Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1) (42 page)

They set out for the Hithian Crater as soon as
the pre-dawn sky was bright enough to light the way. Their guide was a ten-year-old
boy named Rwalon who possessed the endless enthusiasm of a child proudly
showing off his skills. Crowned with a mop of sandy hair, he vaguely reminded
Tyrissa of Sven, but he clambered over the rocks at the base of the ruins above
New Inthai with an enthusiasm for exploration that her youngest brother never
had for the Morgwood. The smile on his face spoke to many days of carefree play
atop the corpse of a nation. He spoke in that headache inducing hybrid of
Hithian and Common, the elegant dying language making the common tongue sound crass
and guttural. Hali handled translating, speaking to him in a slow, pure Hithian
like an instructor, which caused the boy to take long pauses and consider his
response.

Rwalon made a hard left into the hills about a
mile outside of town where the slopes were clear of larger ruins and boulders.
The trail was roughly marked by the paving stones of an ancient road that poked
out of the ground like once-forgotten memories. The boy set a brisk pace and they
crested the ascent just as golden rays of dawn sliced over the far rim of the
crater. Far below, impenetrable mists cloaked the floor of the Hithian Crater in
a morning shroud, the unnatural winds creating clockwise and counter-clockwise
flows in alternating bands. The central ruin rose from the eye of the slow storm,
an ugly, misshapen crown to the graceful interplay of wind and water.

True to its name, The Spiral was a fifteen-foot-wide
bore in the ground that ran straight down to the crater floor with a narrow
ledge that spiraled down along the walls of marble-laced limestone. The ledge
looked just wide enough for a person to walk down. Sunlight appeared as a
minute point of light shining at the bottom of the corkscrew descent. A strong
updraft tossed their hair and clothing, the winds promising to make the trip
down as unpleasant as possible. Tyrissa felt a flush of air magicks carried
upward on the currents, about as strong as the riftwinds. For two of them, the descent
will be easy.

“I do not envy any of you,” Wolef said. “I’ll
Slide through and check it out.” He lowered onto the uppermost ledge and merged
into the shadows of The Spiral.

Kexal watched the deeper patch of shadow follow
the ledge down, like black dye emptying through a drain. He looked over at
Rwalon and asked, “The ledge goes all the way down, boy?”

His emphatic nod said, ‘
I’ve done it. Can
you?’

“The locals said that there are no good ways into
the crater,” Kexal said with a grimace. “Only bad ways. I see what they mean.”

Wolef returned after many minutes.

“Goes all the way down,” he said. “There are a
few thinner places, but it’s navigable. Shall we?”

Tyrissa blinked against the light as she scanned
the eastern rim through the eyeglass, taking in the shaded beauty of the
waterfalls and greenery on the far side of the crater. She then lowered her
view to the central ruin of the fallen city, the pile of carved stone and
rubble appearing close enough to touch. The slopes of the ruin were a jumble of
caves and tumbled walls and masonry, ringed by a skirt of piled boulders. Tales
from explorers and excavators spoke of the caves leading to a maze of still
connected streets and passageways, the city still navigable in a twisted,
ruined sort of way. However, from the outside there was no indication of which
caves led to the interior and which were dead ends. The same tales that spoke
of the interior of the Hithian ruins were mum on exactly where they entered out
of fear of others following their route and taking the supposed riches for
themselves. Can’t let the competition know
all
of your secrets.

Vralin would be in the center of it all. Tyrissa
could
feel
it, like how she could feel pact magicks being used nearby.
Never mind that diaphanous column of shimmering air rising from the peak of the
ruin like a beacon, taunting and beckoning her onward. It was stronger today, almost
corporal. With the telescope’s aid Tyrissa could barely make out gossamer
threads drifting in spiraling patterns up and down the column.

She dragged her view over the field of spines,
their uniform shadows from the morning sun turning them into a legion of jagged
sundials. They all pointed away from the city, raised by the impact of The Fall
and shaped into cruel points by the winds of the subsequent centuries into an unwelcoming
stone forest. Between the spines were countless cracks, crevasses, and
sinkholes, the terrain pockmarked and scarred by burrowing wurms and the savage,
inconsistent winds. Directly below was the southern end of the spine forest
where the land became temptingly clear aside from a few scattered tears in the
ground and a single long crevasse that ran from the base of the rim to the
central ruin. Wolef was somewhere along that crevasse now, using the shadows
within to quickly cross the crater and scout the central ruin for an entrance. The
flat areas of the Hithian Crater were said to be deceptive in how safe they appeared,
that they were as seismically unstable as everything else. Never mind the local
fauna lurking just out of sight to make it all the more dangerous. Beyond the
spines, mists billowed out from the point where the Rift burrowed into the
mountainous ruin like a parasitic worm. No, she had it backwards: it had burst
out
from there to rip across a continent.

Kexal’s voice brought Tyrissa out of her
surveying. “Hand my scope back, will you?” She lowered the glass and passed it
back to him with care. The device was clearly a cherished possession from his
homeland, expertly bound in reddish leather and brass casings. The lenses bore
a few faint scratches, the only evidence that the telescope had been tearing
across the continent with its owner for years. Kexal raised the scope to his
eye and focused on the central ruin.

“Don’t suppose you could be of any help here
Hali?” Kexal said, scanning the lower slopes of the city. Their group was
perched atop a ring of higher ground built up against the base of the sheer
cliff walls, as if much of the debris of the Fall had been swept out of the
center of the crater. Kexal and Hali sat near Tyrissa while Garth sat ten feet
down the steep slope. Garth was, as usual, fiddling with the finished ‘dust
box’, tweaking his invention ahead of its maiden and final use.

“This is the first time I’ve been past the rim.”

“Really? I’d have thought that you of all people would
have gone to see the sights once or twice.”

Hali gave him a hard stare.

“Don’t give me that look woman, it’s a joke,”
Kexal said without looking away from the city. “Well, I reckon we’ll just have
to make a run for it and hope for the best, unless Wolef gets back with word of
a better choice. We’ll hug that borderline between the spines and the flats.
Looks like the safest route.” He lowered the glass and pressed each end inward,
collapsing it to a shorter tube a little wider than his palm. Kexal then
replaced it in the hard case sitting to his side, the interior padded and
shaped to fit the telescope. The case closed with a metallic click.

“I don’t mind running across,” Tyrissa said, “But
improvising is best done when you have an idea of what to expect. What’s the
worst that could be out there?”

Kexal cleared his throat and said, “Pebble fields
that’ll swallow up your foot and at the least break your ankle, crevasses that open
a few feet in front of you, no appreciable cover, and probably the attention of
the local wurm population.”

“Oh, is that all?”

“No. Winds that can knock you flying without
warning, birds of prey that care nothing for size differences, and knowing that
all you can look forward to is doing it all again on the way out.”

Wolef clambered over the boulders downhill of
their perch, breathing hard with lines of sweat running down his face. Garth tossed
over a canteen.

“Well?” Kexal called down from above.

“Many dead ends,” Wolef said between swallows. “I
found one that leads into the ruin proper, straight across, a little way south
and about a hundred feet uphill.”

“There a catch?”

“Whatever lives there might not welcome us
tromping through its lair. It was away when I Slid through, but that could
change.”

Kexal reached above his shoulder to pat the hilt
of his sword. “It’s our only option, so we’d best introduce ourselves as we
barge on in. You good to go out again?”

Wolef nodded, “I only need to swap in a fresh pair
of rods.”

“Good. Saddle up folks, we’re heading out.”

They descended to the floor of the crater and
began to thread a course between the spine forest on their left and the exposed
flats to the right. Garth took point with his crossbow out and readied, eyes
constantly scanning the nooks and crannies around the towering spines of rock.
A reedy cry sounded above them as they passed near the first of the spines.
Tyrissa looked up and saw a pair of beady black eyes glaring back. The creature
was the size of a hawk but looked to be more lizard than bird, with gray and
brown scales running along its serpentine body. Its head ended with a sharp
black beak and when it spread its wings, they were translucent. Oversized black
talons adorned each spindly arm and leg. Tyrissa had no doubt that they were
sharp as razors. It gave out a warble and received a dozen responses.

“Breeze raptors,” Hali said. “Pack hunters and
scavengers. The crater’s lousy with them, though their range beyond that is
limited.”

Tyrissa looked to the tops of other nearby
spines, and could make out others of the pack, all keeping a close watch on the
five travelers. “Native?” she said lightly.

“Planar. Though they’re native now. Showed up
during the Fall and had quite the feast.”

“We have a plan for them,” Kexal said, “Soon as
Garth—”

Garth’s crossbow thrummed once, the bolt whistling
through the air and impacting flesh with the wet sound. A creature screeched
among the spines, the sound of an injured wurm. The rest of the party turned
their heads in unison. At the base of a spine, a wurm twisted in its death
throes with a bolt embedded in its head. This species had smoother skin of
smaller joined scales, like a snake. The raptors raised a communal chorus
before swooping towards the kill on broad diaphanous wings. They formed a
circle around the wurm as it died, a few bolder creatures jumping atop the
wurm’s back to rip away the first bites.

“Creates a distraction,” Kexal continued, “We
won’t have to worry much about them. The blood on the air will keep their
attention them.”

Garth repeated the process twice by the time they
were halfway across the crater floor, the mountain that once was Hithia looming
ever higher ahead of them. The raptors seemed to recognize their game and
followed along, politely waiting for the next gift. Aside from side stepping a
few narrow crevasses and pools of pebbles, the trip through the crater was more
hype than danger. Tyrissa could feel the winds here growing stronger with each
step towards the center, the elemental air filling her with a reservoir of
steady but unsatisfied earthen energy. She wanted to
use
it.

The Hithian Crater complied and the ground shook
violently, causing her four companions to stop in their tracks and fight for
balance. Reaching through the potential to Shape the rock below her feet,
Tyrissa could sense that a significant section of stone was shifting underground,
like a cavern collapsing. Dust burst upward through the countless cracks in the
ground all around them, the air thickening with clouds ejected from below. A
pebble pool to their right exploded upward in a shower of rock and four pointed
snouts of wurms emerged from the pool. These weren’t like the soft skinned ones
Garth had been killing. These were as big as wolves and had the bony ridges and
wide, tooth lined jaws of hunters. Swarms of locust-like insects and more wurm species
ranging from hand size to as big as the bony hunters emerged from rifts in the
ground. A cross-section of the underground ecology of the crater was driven to
the surface, and the five of them stood in the middle of the menagerie.

“Let’s go!” Kexal shouted above the screeches and
cries from dozen different monstrous mouths. Already the pack of hunter wurms
surged toward them, deciding to make the most of their sunlit situation. Garth
loosed a trio of parting shots as they broke into a run.

Aided by the trembling earth magick within,
Tyrissa quickly surged ahead, dodging aside hazards and calling them out to her
allies. Behind, the dust clouds thickened and swirled, the winds of the crater
sending grit and sand everywhere but doing nothing to clear the air. Through
the haze, beyond the swarm of wurms and more, she caught sight of a massive
beast rearing up from the ground. Its roar overwhelmed the myriad cries and
crashes of the menagerie that had boiled to the surface. The monstrous sound
echoed through the crater but as it faded, so too did its source return the
depths from whence it came.

Probably for the best that I didn’t see what
that
was
, Tyrissa thought.

Tyrissa shot a look over her shoulder and frowned.
The others were keeping pace well enough but behind them was a pursuing swarm
of contorting shapes among a growing dust cloud. Wurms were slower than a human
at a sprint but had enough endurance eventually run you down. Tyrissa returned
her attention to the ground beneath her feet just in time to pivot away from a
finger of pebble churn, her Earth-powered stride not missing a beat. The base
of the central ruin wasn’t much farther but there was no promise that the wurms
would simply give up when they reached the rubble.

Tyrissa paused near a spire, one of the last
before the ruins, her breath coming in heavy, controlled puffs. Wolef and Garth
were furthest back, the wurm swarm at times quite literally snapping at their
heels. But each time the two men dodged around one of the fresh crevasses, the wurms
would gain on them a little more. The silhouettes of raptors circled above,
watching the spectacle unfold. Occasionally one would fall into a screaming
dive, spearing out a smaller wurm from the pack and carrying it a short
distance before letting its prey fall to a blunt death.