“Cloud!” I shout, and turn. Then I startle.
The other cloak’s right behind me.
“Take her.” I have to pry Flutter’s hands away. I see her disintegrate with every touch, losing particles. I wince.
Cloud makes a low soft humming in her throat and wraps Flutter up in her wings.
Daral’s behind me. “What—?”
Flutter’s face is a dirty white amidst black cloak and dark hair. “Kato. Bad things come. From the salt.” She sways, and Cloud sweeps her away.
The salt fields.
This is not good at all.
“Wake not the sleepers under the salt,” murmurs Daral. “Beware the wind that blows the Horn of Reckoning.”
I cast a sharp sideways look at him. So he understands the language of Highwind, does he? Instead I say, “We should look into this.”
Three days ago, the most awful things in my world were golems and garguants, losing Sera, and the Dark Masters imprisoned within Tau Marai.
Now fear strokes an icy feather down my spine.
There’s nothing I can do for Flutter, surrounded and veiled and cocooned by others of her kind. It’s not even midday, and there’s an ache deep in my muscles.
The water skin at my belt is full, though, and my nerves twitch with a desperate need to know.
“I’m going to walk up to Tapek Ridge and take a look down,” I tell Daral. I’m already moving.
“I’m coming with you,” he says.
I don’t slow my long-legged stride for him, but he keeps up. We turn off the road together, drive our feet against rock, begin climbing. I step on desert scrub, crushing it under my boot. Its bitter green scent rises in the air.
Once a brown-and-black snake slithers into a hole to our right. A desert toad, warty, blends in with a flat-topped rock. In one small valley, water trickles through a crack in a shadowed hollow. We refill our skins and keep going.
The hills give way to Tapek ridge, an upthrust block of stone, stubbornly square and angular. We half-climb, half-hike up a narrow path to its top. My nails break upon rock.
It’s windy at the top. Hot gusts lash my body, throw grit into my eyes. I peer out toward the unseen salt plains, ringed with hills.
Beside me, Daral mutters, “Taurin’s veil!”
We don’t need to see into the basin to know that Flutter is right.
A pustule of light, oily and rainbow-colored, streaked with darkness, domes the salt basin. It seems to be sucking in the very sky—clouds streak and shred towards it, an agony of white bleeds out from torn blue.
“This is—wrong,” whispers Daral.
My entire body fights against the wrongness of that light, the wrongness of the sky around, the wavering edges of the hills surrounding the basin. My spiders cower; I think I sense bindings within me loosen and shift.
I force myself to step back. Pinpricks of light explode in one eye, a whine rises to a scream in one ear. My tongue is thick and swollen in my mouth, and when I speak, I taste something so alien that I have no words for it. “We have to—”
Daral looks like he wants to be sick. “Listen.”
I close my eyes. And there, tossed about in rags on the wind, is the mournful sound of a horn blowing Too late too late.
I turn away and heave up everything in my stomach.
A ruddy light slips across the rock faces and dribbles into the valley of Tau Marai. The silence here is vast and empty and weighs down upon me. My feet on the ramp slow of their own accord.
The bronze gates on the far side rise higher than any city wall ever built. Mountains loom behind them. Their rocky arms encircle Tau Marai, sealing the Dark Masters in their prison.
The valley walls are pocked with openings. The guardians lived there once—the golems and the Garguants that kept the curious out and the Dark Masters in. For years, we thought they were the enemy, the army of the Dark Masters.
Successive Champions of Taurin battled these mechanical monsters, whittling their numbers down to a few. And then Sera’s army destroyed the rest of the golems and I took down the Garguants to save her—and now the jailers are all gone.
Who will drive back the Dark Masters if they attempt to break out?
A shadow passes over my soul, and a chill takes root in my heart.
The Gates. For a few moments, they’d been open. A few moments in which a doorway had existed between Tau Marai and the rest of the world.
And now Flutter says things in the salt are stirring.
What if something got out?
I’m breathing fast and shallow. My chest squeezes painfully, but no, this is not the transformation.
It’s fear. Pure paralyzing fear. My arms and legs are leaden with it, my head light, my heart beating fast and furious.
No, Taurin, no.
I can’t do this again.
I’ve fought golems and Garguants. I’ve hunted mourning cloaks and night walkers. I watched Sera die in a flare of blinding light. I held the Gates as they opened and I saw the twisted nightmares within.
I gave my body up to pain and consuming fire. Flutter saved me, but I lost my hand.
I can’t fight what’s coming out of the salt.
I am afraid, more afraid than I’ve ever been before.
Taurin, please!
I hadn’t pleaded with my god since the day I lost at Tau Marai seven years ago. I hadn’t wanted anything to do with him since.
But I plead now, falling on my knees in the desert dust, silent tears coursing down my cheeks. I rain blows on the soil, and a cloud of grit envelopes me. It coats my lips and mouth, pricks my eyes.
No, Taurin. No more. No more pain. I can’t!
Haven’t I lost enough? Given up enough? Isn’t it time for someone else to bear the burden?
Kato Vorsok.
A cool voice, one that reverberates inside my head. A voice I know isn’t mine. It stops the frantic wheeling of my thoughts. I draw my breath in, shuddering. My chin is lowered to my chest.
Kato Vorsok. It’s a voice
