Dragon Road

by Joseph Brassey

  “Aimee!” Clutch screamed.

  “They need you more,” Elias said, trying with every ounce of will he had to get her to follow her crew. “Go. Get skyward. Shoot down those ships. Save the day.”

  She looked as though she would strike him across the face, then she did something else entirely: threw herself forward, and wrapped him in a fierce embrace. When she broke away she hesitated for just a moment, as if fighting some deeper impulse, fiercer still.

  “Go,” he interrupted it. They were out of time.

  “Don’t die,” she swore at him. Then she too was gone, following her crew.

  The first of the raiders was overhead now. Elias saw a flash of light in its interior, and cables descended. They were coming. The black knight drew his sword alone in the square, and reached for his power. The blade glowed white in his hands. The first of several misshapen figures vaulted streetward.

  Elias summoned his speed and exploded forward, a blur of shimmering steel.

  War he understood.

  The first of the raiders landed in the street a second before Elias reached the base of the rope. He had half a breath to assess a hulking figure draped in rags and piecemeal armor, large goggles bolted over its eyes, before it raised a black hatchet as thick as a splitting maul, and hewed straight into his path. He pivoted, stepped beneath the range of the chop, and swept his sword across its center of mass.

  An arm of glimmering steel blocked his strike. Gods, it was fast. Elias felt the ripple of wild, chaotic magic infused into its body. He called on his strength and endurance – just in time, as before he could get his weapon free, the raider hammered him in the center of his chest with the butt of its axe.

  Elias staggered back. His powers spared him the worst, but without his plate, the hit had cost him. In the brief moment it took him to recover, four more of the raiders dropped to the street. Each was a different mishmash of flesh and armaments. Blades sprouted from arms, ritual scars crisscrossed heads set with metallic plates. The scent of ambient magic teased at his senses, infusing his enemies with something not unlike his own powers. The five surged forward. Elias had been successful: he was their target now.

  He leaped as they came, over their heads and turning as he summoned another spell. A gout of white flames surged from his fingers, upwards at the aperture in the base of the ship. There was a small concussive burst, and the burning remnants of the ropes fell coiling to the streets. He landed. They rushed him, feet pounding the street in thunderous slams. Like my powers, he realized. But always on. Imperfect.

  All power. All rage. All destruction. No thought. Elias grinned, took his sword in two hands, and streaked towards the oncoming force.

  The white sword struck an arm-blade. In the instant of contact, a second fist rose to strike him. He pivoted away from the blow to bring it up short, jumped, and gripped his sword with a gloved hand halfway up its length. The steel was hot to the touch, yet it did not burn him. Screaming, he drove the point like a spear straight through the raider’s throat.

  Another came behind him. He kicked off the ground, drove the screaming body of the dying foe backwards and followed as it toppled. The swipe of a jagged-edged sword passed just over his head as he descended. He turned the fall into a roll and surged out the other side, whipping the sword around in a screaming cut straight through the next raider. White, glowing steel sheared through flesh, bolted steel, and bone. Elias exploded through the collapsing halves of the dead man. He turned, skidding to a stop further down the street as the three remaining raiders rushed to catch up. “Next?”

  They came at him from different angles now. No more fortunate mistakes. Cunning, then. Elias backpedaled, turned aside a huge, swiping greatsword, the same giant splitting axe as before, and a pair of barbed maces that splintered stone where they struck. He checked blows, sought openings, dodged, jumped back, vaulted, hammered, pressed and chased.

  Still they came. The ships streaked overhead in a second pass, and Elias was forced to summon a shield spell of his own as a fresh burst of mystic fire rained down through the streets. A blast cored the side of a private residence. Exploding glass and masonry sprayed across the street. As Elias lowered his shield spell the first of them crashed into him, heedless of the debris that struck its back in the midst of the charge. The axe cut down. Elias caught it overhead reflexively. Mistake. The force drove him to his knees, and only the imbuing power of his magic kept his skeleton from shattering under the force of the blow.

  He took his left hand off the grip of the sword, slammed it into the center of the raider’s chest, and unleashed the biggest lightning bolt he could summon. A crackling, flesh-crisping surge of summoned magic blasted a palm-sized hole through the middle of its chest and struck the next in line behind in the shoulder. The next raider spun from the impact and staggered forward, off balance. Elias heaved the corpse into the path of the running raider’s legs. Exploding stone rained around them. The storm-crazed stumbled again, caught himself on one hand, and lashed out with one barbed mace at Elias’s legs.

  The black knight leaped over the strike and drove his glowing sword through the top of the monster’s skull and into the street. He heaved himself up as the last one came. The greatsword descended. Elias sidestepped it in a blur, poured strength into his limbs and, screaming, heel-kicked the monster in the face. A loud cracking shockwave echoed through the street as its neck snapped from the force of the blow.

  Elias stood, panting in the aftermath of the carnage. A handful of people were in the streets, staring at him with a combination of shock, fear… and for the first time he could remember in his life… awe.

  “Who are you?” one of them – a little boy clutching his mother’s leg – asked.

  Elias looked back, momentarily unable to answer. His lips moved. It took him a second to find his words, then he simply said, “Just a helpful stranger. Get back inside.”

  He staggered. His head still hurt. The raiders’ ships made a keening, wailing noise as they flew overhead. A second set of blasts tore up a street further towards the prow and back near the wheelhouse. Elias heard the sounds of screams and clashing blades.

  He pulled his sword free, and ran towards the sounds of chaos.

  He found them at the base of the wheelhouse. A second pass had dropped more of the storm-crazed attackers into the square, and corpses lay in their wake. Yet around the base of the ivory structure, a cluster of armsmen battled. In the flashing press, he glimpsed Belit shouting orders, watched her second, Hakat, charge at one of the killers as it snatched a man by the leg and bashed his head against the rocks until it spilt red in every direction. Three shock-spears struck it at once, sending jolts of lightning through its body. Handled.

  He shot forward. Two of the storm-crazed dashed into his path. One strike came upward from the left, another downward from the right. Elias darted in deep, pressing his thumb to the flat of the sword just above the cross, caught the rising blow on the lead edge of his blade, flicked the strike away in time to catch the second with the rotating back edge. Speed. As both weapons flashed in opposite directions, he swept the sword in a horizontal thwart-strike over his head, right, then around in a perfect arc to the left. Another. Another. Oath of Aurum slashed four arcs through the air, trailing streaks of white and red.

  The two storm-crazed fell carved at his feet. A group of panicked functionaries ran past him, darting towards the wheelhouse. A roar reached his ears, and turning, he saw one of the raiding ships flying low over the tops of the behemoth’s towers. Its mystic batteries flared with light.

  Then a sorcerous blast of tremendous power burst through the air, and a beam of blue light struck the raider amidships. Punched through its fuselage. The vessel shuddered, and its own batteries ignited. Ash and rubble rained down onto the bloodstained streets as the wreckage of the main body spun away from Iseult. A second flare of light erupted as its metadrive detonated with a concussive bang.

  A roaring cheer went up from the fighters in the s
quare, as the swept-wing, silver profile of Elysium streaked across the sky. At once, the remaining two raiding ships were no longer focusing their attention on Iseult.

  Turning, Elias watched as Belit cut the legs from beneath one of the raiders, dashed out of the way of its falling strike, and opened its throat with the point of her sword. Then she turned to a pair of officers behind her and screamed her orders. “Raise the platforms!”

  A rumble passed beneath their feet, and one of the remaining storm-crazed was knocked back as a section of the street beneath it slid aside, and a large mystic battery rose. One of the two officers Belit had addressed vaulted into a seat at its back and gripped the controls. The coruscating power of Iseult’s metadrives arced up through the weapon, and it released a blast of purple light upwards with a loud whump.

  More ether-cannons rose, the street sliding away, and men rushed to man them. One of the functionaries cowered behind Belit, screaming something incoherent about guild regulations.

  Further down the square, one of the storm-crazed seized a man by the hair and dragged him back down the street. Slaves, Clutch had said.

  Elias charged. His innate magic wasn’t as powerful as Aimee’s. The great spells were beyond him, but he had a lifetime of precision training. Training he’d feared ever since he was freed from the yoke of those who had made him. Belit’s words rang through his head as he put on a burst of speed and aimed his magic for the line of rope that connected the storm-crazed to its netted prisoner. You own what you are. Never forget that.

  He fired a precision bolt of flame. It split the cord. The netted man fell behind his dragger, and the storm-crazed spun to see who had robbed it. It shifted its feet and lunged towards him. A sword snapped out in a downward slice. Elias skidded to a stop as the blade came, set his feet and sidestepped, dropping a cut across the centerline and straight into the angle of the incoming attack. The opposing sword was blasted off to the side, and Elias stepped in. The point of his sword pierced the storm-crazed just above the collarbone and burst out behind the base of its skull. It dropped, gurgling.

  A second volley of weaponsfire from Iseult ripped across the sky as Elysium turned in an arc. The second of the raider ships came apart, and painted the sky a red stain of fire and light. The third vessel swept high, arced upward, then turned back towards the behemoth.

  Elysium flared low over the buildings atop Iseult, and Elias watched as a massive, blazing version of Aimee’s shield spell caught the incoming blast of weaponsfire meant for the wheelhouse. The silver skyship moved in the air like a pirouetting ballet dancer, and its batteries blazed white. The last raider detonated with a blast that filled the sky with incandescent light.

  Elias grinned as his eyes turned upwards. Wherever you are, Harkon Bright, he thought. Be proud.

  He turned. The last of the storm-crazed in the square had fallen, and a cheer rose from the assembled armsmen. At the base of the wheelhouse, Belit wore a smile of relief. Elias watched as her guard relaxed.

  The functionary behind her rose and darted forward. Elias saw a knife flash in his hand as his face contorted with hate. Too far. He’d run too far. All he could do was lurch forward, screaming, “TEACHER! BEHIND YOU!”

  He ran, as fast as he could. Not fast enough. Too far.

  It didn’t matter. The warning made Belit shift. The thrust of the knife raked off the back of her breastplate instead of the gaps beneath the arm. She caught the arm, twisted it until the knife clattered to the ground, and hammered the pommel of her longsword into his face. The bureaucrat-priest screamed as his nose broke, and he dropped to the street.

  By the time Elias reached them, the functionary was face-down. Hakat’s boot kept his arm twisted behind his back and a forest of blades surrounded him. “Assassin,” the Red Guardsman snarled. “We have you.”

  Struggling against the boot, blood from his broken nose pouring down his face, the functionary snarled, “It doesn’t matter what you have, guardsman. The guild will never accept that bastard-born bitch as captain of Iseult. Better that we all perish in Grandfather’s arms. The Children of the Empty Sky will not be denied.”

  Belit and Elias exchanged a glance as he came to a stop.

  The raiders had been beaten, their skyships destroyed. Yaresh had fallen, and at long last, they had a member of the cult, alive, as their prisoner.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Children of the Empty Sky

  Aimee ran through the halls. The damage was worse than it looked from Elysium’s bridge. Only three raiders, and a delay in getting Iseult’s defenses up and running, and the upper level had seemed a pockmarked painting, or some sort of sculpture peppered with burn marks.

  The hallway she’d once jogged down to first see the Council Hall was littered with broken glass. The roof had been blasted in at one place, and she had to go around a healer crouched over a dying woman coughing out the last red threads of her life. No time. She couldn’t stop. Not when there was a chance to get to the bottom of this mess once and for all. Forgive me, she thought. Forgive me for walking by as you died.

  She came up short of the door to find Elias and Belit waiting there. The door was open slightly, and Aimee could hear conversation within. First, however, the tangible relief to see both of them alive, and apparently uninjured. She let out a breath. “Well,” she said to the green-eyed young man by the door. “I see you managed not to get maimed.” A grin split her face.

  “Not for lack of their trying,” Elias answered. Then he added, “Nice spell work.”

  “Rachim said you took one of the cultists prisoner?” she asked.

  “Aye,” Belit said. “He’s a functionary. The rest of the bureaucrat-priests, conspicuously, have fled the top levels. Suddenly the cult’s seeming ability to be nearly anywhere at all on Iseult makes more sense.”

  “The Axiom,” Aimee said, fingering the priceless jewel still in her pocket.

  “No,” Belit shook her head. “Wait. Viltas is grilling him. They’ve got him angry. Indignant. Soon they’re going to mention your mentor. When that happens, walk in slowly. It will throw him off, and he’s already barely emotionally balanced.”

  Amut’s daughter let out a long sigh. “The functionaries… their origins aren’t on Iseult. They were originally guild representatives, generations ago, responsible for streamlining our relationship with the great trade houses, and over time they integrated themselves into our political processes. Became representatives of the aspects of government that never changed from captain to captain. They are not accustomed to being questioned. That is our advantage now. If you use the diamond, it will be said that sorcery was used to force the words from him. It worked against Yaresh, but not here.”

  Aimee regarded the warrior woman, considered her words, then let the Axiom slip back into her pocket. It grated, when the direct method was available to her, not to use it… but Belit was also right. “Do you think that all the functionaries have been compromised?” she asked.

  “I think it is possible,” Belit answered. “That so many have fled is deeply concerning. At the least, compromising them would have made it much, much easier for downleveler members of the cult to hide. The functionaries control much of the record-keeping aboard the ship.” Her gauntleted fist clenched.

  Aimee leaned close to the small crack in the door, and listened.

  “None of you ever cared for Amut,” Viltas said. His voice was a low growl. “You obstructed his efforts at reform at every possible juncture. Yet still his popularity never slipped. Is that, then, why you threw yourself into the insanity of these Children?”

  “You know nothing of the great society this ship once constituted,” Aimee heard the functionary reply. “It was a seamless, beautiful organ in the grand body of the guild. Harmonious. It remembered its purpose, in service to its true masters. Its people did not bow to the archaic wills of an outdated Oracle. Better it die than become the tool of a foreign upstart and his bastard bitch of a downleveler daughter.”

&
nbsp; She heard footsteps, as if Viltas’s boots were bringing him closer to the prisoner. “Is that what you told Harkon Bright?”

  Aimee pulled the door open, and walked slowly through the room towards the place where the prisoner was held, before the blue table as Yaresh had been mere hours before. Aimee’s boot heels clicked on the stone, and she freed her hands, fixing her eyes on the man that had tried to kill Belit. He was much like the others of his order: shaven-headed, pale, with a small glyph beneath his eye that marked him as a member of the functionaries. He turned at the sound of her approach, and though his face didn’t waver in its hate, she saw him gulp.

  “Where is my teacher?” Aimee said, her voice deathly quiet.

  “I do not have to answer the bitch’s questions.” He averted his eyes. “She holds no dominion over me.”

  Until that moment, at every juncture of her interactions with these people, save her confrontation with Yaresh, Aimee had maintained something at least close to calm. Yet the slow turning away of his face, the subtle twitching at the corner of his jaw, the strange combination of obvious fear and smug self-confidence, struck a deep, personal nerve. Before anyone could stop her, she surged forward. Her hands slammed down on the arm of the chair, and the harsh thunder of her voice filled the room. Magic sparked and flashed in the air around her, and she felt a burning heat around her eyes as fire colored the edges of her vision.

  “ANSWER THE QUESTION.”

  The functionary screamed and reeled back in his chair. When he tried to look away, she grabbed his face in her fingers and jerked his head back to meet his eyes with hers. “You’re right,” she snarled. “You’re not dealing with another officer aristocrat, or enlisted, or even one of your own precious functionaries. You’re dealing with the frightening, uncouth, disrespectful foreigner now. And you know what happened to my teacher.”

  Her left hand flicked through the gestures of a minor spell, and a single tongue of blue fire appeared just above her right index finger. “Tell me what you know. Everything. Or this foreigner finds out at what temperature that glyph burns off your skin.”