by Terah Edun
“So the ship’s here,” Ciardis said while leaning over the railing, “Maradian’s alive. Does that mean Sebastian’s father also lives?”
Mentally, Ciardis thought hard. Everything seemed to come back to this blasted ship. Everything was predicated on it. Though that was something she already knew. She was impatient to learn why she’d come back and seen this memory of all the ones Vana could have hidden. She even wondered if the memories were more potential visions than actual experiences, since they kept coming back to the warehouse, but at this point she wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.
She did know that everything that she had learned so far was critical to the mission they were on right now. Taking down the emperor had become paramount.
Vana raised a curious eyebrow. “What makes you think that?”
Ciardis looked directly at her. “An emperor’s death would be felt through the land, isn’t that what you said?”
Vana grimaced. “An unplanned and unprepared-for death of the head of the Algardis family might. From what we’ve learned about Maradian, he’s been in power for at least a decade, maybe more. I wouldn’t be surprised if he planned his own fake death and that of his brother’s as well. But that is neither here nor there.”
Unplanned, the mental Ciardis thought. That word choice was deliberate, but what does it mean? What are the implications?
Neither of the actual participants in this memory responded to her, however. They kept conversing as if she wasn’t there, though to be fair, she wasn’t.
Young Ciardis nodded. “This ship, however, is here. If we can’t use it to kill Maradian, then we need to use it to expose him.”
Vana nodded grudgingly. “It’s about the only leverage you have on him at the moment.”
Well, well, Ciardis thought. So no killing the imposter emperor. If not that, then how do we expose him?
Eyeing the fully-sized and assumedly functioning ship in front of them, Ciardis said, “Other than this particular ship’s connection to the imperial family, this Kasten ship must be important in some other form to us.”
Vana nodded. “That’s the right way to think about it, and may well lead to whatever it is we’re overlooking.”
Ciardis crossed her arms and said in a leading tone, “If that’s the case, whatever we know about the ship could lead us to a way around Maradian. Even the littlest detail…of course, we could discuss it after I get back from Kifar.”
She looked at Vana out of the corner of her eye. Waiting to see if the logic was working. Vana must not have looked too impressed, because the younger Ciardis’s voice dipped in hesitation as she plowed on. “That’s if I come back from Kifar.”
“You’re not very subtle, you know,” said Vana.
The younger Ciardis turned to look at the combined Vana-and-Ciardis directly as she stated, “Whatever gets the job done, because we’re running out of time.”
The mental Ciardis almost cackled in amusement. Well done, young me.
“Fine,” Vana said with a sigh. “Here’s what I know. After the founding of the empire, and in accordance with the dragon-human peace agreements, Kasten ships and their builders were outlawed. Anyone from the Western Isles with the knowledge and skill to build them were executed or exiled.”
Ciardis blinked. “The Western Isles? What do they have to do with this?”
“Their people were great sea mages. Those mages were the only ones capable of both investing a ship with an almost indestructible exterior,” Vana said with tense breaths, “as well as constructing it so that it would work with a mage to ensure that passengers and crew were able to navigate the deep and magical ocean unharmed.”
“Oh,” said Ciardis.
“The first emperor threatened to bring an army of humans down upon the coasts of Sahalia with his fleet of Kasten ships,” said Vana, “just before the treaty was signed—hence their importance.”
“And the dragons gave us Algardis to stop that?” Ciardis said with wide eyes.
“Not precisely,” said Vana with grimace while shooting her an irate look. “Really, did you study at all?”
Ciardis glared. “Enough to snag a patron.”
Muttering something about gods and idiots, Vana continued with a sigh, “Suffice it to say, the emperor agreed to destroy his entire fleet of Kasten ships if the ruler of Sahalia agreed to not take any more human slaves, by force or free will, to her lands. The treaty was signed on the back of that agreement.”
Ciardis blinked. “It does sound terribly important.”
“Which is why seeing this here is so flummoxing,” Vana whispered in disbelief. “Just the presence, if known, could start a war with Sahalia.”
Weakly, Ciardis said, “But it’s just one ship.”
Vana shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. One is all we’d need to cross the oceans again.”
“With just a few hundred souls,” Ciardis said. “Surely that’s not enough to threaten Sahalia.”
Vana turned to look at Ciardis’s dark eyes. “You tell me. Wasn’t it you and one other person who conjured the net of Sauras in the sky and killed a dragon?”
Ciardis gaped. “You know about that?”
“The entire city saw that, Ciardis,” snapped Vana.
“Right, well, point made,” Ciardis said hastily.
Meanwhile, mental Ciardis was back to being flummoxed. If we can’t kill Maradian or the ship, what the heck are we going to do with it?
Apparently Vana was wondering the same thing, or at the very least trying to prod the younger Ciardis in that line of direction.
Sighing, Vana said, “Maybe the key is in how it was discovered. How did you find it?”
Younger Ciardis shrugged. “Do you remember when the emperor agreed to send me two of the princess heir’s possessions in order to discern her activities in the Ameles Forest?”
“Yes,” Vana said testily while rubbing her brow.
“One of those objections led us here,” Ciardis said, staring down upon the ship with her hands gripping the platform rail tightly. “To be fair, I don’t think the emperor knew what the contraption was or what it would lead to.”
“He most certainly did not,” Vana said tightly.
Ciardis turned to her with raised eyebrows. “How do you know?”
“Because he would have killed you the moment he found out you had this in your possession.”
Ciardis didn’t have to think twice about that. From what they knew, even with their inability to kill Maradian with it, the ship was an obvious weakness in Maradian’s armor, politically and magically.
After a moment Vana asked quietly, “If you didn’t have any clue to its true potential as a weapon or even a political disturbance, why did you bring me here, Ciardis? And don’t tell me it’s because you wanted a back-up secret keeper. I’m not here for childish games.”
“Fine,” Ciardis said. “I wanted you here because Thanar is the only other person who’s seen this ship, and for reasons of his own he didn’t tell me everything.”
“The only other person?” Vana asked.
She looked at Ciardis as if she could see into her very soul and knew she was lying.
Mental Ciardis grimaced. How did she know?
“All right, maybe one other person?”
“Who?”
“Raisa,” said the younger Ciardis with a wince. Mental Ciardis was wondering if she had always been this much of a pushover. She didn’t have a clue, but she for darned sure knew that she wasn’t actually guilty of anything nefarious. After all, Ciardis hadn’t actually brought woman here. She’d shown up all on her own.
“The ambassador from Sahalia?” gasped Vana.
Ciardis looked around and back. “There’s not another.”
“Now is not the time to get snippy, Ciardis,” Vana said with an audible groan. “This grows worse with every minute that you tell it. Why would you bring a dragon queen to the resting place of the only weapon we have capable of reaching their home shor
es?”
Mental Ciardis looked on in disbelief as this conversation got worse and worse. When put that way…there really wasn’t any excuse. The strange thing was that she remembered Vana warning her of the dangers of telling anyone else about the ship when they’d come here before, and even then she hadn’t told her about Raisa.
What is going on? she had to wonder. Maybe it’s an altered timeline, or maybe my other memory was the wrong one?
She didn’t like this. She felt like she was second-guessing the very essence of who she was. If she couldn’t trust her own memories, what could she trust?
Mental Ciardis tried to refocus her attention. So she came back in time to see her younger self replying to Vana’s inquiries.
The younger Ciardis said weakly, “I swear on Lillian, I had nothing to do with the dragon queen’s presence. She showed up and led us in.”
Vana paused. “So she knew where it was?”
“Maybe,” Ciardis replied. “She was already in the shadows of the doorway when we got there.”
Vana nodded. “Did she make any threats?”
“No,” said Ciardis shortly.
“This ambassador’s an unknown,” Vana said. “Where is she now?”
The question almost sounded like a murmur, but Ciardis answered anyway. “I don’t know, but I do know this—the last time I saw Raisa, she said she would only help us in our fight against the bluttgott if the emperor was ‘on-board’ with our plan.”
“So in short, we have no idea what the dragon is planning, how to leverage this Kasten ship against the emperor, or even if we should try to leverage it at all and instead give it to him,” Vana said.
“Give it to him?” Ciardis gasped. “Why in a fool’s errand would we do that?”
Vana eyed her askance. “If Raisa reports the presence of this ship to her empress, the empire will be fighting a war on two fronts. One against the bluttgott and another against the dragons. And believe me, you don’t want that. It was the dragons who unleased the gods on us in the first place.”
Ciardis blanched. “Meaning?”
“Meaning that they’ve been known to toy with gods in their own bids for power,” Vana said flatly. “Never play a game with dragons. You’ll lose.”
Vana’s mental passenger didn’t have a chance to hear more than the ominous warning. She felt herself yanked back just as Vana finished the words. Ciardis left even more conflicted than when she had first dropped in, and what’s more—she was frightened.
If Vana’s memory was correct, Raisa was playing a game that none of them could afford to see come to fruition. Because it didn’t spell the end of one empire, it spelled the doom of two.
23
As Ciardis emerged from the memory, her stomach was in turmoil and Vana was nowhere to be seen. Stumbling over to a bench, she put her head in her hands and groaned.
Aloud, she muttered, “What is going on?”
Fortunately for her, even though she didn’t have the answer, someone else did.
Sebastian walked up and handed her a red apple with a brisk, “Here’s lunch.”
When she looked up at him with a raised eyebrow, he said, “Trust me, it’s late enough, and yes, that counts as lunch. I’ll see if we can get something else at—”
His voice trailed off when he got a clear look at her face.
Before he could say anything worse, though, she smiled softly and said, “Thanks, I was wondering where you were.”
Sebastian sat down next to her abruptly. “Tell me.”
She didn’t even have to explain that something was wrong. He just knew.
She told him about her morning adventures with Vana, and Sebastian cursed.
By the time she was done, Ciardis felt the sharp pangs in her stomach that indicated that an apple was in fact just what was needed.
“Any idea where Vana is?” Sebastian quickly asked.
Ciardis shook her head. “No, she was gone when I awakened. No word. No warning.”
She kept munching on her apple as Sebastian looked around for a lurking assassin in the corners. When he found none, Ciardis said, “We need to find her. Maybe Jason’s people can help?”
“Good idea,” Sebastian said. “We might ask them to look for Raisa while they’re at it.”
Then they heard a roar. A roar that could only mean one thing. They raced back to the courtyard.
When they arrived, the ambassador was standing on a balcony in a rage, and the Duchess of Carne was staring up at her in fright.
It was oddly reminiscent of an event just a year ago when the dragon had the Duchess of Carne in her sights on the palace grounds. Then as now, Ciardis truly gained a respect for Raisa’s massive presence. Even in her human form, she was unmistakably draconic.
Then Raisa smiled, and her mouth filled with rows of razor-sharp teeth. If there was any doubt she was here for a physical altercation, those doubts went out the door when Ciardis saw those.
The ambassador said to the Duchess of Carne, who cowered next to the dry fountain below her, “Do you remember the last time I tried to kill you and my sarin spared you?”
The duchess paled. “I promise you, the people outside are something I had nothing to do with.”
Raisa shook her head and said, “I don’t believe you, and what’s more, I knew I should have killed you when I first had the chance.”
Ciardis shouted at Raisa to wait, but the dragon leapt off the balcony with a terrifying smile.
To their credit, the duchess’s soldiers rushed to her aid. But that was their undoing. They should have run screaming, because in a flash Raisa ripped the throat from one and tossed the other high in the air to land on the balcony. Still in a human form, the ambassador took on every soldier who came against her. When Sebastian and some of Jason SaAlgardis’s men dared tried to interfere, they were knocked off their feet by waves of dragon magic that left their skin blistering and several of the men howling.
Their fates were nothing compared to what the ambassador had in store for those loyal to the duchess, though.
Raisa continued her carnage until not a single person who’d entered her magical perimeter was left alive in the courtyard. Then she looked Ciardis directly in the eye, lowered her head in a friendly greeting, and stepped back with a last forlorn mental message for Ciardis.
I must go, sarin, Ciardis heard in her head.
Wait! Ciardis cried. I need to explain.
The time has passed for explanations. I only came to kill your duchess and exact revenge before I left your empire. But don’t worry, we will see each other again.
Revenge for what? Ciardis asked.
The man you call SaAlgardis can fill you in, the dragon replied. I’ve done what I can to speed you on your way, and it’s more than I should have done in the first place.
Before Ciardis could blink, the angry dragon was gone. She was left staring helplessly at the half a dozen headless and disemboweled corpses that represented what was left of her envoys from the Shadow Council.
Whatever this was, it has vastly more important implications than a dragon’s mere vendetta, Ciardis said to Sebastian as she tried to give him a brief summary of everything Raisa had said, which, to be fair, wasn’t much.
Meanwhile Ciardis sank down to the ground in horror and waited for Jason SaAlgardis to arrive on the scene. He couldn’t have missed a battle that loud in an underground city that was practically abandoned.
Apparently Sebastian didn’t disagree, because he winced and patted her back in sympathy.
“Ciardis,” said Sebastian when a few minutes had passed.
Ciardis stood up but didn’t turn around. Sebastian had to guide her over to a bench out of sight of the fresh corpses. Ciardis was absurdly grateful for that small courtesy. She wasn’t really disturbed by the carnage. She was, however, irritated that this was one more mess that she had to clean up, one more thing that had went wrong, one more issue to solve.
For a moment Ciardis wondered if she could even
plan a citywide meeting without the true people in power being represented, or for that matter, without the Duchess of Carne and her support. Would she be able persuade the silent nobles to back her bid against the emperor himself at a later date…after they got rid of that pesky problem known as the bluttgott?
Ciardis buried her head in her hands. Nothing was going her way.
“Why?” she cried as she stared at the red rock of the underground city. “Why did Raisa have to eat the duchess’s head?”
It was a petty thing to focus on, but at the moment she was feeling incredibly disenchanted with how the world was going.
As Thanar landed beside her and Jason SaAlgardis ran up, Sebastian recounted what had just happened to the rest of their stunned party.
Ciardis looked around. “Do you think she just went back to bed?”
Terris looked at her as if she was going insane.
Numbly, Ciardis said, “Raisa, I mean.”
“I highly doubt it, my lady,” Jason SaAlgardis said.
“Still,” said Ciardis stubbornly. “Could we check?”
She just wanted one thing to go right this time around.
Thanar exchanged glances with a pale Jason SaAlgardis and then took off.
Ciardis panicked. “We have to get her back. We have to explain before she leaves Algardis.”
Thanar came back. His face said bad news without a word being spoken.
“Why would Raisa just up and leave to go across the Sahalia Sea?” Terris said, mystified.
“Because she knows that we know,” Ciardis said in a dull tone. “And unlike us, her first duty is to her empire. She must go to her queens.”
Terris frowned. “I’m clearly missing the rest of this conversation.”
Dryly, Thanar observed, “Don’t worry, so are we.”
Ciardis groaned and decided that the secrets weren’t worth her going crazy, so she told Terris, Jason, and Thanar what she had already filled Sebastian in on. Including what she had seen in Vana’s last memory regarding Maradian’s ties to the land, a dragon keeping a monumental secret, and the deal she had made with a woman who had changed from the Vana Cloudbreaker that she respected and knew.
