by Tammy Salyer
Her eyes fell on them again. “We’ll return for Balavad’s Fenestrii better prepared,” and the cerulean brilliance of the starpath engulfed her.
She and the Raveners were gone as quickly as they’d come.
The valley was hushed for a moment, then Ulfric, uncharacteristically shaken by the turn of events, grated at Deespora, “Why didn’t you stop them!?”
Symvalline turned so the memory keeper around her neck was facing the Archon-turned-Verity, who looked at them steadily.
Her answer came in a tone that seemed a cross between the old Deespora’s and a deeper resonant voice. “We Verities are divided. We do not meddle with the others’ creations.”
Ulfric, and it seemed Symvalline as well, was at a loss for words for a moment. He finally blustered, “But Balavad is meddling. He has meddled. His meddling is the reason you were trapped in a stone corpse for so long.”
“Then he is breaking our pact,” the Verity said simply. “You have my quin’s Fenestrii. I’ve come with you today to send you wherever you wish, and you will take them with you. Now, you must go.”
Infuriated, Ulfric wrestled with himself against responding. Before he could say something brash, Symvalline spoke for them both. “Yes, Mithlí. To Himmingaze, if you would.” She looked to Isemay. “If all else fails, my daughter, hide in the Churss. You should, you will be safe there no matter what.”
A breath later, Symvalline, Ulfric, and the bruhawks were whisking through the Great Cosmos.
Chapter Five
The Himmingazian named Bardgrim and Knight Dondrin slipped off quietly, Mylla barely even registering they’d been there. Her mind was a chaotic storm with all she’d learned. It wasn’t possible. It simply was not. Ulfric and Vaka Aster irredeemably shackled and now at Balavad’s mercy? Vinnr on the brink of war, waged by the Dyrraks? And, horridly, her companion Eisa was some kind of malevolent puppet wielded by the usurper Verity.
She was at a loss for words as she took in the news, her stomach swimming. She looked around at her fellow Knights, the few of them now the only ones left to swing the fate of the Great Cosmos away from Balavad’s plans for dominion, servitude, and subjugation. The front she and her companions represented meant more now than it had before she’d nearly died. Because now she knew something more. Her own realm had faced a great war against the Battgjaldic Verity as well—her memories had made it plain to her what had become of Ærd and why it was now considered “lost.” The attack there had been dire enough to force her parents to flee, taking her, their only child somewhere safe. Or so they’d hoped. She could have died in Ærd, almost four hundred turns ago, and Balavad’s warmongering there would have remained unknown in Vinnr.
But she hadn’t. More so, she now served a new Verity as a Knight Corporealis, and all this tragedy and horror had led to the day when she’d faced Balavad. She had faced the Verity of Battgjald, instead of her father, who was Warden before she was Knight. She wanted to laugh at the irony of it, but her mouth was too dry, her spirit was too dry, to conjure one. Would she have made her father proud? Did it matter after he’d abandoned her?
Her shock at what she’d learned of Vinnr and Ulfric was slowly being consumed by her bitterness at her own past, but she reined it in. Now wasn’t the time for her to dwell on such an injustice, such a humiliation, even if it wasn’t hers. And—there was something else… something tossing about within the detritus of so many newly loosed memories and thoughts bucking around in her mind. Ulfric had been tricked into caging Vaka Aster, and he’d hoped the Battgjald Scrylle held the secret to unmaking the cage, but it was empty.
Empty, yes, but it had not gone unread before it was purged. She had looked into Balavad’s Scrylle, when Eisa had sent her to Himmingaze against her will. She’d found the Scrylle, and needing answers and a way to get home, she’d looked inside. Balavad had found her and nearly wrecked her mind, yet she’d been there awhile before he did. She’d seen something she hadn’t understood and had immediately forgotten. But it wasn’t forgotten, was it? A Knight’s mind was more tenacious with holding memories than was typical. In Balavad’s Scrylle, she’d seen the way to unmake the Verity cage.
Her companions were staring at her expectantly, as if waiting for an answer. She hadn’t heard the question, but it didn’t matter. She had more important news to share. “Safran, Stave, Roi—I think I know how to do it.”
“It?” said Stave.
“Ulfric, the cage. I’ve seen inside Balavad’s Scrylle—I was trying to open a starpath to return to Vinnr—and I think I read it. The way to unshackle Vaka Aster and the Stallari.”
The three stared at her wordlessly for a moment, then Roi spoke up. “Do you remember it? Do you remember it perfectly?”
She blinked. Perfectly? How would she know?
“It’s imperative that you do, Mylla, because this is not a thing that we can chance getting wrong.”
“I would have to think it over,” she finally said, frustrated at her own thoughts for being so helter-skelter at a time like this.
A moment later, Safran sent, It might not matter anyway. Ulfric is… I’m not sure. Locked away? Absent? “Only the maker can unmake the cage,” he told us. If Ulfric can’t speak the incantation, even if Mylla remembers it flawlessly, neither she nor any of us can make use of it. Especially not now.
“Then we have to get him back, we do. Get him back, and then get him back,” Stave said.
Lightning flashed outside, suffusing the interior in a momentary blaze. Huddled on the far side of the temple, in a space that was mostly shielded from the pouring rain, sat the Himmingazian Glisternaut crew. The sight of them reminded Mylla of Bardgrim, and Himmingaze’s own Verity troubles.
“The Glunt is a Knight now?” she asked.
“Aye, he is, and a natural, like you yourself were when Ulfric recruited you from the Conservatum,” Stave acknowledged. “Though,” he added, “a bit less handy with sword. But we’ll fix that, we will.”
Safran’s sympathy-filled eyes watched her with friendly concern. The memory of Ayanna, Mylla’s mother, came back to her. She’d had the same dark eyes as Safran’s, same as Mylla’s. How was she going to tell her Order, her friends, what she’d discovered about Ærd, about her past? All her childhood memories had just been released from the buried vault they’d been locked in almost her entire life, and all she could feel was… alone.
She shook her head and rose to her feet, wobbling a bit until Roi’s firm hand gripped her elbow. With a deep breath, she straightened her shoulders and said, “So what are we going to do now?”
Thunder bellowed, the sky itself raging. The building seemed to shake in the reverberation, and several of the ’Gazians cried out at the roaring echoes that seemed to take minutes to fade. A purple-red crack of lightning directly above the temple followed. So that’s why the old Knight and Bardgrim were in such a hurry to find Himmingaze’s artifacts. It truly does seem as if this world is about to end.
Eyeing the remains of the ceiling with distrust, Safran sent, We have no choice but to return to Vinnr at once. We have Vaka Aster’s Scrylle. We have to rescue Ulfric.
“We are at a marked disadvantage, Safran. Nothing has changed since Eisa sent us here, except that we no longer even have her with us. Balavad will be waiting for us.” Roi’s tone betrayed a simmering, sharp-edged anger that Mylla had never heard from him before.
“We’re not leaving him in that boggin’ slag’s clutches,” Stave protested.
“I’m not saying we should or will,” Roi went on. “But without a plan or a means to stop the Verity, we may as well be returning with our hands already bound, and one of these”—he scooped up an unusual birdcage-sized metal container and hurled it furiously against a far wall—“already clamped on our heads.”
The crash of the cage had the same effect on the ’Gazians as the thunder from a moment ago had. They tensed and eyed the Knights warily.
And what about them? Safran added after a moment. She didn’t look
toward the ’Gazians, but she didn’t need to.
None could answer that. Himmingaze’s doom seemed sealed and now rested on the shoulders of a long-absent Knight who, Mylla had to admit, had seemed not altogether clearheaded, and a young Himmingazian who had hardly heard of Verities less than a thirty-night ago. She questioned the odds of their realm’s survival, bitterly realizing her own realm’s gambit for survival might have already been lost.
Her own realm…
What realm was hers?
I am Ærden. Vaka Aster is not my creator, Vinnr not my true home. It never has been. It was a waystation my parents took me to so they could escape whatever cataclysm was happening in Ærd, and it’s where my mother died, shot to death by bandits. Burned to char by a—dragør.
But how did I live? WHY did I live? Is there any meaning to any of it, or is the fate our Verities have created for us just as uncaring and fickle as they are?
She felt cold inside, and not from having been lying at the bottom of a sea for half a thirty-night. Cold and empty at the realization that no sacrifice she’d ever made, anyone had ever made, for a Verity had mattered. Not to the celestials. Vaka Aster hadn’t even spared enough thought for Mylla to return her to Vinnr with the rest of the Knights when she’d destroyed Balavad’s warship. Simply abandoned her to oblivion in the doomed world of Himmingaze.
That isn’t true, she told herself. Sacrifices do matter, because we don’t make them for the Verities. We make them for those we call our friends, our family. She looked at Safran’s troubled face, at Stave and Roi, each brooding silently. And that’s what they are. My family, especially now that I know what happened to my real family, and I’d do anything for them, just like they would for me. I am not who my father was.
A humming noise began to rise from somewhere outside. Not the storm, more like the sound of a flying dragørfly scout but several times louder. In moments, it had reached them and come to a stop overhead. Through the broken ceiling, distant flashes of lightning illuminated a ship of some sort.
The Knights automatically arranged themselves in a defensive semicircle, backs to the temple’s wall, klinkí stones withdrawn. Mylla was dazedly surprised to find hers in her pocket still.
The ’Gazians reacted differently, however. The leader, a tall man with dark hair and gripping sea-green eyes, moved closer to the center of the floor, then said something to the others. They all watched, their expressions a mix of relief and surprise, as though this new ship belonged to someone they knew.
The ship, oblong and half the width of the temple, hovered overhead like the Vigilance once could. Warm yellow lights from its undercarriage flooded the temple’s interior as a hatch opened at its base, similar, Mylla remembered, to how Jaemus’s ship had been designed, and a ladder fell down into the building. Soon, half a dozen more Himmingazians had joined them.
The first was an elder woman with waist-length silver hair woven into a tight braid. Her face was lined, her eyes bright. When she planted her feet on the temple’s floor directly in the center of Lífs’s symbol and turned to look at the Knights, her back was straight, unbent by age. She regarded them levelly, and the Knights stared back.
Safran held out the Fenestros from Vaka Aster’s Scrylle as if to speak to the strangers, when the leader of the Glisternaut crew stepped forward and said something to the older woman. To Mylla, it sounded like he said, “Varae Ya.” A name?
It must have been. The woman turned around. Upon seeing the Glisternaut leader, she hurried to him and they embraced. Mylla relaxed a bit, as did her fellow Knights.
The other five new arrivals behaved with a bit more caution, backing toward the Glisternauts at the opposite side of the building while eyeing the Knights. One benefit to their arrival, Mylla noted, was the cover over the broken roof offered by the hovering ship. The constant heavy rain was reduced by half.
Safran sent, That solves the problem of the Himmingazians, then. Whoever these new people are, they’ll be able to take them back to their homes.
However much longer they have them, Roi added.
Maybe they can help us? Mylla put in, but immediately thought it was a silly idea. The Himmingazians seemed like kind enough people, if not a bit meeker than the typical Vinnric. There was nothing wrong with this, of course, but meekness would not serve them against Balavad, if they ever had to face him.
Absurd, she thought with a jolt. Even for us to think of facing a Verity. We must be crazy. No—desperate.
As she thought this, the older woman and the leader of the Glisternauts approached the Knight. She stood before them, and to Mylla’s surprise, she saluted them in the Vinnric way. Even more surprising, she addressed them in heavily accented Elder Veros.
“Hello, members of the Knights Corporealis of Vinnr. I’m Vreyja Bardgrim, friend of Knight Dondrin, and the grandsirene of your own newly…” She paused and glanced toward the Glisternaut leader and asked him a question. After he responded, evidently telling her the word she’d hesitated on, she continued. “Ordained Knight.” At that, she stopped again and gave them a broad, proud smile. “My grandling, a Knight! It’s beyond what even I might have imagined, though in Himmingaze they are called Mystae. And we, loyal devotees of the Creatress, welcome you.”
Roi took a step forward and returned the Vinnric salute. “Thank you, Vreyja Bardgrim. We are glad of your welcome,” he said.
“So,” she said matter-of-factly, “do you or don’t you know how to stop this?” She waved toward the open sky, where a renewed deluge of lightning cracked.
“We’re awaiting Griggory and Jaemus now,” Roi said. “They are going to try.”
Vreyja gave a curt nod. “That’s what Cote tells me. We’ll wait with you, then. There’s going to be nowhere left to go soon anyway.”
Mylla didn’t have to think hard about what she meant. Much of the Cosmos seemed to be in a fight for its survival, and on the verge of losing.
Once more, she thought of her last memory of her native realm, the fires and destruction her parents had been running from. The battles they’d spoken of. And an idea bloomed at the edge of her thoughts.
Chapter Six
Must have been water in his ears. Jaemus could have sworn Griggory said something about dying, which was ridiculous. Hadn’t the old Knight just explained to him that nothing really dies?
They shot up from the seafloor so quickly Jaemus would have ended up swimming if he hadn’t fetched up against Hither’s back fin. By the time he’d regained his grip of Griggory’s waist and convinced himself he’d misheard the Knight, they’d neared the surface enough that Jaemus could see the Glister Cloud. As they approached the surface, the water, so smooth in the deeps, started to beat and batter the slangarook, pushing her about as if she were a pebble inside a bottle being shaken by an angry toddler. It seemed that the Glister Cloud storm had grown worse in the few hours they’d been searching for the celestial artifacts.
When they reached Isle Stonering’s shore, the Never Sea had escalated from its usual teeming swirl to heaving itself into great frothing waves that stacked nearly as high as some of Himmingaze’s floating cities. Most of the waves broke before reaching the island, but Jaemus could see the incoming water lapping at the temple’s steps. Ice-cold wind pushed through his Vinnric robes. They were not made for such malicious climes.
Griggory slipped off Hither’s back and started toward the short stairs leading into the temple, leaving Jaemus to slide awkwardly from the beast on his own and hurry to catch up. Before the old Knight reached the door, Jaemus carefully placed a hand on his shoulder to stop him. Griggory spun around, standing nearly nose to nose with Jaemus. The old man had always seemed small and stooped to Jaemus before, but he realized how wrong that impression had been. Griggory stared him in the eyes, unflinching, the somber gold-flecked brown irises nearly mesmerizing in their intensity.
“Ahem,” Jaemus began, “I’m sure it was just the water pressure in my ears, Sir Knight, but I definitely heard you wrong. You d
idn’t say anything about dying, did you?”
Griggory remained stubbornly silent, and Jaemus did his best not to think of this change from his previous talkativeness as maudlin.
“See, I’ve tried the dying thing once,” he went on, just as stubbornly, refusing to give in to what was turning out to be this most interesting—if by “interesting” one meant “deeply objectionable”—development. “It just didn’t suit me and I’d rather avoid doing it again.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. The time has come for me to make amends to Himmingaze and Lífs for what I let befall this realm so many turns ago.”
“Amends? There are other ways to make amends. You could give to charity, for example. In all probability, whatever we’re about to do with these celestial artifacts will open whole new avenues for amends-making.” He paused, not enjoying the Knight’s silence in the least. “It’s all about just keeping a bit of the ole faith in the fight, right?” he finished blandly and, he thought later, dumbly.
Without another word, Griggory turned back to the building and headed up the steps to the entrance.
Sighing heavily, Jaemus was about to follow, but the Knight’s words ate at him. Make amends for what he let befall Himmingaze? How could he have been involved?
Before he could ponder it further, other matters arose. The quiet hum of a Glisternaut ship’s engines found its way to his ear, though muffled by the rain and nearly constant thunder. “A ship! Terrific!” he said, then thought more about it. “A ship… how in the Creatress’s name am I going to explain… everything?”
Squinting, he did a slow spin around, trying to see where it was coming from, finally realizing it was already there and was hovering directly over the temple’s dilapidated roof. It was a smallish hauling craft, one of the cargo ships used to sling goods between cities. Its landing apparatus would be useless on the island’s steadily diminishing surface area, but the craft was Himmingaze-built, and like the world’s cities, able to hover in stasis when needed.
