Winter Warrior (Song of the Aura, Book Two) (20 page)

   
Just when I was remembering how to walk again, too
, Gribly complained to himself. He had clambered out from the snowdrift that had fallen on him as soon as the earthquake stopped, and had been able to witness Lauro’s return and his fancy little voice trick. His first thought was selfish as usual- to run to Elia and make sure she was safe, just to make himself feel better. Blast. He’d kept the wrenching feeling inside him tamed for so long he hadn’t even known he felt it. Why was it acting up again, especially now?

   
He’d made a fool of himself back in the city. He wasn’t even sure he meant most of what he’d said, and now he couldn’t take it back. Bah. Quests and mystical dreams were all fine if they didn’t mess with your head… but that’s what this quest and
these
dreams were doing. They were making him sick. He’d always imagined he was more noble than the average thief, but now he was finding it hard just to stay with his friends… if he could call them that.

   
But it would all have to wait. He’d probably die now anyway.

   
“Whaaaaa!” he yelled as the ground pitched up in front of him. This was no mere earthquake: this was the end of the world! The flat floor of the Shrine had suddenly broken into pieces, and his piece had tipped up and hurled him skyward with a painful jerk. For the two seconds he was in the air he wished he could wind stride like Lauro… Then for the single moment it took to plow into the snow and debris behind him he wished he could frost stride like Karmidigan.

   
Oh well. Can’t have it all, I guess.

   
He dug his way out of the mess just in time to see what it was that had caused the explosion of the Shrine floor.

   
“Oh, gypsies,” he chortled in horror. The massive bulk of the Sea Demon had appeared out of nowhere, taking up almost the entire space between the building’s four walls. Chunks of ice from the very ground were flying everywhere, like pebbles tossed in a hurricane.

   
One was coming his way: a massive shard of ice and rock.

   
Swearing colorfully, Gribly dived to the side as fast and far as he could. The chunk hurtled past him and disappeared in the obscuring cloud of snowdust it generated when it slammed full-speed into the north wall of the Shrine. For a moment the entire world was blank and white, punctuated with the screams of the dying he couldn’t see with his eyes.

   
Coughing the wet slop out of his mouth, he crawled toward the scene of the hit. The shard had opened a mammoth hole in the side of the Shrine, which he saw as the snow cleared.

   
Escape. It was his, and only feet away. For a brief moment he was horribly conflicted.

   
Come on, you can’t do anything about them. They all probably died when the Demon broke through. RUN FOR IT.

   
Fine,
he told himself.
I’ll get away, but once I get my bearings… I’ll be back.
Hoping he’d convinced himself, he leaped up, ready to run and climb through the hole in the wall as he had done countless times in Ymeer.

   
The shattering and mayhem was still going strong behind him. A tremor threw him face-first into the ground, then he scrambled to his feet and leaped up on the low edge of the hole in the wall. He slipped going out the other side, skinning his knees when he fell on his face for the third time in as many minutes.

   
I like the taste of snow on a good day. This is NOT a good day.
He leaped up, bloody knees ignored, and barreled forward into the fog that billowed out from the hole and quickly engulfed his surroundings in a shapeless gray shroud.

   
As the fog surrounded him, he thought he could feel it penetrate past his skin, chilling his bones with an unearthly cold. An unsleeping malice.

   
PROPHET,
thundered a voice in his head.
I KNOW YOU ARE HERE. YOU HAVE IGNORED MY COMMAND. FOR YOUR IGNORANCE YOU WILL DIE.

   
The Sea Demon. It had found him!

   
Without a thought for his friends, without even a shred of dignity or honor, Gribly let his mind surrender to fear.

   
He screamed, and for the millionth time in his short, miserable life, he ran away.

   
He ran from danger. He ran from fear and pain. He ran from everything that hurt inside, that he had been bottling up and suppressing from Ymeer to Mythigrad.

   
Old Murie’s death. The killing he’d witnessed when Cleric Argoz took control of the desert city, and the scattered death and sodomy he’d seen in his life as a street thief. The death of Byorne. The death of Captain Berne. Elia’s family… massacred.

   
All because of him. And because of the ever-elusive, damnably mysterious sorcerer who
wore his face
! It was unbearable, so on he ran. And on and on the Demon’s rant pursued him, without ever pinpointing exactly where he was. The Demon felt him as he felt it, probably: nearby, unsettlingly so, but not close enough to
see
. If Demons saw.

   
He ran on and on, until he had outrun the evil fog and reached the hollow shells of the abandoned Reethe homes that been smashed by the Demon in its first attack. He ran until his face was bluer than cold and his body was crippled with cramping pains. He ran until he fell, then he got up and ran again.

   
He ran until he turned a corner in the silently screaming city and ran smack into a large, hideously hairy head infused with metal plates. His nose bled at the impact and he crumpled, crying from fear and shame. It was a draik!

   
He was going to die… He was going to die… It was going to kill him like the coward he was…

   
But it didn’t. And when it didn’t and he had lain there shaking for a minute and his nose had stopped bleeding, he looked up. And… he laughed. He laughed long and loud.

   
It was Steamclaw. The draik who talked. The monster who obeyed his command.

“I HAVE COME. THE SEA CANNOT STOP ME. I AM YOURS TO COMMAND UNTIL I PERISH.”
His rasping, guttural speech still seemed unnatural to Gribly's ears. But it didn't matter now.

   
“You can't help, Steamclaw,” the thief told the beast reluctantly, “Not unless you know how to kill Sea Demons.”

   
There was a pause.

   
“You don’t know how to kill them, do you? You can’t!”

   
Another pause, and something suspiciously like a snort from the hulking, dripping-wet draik.

   
“You
do
? You know how to kill Demons?”

   
“I
AM
A DEMON. OR AT LEAST WHAT MASTER
CALLS
A DEMON.”

   
“But you know how- I mean you can- You can kill the Sea Demon??”

   
“NO. BUT I CAN SHOW
MASTER
HOW.”

   
“You can?”

   
“I CAN.”

~

   
“
Calimá! Lei Tempstre nadt Calimálei!” Lauro heard Karmidigan shouting below. The Frost Strider was gesturing wildly to the conjured storm above. Thunder rolled and lightning flashed in the heavens, faster and faster, growing more wild every second.

   
With a jolt Lauro realized Karmidigan was talking to
him
. He swerved in mid-air, angling down around the luminous hulk of the Sea Demon as it thrashed its way up through the surface. It was so
big
…

   
“What? What?” he yelled, trying in vain to understand the nymph’s speech.

   
“
Calimá!
Lightning! Get out of the sky!”

   
Oh,
the prince thought.
That’s not-

   
Before he finished the thought, twenty hands slammed palm-down into the stone platform as the ten Frost Striders who had been conjuring the storm pounded the ground. Lightning streaked out of the sky in a thousand crackling arcs, and Lauro was caught right in the middle of them. He didn’t even have time to scream.

   
White flashed and heat washed his body in a roaring flood of pain. Instantly he jerked his head up and saw he was lying on his back near one of the ruined Shrine walls.
What just happened? Wasn’t I flying? Where did everyone go? Why aren’t I dead?
He struggled to bring his memory up to speed. He had been hit- then he had woken up! What had happened in between?

   
He raised himself up on his elbows and was surprised to find the pain in his chest was bearable. The world around him was chaos. The Sea Demon had risen out of the ground up to its waist now, and the Shrine was in ruins around it. The storm that had knocked him out of the sky was hovering at the Demon’s head, striking it with lightning and fire, crackling with the energies of snow, ice, and rain, smoke, mist, and wind. The hideous monster was striking at the clouds in earth-shattering anger, trying in vain to brush the insubstantial mass away like it would any normal, solid object. The Frost Striders had not failed, apparently.

   
The rest of the scene was almost as chaotic. Little white creatures scurried and hopped about at the Demon’s flanks, attacking it furiously with their claws and teeth like little insects on a hostile animal, even crawling up its slimy body in some places. What on earth they were, Lauro had no idea. Blast. His head was throbbing like an open wound. He put his hand to the base of his skull and felt wet, hot blood. Not good. He felt something else, too: a liquid coolness that seemed to be gathered at the center of his wound, protruding outward from the back of his head. What the-

   
He felt a blessed cessation of pain as his wound knitted itself back together seamlessly, leaving nothing but dried blood behind. The coolness left, and he turned his head to see what it had been.

   
Elia. The nymph girl’s face wavered in the light, and he could almost fancy he saw through it into the space beyond. Of course! She was in her Swimmer Form, translucent as the waves themselves. She had healed him, somehow.
“Lauro?”
her voice was high and tinkling, like a stream in the summer hills of the Greyfeld.
“Thank the Aura, you’re all right!”

   
“How in Vast did you do that?” he gaped. “You just put my head back together like it had never been hurt!”

   
“In my second form I am much more attuned to the natural world,”
she explained, casting a glance over her shoulder as she did so, as if any time the moment of respite might pass and an enemy see them.
“Healing comes naturally to most Treele nymphs… or did. Thankfully your wound was not deep, or there would have been nothing I could do. I don’t know how you survived that fall.”