Dragon Road

by Joseph Brassey

  “And the other engineers?” Vant said. Elias detected a falling hope in his tone. The black knight looked behind the heart of Iseult, to the far wall, where rows of corpses were laid in state.

  “Over there,” Nubin said, gesturing in the same direction Elias had looked. “The robed freaks hit hard and fast, slit as many of their throats as they could, before our backup arrived.”

  “Of course they did,” Vant grunted. “Fine, then it’s you and me, and Jerich and the other people he brought who put together those damn weapons.”

  “Sir,” Nubin objected, “Jerich and his companions are enlisted, they’re not trained–”

  Elias had never seen Vant wheel around so fast, or look so angry. The engineer’s hand fisted itself in Nubin’s coat collar and pulled his face down so they could speak eye to eye. “You have no choice, you arrogant prick! All your other engineers are dead. You have me, and a number of fucking geniuses that built powerful crowd control weapons with spare parts. Now follow my damn orders and teach them!”

  Nubin’s eyes flashed to Belit, and the commander of the Red Guard crossed her arms and nodded. “Do as the man says. Now.”

  As conversation and activity exploded around him, Elias knelt beside the corpse of the engineer, reached out, and closed his eyes.

  Next to him, Aimee took a few seconds to gather herself. He caught sight of a shaking in her hands fading as her steel will reasserted itself. “Next time,” she breathed, “next time I won’t fail.”

  “You didn’t,” Elias replied. “Don’t carry his weight. Let it go.” Straightening, he fixed her with a level stare. “What’s next?”

  Aimee took a hard breath, and he watched as her face passed from frightened and grieving to hardened and focused. “We find out how they got in here,” she said. “And if those damn symbols had anything to do with it. I’ll start at one end, you start at the other. We’ll meet in the middle.”

  They walked in opposite directions. It had been so long since Elias had used his magic in any complex way that calling the powers to mind felt sluggish, uneven. That was to be expected, of course. A muscle that went unused atrophied. Still, he had some spells for truthful sight, though none of them were as strong as what Harkon had effortlessly used. Kneeling near one of the spaces where Harkon had later indicated one of the hastily scratched symbols of the Eternal Order, Elias took a breath, reached for his power.

  His head exploded with pain, with noise, and with discordant music. He was aware of lurching back from the wall, clutching the side of his skull with his left hand. Abruptly his vision of the room began to fall away, bisected by a tear in reality, behind which indistinct white and black shapes battled, slicing each other to ribbons and leaving streaks of red across his waking sight.

  Through the chaos walked Lord Azrael, resplendent in his black and gold armor, his mocking face contemptuous and predatory. “You wretched, contemptible worm,” his own voice snarled in his head. “No. You will not take what is mine from me. You will not restore power to this ship. You will LISTEN TO ME.”

  Elias’s head felt as though it would split apart. He dropped to one knee, dimly aware of his own scream. People were moving, elsewhere, running towards him. Elias felt his right hand move against his will to grip his enchanted sword. Smoke obscured his vision, enclosing him in a darkness where he faced the dark mirror reflection of himself, and it thrust its hand into his chest. In the twin pits of Azrael’s eyes, Elias glimpsed a thousand flashing images. Elias’s hands were both gripping his sword as Azrael manipulated his movements. “Kill them, worm. As your master commanded you to. Kill them all.”

  “NO!” Elias’s hands stopped moving. The sword heated in his hands.

  “I am you,” Azrael snarled back. “Do as I command.” The face contorted in fury. “To have waited so long, to have patiently bided my time in the darkness, restively awaiting my revenge, and to be sent you? A mewling coward ashamed of what he is? IT IS GALLING.”

  Realization struck him at the words. “You,” Elias snarled back, “are not me.”

  A flash, and for just a moment, Azrael’s face was replaced with the leer of a rotting visage, little more than a desiccated skull fixed in a rictus scream. “Mayhap not, but you have been the slave to powerful magic before. The weakness is within you, aftereffects of whomever ruled you before.” The image’s face was suddenly Esric’s, and its command echoed through his head like a hammer blow. “COMPLY.”

  The shock of the all-too-familiar word ripped through him. Elias felt his eyes flash wide, and a jolt shot from his feet to his forehead. The sword blazed white hot in his hands. “I,” he heard himself say, “don’t do that anymore.”

  He twisted free as the specter grasped at his thoughts and raked its hate across his mind, and with a shout of defiance, drove Oath of Aurum through the center of the awkwardly scratched symbol.

  There was a scream, keening in his mind, then a crackle of light, and a small discharge of mystic energy that sent sparks flying across the floor.

  The vision receded, but only a little. The specter still roared at the edge of Elias’s mind, and he could now see the chamber again. People were moving away from him or running towards him. He heard screams, saw people pointing at him fearfully.

  “Don’t move!” shouted one of the men, bringing a mystic force projector to bear.

  “Elias!” Aimee shouted, pushing her way through the crowd. “What the hell are you–”

  “Destroy the symbols!” Elias shouted back. “Every one of them. I’ll explain later, there’s no time!”

  “Wait,” Belit said, as one of Jerich’s people aimed the powerful mystic weapon at Elias. “Lower your weapon, he’s not your enemy.”

  Elias staggered along the perimeter of the wall as the specter screamed in his mind, and began ramming the point of his sword through each, marking their intervals by sight. Each one released a small burst of light and a shower of sparks, then the voice faded further. Soon Aimee was beside him, sweeping away the illusions with repeatedly uttered spells, blasting the marks away with summoned, precision flame.

  When it was done, thirteen black, burnt-out symbols clearly marked the walls in a semicircle that mirrored the metadrive cores of Iseult.

  Elias sagged to the floor and dropped his sword, pressing his hands to an aching scalp.

  “What happened?” Aimee said, kneeling beside him.

  “Junk ritter,” he heard Belit say. “You started screaming, then you looked as though you would turn on the people around us.”

  Elias let his head fall back against the wall. The voice was silent. After a few labored breaths, he answered in a croak. “I saw it again, the vision that wore my face. Tried to use Esric’s last vestiges of control to force me to do its will. Wanted me to kill you all.”

  He closed his eyes. The thought of what he’d nearly done, the revelation, began to sink in. Palpable shame came in its wake, dragging his limbs down with a terrible weight. “It almost worked. It happened when I tried to use my powers. Not safe for me to do it. Not here.”

  Vant rallied the workers back around the broken core. As the three of them watched, they slowly detached the large cylinder from its base and lowered it to the side, before Vant began directing with broad gestures and commands. Elias reflected, as he watched and caught his breath, that Elysium’s engineer really was an underrated genius.

  After what seemed both too little and too much time, Vant gave the command to connect two massive cables to a makeshift box hastily assembled, then stood back as the men started screwing them into place. “We built a subsidiary node,” Vant said as the three stepped up to stand beside him. “It doesn’t replace the lost subsidiary core, but it does… help take the burden off the other ones, hopefully causing less degradation to the grid, and letting power flow through the whole ship. I mean, so long as it works.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Belit asked.

  “Well, either nothing happens,” Vant said, “or it explodes and we all go the w
ay of Hephus. But let’s be optimistic, shall we?”

  Elias stared at the box as the cables were attached. There was a loud crack, and purple light flared from within it. Then – slowly – the furious glow of the other cores receded, just slightly. Somewhere without, they heard the sounds of ship functions coming back to life.

  Someone called from the doorway, “It worked! It worked!”

  They jogged after the call, across the battered floor of the room, through the aperture in the barricade, and out onto the platform that overlooked the cavernous vastness of the ship’s interior. One by one, in a cascading wave, the lights on the lower levels glimmered, and flicked back on. They weren’t as strong as before, Elias noted, but he felt the swell of relief ripple up from him. Aimee physically leaped and pumped her fist into the air. Belit laughed, and Hakat grinned. Behind them, a wave of cheers erupted from Rachim’s armsmen and the host of enlisted that had guarded, and now saved, the heart of Iseult.

  Even given what he’d just endured, nearly caused, Elias felt his own face breaking into a wild smile at the relief that surged through the assembled people. “We did it,” he breathed. Turning, he grinned at Vant. “You did it. You fucking genius.”

  Vant grinned back, crossing his arms across his chest as Nubin and the others surrounded him with cheers and whooping cries of victory. “Course I did,” he said. “Hark doesn’t pay me to drop the ball when it matters.”

  “And not a moment too soon,” Rachim grunted, nodding his head past the group to where another, smaller group of people were approaching on foot.

  Vallus jogged towards them, accompanied by three of his father’s armsmen. The diplomat’s face was soot-stained, and he had a cut on his forehead that had been recently bandaged, but looked otherwise none the worse for wear. The relief on Belit’s face at the sight of him was palpable.

  “Lord Rachim,” he said, out of breath. “Miss de Laurent… Where is Harkon? We need him at the Council Hall now.”

  “What in the damned Maelstrom’s Heart is going on?” Rachim asked. “Hark is… Hark has been missing since the portal storm. Slow down. Tell me exactly what’s happened?”

  “The lot of you need to get up there immediately,” Vallus said, “before the whole council finds out: Pentus is dead.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  What Walks in Shadows

  Less than an hour later, Aimee stood in the heart of the Council Hall, before the vast expanse of the blue table, and tried to reconcile everything that she knew about what this space was for – and the number of times she had stood within it, hearing powder-faced officer aristocrats argue with one another – with the dissonance of the horror before her eyes.

  Pentus’s corpse was spreadeagled across the center of the blue table. He wore the clothes in which he’d hosted his Grand Ball – his political masterstroke – little over a day ago. That was well, for were it not for the Duke of the Midlevel’s garments, Aimee wouldn’t have recognized him. His shirt had been slit down the center, and his coat was open, leaving his chest bare. His eyes were open in his frozen, rictus scream of a face, and his entire body desiccated and prematurely aged, every moment of life ripped from him. The sorceress swallowed. It hadn’t been quick.

  And whoever did it left a final message.

  In the center of his chest, burned into the dead flesh, was the same symbol as had been scratched into the walls of the metadrive chamber far below. The nine Stars of the Eternal Order.

  Across from her, Elias stared at the same mark on the dead man’s chest. His hand gripped his sword, white-knuckled, at his side, and his face had lost nearly all of its color.

  “This is how you found him?” Aimee asked.

  “One of Diara’s astronomers, actually,” Viltas said from beside Elias. The lord shipman had an angry vigor about him, no longer looking ill. Crisis had a way of revitalizing people, and adrenaline was damn near magic itself, Aimee reflected.

  “The poor man was in a bloody panic when he found me. I figured we had only a brief window to get to the bottom of this before Yaresh learned of it and made a move. He has only one opponent, now, and a corpse to use to stack blame. The truth could be buried in a matter of hours.”

  Aimee leaned forward over the table, going over everything her teacher – dammit, where was he? – had had her read on necromancy since they’d first learned what they were up against. She hadn’t had the chance to inspect Amut’s body, had only had a glance at his bedchamber, but this was still familiar. Amut’s death had been slow, as the life was drained from him bit by bit under the auspices of a deadly illness. This was a similar thing, but done with far greater haste, directness, and sheer malice. It was the act, not of a hesitant, quiet-working sorcerer, but of a powerful mage become bold and proactive. Extrapolating from that, and where they were finding the body…

  “Yaresh is wrong,” Aimee said. The suspicion had been growing in her for some time, and there was no denying it, now. “The Faceless hasn’t been hiding amongst the downlevelers. He’s been lurking amongst the officer aristocracy, and using the cult below to funnel strength to himself. In return, he creates undead killers to serve their ends… As to those,” she faltered. “I don’t know.”

  Grandfather. She didn’t have any answers to that, either.

  “That,” Rachim grunted, “is going to be a hard thing for the council to swallow.”

  Aimee leaned forward, inspecting the body. She formed and released a spell of detection, very minor, to seek the shape of the magic that had been cast here. The ritual in Amut’s bedroom had been immense, long-term, with too many parts for her to attempt to canvas at once… but this had the feel of a single – if potent – spell. Pentus’s chest collapsed slightly inward as she released the magic, and a series of glowing glyphs appeared above the corpse.

  Viltas’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “I didn’t know you could do that,” he said, impressed.

  “Fairly basic academy spell,” Aimee murmured as she pulled out a small notepad and started jotting down notes. “One of the first things we learned was how to identify hostile magic. I’ll be able to look these up as soon as I get back to Elysium – though I can tell you that this is… very advanced, very dark work.”

  “We need to act quickly,” Viltas said to Rachim.

  This is something whoever did this couldn’t likely have done a mere few days… hell, weeks ago, Aimee thought. Not only were they facing a powerful necromancer that had completely managed to play those around it for fools, but it was growing more powerful by the second. Hephus’s last words echoed through her mind. Beneath.

  “And do what?” Rachim answered. “Hide the corpse? We can’t keep this from the council. I’m sure that astronomer has already told Diara.”

  “Well,” Viltas admitted, “it is… hypothetically possible that he hasn’t been permitted to yet.”

  “Father!” Vallus said with anger in his voice.

  Aimee was still lost in her thoughts. The Faceless came from above, clearly, and the cult had its roots somewhere deep in Iseult’s lower levels. Pentus had been caught off guard. She looked over her shoulder towards the door, tracing potential lines of trajectory across the vast room. At range? No. Whoever had done this had struck quickly, and violently, and had grabbed Pentus physically, with a great deal of strength. They hadn’t been weak, whoever they were.

  “The accusations are going to start flying,” Viltas warned. “So quickly that we won’t be able to keep the council functioning as a democratic body. Yaresh will seize power. He’ll find some patsy to blame quickly, and by their execution and trial, build himself the coalition to take control.”

  She pushed aside Pentus’s coat as the others argued. There, the shoulder had been broken, and the bruising was shaped like the palm of a sizable hand. Up close. Personal. Hateful. She glanced down at the glyphs she’d written down as the spell had dissipated. One was the same as that which she’d seen over Amut’s bed. The other two symbolized expansion, quickening. A third she d
idn’t recognize, but the basics were becoming clearer. Necromancy required life-energy, and this spell would’ve needed a not insignificant amount… and Iseult had just been through a day of chaos, wherein it was much easier to kill without being caught.

  “He’d need an ideal target, first,” Rachim said. “You sound like you have someone in mind. Care to share, Vil?”

  “On that I…” Viltas shook his head. “I admit, I don’t know.”

  “I do,” Elias said, breaking silence for the first time since they were brought to the corpse. His eyes were haunted as he raised them to look at Aimee. “Yaresh already suspects my training. There will be stories going about, about the things I did during the portal storm, and just now in the metadrive chamber.” He swallowed. “I’m the perfect target. An outsider with abilities most can’t explain, and that many fear. It won’t matter that I can’t perform necromancy. Most people don’t know that. Yaresh is going to pin this on me.”

  “The symbol,” Aimee nodded, as the reality of it sank in. She wanted to reassure him, but he was also dead right.

  “That makes no sense,” Rachim began. “What are you–”

  “I marched under that symbol,” Elias said, “not long ago. Please. Don’t ask me to tell you more. Suffice to say I was a different person, and now the man I was is a danger to your whole cause.”

  Viltas’s expression paled. Rachim took a step back. Aimee’s mind was running a thousand possibilities per second. Dammit, Elias. Why did you tell them that?

  “We’d best prepare for accusations, then,” Rachim said slowly.

  “How long do we have?” Viltas asked.

  Aimee took a step forward as they talked, summoned a spell to her mind, and whipped her fingers through the requisite gestures. Then, before the others could object, she aimed her finger at the symbol, and burned it, the precision flames crisping and warping the mark on the dead man’s chest until it was gone. Two more spells followed: frost to cool the mark, then wind to blow away the scent.