Then the ship sailed around a curve in the gorge, and Erika looked upon the truth.
Ahead lay the Illmoor Fortress itself, whose walls had defended the lands of the Gemaho. For generations, those walls had defended the kingdom against Tangatan and human foes alike. No foe had ever breached their granite expanse.
Now the fortress lay in pieces, great holes torn through the stone of its walls, as though a giant had swung his club to break them. Blocks the size of a small house lay scattered around each breach, and part of the citadel had been broken too, crumbling before some vast power. Black ash scorched the stone blocks, suggesting some fiery explosion had been behind the fortress’s fall.
“Your Archivists guild finally proved itself useful,” the queen announced. “After your departure, I had my guard tear their school apart in search of any secrets you might have hidden from me. Turns out they had secrets of their own. Black powder. Seems you used it for minor excavations, but my engineers saw other possibilities. The Gemaho never knew what struck them.”
A shiver ran down Erika’s spine at the destruction the queen had wrought. If the Illmoor Fortress could have fallen so easily…
“You see now, Archivist?” the queen’s words echoed Erika’s thoughts. “You see the truth? There is no one left to save you, no one left to stand against me. Nguyen, your father, they stood in my way. Now they are dead. Whatever it takes, I will unite the kingdoms beneath me against the Anahera. There is no reason left now for you to resist, nothing left for you at all, but surrender.”
Looking upon the ruin, Erika knew it to be true. She closed her eyes, her body trembling. She imagined returning to the stale air of the hull, to the torture and pain, to the unending agony without even a hint of hope. No one would come for her. Nguyen was gone, his kingdom fallen, the Gods made slaves to the enemies of humanity. Her future held only agony, and death.
But the queen was wrong. There was still one person left that Erika cared about, one good deed she might yet fulfil.
“Okay,” she croaked, eyes still closed, unable to meet the queen’s gaze. “I’ll give it to you. But first, I must see Cara.”
3
The Sovereign
“Well, I can’t say the past few weeks went quite as I imagined when I set out from Gemaho,” Nguyen said, speaking to those gathered in the room.
Holding a glass of whiskey in one hand, the other tucked behind his back, there was regal manner to the way the king paced the room while Lukys and Sophia sat together on a velvet sofa. Lukys tried to hold himself a little straighter to mimic the king’s posture, but it was only a moment before he slumped back into the soft cushions. It was no use—Nguyen had trained all his life in the ways of royalty. Lukys couldn’t hope to achieve the same poise in the span of a few days.
“You mean when you fled from Gemaho, right?” Travis interjected. Standing to attention at the door, he seemed to take his Sovereigns’ silence as an opportunity to speak himself.
A scowl crossed Nguyen’s face as he glanced at the newly made royal guard. “It’s customary for guards to keep their silence in a gathering of monarchs,” he said with a scowl.
“It’s also customary for a king to have a kingdom,” Travis shot back, face blank.
For a second, Lukys thought the king might explode at his friend’s impudence. The moment stretched out as Nguyen stared at the guard, teeth bared. Then suddenly the man let out an explosive ha! Waving a hand, he turned his back on the gathering and continued his pacing.
“Might be your man is right, Lukys,” he said, glancing at their sofa. “Regardless of how we came to our current circumstances, we have what we wanted: Gemaho and Perfugia united.”
“It won’t be enough,” Sophia spoke up.
Lukys looked at her sharply, his consciousness already extended, sensing the familiar fear she had carried since that day in New Nihelm when Maya had slain her Matriarch. There was more to Sophia’s fear now though, augmented by the knowledge they had acquired, though they had still only glimpsed a fraction. The rest lay buried, like the iceberg concealed beneath the waters. But what they had uncovered so far of the Old Ones filled Lukys with terror.
Sophia did not reply to his silent enquiry. Instead, she reached for the table beside their sofa. Taking up her glass of rum, she raised it in silent salute, then down it in one go. Lukys raised an eyebrow, even as he sensed ripples of the alcohol’s burning from his partner. She seemed to have developed an appreciation for Nguyen’s various liquors over the last week, though Lukys understood from the Sovereign memories that a Tangata’s sense of taste and smell were far more sensitive than humans.
Letting out a sigh, he took a measured sip from his own glass. Unlike Sophia, he did not have the metabolism of a Tangata, though…it might have been his imagination, but his senses did seem augmented now, as though the imbuement of all those lifetimes had passed something else onto him. He held the rum in his mouth, savouring the caramel tones overlaid by wood smoke. Memories stirred at the taste, an image stirring in his mind, of shakes built of wood clinging to cliffs, a hundred at most, a broad harbour stretching out beyond.
Ashura, as it has been long ago.
Lukys shivered. Nguyen claimed to have uncovered the cask in the Sovereigns’ private cellar,
