Читать книгу Tales of the Goddessi - Heather Ranier - Страница 4

I shall not waste my fear on the unknown

with so much already in my acquaintance to spend dread upon.

- Thoran of Mount Enror

Kimber laughed and held tighter as the wind endeavored to shove her from her perch.

They had not died in the night nor on the next day, the balance of which was spent on the ground within the circle of woven highgrass. It was Kipi who had given up on rest in favor of food and it was the green beast’s snorting and slurping that announced the lunch hour. Kimber had levered herself up and found the creature nose-first in a woven package that had not been in the clearing the night before. Another had been left intact and she had made her wary way around to find it filled with strips of meat and a hollow shaft of bone that had been broken off something larger.

Unable to resist troublesome curiosity, she had put the tube to her lips and blown. The grass beasts’ song piped through it, bringing the veser and the Elanaite scrambling to their feet. Kimber guiltily launched the thing into the highgrass behind her and busied herself with the food.

They had eaten without cooking, fearful of setting their entire camp ablaze, and while Cho had wrestled a few strips from her beast, there was not enough for a real meal, especially with Bre’et’s insistent demands for his share. In the end, it had been the pattering beginnings of an afternoon rain that had gotten them to their feet.

Kimber had expected to walk and to push their way through the stalks again but it was a day that challenged expectations. The crashing stalks of the previous night had fallen away in a northward path, not as straight or easy to travel as the tunnels they’d trekked before, but blessedly free of the constant pushing, slapping, and tangling underbrush. Kipi had once more been pressed into duty as forward guard and they had started on the day’s journey in a ragged line, the green beast, the small woman, and Kimber behind her, while the veser trailed and lingered wherever he wished.

They were not on the trail long enough to lose sight of the clearing before Bre’et was at Kimber’s back, nudging and bumping insistently. She’d turned and ruffled his stiff mane, unable to begrudge him the attention he insisted upon. Without warning, he’d pushed his head into her stomach, flipped her up onto his neck, and bolted along the track. Cho had dived out of the way and Kipi had slashed at his retreating feet. Kimber had held on for her life.

Now, saved from bruising by a folded blanket, Kimber enjoyed the breeze, the view, and the speed. If she closed her eyes, she could believe they might run forever, neither to nor from anything, merely sprinting for its own sake. Cho was probably unhappy at being left behind, but when she’d tried to force her way into the lead, the black Child had leapt cleanly over the Elanaite and her mount, kicking shreds of grass back with obvious contempt. As when they had fled the grass beasts, Kimber was only a passenger. She’d kept apologizing until Bre’et took her out of ear shot.

The stalks dove away on either side of the broken trail, each crushed out of the way by an unseen hand. Unseen and unexplained. They had both left their escapes a mystery. Kimber assumed a tale of obliging Bane would not improve her standing in Cho’s eyes and whatever had happened to the Elanaite, she had been delivered unharmed, as Kimber had kept herself believing all along. So she had simply gathered up the claws that she must have dreamed had been sticking from the Elanaite’s back and put them in the pachaak’s pack with a wary watch on her fingers, and for the moment, that was enough.

In the rush of running, she imagined she heard Hasana’s words. Not yet, he had told the veser. Not yet. Now was not the time for revelation.

The rolling waves of highgrass began to ebb, sinking down to the tops of the veser’s ears, then to his shoulders so that Kimber could see what lay ahead.

“What do you see, rel?” Cho asked, her voice echoing through the intervening stalks, a hundred little voices that insisted on forgetting Kimber’s name.

It seemed at first that they had returned to meadow wastes once more and her gut gurgled unhappily at the prospect, but the green expanse beyond was not as uniform as its cousin on the opposite shore of the sea of grass. Made blurry by distance and falling water, if she squinted hard, Kimber thought she could make out a drop and heave in the land.

“There’s a break in the earth, like some great irrigation ditch.”

Cho snorted a laugh. “Doubt the Faer would enjoy the comparison. It must be Big Valley.

“From the Tale?”

The highgrass finally gave way, not grudgingly but in unconditional surrender, disgorging the travelers onto the meadow grass and into the unadulterated pour of the storm. Bre’et shook, trying to rid himself of the clinging water, and nearly unseated his rider.

The valley stretched east and west, farther than even her vantage point would allow her to see. The farther wall was steep, gouged from the rock by the long rush of the river at its center. The southern wall must have collapsed upon itself sometime in the past, allowing the grass to clamber over the destruction and hide it beneath of verdant rug. Only the river and the vertical precipice stood as sentinels against the meadowlands hostile advance.

“Look,” Cho commanded. Her beast waddled forward so that the Elanaite could point out into the distance. “See the dark patches in the rock? Those are the caves where the sisters and their people lived.”

Kimber put a hand up to shield her eyes from the rain.

“There are people on the ridges,” Kimber said, trying to decide if she was seeing now or then.

Kipi moved forward, the Elanaite’s subtle signal unseen.

“People still live there?” Kimber asked. Bre’et overtook the little green beast, forcing Kimber to look back over her shoulder.

Cho looked uninterested in continuing the conversation, making it clear with her stone-faced continence. The rain slid in thick rivulets down her black braids and clung to her lashes, but she did not break her far off gaze long enough to wipe any of it away.

In that far off, figures moved along the thin paths that veined the cliffs. The rain still veiled them, but they seemed bright against the grey backdrop and too tall to be mountain animals scampering on three or more legs. Winding through the words of the Tale, Kimber found herself at the mouth of one of the caves, looking down on the roiling river, much wider and wilder than the course that had flooded the Bashrai’s basin, but she couldn’t find any people in the words. Searching, she leaned too far, transfixed by the spray and white-capped chop, and fell out of the story and back into herself with a jolt.

Bre’et bawled and side-stepped, nearly colliding with their companions.

Anxiety tightening her voice, Kimber asked, “We’re going to cross that?”

Cho looked up. “The river? I would not be so keen to put my swimming skills to the test.”

“Me neither,” she assured Cho. The veser agreed, this time side-stepping in the opposite direction. “Maybe we could ask the people on the far side how they got there.”

The Elanaite was not so easily baited. She pointed east, down the length of the valley. “We’ll have to visit the Faer. There should be a city to the east. They’ll let us cross there.”

City. The word pulsed and throbbed in Kimber’s head. The press of Maan, new people and their ideas contorting her, as the decorated man had twisted Bre’et into something he shouldn’t be. Spinning the story in her head, she did not like the ending. Into the river, bound to something heavy and no doubt sacred. She received a muted agreement from the woodsy voice in her head.

“No.” She coughed, putting on a façade of staunch indifference that, like her voice, cracked like dry earth. “I…isn’t there another way?”

“No,” the Elanaite insisted.

Bre’et did not follow but Cho refused to notice and turn back. Through the downpour, growing colder by the moment, Kimber called out, “I can’t go.”

Finally, the little beast and rider ambled to a halt. Shiny drops whirled around Cho as she turned fiercely. “In this, you decide to mistrust me? You follow me through the Godessi-forsaken grasses without a word and this is the time you choose to make your stand?” Though her voice had to be loud, she did not seem angry so much as flabbergasted.

Kimber wanted to defend herself but the cold and the woman’s black gaze sucked the resistance out of her.

The Elanaite’s gaze grew suddenly suspicious. “Is this advice from divinity? Is this the path They have told you to travel? Were you visited in the grass?”

It would have been easy to tell her that the heavens had parted or a blueflyer had flitted onto her shoulder and told her to avoid the city but pieces of her overrode the desire to take the undemanding path. “No,” she finally admitted, bowing her head.

“Then hunger is a joy to you and the rain cleanses your spirit, is that it?” Cho taunted. When Kimber could muster no reply but more noises from her stomach, the Elanaite’s face puckered in a scowl that was too comedic to be true and she finally wiped a hand across her eyes. “There is nothing to fear from the Faer.”

“The Bashrai were also supposed to be peaceful,” Kimber countered. Cho looked at her like a recalcitrant child and she was beginning to feel petulant and younger than she had been a moment ago.

This time when Kipi began to move, Bre’et followed. Each took slow, measured steps to bring them side by side and seemingly to keep the tempest-driven river in the distance as long as possible.

“You know the Tale, rel,” Cho reminded her. “The Heaven Walker holds peace above all. The Faer won’t harm you.”

Kimber lamented her frail resolve and hunched over the veser’s back as the rain chilled her to the bone. Of all she had taken from others, none of it seemed to be strength of will. Even Cho’s pervading stubbornness rolled off her like water off a basla’s scaly back. If only the Elanaite would order her, give her a ‘must’ to rail against. But the word never came, as if Cho knew what not to say, and Kimber allowed herself to be shepherded. She was glad that her own thoughts did not seem to have the strength to shape her, lest she grow a wooly coat and extra leg.

Her silent cogitation was shattered with a scream as, off in the green expanse, a jagged line of crackling white light split the World into left and right. In the next instant, a sound like a hundred splintering tree trunks launched an attack on her ears that could not be staved off with a simple barricade of hands.

Bre’et wheeled back and even Kipi bristled, but Cho was a calm island in the waters of chaos. She slid down and commanded her beast to lie on its belly, then gestured for the veser to do the same. The Child snorted derisively and pawed the ground near her feet. She did not flinch back but instead kicked him in a foreleg where one of his wounds was still raw and seeping. The veser squalled and tumbled and Kimber found herself on the ground, having her face pressed into the dirt.

“Are we praying?” she asked, provided with vague fragments of time spent similarly bowing in the dust. It felt more ancient than the Other’s time, like something from one of the old Tales. Maan had been more demonstrative back then.

Cho mumbled something with exaggerated facial contortions. No, she was yelling it but Kimber’s ears weren’t working. The sound still echoed inside them, making it difficult for anything else to get in.

“What was it?” Kimber asked. Her own voice sounded nearly as muffled to her.

“A skyclap.”

Kimber laughed Cho’s laugh, a disbelieving little breath of contempt. She wedged a hand into the dirt to press it to her mouth, tasting mud. It still tasted better than channeling the Elanaite. “It was too loud.” The Other offered up only low far-off rolling rumbles as a definition for the word.

“You really are just some banaar digger,” Cho laughed. It somehow sounded gentler when she did it. Taking her hand off the back of Kimber’s head, she said, “On the open plains, a skysplitter will hit whatever is tallest. We’ll crawl.”

Something dark flashed in Kimber’s brain and told her to put her hand up in front of the Elanaite’s face. An instant later, a clawed foot struck it and she was able to deflect it back to the ground only because it had been a half-hearted attempt in the first place. Again, Cho did not flinch. Again she laughed, loud and cynical but edged with a dark humor.

“The brute is taller than all of us. Let it walk if it insists. It will make a serviceable skysplitter attractor.”

Another bolt split the grey day and dazzled the sky but this one traveled without aural accompaniment.

Holding her hand up, Kimber’s eyes were flashed by another burst that failed to sound. The streak of white light had lanced down its erratic arc toward the earth but had never landed its blow. Instead, it froze almost as it entered the valley from above, sparking and throwing up shadows that fell on something that had previously lain unseen in the gloom of the storm. The light now moved in a perfect line, exploding outward as it struck the end of its trail in a hundred different directions, tracing the sharp lines of a floating structure that fell back into invisibility once the brightness died.

Even through the driving downpour, the rel could hear Cho exclaim, “By Rock Sister!”

“What is that?” Kimber cried back, still squinting at the vacant space that had moments ago been brilliant with energy.

“I think it may be the city.”

“They capture skysplitters?”

“Apparently so,” the Elanaite said.

Before them, the ambient ash-colored murk gave no hint of the structure made real by the strike. The plain dipped and rose and continued on uninterrupted to the end of sight but there was a presence. A feeling of the hidden place pervaded Kimber, a weight towering over them, lying almost within reach.

At her side, Cho was being strange. The smaller woman had one eye tightly closed and was looking at the land askance, as though it had spoken ruefully to her. The eye tightened and widened sporadically for a moment before she lifted her arm and pointed ahead. “You can see the edges,” she said in the face of Kimber’s confused stare.

Following her example, Kimber found the dwelling of the Faer.

When not looking straight at it, she could just catch a hint of fluctuating color in the air. When she knew where to look, the outline of several structures sparkled into existence. Here and there, colored motes drifted in busy lives nearly unseen by the World without. When she blinked in surprise, it all vanished back into the trick of perspective, forcing her to squint and twist her face once more to find what she now knew was there.

“How?” she wondered aloud. The languid sisters of the Twins’ Tale and their kin had lived their lazy lives on the shore and in the caves without mention of invisible habitats suspended midair, a lapse not readily explainable by the teller’s creative bowdlerization.

Another strike shook the ground nearby. Its cracking retort deafened and the veser stomped and started. Watching the skies as though she could catch warning sight of the light before it fell, Kimber rose up to her knees and stroked the Child’s leg.

“I don’t know,” the Elanaite admitted. “But we’ll never find a way up there in this. Better to find some shelter.”

It seemed a fool’s errand on the rolling plains, but a subsequent flash illuminated slender lines like cords depending from the half-seen city to several points along the green tract. Bre’et either refused or was incapable of crawling but hunched in beleaguered accordance to Cho’s imperative that they all stay low. Cho’s beast made incredible time to the anchor-point of the towline, ably pushing itself on its belly as quickly as it had when running upright. Before the rest of them were half-way across the field, it was already atop a small atoll that marked where the line met the earth. Cho ordered it to come down and when it stood and turned to comply, it lost its footing and slid down the backside, dropping out of sight just as another skyclap blasted them all closer to permanent deafness.

They made it around to the far side of the hill, which proved to be an unnatural formation, hollowed out and open here where Kipi squatted under the overhanging roof. A white lip around the edge of the depression kept the wet earth from pouring in after them. It was hard to see how large the space was in the gloom, but much of it was taken up by a strange amalgam of silir poles and dimly glittering material.

Cho took a moment to investigate the contraption with poking, prodding interest before turning back to the entrance. “It’s safe enough for now. Come, even mhuron know when to come in out of the rain.”

And so did Kimber. She shook herself and rung out her hair and what was left of the uniform before squeezing past Cho and finding a seat inside the little hill house. It was low-ceilinged and claustrophobic but a terrible familiarity began to strop her nerves, stronger than both her fear of the city and her terror at the storm.

“There’s no room,” Cho contended to the veser.

Without need of divinity-given words, he made a clear statement. You will make room, his shoulder said, shoving the little woman aside.

Kimber paid little attention, merely moving around to let him pass without crushing her feet. She had known a house like this before. Her hands smoothed the dirt walls unconsciously and she breathed in the close, heavy air, rife now with animal and root smells.

“Kipi, get off,” Cho demanded, assaulted on all sides with insubordinate traveling companions. Her beast cringed and jumped off the piece of shimmery fabric it had just begun gnawing on.

Kimber lifted a hand to her face. Bre’et, crammed in the back of the little hill, nudged her shoulder and tried a tune that didn’t reach her. Her hand was brown with earth. She had the urge to rub it into her flesh.

The sudden hand on her forehead was what cold water is to a dreamer, instant and disconcerting, but effective.

Cho, able to stand straight under the low roof, had placed herself in front of Kimber, nearly nose to nose. “Hard to tell, but I think you’re paler than usual. And your face is hot. If a good meal and hot bath doesn’t fix you up, best we see a doctor in the city as well.” She sat back on her heels and cocked her head. “When was your hair cut?”

Secured to the World once again, Kimber wiped the dirty hand on her thigh and noticed there was almost no fabric left on it. The other hand ruffled the ragged handiwork of the decorated mother. “In the grass,” she said truthfully. “One of the monsters,” she added in a half-evasion that made her feel like a horrific ingrate.

“A close call,” Cho commented. “It should have cleanly cut the top off your head. The Twins must have intervened on your behalf.”

Unwilling to agree or deny, Kimber shrugged into the silence. Cho conceded her stare and turned back to the thing taking up most of the room in the bunker. “Don’t know what to make of this,” she muttered, pulling on the largest piece of material. The machination squeaked and swung on a trackline that was fixed into the ceiling.

Kimber slunk over on hands and knees, ignoring Bre’et’s protests for the moment. She put a hand on one of the poles and tried to understand at least how the fabric was attached, as the purpose of the whole thing seemed far beyond her comprehension. “It’s so smooth and cold.”

“The supports are all metal,” Cho said, squeezing farther into the collection to investigate the towline’s connection.

“What’s medel?”

“Metal,” Cho repeated. She spun a pair of round pieces that sat in a little box on the thin cord. They whirred with a high tone then slowed into silence. “All the big Mounts have a mining operation, but nothing can be done with it. Too hard to carve, breaks all our tools. Watch.” She took one of the thinnest rods, no thicker than a finger, in two hands and strained but it would not break.

Another skysplitter lit the dugout and reflected off the device’s shiny surfaces. The whole structure rattled in concert with the crash.

“Do you give it to the Faer then?” Kimber asked.

This time, Cho’s laugh was harsher, more like the one Kimber had held in check. “Elanaites do not give things away, rel. The Caravaners trade it with the Fallen Star’s people. They must trade the Faer for their medicines.”

“They are good healers?”

It was suddenly so quiet that Kimber thought another skyclap had come and left her completely deaf. She froze, listening, and heard Bre’et’s heavy breathing and the thumping of the little green beast’s tail. Only Cho made no noise, perched on the main body of the machine, her arms braced on an upper strut that bent like a bird’s furled wing. A ripple went through the little woman, fast and almost imperceptible, and the device squeaked and jittered suddenly under her before lapsing back into inscrutability.

“They are good healers,” the Elanaite said. “They can give a man back his legs when a rockslide makes them useless pulps of bone splinters or give a barren woman a child.” Her tone, grave and enigmatic, became suddenly glib. “Why, if you ask nicely, they could likely file down that fearsome smile, round your silly ears and tint you an acceptable color.” The last was delivered with a sly but forced grin.

Kimber’s hands fluttered to her chest, to the scar that was no longer hidden by the remnants of the uniform she wore. She wondered if the healers could fix it. A shiver of cold dread clutched at her chest and she quickly pulled her hands away.

Desperately wanting to hold tightly to the sudden light atmosphere between them, Kimber raised her chin with mock imperiousness. “I have become quite partial to my current hue,” she said, flashing the same derided sharp-toothed smile.

“Merely an example of their expertise,” Cho assured her, slipping down from her spot and into a hollow section that sported a crossbar and what looked like a cushion.

The better mood made Kimber bold, for better or worse. “Cho, who are the people across the river?”

Seated on the cushion, the small woman could not quite reach the crossbar. She scooted forward, but it remained outside her reach. “Ask me last year,” she sighed.

“I don’t understand.”

“Last year it would have been easier. Before the Day of the Dead, they were not people and they still may not be but I cannot be sure.”

“I still don’t understand.” It was beginning to feel like a mantra, though not a particularly illuminating one.

Cho gave up and slid down between joints attached to the body of the device, her legs still swinging off the ground. “When the Faer moved to the cities, others moved into their homes in the North Wall caves.”

“Maybe they know how to cross the river.”

“We cannot talk to them,” Cho told her.

“Why not?” Kimber asked. Even a swim would be better than a trek into a crowd of Maan, however peace-loving they might be. After all, how much wetter could they possibly get?

“Because they are natural to the World and thus, they do not speak.”

The things in the trees. The horrid things that wanted her to forsake clothing and the earth and go with them into a silent place. Terrible creatures with her face and features, pulling her up into the trees.

Kimber swatted away the intrusive foliage-rustled thoughts.

Cho gazed at her from between two thick support struts. “They are the red rel, not your kind. Not your…people.” The last word stuck and had to be rung out. “Do they call to you?”

Kimber listened. Only the storm spoke. “No,” she said. “No, they don’t speak to me either.”

Tension bled out of the little bunker, again leading Kimber to loquaciousness. “Why did the Faer leave the caves? They seemed so happy in the Tale.”

So happy, flitting back and forth along the worn trails, fishing and digging up the gifts of the Twins. Some stood by the shore, letting wind pick up tiny sails on strings and toss them in frantic circles in the sky while the children squealed gaily in the late noons sunshine. The glassy calm of this river broke only as swimmers surfaced and split where men sat on wooden boards, pulled along by tight reed cloths that captured the funneled breeze.

Within the scene, no one paid Kimber any attention, too contented in their lives. Kimber could not quite make out their features or their colors, just the general shape of men, women, and children hard at play. But far from the others, set apart by attitude and the other valleymen’s ungenerous glances, a little girl sat at the foot of the cliff. The girl seemed fuzzy, difficult to see within the scene, but she seemed to be staring back at Kimber.

She waved to the little girl and the figure waved back in a slow, dolorous fashion.

“Big Valley was beset by disaster.”

The Faer fled in panic as the scene became chaos, but Kimber could not yet tell what terror had befallen them.

“Life was so easy that there were too many children. The Faer began to starve and they dirtied Big River. There was a flood and the south wall collapsed into the vale.”

Children wept over the bones of their mothers and men choked on black water. The World was beset by the constant skyclap clash of a falling mountain that swept and rolled everything in an undertow of shattered rock. But the little girl, glowingly pale against the backdrop of mud and roiling stone, stood in the midst of it, untouched and still waving.

Somewhere in the bunker, Cho was fussing with the joints of the device. The sound floated up to Kimber and she grabbed hold of it, preparation for a quick escape.

“A wise woman led them to build the suspended cities. They cull fish from the river and string great hanging fields like the water nets the Bashrai use. When I was young, my mother’s brother told me that he had even seen them fly from one city to the other on great white wings and never touch the ground.”

Big Valley was restored to lushness though the ground remained uneven and rolling. Above, the heavens filled with soaring ashen figures winging through the azure expanse. Eyes watched from the far cliffside, furtive and hidden, different but familiar. And still, the little girl remained and still she waved.

“You will most definitely visit their physicians. You’ve gone whiter than basalt.”

Kimber blinked and found her way back into the dugout. Her breath blew out of her as though she’d been holding it captive.

A black eye stared at Kimber from between the joints and under a cocked brow. “It’s even said the Heaven Walker taught them how to steer the lost off Hebree’s path.”

“Bring back the dead?”

“I have heard Tales of it. It must be true.”

“Maybe someone made it up.”

This laugh was short and even harder than before, as sharp as the crack of the storm. “What makes you think that matters?”

The sky lit again in dramatic accompaniment, tossing light but also throwing a shadow across them. For just a moment, a sparking sensation assailed Kimber, like a thousand upon a thousand tiny insects landing on her skin and instantly taking off again in a flutter of wings and tiny prickling feet. Cho’s view was blocked by the bulk of the device but Kimber faced the bunker opening and the shade that lingered there.

“You must leave,” said the spectre.

It was neither spirit nor demon. Just a boy.

Against the backdrop of black clouds, the boy glowed. He was not simply pale, not like the Bashrai nor even like Kimber herself, but purely white, from his hair to his short robe and calf-pants. Even his eyes were such a pale shade of blue that the definition between irises and whites was nearly indefinable. The tiny black pupils were the only color in his whole being, lending him an eerie wild-eyed look as rivulets of water plastered his shaggy hair to his face.

The creeping tingling seemed to pour off the boy. Kimber felt her hair stand on end.

Cho struggled to extricate herself from the device, which was suddenly a prison of crisscrossed support rods, a fist that had captured her in its ‘metal’ grip.

“You must go,” the boy whispered, his breathy voice like a breeze.

A string of skyclaps boomed in rapid succession and the pin-prick blacks of his eyes disappeared in what might have passed for fear. He reached for Kimber, his unshod feet leaving wet footprints with each step, one white hand gesturing to the metal and fabric.

In the face of the mystery and the musts, Kimber found her voice. “Who are you?”

The boy brushed the device’s wingtip and it began to glow as well. “You must take the kite.”

A menacing growl echoed from the far side of the shining device and Kipi’s yellow eyes shone in the reflected light. Its tail whooshed through the heavy air as it stalked around the front of the ‘kite’.

“You will die,” the boy said. His features were so fair and flat that she could barely discern the emotion attached to the statement. Like Bre’et, the boy seemed desperate to communicate something that was beyond his power.

Cho threw a fist into the body of the kite and the metal crumbled like cloth. Something was wrong with her face, which was pulled back into a bare-toothed grimace. The skin of it dulled and cracked. Flakes of it fell onto the metal with the plink-plink of pebbles. “Get away from her!” Her voice boomed in the narrow confines.

The boy stared with almost perfectly white eyes. “The white rel-“

Kimber was thrust to the side and cracked against the wall, the device and trapped Elanaite skidded in the opposite direction, and the white boy disappeared under an onslaught of charging black. Bre’et’s charge was uncharacteristically silent, only his footsteps sucking in the mud, and he merely thrust the boy back out onto the plain instead of launching him end over end into the air.

When the veser stopped, the boy tumbled to the ground. He stumbled back up to his feet, the wind blasting his shaggy hair into his face. “The Good Lady. The white rel comes,” he said, his voice still flat.

“What is he talking about?” Kimber asked.

Now wedged between the wall and the ‘kite’, Cho struggled to pull her pinned right arm free.

“The Faer exile their undesirable elements. They usually go mad out here in the rest of the World.”

The rel felt a terrible empathy with the boy, his pale gaze lost and anxious. Cho was less sympathetic and loud enough to be heard over the storm. “It will take more than some barmy man-child to stay us, boy.”

A skysplitter flashed without sound and the wind shrieked in to fill the void, twisting and whirling in a pallid fog that hid from view the valley, the river, and all points beyond. Suddenly, the boy was split apart, two white figures in the drowning rain, but no, the boy was thrown to the ground while another colorless figure took his place, taller, more imposing, its eyes perfect orbs unmarred by pupil, its gaze indefinable. The rain struck the air around it but never touched, a nimbus of scattering droplets sparkling all around.

“Cho!” Kimber called, creeping closer and behind Bre’et’s tense and dripping form.

The Elanaite seemed to shrink within her prison, gaping and slack-jawed. “The Heaven Walker?”

“Good Lady,” the boy said, a little louder than his previous breathy squeaks, in what might have been meant as a shout.

It was a woman in a long white frock, her long straight hair falling nearly to the grass, the tips of her feet hovering over the tops of the wet green sward. Her features, familiarly sharp, were placid and beatific, and when her mouth opened, revealing overly long teeth, it looked as though there might be more than just Kimber that was unnatural to the World. It seemed she would speak.

If she did, the storm drowned the words. The boy was back on his feet, his pants and hands stained by the grass. The rel, a truly white rel, faced him, reached out and touched his face as his mouth opened and closed in words made mute by the rain. Neither face creased with smile or frown. Neither voice was raised to indicate a heated exchange nor softened to share confidences. The rel stroked the boy’s cheek. He grasped her hand with pale, shaking fingers. Kimber imagined it as affection and felt jealousy bubble up, hers mixing with the Other’s.

And then the boy flew.

As though wrenched from behind, he crashed backwards through the air, arching high before his silhouette was lost in the fog. A scream, wrenched up from his placid depths, forced its way through the downpour and whirled with the wind long after he had disappeared.

The white rel settled her vacant stare on the bunker.

Cho’s mouth opened but there was silence, her voice a captive of surprise or something more sinister.

The white rel lifted an arm, the long sleeves of her dress unmoving, even in the raging wind. Light glimmered on her fingertips, stars captured in her hand.

Kimber flung herself next to Cho, grabbing her free arm and pulling. Cho’s face fell into a grimace but she did not protest. The air shivered, crackled. The insects returned, this time under her skin, frenzied.

The white rel’s mouth stretched. It might have been a smile. There was no way to tell if it was malice or delight.

The rain turned to ice and fell in a shower of stabbing needles, the wind forcing it into horizontal flight. Bre’et bleated, lowered his head, and tried to back into the bunker again. Kimber shielded her face with bare arms but the cold water found her anyway, flaying the skin from her forearms. Something struck her side with bruising force, spinning her off her feet onto the quickly freezing ground.

Kimber lowered her arms and was snapped in the face by a whipping cord end. It and several others trailed behind the cloth and metal ‘kite’ as it hurtled forward of its own accord. Trapped within the silir wings, Cho took to the air.

Another cable snapped past and Kimber’s hand darted out to catch it. It slid through her palms, splitting the skin before she could get a good grip and then she was slipping over the sodden earth on her belly. Rocks punched her gut and scratched at her chest. She struggled to look behind when Bre’et’s vengeful bellow managed to cut through the drowning silence.

The black beast charged the white woman, his beak open and pouring plumed breath like smoke, his claws throwing clumps of earth into the frosty air. The white rel did not move but when the raging veser reached her, she was gone, a puff of pale condensation spread thin by a tempest gust that caught the kite and wrenched Kimber up into the air.