The Secret Kings Read online

  Paint chips crunched with each step, and Cook felt like he’d pulled a fire alarm in a library.

  He took one more step and froze. There were no other footsteps, but there was something else.

  Cook advanced two more paces. There it was, almost undetectable over the engine vibrations—light impacts on the deck behind him, synchronized exactly with his stride.

  Cook rounded on his pursuer and saw no one. He focused on his surroundings—the cargo containers, catwalk support struts, and the steel-paneled walls—letting his senses inform his mind without judgment.

  Someone less acquainted with weirdness might have dismissed it as a trick of the low light, but something was there. A distortion in space; not like one of Pelm’s, stood between him and the nearest container. It was about the size and shape of a man, and Cook’s detached calm shattered when two dark, human-seeming eyes opened in the warped space corresponding to the thing’s head.

  Cook failed to keep his voice from trembling. “Izlaril? Shaiel’s Blade?”

  “Yes.”

  It might have been the direct answer, delivered in a deep airy voice, that stunned Cook to silence. That, or seeing an invisible man fade into view as if his bare flesh were a screen that had just been switched on.

  Izlaril filled the silence. “The souldancer of fire killed the last Blade. Is it true that you fought him man-to-man?”

  The memory of claws digging into his lungs shocked Cook awake. He studied the new Blade. Though more robust, Izlaril didn’t project anything like Hazeroth’s menace. A lank mane of black hair framed his face, which challenged Cook’s for the Middle Stratum’s ugliest.

  Cook gave a curt nod. “It wasn’t much of a fight. I’m lucky to still be here.”

  “Yet you are here. Few of Hazeroth’s prey can say the same. That makes you a threat.”

  Cook tried to read Izlaril’s face. The angular features, marred by strange welts that looked like gridiron burns, betrayed neither thought nor emotion.

  Knowing what he wants might help save the ship. I need to get him talking.

  “You’re a good choice to fill Hazeroth’s shoes,” said Cook, “killing your own men like that.”

  “You killed their pilot. With no way to escape, they faced capture and shame.”

  Cook frowned. “You killed your men to spare them from dishonor?”

  “No. To set them free.”

  Reflexively, Cook backed toward the Kerioth.

  Izlaril didn’t budge. “There is no death; only reunion with the Nexus. So you also believe.”

  “How did you know?” Cook blurted out.

  “You made Atavist signs over the bodies.”

  Panic stabbed up Cook’s spine. “How long were you following me?”

  “Since you came into the hangar.”

  Terror urged Cook to keep backpedaling, but he took hold of himself again. The one thing he knew for sure was that running from Izlaril would be impossible.

  Izlaril took a cautious step forward. He didn’t appear to be armed.

  Cook stood his ground and raised his guard. The Blade seemed just as wary of him, so it was time to get answers while he could.

  “Nice vanishing act,” said Cook. “I don’t know of any Workings that could make you invisible. Is it some kind of nexism?”

  Izlaril inched closer as he shook his head. “They tried to give us nexism but only made us invisible to it.”

  The allusion to creating nexists stirred memories of shadowy historic events—none of them pleasant.

  “There are more like you?” Cook asked, if only to stall his foe.

  Izlaril now stood less than twenty feet away. “Not for a long time now.”

  “Shaiel must be really fond of the Serapis if he sent his Blade to taker her back.”

  “Shaiel’s Left Hand wields the Blade,” Izlaril corrected Cook, “and his Will directs it. They would sooner see this ship destroyed than retaken.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  Izlaril pointed over Cook’s shoulder to the Kerioth. “To retrieve Shaiel’s kin and property.”

  He’s after Smith!

  The souldancer must have known it, too. Why else hole up aboard the Kerioth behind an anti-nexic field? But Hazeroth had hunted the souldancers because one of them was a gate to Shaiel’s prison. What use did Shaiel have for them now that he was free?

  Cook didn’t get the chance to ask, because Izlaril made his move. He closed the distance between them with sure, rapid steps that spoke less of preternatural speed than inevitability.

  The first blow came—a jab at Cook’s left side that he twisted to evade. Cook threw his momentum into a cross to his opponent’s face. Izlaril blocked, but just barely.

  Something didn’t sit right with Cook. Izlaril was good. His form, which called to mind pictures of Guild mercenaries from the Purges, was textbook perfect, and Cook hadn’t laid a hand on him yet. But he didn’t fight like you’d expect of Shaiel’s chief cutthroat.

  I need to end this now.

  Cook threw a feint at Izlaril’s eyes. The Blade lifted a hand to block, and Cook drove his knee into the area exposed by his opponent’s raised elbow.

  The oddest sensation followed. Cook knew the crunch of broken ribs, but Izlaril’s bones didn’t break. They moved; bending to distribute the force of impact before popping back into place like a dented plastic bin. The blow didn’t knock the wind out of Izlaril’s lungs. He didn’t so much as grunt.

  What is he? Cook wondered. He tried to back away, but for some reason he couldn’t distance himself from his foe, as if Izlaril knew all of Cook’s escape routes before he tried them.

  Cook renewed his attack with greater speed. Izlaril turned every blow, never seeming to fully exert himself. Cook tried another feint. Izlaril ignored the ruse. His scarred face retained its neutral expression as his fist hammered Cook’s left biceps, momentarily numbing the whole arm.

  Izlaril threw a seemingly halfhearted kick that Cook nevertheless barely dodged. Cook’s muscles ached and his lungs burned while Shaiel’s Blade wasn’t even short of breath.

  Fighting him is like trying to tear down a brick wall by shouting at it!

  Cook didn’t see the blow that sent him rolling across the deck, his head pounding in agony. He willed himself to get up, and while still on his hands and knees, he saw Izlaril striding inexorably toward him.

  In that moment, Cook knew how he’d been played. Izlaril’s creators had failed to produce a nexist, but they’d made something worse—a monument to brutal efficiency that existed only to free the living from the prison called life.

  Cook spared a moment to reflect on Izlaril’s beliefs, which were really just the ultimate logical conclusion of his own. But his shipmates’ faces flashed before his eyes.

  Sorry, Cook told Zadok, rising to his feet as his right hand reached behind his back. Now’s not a good time.

  Izlaril’s gait never seemed to change, yet he closed with his victim faster than his pace should have allowed. Cook was ready though. He swung with all his strength, and the Blade of Shaiel walked into the white scimitar’s flashing arc.

  What happened then removed any possibility that Shaiel’s Blade was human. Izlaril contorted in ways that would have snapped a normal man’s spine. His trunk moved just beyond the white sword’s tip, but something—possibly a stray air current—nudged the blade just enough to sink into his flesh.

  Not even the best fighters could remove every foreshadowing of their attacks. The mind signaled the limbs, and several other muscle groups supported their motions.

  Yet Izlaril’s leg moved on its own, sinking the ball of his foot into Cook’s hip, which separated from its socket with an audible pop and a red flash of pain. Cook fell to one knee but kept his grip on the sword stuck in his foe like a climber clinging to the rope holding him over the abyss.

  Izlaril looked down at the mirrored blade protruding from his stomach. Blood streamed from the scalpel-straight wound, and Cook caught a whiff of se
ared meat. The burning smell intensified when Izlaril grabbed the crossguard. The skin of his hand shifted through myriad colors as it sizzled, and for the first time, his expression changed to a grimace.

  Cook fought to keep his hold on the hilt, but he was reduced to one hand; the other being needed to keep him up. Despite the pain it must have caused him, Izlaril clasped his other hand on the sword and wrenched it from Cook’s grasp. The blade struck the deck with a chiming note.

  Izlaril stood over his disarmed foe. His wound had compressed itself into a thin line shedding only a thin trickle of blood, though the palms of his hands were still discolored and raw.

  He gave Cook a solemn nod.

  A blur of motion was Cook’s only warning before absolute darkness claimed him.

  3

  Crote was a dirty slushball. Tharis was a blasted hellscape of fused volcanic ash and toxic gas. Teg was sure that nowhere else could possibly be worse.

  Keth proved him wrong.

  “I am setting course for Mithgar,” Yato said from the pilot’s seat of the Theophilus. Framed against the view of Keth through the Wheel pod’s grubby window, the Nesshin steersman’s bald head looked like a beige planet orbiting a red-orange star—a star that had been Teg’s home sphere.

  “No,” Teg told the back of Yato’s wrinkled head, “you’re not. When I left Keth, it wasn’t on fire. Now it is. I’d like to know why.”

  Yato turned his seat—a shabby affair salvaged from a wrecked drifter and bolted to the Wheel.

  “The rest of us need safe harbor more than you want answers,” Yato said. Did his face have new lines? “You cannot believe that anything survived down there.”

  Teg studied the globe of roiling flame that turned silently in space. “I can only stop believing what I know isn’t true.”

  Yato swiveled back to face the front window with a frustrated snort. “Sentimental folly! Our supplies are low enough without dawdling here.”

  “Too low to make Mithgar; especially with an extra mouth to feed.”

  Once again, Teg pondered whether he should have just left their new passenger on Crote. It would be one thing if Jaren could lend the Theophilus crew a hand. But the former pirate captain no longer had one to spare. His decrepit physical state and near total amnesia didn’t recommend him either, even though Yato had healed his eyes.

  Yato’s right. I am getting sentimental.

  “Thera bed me,” Yato cursed under his breath.

  “Am I that irritating?” asked Teg.

  “Yes, but that was not meant for you.” Yato gestured to a point in high orbit. “This concerns me more.”

  Teg leaned over the pilot’s chair for a better look.

  How did I miss that?

  Turning quietly in high orbit, the vortex yawned wide enough to swallow the Theophilus. Its ragged disc resembled a hurricane seen from above, but with no atmosphere to sustain it.

  “Any clue what it is?” asked Teg.

  Yato’s bony fingers danced across the makeshift control panel wedged between his chair and the window.

  “There’s a rip in the ether. Huge volumes of elemental air are flowing out.”

  “I’m no expert,” said Teg, “but I feel pretty safe calling it an Air Stratum gate.”

  Yato nodded. “We agree for once.”

  “Remind me to buy a sweepstakes ticket. What caused the rip? The Cataclysm?”

  “Not if air flow through the gate has been constant. Judging by these concentrations, the vortex has been here for less than a week.”

  Teg sidled up beside the pilot’s seat. The chair’s occupant reeked like a month’s worth of soiled laundry. Worse, Teg knew that he himself didn’t exactly smell like a rose.

  “All I wanted when I joined you Nesshin on this flying scrap heap was to get home; to settle down someplace without demons and dead men. I’m not giving up just because the front door’s locked—and in flames.”

  Yato sighed. “Why should you? Knowing when to quit is a mark of good sense. Yet curiosity compels me to ask. How will you get past the flames?”

  No matter how many years he’d lived with it, the constant rattle from some elusive cranny of the ship’s ductwork still distracted Teg. Ignoring the irritant by force of will, he thought back to his youth, the last years of which were misspent smuggling contraband to and from the sphere below.

  A lot’s changed, he thought with a laugh both wistful and bitter. He’d barely reached his teens before his father’s death and his mother’s arrest drove him to finish his upbringing in the cutthroat Kethan underworld.

  Back in those desperate exhilarating days, he’d believed in nothing but the money in his fist; hoped for nothing but the next job.

  To be honest with himself—and aboard the leaky tub that would probably be his tomb, there was no use for anything but brutal honesty—Teg had maintained that outlook practically unchanged for twenty years.

  Not that he was ashamed. His was a sturdy philosophy, practiced throughout history by renowned and accomplished men. In all likelihood he’d have kept to his ways till they put him in the ground.

  But then he’d seen the Circles, and died. And the girl with rose-colored eyes had pulled him back from the Void with a black miracle.

  After that, Teg didn’t believe anything. He knew. And he envied those with only faith.

  The faint clatter reasserted its hold on Teg’s thoughts, making him mindful of the air coursing through the ducts. He hunched down next to the pilot’s ear.

  “Let’s go through the vortex.”

  Yato’s face, when his head spun toward Teg, looked as if the steersman had swallowed a hot brass casing.

  “The Air Stratum is an endless hostile waste! You would strand us there?”

  Teg pointed at the swirling storm. “No, look. It’s basic cosmology. Diagrams show the Strata stacked on top of each other, but that’s a dumbed down version of the truth.”

  “Well, yes,” said Yato. “The Strata relate to one another much like the dimensions of mundane space.”

  Teg gave his voice a conspiratorial tone. “So all of the Strata are actually here. That gate marks a spot where the Air and Middle Strata intersect, and the ether touches all of them. That gives us a fixed point for navigating all three.”

  Yato ran his fingers through his scraggly beard. “You suggest that we fly straight into the Air Stratum, transition to the ether, and emerge back onto the Middle Stratum under the fire barrier, guiding our course by the gate.”

  “Brilliance like that is why we haven’t butchered you for stew meat,” said Teg, slapping the threadbare headrest.

  “In that case,” Yato said, let me shed more light upon your scheme. There is no guarantee that the gate is stable, or that the ship would survive a trip through even if it were. Supposing we do make the passage without mishap, the Air Stratum is notoriously unnavigable. Lastly, if by God’s grace we manage to stay on course through a perpetual hurricane, we don’t know if the fire reaches down to Keth’s surface. We do know that the flames extend into the ether, so making the transition anywhere within the atmosphere may kill us.”

  Teg paused for a moment. “Is that all?”

  Yato sighed. “You should tell the others if you insist on gambling with their lives.”

  “Sounds fair. But don’t fret. I’ll be right back to give you moral support.”

  “Zadok help us,” Yato groaned.

  Teg sat on the patchwork deck plates and swung his legs down into the tube that bridged the Wheel and habitat pods. “If not him, I’m sure someone will.”

  We’re not going to crash.

  Realizing that they couldn’t crash without something to hit intensified Teg’s nausea. Theophilus careened through the Air Stratum’s endless sky, tossed like a kite by shifting gales. Yato’s grimacing, sweat-streaked face told of his battle to control the ship, and the violently pitching deck showed that he was losing.

  The pilot’s chair was the only seat in the Wheel pod, so Teg had to brace
himself by threading an arm and a leg through the exposed pipes that traversed the walls. His joints burned, and he expected the next jolt to pop his aching shoulder out of the socket.

  Looking beyond Yato’s mortal struggle with the Wheel, Teg saw a world of cloud in constant flux. The window’s webbed circle frosted and cleared with a suddenness that betrayed wildly shifting temperatures. Light from the Fire Stratum filtered in through the ether, continually switching between a smoldering sunset, high noon, and everything in between.

  At least the view’s nice, thought Teg. But a grim yearning seemed to haunt the frenzied dance of wind, water, and light.

  A grunt from Yato pulled Teg back into the moment. The ship took a sudden dive, almost fulfilling Teg’s prophecy of a dislocated shoulder. Far below—or ahead, there was really no difference here—loomed a thunderhead that made his jaw drop. Blue forks of lightning arced across its charcoal face and set its inner depths ablaze. The shockwaves of its thunder shook the Theophilus like an infant’s rattle.

  “Turn!” Teg shouted over the din of God’s own kettle drums.

  Yato’s voice emerged through clenched teeth. “No center of gravity. Drifters useless. Something’s pulling us in!”

  Teg watched the monster cloud fill the whole window. The storm might’ve been large enough to swallow a planet.

  Come to think of it, unless the wild ride had totally muddled Teg’s sense of direction, the storm corresponded to Keth’s position on the Middle Stratum.

  “Let it pull us in,” Teg called to Yato.

  “What?”

  “That storm is Keth. Ride it down, and when we get to a depth that equates to the lower atmosphere, take us into the ether.”

  Yato turned from the blacked out window to scream at Teg. “The cloud is constantly changing! Chances are we’ll transition into the fire or the sphere’s crust.”

  Teg only took a moment to make up his mind. “This way, we explode or live. The other way, we starve to death. Your choice.”

  Resignation hardened Yato’s face. He looked back to the window.