They reached the base of the wheelhouse tower first. It seemed strange to Aimee that she’d been aboard Iseult this long without seeing the thrumming mind of the ship. The tower was nondescript. Ivory-colored, with simplistic doors crowning a small semicircle of steps at its base. It was flanked by two equally tall black spires at the foremost corners of the massive behemoth, and connected to both by one seamless white bridge, pale in the darkness.
“The last time I was here,” Belit murmured, “Amut was still captain, and I stood watch over him.”
“Austere,” Elias remarked.
“The finery of officer aristocracy has not yet infected everything sacred in our home,” Rachim said. Then he turned and addressed his men. “Fan out. Semicircle at the base of the stairs. We’ll force him to answer us before he makes for his objective. At the very least, he won’t be able to go around us.”
And then they waited. This close to the prow of the skyship, the wind of its passage through the heavens was a dull roar rather than a distant groan. Of their allies, Viltas alone had not joined them, still watching over his unconscious son. He’d sent his remaining armsmen, however, and they joined Rachim’s men at the base of the steps, arrayed and armored, armed with shock-spears, and two mystic energy projectors, more refined versions of the weapons the enlisted had assembled down below in defense of their home. Behind Belit was Hakat, her second-in-command, and three more members of her Red Guard.
After what seemed too long, the cold and the silence both started to creep into Aimee’s mind. Had they misjudged their opponents? Was Yaresh trying another tactic? Had the council perhaps been assembled without their knowledge? The questions rose like a bile in the back of her throat. She’d triumphed in Port Providence, but that had been as much luck as it had been skill. She’d had her teacher to help her, and Elias had betrayed his former masters in order to do the right thing?
What if she’d gambled everything, and guessed wrong?
Then Elias shifted, his hand going to his sword. The gold chasing on the hilt caught the light of the slowly rising sun, and he inclined his head towards the central thoroughfare that spanned the spine of Iseult. “They’re here.”
Aimee squinted through the morning dim half-light… but it was the sound she caught first. Rhythmic. A steady, intermittent thump of many feet drummed on the streets in unison.
“That,” she heard Vlana murmur, “sounds like a lot of boots.”
Aimee saw the points of their shock-spears first. They glinted in the red dawn light. From the pale fog they emerged, a wall of beige uniforms, lightly armored, with ranks in perfect order stretching out behind them.
And in the lead, unafraid to be seen, clad in his gilded, ornate steel and bearing a naked sword in a gauntleted hand, the authoritarian himself. His helm was crested with feathers, and his cold eyes fixed upon them with murderous intent. He reached the square and raised a clenched fist. The ranks of his small army – still bigger than their own – came to an orderly halt.
Yaresh.
Silence. The would-be captain stepped forward, and his voice rang out across the space. “Rachim!” he shouted. “I confess, I never thought you would take your suicide-pact politics this far! Iseult sits at the edge of oblivion! Will you not let me save her?”
“I’ve never seen a man more giddy at the suffering of his ship!” Rachim shouted back. “You’re not taking the wheelhouse, Yaresh. Even if you do, I doubt the chair will have you. Iseult is already in the process of choosing her own!”
That cut close to the heart. Yaresh’s face twitched as Aimee watched, and he took several steps towards the line of armsmen at the base of the stairs. “Pentus is dead,” he said. “Diara is dead. Only I remain. Only I am worthy.”
“And isn’t it strange,” Aimee shouted across the space, “that at every step of the way, the people opposed to you have met their deaths at the hands of cultists, undead, and convenient accidents.”
She saw the faces of the men behind him shift, glancing left to right. So he had cloistered his armsmen against contesting ideals. Not well, apparently.
“Your task is done, little girl,” Yaresh snapped at her. “The council you were here to moderate has abdicated its sacred duty. You cannot moderate this. Crawl back to your foreign silver skyship and weep over your coward master. I have a home to save.”
The fury in Aimee’s chest exploded. She stepped forward impulsively, ambient sorcery sparking in the air around her hands and eyes. “I didn’t come here to moderate you, Yaresh. I came here to put you the hell down.”
“The sorceress seeks my death!” Yaresh shouted. “You all heard it! This is a contest for power between our people and the foreign influence of meddling outsiders with no respect for our sovereignty, our culture, our very safety! You wish to know whom I stand against, people of Iseult?” He shouted at the assembled. “It is her!”
“NO.”
The declaration rang across the square. Aimee nearly took a step back at the force of the words, and by the time she’d identified their source, Belit had already descended the steps and entered the square beyond the line of Rachim’s men. Her gold eyes stared down the lord of the muster as her armored feet trod over the cobbles, stopping a few feet from where her opponent stood.
“Belit,” Yaresh said after a moment, and for the first time, Aimee caught a hint of fear. “You overstep your place.”
“Wrong,” the lioness answered. “Captain Amut raised me from nothing to the command of the Red Guard. I’ve been from one end of this ship to the other. I have lived as a downleveler, an officer aristocrat, and everything inbetween. I am the daughter of Amut, Lion of Heaven, and the Oracle herself laid the trials of captaincy at my feet. Iseult is my home, my duty, my burden.”
Her sword rang free, the cold steel painted red by the light of the rising dawn. “You stand against me, Lord of the Muster.”
A murmur passed through Yaresh’s men. Their confidence wavered. They don’t want to fight her, Aimee realized. Diara was right: there is only one on this ship whom everyone will follow.
Yaresh took a step forward, and his words were filled with the fury of wounded pride. “You have no authority to oppose me.”
“I have every authority,” Belit replied, dark face fierce. “You stand accused of sedition, of conspiracy to murder, of collaboration with our enemies. Of tyranny by force over all those beneath you, and now of mutiny. As commander of the Red Guard, I order you to stand down.”
The lord of the muster’s eyes were wide. Aimee watched the assembled armsmen behind him hesitating. Beside her, she heard Elias muttering under his breath. “If he breaks, they break.”
Yaresh watched Belit in silence for what seemed an eternity, then he let out a furious, humiliated shout of rage, and lunged at her. His ornate sword snapped out at her head. He still knew how to move. His strength had not yet abandoned him to age.
Belit’s sword descended. She hammered into his cut, controlled his sword, and snaked her arm around his own blade to grip her gray steel halfway up its length. Her hips rotated. The lord of the muster’s sword was levered out of his grasp and sent skittering across the street. His gauntleted fist rose to strike her unvisored face, and with a triumphant shout, she pulled his bodyweight through the punch. The lord of the muster let out a shout of dismay and shock as Belit flipped him through the air and body-slammed the entirety of his armored weight into the cobbles. Yaresh landed on his back, his breath leaving him with an explosive cry. Belit crouched over him, sword still held in two hands, its point hovering inches from his eye.
“This is over!” she shouted. “Yield!”
A quivering series of chokes and gasps escaped from the downed man, as the assembled men and women in the square stared on. Then Aimee heard a small, choking reply. “I yield.”
Belit drove her knee harder into Yaresh’s hip. Something had broken when he went down. He let out a cry of pain. “So they can hear you. Command your men to stand down,” the swordswoman pressed.
“I yield!” Yaresh screamed. “Throw down your weapons!” he shouted at his men. “I YIELD!”
A chorus of clattering sounds echoed through the square as hundreds of warriors let their armaments fall to the streets. The sun was up now, and its red rays filled the square with a brilliant light, painting the ivory tower of the wheelhouse in crimson and gold. Belit had disarmed Yaresh’s uprising, without spilling a single drop of blood.
Aimee let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
It was over.
The interior of the Council Hall was dark and cold. They stood before the blue table, and in his own personal seat, Yaresh sat, stripped of his armor and bound hand and foot. In a semicircle, they surrounded him: Belit, Aimee, Elias, Rachim, Viltas. Behind them stood Bjorn, and the rest of the Elysium crew. Haysha, new Countess of Astronomers, stood by as well, her cold anger chilling the air.
“And now,” Rachim said, his voice a low growl, “we will have answers.”
Yaresh slowly raised angry, dejected eyes to stare at them. “I owe you nothing.”
“Every one of your political opponents and enemies has died,” Viltas said. He looked tired again, Aimee thought, ravaged by the recent near-death of his son, and there was an intense, fierce dislike in his face. “You were always Amut’s most stringent opponent, when it came to his reforms for the downlevelers.”
“Don’t think to lecture me,” Yaresh snapped, “washed-up wreck of a former hero: I remember the dominion of the Faceless as well as you.”
Something snapped in Viltas, and the lord shipman exploded, slamming his hands into the arms of Yaresh’s chair. “No!” he screamed. “You will not profane his memory by association! Not in the presence of those who have opposed your authoritarian insanity! You, who spit on the idea of reform, who have truncheon-bearing brutes brutalizing our people below! You will not profane the heroism of my companions by association! While we fought the Faceless, you sat in your ancestral mansion and cowered in fear!”
For the first time in the brief span that Aimee had known him, Yaresh’s expression showed a hint of something near to shame.
“Pentus,” Belit said. “Diara. Amut. Answer.”
“I didn’t kill Pentus,” Yaresh said. The force of Belit’s throw had left him shaken, probably dislocated a joint or two. He was in obvious pain. “Nor did I kill Diara.”
He looked at Aimee, as if seeming to sense her next question. “Nor do I know what became of your master. But he–” the defeated lord of the muster inclined his head towards Elias “–is Eternal Order, so you will forgive me if your cries of virtue seem empty to me.”
“You’re one of only a handful who knows of my former allegiance,” Elias said, bluntly. “Something the Faceless has used against me.”
Yaresh looked back and forth between them all, and then his face split as he started laughing. “Oh… oh gods,” he said around his laughter. “You think it’s me.”
“Have a care how lightly you treat this,” Viltas said dangerously. “My son still lies abed from the wounds received at the hands of the dead. You are the obvious candidate.”
“If I were truly a necromancer,” Yaresh snapped, “do you fools think any of you would be alive right now?”
“We could be at this for hours,” Bjorn snarled. “Around and around.”
“Then let’s end it,” Aimee said. The insurance was in her pocket, the tool she’d brought with her to suss out the truth. She pulled the small satchel from inside her blue coat, and produced the glimmering Axiom Diamond. A collective gasp echoed from around them.
“What,” Viltas breathed, “is that?”
“The means,” Aimee said, and before anyone else could object, she pressed it to the center of Yaresh’s forehead, hoping it would still work this close to the maelstrom.
The world faded. Aimee braced herself for the visions of before, the complexity that had come when she’d had the truth of Elias Leblanc revealed to her… but instead, she simply heard the familiar voice in her head, its words thick with strain.
“You don’t ask small favors, do you, hero?”
And in a storm of images, sights, sounds, and whirling recollections, she came to know Yaresh, soldier, politician, coward, warrior. A man who aspired to greatness, yet choked over and over, or mistook the signs when the opportunity for virtue lay before him.
The callow boy, resentful of others’ glories.
The bitter teenager, given wealth and stature, and not a slice of wisdom.
The angry man, hiding in terror from the shadow of a monster beyond him, then shamefully cringing from the impossible shade cast by the hero that defeated it.
She saw failure. She saw double deals. She saw planned political killings, and innocents left to die when it didn’t suit the lord of the muster’s aims to save them. She saw neglect, fear, nationalism, and authoritarian ambition.
But she did not see the blood of Diara, of Pentus, of even Amut, on the lord of the muster’s mind. And across the darkness of his pathetic, mediocre life, only the fear of the Faceless cast its shadow.
When she pulled back, in the empty cold of the Council Hall, before the blue table, it took her a moment to summon any words at all. She’d taken the measure of the man named Yaresh, looking for the darkness of a dread lord, and had instead found nothing at all.
“Aimee?” Elias’s voice brought her back to the now. Yaresh stared up at her, his eyes wide, tears of shame leaking down his face. In place of the terrible would-be conqueror was nothing more than an old man, broken and pathetic.
“He didn’t do it,” she said, feeling a mingled panic and despair rise within her. “It’s not him.”
She was still struggling with the revelation, with the utter dead end her plan had led them to, when the far door to the chamber burst open, and Belit’s second, Hakat, came running towards them. At the same time, there was a loud crash without, and the floor beneath them shook.
“Commander!” he shouted across the room to the swordswoman. “The wheelhouse sends word! Raiding ships have been spotted astern, closing fast. We’re under attack!”
Chapter Twenty-One
The Helpful Stranger
If there was one thing Elias understood well, it was war. They sprinted out into the street in time to see a tower further down explode into flames as a cluster of three ships loomed against the risen sun. Their make was hodgepodge, mismatched sets of broken pieces bolted together and powered by unstable metadrives that sent flaring bursts of light from their exhaust ports at irregular intervals.
“Oh hell,” Elias heard Clutch say behind him. “Crescent raiders.”
He shot a look over his shoulder at her in time for Aimee to snap, “Clarification please?”
“I told you,” Clutch answered. “People who fly in the crescent for too long start to lose their minds. Crescent raiders are the worst of the lot. Even bog-standard pirates fear these freaks. The storm does things to them, twists their minds and bodies. My old crew called them the storm-crazed.”
“And a big, juicy behemoth is too big a prize to pass up,” Vlana said.
“They’ll be coming for plunder,” Clutch said, and there was genuine fear in her eyes. “For raw supplies, and more than any of that, for slaves.”
“Send word to the wheelhouse, and every officer aristocrat on the ship,” Belit said, sending Rachim and Hakat running. “Call up the armsmen and get people on the guns.”
“Clutch,” Aimee said.
“Already on it,” the pilot said. “No way in hell I’m fighting this war in the street. Bjorn, I need you on guns! Aimee, we’re gonna need you on the bridge, come on!”
Aimee nodded. She still looked shaken from Yaresh. From the revelation that the authoritarian lord of the muster hadn’t been responsible for the political killings and cult activities from which he had benefitted. The handful of words she’d had a chance to say still had Elias’s head swimming.
“You said the storm twisted these pe
ople,” he said to Clutch. “How fast are they? How strong?”
The pilot fixed him with a look that held no exaggerations. “Pretty damn. They’ll be dropping men on the deck. Precision. Violence. Shock and awe.”
“Go,” Elias said to the others. He knew where he was needed, then. “Get those damn things away from us. I’ll stay here, where my skills count for something.”
Belit looked at him as she turned, ready to organize the defense of the ship. “It will take us time to organize a defense.”
“How long?” Elias asked. The ships were getting closer now. Blasts of mystic energy raked across the sky.
“Ten minutes for us to get into the air,” Aimee replied.
“Half that for me,” Belit said. “Yaresh’s men are still armored. They will defend their home.” The commander of the Red Guard looked at the ships again. Elias did the mental calculations. They’ll be here, putting killers on the top level by then.
“Get moving,” he said. “I’ll buy you the time.”
“They’ll know,” Aimee said. Worry was writ across her face.
Belit grabbed his arm. “People are already starting to suspect. If you do this, junk ritter, the secret will be out. Yaresh’s accusation that you’re Eternal Order will hold weight. I can’t ask you to do this.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Elias replied. “Besides, don’t the stories speak of white knights coming to save the ship in its darkest hour?” He flashed his bravest smile. “Maybe I’ll give them a few more legends to tell.”
A small smile quirked up the side of Belit’s face. Aimee just watched him with a piercing intensity. Finally, the commander of the Red Guard nodded. “I’ll find you in the streets, student. Fight well.”
Then she was gone. Elias looked at the sorceress who had saved his life. “Time to fly,” he said.
“Your head hasn’t fully recovered,” she accused.
“And you’re still tired,” he fired back. “No breaks today.”
“Dammit Elias,” she swore.
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