Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1) (38 page)

Tyrissa slid to a stop at Kexal’s pack of supplies.
She set her staff aside, knowing it would be useless against that monster. It
was time to get creative. She dug through the assorted climbing gear that had
been largely unneeded in the descent and pulled out a pair of long pitons with
ropes tied to the rings.

The wurm closed in on Garth and its wide mouth opened
to reveal rows of teeth shaped like rough stone knives. Pitons in hand and
trailing the ropes behind her, Tyrissa charged up to the wurm and leapt onto
the wurm’s back just behind its head. The wurm lurched and tried to throw her
off, but the stability granted by the earth magicks flowing through her gave her
a firm grip on the bony crest atop the beast’s head.

A quote from her old ranger manuals came to mind.

‘If surprised by a wurm in the wild,
fight
back
. Wurms are generally ambush predators or scavengers and they do not
expect their prey to put up much resistance. Even a relatively minor injury may
convince the beast to retreat.’

Tyrissa leaned forward and plunged a piton into
the wurm’s right eye. Viscous gray fluid exploded outward, coating her hand.
The wurm screamed out a sonic shockwave that shook the walls of the cavern. Dark
red blood followed as she shoved the spike in deeper until it crunched through bone.
Tyrissa wrapped the rope tied to the piton around her forearm and shifted to
the other side of the wurm’s head. The beast began to thrash around the cavern
floor in another, more urgent attempt to throw her off. Tyrissa pulled herself
toward the other eye and blinded the wurm with the second piton, birthing another
explosion of goo and blood. The deafening pained shriek that followed could
have been heard in Khalanheim.

The wurm blindly sought an exit tunnel and its
warbling now had a rapid, panicked rhythm. Tyrissa attempted to steer the
creature with either rope, pulling it away when it turned toward her allies. Kexal
and Vralin continued to exchange blows on the far side of the cavern, both
looking torn and bloodied. Garth limped away from the thrashing beast, towards
Hali and Wolef. The wurm eventually found a side tunnel and dived into it,
seeking escape. Darkness swallowed them and Tyrissa found herself as blind as
the wurm while they barreled through the tunnels.

Wounded and terrified, the wurm plowed ahead
through the tunnel in pursuit of some manner of escape. Tyrissa crouched low on
the beast’s thickly scaled back, the heavy underground air tossing her hair in
a wild mane. She held each grisly, makeshift rein steady. Any excessive motion or
attempt to throw her off would result in a tug on the embedded pitons that
produced another pained cry from the wurm. Her unwilling mount soon settled
into a smoother flow.

Giant wurm riding is easier than I expected
.

The roof above was frighteningly close, but the
tunnel only seemed to be widening, the air growing fresher. Tyrissa risked
raising her head to peer around the wurm’s pointed snout and spied the literal
light at the end of the tunnel. Through equal amounts of good and bad luck, this
particular tunnel ran right out into the Rift and Tyrissa could see the
familiar shimmer of sunlit stone that indicated a plateau. The wurm only surged
faster, oblivious to its approaching doom.

“Time to get off,” she muttered as she untangled
herself from the makeshift reins, revealing wide streaks of rope burn. The
wurm, now free of the maddening pull from within its eye sockets, began to buck
violently to either side of the tunnel, sending showers of loose rock into the
air. The sunlight had grown strong enough for Tyrissa to see the smooth floor
of the tunnel rushing past below them, her vision rocked back and forth by the wild
undulations of the wurm. Jumping out to either side wasn’t an option; she’d be
smashed between the wurm and the tunnel walls. She would have to leap from the
creature’s tail and roll away, and hope that would minimize injuries. Too slow
for comfort, Tyrissa turned away from the approaching mouth of the cave,
hugging tight to the wurm’s back every inch of the way. She could hear the
riftwinds ahead, their howls merging with the beast’s panicked bellows and the
crunch of rock against scale to create a cacophonous din. She didn’t have
enough time to crawl to the tail. However, there was enough now clearance above
to stand.

Go, go, just GO!

Tyrissa pushed herself to a crouch and half ran
and half stumbled down the wurm’s back. Each step was a fight for balance
against the rumbling, twisting creature below. She had only crossed half the
distance when the world burst into brilliant daylight. She shot a glace over
her should and saw that the ground dropped away a scant hundred feet away. To
call this a ‘lower flat’ would be generous as the plateau slopped heavily
downward. The wurm lurched in an attempt to stop, realizing its fate all too
late. Tyrissa took the sliver of extra time to dash down the rest of the wurm’s
back, leaping from the lashing tail towards sweet, solid ground.

Tyrissa landed with all the grace of an avalanche
and, much to her terror, continued to slide towards the cliff’s edge. Ahead of
her, the wurm’s momentum pulled it over the cliff and the creature let out a
final, mournful death bellow as it disappeared from sight. Tyrissa felt a
minute trickle of earth magick from the riftwinds and frantically clawed
against the wind-worn rock, seeking anything to slow her from joining the wurm
in an infinite fall. Her body slid out into open air, her heart skipped a beat,
and she closed her eyes against the terrifying glimpse of nothing below her
save the Rift’s endless drop into mist-obscured depths. A scream died in her
throat as a whimper.

Her left hand found a hold, a smooth but solid
lip at the very edge of the cliff. Tyrissa threw every ounce of strength and
every sliver of earth magicks into her grip. It held and she was yanked to a
stop, her body smacking against the cliff-side. Her other hand snapped up and
made another feeble hold on the edge. Her feet scrabbled about until they found
purchase in a slight grove on the cliff wall and for the first time in what
seemed like hours, she stopped moving. Tyrissa held fast to the cliff and let the
ceaseless winds of the Rift buffet against her, savoring the gritty feel of the
rock in her hands that might as well be life itself.

She then opened her eyes, drew in a ragged
breath, and hauled herself up to safety. She crawled a few feet from the edge
then rolled onto her back and lay still, muscles quivering from exertion and
fading adrenaline. Her eyes followed the immense walls of the Rift up to the
sky and blinked against the calming midday sun.

“And that’s how you kill a wurm,” Tyrissa said
between panting breaths. “Just like back home.”

Tyrissa couldn’t help but laugh, the sound a
manic mix of relief and exaltation that the riftwinds carried up and away.

Tyrissa nearly collided with Kexal on her way
back through the tunnels, running and burning off excess earth absorbed in the
Rift. The Jalarni bounty hunter looked beaten and drained in the harsh light of
his gloworb, but remained in a reassuring single piece.

“Ty,” he said, “Where’s your new friend?”

“Finding out what’s at the bottom of the Rift.
How is everyone else? What about Vralin?” She already knew the answer to the
second from the look on Kexal’s face.

“Escaped,” he said with a sigh. “Slipped away from
me not long after you wrangled that wurm out. Wolef and Garth got roughed up in
a bad way, but Hali was able to work her miracles on them. It’ll take a couple
days to get the three of them one hundred percent again. That’ll be just enough
time for me to find us a ride south. We know where he’s going this time.”

“Hithia.”

“Yep.”

Tyrissa hurried through the halls of the
Grand
Inn
, though this time she had an invitation. The note simply said: ‘I win.
Visit me this afternoon.’ and was signed in overly elegant script by Giroon the
Great.

Giroon’s suite looked like it had fought with a
library and lost. Books and loose sheets of paper monopolized any flat surface
that could hold them. Giroon sat at the back of it all atop the four-post bed,
the curtains drawn up.

“Welcome, Tyrissa. Look upon the chaos you’ve
driven me too.”

She couldn’t help but smile and say, “I like it
better this way.”

“It has its charms,” the bard agreed.

Tyrissa made her way through the maze of tomes,
taking extra care with her steps. Most books lay open and all were bookmarked
with white slips of paper hanging out the edge like tongues. Giroon sat cross
legged on the bed with a half-circle of books spread around him. Front and
center was the red Zegun book from before, heavily bookmarked with slips of
paper. On his left was a slender, new book, a blank journal, one page empty,
the other filled with notes written in the same lightning and fire script that
adorned Giroon’s arms. The last was an ominous black tome with a metal frame
that looked like it belonged in an old Morg temple to the ten gods, to be
opened for the rare occasion when tradition demanded a dose of authentic piety.

“Come closer, our search has reached an end,
though the path was as contorted as any proper plot should be. Are you familiar
with the tales of Jerod the Just?”

Tyrissa dug out the answer as she entered the
bedroom. “He was one of the first Weapon Masters, the founder of the Academy of
Crushing Tides in Felarill.”

“Correct. Then you know that in the chronology of
his exploits there’s a gap in his middle years where no tales of heroism occur,
after his more popular adventures but before the founding of the Academy. He
wasn’t inactive in that time and some scattered tales exist. They just weren’t
popularized. He kept a journal, one that, while copied and spread, remained in
obscurity due to how incredibly dull it was. I only read it on the long voyage
between Zegun’da and Felarill and only after finishing everything else I had
access to. Jerod’s journal largely detailed dry daily occurrences: walked fifteen
miles today, killed a deer, and so on. But every few entries are long strings
of internal thoughts over the leader of his party, a woman who followed a sort
of divine guidance. He never referred to her by name, only as ‘The Witch’ or
‘Our Witch’ and made much of her ability to turn the elements to her will.”

Giroon had clearly donned his storyteller mask
and Tyrissa stayed quiet, listening as a student at the foot of the instructor.

“Again, we have the witch key word and further
mention of the ability to nullify or transmute or otherwise manipulate elemental
energies. But Jerod’s entries are something of a dead end. He’s not very
detailed when talking of his ‘Witch’, as if her abilities were commonplace to
him. Perhaps they were. In any case, the journal is incomplete and the latter
entries are lost.”

“So, Jerod was a just a confirmation of what we
already know.”

“Yes, but some of the details led me forward. One
reason this whole endeavor has been tricky is the nature of the nations and
peoples of the North. Most of you are very… secular. Faith and religion is
tertiary at best.”

“No god or king but coin,” Tyrissa said, quoting
the motto of Khalanheim. Reverence for her own ten gods of Morgale was more
formality than faith, a habit of thought and source for profanity.

“Indeed. The Khalans are the worst of the lot of
you. However, religions have a proclivity to preserve select bits of lore, and
as we’re dealing with a divine sort, or at least source, of magick, that is
where I found our answers.” He laid a fond hand on the red book.

“Beyond the Zegun legends and myths, this book
contains what scraps we could preserve from other Western cultures and, here in
the back, a translated excerpt from the Gospels of the southern continent. We
used to have some contact with the South, but those ties have long since
atrophied. They’re an extremely religious people. Even their traders were
part-time missionaries and left behind copies of their holy text, translated
simply as ‘The Gospels of Whomever.’ They’re presented as long form poems or
epics. I approve of that much.”

Giroon opened the red book to a marker near the
back.

“Forgive the rough wording, as the original was
in Rhalvik, translated into archaic Zegun here and I’m reading it in Northern common.
This is The Gospels of Azzir, canto three.”

To shield the people against forces beyond

He sent one of His blessed Daughters, half
mortal, half divine

Clad in samite and silks, wielding iron and
silver

With beauty unmatched, delivering justice
unquestioned

A bulwark against wildfire and flood, darkness
and plague

An Archangel made flesh.

A bulwark against Fire and Water and Shadow and
Death, wielding silver. Now they were getting somewhere.

“Silver is our color.”
Our
color
.

“They sing her praises for…” Giroon flipped a
number of pages forward, “a while. Here’s something later. Gospels of Azzir,
canto thirteen.” Giroon recited:

In death She left behind a legacy, an order of
guardians

Lead by a daughter blessed with her essence,
her power.

Their symbol a winged shield of four joined
fragments

Heirs of the Archangel, a chain that remains
unbroken.

“How old are these Gospels?” As she listened,
Tyrissa brought out Tsellien’s cloak clasp.

“They’re sourced to about a thousand years ago.
Now, there was no mention of such a figure in any Western texts. We have the
Shades to thank for that. They, ah,
adjusted
mythological cannon to
favor their particular beliefs, purging most other faiths that came under their
empire.” Again Giroon spoke of the Vitu as monsters and cruel conquerors, a
view that didn’t at all match what Tyrissa had seen from Wolef. She never
mentioned either the bard or Zegun’da to the Shade, fearing that he too would
bring out that shared animosity and hatred between the two. She had no desire
to see that side of him. She preferred to think it didn’t exist.

“Age was the key to this search. Younger texts
blur and reinterpret the old myths and tales to a modern point of view. Literal
events become metaphors, and metaphors become canonical law. So I sought out
purity. For all of this globetrotting through the myths of tales of every
corner of the world, the answer came from your own neighbors and cousins, the
Guryar.”

“’Cousins’ is being generous,” Tyrissa said.
“We’re little alike.” The Guryar were said to be even wilder than her own people
once were, corsairs that plied the vast rocky shores between the Fjordland of
Morgale and the northern reaches of the Rhonian Empire. Only the most daring
merchants even considered sailing those waters. The ports of the Fjordland
rarely saw foreign ships.

“If you will, but the Guryar hewed closer to the
old ways of your people in their reverence of your gods and faiths. To you,
words like Valkyries and Elysium and the like are the fancies of children
stories, old myths set aside long ago. There’s no trace of it in Khalan or
Felarill legends.”

Giroon laid a hand on the heavy black tome, its
iron bindings worked into intricate linking hands and vines and shards of ice.
“What the rest of the North has forgotten, the Guryar revere. I borrowed this
book from a guild master of Khalan Imperial, an apparent fan of myths and
religious canon. His collection was as divine as the subject matter, and he allowed
me to peruse the contents in exchange for a small, private performance for his
family. The priorities of the wealthy.”

“Such lengths for a simple symbol,” Tyrissa said
trying to be flippant to hide her building excitement.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

Giroon opened the metal hinge of the black tome
and turned to a bookmark, a ribbon of worn silver fabric. Wordlessly, he
rotated the book around toward Tyrissa. Upon the opposing pages were intricate
illuminations. One was an expanded elemental wheel with ten partitions, two
sections added for the Divine and the Infernal. At the center, a spear pointed
at the Divine icon at the zenith of the wheel. It was the winged shield. The
opposite page had the emblem in full detail, the four shield sections and wings
of ten feathers, five on a side. Below the emblem was a banner with a word in old
Morg runic. It took Tyrissa a moment to dredge out the translation.

Valkwitch
.

“
This
is what you are Tyrissa.”

“Valkwitch,” she said, trying to word out. “Kind
of awkward.”

“Yes, well, I suppose it’s based on Valkyrie but
given that you aren’t guiding the slain warrior souls to the Elysium Fields
they decided to switch it up. A witch takes one thing and turns it to another,
which, as you’ve said, is what you do with elemental magicks. Yes?”

She nodded, eyes fixed on the book’s illustration
of the symbol. Her symbol.

“Valkwitch it is then,” Giroon said, drumming his
fingers against illustration. “I’ve identified your emblem and so I’ve won the
challenge. As I always do.”

Tyrissa ran a thumb over the cloak clasp. Losing
never felt so good. She had something to call herself, a starting point instead
of another dead end.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“If you want my advice, your best bet for
learning more is to ask the Guryar yourself. They should be receptive to you if
you bear that symbol. This book, while containing our answer, is light on the
details and deals with faith over function. I will transcribe any relevant text
for you, but the summary seems to be that your kind is meant to purge errant
and destructive elemental magicks. The Gospels of Azzir confirm that view.”

The stories of the savagery of the Guryar came to
mind, used to frighten children. Then again, what did they hear of the Cleanse?
Perhaps they were closer to kin after all. But that was a journey for another
time.

“You have a dramatic sense of timing, Giroon. A
trip to Guryarund will have to wait. I’m headed in the opposite direction. To
Hithia,” Tyrissa raised the clasp. “My predecessor was killed by the man we
hunt, a Windmage. We’re going to bring him to justice.” Given how hard Vralin
had fought in the tunnels, Tyrissa had a gut feeling that the only justice
would come with his death.

“Ah, the next chapter of your grand adventure, I
take it?”

“That’s right. Perhaps you could write a story
about me sometime.”

“Perhaps,” Giroon said, sounding serious about
the idea. “Who is ‘we’, in this case?”

“Myself, a pair of bounty hunters, and two other
Pactbound.”

“Working with your newly confirmed enemy already.
What kind are they?”

“They’re good people. At least… so far” she said,
uncertainty creeping into her voice. Wolef
did
have a new wariness
around her since that one morning, and Hali was always cold at best. Tyrissa didn’t
want to think it was fear of her.

Giroon’s voice hardened. “What kind?”

“One is Life and the other Shadow.”

“A Vitu?” A worried scowl crossed the bard’s
face, the appearance of that hatred Tyrissa had tried to avoid.

“Yes.”

“Then he cannot be a good man, only an excellent
facsimile of one. However, I suppose you’re better equipped than most to deal
with a Shade, should his true nature emerge. Given what we know about your
kind, these Valkwitches, that seems exactly what you were placed on this world
to do: the sword and shield against rogue elemental powers.” The bard softened
his expression. “Apologies,” he said. “I shouldn’t judge a man I haven’t met so
harshly. Even if he is a Vitu. I wish you good hunting, Tyrissa. While you’re
away, I’ll gather any more information that I can, though perhaps not as
obsessively. Consider it a bonus for the satisfaction of the challenge.”

Tyrissa thanked Giroon a hundred more times before
she left the
Grand Inn
in a hurry. She had a couple more accounts to
settle in Khalanheim before the hunt began anew.