Key of Stars

by Bruce R Cordell

  Japheth walked at his side down the stairs. The footfalls and voices of the knights who had preceded them still rang in the shaft.

  “Amazing that your mother is here,” Japheth said. “It’s too much for coincidence.”

  “It was Erunyauvë who gave me the Cerulean Sign,” Raidon replied. “Had she given it to another, perhaps that one would be here. It actually explains many things about my life. I wish she had contacted me, though, even via a messenger …”

  The monk shook his head. “But I’m just grateful I’ve found her finally,” he said. “Though it would have been …” He couldn’t get out the words that he wished his mother could have met Ailyn.

  The warlock clapped him on the shoulder. They continued down the stairwell in silence.

  The courtyard outside the tower swarmed with knights, winged mounts, and engines of war. A great force had been drawn up before the war gates. The largest company was comprised of knights on griffons. The griffons wore silver barding, and the knights wielded crystalline lances.

  Some of the griffons were hitched to chariot-like conveyances outfitted with ballistae, catapults, and a few devices Raidon didn’t recognize. Two griffons overshadowed all the others, and their pelts seemed equal parts feather and frost. Plumes of cooled air rolled from their nostrils with each breath.

  The knight who had met them at the gate turned up at the monk’s elbow.

  “This way!” she said, leading them to a chariot designed to carry soldiers. Four archers were already aboard—one at each corner.

  An eladrin in red robes and a flaring collar was also aboard. A thick tome hung off his belt on a golden chain.

  The knight said, “Dayereth, these are—”

  “I know who they are, though I can hardly believe it,” the robed eladrin said. “Who would have thought the Lady of the Moon had a child? Unthinkable! But, here you are, nonetheless. Anyway, come, come aboard! I’m honored to have you in my chariot. I’m Dayereth.”

  Japheth shot the monk a quick look. Raidon guessed the warlock’s unstated thought was something along the lines of, “What’s going on with this fellow?”

  Raidon shrugged to the warlock, and stepped up into the chariot. Japheth coughed, then followed.

  Instead of seats, the transport was outfitted with several upright metal poles fixed to the floor. Hand grips jutted from the poles at shoulder height. The archers, disdaining the hand holds, were loosely attached to their poles with tethers.

  Dayereth pointed at the monk. “You are obviously Raidon, progeny of our lady,” he said. “My, my—you really do have a Cerulean Sign stitched to you! How did that happen? And what’s this I hear about your sword? It contains the soul of a Keeper of the old order?”

  Raidon blinked. The eladrin’s rapid fire speech could prove a trial. “Dayereth, suffice it to say I’ve enjoyed interesting times over the last decade or so,” he said. “Once we defeat the Sovereignty, there will be time for long tales.”

  “Listen,” broke in Japheth. “You seem to be familiar with us—Raidon, at least—but what’s your story?”

  The man grinned and pointed at his book. “I’m a wizard of uncommon strength,” he said. “The Spellplague may have changed magic, but I’ve charted entirely new paths to arcane power that far outstrips what I could do when the Weave was in place, holding us back.”

  “Ah,” said Japheth. “That’s nice … Probably another long story we’d love to hear after this is all taken care of.”

  “But I’d be delighted to tell you more right now!” the eladrin said.

  Raidon felt his focus fraying.

  Japheth raised hand. “No! I mean, uh, no,” he said. “I have a question first, about these chariots. One griffon is really enough to pull them into the air?”

  The wizard waved a hand. “Magic went into each chariot’s making,” he said. “A single flying steed can draw one with ease. I worked on the ritual myself, as a matter of fact. It wasn’t too—”

  Notes blared from a hundred horns. Japheth sighed with relief; Raidon felt the same. Anything to shut the odd wizard up.

  Raidon glanced at the war gates. They remained steadfastly closed.

  He chided himself—what need did a flying armada have for gates?

  The griffons screamed a chorus of piercing hunting calls and took to the air. The chariot jerked forward into a storm of beating wings and rushing air. Raidon was glad for his grip.

  “Forever’s Edge!” Dayereth yelled. He waved one hand, and a golden light shot out before them.

  Their chariot cleared the top of the wall by just a few feet, its wheels spinning without purchase. They passed out over the dark plain in a wide curve. Their griffon was momentarily silhouetted by the Feywild gleam on the horizon before the view rotated as they followed a curving flight path. A moment later, and they were aimed directly into the void.

  A wedge of mounted knights took the lead with their crystalline lances drawn. Each lance produced illumination like Dayereth’s conjured light. The two larger griffons with hoarfrost pelts flew on either side of the vanguard.

  The remaining knights and chariots drew up in discreet squads behind. Their own chariot was nearer to the front of the flying platoon than the rear, and higher than most of the others too. From their vantage, Raidon saw occasional flashes of light emerging from the depths of the dark abyss falling away before them, and in those brief flashes, images of writhing horror.

  “Look!” Japheth said, pointing. “They’re all emptying out.”

  Raidon saw platoons issuing from the other watchtowers, billowing up into the darkness beyond the cliff face like dust in the wind.

  The gathered armada of Forever’s Edge flung itself into the void.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

  Over the Edge

  White light splintered the heavens. Thunder tumbled like crashing stones. But Anusha’s gaze was riveted on Malyanna, and the Dreamheart in her hands.

  A seam on the stone parted, revealing an unblinking eye old past understanding. The fey woman peered into that mind-shattering gaze and laughed.

  The world parted, bleeding darkness. Xxiphu fell through the wound, and out of the world.

  The link connecting Anusha’s dreamform with her body snapped as taut as a hangman’s rope at the bottom of its drop. She was jerked off the balcony and back into the waking world, back to the safety of Green Siren.

  Something hard struck her forehead. Anusha opened her eyes. The entire room was spinning, tumbling, including her! A horrible roaring, tearing sound vibrated through the hull.

  The room continued to rotate, and she found herself on the ceiling, then on the opposite wall. She banged her elbow hard against the doorframe. A brush, a pitcher, pieces of loose parchment, quills, and clothing leaped through the air. The pitcher just missed her head, and smashed against the door frame. An old belt buckle pelted her stomach.

  “What’s going on?” she yelled. Her voice was drowned out by the sound of Green Siren’s hull crumbling.

  “Yeva?” she called.

  When she’d fallen into her dream, her friend had agreed to watch over her, and wake her up if her sleep looked troubled. But Yeva was not in the cabin. Although a human-sized hole gaped in the ceiling, near the door, about the size a woman made of metal might make …

  A sound of cracking wood somewhere beneath the floor jerked her attention back to her wheeling cabin.

  The bureau and her traveling chest remained fixed to the wall and the floor. But for how long? The fastenings holding them were for rough seas, not wholesale flipping end over end. She was surprised the ship hadn’t come apart already.

  Wetness trickled on her scalp. She ran her fingers through her hair, and they came away with a faint blush of blood.

  Beyond her door came the plaintive sound of people calling out in surprise, in dismay, and for someone to help them.

  No one was going to help them. Or her.

  Anusha closed h
er eyes, and willed her dreamform to emerge.

  A sharp sting in her knee jerked her eyes wide open. Before she could identify what had hit her, the washbasin struck her. A piece of loose board barely missed blinding her.

  “It’s impossible!” she said. She couldn’t summon the concentration to fall asleep while her life was being battered from her. Panic clawed at her stomach and her chest. She’d never felt less like sleeping.

  A glint of purple pulled her eyes up.

  A vial of fluid tumbled through the cabin with the rest of her belongings. It was one of the potions Japheth had prepared for her, back when she had first learned of her ability. He’d created the sleeping elixir to help her fall asleep.

  The fluid had been responsible for trapping her in dreamform when the Eldest snatched her—

  Her head smacked hard against the edge of the bureau, and she saw only white for a moment.

  Every part of her body ached with pain. The cabin continued to spin and jerk. She had to get out of there, or she’d die. But even as she spun through the air, a view through the porthole revealed that beyond Green Siren lay an abyss of black space. If she managed to exit her room and the cabinway, she’d probably be flung off the spinning ship.

  The purple vial tumbled until it struck the cabin’s far wall, and lodged against a shelf.

  She’d never completely forgiven the warlock for how his potion had kept her from escaping the Eldest’s reach. That stuff was a dangerous drug! If she’d drank it before her last visit to the aboleth city, she might have become trapped all over again! It was unthinkable she’d even consider—

  The ship slammed her to the floor, and all her breath fled.

  “Torm, forgive my stupidity,” she gasped. It was the elixir or death.

  She gathered her legs and leaped for the vial.

  A package of hardtack struck her temple, and she came down hard on her shoulder. She scrabbled through the loose detritus that had gathered for a heartbeat along the wall that briefly served as the floor.

  She plucked the vial from the mess. The cabin shuddered, and suddenly the ceiling was the new floor. She curled into a ball around her prize, and managed to hold onto it even when she hit the ceiling so hard her left arm went numb with the impact. She heard the sound of the porthole shattering, and cold air swirled in.

  Anusha pulled the stopper out with her teeth and sucked down the vial’s purplish fluid.

  The pain disappeared like a heavy blanket being pulled away. Anusha looked upon her bruised and scraped sleeping body.

  She savored her success for a heartbeat, and imagined herself accoutered in her golden panoply. Then the “floor” tilted, threatening to catapult her sleeping body through the gaping porthole.

  Anusha intervened. She plucked her body from the air and cradled it in the arms of dream.

  The cabin continued to pitch, but Anusha decided to treat the floor as the floor, no matter Green Siren’s orientation.

  Items battered her, but her armored dreamform protected her sleeping body.

  What in Torm’s name was going on?

  She stepped to the porthole and gazed through.

  Outside was the void of darkness she’d glimpsed earlier. Broken timbers, flailing crew, and shreds of sail fluttered and fell away into an endless sky.

  “Oh gods,” she whispered.

  Something large rotated into view as Green Siren continued spinning.

  Anusha gasped.

  Xxiphu hovered in the darkness. A halo of water and cloud vapor trailed behind the aboleth city, almost as if the city moved at speed through the void. Green Siren was part of that halo.

  Anusha remembered Malyanna staring into the Dreamheart and laughing, and the opening in the sky … The ship had been caught up when Xxiphu fell out of the world! The wooden craft was like one of Selune’s Tears, trailing the moon through the night.

  Except Green Siren was gradually disintegrating.

  Anusha turned away from the desolate view. She walked to her cabin door, her feet steady on the planking despite what gravity wanted. Her body felt as light as a sleeping cat. She shifted her grip, then unlocked the catch with her other hand.

  Yeva was in the cabinway.

  The iron woman was wedged into a crevice between two stanchions. Part of the ceiling was missing, but Yeva had avoided falling through it. She had one arm hooked around a stanchion, and another around the first mate, Mharsan, who was unconscious.

  Anusha willed her dream form visible. “Yeva!” she said. “Are you all right?”

  Yeva’s expressionless face whipped around to regard Anusha. “Fires of Tu’narath!” she said. “You’re alive! What happened up there?”

  “Malyanna used the Dreamheart. She called a portal, and Xxiphu went through.”

  “And so did we. We’re in trouble.”

  “Where’s Captain Thoster?”

  “Somewhere out on deck, if he was fast enough to grab something. I’ve seen more than a dozen crew flung off since Green Siren began spinning.”

  “Are you all right here?”

  Yeva snorted. “Until this whole ship comes apart, yes.”

  “Then I’m going to find Thoster. The spin seems to be slowing.”

  Anusha held her sleeping self tighter and walked to the cabinway’s far end. The hatch was gone, twisted from its hinges. She gazed down the length of the deck.

  The mainmast was gone, though loose sails fluttered like white waves across half of the starboard side. What she could see of the remainder of the deck was empty of everything save a litter of detritus that hadn’t yet been flung away, and a few crew clinging to whatever piece of solid railing or trailing rope was nearest at hand.

  Thoster stood by the mainmast stump, one hand closed in a deathgrip around a stanchion. His sword was in his other hand, and he was waving it around as if expecting to hold off a hoard of boarders. The captain’s hat was gone. For good, Anusha supposed. The man’s eyes were fixed on something overhead.

  Looking up into the void was wholly different than when she’d peered out through the porthole. From the deck, the night seemed to go on forever, in all directions. The barest glints of distant lights showed the space wasn’t absolute. However, the far-off stars didn’t cheer Anusha. Rather, they brought home the magnitude of the gulf through which Green Siren fell. She shivered.

  The rotation was definitely slowing. When Xxiphu rotated into view again, it crawled up the horizon formed by the broken deck, rising almost as slowly as a real moon, if a moon could ever look so dreadful.

  Colorful flashes, like distant explosions, flared in the darkness beyond Xxiphu. Hints of sinuous bodies flashing away in fire put up the hair on the back of her neck.

  Anusha looked back to Thoster. “Hail, Captain!” she cried.

  Thoster glanced at her. His scowl lightened for a moment. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he said. “I thought the city got you.”

  “No … No more than it ‘got’ all of us, anyway,” she said.

  “Damn straight,” said Thoster. “We were a little too close when the city plunged into this benighted realm.” The captain made to say more, but concern suddenly sharpened his expression.

  “Brace yourself!” he yelled.

  “What? I don’t see anything,” Anusha said. “We’ve almost stopped rolling …”

  “Remember, I hear Xxiphu’s song,” Thoster said. “It prepares to breach something called the ‘discontinuity’! Be ready.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” she said.

  How could she brace herself? She was already holding her dreamform in place merely by effort of will. Still … She stepped back into the open cabinway and gripped the door frame with her free hand. Her sleeping body continued to take long, untroubled breaths.

  “There!” came Thoster’s voice. He pointed to Xxiphu with the tip of his blade. Beyond the receding city, the blackness wavered, as if it was actually an ebony flag undulating in a night wind.

  The city plunged into the face of the r
ippling field. Green Siren followed.

  A pale light stung Anusha’s eyes. A panorama of mist stretched to every horizon. A pale blot of light flared across an alien sky. Monsters flitted around the light like moths around a candle flame.

  Then the floor dropped beneath her feet.

  The entire ship was falling! Whatever influence had held them in the aboleth city’s sway was concluded. She glimpsed Xxiphu for half a heartbeat as they hurtled downward into the waiting arms of substanceless fog.

  Her body would be crushed! Unless … She imagined her real body protected in armor, just as she outfitted her dreamform, but stronger, more like a golden sarcophagus. Strong and impregnable, and capable of withstanding any sort of violence, especially that inflicted by a fall from a great height. It would have to be enough.

  The ship plummeted. The mist streamed by on both sides like reversed waterfalls.

  When Green Siren hit the ground beneath the mist, it shattered.

  Anusha stood on the hull of what had once been a ship. It was nothing more than a heap of splintered beams and broken planks. The cabinway and forecastle that had enclosed it was gone. The deck had mostly fallen into the level beneath, and debris spread away from the ship in a wide halo.

  A capsule of gold dream metal lay on its side next to Anusha. It encased her sleeping body.

  A headache threatened to split her head in two. She was drained; her ability had been pushed to its utmost.

  But the protection she’d fashioned had worked! She was still alive.

  Unless her body had been killed by the impact, rendering her a ghost in an instant, as Yeva had been when they’d first met.

  But no. Anusha looked into the translucent faceplate of the protective capsule. Her body was within, taking deep, drugged breaths. It actually didn’t look any the worse for the fall.

  Thanks to the elixir, it would be several hours before she woke up. Perhaps she’d regret it later, as she had the last time. But deciding to take Japheth’s drug was the only reason her body wasn’t lying amid Green Siren’s ruin like everyone else must be …