The ground was alternately gritty and smooth, and they walked around the catchments of salt water bordered by white crusts. Yeva pulled the armored capsule with relative ease. Her iron muscles apparently didn’t feel fatigue.
The space was vast and shrouded by coiling vapor. Only the shadows of massive, distant towers were visible, stretching away in all directions. Anusha wondered if each shadow was akin to Xxiphu, and she shuddered. It was like being in a cathedral built for gods. Even giants would feel dwarfed striding through the columned expanse.
Before Green Siren slipped out of view behind the veiling fog, Thoster paused and turned. He doffed his hat.
Anusha and Yeva waited. Anusha felt a lump in her throat.
“Farewell, my Green Siren,” Thoster said. “Farewell, my crew, to whatever destination your souls have found. You served me well without too much complaint. You were merry in our victories, and you put your back to it when the seas were rough. I will avenge you. We’ll meet once more, I promise you all, though never again in this world.”
All the feeling she’d tried to bury washed back over Anusha, and she had to turn away. Her dream armor offered no protection from the grasping briars of grief that squeezed her heart.
Thoster bowed his head a moment, then he turned and continued through the mist.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)
Over the Edge
A cold wind blew out of the void, sending Japheth’s cloak streaming behind the chariot in dramatic emphasis. The armada pushed forward. Glittering motes, like a bonfire’s embers, swirled beneath them in a turbulent lane stretching away through the void.
Dayereth pointed. “There, you see?” he said. “Detritus from Xxiphu’s passage. The city impacted more than a few of its own as it hurtled back through this gods-damned abyss.”
“Those lights are, what, carcasses of aberrations Xxiphu ‘ran down’?” said Japheth.
“Just so,” replied Dayereth. “And fragments of the Watch’s magical defenses too, I imagine.”
A sudden pall of stinging dust seemed to appear out of nowhere. “By the Nine, that tastes foul,” the warlock muttered.
“Just as the bulwark of the natural world reacts when aberrations stream in from the void, the void reacts to our presence in such numbers,” Dayereth said.
Black clouds boiled up ahead of them, blotting out the handful of pale stars. The sight was horrifying.
The eladrin wizard grinned from ear to ear.
Idiot, thought Japheth. Clearly the man hadn’t seen more than the inside of his private playpen in the past century. The wardens should have let the knights and wizard-warriors out more. He wondered how Dayereth would have fared during the fight with the aboleths they had faced in Xxiphu’s crown chamber. Probably he would have laughed maniacally until an aboleth grabbed him with an enslaving tentacle. Then he would have soiled himself.
Japheth glanced at Raidon; the monk was studiously looking away from the eladrin. It was obvious that Dayereth was getting under Raidon’s skin too. Japheth chuckled.
The chariot bucked suddenly. The warlock tightened his grip on the iron pole nearest him.
The vanguard of griffon-mounted knights swept wide beneath the boiling clouds, though a few directed the golden beams of their lances into the thunderhead’s belly. Where the light touched, lightning was born.
Their own chariot, pulled by the relentless flapping wings of their steed, went up over the clouds instead of beneath.
Japheth watched the boiling clouds as they passed over them. Flying through such emptiness made his stomach feel slightly off. Looking down at the immaterial vapor of the ebony clouds as they strove to climb above them didn’t help.
The clouds convulsed as a massive shape burst up from their depths. It was half crow, half leprous giant, and all nasty. “Beneath us!” the warlock yelled.
A fell light flickered between the feathers of the thing’s wings, forking back into the swelling clouds that had birthed it. A caw burst from its clacking beak-mouth.
Japheth’s hair stood on end as thunder rattled his brain like a clapper in a bell. Dayereth’s eyes went wide, or wider at least.
The archers leaned as one over the sides of the chariot and loosed arrows.
Japheth leaned too, and released a stroke of eldritch fire from his jade rod, only remembering afterward the Rod of Silvanus still strapped to his belt. Almost simultaneously, the eladrin wizard swept the beam of golden light emanating from his left hand down, directing the beam directly into the creature’s eyes.
Screeching and smoking, the crow-thing veered off. Instead of hitting them directly underneath and overturning the chariot, the creature flashed upward tens of feet away. The rush of its passage blew Japheth’s cloak straight up. The smell of corrupt flesh and burning hair washed over the chariot.
The griffon pulling them screamed a challenge, but continued to beat at the chill air. When the crow creature finally pulled out of its rise, they were far away. It cawed after them, but then turned its attention to the approaching chariots from another tower.
“Pity,” said Dayereth.
“It is foolish to begrudge a fight avoided,” said Raidon.
“Is it foolish to desire to flex one’s hard-earned arcane strength?” the eladrin said.
Japheth shook his head. The man truly was an idiot.
One of the archers yelled an alarm.
The thing from the cloud had changed its mind, and was swiftly catching up.
The archers loosed another volley as the aberration came into range. Purplish ichor beaded where the arrows struck home, but the monster came on.
When the horrid smell was bitter in Japheth’s nostrils, he channeled the blue-white fire of Ulban, a power named in his new pact. The fire washed across the monster and ate at its feathered, corpselike flesh. It cawed as its wings momentarily lost their rhythm.
Dayereth incanted a dozen vicious syllables in rapid succession. Ribbons of fire dropped from nowhere onto the creature and set it ablaze.
It cawed again, even as it burned brighter. The thunder of its dying call shook the chariot, and one archer dropped his bow in his haste to clap both hands over his ears.
Japheth was considering congratulating the wizard, but didn’t want to feed the man’s inflated ego. Maybe-
Someone shoved him. His cloak caught him before he could fall over the railing. It translated him mere feet to the opposite side of the chariot.
An entity of black ice crashed down where he’d been standing. Raidon must have knocked him out of the way before the creature dropped onto the chariot from its soundless trajectory through the emptiness.
The thing was something in shape like a bear, but a bear with too many arms, some of which could more readily be described as tentacles. Cold like a gale off a glacier’s face blew from it. Rivulets of icy water poured from its heaving body, quickly filling the chariot in an ankle-deep liquid that pulled heat from everything it touched.
One archer slipped and fell off the edge of the chariot. Her tether, perhaps weakened by the cold, snapped. The archer fell silently into the darkness, windmilling her arms to no effect.
The thing’s gruesome limbs were also in motion, but Raidon somehow ducked and weaved beneath every lashing one to come up inside the creature’s reach. His Cerulean Sign pulsed as the monk leaned back and speared his knee into the creature’s chest. The ice creature screeched, and the sound of breaking ice issued from its interior.
Dayereth began to incant once more. The moment he did so, a stray tentacle slapped him. The wizard stumbled back and nearly toppled over the side. Dayereth’s sudden screams were muffled behind a layer of blackish ooze that had frozen hard across his lower face.