Osha stepped through and halted at the sight he had seen only once before.
A wide plateau ran in a gradual slant away from the entrance now behind him. At its distant edge, red light erupted out of a massive fissure in the mountain’s belly, like a gash wider than a river hidden somewhere below from where that light came. Smoke drifted up in glowing red air from deep in the earth.
The heat was almost unbearable.
In slow, heavy steps, he struggled forward until he was halfway to the plateau’s edge. There he stopped and reached inside his vestment to draw out the small, dark stone that he could not read. He knew what to do, though he could not bring himself to do it.
What would come of this?
Even for the loss of his jeóin, his mentor, the great Sgäilsheilleache, he still believed in his calling among the Anmaglâhk. It was all he had left. So why had the Chein’âs summoned him—among all anmaglâhk—a second time?
Since the stone would alert those who would come, what if he simply left without casting it over the precipice? He had a life of service awaiting him. With the rift among his caste and his doubts about Most Aged Father, should he turn back to do whatever he could to help?
Brot’ân’duivé had forced him into so many breaches of his caste’s and his people’s ways. His teacher, Sgäilsheilleache, would not have approved but neither would he have denied such a summons.
Now sweating in the heat, Osha drew a shallow breath as he swung his arm back. He cast the stone and watched as it arced out and over the precipice’s edge to fall from sight. Then he froze in waiting, though it did not take as long as he expected.
A soft scraping, like metal on stone, reached his ears before he saw anything.
The plateau’s edge looked almost black against the red-orange glare of the chasm below ... and a part of that dark jagged line appeared to bulge suddenly.
From where Osha stood, at first the bulge seemed no more than a rippling smudge backlit by burning light. Small and blacker than the stone, it crawled over onto the plateau from out of the depths.
Osha made out its legs and arms as it crept forward on all fours ... no, on threes, as it dragged something behind itself. That object, or bundle, crackled softly like cloth pulled over rough stone, though he also heard something like clicks and scrapes of metal. The closer the figure came, the more Osha was certain that the bundle was made of some strange fuzzy material as dark as the figure itself ... and thin curls of smoke or vapor rose from the material.
When the figure was no more than a stone’s throw away, the chasm’s glare cleared from Osha’s sight, and he saw it,a Chein’âs ... a Burning One. It was as small as a naked child of six or seven years; Osha could not tell whether it was male or female, and it was covered in leathery ebony-toned skin. It finally halted its crawl and squatted on spindly legs folded up with knobby knees against its chest. Only one hand was visible—the other was still behind its back and clutching whatever long bundle it dragged. Thin digits on that one visible hand curled near its flat cheek, and each ended in a shimmering claw blacker than its flesh.
The little one’s oversized head was featureless except for a tightly shut slit of a mouth, vertical cuts for small nostrils, and glowing fire-coal eyes. Where there should have been ears were only two small depressions on the sides of its bald skull.
Osha was not shocked. He had seen one of them before, though the sight of one now unsettled him, and then ...
More scraping on stone carried across the plateau. The one sat unmoving, watching him with unblinking eyes like glowing metal overheated in a forge. The new scraping sound came from off beyond it.
A second—then a third—small figure crawled up over the precipice’s edge.
The last time Osha had come here, only one had appeared to deliver his weapons and tools. He retreated a step as he watched the other two approach, and then the first one scuttled even closer and jerked its bundle out into plain sight.
That burden was long and narrow, made of some dark, fibrous cloth, and thin trails of smoke rose from it.
The two new ones rounded to either side. Each bore a similar but much smaller bundle, small enough to clutch in one clawed hand. Both of those wads of dark cloth smoldered as well.
Without warning, the first one snatched the cloth of its bundle and jerked upward.
A long, shimmering object tumbled out, clanked, and clattered across the stone before sliding to a stop at Osha’s feet. All he could do was stare as his mind went blank.
It was a sword, though not like any he had heard described or seen carried by the few humans he had ever met. He did see that the handle was bare and no more than a narrow strut of metal, and that metal ...
All of the blade and strut was silvery white, like his stilettos and tools, like Chein’âs metal.
The blade was as broad as three of his fingers. Nearly straight, its last third swept back a little in a shallow arc. The back of that third looked sharpened like the leading edge. Where the top third joined the lower part, a slightly curved barb swept forward from the blade’s back toward its tip.
The end strut, perhaps needing leather and wood for a hilt, was twice as long as the width of his hand. It curved just a little downward, as much as the slight upward turn at the blade’s end. Two more protrusions extended where the hilt strut met the blade’s base. The top one curved forward, while the bottom one swept slightly back toward the hilt strut.
Osha did not know how long he stared. Anmaglâhk did not wield such large, clumsy, human weapons. They struck swiftly in silence from the shadows by arrow, narrow blade, or garrote, though he himself had never killed anyone.
Unlike many of his people, Osha had no aversion to the sight of that sword. He had spent too much time with humans—with Magiere and Léshil—to be repelled by the mere sight of a foreign weapon. Still, what did it mean?
The Chein’âs had gifted strange weapons, ones made of silver-white metal, to Magiere and Léshil. It was unheard of for any but the Anmaglâhk to receive such gifts. Was this blade to be delivered to one of them? It did not look much like Magiere’s falchion.
Why would the Burning Ones summon him to carry such a thing away?
Looking up, he shook his head in confusion. “What am I to do? Who is this for?”
That must be the answer. He was so unimportant among his caste that using him as a bearer would cost the caste nothing. But to whom should he deliver this sword?
To his puzzlement, none of the three before him made a sound or gesture.
The one to the right of the first opened its smoking piece of cloth. It flung a cluster of tiny silver-white objects that pinged and skipped across the stone floor at him. Before he even looked to where any of those stopped, the third Chein’âs—to the left of the first—flung a single, slightly larger object, though it was not nearly so large as the sword blade.
That last object clattered and rolled in among the other five small ones.
Osha could not help retreating another step.
The five smaller objects were arrowheads, but not the teardrop points used by the Anmaglâhk or even the military archers who most often served aboard the people’s largest vessels. These points were long and diamond-shaped, with harsh angles and thick at the centers.
Osha remembered one of his earliest teachers while he was a mere acolyte. The teacher had shown him and others one such point made of steel, brought back from human lands.
Those were armor-piercing points ... arrowheads for war.