Dragon Road

by Joseph Brassey

  “I suppose,” Yaresh said, spreading his hands wide and looking from right to left, “that we should simply wait to see if this enemy acts again? I respect the countess for her views, but one does not turn to a stargazer in war-time.”

  “Are we at war, Yaresh?” It was Pentus who spoke now. Behind the lord of the muster, the functionary ground his teeth. The duke of the midlevels had risen to stand as well. “Assassins lashing out at foreign travelers – while severe – is hardly an army in our midst.”

  The murmurings of the officer aristocrats were far less united, now. Aimee saw the ghost of a smile on the corner of Harkon’s mouth.

  “Did your excellency forget my warning that these killers were a necromancer’s thralls?” Yaresh snapped. “When the dead walk, it is always war, and last I checked, neither you, nor the honorable countess were among those who fought the Faceless.”

  “Neither were you, Lord Yaresh,” Vallus said beside Aimee. “But my father, Lord Viltas, was. He is home, as this transpires, and I stand in his stead. If we are to defer to expertise, then perhaps this council should hear the words of those who were actually attacked before it authorizes violence.”

  All eyes were on the young officer aristocrat now. Vallus looked nervous, momentarily wrong-footed, but he swallowed and kept talking. “Aimee de Laurent,” he said. “Belit of the Red Guard,” he faltered for a moment. “And Elias Leblanc.”

  All eyes were suddenly on the group. In the sudden silence, Clutch deadpanned, “Yeah, it’s not like any of the rest of us were there too.”

  “Which begs the question,” Yaresh said abruptly, “what were you doing in such low levels in the first place, and in the company of one who is compelled by law to maintain her neutrality in all political affairs?”

  “When last I checked,” Belit suddenly snapped back, “strolling through my old stomping grounds is hardly political, Lord Yaresh. I keep company with whom I wish, and I show them what I wish.”

  “Such as the oft-disproven Oracle in which you’re rumored to place such faith?” Yaresh countered. Belit’s eyes fixed on him, and Aimee suddenly feared that the woman would lunge across the space and put her hands around the old warrior’s throat.

  “Surely,” Pentus interrupted from his space across the table, “accusing Commander Belit of belief in a known fabricated old skyfarer’s tale is rather untoward, is it not?”

  Belit fixed her gold eyes on the duke of the midlevels. “I don’t need protection from you,” she said. Then, turning to Yaresh, she countered: “What I believe is irrelevant to your desire to kill thousands of innocent people for the sake of convenience, Lord of the Muster. People – lest you forget – from whose midst I was upraised to my position by Amut, the Lion of Heaven himself. I take no part in the politics of the selection of our late captain’s successor, but as commander of the Red Guard, my primary remaining duty in the absence of my charge is to the people of this ship. Your request is brutal and cruel. I will not support it, nor should any feeling person on this council.”

  Yaresh stared at her. The look on his face was somewhere between cold hate, and grudging respect. Out of the corner of her eye, Aimee glimpsed the ghost of a smile flicker across Diara’s mouth.

  Silence. Aimee saw her chance, and took it. “Honored council,” she said, taking a step forward, remembering when she’d stood upon the podium before her graduating class, delivering a valediction. “If I may add some clarifying information, the Lord of the Muster does not lie: my companions and I were being guided by Belit to the lower levels, on our request. Myths have long been a fascination of mine, so leave that irrelevant detail to rest. Our attackers were undead. Advanced, graceful things. Terrible and perilous. What I ask this council to remember, however, is their own words. This subject is complex, but I will try to explain it as best I can. Recently animated dead frequently exhibit a magic side effect called the cessation echo. This is the remnant of their last thoughts in the moment of their death.”

  An uncomfortable look passed over the assembled officer aristocrats. Aimee took the opening and pressed. “Each of the foes we faced below exhibited this effect, repeated over and over and over, even as they attacked us.” She stepped right to the edge of the table, and pressed her palms to it, leaning forward. Taking up space and forcing the officers nearest to make room for her. “Do you want to know what they said?” she asked. In the deafening quiet, she heard a man nearby her gulp.

  “They were terrified,” Aimee continued. “Mothers. Fathers. Ordinary workers, sisters, brothers. They repeated recollections of begging for their lives, not understanding what had happened to them.”

  “What is your point?” one of Yaresh’s supporters – a hard-faced woman in gray – asked.

  “The people Lord Yaresh wishes to purge are not faceless masses harboring your enemies,” Aimee said. “They are their first, most vulnerable victims. If this council authorizes a purge, you will play right into their waiting, grateful hands.”

  A concerned murmur passed through the assembled officers. Aimee saw Harkon smile and give a small, approving nod. She breathed out, the sound hidden by the resurgent voices around her. Whatever else happened, they’d at least broken the lord of the muster’s momentum.

  “Enough debate,” the functionary abruptly commanded, slamming his hand upon the table. “The request has been made, and now the council must respond. A vote will be held–” he regarded Harkon and Aimee with blunt dislike “–immediately.”

  Hours later, Aimee collapsed into a chair before one of the large windows on the upper floor of Rachim’s villa. She closed her eyes, breathed out a long, exhausted sigh, and tried to make sense of the way everything had gone.

  “For someone who just won a political victory, you’re awfully somber,” Harkon said. The vote had been close – too close – but they’d won. After what seemed like a long time, she turned her head and opened her eyes to look at her teacher. Harkon stood just past her, facing the windows with their view of the deep sky. It was later in the day, now. The sun was low in the skies. Iseult sailed between immense castles of cloud. Turning in her chair, she paused for a moment to stare. The skyfarers back home said that clouds were bigger in the deep sky… vast beyond imagining, bigger than any isle or continent. In their craziest stories, they said that things lived in them. Storm-Krakens and other myths.

  “Sorry,” she said, realizing that Harkon was looking at her now. “It just doesn’t feel like a victory. The vote was too close. We didn’t win by getting the whole council to repudiate Yaresh’s insanity. We just made enough people feel indecisive. Victory would be the assembled realizing that they can do so much better than just… not killing.”

  “Welcome to politics,” Harkon said. “Victory is never as clear cut or obvious as we would like. Believe it or not, you’re doing well.”

  “It’s not what I signed up for,” Aimee said, regarding her teacher candidly.

  “No?” Harkon shook his head, amused. “You persist in misunderstanding the complexities of the adventurous life you seek. Sometimes we are rebels. Sometimes we are politicians. Sometimes we are keepers of peace, and other times we are destroying it. We’re explorers, troublemakers, dissidents.”

  “And when are we sorcerers, then?” Aimee asked, a small smile playing at the corner of her mouth.

  “Always,” Harkon answered. “You came up here to watch the jump, I assume?”

  Aimee nodded. The cloud-castles drifting by were painted in an edging of royal purple and molten gold. The first time she’d seen Iseult make a portal jump, it had been from a grand viewing deck. She’d watched as the combined magic of four different magi distributed across the prow of the vessel had opened a beautiful, kaleidoscopic portal big enough to swallow the whole of Iseult. The sheer power of the magic had left her breathless – a trait the behemoth shared, as for the first hour after every jump, Aimee now knew, the ship had to run its metadrive cores at a lower intensity.

  This time she was content to watch th
e jump from here.

  “So the Oracle is real,” Harkon said. He gave her a sideways look. “I had a feeling she was. These ships are older than their ruling castes, and Yaresh would not fear the rumor so much if he thought it was nothing.”

  “She is,” Aimee said. “But she fled before we could get more than cryptic warnings out of her. Trials have started, she said. She called me sky-splitter, and spoke of fate like a symphony. Then the dead came, and she bid us run, while vanishing herself. It was like something out of the old stories from the prehistories. Nothing like what I read about divination at the academy.” Her thoughts drifted briefly to the atlas stowed in her cabin aboard Elysium, and the jewel hidden beneath the floorboards of the room.

  “I wish,” she said after a moment, very quietly, “that the diamond were useable.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” Harkon said. “None of us expected it to go dormant after its encounter with Elias. And in any case, it might cause us more harm than not, were things otherwise. Sometimes the earning of a truth, and the worth it adds to the soul, is of greater value than whatever facts were sought to start with.”

  Aimee gave a single laugh. “Easy to say,” she said, “for a man who already knows more than most. Or at least more than he ever actually shares.”

  Harkon chuckled, but beneath it there was an undertone of solemnity. The red and gold of sunset played off the moonlight of his hair, and highlighted the lines in his old face. “It’s not just the things that have to be taught, Aimee,” he said. “The order they’re taught in matters just as much, in the long view. As for the Oracle… she’s not a diviner. That’s a magic for casting possible futures. It’s long-term planning and deals in maybe, might be, and could’ve been. Diviners are some of the most miserable folk you’ll ever meet. Divination doesn’t deal with fate. That’s something else altogether. If she can hear the music–” the old man shook his head, and for a moment, looked deeply sad “–that’s something you’re born with, and can never rid yourself of, no matter how hard you wish it.”

  Aimee turned in her chair to regard her teacher, opened her mouth to ask a hundred burning questions. Then Elias cleared his throat awkwardly behind them, and she nearly jumped – flustered – out of her skin. The tall man stood at the top of the stairs leading up to the landing they sat on. He’d shed his layers from earlier, down to a simple, loose-fitting white shirt unlaced at the neck, and the same snugly fitting black breeches and knee-high boots he’d worn to the lower levels. At a glance, it actually looked as if he’d been about to go bathe when something had interrupted him.

  “Sorry to intrude,” he said, apologetic. “But he asked to see you.”

  It was with a small amount of distracted embarrassment that Aimee now realized that the green-eyed swordsman hadn’t come alone. She blinked twice, felt an irritated flush creep into her cheeks. Viltas stood just beside and behind Elias. She hadn’t even noticed the lord shipman was there. She ran a hand over her tired face. Gods. She must not have been getting enough sleep. “It’s fine,” she said. Then, reflexively, she asked, “Are you alright?”

  Elias frowned briefly, met her eyes, and opened his mouth to say something. Then, after a moment, simply said, “Don’t worry. I’ll keep.”

  He was gone down the stairs again, before she could inquire further. That was when she got her first real look at Viltas. The lord shipman looked exhausted and pale, but he shook his head when Harkon rose with concern. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just a bit of a cold. I stayed up too late digging through the records, and on top of everything else going on these days, my constitution simply isn’t what it used to be.”

  “Have you found anything?” Aimee’s teacher asked.

  “Nothing yet,” Viltas said. “At least nothing concrete enough to report. But that’s not why I’m here. My son told me everything that happened today, including what he could get out of Belit after… Which wasn’t much. They’re not as close as they used to be.”

  Aimee recalled Belit’s rage at the risk Vallus had taken, and wondered just how true that was.

  “Anyway,” Viltas continued. “I thought… I didn’t tell you the full story of Amut’s battle with the Faceless. I might be the only person on the ship who knows it like it happened. It seemed, given all that’s transpiring, that I should be ashamed for not giving it to you all right at the start.” His eyes burned in his tired face.

  Aimee and her teacher exchanged a look. Harkon frowned, then nodded.

  “We never knew where he came from,” Viltas said with a tired sigh. “Never learned his true name, nor saw his real face. You must understand… even the powerful sorcerers on this ship, they have names and faces. Histories. Pasts. He was… He was a force of nature. Powerful in a way that defied concept. The greatest mages Iseult had would face him and shrivel to dead husks at a gesture, then rise as his servants. He came out of nowhere, and ruled the ship for a year.”

  “Those all track with the stories I have been told of him,” Harkon said thoughtfully. “Understand that mages such as him are not unprecedented. Most mortal sorcerers reach a ceiling to their power and skill – but there are those few who live long enough, train hard enough, and through a combination of natural gifts and sheer will acquire an arcane might far beyond what most can dream of. The older they become, the more their power changes them. Until their original names become imbued with mystic potency. Then they take on monikers, mask their former identities, and cease to be what they were.”

  The old portalmage leaned forward, furrowing his brow and looking contemplatively at Viltas. “That the Faceless was such a sorcerer does not surprise me. What does is how Amut – by all accounts a normal man – managed to kill him.”

  “He had companions,” Viltas said. “Myself, and seven others, and only we two survived. He had a magic sword.” The lord shipman paused. “And he knew that the Faceless was not merely supported by his undying slaves, but by a cult of living people already ensconced within the ship.”

  Beware the Children of the Empty Sky. The Oracle’s warning echoed in Aimee’s mind. Grandfather.

  Aimee’s eyes widened. The implications of what he was saying hit her just a moment before he clarified. “I believe,” Viltas said, “that perhaps one or two of these… acolytes may have survived, and are now attempting to imitate their former master’s methods.”

  “The dead that we faced,” Aimee countered, “weren’t the sort of thing you see created by simplistic necromancy… They were graceful, fast.” She spoke more easily about it now, than when she’d explained their encounter to Harkon in the aftermath of the vote.

  “Agreed,” Harkon murmured. “It’s not amateur work.”

  “It’s also been over twenty-five years – near thirty, since then,” Viltas answered. “But apprentice or no, the important thing for you to know is that some of these people escaped.” Here a look of profound guilt crossed his face. It took the lord shipman a few moments to summon up the courage for what he was about to say, and when he looked at them, Aimee saw something haunted in his kind eyes. “Amut killed the Faceless,” Viltas said, “by ambush. We crept up on him in the metadrive chamber of Iseult, the very heart of the vessel. He was in the midst of some ritual, surrounded by silent, unmoving dead. In the years after, I never marked the importance of what he was doing – we smashed and destroyed his altar, burned his books, destroyed every last one of the undead bound to his will – but now? Now I wonder.” He shook his head. “I’ll try to remember it for you. So much of that horrible day is a blur. I remember a circle surrounded by nine robed figures before the core metadrive of the ship, bathed in its purple light. I remember chanting in a language I didn’t understand. I remember a shadow that grew in the air, as the Faceless raised his arms to invoke something dark, ink-like. Mostly, I remember the smell.”

  Harkon’s frown cut lines across his venerable face, and he leaned forward with laced fingers together. A master attempting to extract hints from the finest details. “What smell?�
�

  Viltas shook his head, as if it made no sense to him that he should find his answer so unsettling. “Rain. Surrounded by corpses, in the heart of the metadrive chamber, all I could smell was rain.”

  He grunted, then coughed a few times. “That’s the thing I remember best. That and the men who slipped away. We always worried that perhaps we’d erred by not pushing after them… but after today’s vote, can you blame us? Men like Yaresh, they’d tear the whole ship apart, kill thousands, just to find the one wicked man in hiding.”

  “So that’s why you never told anyone,” Elias reflected. Aimee glanced over at the stairwell. The warrior had returned to the top of the stairs. “You didn’t want to start purges,” he said. “And the officer aristocracy proved today that just under half of them are more than willing.”

  Then, as Aimee watched, a sudden look of self-aware, awkward embarrassment crossed the black knight’s pale face. “Sorry,” he said after a moment. “It was too interesting to walk away from.”

  “Aye,” Viltas said, regarding Elias over his shoulder. “That, and there was never much to tell that would’ve made sense to anyone hearing it.”

  A familiar rumble passed beneath their feet, and Aimee felt a sudden swell of magic energy – more familiar still – that drew her eyes to the window and brought her up and out of her seat. She rose in time to watch as the kaleidoscopic eye of the vast portal erupted in the heavens beyond Iseult’s bow. The play of innumerable colors painted the viewing deck with a collage of light, beautiful and intense. Aimee stepped close to the window as she felt the metadrive growl somewhere deep within the ship, and the behemoth lurched forward at full engine burn. Harkon and Elias stood beside her as the eye grew, swelling in the sky, until they passed through the amaranthine gate and into a heaven filled with different clouds.

  “Where did we jump to?” Aimee asked out loud. It was darker here, but after a few moments, she made out lights amidst the cloud banks. Next came shadows, vast, and sprouting glimmering crowns of lamps without number. One of these passed near to them, and titanic engine vents blazed in her view as it passed. Another behemoth, she realized. Smaller than Iseult, but still the size of a small city.