by Tammy Salyer
Cote shook his head. Exasperated now, as well as frightened, Jaemus sent: Roi, Master Knight? I seem to be without the necessary tools for the starpath.
He waited but received no response. Trying to come up with a plan, any plan, he suddenly remembered what Stave had said—Ulfric had the Scrylle. Then he remembered the map case.
Bending down, he swept aside the unconscious man’s robe. The case! He pulled the artifacts free. As he lifted the Fenestros, a boom came from the chamber’s door followed by a clatter of smaller sounds. Startled, Jaemus dropped the celestial stone. Afraid he’d broken it, he barely reined in his panic.
“Oh lightning…” he breathed and picked it up. Unmarred. Huffing with relief, he tried again: Knight Roibeard, if you could just…?
Still nothing. Shaking, he began the process of converting the Scrylle into a setting for the Fenestros, thus turning the assemblage into a celestial scepter awaiting its crowning jewel. He’d watched Ulfric do it in Himmingaze and the Knights here in Vinnr once or twice. They’d warned him that it took a significant amount of practice and mental discipline to be able to “read” the Scrylle archaneology, that unprepared minds could break from the strain.
And now his mind was about to be tested. Couldn’t even manage a klinkí stone…it now yammered at him unhelpfully.
More hammering came from the doors. It seemed someone was trying to break in.
Cote’s eyes rested on the Scrylle. “Can you get us home, Jae?” he asked, his voice calm.
Jaemus looked around and saw the same fear and anxiety in the face of each of his crew. It was this or nothing. There was no way the Himmingazians could fight the Dyrraks, even if they hadn’t been wystically enhanced by whatever corrupt brew Balavad had served them.
It’s just reading, he told himself. Smart fellow like you shouldn’t have any trouble.
He grabbed Cote’s hand. “Okay, I’m not-not really sure what’s going to happen. But the plan is to get us back to Himmingaze the same way we left. You know what to expect. Um, everyone, just grab each other’s hands like when we went through the interrealm well and get as close to me as you can. Cote, I’m going to need to hold the Scrylle, so you hold my shoulders or my waist.”
“Will that work?” one of the ’Gazians asked.
Through a rapidly tightening throat, he squeaked, “Absolutely.” The effect, according to their expressions, wasn’t as reassuring as he’d hoped.
Here goes, he thought and dropped the Fenestros into its setting.
The globe began to glow immediately with a soft yellow-blue light, the same though more subdued version of Ulfric’s eyes. He wasn’t sure if that was encouraging. With a deep breath, he focused his mind the way Safran had spent hours showing him to and “looked” into the Fenestros.
It seemed as if he were whisked off his feet by a strong but unfelt wind. One moment his feet were planted on the ground beside Ulfric, the next he was skidding into a vast white field of nothingness. Aside from the weightless and uncontrollable careening, the overall experience wasn’t too terrible.
Then the firebolt struck.
A cascade of blazing lightning-like information exploded in his head like all the lights of the Glister Cloud at once. His mind whipped like a shredded flag in a torrential wind, every thread being yanked separately by the gale, nearly ripping it to pieces. The cavalcade was too much, he feared he would combust into embers at any moment.
All sensation of his body left him. All he knew was the tumbling Cosmos, all of its history, experiences, creations thundering inside his head. He tried to retreat, look away, let go of the celestial cylinder, but he could do none of these. He was lost in a maelstrom and there was no way out.
Jaemus…Jaemus, can you hear me? a thready voice whispered through the chaos. Bardgrim, where are you? Are you with Ulfric?
Jaemus’s mental jaws opened in a scream, trying to plead for help. His own wail was lost in the wystic thunder of the Scrylle.
He’s got us, Jaemus, the speaker continued, and Jaemus realized it was Roibeard. We’re being taken somewhere, but we still have our lenses. If you can hear me, if you can still get to the Scrylle, pay attention. The three of us will help you seek the starpath invocation. Listen to me, Jaemus. Can you hear me?
Listen, Jaemus, it’s Safran. I’m here too.
As am I, novice. If you’re hearing us, send us something. Let us know.
As the Knights spoke, their voices grew louder, stronger, and they began to buffer the cacophony that deluged him.
Help…he finally managed.
Oh Verities, you’re there! Roibeard cried. And the Scrylle?
Brain, he mentally moaned, on fire. Help.
He’s inside, said Safran. He won’t last much longer.
Hold our voices in your mind, Jaemus. We’ll channel the threads to follow to show you the way to open the starpath.
The Knights began to speak as one, their voices twining together—but it wasn’t just their voices he was receiving. Images and ideas formed in his head, around him, coalescing into a shield that slowly blocked the onslaught of thousands of turns of Vinnr’s lore. Jaemus latched on to their directions as if they were the only candle in a universe of darkness, a candle that, as they continued to mindlink to him, turned into a torch, then a blazing fire. He felt them echoing around him, and after a passage of time he couldn’t guess at, the lore of the Scrylle began falling into place. The assault slowed and became endurable.
As he regained the ability to focus, he recognized things in the slowing deluge that made sense. Here, the way to build an airship that could be made nearly invisible through some sort of painted coating made of a rare stone; there, a history of a city that, he understood, had fallen to ruin a thousand turns before this day. It was like everything that had ever been a part of Vinnr was recorded in the Scrylle, every person, every emotion that person had experienced, every invention that had existed, every animal that walked the world’s earth. It was, in a word, awesome.
Maybe there was a good reason to remain a Knight after all.
A form began to loom in front of him. Another sphere but huge, as big as Balavad’s warship. Unlike that ship, though, it was not solid and it blazed like a blue-white sun.
I think this is it, he sent, distantly thrilled he could articulate thoughts again. Do you see it?
…Knights? Still there?
Inside his mental ocean, pressure began to build, the same pressure as at first. Archaneology began to batter into him again, whipping wildly like a striking fleech. He felt less and less of the other three’s minds with him. They were growing reedy, thinning…leaving.
KNIGHTS! Don’t go, I don’t know how to get out. I don’t know how to open the starpath!
A final thought from Roibeard reached him. A starpath is a bridge, Jaemus. Just cross it…
Cross it? Cross how? I have no feet at the moment! Like a silk sheet, the last of the Knights’ thoughts slipped away. The Scrylle’s contents blurred around him, threatening to sweep him off with it in an instant. The only thing left he could make sense of was the blazing blue-white starpath, its edges already losing definition as if the storm of everything past and present was tearing it apart.
Before he could be whipped away in the frenzy, Jaemus did the one thing he’d learned that might help, the same thing that had worked for him last time—if not in the exact way he’d hoped.
He leaped.
Chapter Forty-One
Ulfric was able to goad Urgo back inside the throne room, though the bruhawk needed little compelling to sweep Ulfric’s Mentalios lens up in one of his talons. He seemed to understand innately that the lens was their link, and with Yggo’s help, the lens’s chain was draped around his neck to leave his talons free.
However, he and Yggo refused to take the inside passages through the citadel to chase down the Knights and join their fight. Ulfric pushed the bird in every way he could think of—promises of reward, plays to Urgo’s loyalties, threats—but bruhawks
were not known for their tenacious and persevering nature for nothing. The bird would not be urged past the doorway of the throne room, and in the end, Ulfric had to settle for cajoling Urgo back outside to fly down toward the structure’s base with Yggo soaring beside them.
As they dropped like a stone toward the earth, Ulfric cringed at what he saw. A group of Dyrrak warriors swarmed out from the main hall onto the jutting pavilion overlooking the citadel’s amphitheater. They moved with the speed and decisiveness that spoke of a mission. The bruhawk’s beyond-human eyesight showed Ulfric more than he could detect on his own, and he saw clearly that the Dyrraks had undergone the same change his own body had. They were now puppets of Balavad.
His first impulse was to direct Urgo and Yggo to assault them. The birds were the size of people, with claws and beaks that would shred someone into strips of bleeding flesh no sword-wielder could ever emulate. But he thought better of it. There were at least a dozen shapeshifted Dyrraks, and Ulfric didn’t know what would become of him if Urgo were killed. The bruhawks were as much a part of the Order as any Knight, and he wouldn’t sacrifice them if he didn’t have to.
But he had to get to Roibeard, Stave, and Safran. Balavad was enslaving the Dyrraks, and the Knights would already be outnumbered. They had to flee, take his body and Vaka Aster somewhere the usurper wouldn’t find them. Their one choice now was to use Vaka Aster’s Scrylle to open a starpath and spirit away—and if they’d made it to the Himmingazians’ chamber, they may already be preparing to do exactly that. If he wasn’t with them when they did—his incorporeal self, that was—he may never get his body back. Then what would happen to Symvalline and Isemay? What would happen to Vaka Aster and Vinnr? And the Himmingazians? And last but in no way the least to him?
Yggo swept close to Urgo, near enough that the air streaming over their wings ruffled each other’s feathers. They lofted higher, speaking to each other, he assumed, with squawks and churrs. Something was coming. He sensed it too—a crackling in the air that sent pinpricks tingling over his skin. The same feeling as when—
A brilliant column of cerulean flame rent the sky above the citadel, spearing it through the middle like a comet.
A starpath well.
With mighty flaps, the bruhawks sped away from the column of light toward the south. Frantic, Ulfric didn’t know whether to try to force Urgo to go back or to let him keep fleeing. But in a moment, it wasn’t a question anymore. The well closed as quickly as it opened, leaving the citadel itself whole and undamaged.
He had no idea who’d come. Or who’d gone. Was he now alone in Vinnr, formless and helpless?
The only way to know was to get closer and see for himself. At his urging the bruhawks swooped low toward the row of massive arches that spanned the citadel’s long column-lined pavilion like ribs. Urgo complied readily, much to his relief. They were getting used to each other. Just as the hawk was about to dip between two arches, he faltered and flapped away. Ulfric sensed his fear, a palpable sensation like tacks being driven into his mind. The birds did a tight half circle and rose upward again.
Calmly now, stay close, Urgo. We have to learn what’s happened, what’s still happening. As he sent this thought to his copilot, a thick smoke rolled out through the archway over the citadel’s entrance, across the wide landing in front, to the end of the column-lined pavilion and down the steps toward the courtyard arena. Its torpid thickness was like a slow-moving forest fire. He knew that miasma. The agony of being enveloped in it had almost made him wish for death aboard Balavad’s warship.
The usurper was here.
The smoke thinned enough to reveal the Domine Ecclesium step out to the dais at the end of the citadel’s lined pavilion. He was carrying a satchel. Safran’s satchel, the one she’d collected the artifacts in.
Dread tightened around him like a noose. If the usurper had the bag, he must have the Knights as well. Safran would never have given it up. Or had she abandoned it for some reason and taken the starpath away from Vinnr? Vaka Aster’s Scrylle was in the map case he’d been carrying before his body had been taken from him, but Balavad’s Scrylle and two Fenestrii might still be in that satchel, as were the rest of Vaka Aster’s celestial stones. If the usurper had them, many of the tools the Knights could use to protect Vaka Aster’s vessel would be gone. Ulfric had to get that bag back.
Desperately, he pressed Urgo to swoop down and snatch the satchel from the Ecclesium. As the bird turned to line up his trajectory, the usurper himself emerged—but in a new form, a woman’s. Somehow, a Battgjaldic had survived the destruction of Balavad’s realm. There was no mistaking this being came from there, and no mistaking the celestial light that shone from her eyes. Balavad had a new vessel.
Again, Urgo veered away from the dreadful Verity—nothing could compel the hawk to get close to her. The bruhawk instead flew to a spire a few dozen yards over the citadel’s line of columns and landed, Yggo setting down nearby, making both themselves and Ulfric witnesses to what was coming.
Throughout the amphitheater that surrounded the lower courtyard arena, thousands of Dyrrak people sat in silence. Their faces showed a rapt sense of awe, confusion, and perhaps, though their stoic nature made it hard to know, a hint of fear. None had ever seen a starpath well. Knowing the Dyrraks’ devotion to Verity lore, it was almost a certainty that they knew what it was. But knowing of something and witnessing that something in person, especially something as staggering as a path between the Cosmic realms, was very different.
Yet no Dyrrak fled. They waited for whatever was coming. And though it terrified and infuriated him, Ulfric could do nothing but wait with them.
Unnoticed, the bruhawks stood as still as sentinels as Balavad emerged. The Verity was hidden from the amphitheater in the shadows cast by the arches and columns, but Ulfric could see into the dim space from Urgo’s perch perfectly as Balavad waved a hand to someone behind her.
Ulfric tried to call the Knights again, hoping that because he was in a sense once more embodied, his mental voice might have some power in the Mentalios. Knights, Roibeard, can you hear me? Eisa? Jaemus? What’s happened to everyone?
As he waited for a response, a rumbling noise that sounded like great wooden wheels came from inside the hall. The answer to his fellow Knights’ fates was given to Ulfric then. In the form of a contraption being pulled out to the end of the citadel’s pavilion.
It resembled a gallows in every way that mattered. Being dragged with ropes by eight Dyrrak Raveners, the rectangular wheeled platform, the length of three grown horses, had stout vertical beams on each end with a crossbeam laid overtop. From the crossbeam dangled five cages, each only large enough for something the size of a human head. And that was what each contained.
The Knights themselves hung like meat in a butcher shop from their necks, which protruded through the cages’ bottoms, leaving all their body weight suspended from their caged heads. Ulfric could see their neck muscles stretched as taut as ship sails in a frantic gale, his imagination gruesomely suggesting that it would only be a matter of a firm yank by someone heavy to tear their heads from their bodies. He could see no movement nor a sign of life among them, though they were all there. Safran, Stave, Mallich, Eisa. And when he saw the last body hanging from the crossbeam, he wanted to weep.
It was his own.
Then who summoned the starpath…? Jaemus? The thought was whipped away quickly by the frenzy of rage and horror at seeing his friends in such ghastly circumstances.
The Birdcage was an inhumane device, though its construction preceded Balavad. The Dyrraks had long been known for their methods, the Birdcage included, of keeping order among both their own and those who tried, or even considered trying, to imperil them. And now it was being used on the Knights of Vaka Aster by the Dyrraks. And willingly, it appeared to Ulfric, at least in the case of Ecclesium.
From his vantage, he could see the leader of the Dyrraks had not been turned into one of Balavad’s puppets. His physique and countenance had
n’t changed, yet he was working for the Verity as if he had become a Ravener himself. Dyrrakium had sunk to an unknown low. And with this development, Ulfric could see Balavad’s plan clearly. The Verity was carefully, methodically pushing her septic consecration elixir among the Dyrrak people, at least to those who needed more coercion than whatever she’d offered the Ecclesium. She’d gotten to Ulfric, maybe before she even knew Ulfric was present in the citadel. The syke liquor that every Dyrrak favored was the perfect vector. And soon, if Ulfric had to guess, the entirety of Elezaran would be asked to drink, too.
The fact that Dyrrakium’s own leader had needed no more persuasion than Balavad’s poison words to follow her was the thing that most turned Ulfric’s guts into ice. What had she told the Ecclesium? That the Dyrrak forces would at last be freed to fulfill their purpose and prove to the rest of Vinnr that they were the most favored among Verities? Was a promise of war and dominion all the Ecclesium needed, and did it not matter to him what Verity he followed, so long as the promise was kept?
Ulfric had every indication to think this was the truth.
His attention turned back to the Knights. Their bodies were limp and eyes closed. Unconscious—he hoped. As proof, he looked at his own body. As long as his flesh lived, Vinnr was spared. But there was no telling what Balavad would do to him now. One thing seemed without question: Vaka Aster must still be shackled to his former self. She had fought Balavad last time Ulfric had been out of his wits. But this time…nothing.
More Dyrrak Raveners began to filter from the citadel and moved down the side stairs toward the open gates that were built into Citadel Suprima’s outer walls in regular intervals. In quiet, orderly rows, they lined the walls expectantly. Many of the unchanged Dyrraks sitting in the amphitheater stands glanced at them but all remained where they were. Sheep about to be slaughtered, Ulfric thought.
Balavad motioned to the Ecclesium and said something Ulfric didn’t catch. The Dyrrak leader gave orders to the eight Dyrraks who’d brought out the Birdcage, and they lowered and unharnessed Ulfric’s body from its height.