“What, no apocalypses to rush into?” she quipped back.
“I think we’re done with those for a little while,” Harkon said as he exited the bridge. “But never say never.”
Clutch kept steering as Vlana fed her coordinates from her station. By the by, Aimee found herself listening to the sound of humming. Turning, she saw Elias, still at the rail, wearing his new coat and idly doodling with a charcoal pencil on a small notepad. He was humming a tune she didn’t recognize, though – she had to admit – the sound was very pleasant.
“What are you drawing?” she asked, sidling up to him. Her head came about even with the lower half of his face. She made a show of peeking over his shoulder.
“Just the sunrise,” he said, and turning the pad, showed her a sketch of clouds breaking over the stern of Iseult.
“And the song?” she asked. “Sorry, Elias Leblanc, I’m nosy today.”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Something my mother used to sing. Came back to me recently.” A warmth filled his smile. “When I needed it.”
“Has anyone ever told you you’re rather good at that?” she asked.
“Singing or drawing?”
“Either.”
“No,” he said. “And no. But thank you.”
He straightened, as if to go. She didn’t quite step back quickly enough, and at once she found herself closer to the green-eyed man than she’d intended. There was the familiar scent, proximity, and confusion.
“Ah,” she said. “Sorry. Going somewhere?”
“Breakfast,” he said. He honestly looked like hell, she thought. Healthier than when he’d first come aboard, but the past few weeks had been rough on him. There were dark circles under his eyes. His hair was matted. He looked as though he’d rolled out of bed, thrown on a coat, and wandered up to the bridge in a fog this morning. It was hardly the height of handsomeness.
Yet a very insistent part of her refused to see it as otherwise.
She bit her lower lip, and stepped aside. Don’t get distracted.
She wasn’t distracted.
She wasn’t.
“No fair trying to starve me,” he said as he slipped past, and tossing her an amused wink, slipped out of the bridge. She stood in her bathrobe, holding a mug of tea, honestly considering possibilities she’d left be after what she’d written off as a flight of fancy in the aftermath of an adrenaline-filled few dances. Before the world went mad. It couldn’t be anything more than that, after all. She hardly knew him, and besides, she’d been around this street before.
It occurred to her abruptly that she was still staring at an empty doorway, and she turned around. No. Not possible. Not her. Not him. She thrust her right hand determinedly into her pocket.
“You all right?” Vlana asked from her station. Outside, the sun climbed higher in the heavens, filling the bridge with a warm, golden glow. Something pricked at her fingers, and Aimee pulled her hand out of her pocket. In her palm was a single blue rosebud, dropped there after it had been put in her hair the night of the Grand Ball.
She stared at it, and her heart did a small set of calisthenics. Aimee swallowed.
Not possible, eh? Wanna bet?
“For once,” Aimee said, mostly to herself, “I really don’t know.”
She put the rose away, and placed both hands on her drink. That was quite enough of that.
Not by a long shot.
“Vant, are we ready for a hard burn?” Clutch asked.
“You know it, crazy,” the engineer’s voice came back. A roar sounded behind them, and mystic power thrummed beneath Aimee’s feet. And Elysium sailed up and up, into the dawn of the infinite sky.
Epilogue
The House of Nails
When Kaelith reached the top of the stone steps, she felt like she’d crossed half of heaven to get there. The sole survivor of the Eternal Order’s disastrous invasion of Port Providence took a moment to look behind her. The view from the top of Lord Roland’s Manse was beautiful in a brutally austere sort of way. Once, all the land that spread out below her had been the royal palace of New Corinth’s ruling dynasty. When the dread lord had claimed the land as his own fief within the House of Nails, they said, he had savaged the landscape. Destroyed every garden, tore down every building, and visited nightmares without number on the unfortunates left behind. Then, they’d said, he’d raised his citadel in the heart of the ruins. Most of the grounds were now overgrown with red-leafed trees. When she looked, all the foliage was red within the confines of the former grounds. Ever since Roland’s burning, they said, not a single plant’s leaves grew in green.
Kaelith had never flinched from orders, though – truth be told – she did not grieve for dead Malfenshir. But it was a reminder of how the most placid people often hid the deepest darkness. Lord Ogier, Malfenshir’s own master, was an unabashed beast who made spectacular public executions part of his military campaigns, yet he feared Roland. And staring across the red-foliaged ruin of a palace grounds that had once covered nearly a hundred acres, Kaelith started to grasp why.
The doors opened before her, heavy oak banded with iron. Here, the cool wind of late autumn stirred curtains on the other side of the entryway, and beyond she could hear a harpist playing. Kaelith’s own master had not seen fit to train her in the myriad forms of high art and court that Roland’s students had received, but she knew fine art when she saw it, and the music she now heard was of a level of skill normally heard only by kings.
Glancing left, she followed the sound as she stepped through, until she saw the source, and fought down the urge to wince.
The player was a thin man with delicate fingers, plucking away at an instrument with a sort of careful grace that came from mad terror at the prospect of a single error. His face stared past her, to the far wall, the caked blood clustered at his mutilated, empty eye sockets.
Turning, Kaelith stared into the deeper darkness, and there she glimpsed the outline of a man, silhouetted against the faint glow of a brazier of burning flames. Big-framed. Wearing what looked like an evening robe.
“You are Kaelith,” a smooth voice said at length.
Kaelith closed her eyes, placed the head of her great black axe upon the floor, and knelt in the presence of a superior.
“I am,” she said, bowing her head. “And I bring news that I would have brought earlier, but for the request you sent to me whilst I was in the field.”
“You may relax, Sir Kaelith,” Roland said, dismissive. “I want truth, not platitudes. I know the Axiom is lost to us for the moment, and Coulton’s flagship has been roaming the unclaimed, looking for something. Clarify, black-axe. Confirm or deny.”
“As you commanded,” she said, “I followed King Coulton and his fleeing court for two weeks. I sought out those they sought out, and hunted down minor nobles that have fled his increasingly unstable council of advisors. I tortured some, bribed others. His advisor, the gray sage named Silas, is losing his mind. He has embraced ever more dangerous magic, in his obsessive quest for vengeance against us. And moreover, he has Coulton searching for something, using old pathways and secrets known only to the sages. Something beyond the dunes of old pre-Imperium ruins, far out beyond the eastern edge of the Kiscadian Republic. His people are listless, a fleet of refugees floating through the unclaimed, being turned away by one petty kingdom after another.”
“Good,” Roland said after a moment. The sound of pouring wine reached her ears. “You may rise.”
“Dread Lord,” she said, still down upon one knee. “There is more.”
The silence that followed was thick enough that for a moment, Kaelith could only kneel there, fighting down fear, her mind filled with visions of red-stained leaves wafting in an unending breeze.
“Go on.”
“Your apprentice, Lord Azrael,” she said, “lives as a traitor named Elias Leblanc. He slew Malfenshir with Prince Collum’s sword, and escaped the destruction of the Iron Hulk on a silver skyship named Elysium. This same cre
w has in their possession the Axiom Diamond.”
Kaelith heard the sound of glass breaking. The silhouette didn’t move for a long time. A terrible weight seemed to surround her for a moment, a roiling, powerful presence that was enough to make the knight’s armored fist clench tightly about the haft of her axe.
Then it ceased, and Kaelith let out a breath she didn’t know she’d held.
“So,” the figure said, turning. “My wayward angel of death has lost his way, and fallen into the company of Harkon Bright.”
Soft footsteps echoed as he approached. Kaelith kept her head down, trying not to think of the harpist with his bloody, empty eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I believe that was his name.”
He stood before her now, and Kaelith felt the touch of a gloved hand on her chin, tilting it up. The kneeling warrior raised her head, and stared into Lord Roland’s face. His cold, pale eyes glittered like distant stars, and in the half-light of the apartments, she saw the ghost of a twisted smile.
“Perfect.”
Acknowledgments
The second step is harder than the first, but I had people without count to walk the Dragon Road with me. First, to my beloved Meaghan: without you none of this would be possible. Second, to Matt, Kirsten, David, Alice, the whole Backstage Crew, and everyone else who absorbed snippets from this beast and offered sensible advice, quick tips, or just someone to enthusiastically vent at. Loneliness kills writers, and you all kept me alive. To my parents and my sister, for everything.
To Florence + The Machine, Imagine Dragons, Yasuharu Takanashi, TSFH, and a thousand composers without number for breathing life into the Drifting Lands a second time. To every gamer, storyteller, and poet whose shared the road with me, and swapped a story or two.
And you, for sticking with the crew of the Elysium for round two. Now go find an authoritarian and pick a fight.
About the Author
Joseph Brassey has lived on both sides of the continental US, and has worked as a craft-store employee, paper-boy, factory worker, hospital kitchen gopher, martial arts instructor, singer, and stay-at-home Dad (the last is his favorite job, by far). Joseph was enlisted as a robotic word-machine in 47North’s Mongoliad series, and still trains in – and teaches – Liechtenauer’s Kunst des Fechtens in his native Tacoma.
josephbrassey.wordpress.com • twitter.com/josephbrassey
ANGRY ROBOT
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Diamond in the sky
An Angry Robot paperback original 2018
Copyright © Joseph Brassey 2018
Joseph Brassey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
UK ISBN 978 0 85766 679 6
US ISBN 978 0 85766 679 6
Ebook ISBN 978 0 85766 680 2
Cover by Ignacio Lazcano.
Set by Argh! Nottingham.
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-0-85766-680 2
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Legals
Join the Robot Legion
Guide
Title Page
Dedication
Text
Acknowledgements
Copyright page
Title Page
Dragon Road Page 37