Elyth kept still and relaxed as she silently surveyed her options. It didn’t take long; she didn’t have many.
Waiting certainly wasn’t one. Wherever they were taking her, she’d be at their complete mercy when they landed. And the closer they got to their destination, the narrower her paths of possibility became. That left her with whatever she could make happen while they were still airborne, which didn’t offer much room for error either. The skimmer was running maybe fifty feet above the trees, and almost every version of quick action she could come up with was likely to end with the craft planted firmly in the ground. She’d already survived one crash. Trying her luck again so soon didn’t seem like a good idea.
The rear compartment of the vessel was five feet long, slightly more in width and height. She couldn’t fully stand. Two seats on either side, all facing the middle of the ship; thin metal structures overlaid with synthetic cushions. That gave her about two feet of aisle, and not much cover to work with.
The rear hatch was right beside her; the emergency release was a simple mechanism. But even if she popped the door open midflight, leaping out was close enough to suicide that it was off the table. That left trying to take control of the ship in transit.
She looked to the forward compartment, where both men sat unaware of her realization, at least for the moment. The gap in the panel that separated them was centered, roughly three feet wide and maybe half as tall. Neither man seemed the sort to be oblivious to anything; reaction times would be faster than normal.
The man on the right had shoulder-length dark hair, and was more squarely built than his companion. The other man was wiry, short-haired, and bearded. He might well prove to be more trouble than his stronger-looking partner. The strong one would look to overpower her, something she could turn to her advantage. But the thin man had a cunning edge that made him unpredictable.
Elyth scanned what she could see of the control panel through the small window to the fore, looking for the controls she’d need.
While she was looking, the long-haired man glanced back over his shoulder briefly; they didn’t quite catch each other’s eyes, but the effect was the same. He took stock of her with his peripheral vision, and turned too casually back to look out of the forward window. Elyth couldn’t hear his voice, but it was apparent he had said something. The other man’s head turned ever so slightly before he stopped himself. They knew she knew. The air grew thick.
The only question now was how the three of them would resolve the situation.
Her stun baton was in the very top of her pack, if she could get to it without drawing any attention; the confined space would limit its effectiveness, but it would still be a useful tool. She still had her dinner in its container on her lap, but that didn’t seem to offer her any immediate help.
“We’re taking the long way around,” Longhair said, looking back over his shoulder again and flashing a smile he no doubt thought was convincing. “Trying to make sure we don’t draw any extra attention to you when we drop you off. Twenty minutes or so.”
“Sure, no problem,” Elyth replied, smiling back. He nodded, watched her for a moment longer, and then returned to facing forward.
Elyth swept her eyes once more around the passenger compartment, looking again for anything that might give her any more of an advantage than what she had in her pack. The rear compartment was sparse; not much in it apart from the seats and the harnesses to keep everyone strapped in. She hadn’t buckled hers. And the emergency hatch release was right there. If only the fall weren’t sure to kill her, that would be the easiest out.
She looked back at the cockpit. It was going to be a tight fit through that window.
As casually as she could manage, Elyth set her meal aside, shifted in her seat, and reached for her pack; no movement so sudden as to attract attention or so slow as to appear concerned that they might notice. She started to unfasten the top, but before she could, Longhair whipped around, pistol in hand.
“Don’t,” he said.
Elyth froze.
“Whoa, whoa, easy,” she said. “I was just going to get my scarf. It’s a little chilly back here.”
She eased both hands up slowly, palms out, where he could see them… but not too far away from her pack.
“You just sit still,” he answered. “I don’t want to have to clean your brains out of the back of the car, but I’ll do it if I have to.”
For a span, the two just stared at each other. He clearly wasn’t buying the act, and even more clearly was no amateur with his weapon. His aim was steady, and he held the pistol compactly, gripped in both hands and tucked close to his body, avoiding the mistake of extending his arms through the window of the panel. No matter how fast she was, there was no doubt that he could put rounds on target in such a tight space before she reached him.
The distance between them wasn’t much, maybe five feet. Her pack weighed forty-three pounds. Too much to throw. And the window to the forward compartment wasn’t big enough for it to fit through, anyway.
But not all the tools at her disposal were physical. He was certain of himself, and though the weapon was a threat, it was the man’s cool certainty of skill that animated the threat. If she could paralyze him even for a moment with doubt or fear, a window of opportunity might well open to her. Though she had taken great pains thus far not to give any hint of who she really was, there was no point in concealing it now, if keeping the secret would only end in her death.
Within First House, the technique was known as Manifesting the Void. Among themselves, away from their training grounds and strict instructors, the Advocates of the Voice just called it the Dread.
Elyth drew a breath and gathered the words within herself, drawing with them all the emotions and memories, the indescribable awe and unspeakable terror, she’d experienced in the face of the raw, self-obliterating power of the cosmos.
“I am not what you perceive me to be,” she said, and then, in the Deep Language, “Form of the formless, all within the word, the infinite, and the eternal.”
Around her, the air crackled with cosmic energy made manifest. She felt the chill course through her limbs as the force of her speech struck the man, creating in his mind an inescapable impression of the chaotic potential of the universe she herself had touched. The color evaporated from his face, his pupils dilated, hands trembled. And though his eyes remained fixed on her, they were unfocused and she knew, at least for a moment, he wasn’t seeing her but rather a fraction of the power that could move through her. The pistol quavered, the barrel dipped, his grip slackened.
Elyth reacted.
She snatched the top of her pack, braced it against her arm and shoulder like a shield, and threw herself forward, using the weight of her body to propel the pack ahead of her. The gun fired, and her pack shuddered with the impact. A second round tore through the backside, narrowly missing her hand just as she wedged the heavy backpack into the opening. An instant later she was sprawled flat on the floor and with a quick kick she hit the emergency release on the exit hatch; alarms blared as the rear door popped open with a gush and roar of mountain air.
Above her, her pack was stuck tight, but only momentarily. It thumped twice, as Longhair hammered at it from the front; the small cockpit didn’t offer him much room for leverage. Elyth slid tight against the seats as far to the right of the craft as she could manage, her back against the forward panel. On the third strike, her pack shifted above her, and on the next, both of Longhair’s arms shot through the opening as he shoved it free, gun still in hand. The pack swung away and fell heavily on the seats across from her.
“—out the back!” he was saying when his hands appeared. In that instant, Elyth struck. She shot up and grabbed both of his wrists, driving them upward as she sprang from the floor. In the struggle, the gun fired again, the round punching harmlessly through the roof. Elyth was still in motion; she swept left and twisted the man’s arms around each other, using one of his forearms as leverage to pin the other. The weapon sailed out of his hand as she slammed him back in his seat, awkwardly contorted by her hold, wrists pinned against the rounded edge of the panel between them. As predicted, he tried to muscle his way up, wrestling against her. The cockpit was too tight for him to find good footing, but when the angle was right, Elyth gave way and yanked; with the sudden loss of resistance, the man’s own struggle popped him backward, head and shoulders through the window. Elyth smashed her elbow into the bridge of his nose, felt the crunch as it broke under the impact.
A moment later the world flew out from under her.
Longhair screamed as Elyth tumbled over him and hurtled into the right side of the skimmer, crashing upside down on the seat and dislocating one if not both of the man’s elbows in one moment; in the next, he went silent as the chaotic twist and shift of weight snapped his neck.
For an instant, an invisible weight pinned her against the wall of the craft; gravity swirled and then abruptly seized its place, slamming her neck and shoulders down into the seat. She rolled with the impact and found her footing, barely processing that the ship had just executed a barrel roll before realizing a split second later why; the wiry man swiveled around, pistol at point-blank range. She twisted and dropped to a knee, slapping the man’s hand up and aside as he fired; the heat and flash splashed across her cheek as the air ripped in the wake of the kinetic round.
But rather than trying to get his weapon aimed at her again, the man used the momentum from her strike and whipped his hand down and around, catching her across the brow with the flat edge of the gun. She fell back hard against the seats on the left side of the cabin, and the man fired twice more; the rounds tore through the seat beside her head. But the edge of the window and his awkward position blocked his arm from bringing the weapon fully to bear. He spun to his left and leaned back to the right, trying to get the pistol back on target.
The other gun was on the floor by Elyth’s feet, toward the rear of the cabin.
It was a race to the death.
Elyth went flat on her side and reached for the pistol as the man fired three more shots in quick succession, each round trailing just behind her movement. She snatched the gun up from the floor and the man, realizing he couldn’t get his weapon on her fast enough, dropped backward, sheltering behind the panel. Elyth had no idea how strong the panel was, but she didn’t hesitate; she fired twice, putting two rounds into it where she instinctively guessed the man’s body would be. The shots punched two neat holes through the metal.
And then all was quiet.
Elyth held her place for a few seconds, weapon trained on the panel window, watching for any sign of movement; the lack of a response from the cockpit told her she’d found her mark.
The skimmer continued along its level flight path, undisturbed by the torrent of violence that had broken out within its confines. After the havoc, the sudden stillness felt misplaced, as though Elyth had abruptly dropped out of one reality into another. She remained lying on her back for another ten seconds, both to be sure the danger had passed and to allow herself a brief moment to recover. Then, she eased up into a crouch and cautiously crept forward to check the cockpit. The wiry man was there, flopped partway to the floor, held in place by the console and the legs of his partner. Her shots had caught him under the jaw and just behind the ear. The other man was still partially wedged in the window, splayed awkwardly, his arms and neck unnaturally angled like a crushed spider.
The adrenaline coursing through her made her hands cold; she tossed the pistol onto the seat next to her and clenched her fists a few times. After a few deep breaths, Elyth raised the long-haired man’s body and shifted it enough to enable his weight to slide him back down into his seat. She moved the man as carefully as she could, gently repositioning him so that he leaned against the side of the cockpit, out of the way of the console. The wiry man’s body shifted with the movement, falling farther toward the floor, though not completely out of his seat.
There wasn’t room enough for her to crawl into the cockpit, so Elyth had to lean through the window and work the console as best she could from the rear compartment. A quick check revealed that her would-be captors hadn’t set a preprogrammed course; the skimmer automatically kept itself level and managed collision avoidance, but they’d been navigating manually. The sky had darkened to the fullness of night now, and the only lights she could see through the forward window were out on the horizon to her left, some miles distant. She pulled up a map and identified the lights as coming from Alonesse, a companion city some eighty miles northeast of Oronesse, and not nearly as large. The men hadn’t left any clues about their intended flight path, so she couldn’t be certain, but unless they’d planned to circle wide around the outskirts, that didn’t appear to have been their planned destination. Somewhere not far from it, perhaps, though.
She didn’t have enough information, but the one thing Elyth knew for certain was that the longer she was in the skimmer, the easier she’d be to track. She shifted the skimmer into a hover, and activated a display to scan the local terrain for a suitable landing zone.
The scanner located a clearing about half a mile to her south, and she directed the skimmer to touch down there. While it traveled, she brought up the routing interface and plotted out an automatic flight path. She sent the craft on a circuitous route around Alonesse, with commands to touch down in two more locations before returning to the preserve. Unfortunately, the men had deactivated the skimmer’s route history, so there was no way for her to backtrace the ship’s original point of departure. She made the best guess she could, and hoped that if the ship was seen returning to the preserve that might buy her some extra time before they unleashed the hunting parties.
Once she touched down, she’d have to get as far away from the landing site as possible. Assuming there wasn’t anyone already on the ground, waiting to ambush her.
The skimmer approached her selected site, tilting back slightly as it shifted into vertical landing mode. Elyth picked her pack up off the floor and slung it over her shoulders, buckling the front support straps around her as she moved to the still-open rear hatch. On second thought, she went back to the front to collect the pistol from the seat where she’d tossed it. She didn’t much care for such weapons, but things had gone so far sideways that it seemed foolish not to take every precaution.
As she moved toward the front, her foot slipped sideways, and she looked down to see the floor spattered in some dark fluid and matter. Her body went cold with the realization; she’d been hit after all, and shock was preventing her from feeling the wound. She searched her body frantically, looking for what surely must have been a massive exit wound. There was no telling how much blood she’d lost already. But everywhere she looked, she was intact. She glanced back at the dark patch on the floor, followed the trail up to the seat, where the kinetic rounds had ripped through. And she laughed aloud.
There, on the seat, sat the remains of the container Hok had given her. It was ruptured, and the meal he’d packed for her was blasted all over the seat and floor. The moment was darkly comical, both a welcome reprieve from the disaster Elyth had first imagined and a stark reminder of just how close she’d been to death.
Seeing that destruction, however, checked her impulse to carry the pistol with her. Whatever advantage the pistol might have offered, she knew that carrying it with her would impact her decision making, and she was far from an expert marksman. A small change, perhaps, but she of all people knew how seemingly small changes could ripple into unforeseen consequences. She wasn’t ready to allow the circumstances to dictate her way of operating.
When she returned to the hatch, the skimmer was maneuvering above the landing site. Though it was dark, she could tell now that the clearing she’d picked wasn’t nearly as clear in reality as it had looked on the map; numerous stumps and scrub trees littered the area, as though a small patch of the forest had been harvested for timber some years before. The skimmer did an admirable job of finding a way to fit anyway, and landed in what Elyth presumed was the one spot its supports could actually fully contact the ground.
As soon as it touched down, she leapt out and raced out of the clearing in a low run, as fast as she could manage with the pack on her back and across the challenging terrain. When she reached the tree line, she turned back and dropped to a crouch, scanning the area for any sight or sound of trouble. After a minute or so, the skimmer’s engines revved again and the craft lifted off, turning as it did so to clear the irregular canopy and find its heading. Elyth realized she’d left the rear hatch open; it wouldn’t seal itself automatically since she’d popped it with the emergency release. If anyone happened to spot it when it landed in her preprogrammed locations, the open hatch might draw unnecessary attention, and worse, might reveal its disturbing cargo. But there was nothing she could do about it now.
That thought sent her mind back to the preserve, and to Hok and his friends. Would they find out what had happened? She had to assume they would, and she could only imagine what they would think of her once they did. Unless they had known what the Detail’s intentions had been. But she couldn’t bring herself to believe that, even though the possibility presented itself.
No, Hok was a hard man, but he was a good one. If he had known what they had planned, she would have seen it on him.
That, then, suggested that he would draw the only conclusion that seemed most likely; she had deceived him, and killed two of his fellow workers. Deceived not just him; deceived them all. Elyth knew it was unlikely she would ever see them again, but that didn’t lessen the discomfort of knowing how angry and betrayed they would feel.
She was no stranger to betrayal; exploiting the trust of others was often a critical part of her assignments. But for some reason, to be thought a traitor when she was not was harder to bear.
She held her place for a few minutes more after the skimmer had disappeared, watching for any sign of other skimmers that may have been trailing behind the first. To her relief, nothing passed overhead, and the normal nightly sounds of the wilderness began to return. She listened to them for a span, developing a sense of what life there was in the environment, and its natural rhythms. Once she had a baseline for how the forest should feel and sound, she got back to her feet and removed her pack. From it she took out her go-bag and then drew out her monocular and her local nav tracker and got her bearings.
Alonesse was still some twenty miles roughly to her northeast. Oronesse, then, lay sixty miles to the west and south. And somewhere between the two, the mysteriously invisible borders of eth ammuin’s preserve remained hidden. Elyth had some sense of how long they’d been airborne after leaving the cabin, but not a good estimate on how fast they’d been traveling or how many changes of heading they’d made. Even if she’d had a better idea of those variables, her local nav tracker lacked the resolution she’d need to be able to pick out any distinguishing features that might positively identify the location of that site.
She had to assume she was sitting in the middle of hostile territory. But she knew she wasn’t going to solve her problems by crouching under a tree in the dark. First, she’d find somewhere she could hide, a place where she had time to make plans and, if necessary, a chance to defend herself. She tightened the focus of her local nav tracker and scanned her immediate surroundings. It took a few minutes, but the device highlighted an area about three-quarters of a mile off to her northwest; a gully ran through the woods there. It didn’t promise much shelter or any comfort, and that meant it wasn’t an obvious choice. Maybe not a perfect option, but Elyth didn’t have time to wait for perfect.
The night air was already cold and growing colder; her body was weak from the aftereffects of the adrenaline dump and the use of the Deep Language, and sore from the injuries she’d sustained. And now that she’d noticed her body, the pain in her forehead seemed particularly acute, just above her brow. She touched it lightly and hissed involuntarily at the burn and sting. Her fingertips came back tacky, and she realized the blow she’d suffered from the wiry man’s gun had split the skin. She tested the area around the wound gently, felt the knot that was forming. The mark it left was going to be a distinguishing feature for the days to come. Though, out here in the wilderness, Elyth wasn’t sure just how much she’d be needing to blend in anyway.
She picked up her go-bag and slung it so that it lay across her chest, where all her tools and instruments would be accessible, and then donned her pack once more and started out for the gully.
It took her an hour to maneuver her way there; she circled wide around the clearing where she’d set the skimmer down, moved slowly, and paused often along the way to listen for any changes in the natural sounds of the night. When she reached the edge of the gully, she found it rockier than she’d expected and covered in leaves at the bottom. At least it wasn’t full of water. She slipped down the bank and followed the course for another half hour or so until she came around a bend and found what she was looking for.
The eastern side of the bank bulged out wider there, and was overgrown with heavy-rooted trees and creeping ivy. Within the bank, a hollow had formed beneath a massive tree. It had the look of an animal den, now abandoned. Elyth didn’t relish the idea of sleeping where some beast had once made its home, but after all she’d been through, she thought maybe she wasn’t much different from whatever may have lived there before.
Still, she scanned it with her monocular from a distance before committing to it, just to be safe. When she was confident it was clear, she clambered into it, pushing her packs in first. She was happy to discover that moss had crept into the hollow space and blanketed the floor. It wasn’t thick enough to cushion the rocks beneath it, but Elyth was grateful for the comfort it provided, even if it was mostly psychological.
All told, roughly two hours had passed since her narrow escape, and in that time the skies had remained clear and the forest quiet. It appeared she’d at least dodged immediate pursuit. But the question still nagged at her about how much farther the two men had intended to carry her, even though she had little doubt about what they had planned to do with her once they’d arrived.
If their plan had been only to kill her, they could have done so the instant they were in the air. Apart from the comment about not wanting to clean her brains out of the back of the skimmer, they clearly hadn’t had any such concerns once the fighting started. But she couldn’t help but feel they hadn’t merely been taking her somewhere to die. They’d been taking her to someone else.
The uncertainty made the wilderness seem hostile; any direction she turned might be the one that would lead her to whoever was waiting for her. And remaining in one place might allow whoever it was enough time to track her and capture her, despite her unlikely escape. For the moment, the entire planet seemed too small to hide her. She’d been under pursuit before, but this time felt different; she’d been off-balance from the start.
Among the Paragon’s final words, the matriarch had spoken of her uncertainty of the way forward, and how once Elyth had arrived, only then would they see what steps lay before them. Elyth hadn’t grasped then the fullness of the Paragon’s meaning, nor just how difficult walking a blind path could be.
She lay quietly in her hiding place for a few minutes, listening to the gentle sounds of the wilderness. And though she didn’t feel hungry, she knew her body would need calories as it warded off the cold.
Elyth opened her pack, and when she withdrew one of her rations, something narrow and rounded fell out with it, landing on her legs. She felt around in the darkness for the object, and then held it up toward the opening of the den, silhouetting it against the weak starlight from outside.
The cutting of the frostoak.
Sadly, it hadn’t fared well. About a third of the way down it had suffered damage; it was bent, though not completely broken through, with sharp fibers flared like a mane where part of the outer bark had separated. It seemed an apt metaphor for her mission thus far.
“I know how you feel,” she said to the cutting.
And though she’d packed it on a whim, without thinking of any particular use for it, it now reminded her of the broken tangle interpreter she still carried. She had no hope in the gesture, but Elyth unzipped the slender pocket along the lapel of her vest and drew out the tangle interpreter. Even damaged, it too was a reminder of home, and of the importance of her mission; a talisman of power and purpose.
She held the branch and the device in her fist for a few moments and then allowed them to balance across the flat of her palm. Back on the Helegoss, the two had been joined in her mind, each a half representing the whole of her mission. And now, together, they still seemed linked; twins in suffering. The single indicator on the interpreter was dark, as expected. But she stared at it for a few moments longer anyway, drawing from it the resolve she needed. Like the device and the branch, she too was battered. But where they had failed, she would endure.
And as she looked, as if her own will had made it so, the indicator on the tangle interpreter began to glow weakly. Surely she was imagining it. She turned the device over in her hand, rubbed her eyes. When she turned the interpreter back over and looked again, the tiny light remained steady, warm.
Somehow, beyond all hope, the Paragon was calling.