In the Shadow of Lightning

49

There were few things worse than waiting for the next battle but not knowing when it would happen.

The socket of Idrian’s false eye itched horribly, making him want to claw out the eye and scratch back there with a dinner fork. It was almost two days since anyone had seen Demir. Tadeas’s messages back to Ossa had gone unanswered, aside from a single missive from the Hyacinth Hotel saying that Demir was imprisoned in the Maerhorn and they were trying to get him out. Only Tadeas and Idrian knew the truth, but the entire camp, from the Ironhorns to the regular infantry to the fort garrison, was wondering whether they still had a commanding officer.

That glassdancer – that thing – that attacked the other night had not returned. The rumors about it were spreading too. Only about a dozen people had seen it, but that was far too many to keep a secret. Whispers crisscrossed the camp that the Grappo Torrent was the last gasp to defend Ossa; that they’d all been abandoned, and that Kerite would return with fresh troops and monsters to boot, grinding them into a pulp.

Through all of these doubts and questions, Idrian grappled with his madness. Sometime during the last day or so he’d decided that this was not an aberration manifest from his grief for Kastora. The child’s laughter happened so often that he barely noticed it now, but worse specters haunted his waking moments. Shadows flitted in the corners of his vision. Most were nothing more than that – dark splotches, moving about on their own – but on occasion he thought he saw people he knew were long dead.

One of two things was happening: either the eye was degrading faster than it was supposed to, or something had changed within his own mind that made the eye no longer adequate. The former could be solved by Demir’s phoenix channel. The latter could not, and the prospect terrified him. If the madness continued to worsen, and he could no longer tell the difference between what was real and what was imaginary, how could he possibly defend the Ironhorns? What happened when that flying glassdancer returned? Could Idrian even trust himself to tell whether it really existed?

Idrian stood on the bastion wall of Fort Alameda, looking out over the fires of the camp. Roughly a third of the Foreign Legion was gathered here. The rest were back up at Fort Bryce, and he wished they were all together. They would need every soldier on hand the next time Grent and their mercenaries came knocking. If that itch in his eye socket was anything to judge by, it would happen soon.

His sword lay before him on the bastion merlons, ready to be snatched up the moment he saw something strange in the sky. He knew it was unnecessary – Tadeas and the garrison commander had agreed to quadruple the watch – but he stood his vigil anyway, remaining on the wall until he was too tired to keep his head up.

Perhaps he was a fool, and all this extra worry and effort only made his madness worse. But what else could he do? Stand down and risk people dying?

“Good evening, sir.”

“Good evening, Braileer.” Idrian glanced sidelong at the young armorer as he mounted the bastion wall and came to stand beside him. “Dinner was fantastic tonight. Thank you for that.”

And it was. Braileer was better than the garrison cook, bringing Idrian half a duck and a loaf of rosemary bread soaked in duck fat, all done over a soldier’s cookfire instead of in a proper kitchen. Idrian did not admit that he’d barely tasted any of it.

“My pleasure, sir.” Braileer held his fiddle case, and set it down at his feet. “I was hoping I could take your sword for polishing and repairs. There are a few nicks I could work out of the razorglass in the garrison glassworks.”

He’d asked the same thing for the last two nights, and Idrian had refused him both times. The very thought of being more than a few feet from his sword caused him to panic. He ran a finger down the flat of the pink razorglass ribbon, then laid his hand on the steel that supported it. “Does Tadeas keep sending you up here hoping to distract me?”

“Major Grappo is very concerned about your well-being, sir.”

Idrian snorted, swallowing a sharp retort. Braileer didn’t deserve it. “You can rest easy tonight. We’ll be back to fighting soon enough. Take what relaxation you can get.”

“Thank you, sir.” Instead of heading back down into the bastion, Braileer reached down and laid his fiddle case flat, flipping it open and drawing out the instrument. “Do you mind, sir?”

“I…” Want to be alone was what Idrian wanted to say. To be alone with the specters flitting about, where he could concentrate on telling the difference between what was real and what was not. But he knew that remaining alone just made things worse. The shadows were less common in company. “Go on, then.”

Braileer set the fiddle to his neck and plucked at the strings a few times, then produced his bow. He finished tuning and then, slowly, the sound almost imperceptible, he began to play.

Idrian leaned on the merlon beside his sword, his eyes raised to the sky, his thoughts distant. The song played in the back of his head, low and mournful, before it picked up into a steady cadence. He half listened for some time until he realized that he was humming along with it. He turned sharply to Braileer. The young armorer didn’t seem to notice the look and kept playing.

Idrian waited until the melody came around again, and then he sang.

“‘Bend your back to the work, raise your arm with the flail, for the winter she be coming. Grain for the man, straw for the cattle, for the winter she be coming. It’ll blow in hard, it’ll blow in cold. If we don’t thresh this field, then our bellies will starve and our hearts will freeze, and we shan’t plant more in the spring. And we shan’t plant more in spring.’”

Braileer repeated the final refrain four more times, then lowered both fiddle and bow.

“That’s a Marnish farmer’s song,” Idrian said, shaking his head. “Depressing as piss.”

“It’s the only Marnish song I know,” Braileer admitted with an embarrassed smile, “but I thought it might cheer you up. Did I … misjudge that?”

“No, no.” Idrian felt suddenly overwhelmed, his mind leaping forty years and eight thousand miles away. “I haven’t heard that since I was a kid.” He gave a shudder and pressed on his godglass eye. “Another gift from Tadeas?”

“No, sir. Just me, sir.”

Idrian turned to stare back at the horizon. Several minutes passed in silence, during which Braileer plucked at his fiddle, adjusting the strings once more, but did not play again. Something about that song seemed to stab right through Idrian, and he found himself smelling crushed grain and mountain flowers, accompanied by the trickling sound of a high stream. He swallowed a lump in his throat.

“You’re a good man, Braileer. Go play for the soldiers again. They need it more than I do.”

“Yes, sir.”

Idrian waited until the armorer had left, and finally abandoned his vigil to walk down into the bastion, his sword on his shoulder. The Ironhorns had the distinction of camping in the fort courtyard, and it didn’t take him long to find Squeaks. She and Fenny were cuddled together in the corner, behind a tent, their hands out of sight and giggling to each other. “Squeaks,” Idrian called, averting his eyes. “Just a moment, please.”

Squeaks extricated herself from her wife and came over to join Idrian, her cheeks red. “Evening, sir. I never asked, but did those gloves fit?”

“Just as gloves should,” Idrian replied, giving her a soft smile. He heard his own voice and realized that the edge that had been in it since that flying glassdancer was now gone. Was Braileer’s fiddle – a brief memory of a long-forgotten home – all that he needed? Or would it be back soon? It didn’t matter, not right now. “That thing I fought on the roof up there,” he said, gesturing to the high window of the garrison commander’s quarters, “did you get a good look at it?”

Squeaks seemed to draw into herself a little, her mirth disappearing. “Not any more than anyone else from the ground. But … yes, I suppose I could describe it.”

“Did it look like the strange creature you saw in the forest the night of the Grappo Torrent?”

From the way Squeaks stiffened, Idrian guessed he was the first person to ask her that – and that she’d been thinking about it a lot. “No. Not a thing like it. As different as you and me.”

“Was the thing in the forest a glassdancer?”

“I certainly didn’t sense it like a glassdancer. Not like the thing on the roof.”

Idrian looked back up into the sky, thinking.

“Is that all, sir?”

“That’s all, Squeaks. Give Fenny a kiss for me.”

That seemed to break the somber moment, and Squeaks grinned at him. “Right away, sir,” she said, and hurried back around behind the tent.

There were, Idrian considered, two possibilities: One was that they were all a little mad, and Squeaks was seeing things in that forest. The other was that there wasn’t just one creature. There were two, or three, or a dozen, or a hundred. It was impossible to tell. Were they spies? Assassins? Were they some secret Grent weapon? Had Kerite brought them with her from a distant land?

It did not matter. The next time he saw that flying glassdancer, he was going to kill it.

Thessa did not want to admit how relieved she was when Breenen caught up with her and Tirana on the road, trailing several carts full of supplies and another two dozen enforcers. It brought their total number up past forty. Not an army by any means, but if the Dorlani or the Magna or any other guild-family happened to follow them out into the countryside, they weren’t going to sneak up and steal the phoenix channel from underneath their noses.

Their convoy didn’t arrive at the Forge until almost midnight. It was drizzling and windy, though it had been clear less than a mile back, and Thessa was grateful when she hiked up to the crest of the Forge to find not only that Pari and her helpers had set up a number of tents wherever a windbreak could be found, but that the lighthouse had been secured with canvas and a fire blazed in the hearth of the main floor.

“The lightning rod is in place,” Pari reported, clearly pleased with herself. Thessa stood outside long enough to squint up at the copper crown rising a dozen feet above the lighthouse ruins, then went inside and examined Pari’s handiwork.

“No problems?”

“I just followed your diagrams.”

A thick copper cable came in through the roof, hanging loose just above the ground. Nearby was a shorter length of cable that would thread right though the middle of the phoenix channel. Next to that, a third length was buried in the dirt floor of the lighthouse. Each length ended in a coupling that could be easily fitted to another; the lightning rod would attach to the phoenix channel, which would attach to the grounding element. If Thessa’s theory was correct, the lightning would pass through the center of the phoenix channel, providing energy that the phoenix channel would amplify and direct forward into a small basket of spent godglass. The lightning would then bury itself harmlessly in the ground.

The phoenix channel was brought up first, and though the hour was late, Thessa knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep until it was installed. She fixed the couplings in place wearing thick leather gloves, though she had no idea if they would actually stop lightning from killing her in the case of a freak strike. Pari helped her, scrambling around, bringing in everything that the Grappo enforcers carried up from the carts.

When they finished, Thessa stood back with a happy sigh to examine her work. It was one thing to examine diagrams and have theories and draw up schematics. It was another entirely to have it all come out to her specifications.

“You really think it’s going to work?” Pari asked.

“Either we’re going to go down in history,” Thessa replied, “or we’ll have wasted quite a lot of Demir’s money.”

“Or both.”

“How so?”

“Well, we could end up being famous for getting a bunch of us killed by lightning.” Pari raised her eyebrows, and it took Thessa a few moments to realize it was meant to be a joke. Sort of.

“We’re not going to get killed by lightning,” she said, hoping she sounded confident. Tirana already thought she was a madwoman. Best if that idea not spread around the rest of the enforcers. “As long as these three lengths of cable are attached and the phoenix channel is grounded, there should be no danger.”

“What happens if it’s not grounded?” Pari asked.

Thessa shook her head. “Then the lightning will jump. That’s not going to happen, though. We’ve followed all of Professor Volos’s instructions. The worst that will happen is nothing.” That might, she silently admitted to herself, be a fate worse than death. Working so hard, creating so much, only to have to start over from scratch. If this failed, she would have let down herself and Demir, but also Kastora’s legacy.

“Funny,” Pari said, chuckling to herself, “but my dad has kept every piece of godglass he’s ever used over the years. It’s in a little hatbox underneath his bed, and my grandma has been begging him to throw it out since I was a little kid. He must have hundreds of pieces of low-resonance forgeglass. Maybe a few others. If this works, and we can actually recharge godglass, we’ll never hear the end of it from him.”

“My aunt used to do the same,” Thessa admitted. She felt her smile falter and worked to keep it in place. Best not to think of the people long gone, but how happy they would be to see her succeed. “Think of it: secondhand godglass will become a thing overnight. First thing I’ll do is tell Demir to buy this piece of land. We could have a permanent outpost up here with a dozen lightning rods and phoenix channels and…” She was getting ahead of herself now and she forced herself to stop. “It could be grand,” she finished.

Their conversation was arrested by a distant scream, followed by a series of shouts. Thessa and Pari exchanged a glance before rushing out into the open. Thessa shielded her eyes from the drizzling rain, peering toward the lanterns on the other end of the Forge. By the time she reached them she found most of the Grappo enforcers milling about near the ledge, Tirana and Breenen among them.

“Did someone fall?” Thessa asked.

Tirana swore, looking around at her enforcers. “Who was it? Who’s missing?”

“I think it was Justaci,” someone answered. Within a few moments the name was confirmed, and the party grew somber. This was a bad omen at best, to start the phoenix channel with a death, even an accidental one. Thessa briefly wondered whether she was cursed, or if the goddess Renn had finally turned on her for what she did at the Ivory Forest Glassworks, but she pushed the thoughts out of her head. Damned foolish.

“Are we going to try and get him?” someone asked.

Thessa pushed her way into the group, to where Tirana and Breenen were conferring underneath an umbrella. “We could lower a rope,” Breenen suggested.

“That’s a two-hundred-foot drop onto the rocky coast,” Tirana responded, her tone tense. “He didn’t survive that, and I’m not sending anyone down there in the dark in inclement weather.”

Thessa looked between the two, then around at the concerned faces. Almost all of the supplies and equipment had been brought up, and the enforcers looked exhausted from all the effort. “We should post someone down at the bottom of the trail with sightglass,” Thessa said. “It’s unlikely anyone survived that fall, but if he did we want to be sure we rescue him.”

“Agreed.” Both Tirana and Breenen nodded, and within a few minutes a small group of volunteers, including Pari, was heading back down the slippery trail. They would get as close to the bottom of the cliffs as they could, peering into the darkness with sightglass. The rest of the enforcers soon disbanded, heading to their tents, leaving Thessa shivering beside Tirana. The master-at-arms remained close to the ledge, her neck craned, wearing a look of consternation.

Thessa moved to return to the lighthouse, but Tirana took her by the arm. “Thessa, Demir forbade all of us from asking you what’s actually happening here. I get it – a secret silic project. He doesn’t want to risk a leak to the Dorlani or anyone else. But I have to ask you … is this worth people dying over?”

Thessa glanced involuntarily at the ledge. Was there a right answer to this? “Yes,” she said, “it is.”

“Would you die for it?”

“I’d rather not,” she said with a half smile. When Tirana remained serious, Thessa swallowed the lump in her throat. “Yes, I would.”

“Good. Because I don’t know if that was an accident.”

“Why would you say that?” Thessa asked, feeling her stomach tighten. “It’s slippery, it’s dark.”

“No one saw Justaci fall,” Tirana replied.

“That’s not enough for real suspicion, is it?” Thessa didn’t want to scoff at Tirana’s instincts, but this seemed to take it too far. “Anyone could have…”

Tirana raised a finger. “When we arrived here, Justaci took me aside at the first chance he could get me alone, and he told me that someone left the basement access to the Hyacinth unlocked. Those Dorlani enforcers didn’t get in by wile or accident. Someone let them in. I don’t know who it was. I don’t even have any suspicions. But keep your wits about you. We may have a traitor on our hands. One that’s willing to kill.”

Tirana strode off, calling to a pair of nearby enforcers to post a night guard, leaving Thessa wet, alone, and very frightened. She looked up into the pitch-black sky, raindrops hitting her face, and hugged herself.

So much for leaving the city for safety.