Paul Thompson: Alliances

She erupted at last into the air and inhaled with a great gasping shout. When the roaring in her ears and the red veil over her vision had faded, she made for the nearest shore. It was a thin rime of sand beyond which spread a flat sheet of mud. It felt as though hours had passed before she felt mud under her feet. The ooze was charcoal gray and stinking, but Kerian dragged herself out of the water and fell upon it as if it were the finest silk rug in the khan’s palace. After a few grateful breaths, she rolled over and faced the sky.

By the time the quaking in her limbs eased, the light had metamorphosed from late evening to dusk. On her feet she staggered drunkenly. Her entire body felt as though she’d taken a beating from an enthusiastic ogre wielding a heavy stick.

A whooshing sound from behind her galvanized Kerian’s instincts. Despite stiff joints and bruised muscles, she dropped instantly to her belly. Something large had flown overhead. She’d not seen it, but the sound of dragon wings was unmistakable. For two full minutes she lay still as a corpse. Her Kagonesti senses, long battered by the arid, unrelenting furnace of Khur, still served her, and she used them to search her surroundings for signs of danger. There was nothing. If a dragon had flown by, it was gone now. The water behind her was as smooth as a mirror.

Narrow trees grew like a rail fence beyond the mudflats. Whatever might lay beyond, the trees called to the forest-bred Kerian. She sprinted for cover. Her bare toes left clear marks in the mud, but there was nothing she could do about that. Clad only in cotton smallclothes, she was unarmed, unprepared, and alone.

Among the trees she immediately felt better. They were water-loving willows and cypress saplings, none more than four years old, but the shelter they offered was familiar and long missed. She looked back at the water. Must be a lake, she decided. A river would have currents, but the surface of the water was as smooth and unmoving as a slab of polished stone. The shore curved away into the gloom north and south. It was a large lake, several miles across at least. The far shore wasn’t visible even to her keen eyesight.

Alert for the slightest hint of trouble, she moved deeper into the forest. The living trees were all young saplings. When the occasional larger tree appeared, it was never more than a limbless shaft, its top blasted away high up from the ground, its bark sloughed off like skin, exposing the gray trunk to the clammy twilight. Something cataclysmic had happened here, and not so long ago.

A gleam of white, vibrant in the gathering darkness, drew her attention. She headed toward it.

It was one of the ruined stone towers she’d spied during her heart-hammering drop from the sky. The remnant of a mighty spire, the tower was a full thirty feet wide at its base, and its deeply fluted sides rose another thirty feet from the vine-choked ground before ending abruptly. The column was solid stone, marble of the whitest species, yet its upper portion had been snapped cleanly away. No seams were visible. The entire thirty-foot width of marble was formed from a single block of stone.

The tower was elven. No one else could shape stone with such precision and delicacy. Was this Silvanost, a city destroyed by the minotaurs? Her knowledge of the elves’ first home was sketchy, but she couldn’t recall it containing a lake such as the one before her.

Moving around the base of the shattered marble spire, she found an inscription. The letters were monumental, carved deep, and had once been inlaid with solid gold. Someone had hacked the metal away, but traces remained here and there, glinting pathetically in the twilight.

Kananath Kithri Nesti N’Loth Sithelan Sannu, it read. Kith-Kanan, son of Sithel, built this.

She wasn’t in Silvanost, but in Qualinost!

Her head snapped around, and she stared at the now-black lake glimmering between the weedy trees. Somehow she had been plucked from the battlefield in Khur and thrown into the nightmarish ruins of Qualinost. The green dragon Beryl had fallen to her death there, destroying the city founded by Kith-Kanan. The beast’s impact created a huge crater into which rushed the White Rage River. Nalis Aren it was called: the Lake of Death. Kerian’s life had not been spared. Her death had merely been deferred, transferred to a place far worse than the hot sands of Khur.

Like the vile dragon before her, Kerian had been dropped onto Qualinost! Well, she would not share Beryl’s end. She would not die in this dreadful place. She would survive.

When the stars appeared, she used them to navigate away from the noisome lake. The woods were alive with buzzing mosquitoes that swarmed around her exposed limbs. Squat alligators, armored like draconians, lay watchful in shallow pools. She skirted more than a dozen of the lethal reptiles. Their blank eyes followed her, but the animals did not move.

Her thought was to head west, through the great woodland of Qualinesti, then south to the Kharolis Mountains. Qualinesti might be her old home, but it was infested with bandits, brigands, and Knights of Neraka. The mountains contained fewer enemies, and she’d be able to rest and restore herself. As for what she would do then—that would require some thought.

She knew she was in a land beset by anarchy, where evil lived in every town. To the east, Silvanesti was in no better shape, trampled beneath minotaur invaders. Hundreds of miles away, far to the northeast, her comrades in arms were fighting for the survival of their race against the nomad hordes of Khur. Gilthas, her noble, steadfast, stupid husband, had a wild scheme to lead their people to Inath-Wakenti, a fabled valley said to be located in the mountains north-northeast of Khuri-Khan. He had sent Kerian and five hundred warriors to learn whether the mysterious valley really existed. It did. But although the valley’s climate was mild and damp, just as legend held, Kerian’s explorations revealed many dangers hidden within it.

Accessible only by a single pass at its southern end, Inath-Wakenti would be a deathtrap for the last free elves in the world. They could be blockaded easily by their enemies (of which there were many). The valley also was cursed in a strange and mysterious way. In all the time Kerian and her soldiers had spent there, they never found a single living creature. Plants aplenty, yes, but not so much as a fly or bird dwelled within. Something about the valley was hostile to animal life. By night specters wandered the valley’s faceless stone ruins, and weird lights, possibly intelligent and certainly malicious, pursued her warriors, causing several to vanish without a trace.

Kerian tried to make Gilthas understand, to see reason. Their people didn’t need that uncanny valley. They needed to stand and fight! She argued passionately for a new war against the invaders who had taken what rightfully belonged to the elves. Yet Gilthas would not be dissuaded from his dreamer’s notion, even by her report of the dangers of Inath-Wakenti. He insisted their people must make the treacherous desert crossing and conquer the valley.

Kerian halted, realizing she was drenched in sweat. As her mind had raced, so too her pace had quickened through the willow thickets. That was not smart. There were too many enemies about for her to behave so irrationally.

Fireflies sparkled around her. Since her experience in Inath-Wakenti, she had become wary of phantom lights in the night. These proved to be nothing more than luminous insects, sad reminders of the lost serenity of summer nights in Qualinesti.

She was exhausted: first a battle in Khur, then a fall from great height, a near-drowning, and a trek through the wilds around the Lake of Death. It was past time to halt for the night. Food was a problem that could wait, and she’d trained herself to need less water than most, but rest was absolutely necessary. An exhausted soldier was soon a dead soldier.