47. FORTY-SEVEN
FORTY-SEVEN
CALVEROUS
Location: Steila
Acrushing pain struck Calver’s throat. His limbs seized. He closed his eyes for the end.
The hold released.
Calver crashed to the rooftop, shins splitting. He gasped for breath, eyes darting toward the Ruxian child. Raimee stood across from him on the southwestern ledge, hands outstretched, brow contorted with focus. Behind her, Niklaus collapsed in a wet heap with a yelp.
Calver scrambled for his dowaga.
She was alive! She was—
Kretch. He’d told her to come, thinking it the only guaranteed way to keep Cul’Mon’s attention. He’d thought they would be isolated. He thought it might give her—them—a chance.
He’d thought wrong.
Cul'Mon growled in Tera’thian, “Collect her.”
The boy’s eyes widened, but his disciplined feet set into a combat stance.
He turned his gaze to Raimee, then the southern cliff face behind her.
A crack ripped through the air, and the basalt began to crumble and toppled in her direction.
Raimee gasped but held steady. The chunks of stone parted over her and Niklaus, striking the ground around them in a perfect circle.
Calver’s chest inflated, but had no opportunity to marvel further. Cul’Mon surged toward him, dowaga raised.
He had no fight against a Ruxian. But he was ready to settle a very long score. Calver gritted his teeth and leapt to meet him.
NIKLAUS
Stone crumbled over Niklaus’s head, pelting the rooftop in a ring around him and the Ruxian like a summer rain. At the opposite end of the warehouse, Calver had already scrambled to his feet, found his weapon, and gone back about his battle.
Just meters away, his body a silhouette against the blood-red sun, another Ruxian—a boy—glared at them.
“Ah… Niklaus?” the woman he’d just pulled half-dead from the sea panted. “On second thought, let’s put you somewhere else.”
Without warning, the ground beneath Niklaus disappeared. He yelped as a colorless mess of tangled aether swallowed him.
It spat him out a heartbeat later. His knees hit wooden planking, and he fought to retain the contents of his stomach. The world around him was dark but steady, and he gasped as he made sense of his orientation.
A thin sliver of crimson shone against the blackness—the crack beneath a door.
Niklaus crawled towards it, hands and knees thunking against the wood.
He was in a Red Wing wagon. He felt for the handle of the door and swung it open, letting the fiery evening light flood the space.
Not just any wagon—the mess supply wagon.
He let out a low whistle. She definitely hadn’t missed this time.
A shivering sigh of relief overtook him. Safe. For the first time in far, far too long, he was safe.
“Get down!” a voice bellowed to his left.
The door splintered as it was pelted by tanka bits. Kretch. Why did he even bother to think anything at all?
Niklaus scrambled backward into the wagon and huddled in its corner, pulling a metal tray from the shelf to shield himself. The clash of steel and the thumping of bits hitting sand sounded all around him. Of course. The wagon was with the Red Wing, and the Red Wing was engaged in a clash of armies.
Niklaus waited for his end to meet him. Any moment now, a Tera’thian soldier would walk in and place a well-aimed shot between his eyes or slice his throat. They had a battle to fight. They’d be quick about it. It probably wouldn’t hurt much.
A set of boots thunked up the steps to the wagon, and Niklaus squeezed his eyes shut. What perfect irony that his splattered insides were going to make a mess of the cleaning supplies.
Was that really going to be his final thought?
“Fates above, Meyernes. I can’t believe that’s really you.”
It was Chevek. He’d thought Chevek had served him up. But if he had, why save him?
Niklaus lowered the tray. He never thought he’d be grateful to see a Balfida.
Chevek held out a hand. “Get up. We’ve got them in retreat. But I’ll get you behind our lines with the other civilians in case they regroup.”
“Civilians?” he stammered, allowing Chevek to pull him to his feet.
“Encampment staff and Steilites. We’ve been guiding them through the pass. I’ll hide you with them for now. You’re supposed to be dead.”
Dead? Niklaus was too stunned to move.
Chevek, not prepared to wait, threw one of Niklaus’s arms over his shoulder. “Fuck. You’re all wet. How did that happen?”
Niklaus was still trying to put together how he’d gotten from the ocean to the wagon. Magic. A battle between Ruxians. No one believed him even as things were.
“Never mind,” Chevek grunted, pulling him from the wagon. Niklaus stumbled through the sand beside him without argument. “Preservation must have a thing for shitbags. That won’t be slipping on my watch. Let’s get you to safety.”
“Dead?” Niklaus finally asked, his tongue strange around the word. It made sense. Limtush was supposed to be poisoned. Niklaus done away with. But the confirmation was still shocking.
Chevek kept his voice low. “Covern has been working closely with the General Prime. And the General Prime had you listed as an endangerment to our forces. But I kept thinking about what Latouda used to say about you… something wasn’t adding up.”
Niklaus swallowed.
Chevek nodded at the Red Wing soldiers streaming past them towards Steila. “We’ve got them overrun. The fight is ours by nightfall. I don’t expect their ambush went as planned. If it weren’t for you, this would have been a very different fight.”
“Me?” Niklaus asked dumbly, wracking his brain for anything he’d done beyond hold up a tin tray in the mess storage wagon.
“When you told me there was something wrong with the plates, it was right after Thyatira had distributed formations for our arrival to Steila. He wanted to set base level recruits ahead, shields in hand, in a vanguard, rather than a marching column. That was the tipping point for multiple suspicions I’ve had throughout this campaign.
Then, when you never showed up after our discussion, I took it to mean they’d eliminated you.
My team took your tip. We removed the cores from the shields and hid them in a rear wagon.
The ones presented to the vanguard were ineffective. ”
What were the odds that, after years of speaking, someone had actually listened to him? “You took my word? Over Thyatira’s?”
Chevek snickered. “Totally fucking stupid, eah? Talk about an explosive payoff.”
“Senseless as they come,” he stammered.
“You’re alright, Meyernes.” Then, more soberly, “Thank you.”
Chevek’s mention of Latouda gnawed at Niklaus. Niklaus was, in part, the reason she had died. Chevek’s brother had been close enough to her to suggest betrothal. It would be inappropriate to stick a finger into an old wound, but…
“You knew her?”
“Latouda?”
“Yeah.”
Chevek’s lower lip caught in his teeth as he pulled Niklaus along. “We grew up together. When she wasn’t helping her mother up in your parts, she was running through Shrokan’s alleys with us. She taught me my letters—many more of us, too—against the ordinance.”
Latouda had never let on that their secret lessons had proliferated.
“And what did she used to say about me?” he asked, not sure he was ready to hear the answer.
Chevek snickered again. His sweat pattered into the tall grasses beneath them as they lumbered towards a cluster of Steila’s inhabitants, stationed behind a line of Red Wing wagons beyond the city’s perimeter.
“That you were too good for her and definitely too good for the rest of us. Too good for humankind. Not the haughty kind of too good. The good kind.”
Niklaus blinked back the sting behind his eyes.
“And she said you would always struggle because of it. She wasn’t ready to struggle more than she already had.”
So Latouda had betrayed him. But she had also loved him?
“She was very protective of you,” Chevek continued.
“Wouldn’t let us take all the advantages Covern wanted to, considering her easy in.
It made him so mad. As I understood it from him, she knew it was senseless to wait for you, but…
she also never really gave up. He hated you for it.
I hated you too. But I knew there was no way she would have gone all starry-eyed for a lying, money-manipulating scumbag. ”
Niklaus let Chevek keep his arm for support, but his feet were a little stronger beneath him.
“C’mon. We’ve got a lot to talk about. I don’t know what stunt Thyatira’s trying to pull here, but I know my brother didn’t approve it, and I won’t stand by it.
I’ve ordered my men to stay silent about what we know until we can get the truth out in Seraphinden. You’ll have a place to stand with us.”
Sense returned in bounds as Niklaus realized he already had a place to stand.
He dug his heels into the ground. “Chevek, I’m not ready to go behind our lines.
” He looked past the battlefield—rolling grassy dunes, sloping down a rise into the port city, blue uniformed soldiers in retreat, red in pursuit—in the direction of the warehouse at the edge of the sea.
It would take him at least fifteen minutes to run there.
How long had passed since he’d left Calver and the Ruxian? Five? Ten? They could be…
“We need to get into the city. I’m not the one who prevented this ambush.”
“The mute?”
Niklaus nodded. “He’s in trouble.”
CALVEROUS
Calver had nearly forgotten the unearthly speed of his once-owner. The only one who had ever been able to match him blow for blow—and defeat him without fail. But now, dipping into the void, Calver kept pace with him. He was wearing him down.
Cul’Mon made a two-stepped retreat. “I’m going to give you a chance to surrender. Stand down, and I’ll call him off.”
The fact that Cul’Mon was trying to negotiate meant he was nervous.
“You can be a part of our chance to rebuild. Or you can be eliminated.”