Knight Redeemed: The Shackled Verities (Book Two) Read online

  The corners of his mouth turned downward. “What is the use, what? Eating now, so close to the end, is meaningless. There isn’t the time. Not for Himmingaze.”

  The heavy mist looming over the ocean was thickening into a salvo to what felt to be a long-lasting rainstorm. “Come inside the shrine with me,” she said. “We need to talk. And you’re right about that, there isn’t much time.” For both this world and our own, it seems, she thought.

  Whatever wystic contrivance he’d used to keep himself dry beneath the waves on the back of his beast must have worn off, because his silvery-blond mane had begun to droop and grow wet in the drizzle. But he did not move to join her. At a loss, she stepped to him and put a hand on his shoulder, meaning to pull him inside if she had to.

  Shark-fast, he gripped her hand and yanked her forward until their noses nearly touched. “How many turns, Eisa? How many have passed? Do you realize what you did, what you caused and cannot undo?”

  Twisting her arm free, she fought the impulse to strike him. But it immediately gave way to pity. And shame. How could he ask her if she knew what she’d done? She’d lived with that mistake for as long as he had—but she hadn’t gone mad. Why had he? Was it simply because he was from the Yorish bloodline, never as strong as she, a Dyrrak, to begin with? If she let it, her pity would unravel. If she let it, she would despise him for reminding her of her shame.

  Instead of giving in to anger, she grasped him this time by both shoulders, feeling the ridges of his bones beneath his strange costume, and spoke calmly, enunciating precisely. “Griggory, if Himmingaze is doomed, then it was because of the innate weaknesses of its maker’s creations. Lífs was banished by her own creatures. Their own unworthiness and faithlessness condemned them, and I only did what was right in trying to avenge their Verity. You know why, too. Because we are not weak like they were. You are a creature of Vaka Aster, a Knight Corporealis, and I have never seen the taint of faithlessness in you. If this realm’s time is over, then it is their fault, not ours. Do you understand me?”

  She released him and swung her glaive over her shoulder, holding it out parallel to Isle Stonering’s rocky earth. “Now, on my hallowed weapon, renew the faith in our fight and give me the answers I seek. Did you find it? Did you find Lífs’s Scrylle?”

  His eyes took in the glaive, then he glanced back over his shoulder to the sea. A multibranched fork of lightning that seemed to fill the horizon flashed, illuminating him from behind for a moment as if he were a Verity himself. He finally said, “Yes…yes. The Scrylle, all the celestial stones, except the one you keep. I had them all, and I could have brought Himmingaze back from the eternal ocean.”

  “You could have? Do you mean…do you know the way to reverse the banishment? And more importantly, do you know how to cast it?”

  “Oh yes, I know that I knew, but I don’t know now because I no longer have the Scrylle.”

  The rain became sheets, flowing from the sky as if the air itself had turned to water. Eisa hardly noticed. “What do you mean? Where is it?” The fool, his lunacy had totally undermined the mighty Knight he’d once been. She wanted to rage at him, but it would do no good. Griggory was beyond being intimidated; he had to be waited out. “Tell me what’s become of the Scrylle.”

  “Inside.” He pointed toward the shrine’s door. “You’ll catch your death.” Then he snorted, amused. “Catch your death—Eisa the dark daughter of Lœdyrrak. Catch your death, ha! Unless it catches you first!”

  He brushed past her and went inside, still chuckling, the sound of the quiet but sinister feeble-minded. She remained in the rain for another moment, gripping the glaive hard enough to press the delicate designs of its metal shaft into her palms, then followed.

  From a seat in the center of the chamber, directly atop the stonework marking Lífs’s symbol, he gripped his long hair and wrapped it around his free hand, wringing water from it. An illumination charm whispered into his Mentalios, still around his neck after so many turns, cast his face in a soft light that smoothed its grooves and hollows enough to remind her of the hale and hearty man he’d once been. When he spoke next, his voice seemed softened too, the edge of madness no longer punctuating his tone. “There were creatures, servants of another Verity, here. Nearly two thirty-nights ago. In Himmingaze, that is a quarter of an anni-cycle. Everything has changed here, Eisa. Even the way they count time. And—”

  She cut in. “I don’t need an education on Himmingaze. About the Scrylle, and these servants of another Verity?”

  “One,” he went on. “Then two. So pale, so tall. Almost like the Yorish, but they were not from Vinnr. They called themselves Flesh Casters, but it was my doings that took their flesh.”

  Balavad’s minions! She started to interrupt again, but stopped herself. He was talking at last. She had to let him, even if it was barely discernible from gibberish.

  “I finally found the artifacts, Eisa, but then these men, if men they were, found me. They told me they were sent by the Verity of Battgjald as emissaries to Himmingaze. Emissaries, they said. Lies, of course. I could read it in their thoughts—Lífs’s Scrylle taught me many secrets—like poison leaking from their wounded minds.

  “I learned Balavad’s plans. The Battgjald Verity will come and make this world his own, make Lífs bend to his will before the five once again became the one—you know it? The Syzyckí Elementum? He doesn’t want to reunite with his fragmented quins, for all the Verities were originally one Verity, and the Syzyckí Elementum is their reunification. I fear that time is coming, too, whether Balavad wishes it or not.” He held up an empty hand that seemed to be grasping something that wasn’t there and looked thoughtfully at its absence. “There were many secrets in Lífs’s Scrylle. Many.” His hand fell back into his lap.

  What he was saying rang true to her mind, or at least familiar. This is what Balavad had told Ulfric, in a way. So the usurping Verity’s plans went beyond Vinnr. All the more reason to stop him there. If only she could force Griggory to stop speaking in riddles and tell her where the artifacts she needed were.

  But he went on and she waited, biting her tongue, clenching her fists. “I tried to use these poor servants of Balavad, tried to make them help me restore Lífs to Himmingaze, but they were too frail and too unwilling. They fought the Fenestrii and burned like candles, their skin crackling from their bones like leaves from trees. Their screams were…like nothing I’ve ever heard. I lost heart, Eisa. Lost it for a time.”

  She had no idea what he meant, but she knew his nature had never been cruel. Nor had his actions ever been needless. She trusted that if these Flesh Casters of Balavad had died by his hand, they had deserved it. The important thing was: “So you know how to restore Himmingaze and undo the banishment.” She knelt down and looked him full in the face. “Tell me how. And then”—in a flash of insight, she promised—“then we’ll stop this. Together, we can restore Himmingaze. But first, we must return to Vinnr to defend it from Balavad. The usurper wishes to do the same to our realm as he would have done here. But you know how to stop him, Griggory, if you’ll just—wake up.”

  She gave him a tiny shake. She knew the strength the Knight had once had, though, and had no desire to arouse his anger. And, of course, this was Griggory. She couldn’t hurt the first person in all the worlds who’d ever shown her true kindness, the love of true family. Selflessly, he had given Himmingaze hundreds of turns of his life, trying to restore the grave wrong done to it, just as he had selflessly taken her under his wing when she was still so young and needed someone to show her what it was like to be cared for.

  For a moment, his eyes focused on hers, the ancient clarity and wisdom he’d once had perfectly brilliant in them again. “You have the Verity of Battgjald’s vessel?”

  She released him, a feeling like acrid smoke replacing her insides, hollowing her. “Why?” she asked flatly.

  “That’s what it is, Lœdyrrak. The Glister Cloud…” He paused and reached into a bag he wore around his neck,
withdrawing his own klinkí stones. With a childlike smile, he tossed them over his head and sent them spinning and twirling in a spiral, much like the balls of light that comprised the Himmingaze sky. “The Glister Cloud is Lífs’s vessel, or it was. Her Knights used her own spark gifted to them to shatter her vessel, creating this Cloud from her pieces to shield them from her celestial self. When they broke the final Fenestros, the one you keep, it broke the vessel and sent it aloft. As time passes, the vessel is disintegrating. As it does, Himmingaze is destroyed with it.”

  As he was speaking, he’d pulled his wystic stones into a tight ball hovering before them, then allowed them to explode and rise high up to the chamber’s ceiling. On completing his description, he guided the stones in a slow descent until the lay scattered along the shrine’s floor and began to dim until they were colorless crystals once more. A display to match his description of the Glister Cloud’s origination and eventual elimination.

  “Soon, very very soon,” he went on, “it will all be gone. Himmingaze is only being held together by what remains of Lífs’s spark, but it’s running out, dissipating as much as belief in their maker is dissipating among the Himmingazians. And without Lífs’s Scrylle and all her Fenestrii to undo the banishment, and a Himmingazian Mystae with a strong spark to perform the steps necessary, the vessel cannot be restored.”

  These fragments of knowledge about how the banishment worked fascinated her. She hadn’t learned any of this before the last Mystae had hidden the Scrylle and then died—or rather been killed. “And where are the artifacts?”

  He waved his hand vaguely toward the open door. “Gone. Stolen from me.”

  “You’re telling me that the only way we can replicate this banishment to force Balavad out of Vinnr is to shatter his vessel and turn it into some kind of…of barrier that shields our realm from his sight. But we need his vessel and Fenestrii and Lífs’s Scrylle to do it.” She turned and paced a few steps away, then came back. “Do you know who stole them? Can we get them back?”

  “The grandling of a dear friend. A precocious busybody with an imagination fit to beat the best storytellers in Vinnr. Vreyja once told me about a time when he was still a child and he’d tried to invent—”

  She cut him off. “Who is he, Griggory? How do we find him?”

  Griggory stood and began pacing a pattern among his fallen wystic stones as he told her a curious story. Sometime in the recent past—Eisa guessed just a day or two ago based on his description—he’d heard a voice in his Mentalios. The voice had been calling out from Isle Stonering, seeking Ulfric, and unfamiliar as it was, he’d known it must have belonged to a Knight he’d never met. He’d come to the island as quickly as he could, riding on Hither beneath the surface of the sea.

  Evernal, Eisa thought.

  As he got close, from under the waves he’d witnessed a monstrous flying ship, blacker than the blackest ocean’s deepest depth, and knew from the flying Ravener fighters accompanying it, like the ones he’d witnessed when the Flesh Casters had come, that it belonged to the Battgjaldic Verity. As he and Hither watched, the black behemoth consumed two Himmingazian ships. They belonged to the Glisternauts, which he explained were Himmingazian explorers. One ship belonged to the Glisternaut he knew well, the one who’d stolen two of Lífs’s artifacts from him. Some short time after the ships were swallowed, a starpath had appeared, spearing right through the heart of the black starship. Then there had been an explosion, and the starship and everything it contained had been obliterated and scattered throughout the Never Sea.

  Eisa listened closely to the story. “So you think this Himmingazian who stole the artifacts from you was taken by Balavad, and now everything is lost or destroyed,” she confirmed. “Were all the artifacts stolen?”

  “Lífs’s Scrylle, of course, and a Fenestros. I gave them to Vreyja for safekeeping. I’ve known the lovely woman for many cycles. She and others like her are doing their best to keep Lífs’s lore alive, but secretly, and I help them remember what’s almost been forgotten. They know Himmingaze can only be saved one way, through renewed belief and trust in the Creatress. And re-forming her vessel, of course. But I learned a new bunch of Balavad’s Flesh Casters were hunting me and the artifacts—it’s why I stay below the waters with Hither, you see. I couldn’t think what else to do with the Scrylle. Vreyja’s grandling, clever boy, so clever, took them. I should have known he would guess their power and wouldn’t be able to resist such splendid things. And now they are lost to the sea. Without the Scrylle map, I’d have to live another hundred lifetimes to find them again. As you can see yourself, Himmingaze will be forever gone before that happens.”

  Eisa stepped away from the old Knight, staring into the shadows of the shrine without seeing. Balavad’s warship had been here, and, she had to assume, the Knights she’d witnessed taken captive in Vinnr were still his prisoners. The voice calling for Ulfric, that had to have been Mylla. But why would she think their Stallari was here? Her mind would have been muddled by her unexpected journey through the starpath, and she most likely wouldn’t have known what realm she was in unless she recognized Lífs’s symbol in the shrine.

  She turned to Griggory. “Do you know where Ulfric is?”

  “My old friend.” He smiled wistfully. “He was the much better choice for Stallari. His resolve, even after he met Acolyte Lutair—oh, you could see how in love they were…”

  He began rambling and Eisa ignored him. If Ulfric were in Himmingaze, surely Griggory would have sought him out. And if he’d been aboard Balavad’s ship—but his ship was destroyed. So what of the Knights? Are they all dead? she wondered as a cold feeling that had nothing to do with Himmingaze’s rain drenched her. Verity’s tears, not Roi…

  Too many questions, and no way to answer them. She paced back to Griggory and gripped his shoulder to force his attention to her. “Where is Balavad now? If he came here, does that mean he succeeded in Vinnr? Could he have instead failed?”

  Griggory said nothing, eyeing her in that old way he had when he wanted her to think things through and come up with answers to her questions on her own.

  Eisa grasped the hilt of her dagger and seated it more firmly in its sheathe. She had been here long enough. Himmingaze was beyond saving, but Vinnr might not be. There were too many unanswered questions for her to linger here.

  “Griggory, come back with me to Vinnr. There’s nothing left for you in this place. If my fears are correct, only Dyrrakium stands between the salvation of our world and the end of it. You and I must return and stand with them.”

  She reached into the bag she carried that contained Vaka Aster’s Scrylle and Fenestros, preparing to open the starpath. Griggory paced toward the structure’s entrance as if he hadn’t heard her.

  “Griggory?” she called. “Your world needs you. Your Verity needs you. Your faith—”

  He turned back and looked at her, the same kind eyes twinkling in the light of his Mentalios that she’d first seen when joining the Conservatum in Asteryss at the young age of twelve. Eyes containing wisdom for beyond any Dyrrakium priest’s. Eyes that knew compassion as well as power that went beyond human limits. Eyes that had seen things inside the Howling Weald no other person of Vinnr had. Griggory had fed the hunger she’d had as a young Conservatum acolyte for greater things than her heritage and traditions and had made her come to realize that service to her Verity was far nobler and more honorable than the fate of being a Dyrrakium leader, a destiny she would otherwise have chosen. But that had been eons ago, it seemed. Forever.

  “Eisa, daughter of Vinnr, my faith is not in your fight, but in my own.”

  As he said that, the monstrous head of his slangarook pushed through the doorway behind him, its eyes coming to rest menacingly on hers. A limp grayish sea creature fell from its jaws and landed at Griggory’s feet. The old Knight retrieved the animal and bit into it without hesitation. Eisa’s stomach flip-flopped.

  Looking over his shoulder at her and still chewing, Griggory wen
t on. “I will not abandon Himmingaze until its last drop of water has fallen from its shrinking sky, and I with it. You do what you have to do, what you’ve always done. Just remember to do it with the honor and faith I taught you. I have known more living than you can imagine, and love, and loyalty. I know that you have all of those within you still, even if you have forgotten them. If you succeed in Vinnr, remember me here. Remember what happened and spend the rest of your life, however long it may be, seeking redemption within yourself. Then perhaps you can begin restoring your own faith.”

  He stepped into the storm, the slangarook backing out with him, and disappeared.

  Chapter Two

  Ulfric’s eyes opened.

  The light shining into them was almost too bright to take, washing straight down on him through a broken ceiling.

  Dear Verities, no! I’m not back in Himmingaze, am I?

  The shrine of Lífs had been the last ceiling he’d looked on…but no. This was bright daylight, Halla bright, in fact.

  Vinnr. Vaka Aster told me we are in Vinnr. And the Knights are here.

  Following this was a thought that brought both indescribable relief and a sense of heavy weight. I am me, once again, he thought. And he felt it, from his thoughts to the warmth of his toes in his own worn leather boots. Ulfric looked across the chamber and experienced a momentary sense of disequilibrium. He recognized the room, the sanctuary at the peak of Mount Omina, but had never seen it from this vantage before. He’d been in the dark of his mind for…how long? Days, turns?

  How did I get here? What has happened?

  It all came flooding back in that moment. All of it. The duration of his journey through Himmingaze, the engineer Bardgrim, the warship capturing them, his wrathful tirade at Balavad, speaking through the memory keeper to Crumb, then demanding Mylla give him Balavad’s Fenestros so that he could look into the Scrylle and find the way to unmake the cage.