Void Spheres, page 19
“But knowing about the Grand Dragons and their pact with the Ironhands answers something, doesn’t it?” he prodded.
“Yes. I need to check my books and do some divination to be sure, but that gives me an idea of what might be happening,” Armand said. “I don’t believe the White Mountain lied to us, strangely, but it had very different priorities from what a living var might.”
“I’d never even heard or conceived of anything like it,” Cat said. He looked out the side windows as a shiver ran through the ship. They were clear of the lodeplate’s air envelope, which should give them some protection from the wraith skiffs.
“I have heard of smaller fixed constructs,” Armand observed. “We anchor many magics to physical objects; there is no reason we can’t anchor a construct to one. Tradition says we don’t, and what I have read of involved forms that needed to be able to move on their own—more marionettes than statues, and limited for it.
“But, I suppose, knowing what we thought the limits of a fixed construct were is why it didn’t occur to me that that was what we were facing. Well done, my Captain.”
Armand’s words sent a surprisingly warm shiver through Cat. He didn’t think a small compliment was that big a deal—though, to be fair, he would have expected the archmage to see through the nature of an arcane thing before he did.
The skiffs, he noted, were no longer rising. Whatever strange essence empowered them, it wasn’t enough to break the basic limits of the airship.
Without aether, they could not pursue his people, and he sighed in relief.
“Do you know where this Greenrise or the Radiant Realms are?” he asked Armand.
“No. They are not names I am familiar with,” his archmage told him. “You?”
“Never heard of them. I imagine, though, that if the Radiant Realms are the last dragon hatchery and our problem is dragons coming out of the Clan Spheres, the Realms are in gobvar territory.”
“Where we were heading anyway,” Armand agreed. “And I hope that the Blood King is as powerful, arrogant and focused as I believe he is.”
Even the High Court Navy briefings on the Quadrumvirate treated the Blood King as more a myth or legend than an actual political leader, which didn’t lend itself to accurate assessments. Or ones that were wrapped in anything other than fear.
“I am not sure how him being as powerful as we fear helps us,” Cat murmured.
“Because if the Blood King is all that I believe him to be, he will not tell the others of the Quadrumvirate that his sanctuary has been breached,” Armand said. “He will not admit, even, that there is a passage through the void around the borders guarded by Her Crimson Sisters.
“He will come for us himself, which is bad enough, yes, but if we can sneak past him in a ship unlike what he expects, then there will be no one else to bar our way,” the archmage concluded. “We have escaped the Home. There is nothing in this sphere to challenge us, so the Blood King himself is the barrier between us and our destination.”
Cat swallowed his initial reaction, recognizing that admitting his fear would only aggravate that of the handful of var in the control room.
“Perhaps,” he said quietly. “Alloy, can you take over the wheel? Our course should be straight enough now.”
He’d told Streamwater, accurately, that he felt the need to have his hands on the wheel. He still did. But sometimes, other things had to take priority—and while he wasn’t going to put his hands on his archmage, there needed to be a conversation that rumor wouldn’t carry through the entire ship.
“Join me in the chart room, Lord Bluestaves?” he asked calmly—well aware that he didn’t address Armand that way very often.
Hopefully, that would get the message across.
Streamwater was confused to have Cat and Armand enter the chart room as she was working away, but disappeared back up to the control room without even a peep of pushback. If anyone could read the mood of an elvar noble despite his masks, it would be an elvar officer with two hundred dances of experience!
With just the two of them alone in the room, Cat crossed to study the chart where Streamwater had been working. She’d worked up the basics of the course already, though it would be a few clock-hours before they would need to change anything.
Clock-days after that, of course, before they reached the straits. Seventeen thousand leagues would take six days at three leagues a minute, the most they could expend the fuel for.
Except that even that speed would leave them low on fuel, unable to go any faster in Warden of Stone or Stormfall. Their journey to Home had left them able to make it to the Clan Spheres, but they would have little fuel left once they were there.
They would need a new ship at that point, and Cat didn’t like the options he could think of. Still, even that hour of potential piracy was long days away and required them to make it that far, and he finally turned his attention back to the archmage waiting patiently for him to speak.
“Do you have a plan, Armand?” he demanded. “The Blood King is effectively a god. Immortal. Indestructible. More powerful than any mortal var mage or archmage. We can’t fight him. We can’t outrun him. We can’t hide from him.”
“Hiding was my plan, I admit,” Armand told him. “This ship is new, unlike anything he could be expecting. My understanding is that if we aren’t firing the rockets, we should just drift by unnoticed.”
Cat grimaced, closing his eyes and rubbing his temples—a weakness he would show no one else.
“He already knows, Armand,” he told his archmage. “I suspect the White Mountain told him the entirety of our conversations. He knows our names. He knows our faces. He cursed well knows our ship.
“More than that, though, can’t you feel it?”
Armand looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
“The wraiths are different now,” Cat said. “I can feel the vibration where there should be aether. They are made of hunger and I feel that hunger, but there is a will to them now that there wasn’t before. Some of that is that IronHome is the center of the ritual and so there is more of the manifestation here… but most, I think, is that the Blood King is paying attention now.”
“You think he controlled the skiffs that attacked us?” Armand asked.
“Not directly, I don’t think, but he saw through them and commanded them,” Cat confirmed. “These wraiths may be a side effect of the ritual. They may, honestly, have been something he created afterward to guard these spheres from potential interference.
“There is a hunger to the void here that eats at my very bones, but I can feel his will in it now, and I couldn’t before.” He shook his head. “The Blood King knows we’re coming, Armand. We can’t sneak past him. I can feel the hunger of these spheres all around me—and that hunger is his to command.”
The chart room was silently chilly now as Armand finally began to understand Cat’s fear.
“What do we do?” his archmage asked.
“I was hoping you had an idea, my lord archmage,” Cat said drily. “Because hiding isn’t going to work. This ship needs fuel in a way nothing I’ve ever commanded did, which limits our ability to outrun or outfly him—and Void Flyer mounts no weapons.”
“This is not my battlefield,” Armand told him, reaching over to place his hand on Cat’s forearm. “It’s yours, Cat. My power is at your disposal, my skills and knowledge too. But I can’t plot or plan a battle in the void.
“You can. I have faith in your skill.”
“Go kill a god. I have faith in you,” Cat quoted back to him. “That’s not a small ask, my archmage.”
“My power and your skill, Cat Greentrees, can match many foes that think themselves invincible,” Armand said. “And the Blood King, for all his power, is not a god. A var made immortal by mass murder, yes, but not a god.”
Cat snorted, but nodded as he turned to study the chart of the sphere once more. Something plucked at the warning strings in the back of his mind. A sharper sense of the hunger he’d felt through the entire sphere for a while.
“If he’s immortal, what happens if we blow him to pieces?” he asked.
“I suspect the pieces will eventually reassemble,” Armand admitted. “But that would render him incapable for some time.” The archmage paused, clearly realizing that Cat was distracted, and stepped forward to squeeze his shoulder.
“What is it?”
Cat closed his eyes, turning in place as he tried to follow the twang on his mental senses.
“Something woke up,” he said softly, the words only making sense as he spoke them. He stabbed a finger into the air. “Over there.”
He opened his eyes and measured the angle by the ease of long practice. The charts gave him the answer he needed.
The answer he feared.
“There is a nexus of power in this sphere that wasn’t there an hour ago,” he told Armand. “At the shipyards.”
“That… is bad, isn’t it?”
“Probably.”
“Guide me to where,” Armand instructed, his power taking shape in the air. He held his hand out to Cat, expecting Cat to understand what he needed.
And somehow Cat did. He took Armand’s hand and leaned into the other var’s power. His own sense of the strange nexus of power gave him a direction, and his own view of the charts gave him a distance.
His illusory telescope needed to be able to directly draw light and would be useless inside the sealed chart room. Armand’s conjured illusions of a far-distant chunk of space had fewer limits.
The shipyards they’d studied before appeared in the middle of the room, details flickering past as Cat’s guidance and Armand’s power drilled in toward the source of the threat ringing through Cat’s mind.
Somehow, he was unsurprised to see the twentysailed leviathan moving. Green mist swathed the monster’s decks and trailed up her rigging, but it was something else that filled her sails. Not the wraiths of the sphere’s hunger.
“What… What is that?” Armand whispered.
“The last flagship of the Ironhand Imperium,” Cat told him. “Her decks crewed by the damned… and her sails filled by the Blood King’s rage.”
Chapter
Thirty
Brushfire was intercepted before she reached the control room by Alloy, the darvar artificer looking concerned as he waved her down.
“Greentrees just called me down from the controls,” he told her. “The runner didn’t seem to know what for, but I figure if he’s asking for me, he definitely wants you.”
Brushfire wasn’t quite sure she followed Alloy’s logic, but she fell in beside the darvar as he approached the chart room. The second clue was that the chart room was closed and magically sealed. Not heavily, but enough to discourage anyone casually wandering in.
Alloy knocked before Brushfire could and the seal released, the same magic opening the door.
“Come in,” Cat ordered. “We have a problem. Oh, Brushfire—thank the gods; I sent a runner looking for you, but I had no idea where you were.”
“Crane’s infirmary,” Brushfire said as she entered the room. “We got Sky into their care in time. They’ll live, but Crane still wasn’t sure if they’d be able to save both of their legs.”
Fortunately, while missing a leg would be a problem for Sky, Brushfire was certain there were a dozen and one tasks they could still use the elvar sailor for aboard Void Flyer. Taking care of the chart room they were standing in, for example, was currently a rotating duty but could easily absorb one less-mobile sailor’s entire time.
Brushfire wasn’t as skilled at navigating as a first officer should be, let alone as skilled as she’d like to be. She could read the charts around the room and make sense of them, but it only took her a few moments to realize that Cat and Armand—what was the archmage doing in the chart room?—were looking at something entirely different.
“What am I looking at?” Alloy asked, having joined the other two men while Brushfire was taking in the whole scene.
“The Ironhand shipyards and their old home fleet,” Cat said calmly as Brushfire joined them. He then reached out to tap the illusion of one of the handful of massive twentysail behemoths.
“And that.”
Brushfire hadn’t realized it was moving. That was impossible.
“That is an aether ship,” she said softly. “How is it moving?”
“From what I can tell,” Armand told her, “it moves because the Blood King wishes it to move. The sails and arms are crewed by the same hunger wraiths we have encountered again and again across the void spheres, but I do not believe that hunger could fill the sails of an aether ship here.”
“But the Blood King isn’t even here,” Brushfire told them. More a hope, she supposed, than an absolute certainty.
“No, he’s not,” Armand agreed. “We have drawn his attention, though, and it seems he has some power over the remaining manifestations of his ritual. In these spheres, I am afraid, the Blood King may as well be a full god.”
“Depending on how confident he is in this trick, he may well be on his way to bar our exit into the Clan Spheres as we speak,” Cat said quietly, a heavier undertone to his voice than Brushfire had ever heard before. “Or he might believe that the largest warship I have ever seen, with a crew that cannot die, is more than sufficient to deal with a single void ship that can’t fight back.”
Brushfire reached over to squeeze Cat’s arm, hoping her support helped. She’d never seen him like this—and she didn’t like it.
“I haven’t read the same books you have,” she warned the others. “But my Elders have their own stories of the Blood King. He never struck me as a creature to trust in one tool when he could use three.”
“Agreed.” Cat sounded exhausted. “He’s coming. I don’t know if we can get away from this ship, and I don’t think we can hide from the Blood King.”
“Can we fight the twentysail?” Armand asked. “It may be big, but it doesn’t have an actual crew, and it’s been sitting untouched for a thousand dances.”
“There are twelve storm staves in our storage decks,” Brushfire said slowly. “But we have only four void suits aboard… and they’re sized for darvar. I don’t think Alloy’s daughters are trained to set up and fire a storm stave!”
“If I thought it would help, I might ask them anyway,” Alloy noted grimly. “But none of the four of us have a clue with a storm stave. I could work it out, I’m sure, but in a clumsy void suit while under pursuit?”
“We have no other options?” Armand asked. “Cat, you never learned any magic to fight without staves?”
Brushfire squeezed her Captain’s forearm again. There had to be an answer, and she was with Armand. The rest of them had the power to contribute, but it was Cat who might have the skill to know what to do.
Cat was silent for longer than she liked, then turned away from the illusion of their pursuer to look at the chart of IronHome.
“There are a few tricks,” he conceded. “As Brushfire showed me, any mage can duplicate a storm stave. Doing so from the outside of the ship while we’re inside? Harder. There are other options, but they are… tools of desperation.
“They are traps more than weapons, requiring an enemy lured well within a league. These…” He sighed. “The wraiths are not being sent to capture us, my friends. They will destroy us. We must outrun them.”
“How fast can they move?” Brushfire asked.
“Faster than you might think,” Cat told her. “But they are limited by what those sails can take. I don’t care what magic fills them; a mast and her sails can only carry so much force. No ninesail I’ve ever commanded could make more than perhaps five leagues a minute, even with the most favorable currents and crew.
“I don’t know what her masts are made of, but a thousand dances—even in the void—must have weakened them. Five leagues would be my guess, but we’ll see soon enough.”
“We can go that fast,” Alloy pointed out. “There’s… no real limit to how fast Flyer can go except for fuel. It’s just that… well, basically, we store about fifty leagues per minute’s worth of fuel when full. Getting out of a lodestone’s effect costs us about three. And it costs us the same fuel to slow down as to speed up.
“Our plan was to head for Warden of Stone at three leagues a minute, and we’d burned about two-fifths of our fuel getting from Flame’s Gem to the Home and back into the void. Whatever speed we gain, we need to lose most of before we enter the strait—and then we need to accelerate again in both the strait and each sphere.”
Brushfire understood the basic concept of their fuel translating into speed—and that the plan called for them to enter the Clan Spheres with less than a third of their fuel remaining.
“Every bit of fuel we burn is speed we cannot gain or lose later,” Alloy warned. “But we can get up to six, maybe seven leagues a minute while still having some fuel when we reach the Clan Spheres.”
The darvar paused, clearly doing math in his head.
“Enough to transit maybe two spheres, if we’re slow and careful.”
“Slow and careful later beats dead today,” Armand pointed out. “Cat?”
The Captain was studying the charts in silence, though Brushfire was quite sure he’d been listening.
“Everything about maneuvering in the void bothers me,” Cat finally said. “There are no tricks, no currents, nowhere I can find a better way. They will follow a straight line, likely aiming for the passage to Warden of Stone to intercept us.
“All of these maneuvers are mechanical and mathematical. We cannot change them,” he said grimly. “Seventeen thousand leagues for us from here. Thirty-five thousand for them. They’ll reach the strait in five days—less, really.”
“If they can manage that speed,” Brushfire noted. “They may be slower.”
“They may be faster,” Alloy pointed out. “Captain…”
“If we double our speed, four leagues a minute, we should beat them to the strait by two full days,” Cat said swiftly. “That still leaves us with a fifth of our fuel once we pass out of Stormfall and back into aether.
