The Cerulean Storm

FIVE THE GRAY

Sadira had gone to the gray.

She stood on a narrow stairway, looking out over an immense abyss filled with a haze that stretched from far below her feet to the zenith of the sky. It was the color of ash and as still as the midday sands. There was nothing else out there.

The steps had been carved from a spire of porous white rock that rose out of the gray murk far below. The stairway spiraled up the pillar to Sadira’s feet, then continued above her head with no apparent end. The column simply grew smaller and smaller, until both the stairs and its tip vanished into the ashen haze far above.

Sadira recognized the pillar as the Pristine Tower but did not think for an instant that she had truly returned to the distant spire of white rock. If she had, the sky would have been yellow-green, with puffy silver clouds drifting past. Lush thickets of bogo trees would have surrounded the base of the column, and in the distance there would have been fields of silver-green broomgrass. Instead, all she saw was a sea of ashen haze.

The sorceress studied the area carefully, searching for the wraiths who had attacked her on the Cloud Road. The Gray was their natural home, and the whole point of their ambush had been to push her into it. Here, the spirits of the dead were dissolved and absorbed into the Gray, much as corpses on Athas were slowly obliterated by rot and decay. However, some spirits did not suffer this fate. Some were sustained by a force even more powerful than the Gray: their everlasting faith in a cause greater than themselves. The wraiths had dedicated themselves to Borys’s service many centuries earlier, and they were such spirits. It was clear that they intended to use their special natures to force her to fight at a disadvantage.

The sorceress was far from panicked. While she would not be as comfortable in the Gray as her foes, she knew more about this place than the wraiths realized. If they expected her to assume they had killed her simply because she found herself in the Gray, they were badly mistaken. The Pristine Tower served as ample evidence that Sadira was alive. A reminder of the most significant event in her life, the spire of white rock acted as a lodestone for her spirit, holding it together and preventing it from dispersing into the haze. Before they could destroy her, the wraiths would have to drive her off its steps.

Magnus’s voice began to toll out of the haze. He was singing a ballad with melancholy strains as loud as thunder and as sweet as morning dew. Though she could not understand the words, Sadira quickly realized that her friend was trying to help her find a way out of the Gray. Unfortunately, the music came from all directions at once, from the front and back, both sides, above and below, even from inside her own head. She cupped her hand to an ear, trying to locate the source of Magnus’s sonorous voice. It would have been easier to chase down the wind.

The sorceress pulled her slender stiletto from its scabbard. A magnificent weapon with a blade of etched bronze and an iron handle beset with tourmalines, it had been in Agis’s family for centuries. She fished a piece of twine from the deep pocket of her robe and tied it around the crossguard. The other end she looped over her wrist, then held the dagger out at arm’s length and let it dangle from the string. She spoke a magical incantation that would make it lead her to the source of Magnus’s voice.

Sadira felt a strange tingle in the hand with the twine, and its ebony color began to fade. The sensation slowly spread up her arm. What she could see of her flesh, from the fingertips to the wrist, paled to its normal color, and the dagger began to spin wildly.

Though she had not expected the reaction, the sorceress was not really surprised by it. Normally her skin remained black with mystic energy during the day, then returned to its usual color the instant night fell. But in the Gray, day and night did not exist. Without the sun in the sky, her spell had drawn its power from the only available source: her flesh. Then, unable to replenish what it had lost to the spell, her arm had remained pale.

Of more concern to the sorceress was the dagger. It continued to spin madly, attempting to point in every direction at once. Sadira watched the blade for several moments. When it showed no sign of settling down, she decided that her spell had failed, and she caught the hilt.

As the sorceress started to slip the weapon into its sheath, the tower lurched beneath her feet. Sadira stumbled and nearly pitched over the side but managed to drop to her hands and knees in time to keep from falling. Her stomach rolled in one direction after the other, and a sick, queasy feeling rose into her throat. Although she saw no hint of motion when she tried to fix her gaze on the haze around her, she felt like the spire was spinning as wildly as her stiletto had a moment earlier. By plunging her dagger into a fissure and twisting the blade against the edge, she barely managed to keep herself from flying off the steps.

For a long time, all Sadira could do was cling to the hilt and pray the blade would not slip from the crack. If she lost contact with the Pristine Tower, she feared that the haze would begin to eat at her spirit and that her life force would seep away. Even if that did not happen, the wraiths would certainly find it easier to prey upon her as she drifted aimlessly through the Gray. Perhaps they were even responsible for knocking the tower into its crazy spin.

Magnus’s voice began to waver, growing much louder each time the gyrating tower pointed in a particular direction, fading to a mere whisper when it pointed away. At first, the volume increased every few seconds, but gradually the rotations slowed, and the spire continued to point in the same direction for a little bit longer, until the sensation of movement ceased, and the song came to the sorceress’s ears from one direction only: the top of the stairs.

Sadira breathed a sigh of relief. The wraiths had not caused the wild spinning after all. The dagger had been unable to point in a single direction because doing so would have led her not to Magnus’s voice but away from the tower and into the dangers of the Gray. Instead, her spell had reoriented the whole tower, so that the exit lay in an obvious direction: up.

Listening attentively to Magnus’s beautiful song, Sadira peered under the collar of her robe. The flesh of her arm had paled clear up to her shoulder. The sorceress guessed that the magic energy in her body would be completely drained after five or six more spells-even less, if the spells were powerful ones. After that, she would have to find a different source for her enchantments. And in the Gray, she doubted that she would find any plants from which to draw the mystic force of life.

Wondering if she would have enough magic to defeat the wraiths when they finally showed themselves, the sorceress started to climb. The stairs were small, barely wide enough to accept her foot from the toes to the arch. Often, the steps were cracked and so worn that they formed more of a ramp than a staircase. A thousand years of dust lay upon the treads, and she passed over the ancient grime without leaving a track. It took more than a footfall to disturb the torpor of the Gray.

The sorceress climbed for a long time: minutes or hours or days, she did not know. Progress, if she was making any, came slowly. The summit remained veiled by distance, and the base of the tower seemed no nearer. Still, she continued to climb, reassured by the increasing volume of the windsinger’s voice that she was traveling in the right direction. In the stillness of the haze, distance and time were mere illusions, but not Magnus’s song. It came from the outside, and it was real.

After a time, a glowing emerald floated into view. It hovered next to the wall, several steps above, and a large eddy of darkening haze slowly circled it. A pair of green pinpoints appeared in the haze, at about head-height and twinkling with a sinister glow.

Sadira stopped climbing, anxious and ready for battle. Like her, wraiths needed something important from their lives to serve as magnets for their spirits. Although the sorceress had never encountered these particular apparitions before the attack on the Cloud Road, Rikus had. From his description, she knew that for Borys’s followers, a brilliant gem served this purpose. Though she could not be certain, she guessed that Borys had given one of the stones to each of his knights when he took them into his service.

The sorceress thrust a hand into her robe pocket, watching dark haze coalesce around the emerald above. The cloud soon formed the cumbersome figure of a woman in a full suit of plate armor. The warrior wore the visor of her helmet up, so that she could focus the green specks of her eyes on Sadira. The woman’s face was stern and hard, with a cleft chin, sneering lips, and broad flat cheeks.

The wraith pointed the tip of her sword toward the haze below. “Go down,” she ordered.

Sadira pulled a tiny satchel of copper dust from her pocket. The sorceress tore the packet open with her teeth, then waited as the wraith charged. When her attacker was almost upon her, she blew the brown powder toward the warrior’s open visor. The stuff coated the woman’s face.

The wraith’s sword came down.

Sadira twisted away, diverting the blow with a crashing block to her foe’s elbow. From the solid feel of the armor, it was hard to believe the warrior had coalesced out of gray haze just a moment earlier. The wraith stumbled then caught herself and braced to swing again.

The attack came too late. Sadira spoke her spell’s command word, and the copper dust covering the wraith’s face flashed blue.

A tremulous, ear-piercing shriek burst from the wraith’s lips. She dropped her sword and clutched at her face, pitching forward. Before she could clatter to the ground, a blue glow ran through her armor. Her body instantly dissolved into a gray fog and drifted away, leaving a glowing emerald floating where her head had been an instant earlier.

The sorceress plucked the gem out of the air. It was as large as her thumb, cut into an marquise oval and deeper in color than any emerald she had ever seen. The sheen of its many facets looked almost black, while a faint green light glimmered in the center.

Sadira laid the stone on a step, drew her dagger, and smashed the pommel into the gem. The stone did not shatter so much as crumble into a coarse, lime-colored powder. A shimmering radiance hung over the crushed stone, slowly expanding outward in a cloudlike mass. Save for its green tint, the light resembled the mystic energy that normal sorcerers drew from plants to cast their spells.

The cloud burst apart with a deafening crash. Bolts of green light shot through the Gray, lighting it with a spectacular show of brilliant flashes. The storm continued to rage, filling the vast abyss with a tempest of resounding booms and effulgent flares, stirring the ashen haze into a froth of swirling green light.

Sadira was surprised by the tumult. She had known crushing the gem would release a certain amount of life force, for even wraiths needed some energy to bind their spirits together. But the stone had contained at least as much power as she would expect to find in a living woman. Perhaps that was the reason Borys’s knights had been so dedicated to him. If the gems served as repositories for their life forces, it would be possible for him to resurrect them.

After a time, the storm gave one last rumble and died away in a wave of flickering color. Once more, Magnus’s voice descended from the tower summit, clear and unimpeded. Before starting up the stairs, Sadira paused long enough to look under her robe to see how much mystic energy her spell had consumed. The enchantment had been a costly one. Most of her upper torso had paled to the normal hue of her flesh. If she were going to get past all the wraiths, she would have to find a more efficient way to use her magic.

The sorceress began climbing. By this time, Magnus had repeated his sibilant rhymes so many times that she knew the syllables by heart, even if she did not understand the meaning of the words. Sadira began to sing along. The melody lifted her spirits, and keeping a watchful eye for more wraiths, she bounded up the stairs two at time.

Finally, the sorceress rounded a curve, and the staircase broadened into a small apron that sat before the open gates of a white bastion. The ramparts were built of alabaster and finished with undulating caps of ivory. Beyond the entranceway, a pool of shimmering blue water filled the inner ward of the citadel, with a single pathway of limestone blocks leading toward its center. The walkway stopped at the base of a minaret rising directly out of the water. This slender steeple was faced with white onyx and crowned by a crystal cupola.

Although she had reached the summit of the Pristine Tower, Sadira’s singing croaked to a stop. Between her and the gate stood ten wraiths, all armored in gray plate similar to the first woman’s. They wore their helmet visors down, so that all the sorceress could see of their faces was the jewel-colored slivers of light emitted by their burning eyes: ruby, sapphire, citrine, amethyst, and more. None of them carried weapons.

The largest wraith stepped forward. He extended a mailed hand and, in a raspy voice, ordered, “Go down.” Sadira reached into her robe and shook her head. She was vaguely aware that Magnus’s booming voice had grown urgent. Directly above the citadel’s minaret, the pearly haze swirled about in two great eddies, each spinning in opposite directions.

“Stand aside-” She paused to clear a nervous catch in her throat, then continued, “Let me pass.”

The wraith shook his head. “Borys is aware of what you and Rikus are doing,” he said. “He has demanded your deaths.”

Sadira tensed, her limbs cold and aching. She wanted to ask how much the Dragon knew, and whether he had found Agis, but realized that it would be futile. If the wraith replied at all, his answer was sure to be misleading.

“Then Borys should come for me himself.” The sorceress pulled a tiny, two-tined fork of silver from her pocket. “You won’t stop me.”

She struck the fork against the wall and pointed the quivering tines at the wraiths. The leader’s purple eyes flashed brightly, and he threw himself to the ground. Several of his fellows followed his lead, but not all were quick enough to react before Sadira finished her incantation.

A shrill, painful screech shot from the end of the fork and blasted over her foes. Blinding flashes of colored light flared inside the visors of the wraiths who had not yet hit the ground. First their helmets, then the rest of their armor burst apart, the shards instantly dissolving into wisps of gray fume. The whole tower shook with the violence of the explosion, and the air erupted into a maelstrom of streaking colors: red, blue, yellow, and all the hues of the prism. Only the leader and four other wraiths, all lying on the stony apron, escaped the destruction.

The blast knocked Sadira from her feet, making her ears ring and sending her tumbling down the stairs. The sorceress dropped the silver fork and clawed at the porous stone, breaking off half her fingernails. As soon as she brought herself to a stop, she reached into her pocket for another spell component.

By the prickling sensation of her skin, she knew that her enchantment, one of the most powerful she could cast, had drained her mystic energy down to her hips. She had expected that, gambling that the attack would destroy most of her enemies in a single blow. But she had not expected so many of them to drop to the ground, where the tower’s stone would absorb the magic vibrations she had sent to shatter the gems holding their life forces.

Sadira came up ready to attack again, the stairs still trembling beneath her feet, and the maelstrom tearing at her clothes. In her hand, she held a small iron hammer, the first syllable of her incantation already spilling from her mouth.

When she looked toward the wraiths, she held her spell. To her surprise, they were not charging. Instead, they stood on the apron between her and the gate, their feet planted wide to brace themselves against the raging tempest. Behind them and directly above the minaret, a faint gleam of pink was beginning to show through the swirling haze.

The sorceress raised her hand toward the light, hoping it came from the sun and that its rays would restore the mystic power to her body, but her flesh remained pale. Sadira started up the stairs again, catching a few notes of Magnus’s song between the storm’s booms and crashes.

The leader of the wraiths held his hand out toward her. Sadira felt her stiletto slip from its sheath. She lashed out, but the dagger was gone before she could catch it. The weapon sailed straight to his hand, coming to rest with the iron handle in his palm.

“I believe this weapon once belonged to Agis’s mother,” he said, lifting the stiletto. He had to raise his voice only a little, for the tumult was beginning to fade.

Sadira scowled and stopped a dozen steps below the wraiths, still holding her small iron hammer. Although puzzled by the warrior’s action, the sorceress was less interested in what he was doing than in selecting her next attack. She estimated that her body contained enough energy for only one more spell. If she wanted to escape, she would need to pick a good one.

“What does it matter who owned it?” Sadira asked.

“You shall see.”

A pearly cloud of haze began to swirl around the dagger, coalescing into the face of a handsome human, a man with even features, a patrician nose, and long black hair streaked down the center by a single band of silver. The rest of his body took form below the dagger, and soon he stood with his sinewy arms hanging limply at his sides and his shoulders slumped for ward.

Forgetting about her spell, Sadira gasped, “Agis!”

The noble said nothing. The pupils of his eyes remained milky and vacant.

“Don’t worry, he’s still alive,” the wraith said in a reassuring voice. “The Gray often disorients the spirits of the living.”

Sadira’s heart felt as though a hand of ice had closed around it. The wraith was lying. Agis’s spirit had coalesced out of the Gray, not been drawn through it. Had the noble come from Athas, he would have arrived fully formed.

The wraith continued his lie: “Your husband valued his mother’s weapon highly. I used that attachment to summon his spirit from Samarah.”

For a moment, Sadira did not move, too shocked to react. Then she cried out and almost collapsed, her whole body convulsing with grief. Samarah. She repeated the name over and over. That one word confirmed her worst fears. The wraiths had found Agis-or Borys had-and they had killed him. All that remained of her husband was the glassy-eyed apparition at the wraith’s side, a spirit that could not remember his own name.

“Go down,” the leader said. “Step into the Gray, or I’ll take your husband’s life.”

“Take him!” Sadira yelled. Her chest suddenly felt constricted and hot. “What good is he to me now?”

The words had barely passed her lips before the sorceress felt sick with guilt. She could not have said such a thing. It had to have been some other woman, a weak woman who had not truly loved her husband.

Sadira knew that she should be sorry for Agis’s death, concerned about the portents it held for the future. She should be worried that Borys had taken the Dark Lens, and that now she and her companions would have no defense against his mastery of the Way. She should be seeing young Rkard, his red eyes blazing with determination, standing before the beast that had killed Agis and a million others. She should be thinking of what came after Borys killed her and Rkard and the others, of how he would raze Tyr and murder its citizens, of how, too soon, an immense pile of rubble would lie where Athas’s only free city had stood.

But Sadira did not feel any of those things. She only felt angry, angry at the husband who gone away and died so far from her.

Magnus suddenly stopped singing, and an eerie silence fell over the tower. The wraiths cast nervous glances back toward the minaret, where a pink band had appeared between the swirling eddies in the sky. The leader motioned to his companions, then started down the stairs, pushing Agis’s spirit before him. The other wraiths followed, taking no chances that Sadira would make a run for the gate.

Magnus’s voice boomed out of the sky. “Sadira, you’re almost out!” he yelled. “Help me. Sing!”

The leader looked up, as if his amethyst eyes could actually see the words booming out of the sky, then he halted two steps above Sadira. “Stay silent!” he ordered. “The time has come for your decision.”

The sorceress opened her mouth and sang, though her thoughts were more on the small hammer of iron in her hand.

The leader stepped back, pulling the hand with the dagger out of Agis. The noble’s spirit looked toward Sadira, his mouth half-open and his eyebrows arched in sadness, then the apparition dissolved into haze.

Sadira stopped singing and threw her hammer past the leader’s head, crying out an incantation. The weapon smashed into the next wraith with a resounding boom. The impact knocked him into the one behind him, and they both fell to the ground.

The hammer hovered over them for an instant, then enlarged to the size of a kank and crashed down. The impact flattened their helmets and demolished the stairs beneath their heads. As the gemstones containing their life forces shattered, a tremendous blast rocked the tower. The explosion hurled the leader into Sadira and blew the other two wraiths off the stairway.

The sorceress and the leader crashed down the steps together, locked in a tight embrace. Each time they rolled, the wraith’s armored body battered Sadira. She fought desperately to throw her attacker off, while he struggled to drive the stiletto into her heart. Finally, they came to rest with Sadira lying on her back, her head lower than her feet. The wraith kneeled astride her, the dagger still clutched in his fist.

Sadira looked past his leg and up the stairway. Her magical hammer had disappeared with the two wraiths it had destroyed. The two who had escaped the blast were nowhere in sight, but the sorceress could see her own feet lying five steps above. They were as pale as ivory, clear down to the toes. She had used the last of her mystic energy.

“No more spells,” hissed the leader, following her gaze.

His purple eyes flashed malevolently from behind his visor, then he tossed the dagger aside. He grabbed Sadira by the shoulders and started to rise.

“Now you go to the Gray.”

“Hardly!”

The sorceress drove the heel of her palm into the bottom edge of the leader’s visor, forcing it up and away from his face. Sadira lashed out with her other hand and grasped the wraith’s withered visage. She began to pull, as though she were drawing mystic energy from a field of Athasian plants. A warm, stinging sensation rushed up her arm. Had the wraith been alive, it would have been impossible for her to draw the life force directly from her foe. But the creature was not alive, and the energies that held him together were not bound into the gemstone nearly so tightly as they would have been fastened into a true body.

The wraith screamed, and his leathery skin began to flake away beneath Sadira’s fingers. He tried to push her away, his arms already trembling from the loss of vital energy. The sorceress wrapped her free arm around his neck and held tight. The leader stepped toward the Gray, gathering himself up to leap off the tower edge.

Sadira thrust her hand deep into the papery mass of his dissolving head and grasped the dark amethyst inside. The leader’s flesh turned to dust. He jumped, but the sorceress felt her feet drop onto the coarse rock of the tower and knew she would not be carried with him. The wraith drifted past her in a dun-colored cloud, which quickly dissolved into hazy wisps as it drifted out into the Gray.

When the sorceress saw no sign of the other two wraiths, she quickly picked up her dagger and used the pommel to smash the leader’s amethyst. This time, there was no storm of escaping energy. She had already drawn all the life force from the stone and could feel it tingling in her flesh, which had assumed a faint purplish cast.

Keeping a watchful eye, Sadira started up the stairs. She began to sing again and pulled a small lump of green clay from her pocket. After she dribbled a few drops of saliva onto the mass, it began to hiss and pop, burning the palm of her hand with tiny droplets of corrosive fluid. The sorceress did not care. She had not yet destroyed the last two wraiths, and when they attacked, she intended to be ready.

By the time Sadira reached the open gates of the bastion, a crevice of crimson light had appeared above the minaret’s crystal cupola. Magnus’s voice sounded clear and pure. There was no sign of the wraiths on the path anywhere between her and the center of the citadel. Nor did she see them in the blue pool that filled so much of the bastion, but she knew that did not mean much. Her enemies could be hiding anywhere beneath the water, and the shimmering waves would make it impossible to see them.

The sorceress started to step through the gates, then thought better of it and stopped. Borys’s servants had not become wraiths by easily forsaking the tasks he assigned to them. If the survivors had not yet assaulted her, it was because they were lying in ambush inside the bastion itself.

Using the life force she had drained from the leader’s gem, Sadira cast her spell. The purple sheen faded from her skin, and a caustic-smelling mist began to rise from the lump of clay in her hand. She waited until the green fumes condensed into a hissing stream of vapor, then she stepped through the gate.

The first thing she noticed was the quiet. She could not hear Magnus’s song, the hiss of the vapor rising from her palm, or even the sound of her feet shuffling over the limestone cobbles. Then she glimpsed a wraith pulling himself out of the shimmering pool beside the path. The water dripped from his armor without making a sound, and the sorceress realized that a magic pall of silence had been cast over the area-no doubt to keep her from voicing the incantation of her own spells.

Congratulating herself for avoiding the trap, she held her hand out toward her ambusher and blew a stream of green vapor into his face. The wraith’s visor dissolved instantly, and she saw him open his mouth to curse before his head was swallowed in the green fog. Without waiting for the magic acid to finish its work, Sadira spun, fully certain that the last of Borys’s knights was behind her.

The sorceress found a pair of mailed fists reaching for her neck. The wraith at the other end of the arms wore the armor of a broad-shouldered female, with yellow rays of light pouring through the eye-slits of her visor. Sadira twisted to the side, thrusting the hand with the magic acid toward her attacker’s face. At the same time, the sorceress protected her vulnerable throat with her shoulder.

The tactic succeeded only partially. Sadira planted her hand squarely in her foe’s visor, which instantly began to dissolve beneath a billowing cloud of green vapor. The wraith switched her attacks at the last minute, however, smashing one mailed fist down on Sadira’s collarbone and bringing the other around in a vicious uppercut to the ribs. The blows landed with such force that the sorceress felt bones crack in both places.

Sadira’s body erupted into such agony that she barely noticed when her magic acid dissolved the gem inside her first ambusher’s head. She felt the path buck beneath her feet and saw streaks of ruby-colored light flashing past in the silence, then she dropped to the cobblestones gasping for breath. The wraith reached down to pick her up, attempting to carry out Borys’s orders even as the sorceress’s green fog ate away the repository of her life force.

One mailed hand clasped onto Sadira’s wounded shoulder, and the other reached for her throat. Then a silent yellow flash flared from inside the acid cloud. The wraith dissolved. A tremendous shock wave crashed down on the sorceress, spraying her with droplets of acid vapor and driving her tormented body into the unyielding cobblestones.

The sorceress did not care. Pain would not stop her from escaping the Gray. She forced herself to her hands and knees and turned toward the minaret. Sadira slowly crawled forward, the syllables of Magnus’s wind-ballad pouring forth from her silent lips.