The Rifts of Psyche by Kyle West (popular e readers txt) 📗

He heard Cleon saying something, but it seemed like another language from another world.

What followed was a long darkness, a darkness so deep that there weren’t even dreams. It was as if Lucian were dead. When he did wake up, he was inside a hut with a fire burning at its center, over which hung a steaming pot of soup. Lucian blinked, supporting himself with his arm. He was lying on a bed of some sort of woven grass which emitted a sweet fragrance. There were two hammocks across the hut, but both were unoccupied. The periphery was filled with various articles – pottery, roughly made stools next to a small table, tools such as a pickaxe, scythe, and fishing rod, along with amphoras filled with some sort of liquid, probably water or cooking oil. There were bronze spears and shields hanging from the wall, but one spear in particular caught Lucian’s eye, which seemed to be made from dark gray graphene. That was a genuine, retractable shockspear, the kind only forged by Academy Atomicists. Such a spear would have had to be brought here, somehow, as Lucian doubted anyone had the capacity to create one of its kind with this world’s primitive technology.

Lucian hadn’t been awake more than five minutes when Elder Erymmo stooped into the hut, his solemn face watching Lucian from the doorway. This must have been the Elder’s home.

“Elder Erymmo? What happened?”

The elderly man considered him for a moment. “You overexerted yourself. It can happen if you stream too much magic, too quickly. Streaming burns the body’s physical energy as much as it does ethereal.” Elder Erymmo was already ladling some of the soup into a wooden bowl. “Can you sit up?”

Lucian thought he could manage that much. It took some time to sit up, and he felt a moment of vertigo as his vision darkened. After a few steadying breaths, his sight returned. Elder Erymmo was holding the bowl before him.

“Eat slowly,” he said. “We have much to talk about.”

Lucian took a bite of the soup, which was filled with greens, potatoes, and prawns.

Elder Erymmo took up the stool nearest Lucian, watching him for a moment. “Things can change in such a short amount of time. It isn’t often we have the Queen’s soldiers in the Greenrift. Led by a Mage-Lord, no less. That they have infiltrated this deeply into the Riftlands is a cause for great worry. Captain Fergus reported heavy armament and at least fifty hoplites, with no less than six Mage-Knights. That is no ordinary slave train. It’s a war party. And they were sent here for one purpose.”

Lucian already knew the truth, but hearing it stated so boldly only cemented it in his mind. “They were looking for me.”

Elder Erymmo gave a slow nod. “They still are. You buried the entrance to the Greenrift, but we must collapse the entire tunnel and give up the terraces. At least, we must for now. We have stores to last a few months, which hopefully is enough to see us through. But soon, food will be the least of our worries.”

“What do you mean?”

“That Mage-Lord and his men are headed here, Lucian. The Deepfork is a three days’ march north of the terraces, and it’s another four-day march down the Deeprift to reach Kiro. And if they are hardy and run much of the way, they might be here even sooner.”

“So we get our defenses ready,” Lucian said. “We have mages and soldiers too, right?”

Elder Erymmo’s face was grave. “We do. But the Sorceress-Queen may have more men scouring the rifts than even that group. If two or more groups of them were to join up, I’m afraid we wouldn’t last long. Best case, we defend ourselves at a grievous loss we could never recover from.”

“But I don’t understand,” Lucian said. “How do they know that I’m in this village?”

“They might not know you’re in this one, but it wouldn’t take long before they found the right community. There are about a dozen villages like ours in the Deeprift, and we mostly get along. And it may be there’s time to cobble together a decent defense. But we cannot depend on that.”

“There’s one thing that’s still confusing me,” Lucian said. “How in the Worlds did she get her soldiers this far without us knowing about it? Isn’t Dara a couple of months away at least over land?”

“It is,” Elder Erymmo confirmed. “I see two possibilities. The Sorceress-Queen’s brands make it possible for her to instantly communicate with anyone who has one, and that would include all her Mage-Lords. It’s unlikely someone of such a high rank would be directly controlled, but the Sorceress-Queen would be able to give and receive information from them, despite distance. In this possibility, she would have had some men already in place in the rifts, in secret. Which I find unlikely. The other possibility, which to me is the more probable one, is that they were carried from Dara by the Queen’s airship, Zephyr.”

Airship? If they had that, then they could be in the Deeprift faster than Erymmo had suggested. In fact, they could be here at any moment.

“I see what you’re thinking,” Elder Erymmo said. “The Riftlands are treacherous for an airship’s passage. The mountains bordering the Deeprift are so tall that it will still take a few days to find a pass low enough for the ship to get through without its crew suffocating. The Zephyr has never been sighted this deep in the Riftlands for that very reason, besides the fact that traveling the rifts with its wyverns and strange wind patterns is practically a death wish. Yet even so, we must allow for the possibility, given how much the Queen wishes to find you.”

Those words only reminded Lucian of his dream. He suppressed a shudder.

“What do we do then, Elder? How do we fight them off?”

Elder Erymmo watched him grimly, his expression ashen. Lucian had a similar feeling when the Transcends of the