Last time there had been warnings, explanations. No apparitions greeted her this time. Only the empty sky… and Elias. The young man stood a few feet from her, staring about. “No–” she heard him say with rising panic. “Not again. Not again!”
“Forgive me,” the voice echoed all around them, familiar and pained. “It is hard… to speak in this place.”
Aimee turned in a circle. Elias took a step back on the rippling surface. Aimee compulsively grabbed his hand. “Elias,” she said. “You’re all right. You’re all right.” He gripped her palm, closed his eyes. She felt the panic rolling off him in waves. “It’s not going to happen again,” she said, drawing close, clutching his hand as her other palm reached up to touch his face. “It’s not going to happen again because there’s nothing left to rip away. This is you. Do you understand me? This is the real you.”
His eyes opened, meeting hers. Fear – panic – receded just slightly. He nodded without speaking.
“And you both must see,” the voice echoed, all around them. Aimee turned, still gripping his hand, and watched as a vision of blurred figures warred across the sky, a chaotic mass of churning violence in which she glimpsed the uniforms of officer aristocrats and their enforcers pitted against the defiant masses of the enlisted. The shades of Iseult’s people hacked each other to pieces, and from behind where they stood, a terrible wind rose from a keening wail into a deafening roar. A sudden fear seized her, primal and wild. The sunset dimmed as an impossible darkness surged from behind where they stood, and the wind blasted every shadow, aristocrat and enlisted alike, into screaming tufts of mist.
Aimee’s breath came in ragged gasps. She didn’t want to look.
“You must,” the diamond answered.
“I can’t!” Her voice sounded shrill in her ears.
“You can,” she heard Elias say. She glanced up at him, afraid as she. Again, the small nod. Fortified, Aimee turned her eyes to the darkness that rose behind them, and stared into the dark heart of a vast, terrible storm that stained the heavens black. Before the darkness, a lone lion reared its head back, and roared.
“HE COMES WITH THE STORM,” the diamond thundered in her head.
Abruptly, Aimee was back in her cabin, gasping for breath. Her eyes squeezed shut, standing on her feet. Her heartbeat hammered in her ears. Her left hand was wrapped in a viselike grip around the Axiom Diamond. Then several more facts registered to her senses: first, Elias was leaning with his back pressed against the frame of her cabin doorway, the diamond wrapped in her fist pressed against his chest. Second, her right hand was clutching his. Third, she was standing very, very close to him. His forehead was pressed against hers, their breathing slowing in a synced, even rhythm. His other hand was braced against the other side of the frame, behind her. For a moment, she did nothing at all. Her mind – already spun about by the feverish terror of the vision – was suddenly able to focus only on her own intense physical awareness of the man she’d crashed into. Slowly, she opened her eyes. Elias’s face was inches from her own. His expression was quietly intent, and his green eyes watched her with a cautious uncertainty.
“Are you alright?” he asked, after a moment. The sound was like a static shock up her spine.
“Fine,” Aimee answered. Her face was flushed. Her throat was dry. Her voice sounded considerably higher than she’d have liked. “Sorry. That. That was. That–”
“–was unexpected,” he completed.
“Yes.” She stuttered at the word several more times than she needed to.
The sound of someone clearing their throat cut across Aimee’s thoughts, and turning, she saw Bjorn standing less than two feet away. The two of them abruptly separated – practically leaped apart – and Elias held up his hands like a suspected burglar. Whatever spell – strange, unfathomable, impossible – had held sway was broken. Aimee opened her mouth and “It’s-not-what-it-looks-like!” came tearing out.
And what does it look like? her mind asked. Shut up, she mentally snapped back.
“That,” Bjorn started, “is none of my business. Clutch caught your stray, though. And–” the big man’s eyes caught sight of the glowing diamond in Aimee’s hand. Whatever suspicion had been present was wiped from his face in a heartbeat. “–And that hasn’t glowed since Port Providence.”
Aimee swallowed, self-consciously tightening her robe about her waist, glad of the change of topic. Glad of being able to think of something – anything – else. Back to work. Eyes on the prize. The vision was fresh in her mind. “The squitten got it loose,” she said, “and we both ended up touching it. Get Harkon. Now.”
By the time her teacher returned, Aimee was fully clothed and considerably more comfortable with the state of the universe. Though, as the group gathered in the common area and she caught a glance from Elias where he stood by the window, she absently reflected that comfort – while not the wrong word – wasn’t exactly the right one, either.
Harkon looked tired. If she had to hazard a guess, Aimee would’ve assumed that he hadn’t slept all night. It was impressive, then, that through the exhaustion lines on his face and over the wrinkles on his dark, steepled hands, a keen amusement still lurked in the way he asked his first question.
“Really, Vant?” he asked. “Squittens?”
The engineer – in the end – hadn’t escaped the ink himself. A large blotchy patch covered his left shoulder. He looked at it irritably. Leaning against the back wall, Clutch rolled her eyes. She’d since changed her clothes, but a dash of ink still discolored her blue hair. “Go right ahead,” she growled at him. “Complain. I dare you.”
“I didn’t know she was gonna have a litter,” Vant said.
“Neither of us did,” Vlana said with an apologetic sigh that wasn’t entirely genuine. “But it was funny.”
“You’ve lived on ships too long,” Bjorn muttered with an amused shake of his head.
“Says the man who lives on a ship,” Vant quipped back.
“Only for the last third of my life,” the old warrior answered.
“More pertinent is the vision Aimee just relayed to us,” Harkon said, dismissing the argument with a wave. It was just the group of them now, Rachim having returned to his villa. On the table in the center of the room, the Axiom Diamond sat on a small pillow, its glow still present, but much fainter.
“They come with the storms,” Elias said, one elbow resting against the edge of the window as he stared out into Rachim’s hangar. The comment was more to himself than anyone else. Aimee looked his way a moment longer. This second encounter with the Axiom had left him deeply shaken.
She turned back to find Harkon watching her in thoughtful silence, and felt her face grow warm for just a moment before she shook her head. This was ridiculous.
“You’re thinking of what Viltas told us,” she said to her teacher. “Aren’t you?”
The words played again through her mind, and she suppressed a shudder. “Surrounded by corpses, in the heart of the metadrive chamber, all I could smell was rain.”
Harkon nodded. “Indeed. It would seem to lend credence to Lord Viltas’s theory that our enemy was tapping into a greater menace than itself.”
“Care to let the rest of us in on the secret?” Clutch asked. “I mean, fun as this is, listening to the three of you being all cryptic and such.”
“Viltas warned us that the necromancer the late Captain Amut faced was operating in conjunction with some sort of cult,” Harkon explained. “A cult that the lord shipman believes preceded him, having older roots on Iseult than the dark sorcerer they wound up following. He told us that when the monster was killed, it was in the middle of a ritual in Iseult’s core metadrive chamber, involving sacrifices to something lurking beyond what seems to be a small portal, something that he said smelled of rain. The Oracle also said to beware the Children of the Empty Sky.”
Aimee wrapped her arms around her chest, seeking to dissuade herself from feeling a sudden, deep cold. “What he described sound
ed like Esric… that thing I faced in the bowels of the Iron Hulk’s own metadrive chamber,” she said after a moment. Out of the corner of her eye, Elias physically winced. The monster of which she spoke had kept him in thrall for almost sixteen years, keeping him as the obedient, murderous warlord Azrael, servant of the Eternal Order.
“That’s not its name,” Elias said, not looking back at any of them. “Just a bloody coat it liked to wear.”
“I thought the diamond refracted truth back at you,” Bjorn mused, looking at the faintly pulsing jewel thoughtfully. “Wasn’t that what it did to him?”
Elias didn’t respond to the reference, but Aimee saw his shoulders tense.
“Allegedly,” Vlana said.
“That’s one thing it does, or can do,” Aimee said, cutting the former off before more damage could be done. Inwardly, she made a note that she and the quartermaster – her first friend aboard Elysium – were going to have a difficult talk, soon. “But to be honest, I’m not sure if that’s the proper takeaway. All indications are that the Axiom is somehow sentient, or at least is close to it. It bestows its ‘blessing’ on individuals it chooses through some sort of test, and it works by a set of rules we don’t fully understand yet.” She paused, chewed on her lower lip for a moment. “What concerns me,” she said next, “is its first statement: that it was difficult for it to speak to us, given where we currently are. What does that mean?”
“The jewel doesn’t like behemoths?” Bjorn offered.
“Unlikely,” Harkon said.
“Maybe the enchantments keeping Iseult together inhibit it somehow?” Vlana asked, flashing her brother a questioning look. But Vant shook his head.
“Not how metadrives work. Even ancient ones made the old way still have chaos dampeners on them to keep everything else on the ship working.”
“The villa we’re in? What sort of magical defenses does Rachim have in place?” Bjorn murmured.
“Wait,” Clutch said. “What if you’re all thinking about this wrong? What if it’s not the ship the jewel is on – what if it’s where we are in the sky?”
Vlana’s brows drew together. “Alright, pilot, what do you mean?”
“We’re way way out on the far reaches of the Dragon Road,” Clutch said. “I’ve been checking the stars every night to mark our positions. They’re just casual measurements I do as a part of my evening ritual, so there’s a bit of a margin for error… but when we returned to Visramen, I noticed that we were way out on the far edge of the Tarragon Arch.” The pilot took a calming breath. “And that means we’re one jump or portal mishap away from the Tempest Crescent.”
A silence settled over the common room. Elias had turned to look back at the rest of them, and Aimee caught his eyes. There was something knowing, and fearful, in his expression.
“I’ve… heard stories,” she said after a moment. “Legends of ships disappearing, and of something beyond the crescent’s edge that makes navigation almost impossible–”
“They’re not stories,” Vlana said quietly. She barely suppressed a shudder.
“It’s still a long way away under normal engine power,” Vant said. “The Arch is within one jump of the crescent, but that’s not exactly next door.”
“In portal terms it is,” Aimee said. “In magical terms, one jump isn’t very far at all.” She shook her head. “What in the world is the flotilla doing this far out from civilization?”
“The Arch is still a frequent trade route,” Harkon said. “It’s fairly safe, and a sufficiently out-of-the-way place to conduct their own business before the ships begin their long circuit back along the trade routes. But yes, Aimee is right. Mystically speaking, it is… close. And while the crescent, and the maelstrom beyond, is years away under normal power, its reach is long enough to stir up trade winds and drive odd phenomena outwards that are felt even in the spheres of the Empire and the Republic.” He paused. “And throughout the Unclaimed.”
“Gods,” Vant said, sitting down. “We’ve never been out this far before.”
“I have,” Harkon said quietly. “And further, a long, long time ago. If that is where we are, then the warning the diamond conveys must concern the maelstrom. And that–” he paused “–I have never directly seen.”
“I have,” Elias said, quietly. All eyes in the room now turned to him, which seemed to make him immediately uncomfortable.
“When?” The question came from Bjorn, and the old warrior’s face wore a different look: sad, tired.
“I was… very young,” Elias said. His eyes acquired a faraway look. Detached. Thoughtful. His brows drew together. “My former master brought me, and two of his other apprentices there. My memory of it is fuzzy. It was before he started using Esric to control me. I think the order sees the edge of the storm as sacred.” He swallowed awkwardly. “We were taken in a ship, and left in our cabins for the night that we flew close to one of the storm’s wall. That night, we all had… dreams.”
The muscles in his neck tightened as he spoke. “And in the morning, one of them was completely mad. The other had torn his own eyes out. The storm is horrible for everyone, but for people with my abilities…” He shook his head. “We hear things, and see things, there.”
“I’ve seen it too,” Clutch said. The pilot wore a wry expression. “My first gig. Less than legal. We cut through the crescent as a shortcut. Got too close and then got the hell out. Nothing so dramatic as that happened, but… one of my copilots was never quite the same again. He lost his shit after I left the crew. Fell apart at the seams. A year later I found out he’d eaten his own knife.”
“So the warning seems clear enough,” Bjorn grunted. “Don’t fucking go there.”
“Perhaps a better translation would be: don’t let whatever is behind this take us there.”
Harkon stood up. “Do not tell anyone of the Axiom’s role in this. Our possession of the diamond is still our secret, and that knowledge would only complicate everything we’re trying to do here. However, I think the next step is clear. Clutch, I want you to redo those star-chart readings with Vlana double-checking your maps. Vant, you, Elias, myself, and Aimee will be paying Viltas a visit to see if we can’t get access to the metadrive chamber of Iseult. It is possible – however unlikely – that there might be some answers as to the deeper mysteries therein. We have to try.”
As he spoke, Aimee glimpsed Vant slowly inching his way out of the room. Harkon stopped him in his tracks. “Did you miss what I said?”
The engineer cursed under his breath, then stood at attention. “No sir.”
Harkon smirked. “When we return, you will relieve Bjorn from watching over the squats, and ensure that no more of them escape. Do you understand? You brought them aboard, now you get to take care of them.”
Clutch’s grin was extremely smug. Vant stuck his tongue out at her.
“You’ve got your jobs,” Harkon said. “Jump to them.”
As the room started to empty, Aimee walked over to where Elias stood, still staring with a look of trepidation and unease at the diamond. For a moment, she debated whether she would say anything at all, given what had happened… but human concern won out over deeper confusions, and she nudged his shoulder. “Hey,” she said quietly. “I meant what I said in there before. It can’t hurt you.”
Elias stirred, her words drawing him up from the depths of his thoughts. He blinked twice, as if seeing her for the first time. “What? No, sorry… I was just thinking about what we saw in there. A piece Harkon didn’t talk about. It’s eating at me.”
“Which part?” Aimee asked.
“The lion,” Elias answered. “There was a lion, roaring before the storm.”
“They called Amut the Lion of Heaven,” Aimee affirmed, “but–”
“–But he’s dead,” Elias finished. “So who, or what, was it supposed to represent?”
Aimee paused. “All I can think of at this juncture,” she said, “is one of the candidates for captaincy… but I’m not sure the t
hought comforts me much.”
She reached down and lifted the gem. It glowed slightly brighter when it touched her fingers, but no vision came this time.
She wasn’t honestly sure if that was comforting, either.
Chapter Eleven
Two Hearts
Elias stood in his room, staring at the ghost that lurked on the wooden rack. The black armor he’d worn as Azrael, edged in gold, rested there, staring back at him like some sort of monstrous cage that he had escaped, but not actually managed to leave.
It was also the single best suit of armor he owned. He stared at it, weighing the value against the risk, both to his soul, and to everyone around him, were the gold and the black to walk forth again.
“I can’t get away from you,” he whispered in the dim half-light of his spartan cabin. His fists clenched by his side until they hurt. “But I don’t have to use you.” He paused. “Not yet.”
In place of the familiar enchanted steel, he donned the makeshift hodgepodge of leather and linked mail that had sufficed in the interim since he acquired it in Ishtier. It fit awkwardly, unsized for him. The previous owner had been thicker around the middle, he thought, and weaker about the chest and shoulders. There was a mirror on the far wall, and he took his measure after tightening his sword belt about his waist. Azrael had been created, molded with specific intentions in mind. Always clean-shaven, long-haired and princely, trained to wear an arrogant smirk that disarmed as much as it frightened.
It was a comfort, then, that an altogether different man stared back. The ghost of what would eventually be a decent beard was starting to cover his jawline. His shorter hair was ill-behaved, and his expression was weary and worn. Even his eyes were different – still the same green, but more fearful, he thought, than arrogant. The image of a tired, beaten-down man stared back at Elias, dressed in badly fitting armor and clutching the gilded hilt of a dead prince’s sword as though it were some sort of lifeline. This, then, was what Elias Leblanc looked like? It was the antithesis of princely.
Dragon Road Page 14
