Vinge, Joan D - SS - The Storm King.pdf - Joan D Vinge - przemosta

THE STORM KING

By Joan D. Vinge

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

* * * *

They said that in those days the lands were cursed that lay in the shadow of the

Storm King. The peak thrust up from the gently rolling hills and fertile farmlands like

an impossible wave cresting on the open sea, a brooding finger probing the secrets

of heaven. Once it had vomited fire and fumes; ash and molten stone had poured

from its throat. The distant ancestors of the people who lived beneath it now had

died of its wrath. But the Earth had spent Her fury in one final cataclysm, and now

the mountain lay quiet, dark, and cold, its mouth choked with congealed stone.

And yet still the people lived in fear. No one among them remembered having

seen its summit, which was always crowned by cloud. Lightning played in the

purple, shrouding robes, and distant thunder filled the dreams of the folk who slept

below with the roaring of dragons.

For it was a dragon who had come to dwell among the crags: that elemental

focus of all storm and fire carried on the wind, drawn to a place where the Earth’s

fire had died, a place still haunted by ancient grief. And sharing the spirit of fire, the

dragon knew no law and obeyed no power except its own. By day or night it would

rise on furious wings of wind and sweep over the land, inundating the crops with

rain, blasting trees with its lightning, battering walls and tearing away rooftops;

terrifying rich and poor, man and beast, for the sheer pleasure of destruction, the

exaltation of uncontrolled power. The people had prayed to the new gods who had

replaced their worship of the Earth to deliver them; but the new gods made Their

home in the sky, and seemed to be beyond hearing.

By now the people had made Their names into curses, as they pried their

oxcarts from the mud or looked out over fields of broken grain and felt their bellies

and their children’s bellies tighten with hunger. And they would look toward the

distant peak and curse the Storm King, naming the peak and the dragon both; but

always in whispers and mutters, for fear the wind would hear them, and bring the

dark storm sweeping down on them again.

* * * *

The storm-wracked town of Wyddon and its people looked up only briefly in their

sullen shaking-off and shoveling-out of mud as a stranger picked his way among

them. He wore the woven leather of a common soldier, his cloak and leg-gings were

coarse and ragged, and he walked the planks laid down in the stinking street as

though determination alone kept him on his feet. A woman picking through baskets

of stunted leeks in the marketplace saw with vague surprise that he had entered the

tiny village temple; a man putting fresh thatch on a torn-open roof saw him come out

again, propelled by the indignant, orange-robed priest.

“If you want witchery, find yourself a witch! This is a holy place; the gods

don’t meddle in vulgar magic!”

“I can see that,” the stranger muttered, staggering in ankle-deep mud. He

climbed back onto the boards with some difficulty and obvious disgust. “Maybe if

they did you’d have streets and not rivers of muck in this town.” He turned away in

anger, almost stumbled over a mud-colored girl blocking his forward progress on

the boardwalk.

“You priests should bow down to the Storm King!” The girl postured

insolently, looking toward the priest. “The dragon can change all our lives more in

one night than your gods have done in a lifetime.”

“Slut!” The priest shook his carven staff at her; its neck-lace of golden bells

chimed like absurd laughter. “There’s a witch for you, beggar. If you think she can

teach you to tame the dragon, then go with her!” He turned away, disappearing into

the temple. The stranger’s body jerked, as though it strained against his control,

wanting to strike at the priest’s retreating back.

“You’re a witch?” The stranger turned and glared down at the bony figure

standing in his way, found her studying him back with obvious skepticism. He

imagined what she saw—a foreigner, his straight black hair whacked off like a serf’s,

his clothes crawling with filth, his face grimed and gaunt and set in a bitter grimace.

He frowned more deeply.

The girl shook her head. “No. I’m just bound to her. You have business to

take up with her, I see—about the Storm King.” She smirked, expecting him to

believe she was privy to secret knowledge.

“As you doubtless overheard, yes.” He shifted his weight from one leg to the

other, trying fruitlessly to ease the pain in his back.

She shrugged, pushing her own tangled brown hair back from her face. “Well,

you’d better be able to pay for it, or you’ve come a long way from Kwansai for

nothing.”

He started, before he realized that his coloring and his eyes gave that much

away. “I can pay.” He drew his dagger from its hidden sheath; the only weapon he

had left, and the only thing of value. He let her glimpse the jeweled hilt before he

pushed it back out of sight.

Her gray eyes widened briefly. “What do I call you, Prince of Thieves?” with

another glance at his rags.

“Call me Your Highness,” not lying, and not quite joking.

She looked up into his face again, and away. “Call me Nothing, Your

Highness. Because I am nothing.” She twitched a shoulder at him. “And follow me.”

* * * *

They passed the last houses of the village without further speech, and followed the

mucky track on into the dark, dripping forest that lay at the mountain’s feet. The girl

stepped off the road and into the trees without warning: he followed her recklessly,

half angry and half afraid that she was aban-doning him. But she danced ahead of

him through the pines, staying always in sight, although she was plainly impatient

with his own lagging pace. The dank chill of the sunless wood gnawed his aching

back and swarms of stinging gnats feasted on his exposed skin; the bare-armed girl

seemed as oblivious to the insects as she was to the cold.

He pushed on grimly, as he had pushed on until now, having no choice but to

keep on or die. And at last his persistence was rewarded. He saw the forest rise

ahead, and buried in the flank of the hillside among the trees was a mossy hut linteled

by immense stones.

The girl disappeared into the hut as he entered the clearing before it. He

slowed, looking around him at the cluster of carven images pushing up like unnatural

growths from the spongy ground, or dangling from tree limbs. Most of the images

were subtly or blatantly obscene. He averted his eyes and limped between them to

the hut’s entrance.

He stepped through the doorway without waiting for an invitation, to find the

girl crouched by the hearth in the hut’s cramped interior, wearing the secret smile of

a cat. Beside her an incredibly wrinkled, ancient woman sat on a three-legged stool.

The legs were carved into shapes that made him look away again, back at the

wrinkled face and the black, buried eyes that regarded him with flinty bemusement.

He noticed abruptly that there was no wall behind her: the far side of the hut melted

into the black volcanic stone, a natural fissure opening into the mountain’s side.

“So, Your Highness, you’ve come all the way from Kwansai seeking the

Storm King, and a way to tame its power?”

He wrapped his cloak closely about him and grimaced, the nearest thing to a

smile of scorn that he could manage. “Your girl has a quick tongue. But I’ve come

to the wrong place, it seems, for real power.”

“Don’t be so sure!” The old woman leaned toward him, shrill and spiteful.

“You can’t afford to be too sure of anything, Lassan-din. You were prince of

Kwansai; you should have been king there when your father died, and overlord of

these lands as well. And now you’re nobody and you have no home, no friends,

barely even your life. Nothing is what it seems to be ... it never is.”

Lassan-din’s mouth went slack; he closed it, speechless at last. Nothing is

what it seems. The girl called Nothing grinned up at him from the floor. He took a

deep breath, shifting to ease his back again. “Then you know what I’ve come for, if

you already know that much, witch.”

The hag half-rose from her obscene stool; he glimpsed a flash of color, a

brighter, finer garment hidden beneath the drab outer robe she wore—the way the

inner woman still burned fiercely bright in her eyes, showing through the wasted flesh

of her ancient body. “Call me no names, you prince of beggars! I am the Earth’s

Own. Your puny Kwansai priests, who call my sisterhood ‘witch,’ who destroyed

our holy places and drove us into hiding, know nothing of power. They’re fools;

they don’t believe in power and they are powerless, charlatans. You know it or you

wouldn’t be here!” She settled back, wheezing. “Yes, I could tell you what you

want; but suppose you tell me.”

“I want what’s mine! I want my kingdom.” He paced restlessly, two steps and

then back. “I know of elementals, all the old legends. My people say that dragons

are storm-bringers, born from a joining of Fire and Water and Air, three of the four

Primes of Existence. Nothing but the Earth can defy their fury. And I know that if I

can hold a dragon in its lair with the right spells, it must give me what I want, like the

heroes of the Golden Time. I want to use its power to take back my lands.”

“You don’t want much, do you?” The old woman rose from her seat and

turned her back on him, throwing a surrep-titious handful of something into the fire,

making it flare up balefully. She stirred the pot that hung from a hook above it,

spitting five times into the noxious brew as she stirred. Lassan-din felt his empty

stomach turn over. “If you want to chal-lenge the Storm King, you should be out

there climbing, not here holding your hand out to me.”

“Damn you!” His exasperation broke loose, and his hand wrenched her

around to face him. “I need some spell, some magic, some way to pen a dragon up.

I can’t do it with my bare hands!”

She shook her head, unintimidated, and leered toothlessly at him. “My power

comes to me through my body, up from the Earth Our Mother. She won’t listen to a

man—especially one who would destroy Her worship. Ask your priests who

worship the air to teach you their empty prayers.”

He saw the hatred rising in her, and felt it answered: The dagger was out of its

hidden sheath and in his hand before he knew it, pressing the soft folds of her neck.

“I don’t believe you, witch. See this dagger—” quietly, deadly. “If you give me what

I want, you’ll have the jewels in its hilt. If you don’t, you’ll feel its blade cut your

throat.”

“All right, all right!” She strained back as the blade’s tip began to bite. He let

her go. She felt her neck; the girl sat perfectly still at their feet, watching. “I can give

you something—a spell. I can’t guarantee She’ll listen. But you have enough hatred

in you for ten men—and maybe that will make your man’s voice loud enough to

penetrate Her skin. This mountain is sacred to Her. She still listens through its ears,

even if She no longer breathes here.”

“Never mind the superstitious drivel. Just tell me how I can keep the dragon in

without it striking me dead with its lightning. How I can fight fire with fire—”

“You don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water.”

He stared at her; at the obviousness of it, and the absurdity—“The dragon is

the creator of storm. How can mere water—?”

“A dragon is anathema. Remember that, prince who would be king. It is

chaos, power uncontrolled; and power always has a price. That’s the key to

everything. I can teach you the spell for controlling the waters of the Earth; but

you’re the one who must use it.”

* * * *

He stayed with the women through the day, and learned as the hours passed to

believe in the mysteries of the Earth. The crone spoke words that brought water

fountaining up from the well outside her door while he looked on in amazement, his

weariness and pain forgotten. As he watched she made a brook flow upstream;

made the crystal droplets beading the forest pines join in a diadem to crown his

head, and then with a word released them to run cold and helpless as tears into the

collar of his ragged tunic.

She seized the fury that rose up in him at her insolence, and challenged him to

do the same. He repeated the ungainly, ancient spellwords defiantly, arrogantly, and

nothing hap-pened. She scoffed, his anger grew; she jeered and it grew stronger. He

repeated the spell again, and again, and again…until at last he felt the terrifying

presence of an alien power rise in his body, answering the call of his blood. The

droplets on the trees began to shiver and commingle; he watched an eddy form in

the swift clear water of the stream— The Earth had answered him.

His anger failed him at the unbelievable sight of his success…and the power

failed him too. Dazed and strengthless, at last he knew his anger for the only emotion

with the depth or urgency to move the body of the Earth, or even his own. But he

had done the impossible—made the Earth move to a man’s bidding. He had proved

his right to be a king, proved that he could force the dragon to serve him as well. He

Vinge, Joan D - SS - The Storm King.pdf

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