The human’s eyes blinked against the glare, and Glissa helpfully positioned herself between Bruenna’s eyes and the yellow moon. The elf girl held out her hand. Bruenna pulled herself up with Glissa’s help, and leaned heavily on the elf girl’s shoulder. Glissa scanned the horizon, and saw a few glittering specks of silver pass in front of the blue moon. More hunters from Memnarch, from the look of them. “Can you walk?” she asked Bruenna, and pointed at the distant flyers.
The mage squinted at the aerophins. “They’re coming from Lumengrid. We’re too close to the sea. I should never have taken us this way.”
“Your magic,” Glissa said. “Can you disappear us out of here?”
Bruenna closed her eyes for a moment. “I don’t think so,” she whispered. “Retrieving you from the interior took a lot out of me. Memnarch didn’t want to let you go. The safeguards around you were very strong.”
“But I wasn’t in the interior. I thought I was in the-” Glissa began then switched course. “Okay, tell me about it later. What about flight magic? With my leg and your-well, everything, we don’t stand a chance of outrunning more of those things. And I don’t know if I can pull off that trick again soon.”
“I think I can get us airborne, with a little boost,” Bruenna said. She reached out and took Glissa’s hands. The metal of the mage’s artificial appendage was unnaturally cold.
“A boost?” Glissa asked. “What, from me?” The idea of sharing magic with another wasn’t unknown among the Viridians. But Glissa had begun to think of herself as a focusing point, a conduit for the energy of the Tangle. She didn’t even know if she could share it with Bruenna, who was after all human. But Glissa could try.
“Yes,” Bruenna said, closing her eyes. “Just concentrate, as if you’re summoning the power for an ordinary, everyday enchantment. Don’t try too hard, just let it happen.”
Glissa closed her eyes and called the Tangle energy, which didn’t fight back this time. The elf felt the power move through her and into Bruenna through their physical connection, then it washed back over Glissa in a cool wave that felt at once alien and familiar-a blend of quicksilver and Tangle, two magical auras merging into something greater than the sum of their parts.
Bruenna flung her head back and pushed away from Glissa, her body glowing blue-white. Glissa herself no longer felt drained, and when she looked down at her body she saw it was giving on a faint green glow of its own.
The mage clapped her hands together and then swung them wide. Glissa once again felt the soles of her feet leave the ground and grinned.
“Time to go. Follow me,” Bruenna said, immediately taking to the air. As Glissa launched into the sky behind her, the mage called over her shoulder, “And do not go near Taj Nar, even if we get separated.”
“Why not?” Glissa asked. She glanced back over her shoulder. The aerophins were receding, but she didn’t think that meant they’d given up. She and Bruenna were simply flying more quickly than they’d been walking. Still, it gave them a head start and offered the elf a moment to collect her bearings and catch her breath. Flying was more relaxing than it looked, when you weren’t fighting for your life at the same time.
As they rose higher and more of the landscape opened up below her, Glissa noted something strange-here and there, the plains were dotted with thin, silver spires. These enormous needles rose eighty, maybe a hundred feet in the air.
“Bruenna, what are those things?” she asked as they flew past.
“No one’s sure,” Bruenna confessed. “They appear overnight, and we stopped investigating them after a while. They’re completely inert, as near as I can tell. Possibly some kind of mutated strain of razor grass.”
“You don’t sound like you believe that,” Glissa said.
“No, I don’t,” Bruenna said. “I think there is only one logical explanation.”
“Memnarch?” Glissa asked.
“That’s what I fear,” Bruenna said. “But whatever they are, for now they’re only a hazard to low-flying elves. Watch for them when we get closer to home. We’re going to need to drop our altitude soon.”
“Where are we going?”
“Taj Nar hasn’t been safe for many cycles,” Bruenna said without further explanation. “We’re headed to Krark-Home. It’s-”
“In the Oxidda Mountains?” Glissa remarked. “Underground? Somewhere near a big furnace, and a hole in the ground the size of that red moon?”
“Er, yes,” Bruenna said. “I’m sorry, Glissa. You have been gone so long, I’ve forgotten what you know and what you don’t. It took so long to even find you.”
“But you didn’t give up,” Glissa said. “Thank you, Bruenna.”
“You’re quite welcome, and forgive me if I repeat what you know. Trust me, things will be much clearer once we get to the mountains.”
Already Glissa could see the angular peaks of the Oxidda range coming over the horizon ahead. She was glad to have something else to focus on.
“I am not a leader,” Bruenna continued, “Not anymore. My people are long gone. I have not seen another Neurok in years. I have to assume they’re dead, or worse. Now I just do what I can for the Kha and her highness. So far, we’ve kept the nim from taking the mountains, but how long I can’t say. Yert’s had five years to spread the Dross, and the larger it gets, the greater his power to coordinate the nim grows. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s also Malil and the vedalken.”
“I saw vedalken in the interior, when we went down the lacuna hunting for Memnarch.”
“I believe they returned to Lumengrid after Memnarch had his way with them. He reshaped them into killing machines, Glissa,” Bruenna said. “They lead the construct beasts in endless attacks against our defensive positions, and they’re chipping away at us faster than the nim. Some of them have taken to patrolling alone, too.”
“Why not turn the nim and the vedalken against each other?” Glissa asked, but feared she knew the answer.
“Lumengrid and the Guardian apparently have maintained some kind of truce with Yert,” Bruenna replied. “There’s a loose border running between the Dross and the sea, but it’s remained stable for the last few years. And there’s something else that suggests an alliance-the vedalken and nim often attack us on two fronts simultaneously. That’s happened too many times to be a coincidence. And of course, there’s the temporal sigil. That’s vedalken magic. Yert couldn’t have done it alone. As for why Yert has yet to spread the Dross to cover the plains, let alone the Tangle, that’s still a mystery. I believe Memnarch is holding Yert back for some reason. I just haven’t figured out why yet.”
“Yert’s a fool,” Geth’s head interrupted. “Just look at that swamp! The necrogen! If I had access to that kind of power-”
“But you don’t, so if you don’t want me to stick you on the top of one of those spires, you’ll butt out,” Glissa snapped. “I’m almost afraid to ask,” she continued, turning back to Bruenna, “But do we have a plan? Did you just miss me?”
“We all thought you were lost after months passed without word,” Bruenna said. “It took me years to identify the sigil that had frozen you, and you were taken almost immediately. After what we had seen that day, I had to assume the worst-that Memnarch had you, or you were dead. And there was no way to get back into the interior to find you, with the war.”
CHAPTER 18
“I’ve lost them,” Glissa said, scanning the sky behind them. “Looks like they gave up.”
“Very likely,” Bruenna agreed. “Such a small force wouldn’t last long against Krark-Home.”