“By the restless gods, Vance, what happened to you?” Tassen leaned over the ship’s rail as his men hurried about, releasing ropes and pulling back the footbridges.
“You’re leaving?” I asked, though the answer was obvious.
“I’d be gone already if the bay wasn’t choked.”
I couldn’t do this alone. I had seen her. She would be the end of us.
“Give me five minutes, Tassen?”
Shouts of sailors scrambling to launch their vessels drowned out my request. All around, rigging clanged and sails rippled. And from Brea, church bells rang over and over without pause. I dared not look back, too afraid of the ruin I might find.
Tassen considered me—my singed coat, matted hair, and likely soot-covered face—and waved one of his crew to lower the footbridge. A flicker of firelight caught my eye as I boarded his vessel. Brea’s east side was ablaze. Flames reached for the gray, heavy sky. The wind had caught the flames and was pushing them along. Timber shacks, market stalls, storage warehouses—the entire eastside was lost; it just didn’t know it yet.
“We saw her,” Tassen remarked grimly, noticing my line of sight.
I didn’t have the words to reply as I followed him across the deck into the captain’s cabin. Inside, I reached for the edge of his desk as the ship rolled beneath my feet.
“You’ve got a nasty head wound, friend,” Tassen grumbled. “You should let my doc take a look.”
“You can’t leave. The cannons on this boat and boats like it are the largest weapons in Brea. If you leave, we’ll have nothing.”
“This ain’t my fight, thief. I’m surprised it’s yours.”
“Fallford’s dead.”
Tassen clamped his jaw and ground his teeth. He curled his hand into a fist and bumped it against his desktop. “Well, that’s a wretched shame. He was a good man and kept me in trade. How?”
“The dragon, in a roundabout way. You need to rally the captains of every able boat in this harbor.”
He barked a laugh. “We’re merchants, not an organized fleet. Our ships are our livelihoods, and you’re asking us—me to risk everything, and for what? Brea?”
“Are you just going to sail right on out of here and let us burn?”
“That was the plan, yes. If we can get through the armada in the way.”
“She’s coming for you, for all of us. You think she’s going to see the boats in the bay and turn away?” He had to do this. Without him, Brea would burn. I couldn’t let him leave. One man couldn’t stop a dragon, but cannons could. “Load your guns and turn them to the skies.”
He scratched at his forehead, dislodging his hat. “She?” He noticed me flinch and his eyebrows arched. “This is the sorceress’s doing?”
“It’s difficult to explain.”
“I’ll bet my hat it is, thief.” He closed his eyes, breathing in, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Death follows you—”
“Like a shadow? Yes, I know. I’m trying to make it right—with your help. Tassen, there’s no time and there’s no choice. She’s coming.”
“Well, shit.” He nodded and set his jaw in defiance. “While we sit here, stuck in the bay, we may as well load our guns.”
“And the other boats?”
“Ships. They’re called ships.”
“Those too. All of them.”
“I’ll send a deckhand before we push off. I can’t make the other captains do anything. Half of them would probably prefer to watch Brea burn.”
“I’ve seen it,” I mumbled. “They wouldn’t.”
“Let’s get to it, then.” He swept across his cabin and scooped up several pistols, then ushered me toward the door. “Time and tide waits for no man. What’ll you do, Vance?”
I swallowed hard, still tasting ashes on my lips, and stepped out onto the deck. The smell of hot tar and timber smoke choked the air. “I think I might be bait.”
The Inner Circle people filed through their grand entrance gates two at a time, heads held high. Outer Brea folks crowded around to watch their arrival. Guards from both sides flanked the column, their eyes hard and stances rigid. They expected trouble, but as flames still licked the sky over Brea’s east side, fear of the winged monster chased away their fear of these quiet, regal people.
I walked on the outside of the line, beside Anuska, who was dressed in armor more practical for the battlefield than a parade.
Anuska told me that once the Inner Circle folk had heard the roars from inside their walls and seen the flames light up the sky, she couldn’t prevent them from rallying. I read in her ensuing silence that she hadn’t tried to stop them. This was their choice.
“These are good people,” she said. “And they’re all about to get themselves killed.”
I stayed quiet. They had the right to choose their fate, as my sister had. My parents, good people that they were, hadn’t fought their fate either. They had embraced it, despite my being the catalyst.
As I walked beside the people I had shunned—and saw the fear in their eyes turn to strength with every step—warmth spread through my chest. These were my people. They suffered for the greed of their ancestors, who had stolen from the Arachians, and they continued to suffer, but today they were taking a stand.
A small one-sided smile tugged at Anuska’s lips. “I’m relieved we didn’t burn you.”
“So am I.”
“Though I fear for your life, Curtis Vance.”
“Don’t waste your fear on me, Anuska.”
She saw my smile, which only perplexed her more. I considered that perhaps, had I not fled the Inner Circle and all its teachings, she and I could have been friends. But I’d chosen to take my sister away, and Anuska’s fate and mine had diverged. Now here we were, walking side by side.
Few of my choices had been wise. The words of the moorland woman, Jodelle, continued to haunt me. You make the wrong choice, thief. Your kind always does.
It was time to start making the right choices.
“Where are the mages?” I asked.
“Locked deep beneath the spire. There’s a hatch directly below the platform. It opens into a dungeon. We will free the mages only when all else fails.”
All else being the ships in the bay and the few troops the city guard could muster.
We walked Brea’s narrow streets, our eyes on the sky. I could hope Shaianna had gone, but the chances were slim. She would be close; this had only just begun.
The guards helped clear the dockside of refugees, steering them toward the stone storehouses. They would be safer inside. A flotilla of tall ships had dropped anchor in the harbor, canons bristling along their flanks, and among them, three substantial merchant vessels sat primed. Tassen had come through.
The Inner Circle people lined the dockside. Anuska had shared with them the wealth of Inner Circle gems, but many had brought their own, their pockets now weighed down. Their presence didn’t surprise me. My parents would have gladly stood shoulder to shoulder among them.
A nearby father told his son how to hold the gems and what to do to harvest the power inside. I listened and touched the single ruby in my pocket, but as before, I felt nothing more than the cool sea breeze at my back and the dull aches the toppled carriage had left.
Water lapped at the seawalls behind us while we gazed over our half-burned city. Gulls keened above. We waited.
Anuska stepped from the line of hundreds and regarded her civilian army with the same pride I’d felt swell inside me.
“We fooled ourselves into believing this day would never come. That we could stay hidden behind the wall.” The breeze carried her voice down the dockside. “Our ancestors shut themselves away, forgetting the world outside and our place within it. They turned our truth into lies. But that must change.”
Brean’s Outer Circle folk hung back. Some were armed with rifles, blades, or whatever else they could lay their hands on. They all observed the pristine Inner Circle folk with narrow-eyed suspicion. Their perceptions woul
d soon change once this line of unassuming men and women started harvesting magic from their gems. It would be a fine spectacle, but I couldn’t help wondering how many of the people standing next to me would survive the coming storm. The father and his wide-eyed son, the elderly woman and her stoic husband, the young girl to my right who stood alone but defiant. These people weren’t soldiers. They had no weapons to wield, but they were ocra—magic users—and all the braver for it.
“We have been forgotten for too long, and now we are called upon to reveal our truth. We didn’t ask for this, but we must answer it. We didn’t cause this, but we must prevent it. She is the Shadow that consumes all, and we are the light!”
“The light!” the crowd responded.
Anuska returned to my side. “Are your ships ready?”
I couldn’t know for sure, but I answered all the same, “As they’ll ever be.”
She looked at the sky, trepidation stark on her face. “Then let us begin.”
Anuska nodded at the guard nearest her. He lifted a hand. The crowd quietened.
“Begin.” His voice boomed down the dockside, and in its wake, the line of Inner Circle people bowed their heads, nestled their gems in their hands, and began whispering.
The low hiss of hundreds of voices crawled across my skin and up the back of my neck, wrenching my insides into a bundle of nerves. A shiver followed, the type of shiver that quickened the blood. I gritted my teeth and scanned Brea’s smoke-obscured skyline. She would come. The magic would draw her out. And if the restless gods were on our side, the cannon fire would take her down.
The whispering turned incessant and lapped at my mind like the water lapping at the dockside. I wrapped my fingers around the dagger and clutched it tightly. This would be the end of Shaianna, and that was right, wasn’t it?
Some things should be destroyed, she had told me, surely knowing it would come to this.
All eyes focused on the sky, but something snagged my gaze to my left, where crooked lines of dockside cottages stretched toward central Brea. The breeze pushed smoke through the streets, carrying with it distant screams.
A low rumble, a sound I felt more than heard, bubbled up from the breeze. I glanced at Anuska, but the captain’s attention was on her line as she concentrated on chanting. She was clutching gems, not her sword.
“Hey!” I waved over a stricken city guard. “Rally your guards and protect these people.”
“What are they doing?” he asked, gesturing at the magic users.
“You’ll see soon enough.”
I waved over two more guards. In the absence of their chain of command, they followed.
“Free your blades,” I told them as they fell into step.
The farther away from the line of chanting people we got, the more the whispers slipped like silk from my skin. I rolled my shoulders, ignoring the urge to climb the nearest downpipe, take to the rooftops, and run. It would be so much easier to be a coward.
Smoke folded around us, not so thick as to choke, but enough to scratch at my eyes. I blinked into the rolling layers of gray and heard it again: a low, rumbling growl. This time, it came from directly ahead.
“Stop.” I put my hand out, halting the guards, and said quietly, “Back up.”
“What is it? What’s out there?”
“Guard the Inner Circle line.”
Armor plates clinked and boots scuffed on the cobbles, but below that, the growls rumbled louder, closer. I backed away, and then froze as yellow eyes glowed in the smoke. Wargs. One pair of eyes … then two emerged from the rolling plumes of smoke. A third to my right.
“Go!”
At my shout, the wargs bounded out of the smoke, their teeth bright white and their eyes alight with rabid violence.
“Protect the line!” I ordered, but there was no time to see whether the guards had heard. The first warg sprang off its haunches. Jaws open, it slammed into my chest and snapped at my throat. I punched the dagger deep into its fleshy underbelly, and for a few messy, vicious seconds, my world narrowed to a blur of teeth, pain, and growls. I had my forearm wedged under its jaw, holding the warg back, but its jaws snapped and saliva splattered my face. Tension burned through my shoulder. The warg pushed, and my arm trembled. I couldn’t hold it.
A roar thundered across Brea from above, shaking the earth and air and everything all at once. The warg stopped its attack and lifted its head. It sniffed at the air and then hunched low, its ears flat. It slunk off me, pressed its belly to the cobbles in a pool of its own piss, and loosed a shrill whine. I twisted onto my front and scrambled to my feet. The remaining wargs bore down on the guards, but it was the shadow against the night sky moving in over the sea that drew my eye. She was the darkness. All but her eyes, so brilliant against the gloom.
“Get to the dock!” I shouted. “She’s coming from the bay, not the city!”
The guards and magic users couldn’t see her. And soon, it wouldn’t matter.
A warg leaped and brought down a guard. The beast clamped its teeth around his armored forearm and tried to rattle the man into submission. I was almost on them when the warg saw me and shied away. Just like its companion, it slunk off.
“Thank you. Thank you,” the guard said as I hauled him to his feet.
“Go inform your guardsmen that she comes from the sea. Go, now!”
The other warg also shied away without me having to do any more than lift the dagger. I might have thought it the dagger’s doing, if all the beasts hadn’t locked eyes with me before submitting. Something had changed their minds, and it had begun when the dearmad had made her presence known.
Cannon fire boomed in the harbor with a staccato one, two, three. The explosive resonance was just as loud as her roar, but the cannon fire sailed into the smoke, missing its target.
Hot beats of wind blasted over the harbor wall, whipping up a squall, and there, lit among the smoke by the fiery glow from Brea, was a great shadow, seemingly as large as the night sky. Her green eyes narrowed on each ship in turn. Their cannons swiveled. Shouts from aboard echoed across the bay, and then she opened her jaws and spewed a storm of flame and devastation.
Panic and chaos erupted on the dockside. People scattered.
“Hold fast!” Anuska yelled, but her line was fracturing. “Hold fast!”
She held aloft her handful of gems, bowed her head, and whispered. Some joined her, while others fled. Black vines crawled across Anuska’s cheek. Her whispers grew to murmurs, then to a chant like the one I had heard on the platform inside the spire. I saw it then, the shimmer rippling around her—an aura of something liquid, yet not quite there. Magic. But it would end her. The blackness crept across her face, down her neck, pulling her skin tight. Mage.
“Free the mages, Vance,” Anuska said. She opened her eyes and locked her glare on the dearmad. “Beneath the spire, go!”
The dearmad turned its great head and observed the fleeing people as if they were ants scurrying from a disturbed nest. Cannons fired again, but in the smoke, I couldn’t see if they hit her. She grumbled, her wings beating the air, and loomed closer, her hungry eyes scanning the dockside.
I stumbled backward. Her size, her overwhelming presence, was too monstrous to comprehend. “Don’t,” I whispered. “By the gods, don’t do this.”
“You would have me spare them, thief?”
The voice in my head was Shaianna’s, but colder, sharper, harder—like the flint from the moors. Laced with a touch of slippery malice, that voice cut through my thoughts, and the urge to drop to my knees and whimper staggered me forward.
“This is not you! Not the real you!” I said the words aloud, and despite the roar of fire, screams, and city bells, despite the madness erupting all around me, she heard.
Her laughter was a cruel, twisted thing. I recoiled. Those of the Inner Circle who remained continued chanting, building strength. The dragon’s vast wings—each five times as large as the tall ships’ master sails—billowed across the dockside, fann
ing the flames.
“I am the rise of ocean waves, the whisper in the wind. I am her last order.”
“Once, you were.”
She turned her green eyes solely on me and lowered her head. “A fool, you are. A device. Did you think a creature such as I might care?”
I considered the laughing woman lifting her hands to the waterfall and the girl dancing in Calwyton square. The woman who had asked me to show her what it meant to feel. This beast wasn’t her. Somewhere inside the monster, Shaianna lived.
The dragon’s chuckles rumbled the dockside beneath my feet. “I know you, thief. I know your kind. This world is riddled with greed. Greed consumes, as do I.”
She breathed in, reared back, opened her massive jaws, and roared.
I stumbled against a crumbling wall. Anuska and a few others in her line remained standing. The ship guns continued blasting, but they no more bothered her than flies would. Fighting fire with fire wouldn’t work. There had to be another way. Fallford had said as much. Some other way. An opposite. A weakness.
Anuska and her few remaining magic users lifted their arms and summoned a rush of wind. It howled around the spire and poured into the harbor. The dragon beat its massive wings and pulled up, away from the harbor, but it didn’t go far. I could hear her wing beats like the thudding of my heart.
There is another way.
I gripped my dagger and ran into the streets, into Brea. The mages. If I could release the mages, I could buy some time for the city to retaliate, but the cannons were useless. Anuska and a handful of people weren’t enough. There’s another way …
Debris from half-burned houses blocked some of the streets, and lines of wounded and stricken townsfolk blocked others. I quickly took to the rooftops and maneuvered around familiar chimneystacks, eaves, and terraces, avoiding the raging fire to my right and her looming presence somewhere in the smoke and clouds above.
“Run, thief. Run.”
She swooped out of the dark from behind, her snarls chasing me down. I was breathless, bloody, and beaten, and every muscle in my body burned, but I kept the spire in my sights and ran, just as she crooned inside my thoughts. “This city and its people will turn to dust.”
The Heartstone Thief (Dragon Eye Chronicles Book 1) Page 24