Dragon Road

by Joseph Brassey

  “He froze himself!” the functionary screamed.

  An image flashed through Aimee’s memory: a crystalline structure sketched in one of Harkon’s books. “I need more than that,” she said.

  “I’m not a sorcerer!” the terrified functionary snapped back. “I only know that the dead brought him to us encased in a block of golden ice, and their master said that when he confronted him, he froze solid rather than fall before his magic! We kept him hidden!”

  “Where?” Aimee pressed. The tongue of flame in her hand blazed.

  The functionary looked at her fearfully, back and forth between the flame, and her eyes. “Where our master lies, until Grandfather takes us all… In the rot beneath her heart.”

  Viltas stepped up behind her. “You will take us there,” he said. “And show us everything. Or I will allow her to do whatever she wants to you.”

  Breathing quickly, still in a state of panic, the would-be assassin looked back and forth between them. Then, after a silence that hung in the air for a long time, he closed his eyes and nodded.

  The war party of Aimee, Viltas, Belit, Elias, Hakat, and fifteen or so of Viltas’s armsmen made its way down, through the aperture, past scenes of destruction and death. As they slipped away from the top levels, Aimee took a look over her shoulder. The sky darkened again, with clouds blacker than those she’d seen before. The air held a faint thrum of magic, previously absent.

  “The clouds are different,” she said, as they left the daylight behind.

  “We’re close to the maelstrom now,” Elias said. He held the manacles of their prisoner. “Less than a day’s distance from its outer wall, I’d guess.”

  “Then we’re running out of time,” Belit said, tightening her armor. She cast an uncomfortable glance Viltas’s way. Vallus’s father had donned light armor that hung off him somewhat awkwardly, and an old sword hung at his hip.

  “You shouldn’t be coming with us,” Belit said. “It’s been years since you fought.”

  “My son is still abed because of the actions of this cult,” Viltas said, “and their monstrous ally is the foe Amut and I sacrificed so much to destroy. I’m going, Belit.”

  “He does know more about the Faceless than anyone else,” Elias added.

  “Very well,” Belit said after a moment’s reluctant silence. “Stay to the back.”

  They’d sent warning ahead to the metadrive chamber. Jerich met them outside. “They say Yaresh is no longer in charge, up above,” he said when he saw them.

  “Relieved,” Belit confirmed. “He will not be captain, nor does he currently command the muster.”

  “They also say,” Jerich said, “that Belit the Red is captain.” There was a nervousness in his face, Aimee saw, barely masked by a defensive stoicism.

  The expression on Belit’s face was a combination of exhaustion and apprehensive gratitude. “Not yet,” she said simply. “But she will try.”

  “Many below pray she will succeed,” Jerich said.

  “We think we know where the cultists have been coming from,” Aimee said. “But we need access to her heart.”

  Jerich nodded, and led them through the doorway. The purple glow of the metadrive cores played off the cables, the wires, the consoles and the burnt, defaced symbols they’d destroyed a mere few days ago. This was the third time Aimee had stood in this chamber, but this time, her attention wasn’t on the gorgeous, ancient cores of Iseult’s beating heart, but on the floor. Hephus’s last words played through her head. Beneath.

  Nubin met them. His confidence had increased since the last time Aimee had seen him. He walked with purpose, an expression cognizant of the weight on his shoulders. Not arrogant, either. That was good.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “When the cult attacked this chamber,” Aimee said, “where did they come from?”

  Nubin’s face fell, a look of shame emerging. “I don’t actually know. I was outside when they struck within, and by then everything was chaos. While they assaulted us with numbers from without, there were only a handful of them. I heard Hephus’s last words, as you did… and we haven’t been able to search the chamber from top to bottom yet for secret passages.”

  “You won’t have to,” Elias said, and nudged the prisoner forward. The functionary looked around, dejected. “He’s one of them,” the black knight finished.

  The man raised his bitter, dark eyes to regard the group. Then, after a moment, he started shuffling towards a place just behind the blasted, no longer functional subsidiary core. “They will kill me for showing you this,” he said.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Viltas said. “Show us.”

  The cultist threw the lord shipman a fearful look, then indicated a blank space on the outer wall. “There.”

  “I see nothing,” Hakat said.

  “You wouldn’t,” the cultist answered, disgusted. “Can’t hear the voice, can you? As uneducated as you are brick-dumb.”

  “Magic, then,” Aimee said, nodding. Stepping closer, she felt the faintest scent of it, unnoticed before because of the overwhelming power of the metadrive cores. Harkon’s lesson about illusions from Port Providence echoed through her head. The most powerful illusions play off the expectations of the one watching.

  She expected to see plain, unmarked wall. There were spells that could be used here for dispelling, but they had another tool available to them that had already proven itself adept at destroying powerful enchantments.

  “Elias,” she said. “Your sword. Put it through that section of wall.”

  The black knight looked at her. “Are you sure?”

  Aimee nodded. “It destroyed the order symbols along the walls without issue. I believe that one of its powers may be the breaking of magic. Do it.”

  Slowly, Elias stepped forward. He drew his sword, and the blade glowed a warm white in the dim light of the chamber. She saw his brow twitch, and his eyes closed. “I can hear him,” he murmured. “Fainter than before… but still here.”

  “Yes,” the cultist sneered. “He reaches out to those that are his. And you, Elias, cannot deny what you are.”

  “No,” Belit said softly. “But others cannot define that for you when you own it.”

  Elias took two steps forward, and rammed the point of his sword through the blank space of the wall with a sudden, forceful shout. The piercing blade shattered the ancient enchantments holding the illusion in place. The magic fizzled, sparked, and collapsed with a thunderclap.

  Aimee smiled. She’d been right.

  Before them now, in place of a space of unmarked wall, was an aperture in the steel, one that seemed almost to be the remnant of some old rip in metal. Beyond, a tunnel bored outward. Aimee summoned a globe of light, and stepped up beside the black knight, who now took one hand off his blade to grasp the functionary by his manacles.

  “I didn’t…” the cultist said with gulping, surprised fear “…I thought–”

  “That the whispers would seize control of me the moment I came within their range?” Elias answered. “I know. Now lead on. I believe your cold master and I have a reckoning due below.”

  Sniveling, cringing, his last option seemingly exhausted, the functionary started downwards. Aimee and Elias followed, and the others came behind. The walls closed in around them.

  The tunnel was old, made of great pipes lashed together piecemeal, improved upon haphazardly over the course of decades, centuries even. The steps were uneven divots incised into the floor. There were scratches on the wall. Profane blasphemies that Aimee only half recognized from Harkon’s texts. Every so often a half-spent glow-globe or faint torch guttered in the dark, but by and large, Aimee’s summoned light source and the glow of Oath of Aurum were their only illumination. Just ahead of them, the functionary whimpered as he walked.

  “Forgive me, master,” he wailed. “Prophet of Grandfather, Ninth Star Once-Extinguished. Whom even the Faceless heeds. Forgive me, I have failed you.”

  “Can you st
ill hear the whispers?” Aimee asked.

  There was the faintest mark of sweat on her companion’s brow. “They’re getting louder,” he said. “But at least I know where they’re coming from now. It’s easier to say no to something wicked when you know it’s not coming from inside your heart.”

  Abruptly the tunnel turned, and a large room opened up before them. It was old, Aimee realized immediately, perhaps an ancient storeroom long forgotten by the crew of the ship. The ceiling was high and vaulted, and light came from a number of candles, guttering on pedestals splattered with melting wax collected and reused, over and over.

  But it wasn’t the light that set Aimee’s blood to freezing, nor the strange shadows it cast across the blasphemy-scrawled walls. It was the smell. The moment they stepped through the doorway, the scent of blood, bile, piss, and shit assaulted her senses. A simple glance downward told her why: the room was a charnel house, carpeted thick with fresh corpses.

  “By the thousand gods,” she heard Belit say behind her.

  They were functionaries. Enlisted. Downlevelers, officer aristocrats. They wore threadbare robes over common-stitched clothing and a handful were in elaborate finery. Their bodies lay at random across the floor, and a terrible silence filled the room. She crouched to examine one, then, seeing the mode of its death, raised her eyes to see the same gruesome pattern repeated over and over. Blood poured from opened necks, and everywhere, knives were clutched in the death-grips of dead hands.

  “They slit their throats,” Aimee said. “All of them. All at once. Why?”

  “Too late,” the cultist they’d brought with them exclaimed. “Too late too late too late too late too late…”

  When Aimee looked up, she saw Elias’s face fixated on something at the far end of the room. His eyes were wide, the expression pale and nerveless. “…Him.”

  Before them lay a throne, lashed together of bone and broken steel. It crouched, vulture-like, upon a dais of black stone, as if crammed into a space that didn’t well fit it, and upon the jagged, rust-coated chair sat a mummified, motionless corpse armored from head to foot in faded, weathered plate armor. A leering, eyeless skull stared in agony from the helm, and the same nine stars were stamped upon the battered breastplate.

  The cult had killed themselves revering the armored remains of a knight of the Eternal Order.

  And Harkon was nowhere to be found.

  Aimee turned, wheeling on the cultist. “Liar!” she snapped, in rage and in pain. “Where is my teacher?”

  “I don’t know!” the cultist whimpered. “He was here, when last I was!”

  “Fan out,” Belit said. The armsmen obeyed. “Check to see if anyone lives.”

  Elias walked forward through the corpses, until he reached the base of the dais. A small number of dust-coated effects lay at its feet, surrounded with devotional gifts, like worshipped relics. The black knight knelt and began digging through these furiously, all at once, until he rose, holding a yellowed book with cracked and torn pages that had to be as old as the body before them. When he opened it, a small cloud of dust filled the air.

  “Is there anything there that makes sense of this?” Hakat called out from the entryway to the door.

  “I don’t understand,” Aimee murmured. Everything about this was wrong. Only faint magic emanated from the corpse upon the throne. Despite the elaborate evidence of worship, all indications were that the body was nothing more than a dusty, venerated idol. Whatever malice had once animated the dead man, it was long gone. “This thing couldn’t command them. It’s dead.”

  Elias pored through the book, his hands turning the pages as his eyes devoured the writing.

  “Maybe they just… found the dead man,” Hakat said, “and started worshiping it? No one said these cultists were smart…”

  “No,” Elias said. Silence. All eyes slowly turned to the green-eyed man holding the book in his hand. “This is… is his journal. He was a knight of the order, on a long-range mission, planted here centuries ago. His job…” the young man’s eyes widened with horror “…was to infiltrate and corrupt the functionaries and the downlevelers… to build a religion that venerated the order’s principles, and could be lying in wait, one day, for any other member of the order to take advantage of, when needed. It was a social experiment.”

  A chill crept down Aimee’s back. She looked once more at the dead knight. Closer, now, she saw signs of damage to the armor. A place where powerful magic had rent the once enchanted steel. Another place where a sword had delivered a wound, possibly fatal. “This… this is nothing like what you describe.”

  “He died without finishing,” Elias said. “His notes get more sporadic. Someone discovered what he was doing. He was put to flight before he could finish his plans, and had to abandon his followers. His last writings speak of someone calling out to the true enemy; he describes fleeing deep into the ship, being hunted, and then…” He trailed off. “Then it ends.”

  Belit and Hakat exchanged a look of wonder, then the woman said “…’and white knights came from the deep sky, to vanquish evil.’”

  “You’re wrong,” the cultist sneered. “He died so that Grandfather could find us, and lead us to his waiting arms.”

  Aimee turned to stare at the far wall. Above the door where they had entered, a horrible effigy spread across the metal and stone: black, multi-tentacled, and massive. Something old, vast beyond comprehension, too hideous to describe. It was crude, but familiar enough that finally, an old myth from Aimee’s childhood sparked with recognition.

  “A Storm-Kraken,” she breathed. “When their founder died, the remnants of the cult were left half-finished, their ideology incomplete… and they began worshipping a Storm-Kraken. Monsters – more ancient than any human civilization. They’re supposed to be pure myth, older than memory, cunning, immense, devourers of skyships, even ones as big as Iseult.”

  “Grandfather waits,” the cultist giggled. “We have already taken Tristan, and now Iseult shall follow her lover, into Grandfather’s longing arms.”

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Elias said. He still held the book. A look of deep worry was on his face. “What does any of this have to do with the Faceless?”

  An ear-piercing, keening shriek filled Aimee’s ears, and a bolt of black energy flashed across the room. It shot past Aimee, Belit, even the cultist, and struck Elias full in the chest. The black knight’s eyes widened, and his face froze in a soundless scream as the force of the surprise attack lifted him off his feet and hammered him into the far wall, where he sank to the floor. The white sword clattered from his hands to the ground. Aimee couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. She heard herself scream his name. He didn’t rise.

  She spun to find the source, only to watch in horror as one by one, the corpses of the suicided cultists pulled themselves from the floor, knives in their hands and a fell light in their eyes.

  And amidst them, one hand raised like the conductor of a grand symphony, was Viltas. The lord shipman’s eyes had changed, their kind, clever gaze turned a rotting corpse-white. Aimee felt the back of her mouth go dry. The power that emanated from him now was dizzying, oily slick, and profane. It was as if she glimpsed the tip of some terrible, vast structure jutting from the fathomless depths of a bleak swamp.

  “That’s enough,” Viltas said, and now his voice was different: at once deep and hoarse. “Be quick about it and die, will you? I have lives without number to end, and I’m on an accelerated schedule.”

  Aimee’s shield spell slammed into being as the first of the dead rushed forward. It stopped in its tracks. She pushed back, then let it fade, and unleashed the spell Harkon had taught her. A beam of pulsing white light burnt the first corpse, and the one behind it, to ash. Belit leaped into action, Hakat by her side. Viltas’s armsmen were frozen at once in confusion and horror. Aimee saw two pulled to the ground, screaming, as ripping knives found openings in armor and punched through exposed faces.

  “Viltas!�
�� she shouted.

  “Sorry.” The lord shipman’s neck popped unnaturally and his face twisted into a mirthless expression. “The lord shipman isn’t here any more. For a long time I was forced to act as an influence only, nudging, pushing. It’s taken a long time to siphon enough death to take complete control of him, but with these wretches finished, I can act without his interference. You must admit, the symmetry of using the last of Amut’s companions to undo his victory is apt and proper.”

  His hand flashed and a second bolt of black energy flared across the room. Aimee summoned a shield spell. It split like a fractured window when the spell hit, and her feet were driven back across the floor. The corpse looked down at her from its throne. “You spoke to them through it,” she said. “Manipulated their faith to suit your ends.”

  “Is that what passes for cleverness in the Academies of Havensreach these days?” the Faceless answered through Viltas’s mouth. “Yes, girl, I spoke through its corpse, and its lingering essence helped, though there is so little of him left now. Your teacher made you adept at stating the obvious.”

  A knife-wielding corpse came at her from behind. Aimee twisted, loosed a gust of wind that sent him hurtling across the room, all while maintaining her shield spell. Another tried to grab her. She sank to one knee. Radiance required two hands. She caught him with another gust as he lurched over her, and propelled him head over heel into another just beyond.

  “Dammit!” she screamed at her companions. “Keep these things off me!”

  Belit had gotten herself free from the first of the dead she’d brought down. “Viltas!” she screamed, running towards them. “Fight him! This isn’t you!”

  The necromancer wearing the hero’s skin pivoted, made a gesture, and the air between his hand and the would-be captain rippled. Belit flew backwards into Hakat. The two of them went down. “Correct,” he said. “But Viltas was pliable. Eager for change… and Amut’s reforms were slow. I didn’t have to push hard.”