“Very funny,” Bershad said. “Move on.”
The Nomad headed a little farther south. Gravitated to the reptilian pulse of a fully grown male river snake that was twisting its way up a tributary of the Green River. Judging from the strength of his pulse, Bershad guessed he was about ten strides long.
“You sure?” he asked. “The last one you tried got wrapped around your throat and I had to hack the bastard off with a machete, remember?”
The Nomad tightened her loop.
“Fine, fine. But you’re doing the heavy work on this one.”
* * *
Twenty minutes later, Bershad was sitting by the riverbank, munching on the tail end of the snake. The Nomad was working her way down from the head. The meat up there was sweeter, but she’d been true to her word and dealt with the massive snake on her own, so he figured she deserved the better portion.
Bershad had eaten his fill long before the Nomad was finished. So he leaned back against a river willow and waited for her. There was a white king vulture circling high overhead, waiting for his turn at the carcass. Above her, the smaller black vultures were making their own gyre. They’d wait for the king vulture to finish, and the crows and foxes would wait on them. Eventually, it would just be ants and maggots picking away at the last shreds of meat.
Bershad was a part of that system, too. He hadn’t spent much time contemplating the gravity of eventually turning into a dragon warren. Didn’t seem worthwhile to get all twisted up about something that you couldn’t change. But out here on his own, he couldn’t help but linger on it for a moment.
“Guess there are worse fates than turning into a tree,” he muttered. Then looked at the Nomad. “Just don’t let your hatchlings shit all over me, yeah?”
The Nomad looked up from the snake. Licked her snout. Then went back to eating.
“Good. Glad we agree.”
Bershad stood up and stretched his legs. Brushed a few fire ants off his foot. He was about to start heading back to Dampmire when a scent passed over his nostrils that didn’t belong in this forest.
A human.
“You smell that?” he asked the Nomad.
By way of response, she took one last bite, then leapt into the sky and flew south, toward the source of the smell. When she was directly overhead, she started circling. The scent sharpened in Bershad’s nostrils.
It was a man. Badly wounded, judging from the smell of pus and infection. Not Wormwrot, though. The smell of their face paint was easy to recognize. This was an Almiran.
And he smelled like the canal waters of Deepdale.
Bershad ran into the jungle.
* * *
He found the man crumpled between two big boulders. A mess of sticks and logs had been trapped between the rocks, forming an overhang and a semblance of shelter. The poor bastard had collapsed there and been too weak to move again. There were ants all over his legs and mosquito bites all over his face.
“Hey,” Bershad said, clambering down to squat in front of the man. “Hey, you awake?”
He swallowed. “Barely,” he said in a Deepdale accent.
“Take this,” said Bershad, handing over his canteen.
The man emptied the canteen in a few desperate gulps.
“Better?”
“A little.”
Bershad took the canteen back. “What’s your name?”
“Elondron.”
“What are you doing all the way out here on your own?”
“Came … looking for the Flawless Bershad.”
“Well, your methods could use some refinement, but you found him.”
That got Elondron’s attention. He wiped some black crap out of his eye and gave Bershad a closer look, lingering on his arm, counting the tattoos.
“Lord … Bershad,” he said, voice trembling. “Vallen Vergun has a message for you.”
43
JOLAN
Village of Dampmire
After Ashlyn had been attempting to break into the acolyte’s manual override controls for three straight hours, her hair caught on fire.
“Bucket!” Ashlyn shouted, gritting her teeth and continuing to spin the bands at a high speed.
Jolan put down the astrolabe and picked up their last bucket of fresh rainwater.
“Ramp down, first.”
“But I’m almost through.”
“No, you’re on fire. Ramp down, Ashlyn.”
She cursed, then froze her bands.
Jolan poured the bucket on her head. The water turned to steam against Ashlyn’s flesh, which made the Dampmire hut they were using feel like a bath house.
Ashlyn picked up a needle filled with sedative and jammed it into the acolyte’s neck, putting it to sleep. Then she grabbed the singed ends of her hair and sliced them off with a knife. Dropped them in a pile with the rest. That was the third time she’d caught on fire this week.
“How far did I get?” Ashlyn asked.
Jolan glanced at the astrolabe, which was still lit up with readings. They’d learned the sheer volume of coordinate shifts was too overwhelming for Ashlyn to digest through her direct connection to the astrolabe, so Jolan monitored them visually, keeping an eye on the broader picture while Ashlyn focused on the immediate spiral.
“You made it through one hundred and seventy-seven spirals.”
She sighed. “Last time I made it to one hundred and eighty.”
Now that the astrolabe delivered more accurate coordinates, the risk of Ashlyn making a mistake was essentially gone. The problem now was the length of the lock. There weren’t ten or even twenty layers to weave through, as they’d expected.
There were hundreds. Possibly thousands. Ashlyn kept overheating before she could break into the manual override commands.
Ashlyn took a long, deep breath. She looked terrible.
“You need to rest for a while. At this point, all we’re doing is scraping against diminishing returns.”
“I want to try one more time.”
“You’ll never succeed if you give yourself a stroke.”
Ashlyn chewed on her lip and stared at the acolyte. “We spent months in that pantry banging on dead acolytes, and now that we have the living one, I’m not strong enough to get what we need.”
“Osyrus knows this is a vulnerability. It makes sense that he’s making it as difficult as possible to reach it.”
“He’s succeeding. We’re getting nowhere.”
“Our progress just doesn’t have concrete results yet,” Jolan said. “But Master Morgan always said that experiments take patience and time and careful—”
“Jolan, we don’t have the luxury of a years-long project like some alchemist contract. We need results, and we need them now. Willem and his Jaguars are going to be finished mapping the skyship pairings soon. I can’t walk up to Floodhaven with ten lodestones circling around my head. I need to have his entire system under my control, and as of right now, I can’t even get my foot through the door.”
“Get some rest. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
She took a drink of water. “I’m still bothered by that other command.”
“Remote connection?”
“Yeah. You don’t see anything in the astrolabe when I give the order?”
“I’ll show you.”
Jolan manually cranked the machine backward to the readings he’d gotten when Ashlyn had tried that command. Once he got there, all the lights on the machine went out.
“Nothing, see?”
“Ward doesn’t build things that have no purpose. It must do something.” She pressed her thumb and forefinger against the bridge of her nose. Closed her bloodshot eyes.
“Ashlyn, I just think—”
“You’re right, I need to rest.” She unplugged herself from the astrolabe. “I can clean all of this up. Go check on Cabbage. Make sure he hasn’t blown himself up.”
Jolan could tell that she wanted to be alone. “Sure, Ashlyn. I’ll check on you later.”
He ma
de his way along the treetop pathways of Dampmire village, heading to the empty hut where he and Cabbage were building the bombs.
Jolan ducked inside to find Cabbage hunched over a set of timers, frowning and sticking his tongue out of one corner of his mouth. There were piles of machinery behind him—all the salvage they’d taken from the dead acolytes that had been brought from Deepdale.
“Hey, kid,” said Cabbage, looking up. “How’s it going?”
Jolan took a seat at his workbench. Placed the astrolabe on a pedestal and stared at it. “Not good.”
“Still can’t unlock the grayskin’s secrets?”
He shook his head. “How are things here?”
“Got another fifteen timing mechanisms done, with four more on the way.”
“Gods, you work fast.”
When Cabbage returned from Floodhaven, he’d volunteered to help Jolan, so that they could produce as many bombs as possible. Jolan had been wary of giving a pirate access to such a large amount of explosives, but Cabbage had proved him wrong. He had a gift for working with the tiny gears they used for the timing systems.
“My old master would have disagreed with you there,” Cabbage said. “And if he was here to help us, we’d have enough bombs to fill every house in this village. Guy was an asshole, but he was good at his job.”
“Do you miss it?” Jolan asked. “Being an apprentice, I mean.”
“It was a long time ago, and I’m no good for that kind of life.”
“What makes you say that?”
“If I was, I wouldn’t have ruined the whole thing.” Cabbage put down his tools. “What about you?”
“I think about going back to Otter Rock and rebuilding the apothecary sometimes. Thinking about it feels good, but hurts at same time. You know?”
Cabbage nodded. “I do.”
“Skyship coming!” someone shouted from outside the hut. “Cover! Cover!”
Seeing as they were already in a camouflaged hut, there was nothing for Jolan and Cabbage to do besides go quiet and wait. Jolan used to run panicked prayers to the forest gods each time a skyship passed, but now it barely got his pulse elevated.
The skyship’s approach made the hut’s support beams groan.
“Sounds like a combat model,” Cabbage muttered.
“Yeah.”
They sat still as the ship got closer. Jolan was about to close his eyes, but was extremely glad he didn’t because right at the point where the ship’s engine was at its loudest, the astrolabe lit up with a matrix of dots. Jolan studied them as best he could, but before he could make sense of them, they disappeared, along with the sound of the skyship.
“Did you see that?” Jolan asked.
“See what?”
“The astrolabe. Did you see those lights?”
He shook his head. “Sorry, kid. Must have missed it.”
“There was probably still some latent energy from Ashlyn running through the astrolabe. It could have caused a misfire, but that doesn’t make sense. We never got anything from this position before.”
“Jolan!” came Ashlyn’s voice from outside the hut. “I need you in the surgery. Right away.”
* * *
When Ashlyn and Jolan got to the surgery hut, Silas was sitting in front of a cot where a skinny, dirty man was laid up. A quick look at the bites and scrapes and dirt across the man’s skin told Jolan that he’d seen weeks of hard exposure to the jungle.
Silas looked up at them, eyes filled with fury.
“We have a problem.”
44
ASHLYN
Village of Dampmire
Silas appeared intent on bringing every available knife back to Deepdale with him.
He picked through the makeshift armory in cold silence. Jaw set and eyes focused. Grabbing up a knife, testing the edge, strapping it to his body, then grabbing another. After you passed the threshold of five or six blades on your person, Ashlyn was unclear on how a seventh or eighth could possibly be useful, but she knew better than to question Silas on that front. There were larger problems with his plan that needed addressing.
“Vergun is baiting you,” she said. “Same as we did to him back at that warren.”
“It worked.” Bershad tested the edge of a meat cleaver. Grunted. Dumped it back in the pile. “I am going to skin that pale fucker and wear his hide as a cape.”
“Our objective lies ahead, not behind.”
“My objective is to prevent Vallen Vergun from eating the people of Deepdale.”
“Deepdale doesn’t have any strategic value to us anymore.”
“It has value to the people who live there.”
“We can’t get bogged down in that. It’s a war. And if we turn the army around and converge on an obvious trap, we’ll lose it. Do you understand, Silas?”
Bershad glared at her. “You’re right.”
She relaxed her shoulders slightly, glad that Silas saw reason, no matter how painful.
“I’ll go back alone,” he added.
“What? You can’t.”
“You and Jolan don’t need me to finish what you’ve started with that grayskin.”
“Maybe not, but the Jaguars are going to start ambushing the skyships soon. They will need you.”
He waved at the shield and spear, which were both propped up in a corner. “I’ll leave those.”
“One spear and a shield isn’t enough.”
“It has to be.”
“Why?”
He stopped collecting knives. Turned to her
“Because I am the last lord of Deepdale. The last of the Bershads. And I have broken every oath and promise that I’ve ever made, but I won’t abandon the people of that city.” He swallowed. “I’m going back. Give me the rest of the Gods Moss.”
Ashlyn pressed her lips together. Realized that she wasn’t going to talk him out of this.
She moved to the dirty, worn pouch where they kept the moss. She pulled out a big pinch and held it out to him.
“No,” Bershad said. “All of it.”
“If you use all of it, you’ll trigger the transformation.”
He shrugged. “Doing it in Deepdale is a better place than most.”
“Silas…”
“I don’t have time to argue with you, Ashe. Give me the fucking pouch.”
Ashlyn shook her head. Gave it to him.
Silas tied it around his belt. Then he went back to packing gear and weapons. When he was done, he moved to leave.
“Both of us could die,” Ashlyn said, stopping him. “Is this how you want to leave things between us?”
He looked back at her. Softened a little. “If I wind up down the river ahead of you, I’ll try to find a decent spot for us in the afterlife. And if you go first…” He trailed off. Swallowed. “Well, I don’t see much point in staying around in this mess without you. So I’ll be following right behind. I promise.”
Bershad left. Jolan had been waiting just outside, and Ashlyn could hear his footsteps chase after him.
“Don’t go!” the boy called.
Bershad stopped. “If Ashe couldn’t talk sense into me, neither can you.”
“But—”
“You need to protect her now. She’s far crazier than I’ll ever be. You keep her safe. If you don’t, I will come back from Deepdale—or the dead—and murder you. Understand?”
“Yes,” Jolan said in a brittle voice.
Ashlyn took a deep breath. Gathered her emotions together before Jolan came back into the tent. The poor boy looked like he was about to burst into tears.
“I couldn’t stop him,” he said, sniffing.
“Like Silas said, if I couldn’t convince him, then you didn’t stand a chance.”
“But what are we going to do?”
“We move forward,” she said. “There’s no other direction to go.”
Jolan nodded. Paused. “How much of the Gods Moss did you give him?”
“All of it.”
“But if he takes
all of it, then—”
“I know,” said Ashlyn, putting a hand on his shoulder. “That’s why I need you to brew a full dosage of the suppression tonic, and I need it to be stronger than any of the ones before it. I’ll be back before you’re done.”
“Where are you going?”
“To find the only person Silas won’t murder if he tries to follow him.”
45
BERSHAD
Dainwood Jungle
Bershad picked up Felgor’s scent two hours after leaving camp. He’d stolen some of Simeon’s cheese, and was munching on it while he hiked through the wilderness.
Bershad could have lost him in the woods, but Felgor had crawled through the bowels of Osyrus Ward’s Balarian dungeon to rescue him from torture. He’d stowed himself aboard a ship bound for an island in the Big Empty and followed Bershad into that horrific experience. Bershad knew in his bones that Felgor would keep after him, even if he lost the trail. And the jungle was full of hungry dragons.
So Bershad stopped at a cool spring and waited for his friend.
Felgor made surprisingly quick progress along Bershad’s trail. He got tripped up twice, but worked his way backward within a few minutes both times and found Bershad’s footprints again. By the time he reached the pond, he was drenched in sweat and scraps of foliage.
“Silas,” he said, then turned to the Nomad, who was roosting in a tree overlooking the spring. “Smokey.”
“She hates that name.”
Felgor shrugged. “So, what’s the plan?”
“I’m going back to Deepdale to kill Vallen Vergun, and every Wormwrot soldier in the city.”
“Sounds good,” Felgor said, as if Bershad had just delivered plans to buy a beer at a local tavern. He bent down and filled his canteen in the spring.
“Felgor…”
“Don’t even bother with that shit, Silas.” He screwed his canteen closed. “You wanted to put up a genuine fight regarding me going with you, you wouldn’t have left such an easy trail to follow, so let’s skip the part where you tell me to turn around.”
“Wasn’t going to, idiot.”
“Oh. Good.”
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