by Tammy Salyer
A screeching, pounding racket echoed through the ship’s interior, coming from something outside. No one had to tell the Glisternauts they’d collected an unwelcome passenger, probably one of the dragørs they’d just smashed into, but the situation quickly righted itself. A Weald dragør swooped over their bow, and a moment later, the ship vibrated teeth-rattlingly. They were familiar by now with the sensation and its cause: the Weald dragør had unleashed an inferno, knocking the crimson from its perch and giving the Horizon a good shaking.
As the crew gripped their seats and controllers, waiting for the shaking to subside, Knight Evernal reached out to Jaemus. Bardgrim, if you can, lead the dragørs out to sea. It’s their weakness, and it might slow them long enough to give us the upper hand.
So it’s a divide-and-conquer kind of strategy. I think we can do that, he sent back, and told Cote the plan as he and Knight Evernal shared a few more words.
Acknowledging Jaemus, Cote directed the ship toward the sea. It was an arduous turn, as the ship was still shaking from the Weald dragør’s blast. Fire had skimmed them several times by this point, but as long as the fire was indirect, the consequences hadn’t been severe. Up to now, they’d just needed to hold on to something stable until it passed.
But it didn’t pass. Far from it—the shaking worsened.
“Cote, C-Cote,” he stammered through his juddering jaw. “What’s happening?”
“I think we’ve lost our stabilizers.”
Jaemus didn’t have to ask what that meant. He’d designed almost every system aboard this ship, or improved on the old ones. He knew what happened when it couldn’t stabilize as well as he knew his birthday. (If you counted by Himmingazian cycles. He had no idea how that would translate in Vinnric turns. And why in the worlds was he thinking about his birthday when they were moments from becoming a plummeting-out-of-control metal coffin?)
“Take over my remotes, Heleina, Jae!” Now Cote was yelling. “I’ve got to… keep us…” His face was a mask of concentration, sweat was dripping freely from his hairline, and he leaned forward in his seat, controls in hand.
The ship suddenly dropped a hundred feet straight down. Jaemus’s stomach countered by rising so far into his throat he gagged. The straps holding him to his seat strained painfully, cutting into his shoulders and waist. Heleina gave a grunt and a curse that Jaemus found perfectly suited to the moment. Cote, quiet now, pulled back so hard on the main control stick that it appeared he was trying to wrench it from its moorings.
But they stopped falling. Instead, the tilted ninety degrees to the side, leaving all three crew members dangling from their seat straps.
“Over the ocean, Jae. Help me steer! If we’re going down, we might survive it if we’re over water.”
Jaemus was speechless. Might survive? What kind of muddleheaded nonsense was this?
Beside him, Heleina yelled, “I did not fly across the stars and risk the Council of Nine Crests charging me with treason for a ‘might survive’!” And she threw herself into operating the ship’s navigation systems with the verve of a live-at-all-costs zealot. Which seemed like a much better attitude than Cote’s silly “might die” to Jaemus, and he yanked himself closer to the controls, gripping the secondaries like a miser grips gold.
Fate threw them one bone, and that was their preset course toward the Verring Sea before they’d lost most of their controls. Through what he knew was more luck than skill, together they pulled the Horizon out of its vertical tilt enough to reach the water at an angle that allowed them to skate across it rather than cut straight in. The large Dyrrak sailing vessel that happened to be in their path served as the one thing that could slow their crash. Unfortunately for the Dyrraks, it was split into ragged halves in the process. Likewise, unfortunately for Jaemus and his crew, their impact with the ship finished the job of smashing their forward viewscreens.
Jaemus realized it would happen a second before it did, and yelled, “Get down!” Of course, he needn’t have. His fellow Himmingazians may not have been born fighters, but they were still survivors. Already they’d found safety by ducking behind their consoles, leaving Jaemus the last dunce to react.
The viewscreen disintegrated as they scythed through the Dyrrak ship and burst from the other side, moving comparatively sluggishly. Their skim across the Verring Sea ended a hundred yards from the already half-sunk Dyrrak ship, and they began to do the same, sinking like lead as water filled the bridge.
For the Dyrraks, drowning was a real threat. For Jaemus and his crew, it wasn’t even in the top ten of their concerns. Once Jaemus adjusted to the jarring calm of submersion enough to leave the safety behind the console, he released his seat harness, looked to his left to see Heleina doing the same, then looked to his right to see Cote—wasn’t moving. His lifemate floated in his seat like kelp in placid water. Blood rose languidly from a gouge on his head.
No, no, no, Jaemus thought and pulled himself to Cote’s seat. They’d been underwater for less than a minute, but he knew they couldn’t stay there. Himmingazians could survive in water, but that was it. He needed to get Cote to dry land to assess his wounds and do what he could to treat them. And he would be treating them, because there was no way in the Great Cosmos he was going to entertain the idea that Cote was dead.
This was confirmed, to his great relief, upon his grasping of Cote’s arms. The pulse in his wrists was strong and steady. He’d only been knocked out, nothing worse. Jaemus would have gleefully called it a day then and there, if not for the pesky war still being waged all around.
As he motioned to Heleina his intention to swim to the surface, something whooshed past him, something unseen but uneasily felt. At first he feared it was some ghastly unidentified Vinnric sea monster, then he remembered they weren’t the only ones aboard the Horizon. The stowaway flittercat Scintilla was with them. He felt the sensation of the underwater current created by their passenger as it passed through the shattered viewscreen. The flittercat moved impressively fast, and Jaemus, one arm linked around Cote’s back, followed.
Even before they broke the surface, he noted the vast amounts of debris from the murdered Dyrrak ship floating willy-nilly. This was a boon. They would have less chance of being spotted by survivors or crew of the other Dyrrak ships if they weren’t the only things bobbing around.
Bardgrim, are you there? It was Knight Evernal.
Depends on what you mean by “there,” he returned, too stunned and concerned for Cote to remember to be direct, as the Vinnrics seemed to prefer. Come to think of, as everyone he’d ever known did.
We saw your ship go down, Knight Evernal sent, and we’ll try to get to you as soon as we can. Just hold tight.
He planned to hold tight—he didn’t need to be told—to anything that would keep them afloat and alive. He and Heleina broke the surface, and he slowly spun around, taking in their situation.
It wasn’t good. In their last moments of trying to control the Horizon’s descent, they’d lost track of the remotes. These had gone down en masse without anyone to pilot them. Naturally, Jaemus had built in autodetector systems for such an event, and they’d self-piloted to the nearest dry-ground landing site. It was good that they were spared—Himmingaze would want them back, after all—though it was less and less clear if there would be anyone left to take them back. All this meant, however, was that Jaemus, Cote, and Heleina were surrounded by hundreds of enemy ships with none of their own nearby to aid their escape.
And that was when things went from bad to worse.
As Jaemus dragged Cote to a nearby floating bit of a wreckage and took hold, a shadow of ominous portent passed overhead. He knew it was no Dyrrak attacker without even looking. The shadow slid by like a serpent, not like a ship. Steeling himself, he raised his head for a look.
A crimson flew in the near distance and was already turning back for another pass. It sensed them, he knew it. But hadn’t Knight Evernal said they couldn’t fly over water? More pressing, was it searching for th
em? Would it see them? ’Gazians might be waterproof, but by no stretch of the imagination were they fireproof.
The crimson slid low over the water as if it were swimming through the air, its flight jogging slightly left and right, as if searching. Jaemus, too terrified to speak, motioned for Heleina to dive. But she’d already done that on her own. He pushed away from the wreckage to pull himself and Cote down too—but something held him up.
Frantically, he thrashed around, trying to free himself. He was snagged on the wreckage, and a moment later he discovered by what: the strap of the map case he still kept the Himmingaze Fenestros and Scrylle in.
He yanked the strap hard with one hand, holding Cote tightly to him with the other. But the strap was tougher than Stave’s kill-or-be-killed training regimen and wouldn’t break. He attempted to dive, but that was as useless as if he’d attempted to fly. The chunk of wood he was attached to must have been a mast or a beam, and pulling against it to try and yank it underwater with them was like trying to pull the sky into the sea. He only managed to roll it over so that now he was stuck ninety percent submerged, with only his and Cote’s heads breaking the surface. Was that enough to hide them?
Glancing sharply up, he saw the dragør closing in. The creature’s long neck was bent downward, its nostrils flared as it sniffed the water’s surface. And it was no longer zigzagging. It was coming directly toward him.
He couldn’t escape, and if he released Cote to sink from sight, his lifemate could be lost in the turbulent, debris-strewn water. He might never find him. But if he didn’t let him go, they would both be crispy dragør snacks in a moment.
Water and lightning, his mind yammered. Water and lighting, andwaterandlightning, and he closed his eyes, the last voluntary action he believed he would ever take.
As he drew his last breath, the sea around him and Cote rocked and frothed. The dragør, it must be the dragør. Despite his unwillingness, his eyelids shot open on their own, cruelly forcing him to witness their doom as his final foe attacked. But that wasn’t what he saw.
To his stunned, uncomprehending eyes, it appeared that somehow he and Cote had been encased in a crystal prism. The light bent around them, distorting and magnifying the sky and what floated beyond. The trick of perception almost convinced him that he could reach out and touch the clouds above, which seemed only inches away.
Boggled, his mind wondered momentarily if this was what happened when you died. But at the same time, he wasn’t so sure he was dying. Because, after all, the dragør had stopped its flight toward them and resumed a back-and-forth pattern, as if it had lost sight of its prey.
Needle-sharp nails sank into the back of his neck. Amazingly, the sensation didn’t even startle him. He knew the feeling well enough by now. Scintilla was back, using Jaemus as his own personal flotation device.
The words of Commander Nennus flitted through his mind then: Flittercats can bend light. If they want to be seen, they will be. If not…
Jaemus turned his head to one side, chancing to hope he might catch sight of the cat, who it turned out, had just risen in rank from “nuisance” to “greatest and most wonderful being in the Great Cosmos.” The strange perception of magnification intensified right in front of his eyes, and he knew that though he couldn’t see Scintilla, the creature was right there.
“You just saved our hides, boy. I don’t even care if you were doing it for Cote more than me. But I promise on my glint engineer honor that I’ll get you so much veeshock for this that it’ll be as high as a mountain, and you’ll be able to sit at the very peak and reign over all the other flittercats.”
From his shoulder came the deep, throaty rumble signaling the flittercat’s pleasure.
“Me too, Scintilla. Me too.”
Chapter Forty
The crimsons could fly over water. It was inconceivable. Mylla didn’t know much about dragør lore, few who lived in these times did, but Noble Inferno herself had said dragørs couldn’t abide the sight of their own reflections. What had gone wrong? And by the Verities, how were they supposed to fight creatures who apparently had no weakness?
As she watched Jaemus’s ship dive into the Verring Sea in the midst of hundreds of their enemies, her stomach bottomed out with it. The realization that not only had their one advantage turned out to be a fanciful, empty wish, but worse, that she was currently helpless to go to her companion’s aid sucked her faltering spirits into a dense, bleak fugue.
Panic-struck, she sent: Bardgrim, are you there?
Depends on what you mean by “there,” her fallen friend answered immediately. He sounded stunned, but he was alive, and that was enough to tentatively arrest her plunging hopes.
We saw your ship go down, and we’ll try to get to you as soon as we can, she assured him. Just hold tight. To Noble Inferno, she asked, “What happened, why didn’t the water stop the Anzuru dragørs?”
They no longer see in the way the rest of us do…
Noble Inferno sounded puzzled, and Mylla realized the reasons didn’t matter. What did was saving her companion, if it was even possible. “Please,” she said, “tell the Weald dragørs to keep the crimsons at bay and let no more out to sea. We must protect the Himmingazians too.”
The other-worlders? They merely need to rejoin their leader, this Mystae Bardgrim, and go home.
Please, she pleaded. This is a fight for more than Vaka Aster, and they have as much at stake as we do.
The dragør huffed what Mylla hoped was assent, and that was the best she could hope for. But she didn’t dwell on Noble Inferno’s recalcitrance, especially not since what she was suggesting was what Mylla had in mind anyway.
If they couldn’t beat the crimsons, then they would expel them from the fight.
She’d already realized that, and her allies had to find some way to even, or better, to improve, their odds. After all, it was one of the first lessons Ulfric had ever taught her at the Conservatum when she was still a recently parentless child. At first, she’d been frightened by his size and his stern glares, but that fear had quickly given way to affection when he came to collect her from her room one day, not for a class, but to play the game called dark stars. It was a game of throwing skills, where each contender had several white stones and half as many dark stones. The object was to collect everyone else’s stones by being the best at throwing one’s own into a small bucket held by a Prelate statue that rose from the grand fountain in the Conservatum’s central courtyard. Everyone had to stand at the same distance, but if you chose to throw a dark stone, you were allowed to step closer. If you chose to throw two, you could stop closer still. If you missed, you lost your advantageous dark stones, as well as many white ones. If you made the shot, you collected everyone else’s who had missed, thus gaining more dark stones and the opportunity to throw from an easier distance.
Collecting the most dark stones, Ulfric had taught her, was how you bettered your odds. “First and foremost, Mylla, remember that you can never count on luck or skill, but you can almost always count on the odds. Strengthening the odds in your favor, that’s the real skill. Study your counterparts, learn how to improve your odds, and then you’ll have the most advantages.”
Upon discovering just how dangerous, not to mention numerous, their foe was, the deep recesses of her mind brought the old lesson to the fore, searching for a way to tilt the odds in Vinnr’s favor. The Vinnric defenders couldn’t get any more powerful or any more numerous—they had no air or water fleet to call on, Yor could never get to them in time, and the army in Asteryss was already on their last leg. The hundred or so Weald dragørs were by no stretch a negligible force, but their code against harming their own kind and the indefatigability of the Ravener dragørs meant the defenders’ only remaining option was to be wilier than their foe. Through wile, Mylla had hit upon the way to diminish their enemies’ number, and thereby, their strength.
Boxing up her fears for Bardgrim and shoving them to a corner of her mind temporarily, she reached out to th
e Knights. Roibeard, are you there?
For the moment, Mylla.
Who has the Vinnr Scrylle?
It’s with us. Were you able to find Ærd’s?
She heaved a sigh. Someday her impetuousness was going to be the death of her. No. Well, yes, kind of—it’s a long story. But I know what we must do if we’re going to stop the Dyrraks and their pet dragørs.
A heavy, displeased growl rumbled through Noble Inferno all the way up to where she sat between the creature’s horns. Call dragørkind “pets” once more, speck, and I may forget you are an ally.
My deepest and most humble apologies, Master Inferno. She was finding that as her familiarity with the creature grew, her fear of her lessened. Or perhaps she’d simply run out of room for that particular terror. Roi? she went on, not even pausing long enough for Noble Inferno’s response.
We’re here, he said. I think I can guess what you’re planning.
If it’s to send them out of Vinnr altogether by starpath, you know me well.
Mylla, we do that and we’ll only be putting the folk of other realms in danger. These creatures are controlled by a master who desires control of the whole Cosmos. We’d just be doing Balavad a favor by sending his Raveners and dragørs into an unprepared, hapless realm.
No, that’s not entirely true, Roi. There’s one realm that has nobody left for Balavad to harm. Ærd.
There was a brief pause, then: Are you saying he’s already taken Ærd over?
In a sense. There’s no life left there, save… Save the tessalopes, but how could she explain them to Roibeard and the rest of her companions, especially since she hardly understood what they were herself?
Save what?
Never mind. There’s no one there. I think there was a war. It swept through the realm, and that’s why I’m in Vinnr to begin with… but now isn’t the time to go into that. We’re coming to the walls. I need the Scrylle. I’ll be able to move through the battle with Noble Inferno and open the starpaths to reduce their numbers quickly. She’d only just learned the trick to summoning the starpaths, but Eisa used one to exile Mylla to Himmingaze, so she knew it could be done. She just had to figure out how and hope that the fact that Vinnr depended on her would be all the boost she’d need. It’s the only option we have, Roi.
