Winter Warrior (Song of the Aura, Book Two) (19 page)

   
“No!” he barked, realizing he was about to pass it over. His control must have been improving: the verbal command worked, and the tunnel died around him with no more resistance than a slight tug at his clothes. He was suspended, almost motionless, over the roofless Shrine. Warriors milled below, and the Frost Striders were still at their places. There was no sign of Gribly, but Elia had joined the Reethe Striders on their stone platform. A vicious storm whipped and churned in the sky overhead.

   
“Blast it!” he grunted. In the wind tunnel he hadn’t been able to hear or feel: now he heard the deafening thunder of the storm and felt the pelting, heavy drops of its rain. Winds almost too strong for him to control attempted time and again to buffet him out of his path. His energy was almost depleted in seconds- not least because of the strain his new powers were having on him.

   
Swooping lower over the Shrine’s walls, he alighted smoothly on the northernmost one. Something in his mind; a built-in gauge for danger, perhaps; warned him he didn’t have much time to warn the others. More wind-striding was called for, even if it made him so tired he fell off the wall. He was nearly tired enough, anyway- no food, no sleep, in how long? But he was digressing.

   
He put his hands up to his mouth, cupped them into a trumpet-shape, and blew as hard as he could, clicking his tongue as he did so. It was a Stride he’d learned only days ago, on the spur of the moment…

   
“KARMIDIGAN!”
He saw nearly everyone in the Shrine jump at the amplified sound of his voice. He understood- it had taken him by surprise the first time, too. Several of the nymphs raised bows and slings at him, and he thought he saw the chief Frost Strider’s shorn head below.
“IT IS I, PRINCE LAURO!”
he called.

   
Down below, Karmidigan was bellowing at his men to lower their weapons. Lauro continued.
“THE SEA DEMON HAS GONE BELOW THE WAVES. I WILL FLY UNTIL I FIND HIM. BE WARNED! HE MAY ATTACK HERE NEXT!”

   
The nymph warrior was easy for him to see now, standing head and shoulders taller than most of his soldiers. He flicked his wrist in a queer gesture, and snowflakes whirled about his mouth.

   
“Understood, Prince! We will hold our own until your return. The storm is here at our bidding, as a weapon; and the Shrine is built on solid ground. To reach us the Demon would first have to dislodge this city from its foundations.”
His voice was being thrown! Could all Striders do it in their own way? He’d thought it was just wind. In any case, what Karmidigan told him was encouraging.

   
“Good!”
he called down, trying to control the volume of his voice. It worked- roughly. It irked him to have this nymph be better than him at his own trick.
“We meet in Halla, my friend!”

   
Lightning crackled overhead. Lauro leaped up and flipped back off the wall, twisting and coming back up in a wide flying arc towards the gray sky. At points the smoke that had encased the Reethe iceberg was breaking up. That couldn’t be bad, could it?

   
He had flown no more than a hundred meters North when the sound of screaming and an ear-splitting explosion from behind told him he was wrong.

~

   
Elia had never felt anything like this. She was no mean talent when it came to wave striding; in fact, she was one of the best. But even her unexpected experience controlling the draik’s fire was worthless compared with what she felt now.

   
“You feel it, do you not?”
said Karmidigan, still speaking in the nymphtongue.
“The water in the air… the air itself… the clouds that are made of hundreds upon thousands of little water droplet… the world of the Above, as no nymph has known it since our ancestors walked in the halls of Halla and spoke with the Allfar and his Sky Ravens. It is our blessing.”

   
Her eyes were closed, and she was only dimly aware of her surroundings. She was standing, arms lifted high, in the middle of the ten Frost Striders. And she was striding a storm.

   
“Listen to the storm, Elia Treelese. Amar Undun. It will tell you the story of the nymphs. We, who are Eldest and Youngest. One and Ten. Placed here for a purpose. We hear the words of Wind and Rain, and we understand them. We listen to the speech of Wood and Stream, Grass and Tree, Earth and Sand, and we know what it is they speak of. Even Fire once spoke in a tongue we knew, and we alone.

   
“We taught the humans, we did; the doughty, dire humans. They learned of us all the tongues but Fire. They learned to walk the paths of Wind, Wave, Wood and Storm. They learned to Stride. All this we taught them, for we have always been closer to the land than they. Our people have always known the speech of the land. We were put here to speak to it and to stride down its paths.

   
“Yes, Elia, you understand. You are right. We did not come here: we were placed. We were placed here by the One who knows us best. The One who created us. The One who taught us the tongues of the World, of God’s Scepter. The Creator.

   
“Yes, Elia. We were Created by the Creator. Do you know what you are doing, when you listen to the storm? You are speaking the language of God!”

   
“YES!”
she screamed into the sky, in her mind and in her native speech and in the Common Speech she had learned so young. She did it all at once. And she
felt
it. “Come alive,” she whispered, to Whom she knew not, exactly. “I will speak this tongue. I will walk this path.”

   
“Good,”
Karmidigan’s voice rumbled beside her, or inside her head, or somewhere deep in her mind. She did not open her eyes, but she kept her hands raised to Halla and the One Thereabove.
“Praise the Creator, Elia. Then you will have taken the first step on the path we all must stride to reach our goal.”

   
She praised. And the storm that raged above her suddenly seemed not so far distant. It was remote no longer. It was near her, around her, filling her…

   
…It was
under
her.

   
Her mind was floating above the storm, on wings she couldn’t see, with the flight of a heavenly bird. She felt or saw the electric chill of the gray-white clouds; the silvery black of the sky; the exhilarating magnitude of the rumbling thunder; the enlivening shock of the graceful lightning as it leaped from cloud to cloud like a summer fowl on the branches of a shapely tree.

   
Then came the rain. It was like a torrent, it was like a flood. It
was
a flood; a flood that poured down from the heavens and swept all things away… all things that she wished it to. All things that she
told
it to.

   
She was connected to the storm. Its wisps were her hands, its winds her hair. Its sky was her mantle and its lightning her heart. Her praises were its thunderclaps and her words were the melody of its furious glory. With it under her command, she was really, truly
powerful
.

   
Then she saw… no,
felt
the others. Like vast wells of thought and memory, and of meditation, shot through with the freezing ice of pride and the fierce strength of a thousand years spent among the waters of the snowy North Sky.

   
Frost Striders, uncloaked and in the form they were born to inhabit.

   
And yet, she did not feel ashamed to be among them.

~

   
A blindingly bright presence, yet one that was at the same time remote and collected, wise and strong, was beside her.
So you have strode down our path, Young One.
It spoke to her, and its voice held an emotion that did not fit it: surprise.

   
It… it appears I have. But I am not sure how, Karmidigan, or why.

   
All will be revealed in time, to those who do not ask.

   
I do not understand.

   
You are not asked to. But I will answer you, at least in part. In the past, all who strode the paths of Wind, Water, and Wood could learn their secrets and speak their tongue, if they strode long and far enough. From these first few nymphs who did so came the Striders. The skills they learned ran so deep that not only they but their descendants gained the gift. A fewer number of humans did the same, and with a similar effect.

   
As time passed, less and less ‘became’ Striders. Many were born of the first Striders’ descendants, but their skill was weaker. Less potent. The path of Fire and its language has been forgotten, and none have since learned it anew. Other paths have become more scarce. Once, to know one path was to know them all. Now the only Striders left are the sons and daughters of the descendants of the First. They are limited to the path their life takes them down: Wave, Sand, Rock. Sand, Wind, Frost and Mist. Only in such places where our paths mix in the cascade of the elements do we grow more powerful: such as in this storm, where Frost and Wave and Wind meet and are Strong Together.

   
I…
she began, wanting to interrupt- to tell him that he was wrong, and she
could
stride fire. And Gribly! He could stride stone
and
sand! If it really was so rare, then…

   
Wait,
his voice said quickly, and it seemed farther away somehow.
An enemy may be approaching below.

   
But I…
He was gone. She soon forgot him and reveled in the storm. She could actually stride it! He was right: where the elements met, so did the strings of power buried deep within her. She could feel a heat in her belly, or what part of her mind felt like it. Fire. Her fire. The fire she knew she had in her. Was it possible that she could walk the paths of Wind and Wood as well? It was arrogant to think of it… but…

   
I have returned,
came Karmidigan’s voice again. He needn’t have told her.
There will be trouble. Deadly trouble. The wind Strider has returned from his venture against the Sea Demon. He thinks-

   
But she never learned what Lauro had thought. Into her world of Storm and Sea, a hideous darkness thrust itself, all aflame and bristling with malice. The Frost Striders had been expecting it: they were ready and strong enough to resist, and she was not.

   
Her fragile hold- oh, so fragile!- on the striding of the storm simply broke. Her consciousness plummeted back into her body.

~

   
Elia came to herself amid an all-consuming roar of noise. Thunder boomed and ice cracked; lightning flashed and wind howled. The dying light of the sky was eclipsed by the unholy light of the Sea Demon’s luminous body as it smashed its way through the Shrine floor. Its eyes burned with blue fire and its mouth belched acrid smoke that clung to the shattered world around it like a strangling shadow.

   
The final struggle was beginning.

Chapter Sixteen: Battleheart

   
Everyone was caught off guard- even Karmidigan and the other Frost Striders.