Dragon Road

by Joseph Brassey

  “It is rather a miracle,” Diara said with a nod, “that we haven’t destroyed ourselves yet.”

  “So after you talked,” Aimee said, “he just… left?”

  “I wish I could tell you something more profound or revealing,” the countess answered wryly, “but other than the fact that he clearly seemed to believe he was being followed. Given that he was murdered shortly thereafter, that is hardly surprising.” Diara shook her head then. “I believe that you have the potential to be every bit as skilled as your teacher. A mere few days ago you saved officer aristocrats and their entourages almost without number, and one of your own holds the metadrive chamber. I called you here because it has been made clear to me that those of us on Iseult who believe in a better future – however slim the chance – must start speaking with one another, and coordinating, or we are all lost.”

  Aimee fixed her eyes on the older sorceress, so accustomed to walking a razor’s edge lest she offend too deeply or insufficiently. Then, carefully, she leaned forward, pressed her hands to the table, and said, “You want me to support your bid for the captaincy? Is that what you are saying?”

  Diara met her stare unflinchingly, then said, “No.”

  It wasn’t the answer Aimee had been expecting. “What?”

  “You misunderstand my motivations,” Diara said. “I put forth my name because the alternatives were a well-meaning dilettante who buys power, and a narrow-minded soldier longing for his next war. In truth I do not care who becomes captain, so long as it isn’t Yaresh. I called you here to help you defeat the Faceless and this cult below.”

  “The only alternative,” Aimee said in frustration, “is you.”

  And for just a moment, Diara looked away. “I am the only other candidate who has sought election,” she said quietly. “But I think we both know that I am not the other candidate… there is another.”

  Aimee stared at her. A possibility flashed through her mind, one that she had never considered, which seemed absurdly outlandish.

  “You see it, too,” Diara said, nodding with a grim smile. “And I am coming to believe, so does Iseult.”

  Before Aimee could answer, a shudder passed beneath their feet, and the lights in the astronomy dome died.

  A second later, the lights immediately around them, the control station at the heart of Iseult’s long-range navigation, flickered back on, casting all of them in a pale blue light. Clutch freed her knives. Diara started giving orders. “Protect the central control station!” she said. “Without it, Iseult is blind!”

  Diara suddenly grasped her arm, turned her around. “Whatever happens,” the countess said quickly, “I did everything I did for my people, for the ship. If my candidacy has failed, it must be her.” She shook her head, and Aimee saw regret in her eyes. “Perhaps it should’ve been her to begin with. She has better claim than any. Go, look upon his face, and you will see.”

  “I will,” Aimee said. “We’ll fix this now, then we’ll talk.”

  Aimee freed her fingers, turning in a circle as the astronomers jumped to follow the orders of their superior.

  “Another attack on the metadrive?” Clutch asked.

  “No,” Aimee said with a shake of her head. “This was localized. Close by.”

  “Astute,” said a voice just to Aimee’s left, one of the astronomers whom she had neither met, nor recognized. With his left hand, he drove a shock-stick into one of the panels next to the main control panel. A shower of sparks exploded across the platform.

  Diara turned, sweeping her hands through forms Aimee didn’t recognize. Cold flames sparked in the air about her fingers. Aimee swept her hands high, summoning her binding spell, only for Clutch to shove her to the side. Aimee swore. A bolt of unstable mystic power exploded in the air where her head had been a second before. The astronomers shouted. Aimee pushed herself up on her hands in time to watch as Diara was forced to shift her hands into a defensive posture, deflecting another spell while the traitor astronomer cackled madly by the panel he’d destroyed. Then he lunged for the central console.

  “Her eyes will burn!” he screamed. “Sightless she shall stagger into Grandfather’s waiting arms! Rise, Children of the Empty Sky!”

  Diara’s hands flashed with coruscating light, and the traitor ignited. Fire blasted from his eyes and mouth, and a shriveled corpse fell to the floor.

  Aimee had half a second to catch her breath, then a mass of black-clad cultists swarmed over the platform’s edge, screaming, “Blind the eyes! Blind the eyes! Empty Sky! Empty Sky!”

  “Defend the console!” Diara shouted. The astronomers hurtled themselves forward. Clutch slammed into a running cultist. Her knife darted in and came away red. The man dropped, twitching. Living, not dead. That made things easier. She froze a man solid with a bolt of frost and shattered him with a gust of wind. These, then, were the wretches that had tried to kill Iseult’s beating heart, whom the Faceless used as his living agents of murder and chaos. Who worshipped a thing that smelled of rain. Aimee felt a swell of terrible, overpowering rage. She stormed forward as they came. Her hands summoned combative spells sparking into the air around her.

  “Was it one of you?” She ducked under a swiping knife and set fire to its wielder’s face. Her booted foot stepped over his twitching body and she wind-blasted the man behind him into one of his compatriots. “Where is he?” she heard herself demanding. Cold. Furious. Another came at her. She froze his arm and shattered it at the elbow. Her scream carried above the uproar, hateful and loud. “WHERE IS HARKON BRIGHT?”

  The fight raged around her. She tried to keep her back to the console, but the cultists were everywhere, swarming, lashing out viciously at anything that looked breakable. Their targets were the objects, not the people. Sorcerers. There were sorcerers among them. Unrefined. Likely half-trained, but fighting to control the panel from swinging cudgels was nothing when two people could melt it at a distance.

  She didn’t have to look far. They climbed the steps behind their brethren, wearing rags and clutching profane talismans in gnarled fingers. A pair of hedge mages, likely reared on the mad scribblings of stolen form-scrolls. All skill. No theory. A bolt of fire was hurled at her, disjointed, barely contained. She sidestepped it. There was nothing so simultaneously incompetent and horrifically dangerous as a hedge mage that thought they knew something.

  “Was it one of you?” she snarled. “Did your wretched cult come for my mentor?”

  “Foreign bitch,” the more forward of the two snapped back. “Soon all will know Grandfather’s embrace. Your wealth and your teaching will not save you from him.”

  A crude blast of mystic force thundered up the steps at her. Aimee’s hands swept up, formed a wedge, and split the chaotic spell down the middle. The sundered energy dissipated behind her. “Get a new line.”

  Her two enemies unleashed a barrage of crude, unstable mystic assaults. Aimee ducked, weaved, blocked, and cleared the last of them with a leap that brought her into direct, physical range. A spell lashed from her right, one from her left. She formed a wedge-shaped shield spell between the two of them. Caught the brunt of each. Then she summoned her frost, dissipated the barrier before they could react, and unleashed her magic on both hedge mages at once. “Enough!” she screamed. “I’m done with fear and beyond sick of dealing with amateur hour at the psychopath establishment. This is my arena, you incompetent fanatics. Out!”

  Her hands flashed one more time, and a blast of wind ripped outward, shattering the two frozen mages into a thousand pieces of ice. She stood on the steps, breathing hard. Tingling from the expenditure of magic energy. Then she heard the cries coming from behind, and spun on her heel so fast she nearly fell off the stairway. She rushed upwards, clearing the steps two at a time.

  Aimee reached the top just as the lights came on once more, the power restored. The platform was a charnel house. Dead cultists lay strewn across the floor along with over half the astronomers. She saw Clutch, covered in blood, but still standing
, and breathed a momentary sigh of relief. A second glance. The central control panel was still intact.

  Then she heard the wailing, and it took her a few seconds to recognize that it was Haysha weeping. “Blind!” she cried. “We are blinded!”

  Aimee’s mouth dried. Her hands felt like lead weights. The astronomer crouched at the base of the central control station. Cradled in her arms, unseeing eyes staring up at the starscape to which she’d dedicated the whole of her life, lay Diara.

  The Countess of Astronomers was dead.

  Aimee’s footsteps carried her through the street. Behind her, the chaos of the dome was being managed. Clutch followed. Dimly, the apprentice portalmage processed the immediate aftermath of the countess’s death. She knew what would happen next. Yaresh would make a direct play for the captaincy. It would take him perhaps two days to gather everything he needed. But there would be no more council meetings. No further moderation.

  Her footsteps carried her through the streets. She had succeeded. She had failed. In one day she had saved a single life, and lost so many others. Viltas’s armsmen. So many of the astronomers. Diara herself.

  Yet amidst the terrible weight of a pressing failure, there was also a sudden, visceral clarity. Iseult could not survive what was coming without a captain. That captain could not be Yaresh, and now Diara was gone, which meant it could only be one other.

  “Where are we going?” Clutch asked. “You’re headed in the opposite direction of Elysium.”

  “I just have one thing to do,” Aimee said. “A suspicion to confirm. It will only take a few moments.”

  “Still not an answer to the question,” the pilot said, though her voice had lost most of its snark.

  “Amut’s compound,” Aimee said. “There is something I have to see. That I have to know.”

  Look upon his face, Diara’s voice echoed in her mind. And you will see.

  The black estate emerged from the curtain of rain. Its glossy walls wept rivulets of pouring water, and its stately windows were cold and dark. Aimee climbed the steps. The main doors yielded to her at a simple spell, and she stepped across the threshold into the interior of the late captain’s residence.

  This would’ve been different, Viltas said in her mind, if he’d had any legitimate children.

  How could she have been so blind?

  Her boots echoed across the hardwood floor, past furniture now draped in pale white sheets that made them seem as ghosts in the darkness. A flash of lightning painted the edges of the interior white for just a moment, and Aimee walked as if in a dream towards the great hearth that dominated the room. Over it, still covered by a shroud, was a barely visible portrait of the former captain.

  “Seriously?” Clutch said. “You came here to look at his painting?”

  The Oracle’s words flashed through her head. The trials have begun. The time has come for choices.

  There is one other they would follow.

  There was a black cord hanging from the shroud. Aimee clasped it in her hands.

  …the only woman he ever loved was some downleveler girl…

  “…My mother loved a man who lost her…”

  She pulled the cord as hard as she could, and the shroud fell away, revealing the visage of Captain Amut. Behind Aimee, Clutch swore as she belatedly realized what Aimee should have seen from the beginning. “Holy shit.”

  The resemblance wasn’t perfect: Amut’s face had been squarer, his expression more reserved. His eyebrows were thicker than the slender ones of his daughter’s face. Yet the dark skin, the warmth of disposition – captured by a superb painter – was unmistakable, and the gold eyes of the late captain were the twins of ones that Aimee knew all too well.

  Aimee stood beneath the portrait of Captain Amut, and stared into the face he had given – along with so much else – to his daughter, Belit.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A Breath before the Night

  It was the better part of a day before the aching in Elias’s head subsided. The healing magic had done its work, but for that span, he’d been forced to wait in his cabin aboard Elysium. The leather and mail were mostly repaired, rings knitted back together and leather stitched where it had been torn or battered. The repair work was supposed to be a focal point for calming his nerves.

  By the time he was done, it hadn’t worked at all. And as word rolled in of what had happened since he’d returned with Bjorn to Elysium, it became so much worse. Diara, and half the astronomers, dead. The council in shambles. The officer aristocrats fled to their duty-stations and their estates, abandoning even the pretext of fulfilling their task of selecting a captain. All the while, Tristan flew deeper into the crescent, and Iseult pursued. Finally, Elias gave up trying to cloister himself, and ventured out into the ship just in time to hear Aimee talking down the hallway in the common area.

  He climbed the steps, still dizzy. It wasn’t just the blow to the head. He hadn’t used his own magic with this sort of regularity in well over a month now, and, like any muscle, when it went unworked, the endurance faded first. He staggered a little. Hiding had been the game since they came to Iseult, with a handful of exceptions when his powers were necessary… but it seemed that wasn’t going to be an option any more. If he wanted to be useful, to make a difference, anything less than his best would not suffice.

  He stepped into the common room and found the rest of the crew seated. Aimee and Clutch had cleaned up and gotten at least a little rest. He felt a small pang of relief, again, that neither of them were injured.

  They stopped when he entered the room, and an awkward silence settled. Then, to his surprise, Vlana spoke up. “Heard what you did out there. How’s your head?”

  “Still sore,” Elias answered, quietly, “but better. I’m good to go, once I know what we’re doing. Bjorn filled me in, at least on Diara.”

  “The question is,” Vant said, “what now?” The engineer had returned from the metadrive chamber earlier that morning. “We’ve got, what, a day before Yaresh storms the wheelhouse?”

  “Maybe a little more,” Rachim said. “The wheelhouse is well guarded, and taking it by force won’t win him any allies, but I don’t know that he’ll much care any longer. Iseult is headed for the maelstrom, and he can argue that pursuing Tristan is a suicide mission. He wouldn’t be wrong, even if there are a lot of people on our sister ship.”

  “Do we stop him?” Bjorn asked. “Does that make sense any more? The ship needs a captain, and–”

  “And the ship is already choosing one,” Aimee cut him off. “We just didn’t see it before, though the signs were obvious. The trials of captaincy are already being put forth, by the ship’s Oracle.” She gave a small smile, rueful for how long it had taken her to see the obvious. “It’s Belit. She’s a proven leader, adored by downlevelers, respected by many of the officer aristocracy, and–” she looked at Elias “–she is Amut’s illegitimate daughter.”

  As the truth washed over Elias, all the disparate parts, only seen piecemeal since they arrived on Iseult, fell into place. It had been Amut, after all, that had first chosen her to join the Red Guard. It seemed insane that he’d never guessed at it. You were distracted, he reminded himself. By many, many things.

  “So that’s your play,” he said. “Throw Yaresh down and put Belit on the throne?”

  “No,” Aimee said, shaking her head, then pausing. “Well, not entirely. I plan to stop Yaresh. He’s benefitted enough from all this insanity to make me suspicious that he isn’t at least allowing it to happen.”

  “Yaresh is no sorcerer,” Rachim murmured.

  “I don’t think he needs to be,” Aimee countered. “Everything I’ve read in Harkon’s books suggests that a necromancer as powerful as the Faceless might have been able to survive the destruction of his original body. I believe, in fact, that he has been inhabiting someone on the upper levels of Iseult.”

  “He can speak through any of his thralls,” Elias added. “And when I last faced them, he called m
e…” He paused, Rachim didn’t know. “…He called me by a title that only a few people on Iseult – three, to be precise – might recognize the significance of. Yaresh is one of those people.”

  “He has seemed energized by every unfolding of death and chaos that’s happened on this ship,” Vant acknowledged.

  “It’s possible,” Rachim admitted. “Enough that we can’t discount it.”

  “Then we convince Belit to finish the trials,” Aimee said. “And then, hopefully, we save the ship, and Tristan.”

  “Do we even know what’s happening over there?” Vlana asked.

  “Last I heard, madness,” Rachim grunted. “There was a plague gripping the ship when we arrived back at the flotilla… They were trying to quarantine the lower levels, but it wasn’t looking good. Viltas had a smaller ship sent over shortly after the portal storm, but they never returned and there have been no communications.”

  “We may have to leave them to their fates,” Clutch said. Elias looked at the pilot in surprise. The others did likewise.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “In the astronomy dome,” Clutch said, “those cultists – the Children of the Empty Sky. Most of what they were saying was rambling, apocalyptic nonsense… but I heard one of the sorcerers Aimee killed talking about bringing the ship to the waiting arms of Grandfather.”

  The pilot wrapped her arms around her middle and suppressed a shudder. It struck Elias that this was the first time he’d ever seen Clutch look afraid. “Look,” the pilot said. “I’m not advocating for leaving countless innocents to their deaths… but I’ve flown through the crescent before, and I know that name. A half-mad skyfarer we picked up in a lifeboat on that trip whispered it, and that whisper was enough to make a crew of hard-nosed salvagers–” Elias noted she used the word very deliberately “–damn near piss themselves and abandon both the treasure they sought and the mission they were on.” She looked at each of them. “Whatever that thing is out there that they’re worshipping, it’s not just a story, and I’m not in a hurry to learn what degree of real it is.”