The flippercraft suddenly dropped beneath Tylar’s feet. Someone screamed from the back of the ship. Then the deck came crashing back up, knocking Tylar to a knee.
Captain Horas landed lightly. He waved an arm outward, at the sky, at the storm. “The storm gods have grown wise to our artifice. It is not only Dark Grace we must fight. Bile can’t block a wind. The storm turns its winds against us, seeking to drag us out of the skies.”
“What can we do?” Tylar said.
“Fly, your lordship. That’s what my ship was made for!” He said this last with a savage grin. “We’ll keep flying until the ground stops us.”
Tylar gained his feet.
The pilot called from his spar. “Captain!”
Tylar and Horas turned to the man. He motioned below.
Tylar leaned over the rail. Below, the black Eye was now streaked with white. “We’re losing bile,” he said.
“Snow and ice…stripping us…” Horas shoved away from the rail and hurried back to his station.
The ship rolled, first to one side, then the other. Though still blinded, Tylar felt the pressure in his ears.
“We’re losing Grace!” Horas called. “They’re breaking through! Open all taps! Full flow!”
As Tylar watched, a large swath of bile washed off the Eye. Through the rent in their protection, the storm swirled white. He searched below, expecting a dark eye to form, to peer inside. Instead, far below, globes of light floated and rolled near the bottom of the storm, like luminescent fish at the bottom of the Deep.
As he struggled to discern the source, the pressure continued to squeeze his ears. They were plummeting into the depths of the storm. The strange lights below grew larger.
Captain Horas passed him again, drawing his eye. “The more power we burn,” he called as he passed, “the more Grace they steal!”
Tylar followed him across the deck. “Then stop burning Grace!” An idea grew in him. He joined the captain and the mate at the wall of mekanicals.
“Then we’ll fall to our deaths that much sooner,” Horas said.
Tylar kept his voice fierce. “You said this ship is built to fly! Then fly her! Cut the flow of Grace. Use the winds for as long as you can. Convince them we’re lost-flying Graceless.”
He read a growing understanding in the captain’s eyes. “You’re mad…”
“Gain as much distance as you can.”
The captain nodded. He waved for the mate to obey. Together the pair began shutting valves and turning knobs. The bubbling in the mica tubes slowed.
“Captain!” the pilot cried, sensing the sudden loss of Grace.
“Keep her nose up! Into the wind. True south!”
Tylar backed a step as the mate and captain stifled the flows. The tubes still steamed, but all that bubbling died.
“Keep the mekanicals stoked,” the captain said. “Hot and ready. Wait for my word.”
Horas led Tylar back to the rail. The deck tilted nose down. The pilot fought to pull her up, shoving the bow of the ship into contrary winds. The craft jarred up momentarily, gaining a bit more distance, a few breaths where the ship rose instead of falling. But it was a doomed struggle.
Down the nose went again.
Tylar bent over the rail. The floating lights grew as the land rose. The lights, azure and scintillating with power, grew clearer. Globes of lightning, trapped in the heart of the storm.
The plunging flippercraft sailed across a wide field of the glowing orbs, stirring them up with the wake of their passage. Below, the hills of Tashijan sped past, lit by the deadly cold fire.
But the hills weren’t empty.
A vast army spread across the hills.
“Wind wraiths,” Horas said, recognizing the spindly forms as they spiraled into the air, men and women born under alchemies of air, like loam-giants and wyld trackers.
But even from this height, Tylar saw the twist of their bodies. He remembered the tortured figure that had attacked them from the air in Chrismferry. The same here. Wind wraiths corrupted by Dark Grace into beasts.
“They’ve been ilked,” Tylar said.
A shout from the pilot warned them back from their dark observations. The hills climbed toward them. The captain watched, studying.
“Be ready!” he yelled to all.
Another breath…the ground rushed up at them.
“Now!”
To the side, the mate yanked a large bronze lever. Flows, boiling and pent, were finally released again. The mekanicals gasped with a thick wheeze of steam.
The pilot hauled on his controls, leaning back, as if by muscle alone he could pull the nose back up. But it wasn’t just muscle that powered the flippercraft now.
Grace slammed through the mekanicals.
A tubing exploded with a spat of flaming alchemies.
Horas rushed to aid the mate. Tylar kept his post by the rail.
The hills continued to rise toward them, snowswept waves ready to accept the keel of their craft. The army of wraiths vanished behind them, along with the globes of lightning.
The flippercraft raced across the frozen landscape.
Slowly…slowly…the nose lifted to an even keel. They flew no more than the height of a man over the hills. Then began to climb. Caught by surprise, the dark forces were sluggish in bringing their Dark Grace to bear. The churning alchemies remained steeped in the air aspect.
The pilot tilted their nose up, shooting back into the skies. The land dropped away, vanishing into the swirling snow.
Then in one breath, they were through the clouds and shot out into open air, like a bile-streaked arrow. The world opened and stretched ahead of them. Moonlight and starlight cast the world with a silvery gloaming.
“We made it,” Captain Horas said, making it sound more like a question.
“We did,” Tylar mumbled.
He turned to stare toward the stern of the flippercraft, but his eyes did not see the ship any longer. He pictured the wraith army-and the towers lost in the heart of the storm.
But mostly, he pictured two women’s faces.
Despite his fear for them, he turned his back on the storm. He had no choice. He had his duty.
Off to the east, the night sky purpled, heralding dawn and another day.
“Head south,” he ordered the captain.
“Aye, ser.”
The flippercraft swung toward the open sea. They would stop at Broken Cay, to wash their ship and freshen their alchemy. Tylar would send ravens flying in all directions. The First Land must rally, but he knew it would not be his war.
The skies continued to brighten to the east as the world turned, oblivious to the struggles of man and god.
Another day.
It was all a man could truly hope for in life.
One more day to make it all right.
Tylar stared south, beyond the curve of the world. He had escaped, but it was only a small victory. Saysh Mal and the hinterlands awaited. There were battles yet to be fought.
Still, something troubled Tylar.
Something he had forgotten.
Far below Tashijan, she sat in a stone chair. A spider, blanched white by a life beyond the sun, crept across her veined hand. Its legs suddenly curled, its body dried to a husk, and it rolled from her flesh.
Mirra did not move. She remained very still until a thin smile stretched her lips. Then she slowly rose to her feet.
“So he has slipped our noose,” she said to the darkness that surrounded her. The only illumination came from her stone seat, a melted drape of volcanic flowstone. It shone with a soft sheen of putrefaction and decay. She trailed one finger along its arm as she stood, sensing the whispers of her naethryn masters.
“No matter. Tashijan will fall all that much faster.”
She crossed to where the putrefying glow met the darkness. In that border, her creation abided, her last and most perfect. Twelve others circled this margin between corruption and darkness. They would serve their new master.
> “Perryl,” she whispered, naming her finest creation.
No reaction. Eyes stared into nothingness.
“You know what you must do,” she whispered to him.
He lifted his sword in acknowledgment and stepped back into the darkness. He drifted into the shadows, his white face fading as if he were sinking into a black sea.
The others followed.
Her black ghawls were creatures of Gloom. They flowed through more than mere shadows. Just as these few had drifted between the glow and the darkness, they could also sail between the world of substance and the naether, spaces misted with Gloom, slipping between the cracks of the world.
Into one and out another.
No place was beyond their reach. Throughout Myrillia, such dark cracks existed, where Gloom seeped and leached into this world: down in sunless caverns, in the midnight depths of the sea, beyond sealed doors of forgotten crypts, even under the roots of ancient forests. Wherever Gloom bled and trickled, her legion could travel.
“Go,” she whispered to the fading figure. “Hunt them all down.”
As the ghawls slipped away, Perryl’s sword was the last to vanish, sheathing slowly into the Gloom. She reached for its tip, lanced through with malignant green fire. The Godslayer thought he had escaped-he remained blithely unaware of his own doom.
Her smile widened.
Though his naethryn had avoided the full kiss of Perryl’s blade, it had not remained unscathed. A nick was more than enough.
As the blade sank into the darkness, whispering with emerald fire, she named the poison within the sword, a venom without cure, already instilled in naethryn and man.
“The blood born of hatred…the blood of Chrism.”
FOURTH
RUIN AND A SHES
Farallon Jeweled Bloom
Alchemical Preparation of Dreamsmoke ::: The petal of the water lotus must be soaked in brine for three days under the full heat of the sun. Once bathed, each petal must be dried to a crisp between baked bricks of yellow sandstone and then ground under a granite pestle. Powder is dissolv’d in yellow bile bearing the Aspect of Water, then said waters are boiled off. The caked ash should be aged a full year under opaque glass. Only then will it prove potent when smoked.
- Basick Alkemie, ann. 1290
A TRAIL OF SMOKE
As dawn broke, Brant had the wide chamber to himself. He laid a palm on the curving wood of the portside hull. If he leaned close, inhaled deeply enough, through the varnish and the trace of black bile, he could still catch a whiff of a familiar spice.
The resin of pompbonga-kee.
The scent of home.
For three days, he had recuperated in the heart of a wooden whale, one built from the very trees of his home realm. He felt swallowed whole, unable to escape his past. And now, against his will, he was being dragged back home. Four years ago, he had left Saysh Mal in chains and now he returned just as bound-if not by iron this time, then by duty.
Alone, he crossed the room to a curved rail that overlooked a wide window in the lower hull. The space, though smaller, mirrored the captain’s Eye. The window opened a wide view of the passing landscape, the little that there was to see with dawn barely breaking.
But Brant had woken well before sunrise, knowing they’d be crossing into the Eighth Land this morning. Over the past days, tensions continued to mount within the craft as all wondered about the state of Tashijan. With the ship burning alchemies, they sped faster than any raven could wing.
The regent had been particularly short of mood, worn by the worry of it all, the responsibility. Even the roguish nature of Rogger and his ribald tales of his prior exploits did little to lighten spirits. Brant had also noted how Tylar had begun to limp over the past two days. No one commented upon it, but he had seen the regent, wearing a worrisome expression, kneading his left knee when he thought no one was looking.
But their confinement would soon end.
As Brant waited for sunrise, he felt a now-familiar warming of the stone at his throat. He searched around him, knowing Pupp must be near.
The door creaked open behind him. He turned to see Dart slip into the room. She wore the black boots and leggings of her station at Tashijan, though the shirt was untucked and worn loose. She had also left her half cloak back in her room. It was the first time that he had truly seen her free of cloak and hood. Her tawny yellow hair was longer than last he remembered, past the shoulder. She even looked taller out of her cloak, her eyes bluer. Still, the look she’d worn on her face when he first met her back at the school in Chrismferry remained. Anxious.
“Oh!” She startled back. “I didn’t know anyone was in here.”
“Just come to watch the sunrise,” Brant said.
She edged back, awkward with her intrusion. She would not meet his eye.
“I’ll leave you to your sunrise,” she said.
“No…please…” He waved to the rail.
She approached warily, as if she would rather be anywhere else.
“I appreciate the company,” he said, intending it as a balm for her, but was surprised at discovering it was also the truth. The realization suddenly dried any further words in his mouth.
Brant cleared his throat. He had heard about Dart’s connection to the rogue god who had wandered so disastrously into his life. A god named Keorn, son of Chrism. The rogue god gave birth to her, while his death took Brant’s life away. And it seemed now their lives were still linked: by the bones of the same god’s skull.
His hand drifted closer to hers on the rail-not touching, just closer. Not finding words, he stared below. The roll of the sea lay beneath their keel, black still with night, but to the east, the skies brightened rapidly with hues of purple and rose. The first light revealed a new world rising steeply out of the seas, a land of rock and jungle, cliff and creeping vine.
She spoke to the wide window. “Tell me about the Eighth Land.”
That, he could talk about. “Most of it is hinter-shattered rock, thick jungle, steaming vents of brimstone. There are few gentle beaches, few harbors. Only three gods made their homes there, each more isolated than the last.”
Out the window, the morning sun set fire to the highest peaks.
Dart made a small exclamation, struck by the raw beauty of the sunrise. An ember of pride for his homeland burnt within him.
“Duck down here,” he said and crouched below the railing.
As she knelt beside him, their shoulders touching, he pointed toward the brightening land rising from the sea. “The northernmost cliffs that lie ahead are the domain of Farallon, lord of the Nine Pools.”
“The Jeweled Pools,” Dart said with a thread of wonder. Five rivers flowed out of the highlands to form a cascading series of cataracts and waterfalls, captured on nine separate terraces, a great pool on each. “Is it true each pool is a different hue?”
“That’s how they got their name. Master Sheershym, a chronicler at my school in Saysh Mal, says it’s because of dissolved stone and water depth, but I’d rather think it’s Farallon’s Grace.”
“It’s probably both,” Dart suggested.
The rising sun now glinted off the falling water in the distance.
“What’s beyond the pools?”
Brant pointed higher, where the peaks glowed emerald in the first rays of the sun, shrouded in mists. “The highland mountains are split by a deep valley, all thickly forested.”
“Saysh Mal,” she said.
He only nodded. He had no wish to talk much about his home. They would be there soon enough. Instead, he crouched even lower and pointed to the curve of the horizon. There, almost directly south, was a shouldered mountain that towered above the others. Unlike the emerald glow of the highland peaks, the tip of that mountain turned the first rays of the sun into fire. But Brant knew the opposite was true. It was snow that tipped that mountain, an ice that lasted all the seasons, chilled by the thin air near the roof of the world.
Still, the mountain’s hea
rt burnt with fire.
“Takaminara,” he said, naming god and mountain, a sleeping volcano that would occasionally quake the entire land.
“Truly? It doesn’t appear as tall as I’ve heard tell.”
“The distance deceives-as it has many men and women.”
“And it’s true that the god lives in caves at the top of the mountains? No castillion. No handservants. By herself.”
“There are the occasional pilgrims who have braved the cliffs and crumbling ice,” he said. “And those foolish few who seek merely to touch the sky. But most of those who climb seek to become her acolytes, to be blessed at her feet, to be burnt by her Grace and have their inner eye set ablaze.”
“The rub-aki,” she said, touching her forehead, “the Blood-eyed.”
He nodded. The rub-aki were stained with the fiery blood of Takaminara. Each bore a crimson print of her thumb burnt into the middle of their foreheads.
“Can they truly see the future with their inner eyes?”
Brant shrugged. “It is said that by staring into their alchemical fires, they can portend the future. But few have ever witnessed a true foretelling.”
“I once saw one of the Blood-eyed at the Grand Midsummer Faire back in Chrismferry.”
“A charlatan surely. Master Sheershym once told me that fewer than two acolytes a decade survive the ordeal of Takaminara and return from her caverns into the world.”
“But I’ve heard of plenty-”
“It’s easy to tattoo one’s forehead and claim to see the future. Master Sheershym said that for every thousand who claim to be rub-aki , only one truly is. And they certainly would not be selling their skills at a fair.”
He said the last more harshly than he intended.
“Oh…” An edge of embarrassment returned to her voice and manner.
He suddenly felt like a cad. He stood up, drawing her up in his wake. “But in the end, I guess none of the god-realms really matter. Not even Saysh Mal. It is into the hinterlands that we must ultimately tread. Once there, we’ll all be on equal footing.”
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