The Ale Boy's Feast (8 page)

“Failed? You did what you could to build something that would last. It wasn’t your fault, Nat-ryan. The fire. The Deathweed. Let it go.”

Soro laughed again, shaking his head.

Cal-raven glared at him. “I should heed my own advice. Is that what you think?”

Soro took a long strand of reedstring and began binding two of the wooden beams crosswise and then wove the reedstring through a flat of canvas. Another kite, Cal-raven realized.

“It’s been a year,” said Nat-ryan. “A year, master. You cannot build something in haste if you hope for it to stand.” He watched the kite-maker work. “Soro. That’s your name?” He frowned at Cal-raven. “If you know him, why did you run from his camp?”

Cal-raven blinked.

The pillarman continued. “He says he knew there was trouble in Cent Regus’s territory. He went in there and found you half-dead.”

“Soro? He carried me out of there?” Cal-raven closed his eyes. “I woke and thought I was in a slavers’ camp.”

Soro gave the rest of the bread to Nat-ryan. He devoured it, his jaw working hard as an animal fighting for its life.

Soro got up, and the sight was something like seeing a misshapen shrub grow legs. Cal-raven watched the brusque hunchback hobble awkwardly across the grass.

Left alone with the rain and the emaciated pillarman, Cal-raven felt as if he couldn’t breathe. He glanced up at the three shadows on the canvas ceiling, and their strange dance was all the persuasion he needed to step out into the air.

The veering shapes in the sky hypnotized him. They were kites—more kites, smaller and bound to strings that were tied to the tree branches. And yet they flew in concert, darting left and right, diving and rising, dancing in the sky.

“They’re learning,” said Nat-ryan from behind him.

“Learning?”

“Didn’t you see the kite that carried you out? The old man calls that one ‘mature.’ It flew on its own, master. He builds them, and then he trains them to fly but never to wander away. And if he takes their strings, they respond to him.” Nat-ryan shrugged. “Sometimes they fly off on their own, but eventually they fall and break. He runs after them, puts them back together. He says they’re humbler after they’re repaired.” He coughed suddenly, pressing his hands to his chest. “He may be crazy, but he brought me out of the pit.” Then he coughed again, clearly pained by the turmoil in his lungs.

“What happens now, pillarman?”

“Soro’s taking me to the lake. He says there’s good water there. And you don’t want to know what I’ve been drinking here.”

Soro seemed to be adjusting the rods of the heron-kite’s frame.

“Shall we take you along, master?”

“I don’t think you’re equipped to take me on any journey. What do you have
here—a mule?” Cal-raven shrugged. “And I can’t say I’m comfortable around Soro. I don’t know what he wants. I need somebody who can answer my questions. Somebody I trust.” He looked off into the Cragavar.
Where is my teacher now? I wonder
.

Old Soro trudged to the mule at the edge of the trees and lifted saddlebags over its back. Then he paused, distracted, gazing skyward.

A magnificent rain cloud moved westward on high winds, its bulk like the hull of a ship, its highest reaches white and wind-swept like sails. Sunset’s rays beamed along beneath it. The sight lifted Cal-raven momentarily from his distress. He longed to go back into the sky. To forget everything that burdened him.

Soro buckled the saddlebags and began untying the mule from the tree.

Cal-raven walked down toward him. “Where do you plan to take Nat-ryan?”

“Where does an Abascar man belong?” came the bearded man’s reply.

The barb in the question snagged him. “I’m not going with you.” He turned back toward the ruins. “I can’t.”

Soro finished strapping the bags to the mule, then clapped his hands three times, and the animal turned and trotted dutifully into the woods, its ears swiveling as if already watching for predators.

“What are you …” Cal-raven pointed after the animal as if Soro hadn’t noticed. “It’s off with your things!”

Soro ignored him and marched back to the large kite. He began bending the beams of its wingspan. Then he unclasped small latches along those beams and unfolded greater extensions of canvas, doubling the stretch. It began to beat those wings against the air, eager as a hawk for the hunt. He lifted it then, turned, and waited as if listening for something.

A wave of wind poured over the ruins, stirring up a dustcloud that rushed toward the forest.

The hunchback cast the kite up, and it caught the current, fluttering and rising. Its master walked backward, giving it more and more of the cord. “Nat-ryan?” Soro called. “Ready?”

Cal-raven glanced back to find that Nat-ryan had untied the canvas shelter
from the trees. He was holding the canvas just as Soro had held up the kite. And then he cast it up into the wind. It caught and rose, trailing a cord of its own, which, Cal-raven saw with surprise, was anchored to Soro’s belt.

The two kites began to ride the wave of wind toward the forest, and their combined force pulled Soro into a heavy run. Cal-raven saw now what the man meant to do, and even so he could not bring himself to believe it would work.

But before Soro had reached the trees, he was bounding in long, elevating steps. And as he reached the tree line, he steered the kites sharply to his left, and they wheeled about and lifted him in another long and sweeping curve. Their spools began to retract. Old Soro ascended, soaring over Cal-raven’s head. His laughter as his kicking boots passed by seemed a response to Cal-raven’s incredulity.

Then Soro flung out more cords, and they trailed below him. Nat-ryan reached out and caught them and quickly bound their hooks to the strange harness that he wore. As he did, he began to run forward, a frantic stumble, until the cords pulled taut and he too was lifted and swinging through the air just behind Old Soro. Now he was laughing as well.

The kites ascended to the tops of the trees, then higher and faster, in wide circles around the clearing. Cal-raven found himself turning in place, open-mouthed. And then they began to pick up speed, gliding swiftly on stronger currents, straightening their paths, and moving north and west, their backs to him.

“Wait!” He began to walk forward. “Wait! Don’t go yet!” He started to run. And soon he was dashing hard and anxious after the rising kites and their passengers. “Take me with you!”

The three kite fliers gripped the cords and gazed wide-eyed at the forest beneath them, the trees painted gold by the sunset’s flood of light.

Cal-raven, strapped in a harness Soro had drawn from his pack, had already forgotten the first sight he had seen in the moments after the cords pulled sharply and broke his run, lifting him in a graceful curve over the ruins of House Abascar.
The crater in the stone below had seemed an open mouth, a throat, a devouring emptiness swallowing all that Abascar’s people had built to make themselves the world’s glory.

Abascar seemed so small as Cal-raven was carried up toward the low, streaming clouds. And as they turned and accelerated westward, he marveled that such simple constructions—wooden beams fixed crosswise, with canvas stretched to catch the invisible forces around them—could lift him so easily above his troubles and give him hope, could raise him to such a staggering view.

It was as if he could see the whole world.

As they rushed across the Cragavar, he saw highwatches far below, the platforms he and his soldiers had built to send messages over the trees. They were small wooden squares, tiny pieces from a game he had played long ago. When the mist of the low clouds moistened his brow, he found himself laughing. Nothing—not even the fastest charge on a horse—had ever given him such a thrill. He felt as if he were escaping the world to touch the fiery sky. He was free in a nameless country. Anything seemed possible now.

The world blurred—colors, motion. They moved in a cool dream, a concert of whispers, and the wind told the kites just where to fly.

Cal-raven watched Old Soro, admiring the way he could steer the kites with the slightest tugs on the line. It was as though they were knives and he was sculpting the air, finding the right contours.

When the gleaming lake came into view—a pink mirror of the evening sky—they began to descend.

Hearing the kite-maker’s instructions, Cal-raven and Nat-ryan raised their feet and then landed in a run. Soro guided the kites to gently scud along the pebbled beach until they stopped, their canvas sagging wearily.

The beach ran along between the rippling lake water and three dark cave mouths at the base of a cliff that rose high and smooth above them.

The high stone wall gained his full attention, for it was painted in grand, vivid stripes of color.

“Auralia,” he whispered.

s the ale boy emerged from the earth’s crooked mouth, he breathed deep, relieved to escape the stagnant air of the maze below. Any light, even the sickly glow of the sun’s cold coin over a world drained of colors, was better than the subterranean dark.

Auralia’s out there somewhere
.

He looked down at himself, an unfamiliar clown. The tunic and torn trousers that Jordam had found in the Cent Regus’s plunder did nothing to muffle the bite in the breeze. Had winter lost its patience and pushed autumn aside?

How he longed for a hot bath. He thought of the wine barrel that Abascar’s brewer, Obsidia Dram, had given him for a washtub, where he could bathe after carrying heavy harvest from the forest to the Underkeep. The steam had smelled faintly of the wine that had once filled it. Obsidia would hunch over the barrel—she was always hunched—and redden his back and shoulders with a harshbristle brush while she sang a strange, comforting melody fourteen notes long.

He sang it now, limping along the river’s slick bank on his half broom-handle crutch, his body slow in remembering how to walk.

The river slithered past, its skin opaque and filthy, spilling down into the Core. Brascles crazed the sky’s brown haze, waiting for the beastmen they served to come out of their burrows and take them hunting. He could see their beady eyes.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I miss the Underkeep.”

His words startled a heap of branches. It leapt from the riverbank, shrieking. The ale boy dropped the crutch and slid on his backside down the incline to the river’s edge.

The branch-tangle pursued him, snatching up the crutch as a weapon. Then it stopped. Amid the thicket costume, a bearded face peered down at him.

The ale boy noticed the tall forehead and the wiry grey hair. A name found his voice. “Kar-balter?”

The man in the suit of twigs paused. “Rescue? Is that you?” He turned the crutch to offer the blunt end.

Relieved to recognize the former Abascar guard, the ale boy took the offer. Upright, he nearly fell again under a barrage of anxious words.

“That beastman, the good one, he went to look for you, boy, and he hasn’t come back and—forgive me—I told him you were shot or eaten or ruined, in some way dead like the rest of our people, and it’s true about them, I’ve seen them, just back in there, downstream, where you came from, but shut my jaw like a window! You’re … you’re not dead! Where’ve you been?”

“Far below,” the boy whispered. “On a different river. Jordam told me to bring you back in.”

“Go back? No, you have it wrong. We’re leaving.”

“He told me he asked you to watch over the dead.”

“You came out of there, so you’ve seen them, the bodies, back there beside the river where we started our escape. Awful, how they’re piled on top of one another, like firewood. You, you’re lucky, only a bad leg to show for it all. But, oh.” He leaned in closer. “Oh, you’re burnt like bacon on the spit too long.”

The ale boy hobbled toward a rowboat that someone—probably Kar-balter—had half covered with dead reeds. “Beastmen’re distracted for now. They’re fighting each other and digging for Essence. When they find it, they’ll be dangerous. And hungry.”

“Sure as vultures.” He brushed the reeds away. The rowboat’s sides had been smashed, but the remains still worked as a raft.

“So we gotta finish what we started.”

“Finish?” Kar-balter glanced over his shoulder, then followed. “Maybe you’ve not noticed, Rescue, but our adventures here are over. Beastmen are swarming back to the Core like flies to … well … We’ll be lucky to get away alive. The Strongbreed have arrows as thick as tent stakes and spears heavy as flagpoles. They came over the rise and attacked. Thought sure I was dead, but Nella Bye, she …” He paused, trying to wipe at tears, but poked himself in the eye with a twig glued to the back of his hand.

The ale boy clutched at his chest. “I don’t want to know.”

“She stepped in front of me. Arrow hit her hard.” Kar-balter pointed to a purple lump over his left eyebrow. “Back of her head knocked me overboard.
Splash! Splat!
Arrows. Arrows everywhere.”

The ale boy knelt and pushed the makeshift raft back into the stream.

“You were an Abascar ale boy, weren’t you?” Kar-balter stepped carefully on and crouched down, ten fingers splayed on the raft’s wet wood, while the boy lifted his long, spiked pole from the bank. “Know where I could get a drink around here?”