Mortal Consequences (12 page)

“We don’t care! Pick up!”

Together, lugging the tubular frame and gossamer wings, they hopped forward toward the gaping hole crisscrossed by clouds. Wind blew in their faces, and Sunbright closed his eyes.

The cellar floor was suddenly gone, and the barbarian’s boots dangled. Then they plunged nose-first into naked sky.

On the top floor, Lady Bly called for help, then stopped at the smashing and crashing downstairs. The guards had finally arrived. Good, except they should be gentler with her property. She’d sue the city for damages. And sue—someone—for the indignity of being trussed by a gutter rat in her own workshop. What did she pay taxes for? So the city could let thieves break into peoples’ houses?

“Hurry up, you dimwitted nincompoops! Get up here and untie me! I command it!”

Silence below. No answer. Another crash, a chair tossed aside. Scuffling on the stairs. Odd sounds, scratchy and uneven, as if the walker limped. Bly had expected the tramp of boots. This animal skittering made her nerves crawl, as if rats came creeping …

No, something far more horrible. Too awful to look at. The thing topping the stairs was tall, misshapen, rail-thin, covered in a shimmering carapace of stone that glinted with minerals. Hands were hooked claws. The bald head had eyes a startling, staring blue, quite mad.

It rasped, “Where are my enemies? I smell them! Tell me!”

Bly the Seer had lived a long time. As a scryer, she’d spent decades hunched over her magic table, seen sights from around the world and beyond, but never, in all her visions, had she beheld a monster like this one. Trembling overtook her, and a low moan escaped her lips.

The monster scuffled to the black table and touched the midnight surface with a crooked claw. “My enemy was here. What does this do? It scries!” the fiend hissed, more to itself than to the trembling mage stretched across the table. “Show me!”

Shivering as if frozen, Bly pronounced the words that opened the vision. Bulging blue eyes watched the picture, and murmured, “The bright-haired one goes there. But far. Too far, too sunny, too open … But I have many enemies. You will find one. Polaris is its name. And another, a fat mage… Make magic!”

With a claw it severed the twine binding Bly. Numb with fear, the archwizard slipped off the table to the floor. Quickly the monster caught her hair and wrenched her upright, then banged her face on the table so blood spurted from her nose.

“Scry out my enemies!”

With no physical element, like the sage and the scent of the barbarian, and with Bly clumsy with fear, the scrying went badly, but finally the monster croaked, “Yes, yes! There is one I seek! I’ll kill him, flay his flesh from his bones and suck the marrow! Yes, I go to kill, to avenge!”

Bly closed her eyes. She was banged up and near fainting, but if the monster left—

Suddenly her face was caught in obsidian claws that cut her cheeks and throat. She screamed, but claws strangled her. Helpless before the monster’s crushing strength, Bly felt herself dragged into the air. Piercing, white-hot pain ripped through her hands and she swooned.

Slapping her face brought her around. Her hands felt afire. Glancing up, she saw the monster had bent open an iron hook that held herbs and—Scribe of the Doomed!—impaled her hands over the hook before crushing it shut! Writhing only ripped flesh and ground the bones, so she hung still. Her world was pain.

The monster rasped, “You aided my enemy, so you become one! All my enemies must die!”

Stepping back, the monster extended both craggy claws. Fire flickered from their tips and washed over the room. Herbs, books, papers, paint, walls, and Bly’s gown all crackled with eldritch energy. And burned.

Bly screamed long and hard before smoke choked her. Then she fell limp, and never felt the flames around her legs. The monster disappeared, hissing of revenge. The black table went with it.

Wind rushed in their faces until their cheeks were numb and their eyelids swollen. The breeze made them thirsty, and Sunbright was hungry, for Knucklebones hadn’t let him eat before their aerial duel. The barbarian was cramped from sitting hunched in the wicker seat under tubes and wires, and he ached from crashing in the treetop. Yet there was one consolation to all this misery. Fatigue and battering had expunged his fear of flying. In the hours they’d banked and soared, Knucklebones had even let him steer. Later he’d even dozed off, exhausted, while Knucklebones wrestled the steering bars with one good and one lame arm.

Yet he jerked awake with a cry, making Knucklebones jump. “What’s eating you?” she asked, irritated. “You’re moony as a hammer-struck calf!”

The barbarian shook his bright-blond head. “Someone’s after me, I think. Cursing my name, hounding my dreams. Evil, and mad, and angry.”

“Not just imagination?” Knucklebones’s voice was hoarse from shouting over the wind. Far below rolled plains with a glint of sea in the north. All were slanted with black shadows, for the sun was setting, ending the long summer day.

“It could be,” Sunbright sighed. “When I’m tired, who’s to know if I dream or hallucinate? Sorting truth from fancy is hard enough in this world, never mind the next.”

“We’ll have the world in our laps soon! We must land before the sun drops. We can’t land in the dark.”

Sunbright hadn’t considered that even birds bedded before sundown. He squinted ahead. The Channel Mountains looked larger, tall as his hand. “Land east of the mountains,” he advised. “Walking with them at our left hand, we’ll find my tribe south of Scourge.”

The thief banked east, until the flitter’s nose slanted across the mountains. “We’ll fly until I think it’s too dangerous.”

Sunbright felt a familiar looseness in his bowels. Launching, Knucklebones had pointed out, was simple as falling off a cliff. Landing was like diving headfirst into an eagle’s nest without cracking any eggs. Sunbright called, “Let’s get it over with. If we’re hurt, we’ll need daylight to patch up.”

The small woman didn’t argue, simply tipped the bar, and pointed them down. Sunbright gulped, and clamped down on his stomach.

The plains were glossy with summer grass. As they sank, antelope and bison and skulking wolves fanned out before them. Knucklebones slowed the flitter by hauling the wings back while pointing the tail down, though the landscape swept by alarmingly fast. Finally, at spitting height, the thief called, “Hang on!” and shoved the nose down.

Sunbright gritted his teeth as the land leaped up like a tiger. But the clever thief flopped the craft on its belly skids, and they slithered over grass for seeming miles. Sunbright yanked his knees to his chin, felt chaff and grass stalks snap and tickle.

Then it was still. Grass billowed all around, except for the flattened track behind. Knucklebones pried stiff hands off the bars, massaged her scarred forearms, and chuckled, “I could get to like this!”

“You can have it!” Sunbright grabbed bars and hauled himself out of the flying coffin. Unlashing their supplies, he hung his great sword Harvester of Blood across his back. His bow and arrows were lost, but he kept the empty quiver, and hung his food satchel and both blankets around his shoulders, ready to march.

Knucklebones tossed her rucksack over one shoulder. “Shouldn’t we scavenge wires and such? You made snares last time,” she said.

“I just want to get away,” Sunbright began, “but you’re right.” With their knives they cut away loose wires, lengths of tubing, and fabric from the wings. They never knew what might prove handy.

Looking at the wrecked flitter, Knucklebones asked, “What will the coyotes think of this?”

“A bird skeleton picked clean,” he mumbled, then faced north, where a sentence of death awaited. “Let’s get this over with, too.”

They walked where the evening shadows of the Channel Mountains touched the tall grass, and, gradually, darkness overtook them.

After three days’ walk—the last across rock and shale—they breasted a low hill. Sea wind carried salt to their nostrils. Sunbright stopped dead. “That’s them!” he cried. “But it can’t be them!”

Knucklebones just stared. In the distance winked the Narrow Sea, a silver so bright it shone white. At its shore, and surrounding the toe of the last Channel Mountain, the peak called the Anchor, lay the villainous town whose name had become Scourge. Punished by hard winds off the sea, the town saw any steel mysteriously rust away within weeks. Since industry could not prosper, the town had fished until the fish thinned out. Good people left, the desolate stayed. Them, and plagues of rust monsters. The idle population turned to thieving and infighting, until Scourge gained its name as a place to avoid.

And here, on the outskirts, amidst sand and rocks, where no humans would venture, Sunbright found his tribe.

The camp was lumpy huts of piled stone, or caves cut into hillsides, or mere holes in the ground covered by rotting hides. The only wooden structure was the common house, a ring of rotted aspen trees dragged from the mountainside, the roof thatched crudely with brush. The disordered camp was rife with garbage, droppings, bones, ashes, and trash. The smoke of a few fires trickled into the brassy sky. At midday it was hot here on the rocks, as it would be cold by night. A few women trudged through camp with fagots or bundles of meager food. Men slept in the shade or lay with feet jutting from canted doorways. Dirty children crept at quiet games, or else turned over rocks, hunting salamanders and insects for food. Buzzards picked at garbage, unmolested.

Sunbright stood with his mouth agape. “I had a hint …” he said, his voice heavy with shocked disappointment, “when I glimpsed the village in the scrying table … but how…. Where are the reindeer? Where are the dogs? How did this happen?”

Knucklebones only shook her head. She’d grown up in poverty, in the sewers of a mighty city where every scrap was stolen or scavenged. But even she was shocked, having heard time and again of Sunbright’s proud people. This motley bunch looked like trolls.

After a long time the barbarian picked up his feet—a mighty effort, as if they were glued to the ground—and descended the slope.

At first there was no sign they’d arrived, as if the pair were ghosts. Children looked up curiously with big eyes, and retreated around rocks. A woman glanced up, for strangers never came from the south, and rubbed her eyes. Without a word she slunk into a hut. A man peeked out and frowned. Other folk noticed the odd couple, one small and one tall, and trailed them. Sunbright kept walking, watching everywhere, but not believing his eyes. His goal was the common house. By the time he reached it, thirty ragged barbarians had trickled from shelter to see him enter.

Sunbright ducked under a reindeer hide so old it was white strings. Knucklebones slipped after, quiet as a cat. Inside hung rotted hides with faded totems, but nothing else: neither animal masks nor enemy scalps nor ancestors’ skulls. The old couple seen from afar, Iceborn and Tulipgrace, huddled under thin blankets by a smoky fire. The old man turned blind eyes, demanded, “Who is it?”

His wife, Tulipgrace, woke with a start, peered at them with red eyes, and asked, “You are …”

“Sunbright Steelshanks, son of Sevenhaunt and Monkberry,” he said flatly. He almost added: of the Raven Clan of the Rengarth Barbarians, but these were the same folk, or had been.

“Sunbright…” Tulipgrace said, awed. “You fled, were banished in absence. You’re sentenced to death.”

“Unwrap the wolf masks then, and sing the death song! Kill me if you can! I’ve yet to see a man or woman in this village bear a sword! By the Teeth of Kozah, what’s happened to my people?”

The elders didn’t answer, only turned back to the fire. Knucklebones cleared her throat, an explosion in the awesome silence. She noted that once Sunbright had set foot in the camp, he walked taller and spoke more boldly, blood and thunder in his voice, but boldness seemed lost on this lost race. It was as if they’d invaded a graveyard full of tired ghosts.

“Sunbright,” came a mild reproof.

The barbarian whirled, hand over his shoulder to snatch Harvester, then froze. A wizened woman peeked from the doorway.

“Mother!”

In three steps the warrior-shaman became a small boy, stumbling as he hugged his mother. Barbarian emotions never lay deep, so he wept openly, tears streaming onto her gray hair. The woman curled arthritic fingers around his massive, scarred arms and patted his back like a baby’s, cooing, “My boy. My man-child.”

Sniffling, Monkberry led the pair from the common house to her own abode. It stood on the edge of the camp, a heap of stones roofed with branches, but round like the ancestral yurts of reindeer hide. The roof was so low they sat, Sunbright’s head brushing dead leaves, the room so tiny their knees touched. A bed of rags was the only furniture. A fire pit let smoke through a hole in the roof.

Once seated, no one knew what to say. Monkberry’s face was seamed as a prune, her eyes deep-set but bright blue, like her son’s. Her hair was long and gray, but neatly combed. She wore a simple smock of deer hide, almost worn through at the shoulders. As the awkward silence dragged, she nodded at Knucklebones. Flustered, Sunbright said, “Uh, this is Knucklebones of Karsus. She’s a—rogue. Good with her hands. Clever, I mean. She’s a friend.” When Knucklebones shook her dark head, he amended, “I mean, I love her.”

Monkberry took the thief’s small hands, touched her scarred cheek with crooked hands, and said, “She’s lovely. Elven blood so becomes a woman.”

“I’m not,” Knucklebones stammered. For the first time in her life, she felt shy. “I’m just an old, scarred alley cat. A sewer rat too contrary to die.”

The old woman caressed her tousled dark curls, and said, “Scars are a badge of honor in our tribe, dear. You carry enough to sit at the elder fire.” Then she sighed at painful memories.

“Mother,” Sunbright began. “What’s happened? How came you here? Where is everyone? Why don’t you leave this awful place?”

Another sigh. “I prayed you’d return, Sunbright,” his mother said. “In my heart and dreams I knew you’d come back. I could feel your eyes on me, hear your voice, grown so deep and manly. And it’s time, for the tribe needs you desperately. Needs a miracle, or else we die out. Far worse than the gods forsaking us, we’ve forsaken our own heritage. But ask not, and let me speak …