Servant of Fire (The Cloud Warrior Saga Book 7) Read online

  Fur chuckled and rose to his feet. “Bold words, Warrior, but when he is gone, another will take his place. Such is the way of power. Someone must hold it. It is the same even within your kingdoms. When the king fell, Theondar took his place.” He motioned to Cora. “Come. We will return. The others will need to learn the shaping. Do not worry about Par-shon, Warrior. The Sunlands will keep the shores free of them.”

  Cora hesitated, raising a hand in farewell, before going with Fur. She shaped lightning, and they disappeared.

  As they departed, Cianna and Sashari landed. Cianna tapped Sashari on her side and the draasin took to the air, circling for a moment before disappearing.

  “You are tired,” Cianna said, throwing herself to the ground next to Tan.

  He was struck by how much these lands suited her. Maybe not the people—though Cianna had once told him about those who’d once lived in the nation of Rens and how they had gone to found Nara and Incendin—but the arid earth and the bright, hot sun overhead suited her nearly as much as it did the draasin.

  “It was necessary work,” Tan said.

  “The lisincend and how many hounds?”

  Tan let his eyes fall closed. The hounds had been the hardest. Like Issan, many of the lisincend had called hounds to them. The connection didn’t require a shaping, at least not one that he saw. He hadn’t discovered how they had managed to reach the hounds, but they had come, much like the three that had attacked when Issan summoned them. Each time, Tan had paused and healed them. Each time, he’d been forced to reach deep into the earth and call upon the earth elementals that were buried deeply, summoning the power of Incendin elementals, but also of golud deep within the kingdoms.

  With each healing of the hounds, he sensed a new addition to the fire bond. Now they were out there, hunting through Incendin, but no longer the mindless creatures they had been. If he reached for the fire bond, he could find them and maybe call to them as he did with the other elementals.

  “They’re like kaas: elementals that had been twisted together,” Tan said.

  “So Sashari said.” Cianna inhaled deeply. “She is pleased with what you’ve done. She tells me that Fire is pleased.”

  Tan hadn’t needed Asboel or Sashari to tell him that. Each time he’d pushed one of the hounds toward the fire bond, there had been something of a surge in power, almost as if Fire welcomed them, more so than even the lisincend. As they were mixed with earth, he hadn’t expected Fire to embrace them, but then again, Tan knew so little about the source of the elemental power.

  “She returns to the den?” Tan asked.

  “Asboel needs to eat,” Cianna answered.

  Tan twisted the dark ring which marked him as Athan on his finger. It was marked with the rune for each of the elements. It was difficult to balance the needs of the kingdoms with those that he felt compelled to follow for the Great Mother. Could he really do both, or would one suffer because he was unable to give the required attention?

  As part of that attention, he felt the need to heal his friend, to restore Asboel so that he could once more soar within the clouds, riding on the winds, and look down upon the world. The draasin deserved that freedom. After all that Asboel had done, he deserved that.

  “What will you do now?” Cianna asked.

  Tan looked up and sighed. If the lisincend and Incendin held out against Par-shon, they had more time than he thought, but how much more? “I’m not sure,” he answered.

  Cianna clapped him on the shoulder. “You should rest. Even shapers such as yourself need to sleep. You’ve stopped Par-shon from attacking and you’ve saved rogue elementals. Maybe it’s time to find your woman and take a day for yourself.”

  Tan wished there was the time. “Par-shon won’t rest simply because I’m tired.”

  “And the world will not end simply because you took a day to yourself.” Cianna stood and shaped fire, spiraling it in such a way that she lifted into the air, flying in a way that reminded Tan of the Par-shon shapers. “I will tell Theondar that you still work with Incendin,” she said. “You will find time of your own and return when you are refreshed.” Then she soared away, moving quickly toward the kingdoms, leaving Tan wondering if he would ever find time of his own.

  7

  A New Elemental

  Tan let his fingers run through the water for another moment. Then he stood, glancing toward the sky where Cianna had disappeared. He sensed the fire shaping that she used and could track her. He should return, using a shaping of lightning to reach Ethea, and find what Roine needed of him as Athan . . . but he didn’t want to, at least not yet.

  Honl, he called.

  The wind elemental separated from the tree and swirled toward him on a thick, inky dark cloud. As he landed before Tan, a figure materialized out of the cloud, more distinct than ever before. “You’re troubled, Tan.”

  Tan shook his head. He’d actually heard Honl. His voice was breathy and soft, but it had not come through the bond between them. That was still there, and Tan could reach for it if needed, but could Honl have changed so much that he no longer needed the bond to speak? “You can talk.”

  Honl laughed, and it sounded as airy and light as his voice, drifting quickly away on the warm Incendin wind. “I’ve always been able to speak.”

  “Not like this.”

  “No,” Honl agreed. “Not like this.”

  Tan wondered what this change meant. Whatever he had done had allowed this change in Honl. Was this what the Great Mother wanted from him? Was this how he was meant to use his gifts?

  The change hadn’t been intentional, though. Tan had only done what was needed to prevent kaas from destroying the wind elemental, but doing so had required mixing spirit with the wind.

  Did Honl resent what had happened to him? Seeing the cloud that was now Honl, Tan couldn’t tell. The bond didn’t share the answers, either.

  “Walk with me?” Tan asked.

  “Of course.”

  Tan started north, toward the kingdoms, walking with a mixture of wind and earth, moving dozens of steps with each one that he took. He could simply shape his return, but he would listen to Cianna and take this moment for himself. Probably no more than that, but he needed time to recover and consider what he’d experienced with both the lisincend and the hounds, and what it might mean for both.

  “What does it mean that the hounds are elementals?” Tan asked as they walked.

  The Incendin landscape changed quickly with each step. All of Incendin was rocky and wild, with great valleys set into massive cracks of open earth, but parts of it sloped differently. Large, jagged fingers of rock forced Tan and Honl to take to the air to make their way up before descending again. Plants changed as well, and Tan passed them too rapidly to trigger the deadly needles some of the plants could shoot. Tan made a point of staying above most of the plants, coming down only in open areas where the ground was hard and clear of the poisonous life around him. He sensed no other life, not even the hounds that he’d healed. Incendin—at least this part of Incendin—was barren.

  “There are many elementals,” Honl answered.

  Tan sniffed, thinking of the elementals that he sensed all around him, elementals that he had no name for but were nonetheless present all around. There was no doubting that there were many. He thought back to when he’d first discovered his connection to the elementals, when he realized that he was able to reach the nymid and the draasin. Even then, he hadn’t realized how commonly the elementals were found.

  Time had changed much about his understanding. They weren’t just drawn to places of convergences, though there was something about those places that was unique. They were found throughout the land, a part of the land in ways that Tan still didn’t fully understand.

  “But elementals created by forcing together opposites? Fire and earth, much like kaas. Why would the ancients have attempted such things?” he asked.

  They paused atop a tower of rock. Spread out to the south beneath them was all of Ince
ndin. Distantly, Tan could make out the flames spewing from the top of the Fire Fortress as it burned with an intensity unlike anything he’d ever seen. Power radiated from that shaping. Even from here, part of him was drawn to it, itching to join in the shaping.

  To the north, Incendin slowly blended into Nara and the kingdoms, eventually rolling into the plains of Ter before reaching Ethea. Tan couldn’t see the capital, but the bonds between Asboel and Amia pulled on him, guiding him even if his eyes failed.

  To the east, the great Gholund Mountains separated Incendin from Galen, but also from Chenir. Tan had never visited Chenir, at least no longer than it took to stop kaas from attacking and to save Honl. There were shapers there with a different understanding of the elements and a different way of reaching the elementals. They would need to work with Chenir as well if they hoped to stop Par-shon.

  “You ask why your ancestors would force the elementals to change when you have done much the same.”

  “I’m sorry for what’s happened to you,” Tan said. Honl stood off the rock, the shape of a man made of black shadows and darkness. Warmth radiated from him, much like it did from the draasin.

  Honl faced him. “That was not my point, Tan. You serve as the Mother has directed, and I do not think it was my time to return to her. This,” he said, sweeping a hand over himself, “is a form of my choosing. I can be any other form should I wish it.”

  With the words, he shifted, becoming the shape of the lisincend, the hounds, the draasin, before resuming the shape of a man.

  “This feels the most fitting,” Honl said.

  “What does it mean that you can speak?”

  “I think that I could always speak. I am of wind, and wind is the elemental of life, of voice and music. When you saved me, you fused spirit to me, giving me language and understanding.”

  Tan still didn’t fully understand how. What did it mean that Honl had been fused to spirit? What would it mean for Honl to have the understanding that spirit offered, or to be the only one of his kind?

  “You’re no longer ashi, are you?”

  Honl shimmered for a moment, the dark cloud that created his form drifting apart for a moment. “Ashi is wind. I am wind, but now I am something more. Perhaps ashi,” Honl said.

  Even Honl didn’t know what he was. How was Tan to know?

  “Thank you for helping when Issan attacked,” Tan said.

  “You do not need to thank me, Tan. The bond still connects us.”

  “That didn’t change?”

  “Did the bond change with the draasin when you reforged your connection with spirit?”

  Tan knew that it had. Before nearly losing the bond with Asboel, he had been able to understand the draasin and had been able to speak with him, but when Tan had saved the bond, it had required the addition of spirit. They had both chosen the connection, but the choosing had granted both Tan and Asboel a deeper understanding of one another. Maybe that was why Tan had been able to reach the fire bond. Maybe it was not his ability at all, but something borrowed from Asboel.

  Honl started away, drifting on another step and making his way forward. Tan followed him, reaching the ground with a shaping of earth and wind so that he landed atop a massive boulder. Another dozen steps, and they reached the border of Nara and the kingdoms.

  Tan paused, letting the sense of the barrier wash over him. It vibrated against him, but not as strongly as he thought it should. Something about the barrier had changed.

  Honl passed over, blowing through, briefly becoming a dark cloud again as he passed over the barrier. He lingered, looking toward Incendin, before facing Tan once more.

  Earth sensing told Tan that something else watched him from deep within Incendin. He reached out with earth, trying to understand what he sensed, but he realized that was the wrong element to choose. Using fire and spirit, he reached for the fire bond.

  There, he glimpsed a massive hound watching him. Tan didn’t remember healing one quite so large, but he didn’t sense twisted fire within her. She aligned with fire, drawing strongly on the fire bond, burning within it, but she also held strongly onto earth, using it to obscure herself. Without the fire bond, Tan wondered if he would have even known she was there.

  She bounded toward Tan and landed almost at the border, as if sensing the barrier, and then lowered herself to sit. Eyes of deep orange stared at him, watching him with an intelligence he didn’t remember from the other hounds.

  Honl drifted toward him in cloud form and then shifted into the shape of a man. He stood next to Tan, his insubstantial form allowing shafts of sunlight to filter through. “She waits for you, Tan.”

  Tan glanced at Honl. “You speak to her?”

  Honl tipped his head to the side, farther than would be possible for a person not made of smoke and wind. “I hear the way she calls to you,” he said.

  “I hear nothing.”

  Honl shifted into a shape that resembled the hound and then back into the shape of a man. “Only because you are not listening.”

  Tan focused on the fire bond, letting himself feel the way fire called. This bond was the reason he could speak to Sashari and Enya, the reason he was able to reach the hatchlings and name Asgur, allowing him to live. With the fire bond, he could reach kaas where it slithered far beneath the earth—now near the Fire Fortress—serving Fur and the bond that had formed between them. In time, Tan hoped to reach saa, perhaps saldam and inferin. Why couldn’t he reach the hounds?

  He sighed out a shaping of fire mixed with spirit, combining them together as he reached for the hound. As Honl suggested, he sensed her waiting.

  The call was distant. No . . . not distant, but deep, a heavy rumbling that reminded him of earth. Not of golud, but of another elemental, one that he’d heard speak to him. Nodn was an elemental of earth, different than the vast golud, and one that Tan had managed to hear.

  The hound called through fire, but also through earth.

  Tan added earth to his shaping, mixing fire and spirit with it, letting them all join. As he did, the rumbling sound of the hound came to him, a deep, echoing call that suddenly filled his mind with nearly the same power that Asboel had initially managed.

  He grabbed his head and pushed the awareness to the back of his mind, fighting for control. The hound sat on her haunches, her deep orange eyes simply staring, as if oblivious to the pain she had nearly caused him.

  Who are you?

  That was the first question the hound asked, the call that she sent like a deep, fiery rumble through the earth. She had asked the question over and over, waiting for the time when Tan would hear her and answer. Since he had not, she had continued with the question, sending it with increasing strength until he would eventually have no choice but to hear and answer.

  I am Tan, he sent.

  The hound’s ears perked and she stood. She paced in front of the barrier, long snout sniffing at it for a moment before stepping across. Her short tail twitched as she did, as if what she sensed of the barrier had given her some discomfort.

  Tan reached through his ability with earth, sensing the hound. As he did, a familiarity clicked within. He remembered the healing of this hound, one of the first that he had brought back to fire. Like all the other hounds that he’d healed, there was strength to her, and a sense of massive and deep power that rivaled any of the elementals that Tan had ever encountered.

  You are different, he said.

  She circled around him, sniffing as she did. Tan had not been this close to one of the hounds before—at least not one that lived—and there was something very disconcerting about the way she circled him. She briefly bared her teeth to Honl, and sunlight flashed off her long fangs.

  Changed. This form is different than before. It is more fitting.

  Changed. Had she changed like Honl had changed, or was there a different way that the hounds had been created?

  You should no longer have to fight against fire, Tan suggested.

  Fire is there, but there is mor
e.

  Earth.

  Her head swiveled toward the north. Toward Ethea, he noted. Earth and fire should not mingle.

  And yet they do, Tan said.

  You have brought me to fire. How?

  The question seemed to have another layer beyond what she asked, though Tan had a difficult time trying to determine what that might be. How have you changed?

  She stood, circling Tan and giving Honl a wide berth. Somehow, she seemed even larger than she had before. I know little before my birth.

  Tan paused. When were you born?

  The hound drew her eyes to the sun and sniffed at the air. When I first saw you.

  Tan turned to Honl. “Did you know?” he asked.

  “Know?”

  Could he have been wrong? Had the hounds not been elementals when they roamed free? Or maybe they were elementals the same way that kaas had been one—powerful and wild, but without a true connection to the element. Now that Tan had drawn them into fire, solidifying the connection, they had become something more.

  How had he managed to do something like that? He shouldn’t have the ability to create an elemental. And he hadn’t, he didn’t think. All that he’d done was to take the power that already existed and bring it into the proper alignment. Fire had allowed what he’d done. Had Tan attempted something Fire opposed, he doubted he would have succeeded.

  “The hounds were not elementals before?” Tan asked.

  Honl ran a hand over the hound, passing through her before standing again. “She is fire and earth. You said so yourself.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Tan said. “Were they not elementals before I healed them? Was kaas?”

  Honl shifted into a thin cloud and then back into his manlike shape again. “Does it matter what was? All that matters is what is.”

  Tan had no answer for that, but it did matter to him. How many others were there like kaas and the hounds? How many other experiments existed from that time so long ago? Was that part of the secret that the Utu Tonah knew? He’d alluded to a knowledge that few within the kingdoms possessed, knowing that the elementals had once been harnessed, and he’d known about kaas. What else might there be?