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I grab two handfuls of vine and feel them sag under my weight. My feet dangle over a kilometer drop down the snowy cliffs. People always make such drama of heights. Still haven’t met one worse than the Unshorn.
I climb down the sheer face of the parapet. High-altitude wind nips at me. My hands are already going numb. The vines are beginning to fray. A thick stone support column upholds this section of the castle. It too is covered with vines. I shimmy to the right and plant both feet on the stone and shove off, trusting the acrobatics that helped me become a legend of the underworld. Ephraim the Reptile. Ephraim the Climber. Ephraim the…oh shit.
I fly straight past the column.
My right leg is a freak. When I pushed off, it didn’t push. It shot me like a bloody ballista. Three times as strong as the old one ever was. Two-comma tech. Maybe even three. I’m going to sail out into nothing—
I slam into solid stone. Another column! Ah that hurts. Fingers scramble on bare stone for a grip as I bounce off. I snag one as I fall. The vine begins to unravel. I plummet down, breath stuck in my chest until I come to an abrupt halt. Skin tears off the palm, but I hold on to the vine for dear life. My slippers drift off into the expanse below.
O blight my balls.
I’ve fallen past safe harbor, at the extreme west of the network of support columns. There’s nothing beneath but jagged cliffs and twirling snow. My only salvation is to the left, toward the western edge of the foundation of Eagle Rest. It’s more than twenty meters away. Not far enough down. I rock myself toward it. The vine sags. Keep at it. Better than Unshorn. I swing in a parabolic arc, not close enough yet. The vine begins to fray. Hold on, vine. I rock back into nothingness, sagging a little. Rock back toward the eagle wing, reach the zenith of the parabolic arc. And let go the vine. Gravity tugs. I fly feet-forward, body perfectly horizontal, and then jerk my shoulders back, pull my knees up, twirling into a flip. Stick it, stick it, stick it…
Jarring force shoots from my heels into the knees as I land barefoot on the stone. Haha! Then I slip on a patch of ice and twist sideways just before a fall that would mean certain death. I scramble to safety. Bloodied, freezing, and cackling, I glare at the drop and spit.
Now, time to descend the cliff face, get to the city, get some s
hoes, a ship, and get out of Dodge. Do I know anyone in Olympia? Hope not, Syndicate will have a price on my head.
Then I hear something in the wind. I look up at the sky. Nothing. I can’t even tell which parapet was mine, I’m so far down. No one pursues. See my fate in your bones now, shaman? Then the wind wails behind me. I turn around to face the city, cupping my eyes against the sun. It winks off the distant loch. Must have been…
Oh.
Jove.
On.
High.
Six monsters rise from beneath the edge of the stone eagle wing. Pale blue feathers. Wingspans of twenty meters. Huge birds of prey with bodies of feathered lions, wrapped in rune-laden pulseArmor.
Griffins.
I run, because what else do you do?
A missile of fur, feather, and muscle hits the stone in front of me. I sprawl backward. From amidst a cloud of spitting snow the biggest damn thing I’ve ever seen uncoils her white mass. I’ve seen the monster once before as it devoured Euripedes au Votum atop the Dome of Endymion. It is Godeater, the albino steed of the Obsidian Queen. But no one rides in its saddle.
The griffin’s razor-scarred beak is the size of me. It opens to scream into my face as a mountain of a man lands in its shadow. My cilia wail. The man’s armored boots are big. His tattooed arms like tree saplings, and ringed with gold torcs. His helmet is three times the size of a human head. Made from the skull of an African sand hydra, and plumed with green meter-long poison feathers of a Pacific archipelago jungle dragon. His pulseArmor is battered and white, shoulders set with the skulls of the Peerless warlords he killed with the man-sized greataxe strapped to his back.
The Reaper’s greatest armored cavalry commander stomps toward me. The long valor tail of hair from which he gets his name falls down his back to his tailbone, sewn with trophies. I pick myself to my feet.
To his people: he is Big Brother.
To Golds: the Sky Bastard.
To everyone else: Valdir the Unshorn. Warlord and royal concubine of Sefi the Quiet.
“Well, this isn’t where I parked my ship,” I say up at him. Black eyes within the hollows of the hydra skull flick toward the mountain face and stone columns where I made my passage. “Have you seen it? Shiny, long, two swollen engines at the stern. Plenty of thrust.” No reply. “Listen, I was working with the Sovereign. Your ally. Give her a call. I ain’t saying I haven’t made mistakes, just don’t give me to Barca. I ain’t earned that.”
Now he looks back at me. “Earned?” The voice filters through the sonic chamber of the hydra, each decibel contorted.
“Well, I mean, I did go face down the whole Syndicate. Ask the kids. Either of them. I was pretty impressive.”
“In the land of my mothers, those who steal children declare ashwar. A holy war against the spirit of tribe. So their covetous juntak are shorn from their bodies and cast into the fire, so their seed may not spread, but crackle pleasantly and share warmth with tribe. Children peck their eyes from their skulls with crow bones, so the nomen shall be at the mercy of the tribe from which they sought to steal. This is what you have earned.”
“Crow bones?”
“Crow bones.”
