Dragon Road

by Joseph Brassey

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Amber in the Heart of Bronze

  Elias sank into the violence. The white sword split the trunk of a dead man. Ash and embers trailed in his wake. He moved forward, deliberately slow, carved another, and another. They sheared down the catwalk, and when Elias fell back, Vant stepped in, and the mystic energy projector let out a loud whump, blasting a channel down the center of the walkway. Elias lunged, stepping over corpses blasted near to paste, and into an advancing tide of glowing eyes and ripping limbs.

  They careened down the catwalk, running, fighting, dodging. The black knight sent a blooming gout of fire tearing across the edge of the rail, sending a cluster of the dead hurtling into the abyss below. Closer, he glimpsed the heart of Tristan glowing. He dropped as a raking limb lashed across the space above him and put the glowing sword through its center of mass. Light exploded from its mouth and eyes as it burned away. He dashed forward. These dead were less individually powerful than the assassins the Faceless had sent against them, but there were more of them, by far. They came, needing no strategy where sheer numbers sufficed.

  The three men hurtled down the interior promenade. Bjorn split one from neck to crotch. Vant dashed and shot. Elias kept the pressure on. The sword rose and fell, again and again. Bodies split and burned. His blood pounded in his ears, and the ingrained, rote repetition propelled him forward, until they burst onto the open platform just before the battered, broken bronze heart of the chamber. Here the purple light bled forth from the tremendous rent in the thick metal walls, torn by a force that dizzied Elias to imagine.

  “An explosion,” Vant said, as if reading his thoughts. “If I had to guess, they overloaded and destroyed the subsidiary cores, and the backlash ripped the chamber open.”

  Elias turned. The dead were holding back from them, now. Wherever the light of the core shone, the dead held back like shadows fleeing the sun. Ironically, the only place they were likely safe from relentless attack was the unstable heart of the dying ship. At least it was where they had to go.

  “They’re staying away from the heart,” Bjorn said, flicking gore from his two-handed blade. “Is it the magic?”

  “Maybe,” Vant said, “but let’s not burn time worrying about the why, yeah? We gotta get in there.”

  They emerged into a macabre twin of Iseult’s heart. A nightmare of shattered controls, broken cables, and obliterated subsidiary cores greeted them. The central control station was a blackened mass of twisted wires and shattered consoles. The corpses of the engineers were scattered around the room in multiple parts, flesh burnt away and screaming skeletons frozen in positions of agony.

  “Well,” Vant breathed, as they stepped through the wreckage. “Iseult got off easy.”

  There was so much magic in the air that Elias felt dizzy. He pressed a hand to his forehead, trying to steady himself against the fresh assault on his perception. It was like trying to see through fog, and he swayed on his feet, caught himself on a piece of wreckage, and muttered, “Not yet.” He caught his breath and looked around. “Where’s Harkon?”

  Bjorn grabbed his shoulder, and pointed.

  The source of the purple light in the chamber was the primary metadrive core of Tristan, sitting atop its platinum pyramid, somehow still blazing in defiance of the destruction surrounding it. The twin heart to Iseult shone, the churning magic energy within so bright it was hard to look at.

  But it wasn’t the core that Bjorn was pointing at. Lashed to its base by steel cables was a large, coffin-sized cyst of golden crystal, and within it was the silhouette of a man, his hands clasped as if in the culmination of a spell.

  Harkon Bright.

  Elias stumble-dashed towards him, almost fell on his face before he reached the pyramid’s base. Up close, the crystal was clear, and within, Harkon’s face was in an oddly serene look of repose.

  “Is he dead?” Vant asked, giving voice to their shared fear.

  “No,” Elias said, peering closer. The storm of spilt sorcery clouding his senses made it harder to tell for sure, but there were clues. The moment his fingers brushed the crystal, he felt the energy like a static shock. His knowledge of magical theory wasn’t as strong as Aimee’s, nor of her exponentially more powerful master, but in a flash he understood what he was looking at.

  “I don’t know how he did it,” Elias said, “but this is the crystalized energy of a powerful necromantic spell. He must’ve seen it coming, and somehow managed to trade death for a sort of mystic slumber. That’s powerful magic, and I have no idea how to undo it.”

  “Then we take him back,” Bjorn said. “Maybe Aimee can. I know Hark. He wouldn’t do this to himself if he didn’t believe someone could get him out again.”

  “This is heavy,” Elias said, assessing the man and his crystal prison before him. “And those undead are still swarming outside the chamber. I can’t fight them and carry this.”

  Bjorn swore. “And once we get too far outside the damn chamber, they’ll hit us. All at once.”

  “It was expected that these subsidiary cores would be replaced,” Vant said. “Ideally, we shouldn’t have to carry it. We just have to find one of the wheeled platforms they moved them on. I saw at least one back in Iseult. Start looking!”

  They cast about in the flickering light, overturning wreckage. It was only a few moments before Bjorn called out. “Over here! Gonna be hard to push, unless you can get some power into the damn thing, but we might be able to swing it!”

  “Let me look!” Vant jogged over to the blackened platform. The engineer crouched and started pushing bits and pieces of ruined equipment off it. “It’ll run,” he said, “but not fast. We’ll still be fighting the damn things off while it crawls towards the loading bay. I don’t know if we even have that kind of time.”

  Elias stared up at Tristan’s core. What was the legend again? Two hearts in two ships. Mythical lovers separated by death, sustaining their vessels through the eternal skies. Tristan was dying now, and there was no way that even its mighty, ancient heart could save it.

  But it could still save Iseult.

  Two hearts.

  “Vant, wait!” he called over his shoulder. Both of the other two stopped. Elias looked back at them, a mad grin crossing his face. “How fast would it go if you hooked it up to Tristan’s core?”

  “Pretty damn,” the engineer answered, “until we ran out of cable… Wait.”

  Bjorn’s eyebrows raised, and the two of them exchanged a look. Elias watched the comprehension sink in.

  “You’re a mad genius, Elias Leblanc,” Vant said. “Alright, come on! Let’s get this done!”

  Removing the core ate up more time than they’d hoped, but Vant got the job done, and as they finished laying the priceless power source and the crystalized form of their leader onto the platform, the engineer jumped down and started fiddling with the wires. Beneath them, the core thrummed, encased in a steel shell that covered the translucent exterior for transport.

  “For the record,” Vant called up to Elias as the black knight took hold of one of the cables, “we’re going to have to steer by leaning. I have no idea just how quick this thing is going to go, and there’s always the risk that the influx of energy will make this platform’s little engine, um, explode.”

  “The alternative is all of us dying!” Elias shouted back. “Are you ready?”

  The engineer hopped up, looped his arm through one of the cables tying the core and the crystal-frozen Harkon together, then held up two sparking wires. “Hang on!”

  A spark flared between the two ends, and the platform exploded forward. They burst through the battered remnants of the door and out onto the exterior platform, straight towards the edge of the abyss, sending a cluster of undead hurtling into the darkness. Elias grasped the cables and threw all his weight to his right side. “Lean right!”

  All three of them cast themselves in the same direction. The super-charged platform arced, ran nearly to the edge of the rail, then tur
ned violently inward. “Left!” Elias screamed, and they arced just short of smashing themselves into the far wall. “Center!” he screamed again, and they were shooting up the long, broad promenade by which they had come. Bjorn shouted something incoherent behind him, and Vant started laughing. They accelerated, moving faster the longer their line was straight. The dead parted before them, hammered out of the way, run over, smashed aside.

  Then the entire ship started to tilt. It was hard to notice at first, but suddenly they were leaning simply to remain upright, and the core walls were beginning to roll.

  “Well,” Elias heard Vant say, “that took longer than anticipated. With the core disconnected, Tristan has no power, which means she’s at the mercy of the abyss’s pull and the storm’s winds!”

  “No auxiliaries?” Bjorn snapped.

  “Not with the subsidiary cores destroyed!” Vant shouted. “We might want to get out of here now.”

  There. The corridor entry to the bay loomed ahead. “Get ready!” Elias shouted. “And lean right!”

  They crashed through the doorway. The platform bashed into its edge. Elias held on. They careened off the corridor’s far wall, bounced off the frame of the exit, and spinning, crashed into the landing bay. “Kill the power!” he shouted.

  Vant lurched, hooked his legs into the cable to keep from falling, and pulled one of his shock-sticks, jamming it into the platform’s engine. There was a loud bang, a discharge, and their propulsion died… but not their momentum.

  The platform skidded across the floor towards the open bay door of Elysium, wobbled, slowed. Elias turned. The glimmering, hungry eyes of the dead appeared in the entryway to the corridor they’d come through. “Get the platform into the cargo hold!” he shouted, then leaped clear of the skidding contraption. Oath of Aurum flashed free and blazing, and he landed in a crouch before the charging horde. There was no more time to see if his friends had done it. He loosed concussive flames into the first mass of the dead, then carved the first to reach him in half. Then the second. The third. He kicked the body of the fourth, blasted the fifth, then had to give ground as ever more came rushing in.

  More kept coming. He piled on speed. It made no difference. Blasts of magic kept them from overrunning his flanks only long enough for him to defend himself from upwards of four attacks at once. No matter how many he struck down, more pressed in. He could give no more ground. He hoped they’d made it to Elysium’s loading bay. He hadn’t come here expecting to die, but the thought crossed his mind that there were worse ways.

  Noble and brave, he thought. Gentle and kind.

  Borrowed time. Make it count.

  He was running out of strength. His arms ached. The hands gripping the sword were almost numb. One of them had hit him at some point. The steel darted across his vision, leaving streaks of white through the air. “Come on, you bastards,” he breathed. “I can put another hundred of you down before this is over.”

  “ELIAS!” he heard Bjorn scream behind him. “DROP!”

  He obeyed without thinking. A brilliant flare of light roared overhead and slammed into the press of running dead. An entire cluster of them splattered into red mist. He rolled onto his belly, surged up, and ran for the landing bay. Bjorn and Vant had loaded up the platform with its precious cargo, and as he dashed, the old warrior could be seen behind the glass of the rear gun turret, blasting concussive bursts of light into the rushing, undead remnants of Tristan’s crew. The floor lurched. The sky outside the bay door tilted. Elias ran, until the bay swelled in his vision and he hurled himself up over the ramp and onto the floor of the bay, gasping for breath. “Go!” he shouted. “I’m in!”

  The ramp slammed up; Elysium rose from the floor and shot into the open air. The wind struck her, making the floor tilt so hard that Elias was nearly thrown against the cargo bay wall. He grabbed a rail to steady himself, sheathed his sword, and ran up the stairs and into the central corridor of the ship.

  Halfway to the bridge he reached the common area with its large viewport, and what Elias saw froze him in place.

  Tristan hadn’t tilted because its core had been removed. Elysium was in the process of turning against the wind, giving them a sideways view of the behemoth. A vast limb, blacker than night, lashed across the entryway through which they’d just escaped. It was wider than the thickest tower, longer than a warship, and visible only by the light it defied to illuminate its ink-like surface. It took a full breath for Elias to make sense of what he was seeing, then another arm lashed up across the hull of the behemoth. Bits of surface construction exploded, estates and fine marble sloughing from the vessel in a torrent of collapsing buildings. Beyond the bow, something vast beyond measure, and incalculably dark, rose from within the storm.

  Grandfather had come.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  One-Woman Army

  Aimee turned from the controls. Iseult swung, but not fast enough. Belit strained behind the wheel. Slowly, the black wall of raging storm moved in their view, and the sorceress held on to the rail before her, urging the ship beneath her to fight against the winds even as she prayed.

  Rachim burst through the doorway with two more men behind him, and a storm of curses escaped his mouth at the sight of the bodies strewn across the bridge. “By her beating heart,” he swore. “No survivors?”

  “None,” Vlana said from behind the crystal table, “and it’s worse: I’m not sure if Iseult has the power to break free of this wind. Not with one core down and her crew fighting the dead on every damn floor!”

  Abruptly the quartermaster paused as another light on the table flashed. “We’re getting a communication from Elysium. They’re alive!”

  She pressed her finger to the blinking light, and the image of Elias Leblanc flashed into the center of the room. He looked battered, but not seriously hurt. Aimee felt a surge of relief flood through her.

  “We’ve got Harkon, and we’re coming in hard,” he said. “Grandfather is destroying Tristan. I’d wager we only have a little while before he realizes we took the Faceless’s magic bait out of the ship and turns towards Iseult.”

  Again, a surge of relief flooded the young sorceress. Alive. Her teacher was alive.

  “We’re trying to turn away from the maelstrom,” Aimee answered. “But with the winds and our previous speed, it’s a struggle. Being one core down is making this a lot harder, as is Amut’s bridge crew being dead.”

  “We actually have the solution to that!” Elias said, and his excitement was palpable. “We pulled the primary metadrive core out of Tristan, and we’re bringing it back with us.”

  “You what?” Rachim exclaimed.

  “Long story,” the young man answered. “We can’t land at your villa. There won’t be room to get the core out.”

  “The nearest bay to the chamber is the starboard amidships aperture. It’s adjacent to Pentus’s estate,” Rachim answered. “And it’s completely overrun with the dead. They’re fighting them down there, we’ll have to find another–”

  “No,” Aimee interrupted. “It’s their best shot. We don’t have time to haul the core halfway across the ship, not when they can fly it in closer and get it to the chamber in time.”

  “We don’t have the men to spare,” Rachim said.

  “But the wheelhouse does,” Aimee said. Turning back to the image of Elias she said, “Tell Clutch to make for the starboard amidships bay near Pentus’s estate. I’ll meet you there.”

  Elias gave a nod and a half smile. “Hang on,” he said. “We’re coming in hot.”

  The image flickered and vanished.

  Aimee picked up one of the shock-spears, grateful for the training Bjorn had briefly given her with it.

  “You’re out of your godsdamned mind,” Rachim started.

  “I didn’t acquire my reputation by playing it safe,” Aimee answered. “Belit, do you have things up here handled?”

  “In as much as I can,” the swordswoman answered. “The three of you,” she snapped at R
achim and his men. “Make yourselves useful. Get the bodies away from the consoles so we can access the workstations. Rachim, help Vlana get the star-charts up and running. Once we have the power to get free of the wind, we’re going to have to fly ourselves out using old-fashioned navigation.”

  Rachim grunted his disapproval, but he headed towards the crystal table, where he laid a map out across its surface, pointing to a specific route from the wheelhouse down to the bay in question. “This is the most direct route you can take,” he said. “It’s also compromised, and once you get there, all we really have is a perimeter keeping them from threatening the metadrive chamber. I still don’t like this. You’re one of our most valuable assets in this fight.”

  “Thanks,” Aimee said. She memorized the route, then folded up the map and stuffed it in her coat. “And I know,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m going where I’m needed.”

  Aimee de Laurent stalked through the raging wind and the pouring rain, blasted the door to the access corridor off its hinges, and dropped down into the darkness. The dead were waiting, but there was no longer a need to worry about shielding her companions, obsessing over the preservation of delicate instruments, or holding back for fear of what the people in power might do. As the first of the corpse-functionaries turned towards her, she blasted the entire corridor with a wind spell that sent it hurtling into its fellows, then summoned the Radiance, and unleashed hell. Bodies hurtled backwards, slammed into walls. She unleashed the spell again and again, then stalked forward through a cloud of embers and ash.

  She turned, stepped out onto the edge of a winding staircase and glimpsed down the long shaft to its bottom, further down than she cared to think. Her target level was at its halfway point, she estimated. Aimee took a breath, tightened her grip on the shock-spear, stepped out onto the edge and held a spell in her mind to slow her fall, when the time was right. Then she jumped. Levels shot past. The wind whipped by her as she strained to keep her body upright and pencil-straight. Closer. She glimpsed the dead in numbers that galled and horrified. Then she was coming up on the midlevels. The numbers rushed towards her. Aimee wove and released the spell, and as her descent slowed, she kicked off a rail and angled herself straight into the stairwell just above her target.