Dragon Road

by Joseph Brassey

  A wave of emotion washed over Elias. He swallowed, unsure of how to process it. There was no answer in the well of his mind, save the echo of a simple lullaby and the repetition of six words. Noble and brave. Gentle and kind.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For everything.”

  Then he headed down the ramp and through the main foyer of Rachim’s home. As he crossed the landing pad, he caught a glimpse of the cold stars in the skies. The last time he’d been here, it had been as a shivering child. Evil memories crept across his mind like cold fingers in the dark. His hand reflexively gripped the hilt of his sword. How many other children without number were about to be exposed to what he’d seen in the cold darkness of his nightmares?

  None, he thought resolutely. Not if I have any say in it.

  He was the last one to get there. Just outside the doorway to the streets, Aimee stood with Rachim examining a map. Vant was dressed in his leathers, his shock-sticks hanging from his hip. Rachim was wearing mail and a breastplate, and for the first time since Elias had seen him, carried a gilded black hammer at his waist and a heavy matchlock on his opposite hip.

  Aimee herself wore her field gear: blue coat, knee-high boots, and fingerless gloves. Her hair was pulled away from her face, and the expression she wore – though tired – was like steel. “We can’t rely on the railcars,” she said.

  “No,” Rachim said. “According to my sources they’re down between here and the midship aperture. But obviously there’s still power below, or we’d be in for a hell of a worse time.”

  To fall forever. The fate of skyships that dropped from the heavens was the stuff of terrifying stories, as was the eternal dark that waited below. Even mentioning it on an airborne vessel was considered taboo.

  “What’s the status of the streets?” Elias asked, stepping into the conversation. The others looked at him, and this time he received a chorus of nods. Fear made allies of the suspicious very quickly. “It’s only your strength they value,” that niggling, vicious voice whispered in his mind. Elias didn’t dignify it with an answer.

  “So far, aside from cleanup efforts and rescue efforts, clean,” Rachim answered. “Not as much rubble as feared, either. They build most structures on the upper levels squat and broad for a reason.” He turned back to Aimee. “But if we can reach the aperture on foot, a working railcar should be findable. Belit sent word that we’d find her and her people there, as well.”

  “Then let’s get moving,” Aimee said, seeming to square her shoulders and push aside her weariness. As Elias watched, she stepped into the role of leader, and took the reins firmly in hand. Good, he thought. Hold them tight, and we may yet weather this.

  It was not the first time that Elias had walked through the ruins of a once-wealthy city. The crumbled, battered fronts, scarred buildings, and blasted statues were all nauseatingly familiar sights, and conjured the ghostly specter not only of burned and blasted Port Providence, but of other times, earlier, when he had walked beside Lord Roland through shattered neighborhoods as the accounters took their blood-money measurements. “This is the natural order,” his old teacher’s words echoed in his mind. “The weak grow decadent and fat, and exercise their forceful decree, but inevitably, nature seeks a redressing of balance, and we, enforcers of its law of strength, come to collect what is due. This is the way of the world, writ in purest form.”

  Elias stepped over the smashed face of a statue, and through the hazy memory of evil men and their evil words. My one-time master, he thought. How utterly wrong you were.

  It was not the first time Elias had seen this, but it was the first time he had nothing to do with it.

  It took clambering over a few rubble piles to reach the first stop in their route, but when they arrived at the aperture’s edge, Belit awaited them. Her red armor had sustained a few scars, and her face bore signs of recent magical healing, but she looked resolute, and whole, if tired. Next to her was her second-in-command, Hakat. The barrel-chested, bald-pated warrior wore a similar longsword to his superiors, and his armor was a darker shade of red. He favored the group with a nod as they approached.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to find down there,” Belit said candidly. “But I do know that there have been violent scuffles in the area. A servant fleeing upwards from the lower levels just after we came through the portal said that she’d heard the sounds of gunfire and weapons clashing, a short time before the explosion. I choose to believe the chamber hasn’t fallen. If it had, more would have certainly gone wrong than has. Are you ready?”

  “Born that way,” Aimee said with a fierce energy. “Rachim has brought ten of his best armsmen–” She gestured to the armed, armor-clad men with their short-swords and flame-projectors who were walking behind their host. “Elias you know, and Vant has metadrive expertise, in the event that people down there are dead.”

  “The gods save us,” Belit said, “if that is the case. Come. Iseult is in need.”

  The elevator still worked, but they only got halfway down its path before it let them out at an earlier stop, and a quick glance at the ceiling above showed them why. Beyond the catwalk onto which the group stepped, the rail high above had been physically blasted apart, and its tangled wreckage hung out into the cavernous interior of the ship, shedding sparks into the darkness. As Elias watched, he saw the lights constantly flickering on and off on some levels, and utterly shut down on others. It was worse, then, than Rachim had thought. Much worse.

  “Shit,” Aimee swore.

  “I know the way from here,” Belit said. “Follow.”

  The walk was long and arduous, past apartments that had emptied, store fronts ravaged by explosions, and dark windows from which Elias occasionally saw frightened eyes peeking past threadbare curtains. One or two glances told him everything he needed to know: these people had seen recent violence.

  When they turned a corner and came into sight of the great wall of the metadrive chamber, he glimpsed the first real sign of the aftermath. There were corpses all around the foot of the wall with its innumerable prayer notes. When they reached the first, Elias paused to kneel and examine a black-robed figure that had been carrying a makeshift cudgel made of a long broom-haft capped by an unstable power source from a shock-stick. The dead man wore a crude mask that was supposed to seem like an opaque face, and stripping it off, Elias stared into the dead grimace of an utterly ordinary, half-starved, gaunt man.

  Well-fed, well-treated people who felt they had a wealth of options weren’t likely to join apocalypse cults. This man had been killed by some sort of high-powered magical discharge that had put a hole the size of two fists through the center of his chest. As the others fanned out, he rose and walked to examine another, much the same as the last, and another still.

  “Eyes open,” he said to the others. “There’s either a sorcerer inside, or someone packing some impressive firepower.”

  Aimee rose from where she’d inspected another corpse. “It looks as though they threw themselves at the chamber,” she said. “Probably in waves, given how many of them there are… and the people within boarded themselves up.”

  Elias followed the aim of her hand to where the doors they’d passed through mere days before were now more barricade than entryway. “So then,” he answered, “the question is who’s in there now, and will they talk to us?”

  “I heard the downlevelers were rioting,” an armsman said behind them.

  “Trashing their own living space,” another affirmed. “Maybe Yaresh was right about bringing order to this wretched place.”

  “Shut up, both of you,” Rachim snapped. “These corpses are cultists, you damned fools.”

  “Don’t. Move.”

  Elias slowly looked in the direction the new voice had come from. A figure approached from the far end of the wall, dressed in the dirty, stained uniform of one of the enlisted. There was soot on his brown face, and in his hands he held a large, chrome-plated weapon that glowed at the end of an aperture mangled by its l
ast discharge. Elias’s eyes widened. He knew exactly what that thing was.

  “Put that damn thing down, Enlisted,” the second armsman snapped and leveled his shock-spear at the newcomer.

  “I wouldn’t point that at him,” Elias said, flashing the armsman a look that stopped him in his tracks. “That’s a mystic force projector.” All eyes were suddenly on Elias, who held up his hands to show their lack of weapons. “It looks homemade, which says a few things about the genius of the man carrying it. It also needs to recharge for at least twenty seconds between each shot,” he said.

  “But one shot,” the newcomer said, “will obliterate the target and everything else within a fifteen-foot radius. So I repeat. Don’t. Move. There are more of us, and we hold this chamber. You’re not touching the Maiden’s Heart.”

  “Dammit boy,” Rachim snapped, “do you not understand that we’re here to help you?”

  “No,” Belit said, in a tone that shut down further argument. “He doesn’t. Look at him, Lord Rachim – no, really, look at him. He’s half-starved and looks like he’s been fighting for days. Tell your frightened warriors to lower their weapons. This man isn’t our enemy.”

  She stepped more fully into the light cast from the cracks in the barricade. “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

  The young man hesitated, then nodded. “Belit of the Red Guard.”

  “That I am,” she said, her arms spread wide. “And this is Aimee de Laurent of the skyship Elysium and her companions. You don’t have to give up your weapon. Just lower it and let us come inside. We’re here to help. Can you tell us what happened?”

  “Don’t fully know,” the man said after a second, though he seemed to relax, just a little. “We saw the explosion from three levels down. Purple fire belched out of every hole, and the power was cut to our entire level. Enforcers started going nuts, confining people to their quarters. Didn’t work. Then we heard the shouting and the screaming and cut loose. Got up here in time to find them–” he gestured at the corpses “–throwing themselves at the doorways. Killed a bunch of ’em, then it became clear no help was coming, so we–” he paused again “–used some of the spare bits they’ve got inside to put together a few of these. A warning: there are fifty of us. We’ve already restored a measure of power to some of the lower levels, and kept more of these robed bastards from slipping in. Any funny business, and you’re all gonna fry.”

  “No funny business,” Aimee said, with a shake of her head as she stepped forward.

  “I’m a metadrive engineer,” Vant said. “Whatever’s happened in there, if I can get a look at it, I may be able to help.”

  Elias spoke up last, adding his voice with a question nobody else had asked. “What’s your name?”

  The enlisted man looked between the group of them, then slowly lowered his weapon. “There’s seven more of these trained on you right now. The armsmen and the aristocrat stay out here, where maybe they can help fend off another attack, if they’re sincere. The rest of you… you can come in, but only if you can fix this mess.” At the last he looked at Elias. “My name is Jerich. Junior sanitation.”

  “You have my word,” Belit said, as an aperture appeared in the barricade, many organized hands quickly moving debris to allow entry into the interior of the chamber. “We will do our utmost to fix this.”

  As the group slipped through the entryway one by one, Elias heard the same, bewildered armsman say to himself, “they told us the lower levels were rioting.”

  Jerich rolled his eyes. “Sure they did,” he grunted as Elias walked past him. “That’s what they always say.”

  The interior of the metadrive chamber was chaos. The purple lights of the main core and its secondary supports still filled the room, but all around the floor, wires were twisted, cables smashed and frayed. A great shower of sparks occasionally disgorged itself from somewhere high above, and it was looking in that direction that showed Elias what had happened to lay Iseult so terribly low.

  The first secondary metadrive core of Iseult had been completely destroyed. The translucent cylinder was smashed open midway up its length, acrid smoke still leaking from its now-dark interior. Whatever had destroyed it had shifted the entire thing in its frame, and it now sat, a leaning, broken pillar capped with mangled wires and ruined enchantments, forcing its burden on the remaining cores in the semicircle. Each of these gave off an uncomfortable heat that Elias recognized all too well as being a sign that the entire chamber was dangerously destabilized.

  The group was immediately greeted by a host of hungry faces of a dozen different shades. Dirty enlisted uniforms were worn, or, in several cases, stained nightclothes or off-duty casual clothing. Makeshift weapons were in evidence: tools repurposed for defense mostly, including several shock-sticks homemade from spare parts… But here and there Elias saw a sword, mace, or truncheon taken from a foolish enforcer. Along the far wall, behind Iseult’s prime metadrive core, a number of bodies had been laid in state. Elias felt his heart sink: a large number of them wore the uniforms of Iseult’s metadrive attendants and engineers.

  “My gods,” Belit said as they stepped fully into the chamber. “What happened here?”

  “I’ll let the chief explain,” Jerich said. “He’s over there. We’ve done what we could, but we’re not sure how much longer he’s going to last.”

  No, Elias thought. They were led forward, through a parting crowd of determined, tired faces, to where Chief Engineer Hephus lay at the foot of Iseult’s prime metadrive core. The soul of the Maiden herself. His back was propped up against the base of the platinum pyramid, and there were blankets over his legs, but the bindings about his middle were stained a red that bordered on black, and his face was the color of ash and milk. Only by the steady rise and fall of his chest did Elias discern that he was still alive. Aimee walked past them without thinking, jogging to the engineer’s side. On the opposite side, one of his subordinates was holding his hand, trying to get his superior to drink some water from a battered tin flask.

  “I promise,” Aimee said with quiet certainty to the other man. “I have some skill at healing magic. I won’t hurt him. Just let me look.”

  Hephus stirred as she crouched beside him, and his eyes slowly opened. “Should’ve,” he croaked past dry lips, “should’ve… seen them coming. Didn’t… didn’t think they were that… desperate.”

  “It’s alright, chief,” the junior engineer said. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “He was worse when we found him,” Jerich explained. “Don’t think the initial explosion did this to him… but there’s only so much we could do with makeshift bandages and boiled moonshine.” The bitterness in his voice was palpable.

  “Not your fault either,” the junior engineer said, through a lump in his throat. “They snuck some sort of makeshift bomb in here, a null-stone attached to a small charge. It destabilized the interior of the secondary core. Started a chain reaction that would’ve taken more of them out. Chief Hephus jumped in. He climbed up the damn thing and manually severed the secondary core from the rest of them before it could do any more damage. He was on the way down when it… went off.”

  “Just… wasn’t fast enough,” Hephus breathed. “Too slow. Too old.”

  Aimee looked up at them, and Elias saw something in her face that he hadn’t before: a deep, sudden pain. “Gods,” she said quietly, “this is… I can’t…”

  “Please,” the junior officer pleaded, “you said you know healing magic.”

  “The wound has to be properly stitched, cleaned,” Aimee’s voice shook. “I can… I can ease his pain, I think… but the internal damage is… it’s beyond my skill.”

  Vant moved forward, knelt in front of the trio where they stood. Elias closed his eyes. He’d seen this before, on too many battlefields to count, and his mind took him there even as the others struggled to catch up with the implications. Healing magic, at least the basic kind, such as that Aimee knew, required chirurgery to make s
ure the wound was properly cleaned and stitched and everything was in its proper place, before it could accelerate the healing process. If Hephus had been hit by a powerful mystic blast to the gut, and it had gone untreated for the better part of a day…

  That he was alive now was something of a miracle.

  “Hephus,” Vant said, and Elias recognized a gentleness in the engineer’s voice that he’d never heard before. “I am Vant of the Engineers’ Guild. I can finish the work. Pick up where you left off, and keep Iseult’s sacred heart beating, but I need to know as much of what you know as you can tell me. Are there any plans in this room to which I can return? Or schematics I can rely on? Tell me. Help me save the heart of your ship.”

  Hephus closed his eyes. Nodded slowly. Then, with great effort, he lifted a shaking hand and pointed to a central control station. “Under floor panels. Bastards demanded them. Never gave in. Use them. Use him.” He lifted his apprentice’s hand, then said to the junior, “No more secrets. They’re here. They’re… beneath. Should’ve seen.”

  His eyes bulged and his body convulsed. Then a terrible rattle shuddered out of the chief engineer. His head thudded back against the pedestal, and his eyes stared sightlessly up at the still-beating heart of the ship he served.

  “Chief Hephus,” the junior engineer murmured. “Chief Hephus. Chief Hephus!”

  Two of the enlisted reached out and began to pull the younger man away from the corpse of his mentor. Aimee slowly rose to her feet, a new, terrible weight evident on her face when she looked at Elias, and then the others.

  “Do your job,” the young knight said. “His troubles are over.”

  “Alright, you heard the man!” Vant snapped. “Get those floorboards up under that central control station! We’ve got minutes, not hours!” Abruptly Elysium’s engineer gestured at Hephus’s junior. “What’s your name?”

  “Nubin,” the man said, barely keeping his composure. “Junior engineer, first class. I… I don’t have my tattoos yet.”