Void Spheres, page 11
“It’s possible. But the risk remains, and…” Armand trailed off, looking at the castle-up die.
“And you’re curious,” Cat said.
“And I’m curious. There is an answer in this sphere that seems to matter to our mission… and I have too many questions to turn down answers, Cat.”
Chapter
Eighteen
“Can anyone see anything?”
Streamwater’s plaintive words made Cat smile grimly to himself. Void Flyer was hurtling through the void at twenty cables a minute, five cables slower than the league per minute Alloy had suggested for the transit.
Except that where an aether strait was a visible smear of light across the sky, marked by magic and aether and energy, a strait between void spheres appeared to be completely invisible.
Or wasn’t where it was supposed to be.
“Turn is complete,” he said aloud, not revealing his own fears to his officers. “According to the charts, we are on the entry line and should hit the strait in about ten minutes.”
His second officer stood by the starboard sextant, looking more than a touch concerned. Brushfire, standing by the port sextant, didn’t look quite as bothered.
Cat figured that had to be the gobvar successfully putting the masking skills she’d learned as a gobvar in elvar spheres to use. Brushfire might not have been a deck officer for dozens to hundreds of strait passages like Cat or Streamwater, but she knew what an aether strait looked like.
And there was no aether strait in front of them. Worse, the outer edge of the sphere was only a thousand leagues past their planned destination, which meant the light and heat from the spherelight was beating down on the ship.
Cat suspected that the crew was delighting in the fact that Void Flyer’s construction meant less than two dozen of the crewvar were visible to the Captain as they approached the transit. He figured that, throughout most of the rapidly heating ship, shirts had become a thing of yesterday for a large chunk of the crew.
If he could see that, even as a theoretically civilian Captain, he’d have to say something. He, after all, wore a dark blue tailcoat that barely differed from his High Court uniform beyond its lack of gold braid.
And if he was using magic to keep from melting inside said coat, well, face and image had required stupider things of him over the years.
“No one, that I know of at least, has ever transited between void spheres,” Cat pointed out loudly. “We are the first. Our names will go down in history, thanks to Archmage Bluestaves.”
“Assuming the strait is there,” Streamwater countered.
And that they survived the archmage’s mission, Cat knew. No one was going to say that, though. Not where he could hear them, anyway.
“Five minutes,” Brushfire declared, her eye on the clock on her sextant. “We should be four leagues out from the strait.”
At four leagues, an aether strait should be an easily visible bruise in the sky. To Cat or any other var with his sense of the aether, its position would have been blatantly obvious. He could have guided Void Flyer—or any aether ship he’d ever sailed—through an aether strait with his eyes closed.
In fact…
Cat closed his eyes. He focused for a moment on the feeling of the wood under his hands, Void Flyer having the same kind of tilting helm as Star or another aether ship. He could adjust the ship’s course from there, though big changes would require orders to the crew.
Less so than aboard an aether ship, in truth. They’d brought all of Star’s crew with them, but Flyer really only needed a hundred var to fly her—especially since she had no storm staves.
Through the helm, though, he could guide the ship through her last approach to the strait. Despite the lack of aether around them, if he focused hard enough, he could still pick up a sense of Flyer’s position. Relative to his own position, anyway.
In the distance, he could feel sparks of something, edged with an emotion he suspected was hunger, but that wasn’t what he was looking for right now. He knew what an aether strait and the currents around it felt like.
But now, for the first time in his life, he reached out through that strange magical sense and tried to find the tension point of the strait, without the aether that shaped around it normally. He knew the flow, but could he find the weave that shaped the flow…
And there it was. Cat inhaled sharply in surprise as it clicked into place, a warp in the weave of the universe, a gap in the fabric of the spheres.
“We’re not quite right,” he said aloud. “Chart’s a thousand dances out of date.”
And the chart was more of an equation than a map, anyway, saying where something would be relative to everything else. Mistranslating one number of a dozen could easily put them off by a minor angle.
Like they were. They were going to miss the strait by a full cable. But they were far enough out and slow enough…
“Alloy, I need full thrust on my mark,” he said aloud. “Adjusting our line.”
He didn’t even remember kicking free the lock that held the wheel in place. He twisted and tilted the wheel, the magic of the lift crystals moving with him, and he felt Void Flyer move around him, turning in space as they swiftly approached their destination.
“Two leagues from the charted point,” Brushfire said, and Cat, at least, picked up the nervous edge in her voice. She knew he’d caught something. If they missed the strait, turning around and coming back would take days.
“Alloy?”
“On your mark.”
“Full thrust… now.”
More than any other ship Cat had commanded, Void Flyer’s courses were a thing of calculation and maps. This, though, couldn’t be. Calculation and maps had brought them to the strait, but it would take instinct and magic to get them through.
It was also going to take full thrust, which was something Cat had only felt the ship unleash to leave Flame’s Gem behind. Void Flyer hurtled along the line he’d drawn in space, the pressure of her engines pushing him into the floor as he semi-locked the wheel and hung on for dear life.
The engines hammered beneath him, and he kept his eyes closed as he moved the helm against the partial lock. The line was close, but as the rocket changed course, arcing toward the strait, he knew he’d misestimated.
Lack of practice. He was used to sails, not rockets. A few minute adjustments got her on the right line, and he held his breath, feeling the course for a few critical heartbeats.
“Cut the engines,” he ordered. “Streamwater, Brushfire, keep the lift crystals pulsing. Last maneuvers will be very tight.”
Someone muttered something he couldn’t hear—something it was probably good he hadn’t heard—and the engines cut out again. Silence and heat filled the control room as Cat continued to guide the ship with his eyes closed.
“I have no idea how close we are now,” Streamwater warned.
“Close,” Cat told her. “This may be… strange. Hang on!”
He barely managed not to hold his breath as they entered the distortion he could feel in the weave of reality, the big cylindrical ship riding the line he’d marked in the void like it was nailed to it.
Nothing. There was no sign that they’d hit or missed it or…
“We’re in,” Streamwater told him, her voice very soft.
“Open your eyes, Cat,” Brushfire told him. “Please.”
Laughing, he did and saw why his officers were so sure they’d hit the strait. The glowing outersphere of the Warden of Fire was gone. In front of them was simply void, with a few sparks of light and dust marking the edges of the strait.
“So, let’s… not move from this course,” Cat said slowly. “Because I am quite certain this path is safe, but given that I can’t see where the strait ends and nothing begins… we will wait until we are in IronHome before we touch the crystals or engines again, yes?”
“Please,” Brushfire repeated. “And Cat?”
“Brushfire?” he replied.
“If you close your eyes while flying the ship again, I think poor Streamwater might actually faint from the stress.”
Chapter
Nineteen
After the clock ticked past the second hour in the strait, Brushfire started to worry. Cat seemed unbothered, but she was all too aware of how skilled her Captain was at concealing his feelings.
She only knew elvar culture from a distance and only knew High Court culture, especially, by reputation and rumor. But she suspected that not having full control of how people perceived your emotions would have been unwise for a senior High Court officer.
Even so, she’d learned to read him better than she hoped he realized. So, either he really was unbothered by the complete lack of a clear form to their strait or sign of an exit, or he was very determined to shield his concern.
“Shouldn’t we see the exit by now?” Faith Streamwater asked, the second officer running out of patience first.
“We don’t know,” Cat said calmly. “Brushfire, how far have we traveled down the strait?”
Brushfire looked at the sextant she’d been using.
“We have no external markers, Cat,” she replied. “None. Given our speed on entry and the time we’ve spent in the strait, well over a hundred leagues.”
She’d worked on ships that had passed through longer straits, though she’d only navigated a ship through one herself. One of the straits along their journey to Brokenwright had been a hundred and sixty leagues long—but they’d had charts and had been able to see the sides and the end of that strait.
“The charts say the strait is a hundred and ten leagues long,” Cat told her.
“I would say we’re past that,” she warned. She was surprised when he simply nodded.
“I know. But I haven’t seen any sign we’ve left the channel, which means the channel has changed. Our charts are over a thousand dances out of date, Faith, Brushfire. No var has traced this course in over two elvar lifetimes.
“It’s not something we commonly think of, but straits change over time. Their positions in a sphere continue to follow their orbits, but their lengths are far more variable than we imagine.”
He shook his head.
“It’s just that those variations take place over cycles of a hundred or more dances. A thousand dances without a chart update? Finding the strait was still almost guaranteed, but we couldn’t be sure how long it was going to be.”
Brushfire didn’t quite shake her head. She had her own reasons to have learned to control her expressed emotions, after all. Cat was spinning a solid line—it was probably even true!—but the combination of a potentially unusually long strait and the inability to clearly see the sides of the strait had to be nerve-wracking.
“That should help your nerves,” Alloy suddenly declared, gesturing. “I see a light.”
Brushfire followed the darvar’s pointing hand and let her shoulders relax as she saw what he saw. It wasn’t much more than a dot at the moment, but the warm golden glow of an ember meant they could see the end of the strait.
“And there we go,” Cat said aloud, suddenly resting his hand on Brushfire’s shoulder. His touch sent a reassuring shiver through her—but she could also tell that he was drawing reassurance from her.
“If we can see IronHome’s ember, then we are almost through the passage. So, let’s keep her straight and clean and see where the ancient road takes us, shall we?”
The crystal “windows” surrounding the control room aboard Void Flyer were more magical than transparent, but they gave the crew in that space a clear view into the void around them. Thanks to that view, the exit from the strait into IronHome was clear.
One heartbeat, all they could see was the ember growing larger ahead of them. The next, they emerged from a cave-like opening in reality and the entire sphere spread out around them.
IronHome was seventy-six thousand leagues across, according to their charts, with this particular void strait emerging some twenty-six thousand leagues from the burning ember that lit the place. Of course, that diameter was based on where aether ended and void began, so Brushfire saw some awkward questions about how accurate it was now.
“Here we are,” Cat announced from the helm. “Let’s see if we can locate the Home itself. That’s our next stop.”
Brushfire pulled a telescope from the scabbard next to the sextant. Unless the charts were more wrong than they’d been in the Warden of Fire, they should have a decent idea of where to find the single lodeplate that occupied the sphere.
As she put her eye to the device and swept her vision across the sphere, though, she shivered. According to Armand, the archmage’s divination had flagged eleven key places, worldlets of a few million var or the Home itself.
Those may have been key, but the sphere had been home to far more worlds and outposts and possibly even artificial lodeplates. It seemed like everywhere her telescope fell, as she guided it toward the big lodeplate, there was something reflecting the ember’s light.
“This place is… something,” she said aloud. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many lodestone sources, rocks and worlds and floating cities…”
“The High Court is much the same,” Cat told her. “We often only speak of the Sixteen, the High Court themselves, but there are about a score and ten small worldlets as well. Plus, the shipyards and other aether works.”
“I haven’t seen the High Court, but this place looks just as busy,” Brushfire told him. Her telescope finally settled on the massive shadow of the Home. “Found the plate. About a degree up from where we calculated, but in about the right area.”
Cat didn’t use a telescope to follow her direction. She felt his magic take shape and took her eye away from the telescope—which used magic of its own to make a floating continent thousands of leagues away visible at all—as her Captain wove a magical illusion into place above the helm.
The illusion mirrored what her telescope had seen—it was a telescope, but one operating entirely from magic and giving a both more focused and broader view of the specific target.
“That… is huge,” the elvar said slowly. “How far are we?”
“Just over ten thousand leagues,” Brushfire confirmed.
Cat nodded and held up his hand to the illusion, measuring it with his fingers. Presumably, he was doing some kind of math she didn’t understand yet.
“It’s got to be two thousand leagues across,” he concluded after a moment. “Only the Prime of the High Court is larger. I’d never… I’d never heard of anything like this outside the High Court itself.”
“Armand says that’s why your people buried the knowledge of the Ironhands,” she pointed out, taking advantage of a moment to softly prod him. He needed the poking sometimes.
“We’re not quite on the course to the Home,” she continued. “I don’t think we’ll get to her without firing the engines.”
“We can straighten out our course and it’ll take us seven days,” Alloy suggested.
“No, we’ll go faster,” Cat decided aloud. “Alloy, do we have the fuel to detour out to the Home at two leagues a minute?”
“Aye, but it will make our trip through the last two spheres slower and more careful,” the darvar warned.
“Maybe we’ll find fuel on the Home?” Brushfire asked. “It does seem like there was a lot going on there.”
“Not void ships, though, and regular alcohol won’t work,” Alloy told her. “Only way we’re going to find much more fuel for Void Flyer now is to settle somewhere for a bit and make it.”
Brushfire figured they weren’t doing that until they got to the Clan Spheres—if then. Void Flyer would take them this way, but both finding their answers and coming home were going to require more work.
“Some of our answers are on the Home,” Cat said, like he’d been listening to Brushfire’s thoughts. “Two leagues a minute will make it a four-day journey there, yes?”
“Agreed,” Alloy said.
“Six from there to the strait to Warden of Stone,” the Captain continued. “Brushfire, cast an eye around the sphere. Something about this place…”
He shook his head.
“See what you can find,” he instructed. “I’m going to go talk to the archmage.”
Chapter
Twenty
The ember was wrong.
Armand knew he wasn’t an experienced aether sailor, the type who’d walked a thousand different worldlets in a hundred different spheres. Prior to the vision that had sent him on this particular quest, he’d never actually left the Shining Kingdom.
The Shining Eye, the light source for the Kingdom and its sphere, was a light crystal. Almost a hundred leagues across, it glowed from within with a magical energy no var had ever been able to control or identify.
Most archmagi like Armand suspected that the crystals and outerlights and embers drew from the Deep Magic that underlay all spheres. It was where their own power came from, and it made sense that the same underlying energy field that seemed to empower all reality would empower the lights that sustained all life.
But while Armand Bluestaves only knew one crystal well, he had read more books than most var would ever even see. Many had even had pictures, including drawings and illustrations of what embers and outerlit spheres and light crystals usually looked like.
None of his experiences so far had shown him anything that departed from what those drawings had shown him. Until now.
More than that, even, the papers he’d brought with him included sketches and illustrations and descriptions of what the IronHome’s ember had looked like.
A flaring pale red, like iron ready to be forged, one text had described it. Other documents and imagery had matched that descriptor.
But now Armand looked through the magical crystals that turned this deck of Void Flyer into an observatory, and the color of the fire at the heart of IronHome did not match that description.
