by Tammy Salyer
Ulfric released a caustic laugh. “Temple? You call this ruin a temple?” Like a whip crack, his demeanor sharpened again. “If you think to test me for a fool, Bardgrim, you will lose.”
With his klinkí stone arm still at his side, he balled his hand into a fist, watching as Bardgrim picked up to the gesture. The Himmingazian didn’t have to see the stones themselves to feel their threat. He sighed with exasperation, and with a nod spun on a heel and began walking toward the chamber’s wide doors.
“You forgot your bag,” Ulfric commented.
Without turning, Bardgrim said, “I’ll come back for it later,” and pushed the doors open.
Despite the aged, cracked plaster inside the building, the immediate cold of the gust that blew inward told Ulfric the dilapidated temple still retained enough integrity to shield them from this world’s weather, which he hadn’t guessed would be quite so turbulent. The light coming through seemed tinged by lavender, but a living lavender, dotted and speckled with iridescent raindrops, at least they appeared so to his enchanted eyes. Nothing disturbed the retreating horizon, but the far-off sky exploded in glittering lights and pirouetting hues of every color real or imagined. The Glister Cloud, he realized. It was awesome, a sky so profoundly different from any he’d ever seen.
Immediate problems quickly surfaced and took his mind off the sight. The challenge of stepping into that pulsing glow might be beyond him. He could barely focus inside the crumbling temple. How was he to see anything in this radiant miasma?
Bardgrim, it seemed, had an advantage after all: the Himmingazian might pick up on Ulfric’s affliction. And outside, it could be worse. Did he have no choice but to trust Bardgrim? No. The instinct of millennia told him he couldn’t, and the desperation of his plight told him trust was another luxury, like hope, he could not for a moment expect. He’d simply have to strangle the hindrance into submission and carry on till he was back in Vinnr, back on Mount Omina with his Knights and—
—and what? What had he done? Where now were Vaka Aster, and her realm’s nemesis, Balavad?
“Coming?” Bardgrim had turned and now watched him keenly, perhaps sensing a hesitation Ulfric hadn’t meant to show.
With legs that felt as lumbering as tree stumps, he stepped forward, again with a lurch and fumble, his body feeling unfamiliar and disjointed, as if it weren’t his own. Seventeen hundred turns he’d walked in this flesh, and now it betrayed him. Like his Verity had. Like, the Glister Cloud seemed to prove, all Verities did.
“Need a hand?”
The Himmingazian’s attentiveness—or was it vigilance?—irritated him. They were not allies, so why did he pretend to be one? By fate’s fickle whimsy, Ulfric could use an ally . . .
He ignored the question and continued his forward momentum, gracelessly, though with each step it became easier. When he reached the door, Bardgrim turned back outside and continued down a short flight of stone steps. The biting chill scoured the skin of Ulfric’s face and lifted his tangled hair from his brow. His breastplate guarded him against the worst, but he noted Bardgrim closing the oddly high collar of his one-piece uniform more firmly over his chin and lower part of his ears. The unfamiliar material looked thin, but Bardgrim seemed more comfortable in the squall than Ulfric was.
The Himmingazian hooked left around the building, throwing over his shoulder: “I’m docked out back.”
The ground’s slick and uneven rocks and his hindered eyesight seemed to be teaming against him. Between moments of watching the earth to pick sound footing, he scanned the area. As Bardgrim had said, they were on an island, a small one at that, with waves smashing fiercely against the stony shore like gnashing, foamy teeth. How could any boat dock in this? In every way, the surroundings were opposite of his beloved home of Ivoryss, with its white sand beaches, limpid beryl ocean, weathered wooden piers reaching far into the bays until the water was deep enough to dive into and spear-hunt the shoals of maggies and bewlies amid the red and green corals of the reefs. He had no doubt this island’s reef’s only bounty was a quick, airless, pummeling death. At least for commoners. Knights weren’t easily drowned.
The answer to what kind of boat the Himmingazian captained came as they turned the corner at the temple’s end—but it was not the answer he expected. A bulbous, inelegant craft stood on a tripod, but it bore thruster-like units on its flanks that made it appear capable of flying, not bouncing along a sea. For the first time, a sense of foreignness so complete it threatened his equilibrium (again) hit Ulfric. This was what another reality looked like, felt like. Himmingaze was not his home.
Recovering, he paced behind Bardgrim beneath the Octopod’s hull, gaining respite from the heavy rain. The craft’s stilts reached high enough that neither of them had to stoop. Bardgrim climbed a short ladder and peered into an unobtrusive half-spherical bulb depending from the metal, and as he did so, a hatch slid open above him. Without a word, he climbed inside. Warm light—Ulfric’s new vision seemed to transform light and color to sensation, the lambency literally warming him—emitted from within, beckoning Ulfric to follow.
The interior spread out in a cabin designed to be living quarters, with the necessities of daily life dotting the area: seating and a table, containers for sundries, mechanisms and devices he didn’t recognize but likely had equivalencies in his own realm. It reminded him of the Vigilance but specific to its own time and place. The contrast between the very familiar and very foreign continued to strike Ulfric unexpectedly. He imagined he’d get used to it if he were here long enough, but he had no intention of that being the case.
Are all Verity creations this similar? he mused, thinking of the brief vision he’d had of Battgjald, and the members of Balavad’s own retinue, who had been alike to the people of Vinnr in most ways he could see. Why would that be? Reality to my kind is fixed, it seems, but the makers can create any form and any function, can’t they? Like his body had earlier, his mind, his understanding of reality, felt disjointed. He’d never imagined traveling beyond his own realm. Why would he? He served Vaka Aster; his duty lay in Vinnr.
A crushing sense of insignificance suddenly filled him. His devotion now was only to Vaka Aster’s shell, an inert statue that still, for all its coldness and distance, held his world’s fate in its stone. What good was long life when what he lived for had all but abandoned the world of Vinnr? What was he to a Verity? What were any of them? Motes in their realities, hardly the greatest of their creations, barely worth their brief lifetimes, a few turns for a commoner, or a few centuries for someone like him who’d pledged everything to serve. A being that was capable of creating everything could hardly be blamed for paying little of it any mind, for lacking devotion or even a sense of responsibility to the small, fleeting human breed, which had . . . what purpose exactly?
To amuse. That’s what Balavad had said.
Bardgrim pointed to a chair, and silently, still lost in thought, Ulfric sat. After rummaging inside a container, the Himmingazian returned with an item wrapped in cloth, containing presumably the Scrylle. “Here. I’ll be back with the Fenestros.”
Ulfric controlled his reflex to snatch the cylinder and took it solemnly instead. “I’m coming with you.”
With an eye roll, Bardgrim strode to the rear of the cabin and past a heavy hatch leading to an alcove and another hatch. “We can’t both fit inside the core, so you have to wait here.”
He gave a single nod, and Bardgrim slid inside the smaller opening. Within moments, he returned with the Fenestros and held it out. At first Ulfric couldn’t believe the Himmingazian could palm such a thing: a ball of yellow and white fire, like a sun shrunken to the size of a kórb fruit, ablaze with a heat that would turn even stone to ash. Then he realized it only appeared this way to his weirded eyes. He took it.
The Himmingazian added, “We won’t get far until I put that back, so I suggest we do this quickly. No one is supposed to be on Isle Stonering, like I said, and we don’t want to be here if the . . . anyone else shows
up.”
Back in the main cabin, Ulfric returned to the table and quickly removed the Scrylle cylinder from its cloth wrapping. The scepter, made of an identical celestial metal to both of the other Scrylle’s he’d so recently held, comforted him with its sameness. Here, at least, was an artifact that was like home, and if all went well, would get him there.
He placed the scepter upright, preparing to set the Fenestros atop. But with a glance at Bardgrim on the opposite side of the table, he stopped. Despite the way the Himmingazian leaned casually on his hands over the tabletop, his shoulders were rigidly set, the muscles in his neck taut as stretched springs. For a moment Ulfric considered ignoring him, but the man had not done anything—yet—to cause Ulfric to mistrust him, and had even come to his aid. Their bargain was fair, though Ulfric was sure Bardgrim would be disappointed in his end anyway. The writing on the Scrylle’s inner parchment was indeed a map to the other Fenestrii of this realm, the same map all Scrylles contained for their respective worlds, and it would not take Ulfric more than a moment to tell the commoner where they were.
He slid the parchment out of the Scrylle’s inner core. The cold yet smooth material against his rough hand reassured him in a way he’d not been when seeing the Fenestros. The parchment was neither paper nor cloth nor hide, but something like all three, the color a pearlescent white. He’d held the parchment within the Vinnr Scrylle enough to know the material would never fray or tear, and its runes would never fade.
After he unrolled it and laid it flat on the table, the runic script covering it danced in front of his eyes, more a dream of words than words themselves. He knew the Himmingazian would be seeing nothing of the sort. This was the effect of his travel along celestial paths, and to a commoner the runes would simply be oddly difficult to focus on. In a flash of insight, he reached for his Mentalios chain. Perhaps looking through the lens would mitigate some of his visual defect.
To his relief, it worked. The Verity runes solidified and revealed the locations of the Fenestros that sat before him on the table (Isle Stonering’s name easily discernible on the map), as well as three of Lífs’s others. Interestingly, one was not visible. That means it’s in another realm, Ulfric thought. Odd. On a whim, he decided not to concern himself, or the Himmingazian, with this. Too many other things were more important.
“Bardgrim,” he said, “your stones are scattered widely across your world. One remains unfixed. The Knight you met keeps it.” To himself, he wondered, What is Griggory doing with one of Lífs’s Fenestrii? His guess would be just wild as his guess about why Griggory was here in the first place. “And the fifth . . . it’s not here. It must be outside your realm.”
Notes of giddiness infused Bardgrim’s voice as he asked, “Well, four out of five is still three more than I have. Where—can you tell me where they are now?”
With one eye still shut, Ulfric raised his head, seeing the Himmingazian for the first time with normal sight. As he had thought, Bardgrim was tall like the Yorish and flaunted a carefully trimmed and styled mop of brown curls that stood high over his forehead, even when damp. His sharp nose and bright orange-brown eyes gave him the appearance of an attentive, scholarly type, reminding Ulfric again of Acolyte Irrick, but with a touch of rogue. He looked to be somewhere on the low side of his thirties, by Halla-turn reckoning. Yet his smooth skin was a pale, soft green—was the man ill, or was this normal for a Himmingazian?
Ulfric listed off the locations of the two other fixed stones, names and places that meant nothing to him, and Bardgrim watched him like a hungry bruhawk, repeating each place—though his own expression seemed puzzled. When he got to the last visible stone, Ulfric said, “I can see from the runes that the last Fenestros and Griggory are at,” he had to let his mouth get used to the word before he could say it, “Bludghadda.”
Bardgrim stood up straight and pushed his hand through his curls. “I’ve had the Scrylle for almost a six deca-cycles. The places you named are a start, but the stones could be almost anywhere now.”
“No, as I said, at the moment, these stones are where I told you, Griggory’s included.”
Bardgrim eyed him skeptically. “All the places you listed are cities that existed a long time ago, when Himmingaze still had land—and cities. Our cities are built on the water now, floating. It’s not going to be an easy task to retrieve them.”
“Ah,” he remarked with disinterest. With the task done, his focus returned to the Scrylle. Concealing the Mentalios inside his armor and setting the celestial parchment aside, he grasped its cylinder. The time had come to, hopefully, return home.
As Bardgrim watched, he set the Fenestros atop the cylinder and spoke the Elder Veros words to see inside. The heart of the stone began to glow, and Bardgrim’s eyes widened with wonder.
“Huh, I had no idea it did that,” he murmured. “It is actually just like a kaleidoscope.”
Ulfric leaned over the stone and gazed into it. Just before he made the mental leap into its streams of lore, he thought, If Griggory had been keeping this, why didn’t he ever return home? Will it show me the way to open a starpath well? If not, I must find Griggory. He may be my last hope.
Chapter 24
If praying hard to all the Verities to show mercy and spare your life were to ever become a tournament-worthy sport, Mylla would win every medal. Her panicked, beseeching litany forced itself past her clenched teeth as they plummeted from the Vigilance—and kept plummeting long after she was ready to stop. The launch had seemed to be going smoothly—right up until the moment they left the Vigilance’s deck and hit the air. Which really meant that the prelaunch had gone well, it was the actual launch that had caused her world to turn, literally, upside down.
Unlike the copilot seat in the Wing fighter, the cargo space in the modified scout did not afford Mylla a view of the outside. In the lifetimes that passed as Lock struggled to get control of the nose-down spiraling craft, she couldn’t decide if this was an improvement or not. Her involuntary pleas to the Verities suggested it wasn’t. When his frantic grappling with the ship’s controls finally brought its wings and thrusters into harmony and smoothed out the ride, she, too, finally found some control and silenced her airless entreaties. The sudden jolt that brought the ship into a saner trajectory bounced her stomach back where it belonged, and she pulled her knees closer to her chest like a frightened child and willed her thoughts away from the here and now.
She didn’t know how long they’d been flying before Havelock spoke. “If I’d known you had these in the Knights, I would have considered staying at the Conservatum. How are you doing back there?”
Peeling her tongue from the roof of her mouth, which now felt dryer than the burnt crust of Mount Omina, took some effort, but at last she succeeded. “Is there a word for feeling as if your guts are trying to shoot through your eyeballs? If so, that’s how I’m doing.”
“I’m sorry, love. I didn’t realize how delicate this ship was at first. Should be smooth sailing from here. Promise.” They were both silent for a bit before he said, “These dragørfly ships are supposed to have the same invisibility as the Vigilance, right?”
She grunted an affirmative.
“Then why could I see it while we were still aboard? And how do we know if it’s working now?”
“The flint glass cloaks are activated by celestial light, either from Halla or from the reflection of the stars. They’re always cloaked out of doors, but not inside unless celestial light can be focused on them.”
“Then how do you see each other when you’re flying?”
“They’re visible to us when we look through our Mentalios lenses.” She fingered the thick chain holding her Mentalios around her neck. Clasped in a certain way, the chain would hang around her head and allow the Mentalios to hang directly over her eye when holding it was impractical. Another of the Stallari’s innovations that the Knights relied on.
Lock nodded and gently feathered the craft’s wings, refining the flight with the precis
ion of a master. “We’ll be there soon.”
For the first time, she detected a note of strain in his voice. What could he be thinking? What fears were he fighting to keep in check? The distance to Asteryss gave her more time than she really wanted to think about this, but the diversion was almost welcome. She understood his distress. The stakes were so much more personal for him, as he stood to lose his family and home. She hadn’t had a family other than the Order in ages and had grown accustomed to her lack of attachment. And when Halla-turns were like days to you, a home could be anything that offered mere moments of comfort and respite from a duty that sometimes felt too much like a burden, and other times just a meaningless fancy. She reached for him, idly stroking his neck as they flew, wanting him to know that he wasn’t as alone as he might feel.
Safran had been right. She loved Lock and always would. She didn’t know a way to put this feeling behind the demands of her oath, no matter how important that oath was.
Soon enough, these thoughts pulled in another direction, to the last thing she’d seen before Lock had closed the dragørfly ship’s hatch and they’d dived from the Vigilance’s launch deck. The Stallari Regent had appeared just as Mylla had settled in to the ship’s cramped cargo seat. Her gaze locked on Mylla immediately. The ferocity, always boiling in the depths of Eisa’s eyes, had been there, of course. But what hadn’t been there was what stayed with Mylla, an absence more curdling than the anger she’d expected to see. There’d been no surprise in Eisa’s expression, only a cold look of expectations fulfilled.
Now that coldness busily worked itself into Mylla’s tenuous composure, seeping into the cracks of her conviction, making her doubt: Am I worthy of the oath I took? Am I failing in my duty by pursuing what’s right, or at least what I think is right? Decisions and strategic plans of such great importance should come from those with the centuries of experience to make them wisely, shouldn’t they? And what was Mylla but a novice Knight with a weakness for a man she would outlive by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of turns? A weakness for what was temporary in a life that was pledged to the eternal.
