Storm Warriors
Keladry of Mindelan lay with the comfortable black blanket
of sleep wrapped around her. Then, against the blackness,
light moved and strengthened to show twelve large, vaguely
rat- or insectlike metal creatures, devices built for
murder. The killing devices were magical machines made of
iron-coated giants' bones, chains, pulleys, dagger-fingers
and -toes, and a long, whiplike tail. The seven-foot-tall
devices stood motionless in a half circle as the light
revealed what lay at their feet: a pile of dead children.
With the devices and the bodies visible, the light spread
to find the man who seemed to be the master of the
creations. To Keladry of Mindelan, known as Kel, he was
the Nothing Man. He was almost two feet shorter than the
killing devices, long-nosed and narrow-mouthed, with
small, rapidly blinking eyes and dull brown hair. His dark
robe was marked with stains and burns; his hair was
unkempt. He always gnawed a fingernail, or scratched a
pimple, or shifted from foot to foot.
Once that image-devices, bodies, man-was complete, Kel
woke. She stared at the shadowed ceiling and cursed the
Chamber of the Ordeal. The Chamber had shown Kel this
vision, or variations of it, after her formal Ordeal of
knighthood. As far as Kel knew, no one else had been given
any visions of people to be found once a squire was
knighted. As everyone she knew understood it, the Ordeal
was straightforward enough. The Chamber forced would-be
knights to live through their fears. If they did this
without making a sound, they were released, to be
proclaimed knights, and that was the end of the matter.
Kel was different. Three or four times a week, the Chamber
sent herthis dream. It was a reminder of the task it had
set her. After her Ordeal, before the Chamber set her
free, it had shown her the killing devices, the Nothing
Man, and the dead children. It had demanded that Kel stop
it all.
Kel guessed that the Nothing Man would be in Scanra, to
the north, since the killing devices had appeared during
Scanran raids on Tortall last summer. Trapped in the
capital by a hard winter, with travel to the border nearly
impossible, Kel had lived with growing tension. She had to
ride north as soon as the mountain passes opened if she
was to sneak into Scanra and begin her search for the
Nothing Man. Every moment she remained in Tortall invited
the growing risk that the king would issue orders to most
knights, including Kel, to defend the northern border. The
moment Kel got those orders, she would be trapped. She had
vowed to defend the realm and obey its monarchs, which
would mean fighting soldiers, not hunting for a mage whose
location was unknown.
"Maybe I'll get lucky. Maybe I'll ride out one day and
find there's a line of killing devices from the palace
right up to the Nothing Man's door," she grumbled, easing
herself out from under her covers. Kel never threw off her
blankets. With a number of sparrows and her dog sharing
her bed, she might smother a friend if she hurried. Even
taking care, she heard muffled cheeps of protest. "Sorry,"
she told her companions, and set her feet on the cold
flagstones of her floor.
She made her way across her dark room and opened the
shutters on one of her windows. Before her lay a courtyard
and a stable where the men of the King's Own kept their
horses. The torches that lit the courtyard were nearly
out. The pearly radiance that came to the eastern sky in
the hour before dawn fell over snow, stable, and the edges
of the palace wall beyond.
The scant light showed a big girl of eighteen,
broadshouldered and solid-waisted, with straight mouse-
brown hair cut short below her earlobes and across her
forehead. She had a dreamer's hazel eyes, set beneath
long, curling lashes, odd in contrast to the many fine
scars on her hands and the muscles that flexed and bunched
under her nightshirt. Her nose was still unbroken and
delicate after eight years of palace combat training, her
lips full and quicker to smile than frown. Determination
filled every inch of her strong body.
Motion in the shadows at the base of the courtyard wall
caught her eye. Kel gasped as a winged creature waddled
out into the open courtyard, as ungainly on its feet as a
vulture. The flickering torchlight caught and sparked
along the edges of metal feathers on wings and legs. Steel
legs, flexible and limber, ended in steel-clawed feet.
Between the metal wings and above the metal legs and feet
was human flesh, naked, hairless, grimy, and in this case,
male.
The Stormwing looked at Kel and grinned, baring sharp
steel teeth. His face was lumpy and unattractive, marked
by a large nose, small eyes, and a thin upper lip with a
full lower one. He had the taunting smile of someone born
impudent. "Startle you, did I?" he inquired.
Kel thanked the gods that the cold protected her sensitive
nose, banishing most of the Stormwing's foul stench.
Stormwings loved battlefields, where they tore corpses to
pieces, urinated on them, smeared them with dung, then
rolled in the mess. The result was a nauseating odor that
made even the strongest stomach rebel. Her teachers had
explained that the purpose of Stormwings was to make
people think twice before they chose to fight, knowing
what might happen to the dead when Stormwings arrived. So
far they hadn't done much good as far as Kel could see:
people still fought battles and killed each other,
Stormwings or no. Tortall's Stormwing population was
thriving. But this was the first time she'd seen one on
palace grounds.
Kel glared at him.
"Get out of here, you nasty thing! Shoo!"
"Is that any way to greet a future companion?" demanded
the Stormwing, raising thin brown brows.