Void Spheres, page 2
“He knows this ship better than any of us,” Brushfire reminded Cat. The Captain had already made his decision, she could tell, but a bit of extra support never hurt.
“Indeed. Master Bellowforge, I feel we need to make your place on this ship clear to everyone,” Cat murmured. “How does Engines Officer sound to you?”
“New and shiny and confusing to anyone who doesn’t know what you mean,” Alloy said. “Does it come with a salary?”
“I’d say I’d ask Armand, but every time I’ve asked him about money, the answer has been yes,” Cat replied drily. “Let’s say you’ll draw comparable pay to First Officer Hammerhead.”
As opposed to Master of Decks Axfall Hammerhead or Master of Sails Windheart Hammerhead. Of the two hundred gobvar aboard Void Flyer, nearly a hundred were Hammerheads.
Strangely, no one seemed particularly confused by that. The gobvar knew how to handle extended tribal families, and the hundred-ish elvar aboard the ship just… managed.
“I have no idea what that number would be,” Bellowforge admitted cheerfully. “But yes, I would like to remain in charge of my engines. I will train the crew, of course, but Void Flyer is my masterwork.”
“She is a masterwork,” Cat agreed. “And the fate of all spheres and all var may ride on her, Alloy. For now, let’s get to this depot and fill her tanks.”
Brushfire nodded her agreement—not that Cat needed the confirmation. She’d made her opinion clear, she hoped, and she suspected the Captain would have explicitly asked her to argue her case if he hadn’t thought she agreed.
“This entire sphere makes me nervous,” Brushfire observed. “Do we know…” She paused, reconsidering her question.
“There’s no aether in this sphere,” she said. “Do we know if there’s air on the worldlets?”
“There are armor suits aboard intended to let people breathe in void,” Bellowforge said slowly. “But… well, they’re sized for darvar and aren’t going to fit anyone bigger. His Dark Brothers never said anything about the worlds here, but…”
“But what?” Brushfire asked.
“There are four suits,” the artificer told her. “I’m not sure they could have set up the depot with just four suits.
“I do not know, my friends, but I suspect that the surface of the worldlet may be more hospitable than we fear.”
“It can’t be less,” Cat said grimly. “In the worst case, we have enough mages on this ship to make it work regardless. We’ll get that fuel.”
Chapter
Three
Great magical power did not make it any easier to give up habits when circumstances changed. Armand Bluestaves, Archmage of the Towers of the Great Red Forest, certainly possessed the former.
The rotund halvar commanded the base magic of the spheres, a link to the fundamental underpinning of reality that he felt as a second heartbeat. That was the power that had fueled his duel with the Seeker of Her Dark Brother, the priest-archmage who had originally owned Void Flyer.
Drawing on that power was more a loan than a gift, however, and Armand had paid for the power he’d commanded in that duel with clock-days of fatigue and muscle pain.
In theory, he could have climbed the steep stairs that rose the full height of Void Flyer. The exercise would have done him good, on the clock-days when he had the energy. But habit spoke louder than intent, some days, and Void Flyer was a strange ship.
A halvar like Armand couldn’t breathe aether. Neither could a darvar like his newest sworn servant, Bellowforge. But the elvar and gobvar who made up Void Flyer’s crew could, and so, on an ordinary aether ship—like Star, the ninesail that had delivered them to Brokenwright—most of the ship was open to aether.
Only the quarters for special guests—like halvar archmagi—and the medical suite were sealed to contain air. So, Armand had been basically trapped in his quarters aboard Star. He was not so trapped aboard Flyer, but habit kept him out of the way of his crew.
He felt it was… excessive that an entire deck of the void ship had been set aside for him. The deck—one of four with magical windows that looked out into the void around them—had already been set up as luxurious personal quarters, probably for the Seeker, but Armand still felt that he should have shared the space with someone.
Still, it meant they’d had room to bring not only his books—all copies of tomes in his personal library, just in case this library was lost—but his oven.
And another habit that Armand had no intention of ever giving up was that he baked when nervous or exhausted. The current batch of sweetrolls didn’t taste quite right, and he leveled a sad look on the glaze he’d made.
The sweet cinnamon icing he’d made would be too much on these rolls. They needed something—they were both too dry and too sweet—but the different temperatures and vibrations of Void Flyer compared to anywhere else he’d ever baked had turned the sweetbark nuggets into a pervasive flavor.
He was about to give up entirely when Cat Greentrees knocked on the door. Armand couldn’t identify everyone aboard Flyer by their knock, but he knew he could pick out Cat and Brushfire. His two senior officers had been recurring visitors on Star, and only the nature of the door had changed.
“You know you can come in,” he told Cat. “Captain Greentrees.”
“Armand.”
The elvar Captain crossed the room swiftly to stand across the table from Armand. The archmage took a moment to, hopefully covertly, enjoy the sheer grace and agility of his subordinate’s movements.
His own frame couldn’t have managed that even if he hadn’t happily consumed the majority of his own baking over the dances.
“We’re changing course,” Cat told him. “Talking to Alloy, we don’t have enough fuel to make the full journey. I tried to plot a course to a sphere in the Kingdoms, but…”
He shook his head and Armand waited patiently.
“The navigation cantrip I used calls for a divination tool,” the Captain explained. “I have an old oracle deck—nothing like yours—and the card I drew was the Aether Storm.”
Armand had his suspicions about what an old oracle deck meant to a senior scion of one of the central bloodlines of the House of Forests, a Great House of the Elvar High Court. On the other hand, his own oracle deck was a gift from the Shining King, the master of his home sphere.
Each card was a hand-calligraphed work of art.
“So, we do not take that route,” Armand agreed. “What course did you and Brushfire agree on?”
The elvar smirked, silently acknowledging that, yes, the first officer had been involved in the discussion.
“The largest worldlet, Flame’s Gem,” Cat concluded. “Thanks to Alloy and the charts from His Dark Brothers, we know the Brothers had a fuel and supply depot there. While we do not know if Flame’s Gem has, oh, air…”
“Any work done by the darvar there was done with the tools we have,” Armand agreed. “We should be able to access the fuel depot, yes?”
“Yes. We may need to use more magic than they did,” Cat warned. “The suits aboard Flyer would fit Bellowforge or his wife. They are made for darvar, and the Bellowforges are the only adult darvar aboard this ship.”
“A risk, I think, we should hesitate to take,” the archmage said. “I believe in Alloy’s oath of service, but he has spent a full dance or more in the hands of His Dark Brothers.”
And His Dark Brothers regarded lying, manipulation and torture as sacred rites, holy sacrifices to Her Dark Brother, their god.
“He also lacks a focus,” Cat pointed out. “I did not think to lay in a supply of spare general foci, which leaves him limited in the magic he can command.”
Armand nodded, glaring down at his failed sweetrolls.
The ability to make a focus was what differentiated an archmage from a regular mage. Cat, for example, was a fully trained Captain of the High Court Navy, empowered by the blood of his Great House and equipped with a personal focus made for him by Armand himself.
There were few regular mages who could face Cat Greentrees. Brushfire Hammerhead might be more powerful—even Armand wasn’t sure!—but she lacked the Captain’s extensive training.
But Cat could not make a focus, and without a focus, he would be drastically weakened. The elvar also bore a brand on his right hand that was supposed to keep him from using magic, but Armand had broken that as part of his payment.
“You want me to make him a personal focus.” It wasn’t really a question.
“I am suggesting it, yes,” Cat agreed. “What I want, though I do not know if it is an option, is to have personal foci for all of my officers.”
Armand nodded slowly. There were three junior officers aboard Void Flyer—all elvar who had proven their worth on this mission but had been hired through ordinary channels originally.
He had to be careful with personal foci. A mage with a focus attuned to them was easily twice as strong as a mage with a general focus. There were levels in between—family and House focuses, tied to family groupings of differing sizes—with increasing power with the increased alignment of the mage to the focus.
Of course, the main reason to be careful with making foci was the judgment of his peers, and they were outside the Kingdoms now.
“There is a difference,” he warned slowly, “between a personal focus and an attuned focus.” He gestured to the wand Cat wore at his hip. That had been carved from the wood of the ship he’d learned to sail aboard. Both its magic and its construction were intimately linked to Cat.
“We stand aboard Alloy’s masterwork,” Armand said. “I am confident I can find something to make him a true personal focus from. For the other three, I can attune a focus to them more tightly than any other, but without materials that are meaningfully linked to them, I cannot make a true personal focus.”
Armand wasn’t sure anyone other than an archmage would notice the difference.
“I don’t think they will complain,” Cat replied. “I presume such work shouldn’t be done on Flyer?”
“I would hesitate to try, not least because a failure in the process is… energetic,” Armand said. He’d used a munitions bunker as a workshop on Blueswallow to make Cat and Brushfire’s foci.
Just in case.
“We’re some clock-days from Flame’s Gem, but I imagine the fuel depot is near a city or something similar,” Cat said. “We can set up an air envelope for you to work in.”
“Then I see no true barrier,” Armand said, nodding firmly. He took another bite of the sweetroll and sighed, sliding an untouched roll to Cat. “Try this, Captain? I fear they may be irretrievable.”
Cat hesitated, then shrugged and took a bite of the roll.
“Irretrievable is… harsh,” the elvar said after a moment. “They are very dry. I could tolerate the sweet if it was a touch softer.”
“I must learn how Void Flyer impacts my baking.” Armand smiled. “Among other things. She is a strange ship, though as one unable to breathe aether, I see advantages to her.”
“Takes less lodestone, if nothing else,” Cat noted. “I wasn’t sure, so I checked. There is a single plate at the base of the ship which weighs far less than the keel of a ninesail. The highest decks are a bit light but no worse than the rigging of a ninesail.”
Lodestone was the strange metal that cored worldlets and anchored lodeplates. Even a tiny chunk of lodestone exerted a clear pull of down toward it. Aether ships had central keels made of the metal, drawing everything toward the center of the ship.
Void Flyer had a single base plate, more like the lodeplates of the High Court—vast continents that floated in the aether, one side forever to the life crystal of at the center of the sphere.
“I have one request, when you make the foci,” Cat said quietly.
“Oh?”
“Allow Brushfire to watch.”
Armand stared down at the sweetroll in his hand and considered the suggestion.
“You know what that leads toward,” he observed softly. He knew that Cat would have watched a focus made at some point. “She has mastered every magic shown to her even a single time. There is a danger to that.”
“It is the path to archmage,” Cat agreed. “And I believe it is a path she can walk.”
Armand was silent for a long time.
“She is a gobvar,” he finally said. It wasn’t an objection. Just a statement.
“And one of the most powerful non-archmagi I have ever met,” Cat pointed out. “And…” He paused, then shrugged. “It is an open secret, I believe, that the Academies of the High Court are better at judging archmage candidates than the Towers of the Great Red Forest.”
Armand wanted to argue, but he knew that was true.
“They still lose two Trial petitioners for every archmage they raise up,” he pointed out softly. An Archmage Trial could have four results: the petitioner could become an archmage, they could have their pathways of magic forced further open to make them a more powerful ordinary mage, they could lose their magic, or they could die.
The Academies had a far smaller number of the last three options than the Towers of the Great Red Forest. But they still buried more failures than they celebrated new archmagi.
“And that is why I am forbidden the test,” Cat noted. “My sister is an archmage; you knew that. I have passed all of our pre-Trial examinations and would otherwise stand, but the odds suggest that I would die.”
“And those are the odds Brushfire would face. Plus the risk of losing her magic entirely.”
“I am trained in things I cannot share,” Cat said quietly. “Things I know from being of a line of archmagi, Armand. Like myself, Brushfire would either pass the Trial or die.”
Armand let the silence sit in the room, closing his eyes as he processed Cat’s words.
“How many of your family have you lost?” he asked slowly.
“My eldest half-brother died. A cousin died. Two lost their magic forever. Another was lucky and channeled instead of burning out.” Armand heard the shrug in his Captain’s voice. “Once Hearth passed the Trial, of course, no more of my generation were permitted the attempt.”
“We are less… organized, I think,” Armand admitted. “Our lives are shorter, so perhaps we regard the risk as lesser. I do not know.”
The elvar rule—law? Tradition? Armand wasn’t sure of the exact form—allowing no more members of a family’s current generation to attempt the Trial after one had succeeded made sense, in a cold-blooded way. Certain lineages tended to produce archmagi; that much was known. The rule both allowed those lineages to produce archmagi and preserved those lineages to produce more archmagi.
“My sister was never interested,” the halvar murmured. “Gods bless her, she wanted a family, and the path to archmage didn’t permit that. My father never had time, according to him, but his mother’s sister was an archmage.
“It runs in families for us, too.”
“But we would never know what families it runs in among the gobvar,” Cat pointed out. “My people would not permit a gobvar to be trained to face the Trial. Yours might allow it, but I suspect the Academies would find a way to stop it before the Trial took place.”
“We would be no better.”
Despite Cat’s allowance for any impression that Armand’s var were less bigoted than the elvar, he was probably wrong on that point. Armand had no illusions about halvar tolerance. The long dances of the border war between Kingdoms and Clans had been fought by the elvar, but when the High Court Navy failed, it was halvar and darvar worlds that felt the blades and fire of Her Crimson Sisters.
The hatred those raids spawned toward the gobvar and the Clans was, Armand suspected, part of the point. Her Crimson Sisters—the warrior-priestesses of Her Crimson Sister, the sibling to Her Dark Brother and mistress of bloodshed and murder—wanted the Clans and the Kingdoms to hate each other.
As lies and torture were sacred to Her Dark Brother, strife and hatred were sacred to Her Crimson Sister.
“And even if you were, my people would stop it,” Cat repeated. “The Academies and the High Court would break a mage academy that raised a gobvar.” He snorted. “It is rare enough that anyone would take a gobvar as a student mage. The path of the archmage would be closed to them.”
“Which brings me to another thought, I suppose,” Armand asked slowly. “If Brushfire is as powerful a mage as you and I know her to be, the rest of her family and tribe should not lack for magical power.”
His Captain was silent for longer than Armand expected, then took another bite of the dry sweetroll to conceal his thoughts.
“Petal,” he said grimly. “I didn’t think of it until you spoke, but there were signs in her cooking for those with the eyes to see and the wit to think.” The Captain snorted. “The latter I appear to have lacked.
“Unfortunately, His Dark Brothers killed her.”
Seven of Hammerhead Tribe had died in the desperate battle to seize Void Flyer and the Bellowforges from the Seeker and His Dark Brothers. Seventeen dead and eleven missing in total, with the heaviest weight falling on the elvar storm-stave crews.
Even Cat and Armand hadn’t been willing, initially at least, to train gobvar to manage the magical storm staves that armed a ninesail. They didn’t have any of the weapons aboard Void Flyer, so the remaining elvar crew were learning new tasks.
But so were the riggers and deckhands, from what Armand understood.
“Curses.” Armand sighed. “I have spent too little time among the crew, I fear. I don’t have enough exposure to pick out who should be trained.”
“Fistfall. Brushfire’s first-brother.”
Armand didn’t pretend to understand the complexity of anyone’s family relations. Even Cat’s family structure and its position in the greater House of Forests was odd to him—nothing like the simple, if sprawling, connections of blood and history that made up the Bluestaves.
But Fistfall was definitely Brushfire’s brother by any standard Armand understood. He was probably the biggest gobvar on the ship, physically powerful if, well… a touch dim.
