Prologue

“How is one to hold against the darkness,

when the darkness has already consumed him?”

from the journal of Scanlin Ross, First Sword in Tyrian, Believer

The living flame, blue as heaven, flowed around the observatory in the distance, illuminating the tower before splintering into a million filaments of light that swam across the night sky. Beside Aralt in the bow of the Aurora Dream, Scanlin Ross bent his grey head in silent prayer before kissing the pendant that lay like a fragment of starlight in his hand. He then offered an eloquent blessing for the New Year, but Aralt had just one thought.

“We’re late.”

Scanlin tucked the star pendant under his collar and sighed. “That we are.”

“Blood and ashes, Grey! It’s Lian’s first Lighting. I promised him I’d be there.” He scrubbed at his face. “Kavistra Devailyn is going to kill me.”

The incongruity of that statement met with nervous laughter among the crew, but not a one dared contradict him. One of the most auspicious celebrations on the calendar of the Faith, and they were late. Even if the high priest himself let it pass—and knowing Devailyn Kynsei, he would—his younger brother, Lian, would be decidedly out of sorts.

“More’s the pity we were delayed, but ’tis nae your fault the Northern Alliance is governed by a host o’ bickerin’ old fools,” Scanlin pointed out, leaning his forearms on the rail.

“Tell that to a twelve-year-old.” Not even twelve, Aralt corrected himself. Not until Midsummer. As if being that age wasn’t agony enough.

“It must’a’ been a sight, him callin’ the flame forth as they do,” Scanlin said, extending his hand in demonstration. “A miracle that is, holdin’ the holy light o’ the kyrrith anim in the palm o’ your hand. The liturgy will have been spoken by the time we arrive.”

“One can hope,” Aralt muttered as the moonless night filled with sky lanterns and the countryside warmed with the glow of bonfires. Soon the land would mirror the star-filled sky.

Scanlin shook his head, his grey hair a halo of mercury in the lamplight. “Sweet Creator, Wolf. You’re incorrigible.”

Aralt’s stomach dropped as they crested the edge of the forest, the compact ship skimming treetops as it began its descent. He regretted promising Lian a night flight over what would soon be a churning coastline, vastly preferring an opportunity to utilize the finest star-gazing equipment in the country. But the promised flight—and his personal discomfort—was a small sacrifice to atone for his lateness. Wisps of blue light spun in dizzying circles overhead now, as if writing the names of the prophets in the evening sky. As a boy he had tried to decipher the script, recreating what he could on paper with his mother’s costly pastels. Now, he just enjoyed the spectacle—or would have, had those same lights not suddenly been captured, extinguished by a darkness deeper than the moonless night.

Scanlin pushed away from the wooden rail. His voice fell to a whisper. “Aralt—”

“I see it.”

Cool eddies washed over them as a shadow crowded out the stars, then another and another. The thrum of strange engines infused the night air with dread. The Aurora Dream’s pilot engaged the steering fins as the crew doused every light source in an attempt to camouflage their ship and pass undetected toward the makeshift airfield that had been established on the outskirts of the parish. Aralt gripped the deck rail as the gondola swayed. A vessel five times their size soared swiftly overhead, bypassing them as it turned south, shafts of light cutting through the darkness as flood lamps focused on Kyrrimar City.

“Those are Shirahnyn craft,” Aurora’s pilot hissed, ushering them onto a swaying rope ladder before mooring lines had even been secured. “They’ve made the skies their own.”

Aralt counted their number as he descended, his long coat whipping about his legs, his stomach growing cold. Never had he seen so many ships. He looked back toward the beleaguered city, more vulnerable than ever on a holy night. “We’re not going to get to the kavistra’s residence before them unless you take us closer, Mariah.”

The pilot slid down the ladder after them. Two airmen followed with their gear. “I can’t outrun warships, syr Tremayne. Whoever they are, it’s a wonder they didn’t flame us in midair.”

“There’s only one person that could summon a fleet like this,” Aralt said, shrugging into his baldric. Only one person with the audacity to attack Kyrrimar.

Mariah blanched. “D’riish lonn Tirehl? Best pray it isn’t him.”

“Prayer isn’t going to change anything tonight. Wait for us. The kavistra is going to need to be taken to safety.” As would guests from the far reaches of the country and beyond.

He took the bridle of the docile-eyed beast offered to him by a frightened groom. It had none of the hallmarks of a war steed. It was short enough to mount without a block, its lower lip pockets absent of the quality ivory favored for battle. Even its heel spurs had been filed off.

“Ye cannae ken who it be,” Scanlin said under his breath, taking charge of an equally unassuming mount. “Askierran is at peace with the Houses o’ the Seven Matriarchs.”

“And lonn Tirehl doesn’t owe a single southern clan his allegiance—not even his own,” Aralt snapped. “They’ve never intervened when he’s led forces into our domains before and wouldn’t even acknowledge he got as far north as the Weeping Wall.”

Scanlin gripped his forearm. “Steady on. There’s nay bringin’ back your brother.”

No, Aralt thought, jabbing the esri’s soft belly with his heels, propelling it forward. But he could kill the murderous snake that had taken Kynlan. He wasn’t going to let it happen again, not after the oath he had sworn when Lian was a baby. The oath everyone thought him unprepared for. He’d cross into the nether place before he let any harm come to Lian Kynsei. Just watch me.

* * *

Unarmed sentries lay dead at the Pilgrim’s Gate on the north side of the parish. Tendrils of fire spinning like dervishes enveloped buildings where weathered slate and tile failed to turn back the inferno. Aralt pressed his unwilling mount into waves of heat and the oppressive stench of burning oil as they made their way to Kavistra Devailyn’s grand residence situated on the peninsular bluff overlooking the sea.

The esri squealed in protest when a file of the local militia broke from the shadows of a smoke-filled alley off of the high street, brandishing an array of weapons ranging from proper crystal swords to clumsy brass water-squirts better suited to extinguishing kitchen fires than the unholy conflagration raging through the city. In the square ahead, a crowd of locals dressed in their finest festival garb manned water pumps in a desperate attempt to quell the flames.

“Stand down!” Aralt roared as the armed mob closed in. He looked over the ragtag band. Not a ranking Sword among them and half of them scarcely the age of majority.

“It’s syr Tremayne!”

Aralt cut their cheers short. “Who’s in command here? Anyone? Where’s the kavistra?” And where was Lian?

A youth with blistered lips, the side of his face an angry burn, pushed through the gawking crowd. He dragged the back of a bloodied hand across his soot-stained face. Eyes like polished starbeads blinked rapidly. “Commander’s dead, sir. I don’t know—”

“What do you know?”

The young man lifted his chin at the interruption, meeting Aralt’s gaze. Few men did. He respected the youth all the more for his directness. “About a dozen ships by my reckoning, anchored all around the city dropping fire rain on our heads. Our squad was almost to Shepherd’s Gate when vats of the flow in the jeweler’s studio ignited. There was no getting to the Old City then. We don’t know if Dev—the kavistra,” he amended, “is dead or alive.”

That statement was met with desperate denials and pleas to the Creator. Aralt held no opinion as to the efficacy of prayers; the truth was they were running out of time.

“What’s your name, soldier?”

“Tevin, sir. Tevin Keely. I’m not actually a soldier…”

“You are tonight, Tevin Keely. Do you know the North Road to Linishael? Aye? Good.” He scanned the crowd of weary faces, searching their bloodshot eyes until he found what he was looking for in a young woman carrying a bow with bloodwood inlay. “You there, with the bow and the esri, you’re not injured? Is your mount sound enough to carry two?”

“He’ll fly if he has to, syr Tremayne,” she told him, slinging her bow over her shoulder to rest against an empty quiver. A short sword rode on her hip.

“Archers, give her arrows. Now, listen. There’s a ship waiting at the airfield. Take a message to my father. Tell him what’s happened here—everything you can. Every detail you remember. He’ll do the rest.” When Tevin protested leaving the fight, Aralt reminded him that the fate of every neighboring domain rested on the message getting to Fharyl syr Tremayne. “If the ship’s gone, ride. Ride hard and don’t look back, you ken? The rest of you, with me.”

He might as well have been leading them into hell.

* * *

When their way was blocked by burning debris and they were forced to detour through a maze of narrow alleyways, battling flash fires and curling, suffocating smoke.

“Be it well with ye?”

Aralt cast Scanlin a disparaging look, wrestling with his skittish esri at each stream of molten, hissing oil that snapped, serpent-like, at the creature’s heels. “Don’t tell me it is with you, Grey.”

He flicked ash from his coat sleeves, startled by the burning cold sensation on his fingertips. Not ash. Snow—it was snowing in temperate Kyrrimar. Twisting crystal! He felt his throat tighten. Something even more insidious than war had come to the city of faith.

They found the fountain in front of the kavistra’s residence overflowing. Someone had jammed the valve wide open, and cold water gushed over ornate coral walls, flowing downhill to lap at nearby doorsteps, producing steam and sprays of salty residue that crackled and popped. Aralt dismounted at a safe distance, threading his way past overturned pumper carriages. Kyrrimar possessed some of the most sophisticated technology he had ever seen, but much of the fire engulfing the city seemed impervious to whatever fire-fighting chemicals had been employed. It spread like a grease fire, uncontained.

Scanlin hurried after him, pausing to check one then another of the fire crew. “Poor souls never stood a chance. Not against the likes o’ this. We can only pray that Devailyn—”

“Dev’s a musician, not a soldier,” Aralt told him. None from the Kynsei clan were suited to the art of war. And Lian? Though the boy’s letters had grown more frequent, Aralt suspected he was still suffering the trauma of his father’s untimely death. “You go ahead and pray. Just make sure you keep your sword in your hand.”

Glinting shards of what had been an exquisite rose window in the rotunda crackled under their boots. Banquet tables had been overturned, the orchestra’s instruments strewn about the hall, draperies and tapestries depicting scenes from the Four Books of antiquity torn from the walls and desecrated with urine and feces and the viscera of those unlucky enough to have stood in the way. One of the local soldiers turned away, vomiting until she could no longer stand.

“Scanlin, get her up—get her out of here if she can’t handle it.”

“As if anyone could,” Scanlin muttered, hauling the young soldier to her feet, not unkindly, but with a stern admonishment, before leaving her with her fellows. “’Tis the work o’ men possessed. I’ve nae seen the like since the last Naharasii Horror. ’Tisn’t their way, Wolf. How do Shirahnyn gain battle honor in this butchery?”

Aralt grimaced. How did they gain battle honor in anything they did? “Fan out—everyone, fan out. Check the chapel. We need to find the kavistra…” We need to find Lian.

The invasion had been swift and merciless. Soon enough, not only the less experienced were sick. For the Kynsei brothers to have escaped would require a miracle from the Creator they worshiped. Were it not for the carnage, Aralt would have felt guilty carrying a weapon through the hallowed halls, but there was no one to greet them in the private vestibule near the observatory stairs that they might lay their weapons at the feet of His Holiness, receive his blessing, and spend the rest of their stay in the grand old house feeling half-naked.

“Syr Tremayne! Commander Ross! We’ve found survivors!”

Identifying Anlynn marr Kenesh as a survivor was putting it generously. Aralt did not need to be told that the household steward, a man he had known all his life, was going to die. Soon. He searched faces as a dozen traumatized children were shepherded through the carnage. Lian was not among them. He knelt beside the injured steward.

“Forgive me, old friend, but you haven’t much time. Where are Devailyn and Lian?”

“The harp—” marr Kenesh said, tongue thick, his battered mouth bloody. He gripped Aralt’s forearm tightly. “The harp sang. Lian—Lian lit the candles…”

“We saw the flame, as blue as heaven.” Aralt spoke softly, kindly, forcing himself to stay calm for the benefit of those around him. Only Scanlin would know the truth. Knew the truth. All was not well with his soul! “Scanlin, the tower—”

“No! No. We…we came…to the chapel. I—I told…Devailyn…that he was a fool.” Crimson tears flowed from Anlynn marr Kenesh’s hazel eyes.

“Where did they go? I know this house, Anlynn. It’s full of secrets.”

“Old City,” the man whispered, his body trembling. His fingers dug deeply into Aralt’s arm. “He sent Lian to the Old City…” marr Kenesh said again. And then he said nothing.

Scanlin took a knee beside Aralt, laying his hand aside the house steward’s throat, then pressing his ear against the man’s chest. He shook his head. There was nothing more they could do. He drew the star pendant from underneath his collar and kissed it before touching marr Kenesh’s tear-stained cheeks and lips lightly with his fingers. “Remember the sea, brave heart.”

“Remember the sea,” everyone intoned.

Aralt turned when someone said his name. Finally, a ranking Sword! She was familiar, one of the finest blades his father had employed prior to her commission as a guardian in the city of faith. “There are two airships by the entrance to the Old City. The rest have drawn anchor and are moving inland…”

“And?” Sila's blazing whips, what now?

“More ships have been spotted. On the water.”

“Leave them to the Kell Sea’s witch,” Aralt told her, ignoring the buzz of whispered oaths. With triple new moons, the tide was their ally that night.

He issued new orders, diverting a portion of their demoralized little force to defend the entrance to the Old City against escape. Several more he sent to guard the hall, and the rest he tasked with escorting the survivors out of the parish. “Grey, come with me. We’ll need light.”

“Airships will have need o’ supplies if they’re to move on,” Scanlin said, drawing the remnants of an altar veil over the steward’s ravaged body before he seized a large, flickering taper and followed Aralt to the far end of the chapel. “They’ll nae have brought enough liquid fire with them to wage an attack on Linishael.”

“If they’re fools enough to believe those skies are free for the taking, they deserve everything my father throws at them. This way,” Aralt said, heaving open a narrow door leading to a shadowed, twisting stairwell. The tang of age and saltwater filled his senses as he descended. He did not have to tell his First Sword to hurry.

* * *

They burst onto the balcony overlooking Gaelyn’s Fountain as one of the two remaining skyships cast anchor.

Aralt slew the first man to challenge him on the stairs, then another. Marathis crystal sang, a high keening as he and the sword became one driving force. He slammed into the next man, crystal swords ringing with discord—his Tuned to his hand, a reflection of all that he was. He could only guess if the same held true for his opponent as the blood-crystal blade fell from its owner’s lifeless hand. Hesitation flickered in the eyes of the next man in line. The enemy was not without skill, but they had grown overconfident, murdering so many innocents. And he was angry; far angrier than he had been in a long time. Beside him, Scanlin drove the pommel of his sword into another man’s chest and sent him tumbling, knocking four others down the snow-covered steps. One impaled another on a twisted crystal dagger. Sword and knife finished off the rest, green marathis crystal now red with the enemy’s blood. Not a one begged for mercy.

Every detail in the garden below was etched in ice and frost. Sky-pirates clad in riots of colored gauze and cambric, their blond hair twisted and braided dozens of ways to denote rank and clan affiliation, were in an inexplicable frenzy. Clearly, a retreat had been called, but their panic had nothing to do with the arrival of Aralt and his troops now pouring into the garden from every direction. The mist was ripe with smoke, tinged with an almost electric charge.

He spotted a garment, blue as heaven, on the frosty ground, but there was no sign of the Kynsei brothers. He looked up as the nearest ship began to gain altitude. Sweet Creator! No!

But it was too late. His oath-brother, for whose abduction he would now be held responsible, was being hauled up into the belly of a garishly painted behemoth of the sky. For a moment their eyes met, Lian’s dark hair framing his elfin face. The boy struggled, reaching out with one six-fingered hand, his unspoken thought a blaze of emotion between them. Aralt!

“Lian!” he bellowed, charging the rest of the way down the stairs, seizing one of the mooring lines that had yet to be reeled in. Looping it about his left arm and holding fast, he braced himself as he was yanked aloft. The braided anchor line tore through his palm.

“Wolf!” Scanlin was directly below him, pointing. “Look out!”

His ascent ended when the line was cast off from above, spiraling toward him as he plummeted, the force of the falling line enough to sheer the front legs off the esri statue he narrowly missed. His First Sword gripped him under his arms, dragging him clear of broken shards of marble. Around them, men and women sworn not only to the kavistra but to the country of Askierran itself wrestled with the last of the enemy. At the center of it all stood a tall, rakish man dressed in layers of fine spider-silk. Lonn Tirehl! The Shirahnyn took two steps toward them, recognition flashing across his blood-creased face before he too was lifted to safety. Aralt wrapped his free arm around broken ribs as he staggered to his feet, wind torn from his throat, Lian’s name on his lips, and his bitter enemy’s name burning a hole in his heart.