"What?" "Rain!"
"Ah! Rain!" bellowed Adras. He swung his arms forward, so quickly Tal thought he was about to be thrown off into space. But he was only shifting him out of the way. The rest of his cloud-body roiled and rippled, spreading out into a broad circular shape and becoming even puffier.
The cloud grew blacker. Tal rolled onto his side so he could see. He could already smell the fresh scent of rain, and the temperature dropped several degrees.
It got colder still and there was a hideous grinding noise inside the Storm Shepherd. Tal saw flecks of white appearing in the darkness of the cloud. Then large chunks of ice started to fall.
Very large chunks of ice. In fact, gigantic hailstones the size of Tal's head. Some were thrown out at a sharp angle, narrowly missing the boy as he twisted and turned in the Storm Shepherd's arms.
With the hailstones, the temperature dropped to freezing. Slowly at first, the Storm Shepherd began to fall.
"I said rain!" shouted Tal as they fell faster and faster. "Milla's down there somewhere, you idiot! She could get killed by a hailstone!"
Then the cold really took effect, and cloud and boy dropped as fast as the hailstones.
"S000000000rrrrrrrryyyyyy!" boomed Adras.
"Slow down!" shrieked Tal. But his voice was lost in the rush of their descent. He was shivering uncontrollably now, the chill of the wind making the icy temperature even lower. He felt as cold as he ever had out on the Ice.
But now he had a Sunstone, Tal thought. Several in fact. He hadn't really had time to examine the ones he'd taken from Hazror and he wasn't going to start while he was dropping like a stone from the sky.
Tal held out his hand. His fingers were already blue and he could hardly feel them. But the Sunstone glinted there. He focused on it, willing it to warm the air around his body.
At first he thought he'd failed. It was one of the simplest spells that almost any Chosen child could perform with a Sunstone. But he was still freezing.
Then he realized that he just couldn't feel the heat, because the cold was so intense. He'd have to increase the amount of heat the Sunstone put out.
He concentrated again and felt a wave of heat come off the top of the Sunstone and blow back around him. Some went into Adras as well.
They were still falling almost straight down. Tal risked a look, but his eyes instantly filled with tears from the rushing wind. Even through teary eyes, he could see that the river was very close.
Tal told the Sunstone to put out even more heat, but there was a limit to the amount it could radiate outward without heating up the ring and burning his finger. Waves of hot air billowed off it, but it was not enough to counteract the cold.
"Haaaaannnngggg oooonnnnn!" yelled Adras, and the Storm Shepherd reared back. Their vertical descent turned into a long glide. They were still dropping but it now looked like there was a slight chance they would pull up before smacking into a channel or one of the muddy islands.
But they didn't.
Adras roared and Tal shouted as the water loomed closer and closer. Tal just had time to take a deep breath, a breath that was knocked out of him a second later as they hit the water.
Storm Shepherd and Chosen boy went under, a long way underwater and actually into the mud of the river floor.
Tal found himself trapped not only by Adras's arms but also by sticky mud that refused to let go. He couldn't breathe and he couldn't see. He flailed his arms and his legs as he tried to break free.
His whole mind was filled with panic. He just wanted to take a breath. He had to breathe. He had to suck something into his lungs.
Even if it was water.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Milla and Odris saw Adras and Tal hit the water about two hundred stretches in front of them, sending up a plume of spray higher than the ship's mast.
Milla rushed to the bow and climbed up to look out. As the spray subsided she expected to see Tal's head bob up and a cloud emerge. But there were only the ripples of the impact.
Milla hesitated. She felt that she should dive in, but she was not a strong swimmer. Icecarls did not swim unless the Ice broke, in which case they had less than two minutes to get out of the water anyway.
"Odris!" she called. "Help them!"
"What for?" asked Odris. "Adras will work out what to do before too long. What an idiot! I
couldn't believe it when I saw the hail. You'd never know he was the older of the pair of us, and that by two hundred years."
"Tal will drown!" shouted Milla. "Go and help!"
"He can't live underwater?" asked Odris, shocked. She suddenly launched off the mast and shot over Milla's head. A moment later there was another, smaller plume of spray as the second Storm Shepherd plunged into the water.
Milla watched anxiously. For all his faults, Tal didn't deserve to drown.
A few air bubbles burst on the surface of the river, then one very heavy-looking Storm Shepherd emerged, lurching up to hang only a few stretches above the water. Milla couldn't tell which one it was, till it reached down and dragged another one up, who held Tal in its dripping arms.
The Chosen boy was covered in mud but he was alive, judging by the coughing and spluttering Milla could hear.
Asteyr's boat moved up close to the bedraggled Storm Shepherds and their human cargo. Adras was about to put Tal on board when Milla cried out.
"Wait! He's too muddy! Rinse him off first!"
Adras immediately complied, dunking Tal back into the river. The Chosen boy only just had time to shout, "No!" before he was completely submerged yet again.
Tal was lifted out spitting, coughing, and furious. Dropped onto the deck, he tried to get up to shout at Milla, but he was taken by a fit of coughing. Too weak to rise, he tried to crawl away from Milla. But he had only gone half a stretch when she grabbed him.
For a second he thought she was going to throw him over the side. Then he realized she was helping him up so he could vomit up water over the gunwale.
And she wasn't screaming death threats at him. She was just telling him to be careful he wasn't sick on the boat.
Even when no more water seemed likely to come up, Tal kept hanging over the side. He felt as limp and washed out as an old Underfolk mop.
But at least he was alive. And Milla hadn't tried to kill him. Even if she was being extremely weird about messing up this riverboat.
"So," croaked Tal. "We meet again."
"Yes," said Milla coldly. "Traitor. I have not forgotten. However, I have agreed to help find your Codex and return it to the Dark World. I will return to my people, too, to tell them what I have learned of Aenir and the Chosen's folly. After that, I will give myself to the Ice."
"What?" asked Tal. "What's the Chosen's folly?"
"Do not pretend you do not know," said Milla scornfully. "I have learned that the Veil was made to keep Aenirans out of our world. It is you Chosen who have broken faith with our ancestors, bringing Spiritshadows back to the Castle. You have let the Aenirans establish a foothold on our world once more."
"What are you talking about?" asked Tal. He felt dizzy and his head was clogged with water. "We have always had Spiritshadows; we have always come to Aenir for them. The Veil has nothing to do with it."
"That is not correct," said a voice Tal hadn't heard before. He lifted himself off the gunwale with effort and turned to see who it was. He hadn't expected it to be a Kurshken. He knew from the Beastmaker game that the lizards were very smart but he didn't know they could talk.
"I am Quorr Quorr Quorr Ahhtorn Sezicka. You may call me Zicka. As with so many of my kind, I am a historian. As such, I can inform you that you are quite incorrect. The Chosen first started coming to Aenir for the purposes of taking slaves - whom you term Spiritshadows less than nine hundred years ago. Prior to that, there was a period of more than a thousand years when there was no communication between the Dark World and Aenir. This was due to the ban on traveling between the two worlds that was established by Asteyr and Rame
llan after the creation of the Veil on your world and the execution of the Forgetting in ours."
"What?" Tal asked again. He felt like this was the only word he knew how to say. Then he got angry. What was he doing listening to a lizard and a savage? They knew nothing of the Chosen and the Castle and its history.
"I don't know where you heard these stories," Tal said. "But I know that we have always had Spiritshadows. We have always come to Aenir for them. That is what Aenirans are for!"
"Always?" questioned Zicka. "That is not a specific measurement of time. And you think this whole world exists purely for the purpose of providing Chosen with Spiritshadows?"
Tal was silent. He didn't know how to answer that question. He didn't feel strong enough to debate it. While he would never admit it to Milla or this Zicka lizard, he knew that his knowledge of Chosen, Castle, Dark World, and Aenir was severely limited.
"The Codex knows the true history," Tal said finally. "You'll see when we get the Codex."
Zicka smiled. At least Tal thought that was what it was doing with its mouth. Milla frowned. Before she could say anything, Tal spoke again.
"Zicka. The Codex mentioned you. You are to take us to Cold Stone Mountain. Then I have to get one of the Storm Shepherds to blow this whistle -"
Tal's hand went to his pocket to pull out the chain with the two Sunstones and the bone whistle he'd taken from Hazror. But when the chain came out, there was nothing on it.
"No!" exclaimed Tal. He dropped the chain and started frantically turning out his pockets. "I had the whistle… and two Sunstones… Gref…"
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Tal's hand closed on something wedged across the bottom of his pocket. He brought it out with a huge sigh of relief. It was the bone whistle. But there was no sign of the two Sunstones. They had been washed out and were now somewhere on the bottom of the river. Fortunately his own Sunstone ring was secure on his finger.