Page 45 of A Monsoon Rising

It was a frantically scribbled note from Jie. Talasyn read the contents in disbelief.

Alaric had sailed his shallop to the Dominion’s lone Shadow Sever on Chal earlier that morning, leaving Sevraim and its crew behind. Once there, he’d sent away the Nenavarene moth coracles that had guided him. And now there was a storm brewing to the northwest.

I tried to warn him, Lachis’ka,Jie had written,but he wouldn’t listen to me.

Inwardly cursing the Night Emperor for being all kinds of a fool, Talasyn shoved the message into her pocket. “Uwila,” she told Pakwan, the command to fly home.

The eagle chirped in farewell and took wing, but Talasyn was already running to her campsite.

There she packed up her gear, then hurried out of the shrineand down Belian’s steep slope. These days she docked her moth coracle on a ledge where the trees had been cleared out by lightning-induced wildfire a few sennights prior. It was closer to the ruins than the traditional landing grid at Rapat’s garrison, but she still couldn’t get there fast enough, barely taking a breath as she scrambled into the airship’s well and buckled the leather harness securing her to the helmsman’s seat.

Talasyn fiddled with the aetherwave transceiver, pulling levers and turning dials until she patched through to the communications tower at Iantas. She reeled off her instructions—that she would handle fetching her erstwhile consort, that a rescue team should be sent if they hadn’t returned in two days. That was enough time, she figured, for the weather to calm. She didn’t want to endanger anybody else.

One of the Nenavarene archipelago’s seven main islands, Chal bore the brunt of the storms coming in from the northwest during wet season. The range of limestone cliffs where the Shadow Sever was located directly faced the Eversea, with no mountains to shield it. Itwasthe shield, and it was the worst possible place to be when the monsoon unleashed its wrath.

Alaric was an idiot. A soon-to-bedeadidiot, if Talasyn couldn’t get to him in time.

She disengaged from the Iantas frequency before the officer-in-charge could get a word in edgewise. That was the best way to get people to do what she wanted, she’d learned. As she steered her coracle over the treetops, she tried to make contact with the Kesathese shallop’s aetherwave as well, although she wasn’t particularly surprised when there was no response. That would have been too easy.

Thirty minutes of gliding brought Talasyn within sight of the Eversea and the pillars of black clouds gathering over the water on the horizon. There were no other airships in the sky; everyone else in the Dominion had hunkered down, bracingfor the worst. It was all eerily still, too. No breeze, no birdsong, as though the world was holding its breath.

The coracle’s aether hearts whined and whirred, spitting out emerald-green fumes as Talasyn accelerated. She streaked through the air in her opalescent ship, its finned blue-and-gold sails fluttering over jungles and rivers and villages whose roofs were a patchwork of colors and patterns. All the while the pillar of clouds drew closer, becoming thicker and darker and increasingly flecked with lightning.

Talasyn raced the storm, hoping to get to Alaric before it made landfall, but her efforts were futile. It was already drizzling when she crossed the channel between Sedek-We and Chal. She hastily tugged at the running rigs to fold up the sails, but still her coracle was nearly knocked off course by a gust of wind. She sailed over the narrow, sword-shaped strip of green that was Chal and began her descent, which was like diving into silver mist, rain spattering against wooden hull and metalglass sidescuttles and retracted canvas fins. Up ahead the black clouds washed over the shoreline and the world went dark with a howling that she felt reflected in her heart, in her bloodstream, all the way to the tips of her toes.

Rain and wind. Everything was pelting rain and roaring wind, slicing into her skin. But the Nenavarenealindarihad been built for weather far more vicious than what the Continent’s magic could ever achieve, and it plowed through, rolling with the current, slipping into the safer spaces between. Talasyn ignited the vessel’s fire lamps to light her way through the fog; she could see only an assortment of vague silhouettes on the beach below, but that was better than nothing. Finally she broke past the low-hanging clouds and it was all spread out before her, white sand and forested cliffs and the Eversea’s crashing waves.

She rolled her eyes when she spotted the Kesathese shallopdocked several feet away from the rising waterline. At least Alaric had possessed enough sense to secure it to the mooring with ropes, but one would think that it should have occurred to him to wonder why his was the only ship at port.

Honestly, she wasn’t much smarter, chasing after him, although there was some small consolation to be found in the good senseshehad to dock her coracle atop the cliffs and lash it to a sturdy tree trunk.

Already drenched to the bone, her braid tossed this way and that by the biting gale, Talasyn shouldered her pack of supplies and inhaled slowly, the improvements in her aethermancy about to be put to the test once more. She had practiced this at the Belian ruins and along Iantas’s granite-shell facade, but never from so great a height. She broke into a run—and leapt right off the edge of the cliff, every churn of the Eversea below promising dark death by water, by momentum.

As she fell, Talasyn first wove the lily-shaped grapnel with its crown of hooks. She hurled it, still attached to her hand by an ever-lengthening chain of light, toward the cliff face. The golden barbs dug in and the coils folded and she was yanked up onto the craggy limestone, where she soon found her footing in a passable imitation of how Alaric had stopped his own plunge when the balcony crumbled under them back at the Citadel. She had studied her memories of that carefully and she had asked the Light Sever to show her how, but a part of her still couldn’t believe that it had actually worked. The storm continued to build as she rappelled down the cliff, her magic singing in her hands, in a feat of concentration not helped in the least by how treacherous limestone was in the rain. Every time her knees and elbows and the soles of her boots slid off the wet surface her heart caught in her throat.

Finally she made it all the way down and sank into the damp and darkening sand of Chal’s westernmost shore. Thegray heavens growled with thunder and spat out a ceaseless downpour. The waves rolled in like the spines of dragons and loomed up like seesawing towers, agitated by the same bitter wind that bent the beach’s coconut palms nearly in half and threatened to blow Talasyn away as she scrambled over the rocks that led to the Shadow Sever’s cave.

Bukang-nabi, the Nenavarene called it. The Mouth of Night, where the Shadowgate came seeping in from aetherspace as plumes of steam rising out of cracks in the earth rather than as the eruptions of smoke that shot up into the skies of the Continent.

True to its name, the Mouth’s entrance resembled a gaping, jagged maw at the base of the cliff, carved out by the ocean beating against the limestone over a span of thousands of years. The Eversea gurgled into it, forming rapids over its boulders and stalagmites, and Talasyn cursed her husband to hell and back while she navigated the treacherous path inside, trying to cling to cave walls that were far too slippery. Another row of turbulent waves dashed against the rocks, coating her rain-soaked body in salty sea spray, as though adding insult to injury.

Although the interior of the Mouth was shielded from the sky’s wrath, conditions there weren’t much better. The flood fed the swelling river and Talasyn had to watch her step on the narrow juts of stone serving as its banks. The gale whistled down the tunnel, raking at her spine, and the already meager daylight faded as she ventured deeper.

“Alaric!” Her call echoed around her in the gloom, but it was soon swallowed up by the torrents, by the song of wind on stone. She tried again and again, but there was no response.

This subterranean river was unpredictable, especially during the monsoon. It was the main reason she’d been in such a rush to get to the Mouth. What if he had already drowned? The merethought set off an ache inside her. As she inched along the water’s edge, she couldn’t escape from the images that plagued the dark behind her eyes, images of that pale skin turned blue and those black locks tangled up in seaweed, his strong warrior’s body unresponsive, bloated, dashed against the rocks, never to exist in the same room as hers again.

Something crept up Talasyn’s throat, something that pinched behind the bridge of her nose and felt dangerously like tears. Gods. Crying for her Kesathese husband was a new low. She shook her head to clear the feeling, and that was when the unthinkable happened.

She slipped.

Her left leg gave out from under her and she fell into the freezing-cold river. It reached only up to her chest, but a surge barreled through the cave before she could right herself, and she was swept away.

CHAPTERSEVENTEEN

Saltwater rushed into Talasyn’s lungs and stung her eyes. She did not know how to swim. There hadn’t been so much as a pond on the Great Steppe. She was helpless in the face of the flood that carried her deeper and deeper into the Mouth, the world a rush of wet and ice and sparks of failing magic as she tried to conjure another grappling hook or anything else that could help her fight against the current.

But her aethermancy was no match for the fear and panic that gripped her, for the swift and violent waters that bore her. She was tumbled along the twists and turns of the cave and eventually down a brief cascade that deposited her into a deep, dark lake, where she kicked and flailed, desperately, to no avail. She was breathing water, she was sinking, she was fading, she was—

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