only color in his whole being, lending him an eerie wild-eyed look as rivulets of water plastered his shaggy hair to his face.
The creeping tingling seemed to pour off the boy. Kimber felt her hair stand on end.
Cho struggled to extricate herself from the device, which was suddenly a prison of crisscrossed support rods, a fist that had captured her in its ‘metal’ grip.
“You must go,” the boy whispered, his breathy voice like a breeze.
A string of skyclaps boomed in rapid succession and the pin-prick blacks of his eyes disappeared in what might have passed for fear. He reached for Kimber, his unshod feet leaving wet footprints with each step, one white hand gesturing to the metal and fabric.
In the face of the mystery and the musts, Kimber found her voice. “Who are you?”
The boy brushed the device’s wingtip and it began to glow as well. “You must take the kite.”
A menacing growl echoed from the far side of the shining device and Kipi’s yellow eyes shone in the reflected light. Its tail whooshed through the heavy air as it stalked around the front of the ‘kite’.
“You will die,” the boy said. His features were so fair and flat that she could barely discern the emotion attached to the statement. Like Bre’et, the boy seemed desperate to communicate something that was beyond his power.
Cho threw a fist into the body of the kite and the metal crumbled like cloth. Something was wrong with her face, which was pulled back into a bare-toothed grimace. The skin of it dulled and cracked. Flakes of it fell onto the metal with the plink-plink of pebbles. “Get away from her!” Her voice boomed in the narrow confines.
The boy stared with almost perfectly white eyes. “The white rel-“
Kimber was thrust to the side and cracked against the wall, the device and trapped Elanaite skidded in the opposite direction, and the white boy disappeared under an onslaught of charging black. Bre’et’s charge was uncharacteristically silent, only his footsteps sucking in the mud, and he merely thrust the boy back out onto the plain instead of launching him end over end into the air.
When the veser stopped, the boy tumbled to the ground. He stumbled back up to his feet, the wind blasting his shaggy hair into his face. “The Good Lady. The white rel comes,” he said, his voice still flat.
“What is he talking about?” Kimber asked.
Now wedged between the wall and the ‘kite’, Cho struggled to pull her pinned right arm free.
“The Faer exile their undesirable elements. They usually go mad out here in the rest of the World.”
The rel felt a terrible empathy with the boy, his pale gaze lost and anxious. Cho was less sympathetic and loud enough to be heard over the storm. “It will take more than some barmy man-child to stay us, boy.”
A skysplitter flashed without sound and the wind shrieked in to fill the void, twisting and whirling in a pallid fog that hid from view the valley, the river, and all points beyond. Suddenly, the boy was split apart, two white figures in the drowning rain, but no, the boy was thrown to the ground while another colorless figure took his place, taller, more imposing, its eyes perfect orbs unmarred by pupil, its gaze indefinable. The rain struck the air around it but never touched, a nimbus of scattering droplets sparkling all around.
“Cho!” Kimber called, creeping closer and behind Bre’et’s tense and dripping form.
The Elanaite seemed to shrink within her prison, gaping and slack-jawed. “The Heaven Walker?”
“Good Lady,” the boy said, a little louder than his previous breathy squeaks, in what might have been meant as a shout.
It was a woman in a long white frock, her long straight hair falling nearly to the grass, the tips of her feet hovering over the tops of the wet green sward. Her features, familiarly sharp, were placid and beatific, and when her mouth opened, revealing overly long teeth, it looked as though there might be more than just Kimber that was unnatural to the World. It seemed she would speak.
If she did, the storm drowned the words. The boy was back on his feet, his pants and hands stained by the grass. The rel, a truly white rel, faced him, reached out and touched his face as his mouth opened and closed in words made mute by the rain. Neither face creased with smile or frown. Neither voice was raised to indicate a heated exchange nor softened to share confidences. The rel stroked the boy’s cheek. He grasped her hand with pale, shaking fingers. Kimber imagined it as affection and felt jealousy bubble up, hers mixing with the Other’s.
And then the boy flew.
As though wrenched from behind, he crashed backwards through the air, arching high before his silhouette was lost in the fog. A scream, wrenched up from his placid depths, forced its way through the downpour and whirled with the wind long after he had disappeared.
The white rel settled her vacant stare on the bunker.
Cho’s mouth opened but there was silence, her voice a captive of surprise or something more sinister.
The white rel lifted an arm, the long sleeves of her dress unmoving, even in the raging wind. Light glimmered on her fingertips, stars captured in her hand.
Kimber flung herself next to Cho, grabbing her free arm and pulling. Cho’s face fell into a grimace but she did not protest. The air shivered, crackled. The insects returned, this time under her skin, frenzied.
The white rel’s mouth stretched. It might have been a smile. There was no way to tell if it was malice or delight.
The rain turned to ice and fell in a shower of stabbing needles, the wind forcing it into horizontal flight. Bre’et bleated, lowered his head, and tried to back into the bunker again. Kimber shielded her face with bare arms but the cold water found her anyway, flaying the skin from her forearms. Something struck her side with bruising force, spinning her off her feet onto the quickly freezing ground.
Kimber lowered her arms and was snapped in the face by a whipping cord end. It and several others trailed behind the cloth and metal ‘kite’ as it hurtled forward of its own accord. Trapped within the silir wings, Cho took to the air.
Another cable snapped past and Kimber’s hand darted out to catch it. It slid through her palms, splitting the skin before she could get a good grip and then she was slipping over the sodden earth on her belly. Rocks punched her gut and scratched at her chest. She struggled to look behind when Bre’et’s vengeful bellow managed to cut through the drowning silence.
The black beast charged the white woman, his beak open and pouring plumed breath like smoke, his claws throwing clumps of earth into the frosty air. The white rel did not move but when the raging veser reached her, she was gone, a puff of pale condensation spread thin by a tempest gust that caught the kite and wrenched Kimber up into the air.
First Interlude
A Tale Not Told
The Goddessi had hoped that Kimber’s Tale would take a very different turn. Watching the group move through the World, from the basin of the Seido Bashran through the highgrass and into the meadowlands, the women who were not women saw a chance to change something that had long been on Their minds.
The city of
