Knight Awoken

by Tammy Salyer

  Mallich was saying something about naval options, but Jaemus cut in. “How do the weapons carried by the Dyrraks work? Embersparks, you called them?”

  Mallich eyed him tolerantly, then explained, “Halla, to put it briefly. The light is captured and focused through lenses into the emberspark barrel reservoirs. Triggers release a fine grain of powder made from flint stone, or more likely from puurite in the Dyrraks’ version—it’s more combustible—into the barrels, which are then ignited and channeled via the weapon’s mechanism.”

  Jaemus was nodding but still quizzical. “Light and powder, got it. But how is that damaging?”

  “What comes out of those barrels is like a bomb made of fire that turns whatever it touches to, as Nennus put it, chunks of slag,” Stave said matter-of-factly.

  “Ah, all right. Slag, that’s not good.”

  “Are you going somewhere with this, Jaemus?” Safran asked.

  “What happens when they run out of this catalytic powder?”

  “I’m sure they’re bringing a good supply aboard their water fleet,” Mallich said, but his tone had an edge as if he had begun to guess what Jaemus was getting at. “The air fleet would simply return to those on the water to resupply. It would take some time before they used all their reserves.”

  “Yes, but if their attack craft run out, for instance in flight or during a skirmish?”

  Stave answered, “Then their ships will be useless for battle, they will—unless they want to turn themselves into bludgeons and die right along with whatever they target.”

  Unconsciously, Jaemus began to pace like Brun. “So if we draw their fire long enough, their airships will use up their weapons and be defenseless. If they’re kept defenseless, the advantage will be ours—” He reached the near wall and spun back. Something golden and hazy, moving fast, caught his eye just before a fur-covered creature about the size of his head landed on one of his shoulders. He flinched and let out a yelp. When he reached up to brush the thing off, it was no longer there. Just a flash of something sliding beneath the table, but he couldn’t make out any details. “Sorry, did you all know that you have… flashy, jumpy things in here. Did anyone else see it?”

  Everyone looked at him curiously. Nennus spoke up first. “By ‘things,’ Knight Bardgrim, I assume you mean the flittercat that just used you as a launch pad. His name is Scintilla.”

  “Scintilla? The flittercat? So… not dangerous, then?”

  Nennus laughed at him with genuine humor. “They’ll eat your guts out if you intrude in their territory. But they only kill people they don’t like.” One of his eyes squinted in a look of intense sincerity. “So stay on his good side, would be my advice.”

  Jaemus had not resumed pacing. He couldn’t seem to pull his gaze from Nennus, waiting for the grizzled commander to admit he was joking. Nennus stared back, unblinking and unbudging.

  “Ahem, I’ll, um, do my best,” he affirmed and forced himself to look back at the group instead of searching the floor for the gut-munching creature. “What I was saying is, if we can sink the Dyrraks’ supply of puurite or disable their ability to access it while their ships are weaponless, they will have to resort to ground fighting, just like Magdaster.”

  “And be as weak as a spider with no venom,” Nennus enthused. “No one’s getting through Magdaster’s walls. Even dragørs have to put in a bit of effort to take them down.”

  “Exactly,” Jaemus nearly crowed, having unearthed an unexpected pride at his blooming strategy skills.

  Brun spoke up for the first time in a while. “You make many valid points. Except we don’t want to draw their fire inside the city. Even with shield-walls, the damage would be too great. And we’ll never get near their water fleet to cut off their resupply. Magdaster’s navy is ill-prepared to handle a battle, and we don’t have any flying craft at all. I thought we’d covered that.”

  Jaemus wanted to smile but thought better of it. “What if we did?” No one spoke, all waiting for some kind of plausible reason to be discussing folly. “I happen to know where to find a fleet of airships that I’m pretty sure can be made perfectly capable of achieving exactly what we need.”

  Symvalline, the Knight who knew him least well, was clearly trying to be diplomatic when she said, “Knight Bardgrim, I’m not sure if this is a taste of Himmingazian humor. If it is, I apologize for being short with you, but we haven’t the time—”

  But he was on a roll now. “I’m actually quite funny, once you get to know me,” he assured her, “but that’s not what this is about. I’m talking about the Glisternaut fleet!” He held out his hands in a “there it is!” gesture, as if he’d just explained a great mystery.

  They all stared at him as if he’d begun sprouting another head, complete with Himmingazian green skin.

  “I see…” How to explain what he meant in as few words as possible? “Listen. The Glisternaut fleet comprises some two hundred ships. Most are much bigger than the Dyrrak fighters, though not quite as nimble, true. But that’s the beauty of it. They were built to fly through lightning and storms the likes of which, if you don’t mind my guess, Vinnr has never seen. In just a few cycles”—he reverted to the Himmingazian term in his excitement—“we could rig the Glisternaut ships with some of your own weaponry and fight back against the Dyrrak forces. It would be like hawks against a swarm of gnats. Their embersparks would barely scratch the surface of a Himmingazian-built ship. They’re already reinforced with a shield of my own design, let me add. And, again I’m guessing here, we could very likely get close enough to the Dyrrak water fleet to put a stop to, well, the whole attack.”

  Stave, looking like he’d been poleaxed, said, “But they’re in Himmingaze.”

  “I’ll simply go and get them,” he said. “I think after what they’ve been through and seen lately, it won’t be hard to convince them that they’re needed here in Vinnr. The Council of Nine Crests are well-reasoned and wise, and they’ll agree quickly that they, to put it bluntly, owe it to Vinnr for everything you’ve done for Himmingaze. And my lifemate is the fleet commander, after all.”

  Mallich was nodding, coming around to the idea more quickly than the others. “The world is different in Himmingaze, though, Jaemus. The skies are different. I know from my own days as a sailor that a ship built to float a lake differs substantially from one built for the sea. Would your other-world ships even be capable of flying in this realm?”

  Jaemus was ready for this question. “Most definitely. It’s not so much a matter of aerials as it is power that differentiates ours from Vinnr’s ships. On Mount Omina, I took a close look at Wing Rekkr’s fighter and learned some useful things. Vinnric ships are powered by Halla but use other mechanisms that aren’t so different from a Glisternaut ship. Ours, though, are powered by water and lightning. If I can get to the Glisternaut fleet and their crack mechanics—I trained most of them, naturally—I know exactly what modifications it will take to shift their power systems to Vinnr-compatible ones. With enough help, we could have them all modified inside a few Vinnric cycles, er, days.”

  He smiled again broadly. But the smile dropped from his face the instant he felt that soft, warm sensation of something rubbing against his cheek again, and the not-so-soft sensation of what seemed to be tiny daggers stuck in his chest. His gaze shot downward to his chest, where Scintilla clung like a barnacle. The creature’s hideously large eyes, golden like its fur though darker and parted transversely by moon-shaped pupils, gleamed up at him. “Ah! Why does it keep doing that? And why is it stabbing me!?”

  A moment later, the eyes, along with the tiny daggers, were gone again. He looked around but saw nothing. “And one last question, how in the Creatress’s celestial balls of power does it disappear like that?”

  “Flittercats can bend light. If they want to be seen, they will be. If not…” Nennus trailed off with a meaningful, if amused, look.

  “So you’re telling me that if he decides he wants to nibble on my innards, I’ll never see him
coming?” Jaemus asked. “If he’s going to keep jumping onto me like that, I suppose I’m going to need detailed advice on how to stay on his good side.”

  “Later, Jaemus,” Mallich said. “Let’s talk more about the Himmingaze fleet. Tell us exactly what you’d need to make them viable in Vinnr and who’s going to fly them.”

  Crossing his arms low enough to protect his belly, he said, “It’ll only take a short bit for me to list the parts we’ll need. As for pilots—leave that to me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Staring into the maw of a shelksie was not the first thing Jaemus expected to be doing immediately upon arriving back in Himmingaze.

  The starpath delivered him to the Creatress temple, and he was just picking himself up off the floor and counting himself lucky he hadn’t broken anything when he heard the timid not-quite-command, “Hold still and remain quiet. You are hereby being constrained by order of the Council of Nine Crests. If you don’t behave as commanded, you’ll be constrained bodily.”

  Which to Jaemus meant if he didn’t do as told, he’d find himself struck by a disabling, and not totally painless, shelksie projectile. With a glance toward the voice, he froze.

  A Glisternaut, one he didn’t know, stood in the shadow of one of the shrine’s large interior pillars, pointing the aforementioned wrist-mounted shelksie. It was a simple weapon that fired shullets, pebble-sized gas pellets that would explode upon impact and put their target to sleep almost instantly. The sleeping part wasn’t uncomfortable, but Jaemus had learned, thanks to Ulfric, that being struck by a shullet was like being hit with a thrown stone, if the stone were thrown by someone whose arm was powered by a Glisternaut ship’s thrusters. There was no lasting damage beyond a deep sleep and a memorable bruise—but that was all beside the point. Was this any way to treat the man who’d just saved the realm from dissolving into Cosmos dust?

  “It’s me, Spark. Glint Engineer Jaemus Bardgrim. I’m sure the Bounding Skate crew has had time to inform the Council that”—what was the best way of putting it, exactly? That he’d saved the world? That their celestial maker the Creatress was not only real but was now embodied by the fiercest creature ever to swim the Never Sea, a slangarook who happened to have the uncanny name of Hither? He wasn’t sure which, if either, of those options would most succinctly and directly convey the message he wanted to get across, so he finished with: “I mean surely you’ve seen what’s happening outside. No more Glister Cloud! That is what the Council should know by now.”

  The spark engineer, his young face a cartoon of inexperience and confusion, merely glanced toward the shrine’s broken door, then shrugged.

  Jaemus couldn’t contain his incredulity. “… You’re telling me you don’t know that Himmingaze has been—I mean, I don’t like to brag—but saved would not be too strong a word.”

  “The Council is…”

  The Glisternaut stopped speaking, as if unsure what he wanted to say, so Jaemus prompted him. “Is?”

  “Is… not officially sure what’s become of the Glister Cloud. So they’ve stationed me here to bring anyone who, um, shows up back to Vann to be questioned.”

  Jaemus was beginning to guess what might be going on, but he had to ask, “Do you even know who I am?”

  “Glint Engineer Bardgrim, of course.” It was the first thing the young man appeared to feel confident about, and not just because Jaemus had already said his name aloud. He supposed he should take some pleasure in his celebrity, but he was getting the sinking feeling that, for some inextricable reason, while he’d been gone it had changed more to notoriety.

  “And what have you, personally, heard about what’s happened in Himmingaze and my involvement in it?”

  The spark engineer glanced outside again, his round eyes not able to conceal his wonder at the newly transformed world. “They say you brought back the old ways, the Creatress… They say Himmingaze has been returned to the Great Cosmos, that it had been cut off and—” He caught himself. “What they say isn’t what matters. What Captain Illago and the crew of the Bounding Skate have testified to is that you, disgraced Glint Engineer Bardgrim, were found here at this forbidden shrine, and when they came to constrain you, you created some kind of mind trick that led to a mass illusion and made them think they saw and heard things that they could never have seen or heard. The Council forgave them all and released them, and now the fleet’s orders are to constrain you the moment you come back from… come back. You’re in serious trouble Glint Bardgrim, and I recommend you come with me without adding more.” On seemingly realizing how presumptuous it sounded for a mere spark engineer to be giving orders to a glint, he added, “Please?”

  Jaemus had stopped paying much attention to him right after the part where he’d said the Glisternauts claimed he’d brainwashed them, and was busily thinking about all the times Cote had played a practical joke on him—because what else could this be but a gag? Unfortunately, the number was in the low zeros, the absolute nevers. Cote just wasn’t the joking kind. His relationship habits tended more toward thoughtful romantic gestures and sincere, meaningful conversations—or sincere, meaningful imputations if Jaemus was acting on one of his more impracticable whims.

  But there was no way, no way Cote would have turned on him. And even more farfetched was the idea that he would somehow come to disbelieve everything that had happened. No conjurer or trickster, no matter how skilled, could have pulled off a deception as intricate and amazing as everything the Glisternauts had been through since Balavad came to Himmingaze. On his own, Jaemus himself couldn’t even have imagined half of the wild things he’d lately seen and done.

  So, evidently things had taken the most unfortunate turn they possibly could have. The Council had for too long been wedded to the idea that the old lore of the Creatress was a dangerous superstition and hadn’t been able to bring themselves around to believing the evidence right in front of their eyes, even after Cote and his crew had explained it. He imagined how things had gone. The Glisternauts and Vreyja and her companions had gone to the Council and explained exactly what had happened here at the Creatress’s old temple, and the Nine Crests had decreed them muddleminded, or worse, heretics, and likely would have locked them up had they not changed their story. All the while, the Council members would have been eagerly spinning tales and superstitions of their own to account for the fact that Himmingaze once more had a horizon and, beyond it, millions of distant stars that no living Himmingazian had ever seen before.

  The more he thought about it, the more Jaemus realized he couldn’t blame the Glisternauts for scapegoating him. It wasn’t as if he’d been there to stick up for himself anyway, but he was definitely going to give Cote a peace of his mind—a large and forceful piece—when next they crossed paths.

  What now, though? Gramsirene Vreyja had always been considered eccentric, but if Cote and his entire crew had been unable to make the Council believe the Creatress had returned and Himmingaze was restored, Jaemus had no chance at all. He had, after all, been constrained once already for coming to the forbidden Isle Stonering against Himmingazian law. And now he apparently had a “new talent” of controlling people’s minds, and for some strange reason got his kicks from making people believe they’d traveled to distant worlds and fought monstrous marauders whose minds were controlled in much the same way by a mythical Verity.

  Old Jaemus would not have known what to do in this situation, other than comply meekly with the spark engineer and been flown off to face the Council’s inquiry. But he was not old Jaemus. He was Knight Bardgrim, now. No, he was Mystae Bardgrim, and it was his duty to protect his Verity’s creations. Even if they didn’t want it, approve of it, or appreciate it.

  The Glisternaut was showing signs of addled impatience, uncertain what to do about his distracted not-yet-prisoner.

  Jaemus asked, “That’s the way it’ll be then, you wish for me to come with you?” He slipped a hand into his Vinnric robe pocket. “Of course, as you please. But what about
my partner there?” With his other hand, he waved toward the doorway.

  The spark engineer, exactly as Jaemus had anticipated, started and turned toward the door, shelksie still raised. Jaemus pulled his one klinkí stone from the pocket and targeted the man’s weapon hand.

  The spark engineer yelped at the impact and fired his shullet into the wall. The shelksie was now empty until reloaded. His eyes widened again, this time in fright, as Jaemus pulled the wystic stone back a foot or two, then held it up to hover menacingly before the young man’s chest.

  Not quite believing his own actions, Jaemus did what came naturally next. “Gah! I am so, so sorry, Spark. Are you okay?” The klinkí stone, now just as devoid of malice as Jaemus himself, dropped to the ground.

  The younger man was staring at him in utter disbelief. “You, you hit me with a rock!”

  “Technically, it’s a klinkí stone, but I would never, that is to say, I won’t ever do that again, I promise. Unless you force me to like just now, but I don’t want to. So if you don’t mind, could you just put the shelksie down and, um, I guess have a seat by the wall while I wait for the rest of my supplies to arrive?”

  The Glisternaut blinked several times and seemed unconvinced the danger had passed as he quickly stripped off the shelksie and dropped it. It landed beside Jaemus’s barely glowing wystic stone. They both looked at the two objects as if they’d never seen anything quite so strange, quite so hostile and harmful, and it just wasn’t sinking it what any of it meant.

  When the man looked back at him, Jaemus pointed to the wall, an apologetic lift to his eyebrows. Finally, his “prisoner”—which wasn’t the word Jaemus wanted to use, but his mind was too rattled to think of a more appropriate one—paced near where his shullet had struck and turned with his back to the wall.