Knight Chosen

by Tammy Salyer

  As he did, the shadows surrounding the far walls inside the cavernous chamber began to dance and writhe, and the shapes of bodies distilled from what had seemed to be empty space: the soldiers who had so easily overcome the city’s defenses and brought them all to this cursed place. Like Balavad and the Flesh Casters, their skin was as white as the light of distant stars. Their bloodless lips peeled away from mouths filled with dagger-like teeth, the points protruding and gleaming. Each was as different from the other as the prisoners were different from each other. There were women and men. Red-haired, black-haired, sable-haired; younger, older; thicker, thinner; all carrying vicious blades that were not ceremonial. Dozens of them suddenly populated the space, threatening and ready, and Irrick stopped cold in his steps.

  “The brave one,” the Verity said, and with a speed too fast to see he stood before Irrick.

  His hands wrapped Irrick’s head between them, the palms covering his ears, the fingers linking in the back. Irrick started to struggle, but the Verity leaned forward and tilted Irrick’s neck backward until their gazes met.

  Balavad’s inky eyes began to change.

  Instead of bottomless black pits, Irrick was staring into aquamarine pools as clear as crystal, the color so vibrant he gasped. A memory from childhood filled his mind, when his parents had taken him to Kolga, an Ivoryssian city surrounded by lakes. There were salt-rich lagoons in Kolga where visitors could swim. He’d been almost twelve, just shy of entering the Conservatum, and had since thought back to the feeling of silky weightlessness while swimming in those heavily mineralized pools, of his body gliding amid the emulsion like a fish, as if he’d been born with wings that only unfurled when submerged. It had been sublime, the greatest joy of his childhood, and the memory of that day had brought him moments of peace in an oftentimes hectic, sometimes hard life ever since. Looking into the Verity’s eyes made him feel as if he were back in that enchanted pool. If fear had a flavor, the bliss of that joyous time in childhood had a color, and it was the warmly inviting azure of Balavad’s improbable eyes.

  Distantly, Irrick was aware he should fight against this mesmerism, yet he did not have the will. The Verity, hands still circling Irrick’s head, drew him toward the front of the line. They stood before one of the pedestals holding the alabaster bowls, and Irrick’s eyes stayed fixed, his thoughts lost in his childhood. The Verity released him, reached out, and grasped the hilt of the dagger held by the nearest priest. Fingers suddenly penetrated his lips and pushed inside, seizing his tongue between them. They yanked, and Irrick felt someone else’s hands on either side of his head, keeping it from being drawn forward as his tongue was drawn out. From somewhere behind the bliss, his mind screamed in alarm, and he knew that he should fight whatever was about to happen. But the Verity’s unwavering gaze was peace, and Irrick did not want to fight.

  The dagger was lifted, and it reflected from his hazel eyes in a piercing flicker that caused him to blink. Then it fell, stabbing straight down into the center of his distended tongue, cleaving into its thick meat. His blink broke the trance he was snared in, and pain rocketed all the way to his spine. He shrieked, the movement so involuntary and sudden that his tongue ripped itself from the fingers grasping it. The narrow dagger sliced through its center smoothly, splitting it in two like a snake’s. Blood quickly filled his mouth, and he shrieked again, vaguely aware of other howls of fright and horror rising around him.

  His head was still being held, and Balavad grasped his chin, drawing Irrick’s gaze once more. But his eyes no longer held the lovely blue of Irrick’s memories. They were obsidian. The Verity spoke, and his voice was shattered glass. “Now drink.”

  The white bowl was placed at his lips, his head was pulled back, and the clear liquid joined the blood in his mouth. He had to swallow or choke. His throat convulsed and the mixture squirmed into his stomach. Gagging, he swallowed once more.

  And then he was released.

  Nothing supported him, and his body rebelled, spilling him bonelessly to the cold chamber floor. He noted that it felt like steel, and he suddenly remembered where he was. On a ship, flying through the Vinnric sky. This was not a nightmare, not some strange and morbid fantasy of immortal imps from some other world, though that’s what it felt like.

  Moments passed and the chamber fell mute. His violated tongue throbbed with agony. No one came to his aid. Warm blood ran down his chin, and he gingerly pulled himself from the floor until he rested on one hip, his arms stretched out stiffly to hold him up. He looked around.

  Is that all there is? he tried to say, but splintering pain from his tongue dissuaded him. Instead, he questioned with raised brows, his stare on the desecrator.

  “No, that is not all there is,” the Verity said, as if he knew Irrick’s intended question.

  And then new pain exploded from everywhere in him at once, growing to the size of worlds and ripping through his body like a tempest.

  He shrieked, and shrieked some more, so shrilly it seemed to split his throat. His body convulsed and his back arched wickedly, threatening to break him in two. Blood began to pour from his eyes, his ears, his mouth, slicking the floor. His skin faded into the white pallor of the desecrator’s minions. His bifurcated tongue, no longer bleeding, flailed like a lizard’s, a pathway for his continuous, echoing screams to follow from him ravaged throat. In a moment that felt like lifetimes, the seizure ceased and he went utterly limp. Nothing moved, not even breath in his lungs.

  One of the Flesh Casters came forward, carrying a black tunic. She stopped before the lifeless, drenched body of Irrick lying in a bloody pool, and her black boots squished in the liquid. With one toe, she nudged his feet. Irrick’s eyes shot open, now as dull and sightless as the Raveners’. The Caster beckoned with her empty hand, and Irrick stood, docile and obedient. She dropped the tunic over him, and together they waited for their next command.

  “New life!” Balavad intoned, his voice echoing as loudly as Irrick’s shrieks had. All the prisoners jumped, startled, and many whimpered or gasped. The desecrator’s voice lowered. “Now all of you, choose.”

  Irrick stood silently, no longer a man or an acolyte but a Ravener of the Tooth, one of Balavad’s legions of realm-crossing soldiers. His thoughts drained with the color of his skin until only one voice remained in his head. Balavad’s, a whisper like a spider’s legs on stone: Welcome to new unlife, Ravener. You are no longer a creature of Vaka Aster. You are one of mine now.

  With the Flesh Casters as their aides, one by one the prisoners chose their fates. The deck of the ritual chamber grew slick with gore. By the ritual’s end, Balavad’s retinue of Raveners had swelled by hundreds. As the desecrator grinned the grimace of the dead, Irrick’s mind filled with his glee. My legions are growing.

  Chapter 19

  If the mind were parchment, Ulfric’s was being ripped in half. Everything from his eyesight to his own thoughts seemed to be twisting and doubling up in a way that made him wonder if he’d fallen into madness. A distant voice spoke: I have interfered. And then answered itself: If I hadn’t, Vinnr would be lost, and he didn’t know if the voice came from inside or outside his head.

  What had he meant when he’d told the Himmingazian “She speaks Himm”? Who was she? He wasn’t she. The voice had said it in his head, and his mouth had repeated it—all happening as if he weren’t present. Yet here he was, in a strange place, the smell of a strange sea in his nose, and a stranger speaking a strange language to him. And how did he know this language, anyway? He had never heard it until now. Perhaps it was an artifact of transporting along the celestial paths of Verities?

  This fact was the one clear thing: when he’d broken the corona of Fenestrii caging Vaka Aster, either he or Vaka Aster had triggered a starpath portal, a well between realms. He couldn’t guess how he’d done it, if it was him—mysteries he’d eventually need to solve. Did Vaka Aster send him here for a reason? Had she been present, or was she still caged? All he knew was that he was no longer in Vin
nr but in a realm called Himmingaze. He didn’t need to be told this. When this man had said this was the Creatress’s shrine, it all became . . . well, not clear, but somewhat less foggy.

  A Knight’s mind could rarely, maybe never, become unhinged. The fortifications that gave them limitless longevity, accelerated healing of wounds, and immunity to disease also made their wits more resilient to things that would scramble any commoner’s (otherwise, their cognition could never withstand the trials and taxations of their overlong duties). And he didn’t feel as if he’d gone insane. At least not in any way he imagined it might feel. He simply felt his ordinary clarity one moment, but distracted the next. He quickly realized this muddling that both made his vision abnormal and twisted his thoughts cleared when he closed his eyes. But he could hardly keep his eyes shut now that he was in an entirely new reality.

  Still holding the Himmingazian back with his klinkí stones, he turned his thoughts inward. If he’d created the interrealm well once, he could do it again, he just had to read the incantation from the—wait . . . the Scrylle, the stones, where were they?

  Swiveling his head around, he searched the room. His strange vision cast everything in wavering, luminescent lines, but he saw nothing that suggested the artifacts had made it through the well with him. What has happened? Guilt knifed into him, chased by despair. What have I done? What has become of Symvalline and Isemay?

  They must be dead.

  No, they weren’t. He wouldn’t believe that. He had to cut through this lowering despair immediately and think clearly. If unable to open another starpath and return to Vinnr, what other options did he have? During his brief exchange with the foreigner (But I’m the foreigner now, he thought absently), he clung to what little he knew. He had entered the realm of Lífs, a Verity mentioned in the Scrylle. Beyond that, he knew nothing of this world or its people. More importantly, he didn’t know what had happened, was still happening, in Vinnr. Mount Omina may as well have ceased to exist for him.

  He had one other potentially useful fact at hand: this man before him knew of the Knights. Perhaps he knew more.

  His vision swam and pulsed in colors and shades. His damaged, traitorous eyes had become a hated distraction. If he moved, he wasn’t sure he would be able to keep his balance while at the mercy of the chromatic morass the world now swam in. So he stayed put. “Tell me your name again,” he said.

  “I’m Jaemus Bardgrim, Glint Engineer, at your service. Disgraced Glint Engineer, actually, but whatever. Cake and eating it too and all that.”

  “I don’t want any cake. Can you tell me where the Mystae of Lífs reside?”

  Confusion danced across the Himmingazian’s face. “I’m not offering you any . . .” He trailed off, then said, “Say, would you mind with these . . . rocks?”

  Ulfric scoffed. “Rocks? These are klinkí stones, lit by the wystic spark of Vaka Aster. Perhaps your realm doesn’t have them.”

  “K— . . . kinky stones?”

  The Himmingazian’s dimwittedness would destroy his patience quickly, but perhaps the man would be more forthcoming if he felt less threatened. “I see you’re unarmed,” Ulfric said, then twisted his outstretched hand and closed it slowly. The stones pulled away and retracted back inside his vambrace. “Don’t make the mistake of testing me.”

  Bardgrim’s posture relaxed a bit. “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it. It looks to me like we’re both a little out of our element, wouldn’t you say, and I’d like to know more about that thing you mentioned, the five Verities. Maybe we can try this: you ask me a question. After I answer, I get to ask you one. Sound good to you?”

  Ulfric swiped the back of his hand across his top lip, the stickiness of the blood telling him it was already drying, his nose already healing. “The Mystae, Himmingaze’s own order of Knights Corporealis. Do you know where they reside?”

  “Look, as far as I know, you’re the only, er, Knight in Himmingaze. But look, this place we’re at, the Creatress’s shrine, people aren’t supposed to come here. I had to stop for . . . repairs to my ship and just happened to find you. Actually, I can’t tell you how lucky you are I came across you. No one comes here anymore. You could have been stranded. But if someone did find us here, we could be in the proverbial boiling eel pot. We should maybe both be on our way.” The Himmingazian paused again, seemed to calculate, then prompted: “So you must have a ship outside?”

  Lífs, my quin, is leading her creations to oblivion.

  Ulfric wasn’t listening to this damnable voice anymore. At least he was trying not to. He didn’t even have a twin, much less a quin, and Bardgrim talked too much. The last words that mattered were Bardgrim’s statement: there were no Knights, which meant no allies, and maybe no way for Ulfric to find this realm’s Scrylle and at least one of its Fenestrii—his only way home, and his only way to learn Symvalline and Isemay’s fate.

  Face the truth. They’re dead, he told himself, his own voice clear in his mind. Murdered by that corruption of power, Balavad. That monster. And Vaka Aster did not save them, did she?

  How can I know? How can I live not knowing? They were my life.

  As if in response, a leaden certainty came to him: They are not dead, Stallari.

  He feared this was a lie he wanted to tell himself, but he wouldn’t, couldn’t, allow himself such a luxury as hope. How could they possibly have survived? He had caged his own celestial maker. He had brought Vaka Aster to heel, then released her, and now, apparently this was his penance. Balavad showed him what Verities were capable of: the maliciousness, the darkness. Wasn’t it obvious that they were likely to mete out punishments? And who deserved to be punished more than he?

  “Sir? Knight?” The Himmingazian broke into his spiraling thoughts. “Did you fly here? Do you have a ship?”

  Ulfric’s gaze had wandered, but he now brought it back to bear on Bardgrim. The figure wavered and coalesced into glints and streams of light of every hue, barely a solid shadow to be found in the prism. “Do you know where the Scrylle of Lífs’s Order is kept?” he asked.

  “So—no quid pro quo, then?”

  “The Scrylle, where can I find it?” Ulfric raised his klinkí stone arm menacingly.

  “Okay, calm down. I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s a Scrylle?”

  He would not play games with a commoner, even if the commoner belonged to another realm. With a twitch of his pointer finger, a single stone rolled from his vambrace and perched just above the fingertip. He longed for his sword. In Ulfric’s lengthy experience, a hostage’s fear of being chopped into pieces often took hold faster and resulted in compliance sooner than the fear of being struck by a klinkí stone. The sword should have been hanging at his side, but it had been taken at Aster Keep by Arch Keeper Beatte’s guards. “You are in the shrine of Lífs, you speak Elder Veros, and you know of my Order. You expect me to believe you don’t know what a Scrylle is?” he accused. “And Lífs’s Fenestrii? I’ve already told you once not to test me, so I’m going to ask only once more. Where do I find them?”

  To his own warped vision, the stone hovering at his fingertip was a tear of vibrant blue in a fabric of shifting radiance, but the Himmingazian’s wide-eyed and immediate focus on it indicated the fear Ulfric anticipated. Still, he felt a shade of regret. His nature wasn’t inclined toward cruelty. He simply needed answers. With a casual flick of the finger, he sent the stone shooting toward Bardgrim’s throat.

  To what seemed to be their mutual surprise, Bardgrim flinched at first, but then he straightened defiantly and said, “Can you maybe give the I’m-going-to-turn-your-skin-into-bleeding-polka-dots thing a rest?” He raised a hand to bat the stone away, now close enough to his throat to force his eyes to cross to look at it, then thought better of it. “Haven’t you ever heard of catching more phanks with sugar than darts? I can help you, but you need to recognize that I’m a citizen of Himmingaze, and we’ve outlawed worship of the Creatress, this Lífs, before my mother’s great-great-gramsirene was born. We
may both be speaking Himm right now, friend, but sure as the Glister Cloud glows, we aren’t speaking the same language.”

  The Himmingazian had a fair point, and after a moment of consideration, Ulfric beckoned the stone back, stowed it in his palm, and stared at the stranger expectantly.

  Bardgrim let out a breath, relieved. “Good, thank you. That’s what I call crossing the cultural divide. So now we can talk. Tell me about this Scrylle. What does it look like?”

  Chapter 20

  Dawn hit Mylla with an impact that could have dislodged a gimgree swamp sloth from its tree: sudden, hard, and paralyzingly bright. She woke as the merciless Halla beams plunged through a porthole along the Vigilance’s hull and struck her in the face. Teach me to sleep in the top bunk, she thought, stretching and sitting up to escape the blinding glare.

  Mylla and Lock had spoken little during their watch on the bridge. He’d tried a couple of times to entice her to share details about the situation he knew he was missing but had given up when it was clear she was either too tired or too troubled to illuminate him any further. It hadn’t taken her much effort to dissuade him. He, too, had his worries to fester on.

  She listened to Lock’s breathing from the bunk below her for a moment, the sound much loved and intimately familiar. Almost ten turns now they’d been together. His youth had hardened a bit to a nobility she found more handsome every season, while hers . . . well, she changed much more slowly.

  A memory of a conversation she’d had with Symvalline five or six turns ago came to mind. They’d been dining together at the Conservatum, and she’d asked Symvalline why she and Ulfric had never thrown a nuptial feast and made their union official.

  Bemused, Symvalline had said, “Did you know that in Ivoryss four hundred turns ago, newly joined couples had to sleep in their betrothal gowns for a thirty-night before they could consummate their marriage?”