Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1) (24 page)

“She never came for the Stone Shapers. The Circle
was nervous all the same. I volunteered to seek her out on our behalf. An
ambassador. We knew she would be here, where someone can hide amongst the old
tunnels, the long-forgotten settlements built of stone. These tunnels are the dominion
of the Earth. Our realm. I found her, in time. Said her name was Karine. A
Khalan name,” he frowned. “A false one. That accent belonged to no land
nearby.”

“Where would you put it then? The accent.”

Settan shook his head and said, “I couldn’t tell
you. East of the Rift for certain. Not any flavor of Rhonian though. No Rhonian
dialect sounds like that. Further away, then. Whatever lies beyond the empire.”

Tyrissa tried to remember the rare maps she’d
seen of the Far East. Beyond the vast Rhonian Empire lay the jungles of
Amonzae, an area that was half-myth, and the lands past that were even more
defined by contradictions. Cartographers couldn’t even agree on whether the
North and the East were connected by land.

“Though I came as an ambassador it was she that
delivered an offer. She promised to fix me. Not like the others, the drained
and freed former Pactbound that were the handy work of a faceless ‘Pact Witch’.
Karine thought of me as an experiment. ‘A new method’ she called it. A new
method that created something new, something unbound and unknown. She kept her promise.
Thanks to her my will is my own yet the Earth’s gifts remain.”

“You still have your Pact abilities?” All of the
power and none of the obligation? That seemed like cheating.

Settan leveled his gaze on his left forearm’s
stone bracer. The surface began to ripple like a lake stirred by the wind. A
line of short spines rose from the stone and solidified. Once stilled, it
appeared to have always been that way. Tyrissa’s skin pricked up, as if a cold
draft had moved through the room, though the air around her was calm.

“Most of them.”

Tyrissa drummed her fingers against the tabletop.
It was a lot to digest, but didn’t dissuade her from wanting to find the Karine
as soon as possible.

“Can you tell me where she is?”

Settan’s bracer rippled again, the spines merging
back into the polished whole. His face almost looked bemused. Almost.

“If you seek her, remember that the Outer Powers
do not let their tools go so easily. While the obligation of the Pact is gone,
the costs remain.” Settan ran a thumb down the collection of short stony ridges
on his bare upper arms. “At times, I still hear the whispers from the stones
that surround us, calling me back down. Are you certain you wish to proceed?”

“Yes.”

“Then listen close, Tyrissa. It’s a long way.”

Settan’s directions proved accurate but also
provided a history lesson, a trip through the construction and expansion of
Khalanheim’s under-city. As she followed the route the streets narrowed and
abandoned their mimicry of the stately grid system of the surface. They began
to resemble tunnels as the ceiling slopped closer to the floor, transitioning
from cavern to cave. The buildings lining the streets melded back into the rock
and the number of people and lit windows dwindled to zero.

The streets became progressively more cavern-like
as Tyrissa’s journey in the under city went ever-deeper. Tyrissa reached into a
coat pocket and pulled out a gloworb once the flickering and poorly maintained
night lamps became rare enough. The device was made of two conjoined
hemispheres, one clear glass and the other coated in thin leather. The leather
had ‘Under License from the Khalanheim Elchemist Concordium’ stamped just below
the equator. A thick soup of gray fluid studded with tiny white beads sloshed
around inside the gloworb. She pressed in the small brass lever and the orb
burst into a brilliant lens of white light. Warmth radiated through the leather
half as the elchemical reaction burned inside the orb. Tyrissa pointed the
gloworb away and blinked against the sudden night-blindness. A circle of brass
that pressed open and sprang shut opposite the lever allowed her to attach the
orb to one of the metal rings embedded on the shoulders of her guild coat.

‘
There will be a trio of tunnels that split
off from the main road after you’re the only light to be seen. One should be
open.
’

And there they were. Tyrissa angled the orb’s
light down each of the three. Two were collapsed, with only piles of rocks
greeting her curious light. The leftmost passage was crumbling, but could be
squeezed through. She turned sideways and pressed on, the coarse walls closing
in on her like an unwanted embrace from the earth itself. Moistened rock and
dirt fell away from her touch and smeared into her hair and clothes, mixing
with a day’s worth of soot and smog from the two sides of Forge.

The tunnel seemed to go on and on. The gloworb
cast out chaotic fingers of light and shadow that tricked her eyes into seeing
an exit that would vanish after a few steps. Her breath became shallower,
sipping in short gasps of musty air. Tyrissa could feel the walls drawing
closer together, or perhaps imagined it so.

Settan didn’t mention a narrow gap passage
like this. Did I take a wrong turn?

Then, the earth released her and she stumbled out,
falling to her knees within a cavern on the other side. She took a moment to
rest, breathing in the suddenly fresher air. Wind currents curled chaotically
through the tunnels, tugging her hair every which way. Sunlight shone from
around a curve in the tunnel ahead of her. She must have come all the way to
the Rift’s wall.

If Settan considered that a ‘tight’ squeeze,
Tyrissa dreaded what came next: a ‘brief, narrow ledge’. So far his directions
had the insufferable phrasing of someone with a memorized familiarity of the area.

Tyrissa stood and followed the increasing
sunlight and winds around the curve in the tunnel and was greeted with a view
straight out into the Rift through a gaping hole in the cavern wall. The gap in
the wall was ten feet tall but partially enclosed by a handful of thin stone
columns.

From this vista, a branch of the path turned
south into a knife’s edge path that hugged the wall of the Rift and was just
wide enough for a single person. The riftwinds had eroded the path to appear
somewhere between smooth and slick and aside from scattered columns that joined
the floor and ceiling there was nothing to stop a strong, errant gust from
sweeping off anyone foolish enough to take this route. The columns were too
uniform and evenly spaced to be anything but the work of intentional magick, though
they were spread too far apart for Tyrissa’s comfort.

Tyrissa took a firm grip of one of the columns
and leaned out into the Rift. To the south and high above, the Sunset Span
crossed the canyon and bulbous zeppelins drifted at their mooring towers. Once
again she felt that growing weight in her gut, stronger than what she felt on
the Sunrise Span high above, or the flash of the same sensation she felt when
that Wind Pactbound crashed Khalan Southwest’s party. The Rift was carved by
wind magicks and those same energies must still course through the unending gales
that flowed within the canyon. Of course she would react when immersed in them this
deep in the Rift.

Tyrissa stuck a tentative hand into the open air
while the other maintained a death grip on the column. Warmth washed over her
skin, a faint tingling sensation distinct from the heat of the sunlight. The
feeling quickly sank through her skin and went deeper, running in currents to
coalesce in her core and create a center of earthen gravity. She pushed away
from the rock window, steadying herself against the realization more than the
vertigo or her footing. Closing her eyes, she tried to focus on the feeling of
pact magicks running through her. The energy was less demanding that her
encounters with Fire and Water. It was as calm and patient as the mountains,
yet pliant.

Turning toward the narrow path, she let her heart
set the pace, one deliberate step for every three beats. Each step landed with
more certainty that the last, as if rooted to the smooth stone below. The path lost
its precarious nature and became a regular road that was no danger to someone
like her, to someone that walked with the elements. To a Pactbound.

Using her new abilities, despite their unknowns,
felt less alarming and more empowering every time. Though she felt anchored by
the calm power within her, the riftwinds still playfully tossed her hair and
clothes in aimless rhythms.

Soon the path merged back into the cliff and once
again became a tunnel. She left the Rift behind, but the surefootedness
remained, the weight in her core slowly dwindling. The final waypoint in
Settan’s directions followed shortly after: a lit street lamp, wildly out of
place this far from the settled underground districts of Khalanheim. A trio of
replacement bulbs lay at its base.

This cavern was much wider, running deeper into
the earth and away from the Rift, though another long tear in the Rift-ward
wall let in sunlight and the winds. Opposite the tear were the dilapidated
facades of houses carved into walls, the wooden frames and doors rotting away
from the march of time. At the center of it all stood a free standing house
built like the others, a block of stone with the hallmarks of humans carved
into it to make it livable. All was silent save for the riftwinds howling
across the window onto the canyon.

“Finally.”

Tyrissa jogged up to the long-promised mystic’s
house, circling around to the far side. Her head swam with questions and
anticipation. But something was wrong and promise withered to dread in an
instant. The front door of the house was gone and the interior darkened. She
came to a stop a few feet from the threshold. Metal hinges hung empty on the
frame and a thick wooden door lay inside, broken and cast aside like a child’s forgotten
toy.

“Hello?!”

The house had that eerie stillness of abandonment
and all was quiet save for the roar of the Rift and. Tyrissa unclipped the gloworb
and settled the other hand on her knife. She stepped through the doorway, boots
crunching against fallen splinters. To her left was a common room in total
disarray. She ran the light of her gloworb across the room. Fallen books and loose
papers littered the floor below a bookshelf, two chairs and a small wooden
table lay overturned, along with broken plates and the remnant of an abandoned
meal. A stout writing desk and cast-iron stove stood oblivious to the mess
around them.

Tyrissa repeated her call as she gingerly walked
through the detritus littering the floor to the center of the room. No answer. Despite
her caution she nearly stumbled and realized that the stone floor was warped
and uneven beneath the scattered books and objects.

Four sets of weapon mounts were drilled into one
wall. The top two held a sword with a slightly curved tip and a long dagger.
Both were stored in leather scabbards banded with silver cloth. The other two
mounts were empty. Tyrissa moved closer and saw that the dagger bore a slightly
different version of the winged shield crest stamped into the disc of the
pommel. The feathers were harsher and pointed, and the shield was a diamond
instead of a kite shield.

Reverently, she lifted the dagger from the mount
and ran her fingers over the insignia. Then her eyes caught an arc of dried
blood just below shallow rents in the rock of the wall. The furrows were spaced
just wide enough to have been made by fingers dragged across the stone, leaving
their mark as if the wall was wet clay. Tyrissa aimed the light of the gloworb
around the room once again. More blood lay in a dried pool near the middle of
the room. The window looking out on the gap in the tunnel wall was shattered,
the glass thrown outward.

The story began to come together and the chaos of
the home started to make sense. Karine must have been attacked, the intruders
breaking through the door. She grabbed a set of blades from the wall and fought
back. A melee wrecked the room, tossing aside furniture and shattering the rear
window. Judging from the warped floor, earth magicks must have been involved.
Tyrissa nearly jumped to blaming Settan or another Stone Shaper, but paused and
ran a thumb over the winged shield on the dagger.

‘You have the same curious gravity.’

Earth into Wind. Wind into Earth. Karine was
attacked by a Wind Pactbound. Maybe a failed target from one of her infamous
night hunts. Maybe the same one from the attack at Khalan Southwest’s party.

There was little else for her here. The bedroom
lay in similar disarray. A small chest was left open and pieces of clothing
were tossed carelessly over the narrow bed. Tyrissa returned to the main room
and picked up a sheet of paper from the writing desk. The script was in that
language she didn’t recognize, as were the titles of the books that littered the
floor. She folded sample sheet and placed it in her coat pocket. Perhaps she
could get it translated.

Regardless, Karine the ‘Pact Witch’ was connected
to Tsellien. To her own Pact. And was now either dead or long departed. Tyrissa
hoped for the latter, but both led to despondency. Her best hope for
understanding what she was becoming was gone.

Sunset was an hour gone by the time Tyrissa wove
her way through the twisting but now familiar streets of southeast Crossing.
The days grew short and for once the air held the chill she expected of an
autumn night a month ago. She could feel the eyes of the night watching her
from the darkened balconies and windows of the jumbled buildings that loomed
over the time-worn cobblestone streets. The Cadre’s red and white crest on her
dirtied guild coat would deter most trouble, at least in this neighborhood.
Never mind the manner in which Tyrissa
stalked
the streets, still fuming
from the failures below, her staff striking the stones as a third, furious
footfall.