Knight Chosen

by Tammy Salyer

  “It’s an illuminator. I can barely see in here. And for you . . .” He pointed the light beam so it shined on the floor near a pillar—and on the set of artifacts Ulfric had last touched in Vaka Aster’s sanctuary at Mount Omina.

  Ulfric paced to the artifacts and knelt beside them, barely believing they were here. The engineer had surprised him with the truth. Bardgrim’s satchel lay nearby. It was about this size of a folded cloak and would serve to carry the objects. He swept everything but one of Vaka Aster’s Fenestrii inside, barely sparing a glance at Bardgrim to assess what new trick he might be playing, and returned at once to Mylla.

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” he heard Bardgrim say but ignored him.

  Removing the eye shields once more, he lowered onto one knee beside her, set Vaka Aster’s Fenestros in the center of her chest over her armor, and pulled her hands so they lay atop it. Pressing his own hand down to keep hers from falling, he closed his eyes and channeled a simple invocation using his Mentalios. Ambient energy from within the chamber slipped by him, collected by the Fenestros. Beneath his hand, the celestial stone glowed, growing warmer, and soon the heat spread into her body, past her hands through his own. He continued chanting, absorbing without intending to part of the charge’s vitality. With the Fenestros serving as a healing dynamo, it would not take long to rejuvenate his fellow Knight Corporealis.

  Her chest rose and Ulfric opened his eyes, continuing the chant. The color had returned to her pale flesh, umber with a touch of rose, just a shade more like fire than his own earthen hue. A beat later, she blinked then coughed.

  “Havelock,” she whispered as she turned to see his face. After a moment, she was able to focus. “By the Verities, Stallari. Is it really you?”

  He ceased chanting and pulled down the eye shields, leaving her hands over the Fenestros. “Yes, Mylla, it’s me.”

  Her eyes closed again in relief. When she opened them, she looked down at the stone beneath her hands, grasping it tighter. “I thought it was Ba—”

  But she cut herself off and looked at him with a plea in her dark eyes.

  “You thought it was what?” he asked.

  He couldn’t tell if she hesitated because he’d just stolen her back from the brink of rejoining the Great Cosmos or because of something else. She licked her lips, dropped her eyes. Pulling herself up to a sitting position, she said, “I can’t believe I found you. And—who’s that?”

  She’d spied Bardgrim, who stared at them with his mouth gaping in speechless surprise.

  “A Himmingazian,” Ulfric responded. “He found me when I came through the starpath well, and now he’s aiding me to . . .”

  He stopped. To what? He had Balavad’s Scrylle, but more importantly, he had a trove of Fenestrii, the keys to creating the Verity cage once more. He only required their vessels now to imprison them and stop their reigns of suffering amid the realms. It was time, wasn’t it, time to get back to Vinnr and fulfill the promise he’d made himself. Exact vengeance on the monsters—the real monsters, not those pestilent water maggots outside—who’d killed his family, stolen his life.

  Mylla, too rattled to comment on his pause, spoke. “Stallari, so much has gone awry. We have to get back to Vinnr at once. Reopen the well quickly and take us.”

  That was a curious statement, and one that filled him with dread. He rose and lent her a hand, helping her to stand as well. Speaking slowly, deliberately, he asked, “Did you not use the Scrylle of Vinnr to create the starpath and bring yourself here? You must have the Scrylle still, yes?”

  Sorrow hardened her expression. “No. I didn’t come here by choice. Eisa . . . Eisa has betrayed us all. She took the Scrylle.”

  The blood drained from his face. Eisa would never . . .

  Would she? So much suffering had been heaped on the Knight in her turns, so much loss. But she would never, never betray her oath. Her resolve to serve Vaka Aster and protect the vessel was the strongest of any living being he’d ever met.

  But wasn’t betraying his oath what he planned to do? Was it so hard to believe she would fall from faith and quit the fight as well?

  No. After all, it wasn’t.

  Through numb lips, he asked, “Where is Vaka Aster’s vessel? What’s happened in Vinnr?”

  Chapter 43

  Where is Vaka Aster’s vessel? The question nearly doused the renewed Verity spark within Mylla. “What do you mean? We all thought, hoped, you . . . don’t you know?” she asked.

  Ulfric took a step backward. Planting his feet, he said, “I do not,” then repeated, “Tell me everything that’s happened.”

  In clipped phrases, she quickly told the tale of all that had come to pass since Ulfric had disappeared. At her question, he explained how he’d reached this realm purely by accident, somehow inadvertently opening a starpath well and going through when he’d destroyed the Verity cage, and that he didn’t know how to reopen it. She might have sped through her explanation quicker if she’d used the Mentalios, but she didn’t trust herself to be able to hide certain things from his keener mind. Things like the fact that she’d shown Balavad exactly where to find them. Things like what had become of Symvalline and Isemay, a calamity, she assumed he didn’t yet know of.

  As she came to the end of the story, he asked, “Why did Eisa send you here?”

  “I don’t know.” And she didn’t, couldn’t. The older Knight’s reasons had become a wall of shrouds and deception by the time Mylla had clashed with her.

  He thought for a moment, then said, “Perhaps it was to protect you. I don’t doubt your words, Knight, but they are hard to swallow. Eisa has always been true to the Order, even at great cost to herself.” He paused, then added, seemingly to himself, “There is a strong link between the two realms for Eisa, and Griggory as well.”

  Surprised to hear him speak of the other Knight, whom she’d only recently learned had existed, she asked, “Griggory? Why’ve you never spoken of him?”

  He hedged, looking away from her before answering. “That is a story for another time. First, we must get back to Vinnr.” He retrieved the Scrylle of Battgjald from the satchel near him.

  “No,” she blurted and reached out to grasp his hand.

  At first taken aback, he grew grave—graver—at her expression. “What is it?”

  No choice now. She dove into her confession. “There’s something worse, something much worse, I have to tell you. I have made such a misstep, Stallari. When I arrived here, I attempted to look in Balavad’s Scrylle. I was trying to find a way to conjure a well on my own. But somehow, when I gazed inside, Balavad was there. He took over my thoughts, my very being. The usurper . . . knows we’re here.”

  A flash glimmered behind the strange eye shield Ulfric wore, as if his eyes themselves glowed, then he began sweeping the celestial artifacts into the satchel she’d found them in, saying, oddly, in Elder Veros, “Come, Bardgrim, we must get back to your ship and depart with all haste.”

  “But those fleeches outside . . .” the kórb-fruit-colored foreigner protested, also in Elder Veros.

  “We’ll get past them,” Ulfric said, pulling one of Vaka Aster’s Fenestrii from the bag and holding it in his palm. “With this, I can weave a shield that would hold off a dragør.”

  She could see the Himmingazian hesitate, afraid of facing the fleeches, as he called them. Or perhaps he feared something else. Her own skin broke out in gooseflesh at the memory of the water monster that had attacked her unawares. She’d have preferred not to meet another of those creatures, but it sounded as if the means to escape this forsaken island and its resident life-suckers awaited them.

  “Look, Aldinhuus,” the Himmingazian tried, “there’s something important you need to know. I’m supposed to tell you—”

  “Later. Mylla, gather your klinkí stones and anything else you brough with you.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “As far from here as we can get.”

  Without another word, he pushed
past the doors, letting hard rain pelt the white stones of the temple’s floor. Holding the Fenestros out with a single hand, he flung his own klinkí stones into the storm with the other. He murmured some words, and lines of white-gold light from the Fenestros shot out to connect with each of his smaller stones.

  “Come,” he commanded and stepped outside.

  Mylla glanced back at the Himmingazian. His eyes bounced from the entryway to her. His eyes, their color is so similar to Havelock’s, she thought, and the pang that accompanied the observation struck deep. “It’s okay. We’ll protect you,” she told him, speaking Elder Veros too, apparently their common language.

  After what appeared to be a contentious internal debate, he paced to her left shoulder, and they followed the Stallari.

  Chapter 44

  Things were moving almost too fast for Jaemus to keep up. It was one thing to break the rules of your own fleet just to try saving a world (proving your own engineering brilliance while you were at it). It was another to join ranks with a madman who threatened to harm said fleet, and it was quite another still to learn that myth was fact, and madmen, and now possibly madwomen, from another world were the only ones who might stand between the end of the world and, well, not the end of it, instead of you and your brilliance after all.

  There were limits to how many brain-bursting realizations one man could withstand over the course of just a couple of Brights and Dims. Consequently, he reeled behind the two Vinnric Knights as Aldinhuus, as promised, made quick work of the current wave of fleeches. Somehow the Fenestros and his own kinky stones created an envelope that, unlike the one aboard the Skate, instantly turned every fleech that dared try to penetrate it into a smoking husk of hideous, rank flesh. The two hundred or so steps to the safety of the Octopod went by in flashes and bursts, and the three made it aboard the craft before he’d had time to do more than acknowledge his woeful lack of preparedness for this current predicament.

  There was still one thing he could do, and that was fly, at least better than Aldinhuus. “I’ll take us up,” he said as soon as the hatch had closed, “and get us some distance as quickly as I can.”

  Surprising him, Aldinhuus held up the Fenestros. “Would this help?”

  Recovering immediately, he said, “Master Knight, it can’t hurt,” and reached for the stone.

  “Wait,” the new Knight said, and put her hand over the stone before he could grasp it. “You trust this man, Stallari?”

  Now he was more than a pinch curious about the answer to that question, and he froze to wait for it. Though this new Knight seemed a bit less . . . grumpy, she still looked dangerous. Armor like Aldinhuus had originally worn, kinky stones, and an intensely long and sharp sword hanging in a belt across her back. A fine silvery patina gilded the delicate but heavy-looking hilt, and its pommel bore a star with nine points. The craftsmanship of this bizarre weapon could not have been finer, and Jaemus didn’t doubt its blade would be as sharp as its maker was skilled. What this woman lacked in Aldinhuus’s brawn, she made up for in the kind of military bearing Cote had.

  He looked to Aldinhuus, awaiting what felt like judgment.

  With a single curt nod, the Knight gruffed, “I do.”

  The new Knight shifted her eyes to Jaemus once more, then dropped her hand. “As you were,” she said.

  With all the haste he could manage, he placed the foreign Fenestros in the Octopod’s unique harness and returned to the cockpit to prepare for takeoff. As he did, he heard the new Knight question Aldinhuus about the dragørflies, which had dispersed once more after the last fleech fell, using a word he didn’t understand. Aldinhuus gave a brief explanation, saying they’d come through the well with him. Though Jaemus couldn’t articulate to himself why he didn’t think that was the full truth—how could the things just appear out of thin air, even if they had originally traveled along the starpathway with Aldinhuus?—he chose not to offer any of his own thoughts on the matter.

  When he returned from the Fenestros compartment, Aldinhuus quirked a questioning eyebrow and asked, “Are there any weapons besides those tiny arm apparatuses on your ship, Bardgrim?”

  “Shelksies?” he offered. “No, but we wouldn’t need them. Like I said, Himmingazian ships don’t bear weapons. The Skate’s not going to attack us.” At least not in the way I think you’re implying, he admitted but only to himself.

  “It isn’t the Skate we need to worry about.”

  This caught him off guard. He opened his mouth to ask what Aldinhuus meant, then decided he didn’t really want to know. “Then off we go,” he said lightly, though the tone was feigned, and eased into his seat. “Should be just a few moments until the thrusters are suitably powered.”

  “Mylla,” Aldinhuus said, “you take the second seat up here. I’m going to take a closer look at those weapons the Himmingazians carry. There are some in the hold.”

  Jaemus focused on getting them in the air while the Knight called Mylla sat beside him. Feeling her stare as he followed launch procedures, he eventually turned to her. While Aldinhuus was a mellow brown with brown hair, she was darker but with a hint of red and her hair was black. A goodly height, her eyes were almost level with his, and were the largest, darkest eyes he’d ever seen. They shone so brightly they seemed to be lit from within by a shadowy lamp. Her smallish nose reminded him so much of a button he had to tell himself not to press it.

  She seemed to be staring at him with the same fascination, but eventually asked, “How long is what you’re doing going to take?”

  “Just another minute or two.” He tried a smile. “I’m Bardgrim. Jaemus Bardgrim, Glint Engineer.” The last two words were in Himm, as there didn’t seem to be an equivalent in Elder Veros. Remembering the gesture Aldinhuus had made inside the Bounding Skate’s holding cell when they’d agreed to assist each other, he made a guess that it might also be some kind of universal greeting, and touched his chin with his right hand, then held it out palm forward for her to grasp.

  One of her eyebrows, a thin horizontal black line, arched. “What are you doing?” she asked in a tone that made him feel quite silly indeed.

  “Oh, uh, I just thought . . . I’m trying to say it’s nice to meet you, Master . . . ?”

  “Knight Evernal. Should I just call you Glunt?”

  “Heh, no, it’s Glint. That’s my title, my job.”

  “I cannot press upon you strongly enough how important it is that we leave here instantly.”

  “Right. Master Knight,” he called through the hold, “you should sit down and brace yourself.”

  “Go,” Aldinhuus called back.

  With smooth efficiency, he accelerated, letting the same ascension technology that allowed Himmingazian cities to hover over the waves of the Never Sea rather than on them. The Octopod rose straight up before engaging the forward thrust. Though they’d discussed no course thus far, instinctively Jaemus spun the bow toward the west, away from Himmingaze’s most populated floating city-state. He was about to accelerate but gave Mylla one last glance, noticing her safety belt wasn’t buckled.

  “Let me just show you how to . . .”

  The way her eyes suddenly widened made him stop. Jerking his head back to look past the windshield, he spotted what she had.

  “Water and lightning, what in the Glister Cloud is that?” he cried.

  In his forty anni-cycles, he’d never seen the glistering sky completely black. But it was now. Everything outside of the Octopod was simply gone, replaced by a massive shape seemingly composed of complete darkness.

  “It’s the usurper’s warship,” Mylla said. “Turn us around. Now! Get us out of here.”

  After the word “warship,” no other words had ever been less necessary to say aloud. Dipping the port side, he spun the Octopod on its axis, allowing himself the brief elation of knowing nothing could catch them once he activated the harness and drew power from the celestial stone.

  But like all the wonderful bouts of enormous luck he’d had in the las
t couple of cycles, this one, too, flamed and died like the fleeches against Aldinhuus’s Fenestros-fueled shield. The Bounding Skate, having caught up at last, hovered before them.

  “Come on, Glunt,” Mylla cried. “If that warship takes us, more than our own doom awaits. Go!”

  But he couldn’t. Cote and the Glisternauts were here. And after seeing how much the encroaching warship frightened this stalwart-looking Knight, even if Jaemus could escape with the Octopod’s celestially charged speed, what would happen to Cote?

  “I can’t,” he said simply. “I can’t leave them at the mercy of that. Whatever that is.”

  Chapter 45

  The ship had stopped its erratic tilt, and though Ulfric had a firm grip on the shelksie locker, the anticipated shock of speed hadn’t yet come.

  “What are you doing, Glunt?” Evernal’s voice, pitched high with alarm, broke from the cockpit. “We must flee!”

  No further prompting needed, Ulfric shot through the hatch to intercept whatever new calamity the Himmingazian was about to attempt. And just when he’d finally begun to trust him . . .

  But there wasn’t time, or need, to explain what had caused their aborted escape. He looked beyond the windshield and saw for himself what the issue was. The Bounding Skate had arrived. “Bardgrim, go around—”

  Mylla spun around and cut him off. “Stallari, the usurper’s warship has found us.”

  A memory flashed in his mind with a jolt. Balavad’s voice in his head saying, A starship, Stallari. You are looking at the flagship of a great people . . . This starship brings the bearers of my gift: preservation from needless destruction. And with this, a view of the behemoth ship as it had risen over Vinnr in front of his eyes.

  “Balavad’s ship—” she started, but it was his turn to cut in.

  “I know the ship.”

  “ . . . How?”