Bone, Fog, Ash & Star (30 page)

“They are no match for Faeries!” cried Malferio.

“You think because you are Immortal you are more powerful than the mortal beings,” said Kyreth. “But it is not so. Why did you need Amarantha, then?”

“Look, they can fend off Curses with those barriers, but what can they do against Illusion?” scoffed Malferio.

“How will the Faeries get near enough to them to work Illusion?” Kyreth countered. “A myrkestra cannot approach a dragon.”

“Ah!” cried Malferio, growing excited and getting up. “Let me see this part!”

The two of them watched in the Vindensphere as the Emmisariae on their golden dragons soared over the waiting Faery troops and circled the battle between Eliza and the Thanatosi. They saw Eliza look up, the stunned panic on her weary face. She pointed her palm out and a ball of fire shot from it towards the Mancers. Immediately the ball of flame was caught in a barrier, which closed around it, extinguishing it. She held her dagger up and shouted a command at the dragons in the Language of First Days:

“Stay back! Stay back!”

The dragons pulled up, unsure. The Emmisariae commanded them more firmly to go down. The dragons seemed briefly uncertain, circling, and then made another attempt at descent. Eliza ran into the thick of the trees, the Thanatosi behind her. She shot out another firewall to stop them and kept running. The trees snatched at her, recoiling before her hand and her dagger every time.

“She will run straight into the Faeries!” cried Malferio excitedly. “She is done for!”

Kyreth stood up. Indeed, the forest was spreading out, she was nearing the Faery troops, when the Mancer dragons recoiled before a blade of green fire. A dragon far bigger than they, dark red with nearly black wings, came screaming from the clouds and plunged straight for Eliza. It caught her in its talons and shot back up into the sky before anyone had time to react. The Faery myrkestras rose into the air but could not rise fast enough or high enough. The Mancer dragons pursued but they were soon left behind. The great beast took the Sorceress high into the clouds over the foothills and they were gone, leaving behind them the howling witches’ forest in flames and the Thanatosi pouring out of the forest after their prey. The Mancers and the Faeries ignored each other, making for the mountains, seeking a sign of the vanished Sorceress.

Kyreth laughed. “There,” he said.

“You see!” grumbled Malferio.
“Lucky.”

Chapter

~18~

The cliffs of Batt loomed over the Dead Marsh.
Since the destruction of her home and her dragons, Swarn had built a new house high on the cliffs, overlooking the slaughter ground where she had buried the dragons. She was waiting outside her house, a modest dwelling made of clay and bone, when the dragon bearing Charlie and Nell arrived. She stood erect as always, her white hair loose around her shoulders, spear in hand, but Nell thought she seemed much older than the last time they had seen her. It was not that her face was more lined, or that she appeared any less powerful and agile. Rather, it was as if something steely at her center had begun to collapse. Some of the fire was gone from her eyes.

The dragon landed before the witch with a wild scream.

“You got Eliza’s message? Her raven, I mean?” asked Nell, scrambling off the dragon’s back and slipping to the ground. From the cliffs, they could see over the Dead Marsh all the way to the Ravening Forest beyond. On the eastern horizon the silver-green of the Far Sea shimmered like a strip of watered silk.

“Yes,” said Swarn. “I sent the other dragon to assist her.”

“Then she’s all right,” said Nell hopefully.

“I do not know,” said Swarn. “She has burned the witches’ forest. So many souls! And every being whispers now that the Shang Sorceress went to the Realm of the Faeries to free Amarantha. What is she doing?”

“I spose she’s trying to save my life,” said Charlie unhappily. “It’s gotten very complicated, aye. She thinks if she gets all the Gehemmis she’ll be able to do something, stop Kyreth.”

“Yes, she has asked for my help in her quest. But why burn the forest? The witches imprisoned in those trees are not her enemies.”

“The Thanatosi were right there. I dinnay know what happened. We just ran,” said Charlie. He repeated this, as if he couldn’t quite believe it: “We didnay stay to help her. We just ran.”

“Eliza can take care of herself,” said Swarn tersely. “What I do not understand is how the two of you are constantly tangled up in her affairs.”

“It’s nay on purpose,” said Nell. “The Thanatosi are after Charlie.”

“I am unsurprised,” said Swarn. “We will eat and then I will take you to Lil. It is no more than a day’s journey.”

~~~

Gautelen mon Lil mon Shol was eighteen years old. She spent almost all her time in her father’s library. It was a fine library, one of the finest in the worlds, though Uri mon Lil liked to tell of how he had seen the Mancer Library, albeit decimated by the Sorceress Nia, and since then could only see his own library as a few rooms full of second-rate books.

“There is nothing wrong with a young witch spending her time among books,” he said to his wife. “She is studious, that is all!”

“She is changed,” said his wife, the Storm-Seamstress Ely-Hathana mon Shol, her long amber eyes serious. And Uri knew that Ely-Hathana was right. At sixteen, Gautelen had been full of life and mischief. She had been gifted at music and magic and poetry, quick to laugh, kind to all. Then she spent a year in the Realm of the Faeries as their unwilling Queen. Since her return from that place she was a different girl: quiet, brooding. There was a slow-burning fire in her, and she was tending it.

She returned to them joyfully at first. There was a great party at the house in Lil to welcome her. At the dinner table that night, Gautelen heard for the first time her father tell of his own adventures: how, burdened by a terrible Faery Curse, he had travelled to Di Shang and the famed Library of the Mancers to seek some way to free her from her bondage. She was rapt, reaching to take his hand, tears starting in her eyes. Then he told how he had helped the Shang Sorceress to trap Nia with her own Magic and as he spoke Gautelen’s face changed. She withdrew her hand slowly. Confusion and grief battled across her face. A wind began to howl outside. She rose to her feet and the dining hall fell silent. Rain battered the windows – heavy drops the size of a water-ape’s head.

“Nia delivered me from the Faeries,” she said in a low voice. “She deposed and punished that…
King
.” She flinched and would not speak his name.

“But my dear!” said Uri mon Lil, surprised. “The Sorceress Nia is
evil
. Her revenge on Malferio does not make her less so.”

“She freed
me
,” cried Gautelen, amber tears rolling down her smooth dark cheeks. “She did not have to but she did!”

“You were useful to her,” said Ely-Hathana briskly. “Do not be foolish, daughter.”

“You don’t know her. You didn’t meet her. She came to me and…I know her heart, father! She is not an evil Sorceress! She is…I cannot describe her, but she is wonderful and she is good and we must free her at once!”

“That would be folly!” protested Uri mon Lil. “And impossible besides. Only the Shang Sorceress can free her. She has the…well, she is the only one who can do it.”

Gautelen’s face hardened. “She has the what? What does she have?”

Uri mon Lil hesitated. “The power,” he said in a small voice. “My dear…I understand you have been through a terrible ordeal but you must choose your friends carefully.”

Gautelen would hear none of it. She brooded for weeks. Nothing her mother or father said to her could lift her mood. Some time later, when Eliza sent word that she was coming to Lil to return Uri’s staff, he arranged for Gautelen to go to the isles of Shol and visit relatives. She heard about the Shang Sorceress’s visit later, from a wordful water ape, while she was out rowing. A week of terrible storms followed. The womi of Lil begged Ely-Hathana to stop the storms, but she thought it best to let her daughter vent her rage. Then one day Gautelen disappeared in one of Uri mon Lil’s enchanted boats. Uri was frantic. The womi and the wordful water apes of Lil went in search of her. Relatives in Shol were alerted to the young Storm Seamstress’s disappearance. Finally, a centaur spotted her in the Irahok mountains and word spread. When it reached Uri, he knew where she was going.

He found her in the ruined Hall of the Ancients, weeping at Nia’s feet, half-starved and frozen, having employed every spell she knew. She cursed the name of the Shang Sorceress even as Uri brought her home to Lil. In Gautelen’s mind, Eliza was wicked and powerful and ruthless, and Uri thought wryly that the image Gautelen had of her did not at all match the good-hearted, awkward young girl he knew, who did not look as if she could enchant a river rat.

Since then, Gautelen kept to herself, studying in the library. In the Hall of the Ancients she had entered Nia’s mind and learned the secret of the spell that bound her: the Urkleis that was lodged in the Shang Sorceress’s chest. She poured all her efforts now into preparing to face the Shang Sorceress and obtain the Urkleis from her.

Gautelen ate her supper alone in the library as usual and then walked down to a sandy cove hidden by low-hanging trees on the northeastern tip of the island. She could see the dark heads of the wordful water apes sometimes breaking the surface of the water and she could hear their deep voices murmuring beneath the waves. She sat in the sand with her legs out straight and let the foaming waves wash over her ankles. The tide was coming in. Powers of the Deep controlled the tides, and these powers remained a great mystery. When she was a little girl her father had told her that under the sea there was a world as complex as the one at the surface, as full of different beings, some good and some evil, some powerful and some less so, and as ignorant of the world above as the overland beings were of them. She lay back in the sand and the water washed up her legs. Maybe she would lie here and let the sea take her. The tide would come up over her and pull her down to those mysterious depths she had been so curious about as a little girl. The great beings of that secret realm would help her, give her Magic; she would return to the world, smite down the Shang Sorceress, bring the Urkleis triumphant to Nia. She would build Nia a castle on one of the lovely uninhabited isles of Shol and defend her against all those who meant her ill. Lost in this fantasy, Gautelen let the waves creep up to her waist, soaking the bottom half of her dress. The dream was shattered when a thousand black-headed water apes surged up and began to bellow all at once around the island, making the sea churn. Gautelen sat up. A massive shape came rocketing through the evening sky towards the island. It was a dragon – far larger than the green-gold dragons of the inland sea or even the long black dragons of the Dreaming Wasteland, illustrations of which she had found in her father’s library. It soared over her head, up towards her father’s house on the hill. She leaped to her feet and ran back through the jungle, where night birds chattered and huge snakes unwound their bodies and began to look for food. She passed a few of the peaked houses of their womi neighbours as she climbed the hill and saw their faces peering out anxiously. They too had heard the ruckus of the water apes and seen the dragon. Now they watched as the wizard of Lil’s strange daughter ran home, half-soaked.

The dragon was sprawled across the front lawn, crushing the rows of flowering bushes her father had planted last spring. It turned its flaming eyes on her and for a moment Gautelen could not move. She had never seen any creature as large or as terrible as this one. But the house was not burning; there were no screams from within. It watched her, but made no move to gobble her up. At last she crept past it, breaking into a run halfway, bursting into the house and slamming the door shut behind her. Her knees folded and she leaned against the door, her heart racing. It was the first time she had ever seen a dragon and she thought she could go a good long while without seeing another one.

There were voices upstairs in the visitors’ parlour. She climbed the stairs quietly and knelt at the closed door to peer through the keyhole. She saw a tall white-haired being talking to her father. There were two others with her, slightly smaller, dressed head to toe in heavy furs. They could only be witches of some kind. She had heard of the Warrior Witch Swarn, who rode a dragon. Another enemy of Nia and friend to the Shang Sorceress. One of the smaller beings turned her head, looking around the room curiously. Gautelen could not see very well through the keyhole, but she made out chestnut hair and a youthful face. Her father had described the Shang Sorceress as a human girl a couple of years younger than Gautelen. Gautelen’s heart began to pound again as she looked through the keyhole at the pretty girl dressed in furs.

She crept away to the library to think.

~~~

They were tired when they arrived that evening, but Nell thought Uri mon Lil’s house the pleasantest place they had ever stayed in Tian Xia. Built with black bamboo, it had a great many peaked roofs spiked with chimneys. Inside, it was warm and comfortable, with fires lit in every room and lamps lighting the halls and stairways. Uri mon Lil, with his shock of white hair and his shriveled face beaming around bright blue eyes, was a tiny figure next to his towering wife. She had long amber eyes, and her wild hair burst out around a face that might have been sculpted from ebony, so perfect and smooth and black it was. The couple greeted the visitors and welcomed them in the parlour with warm food and drinks. Uri and Swarn agreed to immediately work on putting a barrier around the house and trying to hide Charlie’s presence with Magic. Charlie and Nell sat by the fire growing increasingly drowsy, fingers interlocked. Every now and then they looked at each other and broke into silly smiles. Sleepy though she was, when their eyes met Nell had to hold back the laughter that burbled in her chest. There was nothing funny in particular, and certainly their plight was hardly cause for humour, but she felt so ridiculously happy that laughter seemed the only outlet for it.