Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1) (15 page)

Tyrissa rolled away as she hit the ground,
thankful for the practice from sliding out of her cabin. Bits of the creature
stuck to her clothes and skin, little isles of heat, like the embers of a
campfire blown by a sudden wind. She brushed away any stuck coals and sprang to
her feet, hands smeared with ash. The heat too was easy to ignore. Tyrissa
could swear she felt… cold, as if shielded from the flames. She dismissed it as
the chaos playing tricks on her mind, and snatched up her staff, dropping into
a defensive posture.

The creature rebuilt itself into a web of
smoldering coals and rock four feet tall, cords of orange flame connecting each
piece. No face, no limbs, only an animate pile of shifting debris fueled by
fire magick. It contorted and rambled toward her, extending out a branch of hot
stone. Tyrissa leapt aside, staff whirling to attack what passed for a joint
among the stones, sending a cloud of embers into the air and severing the limb.

Another attack emerged from the mass, catching her
in the thigh and searing through her trousers. Her skin was unharmed. She felt
no burn, only another wash of icy chill that raced through the bones of her
leg. The cord of flame running along that limb sputtered out as if doused. The
elemental drew back, as uncertain as a pile of rock can look as part of its
body fell away. The confusion was mutual.

What’s happening? Why am I so cold?

The day’s heat fell away from her and the cold
intensified. It felt like she was running naked through a Morgale winter,
frigid and yet fluid, a partially frozen river flowing over rapids.

Tyrissa pulled the water skin off her belt,
thumbed off the stopper and swung it in a wide arc. Water sprayed across the
elemental, flashing to steam. She could swear she saw shards of ice mixed in.
More fiery links faded and pieces of the creature fell away. Tyrissa dropped
the water skin and swung her staff through the elemental, breaking it in two.
The bottom half crumbled away, while the top coiled into a ball and sprang at
her, a net of stone and fire thrown across her face and chest. She fell
backwards, suddenly pinned as the creature tried to smother her in cinders.

Again, her clothes burned away where the creature
made contact but Tyrissa felt nothing but a surging embrace of frost. Flakes of
ash fell on her face, but she had nothing to fear from the fire.

‘Touch the flames and you get burned,’
Hali
had said.

Not me.

Tyrissa reached up and grabbed the largest rock
at the back of the creature where a lattice of flaming cords sprouted, the
closest thing it had to a heart. Her hands, nimble and fluid, only grew colder
as she ripped the heart away, cords fraying and twisting in the air. She tossed
it aside and the creature collapsed atop her, inert and lifeless.

She climbed to her feet, the stones falling away
to leave her coated in ash and char. Where she had thrown the elemental’s heart,
a snaking line of fire a few inches long tried to worm back toward the domain
to the west. Tyrissa walked over and stepped on the creeping flames. Wisps of
smoke coiled up from below her boot, and the elemental stirred no more.

The world around her emerged from the blind and
deaf bubble of battle and the cries of combat were now calls for aid and the
wails of the wounded. The fight was over. Tyrissa picked up her staff, drew in
that first calming breath, and looked around. Behind her, Hali stood under
Roth, her hands pressed against the mastodon’s leg. Her robe was a patchwork of
torn fabric and burned holes, but the flesh underneath was unblemished save for
a few streaks of char and ash. She’d read tales of Lifepacts being tough, their
regenerative powers unnerving and bottomless, but Hali seemed invincible.

Approaching hoofs on Heartroad stone announced
Kexal riding in atop his horse, a black stallion bigger than even the Khalan
draft breeds.

“Hali! There’s wounded at the rear of the
caravan,” he called, sliding off the warhorse and holding the reins out. Hali
strode over, unhurried and murmured to Kexal before accepting a hand up into
the saddle.

Kexal gave Tyrissa a nod and went through the
motion of a respectful tip of a nonexistent hat.

“Good to see you’re in one piece,” he said.

“Y-Yeah. Can’t say the same for these fire
elementals.” Tyrissa kicked a spherical rock that used to be part of the
creature. She was so cold and had to keep moving, keep talking, just to stop
the shivering. It wasn’t going away, though she could distantly feel the
broiling heat of the Wastes around her.

“Elementals? No, these were flamekin, smaller
fellas that have to bind to something to be any use or danger. But I’ll tell
you what, a true elemental would have been a lot more fun, though we’d be in a
worse way after it was all over.”

Though he was tearing across a battlefield not
three minutes ago, Kexal was back to his normal buoyancy. If anything, he
seemed to be even more jovial than normal, as if fighting the flamekin caused
his spirit to lift higher.

“You’re shakin’ there, kid. This your first taste
of real action?”

Tyrissa was unable to keep it controlled. She was
bitterly cold, as if her bones contained cores of pure winter. Her mind slowed
like a stream in the first deep frost of the year. Tyrissa nodded and forced a
weak smile through clamped teeth just as Kexal began to look at her askance.
She possessed neither the will nor the trust to correct him.

“I should find my brother,” she said, making an
excuse to leave.

Tyrissa shivered to sleep underneath every
blanket and coat available in their cabin as the frigid presence in her bones
slowly leeched away. Her mind drifted in and out of dreams, all the typical and
inconsequential mental ramblings of the unconscious mind. Heat and cold
featured heavily, as did the sense of being lost. Nothing surprising there.
They were fleeting images, nothing more. It wasn’t until she felt herself near
waking, balanced on that delicate fringe between awake and asleep that the
chaos of her mind focused on a single scene. It was only natural that it was
another dream of ice.

A vast blanket of snow smothered an expanse of
rolling hills that gradually rose to the foot of a mountain range. It was night
but a further layer of abyssal darkness clung to the indistinct peaks like a
protective cloak of rippling shadow. The snow looked wrong, unnatural. It was
too pure and uniform, even for freshly fallen drifts. The bare branches of
scattered trees clawed out through the snow like skeletons bursting from their
graves. A blue aurora blazed over it all, the one source of comfort in the
scene, though the color was off, a deeper blue than the azure ribbons that
floated above Morgale.

A lone figure walked through waist-high banks of
snow without resistance. The snows melted in a tight ring around her, the
rising mist and steam shrouding her in a frozen fog. A serrated, crystalline
trail of ice refroze in her wake. Zephyrs blew a dusting of snow over her trail
to bury the element’s shame of defeat.

Tyrissa followed from behind as a disembodied
observer. She knew it was a woman, though the figure was so heavily wrapped
against the cold that all defining features were as obscured as the snowbound
landscape. Here and there, she saw bits of armor glinting beneath the furs,
catching and amplifying the blue glow from above, the aurora granting an aura.
Tied atop the bulky pack slung across the woman’s back was a round shield of
black wood, rimmed in fine polished steel. Small icicles clung to the bottom of
the rim, dripping from the heat. At the center of the shield was a metal disc
emblazoned with a silver shield divided into quadrants, winged by five feathers
to a side. It was the same as Tsellien’s cloak clasp.

The woman paused and tilted her head, as if
straining to hear a distant cry. Then she shook her head, dismissing an idle
fancy. She was wholly alone and continued her journey toward the mountains of
frost and shadow, her destination blazing with a harsh, secret power. She
strode into the unknown with the weight of duty across her shoulders, unbowed
and unafraid, like an Archangel marching off to war.

The vision ended and Tyrissa fully woke, blinking
up at the wooden ceiling of the cramped cabin. Unlike most dreams the details
didn’t wash away upon waking like cheap dye. It felt real, like she stood in
the snows herself. The symbol on the shield meant she wasn’t alone. There was
another, somewhere. Like Tsellien. Like Tyrissa. It was a meager taste of
solace, but she would take it.

The bold and bright daylight of morning leaked
around the edges of the cabin door, unfiltered by yesterday’s oppressive haze.
Their cabin was on the east side of the caravan; it must be some hours after
dawn. She had slept for damn near a day. The strange chill within her was long
gone, replaced by the warmth and sweat of sleeping beneath far too many layers.
Tyrissa threw off the copious covers and rose.

Liran was already out and about the caravan, but he
had left a bowl of now-cool porridge covered with a cloth and a full water skin
atop his desk built of crates. She remembered stumbling into the cabin after
the attack and waving away Liran when he returned, insisting she just needed to
sleep it off, whatever ‘it’ was. The memory between the attack and sleep was so
vague it could have been part of her dreams. Tyrissa wolfed down the porridge
and moistened the cloth to scrub away the remnants of yesterday’s fight, leaving
the cloth streaked with ash and grime. She then set to digging up clothes that
smelled the least like mastodon, a near-impossible feat in the Wastes with no
opportunity to wash the stink from her clothes.

Once ready to go, Tyrissa paused with a hand on
the door. Hali’s words before the attack came back to her: ‘
Embrace it.’

After the enduring chill from fighting the
flamekin and emberhawks, and how she could sense Hali’s own magicks, she
couldn’t ignore it anymore. Tyrissa
drew her knife and held out her left
arm. The caravan had lurched into motion some minutes ago, and Tyrissa swayed
with the gentle rocking of the land barge over the ancient Heartroad. She
pressed the tip of the knife to her forearm and made a quick, light cut about
an inch long. It was little more than the scratch you’d get from an irate
housecat, but she inhaled sharply all the same at the tiny flash of pain. Blood
oozed out of the cut and then she felt the knife across her skin again, this
time a slower drag running along the wound, a shadow, phantom cut.

Tyrissa rubbed away the blood with her thumb and
watched with wide eyes as the cut closed, first leaving a pink line of new
skin, before deepening into her normal tone. She sheathed her knife and
interlaced hands on the door, leaning against them with her forehead, eyes
shutting out the light creeping along the floor at her feet.

She’d received minor scrapes since the caravan
left Morgale, rope burns or little cuts from minor falls, to say nothing of the
welts she received training with Kexal. She ignored them when they vanished
overnight, wrapping herself in denial. This was different. This was right in
front of her eyes and by her own hand. This was a gift, an advantage. She
should be pleased, but her stomach sank with dread.

What will be their price?

Tyrissa took a few steadying breaths, opened the
door, and stepped into a new day’s light.

Though the Vordeum Wastes continued for two days
after the attack, the caravan’s exit from those charred lands was uneventful. Fire’s
grip on the land loosened, the air cooled, and color returned. Their route rose
to meet a range of short mountains that ran west to east and formed the border
between empty Vordeum and the thriving south. The shift was staggering. At the
peak of the pass through the mountains one could see that ahead lay a verdant
realm of fields and forests while behind there was only desolation, as if the
rules of nature were reignited like a lantern.

The Heartroad continued to cut south like a knife
but sprouted frequent thin branches that rambled away into the countryside. They
were now in the lands of the Khalan Federation and the caravan’s progress
slowed with the return of civilization. Every day brought another town and
another stop to exchange goods and accept more cargo bound for Khalanheim. The
caravan’s numbers waxed and waned at each stop and for every merchant that
departed down a side road to their homes, another joined for the final leg of
the journey to Khalanheim. This was not only Khalan territory, but Khalan
North’s territory, with each town flying the guild’s black and blue flag from
the peaked gables of the guildhalls and inns that lined the Heartroad.

Lirveer, the northernmost Khalan state, bore a
striking similarity to what Tyrissa saw of southern Morgale, though here the
fields weren’t split by crevasses and the forests were tangles of broadleaved
trees, some already becoming yellow or orange with the shifting season.
Tyrissa, in a nod to her self-taught ranger ways, made an effort to learn the
different tree species. She received many a strange look when asking what this
or that tree was called, but could soon identify pale-barked birch, stout
maples, and white leaved willows.

The last day of their journey snuck up on her.
One morning, she awoke to a persistent screeching. It was a rare day where she
was not expected at the mastodons until the afternoon and could sleep in. Noise
was common in the caravan: creaking wood, shouting workers, and the constant
rumble when the
North Wind
was in motion. She had grown accustomed to
those. Even Liran bustling about the tiny cabin and checking the fragrant
crates of Morgwood herbs for the hundredth time was ignorable. He had been at
this frenzy of sorting and filing for days now. But this keening sliced through
any attempt to muffle her ears or deny it. After many torturous minutes of trying
to recapture sleep Tyrissa surrendered and sat up on the narrow cabin bed.

“Liran. What in the name of the Ten
is
that sound?”

Her brother looked up from his work, eyes glancing
around, and said, “What do you mean?” He sat at a makeshift desk built of
carefully arranged crates in the corner of the cabin. He had his ledger open,
likely adding to the already vast volume of figures and calculations contained
within. Tyrissa flipped through it once and could make no sense of the
contents. It may as well have been code, with half the words being some manner
of mercantile jargon. Liran guarded that leather-bound folder as if it were his
life. Perhaps it was.

“That awful, howling, screeching
noise
.
Don’t you hear it?”

He blinked a few times, listening. “Oh! Those are
the riftwinds. They’re louder up here where the Rift narrows and turns
northeast. They’re not so bad in the city itself and after a few days you stop
hearing them.”

“The Rift? Then we’re close to the end?”

Liran nodded and said, “We’ll arrive at Avenlild
in a few hours and be in Khalanheim before sunset.” He pulled a sheet of paper
from his ledger and passed it to her. “Sign the blank line there,” he said
while offering her his pen. “It’s a notice of your arrival in the city for the
purposes of Central’s bureaucracy.”

Tyrissa took up the pen wrote her name on the
bottommost line, an inelegant scrawl next to Liran’s refined signature. The
paper was titled ‘Notice of New Resident’ and dated yesterday, the seventeenth
of Amberfields, 257 AR. The Khalan calendar still gave her pause. It was tricky
to switch to a second set of the names of the months and even more disorienting
to have the current year lose three centuries. She handed the paper back.

“Can we see the Rift from here?”

“I was just about to suggest that we take a
look,” Liran said, placing the signed paper into the center of his ledger. He
then set it on the desk, weighing down a short stack of other papers. “Get
dressed and meet me on the top deck.”

It was already warm outside, the clear skies
promising one of those early autumn days where summer’s influence still held
sway. A handful of other passengers had gathered on the top deck of the
North
Wind
to take in the view. Tyrissa took her place at the railing next to
Liran and looked out at the edge of the world.

To the east, the land slopped downward from the
Heartroad until it dropped off a cliff like no other. Parallel to the road ran
the Rift, a legendary canyon a mile wide and thousands long that slashed across
the earth like a vicious, jagged wound. From its origin at the gravesite of
Hithia to the highlands far to the east of Vordeum, the Rift nearly split the entire
continent in two. Like the Vordeum Wastes, the Rift was born from the
uncontrolled magicks of an elemental domain. In this case the culprit was the
disintegrating touch of the Plane of Air brought into the world by the Fall of
Hithia two hundred and sixty years ago. The cliffs of the far side were
composed of white and gray stone stacked in layered strata and stood in shadow,
the morning sun not yet high enough to light the cliff’s face. It all reminded
her of the many crevasses throughout the Morgwood, but on a scale that defied
description. A steady, warm wind blew out of the Rift and tossed at Tyrissa’s
untamed hair, beckoning and mystifying.

Liran excused himself to return to his figures,
but Tyrissa remained for a time, drinking in the views as the caravan rolled
along the Heartroad and weaved through hollows and small vales. All around the
land was partitioned into a dense patchwork of farmland, all bright in green
and gold for the coming harvest. The farms stretched away from the road for
miles in every direction, right up to the Rift’s edge and continuing on the
other side. Neat lines of trees and narrow, dusty roads delineated the
boundaries between lots, each plot dotted with farmhouses and barns painted in
an array of colors but all topped with gray roof tiles that caught the sunlight
in glittering points.

Her curiosity to see yet another legend sated,
Tyrissa left the railing to prepare for her last day of work with the
mastodons.

Avenlild looked as if someone had boiled a town
down to its bare components. The satellite town, as it was called around the
caravan, was well outdone in size by many of the villages they passed in the
last leg of the journey, but the proportions were all wrong. While there were
relatively few homes, the inn, stables, and warehouses were scaled for a much
larger population. A central guildhall completed the core, crowned by a pointed
spire in a style that Tyrissa had seen many times since entering Khalan lands.
Today the offices from within the guildhall spilled out onto the Heartroad and
formed a line of tables and officials under sun-blocking canvas awnings, a
checkpoint for processing the stream of trade headed into the city. Dotted
among the dominant blue and black livery of Khalan North was the gold, silver, and
bronze tricolor of Central, the governing guild of the Khalan Federation.

The
North Wind
slowed at the edge of town
and, without ceremony or acknowledgement, the caravan dispersed for good. The
smaller wagons drove on to the checkpoint, exchanging paperwork in a flurry of
bureaucracy while uniformed guards from Central and Khalan North checked their
cargo. Anton directed the mastodons off the road toward the largest of the
warehouses, a hangar big enough to house the massive barge and its team. A
fence of tall wooden planks topped with coils of razor wire ringed the
warehouse and Tyrissa noted a fair number of armed guards, all understandable
given the scope and cost of the barge’s operation and Liran’s mention of a
previous arson. The oversized doors to the warehouse stood open and a small
army of workers in plain shirtsleeves and dusty overalls waited inside with an
array of handcarts and wagons ready to unload the barge’s haul from the north.

Her final round of work with the mastodons
treated her to one last view from Roth’s back, this time of the clockwork
shuffle of cargo pouring out of the
North Wind
, the spoils of the north
unfurling across the floor of the warehouse. Tyrissa spied Kexal and his
brother with Hali, the three packed and mounted, Hali and Garth sharing a
horse. She had no idea the three of them were together, though it wasn’t
surprising given how private Hali was. Tyrissa’s practice sessions with Kexal
never returned to the frequency of the days before the wastes, and she often
spotted him riding into the towns along the Heartroad as the
North Wind
inched
its way around. Always, he would rejoin the caravan a short time later looking
disappointed. The Weapon Master caught her gaze and gave her a tip of his
brimmed hat and a smile before kicking his stallion into motion distinctly away
from Avenlild’s checkpoint. Tyrissa waved at their backs, thankful for the
chance to train with him. She felt her skill with the staff was honed and
sharpened, but knew she could always get better. Of Ferdhan, there was no sign.
He must have slipped away with the rest of the separate wagons. Tyrissa was
sure to return her most recently borrowed book to him, another collection of
Khalan stories and legends.

Tyrissa finished her tasks well before her
brother, concluding her mastodon tending service with a fierce bear hug from
Anton and the assurance that, “When you get tired of the bustle and noise of
Khalanheim, come to Jolenhem. You will be welcome there.” She now waited in the
doorway of their cabin, watching as Liran worked in a flurry, pinning a final
set of labels to his aromatic cargo. Soon they were among a small fleet of
carriages that waited outside the warehouse to carry the caravan’s merchants on
to the city
.
Liran strode to a smaller one with an open top and two rows
of seats, pulled by a pair of black horses and driven by an older man with
narrowed eyes and a serious forward hunch. Liran slapped a pair of golden
Khalan coins onto the bench beside the driver and said, “Crossing Square,
southeast side,” with that disarming smile of his. The driver simply nodded and
they climbed aboard, Tyrissa taking the back bench with their packs.

Another guild member climbed aboard the carriage
and joined Liran in the front passenger bench. He was about Liran’s age and
shorter by a few inches, but his build and blade marked him as a fighter, as
did the sword stitched at the center of his coat’s guild crest. He had a clean
shaven, hawk-nosed face, with brown hair shorn short in a simple, efficient
style. Tyrissa saw him earlier as the
North Wind
unloaded, barking
orders at the assembled armed guild escort with a quick, precise Khalan accent.

“Crossing Square is close enough for me,” he said
to the driver while tossing a third coin into the fare. “Liran, welcome back.”

“Good to be back, Arik. How was your summer?”
Liran brightened when he saw him, a meeting of long-parted friends. The
carriage rumbled into motion, the driver directing his team to the checkpoint.

“Hot and busy, though the heat’s not so bad
today. I can’t wait for winter.”

Tyrissa found the day well past comfortable, the
riftwinds keeping the air stirred but far from cool. As promised, she could
still hear the weakened howl of the Rift, like the dull roar of a rainstorm’s
gusts cutting across the roof.

“Ty, this is Arik, part of the guild’s security
corps. Arik, this is my sister Tyrissa.”

“Great, now there’s two of you.” He gave her an
appraising look. “What are you, some sort of Morg Battle Maiden?”

“Lirina the Lovely reborn,” Tyrissa said with a
smile. While she hadn’t killed a frost giant lately, the association was
welcome. Interesting that that tale had made it this far south and he knew of it.
Better that then the horror stories of the Cleanse, at least.

“Are you as good in a fight?”

“Ask some of your men from the caravan.”

They passed the checkpoint without incident and
Tyrissa received a thrice stamped paper declaring her new residency.

“Hold on to that,” Liran said. “Or at least don’t
lose it for a while.”

They rode on towards Khalanheim, its gray walls
looming high, the land cut clear for hundreds of yards. From what Tyrissa read,
cities always had a sprawl of shanties and huts, the walls unable to contain
growth. But the base of Khalanheim’s wall was clean. She remarked on the
absence to Liran.

“We have those, like any other city,” Liran said.
“The south side has a lot of buildup around the reservoir. The bulk of the
rougher areas are underground, in the old tunnels and caverns. For the sub-city
you’ll hear people calling those districts by whatever’s above them. Under
Forge, Under Bridge, and so on.”

Tyrissa hummed a half-hearted response, the city
stealing away her attention. The bulk of Khalanheim was vaguely square, those
long, straight walls forming three sides and the Rift the fourth. Two hills
rose from within the city walls. The taller was covered in a dense buildup of
mansions nestled among a coat of trees. A white tower with the lens of a
telescope jutting through its domed top crowned the other hill. Across the
rooftops of Khalanheim, tenuous companions of smoke and steam joined the tower
in reaching to the sky. A bridge spanned the great canyon at the center of the
city’s Rift-ward side. From here it looked to be a narrow finger of
civilization meekly spanning magick-spawned carnage, but up close it would have
to be massive, taking many minutes to cross. A smaller extension of the city
lay on the other side of the bridge. Beyond the city, on the south side, shined
a reservoir and a wide river that curved away to the west.