Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1) (43 page)

Rapidly growing cracks forked out across the
flats from the spine forest, threatening to turn the remaining distance into an
impassable plain. Tyrissa seized upon the immense weight of earth magick she
had built up over the run. She smoothly knelt and drove a clenched fist into
the ground, unleashing her supply of magick into a powerful Shaping and
creating a long walkway of smooth, solid ground among the fracturing terrain.

They took advantage of the pathway and quickly
caught up to Tyrissa. She sprang back on her feet and together they reached the
base of the crater’s central mountain, their pursuers breaking off as they ascended
the slope built of melded rock and ruins. Tyrissa noted they each looked no
worse for wear, though Kexal and Hali both wore fresh splatters of blood across
their clothes. Behind them, the hunter wurms milled about between boulders and
through crevasses, watching but not pursuing them up the first stages of the
slopes.

“They’re not following us,” Kexal said with
relief. He then bellowed out a long laugh. “In all my days, every time I think
I’ve seen it all, something like this happens.”

Making use of a new surplus of prudence, they
ascended further up the mountain, clambering over wind-smoothed rock faces and
bits of Hithian buildings jutting out from the monumental ruin. Wolef led the
way and soon their first destination gaped above them, a wide sheltered cave
that looked to run deep into the mountain. Sun-bleached bones were strewn about
the entrance and the air reeked of rot and death.

“You smell what I meant,” Wolef said as he stepped
into the shade of the cave. “I’ll check again.” He melted into the shadows with
that faint mental burst of allure that marked his element. Tyrissa turned back crater
floor below them and saw that the wurms still kept watch, but refused to follow
them. Not into the lair of a predator. The breeze raptors wheeling in the sky
began to disperse, carrying off or devouring their kills. The dust clouds
thinned and revealed that the plain between the ruins and the crater wall had
calmed back to its normal stillness, the various underground inhabitants having
returned to their homes or found new one. Looking back on it now, it was such a
short distance, a few miles at best.

The Shade returned by the time they had all
caught their breath from the climb and were rested enough to continue.

“The cave leads all the way through, into the
ruins proper,” he said. “It is… strange in there. Like a whole different
world.”

“What about the resident of this cave?” Kexal
asked.

“Still absent, so far as I could see. There’s
nothing but bones and carcasses within.”

“Pity,” said the big man. “Well, let’s get a move
on.”

Tyrissa fished out a gloworb and pressed in the
tiny lever, bathing the area in harsh white light. Wolef shot her a mock
reproachful look.

“What? Caves are dark.”

Kexal entered the cave with a casual saunter and
the rest of the party followed. The interior was as promised, with plenty of
carrion and discarded bones strewn across the wide, wind-smoothed floors. Hali had
her waved knife out. Wolef walked alongside Tyrissa just outside the arc of her
gloworb. His hands hovered near his twin black iron blades and his outline flickered
between solid and shadowy, as if he was ready to Slide at a moment’s notice.
Tyrissa flexed her grip on her staff, picking up on the group’s nervousness.
Something felt off here. Tyrissa felt nearby magicks at work, and not the
slight tugs originating from Hali or Wolef. It was an acute sensation of elemental
air magick, ahead of Kexal and distinct from the crater’s winds. Perhaps it was
something in the ruins beyond the cave.

Kexal looked back at them, “Come on now, nothing
in here but the smell. The sooner we get through—”

Tyrissa saw the wall next to him move, as if the rocks
had shifted in place. Something large rushed through the air and sent Kexal
careening into the opposite wall. A powerful keening reverberated through the
cave, and the shifting image of the walls and floors sprang toward them.

Hali raised her free hand and a cluster of vines
burst out of her loose sleeve, green tendrils that shot forward through the
light of the gloworb. The vines spread and coiled around a large, camouflaged
creature that crawled across the floor of the cave like a moving distortion.
The vines revealed an outline of the beast, and Tyrissa guessed it was roughly
reptilian. Between the vines she could see nothing but misplaced rock walls,
like fragments of a picture set in the wrong place.

The beast recoiled from the vines, circling in
place and dragging Hali along with it. Now able to see a vague target, Garth
and Wolef let loose their attacks, the cuts and bolts leaving bloody patches
and streaks on the creature’s hide, through it didn’t seem troubled by the
wounds. Its skin flashed through colors at a headache inducing pace, making it difficult
to even look at for more than a second. Another rush of air cut through the
cave, knocking Tyrissa aside and sending her tumbling. Initially surprised that
she didn’t keep her footing against the gust, the welt of pain across her chest
told her that it wasn’t a blast of air magicks. It was the creature’s tail used
as a simple bludgeon.

Tyrissa felt a pool of heat on her side and
rolled away to see that she had landed on her gloworb, the luminous fluid
leaking from a crack. She unhooked the orb from her belt and threw into the
fray, aiming for the center of the clutching vines. It struck near the beast’s
shoulder and burst into a bath of shining fluid, brightening the cave further and
better outlining the creature. The gloworb fluid flowed over its forelimbs and
down its neck highlighting a thickly muscled body and limbs covered in fine
scales. Hali’s net of vines grew, further restricting the creature’s motions.

The beast lurched at Kexal, its unseen head
striking outward. He managed to get his shield up not a moment too soon and the
crash of the impact resounded through the cave. Kexal pushed back against the
creature, throwing its head aside and backpedaling toward the cave entrance and
away out of reach. Tyrissa jumped to her feet and ran towards the melee,
bringing her staff down in a vicious overhand, then spinning the staff upward for
a second blow with the lower metal band. The haft of steeloak thrummed from the
impacts and knocked the creature’s head aside, preventing it from biting through
Kexal’s legs.

Kexal’s sword sang from its sheath, and he
brought it down in a chopping arc through the air in front of Tyrissa. A bloody
rent opened atop the beast’s neck, free of distortion. Tyrissa brought her
staff down across the neck and threw her weight onto it, pinning the creature’s
head to the floor. Kexal dropped in two more butcher’s chops. Hot blood sprayed
across Tyrissa’s face, and after a few feeble convulsions, the half-invisible
monster moved no more.

No words were spared as they untangled themselves
from the creature. Hali let her vines fall away from her, the greenery quickly
withering to a dead brown. Garth yanked his bolts out, some appearing to be
stuck in mid-air. Kexal pulled a kerchief from a pocket and handed it to
Tyrissa. She murmured her thanks and wiped her face, the cloth coming away with
bloody streaks. The gloworb fluid bubbled across the corpse, adding the smell
of burning flesh to the scent of decaying carcasses. The creature’s skin
continued to shift from earth tones to invisible to a bright white to match the
light of the gloworb fluid. Wolef cleared his throat, looking down at the
camouflaged creature sheepishly.

“How does that saying about Jalarni cockiness
go?” Hali said.

“He said the cave was empty,” said Kexal pointing
at the Shade.

“To be fair,” Wolef said while cleaning his twin
blades with a dark cloth, “I said I didn’t
see
anything inside. That
held true.”

“Fair enough,” Kexal said. “Shall we?”

They gathered up their gear and carried on. The
cave widened further, the air cleared, and they stepped into the twisted remains
of a civilization laid low by elemental devastation.

Hithia left a fine looking corpse, once you were
inside it. The cave emptied onto a long boulevard that bored into the depths of
the ruins, the street curving up along walls, to the ceiling, then back around
to the floor. The fusing of rock and ruin rose to an even greater scale here,
with intact buildings built in the delicate, airy styling of the lost city
hanging from the ceiling or at other odd angles. In many places, nothing but
wind carved rock formations covered the walls in spiked points or wave-like
undulations.

“This was the Road of Roses,” Hali said as they
descended to street level, such as it was. True to the name, coiling,
unrestrained growths of rose bushes lined road and followed its path along the
walls and ceiling, taking root in both preserved planters and barren rock. “It
ran through the city in a spiral, passing each tier all the way to the Primarch’s
Palace.” The warping effect of the Fall and subsequent centuries of chaotic,
magick fueled winds left the spiraling part intact, in a manner of speaking. “That
mansion was on the second tier, but those tenements at the base, in the Kynarral.”

Tyrissa glided down the slope, throwing as much earth
magick towards keeping her balance as she could. Inside the ruin the wash of air
magicks felt like a five-fold increase from the already high levels outside. A
wind blew up the road toward them, only to reverse direction every few minutes,
as if the ruins were taking long, slow breaths.

“Might as well follow this for now,” Tyrissa said
as the rest of the group reached the stones of the rearranged road. Though the
path ahead curved out of sight, she felt as if their route to Vralin was a
straight line, dead ahead.

“It leads to the core?” Kexal asked.

Tyrissa returned an absent nod. The road led
roughly in the direction of that pulsing pull that rose from the heart of the
crater’s central mountain. It was a secondary, powerful sense of air magicks in
her mind, like a separate melody below the ambient chorus of the air domain
that encompassed the ruins. Following it was a good start, though they needed to
go much deeper.

“Lead on then, Miss Valkwitch.”

Kexal addressing her by that newfound title gave
her pause. Tyrissa looked back at the Jalarni to see the joke in his eyes, but
found that all four of them were deferring to her direction.

The deeper they traveled the more the rules of
nature seemed bent to the point of breaking. Light streamed through cracks in
the walls in inconsistent directions, never with a dominate source. They paused
by a stream flowing from a cleft in the walls and into a man-made channel. The
channel ran straight and true for about one hundred feet to empty into a
circular shaft. A savage, constant wind howled up from the depths, breaking the
flow of water into mist and lifting it upward. Tyrissa expected that if she
followed it up she would find it resuming a downhill course.

Time passed in a blur of warped ruins fused into
the rock, unreal light sources, wild plant growth, and the ever-shifting winds.
Hali would point out intact buildings she recognized: a tenement where a friend
lived when they were children, a brothel, a Windmage chapterhouse. She played
the tour guide and kept her voice light, but Tyrissa suspect that the Hithian
did it for her own benefit, a distraction. Among all the intact buildings, they
saw not one piece of evidence of the former inhabitants. Such a disaster should
have produced a massive number of dead, yet there wasn’t a single corpse
mummified by time or set of bones picked clean by scavengers. Hithia wasn’t
just lifeless, it was deathless.

Tyrissa brought them to a stop after they cleared
yet another stretch of floor filled with jagged rocks where the Road of Roses
ran along the ceiling and the passageway dead-ended at a fifty-foot-wide
sinkhole. Above, the paving stones of the road above turned down the far wall
to vanish into the depths below. Tyrissa walked to the sinkhole’s edge and
gazed down into the darkness. The source of the pulsing was now more below than
ahead. She then reached through the stone as if to begin a Shaping, trying to
sense out the structure below. It was hazy, disrupted by the constant barrage
of air magicks.

“Wolef, if you will?”

The Shade came to stand next to her, sharing in
the view. His eyes flickered to that haunting deep gray, like liquid iron.

“I’ll check it out,” he said, kneeling to place a
hand below the edge of the bore and then melting into retreating shadows. He
shifted close enough for Tyrissa to feel felt a slight flicker of another
element running across her skin, a faint memory of the terrifying pleasure of Light.
She tried to shape it, control it, but it was like grasping at a puff of seed
on the wind. Soon it was gone, overwhelmed by the presence of earth grinding through
her body.

Wolef returned within a few minutes, boiling out
over the rim and reshaping into a man. “Short initial drop,” he said as he
walked over the other four seated in a circle beneath the road. “An easy repel,
fifty, sixty feet. Then an easily navigable sloped tunnel and back out into a
continuation of…” He motioned at the road on the ceiling, “All of this.”

Garth had a pocket watch in hand and elbowed his brother’s
side for attention. Kexal looked down at the watch and ran a hand over his face
in response.

“It’s well past nightfall outside. Any place to
rest on the other side Wolef?”

“Yes, on the lower road there were many buildings
sticking out of the rock. Some were ruined but others were intact and at an
accessible height.”

Nightfall already?
Tyrissa hadn’t noticed
the passage of time. The strange light of this place showed no change in
intensity since they entered. Rays of slightly wrong sunlight still shone
through cracks in the walls, as bright as ever. She had given no thought to the
pace she set, fixated as she was on the guiding pulse below. Even after running
across the crater, fighting off that creature in the cave, and then walking
through Hithia for hours, she felt as fresh as she did this morning. The Rawlins
brothers looked nearly exhausted and even Hali seemed a little ragged.

“Then we’ll make camp below,” Kexal said. “Get
out the ropes and spikes, one last bit for today.”

Their campsite turned out to be an old armory,
according to Hali. Once inside, past the entry that was missing a door, you
could almost mistake the interior for a normal, if empty, building anywhere in
the world. There was almost no rubble or structural damage, through the weapons
and armor housed here had long since fallen into decay.

As Garth sorted through their gear for the
night’s rations, Kexal started picking through the piles of rusted, long-forgotten
weapons and armor.

Hali loudly cleared her throat.

“Oh pardon me. Hali, may I loot your fallen
nation for anything of value?”

“You may.” She almost smiled. “This looks like an
armory for the Winged Champions, the elite of the city’s defenses. You might
find something a collector would want.”

Tyrissa accepted a packet of rations from Garth:
a compacted brick of bland cornbread paired with jerky that was so overly
salted that it masked its source animal. Kexal was right to spring for that
meal in New Inthai. It was a royal feast compared to this.

She watched and ate in silence as Kexal shuffled between
the backrooms of the armory and made a fine racket as he searched for anything
worthwhile. It was an improvement over the constant howling of the winds
outside, at least. Wolef already slept in one corner of the room, a bundle
wrapped in black. Tyrissa fought down the little twitches that ran through her
muscles, the earthen energy begging for release. She knew she would get no actual
sleep tonight but wasn’t even sure if she needed it. A steady buzz of energy
ran through her, and not just the weighty presence of elemental earthen power.

Kexal emerged from a back room with a toothy
smile and two thin blades, both sheathed in matching aged scabbards. “How about
this,” he said, drawing one sword to show three inches of steel. Colors swirled
along the metal as it touched the air, green to red to gold, then fading to
nothing more than polished steel.

Hali gave a little gasp.

“That’s a magecrafted gale blade. They were given
to high ranking officers.”

“So it’s magick?”

“They were used against Earth-aligned Pactbound
or beasts, but they’ve almost certainly lost their charge by now. Aside from
the colors, the most magickal thing about it is lack of maintenance. Should be
perfect as the day it was forged.”

Kexal drew the full length of the gale blade. The
colors flared and faded, like a burst of autumn. He gave it a close
examination, then a few test swings.

“A bit small and light for my tastes, but they’re
keepers.”

After that they settled into a quiet dinner.
Tyrissa finished her portion quickly and tried to rest, but was unable to calm
down. Even in this sheltered location the ambient air magicks flooded into her
and soon her muscles began to spasm wildly with pent up earth energy,
impossible to ignore any longer. Tyrissa laid a convulsing hand on the stone
floor and poured the earthen energy into it without concern with the final
result, the stone shifting through a blur of shapes and figures. She tried to
be as inefficient as possible, adding unstable flourishes to the stone like
fish scales and hair-thin spines.

The muscle spasms subsided after a few minutes of
dumping magick into the rock, the earthquake running through her body smoothing
out with only sporadic aftershocks. Her body’s reaction to the elements was
changing. Instead of shutting down from overloading, it would instead riot,
throwing about the stored power in an internal storm. Tyrissa had cleared the
normal changes of adolescence and found them replaced by something far less
common.

At least I’m getting plenty of practice.
As
Settan had said, Shaping was easier within the boundary of an air domain. However,
as inefficient as that Shaping was, it was only enough for about ten minutes of
peace. She started to feel the quivers start up again.

“I’ll be outside,” she said while standing. “On
watch.” It was a weak excuse. They knew there were exactly six people in this
entire ruin, she just had to be outside, had to spend some of this energy. She
wanted to be alone.

Tyrissa left the armory and broke into a sprint alongside
the shattered and intact façades that lined the Road of Roses, the once-noble
constructions of a people on top of the world. She barely paid attention to the
uneven surface of the road, the ankle-breaking gaps, the jagged little spires
shaped by the unnatural winds of this place. She ran with the steady, assured
steps of Earth, spending as much of the pent up power with each stride as
possible. It wasn’t enough.

An itch you can’t scratch.

She had to make a conscious effort to turn around
and run back to the armory where her allies rested. She wanted to leave them
behind, to run headlong toward the pulsing magick below. To find Vralin and
tear him down, piece by piece. Her thoughts were a bubbling stew of revenge and
questions and memories. She used to be a girl from a no-name village in
Morgale. She wanted to be a ranger, something unneeded, something quaint. That
wasn’t long ago, a span of mere months. Less than a year. Now she was something
else entirely. She wanted more, and more was expected of her.

A hunger you can’t sate.

Unsatisfied, Tyrissa focused a weight of earthen
power into her fist. She knelt and punched at the ground, dumping the energy
into the stones of the road below. A web of cracks sprouted from her fist,
marring the enduring masonry of old Hithia. As she stood she Shaped the stone
below her hand to follow her up. She pulled up an ugly stone column that
started to crumble as soon as she took her hand away. It broke in two and
crashed to the cracked ground. Still the winds howled, topping up her earth magick
reserves, mocking her, daring her to continue her defiance in Air’s domain.

An addiction you can’t feed.

Tyrissa answered the winds’ dare, kneeling and
drawing up another column of stone. This one was better, but still fell apart
in seconds. So she did it again and again until it stood against the winds, as
she must do. She made another column, and another, until the roadway became a
five-foot-high forest of stone, some connected with arches, others delicate but
enduring spirals.

Prove your worth.

“I will,” she whispered. She knew it was the Pact
pushing her towards her goal, and she was unsure how much of the desire to
press forward was the Pact’s and how much was hers. She didn’t care. Tomorrow
it will end.

Tyrissa walked back up the road to the steps of
the armory. She sat down, nearly spent, the buzz of earth coursing through her
muscles a faint quiver for the moment. Tyrissa sat on those steps through the
night, dozing for brief moments and returning to the street to add to her
creations when the trembling earth magick within approached unbearable.

Footsteps snapped her awake during one break.
Wolef stood behind her, looking as well-rested as sleeping on an ancient stone
floor would allow. He looked over the new stone formation in the middle of the
road.

“Your handiwork?” he said.

“Yeah. A little bit of practice.”

“Ah. Care to give me a direction to scout?”

Tyrissa pointed down the road. The lights were
weaker here resulting in plentiful shadows for Wolef to work his abilities.
“He’s still below us somewhere. Check for another bore that goes down along the
right side.”

The Shade nodded and gave her a smile that didn’t
reach his eyes. There was something new there, a wariness.

“Wolef, there’s something I want to know.”