The words were understated, but at their utterance, Aimee felt the flicker of a tremendous power stir within her teacher.
“Hold up,” Clutch shouted behind them. “I’m coming with you. If we’re going to get away from that thing, Iseult will need a pilot that can actually fly.”
They stepped out into the bay. The dead were thinning now, but they blocked their path. Aimee put two down with the blazing spell her teacher had taught her. “Well done,” he said. “Let me handle these next ones, though. We’re short on time.”
He turned abruptly as a cluster of charging corpses bore down upon them. His hands flickered deftly through the motions, and a wave of the same blazing light blasted across them, leaving stains upon the deck, and nothing more. The ripple of power jarred her, and as he draped his arm about her shoulder once again, she said, “Why didn’t you teach me that one?”
“A little too advanced,” he said as they moved. “Though I suspect you’ll be ready for it much sooner than your teachers at the academy would have thought. Pay close attention to what happens when we reach the top, Aimee. It will all be useful in the future. Grandfather is terribly old, and terribly powerful, but there are great spells that were designed long ago for dealing with monsters of his might.”
Hope, real hope, surged within her as they reached the bay’s far wall, where another doorway led to the central corridors of the ship, and from there, the way up. “You think you can drive it back?”
A grim smile crossed her teacher’s face. “Dear me,” Harkon said. “I’m afraid not. From what I have sensed, Grandfather is determined to devour this ship and every soul upon it. Deterring him will not be possible.” He grunted, as if stretching muscles unused for a very long time. “I shall have to kill him.”
By the time they reached the top level, Harkon seemed stronger. He walked on his own now, and the two sorcerers hurried up the rain-drenched central thoroughfare as the winds howled, periodic gusts ripping through the streets and threatening to dash them against the walls of fine marble-faced estates. They ran past the corpses of the storm-crazed, still uncleared from where they’d fallen. The sky overhead was split between the light clouds of the outer edge of the storm, and the flashing, chaotic darkness of its raging black wall.
“Too steep of a turn,” Aimee heard Clutch say. “Too steep.”
And at the edge of her senses, something immense and potent approached. They were nearly at the base of the wheelhouse when Aimee turned, and nearly froze in her tracks. She knew what a Storm-Kraken was. She had a basic understanding of the concepts underlying the myths.
Reading about a legend in a textbook of deep sky mythology and seeing it in person were not things that could be compared. Just past the subdued glow of Iseult’s weakened engines, something dark and incalculably vast approached. Not quite as large as the behemoth itself, yet more than half her length, at least. From its body, a host of probing arms lashed out towards Iseult as she slowly turned.
“Not as much time as I hoped,” Harkon said. “We need to get up to the ivory bridge. Come.”
They climbed the stairs. The sounds of shouts echoed down from above. Aimee heard Belit shouting orders, Rachim barking back, and the echo of Vlana’s voice as well. They burst into the wheelhouse.
“Hark!” Vlana and Rachim said at the same time, and it seemed to take everything in the former’s power not to launch herself over the crystal table to hug the old sorcerer.
Clutch dashed forward, towards Belit. “Alright, Cap,” she said. “I’m a guild-trained pilot. Let me take the wheel. You focus on giving those orders and getting us the hell out of here.”
The look of relief on Belit’s face was palpable. She stepped back, and Clutch took the wheel, immediately grunting with the strain. “I suppose,” the pilot said, “I should’ve expected her to steer like a flying brick. Where are we going?”
“Wheelhouse?” The call came up from the engine room. “This is Vant. We’ve got the replacement core into the metadrive chamber, but it’s going to take us a few minutes to get it plugged in. Just keep that thing from tearing the ship apart, and we’ll give you the engines at maximum capacity soon!”
“Straighten our course,” Belit said.
Clutch looked back over her shoulder as if Belit had just spouted incomprehensible madness. “What?”
“Level us out so we fly with the wind, along the edge of the storm,” Belit said. “As long as we’re trying to fight it we’ll never outdistance that thing bearing down on us. At least this way we delay it! Do it!”
“Sure, talk sense to me, why don’t you,” Clutch said, and let the wheel go. It spun on its base, and Iseult lurched starboard, towards the storm.
“Navigation is still hell,” Vlana said. “The damn table can’t get even half of a reading with all this magic interference.”
“Clutch!” Belit shouted. “Take us up! I glimpsed stars through the cloud cover before. We go high enough we might just be able to see!”
“Hang on, everyone!” Clutch shouted in reply. “This is gonna get rough!”
Her hand snapped down to a lever beside the wheel, and she pulled it down as hard as she could. There was a rumble, and the deck beneath them began to tilt as the city-sized behemoth began to climb.
“Time to go,” Harkon said. “Do try to keep the ship from going completely vertical,” he added to the makeshift wheelhouse crew. “This is going to be hard enough without trying not to fall. Aimee, come.”
The bridge was a narrow strip of white metal between the wheelhouse and each of the watchtowers at either forward corner upon the bow. The moment they stepped out onto the rain-slick metal, Aimee had to hastily throw down a spell to keep her feet from slipping out beneath her. The wind blew from aftward, so powerful that each step was a grueling effort, and her coat whipped horizontally out behind her. And this is only the outer halo beyond the storm’s wall, she thought. Within the maelstrom it would strip flesh from bones.
She turned as they reached the middle of the expanse. Harkon seemed to have found his second surge, now. He strode purposefully through the rain, his coat whipping behind him. At the center he turned, placed one hand upon the rail, and stared to the rear of the ship with a look of terrible fury. “I will need you to defend me while I do this,” he said. “Grandfather is not without his own magic, and it will not be long before he senses what I am doing.”
Aimee turned. The monstrosity surged behind them, now rapidly approaching Iseult’s stern as the vessel climbed. Two of its shadowy arms lashed out through the wind, stretching. One struck the port corner of the stern, and the entire vessel shook.
Then Harkon Bright slammed his hands together at the culmination of a complex series of gestures. A swell of dizzying energy emanated from him, and he placed the palms of his glowing hands to the bridge beneath him. A suffusing rush of light, white and brilliant, flared outward, passing beneath Aimee and throughout the entirety of the climbing behemoth.
When Harkon spoke again, his voice was like the roar of the storm, and carried above the drone of the wind. “In the name of the First Laws, the Palimpsest of Souls, and the Empyrean Wings of Heaven, I declare Iseult Sanctuary against you, Devourer, Old Rain-Lurker. Turn about, and slink back to the haven of your storm-clouds. These souls are not for you.”
And all at once, Aimee realized, with an arresting clarity, the focus of the primordial entity shifted. It had no face she could discern, yet its malice was directed at them, and the force of that ancient hate was mightier than any wind. She felt a pressure building in the air, then her teacher said, “A shield spell, Aimee. Like the one I taught you in Port Providence.”
She stepped forward, and with flashing gestures, summoned a mandala of light into the space between the monster and her master, widening it as much as she could.
It flashed into being a moment before one of the massive limbs extended, whipped across the vast span between them, and hammered into it. The force shook the bridge upon which she stood, but t
he spell her master had cast somehow kept it from killing her. Aimee fell to one knee and screamed, nonetheless. She turned the shriek of pain into a howl of defiance, and shouted, “Is that all you’ve got, Grandpa?”
The malice of the primordial thing struck her like another gust of wind. Instead of buckling, Aimee pushed herself back up into a standing position, holding tight to her defensive spell and grinning madly into the maw of the Storm-Kraken.
“Last chance,” Harkon said. The warning carried above the wind. “Turn back, or be unmade.”
A terrible heat and light was growing within him, crackling beneath her mentor’s skin, and when Aimee glanced back, his hands were outlines of flesh containing blazing sunlight.
The second strike of a limb loosed a spell, and Aimee was almost knocked off her feet. Her back struck the opposite rail of the ivory bridge, and the breath went out of her. Still, she held her spell. Just beyond the range of coverage of her defensive magic, the top level of the watchtower at the other end of the bridge broke in half with an ear-rending split.
“So be it,” Harkon said, then he addressed Aimee. “Lower the shield spell.”
Aimee blinked. “Are you insane?”
“Do it!”
She dropped the spell. The vastness of the Storm-Kraken spread out before her, now almost upon Iseult. Its limbs lashed out towards her. Aimee fought the reflex to close her eyes. She would meet death face on.
A wall of night at the end of a massive arm enveloped the entirety of the bridge in complete darkness. Aimee looked up as her world was smothered by shadow and the overpowering scent of rain.
Then she heard her teacher’s voice.
“I INVOKE THE DAWN.”
In the midst of the suffocating grip of the Storm-Kraken, Harkon Bright became a second sunrise.
Aimee was thrown to the deck of the bridge. The light washed over her. It tore outwards. Shadow-flesh burnt away, crisped, dissipated before the blazing white of heat, light, and the shearing corona of radiance that blasted the night away from every crevice. Clouds fled. The world was white, and through the slits of her vision, Aimee saw something vast and dark fall back into the skies, burning.
The flare of light died. The Storm-Kraken was gone. Aimee pushed herself up on her hands, then launched herself forward with a cry of dismay as her teacher’s sagging body toppled backwards over the edge of the ivory bridge. She caught his hand, felt his limp grip nearly slip through her fingers before she tightened them around the cuff of his coat.
Then the remnants of the spell keeping her feet securely on the deck gave way, and without time for fear, shock, or any sensation but surprise, Aimee and her teacher toppled from the bow of Iseult, and into the open sky. She saw the abyss beneath her, dark, swallowing the rain, filled with clouds and a cacophony of lightning. The last thing doomed skyfarers saw before they fell forever.
She jerked to a stop. A hand held the collar of her coat. Not caring whose it was, she reached out with her other hand to hold onto her teacher with every ounce of strength she had. “Come on, Harkon,” she swore under her breath. “It’s not your time yet.”
“Pull us up!” she heard Belit scream behind her, and turning her gaze over her shoulder, looked into the determined face of the swordswoman, her fist clasping the collar of Aimee’s coat, and above her, Rachim, his two armsmen, and Vlana, hauling them up. The clouds high overhead broke, revealing a night sky filled with innumerable stars. Her teacher landed on the deck beside her, and she watched his chest rise and fall. He was alive.
They’d won.
Aimee let her head fall back to the deck, a reckless laugh bubbling out of her as the last drops of rain fell on her smiling face.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Journeyman
In the warm, fully repaired metadrive chamber of Iseult, Elias sat on a small stool, and watched the twin hearts of the legendary lovers glow side by side as one. A week since they returned to Flotilla Visramin, it would be wrong to say that things had returned to any semblance of normal. Belit was captain, and her ascendency had come not on a wave of support from the officer aristocracy, but from the people of Iseult herself. There had been politics. There had been argument, and a threat of upheaval from an angry ruling caste that rankled at having had its power bypassed. The final remaining functionaries had declared her captaincy illegitimate.
She had answered by going to the metadrive chamber, and touching the core metadrives of Tristan and Iseult, synchronizing them to work nearly as one. Then, two days ago, the last members of the guild’s bureaucrat-priests had been exiled from Iseult altogether. A new council had been formed, of representatives from each of the ship’s decks and districts. The downlevelers outnumbered the officer aristocrats by more than a hundred to one, on average. One of its first votes had been to strip the position of officer of its hereditary status. Elias had watched social upheaval surge through the ship, one vote after another.
And – as with her defeat of Yaresh in the square – done without a single life taken.
Every muscle in Elias’s body still ached. But here and now, in this place that had once held such terrible whispers for his ravaged mind, he felt a sense of deep, abiding peace. He took a long sip from the hot tea they’d given him when he came here, and stared at the twin hearts, beating as one. He’d come here as an open wound of a person with little semblance of where he was to go, or what he was supposed to be. Since then, he’d saved lives, fought with monsters, and done enduring good.
But somehow, he felt, the vision before him, of two lovers’ souls once separated, now working together to power the last of the two ships, was the thing he was most proud to have done.
“Care for company?” Harkon asked. Turning, Elias saw the smiling face of the old sorcerer. He was still walking with a cane, largely on Rachim’s insistence, but looked as if he wouldn’t need it much longer.
“As if I’d refuse,” Elias said, moving to vacate his stool with a smile.
“No,” Harkon said with a laugh. “I spent three days in a sickbed. I have no designs to sit for any longer than I’ve got to.”
Elias didn’t sit back down anyway. It felt wrong, somehow, so instead the two men stood before the vast metadrive cores with an awkward stool between them. “How are you feeling?” Elias asked at length.
“Like I turned my flesh into solar fire for a few seconds, a week ago,” Harkon said with a laugh. “I’d make a joke about being too old for that, but the truth is when I was younger it would’ve killed me. Strange, how this sorcery business makes us stronger as we age, yet still our joints ache.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Elias answered with a grin. “Everything hurts right now.”
“Well,” Harkon answered after a genuine laugh. “The difference between success and failure is preparation. I had time, however short, to ready myself to face Grandfather. Whereas poor Viltas–” he shook his head “–poor Viltas was able to catch me off guard. I hadn’t guessed the extent to which the Faceless had taken hold of him, when I confronted him in the midst of the portal storm. Good work, that night, by the by. They tell quite the stories of what you all did, and after.”
“It was mostly Aimee,” Elias answered, looking up at the twin hearts of the behemoth in all their glory. He couldn’t quite keep the fondness from his voice. “I supported where I was needed. I fought when there was cause. I made mistakes, but she stayed the course throughout. We’d all be dead, but for her.”
When he looked back at the old sorcerer, Harkon watched him quietly, thoughtfully. Then, without any pretense, said simply, “You love her.”
Silence followed. The words struck Elias, a sudden gut-punch that came without warning or time to prepare. His mouth hung open. That was absurd, he wanted to say. He was only a few weeks free from the Eternal Order’s clutches. His own concept of self was still a shaky thing, informed by a lifetime of horrible memories that functioned as a guidepost for what not to be, the teachings of a newfound teacher, and six words that h
e sometimes heard in his dreams: Noble and brave. Gentle and kind.
It was insane to think that he could grasp what it was to love another person… and yet. He looked down. His eyes closed, as music, a moment in a cabin doorway, a dance beneath the stars, and words whispered hastily before interruptions that had relieved him as much as they left him confused. Aimee de Laurent had a path ahead of her. A brilliant future within the grasping reach of her own hands. He could never presume to deter her from it.
And yet.
He looked Harkon in the face, and gave a resigned shrug as the truth settled in. “Too much to ever tell her.”
Harkon watched him, and a look somewhere between relief and pity stirred in his eyes. And he simply said, “I see.”
The two of them sat together for a while longer in silence, as the twin hearts of Iseult and her Tristan glowed in the chamber; together, but apart.
Some hours later, Elias walked the streets of the top level of Iseult, alone, pulling a new longcoat lined with fur tighter against the wind. The thoroughfares had a different feel to them now. Enough officers had been killed over the past few weeks that their positions had been filled by downlevelers with sufficient skill and inclination, and a number of the empty estates were already being repurposed for the good of the vessel. As he walked down the main spinal street, the door to one of them, apparently being used as a school now, opened and disgorged a flood of bright-faced children into the streets. They ran past him, a flood of laughter and smiles.
He was nearly through them when he heard one exclaim, “It’s the white knight who came from the sky!”
Were it not for Oath of Aurum strapped still to his hip, he would genuinely have believed they were talking about someone else. At once he was surrounded by a sea of laughing, awestruck faces, and a thousand questions of which he could hardly keep track. Above it all, however, was a dizzying feeling, half relief and half wonder, to have so many looking at him with something other than fear. He was just in the process of trying to extricate himself, when the familiar figure of Vallus approached up the street, flanked now by two members of Belit’s Red Guard.
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