Shaman's Crossing (The Soldier Son Trilogy #1)

Dewara fell silent, but his feathered chest surged with his emotion. It was the brooding, seething silence of a man who hates and hates without hope of satisfaction. Then he spoke softly, saying, “The warriors of your people are on the edges of the mountain forests claimed by the Dappled Folk. Your warriors are strong. They defeated the Kidona when no other Plainspeople could stand against us. I speak to you of our ancient defeat by the Dappled Folk. I reveal to you this shame of my people so that you may understand that the Dappled Ones deserve none of your good god’s mercy. You should show them the same sword’s edge you showed us. Use your iron weapons to slay them from a distance, and never go near their people or their homes, or they will work their sorcery upon you. They should be trampled underfoot like dung worms. No humiliation is undeserved by them, no atrocity too vicious to inflict on them. Do not ever regret anything your folk do to them, for behold what they did to my people. They severed our bridge to the dream world.” His hands fell to his sides. “When I die, my being will end. There is no passage for me to the birth lands of the spirits of my people.

“When I was a young man, before our war with your people, I vowed I would reopen this passage. I made my vow before my people and my gods. I captured and shed the blood of a hawk to bind me to it. And so I am bound.” He gestured at his bird form. “Twice I attempted this passage. I crossed and did battle with the terrible guardian they have set upon our way. Twice I was defeated. But I did not surrender, nor did I give up. Not until your father shot me with his iron, not until he sank the magic of your people deep into my chest, crippling my Kidona magic, did I know that I could not do this myself. I thought I had failed.”

He paused in his account and shook his beaked head. “I had no hope. I knew I was condemned to the torment of the oath-breaker when I died. But then the gods revealed to me their way. This is why they allowed your people to make war upon us and conquer us. This is why they showed us the power of your iron magic. This is why your father sought me out and gave you to me. The gods sent me my weapon. I have trained you and taught you. The iron magic belongs to you, and you belong to me. I send you to open the way for the Kidona. It has taken all the strength of the feeble magic that remains in me to bring you this far. I can go no further. I redeem my oath in you and bring great glory to my name forever. You will slay their guardian with the cold iron magic. Go now. Open the way.”

“I have no weapon,” I said. My own words made me a coward in my eyes.

“I will show you how, now. This is how you summon your weapon to you.”

He stooped impatiently and dragged his finger in a crescent in the dust. It left a line. He stooped and blew upon the dusty stone, and as the dust flew away from his breath, a shining bronze swanneck was revealed. He gestured at it proudly. Then he lifted it from the ground; its outline remained in the stone of the cliffs, like the imprint of an animal’s hoof near a stream bed. With a powerful blow, he drove the gleaming blade into the blue stone at our feet. “There. That will hold this end of the bridge for the Kidona people. Now, you must summon your own weapon, to use against the guardian. I cannot call iron.”

I pushed my doubts away. I stooped, and in the dust I drew an image I knew well. It was an image I had idly drawn a thousand times in my boyhood. I drew a cavalla sword, proud and straight, with a sturdy haft and dangling tassel. As my fingers traced it against the stone, I suddenly hungered for the weapon to be within my hand again. And when I stooped and blew my breath across the dusty stone, the sword I had left at Dewara’s campsite was suddenly there at my feet. Triumphant yet wondering, I lifted the blade from the earth. Its imprint remained behind beside the swanneck’s. When I proudly flourished it aloft, Dewara shrank from it, lifting his arm-wing to shield himself from the steel in my hand.

“Take it and go!” he hissed, his arms lifted to mimic the aggressive stance of a bird. “Slay the guardian. But bear it away from me before it can weaken the magic that holds us here. Go. My swanneck anchors this end. Your iron will hold the other.”

I had become so much his creature that I could not think of any alternative to doing what he had commanded. In that time and place and uncertain light, there was no room for me to think of disobeying him. So I turned from him and walked along the stone ledge to the cliff’s edge. The rocky chasm gaped bottomlessly before me. The standing hoodoos of stone and the flimsy bridges that connected them were my only possible passage to the other side. My destination was faded by distance, as if smoke or fog hung in the air and curtained it. I could see no detail of it. The sculpted pinnacles varied in size; the tops of some were no bigger than tables, while others could have supported a mansion. The capstones of each spire were a slightly different gray-blue, a harder stone than that of the softer columns that the wind had eroded away beneath them. There was no bridge between the cliff edge and the first hoodoo. I would have to leap to it. It was not an impossible distance, and my landing place was large, as big as the beds of two wagons. If I had been leaping over solid ground, it would not have been so daunting. But below me gaped the seemingly bottomless ravine. I gathered my courage and my strength for the leap.