Call Of The Rift: Veil , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Jae Waller

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226 pages

English

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Return to Jae Waller s wondrous and war-torn colonial world in this captivating second instalment in The Call of the Rift series [A] stunning debut . . . An intricately lush and well-crafted new fantasy that deserves (and demands) a sequel. Kirkus Reviews, starred review of The Call of the Rift: Flight The Blackbird Battle has left all sides devastated. The wind spirit Suriel has disappeared. A hard winter is coming, and famine stalks the land. Kateiko Rin returns to her people, ready at last to rejoin her community, but the dangers of the unsettled times come raging to her doorstep. Kako is left with no choice but to battle the forces that seek to open a rift between the worlds. Leading an unlikely alliance that includes her new love Airedain and her old one Tiernan, Kako must risk all to try and stop the coming disaster. Author Jae Waller returns to her riveting alternate world of brooding rainforests in a colonial

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Children's

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	03 avril 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773054186
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Call of the Rift VEIL
JAE WALLER

For Douglas “When I’m at my best, I am my father’s daughter.”

Maps

Contents
Maps
1. Rutnaast
2. Toel Ginu
3. Autumn Equinox
4. Salmon
5. Father’s Son
6. Bronnoi Ridge
7. Tírcattil
8. Secrets & Lies
9. Schism
10. Hafelús
11. Bódhain
12. Promises
13. Lockdown
14. Clears
15. Moving On
16. Legacies
17. Blizzard
18. Softer Things
19. Arril & Quinil
20. Deep North
21. Innisbán
22. Escape
23. Going Home
24. Famine
25. Breath
26. Sacrifice
27. Gifts
28. Father’s Daughter
29. Heist
30. Ten Years
31. Sinking
32. Spirits
33. Hair of the Dog
34. Pursuit
35. The Crux
36. With Grace
Glossary
A Brief History of Eremur and Surrounding Lands
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright

1. Rutnaast
“Salmon? That’s what you’re looking forward to?” My cousin Dunehein laughed behind me in the canoe stern. “Thought you’d say your friends or a proper bed.”
“Not just any salmon.” My muscles strained with each stroke of the paddle. Droplets streamed off the wood. “Hot from the smokehouse, oily, flaky, and steaming, with that sweet, hazy scent of burnt alder.”
Right now, all I could taste was salt. Sea spray kept my leggings and shirt constantly damp. To our right, snow-capped cliffs rose like crooked walls. To our left, the inlet’s far bank was a green smudge wreathed by mist.
I glanced over my shoulder. Dunehein’s brown hair stuck to his face, escaping its braid. “What do you miss? Dry clothes?”
“Holding my daughter,” he said. “And my wife. Don’t tell her she comes second.”
“Hah, I’m so telling.”
Dunehein flipped cold water at my back. I shrieked and dropped my paddle. He snorted with laughter.
“ Kaid ,” I swore and leaned over the gunwale. Our boat rocked and listed precariously close to the water. Slimy seaweed spilled in. My fingertips brushed the paddle, only for it to float out of reach. I stretched out with my mind, calling the water around it, but the heaving current pulled it back.
A canoe veered toward us, its dolphin-head prow cutting through choppy waves. Ilani, a thin-faced girl around my age, plucked my dripping paddle from the surface. “Don’t you Rin learn how to paddle?”
“It needed a wash.” I yanked it from her grip.
She rolled her eyes. “A few more days until home, then I never have to hear your voice again.”
Her boat glided ahead to the other two canoes in our small fleet. I flicked my fingers. The seawater that had pooled around my boots swirled into the air. I nudged it into Ilani’s craft and through a gap in the sealskin protecting her bedroll. Her older brother, Esiad, twisted to look at me from their canoe stern. I held a finger to my lips, and he grinned.
Esiad and I were antayul, trained to call water since we were children. Our skill was marked by the fan shapes tattooed just below our collarbones. His was faded by a few more years than mine, and arrow scars dotted his chest and back.
“Don’t stare,” Dunehein teased. “You know Esiad’s taken.”
“Shut up.”
Of everyone in our fleet, I was the only member of the Rin-jouyen, our confederacy’s oldest but smallest tribe. The others were from the Iyo, the largest. For now, both jouyen lived at the Iyo settlement of Toel Ginu. There, in the damp chill of a late summer dawn a month after the Blackbird Battle, ten of us had packed our canoes and hugged our loved ones goodbye.
I’d argued against Dunehein coming. He had a newborn daughter and a limp from a wound that still bothered him, but he’d out-stubborned me. We were used to travelling together — paddling the same canoe, collapsing in the same tent, waking at sunrise, and still not wanting to strangle each other.
Officially, this had been a trading trip. We’d paddled up the inlet to Ingdanrad, a settlement built deep in the mountains by itherans, the immigrants who settled in our lands. Their mages had dug underground homes, workshops, even a university where they studied everything from theology to metallurgy. Above ground, fields of golden barley rose up the settlement’s terraced slopes.
Everyone on this trip was used to dealing with itherans — I spoke fluent Coast Trader and decent Sverbian — but half the people in Ingdanrad spoke neither. We’d haggled by pointing and occasionally laughing at offers. I’d been glad of Dunehein’s presence then. No one wanted to challenge me with a burned, tattooed man the size of a grizzly at my side.
Now, finally, we were returning to Toel Ginu, bringing something more valuable than the coins in my purse, more dangerous than the steel blades under my canoe seat. Our real goal had been information on Suriel, the last known air spirit. Why he’d been silent while his human soldiers, the Corvittai, mutinied and attacked us earlier that summer. Where he’d been since then. If any humans still followed him.
As we travelled homeward, the mountains softened, turning green with dense rainforest. Foam churned against our dolphin prow. Paddling an Iyo canoe felt like wearing someone else’s clothes, but in the bow, I could see the kinaru carved inside the hull — wings spread, long neck outstretched, like the Rin bird inked on my left arm. Dunehein’s Iyo wife had carved it into the auburn wood after he had married her, a quiet tribute to his Rin origins.
“Ai. Look out.” I nodded ahead.
A pair of rotting masts jutted up from the water’s surface. We steered around them, gliding over the shipwreck. Taut ropes still snapped in the current. Greenish-white sails billowed underwater. I couldn’t see deeper than the upper rigging, but when we’d passed it before, Ilani had swum down and found corpses and Sverba’s pale blue flag. I tapped two fingers to my forehead in salute.
Last winter, Suriel had sunk half the ships on this inlet in a windstorm. Rutnaast, the only major port between Ingdanrad and Toel Ginu, had fallen to a Corvittai attack the next day. Sea traffic had abandoned these waters after that, along with many of the area’s survivors. We’d seen just three intact ships on our whole trip — a galleon carrying plows and harrows forged in Ingdanrad, a heron-prowed canoe from a southern jouyen, and a cod trawler.
Ilani stared into the cloudy water. “Think Wotelem would let me swim down again? There’s stuff to salvage.”
Esiad snorted. “Whatcha gonna do, porpoise girl? Haul crates up with your flippers?”
“Hush,” Dunehein said. “Mereku’s back.”
An osprey streaked across the grey sky. The bird dove and struck the ocean with a plume of water. A tanned woman broke the surface, flipping black hair out of her face. Mereku hauled herself into a canoe. “Ship coming,” she called.
The foremost canoe spun and looped back. We manoeuvred together, holding each other’s boats so we didn’t drift apart. Wotelem, the Okoreni-Iyo and second-in-command of their jouyen, wound up next to me. Esiad dried Mereku’s clothes with a few waves of his hand.
“Armed and moving fast,” she said, shivering. “Shot crossbow bolts at me when I flew too close. Their shields have Suriel’s kinaru sigil.”
Dunehein swore. “Corvittai. Guess we only killed their army, not their navy.”
Esiad squinted back east. “They’re not here by accident. Someone in Ingdanrad must’ve sold us out. They don’t want us passing on what we’ve discovered.”
“We can lose them on the creek,” a heavily scarred man said.
“Too far.” Wotelem closed his eyes, lips moving in a plea to his ancestral spirits. “Make port at Rutnaast.”
Mereku’s mouth twisted. “I’d sooner step into my own grave. Suriel’s stench is all over that place.”
“It is the last place they will expect us to go.”
Grudgingly, Mereku shifted back into her osprey form and launched off the prow. No one else argued. Wotelem’s callouses and wind-worn skin proved his time on the sea, but if that wasn’t reason enough to obey him, the okoreni band tattooed around his arm was.
Our canoes shot across the water. My arms ached, but I pushed on. Landmarks on tree-lined peninsulas slid past — a massive fallen salt spruce, a rowboat lodged between cottonwoods, Rutnaast’s crumbling lighthouse.
Broken boards floated in the harbour. We glided over the wavering silhouette of a seaweed-mottled ship, sideways with its mast on the ocean floor. Our fleet ran aground on a stretch of gravel sheltered by evergreens. I leapt into the shallows and held the canoe while Dunehein climbed out.
“Ilani, Esiad, Dunehein, Kateiko.” Wotelem split us from the others with a sweep of his hand. “Search the town. Retreat if you see anyone. We will hide the boats and meet you on the granary road.”
I dug my belt out from under my bedroll, buckled it around my waist, and sheathed my knives and flail. Dunehein strapped a double-edged battle axe to his back and picked up a lumber axe. We touched the carved kinaru in our canoe, our private ritual.
Sverbian immigrants had built Rutnaast as a trading post a century ago. With the discovery of silver ore nearby, it had swelled into a mining town. I was the only person in our fleet who hadn’t been here, but I knew plenty about Sverbians. I’d lived with one. Loved one. Attended his wedding and his wife’s funeral. Tiernan Heilind, the burning man who was never mine.
We climbed over the ashy rubble of cabins. In the docklands, a pier lay underwater, pinned down by a capsized ship. Warehouse doorways yawned dark and hollow. An elk flag, its scarlet dye already faded, twisted at half-mast outside a two-storey log building. I sounded out letters etched on the window. Customs House . Fingernail-sized scratches scored the porch like someone had been dragged outsid