The Light That Binds

by Nathan Garrison

  Dedication

  To Kathryn

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part III Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part IV Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Coda

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  By Nathan Garrison

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  A Page from History of the Veiled Empire, Chapter 10

  Uva Thress, Imperial Historian

  11,748 A.S.

  It should be noted that while the Non-Battle for Humanity marked the first instance of open conflict in the Chaos War, hostilities truly began almost two years earlier with the assassination of the Panisian royal family, which was subsequently blamed on Sceptrine soldiers. Not only did this act spark a war between Panisahldron and Sceptre, it left the child Queen Arivana alone amongst the throne’s councilors, who sought to prolong the war for their own ends. Had not the two great sorceresses of the age, Jasside and Vashodia, come to the aid of Sceptre, and forced a once one-sided war to a conclusive, yet (modestly) peaceful resolution, humankind would have been significantly less prepared for the invasion that came soon after.

  And had not the prodigal warrior Mevon Daere returned home to his father, the emperor (who had thought his son dead at the time), it seems unlikely that the mighty Imperial war machine would have ever stirred from its slumber . . .

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Vashodia sat atop the bird statue’s head, dangling her legs from the tip of its upturned beak. Red-and-orange wings stretched a hundred paces to either side, wind whistling through magically forged feathers in tones doubtless meant to invoke a sense of peace and prosperity. A lithe, glowing body flowed down towards monstrous talons that clutched the tower’s edge. A phoenix, the locals called it. A myth from another age, another world, both long dead, supposedly symbolic of hope and rebirth or some such nonsense. It didn’t make for the most comfortable seat, but she’d required a clear vantage point, and this, inarguably, was the highest one around.

  The staff of the royal tower below were less than thrilled by her choice of perch.

  The statue blazed incessantly, as if competing with the sun, forcing her to maintain a wreath of shadows about her at all times. No doubt her dark stain ruined the thing’s intended effect. The Panisians, who swarmed like ants along bricked streets and buzzed like mosquitos in vessels that flew between each of the city’s hundred towers, must have cursed the sight of her as they made their way to and from their mostly pointless occupations.

  Vashodia couldn’t help but giggle at the thought.

  She took a break from her vigil to peer down at the shipyards along Panisahldron’s western edge. Men and women toiled by the tens of thousands in a frenzy of activity that made the rest of the city seem sluggish in comparison. Two hundred fifty-one skyships, at last count, occupied the space, all of various sizes and shapes and stages of completion. Crafted by mundane means then outfitted with energy-infused constructs to enable flight and control—and, occasionally, weaponry—the vessels stood as testament to this people’s renewed unity and their dogged preparation for the trial to come. Expediency demanded they place function over beauty, as witnessed by the plain, blocky hulls; an indication, perhaps, of the nation’s changing heart.

  The problem, Vashodia knew, was that all of it was a waste.

  Some delusions are too strong to dispel with logic, she thought. And hope is the worst offense of all.

  She sighed, returning to her study of the continent. She’d spread her little machines across the land’s far reaches months ago. They examined every village and town, every city and fortress, every lone farmstead and rarely trod trail, observing and collecting news from the waking world, then transmitting their findings through commune. She parsed the data, sifting through oceans of it, gleaning insights and making connections no one else could have possibly seen.

  Far, far to the west rested the Veiled Empire. Though no longer protected by the Shroud, the voltensi—the sensor towers—still stood sentinel, and for the purposes of the coming war, were just as effective. North of that sat the mierothi colony and another voltensus. It held sway over most of Weskara, and the farthest corner of Sceptre. The valynkar reigned in the south, a lodestone of blinding power.

  And that was it. There was little else in those three directions that might be considered a tempting target.

  Not so, the east.

  The horseshoe-shaped island nation of Yusan stuck out of the Endless Sea all alone, a sick buffalo culled from the herd. Like the other coastal nations, it sported few casters of any worth. Unlike them, however, its people would have a hard time fleeing were they to come under attack.

  And they would, Vashodia had warned; it’s where she would strike first.

  Few enough of the petty rulers had listened when she’d made the pronouncement, and fewer still had heeded her recommended course of action. How could she possibly tell, after all, what their enigmatic enemy planned to do?

  Not that it mattered. In the end, they’d all be forced into action. If not by her . . . by them.

  We are the ruvak, the woman had said. The young queen’s false handmaiden, Flumere. The assassin and spy, Sem Aira Grusot. One and the same. She’d proven reticent to give up anything else, however. And that was even after Vashodia had . . . played with her. Extensively. Her interrogations, however—normally swift in extracting information from her subjects—only drove the creature to deeper defiance. Vashodia had wrangled nothing more than those four words from the spy before the queen demanded a cessation of the questioning. Not even a curse.

  She could almost respect the resolve were it not so infuriating.

  Vashodia knew more about them, of course. Ruul’s memories, when she’d visited him a few centuries ago, had been delicious to dig through. Still, she possessed little useful information. She knew who they were, where they came from, and could surmise what they wanted, but she did not know what drove them, what they valued, how they thought—all things that would soon become crucial. The ignorance threatened to drive her mad.

  History will remember me, one way or another. Either as the savior they followed, or the mad prophet, the doomsayer, they ignored. Though I’m partial to the former, either one will do.

  If nothing else, her siphoning of the gods’ knowledge had proven how intractably history treated its most memorable souls. None were recorded with accuracy; few in a manner they would wish. And the greatest sin of all was how many faded to legend, then obscurity, then were forgotten entirely as a new age surmounted the old, grinding it all to dust and dreams in the ever-persistent march of time.

  Such will not happen to me. I will make sure of it.

  A chord struck inside her mind, a dark string thrumming, and she quested towards the construct that had sent the signal. Before she’d even isolated the source, half a dozen more notes rang out in the vicinity of the first.

  Warning bells, sounding off. Large masses descending out of the chaos of the void.

  Over Yusan,
of course.

  She smiled at her own prescience, proven right once more.

  No time like now for the end to begin.

  Dark clouds rolled around and behind Jasside, a seething mass crackling with energy, just waiting to release. She tapped a booted toe in a slow cadence on the deck, the sound quickly swallowed by the wind as she strained her senses for any sign of movement below. Storms brewed, inside and out. The rumbling of thunder grew more insistent, quickening both her foot and her heartbeat, as if seeking to merge with the aching ocean of darkness she held at the ready. Eagerness warred with weariness, and she hated them both.

  A lot of people were about to die. She just had to make sure as few as possible were human . . . or those once called it.

  Footsteps approached, and Jasside ceased her tapping. She clenched her hands, which hung rigid at her sides, trying to release the strain in them while still holding on to the power she’d gathered. Power that partially flowed through the figure now stopping at her side.

  “Grandmother,” Jasside said, then turned to face the woman. Angla was dressed, as Jasside was, in dark leather, layered and covering every stitch of ebony skin below the neck. Black but greying hair hung free to the shoulder, a style most mierothi women had adopted, as if they couldn’t bear, since its miraculous return, to keep it contained. Jasside’s own blond hair fell past her waist, bound in a braid.

  Angla raised her eyebrows in an unveiled expression of worry. “Are you all right, Jasside?”

  “Fine,” she snapped, and instantly regretted her tone.

  “I can see that,” Angla said, crossing her arms. “Clearly.”

  Jasside sighed. “Sorry.”

  Angla’s stance softened, and the mierothi woman leaned in and squeezed Jasside’s hand, wringing out the tension in a manner the younger woman could never do on her own. “Worried about the battle?”

  “Worried?” Jasside asked, surprised that it should even be a question. More surprised that the answer was no. Another lingering effect from Vashodia’s teaching: irrepressible confidence. “Always. But I just—”

  Angla raised an eyebrow as Jasside forced herself to stop. She didn’t know how to convey her desire for the abyss-taken thing to start already. Not without sounding bloodthirsty. This fervor, this hunger for battle—a clash was inevitable and there were people to protect, a job she trusted to no one more than herself. Even so, it scared her. Most times, when examining herself for negative attributes, Jasside found the fault to lie with her former mistress. On this occasion, however, it didn’t seem like something she’d learned from Vashodia.

  It felt more like an attitude that Mevon would share.

  Just the thought of him drove a spike through her gut. To think he’d been alive all this time. That he’d also thought her dead. That Vashodia knew . . . and held it from her. Jasside didn’t know whether to feel rage at her mistress’s deception, joy that he still lived, or shame that she’d moved on so quickly. So she did what she’d always had and stuffed it all away—right alongside her desire to drop everything and fly across the world to find him.

  There will be time for . . . personal matters later. We’ve an enemy to deal with first.

  “We can’t save them all,” Angla said, pulling her back into the present. “But we do the best we can. No need to punish yourself for that.”

  Jasside nodded, realizing how much she’d let show on her face. She didn’t know which was worse, though: that she didn’t correct her grandmother’s false conclusion, or that the conclusion she’d reached wasn’t correct. Jasside knew she needed to focus. Lives would soon be at stake.

  “You’re right,” she said at last. “We do the best we can.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy Angla, who dipped her head briefly then looked out across the cloudscape. “Are sure you want me and my sisters linked? The added mobility could be useful.”

  Jasside smiled, noting the hint of eagerness her grandmother now showed. “Want to test your wings again?”

  Brown eyes flipped up and away, and the woman shrugged. Wings sprang from her back, blacker than a starless void, and fluttered a few times. Angla groaned like someone stretching their legs after being cramped in a tight space for too long.

  “I don’t blame you,” Jasside said, once again marveling at the most impressive measure of mierothi transformation. “But your son’s report made the situation clear. You’re best suited where you are.”

  “Of course, dear. Of course.”

  “And besides,” Jasside added, reaching out to rub her grandmother’s protruding belly. “We wouldn’t want to put the little one in harm’s way.”

  Angla, smiling blissfully, laid one hand over Jasside’s, while the other gently cradled the round bump.

  Draevenus clung to handholds in the rocky hull above him, inhaling lungfuls of something bitter and biting with every steady breath. Eddies of air swirled at his back, threatening to suck him out into open sky. He smiled as he remembered he no longer needed to fear falling.

  The mirth died quickly when he returned his mind to what he was about to do.

  Hand over hand, foot over foot, he crawled across the vessel’s back side, searching for an opening. He’d boarded the thing in haste after its destination became clear, and had no time to study it beforehand. Three crevasses he’d already explored, but they’d turned out nothing more than cracks or folds in the misshapen hull. With his grip starting to fail, and time running short, he hastened his inverted, spider-like creep.

  Around the next chunk of rock he caught sight of another likely opening. He altered his path, angling for it.

  This had better be it. I don’t think I can hold on much longer.

  He’d thought about blessing himself with increased strength before attempting his infiltration, but there was still too much unknown about the enemy, and he couldn’t risk them sensing the casting. As always, assassination required a certain balance of risks far different from that of normal combat.

  And a certain forceful numbing of the soul that he thought he’d long ago left behind.

  Palms aching and slick with sweat, and fingers sharply stung by the porous stone, Draevenus at last pulled himself into the shadowed alcove. He stood upright for what seemed the first time in days as he caught his breath and shook out the fatigue from his limbs.

  I guess I’m not quite conditioned for resuming my old line of work.

  He shook his head at the incompleteness of the thought.

  I guess I wish I didn’t have to be.

  He strode forward. The space ended just two paces in, and he nearly gave up until he saw a thin crack too straight to be natural. He pressed a finger into it and followed the groove, eventually tracing the outline of a half-oval, flat at the bottom. A doorway of some kind. It had to be.

  For several marks he felt around in the rock surrounding the door, searching for a knob or button that would open it, but found nothing. It must have been a rarely used portal, one only for escape or other emergencies. Which meant he’d have to do this the old-fashioned way.

  Drawing a dagger, Draevenus wedged its tip into the crack and began working it back and forth, up and down. The wind of the ship’s passing tumbled into the alcove in spurts, and his sweat had long since been dried by the time he heard a metallic rasp and the door clicking open.

  A second dagger sprang into his other hand as he crouched and stalked forward through the shadows.

  Jasside felt it: a change in the wind. A slight push in the air’s pressure when a moment ago there had been only pull.

  The enemy had arrived.

  Again.

  Images of their previous incursions scraped across her mind: bodies shorn by ruvaki blades, or shattered by ruvaki sorcery, scattered like obscene driftwood across endless coastlines. Red tides washing up on red shores.

  Rather than banish the memories she clung to them, keeping the reminder fresh as fuel for what she now set out to do.

  Destroy them. Utterly.

  The d
ark energy she now held drew them, like the ocean drew a river. It was formidable. Menacing. A threat they would strike at, hoping to bring down quickly before moving on to easier targets.

  This time, though, she had a surprise in store.

  Just a little bit closer.

  Inhaling, Jasside energized further, pulling power through her own capacity as well as that of the dozen mierothi women behind her, until she held tenfold the energy of just beats ago. She extended a hand. Darkness swirled at her fingertips into a spinning disc, then shot forward faster than thought. The clouds near the black beam’s path were sucked forward, adding to the churning, icy vortex as it raced towards her unseen enemy.

  At her command, the spell constricted into a ball . . .

  Then expanded.

  The fog cleared in an instant, at last revealing the scene. Six ruvaki ships, midsized as far as she could tell, hovered low along the wide beach, slowed down enough to drop rank upon rank of ground assault troops onto the sands. Though no two were exactly alike, these ships were made of dull, pitted stone, shaped like nothing more than enormous oblong boulders. Now unloaded, they surged up in her direction.

  Below her marched a throng of refugees, thirty thousand strong, flanked only by a too-thin line of alliance soldiers. Panisians and Sceptrines mostly, with some Phelupari, along with the shattered remnants of the army of Corbrithe, the coastal nation from which they now fled.

  “Forward,” she commanded.

  The pilot heard her clearly, and the back end tilted up before they swept forward out of the clouds like a specter. Wind rushed by as they picked up speed. The enemy ships pointed their noses at her and began glowing with half-lit hues that changed from green to purple to yellow to grey.

  This is where it gets tricky.

  Their straight line wavered, blinked, and they were suddenly staggered and farther apart. Another blink and they were in a circle. Now back to the straight line. Now in no discernable pattern whatsoever. If she focused her sight on one, it would seem to follow a logical pattern, but doing so made the others fade almost to nothing.