“The Oracle mentioned it too,” Elias recalled. “And Viltas said the thing the Faceless was communing with back when Amut killed him smelled of rain.”
Clutch shook her head. “We’ve gotta get control of this ship back, then turn it the hell around.”
“First we have to talk to Belit,” Aimee said. “Then we gather what allies we’ve got, and we move first thing tomorrow.” She fixed Clutch with an understanding, but unyielding look. “We’ll worry about things outside the ship once we have the ability to do something about them.”
Elias had met Belit dozens of times before, but this was different. He and Aimee walked through the ominously quiet streets towards the agreed-upon meeting place: the training hall of the Red Guard. They found the room empty, its lamps extinguished, and only the intermittent light that pierced the thick clouds outside poured through the windows.
In a training circle in the center of the room, she stood, a sharp longsword in her hand as over and over she repeated the basic overhand cuts every student of their shared art was required to know. With every descent of the blade and every snapping rise, the keening wind of the edge splitting the air echoed in the cavernous room.
She addressed them before either had a chance to speak. “There is an old legend,” she said, “that in the ancient times, before we came to the Drifting Lands, a space such as this could not be left empty without a light on to drive the demons away.”
She paused, and turned to regard the two of them. “I first came here as a ten year-old girl, and my first teacher taught me that absent a light, a practitioner of the art, training in somber focus, would suffice. Since that day, this room has never once been empty. When the guard is not performing their duties or sleeping, they train. Now all of them are on assignment, and only I remain to keep the demons out.”
“Do you know why we’re here?” Aimee asked.
“I suspect,” Belit said, “that you want my help against Yaresh in his inevitable coup. But if Diara is dead, and the council will not meet, I suspect the wheelhouse will not resist him. My duty is to defend the captain… If Yaresh claims the seat, I fear I will have to become your enemy.”
“Yaresh is not captain yet,” Aimee said.
“There is no other to oppose him,” Belit said.
“There is, teacher,” Elias said. “You.”
Belit stopped. The look on her face was a mixture of emotions – fear, apprehension, and pain… but not, Elias noted, surprise. “You cannot ask me that,” she said.
“The Oracle has already asked you,” Aimee said. “Twice now, in our presence.”
When Belit averted her eyes, Aimee’s own expression turned surprised. “And you knew it, didn’t you?”
Belit sheathed her sword. “The suggestion has been made more than once,” she murmured. “At first it was a handful of officers in Amut’s company. He was… a reformer. When I was chosen from the downlevelers to serve in his Red Guard, many whispered it was because I was being groomed for command. But there have been no trials in a long time, and the council selects its rulers. They would never suffer one from the lower levels to sit in his seat… a foreign hero was an indignity galling enough to them. As I climbed the ranks, my own men began to murmur it. I bid them stop. Power was never my aim. Only excellence, and service.”
“Belit,” Aimee started to say. “It must be you.”
“Why?” The commander turned and stared at them, anger and pain apparent on her face. “Because I am the most useful of allies you possess? Because I am respected? Because I wield a sword? None of these things make me fit for the role of guiding Iseult through the heavens! None of them make me the worthiest guardian of her people, her traditions, her…” Her voice faltered, filled with a deep and raging self-doubt which Elias knew too well. “…her heart.”
Aimee’s face froze.
“I am no expert on this ship,” Elias said quietly, “on her traditions, or her rich history, but I know a few things about leadership, if only the traits that render a person unfit for it. Your doubt is all the proof I need, teacher, to know that your heart is humble enough to sit in the chair. You have the sort of courage people follow, and the benevolence of spirit that inspires them to greatness.”
That stopped her for a moment. Belit closed her eyes and swore under her breath with the vehemence of one that had faced those sorts of statements before. “The council would never recognize me.”
“We’re past that,” Aimee said, recovering. “The trials are already happening, commander. You’re the one they were laid out for. You’re the only one who can truly complete them, I think, which is why Yaresh fears you… and I believe you are the only one whom the council would accept, after all this. You are Captain Amut’s daughter.”
The words hit the commander hard, and she stared at Aimee for a long moment, before breathing out, and saying – at last – “So, you know.”
Elias opened his mouth, and Belit gave him a pointed look. “I’m no squitten-eyed shop-girl, junk ritter,” she said with a sad smile. “Yes. I knew. We seldom spoke of it, but I long ago guessed. How could I not?” The slightest bitterness crept into her voice. “A thousand downleveler children he might have noticed, might have punished for attempted robbery, and the one he spares happens by chance to share his face, his eyes? I’d have been a fool not to realize, and in time, I did.”
“Why didn’t you put your name forth for the captaincy?” Aimee asked.
Belit sighed, helplessly. “Do you not listen, sorceress? My life was defined by where I came from, and I have spent it proving that my skill, my virtue, and not my blood earned what I had accomplished. To fall back upon an accident of birth to justify a claim at a power that I am not even sure I am equal to? Unthinkable. I earn what I am, Aimee de Laurent. No one can take that from me.” Her tone carried a weight of mingled pains: abandonment, pride, bitterness, and a complex affection deeper than words could express. “Not even my father.”
Elias took a breath. The answer was clear, then, even if she did not yet see it. “Then do as you always have, teacher,” he said quietly. “The trials are not a given, and neither is the captaincy. Pass them, by your skill and virtue,” he pressed. “And earn it.”
Belit fell silent for a long time. She stared at him in frustration, then with an affectionate exasperation, then she let out a long sigh. “You’re far too clever for your own good, junk ritter.”
“It’s why we keep him around,” Aimee said. The approving smile on her face was feline.
“I will need a little time,” Belit said, “to alert my inner circle. I assume you mean to move on him tomorrow?”
“With every ally we can,” Aimee said.
In his mind, Elias was thinking about every able-bodied soul that could be lost putting a stop to Yaresh. It was a disastrous military gambit, tactically. But if they won–
“Then I will come to you tonight,” she said. “At Rachim’s villa, no later than midnight. Be waiting for me.”
“We will,” Elias said. “You have my word.”
As they turned to go, Belit spoke one last time. “I fear you may have doomed us both, junk ritter. But perhaps that is not so bad.”
Elias paused before they slipped out the door. There seemed no point, now, in being anything less than candid. “I’ve been living on borrowed time for months,” he said with a grin. “Choosing where you die is a novelty.”
They spent the rest of the day preparing. Rachim went to rally up the allies that remained to him amongst the council. Vant made sure Elysium was still skyworthy, Vlana redid an inventory of their supplies. Plans were laid out. Paper got involved. Math.
When that was over, Elias found himself alone in the main bay, and – for once in his life – in the midst of what was essentially a military plan he was neither leading, nor taking the lead on preparing. It was dissonant, not being the one to make the hard choices. It was not that he craved the position, and if asked, would have refused it. The memories of choices he’d made as
Azrael in Port Providence were fresh, and painful, and if there was one thing of which he was certain, it was that he never wished to be a mercenary or soldier ever again.
But it still left him feeling uncertain, and with a profound sense of not knowing what to do with himself. Alone, the sound of his breath filled the cavernous bay of the small ship that was his adopted home. He wondered, idly, if Belit’s story had originated from the same white knights as her branch of the art they shared. He wondered at a dim memory of Roland’s old book, with its depictions of roses and chalices, of the visions from his dreams, and a simple, faded stone statue in Port Providence, at whose feet Azrael had collapsed, only for Elias to arise.
Knight upon the White Path, the Oracle had called him.
Perhaps it didn’t need to be as complicated as any of those things. Perhaps it was as simple as Belit had said: one practitioner, one light to keep the demons at bay.
He drew Oath of Aurum. The blade was warm. Its white lantern-light pushed back the shadows.
“More literal than you meant, I think,” he said out loud.
“Talking to yourself isn’t healthy,” Aimee said. Turning, he saw her standing at the entry to the main hallway that spanned the spine of the ship. The light from the common area framed her silhouette, firing the edge of her blonde hair. Elias squinted as he turned. Sometimes Aimee was hard to look at directly.
“Still getting to know myself,” he quipped back. “There’s no knowing without conversation.”
“You know,” she said thoughtfully, “I actually can’t judge you for that one.”
He smirked, sheathing his sword. “It’s a night for firsts.”
She laughed, the sound light – a little nervous – then recovered. “Come on, Elias Leblanc,” she beckoned for him to follow. “The crew is sharing a drink in the common room. We’re already one less. It shouldn’t be two.”
The common room was dimly lit. Enough that outside the big window, the skyline above the lip of the landing pad could be seen. Thick clouds had gathered, and another squall approached. A chill went through Elias at the sight of it. He remembered the terrors carried by the storms that spun free from the maelstrom. The whispers and magic they carried. It was an unnatural place, never fully mapped save the sheer breadth of its edge. The legends said that it was over a thousand years old, the extant penance the thousand gods had meted out upon humanity for the hubris of long-destroyed Varengard.
It was an old story, and not one that he remembered well, but the Eternal Order considered the storm sacred for a reason.
“And there they are,” Bjorn said, producing a flask. “Sit, kids. Hark would bust our asses if we didn’t throw one back for him on the eve of battle…” At the uneasy looks from the others, he added, “…wherever he is.”
He raised his flask. “To Hark.” Small glasses sat on the table, already poured. They each lifted theirs in turn. It smelled like wine – not expensive, sweet. Elias drank, echoing the words of the others. “To Harkon Bright.”
“Never seen storms like this,” Vant said. “And I’ve flown a lot of places. Never thought home would bring me so near.”
The word home had a weight to it just then, Elias thought. The others caught it.
“Where is that, anyway?” Clutch asked, thoughtfully. “Don’t think we’ve ever asked that question, have we? In all the times we’ve drunk before we were supposed to die. What’s home, when it’s not here?”
“Questions like that don’t get answered without the flask,” Bjorn said. “Guess we’re not doing any bullshit before we just jump right into the tradition, are we?”
“It’s simple,” Vlana said, and she nodded her chin in Elias and Aimee’s direction. “Answer and drink. We learn a bit more about each other. We taste the same swill. We remember that we’re crew.”
“My spirits aren’t swill,” Bjorn objected.
“Whatever, old-timer,” Clutch said. “You start.”
They sat around the table in the dim room. Outside, thunder crackled through distant clouds. The silence had unsettled Elias the last time he came to the Tempest Crescent, and it unsettled him now.
Bjorn’s fingers wrapped around the dented flash. “Before here?” he said. “Home was a farm on Skellig.” Red-eyed, he took a drink then passed it right. “It’s gone, now.”
Next was Vant. “Home,” the engineer said, “has only ever been a hammock hanging over a metadrive core.” Short words. Abrupt, but there was a fondness in them, rare for the engineer to show to anything. He drank, pounded his chest, and passed the flask to Vlana.
The quartermaster contemplated the table in front of her. Thunder rumbled far away. “The nest,” she said. “On some other behemoth where Vant and I were born years ago. It was small, and there were maybe three dozen other orphans to share it with. At night it got cold, but sometimes I think that it wasn’t so bad.” She drank too, then passed it on. Her face squinted up at the bitterness.
“The Navigator’s Loft,” Clutch said with simple affection. “Where I was raised. You could always see the stars.” Short in her words, she drank the dark liquor, then passed the flask to Aimee.
The sorceress looked exhausted. Her blue eyes played over the metal thing in her hand. As Elias watched, a fondness, a soft light, kindled in their depths at the sparking of some good memory. “The upper ring of Havensreach,” she finally said. “The library, with its old book smell. And–” she shook her head “–the rose gardens. They always smelled like spring.”
She drank. Elias almost didn’t notice that it was passing into his hands. For a moment he was completely silent. What was he to say himself? The metal turned over in his hands as a series of answers ranging from the cynical to the macabre played through his mind. The word home seemed ludicrous, coming from his mouth. He had only the distant recollection of a place that some part of him wasn’t even sure had existed. A place. A person. More than either, a melody that sometimes found itself on his lips. It seemed an insufficient answer, but at least it was true.
“A song,” Elias said simply. He drank the dark burn without blinking. “Home is a song.”
Outside the thunder rolled on and on, into the night.
Chapter Twenty
The Red Sun Rises
In the pre-dawn dark, Aimee stood in Harkon’s quarters. The dim light of the glow-globes played off his abandoned notes, his books, the possessions he counted as sacred. She’d dressed for battle. Boots. Pants. The blue coat she’d worn from Havensreach and through a war. She’d bound her hair up behind her head and slid leather fingerless gloves over her hands. Her fingers flexed in the darkness. She was an apprentice, alone now. Possibly orphaned. Fists clenched. No. She was the sky-splitter. Aimee de Laurent. She had destroyed demons and torn down mountains. She had quested across the sky and plucked truth from the heart of darkness. With a shaking, forceful breath, she buried the fear, the doubt, anything that kept her from acting, and searching and fighting. She would neither cry, nor throw herself on the mercies of her enemies.
She would find who had done this, and she would bring them down.
“Yaresh,” she murmured under her breath. “We’re coming for you.”
Then she started down the hallway to rejoin her companions. It was time to pick a fight.
The crew of Elysium waited for her in Rachim’s foyer. She heard them talking as she approached, ghost-voices echoing long before she saw them. She paused for a second, just out of sight, and took their measure. Bjorn had a hard, murderous look on his face, quieter than she’d ever seen him. The twins wore matching leather armor, and Vant had his shock-sticks hanging from his hips. Elias stood alone, off to the side, with his repaired secondhand leather and mail. He picked up a curved, single-edged messer from the table before him, and belted it over his left shoulder.
Rachim leaned over a large map on a table, speaking to a number of his guards. “Yaresh has his own armsmen, and – in theory – authority over a proportion of those men sworn by other officer aris
tocrats to his service. I suspect we can rely on several of them to refuse, especially with the ship being in the state that it is. One of ours holds the metadrive chamber, which gives us leverage… But the key–”
Her feet impulsively guided her forward, and Aimee stepped into the light, finishing their host’s sentence. “–is getting Yaresh.”
Conversation ceased. All eyes were upon her.
From the far end of the room, Belit stepped into the light as well. She no longer wore her red plate. In its place, munitions grade steel of plain gray swathed her from neck to foot. Her broad-bladed longsword was belted at her hip, plain and razor sharp. “I pray,” she said, “that you leave him to me.”
Aimee looked at her, and felt the small object in her pocket, her insurance, if it worked. “No promises.”
Especially, she thought, if he’s hosting a necromancer I’m not sure I’m equal to facing.
Fortunately, she reflected, she wasn’t alone.
The dim red of pre-dawn painted the skies as they left Rachim’s villa. The wheelhouse stood out at the prow, visible by its running lamps against the fading stars. A thin layer of fog played through the streets, passing wisp-like around them as they walked. Aimee, Rachim, and Belit were in the lead, and as they passed, the apprentice portalmage caught glimpses of lights in windows, seen for only a moment before curtains were hastily closed. When Aimee had been in primary school, she’d learned about a period in Havensreach’s history where the city had been ruled by a runaway chancellor-turned-dictator. She’d asked her father how such a man could seize power when so many in the city, highborn and low, despised him.
Most people don’t like conflict, her father had told her. Not when it stands before them and they stand to lose the many fineries of a comfortable life.
She’d always wondered what she would’ve done. Despite her fear as they walked through the streets, she also felt a small sense of relief: now she knew.
Dragon Road Page 27
