Chapter 8

  “So we’re bait?” said Xavier, carefully filling a slip of paper with the very diluted elfweed that was all you could buy in the Imperium. Like everything, there were regutions on how strong the slightly hallucinogenic substance could be – something that Xavier had been compining about ever since he’d run out of his stash from the Shattered Sea, and he seemed to regard as seriously as the assassination attempts.

  “We’re bait,” confirmed Adeena, holding up the recording and signalling device.

  They were in their room, sitting on the hard bunks. Well, Xavier and Adeena were, Heidi was on the floor tinkering with a rifle with a green crystalline tank attached to it.

  The device Ser Samara had given Adeena was a strange, vaguely cylindrical object etched in runes with a cap and a button on it. To her mystic senses, she could feel that it contained a tiny bound lightning sprite like most draconic magi-tek, and the energy was being used for… something complicated.

  “We go there,” continued Adeena, “pretend to be dummys, and if they attack us – maybe revealing their diabolical pns in the process – we press this device, and a squadron of Dragonsworn bash down the doors and arrest everyone. If they do nothing, we leave and come back here.”

  “And they won’t just arrest us too?” said Xavier.

  “Doesn’t make sense that they would,” said Adeena. “She wants us to testify to the dragon she works for, and doesn’t gain anything from backstabbing us.”

  “And are you just saying that because that thing is probably already recording?” said Xavier. “Blink three times if you’re being coerced, Cap.”

  Adeena stared at the device. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “No. Look, the alternatives are probably getting assassinated trying to leave the city, or going on the expedition with a lot of people who want us dead.”

  “I just wanted to go on an adventure!” compined Heidi. “It’s not always like this, is it?”

  “I just want to get paid,” said Xavier, sticking the rolled elfweed cigarette in his mouth and lighting it with a snap of his fingers. Then he grimaced. “Ugh, that’s foul. This really is a forsaken pce you’ve brought us to.”

  “We’re getting paid for this,” said Adeena. “Four hundred Horns for just going to the Temple – the same as ‘hazard pay’ for the attempted assassinations.”

  “Should have led with that, Captain, I’m in,” said Xavier, offering her the cigarette. She tried it, it was really bad.

  “That is foul,” agreed Adeena. “Fouler than usual, even.”

  “And then we get to go on the adventure?” said Heidi. “Once people stop trying to kill us?”

  “That’s the idea,” said Adeena.

  “Well, OK,” said Heidi. “Just… we won’t have to hurt anyone, will we?”

  Heidi had been very upset that the person who had tried to murder her in the middle of the street had killed himself, and had been fiddling with her ‘goo-uncher’ to try and incorporate an ‘anaesthetic’ that would knock people out before they could bite down on a poisoned tooth, or whatever it was the assassin’s had used to avoid capture.

  Adeena didn’t regard herself as a particurly callous person, by the standards of the circles she moved in she was a positive sapienterian, but she wasn’t particurly put out that Gabrielle had offed herself, and certainly didn’t really regard it as her fault. Heidi, however, had grown up in Althaea, the City of Magic, as part of a family of mages – and although she’d clearly been well trained in her ‘physical education and combat courses,’ and had a knack for fighting, actual violence was new to her. Adeena would have even considered leaving her behind for the ‘trap’ if she’d had anyone else to bring with her apart from Xavier.

  When Cwdia bothered to show back up, she was going to give her a real earful.

  “We just have to not die immediately, and call in the Dragonsworn,” said Adeena. “They’ll be the ones hurting people.”

  “Oh, um… great?” said Heidi.

  There was a knock on the door, and a moment ter it opened to reveal an aspirant – a young dwarven man.

  “Captain Yassin?” he said. “Mail for you.”

  “Ah, thanks,” said Adeena, accepting the envelope, which was stamped with the Imperial Postal Service’s emblem, and had a date in the ridiculously long system that the Draconic Imperium insisted on using.

  According to the Imperium Calendar it had been sent on what took her a few moments to work out was the current cycle, 4218.422, with the timestamp beneath that reading the ‘Third of the Long Night, 12:23:’ roughly thirteen and a half hours prior, since it was the Fourth of the Long Night, 13.40-ish.

  The first and rgest number of the date –4218– represented ‘epic cycles,’ which were each eight hundred and seventy seven cycles, which was the time it took the Allfather to make its way around the sun. The shorter lived mortal species never lived an entire epic cycle, whereas the longest lived ones, elves, could live somewhere up to ten, with the rest falling somewhere in between.

  Adeena was one and a half epic cycles old, and in the post-Camity era, regarded as rather elderly. When she had to write her age on forms, she wrote 1.431. Xavier was six-and-he’d-stopped-really-counting, making him ancient, and he usually just wrote 6 and then made up a number. She wasn’t sure he actually remembered his birth-cycle anymore.

  The four hundred and twenty two was for each subsequent cycle, that was, each time that Ruvera completed an orbit of the Allfather and passed through a Long Night. Cycles were, to the popuce of Ruvera, the most intuitive and concrete units of time. Because the majority of mortals were not indigenous to the pnet, with goblins the only native intelligent beings, they had only partially adapted to the rhythm – and periods of sleep and wakefulness tended to be divided into two or so divisions of eight hours of wakefulness (shifts), and one of sleep – less if you were an elf and tranced (hence the somewhat less-used division of the four hour ‘trances’).

  Goblins did some kind of weird thing where they entered a phase of low activity during the Long Nights that wasn’t quite sleep, and could stay fully awake for several phases at a time in the other periods, only napping intermittently.

  In terms of history, it had been 673 cycles since the Camity (which was why normal people just wrote the date as 0.673 followed by the phase and period), that was more than the life-span of the average human, made sense and was immediately tangible and graspable for everyone. What was not tangible and graspable for everyone was the vast, fathomless depths of time that was one thousand two hundred and eighteen epic cycles that the dragon’s insisted on using.

  But the dragons ruled, so everyone in the Imperium had to use their stupid dating system.

  The letter itself was made from the high quality paper the Imperium was famous for, and sealed with sky-blue wax embossed with the sigil of Lassia, and which glowed with a faint hint of divine magic that made her skin crawl. Adeena had no idea how the Dragonsworn had managed to forge that part, but it was, at least to her eyes and senses, supremely authentic looking, and would at the very least trick whichever acolyte they met at the temple.

  She opened the letter to reveal a short letter written in Low Elvish, but using the slightly archaic penbeingship of old K’vier, which had a whole series of additional and complex flourishes that had gradually been eliminated as the nguage had become the common tongue, and more people with less of a courtly education had learnt to write it.

  Dear Captain Adeena Yassin,

  I am writing to inform you that your employee, Mr. Lars Grimstar, is recovering with us at the Grand Temple of Lassia on the 8th Terrace (8:1:36/13:1/1). I am sorry for the deyed notification, but he only recently recovered consciousness.

  He is lucid and recovering well, and should be able to begin walking again in the coming period. He asked us to locate you and let you know how he is, and the Outnder Registrar was kind enough to inform us of where you were staying.

  Walk with the Sea and Spray,

  Ssia vass K’vier

  Grand Temple of Lassia

  It was all very authentic looking, although the signature of the sender was unintelligible.

  “Alright then,” said Adeena. “We’ve got our note, get ready to head out – full armour.”

  “Won’t that be a bit suspicious?” asked Xavier.

  “We’re adventurers, the average Imperium citizen already thinks we’re nuts,” said Adeena, moving to where the partly unwrapped package of her newly enchanted gear was.

  She removed her jacket and pulled on padded linen trousers and a long, fitted grey gambeson. Next came the metal ptes which bore the actual combat reted enchantments to make them lighter and stronger. Hundreds of cycles of practice meant the whole process went quickly, and less than ten minutes ter she was finished. It was a bit more limited in movement than her old set, but had a higher colr and was a bit thicker over the chest and back, and the gauntlets were of better design.

  Xavier was already done, since he only wore a breastpte, and Heidi’s custom made artificer armour had taken her all of ten seconds to put on. Arteficer-made things tended not to work properly for the people who hadn’t made them. That unreliability was the reason that magi-tek anyone could pickup and use wasn’t nearly as devastating as an artificer who had made and understood their gear channeling magic through it. Still, she’d have to ask if Heidi could adjust her armour to do something simir. It would be invaluable to be able to don it in a matter of moment.

  “Alright then,” said Xavier, stubbing out his cigarette. “Let’s go ‘find Mr. Grimstar.’”

  They stood out like sore thumbs on the funicur and train, and some guards stopped them when they reached the first district of the eighth tier, but they were waved on after Adeena showed her Dragonsworn stamped visa. She had no idea how Ser Samara was going to move an entire squadron of Dragonsworn through the city without anyone noticing, but she assumed the sneaky woman had her ways.

  The ‘Grand Temple’ was visible from across the district, with a massive crystalline dome that sat above a circur building painted in a soft sky blue and accented with shellfish like patterns. It stood out in both stature, and the wealth that had gone into its construction. Which made sense – the Church of Lassia was amongst the rgest in the post-Camity world, with Lassia possibly the most revered, and thus powerful, of the remaining pantheon.

  And, if Ser Samara got her way, it was all going to come crashing down in a matter of a cycle.

  The atrium was rge and airy, and a friendly looking young elven woman dressed in white acolytes robes approached them as they entered.

  “Hello!” she said. “Sea and Spray walk with you friends, I am Acolyte Anne. How may Lassia aid you today?”

  “I got a letter from the temple,” said Adeena, offering the faked document. “It said one of my company members was recovering here?”

  “Oh, let me have a look,” she said, accepting the letter and flicking her eyes over it. “Hmm, I don’t know any Mr. Grimstar, I didn’t think we had any goblins at the moment – I’ll just ask one of the senior priests.”

  “Sure,” said Adeena uneasily, hoping that the friendly, fresh faced, little-more-than-a-girl Anne wasn’t going to get caught up in what was about to happen.

  The young elven woman wandered off to where a priest dressed in blue robes was lighting candles in a shrine. The older elf took the letter and gnced it over, before turning and looking at Adeena and the others. He said something, handed the letter back, and then strode off quickly, deeper into the temple. Anne frowned, before turning and walking back to them.

  “I’m very sorry, there must be some mistake,” said Anne. “Brother Maurice says that no one by that name is convalescing here.”

  “Oh, really?” said Adeena. “Do you know where he is then?”

  “He said that Father Jacques might know,” said Anne. “And that I’m to show you to the inner sanctum? If you’d, um, like to follow me?”

  “Thank-you,” said Adeena, falling in beside the acolyte as they all made their way to the steps at the back of the atrium.

  “I’m sorry if this is a strange question, but… are you the Captain Yassin of the Irregurs? Hero of Huxbridge?” asked Anne, blushing slightly as she began up the steps. “Sorry, you must get that a lot, you know, with the book series and all…”

  Adeena swore under her breath. “Those books aren’t accurate,” she said. “They’re sensationalist, most of the things in them never happened.”

  “Oh- oh, wow!” stammered Anne, rummaging in her pocket and producing a pen and a pad. “Sorry, um, could I get your autograph? It’s um, not for me, of course, it’s for… for my niece! They’re her favourite books, she grew up – is growing up, I mean!– reading them. ‘Red Commander’ is my- her favourite…”

  “Oh, I like that one too!” said Heidi, speaking up. “The speech at the end is so great! ‘Today we draw the line in the sand: this far, not one step further!’”

  “Heidi!” hissed Adeena.

  “‘Huxbridge shall not fall, not while I draw breath!’” said Anne, holding out the pad. “Um, sorry if it’s strange…”

  Great. Just great. This poor, naive, foolish, fan-girl was going to get killed by a dragon-worshipping zealot because she just happened to be in the wrong pce at the wrong time. Maybe she could get her to leave early…?

  “No, no, it’s fine,” said Adeena weakly, accepting the pad and signing her name. “Hope your ‘niece’ enjoys it.”

  “Thanks! This is amazing!” babbled Anne, carefully blowing on the ink before putting the pad away. “I’m going to frame it! For- for my niece, I mean…”

  They reached a rge set of doors, and Anne wrapped her knuckles against them.

  “Just… just takes a moment – the ceremonial guard need to open these ones…” she said.

  “You know, I think I saw someone looking for you – back in the Atrium,” said Adeena. “I’m sure we can find our way from here.”

  “Someone looking for me?” said Anne. “Oh, it’ll probably be Sister Sissi! Thanks!”

  Adeena smiled as the girl bustled off.

  “Risky, Cap,” breathed Xavier. “Suspicious.”

  “I’m not getting her killed – she’s a fucking kid,” murmured Adeena back. “We-”

  She shut up as the doors opened, and four heavily armoured sea elves wearing blue-enamelled pte opened the doors to reveal a massive circur room above which the stars, the glow of the city, and a few distant sky-ships and dragons were visible through the rge gss dome.

  There was a rge altar on a dais at the centre of the room, where a tall elf wearing bck and blue robes and half-moon spectacles, fnked by two more armoured forms, was waiting with an impassive face. The guards beckoned for them to enter, and they stepped through the arched doorway. The heavy doors closed behind them with a ominous bang, and then the sliding of a heavy bolt.

  Adeena spotted dozens of acoltytes, and several more of the ‘ceremonial guard’ in the shadows around the sides of the room and making their way in through other doors. A few gnced at her, before looking away and pretending, badly in many cases, like they weren’t paying her any attention.

  Adeena schooled her face into a look of slight irritation and strode towards the dais, the guards half a step behind Xavier and Heidi.

  “Father Jacques?” she said, holding up the letter.

  “That is I,” said the sea elf in a heavy K’vissian accent. “I am told you were sent a letter from this temple?”

  “Yes, I am looking for my subordinate,” said Adeena, offering the letter as she came to a stop before him. “Lars Grimstar – your acolyte said there was some kind of mix up?”

  “Hmm,” he said, accepting it, turning and moving past his guards and back to the centre of the dais, holding it up to the light of the altar’s candles. “Impressive.”

  “Sorry?” said Adeena.

  “This is a very good forgery,” he said.

  “Forgery?” said Adeena, pretending to be confused. “Sorry?”

  “You may end the charade, Captain Yassin,” he said. “We both know why you are here.”

  “I am just here for my subordinate,” she said. “If he isn’t here, please tell me where he is.”

  “I was surprised to hear that Sister Gabrielle, Brother Maurice, and Brother Pierre failed,” he said, dropping the letter to the ground. “They were skilled fighters, and favoured by the Goddess. Clearly we underestimated your company. We will not make that mistake again. You were a fool to come here seeking revenge, Captain.”

  Behind her she heard swords being drawn, and she turned her head to see those all around the circur room moving forward. Daggers and crossbows emerged from robes.

  “Oh look, a trap,” said Xavier sardonically. “You take us to the nicest pces, Captain.”

  “I don’t know what is going on,” lied Adeena, grasping her sword’s hilt with one hand, and surreptitiously grabbing the device she’d been given in the other, putting her finger on the button. Not yet… “But you seem to know who I am, you should know that I have faced far worse odds than this.”

  “Arrogant,” said Father Jacques. “Kill them.”

  She pressed the button as she drew her sword. Her right ear itched, and she brought her sword up to deflect a bolt which streaked across the room towards her. Behind her there was an ursine roar as Xavier transformed, his body growing and expanding as he went from high elf to massive, bck furred jungle bear, and there was a ‘chu-chink’ of metal as Heidi did… whatever it was that Heidi did.

  The ceremonial guard ahead of her levelled their halberds at Adeena and charged. She bsted one back with a wave of telekinetic force and parried the other one’s jab before stepping inside his guard, grabbing the weapon, and sshing at his neck.

  He was a good enough combatant to know to let go of the weapon and fall back, drawing his sword instead. She stepped forward, and was just about to feint and then stab him when a shadow fell over the room. They both looked upward to see the metal hull of a sky-ship embzoned with the sigil of the Dragonsworn sliding overhead and coming to a stop.

  Oh. Right. That was how Ser Samara was moving a battalion of Dragonsworn. Of course they had their own sky-ships.

  A dozen figures appeared over the ship’s railing and plummeted downward, nding on the crystalline dome and smashing straight through the gss. The drop would have killed anyone without some kind of magical protection, but these were all Dragonsworn, wearing the same armour as Ser Samara.

  They nded across the room with a series of metallic crunches, a plethora of different weapons drawn and crackling with elemental energy. Ser Samara herself nded nearest to the centre, massive cymore wreathed in lightning. The temple guard Adeena had been fighting barely had time to begin to raise his bde before the feyleen’s cleaved straight through his armour.

  “Dracaris Victoria!” they roared in draconic.

  Ser Samara parries and kicks, driving Adeena back. Adeena responds by picking up the burning beam from the wreck of an sky-ship and hurling it at her. It hits the Dragonsworn and knocks her down.

  ‘Dracaris Victoria!’

  ‘Fall back!’ shouts Adeena. ‘Fall back-’

  Overhead there is an explosion as a fireball smashes into an airship, and it begins to plummet towards her-

  Adeena shivered as she lowered her bde and the memory of the st time she had heard the chant pyed through her mind.

  “Dracaris Victoria!”

  This time, however, the zealots were ‘on her side,’ and it wasn’t her company that was terrified by the chant, it was the assembled faithful of Lassia.

  “Dracaris Victoria!”

  Many, perhaps most of them, turned to run, making for the various doors. They didn’t reach them. Overhead the cannons fired with thundering roars, and the doorways exploded into fme.

  “Dracaris Victoria!”

  The temple guard and a handful of acolytes were the only ones to try and fight, but they were cut down like wheat. Those who surrendered fared no better, and Adeena’s stomach turned as the Dragonsworn began to sughter even those not fighting back.

  “Dracaris Victoria!”

  “You said you’d preserve life!” shouted Adeena angrily, grabbing Ser Samara’s arm. “You said you’d keep death to a minimum!”

  “Dracaris Victoria!”

  The feyleen woman whirred around, her eyes wide and glinting in the firelight, her sword raised. For a moment Adeena thought she was going to strike her down, but then the Ser Samara seemed to catch herself. “I said any who were not directly involved would be spared,” said the feyleen, pulling her arm free. “Not these traitors. Be thankful that I did not order the complex reduced to rubble.”

  Ser Samara turned back to Father Jacques, who had fallen back against the altar. He scrambled for something in his robes as she approached him, and managed to draw a dagger. He stabbed at her, but she didn’t even bother blocking, and it gnced off her heavy armour. She hit him with her open palm, and he fell to the ground.

  “This is- this is outrageous!” he coughed. “You think my dy will stand for this act of aggression!? You have overreached, Dragonsworn! You will pay for this desecration!”

  “But my dear Father, you attacked my people first,” said Ser Samara softly. “Something both you, and they will testify to under Dragonspeech. I wonder what other secrets you will tell my Lady. Hmm?”

  She hauled him to his feet and dragged him over to where a series of ropes were being lowered from the sky-ship.

  “Captain Yassin, Mr. Xavier, Ms. Hammerschmidt if you’d care to join me?” she said, grabbing one of the ropes and tugging on it twice. It retracted, pulling her, and Father Jacques into the air.

  Adeena gnced at her team, before gingerly taking one of the ropes firmly and pulling on it twice. It immediately began to retract, nearly wrenching her arm from its socket as it whirred upward towards several open portals in the sky-ship above.

  As she rose she saw that there were three other sky-ships in the colours of the Imperial Navy nding troops all around the temple: forming a perimeter and dragging acoltyes out of the temple in manacles. Adeena spotted Anne. She looked away. At least she wasn’t dead…

  Beneath her, the sounds of ‘Dracaris Victoria!’ continued to ring out in the now burning shell of the temple as the other Dragonsworn continued to move through it.

  It had all been so abstract, before she’d come. Dragonsworn storm in, save her and her crew, catch a conspiracy. Clean, simple – that was how Ser Samara had made it sound. But it wasn’t, of course it wasn’t. It was bloody and brutal and it didn’t matter that most of the acolytes who were being rounded up and shoved into wagons by the ptoons of soldiers were ignorant and innocent of the war of intrigue between Ser Samara and Melicende.

  Captain Bloodmoon thought that the ‘true’ Imperium was fairly distributed food, free housing, no racial discrimination, and the absence of poverty? No, she was wrong. All that other stuff was window dressing, things that the dragons had created in order to make mortals more manageable.

  The core of it y all below, in the burning temple, in the streets cowering beneath steel-shod military boots. Mortals killed and brutalised: their suffering and pain inconsequential next to the hypothetical possibility that some harm might come to a dragon at some point in time. All of it, the murdered companies, the Brightspark, the dead sea elves sent against her, and now this, this was all because Ser Samara and Melicende were having a political spat, and all those killed and the lives ruined were irrelevant to that.

  She felt the embers that had been kindling in her heart flicker and waver.

  She should have voided the contract, faced whatever potential assassins might have come their way. She’d thought she’d been following her conscience, maybe getting her own back against those who kept on trying to kill her for no reason. But she hadn’t stopped to really think things through: if she had, she’d have realised that the Dragonsworn never did anything by half measures. That Ser Samara knew how to wait, yes, but only to make the hammer-blow fall harder.

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