Aethosphere Chronicles: Storm of Chains Page 6

  Why have the pirates fled to this dead zone, wondered the weary noble, hugging his arms close to his chest for warmth. It had long ago been cleared of any livable structures, and now stood open to the raw elements of winter blowing through the city. Sure, no imperial commander could possible expect anyone to survive out here, and might ignore it, but any airship patrol would easily spot the activity and know something was amiss.

  Whatever their reasons for coming to this place, no one said, but instead disembarked from the truck after pulling up to the empty shell of a foundry warehouse.

  The cold, compact ground crunched under foot as Drish followed through the rubble.

  The savagery of the wind coming off the lake cleaved right through the flesh, to settle into the captive noble’s very bones, leaving them pained and brittle. Death by hypothermia seemed a certainty, until they slipped into a sheltered compartment within the high walls of the factory floor.

  Though still miserably cold, at least the wind was gone from the air, and that in itself was enough of a relief for Drish to feel grateful. Inside the edifice, which turned out to be an empty coal furnace, they found perhaps two dozen armed men and women huddled about barrels of burning refuse, while standing in their center like some sort of pauper king, was Drish’s father, Arvis.

  The fugitive accountant’s temper flared upon seeing the root cause of all his trouble, and even though the elder Larken looked beyond exhausted—even when taking in account his paralyzed left side—Drish felt little sympathy.

  As soon as Arvis noticed the new arrivals, he came hobbling stiffly over to greet them. A disfigured smile tugging at his face, but Drish steeled his resolve against the hated man.

  To send pirates to kidnap me…the gall of that man is mindboggling!

  Throughout the chamber the rest of the gathered insurgents rose to their feet and turned to watch as Drish was escorted into their ranks, led by Bar Bazzon and his pirate brigade. These insurgents were beleaguered souls to be certain, haunted and dirty, with either too much malice, or too much weariness in their faces to ever find happiness again. Between the lot of them, there wasn’t an unsoiled shirt or a proper outfit to be seen; just a hasty assemblage every bit as ruinous as the structure they’d taken shelter in.

  At the fulcrum of all this suffering, Drish opened his mouth, meaning to berate his father and his ill-conceived attempt at rescue, but Abigail rushed ahead first. She scampered right up to the elder Larken and threw her arms around him. “You made it, Arvis!” she cried happily into his leathery neck, while jealousy painted Drish’s vision green watching the spectacle.

  “That I did,” he replied readily, patting the girl’s back with his strong right hand, even as the left hung limply at his side. “But truthfully, just barely,” he pulled away. “But what of your assignment?”

  “Afraid it didn’t go as smoothly as we’d have liked, Arvis,” Bar confessed for her, as he locked hands with the insurgent leader in greeting. Both looked genuinely pleased to see the other…and why not? Drish mulled. The two were side by side for nearly a year during the Chimera’s restoration in the fleet yards.

  “It’s good to see you again, my friend; damn good,” he heard his father spout off in his slurred speech. “Were you followed though,” he asked more gravely.

  “Not on the ground,” replied the captain cautiously, before glancing up over his shoulder into the low-slung clouds. The High Crown’s under-spires had become lost somewhere above the billowing gloom settling in and promising more snow. “Not sure about in the air though. Saw tale of activity from the old Cloudfortress…so could be that an Iron warship got a bead on our escape using ocular magnification.”

  “You boys talk strategy a minute, I’m going to check in with the others,” said Abigail, giving the old gentleman a pat on the shoulder with all the tenderness of a diligent daughter. Without even so much as turning to say anything to Drish, she strolled away. Not only hadn’t his father said a word to him yet, but Abigail was just walking away…and all because of this Resistance. But then had he really expected some heart-to-heart farewell with the girl? He tried to push aside the silly sentiment. After all, he wasn’t some hero of a war-tale who was destined to get the girl in the end through his valiant nature alone. No, this was real life…but then to be so casually forgotten by everyone blew through him like the chilled wind off the Lordswater.

  “Anyway, Arvis,” continued Bar, “I’d say staying here too long is about as suicidal as staying at that tavern of yours.”

  “Agreed, we’ll make preparations to retreat down into the Smugglers’ Redoubt as soon as the last of the cells have arrived.” For a moment Arvis shifted his eyes to his son as though to address him, but Bar interrupted before he could.

  “Listen Arvis,” he said in hushed tones, “this isle’s got edges. Eventually they’ll stumble upon the Redoubt. You’re stuck on a floating trap, my friend, so what about leaving…join one of the other factions…on Crowswaine maybe, where the Empire isn’t as entrenched?”

  “Bar, even if I knew how to get in contact with them, I wouldn’t risk it. That list’s got me thinking we might have a snitch in our midst, and I won’t put any more men and women in danger.” Suddenly frustration draw a clear path across the malleable parts of Arvis’s wrinkled face. “Damn it!” He turned and stalked, limp-legged across the cold, hard ground. “I hate to have to think that any of these fighters are untrustworthy; not after the sweat and the tears and the blood we’ve all shed together. I don’t want to have to start thinking like that, because once we go down that road—of accusing one another—well dammit, there’s no going back. We’ll tear ourselves apart quicker than those imperial siege hulks ever could.”

  Bar signed heavily and offered his old friend a tired smile that set Drish squirming in place. “Sorry to say, Arvis, but that’s something you just don’t have any control over; not now; and I’m sure it’s only going to get uglier from here on out. Now you know I got my ship, and you know you’re more than welcome to come aboard—as though I got to remind you of that.”

  “Thanks, Bar, but no thanks. King’s Isle isn’t lost. I won’t let it be, not my isle—not on my watch,” vowed the crippled leader. “Damn those snitches! I can’t think of anything worse than a traitor.”

  Drish felt guilt flush red-hot through his cold-numbed face. Given the chance, snitching was exactly what he aimed on doing. But then right here was exactly the reason why he supported collaboration with the Empire in the first place. What were these men accomplishing by huddling up in a burned-out factory, besides being cold, paranoid, and doomed? If ever he had to think of a way out of this mess it was now, before he was pulled any deeper into the muck and the mud with these lost souls and their dilutions of restoration. Sure, there was a pang of sympathy for these fellow Candaran men and woman. Most of them looked younger than him, naïve and simple, and with the dull-eyed expression of the lowborn class. They were never equipped to think about the grand picture; it simply wasn’t their lot, and now they were in over their heads. He pitied them, drawn into a hopeless conflict such as this. If any of them had a brain they would take the captain up on his offer to leave this isle.

  And then Arvis turned to Drish. “I’m glad you’re here safe, son, and I wish we had a bit more time for pleasantries, but… so is the way of the Pantheon. Now I know we didn’t exactly part on good terms last night. We both said a lot of things that we didn’t mean—”

  “Are you so sure about that?” interrupted Drish rudely. He wasn’t interested in his father’s olive branch.

  “How ‘bout I let you two talk this one out alone,” said Bar. “Seems to me like…family business, to be sure, so I’ll leave you two at it.”

  Drish was glad to see the pirate go. Damn meddling fool, never should have come in the first place. He should have stayed on that damn airship of his.

  “I—” his father started, but Drish cut him off. “Why did you do this? Why did you send that oaf to kidnap me?”

>   “Kidnap…? Son, you were on that list, you were in danger. I just thought that—”

  “What, that I was helpless? That I needed to be rescued, father? I haven’t needed your help in years.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re being like this, Drish—why you hate me so much. I’ve always told you that working for the Empire was a foolish idea. That it didn’t matter how much you tried to impress them. In the end you’re just another Candaran, beneath their contempt, and easily replaceable. In the end, they would have seen fit to stick you in the stockades sooner or later. Why you ever agreed to sign that Oath is beyond me.”

  “You seem to forget that my life as a collaborator was going fine until you destroyed it. It wasn’t the imperials who put me on that list; it was you—you and this pointless ‘resistance’. This misplaced loyalty to the idea of bringing back a lost nation and a dead king. What difference does it make if we serve a king on the throne here on King’s Isle, or an Emperor on the throne in Junction? How does it change the simple rules of survival?”

  “Gods, Drish, they invaded us, slaughtered us—”

  “We started the war!”

  “That’s what you think? We were already at war, son, since the Endasol Engagement—before that even—when the Empire decided to start spreading through the Candaran states of the Giedi Cluster, and harvesting atmium that didn’t belong to them!”

  “It doesn’t matter,” snarled Drish. “None of it. In the end life it is what we can make of it; what we can earn; where we can live; and what we can accomplish under the circumstances we’re placed in. It’s not in the idea that we’re bound together by imaginary borders held together by the invisible force of patriotism. I’m not willing to die for a fantasy like some people, Arvis! I just want to go home!”

  The elder Larken stood shocked into silence, and he didn’t speak for some time. Meanwhile, Drish fumed angrily in the cold air that blew in between them, until finally his father spoke. The man’s tremulous voice issued soft and low, as though trying not to upset the dead that were buried in the snow and rubble beneath them. “You don’t have a home, Drish; it was the Empire who took that away from you the second they invaded. Now I just don’t know how you can keep making excuses for them in light of that truth.”

  “No, dammit, I have a home! It’s at 521 Cooper Street, Arvis. I was there this very morning and would’ve been there tonight, and the night after that, and the night after that had you not taken that away through your actions.”

  Arvis sighed and looked up past the rafters, into a steely, overcast sky peeking down through the holes in the roof. “Occupation under the rule of the Iron Empire can bring with it many titles,” he spoke softly as wandering snowflakes tumbled down his cheeks, “imperial and Ascellan, Hierarch and Candaran, collaborator and loyalist, traitor and insurgent; and yet where do the titles of father and son fit in the grand scheme of it all?” His far-flung gaze came to rest on Drish. “A day will come when the people of Ascella rise up. And I… I don’t want you executed as a collaborator when that day comes.”

  “Really? Rise up?” Drish pointed to the motley insurgents huddled along the fired-charred walls. “Them? You’re a damn fool, Arvis! I would have taken my chances against that fantasy any day. Make no mistake, the Empire will outlast each and every one of you gathered here today.”

  At that Arvis, wavered, his strength seemed to have been spent. “How can I make you understand?” And then his legs failed him, and he began to crumple to the ground. Drish was surprised at himself. He never even tried to help his father; instead he just stood and watched as the man collapsed into the ash and melt-water beneath his feet.

  Abigail appeared at the stricken man’s side almost instantly, glaring up at Drish in accusation. “Aren’t you even going to help him…? How can you just stand there like that…doing nothing?”

  “It’s easier than you think,” muttered Drish as he turned and walked into the open air outside the furnace room. The snow had begun to fall again and Drish took off his glasses, letting the flakes tumble over his naked face. Each bit of snow that landed melted into a cool drop of water that ran down his burning skin, soothing that savage anger burning within him. After only a few short moments he already felt light enough to float away with the rest of the flurries. It was time for him to leave, he knew that…and his father must have known that as well. Producing a handkerchief from his pocket, Drish wiped away the moisture from his cheeks…not sure what was just snow and what might have been tears. It didn’t matter either way. Tucking the cloth back in his breast pocket, the noble perched his glasses on his nose, leaned forward, and beginning the motion to what was going to be his first step back into the Empire’s embrace.

  But a gunshot rang out before he could finish even that much.

  Drish felt its heat pass him by as it howled in the air looking for blood. He dropped to the ground. A woman began to scream, and then someone high above him yelled “assault machines,” just moments before the unfortunate sentry was silenced forever by a second shot.

  Cold mud was seeping through the aristocrat’s fine clothing, it was in his mouth, he could taste the ashen dirtiness of it, feel its grit on his lips and on his tongue. An artillery blast thundered, and a piece of the building exploded to dust and shrapnel. Pebbles pelted over the noble and when he looked up he saw the flash of imperial uniforms storming through the brick façade.

  They had been followed… or did they know the insurgents could be found here? Perhaps Arvis’s theory of a snitch was correct. Regardless, they were discovered. Along with the soldiers appeared Quadrupedal assault machines, and behind them the squeal of ball bearings promised tread-rovers gathering in mass. The empire had dedicated a sizable force.

  Clatterbolt fire rattled and big guns thundered, and in no time at all the furnace room was a hell of debris and death. What insurgents remained were scrambling for cover or returning fire, while somewhere nearby that woman continued to scream. In the chaos, Drish dared to hunt out this lamentable banshee, turning his head even though it brought the fear that the bullets pealing through the chilled air around him would be attracted to this movement, but he needed to know.

  He was horrified to find it was Abigail screaming. She was with Arvis, his head resting in her lap as she held her hands to his chest. Even from his prone position in the dirt, Drish could see that his father’s blood was pumping out from between the girl’s slender fingers.

  He’s shot! Drish felt panic, and he tried to get up, but the legs to an Iron war-machine clomped by, freezing him with fear. It was Bar who appeared at Arvis’s side in his stead, and through the distance that separated them, the son could only watch in helpless despair, as his father sought comfort in the arms of others in his last dying moment. There was no doubt Drish felt nothing but hatred for the man who’d sired him, yet sitting by and watching him die on the frozen ground tore out his heart just the same. He could see the strength draining from the senior Larken as he struggled to hold onto Bar Bazzon’s collar. He could see Arvis coughing to get his last words out; could see how they came up in foaming bubbles of blood instead. The intensity in Bar’s face confessed he was committed to memorize it all, and only when Arvis’s hand finally fell away did the pirate turn his eyes, locking them on Drish. The look in the pirate’s face was a thing no words could ever properly describe, and the collaborator could feel those predatory yellow eyes burrowing into his very soul.

  What has my father told him, wondered Drish, has he told the pirate what I think of this resistance…? The muscles in Bar’s body tensed and he lunged towards Drish like a wild animal, as though to prove that he did, but a hail of bullets drove him back before he could reach the fallen collaborator. One of the projectiles seemed to strike him, but the man appeared unfazed, trying again to reach his prey.

  Is Bar that determined to kill me? Was he willing to die just so he could get the chance?

  But then Abigail had the man by one arm, and the youth from the truck, Fe
n, had the other. Together they tried to haul Bar back, but the captain was a powerfully built man, tall and lean, and strong, and their combined efforts would have been for nothing had more pirates; Rook, O’Dylan, Tanner, and others Drish had no names for; had they not arrived to help drag their leader back behind the rim of the furnace, and out of sight from the soldiers and machines turning the freshly fallen snow into a tracked-up mud pit.

  What happened after that was a mystery, because Drish never saw the butt of the gun that knocked him out cold in the muck.

  Chapter 6

  When the young nobleman came to, he wasn’t on the muddy ground or in the deserted foundry. He wasn’t even out in the cold anymore, but instead on a soft bed, with clean white sheets. A doctor and a nurse stood over him. Both wore surgical masks, and white tunics. The nurse had just finished fastening an intravenous jar to a rack, and was now checking the line that ran to a shunt taped to Drish’s arm; while the doctor prodded and pocked at his head and muttered medical jargon in between “hmms” and “ahs”.

  “He’s coming to,” the nurse explained, and the doctor abruptly shifted his focus. A light came shining into Drish’s eyes; one so intense that it sent a throbbing pain through his skull and made his head feel like pudding. Combined with the sickening smell of chemical sterilizer, it proved too much to cope, and he nearly unleashed a torrent of sick except that the medical examiner ceased his scrutiny of the noble’s pupils. The absence of the light brought relief.

  “Seems responsive,” muttered the doctor through his mask.

  “Excellent,” a familiar voice clapped through the spacious room. “What’s his prognosis then?”

  “A simple concussion most likely, and nothing life-threatening. The X-ray showed no evidence of a skull fracture, and his current condition is a positive sign, but that doesn’t rule out additional swelling over the next twenty-four hours or so. For now we’ll monitor him, keep him hydrated and on pain medication, as well as an aggressive series of anti-inflammatories.”