Defying Gravity

Synopsis

Aldo was still ill from the bottle and ran the hall to be sick over a railing, which put him within reach. The great bird dropped, took his shoulders and threw itself off the ledge with him. Koa and Mikhail reached the rail in time to watch it cross the valley low, then climb and go, and to remember that the Elder had called it loyal to Vëné and to the chosen, which settled nothing about whether it meant to eat him. They could not follow him across that ground, so they marked the heading and got on with the keep.

It carried him over snowbound peaks while he sang to himself, convinced he was going to die, and set him down in a prepared nest that held a scrap of torn dark cloth and a single leather glove. Over the rim lay a second giant eagle, dead and bloodied, beside a cracked egg and a dead chick. Then he was picked up again, and set down in deep snow on a trail beside the talon-torn body of one of the hobgoblins who had guided the party there. Then back to the keep, where she threw his wineskin off the balcony, sat down on top of him and kept him warm all night. In the morning she crouched until he climbed on, flew him around the valley for joy, and shimmied him gently off her back. Then she dug the glove out of his pack, pressed it on him, screamed, and left.

The other two spent that time on the keep’s last hallway, opened by a latch hidden like a carriage door. The hall itself rotated and sealed behind them onto a chamber of boulders and a central shaft, with Taal plaques on the wall. One read by their hands chains were lifted, by their loyalty they earned passage, which was the other solution to the door across the hall. Another was a complete map of the stairwell’s traps, with instructions for repairing them. The shaft was a corkscrew chute that hauls the boulder back up and re-carves it. This room is machinery, not curse. Mikhail copied the map, took an old book off the floor and recognized it as a volume of the Mól Encyclopædia (one of thirty, and possibly a first edition), and kept it for Elliot. Then they rode Koa’s shield down the boulder chute, which is a shortcut past every trap on the stair.

Riding out to where they had watched the killing, they were ambushed by a small figure that stood down the moment it learned they were not gnolls. She is Yara, a one-armed Hafuwë of the Order of the Broken Chain, which hunts slavers and had come west for the Ten Lashes until the party got there first, at which point they turned to the gnolls. There had been three of them. Grishka and Orsk are dead. She and Koa buried Grishka, and Koa said a prayer over him to Vroga Waruk so correctly that she gave him Grishka’s axe, notched and reinforced for cutting manacles. She also handed them a rune-etched bone out of the Barren Lands, where she trained: break it over a body and you may question the spirit. Such work, she warned, opens Rifts.

They put the flight together. Hobgoblin poachers had killed the matriarch’s mate and her chick and taken her remaining eggs. Mikhail’s book had already told them what giant eagles do, which is hold the wyverns down. They found a trail toward Draazstone and, a day on, smoke: a fortified rest-stop with a ballista, hobgoblins around a fire, and Rakhzan among them with his arm in a sling. In private he agreed the eggs had to go back. His crew was harder: three eggs at two hundred and fifty gold apiece is generational money, and giving them up at an outsider’s word is a shame that follows a family. Mikhail made the case with eight gold, three Mól coins and the location of the mountain arms cache on the table, and they took it, and said plainly what would follow if the story proved false. Mól coins, they let slip, buy favors as well as goods from those of the Rock and the Rain, including from a certain smith who walked away from her family.

The eggs were near hatching and needed warmth, and the crew was out of wood. So Koa and Aldo rode ahead, climbed the chute back up into the keep and told her they had found them. She agreed to carry them both.