by Tammy Salyer
He knew the feel and shape of what the Ecclesium’s uninjured hand found immediately, and the cry of rage echoing from the Ecclesium confirmed it. Ulfric stopped walking and darted into a nearby shadowed alcove before he pulled what he’d found free. A Fenestros. A Battgjaldic Fenestros, to be specific.
Could this luck possibly hold? he questioned. With this, we now have three of the four Fenestrii we need to cage Balavad in the Knights’ possession. With the two Battgjaldic Fenestrii the Knights held, and this, all he needed was to find Eisa and retrieve the stone from her chest. Then they would be equipped to defeat Balavad once and for all.
He had a moment of hesitation then. He was at a crossroads. Alone in the citadel, he was more vulnerable with fewer resources to steal his body back. And he hadn’t yet considered how Balavad would react upon realizing Vaka Aster was gone. It could prompt the usurper Verity to accelerate the war against Ivoryss, both in speed and intensity, though Balavad would lose the option to outright destroy Vinnr completely.
On the other hand, Ulfric was almost certain that with the power of the two Fenestrii he now possessed, along with the power of his most convincing disguise as the Ecclesium, if he found Eisa, he could best her and take the last Fenestros the Knights needed to cage Balavad. Then they could regroup and attack Balavad’s new vessel at the time of their choosing, with numbers, tactics, and strength their advantages.
But that would leave Vaka Aster, and Vinnr, vulnerable. And Balavad had never struck Ulfric as a creature who would be willing to let bygones be bygones, or one to fight fair. The brutal Verity might wipe Vinnr out in a short but final storm of wrath at losing his new pet, Knight Nazaria.
It had to be Vaka Aster first, Ulfric decided, and, placing the Fenestros back inside his pocket, he continued upward.
The citadel was all but abandoned, a skeleton crew left behind to see to essentials was all it contained. He wasn’t sure he’d have made it to the Verity chamber otherwise. It was difficult enough to pass for the human he wore when they were his ally, but when his host was fighting as actively as the Ecclesium was, he doubted he’d be able to say more than a few words to anyone he encountered without arousing suspicion. But once he laid the Domine Ecclesium’s hand on the Verity chamber’s door, he began to feel a sense of triumph.
Still, he had to be cautious. He was in the land of his enemy, and though any Ravener would be helpless against his Fenestros-empowered self, the Battgjald Verity wouldn’t.
The heavy iron door swung inward on nearly silent hinges. Ulfric stood before it and stared across the chamber at the gaudy raised throne he, as the vessel of Vaka Aster, had previously been expected to sit at.
At its base, a funerary table, much like Penitent Rock at the top of the outer citadel’s rampart steps, stood. He lay upon it, or rather, the vessel lay there. He only gave it one quick glance before searching the rest of the large space. This doorway was the only way in or out, aside from the high, steepled windows in the northern and southern walls, a hundred stories above the streets of Elezaran. The chamber itself was empty of people other than his host, himself, and Vaka Aster. Quickly stepping inside, he pushed the door closed and laid the thick bar across it to lock it.
Slowly, reverently, and more than a bit nervously, he approached the table. On one side stood a plinth, atop which sat a metal pitcher and several squat, unassuming clay goblets. He glanced inside the pitcher and knew its contents instantly. The consecration elixir that turned those who consumed it into Balavad’s playthings. The reason for its presence was obvious to Ulfric. Those who wished to swear their loyalty to Vaka Aster, or whatever Verity duress pressured them to choose, were prompted to drink a cup to seal their oath, and their fate.
His body was laid out, again, like a corpse prepared for its last viewing before being interred or sent to sail the eternal seas. The Dyrraks had adorned him in a robe made of some luxuriant white fur, a snowy mountain cat he thought. But that type of cat was only found in the mountains of Yor. How long had the Dyrraks had it? And how had they preserved it so remarkably, having last had dealings with Yor many hundreds of turns ago? Again, he lamented the rift between the kingdoms. Dyrrakium had so many secrets and skills that the realm as a whole would be better off sharing.
This held his focus for only the briefest moment, though, as he slid the Ecclesium’s eyes to look upon his own face. It should have been familiar, unsurprising, humdrum even. He’d seen those deep lines, those heavy, gray-shot, wiry eyebrows, that long, straight nose ending in a sharp point, and that nine-pointed star on his cleft chin every time he’d looked in a mirror for the last seventeen hundred turns. Yet… it wasn’t him, or if it was, it was merely a ghost of him.
His skin had faded to a colorless lead, and if he touched it, it looked like it would be as hard as iron. His eyes were open, startling him. Unlike the limpid flesh of his face and hands, which were crossed over his middle, his eyes burned with a kind of animus, the raging starlight of a furious galaxy spinning inside the orbs. The effect was mesmerizing, holding him frozen as he gazed at them.
Consequently, he did not hear the bar slide away from the door’s catch, nor the iron hinges as it swung inward.
“I did not summon you, Domine Ecclesium,” said a voice that cut Ulfric’s borrowed ears like knives.
He spun, dreading having to look into that ghastly face. Balavad had taken the form of a Battgjaldic woman, but it was still the Verity unquestionably. She stood unnaturally tall, a full two heads taller than Ulfric, with long arms and a surprisingly fragile, thin neck. Her hair, parted into multiple ropes and bound in metal beads, hung nearly to her waist, the tendrils looking more like a cat-o-nine-tails than hair. And the eyes, wide and as black as the void between stars, shined with an unholy light as they beheld his face, perhaps even his spirit.
“Your Holiness,” Ulfric said carefully, giving the charade his every effort. His host’s body was nearly vibrating with Ulfric’s effort to keep him at bay. “I came to bring you news of treachery.” Ulfric was gambling with what information he could use to get himself out of this fix. He didn’t wish to give away the chancellor’s interests and jeopardize her hold over the Dyrrak fleet, but the news of Sveinungr would get to the Verity eventually, he knew, if it hadn’t already.
Naturally, it had. There was no way to hide news from Balavad, who could look inside the minds of any who drank the consecration elixir. Yet the caveat to Balavad’s acknowledgment that she did know surprised Ulfric. “The Fifth Phase Sveinungr’s treachery is noted. No matter, though. The war fleet is hardly necessary to taking Ivoryss.”
Hardly necessary? Ulfric was disturbed. If the fleet was so unimportant, why… ? That was when he noticed the Ecclesium had fallen silent in their shared mind at last. No, not completely. There was a brittle laugh reverberating in his skull.
Alarmed and off balance, Ulfric refocused on Balavad when the slide of the Verity’s long robe brushed over the stone floor as she approached. Holding steady, he awaited her. When she came to a standstill before him, her cold, void-filled eyes gazed into his. And like her eyes, her breath against his face was cold when she spoke.
“But if you were you, Ecclesium, you would have known that.”
It wasn’t fear Ulfric felt exactly, nor even caution. He wondered if it was more like how a sparrow felt when it sensed the shadow of the hawk above it, a knowing that doom soared close, an acceptance of the futility in fighting nature that settled into its weightless bird bones and rapidly beating heart. In short, fate.
He gambled then, rejecting both futility and fate. “I do, of course, Your Holiness. I only bring the news to ensure your confidence in my loyalty.” And though futility, it seemed, had become his constant companion, he gambled further, hoping to deflect the Verity’s accusation regarding his identity: “And learn what new ways I might secure our prize of total dominion.” The Ecclesium’s mind was not totally open to Ulfric—the man was too canny for that—but Ulfric had gleaned enough, or perhaps he simply un
derstood the man enough, to know his pernicious ends.
The brittle laugh that came from his nemesis whipped over him, gouging into his flesh like fishhooks. Even though his skin wasn’t his own, the barbs raked his spirit nonetheless.
“A clever one. I should like to know to whom I’m speaking. Show yourself to me.”
A black vapor, one he was already too familiar with, oozed from the Verity’s own body. Oily, baleful, it encased him, eating at him, at the Ecclesium, like acid. The pain of it focused Ulfric’s mind like few other things could have, and he gritted his teeth against a groan. The game was up, and the fool had lost.
Or had he?
With an effort that felt herculean, Ulfric slammed his hands into his pockets, gripping the Fenestrii of two realms in them like a man clutching a tree in a cyclone. He channeled words into the Fenestrii, much like he would have his klinkí stones, to create a protective barrier between himself and the Verity. A glow of muted luminance faded into a visible spectrum, not around him, but from his borrowed skin. He felt its warmth and a moment of relief. But only a moment.
The hand holding the onyx Fenestros of Battgjald suddenly blazed, lit in flames that licked up the arm and incinerated the sleeve into instant ash. Ulfric cried out and jerked his arm up, dropping the burning celestial stone. It was not his arm, not his pain, yet every singed hair and cell of it might as well have been. His concentration dissolved. He felt torn like paper, one part of him wanting to reach out and clasp the injured limb as one would any wound, the other part of him reaching out with the burning hand, reaching toward the…
You have lost, Aldinhuus, the Ecclesium croaked and yanked the nearby pitcher of elixir to his lips, gulping down the contents in convulsive swallows.
The next thing either of them knew, the fiery arm was doused, the oily miasma of Balavad withdrawn. They blinked, now both sharing the Ecclesium’s form equally. Like the last time Ulfric had been tricked into drinking the contaminated elixir, it slid down their throat and into their stomach with the perfidious smoothness of deception. It had no taste, no temperature; it was the liquid of lies.
Once it settled inside him, the Ecclesium reeled, clenching his belly with clawed hands as if trying to rip it open and remove the poison now attacking him with saber-sharp slashes. Ulfric spared himself this time and retreated to an unfeeling corner of the man’s mind where he could watch and hear his transformation, but not pity him. The Ecclesium chose his destiny the moment he betrayed his maker. And he had chosen it freely.
Ulfric had ridden inside a Ravener before and knew what to expect from the altered senses. The part he most cringed from was feeling the slip of Balavad worming her way into their shared skull. He was discovered, no way to escape it now, but he was not yet caught.
Using the Himmingaze Fenestros to project his call with all the energy left for him to muster, he shouted: Yggo, Urgo, to the window of the citadel! I need you!
He just had to get this no-longer-usable meatsack to the window, and the bruhawks could fly him and the memory keeper to freedom.
With a last gasp as himself, the Ecclesium fell to one knee. To Ulfric’s horror, the Dyrrak clutched the memory keeper and ripped it from his neck so hard that several of the copper links in its chain broke. “Here… is the source… of his wysticism—Aldinhuus—” And he slammed the crystal-centered dragør edifice into the stone floors, cracking the crystal, destroying Ulfric’s one portal of escape.
Balavad watched impassively. As the Domine Ecclesium’s eyes blanched to the uniform flat slate of ancient, weathered stones, Balavad said, “And you have become a vessel yourself now, haven’t you, Ecclesium? Not of a Verity, but of a mere man. Either way, it’s a desire I think you never held. What power in being Vaka Aster’s servant when there is so much to be had in ruling her realm? And now, a servant to Aldinhuus. What this could lead to makes me more than a little curious.”
The Verity waved her hand, and in a fluid, unhesitating movement, the Ecclesium stood. Long-limbed, even more than his natural Dyrrak form, he stooped in a bow of subservience the man in life would never have taken. There he waited obediently for a command. He didn’t have to wait long.
“Stallari”—Balavad looked penetratingly into the lifeless gray eyes—“it pleases me to meet you again. I do think it fitting what, or who, you’ve become.” Without dropping her eyes, the Verity waved a hand suggestively toward the Ecclesium’s sheathed dagger. “But as I no longer have need of you, I no longer have need of the Dyrrak, either.”
Balavad gave another short wave, and the Ecclesium withdrew his dagger and brought it to his throat in a singular, swift motion, drawing it across the Phase-marked skin once, then again, then again, severing all but his spine. His blood, now black as pitch, gushed free in a torrent, and then his lifeless body hit the ground. The black blood pooled around the necklace Ulfric had once upon a time given as a token of his love to his only daughter, Isemay, who would never wear it again.
Chapter Thirty
Bandits or bears Mylla could handle. A gimgree sloth, though they had claws that could slice a woman in half, wasn’t something to worry about. Mylla would have smelled one of those before it could have gotten within fifty yards of her. And she doubted that Griggory, for all his peculiarities, would toy with her. So if he hadn’t vanished for the sake of fun, she had to prepare herself for quite its opposite.
She slid even deeper into the shadows, moving as soundlessly as a bird on the wing. Her hand slipped into a carryall hanging by her side, finding a strange comfort at touching the Fenestros she’d brought back from Ærd. Something was out there, something that felt big. And given where they were located, she didn’t have to stretch her imagination about what it might be.
What she knew of dragørs could be summed up in a page. Old as the realm, once the only sentient creatures in Vinnr, and nearly as powerful as Vaka Aster herself, they had retired to the wild corners of Vinnr ages ago, shunning humanity. The only people who regularly saw them in the common era were Ivoryss’s northernmost people, the Magdastervians, who’d built their city right up to the Howling Weald’s borders some thousands of turns ago—and had paid for the foolish decision more than once.
Through the Magdastervians’ history, they’d managed to avoid being wiped out by the creatures not because of a truce or by paying tributes to the great beasts. There was nothing the dragørs wanted from people anyway. They’d only managed to keep their city erected by having weapons large enough to slow a dragør, though none could stop them, which were crewed by fighters willing to stay behind and sacrifice themselves to the dragørs’ wrath long enough for the rest of the city’s people to escape into the sea. Dragørs shunned the ocean.
Magdaster had been leveled at least twice before the inhabitants had learned to stop encroaching on the Weald and leave the dragørs’ territory to the dragørs. As a result of existing in the shadows of the great beasts, and remaining alive at their whim, the Magdastervians Mylla had met always seemed to be a bit more keyed up and a bit more ready to solve problems with aggression than your typical Vinnric. Stave, shockingly, was perhaps the most reasonable of them, at least that she’d known, but she he couldn’t blame them for their brashness.
And now here she was, in the Howling Weald, and potentially being stalked by a dragør herself, and without even an emberflare petard, much less cannon, at her disposal.
Mylla had put about two hundred yards between herself and the campfire, hoping its light and smoke would keep the dragør’s attention off her, when she heard a noise so improbable that her mind was simply unable to interpret it—a man’s laughter. It seemed to be coming from north of their campsite and from higher up. In a tree, or perhaps a knoll. No, she told herself. You misheard. That must be a cry of fear… or pain. She had no idea what to do, but it had to be Griggory, and she couldn’t very well abandon him and run, could she?
Ever so slowly, unwilling to risk igniting even the dimmest of light through her Mentalios, she moved in a wide
arc through the underbrush toward the direction the noise came from. As she’d guessed, the ground rose at a mild slant, and the half-moon light showed a mound or berm continuing up into darkness. To her own ears, she made no more sound than what was typical of a forest at night, only the occasional crackle of a leaf or brush of cloth against the flora, which could easily be the sound of a small animal or wisp of breeze.
She’d been slinking along for an untold number of minutes, though it felt like hours, hearing nothing more. Was she too late? Had Griggory been killed or perhaps taken to a dragør den as a late-night snack? Before she could despair, another sound came to her, much closer than the laugh or cry of fear from earlier. A heavy, echoing grunt, like the sound of big ocean waves crashing inside a cavern as deep as the earth.
No matter how big she’d imagined dragørs to be, that sound came from something five times bigger. Her heart beat so hard, just once, that it seemed it would explode in her chest. Then it froze for a few beats and finally started to gallop. She sank down to her knees, trying not to gasp in fear. She’d faced death dozens of times. But she’d never faced a dragør.
As she tried to get ahold of the panic, the breeze picked up, making the trees rustle in the forest’s mild song, showering her with the woodsy scent of night-blooming vegetation. It was deceptively peaceful, and she wanted to simply wait here, letting the forest calm her and soothe her fears until morning, when Halla’s light would show her all was well. Griggory had simply wandered off, and she’d find him racked out against a tree trunk, snoring.
Stave would tell her to stop being fatuous, that wishes are for romantics and poor planners. But how did one plan for coming face-to-face with a dragør? All she had were her wystic stones, her hallowed sword—which might be more useful than a regular sword, if it could slice through scales, but was that an if she wanted to count on?—and the Ærd Fenestros.
