Void Spheres, page 35
“I believe I must decline that honor,” she said calmly. “I should return to my ship.”
She started to turn, only to find the blank-masked mage suddenly in her face. They were short for a gobvar, though the horns emerging from their helmet were impressive, but that didn’t stop them barring her way.
“Games and stories tell no tales,” they told her in an odd singsong. “Blood burns but truth reveals. In darkness, hunger. In spherelight, fear. Speak.”
“What do you want?” Brushfire snapped.
“He isn’t talking to you,” Fallen Sky told her, and his voice was strange. Tired? “Your name, please, Captain?”
The title felt stiff and awkward to her ears, but she realized he meant her. She hadn’t quite realized that was the persona she was putting on.
“I am Brushfire of Tribe Hammerhead,” she told him, not turning back to him, still facing the strange mage, and hoping to get some clue of what was going on with them.
“Then, Brushfire, I ask for the truth you have spoken around,” the gobvar commander said. “My Guards are on edge, their steel showing.”
“Steel on steel will veil the feel but leave no answers in the falling.”
Oh. Oh. The second stranger was a seer.
Brushfire had never actually met one, not of her var, but she’d heard Cat and Armand talk about them. Divination was one thing, a focused skill. To be a seer was to see prophecy. To know what would be, not what was.
But not, as she understood it, ever particularly clearly or usefully.
“If one of us makes the wrong move, var will die,” Fallen Sky told her. “You do not appear to believe that will include you, which is fascinating to me, but I would rather, today, avoid any dying.”
That was so far outside what she had expected from a Blood Guard officer that Brushfire considered her next step very carefully. She could push past the seer, use her magic to throw aside the Blood Guard and sever their nets with ease.
On the other hand, she and Cat had expected her to be attacked and for her to seize the ship. Provoking the Guard would certainly get them to that goal.
“What do you want?” she asked, carefully, still facing the seer not Fallen Sky.
“His touch on her soul, a shadow of blood marked by fire and hunger in the void,” the seer said. Their words were nonsense, but the urgency to them told her that the var was drawing on prophecy—probably intentionally, which she doubted was overly safe at the best of times.
“A moment, Stonekind of Gloryherd,” Fallen Sky instructed. The seer stepped backward, one step.
Just one step. They were still barring her way.
“The Blood King entered that strait some clock-days ago,” the Lord Commander said. His tone was slow, stiff, dignified—yet there was an edge of pain and anger, too. She wasn’t sure she’d have picked it up without long experience around Cat, though.
It seemed the Blood Guard and the High Court Navy followed similar schools of thought on command. They certainly used the same clock-day and language… and she wondered if the traditions of the commands were also inherited from the Ironhand Imperium?
“I learned His destination in time to remove the crew from the ship He was on,” Fallen Sky continued. “He entered alone, as only He could. Now, where the Blood King entered, you leave.
“Our King should have returned by now. So, tell me, Brushfire, what did you see on the far side of the strait?”
She heard the seer—Stonekind of Gloryherd, she presumed—inhale to speak before stopping. Slowly, she turned to see that Fallen Sky had held up his hand, ordering the seer to remain silent.
“Speak true, Brushfire Hammerhead,” he told her—and the way he structured her name told her he’d seen through at least one part of her deception. She’d tried to imitate how he’d structured his own name, to avoid the impression that she was from the Court and Kingdoms.
She’d clearly failed, and that suggested she was running out of chances to do anything except grab her wand and start blasting. She could feel Fistfall’s tension beside her, her brother following her lead but not sure what her plan was.
Which was fair, given that she wasn’t sure what her plan was. But if it was down to tell the truth or start killing… well, the truth wasn’t going to save her, but they were at a point where she didn’t think it could hurt, either.
“Your King declared us trespassers and attacked us,” she said calmly. “We destroyed his ship… and the void spheres themselves consumed him.”
The silence rippled out from her like an inverted explosion, her words sinking into each of the Blood Guard and almost freezing them in place.
“Impossible,” one of the guards around her snapped. “He was a god.”
“And we know He is dead,” Fallen Sky snapped back. “Stonekind?”
The seer was silent for long heartbeats, and Brushfire knew that the var around her had to be checking weapons. This time, though, her attention was focused on Fallen Sky.
They already knew the Blood King was dead.
“She is marked,” the seer finally said, their tone more natural, if stilted. “His power has fallen on her, but it does not remain. The hunger of the void… stains her. And the Song of the Spheres fills her.
“One archmage could not defy our King. But I can taste the shadow and ash on the aether current, and she is not alone.”
Even the less-prophetic words were still… not as clear as Brushfire suspected the Lord Commander hoped. She could piece together the meaning, but she knew what had happened.
“You fought the Blood King?” Fallen Sky asked.
“I did. I was not alone,” she conceded.
“And you are an archmage?”
“I am,” she confirmed. It was far too late for them to do anything that could contain the power of an archmage, after all—and the other three archmagi on Void Flyer would end the Guard if something happened to her!
“What do you mean, the void spheres consumed him?”
Brushfire had been expecting to be attacked. Defiance. Rage. Denial. By declaring the death of the Blood King to his people, she’d figured she was kicking off the fight she’d come there to have. The Lord Commander’s questions were not what she’d expected.
“The spheres beyond that strait were once ordinary spheres,” she said slowly. “Everything in them was consumed by the Blood King to fuel his ascension. But a stain of that magic remained, an enduring and insatiable hunger.
“When the Blood King was weakened, the sphere’s hunger… consumed him,” she repeated. “What he stole was taken back and he is no more.”
The Guard shifted around her.
“Impossible!” one of them screamed, the sound turning into a lunge toward her—whether to shut her up or strike her down, she would never know.
Fallen Sky moved faster than she did. The Lord Commander sounded old, but he hadn’t slowed down at any point. She hadn’t recognized the ruby on his uniform as a focus until he called on it, magic moving him at a speed no ordinary var could match.
There was a flash of steel and power—and the attacking Guard was on the deck, pinned beneath Fallen Sky’s boot.
Brushfire couldn’t even tell if the var was alive.
The Lord Commander stepped away from his soldier and glared around his people.
“Do we owe anyone vengeance?” he snapped. “Do we owe that being vengeance? It is not in our bonds. It is not in our oaths.
“I will not avenge the Blood King.”
Brushfire… didn’t understand, but she wasn’t going to interrupt as the gobvar stared down his own people.
“I command here,” Fallen Sky declared. “Our bonds are broken. Our oaths released by death. But I command here. Will you follow… or be broken?”
At least half of the ninesail’s crew had to be on the deck, Brushfire judged. Potentially a bit less, given that he’d said they’d taken the crew off the Blood King’s ship—and Fallen Sky’s specification that he had arranged that, not the Blood King, suddenly echoed in her mind.
The Blood King hadn’t even thought about the fact that sailing his ship into the void would kill hundreds of his var. Not until one of his chief minions had taken action to prevent it.
And whatever bonds and oaths Fallen Sky spoke of being broken, one thing rapidly became very clear on the deck of the Blood Guard ninesail.
Regardless of what bound them all to the Blood King, these var would follow Lord Commander Fallen Sky anywhere.
“We will follow,” Stonekind declared, the seer the first to speak. The first to go to one knee in fealty before Fallen Sky.
With hundreds of gobvar on the sail deck, they were far from the last.
Chapter
Fifty-Eight
Brushfire stood still as the gobvar showed their allegiance, her fingers still on her focus. She didn’t think this was a bad thing, but she wasn’t sure. They’d killed the Blood King, but it seemed like his top commander was, at least, not going to hold it against them.
“You have questions,” Fallen Sky said to her. “Speak.”
“You served the Blood King. He is dead. What happens now?” she asked.
There was a long silence, and the Lord Commander made a wave-off gesture. The Guards slowly rose to their feet, dispersing back to other duties and giving them a growing area of privacy.
Then Fallen Sky reached up and released a hidden latch at the bottom of his helm. Several clearly audible latches released in sequence, and he pulled the mask away to allow himself to lift the helmet off.
Underneath the helm was a gobvar probably between Axfall and Windheart’s age, easily over two hundred dances old. His hair was stark white and close-cut, with the characteristic roughness of someone who cut their own hair. Possibly with a knife.
“Every var on these ships was given to the Blood King as tribute at their sixteenth flaring of the Great Fire,” he told her. With the helmet removed, his voice was clearer, but that only seemed to increase his calm authority and dignity.
“He marked us. Claimed us in a way I barely understand now, two hundred flarings later. We could not defy Him. Could not refuse Him. His orders defined and drove us, and such that we always knew our actions were not our choice.
“For two hundred flarings of the Great Fire, Brushfire Hammerhead, my will has not been wholly my own.” He met her gaze and she knew there was no way she could fully understand what that meant.
“Now the Blood King is somehow dead and my mind is my own and I can choose what I do now,” he continued. “I will not fully deny that choice to my Guards, but for them to lose their guiding light will be difficult. In exerting my authority, I hope to give them focus until they can find their footing beneath themselves.”
“To see if such will work is beyond even such as me,” Stonekind pointed out, the seer the only var still within easy earshot. “Tell me, Brushfire Hammerhead, must you still take our ship by force?”
With a literal mask over his face for most of his career, Fallen Sky clearly hadn’t learned not to show his surprise on his face.
“I am deciding,” Brushfire admitted, realizing that lying to the seer was probably pointless. “It depends on whether you will let my ship go.”
“You think you can take this ship on your own?” Fallen Sky half-asked, half-growled.
She looked at him assessingly. If he reached her before she drew on the Source, he might manage to stop her. In which case Cat and the others would destroy the ship.
“If I cannot take control of this ship, then it and the rest of your fleet will be destroyed,” she told him calmly. “You are not an archmage, Lord Commander. None of your crews are. We are not the ones outmatched here.”
There was a long silence.
“What brings one archmage across the void?” Fallen Sky finally asked. “I did not believe there were gobvar archmagi in elvar spheres.” He paused. “Stonekind already told me there were more of you, didn’t he?”
“I did?” the seer asked, then cough-chuckled. “You forget, my old friend, that I do not always remember what I have spoken. She is an archmage. And…” They sniffed the air. “Yes. The scent of His shadow and the ash that burned it wafts in a way that carries the Song of the Spheres. There is another archmage on her ship.”
“What brings two archmagi here?” Fallen Sky asked. “Your ship is unusual, but now you claim to need mine?”
“What would you have me say, Lord Commander?” she asked. “That the spheres themselves linked the Source to multiple mages to allow us to fight the Blood King? That destroying your king and monarch wasn’t even part of our plan? That we seek to stop a greater threat, one that threatened to enslave all var, and your former master simply got in the way?”
“Not two archmagi, then,” the gobvar officer noted. “More. You killed a god by accident?”
“Killing him was intended, I will admit,” Brushfire said drily, hearing her brother choke next to her. “But we did not plan to fight him at first and did not know our route through the void spheres would bring us into conflict with him.
“We are following a vision of a future where all var—elvar, gobvar, halvar, darvar, all var—are broken and enslaved to the will of a host of dragons. Our senior archmage saw a future of war and conquest, where gobvar were at best first among slaves and all var knelt.
“And we set ourselves on the course to stop it.” She shrugged. “Our void ship is damaged. We need an aether ship to continue our search. The answer, we believe, lies in spheres once called the Radiant Realms.”
“So, you would take my ship by force, would you?” Fallen Sky asked.
“I am prepared to trade or negotiate for it,” she said drily. “We knew the Blood Guard would fight. The Guard are known for their violence, after all.”
“That was His will. We can… choose something else now,” the Lord Commander told her. “It will take me time to deal with the other ships, to sort through my var. But I think…”
She stared at him as he fell into silence, until Stonekind clapped their hands and giggled.
“A quest for the once-damned?” the seer asked. “Hitch your star to the archmagi four, command a fleet in the pursuit of salvation for your soul and all var alike? Will those who helped break the Clans save them?”
“You see, I think, why seers are rarely popular,” Fallen Sky said drily. “But I owe Stonekind’s father from long ago… and them, themselves, for more recent service.
“And they are not wrong. I think, if you give me a clock-day or two, I can give you more than one ship, Archmage Brushfire Hammerhead.
“We are lost souls now, cast adrift by the death of our enslaver at your hands.”
He smiled.
“I think the least you owe us is a quest to provide us a new beacon, don’t you?”
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About the Author
Glynn Stewart is the author of Starship’s Mage, a bestselling science fiction and fantasy series where faster-than-light travel is possible–but only because of magic. His other works include science fiction series Duchy of Terra, Castle Federation and Vigilante, as well as the urban fantasy series ONSET and Changeling Blood.
Writing managed to liberate Glynn from a bleak future as an accountant. With his personality and hope for a high-tech future intact, he lives in Calgary, Alberta with his partner, their cats, and an unstoppable writing habit.
You can find more from the author at glynnstewart.com.
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