Tavis felt the syllables of the axe’s ancient summons rise spontaneously in his chest, but he could not force so many strange words past his trammeled ribs. An unreasoning panic welled up inside him, not because he was caught in the titan’s grasp, but because he had lost Sky Cleaver.
As the shadowroc’s enormous wings and tail rose from beneath the plain, Basil rolled onto his stomach and covered Sky Cleaver. The runecaster murmured something, then he began to pale-hair, flesh, even his clothes.
A shrill screech erupted from the shadowroc’s throat as it broke completely free of the ground. Tavis felt himself whirl. The enormous bird rolled off its back, and then the air throbbed beneath the force of its great wings. Basil’s figure, already as translucent as alabaster and still paling, began to recede. The raptor beat its wings again. The plain spread out beneath Tavis like a milky-blue sea. In the center lay a dark island of shattered ground, the ruins of Bleak Palace.
There was nothing above save the shadowroc’s umbral torso, a ceiling of purple feathers as vast as a cloud. Every few seconds, the bird’s distant wingtips dipped below its gloomy abdomen, lifting them ever higher into the sky. Perhaps twenty paces away, the sticklike stump of a severed leg dangled beneath the fan of a monstrous tail.
Tavis began to work his pinned arms back and forth. Though it required only a few moments to free an arm, by the time he succeeded the shadowroc had carried him so high he could have looked down on the moon. The immensity of Bleak Palace was a mere dot in the milky snows below. He could look across the Endless Ice Sea to where it spilled off the northern edge of the world, and in the opposite direction he saw the dark valleys of Hartsvale lying beyond the white teeth of the Ice Spires North.
The shadowroc leveled off. Tavis wrapped his free arm around a talon toe and jerked back as hard as he could. There was a muffled crack, and the bird opened its claw. The high scout dangled for an instant, then pulled himself up to wrap his free arm around the raptor’s ankle. He shimmied up the tarsus as fast as he could, trying to reach the jungle of feathers overhead.
The shadowroc’s ebony beak darted back beneath its breast, a blue tongue fluttering in its gaping maw.
Tavis grabbed a handful of feather vanes and pulled himself into the dark thicket that covered the bird’s meaty thigh, barely escaping the hooked mandible that came scraping across the tarsus below.
Suddenly, the high scout’s legs began to rise, as though floating, and his entire body followed, straining away from the shadowroc’s thigh. The vast expanse of the Endless Ice Sea flashed past his eyes, then the starlit sky, the jagged Ice Spires, and finally the creamy snows of the Bleak Plain. Tavis pulled himself deeper into the feathers and held on for his life, trying to keep from being thrown clear as the raptor tumbled. Again, the Ice Sea flickered past, followed so quickly by the stars and distant mountains that the sky and ground blurred into a kaleidoscope.
The shadowroc pulled a beakful of feathers from its thigh and tossed them to the wind. Tavis could not tell how far the bird had already fallen, but he felt certain those hooked mandibles would find him long before the raptor crashed itself into the ground. Nor could he climb to a safer hiding place. It was all he could do to keep from being flung off the tumbling creature. He realized now why the titan had attacked in this form. As long as they were in the air, Lanaxis was the master; even if the high scout had been holding Sky Cleaver, he could not have killed his foe without sending himself plummeting toward the wasteland below.
For the next several seconds, the shadowroc struggled against the force of its wild fall to bring its beak to bear. Then, with the ground so close that Tavis could see his friends standing on Bleak Palace’s shattered portico, the raptor’s beak closed around the feathers to which he was clinging.
Tavis thrust one hand into a nostril. The air inside was as bitter and cold as ice. He grabbed hold of a jagged edge and clung tight as the shadowroc flicked its head to rip the feathers from its thigh. The high scout felt his feet swing around and sink into the soft tissue of the bird’s eye. It squawked in shock, then whipped its head in the opposite direction. Tavis slammed against the side of its beak and reached over the top, sticking his hand into the other nostril.
“Try to get rid of me now!”
The high scout had barely growled the challenge before he floated into the air, remaining connected to the beak only by the strength of his trembling old hands. The shadowroc’s enormous wings spread out to both sides of its body. The bird swept low over the ground, and the kaleidoscope of their long, tumbling fall abruptly gave way to the milky snows of the Bleak Plain.
They glided toward Lanaxis’s palace, flying no higher than the cupola. Basil was standing on the portico, supporting his ancient frame on Sky Cleaver’s heft. Already, the runecaster’s organs and most of his bones showed through his transparent skin.
“Throw it, Basil!” The cry was not so much a command as a prayer, for not even Basil had believed he would have the strength to part with Sky Cleaver once he touched it. “Now!”
As they passed by, Tavis kept his gaze fixed on the palace. To his amazement, Basil grasped Sky Cleaver’s heft and began to spin like a hammer-hurler. The shadowroc dipped a wing and wheeled around. Tavis lost sight of the verbeeg, then felt a sudden rush of wind as Lanaxis drew a deep breath through the cavernous bird nostrils.
The high scout whipped his head back around in time to see Basil releasing the axe. In the same instant, the shadowroc voiced the terrible screech Brianna had warned them about. An anguished ringing erupted in Tavis’s ears, and his entire body stung from the powerful vibrations that reverberated through the bird’s beak. The cry swept Basil from his feet and hurled him across the portico into Galgadayle and Brianna.
Sky Cleaver dropped toward the ground.
Tavis pulled one hand from the shadowroc’s nostril and stretched it toward the axe. “In the name of Skoreaus Stonebones, Your Maker-” The high scout’s ears were ringing so painfully he could not be certain he was uttering the syllables correctly, but the axe began to rise into the air. “O Sky Cleaver, do I summon you-”
The shadowroc screeched again, and wheeled around so violently that Tavis slammed against the side of its head. As they turned, the high scout glimpsed the axe sailing after them. He finished the last part of the command, unable to hear his own words:
“Into the service of my hand.”
Sky Cleaver flew to Tavis, turning its heft toward his outstretched palm. The shadowroc flapped its wings madly. Once more the vibrations of its deafening screech racked the high scout’s body; then he felt the axe’s ivory handle in his palm.
The bird flung its head wildly, trying to throw its passenger away before he could strike. Tavis glimpsed the moonlit snows a thousand feet below. He knew Sky Cleaver would save him even if he destroyed the shadowroc, but Brianna had warned him against thinking he could kill the titan so easily. He would have to defeat Lanaxis another way.
Tavis waited and hung on, more for his son’s sake than his own. When at last he felt himself bouncing toward the shadowroc’s face, he struck not with the edge of the axe blade, but with the flat.
“Cleave!” he commanded. “Sunder this madness!”
Tavis could never speak of what happened next, not even to Brianna. He remembered a wind that shined like light and a radiance that boomed like thunder. He stood on the whirling emptiness between the stars, with the titan kneeling at his side, head bowed toward a majestic figure that resembled the smell of freshly cut spruce and the sizzle of lightning and the howl of a lonely wind sweeping over an endless glacier. A voice like oak coursed through the high scout’s body and, he supposed, through Lanaxis’s as well.
“I can return, but why?” demanded the majestic figure. “You poisoned your brothers. You destroyed Ostoria. You cannot raise it again.”
“But the voices, Father!” Lanaxis seemed as young as the day he had walked from Othea’s birthing caves, with a strapping lean body, curly brown hair, and a brow unfurrowed by centuries of worry. Only his eyes, as deep and sad as twilight, betrayed his timeless remorse. “I have listened to them-I have studied them-for decades of centuries. You want me to rebuild Ostoria. The message is clear!”
“Message? There is no message! The time of giants has passed without notice on Toril, and that is your doing. The voices are punishment, nothing more.”
A sob of boundless anguish rose from Lanaxis’s throat. “No, Father!”
“Your punishment is not eternal, Lanaxis.” The god’s voice had grown so hard that it scraped along Tavis’s bones like a rasp. “After all, you are a mortal now.”
Lanaxis gave a cry, then suddenly dropped through the whirling emptiness and vanished from sight. The high scout prepared himself to follow, but instead felt Annam’s voice, as supple as a chamois brushing over his
