Dragon Road

by Joseph Brassey

  She landed in a crouch. One level up and one level down, the dead rushed towards her. She set her teeth, summoned a burst of flame just past each hand, then flowed through the forms of wind and loosed a burst of air at each tongue of fire before either could dissipate.

  A roaring, wind-fanned inferno erupted from just past each of her hands, blazing up the stairs and down simultaneously. The dead burned greasily, swiftly. The magic animating them ignited, discharging in multiple, red-smearing concussive blasts above and below. Learn quickly.

  She rose from the blaze, then turning, blasted the next door open and stepped out into the midlevels. She stood in the middle of a wide street. To her right, the vast interior of Iseult could be seen just beyond the lip of the promenade that spanned the interior opening on this level. To her left, the street wound further past a number of gates set into the walls, and each of these had been smashed open. This, then, was the boundary of Pentus’s midlevel estate. She couldn’t see any of the Faceless’s recently raised children, but she could hear them in the distance, along with the periodic whump of mystic energy projectors and the screams of people fighting back. Aimee hefted her weapon and ran towards the sounds of the chaos. She passed the third gate into the ruins of what had once been a beautiful garden, now littered with the bodies of its master’s servants. Up ahead, a doorway of exquisite hardwood hung broken from its hinges.

  Three of the dead came running out, eyes alight and teeth red with recently drawn blood. Aimee loosed the Radiance to burn the first to ash, but the second came upon her before she could ready it again. She jammed the shock-spear into its body and discharged its magic with a twist. As it convulsed, she wind-smashed the second in the head with the butt so hard she heard its neck crack. It spun from the impact. She turned back to the first and loosed the beam of light straight down its screaming mouth and stepped backwards through the cloud of burning dust as the second lunged through the air at her. Aimee smashed the spear-point into its chest and hit it with a dose of lightning even as she freed one hand to blast its middle into a thousand chunks of meat.

  She stepped over the remnants, and charged into the late duke’s stately apartments. Somewhere on the other side of this mess was the bay she needed to reach. Could she take it by herself? Maybe not, but with her backing them, the people fighting these things on the other side of the estate could push through. Flames licked at priceless works of art as she ran. Dislodged wiring and broken magic conduits sent bursts of fire across her path. She summoned shield-spells, ducked, wove, and rolled.

  She was nearly through. The sounds of fighting echoed just beyond an immense window that looked down onto interior recreational grounds some fifty feet below. Across the space, downlevelers and enlisted battled against the rushing, chaotic masses of the Faceless’s horde of the walking dead. No time to find a way down. Aimee took a deep breath and wind-blasted the window apart. She ran, slammed the spear into the ground, and pole-vaulted herself through the rain of glass razors, slowing her fall with magic and landing in the midst of the battle in a crouch. A downleveler jumped back, alarmed, and Aimee rose. “Hi,” she said. “I’m the reinforcements.”

  She twisted as soon as the words were out of her mouth, and loosed the beam of white light through the center of the nearest of them, burning it to ash. Another came at her. She dropped as it swiped and slammed her palm into its chest, releasing a spell of frost before pivoting back and smashing its frozen form with the butt of the shock-spear, shattering it. Then she turned once more and said, “Who’s in charge here?”

  “Was one of Pentus’s old armsmen,” the man answered back. There was a blast from several feet away as a mystic energy projector created a hole through a garden wall. Aimee summoned a shield spell to ward off the debris.

  “I last saw him charging into the press,” the man said. “He didn’t come back.”

  “Then I’m in charge,” Aimee said. “The loading bay on the other side of that wall–” she gestured at the wall to his back “–we need it cleared, because backup is coming that can save the whole ship.”

  His eyes widened. He gave a nod and hefted the flame-lance he carried. Aimee dashed to the top of a broken bit of statuary pedestal and amplified her voice. “Enlisted of Iseult!” she shouted. “The skyship Elysium is returning with the power to save her heart from the threat of the dead! She must land in the bay on the other side of that wall!”

  Eyes were on her, now. One of the dead leaped at her from the window of Pentus’s estate. She struck it with her spear in the chest and blasted it away with a gust of wind, then aimed her weapon at the large cargo doors to the landing bay beyond. A shout went up from the mass of armed enlisted. It echoed through the chamber, a cry of explosive defiance. She rode the tide, letting it lift her exhausted, shaking heart.

  “After me!” she shouted, and jumped from the pedestal. Her boots pounded the deck floor, and she sent beams of blazing Radiance out ahead of her, shearing through the oncoming remnants of the Faceless’s minions. A wave rose behind her, men and women, armed in the defense of their home, charging at her back. The dull whump of the projectors sent blasts of mystic light ahead of her, blasting pathways through the enemy. Every spell she’d studied in her battle magic classes back at the academy flashed through her mind as she ran. The spells Harkon had given her since. The spear in her hand crackled with lightning. She felt the fire playing at the edge of her eyes.

  Aimee de Laurent charged into the ranks of the dead at the head of an army, and let loose the fury of her magic.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Grandfather

  Elias gripped the brass rail, and held on for dear life. Winds hammered Elysium. The skyship bucked and spun in the storm. Through it all, Clutch held the wheel, shouting words down to Vant in the metadrive chamber. As for himself, the black knight was paralyzed by uselessness, and a mad terror of what was coming.

  “ELIAS!” he heard Bjorn scream. “I need you to take the rear ether-cannons! I’m more use on the bridge!”

  Jumping at the chance to act, he turned past the old man emerging out from the corridor. He gave a nod and jogged back down until he was at the top of the stairs in the cargo hold at the vessel’s rear. The ladder to the gun turret was accessible at the far end of the upper level, and Elias clambered up it, nearly losing his grip. He unstrapped his sword and squeezed into a narrow, armored space. His feet found pedals, and he quickly discerned that by pushing one or the other he could swivel the small sphere back and forth.

  Then he looked out the viewport of the turret, and wished he hadn’t. The vast frame of Tristan rolled in the wind. He had a moment to take in the mesmerizing beauty of the city-sized behemoth before another limb, long enough to wrap around its middle, lashed from the smoky wall of the maelstrom clouds, and struck with such force that the exterior frame of the gigantic skyship dented inwards. A deep, echoing crack echoed above the wind, and Tristan’s spine snapped.

  Elias’s hands shook on the controls, suddenly a small boy again, held prisoner in a tiny cabin as his callous owner flew him into the outer halo of this place of havoc and chaos. But this time, it was no dream. No whispers of mindless terror or illusion assaulted his senses. Two more vast tentacles of impossible scale lashed out from the mass of vast darkness just past the dying behemoth, and started to pull the city-ship in half.

  Grandfather was here. The nightmare was real.

  As the ship split down the middle, a rending shriek echoed through the skies. Marble-coated buildings and scaffolds of rusted metal collapsed and spun into the wind. A series of muffled explosions detonated within the interior of the vessel in its death throes, and the rippling waves of discharging, shattering enchantments tore outward through the sky, making the black knight dizzy as he sat in the small glass and metal sphere on the back end of Elysium. With a final, rending bang, the tortured husk of a vessel split in two. A fireball larger than the central district of Port Providence flared across the sky, forcing Elias to close his eyes.r />
  When he opened them again, it was in time to watch as the two savaged halves of Tristan dropped into the abyss far below, and a cloud of lighter debris hurtled towards them on the whirling winds. “Clutch!” he shouted into the communication tube. “Debris incoming from the rear!”

  “Shoot down as much as you can!” her voice came echoing back. “And strap in! This is gonna make you sick!”

  She didn’t lie. Elias had barely gotten his seat straps into place when Elysium’s engines roared, and the vessel shot into a spiraling upward arc. He was upside down, he was rightside up, again and again and again.

  He was going to lose his last meal all over the interior of the rear turret. Focus. He had to focus. His hands gripped the controls, first to steady himself, then to do his job. A large chunk of whirling hull-plating surged towards them. He tracked it, then set his feet and pulled the trigger. The entire mechanism of the ether-cannon jerked backwards, taking the seat with it. Bolts of blazing mystic fire blasted across the sky, striking their target and blasting it apart. Elias held on for dear life as Elysium spun, dived, and shot forward. He spotted another target, then let loose. Bolts of light traced across the storm-racked heavens. He pulled the trigger again, as the ship’s metadrive fed raw power into her rear guns. Shredded wreckage shattered and lanced overhead and below like drops of windswept rain.

  Then at once the last of it dropped away, and the skyship leveled off, pulling into an even plane before a fresh burst from her engines set her roaring straight towards her target. It took a few seconds for Elias to steady himself and calm his breathing. It was as if the walls closed around him, and again, he was the little boy: locked in a cabin, upon a slab of stone, at Roland’s mercy, at Esric’s, within the burning cottage where his mother had died. His heart raced. He started to hyperventilate.

  He had killed the last echo of the dead Eternal Order knight within Iseult’s depths. Destroyed its corpse and silenced the whispers, but he couldn’t kill his own memories. “Not now,” he murmured, as the surge of recollections and fear threatened to overwhelm him. “Not now, please–”

  “My sweet boy.”

  He heard the words. Whether it was the madness of the storm, or the ravaged state of his fearful mind, he couldn’t begin to guess, but he heard them, and he knew the voice.

  “Mother,” he whispered as the wind roared and the heavens shook. Speaking the words somehow made the fear more real. “Mother, I’m so scared I can’t think.”

  Gentle, as if from far away, came the reply.

  “Not all of your memories are wicked.”

  His eyes squeezed shut. A cottage, long ago and far away. A gentle hand. A melody sung in a voice he could barely recall. But newer, as well. The skyship on which he sailed. Harkon, standing in his cabin. A shared drink in the common room as thunder rolled in the distance. A dance with Aimee, across a gilded floor more memory than real, beneath the landless stars.

  “Noble and brave. Gentle and kind.”

  His eyes opened. His hands gripped the controls. It came for them, now, beyond the remnants of the falling debris. Not as fast as Elysium, no, but fast. He couldn’t see the whole of it. In the immensity of the storm’s edge, it was visible only as a deeper darkness, an ink-like shadow against the gray, unlit even by the intermittent, titanic flashes of lightning. He saw the outline of its limbs, more than could be counted, and beyond, a body that was long and dark, changing shape as it moved swiftly across the skies.

  It followed them. And as it moved, for just a moment, Elias glimpsed something within the mass of writhing black: the flash of a single, glimmering eye.

  He screamed in defiance and pulled the trigger, ineffectual bolts of weaponsfire cracking into the face of the oncoming monstrosity.

  “Hang on!” Clutch screamed over the tubes. “We’re coming in hot!”

  Elysium turned, rotating hard and fast through the air, and suddenly Elias’s vision was filled not with the titanic horror of Grandfather’s visage, but with the swallowing maw of Iseult’s amidships loading bay door. He had a second to glimpse the chaotic battle unfolding across its massive floor, then the ship touched down hard. He felt the landing gear hit the deck with a loud shriek. The vessel tilted violently as it skidded through the middle of a packed melee. Outside, he glimpsed flashes of downlevelers battling with the dead. He angled the gun into the mass of running corpses just beyond the ship, and let loose three loud blasts, clearing the floor before them. Then he unstrapped himself, leaped out of the turret, and snatched Oath of Aurum. “Lower the bay door!” he shouted into the tube. “They’re going to need me out there!”

  A loud thumping release was followed by the drone of the bay door lowering. Elias heaved himself over the edge, dropped to the ramp, and hurled himself into the melee.

  “AIMEE!” he shouted. “I’M HERE!”

  He found her halfway across the bay, at the head of a surge of fighters, loosing beams of iridescent Radiance through the enemy which turned corpses to embers and ashes. The dead were breaking, carved up now into smaller clusters being driven down by the newly armed ordinary folk of Iseult. He cut his way to her, and she turned in time to catch his eye as he burst through a group of them, sending their burning remnants cascading to the floor and leaving a path to Elysium behind him.

  Aimee turned towards him, and it seemed as though a hundred feelings flashed across her blue eyes in a moment. A warm smile spread across her face, and she ran towards him, hug-tackling him with a ferocity that nearly took him off his feet. “You’re late,” she said in his ear.

  “Got held up,” he said as he pulled back. A stupid grin spread across his face. “Did you do this?”

  Aimee grinned back, just as broad. “No, they did it. I just gave them impetus. Where is he?”

  “Inside the bay,” Elias said. “We need you in there now.”

  Aimee stepped past him and reopened his path through the press with a blast of wind that sent bodies flying. Then ran across the floor, up the ramp. Bjorn waited at the top, having strapped on the mystic energy projector. Its steady whump continued behind them as they reached the crystalline cyst of magic that encased Harkon Bright.

  “Whatever you’re going to do, do it quick,” Bjorn said. “That monster the cult worships is bearing down on Iseult, and fast. It won’t matter what the dead do if we don’t find a way to keep their Storm-Kraken at bay.”

  “If I had to hazard a guess,” Elias said, staring at the old mage within the crystal, “he was caught off guard, and managed to redirect the energy of the spell into some form of slumber, rather than death.”

  Aimee crouched beside the coffin-sized amber crystal, eyes wide. “I saw a drawing like it in one of the books in his quarters, the notes spoke of something like that, but the skill level necessary to pull something like that off in the moment is… so far beyond anything I’ve ever done.”

  “Other than opening a portal in the center of a demon’s chest,” Elias reminded her. “You can do this.”

  She flashed him a sideways look. Intent. Almost burning, then she looked at the crystalline coffin again. Bjorn’s weapon blasted off twice more behind them. Aimee’s lips moved as she ran through calculations out loud. Elias reflected for a moment that watching Aimee de Laurent’s mind work was like watching a master paint.

  “Alright, teacher,” he heard her say, as she wove a simple spell that he thought he recognized as being intended for breaking enchantments, but modified, subtly, by the gestures of her swift fingers. “I don’t know how you did this,” she continued, “and this is the best solution I can think of, but I have to believe that you knew I could get you out of it again. Please, for the love of all the gods, don’t prove me wrong.”

  She spoke words of magic, and pressed her hands to the surface of the crystal. A brief silence followed, as the magic dissipated, then the air was rent by the sound of a loud crack, and a flash of brilliant light as the energy of the frozen spell came undone and fell away.

  And from the as
hes of the broken, necromantic shell, Harkon Bright rose.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Hero and the Hurricane

  Harkon Bright sagged, and Aimee stepped beneath his arm, catching him. “Thank you,” he said. His voice was haggard. Exhausted. “It was a gamble, but you’ve made it pay off in spades.”

  The spell had been a last ditch, creative effort. Aimee hadn’t expected it to work. Elias caught Harkon’s other arm, and the two held him up together. “Belit holds the wheelhouse,” Aimee said. “Pentus is dead, Yaresh is no longer a problem, and the cult–”

  “Worships a Storm-Kraken they call Grandfather,” Harkon finished. His voice was getting stronger, as if he were shaking off a bout of bad sleep. “I know. The Faceless was prone to gloating, and he believed he’d won. I assume he’s been dealt with?”

  “Belit killed him,” Aimee said. “With Oath of Aurum.”

  Her teacher’s eyes widened. “Well,” he said. “I suppose that explains a few things. We can discuss it all later.”

  “Can you stand?” Elias asked.

  “I believe so,” Harkon said, freeing himself from the knight. “Or at least, she will suffice. You’ve done magnificently, young man. Now do what you need to do.”

  “Vant!” Elias yelled. “Time to get this core into the chamber!”

  “Iseult is running one subsidiary core short,” Aimee explained.

  Harkon sighed as he straightened. “I’ve missed so much. Help me reach the wheelhouse, will you? I can feel that wretched thing coming, and I fear they’re going to need me soon.”