That brought back some perspective. For the first time since Darya had mentioned Gerant, Amris really looked at her, seeing the lingering animal panic she’d first quashed and then pushed aside for his sake. “Forgive me,” he said. “There are larger stakes, I know, and I’d give much if I had any knowledge that would help.”
“We know he’s back now. That’s a hell of a lot more than we did ten minutes ago, and might help the whole world.” Darya glanced past him, down a long hall lit only by spots where the crumbled walls let the sunlight in. “If we can find a way out.”
* * *
It was never supposed to last this long, Gerant mourned as they started walking. We thought if we separated Thyran from his forces, it would be enough of a blow that our armies could drive them off. Then we could go in, bring Amris back, take down Thyran’s defenses at our leisure, and kill him.
“Decent plan,” said Darya, before she’d thought. Other Sentinels were used to conversations that sounded one-sided, outsiders found them odd regardless, and until Amris gave her a questioning look, it didn’t occur to her to explain. “The plan you two had originally. And Mater Whoever-She-Was, Gerant said.”
“Kasyila,” Amris replied absently. “Among others. I admit I can’t regret it, nor find fault, given what we knew then.”
“It kept Thyran off our backs for a hundred years. That’s not nothing.” She thought she was being sincere. It was hard to know. Darya had used up all her day’s ability to feel, she was sure, between sympathy for Amris and Gerant and…terror didn’t entirely cover her reaction to Amris’s news. The creature under the bed is back, and he’s got friends.
They passed an open door, and Darya poked her head in hopefully, but inside was only a small bedroom, likely for a servant: no stairs, just one tiny window. Not even a child would fit through it.
Action was settling her mind, letting her think past the fear. “Going by the finger, assuming it rotted like most things,” she said, “then he’s only been back for a few months. Three, I’d say, at most.”
“Do you know where he might have gone from here?”
“Probably north. He’d find plenty to work with there.”
“The Twisted?”
“Many things, but them too. We’ve never been able to get farther than this. I’m the first to go as far as Klaishil, for that matter, though there are stories about a city that appears in the summer. Even I wouldn’t have come except I was hunting, and I wouldn’t have been able to find the place if not for the goat.”
“Goat?”
Darya remembered the reason she’d come to the city in the first place. If she’d been distracted by anything less than the potential end of the world, she would’ve been embarrassed. “Right. We have a stop to make on the way out. I need to kill something.”
You can’t be serious.
“Of course I’m serious. I have a job to do. This thing’s eating people. And an hour more isn’t going to make a difference, not when Thyran’s been free for the better part of three months.”
If both of you die, and nobody’s left to take word back to civilization, it very well will make a difference.
“He doesn’t have to come, and a fucking cockatrice isn’t going to kill me,” Darya snapped back.
Well, overconfidence will certainly be an asset in the battle.
“Look—”
Amris cleared his throat. “Cockatrices are as I remember them, yes? Large, winged, not so smart as a man but smarter than an animal? Poison breath?”
“Right. Smart enough to be mean, mostly. And I don’t need to worry about the poison.”
Only the claws, and the fangs, and the size.
She was about to say that she’d bound herself to a sword, not a mother, when Amris sighed. “It gives me no joy to contradict you, love,” he said, which sounded damn odd when he was looking at the hilt of her blade where it rested a little above her waist, “as I believe myself to be doing, but I think we should slay the creature ere we leave. I wouldn’t leave anything more intelligent than a beast here where it might bear tales, nor would I want a creature so malicious waiting at our backs.”
Gerant said nothing at first, then: You’re… He’s…better with tactics than I am. Very well.
Given the circumstances, Darya wasn’t inclined to gloat. “I’ll be careful,” she said. “Honestly, this time.”
“How do you come to be unbothered by poison?” Amris asked, in an obvious attempt to break the tension, but one that Darya silently thanked him for.
“The Forging—wait.” As they left the room, she glanced back at him over her shoulder. “You said the Order was just starting when you…in your day. No magical enhancements yet?”
“A few of us had enchanted weapons or armor. Did such things become more commonplace over the years?”
“Not much,” said Darya, “maybe less, from everything I’ve found. There are soulswords, of course, but most wizards don’t remember how to make magic stick to objects without some part of a person being in there too. Or so I hear.” The only wizard she really talked to was Gerant, but she’d brought back enough tiny novelties, still powered by wisps of enchantment, to draw some conclusions. “We stick them in ourselves instead. As you might have noticed,” she added, gesturing to herself with her free hand.
The other hand she kept on her sword as they walked down the hallway toward the older pile and the hole above it. Lots of things could come in through a hole.
“I had noticed, and wondered, but combining magic with flesh was not an art any had mastered in my time. We had Letar’s healing, and Thyran and his patron had their…arts…but that was all. Even lesser living things, animals and plants, resisted change. Gerant was one of the first to manage it,” he added with a fond, sad smile. “None had seen anything to match those guardian roses.”
He was the one to give me the notion, said Gerant. He’ll not tell you that, but he was quite the gardener. Good with all sorts of growing things, really. People never expected it from a warrior. Without lungs, he still sighed. Go on.
“I’m sorry,” said Amris at the same time. “I ask and then interrupt. Please go on.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I expected worse.” He hadn’t said any of the normal things, now that Darya thought about it—hadn’t even asked what are you when he’d first seen her. “Anyhow, when we’re old enough to choose and we want to stay in the Order, there’s a trial. The Forging, because we’re the gods’ weapons. If we survive, the gods give us gifts, or the magic shapes us—there’s a lot of talk either way, when the wizards are drunk.”