While Chiyo had expected to be startled and shocked, she had not expected war to be fun.
The rampant violence she had expected was minimized by generals' strategies and managed by captains' tactics, and whatever gore wasn't concealed from her by her privilege was prevented by armor. Her laminate Ephremian armor had already turned first an arrow, then a flung spear, without any injury or pain, not even the jolt of impact. And these were only the two which struck her, the other two dozen attacks having been foiled by her Ephremian guard, who zealously warded her with shields, and failing that, their own bodies.
Even when one guard fell, pierced through the throat in the gap between breastplate and neck armor, adrenaline had coursed in tidal waves, and Chiyo waved the Ephremian flag and cheered until she was hoarse.
While the deaths were a slow trickle to begin with, when the dead piled up, she cheered even louder, escalating to such an incomprehensible screech that she couldn't hear herself think until they routed, and even then it was her noble steed Gulvu--the brave antelope who deigned to carry her, but not without a nagging hint of condescension--who had the good sense to peel away from the turmoil and jump to the front of the fleeing troops.
Even in leading the rout Chiyo was having fun, or it was better to say that she was drunk on it.
Drunk on the near-invulnerability conferred by Ephremian armor, drunk on the attention from the troops under her--fake--command, drunk on the speed of her antelope steed, and drunk on the fatal game playing out around her, of which she was only a token piece. Like her dwarven eye, or the gap at her guard's neck, she was the odd spot in her Ephremian contingent. The irritant drawing on the flood of Alsantians, in their efforts to vanquish the flag, and bringing Ephremians out of formation to ward the violent surge of spears and swords. Mostly, she was drunk on this game of reverse-tag, by which the Ephremians would not let her be touched, perhaps because she had been so painfully scratched by the vulture-boy, whose talons had taken her eye.
While Conrad had called it wicked, Chiyo thought her dwarven eye was unsightly, and even if her image could be so neatly plugged by enchanted metal, her wound had gashed deeper, tearing her to a silent, fearful shadow of herself, as if it not only scratched her voice away, but clawed Chiyo from her own story.
While their sympathy had gushed warm then, in hindsight it had cooled to a flat pity, and she had become so enveloped by the group as to fit in with their shadows. No doubt they attended to their shadows more, for their glances flickered over her, as if not only deleting her disfigurement, but editing her entirely from view. Not that Chiyo blamed them; wherever she looked, she saw creation as the Maker intended it, without blemish or scar, until she looked in a mirror or even a glass of water, and symmetry stopped; until she could not pass the merest sliver of glass without the wreckage of her eye splintering her peace of mind.
Perhaps the constant shellshock of her reflection had prepared her for the battleground. When her image in a mirror was now nothing to admire, but a bombardment that sent her reeling for concealment, it was a relief to look on destruction, and know it was happening to others. Somehow, it wasn't violence, but balance being restored to the universe. Only the mechanical owl, lobbing through the gatehouse, had rekindled her trauma, having recalled the dwarf that tore through her face with the brass eye, as if her face had fallen to the siege of dwarven war machines.
As she now would only ever see through that eye by invention, she must second guess half the world, knowing her true vision was flat, and the world she lived in was two-dimensional, a geometrical plane devoid of life. Having not cured her sight, but conquered it, the dwarf had destroyed her vision of the future.
"Are you listening, your grace?" Having dropped to a gentle lope, Gulvu looked over her shoulder.
Chiyo grunted and nodded. Why talk when it was easier to nod? Nodding did not stretch her still-taut cheek muscles under the dwarven eye. And while this tight patch on her face dragged her smiles through queasiness, it was easier to ingratiate her friends with a sick smile than squeeze words through the tightness.
What would mother say? When her thoughts trailed off to this morbid speculation, she tamped them down furiously, wiped the tear leaking from her good eye, then pawed at the burning sensation around her dwarven eye. As the tear ducts there had been gouged, then trimmed away conscientiously by the dwarf, these phantom tears left no wetness but flaring red splotches around the cavity, irritated even further by her fist rubbing at the hard brass eye.
"You must heed me, your grace." As Gulvu's monotone elevated to a strident drone, Chiyo realized they were likely in desperate straits, and she had best unbend as best as she could.
"What is it?" No matter how hard she rubbed her tearless eye, her mechanical vision never blurred, which was not only a troubling reminder of her new face, but of her inorganic vision, which would never be hazed by the blue and red splotches that spread over one's vision after a hard eye-rubbing.
Even her double takes felt half-fake, as her dwarven eye only snapped identical pictures, without applying the filter of disbelief. "Is that...Are they..."
As she rubbed, she rejected her mechanically clear vision, which translated so lucidly that it seemed not neutral, but censored, as if subtracting the awe from the awesome sight crunching toward their fleeing ranks.
From Teriana's endless trees, a vast grove detached, at first shuffling forth, then nudging ahead of their creeping shadow, then lurching in colossal strides so long that their huge feet were midair nearly a minute, their soles and heels presenting to those below a ringed pattern like tree trunks, before settling to the ground with a grinding rumble that made Chiyo's armor shiver and her teeth ache.
"They're walking."
"Marching, your grace. You sound so surprised. Aren't they known to you?"
"Yes."
"Does it bode well for us?"
While trees at a fast march are either inspiring or horrifying, depending on whether they come for you with rescue or vengeance in their hearts, Chiyo's heart leapt, not from the marching grove, but from what clung to the behemoths. From afar, their hooden green robes had blended with the leaves, but as the treeline closed in, she could see, perched on branches, hundreds drawing bows or gripping tasseled javelins, so that each tree bristled with its own regiment.
It was Daiko. Her people had come to war. And most importantly, not only the human Daikonese, but their majestic Elders, the grove of wise trees who created, interpreted, and executed just laws for all the humans, dwarves, and talking animals of Daiko.
Chiyo thrilled inside. There were no living witnesses of the last time the Elders had marched to war, and while you could read about it, these were not books you could get in Draden, even in The Mansion of the Shining Prince.
As she gripped the tufted fur of Gulvu's neck, she realized the antelope had rooted to the spot.
While she was dumbstruck as well, the shock of seeing the Elders had kindled a faded memory, which swelled with vibrant color as her heart thrummed:her Seed Day, when one hoary old Elder, its leaves tinged and mottled, had named her Chiyo, as her mother and father wept and laughed. The more she focused on the marching Elders, the more the memory crashed through to the present.
While Daiko lay west of Alsantia, and Ephremia on the East, the Alsantian Empire had swolen over the centuries, until its fattening margins stole into their borders, not only bloating the vast, corrupt land between, but deforesting Daiko to a sliver of its former majesty.
While brave voyagers had circumnavigated the Alsantian supercontinent, it wasn't until Ephremia invented the Zalgyne that trade and communication resumed the brisk pace they had enjoyed in antiquity, when many lands shared tastes in art, literature, and philosophy. While Ephremia and Daiko were never the best of friends, two hundred years ago, Teriana was an outlying territory of Daiko, and the Terianans, to this day, not only cared for decrepit statues of Elders like museum pieces,
but remembered their ancient governors fondly, especially compared to their Alsantian overlords, who at worst were brutal, and at best were aloof taskmasters. In Terianan fables, Daiko was now scarcely recognizable, and the Elders wielded mighty powers even Suvani would envy.
As the Ephremians' spirits soared, they rallied, cheering and raising spears and bows. The Zalgynes hurtled back, their brassy flutter strumming and droning a melodious buzz that seemed to invigorate each and every Ephremian, who turned not with trepidation, but renewed determination and fortitude, their trudging churning to a sprint as they raced for Teriana.
"It is a miracle, your grace." Gulvu's head bowed. "Thank you."
"It's not my doing."
"They are here for you, your grace."
"They would never risk so much. How can you be sure?"
"They make no parley to join forces with us, but head for the Alsantian front. They're on the warpath."
Chiyo feared for her people. "We're strong, but no match for Alsantia's armies."
"I'm not so sure. A war of terror is won or lost in the imagination. While the Alsantians go on forever, they're already giving up ground to your marching trees."
"But if neither line breaks, Alsantia will overwhelm my people." When Chiyo absently stroked the antelope's back, Gulvu stiffened a little, then looked so sidelong at Chiyo that she seemed to loom disproportionately in the flickering vision of the enchanted eye.
"Do not worry, your grace. We go to their side." When Gulvu bounded for the sprinting Ephremian front, Chiyo once again had the strange sense of leading the combined charge of armored warriors, stomping trees, and clear-eyed, snarling beasts.
As they romped through the tall grasses and sparse groves that made up Teriana's suburbs, Chiyo ducked low branches by clinging to the antelope's neck, and as her helmet slid free, rolling to a stop in the joint between two tree roots, her hair shed its ties, becoming wind-blown and tangled with dry leaves, cobwebs, and twigs.
"Gulvu!" she hissed. "Not so near the trees."
When Chiyo flicked the webs, burrs, and leaf fragments from her hair, they only stuck to her fingers, and as she reached to wipe the gunk on Gulvu's fur, the antelope cocked her head, fixing Chiyo with a large eye, as brown as a hazelnut, and usually as calm and collected as one, but which now shivered with indignation: "Don't you dare!"
"It's a battle, you know, People get their hands dirty."
"Even in war, people don't shower in karik droppings. How can we die gloriously if we're mucked up by crushed leaves, webs, and burrs?"
"Too late." If Chiyo's tone held a note of disgust, it was from the gunk snarled on her hands. "I guess we have to live." As they neared the Alsantian front line, Chiyo's shoulders hunched, and her spine creeped to a curl, clinging to the antelope so possum-like that if she were any more numb from fright, she might fall off to be trampled by the Ephremians. "It isn't fair, Gulvu."
The antelope sighed. "I have no idea what you mean, your grace, there being so many inequities on a battlefield. It would be easier to list what is fair, given the rarity of justice amidst so much violence."
"We already fought today, Gulvu."
Gulvu tittered.
"Maybe it was nothing to you," Chiyo protested hotly, "but your bounding keeps rattling my armor. I'm chafed all over from shaking inside these steel scales."
"It was nothing for me, your grace, because it was nothing."
"I might have been slain! Twice!"
"You might have been slain any day, your grace. Death is everywhere and everyday, and on a battlefield, a commonplace."
"My death isn't common!" Chiyo said with heat. "It's the only death I'll know. How can I be ready to die when I don't know what's important in life?"
"You are what's important in your own life, your grace. You can do without everything else. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something."
"Is that Ephremian philosophy?"
"I wouldn't know." Gulvu bounded through Terianan groves, and past tree dwellings abandoned, collapsed into rubble, or charred by torches. "While I am Ephremian, I dwelled in the wilds of Ephremia. I'm only here having answered the call. Perhaps it's antelope philosophy? These are things attributed to our poets and storytellers, but don't ask me to remember names."
"I'm not here for love either," sulked Chiyo. "I haven't loved anyone in weeks."
"So long as that?" Chiyo suspected Gulvu was being facetious, despite the antelope's even tone.
"Once I loved Conrad. Or maybe I only thought I did."
"The Prince of Gaona."
"Yes. Well, no. Conrad the loudmouth I grew up with. While I always knew he was a prince, I liked him better when he was on a smaller world, with a smaller future."
"Just how small is your world?"
"You're missing the point, Gulvu. Now he hates me, and I don't know what I did."
"Who hates others before hating themselves? It isn't that you've changed, it's that he's changed. Or perhaps he hasn't. He may envy your ability to fit in here."
As Gulvu's lope dropped to a canter, Chiyo lifted her head and propped it on the antelope's forequarters. Her neck ached, whether from the ardors of battle, the effort of maintaining her hunkered-down possum position, or perhaps the weight of her helmet.
Her helmet. As the wind dragged cold needles through her hair, fear crept in her stomach, for she had just realized she was about to romp back into battle without her head armor. Not that she could speak of these fears to unarmored Gulvu, who had carried her from one side of the battlefield to another without a scratch.
The Ephremian and Daikonese armies had joined in a rough line along a tall slope, looking down on the massing Alsantians, who had rotated spearmen to the front, pikemen to the rank behind, then two rows of archers, and all flanked by karik- and horse-mounted knights.
While Ephremia and Daiko held the higher ground, it mattered little when charging a front bristling with spear, pike, and arrow heads, as well as lances longer than two kariks set end to end.
As Gulvu trotted to the head of their regiment, she eyed Chiyo sidelong. "Your helm, your grace...oh look, your beau is waving."
"What?" When Chiyo's hands flew to her head, it was not from feeling weakly armored, but dread of her hair being a lunatic tangle, and unfortunately, she only dragged the smear of webs stuck with crumbled leaves through the hair over her temple and ears. "Where? I don't see him?" As her eye flicked this way and that, the dwarven eye imperturbably scanned for Conrad, and when both couldn't find him, her brow pinched to a scowl as her mouth widened to an unwilled smile. "You were joking, weren't you?"
"Chiyo!" When she froze, her eyebrows shot up, draining both the scowling brow and the wry smile, a dumbfounded face she now turned upon Conrad. "You're alive."
"Well duh. I'm right here." Chiyo's stony expression caved in just as fast, to a warm smile, and a backward loll of her eyes. "Not that I'm unhappy to see you, but why are you here? Where's your regiment?"
Conrad brayed an embarrassed little laugh. "It was..." He started, then stopped, his eyes darting toward Chiyo's, which he glued with a stare for long seconds. A breath crumpled inside Chiyo. Did he still think her his girlfriend? That was how they left it on Earth, despite their long divergence on Alsantia. Did he? Could he really? Was Conrad tongue-tied because of whatever awful thing had happened, or because he still thought of her as his?
When her eyes slunk from his penetrating stare, he stammered, "you see..." His shoulders slumped, not only as if his energy was sapped, but his willpower and thought as well, as if all his strings were cut, freezing him into the cruel caricature his maker had cut for his puppet face. She realized she had been in love not with Conrad, but this caricature. Conrad's entire personality was an imposter, an imitation person set up for show. As she realized this, her love for him, whitened not by the milk of kindness but by the milk of pity, again begin to flow.
Then the need of the moment hardened her, for if she wanted to know what happened before Alsantia overran their position, she must find the key that wound up Conrad's springs and jump-started his animation.
Then she became exhausted by juggling her feelings.
I'm only twelve. I'd rather die unkissed on this battlefield than rush an imperfect, sloppy moment with Conrad.
"Spit it out, Conrad." When his eyes sought hers out again, she rolled them--feeling the slow, planetary revolution of the dwarven orb, until its wet click locked on him a withering stare. "Or save it for later."
Conrad's exhalation jetted horse-strong between them, but seemed to bring him no relief. "There might not be a later. There almost wasn't for me."
"Is this a long story?" she asked dubiously.
"They're not dead, if that's what you think. Well, the truth is, I don't know if they're alive or dead."
"Your troop fled." While Chiyo said it as flatly and uninflected as she could, she could not help a corner of her mouth from perking into a wry smile. "Your whole troop flew the coop."
"How is that my fault!" shouted Conrad. "We were doing good. Not only were we the first Animalyte-led regiment to charge, we did it wonderfully. We routed rows and rows of spearmen and archers, and demolished three catapults. Then the Alsantian cavalry rolled over us, with lances just strong enough to pierce Ephremian armor." Conrad's head bowed. "First to charge, first to retreat."
As Conrad's face whitened, thinking of horrors he had fled, Chiyo also relived the blood and gore, but it was now no longer underscored by adrenaline and urgency, and so sickened her that her hand clapped to her mouth in anticipation of vomiting--and she surprised herself when something else came out instead.
"I don't care, Conrad. It doesn't matter, because you're not supposed to be here."
"That's what I'm saying! They keep calling me Prince of Gaona, but I don't feel like a prince, and I'm not Gaonan. If my upbringing was a little different than the other kids in Draden, I don't feel any different. I want to play basketball. Basketball, Chiyo!"
As the Elders lumbered to a halt, the Daikonese infantry streamed through bushes and groves clasping spears and bows, their armored columns led by grizzled officers girded with two swords and mounted on clear-eyed unicorns with such condemnation writ in their noble brows that it was clear these were no kin to the degraded unicorns of Alsantia, but a nobler breed, their coats black as mahogany, their beards, manes, and tails foamy silver, and their horns glinting emerald green.
These tens of thousands of feet marched shoulder to shoulder with Daikonese hoof and paw, not only raccoons, bears, cats, beavers, badgers, and deer, very much like their Terianan kin, but roguish orange foxes--this was particularly strange, given the treacherous foxes on Suvani's payroll--bizarre crocodiles that walked on feet which doubled as hands, and many birds: ravens, crows, falcons, owls, and eagles.
"Alsantian girl..." The hulking crocodile adjusted its monocle as it peered, very rudely she thought, into her dwarven eye, which by many clicks widened to its utmost capacity, in its attempt to capture its image of the crocodile, and translate its fearsome proximity as neutrally as possible to her raised hair, goosebumps, and teeth set on edge.
Would she have gotten used to talking crocodiles had she lived lifelong in Daikon, and not on Earth, in The Mansion of the Shining Prince? While this crocodile's smiling face was somehow both sinister and sincere, making Chiyo gulp back fear and cling to Gulvu, she knew, as one knew a fact, that Daikonese crocodiles were renowned scholars and ployglots, having contributed to history, science, architecture, agriculture, and linguistics. The crocodiles were such addicted readers, grinding through pages by night and day, that many were spectacled, and even the muscular crocodile soldiers
wore monocles on neck chains, like the monocle which now burned like a laser into her dwarven eye eye, which in that moment, displayed a to-that-moment unknown capacity to Chiyo, veiling its delicate structures with a fine skein of web-like shutters that screened the intrusive light. "I'm not Alsantian. I'm not only Daikonese, but an agent of the Elders."
"Forgive me, your grace." While the crocodile's attempt at a dulcet apology started out sweetness and light, that sugar burned to a growl. "Are you in charge, then?"
Chiyo sighed. "Prince Conrad is."
"What?" Conrad nearly slipped from his antelope, an aged greyback named Oorolix. Oorolix had held his wincing look ever since Conrad mounted the antelope; not because the boy was too tall, although his ungainly legs did swirl near the grass; not because he was too heavy, although Oorolix's back did bow under Conrad's awkward mass; but because Conrad was such an inveterate griper that the antelope's spirit soon sagged, and his expression deflated to the utter resignation of his suffering lot under the bellyaching Prince of Gaona.
Chiyo's heart went out to Oorolix, for at first there was a mix-up about which antelope would carry which Animalyte. Originally assigned to each other, Chiyo and Oorolix had hit it off instantly, not only exchanging names, but hurried backstories and favorite foods (Chiyo--ice cream; Oorolix--dry autumnal liline, of which he took three minutes--which is to say, three minutes too long--trying to convey the savory nuttiness of this wild grass, chomped at the right time of fall) when the antelope commander, Yumiea, tramped from the officers' tent to set matters straight, directing the inarguably huskier Oorolix to suffer under the blatantly beefier Conrad, then pairing the smaller Chiyo with Gulvu, who was so unlike Oorolix as to have no enthusiasm to spare, barely deigning to dole out her trademark condescending smiles.
Oorolix's lower lip trembled in a snort. "Not on your life."
"You don't have the authority, Oorolix."
"As if you did!"
She hissed in the antelope's ear. "Conrad needs this."
Both antelopes nickered bitter laughter, from which Gulvu recovered first. "Needs what? More dead Ephremians on his conscience?"
"It was hardly his fault!" As her cheeks warmed, she realized she had shouted it, and her eyes flicked to Conrad, who scowled, flung himself from Oorolix's back, then plunged into the milling Ephremian and Daikonese armies.
"Where is your commander going?" The Daikonese crocodile scratched his dry, scaly scalp and could not restrain a sarcastic grin. "Your grace, I must speak to your commander."
If Conrad had set a brisker pace than his moody stomp, he might have vanished into the multitude, but he brooded so heavily that he nearly impaled himself on antelope horns. While this third antelope was a hand shorter than Oorolix, he was much shaggier, with profuse unkempt hair that made the animal always look out of uniform compared to the other antelopes of his regiment.
"Volgis!" called Gulvu. "How did you rid yourself of your Alsantian burden?"
While Volgis was not only Gulvu's brother, but the antelope designated to bear Aito, his back was bare, and Aito nowhere in sight. Moreover, while the antelope's bushy hair was frightfully sopped with blood, there was no gash in Volgis's hide.
Conrad shouted, "where's my friend? Is that Aito's blood?"
Volgis looked down his nose at Conrad, snorted, and trotted by, halting near Gulvu. "My charge was wounded." At their shocked, plaintive cries, he snorted a scathing sigh. "Don't worry, he's not dead, and not far, either. The Daikonese took him only moments ago."
"Who took him?" demanded Chiyo.
Volgis glanced at her with a perturbed look. "Not that we're on a first name basis, but it was a Daikonese Elder. A vast fir with silver cones that shook like bells. She knelt to the grass, laid a frond to her mouth by way of warning me not to wake my wounded charge, then scooped him into her leafy hand."
"Without a word? How can you know she means well?" Conrad's tone was more weary than angry.
"He is in good hands." It was a smarmy, ingratiating crocodile smile. "Spare me a moment of your time, Prince Conrad."
When Conrad groaned and stepped back, he backed into more horns, for Oorolix had circled to prevent his young commander's escape.
"Actually, the Elder had a lot to say." Volgis brushed past as if the scaly, monocled crocodile didn't exist. "That's why I'm here. She asked me to bear her message. You're coming with me."
"Who?" Chiyo asked.
"All of you."
Gulvu was so taken aback that her shocked expression flowed into an unconscious backward step. Perhaps she cared more for Chiyo than she would ever let on. Perhaps she feared walking, talking trees, which, Chiyo admitted, was an understandable phobia. "All of us?" repeated the antelope.
"You'd be welcome to come, sister, if the invitation wasn't for the Earth children."
"That's the message?" asked Chiyo. "At best, you're paraphrasing."
"There was some Daikonese idiom." Volgis scowled. "About touching branches with our captains." When Chiyo wrinkled her nose, Conrad frowned, the other antelopes sneered, and even the crocodile's face shone with amusement, Volgis snapped, "I'm a soldier, not a tree, diplomat or poet. Why don't you come see what she has to say?"
"You would have us trot into the Daikonese camp, then put these lordlings at the mercy of those strange trees?"
"Who jumped to our defense. And routed the Alsantians. Do you not know a friend when you see one?"
"Should we not tell the King and Queen?" asked Gulvu.
"There's no time. Even now, the Alsantians ready another assault."
"None of you see it," Conrad said with a smug, dark grin. "None of you see this shady antelope for what he is. Why does he care when we talk to the trees?"
Gulvu sniffed indignantly. "Are you calling my brother a Daikonese agent?"
"Who knows? Maybe he's worse than that. Maybe he's an Alsantian one?"
"I don't care if you're a child, a captain, and a prince!" snorted Volgis. "You're a road apple, a major pain in my hind end, and a clown! Take that back!"
"I'm not saying I agree, mind you, but it is suspicious," grumbled Oorolix.
Whatever unknown duty directed Volgis, he did not gore Prince Conrad, but bucked Oorolix so furiously that their racks locked and rattled--when Gulvu nudged between them, and pried them apart by force of glare.
"Stop this now." Feeling the palpable tension, Chiyo dropped down, patting Gulvu's flank in a half-hearted sympathy for the steed that had carried her so ably, however much she had trotted out sarcastic commentary. While she did not wish to see Gulvu gored by her own brother, she backpedalled as sympathetically as possible from his yard-long horns. Had she not dismounted now, he might have pierced both their necks.
"Sister!" Volgis's grating bray made the hair on Chiyo's neck shiver as she stepped hastily away, behind Conrad and Oorolix."You're on their side?"
"Answer the question," Gulvu's brooding, steely gray eyes fell upon him, "why should you care? You've given the message. What if we choose to ignore it?"
Volgis's bushy brows deepened their scowl. "You're not helping, sister."
"I am helping, if by help you mean doing our duty."
Volgis's hard eyes moistened, whether with tears of frustration or brotherly care, Chiyo could not say. "Stay out of this. I'll talk to the princelings in private."
"As if we're dumb enough to go anywhere with you now," said Chiyo.
Conrad looked at Chiyo quizzically. "Why not? I'm only here because the King and Queen locked up Jgorga. As far as I'm concerned, they mean us no good at all."
Chiyo sighed. "I know Jgorga is your friend..."
Conrad interrupted. "I wouldn't go that far. I mean, I like him, but he really gets under my skin."
"I know the feeling," Chiyo smiled sweetly. "Why do you think we put up with you?"
"Very funny."
When she leveled a stare, as if to say, without so many words, that she wasn't joking at all, Conrad shrugged, scowled moodily, and pretended to scan the woods to hide the tear beading in his eye. "You say you put up with me, when you left me in the ogre's hands."
"You wanted us to fight her? Look how that worked for Berangere!"
He continued as if he hadn't heard. "While that raccoon's dug so far under my skin that I wouldn't go anywhere in Alsantia without Jgorga."
"It's not that you wouldn't go anywhere without him, it's that you couldn't get anywhere in this world without Jgorga."
"Now you're just being cruel," said Conrad. "I'm sorry if I haven't paid much attention..."
"No, it's exactly the opposite. I only liked you when you diverted my attention. Now that you're boring, who cares where you go or what you do?"
His stare was less stung than unrecognizing, as if he stared at a completely unfamiliar person. "Don't take it so hard, Conrad. And as far as Jgorga goes, I doubt he's lost much sleep in his cell on the royal barge." Her wicked grin was much too satisfying, so satisfying that she felt the wickedness sizzle from head to toe. "It's not like you need him, when Gaona is a day's journey by sea from the harbor behind these woods."
As Chiyo tormented Conrad, the brother and sister antelopes had passed the point of conversation, bowing their heads to level horns and match violent glares. While Earth antelope bucks have somewhat longer horns than does, the racks of Ephremian antelopes are equal, twice as long as their silent cousins, and, in times of war, sheathed in steel. As they pranced in circles, these metal tips flashed, and were their hearts truly in it, blood would have spilled from both beasts' breasts.
When Conrad blurted something inarticulate in plaintive, rude tones, she wasn't listening, as all her attention was focused on the bristling, wickedly sharp horns, which flicked and whistled in a brisk, sidestepping dance.
"Conrad!" She tugged on his sleeve.
"Answer me!" His breaths came rapid, and the hands that scooped up her sweaty armpits were nearly as wet. While Conrad was a large, strong boy, he had no saddle and barely any leverage, and all the oomph he could muster peetered out having hoisted her halfway, when she had to monkey up on Oorolix's back, so that her flailing elbow caught Conrad in the gut, knocking him flat on the ground behind Oorolix's startled, stamping hooves.
While Conrad rolled clear of being trampled, his ride cantered for twenty feet before turning,
just in time to brace his horns for Volgis, who, spying their flight, had changed the target of his anger, and shot like an arrow toward Oorolix.
Had Oorolix reared back, he might have spared himself and Volgis, but bracing for the impact with levelled horns gored both antelopes, spraying the blood of both to mingle with the trickle streaming from Chiyo's throat, for while Oorolix's rack had planted firmly in Volgis's breast, only one of the latter's horns skewered Oorolix's throat, as the other grazed hair, ribs, and mane to prick lightly the soft skin of Chiyo's neck.
Unlike Oorolix, in the instant Chiyo had to exercise bad judgment or good sense, she reared back from this deadly thrust, which was hammered another inch through Oorolix by the crushing mass of dying antelopes, not only widening that wound and wetting Chiyo's clothes and face even more with the bloody mist, but scratching a fine line up her chin, stopping just under her ear, and her remaining good and real eye.
A moment before, they were a girl and two talking antelopes, but after the instant of frightful violence, the brute flesh of the dead would never speak again, while Chiyo, in that moment of affrighted weakness, squealed, kicked, and shoved herself from Oorolix's corpse, her pushing hands alighting with so much force that she would not only come to remember herself punching herself off his back, but would not soon forget it, having terribly bruised the base of her palms.
Why couldn't she see? Her eyes were dazzled with blue and purple patterns, like evil flowers.
More importantly, why couldn't she breathe? Her hands--why did her hands hurt so much? had she fallen on them?--felt her stomach, ribs, and neck, tracing the wet scratch up her chin to her ear. It felt shallow, so why was her chest tight as a rock? As the shock subsided, the pain stabbed, a million-pointed star not only piercing her back, but clenching her lungs from behind, a tight, claustrophobic breath that made her relive falling from Oorolix's back. Having the wind knocked out of her shouldn't hurt so bad, she tried to reason with herself, hoping a moment of calm would allow her to draw a stronger breath, but in getting what she wished for, she nearly blacked out from the hot, savage hurt drawn in by the trickle of breath.
"Conrad!"
Again his hands hoisted her to her feet, this time so wet they must be drenched in something other than sweat, and so fast that she bellowed a veritable cannonball of pain and tears, clutched his back, and pounded him with her throbbing fists. While her good eye was still blacked out, or rather, its vision was colored in with rushing blues, purples, and now reds as her vision trickled in, her dwarven eye clinically and emotionlessly related what was happening.
Conrad's hands were, indeed, covered with blood. While she would hate herself later for thinking this, she was glad it was not hers. Although her armor was soaked in antelope's blood, her scratch was more nuisance than injury, having stopped just under her ear. While she was on her back,
it had seeped into her good eye, and no doubt her ear, which felt slick and cold.
She did not ask whose blood it was. Not that she wasn't able to figure it out then or later, but in that moment, her mind wasn't more than skin deep, as if the best part of her had leaked out with a few ounces of blood, leaving nothing that resembled a thought or a feeling, but only fragments, sharpened by a fear that wanted nothing but running for dark shadows.
"Chiyo!" he panted. He pointed over the dead antelopes, who were pierced through by each others' horns, as if they contested their gory battle even in death.
While Chiyo had one good eye--or, nearer the truth, one functioning, mechanical eye--her neck was bruised in her fall, and when she turned by reflex, she managed only an eighth of an inch before she gingerly eased her head back, groaning at the intense pain of that infinitesimal head bob. "Gulvu?"
"Run, Chiyo!" When Conrad dragged her along by her bruised hand, she struck at him with her other fist, but he clung to her all the while, even as she rained welts and ran scratches down his forearm. Only when low growls and feral snarls behind them scratched their eerie, shivering way down her spine did she break into a sprint, until it was hard to say who pulled who, for while his stride was much longer, it was unlikely that, in that moment, there was anyone on any world more frightened than Chiyo.
As their feet beat a hasty retreat, Chiyo's renewed vigor was clouded by weariness, and the force of her fright by the profound unhappiness of her homecoming to Alsantia. Why shouldn't she give in? While disgusted by her own self-pity, this realization felt justified, a cool shudder of relief. What else could happen to her now? While her dwarven eye clicked and whirred, peering passionlessly and monotonously through the fringes of the battlefield, her actual eye, and her real body, were running blind, her hand clenched by a boy she had liked for a little while but had hated for longer, as he never stopped being the bully she had tamed by affection. If Conrad occasionally proved not a coward when the chips were down, he had mostly disappointed her since arriving in Alsantia. This being one of his all or nothing moments, however, she found herself giving in to the rough pull of his hand, and coloring the cool, mechanical vision of the dwarven eye with new admiration for this brute of a boy.
But when Conrad's head would turn, his wild eyes, pierced by tears of frenzy and fear, seemed to see right through Chiyo, until he stopped dead in his tracks, his lips stretched in a tight grimace, and tore the short sword from his belt so ferociously that the scabbard ripped from the belt and clattered to the ground. As his other hand pushed Chiyo down, the blade flashed high, until it was snuffed out, buried in the dark breast of the wolf, whose paws slammed Conrad so hard he bellowed, tumbling ten feet under the snarling, yelping animal.
Having now been knocked on her back twice, Chiyo wanted to stay there. As her head lolled in the grass, the vision returned to her good eye, as if the second backward blast knocked her sight back into her, if not good sense. Why did she run with Conrad? She should have run the other way. He was the one they wanted; for all they knew, she was a nobody, and he was a prince. While these thoughts rushed in, a steady stream of cowardice she would despise herself for later, only a second passed, for she was still in the crystal clear intellection a brush with death brings you. Time slowed to a glacial speed until her fog of life problems cleared, when everday time flooded back, and paws rained down, a thick and furious thunderstorm of wolves, foxes, panthers, brown bears, and then more traitorous antelopes. Many wolves were clad in the Alsantian livery Suvani had enchanted, marking them not only werewolves but her favorite shock troops.
Conrad had only just disentangled himself from the corpse of the wolf, when one brown bear lumbered near, reared up on its hind legs, spread its mighty paws wide, as if it meant to crush Conrad's head like a watermelon, then staggered back, yelping, one shuddering step at a time, as needles flowered in the bear's eyes.
Not needles, Chiyo's dwarven eye corrected her. Arrows. Tiny arrows, flurrying in just a little faster than the fluttering, leaf-like wings of the tiny archers, who by their unerring aim peppered all the softest parts of the wicked beasts, firing their darts so fast that it was like the evil animals were metamorphosing into part cactus. While this once would have been an impressive sight, her Dwarven eye had stolen not only any possibility of a double take, it had weakened much of her capacity for visual realization. The constant stream of perfect vision flowing through her Dwarven eye might greatly limit any chance of being fooled by optical illusions and other tricks of visual perception, but this was not a good thing, as it subtracted much of the surprise and the thrill from life. She envied Conrad his look of shock and...recognition? Chiyo turned to behold a mishmash that puzzled even her monotonous visual acuity.
"Your grace," came the gruff voice. "They've turned the tide, but only for a moment. The Eldryn are mighty little mites, but they can't hold them forever."
Between the dishonest clarity of her Dwarven eye, and the honest fogginess of her good eye, Chiyo had no idea what she was seeing. The weird beast fused one part stag with mangled horns, and the other part miniature bear--no, a raccoon, she realized.
"Jgorga? Ondrei?"
Despite their grave expressions, the faithful raccoon clung to the stag's back in such obvious discomfort that Chiyo, whose head was still a little light from her falls, laughed weakly at their insane juxtaposition.
When Chiyo last saw Ondrei, his rack was wrecked in braking his backwards scramble down a rocky slope, an unfortunate tumble which also parted him from the stags escorting them to Teriana. When their king commanded Ondrei to meet them there, having shattered horns had not made his retort less barbed, and Chiyo's heart had gone out to the sarcastic warrior deer.
Now she liked him even more, as his ruined horns snagged her cloak, and with a dexterous twist that flashed too quick to be seen or believed, hoisted her on his back with an uncanny flexibility more suited to a cartoon. Not that Ondrei could be rendered in any crass CG, but only in the sharpest, most fluid, line-drawn cels, as if he had leaped from Bambi.
As Ondrei cantered right, Alsantian archers lined a wooded crag overlooking the grove, and their arrows seemed to slither through the cloud of nimble Eldryn, who side-flitted and slipped in rings around the arrows. When one shaft whistled toward Ondrei, another dexterous twist caught it in his broken rack, where it bristled, as if Ondrei had only deigned to allow this extension to his antlers.
"What about Conrad?"
"He's right behind you," grunted Jgorga. "No...right above you is more like it."
Chiyo's brows knitted in puzzlement. Surely the fairies weren't dragging Conrad through the air? Surely not all of him? Chiyo shuddered at the thought of Conrad so savaged by the swarm that he had to be carried piecemeal by the fairies. While it was all she could do to clasp the quick-bounding stag, and her stiff neck ached from her fall, she inched her head up by degrees, and her barking laugh so doubled the ache in her stiff neck that her laughter was pierced by groans and a wince that shook her head to toe. When she laid her head back on Ondrei, the uncontrollable laugh still shivered in her, chasing away the wince, but making it so hard to hold on that she had to stifle the laugh to get a grip on the stag.
A leaf. The thought again convulsed her with laughter.
Conrad was riding a giant leaf! While it was no doubt animated by fairy enchantment, it bucked and swooped like a living thing, so that Conrad had to cling to its giant stem. Although he tugged at it vainly, the truculent leaf went where it willed, as it willed. While Conrad hadn't changed size, riding a giant leaf made him look smaller than life, as if no longer to scale, but a miniature under a microscope.
When they were overshadowed by a black swarm that made the darkened sky shudder, this giant miniature of Conrad, like a cuckoo clock soldier, raised his sword high, and when the vultures and crows dived at the fairy cloud, pitting their cruel beaks against Eldryn darts and blades, Conrad hacked hard as he could, sometimes hacking so hard that his feet lifted from the leaf. With her head pressed to Ondrei dwarven-eye-side-down, this scene bounded and receded in her human eye, and she couldn't tell if Conrad was crying or laughing.
"Help him, Jgorga!"
"I did help! I brought the Eldryn."
"Raccoons are uncouth," snorted Ondrei. "And take credit for everything. Who broke you free?"
"I couldn't have done it without you, Ondrei, but..."
"If your brought the Eldryn, and I brought you, who truly brought the Eldyrn?"
"Who cares!" Normally, Chiyo would be very interested to hear Jgorga get his comeuppance, but suddenly, she found herself not only very interested in whether Conrad lived or died, but very interested in Conrad. If Alsantia had proven him weak, that only lowered the bar for these new, foolhardy heroics, not only heedless of his own life, but swinging his sword so hard that he came near on his follow-through to slicing himself several times. "Turn around!"
"Your grace..."
"Turn around, or I'm jumping off here!"
"Jgorga, have I mentioned how much I like your friend?" Was Ondrei smiling? His knitted brow made it look more like an angry, determined scowl. "While I don't like you much, you have such great taste in friends that I think I'll keep you around a little longer...so long as you hang on."
"Hang on?" bellowed Jgorga. "No, wait..." But the stag had already bounded a hard left, veering so sharply that a few degrees more would have made it more true to say they bounced back the way they came, as if the deer was rubber and had struck a hard wall. Both of Jgorga's forelegs flopped free in this abrupt spin, and his hindpaws clenched so hard that Ondrei brayed like a donkey. As Chiyo was already pressed face to fur, she had only to dig a little snugger to be proofed against the change of momentum, but the stag's insane burst of speed whistled in her ear, which, still wet and tacky with blood, was deeply chilled.
Chiyo instantly regretted her outcry, and the change in direction it brought about, for while they had been heading back into daylight, filtered through the bright green leaves of the grove, now they hurtled into the overshadowed battlegrounds, blasted by the gore of dying animals, archers, and fairies,
and clouded by wicked birds mobbing the fierce Eldyrn.
As a second arrow stuck to Ondrei's rack, and a third, flicked by his horns, tore into the bloody grass, Chiyo huddled in his fur and gathered her strength.
"You idiot!" Jgorga shouted. "You great big dope of a deer! This is no place for a kit!"
"What about Conrad?"
"He's a bigger dope than Ondrei!"
"He may be big," said Chiyo, "but he's still a kid!"
"Your little friend speaks true," said Ondrei.
"But what can we do? I'm fresh out of wings, what about you?"
The stag said, with scornful tones, "one only needs wings to fly like a bird. To fly like a deer, you need only panache." With a burst of galloping hooves, Ondrei clattered over a dented shield, the stone-studded ridge, then the rocky crag, where his clip-clop rang breastplates, helmets, and scattering archers, their arrows strewn to the ground. Having reached the cliff's highest spur, he sprang into the flitting swarm, landing so neatly on Conrad's levitating leaf that it only shivered.
A moment later, they were stranded mid-air, as surely as if they rowed a boat down a pirrhana-filled river, for the rats had creeped in, like a vast, moldy carpet dragged over the green.
The rats moved not like an ocean wave but a flood, not surging up in cresting waves, but seeping lower at every turn, spiraling around trees, trunks, shrubs, and boulders, dragging their bellies through ponds and puddles, and oozing a sopping, muddy trail, which reluctantly parted around Alsantian infantry and Suvani's treacherous beasts, but swamped Ephremian humans, dwarves and animals.
Chiyo shivered. The moment Conrad's leaf descended, they would be chewed to pieces, and a moment later, no doubt, the luckiest rat would bound off gripping her good eye in its teeth.
The vermin ebbed away only from the stomp of the Daikonese Elders, whose gnarled feet crushed dozens of rats with each step. As the colossal trees took great care in their march, nimbly skirting each tree as they lurched through the groves--not even snapping a twig--and clearing the allied human and animal columns with their massive strides, the Elders only stamped so many rats by intending to do so.
As Chiyo saw these great and gentle sovereigns of her people, she breathed a sign of relief. Each Elder was different, with some the red-gold of a perpetual autumn, others the vibrant green of eternal spring, and still others the crisp bluish-green of fir trees, but all were so huge that they staggered the imagination, being twice again as large as any tree in the grove.
Bringing up the rear was a mountainous Elder nearly three-hundred feet high, whose hand might have encompassed the Mansion of the Shining Prince. As this gigantic tree-being shambled through the woods, his surprisingly light step left only a gentle tremor.
When Ondrei's fur dampened and matted under Chiyo's dwarven eye, she first thought it was her tears, forgetting her destroyed tear ducts until she smelled the cold and clammy sweat exuding through the stag's fur to dampen her cheek. At the pounding clamor of his heart, her own chest drummed. What could cause such a strong reaction in this hero?
On one side, the chittering swarm billowed back from the stomp of the colossal trees, but on the other, they dropped to a hush as a dark figure, whose shadows seemed to shine with their own black light, advanced through their ranks. Only he wasn't walking, but standing proud and regal on their backs, as if he was the mast of a ship submerged under the swarm, whose eyes glinted reflecting the dark illumination radiating from this dark lord.
As the rats ebbed from the Elders' crunching tread, the huge trees became so still, they seemed as wooden as everyday trees, then turned from the dark stranger slowly, creakily, as if petrifying past wood to become stone.
While the Elders cringed from the dark divinity they knew as Dark Star, and Ondrei sweated away to nothing under the shining void exuding from the Herald of the Abyss, Chiyo, recognizing a darker myth, felt an endless chasm open inside her, unleashing horrors that fattened themselves on her snaking terrors, leaving her remarkably wide-eyed and calm, if holding her breath in disbelief at the unlikelihood of this being who, given the signs, could not be other than what he seemed to be: the Stranger, returned to Alsantia.
If there was a benign god on any world who flipped bad things to their good side for her faithful followers, she was smoking a hookah when Havala went up in flames, and had never set foot in Alsantia. On the other hand, centuries or millenia might pass between his visits, but the Stranger was no stranger to Alsantia, having often stepped in to encourage the Alsantian royal family, and boost the progress of the Alsantian empire. While Alsantia's human historians saw the Stranger as a force of good, their talking animal brethren, not to mention the Ephremians, Daikonese, and Terianans, told a different story, feeling themselves in the way of this advancing history.
Chiyo chuckled nervously as she remembered Worlds class. While the patronizing, entitled tone of Alsantian myth painted the Stranger as a Fairy Godfather, the Elderliches not only encouraged her skepticism, but added to their Worlds textbook an alternate history of a capricious, whimsical demigod whose agenda thought nothing of surrounding nations, and whose only good works for other peoples were side effects and unintended consequences. While unsurprised when the Elderliches later proved to be talking animals of True Alsantia, and no friends to the Regent or Suvani, Daiko had sent Chiyo to the Mansion of the Shining Prince before she could read, and having come to trust her teachers' false human faces, it was a disappointment to learn that her own history had been propped up by followers of a hidden agenda.
"What an interesting character," Conrad had said. It had been early springtime of last year, when warm sunlight glistened on frosty windowpanes. While the bars that braced the glass were dull, cold iron, the brisk daylight rendered the alley below, and the finance building across the street, in crystal clarity.
"You mean the Stranger?" While Chiyo had tried for a tone of mock horror, she found herself unable to suppress her real abhorrence of Conrad's unexpected opinion. Perhaps she should have expected it--he only admired strong things, like football teams, pro wrestlers, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. "Isn't he like the devil of Alsantia?"
"Is the devil so bad?" asked Conrad. "In the Bible, he always gives presents. He gave Eve an apple, and the wisdom of good and evil. He tried to give Jesus everything there was."
"That's called temptation, Conrad. He's not Santa Claus."
"You think the Stranger is tempting the Alsantians? I don't get that at all. He's giving them things, like it or not. He's a take charge guy. I like him."
Chiyo had groaned, and walked away from him, only to become his good friend, then his girlfriend, later that year. She wasn't sure how it happened, as she never stopped disliking him a little, even when she started to admire Conrad. It turned out he was good for many things: carrying books, reaching up on shelves, shooting hoops on the cracked backboard, and slapping together tasty sandwiches to steal from the kitchen when they were supposed to be in bed. But even after she came to know him, he never stopped being a stranger, for she was alienated by his darker side. As her feelings quickened, she feared she was now drawn to his darkness, like the rats to the Stranger. She must lump this dark, reluctant attraction with her new vein of cowardice and selfishness, a shadow self--no, a shadow Stranger--she disliked immensely and would strive to eliminate before it clawed to the surface. So long as this dark half was an unspoken horror, she was still Chiyo.
Even now this cowering shadow tempted her with inaction, whispering that she must only not say a word, and Ondrei would back away from the Stranger. To live, she must only be silent. As this dark divinity would make short work of even the mighty Elders, it wasn't like she could influence the outcome. For while the walking trees were immense in this world, the Stranger was built on an incalculable scale in dimensions invisible even to her dwarven eye. What could a twelve year old girl do in such a contest? Even if Ephremian armor was good against swords and arrows, it was not proof against dark gods. She might as well wield a matchstick as the Ephremian sword, for all its immaculate quality.
Chiyo groaned as she sat up on the stag, cocked her stiff neck, steadied her head with her left hand, then drew her sword with her right.
"Don't even think it!" the stag hissed. "You'll draw his attention! Put that away."
"No! If he strikes down the Elders, Alsantia wins. And after the battle, the executions and slavery will begin. Ondrei, you haven't seen what they did to Teriana." While her Ephremian troops had been up and down the Terianan border, she hadn't had time to process the horrors of occupation. Struggling to shape her experience in words, they burst forth with tears. "When we broke through the Alsantian line, the lucky talking animals were yoked side by side with dumb animals, while the unlucky, unuseful, or rebellious were piled in mass graves." Her tears not only eased her heartache, they relieved her conscience, for having had half her capacity to cry hacked away, and having ignited her feelings in the heat of battle to a hyper giddiness, she had thought herself tearless and heartless; while it was good to be proved human after all, as her hardness shattered, the feeble empathy it had covered ebbed away, leaving only a core of raw fear. It was like the dwarven eye had taken root in her soul.
"What of the stags?"
"Their antlers were hacked off, and they were reduced to beasts of burden." At his look of horror, she could not help a pitiful, despairing laugh. "Better that than dying a snack. The foxes, wolves, and werewolves ate the rabbits, mice and birds."
"I'd rather die than live under Suvani's thumb," said Ondrei. "We may have only a small chance, but a small chance is better than no future. From my shattered rack, new horns grow."
"What do you suggest?" asked Conrad
"Your highness," Ondrei said, "land your leaf."
"Me?" Conrad's laugh was nervous. "Look at me! Do I have fairy magic?"
"Then we must leap for it." At their terrified looks, Ondrei shrugged. "And bounding down gives us the element of surprise."
"Count me out," said Conrad. "Swinging a sword is crazy enough, but I won't fall sixty feet, not even riding a giant, gravity-defying deer."
"Sixty feet?" Ondrei sniffed. "Not that I haven't jumped sixty feet before, but it's no more than forty."
"Straight down!" Conrad's high and piercing shout was drowned in the fluttering of fairies and vultures, now billowing back to their levitating leaf.
"Torn to pieces by crows, vultures and rats, or blasted to smithereens by a dark god." Chiyo's brow fell moodily over her frown as she bullrushed straight through fear into anger. There was no sense in being afraid if it was beyond their control. If they must try to kill a dark god, let them get it over with, so they could get on with their life or death. "It's not a great choice, Conrad. But do you really want to take your chances with the swarm?"
"There's no time to argue. Mount up."
"But..."
"You must come, Conrad. If my broken horns or your blades fail, he won't listen to me. But he might hear you."
"Why would he listen to me?"
"Mount up and I'll tell you."
Once Conrad had reluctantly complied, Ondrei continued. "The Gaonan family tree is an offshoot of Alsantian royalty. You're in the line of succession for Alsantia, Conrad. Like thirteenth or fourteenth, I think."
"That makes you cousins with Michel, Conrad."
"Who's Michel?" asked Ondrei. "No matter, the swarm is nearly upon us. Pray to your myths and makers."
It wasn't a fall after all. It was much worse, with the stag bounding straight down, so outracing the swoop of Eldryn and vultures that the winged creatures seemed to stand still. Chiyo's face split into a violent grimace so sharp that the corners of her mouth ached, her teeth were chilled by the speed-wind, and her good eye blinked shut. Her dwarven eye continued to scroll their horrific momentum matter of factly, as if someone had e-mailed her the footage for review.
No sooner had his front hooves tapped down, than the back legs stole into a sprint, so distributing the brunt of the fall that Chiyo felt only a shudder course through the noble deer. Ondrei had, literally, hit the ground running.
When Conrad 's white-knuckled claw-grip let go of his sword, the hilt smacked Chiyo's outflung off-hand, her stung fingers closed on it by reflex, and in that moment that she brandished both swords, she felt not larger, but smaller, her unvoiced scream racing for the Stranger's dark, sleek shadow cloak, his cowl shrouding not a face, but impenetrable night.
When she presented the blade back to Conrad, she relished his stunned look, but her spite soon faded as fear, anger, and bewilderment overwhelmed her sense of time. They were floating on the leaf but a moment ago, an instant that had stretched and stretched, and might snap any moment, leaving them to plunge into the shadow-swamp swarming under the Stranger. Now they had reached the moment's elastic fringe, pulled so taut and sheer that if they did not somehow shred through, time might never resume, as the moment died, and they with it.
If Ondrei's hooves pounded and roared, she only felt it in the shiver of his back, for as the Stranger locked eyes with her, trapping her gaze, fear consumed all sound but the echoless thump of her own heart, and twisted the sight of her good eye into a dizzying spiral that slashed every direction, seeking escape from the dark god. Only her dwarven eye still communicated sense, or its reasonable facsimile of it, showing, by stark contrast, a figure of slight and humble build, and each rat quivering under him captured in perfect detail by its immaculate but monotonous vision.
From one flowing sleeve so black it glittered, a long finger seemed to crook so far that it threatened to abridge the distance and tap Chiyo on the forehead. As the swarm-wave parted from Ondrei's thundering hooves, a snaking, eldritch spark entangled the stag in a violet, green, and azure web.
When Ondrei came to a creaking halt, his abrupt change in momentum did no violence to what had become a cold, flawless statue of the brave stag, so icy sleek that Chiyo and Conrad, whose velocity was undiminished by the cunning enchantment, slid right off, their scrambling fingers slipping as well, until they collided with the rat-torn earth, where their Ephremian armor so absorbed the fall that they skipped forward, not once, but twice more, coming to rest atop squirming, squealing vermin swarming ten yards from the Stranger.
Chiyo frantically clattered to her feet, pounding the two rats that clung to her arm and thigh with her sword hilt. When Conrad clambered up and screamed shrilly, his clinging rats only sniggered until he jumped and thrashed rapidly and madly, which launched rats every direction from his sheer armor.
Having flung the rats off, Chiyo stood in a daze. Despite her panting chest, pounding heart, and good eye, which fluttered in terrible fear of the Stranger, she felt as statue-like as Ondrei.
While her dwarven eye smoothed over the terror, thinning and flattening the chaos into an undisturbed sea of matter, her good eye rendered the scene in stark panic, and she looked ahead infected by both calm fact and cosmic dread.
"You turned him to stone!" When the shout escaped from her lips too fast to stop herself, terror and embarrassment numbed not only her anger but her questions, and she turned from the dark god. To the Stranger, her strong Ephremian armor was proving as thin as the skin under it.
"You are not Alsantian." His voice was so clinical and detached that, for a queasy moment, she felt that the dwarven eye had turned on her and taken his side. "Nor are you Ephremian." As he spoke, the Elders' branches shuddered as their roots lifted. The shock of her sudden realization numbed Chiyo. They were fleeing! They had managed to take one half-stride, their long, arboreal legs straddling very near to the treeline, when the Stranger batted one hand. "I haven't excused you yet."
As the Stranger's hand squeezed into an empty fist, the nearest Elder trembled, sending a tremor in the rat-ravaged soil. As the Elders receded from the front line, both this nearest representative, and the mountainous tree lord bringing up the rear, were powerless to budge under the Stranger's enchantment.
Chiyo quickly regained her composure. Their life was measured in centuries, and hers in teaspoons, so it was only fair that the Elders should use her as a distraction for their escape. Moreover, there were few Elders, and many Daikonese girls. If the Stranger blasted one Elder to atoms, everyone here would remember for the rest of their lives, but if she died here, her name would be lost sooner or later, perhaps even by Conrad, should he reach his dotage, a senile old king nodding off on the Gaonan throne.
She would do what she could to save the Elders.
"No." Her heart hammered, and her lungs felt painfully full, as if holding a breath she feared to exhale. "I'm Daikonese."
"A young people," said the Stranger.
"Not at all. Our elders are centuries old, and remember when humans and talking animals lived at peace."
The Stranger chuckled. "Let them bury their wishes in a fabled past. It is only a dream. My world never included them, and have no room for Daiko now."
"Your world?"
"Not that I made it, but it is my plaything. For much longer than your Elders have walked this soil." When he waved his hand, Chiyo flinched, but it proved to be no spell, but a vain gesture. "If they walked some grove in the ancient of days, woodlands were always beneath my notice."
When The Stranger rushed forward, the hair on Chiyo's neck stood straight up. While his feet stayed planted, and his robes flowed down in a shimmering black train, dead even to the flutter of the breeze stirred by battling Eldryn and birds in the sky above, he slid on surging rats, foot by foot and yard by yard, straight for Chiyo, until the glassy swarm diverged from her and headed to Ondrei, where he stroked the petrified stag's neck and flank.
"He's not turned to stone you know." A smile glinted in his eyes. "I turned him to pure consciousness. Which, I suppose, is much the same thing, if he's dead to the world."
"You killed him," said Conrad.
"Death is more merciful." The Stranger smiled as if he had made a little joke. "By definition, death is an ending, while consciousness is unending. There is always more to know, even if you must occasionally feed facts in the mill of your brain to manufacture the next domain of knowledge. And on top of all that analysis and synthesis, there are the numberless worlds, beings, and personalities--all you beautiful characters."
"This isn't a video game!" shouted Chiyo. "Good people died today--because of you!"
"In spite of me, you mean. While I find vainglory very attractive, I can't take credit for your kings, queens, and Elders, who rushed into battle a little ahead of my plan."
"Then you admit this was your idea!"
"Less conception than preconception. Regardless of my divine agency, I'm not the final Authority. If this war was my brainchild, I was made to give birth to it. You have more free will than I do. You dangle from strings, but I am the strings."
"You're lying," sulked Conrad. "I think there isn't one thing you can't do."
"There is much I can do, Prince of Gaona. Such as see into hearts and memories, like your cunning plot, lifted from your books and comics, to put me back in my bottle. I'm no genie, Prince Conrad. Nor am I Mr. Mxyzptlk."
"That's how you pronounce it? I always wondered." Conrad shrugged. "You can't blame me for trying to trick an all-powerful god."
"I'm flattered, but hardly all-powerful." The Stranger favored Conrad with a penetrating look. "I like you, Conrad. You might make better material than that brat Suvani. But I'm not sure who I like more, you or Vemulus." He laughed. "Don't look so hurt. I don't mean that kind of liking, for you're a much more agreeable nonentity than Vemulus. I simply meanr I'm not sure who I like in the role."
"The role?"
"As my Emperor. The Emperor of Alsantia."
Conrad's eyes bulged a little as he breathed deep, held it, as if to keep from vomiting, then took a slightly deeper breath, packing it down on the other breath, which made his eyes bulge even more. He held up a finger, as if asking for a moment to work through the indecision of whether or not he should bother continue breathing, or was it all too much work, after all? "If you think to make me happy..."
"A nice thought, but no."
"...then send me back to Earth. A burger on Earth is better than a crown on Alsantia."
"You're a more sincere hypocrite than that, Conrad. Not only a lip-vegetarian but a closet carnivore, your true nature hungers less for pleasure than for power."
"You don't know me." But Conrad looked doubtful. "What do you mean, 'power'? All these kings and queens do is fight one another. That isn't power--it's too many consequences and too much responsibility."
As they bantered, Chiyo's head drooped, not only in exhaustion, but because she couldn't take her eyes from the milling rats, for so many swarmed that it overwhelmed her sensibilities. This couldn't end well. Whether or not Conrad took the Stranger's offer, Daiko, Teriana, and Ephremia would still be downtrodden this day. Even if Conrad was a saint who could humanize the Stranger's inhuman power,
there was little chance of making an Alsantian victory more humane for Daiko, Ephremia, and Teriana.
The dark god's arrival meant not only that the Alsantian story had won that day, but that the other peoples' narratives were doomed to be overshadowed.
Or perhaps not. Chiyo's grip whitened around the sword's hilt. The stranger claimed not to be omnipotent. Perhaps he could be killed? When this dark thought wet her brow with hot sweat, she lowered her eyes and raised her other hand to her heart. It felt like a stupid hope, but if he had spoken literally when he said he could read hearts and memories, maybe she could block this heart-vision.
The Stranger must not get out much. She laughed faintly under her breath. He was enjoying his time on stage a little too much, skating here and there on the shadowy swarm and sweeping his capacious sleeves in grandiloquent gestures. With her eyes downcast, she bided her time, waiting for the moment he skated near, his back turned, when she flicked the blade up and thrust it deep into his robes. It was surprisingly easy, like cutting a tomato.
As if he had been waiting for this, Conrad drew his sword and ran it near parallel to hers, so that, since she was right-handed and he was a leftie, the hilts rattled and their fingertips grazed.
Chiyo looked into Conrad's eyes. Her good eye widened at his fear and terror, while her dwarven eye captured the play of his muscles, and muted his jutting blade, so that it seemed not to cut like a sword but like a clock hand.
Too late, she understood the Stranger's allusions to free will. They were all wound in a tight mechanism, and while even The Stranger had neither engineered the clockworks nor wound the gears, he could see the watch face.
When Chiyo twisted the hilt desperately, the sword came free bloodless.
"I see the problem now," sighed the Stranger. "Why should I be surprised when you prove, time and time again, such limited creatures? No matter where you go or reside, Conrad, you mark only the dimensions of your little heart. There's only one way to get your attention."
When the Stranger's hand raised, her good eye faded to black, but her dwarven eye continued to record Chiyo's passage through nonexistence, whirring and clicking for a few breathless seconds. Perhaps it went on seeing after she drifted off into the abyss.