Knight Awoken

by Tammy Salyer

  He seemed amused by that, infuriatingly so. “Something, yes. Or I’ll simply be silenced in other what I assume would be unpleasant ways. I don’t know, really. I haven’t tempted that fate.”

  She stared at him incredulously for another moment, then rose from her seat, considered picking up the Scrylle and its inset Fenestros, decided she wanted no more to do with them for the moment, and reached for her carryall.

  “Well?” Griggory said. “Are you going back to Ærd, then? As Fimm requested?”

  The look she shot him was so filled with ire that it tainted the air for a moment. But her ire wasn’t directed at him. “No. No, I’m not. I’ve had enough of the Verities. If we want to save Vinnr and the other realms, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. You know what the Scrylle said: ‘Fimm’s last vessel will sing the Syzyckí Elementum and bring the destruction of destruction, the rending and sewing, the end of the five.’” She gripped Star Spark’s hilt angrily. “Fimm told me the truth. The Scrylle will show me how to stop Balavad. If I take the artifacts back to Fimm, it’ll be the end of the five realms, and Balavad will have nothing left to destroy. I don’t know whether to be more amused by the irony or contemptuous of it. The Knights and I may be as powerless as insects next to Balavad’s strength, but even the Verities and their limitless cruelty aren’t strong enough to kill my hope. If they want to end the Cosmos, they’ll have to do it on their own. I won’t help them, not anymore. Until then, I’m going to fight for my companions and our worlds.”

  And that was that. She’d said it aloud, her oath and duty be damned. If any Verity truly cared about such a thing, then let them strike her down here and now for her faithlessness. She’d put her faith in them, and in her oath, in the belief, however wrong it had been, that the pact was two-sided; she and the Knights had protected the creators in return for their protection. If anyone was to be accused of faithlessness, it was them. And she was done.

  She said as much to Griggory, who merely looked at her with his inscrutable expression. If he was disappointed, it didn’t show. Was he surprised? Unsurprised? If so, whichever it might have been was equally unreadable on his grizzled face. For the first time, Mylla noticed that his mark of Vaka Aster, the nine-pointed star on his chin, was faded to a light blue-green, so faint it could be mistaken for a smudge of dirt. Nothing, it seemed, lasted forever. Not even an oath.

  When she was done speaking, instead of trying to talk her out of it, he merely said, “So what will you do?”

  “I’m going to Magdaster to join the Knights.” The deeper meaning of his use of “you” instead of “we” struck her then. “And you?”

  She may not have been able to read any surprise on his face, but she was sure it was unmistakable on hers when he said, “I believe Heart of Purple Might and I will stay… behind. For a time.” He eyed the Scrylle pointedly, still perched on the ground between them.

  Guessing at his intent, she said, “Take it. Go to Ærd if that’s what you want to do. But if you have any faith in our fight left, you won’t. Regardless, I’m through with Fimm, with all of them.”

  His lips curled in a small smile. “Thank you, thank you. But don’t you feel the artifacts might be useful to you?”

  “You seem to know the future, Griggory. You tell me.” She tried to disguise the rancor in her voice, which was slowly seeping back, but failed.

  He merely blinked at her a couple of times, then bent to retrieve the artifacts. “At least keep the other Fenestros,” he averred. “A celestial stone is a celestial stone, after all.”

  True enough. And so, this was where they parted. Though she’d known him only briefly, he was a Knight and in most ways the very heart of Vinnr’s history. Realization that she would regret never seeing him again, if indeed this was the last time she would, struck her. “What do you want me to tell the others?” she asked, her voice softer.

  “That I’ll see them when the time is right, of course.” He looked up at the sky, as if something caught his eye. When she followed his gaze, she saw nothing. “The time,” he repeated.

  “Until then, I guess.”

  “Yes.” He dipped his chin in a farewell.

  With that, she turned and paced toward the edge of the glade, intent on first retrieving the rest of her meager belongings at the campsite they’d set up the night before, then on returning to the byway and back to where she belonged. With the Knights.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  In the Anzuru Desert, some hundred miles south of Elezaran, the capital city of Dyrrakium, a figure strode purposefully and with a haste that few people could manage for more than a few steps. The figure held itself erect, militantly so, and paced with missile-like certainty. Any who might have crossed the figure’s path would immediately have chosen to step aside before being trampled, because there was no doubt whoever this was was on a mission and would never let something as insignificant as another person get in their way.

  Her Stygian hair fell in a long braid down her back, now dusted liberally with red powder from the endless sands of Dyrrakium, so thick in many places that it stained both the braid and her clothing like blood. The glaive she carried in her hand flashed brutally beneath Halla, its edge so keen it seemed to slice the very air as she passed through. The woman stared straight ahead, neither blinking nor breathing, and even her eyes had a dried crust of red sand coating them.

  Yet, she did not falter, did not feel. For the figure who once was called Eisa Nazaria, Nazarian Most High and Heir of the Sixth Line, was no longer the inhabitant of the body that bore her face. Or if she was, she was buried deeper inside than any ancient ruin had ever been buried in Dyrrakium’s thousands of turns of history. She was simply a vessel, a tool, borne forward with unearthly power by Balavad’s artifacts that, like Dyrrakium’s ruins in its soil, lay buried deep in her chest.

  Uneasy whispers traipsed through what could still be called, though loosely, her mind. Of Ulfric Aldinhuus, who had somehow slipped through Balavad’s fingers, along with the Knight called Symvalline Lutair, and had even meddled in Arc Rheunos, a realm that had been destined to fall during the last Equifulcrum. Somehow Balavad’s plans there had been discovered, thwarted, and ruined. Mithlí once again passed freely through the Great Cosmos, and Mithlí’s freedom meant one thing, one unthinkable thing: only by keeping the other four Verities shackled and banished from their realms would the Syzyckí Elementum be avoided; if they were all free, Balavad’s designs on Cosmos supremacy would come to nothing.

  But they weren’t all free. The dried and cracked lips on Eisa’s face split in what might have once been a smile but was now a rictus filled with jagged teeth that would make children wail in terror. Vaka Aster, for one, was still trapped fast in the shell of Ulfric Aldinhuus’s body.

  Hours passed as the whispering continued, and Halla began to drop under the horizon. The glinting red sands became a virtual sea of blood, but the figure of Eisa was undaunted and unwavering in her progress. For blood was what she’d been sent to Anzuru for. Getting closer to the foothills leading to the high peaks and aeries of the southern mountains, Balavad’s whispered thoughts did not stray from focus, focus on Aldinhuus.

  Perhaps the Stallari of the Knights Corporealis’s absence from his old body was a boon, an unforeseen advantage. It left Vaka Aster completely without a link to the outside. In every way, Aldinhuus’s body was a prison, and without him there with Vaka Aster, the prison could not be altered, moved, or undone. The farther Aldinhuus was from Vaka Aster, the better, in fact. If not for the fact that the insufferable human had undone all of Balavad’s ages of work in Arc Rheunos…

  An enormous shadow darker than the darkening sky swept over Eisa. Any normal person would have dropped to the red earth, cowering in fear. Only one thing in these far reaches of the Empire of Dyrrakium had a shadow like that, and it was not a thing that suffered encroachment by any wandering human.

  But Eisa was not any wandering human. Her striding ceased and she looked up to search the sky f
or her visitor. Her prey.

  There, a dragør, one of the fire-red species that lived in these southern reaches of Vinnr. It circled back overhead, having already made its assessment of her, and from this distance, Balavad could see through Eisa’s eyes it was coming back, ready to make a meal or an example, or both, of the intruder. Deep in Eisa’s mind, Balavad had a moment of what passed for smug triumph. The creature did not recognize what he was, not yet.

  It began to dive, its speed increasing so fast that a normal human would already be squeezed in its great claws before that person could think to react. To Balavad, the descent was nearly languid, giving him plenty of time to observe through Eisa’s eyes the creature as it came at him.

  Two things occurred in a blink of an eye that were odd enough to momentarily unsettle Balavad. First, a voice, the voice of his host, Knight Nazaria, burbled from some sunken, tightly contained hollow space in her mind. Flee, before it’s too late! Balavad had believed her spirit utterly quelled and chained inside a pit too deep to ever emerge from again, much less have the sensibilities to still grasp the world around her. To whom was she calling? The dragør, he realized when the next thing happened a moment later. It was subtle, a shift. Perhaps not in the diving dragør’s features but in its aura or its thought. It hesitated, hearing the warning.

  But the creature’s descent had already brought it much too close to the Verity. Eisa’s arms raised the glaive Fate Forger, a hallowed weapon, at the same moment the jet-black Fenestros in her chest began to incandesce. White fire arced through the air between the Fenestros and the shaft of the glaive like lightning, coalesced briefly in the heavy blade, then shot from the weapon into the dragør’s chest. The creature blazed in a ball as bright as Halla for a moment and flapped its wings in an effort to stall its drop or escape that scything fire. To no avail. It thumped to the earth hard enough to raise a cloud of red sand, the light from Eisa’s glaive making it glow like crimson stardust. White bands of fire spread over the creature, tightening like ropes until the dragør was immobilized. It raged and thrashed, but the more it fought, the tighter the fire bands grew around it. It bellowed and belched fire at its captor, but Eisa’s form never moved. She merely stood inside the dragørfire as one might a light fog, untouched and unmoved.

  After some time passed, the dragør stilled, catching its breath. It was wrapped like a spider’s victim lying on its side, the bands of wystic fire holding it crackling. Balavad commanded Eisa toward the creature. It eyed her with a wrath that itself burned, but stayed in place. It was not a stupid creature; it knew when it was outmatched.

  From a pocket, Eisa’s free hand withdrew a small smoked-glass vial. The liquid inside appeared nearly purple through the darkened glass. She pulled the cork free and held the vial up, as if making a toast. Words slipped into the air, spoken in a tongue foreign to most Vinnrics, and to the dragør, their shapes blunt and hard. The vial’s contents rose as vapor and began to pour like oil-smoke from the container, moving toward the dragør like a stalking snake. The dragør tried to squirm free of its bonds, unwilling to be touched by the wystic elixir. It drew in a deep breath, readying to once more attempt to inflame its captor. As the dragør inhaled, the smoky elixir, as if finding its target, arrowed into the dragør’s nostrils. The beast’s eyes shot open wide, it roared, and a moment later, went limp. With the slowness of congealing blood, the creature’s eyes hardened and glazed into a featureless gray orb.

  The figure of Eisa waited several moments, then, satisfied, she lowered her glaive and the wystic bands of white fire drew back toward the Fenestros in her chest and extinguished.

  “You are now mine to command,” she said. Any who’d known Eisa in her lifetime would have struggled to recognize the rough, reedy tone.

  The dragør rose to a crouch and lowered its head until its jaw rested on the ground before her feet, its neck laid bare. If the Verity using Eisa had wanted, he would only have had to swing the glaive once to sever the dragør’s head. But that was not his design. For now, he was done using Eisa to pace through the desert; instead, he’d ride.

  He had more dragørs to catch.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  In the early summer heat of Halla, Symvalline paced back and forth along the highest walkway of Magdaster’s outer curtain wall. As she walked, she scanned the ocean spreading in the western distance. Soon she stopped in the same place she’d stopped several dozen times in the last three days, chewing her lower lip in concern and no small amount of anticipation.

  “Why haven’t they attacked?” she said, peering with rapt attention at the amassed fleet of nearly a thousand Dyrrakium ships anchored off the Magdastervian coastline.

  Though she’d come to a halt beside Mallich Roibeard, he had no response. It was the same question they’d all shared since their enemy’s fleet had arrived three sunrises prior. Arrived, and done nothing. They merely bobbed at anchor in the crescent-shaped bight cut into the shores at the farthest edge of Magdaster’s great wall. No Dyrrak ambassadors came to sue for either peace or surrender. No warning shots were fired to signal their intent. No Dyrrak airborne attackers were launched to begin battle or even to scout the walls. They simply floated there, out of range of Magdaster’s emberflare cannons, but not out of sight of those who watched from the walls. Symvalline’s concerns were Mallich’s too, and though he didn’t pace, the same bottomless well of anxiety curdled in his gut.

  “Why hasn’t Ulfric returned?” she added. This time, she turned her gray eyes to him, their color different to Mallich’s but similar in shape. His eyes were a leonine brown but, like hers, lay deeper in their sockets above wide, heavy cheekbones. They shared these traits with most other Yorish, as they did their measured calm, but even that was starting to crack.

  “I suppose we shouldn’t lose track of the one good that’s come of this,” he said, skirting the subject of Ulfric’s whereabouts. “The longer they wait to attack, the more likelihood there is Bardgrim and his Glisternauts will get here in time.”

  The side of her mouth curled up. Whether in gladness or doubt, though, was hard to say. “You know the Himmingazian better than I, Mallich. Do you really think him capable of delivering on such an unlikely guarantee?”

  Mallich released a snort, not of condescension but of assurance. “That other-worlder is nothing if not capable of truly astonishing surprises. Even if he can’t deliver an air fleet and a selection of Himmingazians willing to fight for Vinnr, he may well bring on something we couldn’t even guess at. I wouldn’t write him off for anything.”

  Symvalline sighed. “I’d like to be glad of your certainty.”

  “Do.”

  With a nod, she said, “I know you don’t know what’s become of Ulfric any more than I do, but I’m trying to tell myself that the Dyrraks are as they are because of him. It’s possible he’s persuaded them not to fight, though I don’t know how that could be. Or he’s hamstrung them in some way. Whatever it is, I’m not sure how much longer I can take the waiting.”

  “Have you thought on what we should do if he doesn’t return? We are in no position to take the battle to them.”

  Though she hated to hear the words “if he doesn’t return” spoken about Ulfric, she didn’t begrudge Mallich’s saying them. They were Knights and had to be realistic if they were going to fulfill their duties. “No, I know. But even once the battle begins, if it does, we’re of little use here at all. The Knights, I mean. Perhaps we should consider taking the interrealm well to Dyrrakium—with or without Ulfric. With Vaka Aster’s Fenestrii and the incantation Ulfric taught us, any of us can cage Balavad. That is where the end of this war will be found. It may even save countless lives if we’re able to achieve it before the Dyrraks launch their campaign against Magdaster.”

  “We only have two of Balavad’s celestial stones, Sym. Even if we could enter Dyrrakium unseen, even if we could find and somehow surprise Balavad’s vessel, we’d still need two more of his Fenestrii.”

  “Eisa has one
…” She trailed off, knowing the subject of Eisa would touch a bare nerve. “And another, maybe both, of his remaining stones is sure to be there. It would just be a matter of stealth and secrecy and some luck to find them. We could prevail, but not if we continue to sit here waiting for doom to strike first.” Waiting for Ulfric to be lost to me forever, her mind added disagreeably.

  “I fear what would happen to Eisa if we were to remove the stone from her more than I fear the Dyrraks or Balavad himself,” Mallich said simply, an uncommon husk to his voice.

  Symvalline tilted her eyes toward him, sympathy drawing her to him, as any healer’s would. But her sympathy went deeper than a healer’s; it went the depth of a friend’s.

  Though neither had looked back, they’d both noted two sets of footsteps approaching from behind, and Stave’s gruff voice broke in: “Any change?”

  Safran stepped beside Symvalline on the right and Stave beside Mallich on the left, the new arrivals gazing over the battlements too.

  “Nothing to note,” Mallich said.

  Sym, we heard your thoughts about attempting to infiltrate Dyrrakium covertly, Safran sent to them all. While I echo your impatience and see the advantage in bringing the fight to Balavad, I wonder at the wisdom of it. Until we know what’s become of Ulfric, any action we take could be putting him in jeopardy. And he advised we wait for him here.

  “I know, of course, I know.” Symvalline sighed.

  “Might be that he’s the Stallari and likes to tell us what to do, and might be that he’s got himself some smart wystical way to control people like puppets and such, but he’s still your man, isn’t he?” Stave gruffed. “And I know if your roles were reversed, Ulfric would dig through a mountain with his bare hands to get to you if he feared for your safety. Rook’s balls, I’d tear this here wall down myself brick by brick if it came between me and Safran, and Roi would too… if he had a heartmatch, that is.” Stave looked at Mallich’s stony features and cocked a grizzled eyebrow. “Why is it you never found someone, then, Roi? You’d think in fifteen hundred turns you’d have had the time, you would.”