Troy Denning - The Cerulean Storm

Neeva retrieved the Scourge, then gasped in alarm. The sword was as cold as ice, but that was not what troubled her. The blade had lost its silvery sheen. It was now covered with a dull gray stain that made it look more like tin than steel.

“What have I done?” she gasped.

Magnus came and stood at her side. After studying the sword for a moment, he gently took it from her hands. “The wraith’s touch has tainted the blade.”

“Can we fix it?” Neeva asked.

“Perhaps, with time,” answered the windsinger. He kneeled next to Sadira, who remained covered beneath the murky shroud that Neeva had been trying to remove. “But for now, we have more pressing problems. The giants are still trapped at Pauper’s Hope, and the Cloud Road remains impassable. Once the sun sets, we can’t stop them from rampaging-especially with Sadira and Rikus both unconscious.”

“Rikus might be well by then,” said Caelum. “As for Sadira …”

“Even if we can help her prevail against the wraiths, I suspect she will be unconscious until morning,” said Magnus, “Still, we can hope. I see nothing else we can do.”

“I do,” said Neeva. She turned and looked toward Agis’s farm, where the Kledan militia was awaiting their return. “Find me a runner who can show my warriors the way from the Asticles Estate to Pauper’s Hope.”

Magnus folded his ears in doubt. “Your men are brave, but are they a match for giants?”

Neeva shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ve learned never to underestimate a dwarf.”

Sadira had gone to the gray.

She stood on a narrow stairway, looking out over an immense abyss filled with a haze that stretched from far below her feet to the zenith of the sky. It was the color of ash and as still as the midday sands. There was nothing else out there.

The steps had been carved from a spire of porous white rock that rose out of the gray murk far below. The stairway spiraled up the pillar to Sadira’s feet, then continued above her head with no apparent end. The column simply grew smaller and smaller, until both the stairs and its tip vanished into the ashen haze far above.

Sadira recognized the pillar as the Pristine Tower but did not think for an instant that she had truly returned to the distant spire of white rock. If she had, the sky would have been yellow-green, with puffy silver clouds drifting past. Lush thickets of bogo trees would have surrounded the base of the column, and in the distance there would have been fields of silver-green broomgrass. Instead, all she saw was a sea of ashen haze.

The sorceress studied the area carefully, searching for the wraiths who had attacked her on the Cloud Road. The Gray was their natural home, and the whole point of their ambush had been to push her into it. Here, the spirits of the dead were dissolved and absorbed into the Gray, much as corpses on Athas were slowly obliterated by rot and decay. However, some spirits did not suffer this fate. Some were sustained by a force even more powerful than the Gray: their everlasting faith in a cause greater than themselves. The wraiths had dedicated themselves to Borys’s service many centuries earlier, and they were such spirits. It was clear that they intended to use their special natures to force her to fight at a disadvantage.

The sorceress was far from panicked. While she would not be as comfortable in the Gray as her foes, she knew more about this place than the wraiths realized. If they expected her to assume they had killed her simply because she found herself in the Gray, they were badly mistaken. The Pristine Tower served as ample evidence that Sadira was alive. A reminder of the most significant event in her life, the spire of white rock acted as a lodestone for her spirit, holding it together and preventing it from dispersing into the haze. Before they could destroy her, the wraiths would have to drive her off its steps.

Magnus’s voice began to toll out of the haze. He was singing a ballad with melancholy strains as loud as thunder and as sweet as morning dew. Though she could not understand the words, Sadira quickly realized that her friend was trying to help her find a way out of the Gray. Unfortunately, the music came from all directions at once, from the front and back, both sides, above and below, even from inside her own head. She cupped her hand to an ear, trying to locate the source of Magnus’s sonorous voice. It would have been easier to chase down the wind.

The sorceress pulled her slender stiletto from its scabbard. A magnificent weapon with a blade of etched bronze and an iron handle beset with tourmalines, it had been in Agis’s family for centuries. She fished a piece of twine from the deep pocket of her robe and tied it around the crossguard. The other end she looped over her wrist, then held the dagger out at arm’s length and let it dangle from the string. She spoke a magical incantation that would make it lead her to the source of Magnus’s voice.

Sadira felt a strange tingle in the hand with the twine, and its ebony color began to fade. The sensation slowly spread up her arm. What she could see of her flesh, from the fingertips to the wrist, paled to its normal color, and the dagger began to spin wildly.

Though she had not expected the reaction, the sorceress was not really surprised by it. Normally her skin remained black with mystic energy during the day, then returned to its usual color the instant night fell. But in the Gray, day and night did not exist. Without the sun in the sky, her spell had drawn its power from the only available source: her flesh. Then, unable to replenish what it had lost to the spell, her arm had remained pale.

Of more concern to the sorceress was the dagger. It continued to spin madly, attempting to point in every direction at once. Sadira watched the blade for several moments. When it showed no sign of settling down, she decided that her spell had failed, and she caught the hilt.

As the sorceress started to slip the weapon into its sheath, the tower lurched beneath her feet. Sadira stumbled and nearly pitched over the side but managed to drop to her hands and knees in time to keep from falling. Her stomach rolled in one direction after the other, and a sick, queasy feeling rose into her throat. Although she saw no hint of motion when she tried to fix her gaze on the haze around her, she felt like the spire was spinning as wildly as her stiletto had a moment earlier. By plunging her dagger into a fissure and twisting the blade against the edge, she barely managed to keep herself from flying off the steps.

For a long time, all Sadira could do was cling to the hilt and pray the blade would not slip from the crack. If she lost contact with the Pristine Tower, she feared that the haze would begin to eat at her spirit and that her life force would seep away. Even if that did not happen, the wraiths would certainly find it easier to prey upon her as she drifted aimlessly through the Gray. Perhaps they were even responsible for knocking the tower into its crazy spin.

Magnus’s voice began to waver, growing much louder each time the gyrating tower pointed in a particular direction, fading to a mere whisper when it pointed away. At first, the volume increased every few seconds, but gradually the rotations slowed, and the spire continued to point in the same direction for a little bit longer, until the sensation of movement ceased, and the song came to the sorceress’s ears from one direction only: the top of the stairs.

Sadira breathed a sigh of relief. The wraiths had not caused the wild spinning after all. The dagger had been unable to point in a single direction because doing so would have led her not to Magnus’s voice but away from the tower and into the dangers of the Gray. Instead, her spell had reoriented the whole tower, so that the exit lay in an obvious direction: up.