by Tammy Salyer
The door was battered again and the hinges rattled. Bits of stone dust fell where the iron of the hinges was embedded in the thick stone walls as the apparatus was jolted. The door would hold back a dragør itself, but the hinges might not for much longer.
Brun considered this and asked the Wing, “Your father and family are still there, right?”
Havelock nodded.
“What do you think?” she asked the Knights as another strike hit the door.
“If Asteryss falls to the Dyrraks, Magdaster will be the last defensible city in Ivoryss, it will,” Stave said. “It’ll be a good place to hold out and let Balavad come to us. Fight him on our own soil in the arena we choose, a solid advantage. And we know that worm-slurper will come, eventually. He’ll not want to miss the sweet moment of victory, but we’ll have a few surprises that make that sweet turn rancid, we will.”
Ulfric immediately recognized the strength of this argument. Balavad had already shown by his mere presence how much he relished the feat of conquering other Verities’ creations in the flesh. “Magdaster it is. Brun, you’ll come too.”
Brun looked so offended at that, it was as if Ulfric had said something disgusting about her mother. “I’m not a coward. I won’t abandon my city.”
THUNK.
“Is it more cowardly to be killed because of stubbornness and lose the fight, or to do what you must to live long enough to beat your enemy?” Ulfric said flatly. He understood Brun’s knee-jerk reaction. Her kind, and he’d known hundreds over the centuries, had so much honor they sometimes almost choked on it. If given enough time, he hoped her sense of reason would break through her misguided ideas of what was right.
THUNK. The bottom hinge popped free of the wall. He just hoped it didn’t take more than the next few seconds.
“Nennus will need your insight into the Dyrraks,” Mallich offered in his infinitely calm manner. “His command is only as strong as the knowledgeable and skillful troops at his side. You have more of both than most. And you’ve faced both the Raveners and the Dyrraks already. You can help him fight wisely.”
Brun appeared unconvinced.
Ulfric gave it one last try. “Commander, I know it was wrong to ask you to tell your soldiers to surrender to Balavad. They are noble and decent fighters, to the last. And when we prevail”—THUNK—“the people of Asteryss and the Dragør Marines will need to be able to look back at this war and know that they kept their honor and their spirit and never backed down.
“But the only way they’ll ever have that chance is if we beat Balavad. And to do that, everyone must sacrifice, and everyone must play the part they are best suited for. Asteryss can’t hold out for long. Magdaster can, and if you help keep their garrison standing for long enough, I swear to you on my Knighthood”—THUNK. Another hinge popped—“you’ll get vengeance for your troops who’ve already fallen and who may yet fall.”
Brun turned partially away from them, her head lowered. She sighed. “When did turning traitor become my duty?”
None answered her—what was there to say?
Finally, she faced Symvalline and the memory keeper, wearing a mask of fury. “I’ll come, but you have to swear one of you will help me get the rest of my troops that I’m being forced to walk away from out of here and to safety.”
Ulfric’s oath to Vaka Aster, taken so long ago, sprinted through his mind. His duty was to Ivoryss, not to any commoner, no matter how noble.
But inside his heart, he’d forsaken that duty a hundred times already. It wasn’t hard for him to respond, and he only hoped he responded for all the Knights. “You have our word.”
Not one to dally, Mallich turned to Havelock. “No time for us to send you in advance. You and I will go first. Sym, Ulfric, you and the bruhawks follow me. Then Safran and Brun, Stave and Jaemus.”
Everyone crowded around the hub to the interrealm portal. As Mallich placed his Mentalios in the keyhole, Ulfric knew it was time to tell them his alternate plan.
He said simply, “Try to draw Balavad to you in Magdaster and hold the Dyrrak forces off as long as you can. I’m not coming with you. I have to go Udunum Island.”
Chapter Twenty
To his utter lack of surprise, Ulfric was right, they didn’t like his plan. But with only one hinge remaining before the door fell, there’d been no time to argue.
They’d tried anyway.
“Vaka Aster’s eyes, Ulfric, don’t be crazy!” Stave had shouted. “You infiltrate the Dyrraks alone and you may as well walk up to Balavad and hand him the rope to hang you with—not that you can walk… or be hung, actually. But you know I’m right!”
Ulfric couldn’t have missed the shock in their faces if he’d been blind, but it was to Sym he spoke next. “Hold the memory keeper where I can see you, my love.”
She raised the pendant. “Ulfric, I can’t let you do this. It’s not just your life you’re risking—it’s everything and everyone.”
“My love, I know it seems that way. But we don’t have a ship that can carry the lot of us, and even if we did, Stave’s right. Going as a group to the island, or Dyrrakium itself, may as well be purposely jumping into Balavad’s trap. We can’t take on their entire army. Balavad has to know Eisa was able to help Mallich, Safran, and Stave escape before she succumbed. And Eisa knows you’re alive now, too, Sym. They’ll be waiting for all of you. But they won’t be waiting for me. And you’re all forgetting something.”
“Forgetting when it was you lost your damn mind,” Stave grumbled. “Was it before or after you turned into Vaka Aster herself and blew that bastirt Balavad’s whole realm into extinction?”
Ulfric, grasping his patience like a drowning man grasps a log, went on as calmly as he could. “No one will even know I’m there. I have some unique abilities when it comes to stealth.” Don’t I, old friend? he said to Urgo.
The bruhawk startled everyone with a blunt screech and ruffled his wings.
They each looked toward the bird, the realization of what Ulfric was talking about dawning quickly. A moment passed, then Brun helped force the decision along. “Figure out your plans, Knights, because if we don’t leave now, some of us may not leave at all.”
That had done it. At Ulfric’s direction, Symvalline had draped the memory keeper onto Urgo’s neck. Jaemus also passed Yggo one of the Himmingazian Fenestrii in a small pouch that hung around her neck. It would aid long-distance communication and give Ulfric a few extra wystic options.
With a final explanation of, “I’ll figure out what needs to be done, then I’ll meet you in Magdaster. Don’t worry, Knights, I’ll see you all soon. Help them hold their walls until I return. And keep your faith in this fight, because it is far from over.”
He’d wanted to say more, much more, but he knew if he’d told Symvalline what he’d been thinking—When you see our daughter again, tell her how much I love her and always will—she’d have interpreted it the way he half-feared she should—as a goodbye, his final words before he disappeared from their lives for eternity. And he wasn’t going to entertain the idea that he, that any of them, was going to die. Not yet.
As the Knights made for the interrealm well, Yggo had launched from one of the chamber’s high-arched windows immediately. But he’d had Urgo wait on the ledge, watching as the Knights whisked through the well. Symvalline had gone last. She’d said nothing, but he’d known what she was feeling. He’d been feeling it too. They’d only just been reunited, and now had to take separate paths again. Being a Knight Corporealis had never been easy, but it had also never been this cruel.
As soon as she was gone, the chamber’s door shuddered and fell inward. Ten armored soldiers pushed through and had been comically stunned to find no one there to fight. Their leader spotted Urgo just before the bruhawk alighted, and of course he recognized the enormous, regal bird. There were only two in Ivoryss, known to all the commoners as companions of the Knights. Urgo hissed at the Keeper Guard, then they were soaring through the air above the city, maki
ng for the sea and Udunum Island. The bruhawks, being descended from dragørs, and these two in particular being ordained by Vaka Aster, flew at speeds that easily matched the fastest Ivoryss ship. It only took them a few hours.
Despite the anchored Dyrrak force, which was large enough to break through Asteryss’s remaining sea-facing defenses, the island was relatively easy for the bruhawks to reach. Ulfric needed information, and if he and Urgo were very crafty, he’d be able to get it without even needing to land. The hawk simply had to drop the memory keeper close enough to a Dyrrak to draw their attention, and once they picked it up, Ulfric could slip inside their mind like a thief.
The hawks flew high enough to remain unseen by those on the island, and upon arrival, they circled like vultures, their great silvery eyes and unparalleled vision observing the force below. The lighthouse on Udunum had been unattended for several decades, thanks to undying illuminate orbs providing light to seagoing vessels. Only on occasion did work crews come out to ensure the ancient tower itself was maintained and to check the condition of the light. Otherwise, it was a small, barren rock alone amid the waves of the Verring Sea.
He counted exactly thirty ships present, anchored all around the island. One was the Gildr, the ship he and the Knights had so recently sailed in to Dyrrakium. Seeing it jolted that spark of hope in his chest—if the fleet’s leading ship was here, it was possible, perhaps likely, the force was being led by the Domine Ecclesium.
The thought of seeing the turncoat sent a wave of eager wrath through Ulfric that spilled over into Urgo, who emitted a piercing, ferocious trill like the last sound heard by the bruhawk’s prey before it was ripped apart in his knife-edged talons. This disembodiment would be made worth it just for the chance to serve justice to that traitor myself—using the old ways, before civility made torture unseemly, he mused.
They timed their arrival for dusk. As Halla fell below the western horizon, the bruhawks fished the waves for a hearty dinner, and as night fell, they found the perfect place to perch and wait for a likely victim where they’d never be seen: at the peak of the lighthouse’s roof. Anyone who looked directly toward it would be blinded by the massive illuminate orb that had spent all day absorbing Halla’s rays.
There they waited, needing only one isolated Dyrrak for Urgo to sweep in on stealthy wings and drop the pendant near. Before the night had progressed far, their prey came to them.
A shore party of five Dyrraks arrived in a dinghy with a variety of tools and equipment under tarps and in boxes piled in the boat’s center. As they alighted and began to unload, the bruhawks kept a close watch for any who strayed far enough from the others to give them their chance. Two sets of two carried boxes toward the lighthouse entry, leaving one alone at the boat.
With the memory keeper held in his talons, Urgo dove like a comet and dropped the pendant with expert precision around the lone Dyrrak’s neck. Ulfric was already whispering the now intimately familiar chant: With thine eyes, these eyes too see. And in as little time as it took to draw a breath, he could feel himself shift from Urgo and slide into the man’s thoughts.
But they were not the kind of thoughts he’d been expecting. They felt as cold as a snake’s belly, and thick, almost soupy. The Dyrrak was a Ravener, and whatever his mind may once have been, it was now an inhuman thing under the sway of its master.
Loathing overcame Ulfric at once, and it was all he could do to refrain from calling Urgo back immediately. The Ravener felt the pendant drop around his neck, and his hands shot up to rip it free. Ulfric was only just able to stop him. Forcing his control of the man’s arms was easier than it had been of Salukis’s wings, which he supposed he should be grateful for, yet that feeling of his own mind brushing against the creature’s remote and wrong thoughts made it hard to concentrate.
Just my luck, he thought as the remaining Dyrraks took their equipment inside. I hadn’t thought about what it would be like to inhabit something so foreign and so… cursed.
“Venerate,” a woman’s voice called from ahead in the darkness. “What are you waiting for? Get over here and hold the door.”
Ulfric froze. He wasn’t sure if the man was expected to answer, and if so, how?
“Hurry it up, Venerate… or whatever you are,” the speaker finished, her last statement mumbled to herself.
If he didn’t want to arouse any suspicion, he had to do something. Forcing the Ravener to hide the pendant inside his leather overtunic, he hurried the man to the lighthouse entrance. The creature didn’t resist, but he’d become somewhat enervated and hard to motivate. This was almost worse than having to fight the man’s own will to make him do what Ulfric wanted, and his bonelessness forced Ulfric to divide his focus between forward momentum that looked at least somewhat natural, and keeping him upright in the first place.
The resulting first step was little better than a shambling lurch, and Ulfric’s worry surged at how obvious the difference in the man’s behavior would be. But that wasn’t even the worst problem. He’d lost the ability to see.
At first he’d thought he was simply getting used to his new senses in the night’s darkness, but that assumption was quickly squashed. Ulfric had become used to his sharpened vision as Vaka Aster, and then as Urgo, and being suddenly visually incapacitated was somehow worse for that fact. He’d never felt so vulnerable.
Of course they’re sightless, fool, he told himself. You’ve seen their eyes. But they’re not bumbling and useless—they’re trained and effective fighters. Which means they see, somehow. Now keep moving and… figure it out!
He put the man’s next foot forward, reaching out with his mind and grasping every sensory element he could for guidance on where to lay the foot down. Sensations reached him, almost as if he had summoned them: the damp mist, swirled by a slight easterly breeze; the ebbing smell of brine as the breeze passed him; the lapping of water inside a hollow between the shore’s rocks and against the dinghy; the scrape of one of the oars in its oarlock; the warmth of the pendant—now that was surprising, he hadn’t known the memory keeper emitted warmth. He realized he could use it to see from, but if it were pulled from the Ravener’s tunic, it would become visible to the others.
Moments ticked by as he shambled, feeling like an eternity. Yet he was already feeling more “at home” in his new skin than he would have thought possible and simply gave up the idea of trying to use the creature’s eyes. The instant he did, a moving image formed in his mind, a gray and black contrasting sight that precisely distilled every sensory clue he’d just taken in. He was “seeing” what he’d only intuited from the sounds, smells, and feelings of the world around him, and the image was as sharp within a few feet of him in every direction as if his eyes worked. The farther from his borrowed body things were, the fuzzier they appeared, but he knew immediately what was happening. The Ravener brain was somehow able to understand the physical world around it through every sense except sight, and miraculously, the result was every bit as precise and serviceable as sight was to Ulfric.
Even as he let go of vision and let the Ravener’s senses work in the way they were designed, the rest of the man’s natural instincts began to come back. Soon he was walking without resembling an animated corpse. Still, Ulfric was grateful for the darkness that hid the man’s awkwardness.
He didn’t turn the man’s head to look at the four Dyrraks waiting to deliver their boxes inside as he passed them. When he reached the door, the smell of recently gouged metal and a few brushes of his hands against the lock told him it had been forced open sometime earlier. It was beyond miraculous to him that he could “see” the door so perfectly just from the way the noise moved around it and scents came from it.
“About time, Venerate,” the leader of the group said. “Her Holiness Balavad didn’t do you any favors by bringing you into his fold, did she?”
Without a word, he made the man push the door open all the way to the interior wall and stand with his back to it, trying to conceal himself in the interior�
��s shadows as much as possible.
It struck Ulfric then that of the five Dyrraks, the leader was the only one not changed into a Ravener, and the sudden curiosity of this made him turn the man’s head to better sense her as she came inside. She caught his dead glance and immediately looked away, the expression on her face betraying an immediate distaste, perhaps even fear.
After a beat, she looked back and said, almost as if speaking to someone behind him rather than to him, “Not that anything Her Holiness would do is imperfect, of course. It is a great gift to be consecrated, one that I too hope to earn soon.”
She snapped her mouth closed and hurried toward the center of the interior chamber, almost pulling the other footman carrying the box inside.
She is frightened of Balavad. And she should be. But why isn’t she consecrated?
On the heels of that, a wild unease pushed its way to the front of his thoughts. Balavad can see into their minds and control them, and she knows this. Will the Verity sense that I’m here, too? Will he, or rather she now, even know to look?
Ulfric had no idea by what mechanism or wysticism Balavad was able to use other’s senses of perception, and if Ulfric’s presence was found, there was no telling what kind of power Balavad would have over him. He may be disembodied in one sense, but in another, he was now re-embodied. Would Balavad be able to take control of him the way he controlled this once-Dyrrak?
He had to get out of this body soon. But at the moment, the only way he could see doing it was by killing all but the woman in the lighthouse and using her as his new host.
Like the warrior he was, he began laying out his strategy.
Chapter Twenty-One
