Knight Chosen

by Tammy Salyer

  With a mute nod, she pulled open the hatch.

  Chapter 35

  In the dark, only two things were known to Ravener Irrick. The first was a pull, a draw, a straining of his mind to . . . something beyond. Some light or heat, or both, called to him, burning like oil in his thoughts. He knew that light for what it was. The wystic spark of Vaka Aster, as potent as the darkness cloaking him but opposite in every way. It was infuriatingly near, he knew, but he could only see it if he got closer—if his new sense could still be called “seeing.”

  The second was a voice. The voice of His Holiness, Balavad the Verity and creator of Battgjald, a realm of which Irrick was now a servitor. His Holiness whispered at the base of his skull, always present, always aware of him, of his perceptions, of what he might think or do. A Ravener’s mind, Irrick understood—in as much as he was conscious of understanding—served the Verity. A part of the maker, to be controlled and know all that the Ravener did.

  In the darkness, Irrick’s fate was slavery.

  His Holiness’s voice slid inside Irrick’s mind. Speak to me, Ravener. Where are you now?

  Holiness, I am a captive aboard the ship of the Knights Corporealis.

  Where?

  Irrick sensed an impatience in the tone, and it sent needles of fear into his flesh. I cannot say, Holiness. But they are near. I can feel the Verity spark they carry.

  Moments of silence passed and the dark closed back in, shrouding Irrick and draining all sense, even of fear, from him once more. A Ravener, first a slave, was also a shell, a space waiting to be filled with his maker’s aspirations. Soon, one came.

  You must get free and kill the Knights. This is your anointed purpose, your reason for existing. Achieve this, and you will be exalted among all Raveners. As reward, I will give you all the knowledge of all the realities.

  A new sensation tingled at the fringes of his mind: profound joy. No reward could possibly mean more to him than to be the recipient of this gift, this wealth of cognition—a treasure so immense only the Verities could claim it and choose to share it. This was his anointed purpose, and it had been since . . . before. Before he became a Ravener.

  But that before is inconsequent, the Verity whispered to him. Now, serving me, the zenith of all the Verities, is all that matters. I have already gifted you with much that you previously desired. Immortality, as well as strength far beyond your frail form. Use these now to escape.

  Irrick reached out, using his hands to understand his confinement because his eyes were blind. Intuitively, he hissed, his vibrating tongue no longer in pain. The noise echoed, and combined with what his fingers felt, they created a picture in his mind that was as clear as, or clearer than, his eyesight had previously been. The door to his small closet was made of wood, and wood could be broken. But the Knights who confined him had left nothing in the room but a wooden pail, a loaf of seedy bread, and a carafe of water. The carafe was made of clay.

  It was enough.

  From the helm of the Vigilance, Safran waited expectantly, her poise statue-still. Her eyes swirled with colors that flowed outside the borders of visibility to normal human sight as she gazed past the confines of the ship, seeing the world outside. Yggo and Urgo soared in loops around Magdaster’s center square, keenly alert to the plight of the Knights below them. Wystic optics had their place, but the eyes of a bruhawk missed nothing.

  It took the Dragør Marines on watch a few moments to understand, or at least react to, the sight of her fellow Knights descending inside a sphere of transparent blue light from what appeared to them to be thin air. Their warning shouts reverberated furiously between the granite walls of the town—sounds so urgent they came to Safran from both the bruhawks’ ears and through the Vigilance’s hull. Her fellow Knights’ thoughts channeled softly along the Mentalios link to her mind. They hoped the Marines’ surprise didn’t evoke such fear and hostility toward the Knights that they would be forced to fight in self-defense. They did not want to hurt these people.

  Mylla, Stave, and Roibeard readied themselves as the soldiers quickly surrounded them. Words she couldn’t hear were exchanged, though the stiffness and menace of their figures—both Knights’ and Marines’—in the square told their own story.

  Stave, she sent, tell me what is happening.

  Just basic negotiations, my beautiful bloom of embers. The breed of these hinter regions have extra-small brains, they do. May take us a few more moments to convince them of our intentions.

  She snickered at his tactlessness, reminded of the reasons Stave was so rarely selected as spokesperson for the Knights. Long turns past, he’d come from these hinter regions himself, which made his brazen insult that much more amusing.

  Yggo swooped low as a gate to the square’s capital building rolled open, sending Safran glimpses of a squad of heavily armored Marines as they formed up and stepped past it. She recognized Commander Brun but knew none of the others. Their leader, a stout dark-skinned man of middling commoner age, wore a breastplate bearing the red and green Dragør, wingless to show his membership in the ground and sea forces rather than the Wings. The emblem on his pauldrons proclaimed his rank as commander as well.

  He must be Nennus. It didn’t take the watch long to summon him. But is this a good sign? They are either very efficient or very uneasy.

  Of course, both descriptions fit, and upon hearing Mylla’s recounting of Brun’s tales of Asteryss, the local legion was right to be on edge.

  Snippets of the conversation below came to her through the bruhawks. Join in this fight . . . the Knights have a weapon that can wither the Ravener’s forces . . . time is short before the usurper arrives . . .

  . . . Eisa was never here . . .

  Safran tensed. So, they had guessed incorrectly. Eisa must have taken the Fenestros to Dyrrakium.

  Leaning forward unwittingly, she strained to hear more, forcing herself not to interrupt as they parleyed, yet chafing against the restriction of staying behind.

  A shriek sliced into the air, so shrill she felt it seemingly cut into her ears. Startled, she dropped her Mentalios and blinked, losing her connection to the bruhawks’ sight. Within a breath, the shriek came again. It sounded inhuman and tortured, coming from Acolyte Irrick’s direction.

  A moment passed as she considered whether to leave her post here and see to him or continue her watch over those below. That scream, filled with daggers of affliction, decided for her. The Knights and the Marines’ discussion, though tense and metered, did not appear to be on the verge of combat, and Irrick sounded as if he were dying. She had to check on him.

  Pacing down the passageway to the locked closet, she noted the water seeping from beneath the door. Leaning against it, she listened and heard the ragged bellows-like sound of Irrick breathing in snatches that testified of pain or illness.

  Quickly, she unlatched the door and pulled it open.

  Limbs flailed at her, one hand striking her cheek and sending her into a half-turn. Before she could react, a gash seared along her neck and blood began pouring down her chest, then a shard was stabbed into her heart, hitting her with an icy agony so stifling that her lungs could not draw a breath.

  With arms that felt made of lead, she reached for the hands holding whatever was lodged in her chest, unable to believe she’d been attacked. Irrick emerged from the darkness of the closet, his sightless eyes wandering, his bloodless lips hanging slack. She looked down and saw the sheet of blood covering her tunic, too much of it, more than any mortal could bear to lose. A shard of crockery bloomed from her heart. Her knees buckled, and she fell back against the passageway wall. Numbness spread throughout her body, and she used the last of her will to look back into the acolyte’s looming white face.

  A mask of undeath, she thought and blackness consumed her.

  Chapter 36

  Jaemus stared past the ship’s view screen into the miasma of color and storm outside. The only difference between the sky and the Never Sea underneath them was that beneath the
fractured and glistening lights of the Glister Cloud the Never Sea remained the same ichor-dark indigo.

  Sometimes during Glister Dim if the Never Sea was very calm, the Cloud’s reflection could not be teased from the Glister Cloud itself, and he worried he’d simply fly straight into the camouflaged sea. He never had, yet, but in the recesses of his mind, he wondered what a death trapped beneath both the glittering envelope of Cloud and layers of leaden water would feel like. If the cold sea filled the Octopod and crushed the hatches shut with relentless pressure, would his last thoughts be of his lonely, frigid fear or simply acceptance of the futility of it all? A certain peace could be found in acceptance, he knew. He’d held his mother’s hand as she’d slipped away from a wasting disease anni-cycles before. Too young and still so many things she’d wanted to do. And though the days leading up to her death had been painful for her, in the end, she’d looked into his eyes and smiled, comforting him instead of the other way around. “It’s all right, son. This is where my suffering ends. There’s nothing more to be sad about.” And then she’d been gone, leaving him with the knowledge that she’d come to terms with the life she would miss, and finally accepting that inevitability had freed her from fear and replaced it with serenity. Her last lesson to him.

  His father, proud of Jaemus though he was, remained skeptical of the Glisternauts’ pursuit, and Jaemus’s career kept him away from Jovus’s city more often than not. Now, Cote was his closest family. And, yes, the Glisternauts as well, to a degree, though he knew they thought him eccentric and undisciplined. Two traits that were rarely enviable or respected in Himmingaze, where the values of order and predictability held sway. But in his own case, he thought they mixed well.

  He’d solved many riddles on how to make Himmingaze’s airborne existence safer and more productive, to improve the hydrofoil lifts that kept their cities’ afloat above the roiling and unforgiving Never Sea, and make life under the looming Glister Cloud more comfortable, as much as it could be. And now he was integral into designing ships that might even get them beyond the Cloud and escape its terrible beauty and danger for good.

  Unless, of course, what this stranger from, he claimed, a strange land said was true: there was no “beyond” the Cloud.

  But that was absurd. Of course it was. Wasn’t it?

  In need of an escape from these thoughts, he glanced aside at Aldinhuus and startled at the man’s striking luminescent eyes. Like the Never Sea below, they reflected the Cloud, with pinpoint beams and motes dancing and swirling against a shadowy cerulean cornea. The Knight didn’t notice his reaction and seemed as deep in thought as Jaemus was. What could he be thinking of? This man, teetering so clearly on the edge of lunacy, who nonetheless possessed abilities unlike anything Jaemus had ever seen or could explain, what grim thoughts held his focus so completely?

  He cleared his throat as he rose from his seat. “Shouldn’t be more than a half-cycle before we get back to the island. I’ve set our coordinates and the skies are calm. Well, calm for Himmingaze. The ship should be fine getting us there on its own. I’m just going to run to the hold and see what kind of supplies are left.”

  The Knight responded without moving a muscle, eerily resembling a statue with gemstone eyes. “Sit.”

  Jaemus’s legs took the command seriously and spilled him back down. Traitors, he mused. I’m the one in charge here. But that was a laugh. It hadn’t been true for some time now.

  “That’s the second time you’ve tried to leave my sight, Himmingazian,” Aldinhuus continued. “You’ve already proved you’re not trustworthy. You may live in a world where your wits have always served you, but your wits have met their match, I assure you. Even without my turns of wisdom, far more than yours, I too am a man of many wiles.”

  Who talked like this? It was like speaking to a man who’d jumped from the pages of one of Gramsirene Vreyja’s forbidden lore books. The only one he’d ever met with similar diction was, well, the man who’d indirectly heaped all this strangeness on him in the first place, the Knight called Griggory.

  Accepting that he wasn’t going to be allowed out of Aldinhuus’s weird sight, Jaemus settled back in his chair. “A simple, ‘please have a seat,’ would have sufficed,” he grumbled. A thought came to mind. “Let me ask you something. You said you and this Griggory fellow are from the same place, but your skin is dark where his is pale, I might even say sickly looking. I’ll give you that neither of you fit in with the usual Himmingazian, but you look almost nothing like each other either.”

  “Griggory is a northerner. The kingdom he came from is now called Yor, but in his time it was still part of the one empire, before the War of Rivening, when commoners split the kingdoms into three. Ivoryss, Yor, Dyrakkium.”

  “And did you fight in this war?”

  “It was over seven hundred turns of Halla before I was born, but I know much of it and have fought enough battles since to wish for no more.”

  “ . . . I have a feeling you’re going to tell me a ‘turn of Halla’ is similar to an anni-cycle here in Himmingaze.”

  For the first time in the conversation, Aldinhuus looked at him. “I have no idea what an ‘anni-cycle’ is, commoner.”

  By his tone, Jaemus judged Aldinhuus’s words to mean something closer to, Speak again, and I’ll sew your lips shut. He didn’t need to be told twice and fell silent. At least for a moment. One attribute of his admittedly stupendous intellect was a tendency to fidget. And if he couldn’t fidget, to speak. Which, as was once more the case, led his mouth to engage before his brain did. “I suppose we’re lucky, then. With all your, ahem, ‘battle’ experience, at least you didn’t kill anyone on the Skate.”

  Once he realized what he’d said, he braced himself for the blowback that was certainly coming. But Aldinhuus simply turned to him and glowered darkly. Jaemus tried on a shrinking smile and began nervously fiddling with the goggles still hanging around his neck.

  “What is that optical apparatus?”

  “They’re lenses to help me see better in the dark, especially during Glister Dim. They—”

  “Give them to me.”

  “ . . . All right then.” He pulled them over his stack of curls, which now leaned lazily to one side from the few hours of astonishingly refreshing sleep he’d gotten while in the Bounding Skate’s brig.

  Aldinhuus let the strap hang and held the lenses over his eyes, then twisted his head this way and that to look around the pilot’s compartment. With a satisfied grunt, he took a moment to figure out the adjustable strap, then fit the goggles over his face and tightened them.

  “What’s mine is yours,” Jaemus offered, only just managing to conceal his sarcasm.

  “These are not unlike the eye shields I wear when I’m working in my craftery. Now I can look upon you and see just a man instead of . . . more than I can explain.” He fell silent again, then asked with what Jaemus liked to think might have been a hint of admiration in his tone, “Did you create these?”

  “I did.”

  “You are a lens maker, too, as am I, among other things.”

  He quirked an eyebrow at the Knight, waiting to see if he would say more, perhaps elaborate on why their shared inventiveness interested him, but Aldinhuus had returned to his laconic state. “You’re sitting in the most marvelous ship in the Glisternaut fleet, one that I designed, and it’s the goggles that impress you,” Jaemus said, then sighed and looked back out into the storm.

  Finally, he couldn’t hold back any longer. “Aldinhuus, give it to me straight. I know our agreement relied on our cooperative effort to retrieve the rest of the Creatress’s Verity stones. But now that we’ve left the map behind, it doesn’t seem like that’s possible. Does this other Scrylle back at the shrine have the same kind of map?” And the question buzzing in his head that he chose not to ask, at least not yet: And if not, what do you need me for? He was afraid he wasn’t going to like the answer to that.

  “Doesn’t matter. If you’re telling the truth this time�
��—he swiveled to burden Jaemus with his weighty scowl, felt if not seen through the opaque lenses—“I’ll have Balavad’s Scrylle and stones that I need to spin a new cage. Then I will put a stop to the two desecrators who killed my family. Forever, if I am lucky.” His voice was so bitter it would have made chuffee grounds left to fester for weeks taste sweet.

  This was news to Jaemus, and he spent a few moments letting it sink in. Was this story true or simply a new layer of the man’s craziness? He cleared his throat. “Who exactly killed your family?” He wasn’t intentionally being insensitive, but the wandering threads of Aldinhuus’s story increased every time he spoke. It was both fascinating and a little like watching an explosion in slow motion. And as with any explosion, he worried the final outcome would be messy, at best.

  Aldinhuus, apparently having exposed something he hadn’t meant to, said abruptly, “Never mind.”

  The tickle of his intuition, something Jaemus always paid attention to, became a hard rub. “So that’s what this is, isn’t it? A . . . a vendetta. You never planned on aiding me at all, did you?”

  Aldinhuus’s silence answered for him.

  Fine foggy mess you’ve gotten yourself into, you fool, Jaemus told himself. This guy has you over a cistern. You know you can’t fight him. He glanced sideways at the Knight, taking in the full girth of the heftier man’s arms and thick neck. No way, nuh-uh. And you can’t disarm him, unless you catch him by surprise. And if you just stop the ship and wait for the ’Nauts, you’re putting them in danger too. No, this is your puzzle; you figure it out. And that apology you were hoping to get from Cote—you can bet the entire humble pie those tables have turned. Damn the skies and sea.

  The hold contained a locker stocked with shelksies that he could easily access if he had a moment to himself. But because he couldn’t even leave his seat without arousing Aldinhuus’s suspicions, as well as paint himself as a target for the man’s remarkably well-aimed kinky stones, what options did he have?