Dragon Road

by Joseph Brassey

  “Not used to children, are you?” the diplomat said, amused. He’d regained much of his color in the past week, though he was thinner, and his face had lost much of its boyishness from grief.

  “Not even a little.”

  “Run along, kids,” Vallus replied with a laugh, and soon their teacher was urging the children further down the street, leaving Elias with the man the crew were now calling the consort.

  “How are you?” Elias asked, when they were alone with the shorter man’s two guards in the now empty patch of street. Vallus had gone, in a very short time, from nearly giving his life to save his father, to finding out that the same man had been host to the very monster the woman he now stood beside had slain.

  “Better,” Vallus said at length. “And worse, both at once. It comes and goes… but I think my father would have wanted us to do better, and not dwell. And speaking of that, my lady wants to speak with you.” He paused. “Specifically, she said she wanted to see her student one more time, in the training hall where he first came to her.”

  The training hall was quiet, lit from without by the brilliant mid-morning sunlight. One member of the Red Guard stood off to the side, wearing his armor and waiting at attention while his captain stood in the center of the hall, repeating basic cuts with her sharp, gray steel. The parting wind of the sword made repetitive sounds in the half-light, and Elias paused for just a moment to watch. Her form was still smoother than his, her posture precise. There were no wasted motions, no superfluous gestures. She might be the finest sword he’d ever met, and a small part of him rebelled at the thought of leaving his teacher.

  “My lady,” Vallus said, and she turned. “I found him just before he was overwhelmed by hero-worshiping children. Saved his life, really. They nearly picked him clean.”

  “And yet he lives,” she said. The mantle of captain rested heavily on her, he could tell. There were tired circles about her eyes where none had been before, and she carried herself with the gravity of one who felt the heavy weight of a painful responsibility. “You are resilient, junk ritter.”

  Elias stood in the half-light of the training hall, and all at once, before the woman that had taught him so much in so little time, his voice was too thick to speak. He didn’t know how long they had until Elysium departed, but somehow, it seemed to him, this was likely to be the last time that teacher and student met like this.

  “Val,” Belit said at length. “Can you give us a moment?”

  “Aye,” Vallus answered, his expression warm. Understanding. “As you wish, my lady.”

  The receding footsteps were followed, at length, with the closing of the door. Belit smiled. “You will leave soon.”

  “Yes,” he said. He could hear his own pain evident in his words. A mere few months ago, it would have constituted an unforgivable weakness… time was a strange thing. “And I still have so many questions, teacher.”

  “You are afraid,” she said.

  “I am,” he admitted. “A month ago I was a monster. I committed crimes without number, and now… now your people sing my praises,” he said, and his voice cracked. “Children stop me in the street, not knowing how much blood is on my hands, and call me white knight. How am I to contend with both of those truths in my head?”

  The grief came out of him, so sudden and sharp that he didn’t notice the tears until they escaped unpermitted. “I came so close,” he said, “twice, to falling under the thrall of a person I thought I’d escaped. How can I know that I will be strong enough next time?”

  Belit stepped forward, and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Elias,” she said, using his name. “Student. There is something you need to understand: you did not overcome the influence of the darkness through strength. It was not power that stayed your hand, not an unbreakable will that brought forth light from that blade. It was kindness, and mercy, and the determination to be gentle, even in the face of ravening hate.”

  He looked into her gold eyes, and she smiled. “I told you some time ago that we own what we are the moment we decide what we will be. I know you are afraid of the future, junk ritter. I know your broken heart is filled with uncertainty, but I am not afraid for you.” The hand upon his shoulder tightened its grip. “Because you have shown me what you are, Elias Leblanc: a good man.”

  For a long moment, Elias couldn’t summon an answer. His teacher’s words had left him silent. “There is no thanks,” he finally said, “that feels sufficient for what you have done for me.”

  “Yes, there is,” Belit said, and turning, she retrieved a leather satchel that he hadn’t noticed before, opened the flap, and presented it to him. “I believe that the heroes who gave our shared art of the sword to my predecessors in the Red Guard were like you. Either fellow escapees from your former order… or perhaps students of an alternate tradition that once preceded it. I believe that they are likely still out there, somewhere, or at least their students and descendants are. I believe that they have the same gifts you possess.”

  “So did my former master,” Elias said quietly. It was why, ultimately, Lord Roland had dispatched Azrael to destroy Port Providence and reclaim the Axiom Diamond. The dread lord’s words echoed in his mind. “The enemies we have long sought will be within our grasp.”

  “You want to thank me for putting you back on the proper path?” Belit said. “Here is what I ask of you, junk ritter: within this satchel are all the writings I have gathered on the legends of those heroes who saved Iseult, the white knights that came from the deep sky, and included are my notes on the legends surrounding the grandmaster’s blade that you carry. Let it serve as your starting point to understanding. I want you to train. Even if you do so alone, at first. Be the light in the training hall that keeps the demons at bay.”

  And here she gestured at another book in the pile, older than the others, preserved against the ravages of time by some faint magic. It was pale, written in a more archaic form of the common language. Elias sucked in a breath. It was the twin to the ancient tome over which Lord Roland had obsessed in his citadel in the House of Nails.

  It was a fencing treatise of the Varengard style. The wellspring of his art. “I have memorized every word,” Belit said with a smile. “And used it to teach many warriors, now including you. Take it, junk ritter, and continue your training.”

  Elias’s hands delicately touched the faded, time-worn pages. For a moment, he forgot to breathe. Then he looked his teacher in the eyes, and said, “I cannot take this, it is yours.”

  “No,” she said. “You can, and you must. It is my prerogative to give it to a student I find deserving. You will take it.”

  “What will you do,” he asked, “should you need it again?”

  Belit’s smile was broad. “I already told you, junk ritter. I have memorized every word, every fable. Every stanza. It’s time for me to do what every other student and teacher before me has done, when the time came to pass on the book. I shall take what I have learned, and I shall write my own.”

  He avoided everyone else for the rest of the day. His emotions were too raw, his mind too full, to want to break an outward silence that seemed sacred. There were victory celebrations still happening as the night fell. Elias stood on the landing pad of Rachim’s villa, to which Elysium had returned, and watched as the conjured fireworks of visitors from other ships, celebrating the ascendency of a new captain, exploded across the star-laden night sky. Other vessels in the vast flotilla sent their own riot of color bursting into the heavens. He was far away from the celebrations, but somehow, that was better. It felt good, he thought, to hang back in the peace and silence of his own, seldom calm thoughts. Enough to know that people were alive to celebrate at all.

  But after a while, her last orders tickled at his mind, and he slowly made his way up the open ramp, into the darkness of the cargo bay. The others were all out, seeing to last-minute affairs, attending one of the parties, enjoying not having to fear for their lives.

  The quiet and the solitude was welc
ome. He looked up at the darkness of the doorway to the corridor that spanned the spine of the ship, remembering some weeks back, when Aimee had appeared there, framed by light, and asked him to join the crew for a last drink.

  You love her.

  Too much to ever tell her.

  Now he knew. And it was what it was. A reality at once euphoric and deeply painful. There was nothing to be done about the fact, so instead, he drew his sword in the empty darkness of the solitary cargo bay.

  Then, finding peace in the repetition and the effort, the solitary swordsman began to train alone. And the glimmering sword cut up and down, through the air. A lone light in the dark, keeping the demons at bay.

  Chapter Thirty

  On Empyrean Wings

  Aimee spent a week and a half watching, working, learning, and obsessively studying. With Belit’s position established and shored up, Harkon’s role shifted to that of advisor and honored guest, and so she followed along with him, learning and working in his shadow.

  After everything that had transpired since she left Havensreach, it was almost novel to return to the duties of an apprentice. Novel, but no less interesting. She was involved in an investigation deep into the bowels of the ship to suss out the extent of the damage the Children of the Empty Sky had caused, and observed as Iseult’s five portalmages worked together on separate daises to tear open the vast, cyclopean portal that let her jump with two other ships to continue her journey, exiting in civilized skies, far to the south. On a cool evening, she watched from the wheelhouse as the lamp-towers of the Kiscadian Republic’s northern borders glimmered in the darkness.

  And there were answers acquired, as well, to questions that had never been closed to her satisfaction. Viltas had been stockpiling corpses, it turned out, helped by the functionaries, to build his undead army. Harkon had begun to suspect him shortly before Pentus’s Grand Ball, and had caught him outside the soiree, but he had underestimated the necromancer, and been taken off guard by his attack.

  Viltas had then sent his body over to the rapidly collapsing Tristan on the smaller skyship that was supposed to carry a team of relief workers and officers. It had gone crewed by cult-functionaries, who had presumably all died aboard the plague ship. As for the plague that the Faceless had used to wipe out the other ship, answers remained chillingly scarce. They knew only that it had been magical in origin, and that neither Elias, Bjorn, Vant, nor Clutch bore any sign of it. But nothing else.

  Between duties, ceremonies, research, book-studies, and general help, Harkon kept her so busy that she hardly saw her shipmates at all. She also slept. Gods, she had never slept so well – or so much – in her life.

  The rigorous schedule didn’t abate until the night before they were scheduled to depart from Iseult. She had said most of her goodbyes earlier in the day, and Vant and Vlana were in the common area, playing Tonk with wooden cards. Elias was nowhere to be found, Harkon was talking with Clutch and Bjorn on the bridge. She had a blessed few hours to herself. So she walked down the ramp onto the landing pad with a glass of wine in hand, and determined to set off for one last walk to take in the sights.

  At length, she found herself approaching the broken remnants of the dome where Pentus’s Grand Ball had been held. The ceiling was still shattered, and though the square around it had been cleaned, there were some things – like the bloodstains upon the stone beneath her feet – that yet remained. At length, she slipped through the doors she’d last passed while wearing her gown and worrying about a thousand things that now seemed small. She descended the grand staircase beneath the destroyed ceiling of the dome, and stopped at the bottom, imagining for just a moment that she could still see the whirling dancers capering across a ghostly floor.

  And the last question, unanswered to her satisfaction, returned to gnaw at her mind as she stood beneath the starlight, and asked the night, “How could the Faceless know that a portal storm was coming? As powerful as he was, he could never have summoned it, and surely he couldn’t have guessed precisely when it would come?”

  Her voice petered out in the starlit dark. She sighed, sipped her wine, and sat down on the bottom step.

  “He didn’t,” the night answered.

  Aimee started so suddenly she nearly spilled her drink, and looking up to the source of the voice, saw the face of the Oracle. But this was no illusion, no projection at a distance. This time the woman herself stood before Aimee, or at least seemed to. She was strange to look at. Her long robe was hooded and pale white. Her face was ageless, pretty in an unsettling sort of way, and there was a strange light in her eyes.

  “I owe you thanks, Aimee de Laurent,” she said. “Under this captain, I no longer need fear the functionaries hunting for me. I will remain in the shadows still – I believe in discretion – but I am no longer forced to. So yes, before you ask, it is truly me, not a projection. And no, the Faceless neither caused, nor knew the portal storm was coming. He merely sensed it, I believe, and took advantage of the opportunity. The question you should be asking is whether or not that opportunity was more than serendipity to begin with.”

  A cold feeling cut through Aimee at this. Speaking to a deep fear, a supposition that had gnawed at her since she’d first beheld the wall of the maelstrom. “The Faceless didn’t summon the portal storm,” she said, “but someone else did.”

  The Oracle nodded. “Perhaps not someone,” she added. “But something. Older than Grandfather, and much worse.”

  Aimee swallowed, remembering the Faceless’s furious words in the moments before Belit killed it. “When we faced him,” she said, “he spoke of Varengard. He spoke of the storm, and of his desire to use the deaths of two ships to give him the power to flee this world altogether.” She swallowed. It was amazing, how she’d managed not to think about the necromancer’s words in the days since. “He spoke of the rise of dead gods,” Aimee finished. “I don’t suppose any of that makes sense to you?”

  “The maelstrom is old,” the Oracle answered. “But, if you would believe it, Iseult is older. Generations beyond count have passed since my first predecessor gave up her life to give power to the heart of this cradle of her people, but we at least remember that in those days, the storm didn’t exist. I do not know if I would call it alive, or even a god, but I do believe that on that night, it reached out to pluck Iseult and her lover from the heavens. Moreover, I can see that whatever this darkness is, you and it are not yet done with one another, Aimee de Laurent.”

  “That’s not very comforting,” Aimee answered.

  “It’s not meant to be,” the Oracle said in turn, and gave a sad smile. “It is a warning, given in affection to one who believed in me when the hours were darkest, who proved herself a hero, and a helper of heroes, when there was need. Farewell, sky-splitter. And remember my warning. We shall not meet again.”

  Aimee blinked, and the strange woman in her white robes was gone, leaving her alone in the night beneath the landless stars.

  “Gods, what a crowd,” Vlana said the following morning. Elysium rose into the air through the morning sunlight. Beyond the tops of the behemoth’s towers, they could see the buildings of the port city of Taresh gleaming in the light of a beautiful sunrise. Below them, Rachim’s landing pad faded away as the sleek, silver skyship rose ever higher at Clutch’s urging.

  And beyond the villa’s walls, the streets were filled with thousands of rapidly dwindling people in dress styles without number, a mishmash of cultures risen up to supersede the finery of the officers that had until just recently ruled them. It was their grand sendoff, after a week of parties and celebrations before Iseult put in to the port, and began to strike new trade deals of her own, independent of the guilds.

  There would be pushback for that, Aimee knew. But Belit was smart, and surrounded by good people. She would do well.

  “Yeah,” Vant said. “I almost wish we could take something of them with us.”

  Something about the way he said it made Clutch turn her head from the wh
eel. “Why don’t I like your tone?”

  “I have no idea,” the engineer said with a shrug. “How you respond to my tone is your problem. And I don’t even have a tone! Elias? Bjorn? Do I have a tone?”

  “I’m staying out of this one,” the old warrior said, leaning against the rail, a mug of steaming tea in his hand.

  “You have a tone,” Elias said with half a smirk.

  “Traitor,” Vant grunted.

  “Still not an answer!” Clutch said.

  “Hey, hey, pilot!” Vant snapped back. “Eyes on the sky, yeah? You almost crashed us into that estate-tower!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” the pilot said, turning nearly sideways at the wheel and steering with one hand. “Do I seem too distracted to you?”

  Everyone on the bridge reflexively lurched forward, and then Clutch laughed again as she righted their course just clear of another small steeple. “Suckers.”

  “Clutch,” Harkon warned. Then, “Vant, you may as well just tell her.”

  “Why do that?” Vant said with a wicked grin. “When she can go look in her bed later?”

  “You didn’t,” Clutch’s eyes bulged.

  “We adopted one of the squittens,” Vant said. “His name is Francesco.”

  Clutch’s eyes flashed to Harkon. “He’s dead.”

  “Oh wow, we’re getting pretty high up there, aren’t we?” Vant said. “Time for me to get down to engineering! Give the little guy a hug for me when you get back to your room, will you?”

  Aimee laughed, wrapping her fingers tight around her mug as she stood beside her teacher. “Where to next?” she asked.

  “I’ll let you know once I’ve gone over the atlas,” he said, amused. “It’s my turn to pick a destination, after all. As a matter of fact, I should probably do that.” Stretching, he turned, and said with a smile, “You’ve done very well. Both under my tutelage and outside of it. Enjoy a bit of a break, Aimee. You’ve earned it. Just don’t let yourself become distracted.”