Read Online Riders of the Storm by Julie E. Czerneda - Free Book Online Page A

They’d found something—or been stopped by a barrier like that impossible river in the next gorge. She preferred the something, imagining a roof and snug walls while she was at it. And heat. Decent, comfortable heat. Glows would be nice.
    She couldn’t send to ask. It was beyond her range and theirs. Another reason to discover which of the exiles could be taught to access the other place . Distance didn’t seem to affect it the same way—
    Splash! Aryl looked down, surprised to find her foot in a shallow puddle. Was the ice-rain becoming something normal at last? She couldn’t tell. Her fingers and toes were numb, as was the tip of her nose, but her body was damp with sweat as much as from seepage through her now-useless Grona coat.
    What fell from the sky looked and sounded the same. It was the little river that had changed. The width of a stride a moment ago, it had swollen to three times that, in many places spilling over its rocky banks. Tendrils seeped along cracks and filled depressions.
    Soon they were all splashing through puddles, a harmless nuisance to already wet feet, except when the puddle formed over ice. At least the ice was melting, adding its drips to the rain and rotting softly underfoot. Sheets of it slid from the rock walls in random smashes they quickly learned to ignore.
    Harmless for how long? Aryl wondered, glancing back up the gorge. Its origin within the mountain ridge was masked by rain and mist. Fed by cloudbursts, the waters of the Lay Swamp could rise with terrible speed. And the Lay had all the groves to hold its flood, unlike this narrow, steep-walled gorge.
    She wasn’t the only one concerned. Veca had already set a quicker, more dangerous pace. Aryl moved even faster, making her way up the line heedless of risk. The older Om’ray gave her a harried look once they were side by side. “What is it?”
    â€œHaxel and the others must be waiting for us to join them. What if they’re on the other side of the river we couldn’t cross?” Aryl gestured to the puddles spreading across the gorge floor. “What if it’s flooding, too? We’ll be cut off.”
    Veca shrugged. “There’ll be a bridge.”
    Aryl raised her eyebrows. “A bridge?”
    â€œGrona build them.” As if this settled it.
    â€œWhat makes you think this is part of Grona?”
    Another shrug. “Could be Rayna, for all I know. Can you tell?”
    Aryl paused while they used a pair of boulders to cross a more ambitious tendril of escaping river. She hadn’t noticed any transition from Yena to Grona, not inwardly. She’d simply known they were in another Clan’s domain. How?
    Proximity to the village? It couldn’t be that…not only that, she corrected herself. What defined a Clan’s influence? The location of Om’ray minds, their glow—that was what she sensed. But with no Om’ray nearby but the exiles—and Enris—what made this bit of Cersi feel like Grona and not Yena?
    Besides the fact that no Yena would want this lifeless heave of stone?
    Though now that she considered the question—Aryl waited to let Veca consider the best route around a wider-than-most puddle—she realized this place didn’t feel like Grona or Rayna or any other Clan. Not to her.
    Were they nearing the edge of the world?
    She felt no compulsion to stop, no dread of traveling too far from her kind despite being farther than she’d ever imagined. Yet from all accounts, the edge of the world revealed itself in that way—it was the limit of Om’ray existence, and Om’ray existence, after all, defined the world.
    What of the world—the worlds—of the strangers? What of the world where Marcus Bowman had stood as a young Human, perhaps wondering such things, too?
    Not, she reminded herself, that Humans were real in the way Om’ray were.
    â€œWe should wait for him.”
    Preoccupied, Aryl almost