V
Lojen
DRENTH SUNG WITH the Hymn of War.
The first blast, blocks away from where he was crouched, rattled the unsteady apartment complex, and forcefully sent Lojen Tevunson careening off the rooftop. His clawed talons groped for something, anything, as the black funnel of aethecite smoke ruptured like a blowing geyser. Attached to the building was a ladder of entirely too much rust and sharp metal. The rungs dung into Lojen’s leathery palms as he grabbed, but his claws clacked against the iron as his shoulders strained to keep him from being blown completely off the building a hundred stories to his death below.
The ladder’s moorings shivered under his bulk but dislodged the uppermost twenty feet. Gathering his wits, Lojen scaled the ladder upward and jumped the growing gap between building and ladder toward the ledge. His claws found purchase in the drab concrete and slimy grime left by Gargantua’s dispelled aethecite.
Aside from their holy roles as wardkeepers, drakken were renowned for their climbing abilities; their claws capable of penetrating nigh on anything. Their tails counterweight, their muscular bodies as strong as four aurochs in one. Their hides coated in impervious, lightweight but near impenetrable exoscales. Men and their aetheurgy Forms repeatedly tried, and failed, to replicate the drakken body, paling in comparison to the lower order of draconem from the Isle of Merj.
Therefore, Lojen made the roof in short order, just as another blast rocked the no-longer sleepy Drenth. His claws were coated in the ashy filth by the time he topped the once ornate but now sandblasted lip. The massive drakken deftly tightrope-walked across the apex between roof and slanting tiles, his tail swishing a blur of greyish blue.
The crossroads of the northern borough the people of Drenth called Stanktown was filled to the brim with trash, and not the vagrant humans suffering from radiation poisoning or their meager possessions. This trash was a recent endemic: the Fallen’s soldiers.
Imperium soldiers filed into the crossroads like ants pouring from their disturbed hill. Armored in grey-painted firedrake scale armor head to toe and wielding wheellock rifles, the Imperium soldiers took up defensive positions all around the empty plaza, under the dilapidated mega-roads. Others shone floodlights, searching the area. Tremors rumbled under their feet, which sent some to their knees. The remaining glass in the surrounding buildings fell in the quakes from the explosions, raining down like a prism storm. Some of the soldiers ducked, but others hauled a green-bearded man toward an armored vehicle.
Through the haze, an airglider took flight, rising above the black smoke that filled the crossroads like a pitch-black avalanche. The airglider was shaped like a metal bird with wings outstretched in a forever glide, a cockpit of glass, combustion engine spewing grey smoke out its narrow tail. Small, ovular portals were cut into the riveted metal sheets both port and starboard, with a hatch and valve-like handle, though now open, a rope ladder spilled out. Two men clung to the ladder, a third on his knees below as Imperium soldiers moved in, his arms lifted in surrender.
It was the man on the ladder who drew Lojen’s attention.
Like a date freshly plucked from the palm, the man’s skin was flushed as the sandy wind whipped at him. Hair short and curly brown with a short-kempt beard to match. Young, perhaps forty, as far as humir went. His nose was narrow at the bridge and slightly hooked. But beyond that, even as the airglider disappeared in the fog of smoke and into the high buildings’ darkness, Lojen saw the man’s emerald pupils gleam with determination.
He knew that face and the man, for Lojen had been present at his birth. Emre Benld, heir to the Regency of Drenth. The true ruler of the city. Its only ray of hope. The one known as the Gutter King.
There were aetheric gunshots of Ignis, louder and closer than the explosions across the city, coming from the apartment buildings, including the one Lojen was hidden upon. The panging of bullets struck the fleeing airglider’s hull mere inches above the ladder-climbing men, others whizzed past their unprotected heads. The bigger of the pair—a Kanjan elfir by the look of it with his silver hair whipping in the wind—shouted in defiance. A cluster of shots riddled the hull and the glider lurched dangerously. Compressed air wheezed from the engine like steam from a teakettle on the stove. The airglider dropped from the loss of cabin pressure, dipping into the smoke. Lojen unintentionally rose from behind the ledge to follow its flight as it headed out toward the deep desert.
There were other airgliders now, dropping from Gargantua at record pace, like stones in a landslide. Imperium airgliders. Some of the larger gilders circled the giant floating fortress, rotating aetheric cannons positioned in defense, while the smaller transports hurried downward, depositing soldiers into the borough to join their comrades. Others flew deeper into Drenth, heading toward the many columns of rising smoke sprinkled throughout the city. A handful of the smallest and quickest chased after the fleeing glider.
Soldiers in the plaza below shouted, forcing some to point their floodlights his way as Lojen stupidly realized his folly with a curse. Diving behind the roof’s ledge, Lojen felt the rush of gunfire whiz by, chunks of brick falling across his body. Rolling to his back and grunting when a jagged piece of stone dug into his side, he found himself staring at the underbelly of the great fortress, its many engines churning that baleful fuel residue. Uncaring as the city below unfurled in chaos.
A low growl came unbidden to his lipless snout as his claw went to the smooth stump above his left eye socket, an unassailable reminder of the missing keratin horns that should curve from said stump. The horns that should have passed on to him at his father’s death when the Fallen took Drenth. The ritual of being named a wardkeeper stolen from him upon his father’s death, nay, Tevun’s murder. The holy rite by the Pentax denied him.
But that was why he came to Drenth, to right that wrong, to seek his father’s horns. To restore his honor and allow him to return to the Isle of Merj a wardkeeper.
Lojen crouched, then raced on all fours toward the other end of the building, claws digging into the tiles, smashing under his bulk. The city was din, but Lojen had seen what he’d needed to see. The rebellion had begun their attack like clockwork, attacking the aethecite factories in coordinated destruction. Loud and colorful in shades of black and grey. Random they were not.
Just like the letter that had summoned him to Drenth had said.
The drakken leapt from the edge of the apartment, his claw slamming into the weakened brick, three sausage-thick talons left deep gashes as he descended story after story. Lojen coiled his tail around his waist like a snake as he landed onto a balcony on the apartment’s fiftieth floor with bent legs as he ripped his claws out of the stone, the shiver of impact running up his legs.
The many aerescreens along the skyline went black as they were shattered by rebel bombs, only a few streaming warning messages from the Fallen’s pet, Solanine, before those burst. All the little drones in the crossroads filtered into the alleyways, searching. One passed over Lojen’s head, its blinking lights taking him in but rushed onward.
A drakken was hardly cause for concern in Drenth.
Even the trams on the fishhook rails had stopped as the bombs triggered across the city brought down Imperium-wrought factories. Explosion after explosion, synchronized. Smoke painted the nightturn in varying greys. A grisly canvas rendered masterfully.
The window held no glass, so he ducked inside the old building. “Ruane.”
Ruane Tevunsdotyr sat upon the ground opposite, her back against the wall, one of her legs bent, elbow resting lightly upon the fur-trousered knee. In her clawed grip, his sister held her drakken longknife, it glinted moonlight.
“Ru,” he said again, louder. This time her purplish eyes slid open, black pinpoint pupils dilating. “How in the name of Zenith are you sleeping while the city sings in war?”
A frown of pointed teeth broke her snouted face, exoscales retracting in annoyance. “I was just thinking about where I’d like to stick my longknife in the Fallen. I could almost taste his misery. Savor his death.”
His sister—six years shy of drakken maturity—glared at him with her predatory, slitted eyes, her long, graceful tail curled tensely around her. Though outwardly calm, Lojen sensed the anger boiling inside, she was eager, too eager by far. She wanted the Fallen dead more than he wanted his father’s horns. His gaze sought the small, horny protrusions just above her eyes, rounded instead of flattened like his own stumps. A reminder that he was different, something she never failed to remind him about.
The true heir of a wardkeeper’s horns.
It was the way of the Pentax for the sacred horns to pass to the firstborn hatchling upon the death of a wardkeeper when they reached the age of drakken maturity at one hundred and fifty—which was the equivalent to a humir reaching the age of twenty-five. Justice, the Arbiter of the Pentax, would bestow His grace upon the next honorbound to the horns, the holiest of rights amongst drakken.
Lojen was pushing two hundred years as drakken age and remembered his father, Tevun, fondly before he was murdered during the conquest of Drenth. But Ruane harbored a deep-seeded hatred toward the Fallen, Solanine, and any sycophant of the Imperium. A hatred so strong, Lojen feared she might be consumed by it.
Ruane slammed her serrated longknife into the rotted wood floor, her lean, light bluish, purple exoscaled arms flexed through her sleeveless, furred vest. “Today’s the day the Fallen pays for Father’s blood,” she growled a low, sepulchral roll from deep within her throat.
“It is,” he said calmly in an attempt to rein in her rising anger. Tevun had always cautioned calm, for it was the way of a wardkeeper. “This’ll work, Ru. Father was revered in Drenth and by the Benld family. The scion of the Benlds will help us regain our honor. The fruits are already ripening here.”
Tevun had been the Regents Benld’s wardkeeper since the early days of Drenth after the Fall of Eminence. He’d been there, their father, when the Last Godsking lost control of the Crystal of Life, breaking it, and sending the heavenly city plummeting from the skies. Tevun and a handful of the Last Godsking’s closest allies had survived the Fall, tasked to protect the fledgling new world.
A task Tevun took as hallowed as could be.
In the afterimage of the Fall of Eminence, the world that was became no more. Mountains had sprung from flatlands. Oceans had dried into empty basins. Once-thriving farmlands had become the Voidlands in the west. New continents had formed, new oceans had swallowed the old.
The lucky—or perhaps unlucky—survivors had struggled in the aftermath, with a new fear permeating the world: the mist. Thousands had flocked to the remnants of cities that were nothing more than ruins, a dire hope welled within the survivors’ breasts, safety in numbers.
Too bad the poison had found a deadly purchase anyway.
A score of mega-cities had grown from those early ruins by plucky survivors, and Drenth, east of the tomb of Eminence, was one of the largest, and that was because the desert offered a natural barrier to the ever-poisonous Sea of Mist engulfing the continent, rendering the mist only partially deadly instead of overtly deadly.
