by Taven Moore
The captain exited the building, hammer braced across his shoulder. He gave a mocking salute to the guards as he passed, and Remora made sure everyone else left the room before she did.
Pausing just behind Jinn, Remora couldn’t help but look back.
Vakaano stood with his back to her, metallic wings folded tightly while the spark drew thin, angry lines between his feathers.
She closed her eyes . . . He wasn’t her father . . . and joined the crew.
35. Epilogue: Meeting with Vakaena
In a dark room down a winding staircase hidden behind a cogsmithed bookshelf, Dame Vakaena waited.
Red spark from her wings and weak yellow flame of the candle she’d brought with her lent the room an ominous glow.
Very few people knew about this room. In point of fact, only three people still living had any notion of its existence. Herself, the man she waited for, and the dresl who disposed of bodies on her behalf.
Not even Vakaano knew of it, which was precisely as she preferred it.
She sighed, thinking of her husband. He had been such a promising match. Strong, handsome, respected among the other Seraph, and from a noble family. She had been so certain he would share her ambitions, but ever since the Sundering, it was as if he’d lost all will to lead.
Her own resolve, on the other hand, had seen the Sundering for the opportunity it was. They could rule this place as Emperor and Empress.
She smiled into the darkness. Thanks to his red-haired indiscretion, she now had opportunity to pursue that goal afresh. Vakaano had a great many admirable qualities, but the most useful of them was his honor. His promise to make his bid to lead the Seraph would be fulfilled, and she would do everything needed to ensure it was successful.
A hand brushed aside the tapestry on the wall she faced, and she returned her thoughts to the meeting at hand.
“You requested a meeting?” the newcomer said, standing. She did not offer him a seat. The light from his own candle did nothing to penetrate the darkness, but did illuminate his face, flickering over the black fabric of his eye patch.
“Report on the viability of continued association with the Shinra’ere Ebin.”
Captain Mack Craft spoke swiftly and without embellishment, a quality she valued. “A little insolent and prone to doing things his own way without permission, but effective and skilled. Continued association recommended.”
“Good.” Vakaena allowed Mack to see her smile, to know that she was pleased with him. “I have a new mission for your crew, and it pleases me to have Ebin join you. His particular brand of expertise might come in handy, as this is not as straightforward as your usual assignments.”
Vakaena leaned forward, so that she might not miss any trace of expression on Mack’s face. “I wish for you to follow the ship Miraj, and more specifically the girl Remora. I wish for you to be obvious and give chase . . . but do not actually capture, even if it becomes a possibility.”
Mack’s brow furrowed, but he said nothing. Good man.
“I want her to feel pressured to hurry, and it becomes obvious to me that she will dawdle without sufficient external motivation to complete her task. In this, you are to become sheepdog, not wolf, do you understand?”
He nodded, and she smiled at him again. Such a good soldier.
She continued the instructions. “In dire circumstances only, you are ordered to step in and rescue the girl and her ship. If possible, you are to do this without revealing your involvement to anyone.”
Finally, he spoke. “How will I know when to allow danger to cross her path, and when to step in?”
A fair question. She considered it. “You are empowered to exercise your own judgment. This is where Ebin’s tactics will become most useful to you. Heed his counsel. Beware especially any contact with a Hideous Paladin. Do not hesitate to intervene, should they encounter the Paladin’s leader, Anderson. If he finds out about Remora’s mission, he will stop at nothing to destroy them.”
Anger rose then, before she could quench it completely. The Hideous Paladins could ruin everything. Decades of planning could be wiped out in an instant.
The girl must complete her mission, no matter the cost. Vakaena had not come this far to lose. Finding a human woman her husband would desire enough to procreate with had been simple in comparison to the mess a full-scale Hideous Paladin manhunt would cause.
Vakaena realized she’d been silent for too long. Mack remained impassive, but his one good eye watched her with too much care. Her fury must have shown. She swallowed the anger so that she could use it to fuel other activities.
“Once the girl completes her mission and finds the final shard, steal the completed crystal from her and kill everyone in her crew. You are dismissed.”
Mack bowed stiffly, then turned and left through the same hidden passageway he’d entered.
Alone once more in the dark, Vakaena steepled her fingers and smiled. Her seeds were finally bearing fruit, and she was more than ready to enjoy the sweetness of her harvest.
36. Prelude: The Origin of Bones
The worst monsoon Ardel had seen in over a decade descended upon the city with all the rage of a Seraph’s curse. Even the oldest residents, hardened by the twice-daily jungle rainstorms of the area, found cause to board their windows and stay indoors. Wind roared down thoroughfares, screamed through alleyways, and whistled shrilly across unshored cracks in houses.
A single man braced himself against the storm, his figure blurred by both hooded cape and rain.
One arm held something tight against his chest. His other arm raised and fell, battering against a nondescript wooden door in an unremarkable neighborhood, pounding out a deliberate pattern. Bang! Pause. Bang, bang, BANG!
He had repeated the pattern not once or twice, but twelve times—so long that his hand had gone numb from the repeated abuse—before someone opened the door.
Wind, rain, man, and homeowner tumbled through the open doorway and into the tiny room, the heavy wooden door slamming shut behind them.
Into the sudden silence, the hooded man spoke. “I claim Sanctuary for myself and my guest, as promised by the Word of Surak.”
The owner of the home, a short man whose bald head was ringed by a cloud of fluffy white hair, peered up at him through square-rimmed spectacles.
“Do you, now?” the little man said. “And just who are you, who knows to ask for such a thing?”
The taller man threw back his hood, revealing a strong jaw blunted by over a week’s growth of scrubby beard. Haggard green eyes peered out from beneath an untidy mess of dirty brown hair.
He looked like a tramp. Smelled like one, too, most likely, but he hadn’t exactly been worrying about his personal hygiene lately. He cleared his throat, cradling his hidden burden more carefully against his chest.
“Daniel McCoy, formerly known as Gerard among the Faithful. You cannot deny me this.”
Behind the spectacled man, a tattered bookshelf clicked, then swung open on smooth hinges. Two robed figures stepped forward. One trained an alchemist gun on Daniel, the other hefting a hammer that glowed softly in the dim light of the room.
Daniel swallowed hard. Of course it would be Winry.
“Sanctuary shall be granted to all who know to seek it. You shall be granted one night’s succor.” The voice of the gun-wielder, calm and precise and female.
Daniel’s lips twisted. The minimum? After all they’d been through together? Only enemies were granted the bare minimum. “I harmed none when I left,” he growled.
Winry shook head, gray eyes unmoved. “You weakened the cause and wasted our training. You are unwelcome in Ardel.”
Pain threaded through his chest, old braided seamlessly with new. “I am unwelcome anywhere, now.”
Winry’s voice softened, just a little. “Why have you returned to us, lost soul? It has been five years.”
She couldn’t even say his name. He straightened, shoving the pain aside. What else had he expected, really?
“I need to see Prime.”
The others drew back.
Winry’s eyes turned flinty. “Say his name again and I’ll see you dead at the end of your Sanctuary. Do not forget your place.”
Hank reached into his cloak and pulled a slim glass tube from his waist pouch, a rolled-up scroll of paper visible inside, protected from the elements. The scroll looked old. Ancient, even. “Give him this. He’ll see me.”
He’d better. He had to. Surely even Prime suffered from curiosity.
Winry took the tube, frowning at it like it was a snake. Finally, she handed it to the hammer-wielding Paladin. “Go,” she told him, and he left, down the dark passageway behind the bookshelf.
Silence filled the room, punctuated by the plok, plok of water dripping from Daniel’s cloak.
Daniel expected neither seat nor drink, and did not bother to ask for one. They’d made it perfectly clear where he stood, and he hadn’t called upon Sanctuary so that he could get a night’s sleep. Everything that mattered depended upon Prime’s response. His entire world, balanced on the tip of a needle.
The hammer Paladin returned, face impassive. “Bring him in.”
Relief shot through him. Pain and release, immediately replaced by new worry. Assuming Prime was willing to try . . . would it even work?
Daniel stepped forward, but Winry held up a hand. “You must show me what you carry.” When he frowned, she frowned right back at him. “You think I would blindly allow a fallen brother to come before Prime himself?”
No. No, she would not.
He clenched his jaw, then lifted his free hand and gently peeled back the heavy woolen fabric, exposing his chest and arm—and what he cradled—for the first time.
A boy, with spindly, too-pale limbs. The child’s eyes were closed and his lips nearly blue with cold and something else. He looked like he might have been three, or maybe four, but that was a lie. He was five years old today.
Tenderly, Daniel brushed a strand of sandy-brown hair from the boy’s forehead. If the boy’s eyes opened, they would be bright cornflower blue. His mother’s eyes.
“His name is Henry,” he said, voice suddenly husky.
“Oh, Gerard, what have you done?” Winry whispered.
Daniel replaced the cloak, settling the boy’s unmoving form closer to his chest. “Anything and everything I have to in order to save him,” he answered her grimly. “Are you satisfied that I do not bring a weapon?”
She nodded, shaking off her surprise. “Follow me.”
He did, through a narrow hallway that spidered off into dozens of offshoots. He’d be hopelessly lost on his own, which was the point. What better security system than a maze filled with armed Paladins?
Fine by him. If this failed, he didn’t care whether he came out or not.
They emerged into a vast open space, a central room which splintered off into multiple directions. Weight-bearing columns lined its edges, and the ceiling reached up to carve a wide overhead dome, lit from some unknown source and painted to look like sky. A low, stone table stood in the room’s heart. The walls were lined with cogsmithing apparatus, vials and tubes and mechanical bits, and inert ticker bodies.
Hank stepped into the light and a pale blue shonfra flew up to land on his shoulder. He scowled at it, but it simply chittered and him and pushed a translator into his ear.
“Better, better, much better. Where did you find the scroll, can I ask? I shouldn’t ask. Oh, do come in, it’s so rare we get company all the way down here. You’re all wet! Is it raining? What’s that like, the rain? To have water fall from the sky, it seems so bizarre, so very strange of a concept. Fascinating, really. I’ve tried to replicate it, but . . . ”
A deep voice that needed no translation boomed from deep within the shadows.
“Time.”
The shonfra immediately stopped talking (though it took a bit longer for the translator to follow suit).
Behind Daniel, both Paladins dropped to one knee, heads bowed. “My Lord,” they whispered, voices reverent.
Daniel felt an absurd urge to join them, but squashed it. He was no longer a Paladin squire, and Henry needed careful handling.
“Tiiiiimmmmme,” the voice said again, as though tasting each letter within the word individually. “Spills out forever, in every direction. Unceasing, the road we all walk upon, shattering into useless dust behind us. Never backward, always forward, never sideways. The narrow path. Take a life, a road destroyed. Save a life, maintain it for what? So that it may in turn take another, or save another, as it pleases. Time is illusion with no greater truth.”
Daniel paused, staring uncertainly into the darkness.
“Such wisdom,” whispered Winry.
Wisdom? More like insanity.
Still, this was Prime, head of the Paladin Order. Bad form to ask for a favor from an all-powerful being just after calling him a nutjob.
“Will you help me?” he called to the dark. All-powerful or not, Henry didn’t have much time left.
The deep voice boomed forth, every syllable richly expressed. “Destroy a path, steal a path, walk a path, these are simple. You seek to forge a new path from the dust of an old one, and this is no easy matter. Something from nothing, impossible, cannot be done.”
Daniel’s eyes widened. “No, not impossible! The scroll—”
The deep voice continued unimpeded, as if he hadn’t interrupted. “Something from something else? This is cogsmithing. What will you give?”
Daniel shook his head. “I don’t—”
“WHAT WILL YOU GIVE?”
The voice snapped out like the crack of a whip, rushing to fill the room with thunderous echoes.
“EVERYTHING!” Daniel shouted back. “I would give everything!”
“Then we begin.” Daniel imagined he heard a smile in that shadowed voice. Gooseflesh broke out over his arms and across the back of his neck, but he pushed his unease aside. Cannot see the forest’s beauty without running into a few spiders, his wife used to say.
The shonfra sprang to life. “Put it on the table, carefully, and don’t knock over any bottles of things. Those are my things and you can’t have them and they’re hard to get and I won’t be able to replace some of th . . . ”
Daniel tuned out the chatter, moving to the aforementioned table and gently lifting Henry’s legs to lay him carefully on the smooth stone surface.
He looked so . . . so tiny. Fragile. He should be strong and tanned and full of life. It wasn’t fair.
The shonfra leaned over Daniel’s shoulder, peering downward. “He’s not dead, is he? We can’t do this if they’re dead. What’s wrong with him?” The shonfra leaped to the table, forearms parting the boy’s toes as his tail wrapped around the ankle and lifted. “Not dead, no, not yet, but close. Sick. Muscles are atrophied, hmmm, yes.”
Daniel cleared his throat. “Ripley’s.” He didn’t need to say more. The wasting disease was genetic and incurable.
He wouldn’t be here if there were a doctor alive who would look at Henry with anything but pity and death in their eyes.
“Eh? Fascinating! How did he live this long? Never mind, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. Build the source, build the source.” The shonfra scampered to the edge of the table and then returned with a measuring stick gripped in his tail. He muttered to himself as he measured the boy’s sternum, foot, head, and navel.
Still muttering, he flew to one of the nearby walls, to a shelf loaded down with bottles of various shapes and sizes.
He chose a medium-sized bottle, square and made of a thick glass. “This will do, yes.”
Instead of returning it to the table, the shonfra flew off into the darkness, toward the voice. A moment passed, and he returned, the bottle filled with a dimly glowing blue liquid.
“What’s that?” asked Daniel.
“No time for questions, no time, no time. Making new time, can’t waste old time. Need some blood. Yours and the
boy’s.”
Daniel gritted his teeth, but submitted. What choice did he have?
The shonfra used a small blade to slice Henry’s chest, just below the collarbone. Blood welled up in a thin, sluggish line. The boy frowned and Daniel immediately dropped down beside the table, taking Henry’s tiny hand in his own.
The shonfra prattled on. “Can’t hear you. Not sleeping, not dead, but somewhere in between. Lost, but still here.”
Henry had fallen asleep two nights ago, during their story-time. The last stage of Ripley’s, according to the doctors.
He’d had plenty of warning. Years of warning. He should have been prepared, but he’d tried to wake Henry the next morning. When the boy didn’t stir, he’d panicked.
Henry was all he had left.
“Your turn!” said the shonfra, the only warning Daniel got before the blade carved into his own chest, slicing through the thin material of his shirt. Sharper than he’d expected, the blade bit deep. Blood rose to the surface, deftly captured by the shonfra’s bottle.
The shonfra hummed a happy little tune and flitted off.
The cut on his chest burned a little, but the pain was nothing compared to the dark panic in his heart.
Don’t die, my little man. I need you.
Only the tiniest rise and fall of Henry’s chest answered.
“Now we need a thing. A precious thing to the boy. Crystal is best, paper would do.”
“I have . . . a book. His favorite book. I read it to him, sometimes, to help him sleep.” Actually, Daniel didn’t read it to him. Henry’s mother had read it to him, while she still lived. Daniel had just memorized the words and recited them while turning the pages. Henry loved it, even though he said Daniel wasn’t quite as good at it as his mother had been.
“Yes, yes, get that.”
Daniel reached into his hip bag and pulled out the dog-eared, colorful book. The Shonfra’s Big Adventure.
Henry’s Big Adventure, Daniel thought, and handed over the book. The shonfra idly ripped out some of the center pages, leaving a jagged gap. Hank snatched the gutted book. Part of his soul shredded with each torn page.