The Watch were still on top of the Taproot cliffs, crouched in the jungle at the raw edge, the last of the boundary laid behind them. Through a gap in the leaves they could see the whole sweep of the Void, and the Gith hulls riding outside the buoys.
The flagship was flying numbers.
Bone-white pennants on black cord, run up the mast where the whole shard could see them. Every few minutes the hoist came down and a new one went up. Slox had spent three nights with the stolen signal book, and she read them before anyone asked.
Twenty. Then, a while later, nineteen.
A raiding skiff slipped out from under the big hull’s shadow, low and fast across the silver, and turned for the shard. Solder could make nothing of the crew. But he saw the flag at its stern, snapping in a wind that wasn’t there: silver and blue. Not the Crusade’s colours. Not anyone’s they knew.
Time was short. They needed to get back to the village. Lindon shrugged off his shape and came up a horse. Veyer swung up onto his back, and they cantered off down the track, collecting Erwin and the centaur guides as they went. The other two ran behind.
The Gap
The count ran out.
Vestrath rose off the low ship, wings labouring, the old wound pulling. In her forefeet she hauled a stone the height of a man, black and cut deep with runes that glowed like coals under ash. Slox saw it and went very still. There was a stone like that on the Pale Fang’s deck.
The hulls drew apart until a hundred metres of open void lay between them. The dragon hung over the gap with the stone. On the bow of each spelljammer a robed figure stood and held a staff aloft.
Then came the chanting, and it made no sound at all. Two crews in one voice, carried from buoy to buoy round the ring, rising up through the soil and the soles of their boots until it was inside every skull on Oakhaven. In the lanes, people sat down where they stood and held their heads.
The runes on the stone flared. The air beneath it began to shimmer, and the shimmer spread down and sideways until it touched both raised staffs. Then it was a window.
Through it, for thirty heartbeats, another world. Quays carved from something that had once been bone. Towers rising from the ribs of a thing too vast to have died. A city built inside a corpse.
And out of it, the invasion. Landing craft in their dozens, packed rank on rank with armoured Gith. A commander stood in the prow of the first, and a flag bearer behind him.
The gap sealed like a wound closing. Vestrath dropped to the deck, spent, and did not rise. The two great hulls came about and made for the horizon. Their work here was done. Somewhere else, a count was about to start.
The Village
Nana‘s cauldron was steaming under the Main oak. Cloe was at her elbow with a basket of mushrooms and a look of great importance. Marna stood behind them both with her arms folded. The Watch heard them out, and the afternoon wore on.
Then the Watch handed out the jobs.
Somebody had to find where that skiff had put in. The centaurs took that one, and went off along the coast at a canter.
Somebody had to follow the landing up to the Shattered Shore and come back with numbers. Embrath decided that was hers, and that Erwin would be taking her. At some point she had decided that a centaur is a thing you ride. She gave him his orders from his own back, in her commodore’s hat, and Erwin, to his great credit, took them.
And smoke was rising in the north. Silaan and Talia went to find out why.
Nana pressed five healing potions into Veyer’s hands. Then, from somewhere deep in her coat, a sixth. It was pea green, and it glowed faintly. “For when it’s bad, dear.”
Solder laid a blessing over the four of them, and they felt it settle like armour.
Talia came back first, at a run. “There’s fire under the Fore oak.”
The Path
The forest ran with them.
Paths that had always wound now ran straight as arrows. Trees leaned out of the way. Where the ground fell away, the earth packed itself hard and glazed with frost, and they sat and slid down it at speed.
Solder in full plate is not built for stealth, but Slox steered him the last of the way. They stopped where a wall of broad, glossy leaves had grown across the track. Leaves that had no business on a well-worn path.
Through them, a clearing under the Fore oak. Crates stacked in rows. Gith in grey smocks, working fast. On a nest of straw and heat, a red dragon watching over a clutch of eggs.
High in the branches, a woman made of bark was watching them watch.
The Nursery
Slox went through the leaves and did not stop. She hit the dragon four times, each strike a handhold, climbing its flank as she went, and the fourth landed from its back. For one glorious moment she was riding a dragon.
Then her footing went, and she went off the far side.
Lindon threw up his arms and the sky came down: four black storms of ravens, shrieking. They buried the workers. The Gith went down under them and stayed down, and the birds did not stop. The noise was enormous, a wall of shrieking wings, and the dragon reeled in it.
It breathed anyway. Fire rolled over Lindon and Veyer. Solder hauled them back from the edge, and they told him in no uncertain terms how much the healing hurt.
“I’m called Solder and not Medic for a reason.”
The dragon died in the ashes of the Gith creche. Veyer went to the eggs with a hammer and did not leave one.
The Lurch
Then Oakhaven moved.
Not a tremor. A lurch, the whole shard dropping under their feet, as if something deep beneath it had let go. Then it began to slide, slow and sideways, toward the Tempest’s Maw.
The ravens took Lindon up, a hundred wings beating together, to where the dryad stood in the crown of the Fore oak. From there they watched a skiff slide in toward the little hamlet at Bramble Bay.
The dryad stepped into her tree and was gone, walking from trunk to trunk. When she came back out, she was grey.
Gith coming through the forest toward the bay. Between them, floating three feet off the ground on a disk of nothing, something that shone like a heart. On the beach, the centaurs. Just corpses now.
Going After It
The light was going gold through the trees, and dusk was coming, and somewhere ahead something that belonged to Oakhaven was being carried away.
They ran.
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