Winter Warrior (Song of the Aura, Book Two) (18 page)

   
“No. I have had little real training that did not come from my Father.”
The memory almost choked her, sudden and striking amid the clash of coming battle.

   
“Then I will show you the way,”
the Frost Strider confidently told her.
“I sense a Power within you. It shall not be hard for you, I think.”

   
“Then let us begin.”

Chapter Fourteen:
Wind Tunnel

   
It saw him. He felt sure it saw him. Lauro couldn’t see any
eyes
on the Demon, but when it had risen head and shoulders out of the sea he noticed two large indentations where its eyes might have been. There was no mouth and no nose, either, but for some reason the effect was even more terrifying than the tentacle visage of the Ice Demon from the southern part of the Inkwell. At least the sheer size of the thing made it slow… he hoped.

   
The air around him crackled with energy:
his
energy. He was striding the wind like never before. The rushing, soaring, flashing feeling intoxicated him; made him feel strong enough to beat this enormous thing on his own. In some corner of his mind, he knew it wasn’t possible, that he could and most likely
would
die if he attacked it… but somewhere along the line he’d simply stopped caring.

   
“Take this, father!” he spat at the wind. It rushed around him, pushing him forward faster and faster through the air while continually building a cushion of pressure under his feet. The Demon slowly eased its gray, shapeless head back, and Lauro realized that it was following his movements, after all.
Good. Maybe I can slow it down.

   
It was hard to judge distance while flying, especially when the size of everything below was so large. Buildings toppled and collapsed as the Sea Demon tried to raise one massive shoulder through the iceberg.
If it gets an arm… or tentacle… near me, I might as well kill myself for all the luck I’ll have getting away. It’ll catch me like a fly.
The prince soon realized he needed to get somewhere the monster couldn’t immediately reach him.

   
His decision was made in a second. Gripping the pike he still carried in both hands, he held it parallel to his own body while twitching his feet ever so slightly. The effect was instantaneous: the wind flipped him onto his back. With the heightened vision his gifts gave him, he could see the spiraling currents of air growing stronger at his feet. When he released them, they would shoot him through the sky at a ridiculous pace- one he wasn’t sure he could physically handle, but one he knew was necessary to foil his enormous foe.

   
Grunting with the exertion it took to move against his own momentum, Lauro spun the pikestaff to be perpendicular with his torso; all while still flying backwards towards the Sea Demon as it grew ever taller. The movement temporarily slowed him: in his mind he was bottling up the gathered wind, preparing for a mighty Wind-stride. He needed more power; more energy; more pressure.

   
He waited a second. The colorful strands of wind-energy visible only to him were growing stronger as he gathered more of them in.

   
Another second. If anyone had been close enough to see him, they would have seen that he had slowed almost to a stop. Any slower and he would fall right out of the sky.

   
A third second passed. To Lauro’s vision, there was a whirlwind of crimson churning beneath his outstretched legs, held back by his own will and the pike he was using as his tool.

   
At that moment there was a frightful roar and explosion from below. It was if both the prince and the Sea Demon had been moving slower and slower in time, stretching it farther and farther, building tension until it finally snapped and released them both at a supernatural speed. The Demon suddenly raised itself up to almost its full height, breaking through what remained of the shattered Reethe city and rearing up so that its head seemed as if it was about to touch the clouds.

   
Its arm, a grasping, slimy thing with less than normal fingers and a hideous sludgy quality, shot up at hundreds of miles an hour, trying to crush Lauro just as he had imagined it would… like a fly. But just as the fly oftentimes eludes the housewife by the sheer virtue of its small size, so the prince survived what else might have killed a larger creature. By luck or quick thinking, Lauro spun onto his stomach and thrust the pike forward just as the Demon struck. The enormous pressure and power of the wind stored at his feet was released all at once.

   
Like an arrow from the bow of the Allfar, Lauro shot across the sky and out of the Demon’s reach. It was a close race: the monster’s claw passed like a thunderbolt not more than ten feet from his side, but he barely noticed it.

   
The wind tore the hair from his head and melted his skull and turned his body into jelly… or at least it felt like it. He felt his whole body wracked with the pain of moving faster and farther and in a shorter time than was ever intended for the human body. White lights and black lights searing his eyeballs until it felt like he had none. His lips were forced back onto his face like the peeled skin of a fruit; his tortured eyelids tried to force themselves shut and couldn’t. His whole body was crushed under the inconceivable force of the wind he had tried to tame. The pike was ripped from his grip like a twig and his arms were plastered to his sides. There was no steering and no sight. His ears were dead.

   
Then, suddenly, it was over. The wind died away to almost nothing, and he felt the air around him grow absolutely still. The only noise his ears could hear was a faint fluttering and rustling, as if he was flying near a small group of starlings.
If any could fly so high,
he thought.

   
He noticed several things at once: one, he was not controlling his own flight. He had the general idea he was flying but the energy wasn’t going out from him like it normally would if he were wind striding. Two, the reason for his confusion was that he still couldn’t see. The world around him had calmed down, but his eyes were streaming with salty tears and even a bit of blood. The bowshot flight he’d taken was still taking its toll on his sight, making him virtually blind. His eyes blinked open and closed rapidly, trying to heal themselves by a constant flow of liquid. While it happened, he was helpless.

   
Finally they cleared, and his vision returned. What he saw amazed him.

   
The Sea Demon stood below, standing or swimming at its full height, completely stopped and strangely still. At least, that was how it appeared- he couldn’t know for sure. The entire scene was whirring by at a tremendous pace below him. Despite the out-of-place calm feeling he had, it seemed his speed hadn’t decreased at all: in fact, it had
increased
.

   
He was in a tunnel. Yes, that was the best way to describe it: a tunnel of wind. He caught glimpses of the rest of it behind him whenever he turned his head: a fleeting, ghostly apparition of white; a charged, sparking space where no snowflake fell and no raindrop landed. It shouldn’t have been possible, even with all he’d learned about his gifts so far in life. But there! It was happening, wasn’t it?

   
It made him feel powerful,
in control
of the battle; and, what was more, it utterly confused the Sea Demon. How he knew that he was wasn’t sure, but from the sight he gleaned of it as he flew the hundreds-of-feet-wide circle around its head, he assured himself that it was, indeed, holding perfectly still. How the hellspawned thing worked and thought he had no idea, but so far it didn’t seem to understand him or his powers. Good: the longer it was confused, the longer it would take to reach the center of Mythigrad and the longer the Frost Striders in the Shrine would have to conjure up some form of resistance.

   
The fluttering noise he’d heard when he’d first “entered” the tunnel grew louder, and something smacked hard into his knee. Looking down, the prince found it to be nothing more than his pike, which for some reason seemed to have entered the tunnel and continued flying alongside him even after it had been forced from his grip by the wind. Reaching out to grab at it, he felt the tunnel start to slow and his own body to slip out of the safe zone. The wind tugged at his cheeks again and threatened to collapse his tunnel.

   
Quicker than thought, he snatched the pike and returned to his former posture: arms at sides, legs flung out straight behind, face forward and body flat. The weapon’s haft was tucked neatly under one arm, and the wind-tunnel’s grew stronger again until there was no more danger of its collapse.

   
The world sped by in circles. Lauro found he could tighten or loosen the noose of his tunnel with slight alterations in his spreadeagled posture, or by moving the blade of his pike ever so slightly, so as to act as a sort of hyper-sensitive rudder for his voyage in the sky. He needed the skill, too. Once and only once did the Sea Demon try to stop him: it raised one heavy arm again and attempted to block his path of flight.

   
It almost worked, too. He was moving so fast he had barely a second to react, but a quick jab-and-twist with his pike shifted the tunnel’s current enough to get him out of the way in time. It nearly snapped his spine and wrenched him out of the tunnel entirely… but it was worth it. He was gaining new power and new experience every minute that he held the Demon at a standstill. It didn’t try to stop him again, at least not in the same way.

   
At first he thought his sight was deceiving him, or that he had accidentally flown higher than he intended: the monstrous enemy seemed to be getting farther and farther away. The next second he realized that just the opposite was happening: the Demon was sinking back into the sea.
Impossible. Could I really have driven it off so easily?
He couldn’t let it out of his sight. Lower and lower he circled, keeping an ample distance between him and his enemy, but never letting the space grow too large. A closer vantage point confirmed his first guess: the Demon really was submerging itself again.

   
Good,
was his first thought. Then he thought better of it.
What if it breaks up through the ice at a different point? This city’s still populated… it could kill hundreds of nymphs!
Unbidden, he heard in his mind what his father might have said.
Good. Let them die. They sit on the edge of the world and work magic against us. They rob and fight and steal. They are worse than animals.

   
He’d never agreed with the king on that. He’d never agreed with the king on anything, but especially not that.
I can’t let these people die! You’re not the kind of king I want to be, Father. I don’t care that these aren’t my people, and I don’t care that they’re not even the same
kind
of people. I’ll risk anything to save them.

Chapter Fifteen:
Storm and Glory

   
Lauro was circling so low above the city now that he could see the jaggedly broken edges of the structures where the Demon had broken through, as clearly as the rapidity of the wind-tunnel would allow him. The last sight he caught of the monster was the top of its bulbous head slipping beneath the midnight sheen of the waves. Only when it was gone and the world grew significantly darker did he realize that it had been giving off a sort of dead luminance. The air was hotter where its body had passed, as if the mucky ice-substance it was made of somehow projected the heat of the Blaze from which it had been born.

   
A tense minute passed. It couldn’t have just
gone
, could it? Lauro quickly flew in higher circles until he could see into the far-off Shrine. He needed to warn Karmidigan and the others, just in case the Demon was preparing to attack from under the ice at a different point. Time to take a risk.

   
When he judged the point was right, Lauro straightened every part of his body, thrusting his pike forward in a gesture of
forward!
and willing himself to break the circular cycle.
Wham!
For a second it felt as if he’d been struck in the chest with a heavy boulder, the breath gushing out of his lungs with an angry
whuuf
ing noise. Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes from the unexpected pain. By the time he looked down, the Shrine was a mere wide blue streak below him. The wind tunnel traveled fast.