the little green beast, forcing Kimber to look back over her shoulder.
Cho looked uninterested in continuing the conversation, making it clear with her stone-faced continence. The rain slid in thick rivulets down her black braids and clung to her lashes, but she did not break her far off gaze long enough to wipe any of it away.
In that far off, figures moved along the thin paths that veined the cliffs. The rain still veiled them, but they seemed bright against the grey backdrop and too tall to be mountain animals scampering on three or more legs. Winding through the words of the Tale, Kimber found herself at the mouth of one of the caves, looking down on the roiling river, much wider and wilder than the course that had flooded the Bashrai’s basin, but she couldn’t find any people in the words. Searching, she leaned too far, transfixed by the spray and white-capped chop, and fell out of the story and back into herself with a jolt.
Bre’et bawled and side-stepped, nearly colliding with their companions.
Anxiety tightening her voice, Kimber asked, “We’re going to cross that?”
Cho looked up. “The river? I would not be so keen to put my swimming skills to the test.”
“Me neither,” she assured Cho. The veser agreed, this time side-stepping in the opposite direction. “Maybe we could ask the people on the far side how they got there.”
The Elanaite was not so easily baited. She pointed east, down the length of the valley. “We’ll have to visit the Faer. There should be a city to the east. They’ll let us cross there.”
City. The word pulsed and throbbed in Kimber’s head. The press of Maan, new people and their ideas contorting her, as the decorated man had twisted Bre’et into something he shouldn’t be. Spinning the story in her head, she did not like the ending. Into the river, bound to something heavy and no doubt sacred. She received a muted agreement from the woodsy voice in her head.
“No.” She coughed, putting on a façade of staunch indifference that, like her voice, cracked like dry earth. “I…isn’t there another way?”
“No,” the Elanaite insisted.
Bre’et did not follow but Cho refused to notice and turn back. Through the downpour, growing colder by the moment, Kimber called out, “I can’t go.”
Finally, the little beast and rider ambled to a halt. Shiny drops whirled around Cho as she turned fiercely. “In this, you decide to mistrust me? You follow me through the Godessi-forsaken grasses without a word and this is the time you choose to make your stand?” Though her voice had to be loud, she did not seem angry so much as flabbergasted.
Kimber wanted to defend herself but the cold and the woman’s black gaze sucked the resistance out of her.
The Elanaite’s gaze grew suddenly suspicious. “Is this advice from divinity? Is this the path They have told you to travel? Were you visited in the grass?”
It would have been easy to tell her that the heavens had parted or a blueflyer had flitted onto her shoulder and told her to avoid the city but pieces of her overrode the desire to take the undemanding path. “No,” she finally admitted, bowing her head.
“Then hunger is a joy to you and the rain cleanses your spirit, is that it?” Cho taunted. When Kimber could muster no reply but more noises from her stomach, the Elanaite’s face puckered in a scowl that was too comedic to be true and she finally wiped a hand across her eyes. “There is nothing to fear from the Faer.”
“The Bashrai were also supposed to be peaceful,” Kimber countered. Cho looked at her like a recalcitrant child and she was beginning to feel petulant and younger than she had been a moment ago.
This time when Kipi began to move, Bre’et followed. Each took slow, measured steps to bring them side by side and seemingly to keep the tempest-driven river in the distance as long as possible.
“You know the Tale, rel,” Cho reminded her. “The Heaven Walker holds peace above all. The Faer won’t harm you.”
Kimber lamented her frail resolve and hunched over the veser’s back as the rain chilled her to the bone. Of all she had taken from others, none of it seemed to be strength of will. Even Cho’s pervading stubbornness rolled off her like water off a basla’s scaly back. If only the Elanaite would order her, give her a ‘must’ to rail against. But the word never came, as if Cho knew what not to say, and Kimber allowed herself to be shepherded. She was glad that her own thoughts did not seem to have the strength to shape her, lest she grow a wooly coat and extra leg.
Her silent cogitation was shattered with a scream as, off in the green expanse, a jagged line of crackling white light split the World into left and right. In the next instant, a sound like a hundred splintering tree trunks launched an attack on her ears that could not be staved off with a simple barricade of hands.
Bre’et wheeled back and even Kipi bristled, but Cho was a calm island in the waters of chaos. She slid down and commanded her beast to lie on its belly, then gestured for the veser to do the same. The Child snorted derisively and pawed the ground near her feet. She did not flinch back but instead kicked him in a foreleg where one of his wounds was still raw and seeping. The veser squalled and tumbled and Kimber found herself on the ground, having her face pressed into the dirt.
“Are we praying?” she asked, provided with vague fragments of time spent similarly bowing in the dust. It felt more ancient than the Other’s time, like something from one of the old Tales. Maan had been more demonstrative back then.
Cho mumbled something with exaggerated facial contortions. No, she was yelling it but Kimber’s ears weren’t working. The sound still echoed inside them, making it difficult for anything else to get in.
“What was it?” Kimber asked. Her own voice sounded nearly as muffled to her.
“A skyclap.”
Kimber laughed Cho’s laugh, a disbelieving little breath of contempt. She wedged a hand into the dirt to press it to her mouth, tasting mud. It still tasted better than channeling the Elanaite. “It was too loud.” The Other offered up only low far-off rolling rumbles as a definition for the word.
“You really are just some banaar digger,” Cho laughed. It somehow sounded gentler when she did it. Taking her hand off the back of Kimber’s head, she said, “On the open plains, a skysplitter will hit whatever is tallest. We’ll crawl.”
Something dark flashed in Kimber’s brain and told her to put her hand up in front of the Elanaite’s face. An instant later, a clawed foot struck it and she was able to deflect it back to the ground only because it had been a half-hearted attempt in the first place. Again, Cho did not flinch. Again she laughed, loud and cynical but edged with a dark humor.
“The brute is taller than all of us. Let it walk if it insists. It will make a serviceable skysplitter attractor.”
Another bolt split the grey day and dazzled the sky but this one traveled without aural accompaniment.
Holding her hand up, Kimber’s eyes were flashed by another burst that failed to sound. The streak of white light had lanced down its erratic arc toward the earth but had never landed its blow. Instead, it froze almost as it entered the valley from above, sparking and throwing up shadows that fell on something that had previously lain unseen in the gloom of the storm. The light now moved in a perfect line, exploding outward as it struck the end of its trail in a hundred different
