Void Spheres, page 24
“I did,” Armand said. “And I have spent our time talking around codicils and complications, rather than the core. I… As I warned, I am not a romantic man. I do not believe I am very good at thi—”
It was less than a full step for Cat to close the distance between them and shut the archmage up in the most appropriate way possible.
Chapter
Thirty-Seven
Brushfire stood alone in the control room, checking the sextants every so often and glancing out to the void around them. She understood enough of Alloy’s usual panel of instruments to see that they still weren’t ready to fly—there was a dial marking the pressure of fuel ready to feed into each rocket, and currently, two of the rockets weren’t getting any fuel at all.
That was why she was alone. Since Void Flyer couldn’t fly, there was no point having extra hands on the control deck, and people were stressed and exhausted. The destruction of the wraith ship had bought them some relief, which would help people sleep.
For herself, Brushfire was already looking to the future. They had no way of knowing if the Blood King was on his way already. They might manage to leave the void spheres before a demigod arrived to bar their way, but she wasn’t going to take that bet.
The strange melding spell that Cat and Armand had used had allowed them to take on the ancient twentysail, but she’d watched as even their facial expressions aligned perfectly. The merger had been terrifying to stand outside of, and she could tell that something about it had put both var badly off-balance.
Plus, what had allowed them to fight an ancient warship with fundamentally conventional sails and weapons, regardless of how those sails were filled and weapons were crewed, paled against what might be needed to fight the Blood King.
Somehow, from an untold distance away, the King had communicated with the White Mountain, not only learning about them from it but giving the Mountain instructions. From what Cat and Armand had said, the increased danger level of the wraiths had been due to the King’s taking direct control.
Worse, the Warden of Stone was fortified. There were fortresses floating throughout the sphere, and while they seemed dead and inactive now, so had the mighty twentysail the Blood King had filled with wraiths and sent after them.
It was interesting to her, though, that the wraiths had needed the ship. Even when they’d swarmed the landing party on Flame’s Gem, they’d come aboveground and been funneled by walls. They might not be physical beings in any sense, but they had limitations as if they were.
Without a world or a ship, the wraiths could not traverse the void. Or, perhaps, couldn’t act in the void—Brushfire didn’t assume that the wraiths had always been aboard the old warship.
It was possible the manifestation had created them there, but it still came back to needing an anchor of some kind. In the void, Flyer and her crew had some protection from the hunger of the spell that had destroyed these spheres.
They had no such protection from the spell’s architect.
It was almost certain that the Blood King had some way to traverse the void spheres. And unlike almost any other var in the spheres, he would know where the strait from Drinkstar into Stormfall was.
There were other connections from the Clan Spheres to the void spheres, of course, but Stormfall was on the fastest route. The Blood King would know that, she presumed, and would almost certainly be able to predict their exact route.
These were his home spheres, after all.
All of that meant that Brushfire had set herself the task of locating and flagging any intact-looking warships and fortifications in the Warden of Stone. The forts, at least, were marked on the more-detailed charts of the individual sphere, though a thousand dances almost certainly made for some differences.
Between magic and telescopes, though, she’d managed to locate three concentrations of ships. She wasn’t sure they were all warships—some looked like ninesails and others like the five-sided ships they’d seen in IronHome, but others were different designs—but they were aether ships.
And she’d started looking around the forts. When she reached the worldlets, she figured more or all of the ships would be merchant vessels. The twenty-odd ships she’d picked out so far were likely warships.
“First Officer Hammerhead.”
Brushfire smiled to herself as Smallwolf gave her the full title, then concealed the somewhat-parental expression before she turned to look at the elvar who’d just stepped out of the stairwell.
“Officer Smallwolf,” she greeted the younger var. “I believe everyone who isn’t involved in the repairs is supposed to be resting.”
“I was. Then I checked in on your brother.”
Brushfire nodded wordlessly. After what she’d learned about how her brother had felt about everyone’s intrusion into his relationship with Petal, she wasn’t going to get involved there unless asked.
“I assume he’s doing better than a few hours ago, when he was still faintly smoking,” she said finally. He hadn’t been conscious, either, at that point. Brushfire wasn’t entirely sure how Fistfall had managed to get back into the ship, but she was glad he had.
“He was awake, but Officer Crane wouldn’t let me stay long,” Smallwolf admitted. “I think he was glad to see me.”
Brushfire wanted to close her eyes and count to fifty. She knew perfectly well where her Captain and archmage were at that moment—and despite a pang of something she was not going to interrogate, she was happy for them.
But Cat and Armand were both experienced adults and well able to make their own decisions, regardless of the difference in their calendar ages. Bogsong, for all that she was roughly the same age as Armand, was elvar. An elvar didn’t really physically mature until about ten dances later than a halvar or darvar.
Elvar culture tended to hold their children back until they were physically mature, and Bogsong probably wouldn’t have started her training as a ship’s officer until her thirtieth dance. She’d served on at least one ship before joining their crew, but she was still in many ways younger and more inexperienced than her age might suggest.
Brushfire was bitterly aware that gobvar matured at the same rate as elvar, but the pressures put on her people in Court and Kingdoms didn’t allow them to keep their children out of work that long. So, while Fistfall was half a dozen dances younger than Bogsong, he probably had more life experience.
“I can’t read my brother’s mind,” she finally told the elvar. “But he’s also not very subtle, so if you thought he was happy to see you, he probably was.”
There were a long few moments of silence, which Brushfire filled by pointing the magical telescope—the simple version she’d learned from Cat, not Armand’s complicated illusory duplicates—back at the largest cluster of ships.
Two ninesails hung in the middle of six of the five-sided ships with their two stave galleries. Another half dozen ships, none that quite looked right to Brushfire, also hung around the fortress they seemed to be using as an anchor point.
“May I ask a… personal question, Officer Hammerhead?”
“I’ll trade you,” Brushfire said, swallowing a sigh. “You ask a personal question you probably shouldn’t, and I’ll ask a professional question I should probably know the answer to.”
“I’m supposed to answer your questions about the ship,” Smallwolf pointed out with a chuckle. “But ask away.”
“These.” Brushfire gestured the elvar mage over to the telescope and indicated the ships she wasn’t sure about. “They don’t look like ninesails to me, but I wouldn’t have figured the five-siders for warships, either, until Cat pointed out the key features.
“What do you make of them?”
Smallwolf stepped closer to the illusion—less than a yard across, it was more shareable than a telescope but still didn’t show much detail at a distance of several thousand leagues.
“I don’t think they’re warships either,” she said slowly. “Three sail decks and I don’t see any stave galleries. They’re beamy ships, as long as the ninesails and even wider. I’d guess cargo, but I’ve never seen cargo ships like that, and there are storm staves on their decks, I think.”
“So, not warships, not civilians,” Brushfire concluded. “Troopships?”
“I can’t think of anything else, sir,” Smallwolf agreed. “The more I see of the Ironhands, the stranger I think they are. An entire troopship squadron waiting in the aether, ready to go? To do what?”
“From what Armand has said and we have seen…” The gobvar officer sighed. “To bring anyone who tried to complain back into line. The Ironhands very clearly ruled by force and were prepared to deploy ships and troops with little warning. I don’t have the impression they were particularly nice people.”
“Even if they were gobvar?” Smallwolf asked.
“Every var has their assholes who should never be given a scrap of power,” Brushfire said. “Some of them always end up in power. With the spheres all under one banner, as it seems they were in the Ironhands’ dances, all the assholes had to do was be born into one family.”
And she suspected that, after a certain point, that became self-reinforcing.
“Says something, I suppose, that these spheres just… went away and no one cared enough to look into why,” the elvar said.
“We don’t know that. Armand thinks the High Court tried to bury evidence of the Imperium in the Court and Kingdoms, to make their leadership seem eternal.” Brushfire shrugged. “Don’t get the impression I like the way the Court and Kingdoms work, Smallwolf.
“My people find themselves struggling upwards against a torrent of grazer shit everywhere. On the other hand, the stories I hear out of the Clan Spheres are as bad or worse—and it’s not an improvement to know the one shitting on you has the same horns you do!”
Smallwolf was quiet for a few moments, still looking at the ships.
“Six warships, six troop transports, sitting at a fort,” she concluded. “Do you… Do you think the Blood King can send them at us?”
“I don’t know,” Brushfire admitted. “I’m making sure we know where all of the warships in the sphere are so that we can keep an eye on them.”
She made a note on the chart. Six warships. Six armed transports.
“I don’t have the impression that the Blood King is going to bother using his powers to send troopships with a few storm staves at us,” she observed. “The ninesails are probably the biggest threat, unless I spot another big bastard somewhere in the sphere.”
She considered the chart for a few moments, then sighed.
“Your personal question, Bogsong?” she prodded.
“Right.” The slim elvar glanced away for a few heartbeats, then shrugged. “Your brother, Fistfall. Do you… think there’s any chance he’d look at an elvar?”
The young were never as subtle as they thought they were.
“My brother,” Brushfire echoed, then sighed again. “I can’t speak for Fistfall on many things, Bogsong. The question I expected you to ask, I can’t answer. This one, though?”
She smiled at the younger var.
“My brother does not have it in his heart to prejudge anyone by their var,” she told Bogsong. “Even before joining this crew, when that openness got him in as much trouble as it got him out of, he would judge everyone on their own merits.
“I have no reason to believe that his romantic inclinations are any different.” She held up a warning hand. “I will warn you that while his relationship with Petal was more complicated than I think anyone else realized, she did die all too recently.”
“I know,” Bogsong said. “It’s… part of why I haven’t said anything to him. He saved my life on the Seventh Ward. I’d… already been enjoying his company when we worked together, but I haven’t been able to see him the same way since.
“And with him training as a mage, I’ve only seen more of him.” She shrugged helplessly. “He’s smart and he’s kind and he’s funny, not that he seems to realize any of that! But I…”
Brushfire let Bogsong trail off and then chuckled at her gently.
“Fistfall is convinced, from what I can tell, that he is only a pile of muscles and some carpentry skills,” she warned Bogsong. “Some of that is put on. He has spent most of his life being the single largest var that most people will have met in their entire lives, and making himself appear less of a threat served him well.
“He is not subtle, but he is more self-aware—I hope—than it might appear. What I can tell you, Bogsong, is that there is only one person you should talk to if you want to know what is going on in Fistfall’s head.”
And heart.
“Fistfall,” Bogsong said, without any prompting. “I know.” She smiled and it was a sparkling thing to see. “I just also figured that… well, he seemed the type where realizing he couldn’t be interested in an elvar would hurt him, too.”
She wasn’t wrong there. But while Brushfire wasn’t going to get further involved if she could possibly avoid it, she also knew her brother. If he did think that… well, she figured he’d get over it.
“Fistfall is now in a strange place on this crew,” she told the elvar. “He isn’t an officer, but he’s no longer crew, either. He’s a sworn servant of the archmage—as are all of the officers. He is a mage—as are all of the officers.
“So, he can’t be crew. But he isn’t an officer, either. No one, including Fistfall, has slowed down to see that as a complication because my dear brother is incapable of not helping if he sees a task being done.
“But in this crew, with his status as one of Armand’s mages, there are no barriers between you two,” Brushfire concluded. “The heart wants what it wants. I cannot—I will not!—speak to my brother’s heart.
“If you both want the same thing, no one on this ship will bar your way. We will do what we can to protect you when we return to Court and Kingdom, even.” She grimaced and didn’t even try to conceal it.
“I won’t pretend that you’re not choosing a hard path,” she warned. “Frankly, Bogsong, I don’t think you understand just how bad the situation for gobvar is back home. I don’t believe that you being elvar will protect him—and I do fear that him being gobvar will harm you.”
“I… think I am prepared to risk that,” Bogsong said slowly. “You’re probably right. I probably don’t know how bad that will get when we go home. But we’re a long cursed way from the Court and Kingdoms, and we’re not going back anytime soon.
“We might not even make it.”
That wasn’t a statement any of the ship’s officers would make if the crew were present, but they were alone on the control deck still.
“We might not,” Brushfire conceded grimly. “Take what you can get, Bogsong. Ask him.”
“I will,” Bogsong told her, her voice determined. “Thank you, Brushfire.”
“You are welcome. Now get off the control deck and rest. We don’t need much of a watch right now, and I have my eyes open.”
She… suspected that Bogsong was going right back to the infirmary and, depending on Fistfall’s response and level of recovery, rest wasn’t in the elvar’s plans.
That wasn’t Brushfire’s problem. Even if she felt a tiny amount of jealousy that she knew she didn’t want to interrogate too closely.
Chapter
Thirty-Eight
Armand was awoken by the engines. The rockets weren’t all that loud inside the ship, especially compared to standing in an enclosed space while the ship tried to escape the Seeker holding it in place! Still, it was difficult to sleep while the engines were firing; plus, it was a good sign that things were going according to plan.
He wasn’t entirely surprised to realize that he was alone in the bed. Cat had slipped away while he slept, probably to make sure that the engines were ready to fire when the time came. Still, he smiled as he recalled his own awkwardness when the elvar had answered his invitation.
Leave it to him, he knew, to turn a romantic invitation and getaway into a discussion of the terms and conditions of them having a relationship of any kind. Cat, thankfully, had seemed to understand.
Snacking on a sweetroll for breakfast, Armand pulled his notes together with a languid gesture and a touch of power. The meld nexus had worked, but it had also been even more of a strange and dangerous experience than he’d feared.
Cat hadn’t said much about it, but Armand could read at least some of the volumes written by the other var’s silence. The revelation of their feelings for each other was one thing, but in hindsight, he suspected they’d fallen deeper into the meld than they could afford.
They probably should have been separated, but he hadn’t actually told anyone to be ready to do so. The situation had been dire enough that risks were called for.
Now, though, he knew that they needed Brushfire or one of the others standing by if it came to using the spell again. And that they needed another answer.
It would do them no good to somehow break past the Blood King if both Cat and Armand lost their minds! The merger of the two of them couldn’t last.
Armand wasn’t sure what the failure point of an unbroken meld would be. The author of the book he’d read had talked around the possibility and, like most intelligent experimental magicians, had kept someone on hand to end the tests.
He suspected that if they couldn’t break out of the meld, it would kill them both.
They needed another option.
After the third card reading, Armand swept the oracle deck off his desk. None of the readings were helpful. It wasn’t even that they were saying things he didn’t want to see. They weren’t telling him anything.
The Blood King kept showing up, but not in places or arrangements that made sense. The cards weren’t lying to him. His dice hadn’t been much clearer.
About the only useful thing the dice had told him was, basically, that the only way out was through. The only course that didn’t end in utter disaster was forward—but forward was… blurry.
