It took three more shallow breaths to resettle and moor himself.
Rogger watched him, eyes narrowing as if sensing his unease. Then he merely shrugged. “We can always turn back. A warm fire and a nip of wine is more inviting than all this skaggin’ snow and wind.”
Tylar shook his head. They had come this far. He wanted to see the true face of this storm. Its low moan swept to them through the remaining crooked streets. These last homes, farthest from the walls, were built less stout. Some were plainly abandoned long ago, while others leaned toward each other, as if sheltering against the cold.
He led them again. The drifts grew between the streets. A wind kicked up, scattering dry snow that stung the face like sharp pebbles. They made a final turn between a set of abandoned stables. Gusts had already peeled away the roofs’ thatching and now tugged at the doors, rattling and banging them, like a dog worrying a bone.
Past the last buildings, the view opened up.
“Sweet gods above,” Rogger gasped. “Who stole the world?”
He was not far wrong.
Beyond the village, the storm swirled in a solid wall. The winds whipped straight across the hills, east to west, seemingly endless, with the force of a gale. Yet where they stood, only the occasional fierce gust snapped at them, warning them to keep back.
“Looks like we’re stuck in the eye of a whirlwind,” Rogger commented.
With Tashijan at its heart. Tylar risked another step out, searching, studying. “Why does the storm just hold out there like that?”
Eylan answered. “It grows. Gathers strength to itself. If you listen, you can hear its hunger.”
The storm’s moan stretched toward a wail.
“No wonder the rats fled,” Rogger mumbled. “Mayhap we’d best do the same.”
Tylar nodded slowly. He needed to alert Kathryn.
“Too late,” Eylan said.
Tylar had started to turn back toward Tashijan, but the Wyr-mistress’s words drew his eyes back to the storm. The perpetual white wall had developed dark streaks, like black ink dripped into swirling milk.
“Something is coming,” Eylan said.
Tylar even felt it. A sudden weight to the air.
But before he could react, a wave of frigid air blasted out from the storm, an icy exhalation awash with hoarfrost. He stumbled back, his cheeks freezing. Ice crusted his lashes. His eyes ached, but even his tears froze. He could not blink, only stare into the face of the storm.
And a face it did have.
The oil-black streaks eddied out of the snow tempest, coalescing into a monstrous countenance, growing as tall as Tashijan’s walls, yet still vague and indistinct. Tylar suddenly knew that it was not oil nor ink that shaped this face, but Gloom, the smoky essence of the naether world, bleeding into Myrillia.
Tylar murmured between frozen lips, “Run…”
But the cold fought them: numbing limbs and heart, frosting cloaks to a dragging heaviness, freezing boots underfoot. Tylar grabbed Rogger and hauled him. One step, then another. Eylan followed, bent against a wind that wasn’t there.
As they struggled, the timbre of the storm’s wail changed behind them. Or maybe it had always been there, hidden behind the wind. Either way, a lilting sweetness stretched to them, ringing with the crystalline shatter of ice. And behind it a voice…as misty as the swirling face of the storm…singing.
Tylar slowed, straining to hear. He snagged up Rogger’s coat sleeve to stop him, to get him to listen, too.
“Keep going,” the thief protested, twisting.
Tylar ignored him and slowly turned.
But Eylan was there at Tylar’s shoulder. She struck him with a fist, square in the face. His head rocked back.
“Seersong,” she said through the ringing in his ears.
Another wave of ice washed over them, worst by far than the first. It cut through Tylar as if he were naked. Again their boots were frozen in place. He felt his very bowels ice up inside him.
A step ahead, Rogger cried out, grasping at his chest.
Tylar fought to help him-but he had brushed too near a wall. His cloak had iced against the bricks, trapping him. He wrested against its clutch, but the cold had weakened his limbs.
Eylan sank to her knees, clutching at her throat. Even the air had become ice, impossible to breathe.
Tylar glanced back to the storm as his vision darkened.
The countenance had grown more distinct-somehow familiar. Who…? But it had not yet fully formed. Song again distracted him, coming not from the face of the storm but behind it and all around, as if the storm were not snow but pure song itself. There were no words, but its sweetness was like warm wine poured into his frozen ears.
Tylar gave up his struggle, happy to listen.
But another was not.
Deep inside him, beyond bone, his naethryn surged in a violent quake, writhing, as if the song burnt. Tylar had never felt it thrash with such force, as if struggling to claw itself free. It bashed against the cage of his ribs. But escape was impossible. The song would snare its trapped prey, and Tylar with it. There was only one key to its escape.
“Agee…” Tylar moaned from between lips frosted with ice.
It was all he could do. He was trapped between ice and song.
But his one word was heard, caught out of the air by the same who had first spoken it to him. Agee wan clyy nee wan dred ghawl. It was ancient Littick, the tongue of the gods. Rogger knew its meaning. Break the bone and free the dark spirit.
The thief was already on his knees, weighted down by the storm, face anguished. But one hand, the one clutched at his chest, shifted to a neighboring fold. To a hidden belt. A dagger appeared in the thief’s fingers as if born of Grace out of the very air.
It was the last Tylar saw. Darkness folded over him as the song’s warmth washed the world away. Even the thrashings inside him calmed to its sweet lilt.
Then the barest flash of silver cut through the darkness.
The thrown dagger struck Tylar in the face-where Eylan had punched him a moment ago. But it was not the blade that struck him, only the butt end of its steel hilt. Struck glancingly from the side and broke his nose.
Tylar’s face was too numb to feel it. But like a loosened pebble that starts an avalanche, the small break spread in a sweep of agony throughout his body. One leg broke under him, then the other. He toppled, only to have his arm shatter to the shoulder. Bones knit, callused, broke again, and reformed crooked. All his old injuries, once healed by Meeryn, returned in a blinding instant, leaving him the same cripple again.
He writhed, and freed of its bone prison, his naethryn rose like smoke out of the black handprint on his chest, burning through cloak and cloth. It sailed high into the air, black wings unfurled, fraying with wisps of smoke, a neck stretched. As it settled to the snowy street, ice melted and steamed around its claws. Fiery eyes opened upon this world. Half wyrm, half wolf, it glared toward the storm.
The pain warmed Tylar’s frozen form and melted his joints. He pushed to his knees, then stood, bent-backed and hobbled, a broken knight once again. As he straightened, he still felt the cold, but less so now, more like a dream one tried to remember upon waking.
He stumbled over to Rogger, who was careful to remain ducked from the wings of Tylar’s dred ghawl, the dark spirit that was Meeryn’s naethryn. Sculpted of Gloom itself, it was deadly to touch, to all except Tylar. He remained tethered to the creature by a smoky cord that sailed out of the print on his chest. The edges of the cloak and underclothes still smoldered where it had burnt its way out.