Ferret was an inch shorter than Aimee, and Elias and Belit towered over him. Still, as he sized the tall, green-eyed man up, Elias had the sense that the man before him wasn’t intimidated in the least. “Yeah,” he said, and his accent was thicker than anyone on the upper levels. “But not here. Not here. Lily-pale-golden hair–” he gestured at Aimee “–and chisel-faced-green-eyes,” he prodded Elias in the chest, “both stick out bad as ornamental doors on latrines. Too white. Too tall. Too foreign. Gotta find somewhere else to talk.”
And with that, he started down one of the many corridors, pausing only to gesture over his shoulder. “Come on! Get you following, before my trust runs out.”
Aimee and Elias exchanged a look of mutual confusion. Then a nod.
They followed.
After what seemed a long walk, Ferret closed the door behind them. They stood in a small room, the exterior of which had been drab and brown, but which inside was painted green. Elias turned, taking in the space around them. A prayer rug rested on the floor, threaded red and gold in beautiful, handmade designs. He knew art well enough to recognize quality. Between the rug and the gilded altar at the far end of the room, he was likely looking at the most expensive things whoever used this place owned.
“Yours?” Aimee asked, looking back at Ferret.
The informant shook his head. “This is the home of a woman I trust. Thick walls, and noise above, below, and to all sides without. Besides–” he flashed a small smile and gestured at the altar “–the gods are good at keeping secrets. A thousand gods, and a thousand, thousand ways to pray.”
Belit smiled as well. “I told him you were foreign, but that you were trying to find the truth about what happened to the captain, and what’s happening now that’s making our people hurt.”
Elias frowned. Something – a faint scent of magic – teased at his senses. But amidst the powerful enchantments that suffused the entirety of the behemoth, it was hard to pinpoint. It didn’t feel strong enough to be dangerous.
“My name,” Aimee started, “is Aimee, apprentice to–”
“–I know who you are,” Ferret said. “Apprentice to Harkon Bright. Arrived on that beautiful silver skyship. We hear things, down below. We don’t know you, but we know your teacher’s legend. Elsewise even Belit’s good word wouldn’t be enough. Outsiders working with the top-levelers aren’t trusted, down here. We also know Amut didn’t die of just a sickness. Something dark is stirring in the shadows, foreigner. Outside our hull, and inside. We’ve heard stories of falling mountains and slain angels, of exile princes and sorceresses who split the sky.”
Elias felt his heart pounding in his ears. Did Ferret know who he was? The man’s eyes gave him no special attention, and he seemed at ease. It didn’t seem likely that anyone would be calm and unconcerned if they thought the monster once called Azrael was in the room. Then it struck him. Slain angels.
The common story being told was that Azrael was dead.
Elias tried not to let his relief show.
“Well,” Aimee said, and Elias watched a calm, relaxed smile settle across her face. “That makes things a little simpler. I saw the glyph above his bed. A spell was cast that drained the life from your captain, and a powerful illusion masked it. The magic used was necromancy, and casting it would’ve required sufficient power as couldn’t be done without taking the lives of others first. If the officer aristocrats had no inkling that this was coming, those first kills must have happened down here.”
Elias smiled wryly despite himself. She hadn’t exaggerated when they’d first been introduced to Viltas. Anyone that saw only beauty and not the diamond-sharp mind beneath was a fool.
Ferret closed his eyes for a moment, then looked at them with the expression of a person having his worst fears confirmed. “Yeah,” he said, after a moment. “This… glyph, you call it. Can you show me?”
Aimee reached within her coat and produced a piece of paper, which she meticulously unfolded with long fingers. “It’s hard to draw it correctly,” she said. “The symbol carries power, and even without the spell behind it, causes discomfort to look at. I did it from memory.”
Elias felt an involuntary chuckle slip out. Of course she had.
She held it up, jagged and dark, a stain upon the page. Ferret and Belit both winced when they saw it. “Put it away,” the former said. “I know the mark. It’s his.”
“My teacher believes,” Aimee said, putting the paper away, “that this is an imitator. Or perhaps a long-hidden apprentice.”
“Pray it is,” Ferret answered. “I hear many whispers. And many things I see myself. People have been going missing. The poorest. The weakest, at first. Then people who ask questions. Never in public places. Always alone.”
Belit looked alarmed. “This is the first I’ve heard of this,” she said. “Why?”
“You stopped coming down here,” Ferret muttered, with hurt in his voice. “Not like we could reach you above.”
“How many?” Aimee asked gently. “Do you know numbers?”
“Dozens before the captain died,” Ferret said quietly. “More after. And there’ve been other whispers. Words we haven’t heard in years: Grandfather. Empty Sky.”
Elias frowned. The phrase was familiar, but he couldn’t say just why.
“No,” Belit whispered. “They were wiped out. The last of them died ten years after the Faceless was slain.”
“They were his followers,” Ferret explained. “Or so our elders say. The Children of the Empty Sky. When he menaced Iseult and threatened to snuff one of the two hearts, they were his servants. The living ones, I mean. He never lacked for the dead.”
“But you’ve seen no husks this time?” Elias asked.
“No,” Ferret muttered. “But no corpses, either.” His expression was wry and dark. “And no Amut, this time. No white knights to ride in and save the day.”
“White knights?” Elias looked up. Another memory pricked at his thoughts, of his former master cursing in the dark, of old tapestries hidden in dank, forgotten rooms. Thinking about it made his head hurt.
“Long story,” Belit answered. “Old. I’ll tell you another time.”
“Maybe sooner,” Ferret said, standing. “But not from me. From her.”
He looked at the altar, then back at the three of them. “The Oracle has agreed to see you.”
He led them down, and this path quickly veered away from the busy, cosmopolitan squares and main byways of the center. They walked in silence for a time, and it gave Elias a chance to take stock of their surroundings. The interior of the ship was a massive patchwork of construction styles, cobbled together from what must have been a thousand cultures, some of which he had never seen before, and others he’d only heard of in old myths of the time before.
Wood paneling and hanging charms upon delicate threads sometimes lived beside harsh, rusted metal walls with doorways so narrow he had to walk through sideways. Here a door was paper and wood, there metal and blank. A window might be circular, square, rectangular, draped in slatted wooden shades, or dirty cloth curtains. He passed prayer strips etched in painted calligraphy, and sutras carved delicately into the hard, rusted faces of exposed steel beams.
“How far are we?” Aimee asked after what seemed near an hour. “From the square where we found you, I mean?”
“A quarter of a day below the surface,” Ferret answered. “Perhaps half that from Her Lady’s Chamber. An hour from the port wall and the open sky.”
Aimee gave Belit a helpless look.
“Deep,” Belit answered, “but not to the true depths or the cargo bays. Closer to portside, and not so far from the metadrive chamber.”
“Why do you call it Her Lady’s Chamber?” Elias asked.
Ferret flashed an amused grin over his shoulder. “Cuz that’s where she lives, green-eyes.”
“The Oracle?”
A caustic laugh escaped their guide. “Gods, no. Though that used to be her rightful place. No, not the Oracle; Her. Iseult.”
Ferret looked back and forth between the two of them, then shook his head at Belit. “Foreigners. Land-born. They know nothing!”
“They’ll learn,” Belit said, amused. “Another story I’ll tell you both, when we have a chance to go through the ship’s ancient history. Suffice to say, to everyone other than the officers, this ship is a living, breathing thing. She has a soul, and it needs tending.”
Elias didn’t answer. He once again felt that rising of hairs on the back of his neck, as if they were being followed. Cursory checks, however, failed to reveal anyone, or anything.
They emerged into an intersection of five different corridors. The space was open, the ceiling high-vaulted and hexagonal. In the center was a decrepit old rock garden crowned with the pale skeleton of a bonsai tree.
It was so quiet that Elias could hear his own heart hammering in his chest. There was nobody here.
“Ferret,” Belit said, “what’s this about?”
Their guide took a step forward, looking about with the nervous reticence of a possum considering a patch of unexpected light. “This is where I last met her, where she has been meeting the worthy for the past year. It’s out of the way. Enforcers don’t come here, and few others. A bit of old magic clings to it, you know? But something feels… wrong.”
“Cold, like the captain’s bedchamber,” Aimee said. Whatever fear had gripped her, however, in the wake of her encounter in Amut’s former chamber had fled her now, Elias could see. The portalmage’s eyes were chips of blue flint, her face hard and determined. She sensed him looking at her and caught his gaze with a half-smile. “We didn’t come all this way to run back empty-handed.”
She took a step into the room proper, and the air before the tree flickered. Elias sensed the surge of magic, and impulse jerked him forward, putting him between Aimee and the rapidly forming, translucent figure of light that stood before them. He could make out the bottom half of a feminine face partially obscured by the hood of a ratty cloak. A blurry wisp of glimmering smoke trailed about the edges of the mystic projection.
Then Aimee was stepping around him, giving him a look somewhere between exasperation and surprise. “It’s just a projection spell,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Elias murmured, awkwardly. “Reflex.”
Aimee’s expression turned baffled.
“So you’re the ones,” the figure said, and her voice was surprisingly young, “drowning out the Song with your deafening fates.”
“I brought them here,” Belit said, stepping forward, hand resting upon the pommel of her longsword. Abruptly, the woman drew her steel, rested the point in the floor, and knelt before the projection. “Please, Augress,” the title sounded formal, “I beg of you. They believe that Amut has been murdered, and troubling signs point to the return of the Faceless. The captain’s chair sits empty, and three candidates bicker for its power.” Her gold eyes blazed, pleading, in her dark face. “We need your aid, now more than ever. I beg you speak to them, with my honor as voucher.”
Shocked into silence at the earnest display before him, Elias was lost for words.
The Oracle seemed likewise surprised. She paused, and in the line of her mouth, Elias detected something – regret perhaps, pain definitely. Then she spoke. “Poor warrior,” she said, at last. “There is only so much that I can do. The lamps have been lit, the water has begun to run. The trials have started, and there is no stopping them. One will pass, or all will fall.”
Belit’s eyes widened in horror. Aimee stepped forward. “Please,” she said. “I am Aimee de Laurent–”
“I know who you are,” the Oracle fixed her gaze on Aimee. “Sky-splitter, Jester’s niece.”
“I must find Amut’s killer,” Aimee said. As Elias watched, the apprentice mage stood straight as a spear, fearless before the projection. “I know that divination is imprecise, but even blurry sight betters the vision of the blind. I implore you, Augress–” she used the title “–help us.”
“You mistake me,” the Oracle answered, and Elias heard a sadness in her voice. “Fate is neither a matter of vision nor of blindness. There is only the Song, sky-splitter. Only the grand symphony, and the notes without number within. Iseult hears, and so do I.”
Abruptly the projection’s hooded head turned. Elias knew why: he heard a sound down one of the corridors. Belit straightened beside him. They exchanged a look. The rasp of steel echoed in the half-light.
“You have been followed,” the Oracle said, and her projection began to fade. “Save yourselves. Flee! Find me again!”
“Run, Ferret,” Belit snapped.
Ferret stepped into the shadows behind them, and bolted.
“Wait!” Aimee shouted. Too late. She stood now in the midst of a dissolving image. Specks of light drifted to the floor, forming feathers of ice that melted snowlike, to nothing. Their eyes met. Hers were wide, frustrated, and afraid.
Belit elbowed him in the side. He turned in her direction. Three corridors branched from the space ahead of them. In the darkness of each, movement stirred. The half-light fired the edges of drawn swords.
“Draw your sword, junk ritter,” Belit said. “Our foes are here.”
They crept forward from three tunnels, moving with steps that made hardly a sound. A frigid fear preceded them, cloying like damp ice to the heart. Even the grace with which they moved was unnatural. Elias’s eyes swept across them as they came. There was a rhythm and a rise and fall of tension in the muscles of living people, a cessation and resumption of movement never noticed until it was completely absent. Their perfect grace was disturbing. An instinctive part of him he couldn’t name reacted with panicked revulsion. These killers were dead.
His hand closed on Oath of Aurum’s hilt. The grip was hot to the touch, and the steel glowed white when he drew it, lit from within. He took a single step forward past Aimee. “Miss Laurent,” he said, “forgive me, but this time I must insist you stand behind me.”
“They’re dead,” the sorceress breathed. In her voice, he detected a rising terror.
“You’ve faced worse,” Elias snapped back. She might be the only one here with the power to stop these things.
“Worse?” he heard her say, still in the thrall of her fear.
He risked a single glance over his shoulder at her wide-eyed, startled face. “You defeated Esric, didn’t you?” He almost choked on the name. “You defeated me.”
“Right,” he heard her say, fortified. “Right.”
He felt the flare of magic and heard words slip, practiced and sharp, from her lips. He had no idea what the spell was, and there was no time to think about it. The dead swordsmen leaped forward, and thought vanished. They were quick. The enchanted sword rang against an incoming blade. Shoulder to shoulder with Belit, Elias faced the dead. He tried to call on his speed, but his mind wouldn’t focus. A sword was there, cutting in, he turned it aside, shifted his stance immediately to ward against another cut. The strikes were patient. Probing. Deft as willow reeds. And they never stopped.
Go ahead, Roland’s voice rang mocking in his head. Show them your power. See how quickly they turn on you.
“Elias!” Belit shouted beside him. “Focus!”
Elias parried a second sword, a third, a fourth. The incoming strikes sped up. A wall of advancing steel pushed them back. The twist and crack of sinew and muscle pushed past its limits filled his ears. This close, he saw half-rotted faces with glowing eyes. Then their mouths started to move, and rasping voices filled the air.
“Where is my wife?” shrieked one.
“I’m so cold,” whimpered another.
“Please, I can’t see. Why are you doing this?”
“I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”
“Help me, HELP ME!”
The two warriors took a step back, giving ground as one. His nerves raked raw, his mind defying focus, Elias fought the urge to scream. The dead pressed in,
the pace of their attacks increasing. Five blades now bore down on two, and it was all Elias could do to defend Belit’s left and Aimee’s front. An opening. The stink of rot and the flash of swords that needed no rest filled his senses. He needed an opening.
There was none.
Then two things happened. First, Aimee shouted “DOWN!” behind him. Elias dropped reflexively into a crouch, and the bloom of a powerful spell passed over his head, the tingling ripple of magic hitting his senses and making his hair stand on end. A wave of concussive flames hammered into their enemies in a semicircular arc expanding outwards. They staggered back.
Second, a scream sounded from the corridors behind them, and Vant, Vlana, Clutch, and Bjorn came charging into their midst, the former two wielding pairs of short shock-sticks, the latter two with a large boarding axe and a huge mace. Two of the dead were actively on fire. The others leaped to their feet. None of them had slowed down at all. Elias surged upward. Aimee grabbed his arm.
“I know you’re holding back,” she said. “Don’t. We need you.”
Then she was moving, her hands working through forms and a fresh spell on her lips.
Oath of Aurum blazed in his grip. The black knight tried to center his mind, but one of the dead was upon him. Steel rang on steel. He wound for a thrust. It shoved him aside and jackhammered its fist into his throat. “Help me,” the dead man moaned. “Where is my child? Where is my child?”
Elias staggered from the blow, barely kept his balance. Pain rippled through his middle. Go ahead, the sliver of Roland within his mind sneered. As if you could be anything without me.
He parried again, but no counter was possible, as a second of the dead – this one actively blazing with Aimee’s flames – set upon him. Pushed him back towards the dais. He glimpsed the rest of the fight. Vant and Vlana held their own against one of the dead, their four sticks scarcely blunting its darting cuts. Aimee summoned a shield spell, then thrust forward a punch that sent a blast of force into the center of another, sending it hurtling down the corridor whence it had come. Belit slipped under another’s cut and buried her sword in its chest. The dead thing ignored its impalement and raked its blade at her face. She caught it on a steel gauntlet that wrapped her arm beneath her sleeve, and ripped her sword upwards, splitting the thing into two halves that still twitched and moved.
Dragon Road Page 9
