CEPHAS SQUINTED AGAINST THE SUN, THEN RETURNED TO his study of the boulder- strewn gully wall, plotting a route before he began the climb. Ariella squatted at the top of the rise, drinking a single mouthful of water from their last canteen and keeping a westward watch. Cephas had watched her make the ascent, but he had stopped trying to follow the leaps and graceful slides she made from shifting stone to invisible handhold. The couriers of the Airsteppers’ Guild had trained the swordmage to navigate across broken country as if she were dancing.
Cephas was no dancer.
“Any sign?” he asked her, keeping his voice low even though they had yet to see another living thing since they entered this unnatural plain.
Ariella did not answer aloud. She shook her head and held up the canteen, giving him an inquiring look. Cephas considered for a moment, then nodded, and she tossed it down. He took as shallow a swallow as he could manage, and again wondered whether this journey would be easier if he were manifesting the earthsoul he had known all his life.
At least I believe it’s the one I’ve known all my life, he thought.
Corvus’s hurried hints of explanations to come weighed on him. The joy he felt on learning another way of being faded with the knowledge that the people who rescued him from the mote apparently had intended to make some unknown use of him.
He tried again to hear the song of the earth, but heard nothing except the wind.
Ariella told him not to worry. He was new to his Second Soul, and it was still coming fully into its first manifestation. “Besides,” she said, “the earth’s song is probably muted here, or warped. I know the wind is strange just from blowing over this strange ground. Don’t you hear it?”
He did. The wind he heard with his ears was little different than the wind that blew through the canyons of the Omlarandins, but when he listened with his windsoul, he heard something different, a high and lonesome sound, almost as if the air itself felt pain.
“Yes,” Ariella said when he told her this. “Yes, that’s it exactly. High and lonesome.” She shivered, then bounded off again in one of her masterful displays of movement.
Cephas tucked the canteen through the webbing of his belt. He did not see an easy route up through the tumble of rock and dust, or even a difficult one. Well, he thought, I cannot hear the earth, but I can still hear the wind. He felt the wind-force gathered inside him. Yes, enough time had passed since he last released it.
Cephas spread his arms wide, brought his feet together, and straightened his spine. With a thought, he rose from the ground, floated up the gully wall, and came down to a silent landing beside Ariella. She returned his grin. “You don’t have to do it so prettily, you know,” she said. “It is even possible to slouch in flight.”
He addressed her gravely. “That is not the way of a strongman,” he said, and even to his own ears, his voice was a fair imitation of Tobin’s.
Ariella laughed. “Listen to you!” she said. “Imitations, flying every chance you can, and even taking a drink of water when you are thirsty instead of grimly soldiering on. I knew I heard wind in you as well as rock.”
Cephas smiled but did not answer. He was glad she was pleased by the behaviors that surprised him, but he hoped that listening to the wind was not the same thing as being irresponsible.
But then, Ariella was a swordmage, and so a scholar of both spell and blade. She was a member of a guild that demanded a rigorous ethical stance and an extraordinary physical discipline, and she was risking her life to pursue traitors to her homeland. If he sensed any irresponsibility in himself, it was not because it blew in on the wind.
There
“Do you hear that?” he asked Ariella. “What is it?”
She listened, and then an enormous, excited smile lit up her face. “That, Cephas,” she said, “is the sea! Come on!”
She took his hand, and now he had no problem following her.
It was … enormous. Gigantic. Unending.
“What do you think?” Ariella asked him, standing next to him on the bluff as they looked out over the water.
Cephas cleared his throat. “Big,” he said, before he could gather his thoughts.
She did not laugh. “It is that,” she said. “It is big.”
The surf crashed on the rocks below. Black-winged birds with scarlet head feathers screamed and dived, dipping into the water and then arcing back up with silver fish twisting in their beaks.
“Is that what your father hears?” Cephas asked. “And your brother? Is that endless rush the voice of water?”
“Hmmm. One new soul is enough for you to consider right now, I think,” she said archly. Cephas smiled, content to watch the water and breathe the salt air instead of trying to fathom their call.
He saw a triangular shape on the waves, moving east to west. He began to ask Ariella what it was, before realizing he already knew.
“A dhow!” he said, pointing. “A fisherman’s dhow as in the stories! Do you suppose he’s had to fight off a sea dragon?”
Ariella said, “The Almraivenar fishermen don’t come this far west, but I don’t think it’s because they fear dragons.” She laughed. “You still think every new thing you see is out of a tale of wonder. I like that.”
The shadow of enormous wings crossed over them, and a hunting cry drowned out the waves and scattered the terrified birds. A huge serpentine shape beat hard for the little boat, which was tacking to shore.
A figure stood in the prow, waving. It was Corvus, and the winged shadow was Trill, diving to carry him to land.
Shan found them not long after and led them to the camp Mattias had set in the lee of a gigantic oblong boulder balanced atop a much smaller spire.
“It’s probably been that way for a century or more,” said Mattias. “At least since the swampland petrified into what we see now.”
What they saw, away from the shoreline, was the same terrain Cephas and Ariella had traversed for the better part of two days before their little band gathered back together. Cephas had come to think he knew what the word “plain” meant in the journey across the highlands of Tethyr. But if this brooding wasteland was also a plain, then his understanding of the word was as limited as his understanding of what “ocean” meant before Ariella led him to the seashore.
Corvus crouched over a smokeless fire, the fuel for which consisted of dried bricks he fished from the mysterious portal in his breast. “Not too many of these stored away, I’m afraid,” he said. “But we’ll not need a fire once we get to the Calim Desert.”
Cephas wondered if his mental image of a desert was anything like what they would find beyond the western horizon. “Because it is endlessly hot,” he hazarded, “and there is nothing to burn across the distance a camel can walk in a hundred days?”
Mattias snorted. “Do you even know what a camel looks like?”
Cephas sensed Ariella’s eyes on him. “It’s like an ox for the desert,” he said.
Mattias looked at him, holding a grin, then at Ariella. Whatever he saw on her face caused him to clear his throat and rearrange his features. “Well, yes, more or less,” he said. “Good lad.” He went back to checking the gear they had managed to carry out of Almraiven, supplemented by items Corvus periodically remembered he had tucked away in his ritual-bound storage place.
Corvus looked up. “We’ll not need a fire, Cephas, because we will be met by your kin.”
Shan moved next to the kenku. Dark circles had appeared under the woman’s eyes over the last two days. She had a haunted look, and Mattias said she had not slept since Cynda and Tobin disappeared. She looked a question at Corvus, not troubling herself with gestures or signs.
“And we
