“Yes, I’ve kept a loose eye on him,” Ethan murmured as he flipped through the pages in search of anything familiar. While he had always maintained plenty of contacts in Crell and Solaria, Asgardia had been a much lower priority. “I don’t recognize any of these names except…” He paused and glanced back to her. “Torvald Halfren. Is he any relation to Vanek Halfren?”
“Good memory,” Valestra said with an approving nod. “Yes, he’s Vanek’s youngest son. Vanek himself was executed by Zharrs when he claimed power. You know how their ridiculous traditions work—the highest ranking shamans of the previous king are always put to the sword, and then one of their children is elevated to serve the new ruler as a symbol of the transition of power. It’s a wonder their idiotic culture has survived this long…”
“New leaders in any nation yearn for a clean break with their predecessor. This is just a bit more…direct.”
“It’s barbaric,” Valestra said. “Sometimes I think they’re even worse than the Crell.”
Ethan shrugged. “The point is we’ve found our weak link. Vanek and I were good friends for many years. He hated the Imperium nearly as much as I did. Perhaps his son will feel the same way.”
“His clan is on the weaker side, comparatively. The Mon’Gardoth, I think they’re called—‘men as beasts’ or something equally absurd. A fleet of pirates sacked one of their ports a few years ago, and they’ve struggled to recover.”
“Which means they’re desperate,” Ethan said, smiling. Yes, this was exactly the opportunity he’d been looking for. “The other clans could crush them at any time. Do you know how many soldiers Halfren commands?”
Valestra shook her head. “Not really; our reports are woefully out of date. But I would guess he controls at least five thousand men plus a small armada.”
“More than enough. The only trick will be finding him.”
“His clan has a strong presence in Frostgarde just across the lake. Weather-permitting, you could probably catch a ship and dock in the city within a few days.”
“Yes,” Ethan agreed. His mind was already swirling with the possibilities. Between the Aether and his demons, he could probably get there in half the time. He would just need to steal a ship…
“For what little my opinion is worth to you, I still think this is a bad idea,” Valestra told him. “You don’t exactly have a sterling reputation in Asgardia, and there’s no reason to believe that Halfren will share his father’s old loyalties. He’s just as likely to kill you as talk to you.”
“When I walked in the door you said you wished I was already dead. Maybe you’ll finally get your wish.”
She smiled ever-so-faintly. “You know, I miss the old days sometimes. Back before the war, I mean, when we all lived in Ashenfel.”
“Everyone does,” Ethan said.
“It wasn’t so long ago, but I swear it feels like a different lifetime.” Valestra took in a deep breath and finished the last of her brandy. “The world has changed. More than anyone could have ever expected…”
“Now it’s up to us to change it back—and we will.”
Her grey eyes flicked back up to meet his. “Whatever happened to that faeyn druid you were so fond of? The one with the violet eyes? I know she left the Resistance at some point. Did she finally return home?”
Ethan’s lip twitched. “She’s with my son. She follows him everywhere, as far as I know.”
“Ah. Guilt is a powerful motivator, I suppose. Does she know that you’re alive?”
“No,” Ethan lied again. “It’s best for everyone that way.”
Valestra studied him in silence, a dozen unasked questions simmering behind her eyes. She knew that Ethan and Selvhara had been lovers long before Elissa’s death; she knew that both women had meant the world to him, if for completely different reasons. She probably wanted to know exactly what had happened in the dark days following the war and why Selvhara had chosen to leave rather than stay with him. But again, Valestra was keen enough to leave some questions unspoken.
“Is there any way I can contact you?” she asked instead. “Besides relaying a message through Her Majesty, I mean. I suspect you’d rather she didn’t know what you’re up to, either.”
“No, but I’ll be in touch,” Ethan said. “And when I return, I’ll have an army of Asgardians with me.”
“We’ll see. If they do decide to kill you instead, be sure to have them put your corpse in a raft and send it down the lake. I’ll have my people pick it up when it washes up on the shore.”
He grunted. “You always did have a soft heart.”
“I know,” Valestra said with another faint smile. “Now get out of here before anyone else sees you. I’d rather not have to chastise my guards for allowing you inside.”
Ethan nodded and smiled back. A part of him wanted to stay and catch up on everything he had missed in the last decade…but they both knew there was no point in pretending. Things really had changed, and the old days were never coming back.
He slipped back out of the consulate without a fuss, and Kar’zhel was waiting for him in the alleyway. The demon cackled giddily as he approached.
You have a plan, master? Kar’zhel asked.
“I always have a plan,” Ethan said matter-of-factly. “The Asgardians don’t trust the Solarians, and there’s no way to convince them to help us without offering them something in return.”
I could take one of them. I could use his body and voice to tell the High King whatever message you wished…
“Perhaps, but not just yet. I will need to summon additional allies before we leave, and then I will need to evaluate the defenses in Frostgarde. I’m going to speak with one of the minor clan lords and convince him to help us. With his men, we should be able to retake Ashenfel.”
Kar’zhel leaned in close, his fang-ridden maw dripping with acidic bile. And if he refuses?
“I doubt he’ll be able to resist our offer, but if he does…” Ethan shrugged. “That’s where you will come in. One way or another, I will have those soldiers.”
“One way or another, Ashenfel will be free.”
Chapter Seven
“To dominate the skies is to dominate your enemies.”
—Elundel, King of Beleth, 1389 A.G.
For the better part of the last two thousand years, the hearty people of Beleth were known throughout Torsia as the preeminent masters of griffon breeding. They were the first humans to successfully mount flying beasts, in fact, and their dominion of the sky allowed them to greatly expand their territory during the Age of Ascension in the aftermath of the Godswar. The Belethian Empire ruled most of northeastern Torsia for almost eight hundred years, right up until the Legion of Sol and their vaunted dragon-riders carved a path through the heart of the continent during the Second Crusade. Within a few decades, the Legion had conquered most of modern-day Solaria and united the disparate provinces under a single Ascendant king.
In modern times, Beleth remained the centralized hub of griffon breeding in the Alliance, and griffon riders were the vanguard of the Solarian Legion. As a species, the majestic, golden-white creatures were probably the most reliable aerial mounts in the world, and they were relatively quick to raise and train. Dragons, on other hand, were dramatically more powerful and resilient, but they also took decades to grow into maturity. The Alliance had always deployed them sparingly as a result, and for the last few decades the Imperium had held a significant tactical advantage based on the simple fact that they were much more ruthless in their draconic breeding techniques. According to the Legion’s own estimates, Crell dragons outnumbered Solarian ones by a nearly four-to-one ratio…and as the war raged on, the gap continued to grow.
A few months ago, Sovan promised Krystia that he could neutralize the Crell advantage, and he had taken a few of the recently-liberated Unbound to the “Golden Hatchery,” the largest dragon breeding site in Solaria. Today he was finally willing to show her what he had accomplished in the months since.
; Krystia’s frozen breath billowed out in front of her as she dismounted her giant white eagle, Oren, and swept her eyes across the massive cavern entrance. The Hatchery was located at the base of the Frostpeak Mountains below the now defunct Asylum and just a few miles away from the city of Tulia. Normally the Legion garrisoned an entire battalion of troops here to protect the chamber, but after Sovan’s comrades had moved in, Krystia had ordered the soldiers back to the front lines. With the Crell rapidly advancing on all fronts, they couldn’t afford to waste good soldiers on guard duty behind the lines. There was also the non-trivial consideration that she didn’t really want an army of spies snooping around her new Unbound allies if at all possible. She didn’t know exactly what Sovan had planned, but morale was already shaky enough without her soldiers interacting with people who hadn’t seen the light of day in years.
“It’s certainly well-hidden,” she commented as she handed Oren’s reins off to one of her royal guardsmen. Her entourage had all flown in directly from Celenest; despite the gradually rising temperatures, most of the Frostpeak region had yet to fully thaw. The roads remained virtually impassable.
“The location is perfect,” Sovan said as he stepped up next to her. His breath, she noted, wasn’t freezing as it left his lips. He had evidently extended his heat-trapping Aetheric barrier into a full-blown bubble surrounding him on all sides. “But the real treasures lie within.”
Krystia nodded and glanced back to her guardsmen. “Stay here and feed the mounts. I’m sure they’re famished.”
“Of course, Your Majesty,” they replied in near unison. If they were at all annoyed about being left out in the cold, they didn’t show it. Not that they had anything to worry about—she had already empowered all of them with the Aether, and they could easily buffer themselves from the wind and sleet if they so desired.
Once the mounts were settled, Krystia and Sovan made their way into the enormous cave mouth. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they were walking into the maw of a great beast. The cavern was clearly not a natural rock formation; the surface was too smooth and too perfect, and the floor had been meticulously chiseled to provide solid footing as it descended deeper into the earth. Allegedly, the Golden Hatchery had been around for nearly five centuries, and if that were true its caretakers had done an excellent job shielding the cavern from the passage of time. Distantly, she wondered how many Bound had been involved in the original construction.
They spiraled down much deeper than she had originally envisioned, and her nose wrinkled at the strange mixture of aromas wafting up from the depths. Stretching out with her telepathy, she could only sense five humans below, along with several dozen beasts. The latter were much more difficult to separate from one another; their primal, instinctual minds tended to blur together.
“You can’t treat them like humans,” Sovan answered her unspoken questions. “If you search for individual thought patterns, you won’t be able to separate them. Beasts do not reason as we do.”
“I didn’t realize the Asylum kept animals around for you to practice on,” Krystia muttered. The strength and precision of his powers continued to annoy her; she was the Ascendant here, blessed with the memories and knowledge of every Solarian monarch throughout history.
“I learned this trick as a boy long before I was imprisoned,” Sovan told her. She swore she caught him grinning out of the corner of her eye, but when she turned he was expressionless. “The key is to search for specific sensory stimuli. One beast may smell something interesting, while another may feel the grass between its toes. Those instinctual responses are what can help you isolate one simple mind from another.”
Frowning, Krystia stretched out her mind and followed his advice…and the trick worked almost immediately. Suddenly the blur of primal emotions focused, and she could pick out dozens—no, hundreds—of individual bestial minds.
“Two hundred forty seven, after the last clutch spawned a few days ago,” Sovan said. “Twenty of them will be ready for deployment soon, and another thirty should be ready by the end of this month.”
“Fifty dragons?” Krystia breathed. “How is that possible? There are only a handful of fertile females in the whole country.”
“More than that soon,” he replied. This time, his smile was unmistakable. “Come—let me show you the future of warfare.”
They pressed onward, and a few seconds later the passage opened into an enormous chamber. The ceiling was at least a hundred feet high, and a series of wide, interconnected cubbies stretched out farther than she could see in both directions. Each cubby was filled with dragons of varying ages—newborn whelps, person-sized wyrmlings, and even a few adolescents. Krystia had never seen anything like this before. There were rarely more than three or four dragons guarding all of Celenest at a given time…
It took a while, but eventually she conquered her initial awe and inspected the area more closely. Sovan’s Unbound had placed a variety of strange glimmering crystals near each cubby. She was intimately familiar with Aetheric forging and tempering, of course. Channelers of all varieties could focus their energies through certain stones to produce wondrous effects—that was the underlying premise of all Aetheric enchantment. Ancient artificers had learned and catalogued how the Aether reacted when exposed to certain natural elements like granite or steel or diamond, and they had discovered ways to “infuse” these raw materials with lingering power. The result was the variety of enchanted items they enjoyed today, from sharper, more durable blades and armor to purifying herbal salves to simple glow-lamps. But even though she could see and feel the Aether coursing through these stones, she couldn’t discern their purpose.
“Several centuries ago, a channeler from Ikara discovered a technique to accelerate the growth of pigeons, specifically those trained to serve as messengers,” Sovan explained. “The various merchant guilds immediately started using the birds to deliver missives between their ships.”
Krystia frowned. “Why rely on beasts when you could use calling stones?”
“They hadn’t been invented yet, and they’re still very expensive even today. The Ikaran king also wasn’t willing to waste his precious Bound on civilian ships. As a result, the merchants were forced to rely upon conventional means of communication. Pigeons were the obvious choice.”
“But they already breed very quickly. Every port city in Torsia is blanketed by them.”
“I’m well aware. This channeler’s discovery was considered worthless. He was mocked and shunned and eventually vanished into obscurity.” Sovan gestured behind him to one of his former comrades in the Asylum, a middle-aged man with russet skin and a thick beard. “The technique, however, lived on in his family for generations. Remember that the Ikarans have never persecuted their Unbound as viciously as other Torsian nations. They were allowed to lead mostly normal lives as long as they stuck to the fringes of society…and this man’s family endured for generations as horse breeders. His father eventually moved them into southern Solaria, where they adapted their techniques to griffons. Not long afterwards, King Areekan’s priests discovered what was going on, and they instantly imprisoned the family and confined their ten year-old son to the Asylum.”
Krystia’s eyes narrowed. “But his father had already taught him the technique, and he has somehow adapted it to work on dragons.”
“Precisely,” Sovan confirmed. “Many of our people are blessed with similar gifts and ancient knowledge, but the world has chosen to shun us rather than embrace us. King Areekan literally buried away resources that could have turned the war on its head a generation ago.”
Krystia nodded and clenched her jaw in disgust. Anytime she felt the pangs of guilt for what she’d done to Areekan—a feeling that was less and less frequent these days—all she needed to do was remember the crimes of his regime and all those before him. If he hadn’t been such a coward—if he had been willing to train and trust his Unbound rather than seal them all away—then perhaps they could have crushed the Crell decades ag
o. Perhaps Borden and Galvia and Izaria would never have been conquered. Perhaps some of those nations would have willingly joined the Alliance instead.
“The technique is actually surprisingly simple,” Sovan went on as he led her before a cubby filled with newborn whelps. In this stage of life, the dragons looked more like tiny, golden-scaled lizards than majestic flying beasts. “Accelerating a brood mother’s gestation cycle requires only the smallest variation of a standard healing technique. As you know, once you understand a creature’s anatomy, virtually anything is possible.”
“Yes,” Krystia whispered, nodding idly. She probably understood that better than most—her experience as a temple healer had opened her mind to numerous other channeling techniques over the years. She had never spent a tremendous amount of time mastering energy manipulation, for example, but while other channelers might have been able to conjure a more potent arc of lightning, she knew exactly where a discharge would inflict the most damage.
“Sadly, the acceleration process is not without side effects,” Sovan went on. “So far, nearly all of the females we’ve tested have been rendered sterile after spawning their first clutch.”
“They’re not just sterilized,” Krystia rasped as she gleaned the details from his surface thoughts. “Most of them die!”
“Only about a third, actually. The rest remain suitable for the majority of standard combat deployments. I recommend they be used for static defense rather than overt incursions, however; their concentration and endurance seem to suffer the most.”
She winced despite herself. “But the average brood mother can spawn many clutches in her lifetime. If all of these females end up dead or sterilized, then we’re just sabotaging our long-term efforts for minimal short-term gains.”
The Godswar Saga (Omnibus) Page 99