Chapter 55

Chapter 55: Chapter 55

For the last ten days of the ride to the capital, the land changed a little more every mile. The wild border country gave way to the Empire’s well-kept heartland. The dark old pine forests turned into rolling hills of golden wheat and carefully terraced vineyards. The King’s Highway, which had started out as a track of cracked stone and moss, widened and leveled until it was a broad road of smooth white cobblestones.

Beside me the whole way rode Lord Luckas of House Vance, who was bright as a lantern and never seemed to run out of oil.

We were as mismatched as our horses. I rode Ironfoot, a huge, ill-tempered vanguard destrier bred to break shield walls, with my runic bastard sword strapped to a saddle still stained with mud from the southern marshes. I wore dark, heavy leather and the crimson cloak of the 7th Legion, hood up against the autumn wind. Luckas rode a purebred Akhal-Teke stallion whose coat shone like polished silver. His riding clothes were tailored midnight blue with silver thread, and he looked like one of the flawless heroes in the capital’s tapestries.

He also couldn’t stand silence.

For ten days Luckas talked. He told me about the tangled rivalries between the noble houses of the Crown Jewel. He described the grueling training he had gone through under the most expensive swordmasters in the Empire. He talked about the Bud Burst with real enthusiasm, certain that the Imperial Academy would turn him into a legendary commander. I said very little. I listened to the hooves, nodded now and then, and once in a while dropped in a single blunt sentence to bring his ambitions back down to earth.

He never annoyed me, though. Somewhere along that road I realized, with some relief, that I needed his company. Luckas kept me steady. He was a Swelled Bud like me, with the same unnatural density and strength, but nobody had dragged his soul through a underground meat grinder. He had never watched his cohort burn alive in the mud. He had never had to cannibalize his own Ember to survive in the dark. He still had the arrogant, brilliant innocence of youth, the thing the vanguard had burned out of me.

On the sixth night we made camp in one of the clearings set aside for travelers, just off the highway. The air was crisp and cold. I sat on a heavy log by the fire, working a whetstone along the edge of my Veriti combat knife.

Across the fire, Luckas was running through his formal sword forms. He moved beautifully. His footwork was flawless, a dance worked out to the inch, and the silver longsword was a blur. Now and then he pushed the heat of his Ember into the blade and it burst into a controlled, roaring orange flame that lit up the trees. He finished a long spinning combination and turned to me, a little out of breath, with the smile of someone waiting for applause.

"The Rising Sun," Luckas said proudly, and rested the tip of his sword in the dirt. "My master said no one in the capital executes it better. What do you think, Elvit?"

I stopped honing the knife and looked him over. His posture was perfect and his boots were clean, and there was an eager, competitive light in his eyes. He was half showing off, half hungry for a vanguard veteran’s approval.

I sheathed the knife and stood. I left my runic bastard sword where it was and picked a thick branch of dead oak off the firewood pile, about as long as a shortsword.

"Your footwork is perfect," I said, and walked away from the fire into the middle of the clearing. "It’s beautiful. But the mud doesn’t care about beauty."

Luckas’s smile faded and his face went serious. He raised the silver sword, its flames sinking to a faint glow, and settled back into his perfect dueling stance. "Show me."

I kept the Rune of Antiquity and its astral precognition out of it. Beating him with divine magic would only have humiliated him, and what I wanted to show him was what survival really looks like. All I would use were the feral, efficient instincts of my evolved brain and the dense muscle of a Swelled Bud.

"Attack me," I said, holding the branch in a loose, lazy guard. "Use the Rising Sun."

Luckas came at once. He lunged, and the distance between us vanished. The silver blade swept up in a blinding diagonal, exactly as he had drilled it, meant to cut my makeshift weapon in two and stop an inch from my neck.

Blocking was out of the question. The branch would have shattered.

I stepped inside his striking radius and abandoned form altogether. As the blade swept upward I dropped my weight and drove my left shoulder into his exposed chest before the cut could finish its arc. The impact knocked a gasp out of him, and his perfect balance went with it. In the same instant I brought the oak down on the unarmored inside of his right wrist, hitting hard but pulling the blow just enough to keep from shattering the radius bone.

Luckas cried out and his fingers spasmed open. The silver longsword slipped from his grip and clattered into the dirt. Before he could find his balance or reach for his dagger, I swept my boot behind his ankle, twisted my hips, and sent him crashing onto his back.

I stood over him with the tip of the branch resting against his throat. The whole exchange had taken under two seconds.

Luckas lay in the dirt, blinking up at the stars, his chest heaving. He looked at the stick at his throat, then up at my scarred face, and I saw awe in his eyes.

"The Rising Sun assumes your opponent values their own life enough to block your blade," I said quietly, and tossed the branch into the fire. I held out my hand, rough with calluses. "A barbarian of the Coalition will gladly let you cut off their arm if it means they can bury a rusted hatchet in your neck. Nobody out there is scoring your form, Luckas. Fight to survive."

He took my hand and I pulled him to his feet without effort.

"You didn’t use the starlight," he murmured, rubbing his bruised wrist. He was staring at me with the same undivided infatuation I had seen outside the logging camp.

"I didn’t need to," I said, and turned back to my saddlebags.

We never sparred again, but after that night Luckas was different with me. The boasting stopped. He started asking real questions about the cold, the hunger, the smell of the ruins underground, and I answered them. I told him what the front lines were like, the quiet human horror of it. I told him about Elara, and that I could no longer remember the sound of her laugh. It helped, more than I had expected, to say these things to someone who had never been through any of it and who simply listened. Noble or not, he was a good man.

On the afternoon of the tenth day we crested a high paved ridge, and the Crown Jewel came into view. I pulled back on Ironfoot’s reins without meaning to, and the big warhorse stopped dead.

The capital of the Empire was a marvel of architecture, a monument to human ambition and to the dominance of the Ancestral Runes. It sat on a huge tiered island in the middle of a perfectly round freshwater lake. Five sweeping bridges of white limestone joined the island to the mainland, carrying the King’s Highway out over the deep blue water.

The city rose from the lake like a mountain of polished stone, gold, and glass. The lower rings were crowded with merchant districts and ordinary housing, a bright patchwork of silk awnings and terracotta roofs. The higher the tiers climbed, the more monumental the buildings became. Spires of white marble pierced the sky, linked by soaring aqueducts and by gardens that floated in the air, held up by ambient Ember magic. At the very top, over everything, stood the Imperial Palace, a sprawling fortress of gold and obsidian.

"It takes your breath away, doesn’t it?" Luckas asked quietly, drawing his stallion up beside me.

"It’s loud," I murmured.

Even from the ridge, the city overloaded my senses: millions of voices, the clatter of carriages, a thousand anvils ringing, the smell of roasted spices and blooming jasmine and concentrated magic.

We rode across the grand southern bridge and into the lower wards, and there the real scale of the place hit me. The streets were absurdly wide, paved with smooth interlocking stones, and every inch of them was full. The crowd moved like a dense, suffocating river: nobles in velvet carriages, merchants shouting in foreign tongues, street performers weaving illusions out of minor Ember sparks.

A sharp, freezing pain began to throb in my right arm.

The Rune of Antiquity was reacting to the crowd. Its astral precognition was trying to chart the paths of ten thousand people at once, and my vision filled with ghostly, translucent afterimages, layer on layer. I gasped, squeezed my eyes shut, and clutched my right arm. A migraine spiked behind my glowing right eye.

"Elvit?" Luckas had seen me sway in the saddle, and his voice was tight with concern. "Are you all right?"

"Too much," I got out through gritted teeth. I had to fight my own biology for control. I reached down into the boiling heat of my Ember and forced it down my right arm, smothering the cold astral magic of the rune. Then I built a wall in my mind and pushed the precognition back into dormancy.

The afterimages vanished. The migraine dulled to a heavy ache. I opened my eyes and let out a ragged breath.

"I’m fine," I lied, gripping the reins. "Lead the way."

We rode for three hours, climbing the steep, winding avenues between the tiers. The higher we went, the cleaner the air became, and the crowds thinned out and gave way to elite Imperial guards and the sprawling estates of the high nobility. At last we reached the second-highest tier, just below the Imperial Palace.

The Imperial Academy took up a whole walled citadel, a self-contained fortress of learning. Its walls rose in polished black granite, very like Shepfold’s, but laced with intricate geometric arrays of silver Ancestral Runes. The main gates were fifty feet of wrought iron, twisted into the swirling, violent patterns of a roaring fire. Two colossal marble statues of the ancient Pioneers flanked them, their stone eyes looking down on the students who had come to inherit their legacy.

Dozens of young men and women, the incoming class, were gathered in the grand plaza in front of the gates. Every one of them came from the elite. They wore pristine, tailored uniforms, and servants stood behind them with heavy leather trunks. Each of them gave off the dense presence of a Swelled Bud. They were prodigies, bred for greatness.

When Luckas and I rode into the plaza, the chatter died. Hundreds of eyes turned to the huge, mud-stained warhorse, the runic bastard sword, and the scarred, imposing woman in the blood-red cloak of the vanguard.

I kept my back straight and my chin high and carried myself the way a Lieutenant of the 7th Legion should.

We dismounted and tied our horses to the iron posts near the gate, then went to the admission tables. Elderly, stern-faced administrators in the heavy velvet robes of Imperial Scholars sat behind them.

Luckas stepped up to the nearest table with a charming smile and drew a white scroll sealed in blue wax from inside his doublet.

The administrator was an older man with a pointed beard. He took the scroll, broke the seal, and nodded with a warm smile. "Lord Luckas of House Vance. We’ve been expecting you. The theoretical scores from your private tutors were exceptional. Welcome to the Imperial Academy."

Luckas bowed gracefully and stepped aside, waving me forward.

I went up to the heavy mahogany table. The administrator looked over my muddy boots, the thick scars on my neck, and the silver Lieutenant’s insignia pinned to my chest, and his warm smile vanished. His face settled into deep, aristocratic disdain.

"This tier of the city is strictly off-limits to regular military personnel," he said, in the tone of a man explaining something to a servant. "Mercenaries and camp followers are required to remain in the lower wards. Return to your garrison, soldier."

Luckas opened his mouth, his face flushed with anger on my behalf, but I raised a leather-clad hand to stop him.

I stayed calm. I reached into the inner pocket of my tunic and took out a heavy cream-colored envelope bound in black ribbon, and I dropped it on the mahogany table. The golden wax seal of the Imperial Throne, a roaring lion crowned with stars, caught the afternoon sun.

The administrator’s eyes widened. The disdain drained out of his face and left only shock. He looked at the seal, then up at my scarred face. With trembling hands he untied the black ribbon and broke the wax.

He unrolled the heavy parchment. I watched his eyes move down Commander Erula’s elegant, ruthless calligraphy.

Lieutenant Elvit. Vanguard of the 7th Imperial Legion. Swelled Bud evolution confirmed. Sponsored by direct decree of the High Command.

The administrator swallowed hard, and the color left his face. He looked at the runic sword on my back and understood at last what the scars on my neck were: the credentials of a monster, forged at the edge of the world and sent here.

He rolled the parchment up slowly and held it out to me with a hand that shook badly. Then he bowed, low and stiff, with fear in every line of him.

"Forgive my insolence, Lieutenant," he whispered, stepping back and gesturing toward the iron gates. "The Academy is honored. Welcome to your new home."

I took the envelope and slid it back into my tunic. Luckas was grinning from ear to ear, plainly delighted by the chaos I had just caused.

"Let’s go," I said.

Together we walked past the silent, staring children of the nobility and through the iron gates of the Imperial Academy.