Lance of Earth and Sky

The surface of the sea bubbled and frothed, spraying the deck and everyone on it. Vidarian kept his mind locked on the task of drawing the body from the water; the mechanics of it were not difficult, but he had to fight to keep his grip on today's reality when Alora's object-sense still bombarded him with the chaos of the past, a million million moments experienced all simultaneously.

Over his shoulder, Oneira was shouting for the deck to be cleared. A very small part of him was aware enough to be grateful; the thought of strangers witnessing what they were about to do clawed at his gut.

He continued to pull, aware now that the heaviness was receding; the closer he brought it to the surface, the less the sea seemed determined to haul it back to the depths.

Then—a presence.

It loomed up out of the water, a mind Vidarian had felt before; Ruby had lived then, and steered her ship around the deadly storm-tossed arc of Maladar's Horn. He very nearly lost his grip on Ruby's body: pain lanced through his eyes as he forced himself to concentrate.

A face formed in the water, and human voices around him gasped. Altair and Thalnarra each said something in a language he didn't recognize.

* Nistra! * Ruby exulted. She had always been absolute in her loyalty to the goddess of the sea, but now she was a nomad dying of thirst.

What you attempt cannot be done, the words swirled in Vidarian's mind like drops of oil in water. You should not take from me what is mine. Weight suddenly settled on Ruby's body, preventing him from lifting it further. But neither did it draw her back into the depths.

* What is she saying? I can hear her voice but not her words! *

“Beloved Nistra,” Vidarian said, and starbursts of white light bloomed against his eyelids as he fought to keep his concentration. What little mind's energy he could spare from keeping the body from dropping again into the black now spun with furious calculation. He chose his words as an archer chooses fletching. “Will you deny us the attempt to return your daughter to her rightful vessel? A captain who has served and honored you always?”

I will not, the words bubbled now, and the presence withdrew. Ruby's body began to rise once more. But you are warned, blood of my waters. The knife-reefs line your path.

Then she was gone, the shadowy face surrendering itself to the chop and roll of the waves.

* What did she say? * Ruby asked again.

And then her body broke the surface with a crash and rush of water. The shrouded shape tilted, bobbed, and then floated. Now that he could see it, Vidarian stepped away from Alora—parting from her touch was like emerging into clear air, and his thoughts became his own again—and pushed the waves up underneath the body, lifting it gently up and over the rail, then down onto the deck.

Part of him was still in denial about what he was seeing. He had seen bodies prepared for sea burial before, and this was one such, wrapped tightly in binding linens. The left foot was missing; the linen would have been treated to repel the appetites of sea creatures, but this was no guarantee.

The linen was stretched, loose where it had been pushed outward by bloating and then fallen in with decay. As the wind shifted, gaps in the fabric carried a mordant air of death to their faces. Vidarian choked, and brought his forearm up to cover his nose and mouth.

When the wave of nausea passed, he said, “Ruby…I don't think…”

* NO! * Ruby barked, a hysteria creeping into her voice. * We have come this far! You swore an oath! *

Numbly, Vidarian held out his hand to Alora, who stared wide-eyed at Ruby's body. He cursed himself for allowing her on the journey, even if Isri approved. The seridi squeezed the girl's shoulder, and she started, then handed Vidarian the sun ruby.

Keeping his forearm across his mouth, Vidarian approached the wrapped body, and knelt. He turned to look at Isri, who was concentrating very hard on the shape in front of him. She gave a slight shake of her head, as of uncertainty, and so he turned back, and placed the ruby on the forehead of the corpse.

The ruby flared just as it touched the linen, growing hot, and for one terrible moment Vidarian was sure they would see the corpse lift itself and stand.

Then—nothing.

He choked in one breath after another, staring at the linen shape that part of him still would not accept had been one of his dearest friends. There was a rustle of feathers, and Isri was there, kneeling beside him. She spread her hands over the body, concentrating.

They waited for long minutes, and at last, Ruby spoke.

* This isn't possible. Why can't I go back? *

A fury burned in her, something beyond human emotion, something that resonated through all the “chambers” of her prison. It was as if the alien thing that lived within the prism key with her now manifested itself alongside her will—and it was preternaturally angry.

The force of that inhuman consciousness jarred Vidarian from his shock. He realized, almost for the first time, what he was looking at, what he was doing, and suddenly it all seemed quite, quite mad. He turned his head away from the body, seeking anything else to look at.

Tears streaked Isri's face. Vidarian had not known seridi could cry. “It seems…” Her voice rasped, and she coughed. “It seems that Ruby's body is too far gone to house her. The…place…that her mind would go is unreachable to me, as if it were not flesh at all.” Though her words stung, the truth of it again seemed obvious; there was hardly anything left of her body that could be imagined to live.

At Isri's words, Ruby let out a cry of despair and frustration that clawed straight through his soul. None of them could bear to answer her, and so they sat again in silence.

“We should,” Vidarian began at last, choking over his words, realizing that tears were running down his cheeks and throat. He coughed. “We should return the body to the sea.”

* No! * Ruby snapped again, rage pouring out of her, lighting the prism key from within. * This is Nistra's doing! She would not let me hear her, and now would deny me my own body! She shall not have it again! *

Vidarian reeled anew, struck to some deep part of him that had been raised to revere the sea goddess. Her words echoed back, stirring dread. He started to object, but Ruby cut him off again.

* Burn it, Vidarian. Do me this service, at least. *

Dread crystallized into ice. Fire was a landsman's burial, not a sea captain, much less a Queen of the West Sea.

* It isn't me, my friend. And it has already been taken from Nistra. *

Ruby's sudden composure, the air of command and confidence once more in her voice, did not dispel the dread, but it loosed its hold.

They could not burn the body on the deck. Which meant in all likelihood, the crew could not burn it at all. Vidarian called a wave up from the ocean's surface with a murmur, and directed it under the body again. He lifted it out, and back to the surface, holding it there. Then he turned away, and willed fire into it.

The fire did not go willingly. It fought him, both at being summoned while he still held the body aloft with his water sense, and in objection to the water energy that saturated the body. Vidarian closed his eyes and redoubled his efforts, clenching his teeth, pressing the water from the body and commanding the fire to enter it.

He heard the fire, and felt it, but would not look back. This might be Ruby's will, and a fulfillment of his oath, but he retreated within himself as he carried it out, searching within for a meditative mind that an exercise from the Book of Nistra had taught him. And he mouthed silent prayers to the goddess of the sea, asking forgiveness for Ruby, and for himself. Nistra was not a goddess to contemplate forgiveness, nor the owing of debts or action, but he asked it anyway, offering himself up to the sea.

An oily smoke and char stained the air, choking them again, until Altair silently summoned a wind to chase it back across the water. The tall gryphon stole up next to him, spreading a wing around him, and Vidarian leaned into his feathered shoulder, reaching for a peace that would not come.


Clouds spread below them, rolling white here at the heights, their every detail revealed by the bright and golden afternoon sun. Far below, a storm rumbled close to the ocean's surface, charcoal clouds lit by intermittent punctuations of lightning.

He had asked Oneira to return them to the Imperial City, his task fulfilled. The dread that ate at his stomach had not diminished. If the ship had been a quiet one before, now it was silent as a tomb. For the first day of sailing Vidarian stood at the stern, looking down and back over the clouds, and spoke to no one.

Ruby, too, had been silent, her thoughts only her own. When she spoke at last on the second day, it was to stir Vidarian out of a solemn and wordless meditation.

* You have to destroy me, Vidarian. *

The breath stopped in his chest.

* I can't live like this. It's not living at all! I am not dead, and I am not alive. And I am losing myself to…whatever this is. *

“Ruby, I…” His head spun.

* I'm dangerous. I'm a danger to you and to anyone around me. You know this. *

He must have radiated his agony and shock, for Isri was suddenly there in his mind, whispering up around him as she had never done before, wordlessly radiating reassurance. Far to starboard, Thalnarra gave an upward-lilting call, inquiring.

“I have fulfilled my obligation to you, Ruby,” he began, knowing in his heart that it felt untrue, but resisting her would be truer than admitting he could now bear to destroy her, which he knew he could not.

* You don't believe that, * she snorted, an ire raising to stiffen behind the moroseness of her first demand.

Footsteps sounded on the deck, and he turned, stunned to see Oneira approaching the stern rail. He shook his head, but to his further astonishment, she only lifted her eyebrows, and continued forward.

“I know that I cannot destroy you,” he said, reaching for the words that would deter her from the chase. But she only bore down harder.

* How can you lack the strength to do what you must do? Are you no captain at all? Perhaps you were never? * He clenched his jaw, but she plowed on relentlessly. * Or has ‘destiny’ weakened you? First that mongrel wolf, and now you flinch again. * He flushed, aware of Oneira's presence, as Ruby must have known he would be, and that the woman could hear her.

This was a Ruby he knew, a woman ferocious in negotiation, a master of sea politics. She was pushing him, hoping to seal him in his own anger so that he might do what she asked. Perversely, it made him all the more inclined to resist her. “I won't do this, Ruby. I can't.”

* Then you betray me for the second time. *

He wanted to argue with her, but felt all composure slipping away. He closed his eyes, and a kind of madness yawned under him, a panic; Isri's presence wrapped around him again, soft as a down blanket—a specific down blanket, one that smelled of lavender and cedar, pulled from his memories of his mother—but it could not reach the knife of breaking within him, the fissure, opened by the Great Gate, that now threatened to swallow him into unbeing.

“There is another way.” The voice was soft, gentle. Unrecognizable. It was Oneira's.

Vidarian opened his burning eyes and looked at her. The world seemed tilted, and he worked to straighten his head, assaulted on all sides by sensation. The sun seemed far too bright, the scent of the varnished rail suddenly stifling, the sky too huge and bearing down on them.

Oneira took his silence for permission. “The vessel that you now inhabit, the prism key. It is one of many, some larger than others. Some are so large that they can contain the fullness of a human mind. They can even give it a human shape.”

Ruby's attention palpably turned away from Vidarian, felt as a cooling of his skin. He struggled to breathe. * You speak of automaton bodies. Like Iridan's. *

Oneira nodded, folding her lace-gloved hands in front of her. “The creation of automata is assumed to be a lost art—but not for the Company.”

* You can craft me such a body? *

“Not I,” Oneira said. “But I know someone who can.”


Try as he might, Vidarian could not bring himself to eat the lavish meal Oneira had laid before them in the forecastle's stateroom. He had never been seasick a day in his life, but even looking at the poached rock crab before him turned his stomach.

Oneira had no such difficulty, daintily downing chilled oysters and wilted pepper greens with sweet plum vinegar.

It didn't help that Isri also went without eating, though she was offered plate after plate. The seridi ate no meat, by choice and not biology, and it had taken subtle pressure on Vidarian's part to have her included at the table at all. Now he wasn't sure that he'd truly done her a service by insisting.

Iridan did not eat, but he did have a plate in front of him, an etched silver platter set with a translucent sphere that glowed a soft blue. It was an attunement sphere, Oneira had said, and it had some sort of meditative effect on automata.

Now that Oneira was openly acknowledging Ruby, she, too, had a place at the table, set in an ornate golden jewelry box. She and Iridan could communicate silently, which meant that the meal, awkward already, was made more so by punctuations of long silence.

“I would be very grateful,” Iridan said after one such, “for any information about my siblings. Any of them.”

He addressed this to the table, and Vidarian wasn't sure whether it was with honest openness or to pressure Ruby—or Oneira—by voicing his question publicly. It was unfair to hold his origins against him, but the mere fact that he was created for diplomacy—or created at all—made it difficult for Vidarian to feel comfortable with his motives. If an automaton could be said to be motivated for anything other than its purpose.

* I wish I could tell you more than I already have, * Ruby said. * What I…said…in the Arboretum—it came from a part of this prism key that I can't open on my own. It's as though a door is shut, and I can't control what opens it. I'm genuinely sorry. *

“My plight is certainly not worse than yours. Perhaps we can help each other.”

Ruby and Iridan warming to each other was hardly surprising under their circumstances, but Vidarian couldn't help but be disquieted by the thought that Ruby was testing the waters of Iridan's intelligence, imagining herself in such a body. Oneira's offer presented more questions than it answered, but while they were still leagues from the Imperial City, there was no prospect of answering them.

Iridan's lavender eyes were on Oneira. She set aside her silver fork and lifted her linen napkin to her lips, then set it aside, all thoughtfulness. “What I am about to tell you is a Company secret, and you should know already how covetously knowledge is guarded.” She lifted the napkin again and carefully folded it. “I only tell you as I suspect you know already, and what I know isn't much. The existence of the four automata created by Grand Artificer Parvidian nearly a thousand years ago has been continuously known to the Company, which has also paid handsomely to preserve the knowledge of the Animators, whose guild in turn trained Parvidian.”

“Four,” Iridan repeated, his inflection flat, his mind somewhere far away.

Oneira nodded, watching him carefully. “Three known to each other and to the public—the fourth known only to the highest echelons of government, and, of course, the Company.”

* Do they exact some kind of loyalty oath from you, to keep you from disclosing your secrets? * Ruby asked. Her tone said clearly that she did not trust the Company, even if she remained tempted by Oneira's offer of an automaton body.

“They don't need to,” Oneira said, and rang the serving bell. A black-uniformed maid entered promptly with a steaming pitcher of kava and a tray of sugar, cream, and spices. “Knowledge is disclosed only with advancement into genuine wealth—and the Company controls access to that wealth. No one would jeopardize what they had earned.”

“Unless someone else offered more wealth?” Vidarian ventured.

The bemused look Oneira gave him was chilling in its implication: no one in the world had more wealth than the Company. She gestured, and the serving maid set the tray on the table, then poured a silver cup of kava and spiced it. Vidarian had known the Company was powerful, but only the opening of the gate had revealed the glacier of strength that lay below the surface. “And Justinian?”

Oneira accepted her cup and gestured the maid to pour Vidarian's. She took a long and deliberate sip. “I should have known that he of all the directors would have had a contingency plan.”

Her tone was neutral, a subtle rebuke on her analytic abilities, but the wound was clear: whatever Justinian's contingency plan had been, it did not include her. Vidarian decided not to suggest to her that it had appeared to include him. It felt oddly oily to withhold information with her when she had shared a piece of her own, but he reminded himself as he accepted the silver cup that he did not trust her at all.


The next morning Altair arced down to hover just off the starboard rail where Vidarian stood.

// Thalnarra has heard something from below, // he said, curiosity giving his voice a metallic tang. // A contact. She is coming in to land. // Generally, Altair flew at higher altitudes than Thalnarra, but lately they had been reversed.

“Can't you hear them yourself?”

// Her telepathy is quite a bit stronger than mine. // He didn't seem embarrassed, though Vidarian was; certainly, as telepathic strength varied in humans and seridi, so must it also in gryphons, but the thought had never occurred to him.

Altair cupped his wings and allowed the wind current produced by the ship's wake to carry him up and over the rail with a slight tilting of his right wing. He touched down gently on the deck, just before Thalnarra, as promised, angled in from above and dropped down next to the port rail. Her landing was not so delicate and tilted the ship, but it soon righted itself.

Her dark-backed primaries brushed the deck as she extended her wings for balance. // Arikaree is here. An'du is with him. //

“An'du? Here?” Vidarian went to the rail and peered down, but could see only clouds.

// I asked about that. Now that she can change shape at will, she's no longer confined to the An'durin. She's rejoined her people in the West Sea. //

“Her people?” An'du had said there were “many” of her kind, but it had been hard to believe. He'd never heard of another whale like her.

The round, red eye that Thalnarra turned on him suggested that the Company wasn't the only group to hoard knowledge. // There are quite a few of them. She has one with her, some kind of ambassador from one of the other clans. She wants you to meet him. //

Vidarian found Oneira in the navigation room consulting with her boatswain. He hadn't quite figured out the Wind Maiden's arrangement; the crew clearly answered to Oneira alone as the Company representative, but she did not fulfill a captain's duties, and indeed they seemed not to have one. He apologized for interrupting, then explained about their new guests.

“The sea-folk?” The flatness of her eyes said that she was neither surprised nor inclined to elaborate. More secrets. Vidarian fought not to grind his teeth. “I'd love to meet one of them,” Oneira said, and instructed the boatswain to anchor the ship on the water again.

Above, Thalnarra and Altair had returned to the sky, and circled the Wind Maiden as she descended toward the water. They called out greetings to unseen—to Vidarian, anyway—targets below. The ship hove along a starboard arc and the ocean loomed up beneath them, all chopping whitecap under a brisk northeasterly wind.

// Be greeting, good-friend, // the pelican-gryphon said joyfully, voice fresh like a north sea breeze. // Nistra's blessing to be seeing you once more. //

The gryphon might be able to see Vidarian, but not the reverse; it was some long moments before he made out the bobbing shape far below on the water. Arikaree spread his wings in greeting, and flipped an arc of seawater up into the air with his beak.

Beside him, a scaled equine face broke the water's surface, followed by a long, muscled neck. Vidarian only had a second to attempt to make sense of a horse—a green one—in the water, and then An'du's grey-green head surfaced as well, perched atop the creature's back.

The horse reared, another impossible-seeming feat, until the churning foam cleared to show the massive scaled fish torso that continued downward from its waist. Its forelegs, split and webbed where a horse's hooves would be, pawed at the waves, and it squealed, a sound more dolphin than horse.

An'du laughed and cursed the beast in a language Vidarian had never heard, then released the reins. As soon as it had its head, the horse dove back beneath the water's surface to glower at her. How he could tell it was glowering Vidarian had no idea, but it rolled off the creature like water.

“A pleasure to see you again, Vidarian—especially on the open sea.” An'du smiled, and Vidarian knew her words to be genuine; she glowed with health, a fact that must have been attributable to the ocean return. “May we board your handsome vessel?”

The Wind Maiden still hovered above the water's surface, and Vidarian turned, looking for the nearest davit, or some way of bringing them aboard. Oneira was already there, supervising the lowering of something better—a rope ladder.

There was a kind of chirp from the water, and a splash. A sea otter had hopped from its camouflaged perch between Arikaree's wings to swim over to An'du's shoulders. She wrapped him around her neck like a fine lady with a foxtail stole, then swam to the ladder. One muscular arm wrapped between two rungs, and she waved with her free hand. Three strong sailors set to pulling the ladder back in, while Arikaree swam with surprising speed and flapped his broad, rectangular wings, laboriously—but impressively—taking off from the water.

When An'du stepped up to the deck, Vidarian realized he'd forgotten how large she was—or perhaps she had always looked smaller in the water. He'd become accustomed to the size of the gryphons, but An'du at least appeared human, though her dark eyes without iris or pupil, not to mention her mottled green skin, loudly proclaimed that she was not. Still, as she towered above all of the humans, easily half again as tall as Oneira—no small woman herself—Vidarian appreciated her strangeness anew, trying to imagine the great green whale of the An'durin somehow being the same creature, and not quite succeeding.

An'du knelt and the sea otter leapt from her shoulders, shook water from his pelt in a sinuous head-to-tail twist, then grew, becoming a slim, dark-olive-skinned young man.

He was slender and strong, so wiry that he seemed taller than he was. But where An'du was much larger than a human, her guest was slightly smaller, fine-boned and sharp of feature. And the quiet burn of his eyes as he took in Vidarian, Oneira, the sailors, and the gryphons said that he was not terribly impressed with his new company.

“My friends, I introduce to you Tepeki Underbranch, prince of the Velshi,” An'du said, coming to stand behind the boy and put a hand on his shoulder that easily could have cupped his entire head. She squeezed gently, almost unnoticeably, and he gave the slightest possible nod of his chin.

“I'm pleased to meet you,” the boy said, a soft voice that tried to be low but couldn't.

* Another shapechanger, * Ruby said. * Fantastic. *