by John Bierce
When the storm ended, it wasn’t gradual. The edge simply rolled up behind them, then past them, and they were out as the storm overtook them entirely. The back end of the storm ended unnaturally smoothly, and Artur shuddered at the unnatural sight.
Someone had made this storm. Either Ilinia Kaen Das or Indris Stormbreaker could easily have done it, but their reach ended at the Skyreach Range. Ephyrus, the dominant weather mage in this portion of the continent, simply wasn’t known for randomly sending storms out to sea, though, in fairness, no-one really understood how Ephyrus thought, or had ever successfully communicated with the creature. There were many other weather mages on the continent that might have been able to raise a storm working in concert, but acting on weather beyond a local scale was a surefire way to attract the irritation of one of the greater weather mages. Even Ephyrus, as alien and inscrutable as it was, would react against a transgression like that. Weather spells cast by the great powers often acted on the scale of weeks, months, or even years, and interference with that would readily draw their ire.
In the distance behind them, Artur could see another storm.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Storm Armada
“We have a problem,” Alustin said, dumping out a huge load of assorted paper scraps from his satchel onto the patch of decking that he’d just dried off with a cantrip.
Hugh knew that his teacher had dumped all those paper scraps into his satchel from his arm tattoo, but there were clear and obvious advantages to people not knowing where you were actually storing things.
The paper scraps abruptly formed themselves into a moving paper sea, with tiny swells and a miniature model of the Rising Cormorant in the center.
“The second storm is, like we expected, going to miss us by leagues. Unfortunately, I scryed at least a half dozen more already on their way, and even more forming in the edges of the Skyreach Range. I think we can all agree they’re unnatural, but there’s nothing we can do to stop them. This is clearly the work of one or more of the great powers,” Alustin said.
Stylized storm clouds rose up from the little paper sea behind the model of the Cormorant.
Most of the group stole glances at Sabae, though Hugh found his sliding over to her side, where Talia was standing. Their eyes locked, and to Hugh’s surprise, Talia looked away first, blushing.
“We’re well ahead of schedule, thanks to the boost the first storm gave us,” Alustin said. “But getting to the second or third potential locations for Imperial Ithos’ return is going to be a problem.”
The Radhan all got confused looks for a second, then Captain Grepha shook her head.
“This would all be so much easier if you could tell us what you’re looking for,” she said.
“Unfortunately, I can’t,” Alustin said. “The Themesere harbor is impassible during storm surges. Its gravity enchantments can keep the water in bowl shape under normal conditions, but they’re overwhelmed during storms,” Alustin said. “Even if we made it in, we’ve got at least a week’s march overland to get to the site, and it’s a middling quality one on a ridge that stretches out from the Skyreach foothills into the jungle. Then we’d have no way to get out, and the Cormorant would be trapped in the holding pools atop the cliffs until the storms ended, and we don’t know when that would be.”
Artur leaned over to Hugh at his confused look. “The gravity enchantments in Themesere pulls the water and ships sailin’ in it against the cliffs, sa’ that the ships can jus’ sail straight up the side, then over ta’ the holdin’ pools. It’s a sight ta’ see. Not a’ particularly large city, but ah reckon a lot a’ ships jus’ add it ta’ their routes fer the view.”
Alustin nodded at that, and a tiny seaside city atop a line of cliffs formed, the paper sea crawling up its cliffs unnaturally.
“The third site,” Alustin continued, “is in an open patch of ocean to the southeast of Themesere.”
A mark formed on the paper model of the sea.
“Wait. Why would Imperial Ithos be out in the ocean?” Hugh asked.
Several of the nearby Radhan shook their heads, confused.
“It probably wasn’t,” Alustin said. “Odds are it’s none of the sites we’ll be checking. This one is an especially low probability. Successful floating cities are exceptionally rare, and they seldom survive more than a couple generations. The tides and storms are simply too much for them, no matter how well-built or designed. It’s also dead center in the path of at least four or five storms.”
“So are yeh thinkin’ site four or site five, then?” Godrick asked.
Talia started to perk up at that, and Hugh could see Sabae visibly rolling her eyes. Hugh recalled Talia’s guess that it would be the last site they checked.
“Site four,” Alustin said. “Zophor is closer than Nidassus, and it’s one of the highest priority sites being investigated.”
Talia deflated.
“Hold on,” Sabae said. “Isn’t Zophor both in a swamp and in a fairly high aether density region?”
Alustin shrugged. “It’s a tidal delta, which is a fairly specific type of swamp, but yes, it has fairly high-density aether. It also has a junction mana well with a complex labyrinth. The actual site in question is Lake Nelu, about a week’s travel upriver from Zophor. It’s a huge, shallow lake that the Ylosa River passes through on its way to the delta and Zophor.”
The paper scraps swarmed and twisted, and the sea was replaced by a map of the shore, showing a great river delta, with a sort of crude grid of channels formed by the tide overwhelming the river’s current twice a day. The islands were completely covered in a shockingly detailed rainforest. As Hugh traced the paper river upwards, it slowly grew more and more dominated by the river current, until it was a vast, interlocking braid of rivers, filled with great islands. Hugh seldom saw anything like a distinct bank to the river on a paper map. Instead, the waters seemed to intrude into the forest, and the trees of the forest into the river. In fact, many if not most of the islands in the channel, on second glance, were more groves of trees protruding from the paper waters than anything.
Hugh didn’t know how accurate Alustin’s paper map was, but…
“Hold on a second,” he asked, not looking up. “Where’s Zophor? I don’t see a city on here.”
A bit of a laugh went around the deck.
“It’s definitely there, Stormward,” Captain Grepha said. “You’ll understand when we get there.”
Hugh glanced up, confused. Even Godrick and Sabae seemed a little amused at the question. Only Talia also seemed confused. Then she froze, and looked up towards Alustin with a smile.
“Wait, is it like Hold Yehal?” Talia asked.
Alustin nodded. “Even more impressive in some ways,” he said.
“Hold Yehal?” Hugh asked.
“The closest thing ta’ a capital city the Clans have,” Artur said. “Beautiful place.”
“We don’t have a capital,” Talia said, glaring at Artur. “It’s just the biggest clan hold is all.”
“Ah’m not sure Hold quite does Yehal justice,” Artur said. “It’s a full city on its own.”
Alustin raised his hand to quiet them, and the paper delta collapsed into scraps on the deck.
“One important difference between Hold Yehal and Zophor is that Zophor is the demesne of the lich Zophor. He created it wholesale a little over a century ago,” Alustin said.
“Humble sort, sounds like, to name a whole city after himself,” Talia muttered.
“Zophor is one of the most powerful liches on the continent,” Alustin said. “He’s no ally to either Kanderon nor the Havath Dominion. We need to be careful not to offend him while we’re there.”
Waves began to form slowly in the piles of paper scraps, then the Rising Cormorant seemed to rise out of the waves.
Off to one side of the map formed a clear representation of the Ithonian coastline, with paper Skyreach Range foothills to the west and the Ylosa river delta to the East.
&nbs
p; “Here’s the problem,” Alustin said. “Or, problems, I suppose. First, the storms.”
Stylized storms rose all throughout the paper map. Hugh glanced behind him, where he could see the second storm near the horizon, while off to one side, he thought he could see yet another storm forming.
“Even assuming they were our only problem, we’d likely have to pass through at least five more of those storms before we got to Zophor,” Alustin said. “We could try and avoid them, but that would add days, if not a full week, onto our trip. And given how quickly the Exile Splinter’s hold on Imperial Ithos is fading, we don’t know how long it will be until the city merges back into our world.”
The Radhan all looked confused to the point of pain, and several of them were clutching their heads now. Alustin’s face turned grave, and the Skyhold party exchanged worried looks. The Radhan’s confusion grew worse and lasted longer every time the city was mentioned. It had taken a year and a half of Alustin mentioning it regularly for the Exile Splinter’s hold on Hugh and his friends to collapse, but it appeared to be progressing far more swiftly for the Radhan.
Hugh couldn’t help but notice Sabae was practically glaring at Alustin. Hugh was used to others keeping secrets from him— in all honesty, he rather liked being ignorant of the dangerous political currents that often moved around him— but Sabae and Alustin definitely knew something that they hadn’t told the others, and it had been splitting the two of them steadily apart since the aftermath of midsummer.
Hugh might not be the most observant person ever, but this was hard to ignore.
Finally, after what had to be almost a full minute, the Radhan all seemed to refocus. The other Radhan sailors on deck cleaning up the damage from the storm didn’t seem to have even noticed their confusion.
“The storms aren’t our only problem, though,” Alustin said. “Then we have the sea serpents. We could normally handle that one well enough, save for the fact that the ship’s water mages are already exhausted from just a single storm, and keeping watch for sea serpents while dodging or crossing storms would be a nightmare.”
“What do yeh want to bet the storms are behind the serpents stirrin’?” Artur said.
No one took him up on that bet.
“So, then we’ve got our third problem,” Alustin said.
More ships began to assemble on the paper sea— forming out of clouds of scraps, not rising whole from the waves.
“Havathi privateers,” Alustin said. “They might not have a navy worth a pair of old socks, but they’ve got the money to hire as many independent ships as they could ever want. I’ve found at least a dozen so far, all with complements of Sacred Swordsmen and assorted battle mages on board, and there might be more caught in the storms as well. They even have a war ammonite in the area. It looks like they’re actively hunting for us. They don’t appear to be heading to Zophor, so I suspect they don’t know about that site yet, though they do seem aware of Nidassus, Themesere, and the third site.”
There was a moment of silence, then quite a few moments of cursing from nearly everyone.
“How, exactly, are yeh proposin’ we get through storms, sea serpents, and ships huntin’ us?” Artur said.
“Fairly easily,” Alustin said, smirking. “There’s a reason I picked this ship, after all. Same reason it’s called the Rising Cormorant. It should also let us safely check sites three and four.”
All the Radhan went still and silent, and finally Captain Grepha sighed. “Of course you know about that. It won’t work, though. It’s a short-term solution, it won’t work across these sorts of ranges. There’s no way we can supply that much mana to the enchantments for that long.”
Alustin’s smirk grew even wider. “No, but Sabae and Hugh can handle that.”
Hugh shifted uncomfortably as all eyes turned to the two of them.
Despite the cryptic pronouncements, Alustin didn’t tell them what he’d been talking about. Instead, he, Captain Grepha, and some of the ship’s officers spent several hours arguing and debating. Whatever Alustin’s plan was, it wouldn’t be starting until the next morning.
And he gave them all training to work on in the meantime, at that.
Talia was assigned a series of exercises meant to help her cast increasingly small dreambolts, using minuscule amounts of mana. Alustin had been somewhat irritated when he’d found out how she’d killed Abyla Ceutas atop Skyhold. He was happy she’d saved the others, but Talia had received a long, pointed lecture about the difference between siege magic and battle magic.
Siege magic— especially artillery magic— focused on expending the entirety of a mage’s mana reservoir on a single spell, meant to punch through powerful defenses. Depending on the aether density around them, they could often only cast a single spell per hour. Even mediocre artillery mages could fire archmage level spells, and powerful siege mages were a serious danger even to great powers.
The problem was that once a mana reservoir was trained to do siege magic, it became almost unusable for other magic. The change was irreparable as well. Siege mages were simply only useful as part of an army, not as independent operatives. And while the vast majority of battlemages Skyhold trained were destined to serve in armies across the continent— save, apparently, for in the Havath dominion and a few unfriendly city states— Alustin was most certainly not putting in the time for something so mundane. Even most army mages weren’t trained in siege magic— it was a very limited duty.
And if Talia kept using monstrous attack spells like the one she’d used against Abyla, ones that simply used all mana she had available in her mana reservoir, it could start happening to her. It wouldn’t happen immediately, or even quickly, but Alustin knew quite a few mages who had slowly degraded their abilities to use more delicate magic over time. Apparently, Headmaster Tarik’s obsession with mana efficiency wasn’t just for the purposes of making her already absurd mana reservoirs stretch even farther, but was also to help her retain her ability to do fine work with her magic. There wasn’t a set size where magic started counting as siege magic, however. Instead, it had to do with the size of the spell related to the size of the caster’s mana reservoir, and to how precise the mana requirements for the spell were.
So Talia had to sit there for hours on end, manifesting and holding swarms of tiny, fingernail-sized dreambolts in front of her, gradually progressing to smaller sizes and larger swarms. To everyone’s surprise, Talia hadn’t complained in the slightest, but had taken Alustin very seriously.
“It might make me more powerful,” Talia had said, “but it also leaves me less capable of defending myself or others. What use is more power if it leaves you less battle-ready?”
Sabae, meanwhile, was progressing in using wind and water armor at the same time. Rather than just holding one on each arm, Alustin had her passing segments of each around her body. The ship’s sailors had been instructed to call out commands to her whenever they passed— move the spinning water to her left arm, or the wind to her right leg. They quickly jumped into the spirit of the training, giving her contradictory commands, elaborate patterns to follow, or making her move the two spinning sections of armor in time to the beat of sea shanties.
They didn’t come close to her, though. The armor had a nasty habit of exploding off her when the wind and water passed over or even too close to each other when she wasn’t focusing, and it could easily knock a person down. It definitely knocked Sabae down quite a bit. Hugh spotted her surreptitiously healing her own bruises every now and then.
Hugh and Godrick had been assigned training together, under Artur.
Specifically, working with what had once been a sword made of ice, and was now a ring of ice.
Godrick stared at both of them in slight horror as they showed him what they’d turned the weapon into.
“Neither of yeh are enchanters,” Godrick said. “Couldn’t yeh have sunk the ship, alterin’ an enchanted weapon like that?”
“We didn’t make a single change ta’ the
enchantment, Son,” Artur said. “It was never a sword at all.”
“It was always a ring,” Hugh said. “The Swordsmen had just… persuaded it to form a sword-shaped shell around itself.”
“It’s alive?” Godrick asked. “Ah’m supposed ta’ wear a livin’ ring that might still be loyal ta’ Havath?”
Hugh shook his head. “It’s… not like my book. I’m pretty sure your average snail is considerably smarter than it is. Most of our work was just persuading it to change its shape.”
“Hugh’s spellbook is somethin’ special,” Artur said. “Ah’ve never heard about an item pacted by a warlock gettin’ that smart that fast. Reckon it might have ta’ do with the way the labyrinth stone is part of Hugh’s pact with Kanderon, not ta’ mention merged inta Hugh’s attuned aether crystal. Plus, ah don’t know anyone who really understands labyrinth stones. They don’t work by Anastan spellform rules, growin’ in labyrinths as they do. Anyhap, an enchanted weapon would have ta’ be bonded ta’ a person for years an’ years before it gets that smart. Some a’ the older ones, like Grovebringer, are nearly as smart as people.”
A thought occurred to Hugh, and he looked around with a little alarm. He hadn’t seen his spellbook since just after the storm ended. It had stayed slung around his shoulder for the whole storm— for all its mischievousness, it seemed to understand exactly when there was danger and it needed to behave.
He would bet money that it was up to something right now.
“Regardless, ah couldna have done this without Hugh,” Artur said. “Ah doubt anyone but a warlock could talk ta’ this little lass with any ease. Ah’ll be right back.”
Artur got up and walked off. Godrick stared uncertainly at the ring in his palm.
“Is this ring really female?” he asked.
Hugh shook his head. “It barely even has self-awareness or a personality. I think your dad just likes assigning personalities to things.”