sit around with no sand and no striding.” It was a joke, almost, and the nymph girl caught it. She smiled, and it encouraged him. “I hope we’ll be on land soon,” he added. “If I don’t feel solid earth under my feet soon, I think I’ll turn into a fish!” To
that
she actually laughed, throwing her head back as the pair passed under a broken arch of white stone. Anything to break the suffocating silence of death that hung about the hollow buildings and thin, dripping alleyways.