Threads of Amarion Read online

  One more, he thought, but it took him a second to gather his wits, and even longer to pick up the horn and push himself to his feet. He wobbled, raised the horn...

  And stopped.

  A swell rose from the ocean, just like it had when Saraphazia had come at his summons, but this swell was smaller. A jet of water burst into the air, and a huge whale surfaced. The little eyes glistened, focusing on him.

  Another swell rose beside the first whale, and in the distance a whale breached and fell heavily onto the water. A third swell, then a fourth and fifth and...

  They just kept coming. In moments, the water just off the southern coast of Dandere was filled with whale heads and backs, pushing above the waterline and ejecting water from their blowholes. Spray filled the air and reached all the way to the shore, blotting out the sun and coming down like rain.

  “By the gods,” he murmured. There had to be a hundred of them out there.

  The horn vibrated in his hand, and the golden fire leapt from hand to stump and back again. Streaks of yellow lightning shot out, one jagged fork at a time, into each whale, connecting them to the horn. Then the horn shot a hundred little bolts of golden lightning into Medophae.

  He gasped, and the energy lifted him off the ground like he was a leaf on the wind. Each streak of lightning lodged into his vital organs. He shouted and clenched his teeth, gripping the horn. He felt the struggles of the whales, resisting the call. They yanked at him, trying to rip him down from the sky.

  This was the battle of wills. This was the fight he had to win.

  He growled. This was a tool for a god, and no doubt Oedandus had more than enough will to quickly bring these whales to heel. But this wasn’t a tool for a mortal. Already, Medophae felt his body slowly being torn apart.

  But Medophae wasn’t just any mortal. He had wielded power like this before; he had housed it for hundreds of years. The crackles of Oedandus were familiar to him, and he harnessed them. He let the power soak into him, let it make him stronger. With a grunt, he used that power to hold his body together.

  He yanked on those lightning threads. The pain was excruciating, like every hair on his body had been lit on fire, burning deep under his skin one needle-thin point at a time.

  He could not budge them. Pulling on the lightning was like pulling on iron handles bolted into a cliff face. His mortal vitality wasn’t enough to compel these huge creatures. He needed overwhelming strength, a presence larger than a hundred whales, and he was just one human. He didn’t have the endless GodSpill that comprised Oedandus. He needed more GodSpill. He needed to be filled with it just like Oedandus.

  “No...” he growled. His body began to come apart again. He could feel the bones separating from the ligaments under the pressure of his failing will, and the whales sensed his weakness. They pulled harder.

  But there was something...

  The lightning had connected Medophae’s meager reservoir of GodSpill, the tiny bit that every living creature possessed, with the vast ocean of GodSpill within a hundred whales.

  The lightning connected him to the whales like a river connected a lake to the ocean, and all of his personal GodSpill was running to them. But if he could reverse the flow of the river, rather than fighting the strength of their combined wills, he could pull their GodSpill into him.

  Medophae had swelled with Oedandus’s power, swelled with GodSpill beyond a mortal’s capacity, before. When he had destroyed Dervon, or brought the Deitrus Shelf tumbling down, he’d housed enough to make him shine like the sun.

  He stopped trying to dominate the minds of the whales with his little reservoir of GodSpill. Instead, he commanded the flow of the golden lightning to reverse, to fill him.

  Golden energy flowed into him, and he swelled like he had with all of Oedandus at his command. The life force of each whale flowed into him until their combined GodSpill became his.

  “Yes,” he breathed, gathering that immense power and turning it into a single command for the hundred whales.

  “You...are...mine!” he shouted.

  He grabbed the lightning cords with his one remaining hand. Golden fire crackled around his fist, but he clenched them all. He yanked them, and every whale in the ocean shuddered, sending waves of water toward the shore. Some actually thrashed, trying to get closer to him.

  This is how he did it. Oedandus could have used his own personal power to dominate them, but it would have exhausted him. Why do that when he could simply pull the GodSpill he needed from the whales? With every whale added, it added more power to the horn. It used their own strength against them.

  The whales stopped thrashing. They stopped shooting water into the air, and each became docile, floating just beneath the surface of the water.

  Medophae looked down at himself. He glowed like a sun, floating a dozen feet above the coast. He imagined himself floating toward the whales and it happened, taking him over the water. He landed on the back of the nearest whale, one of the largest of the frightening gathering.

  The whales waited patiently for his command, and he obliged them.

  He sent three whales to the north and three to the south, telling them to swim for a day in that direction. The rest, save the one upon which he stood, he told to swim west toward the continent of Amarion. He told them to spread out, commanding the southernmost whale to swim for Calsinac and the northernmost whale to swim for Irgakth, the land of the dragons. He commanded each subsequent whale to spread out, each hitting the coast somewhere between those two points.

  Go now, he thought to them. Go as fast as you can swim.

  He commanded the final whale, the one upon which he stood, to wait.

  If Saraphazia came upon the first whales headed for the Amarion coast, he wanted her to spend her time jumping from decoy to decoy. That might keep her busy long enough for him to punch through to the coast and rejoin Oedandus.

  Medophae waited an excruciating half an hour. He worried that with each passing second, Saraphazia would emerge with a vengeance, and this time she’d make sure he died.

  But she didn’t come, and when Medophae could stand still no longer, he spoke to his whale. “Take me to Amarion,” he said, feeling his will flow into the whale on a river of GodSpill given to him by the other ninety-nine whales. He gave it a picture of the coast north of Teni’sia and, after a moment, the whale began to move.

  It kicked its tail and surged forward. The lightning connections kept Medophae upright like they were lines harpooned into the whale’s flesh. He could no longer see the other whales moving away on their various missions, but there were still invisible connections to him. If he had a different command for them, they would hear him.

  At Medophae’s behest, the whale he rode stayed above the surface of the ocean. Medophae used the overwhelming flow of GodSpill to refresh himself, and it held his fatigue at bay. He stayed awake, standing, for hours as the water rushed by. When he had flown on Bands, this journey had taken an entire day and night. He could only assume that it would take twice as long on a whale. He stood the entire first day, munching contemplatively on dried goat meat. As night fell and the whale still continued at the same strong pace, he lay down and rested. He didn’t fall asleep, worried that his connection to all the other whales might break if he stopped concentrating.

  He forced himself to stay awake through that entire first night.

  The next day passed much as the first. Salt spray soaked him, the lightning connections kept him attached to the whale, and the whale continued forward, unflagging.

  He found himself wondering how long it would take for Saraphazia to notice that her whales were being controlled.

  That night, an hour after the sun went down, the connection to Medophae’s southernmost whale, the one he’d sent to Calsinac, suddenly winked out. He hadn’t released it. It was as if someone had simply cut the cord.

  Saraphazia had found his first whale.

  24

  Bands

  Bands stopped on the road about
a mile from the walls of Teni’sia. The thin moon gave some illumination, but clouds sailed the skies tonight.

  Stavark stopped beside her and watched her carefully. She’d hesitated in bringing him, but she was going to need an extra pair of hands tonight, and the boy needed something to take his mind off his troubles. She marveled at his depth and strength. He carried the weight of two peoples on his shoulders, and yet he had managed to bear it with grace all the way through the Wave and the journey to Teni’sia.

  But slaying Mirolah might have been too much for him. He had wanted to die, but Bands had blocked his request by telling Mirolah not to kill him. Now, he just seemed miserable in his own skin. He did what was asked of him. He went where he was requested to go, but he seemed to take no joy in anything.

  “We leave the path here,” she murmured. He nodded, and they walked into the woods. Bands led him through the trees for another ten minutes until she found the clearing she sought. It was a dark enough night, and this glade was far enough from the city that no one would see her in the night’s sky. Stavark stood waiting, hands at his sides.

  “From here, we fly.”

  “You will change,” he said.

  “Yes.” She walked to the center of the glade. “Stand back.”

  He moved silently to stand beside the tree. Bands reached within herself and focused on her true form. The trigger was an easy one, well-used. She’d done the transformation so many times, she did not need words to focus her threadweaving, but she said them anyway out of habit.

  Bring me out.

  The air warped around her, and her form expanded. Wearing the body of a human woman had become comfortable, but whenever she took her true form, it was like she was being released. There was a pressure, being in another form. There was no pressure in her true form.

  Stavark’s silver eyes widened and his jaw went slack, but only for a moment. The stunned expression changed to reverence.

  “Kaarksyvihrk. Maerstek dumir Kaarksyvihrk,” he murmured.

  She smiled. “You are too kind, young Stavark. Shapeshifting is not so impressive as it may appear.” She looked to the sky and flexed her wings. “Come, my friend.” With her teeth, she picked up the two bags that held the fishing nets they had brought, and secured them on a pair of spine spikes along her back.

  His pack bobbing, Stavark ran forward and leapt as high as he could. He scrambled atop her, settling himself between the bags.

  “Hang on tight. The beginning is the roughest.” She rocked back on her powerful legs and launched them into the air. They soared above the treetops as if shot from a crossbow. Just as their momentum ebbed and they began to fall, Bands unfolded her wings and caught the air. She pumped twice fiercely, evened them out, and began a steady rhythm, taking them high into the sky.

  She glanced back at him. Stavark narrowed his eyes and pointed his serious face into the wind, his hair flying behind him like a silver banner. His fingers were white-knuckled where they gripped the spike before him.

  They soared away from Teni’sia.

  She kept the castle behind them and pushed southward. Only the most intent would be able to see a dark green dragon against this cloudy sky.

  To their right, the Inland Ocean glimmered like a dark sheet of glass. Below, the jumbled landscape of young mountains and tenacious alpine trees rushed by. The Corialis Mountains could not compare to the overpowering size of the Spine Mountains, but they were powerful and beautiful in their own right.

  Bands banked left and drove upward toward the summit. They said goodbye to the Inland Ocean, and she bucked the turbulence at the ridge as the eastern wind rushed at her. She used it to climb higher, then ducked her head and shot downward. They swooped along the eastern slope and skimmed the edge of the True Ocean. Black and fathomless, the True Ocean stretched on from here to the horizon. So far as the humans of Amarion were concerned, nothing existed beyond the True Ocean. The malicious waves churned and rolled all the way to the end of eternity. No human had ventured more than a mile out onto those waters since before human history was recorded, except for Medophae. And no dragon had even flown over them since the War of the Behemoths, except for her.

  Bands often wondered how much of that adventure had been fated. If she had not bucked the superstitions of her kind and discovered that dragons didn’t die when they flew over the waters of the True Ocean, if she hadn’t traveled far out over those deadly waters with her partner-in-adventure, Jarissa Chandura, she would never have found the Isle of Dandere. Jarissa’s heart would never have been stolen by Jarod Madis Roloiron. And then there would never have been a Medophae Roloiron, prince of Dandere and heir to the rage of Oedandus. The great god would have remained imprisoned under the thumb of Dervon the Diseased forever.

  The Corialis range pushed them closer and closer to those dark waters, curving inexorably to the place Bands sought. What would have been a day-long gallop by horse took less than an hour by dragon flight.

  Bands’s keen eyes scoured the cliffs, and she found the spot she was looking for: a sheltered cove, almost invisible from the ground. The cliffs ended abruptly, bracing the persistent crashing of the waves, forming a broken “C” around the hidden beach. She wheeled about and dove to land on the sandy bank.

  Stavark jumped from her back, landing on the patchy grass and sand. He rubbed his hands together vigorously. The poor thing looked frozen through and through.

  “I am sorry, my friend,” Bands said. “It has been long since I had a mortal rider upon my back. I forgot to ask if you were cold. Here.” She turned and sent a jet of her breath onto the beach. A riot of flames exploded, creating a bonfire.

  “Warm yourself. I will return.”

  Bands transformed back to her human form. She left Stavark by the enchanted blaze and walked through the sand to the edge of the jagged cliffs.

  Through tangled vines and undergrowth, stone steps meandered up the slope and through an archway covered with moss and eaten by time. Beyond that archway lay the Tombs of the Lost, a monument erected to the dead of the Battle of the Deitrus Shelf. The tombs sprawled across a flat shelf that clung to the cliff overlooking the bay. Short-branched trees thick with leaves rooted at the edge of the bay and even along the sides of the path, reaching for the night sky like spears. Clusters of sea vine meandered up from the water and twisted about the stone walls and archways of the tombs. The trees and vines were everywhere, obscuring the somber tombs, the archways, the flagstone walkways. The Deitrus Shelf hadn’t seen the touch of humans for generations.

  The bay below the Deitrus Shelf was almost perfectly round, creating an inlet that was cut off from the True Ocean by long strands of rock reaching around it like arms. Where the “hands” would have been, the rock wall disappeared into the water. Rock spires rose up from the bay at random places, mirroring the tall, thin trees that clustered near the shore.

  A light touch on her arm caused her to jump. Stavark looked up at her. “These are the tombs,” he said. The boy made no sound when he walked. She’d forgotten how quiet quicksilvers could be.

  “You are familiar with the Deitrus Shelf?” she asked.

  “Orem told me the stories.”

  “Ah.” She gave him a sidelong smile. “I think I’d like to meet this Orem. Everyone seems to think very highly of him.”

  “He said the dead are restless here,” Stavark said. “I can feel it.”

  “Yes.”

  “The weapons are in the tomb?”

  She pointed at the bay. “In the water.”

  He watched the gently lapping shore for a moment, then turned his attention back to the hill. “This is a sad place. The dead refuse to rest. Why?”

  “I don’t think they know they are dead yet. What do you see?”

  “Nothing,” he said, as his gaze fell on the archway that led up and onto the shelf. “But I hear them. They howl.”

  She reached the flagstone and took the steps slowly toward the first arch that led to the platform of tombs. Stavark res
olutely followed her. Eerie silence settled about them as they approached the tall, sturdy arch. They stepped through, and Bands heard the voices Stavark had already heard.

  The noise of battle rang in the air, but quietly, as though echoing around the corners of the mountains. The muted screams of the dying and the distant roars of victors surrounded them. Stavark walked with his head high and his silver eyes wide. His hands clenched into fists.

  “They cannot touch us,” she said to him.

  He nodded once, but there was no relief in his eyes.

  Bands navigated her way through the ivy-choked cobblestone paths, past the spear trees that cracked the flagstones in their violent desire to rise. She found herself looking for blood on the rocks. They’d found so many bloodied stones as they built this place, so few bodies.

  It was difficult to keep the memories from overwhelming her. These ghosts lived only one moment over and over: the Battle of Deitrus Shelf. They desperately sought a resolution that would never come.

  After wandering past the stone tombs and archways, images flickered about them and joined the noises. Every now and then, a transparent figure ran between tombs, welding sword or spear. Hundreds of ghostly figures fought as though Bands and Stavark stood in the middle of a battlefield. Stavark’s face had become rigid, and he walked closer to her. His gaze darted back and forth, following the ghostly violence.

  “We’re almost there,” she murmured.

  Again, that single nod, but he kept his eyes on the ghosts near them.

  They crossed the grand courtyard, more green than stone now, and headed toward the tallest tomb, covered in sea vines that had climbed up the steep cliff from the bay. Those thick walls housed the ghosts of the two dead kings who had met here with their armies. Massive granite pillars held up the façade. Medophae had constructed that tomb by himself, a somber penance for his horrible mistake.

  She and Stavark ascended the steps slowly and entered the dark tomb. Two ghosts within glowed in the darkness: Seldon Tyflor and Matro Den. Swords flickered in the darkness as they struck at one another. Thrust and parry. Hack and deflect.