Wind howled from the ridges of the arctic massif that comprised the Jokyl Mountains, while the winter sun flitted in and out of brisk wisps of cloud. Hunt Leader Ilia sat cross-legged on the ice, hands resting on her knees, eyes closed. She pictured the flame in her mind, trying to suffuse her body with warmth. Every inhale and exhale took a measured eight seconds. Her pulse slowed. Warmth suffused her limbs, radiating out from her core. The sound of the wind faded as the crackling flame in her mind grew brighter. Her body grew light as she levitated a few inches above the frozen lake.
The daughter of a void mage and a demigod, Ilia boasted no magic of her own apart from her unreliable ability to focus on her meditation. Her father commanded void particles, her mother had divine blood, while Ilia was stuck with the power of simple belief and self-determination. It wasn’t fair.
Nearby voices interrupted her thoughts. The flame sputtered. Ilia tried to hold on to it; tried to fix it in her mind’s eye as her mother had taught her, but it was no use. Viscous drool splattered her pants, followed by a rough tongue dragging along her exposed cheek. She dropped hard onto the ice, eyes fluttering open.
“Simon, you scoundrel,” she laughed, “I nearly had it that time.”
Simon the bullmastiff, licked her face again, snorting and drooling his affection all over her sealskin pants. She took his face in both hands, crooning sweet nonsense and kissed him on his cold nose. He shook his heavy, wrinkled face, spittle flying in all directions so Ilia had to turn away to avoid getting soaked. Then he turned and trundled back to camp, tail wagging, green sweater bright against the stark white of the landscape. Ilia stood and followed her canine companion across the ice to where the rest of her reliquary hunters were breaking camp, the spikes embedded in the soles of her boots providing ample traction.
“Hail Solo,” she said to Coraline, who was tying off her bedroll and stuffing it back into her pack.
“Hail Solo,” Coraline muttered. She was the newest hunter of the Rostovka Monastery, the headquarters of the hunters, and Ilia knew little about her. Coraline handled herself well enough in a fight, but she was quiet and surly most of the time. Rumor had it she was an escaped slave from a coffee farm on Flynt, and Ilia recognized the woman’s difficulty in adapting to the vastly different climate in the arctic circle of Highgaard.
“Hail Solo, Gearbox,” Ilia said, coming to stand beside the golem.
“Hail Solo,” Gearbox said through chattering teeth. Despite his oilskin trench coat and fur-lined gloves, the winter weather was hard on the metal man. The frigid temperatures affected the efficacy of the grease, and ice sometimes gummed up the works, causing him to ‘chatter.’ He didn’t feel cold the same way the rest of them did, but the effect was close enough to feel familiar.
The twin Ankhim, Aput and Masak, sparred, stripped to the waist, the clack of their staves echoing across the frozen ground. The frigid temperatures appeared not to affect the arctic Ankhim, their white skin traced with the delicate tribal tattoos of their people. For this type of mission, the contingent of Reliquarists was usually larger, but a storm three days prior had scuttled their rendezvous with Vertrag and his men. They had received a raven yesterday with a message saying he was returning to the monastery. There had been much swearing and gnashing of teeth at Vertrag. He and his men were supposed to pick up Ilia and her crew in a snow skiff. Without him, it meant they had to walk from the gaiagate over Bazak Pass to the abandoned hunting lodge the hunters sometimes used for shelter. The pass was arduous and steep, not to mention walking put them several days behind schedule.
Forget him, she thought. We can recover the shard key without him.
Ilia scratched Simon behind the ears, her attention on Gearbox.
“What are you cooking?” she asked. “It smells great.” She tried to stick a finger in the yellow goo, but the golem batted her hand aside.
“It’s a roc egg,” Gearbox said, stirring the contents of his cast iron pan with a wooden spoon, “and it isn’t finished.”
“Where did you get a roc egg?”
Gearbox pointed up the slope to a craggy outcropping. “Up there.”
“It wasn’t frozen?”
“Partially.”
“You went up last night?”
Gearbox nodded. “While you were sleeping.” It was difficult to interpret expressions on the brass face, but Ilia had run with the golem for so long now that she had learned the subtle cues that indicated his emotional state. The way his eyes flitted back and forth, the way he turned away from her ever so slightly. He was embarrassed.
“What about the recharge?”
“I have enough spinners to get me to Valehaven.”
Ilia sighed, “Put out your array tonight, I don’t want you running on empty.”
He looked up at her, eyes sparkling blue. It was as close as he could get to smiling. “Worried about me?”
“We’re already down a crew, thanks to Vertrag. I need a working golem, not a frozen hunk of metal. Besides,” she laughed, “I don’t think I can convince Masak to carry you again.”
“What’s that?” Masak looked up at the sound of his name. Aput caught his distracted twin behind the knee with his quarterstaff. Masak harrumphed and landed face first in the snow, his brother pinning him with a broad knee until Masak tapped twice to admit defeat and end the fight.
“Two out of three?” he asked upon rising.
“It’ll have to wait,” Ilia said. “We have too much ground to cover to play around all day.”
“Bazak Pass,” Coraline muttered, coming to stand behind Ilia who jumped at the silent woman’s approach.
Djinnar’s blood, Ilia thought, it’s creepy how silent she is.
“That’s the route,” Ilia said. “The gaiagate should enter the opposite valley just before midnight.”
The troupe gazed up the slope toward Bazak Pass, which was shrouded in dense, gray clouds.
“Let’s hope that storm moves off before we reach the top,” Coraline said. Aput and Masak shrugged.
“We’re not all as well insulated as you two,” Ilia teased.
“You calling us fat, hunt leader?” Aput feigned offense.
“Burly, I’d say.”
“Burly!” Aput flexed. “I’ll take it.”
Ilia rolled her eyes in good humor. Many hunt leaders ran their crews with a strict hierarchy, but Ilia saw her hunters more as the family she never had. Men like Vertrag teased her for it. They complained she was too young to be a hunt leader, but her mother ran the monastery. A combination of high marks and nepotism had made her one of the youngest hunt leaders in Reliquarist history. She’d earned her stripes, including saving Vertrag’s bacon on more than one occasion.
“Eat up before those rocs return and realize we breakfasted on their offspring,” she said. “Coraline, load the gear on the yak, please.”
Coraline’s eyes were wide. For reasons Ilia did not understand, their newest member was afraid of the hairy pack animal.
Well, she’ll have to get over it. It was tradition that new recruits pulled the most unsavory jobs.
Ilia’s mother had tasked her group with retrieving a cursed Shard Key. Ilia normally scoffed at curses. The Rostovka monastery had an uneasy truce with the Empire. The Emperor wanted the old god of Chaos, Corendar, to remain in his prison in Basalt. That meant void relics like the Shard Key had to be kept out of the hands of the Shackled, Corendar’s monstrous followers. The reliquary hunters collected these for the Emperor, and he left the monastery alone to govern itself and see to its other purposes unmolested.
Bellies full and yak loaded, the party began the steep ascent up the snowfield to the toe of Bazak glacier. At its base, Ilia, Gearbox, and Coraline roped themselves together. Ilia attached Simon to her harness with an extra bit of rope. Aput and Masak seemed to sense the deadly crevasses lying beneath the fresh snow, so they led the way, while the yak fended for himself. There was no rescuing the enormous beast were he to plunge into one of the ice fissures, and Ilia refused to let him take anyone along with him.
The snow was deep and the going, slow. They paused once to strap on the broad snowshoes made from stracci reeds harvested near the monastery. Ilia doubted the snow skiff would have done them much good. Maneuvering the ship in bad weather between myriad vast crevasses would have been a tricky endeavor.
As they neared the top of the pass, the wind picked up, making conversation difficult beyond short, shouted commands. Thick clouds still clung to the heights so that Ilia could not see Gearbox on the rope thirty feet behind.
A hard snow fell. Ilia had to pick up her pace to follow the Ankhim’s footprints before they filled in. The day stretched on, a monotonous white world that seemed to slope upward forever. Ilia attempted to check her watch. Her oversized mittens prevented her from prying the cover open, as it was frozen shut. She had no sense of time, no way of determining whether they would miss their rendezvous with the gate. She did not relish the idea of waiting two months for it to come back around or trying to chase it across the frozen landscape.
Behind her, Coraline shouted and fell. The rope went taut, yanking Ilia backward. The weight of her fallen comrade pulled Ilia down the mountain for several long seconds before she could find purchase with her feet and dig the sharp end of her ice pick into the snow. She pressed all her weight into the head of the pick and came to an abrupt halt that nearly yanked her arms from their sockets.
“Gearbox!” she shouted over the wind. No reply came. Ilia built an anchor in the snow for the rope, so that she might repel down and assess the situation. Suddenly the tension on the rope eased. The unexpected sensation of weightlessness caught her off guard, and she slid a few more feet down the mountain, little pinwheels of snow rolling away from her boots. Her toes were going numb. She tried to picture the flame in her mind, to suffuse her limbs with warmth the way she’d been taught. It didn’t work. There were too many distractions. She couldn’t focus. Ilia cursed her own ineptitude.
A shape loomed out of the gray-white. Gearbox!
“Are you alright?” he shouted.
“I am,” Ilia replied.
“You can get up.”
“What happened?”
“Coraline punched through into a crevasse but climbed out.”
“The yak?”
Gearbox shook his head.
“Djinnar’s blood,” Ilia swore. “How much gear did we lose?”
Gearbox shrugged. He was right. This wasn’t the place for this conversation. Ilia stood brushing snow from her clothes. The curse of the Shard Key rose unbidden into Ilia’s mind. She wanted to laugh, as all such Chaos artifacts came with cautionary tales, but abandoned by Vertrag, standing on the side of Bazak Pass in a blizzard, and with their gear and yak at the bottom of a crevasse, it might be enough to make her believe.
“Let’s press on,” Ilia said. “We can take stock at the gaiagate.”
Gearbox nodded once more, his face hidden behind the flaps of his hat.
Shortly thereafter, the ground leveled out, indicating the top of the pass. Masak and Aput stood with bored expressions on their faces as if they’d been in dozens of high-altitude blizzards. Maybe they had.
Their descent down the east face went more smoothly. The snow was deep, but their shoes kept them afloat. Soon they descended below the dense clouds crowding the summit and emerged into the twilight of Yaskir Valley, where Ilia called a brief halt.
From their elevated position, she could make out the snow skiff at the abandoned hunter’s lodge. A vast herd of caribou stood between them and their destination, their bellows and grunts visible as white puffs of air in the evening chill. Ilia watched the shadow descend along the ridgeline as the sun sank below distant peaks and pulled her jacket tighter around her shoulders. To the south, the gaiagate shimmered, a turquoise ring around a starry ovoid.
“Let’s go,” Ilia said, stamping her boots to get feeling back in her feet. “It’s only going to get colder.”
“I’ll let you know when it gets cold, hunt leader,” Masak laughed. Ilia punched him affectionately on the arm.
The troupe descended the gentle slopes west of Bazak Pass. The caribou paid them little heed, though Ilia remained vigilant. Their lofty antlers swept back in sharpened arcs. A few snickered and stamped their feet nervously at Gearbox’s presence. Ilia knew the metal man often made the animals nervous, and she prayed to Solo that they weren’t afraid enough to stampede with her crew embedded among them.
Being trampled by caribou before their mission really got underway would be an ignominious death, and Ilia was determined not to have one of those. The monastery adept told stories about the heroic deaths of famous reliquary hunters, and Ilia wanted her place among them when her time came.
They navigated the caribou without incident and were soon chiseling ice from the lodge’s doorframe to gain access. Evening twilight filled the entry hall with long shadows. The roof sagged dangerously under the burden of heavy snow, and the hearth was dark, though Ilia could hear rats scurrying through the nearby kitchen.
“We need to move quickly,” Ilia said. “The gate is nearing the end of the valley.”
Curse that coward, Vertrag. Ilia thought. When I return to the monastery, we will have words.
“Aput and Masak, get the boiler on the skiff heated. Gearbox, see if they left us any supplies in the kitchen.”
“What about me?” Coraline’s teeth were chattering. Ilia worried the adept was a liability. First, the crevasse and the lost yak, now a failure to manage the cold.
“See if you can find some wood and start a fire in the hearth,” Ilia said. It was busy work, and the hurt expression on Coraline’s face told Ilia that the woman knew it, but the adept did not object.
With her crew at their tasks, Ilia and her mastiff retreated into the gallery to find the mission packet. Hopefully, Vertrag had remembered to leave it before he fled. A blast of icy wind rattled the windows, and Ilia looked anxiously west. They did not have the provisions to weather the mid-winter gales notorious in arctic Highgaard for making the landscape impenetrable for days. Small tendrils of cloud, like carded wool, clung to distant peaks, but Ilia saw nothing ominous.
Taxidermized hunting trophies cluttered the gallery. Ilia lit the lantern hanging by the door to navigate the glassy stares of caribou, polar bears, weasels, pheasants, ermine, foxes, wolves and the centerpiece, a huge white mammoth, its ivory tusks as thick as Ilia’s forearm. The mission packet waited on the writing desk at the far end of the room. Ilia let out a breath she had not realized she’d been holding. If Vertrag had failed to leave that, their trek through the arctic would have been for naught. That would have been an insult worth dueling over. Vertrag was a skilled swordsman, and, if Ilia were honest, the outcome of a duel between the two of them was uncertain.
Ilia flipped open the lid of the metal box, adorned with the tripartite circle of the Rostovka Monastery and the reliquary hunters. The box contained a map of the Gaashian countryside where the gaiagate would deposit them, the Daronic cloister, where the artifact was believed to hide, circled in red. Beneath the map was a letter sealed in wax and a quartet of void breathers.
“Djinnar’s blood,” Ilia swore. Simon whined beside her as if he understood her frustration. She hated void breathers. The recovery of void relics required their use. The relics’ auras were often so heavy with void particulates that it was suffocating to those unable to wield void magic, which was everyone in her crew.
Ilia cracked the wax seal on the letter and unfolded it to discover her mother’s flowing script. Ilia, it read. Ilia sighed, never my daughter, but demigods didn’t seem to experience human emotion and connection in the same way. She scanned the letter. Their objective, the Basalt Key, was a wooden key fashioned by Kade from remnants of the Sojourner’s ship and was used to help imprison Corendar in Basalt. The wood was suffused with malignite from Basalt itself, thus the void breathers and the dampener.
“Kade’s hairy arse,” Ilia swore again. She might have expected the void breathers, but a dampener was another level of danger all together. Artifacts fashioned from void particulate itself required dampeners to prevent the powerful magic from having adverse effects on the people near it. The machine sat underneath the writing desk in a crate emblazoned with the same tripartite circle. Ilia had seen them before. Inside the crate would be a black cube two feet to a side that could be mounted upon a heavy, wooden tripod. A stout handle often protruded from the top to allow the cube to be opened and artifacts placed inside to shield people from the devastating physical damage of void particulate.
Simon nuzzled her hand. She pet his broad head absentmindedly, while considering. Crossing the void with a dampener attracted the creatures that dwelled therein, like balechtoplasms, starwing bats, or worse: chronoleeches from Mellibor, the river of time, or the Fallen.
Why could they not pick up the dampener after the void crossing? That would add several days to their mission. They didn’t have several days. If the reliquary hunters had learned the whereabouts of the Basalt Key, that meant the Shackled knew too. Ilia shivered at the thought of those rotting, animated corpses part-man, part-beast, known as the Shackled. They followed Corendar, fallen god of Chaos. She had encountered them before and barely escaped with her life.
The Shackled could not be allowed to acquire any artifacts that might aid Corendar’s release. If they freed the father of Solo’s children there would be a war in heavenly Avernus that would spill out into the World System.
Ilia pocketed the letter and hefted the mission box before returning to the entry. Simon padded after her. Coraline was huddled beside a tiny fire, rubbing her hands. The tips of her fingers were blue. The fire looked ridiculously small in the massive hearth. Gearbox had laid what provisions remained untouched by rats out on the table. Some stale bread, a carton of half-frozen eggs, and a bag of military grade ration bars.
Even the rats don’t want those oat bricks, Ilia thought.
“There’s a crate under the desk, if you two would load it on the skiff. We’ll get moving.” Ilia said in passing. “Handle it with care.”
“A dampener?” Gearbox asked.
Ilia nodded. Despite his fixed faceplate, Ilia knew the golem grimaced at the thought. She pushed worries of dampeners and void crossings aside and headed out to the skiff. The wind had picked up, biting through her coat. The last vestiges of daylight shown pink and orange behind the ridgeline. Masak shoveled coal into the hopper, while Aput finished rigging the sails. Ilia looked south. The gaiagate glimmered at the far end of the valley, overlapping rings of astral and aetherial magic enveloping a shimmering starfield. Gearbox and Coraline hefted the dampener onto the deck with a pair of satisfied grunts.
“Let’s get moving,” Ilia said, “if you think it’s cold now, wait until the sun drops below the ridge.”
Long moments passed punctuated by caribou clicks, as the troupe of hunters stoked the boiler and trimmed the sails. Gearbox assumed his position astride the dual winches that swung the boom, allowing them to steer the steam-powered snow craft. Coraline chipped ice from the aft propellers to get them spinning. The craft lurched forward. Ilia steadied herself by leaning against Simon. Masak stoked the boiler while Aput took the lookout, shouting directions back to Gearbox to avoid gouging the pontoons on sharp ice or jutting boulders.
Ilia pulled the fur collar tighter around her neck as the skiff picked up speed. The gaiagate soon seemed to grow off the prow as their ship closed the distance. A glance back over her shoulder revealed a thin tendril of smoke from Coraline’s dying fire curling lazily from the lodge’s chimney. The clouds on Bazak Pass were breaking apart in the twilight chill, and Ilia spotted a pair of rocs circling high above the ridge, too far to be any threat. Her stomach rumbled. They would get a proper meal when this was done.
The crate containing the void dampener vibrated as they approached the gaiagate. Simon whined and Ilia scritched his ears and wondered if he could sense the vibrational frequency of the device. Ilia scrounged around in her gear until she found the void compass and barometer loaned to her by the monastery.
“Aput,” Ilia called, “take the focus.”
As their troupe’s astral mage, it was Aput’s job to see them safely through the void. He abandoned his position at the prow and came to stand beside Ilia, who in turn stood beside the navigation panel that contained the focus. It was nephrite, polished to a high shine and set in an oval fitting. Aput pushed buttons and pulled levers to deploy the skiff’s small array. An ominous grinding sound emitted atop the mast.
“Array is stuck,” Aput complained. “Probably frozen.”
Ilia rolled her eyes. Nope, definitely not cursed, she thought and began to climb the slippery pegs fitted into the mast as a ladder. Without the array they would have no protection from the creatures of the void. Couple that with the fact that the dampener would call to those creatures, and their chances of successfully crossing the void between Highgaard and Gaash were effectively zero.
The array was indeed frozen, its delicate webbing half-deployed as the braces ground against ice frozen in the gears. She removed her gloves and tried to break up the ice with her hands, but it was too thick and she soon lost feeling in her fingers. She had to bang on the frangible apparatus and pray to Solo that she didn’t break it. Chunks of ice broke off to crash harmlessly below on the deck. The braces opened, extending the netting.
“It’s open,” she called down.
“Thank Solo,” Aput shouted up.
Ilia gazed around the Yaskir valley from her perch atop the mast. Sailing on snow was much quieter than the ocean. While the wood creaked and the snow crunched it was subtle compared to crashing waves and swirling wake. Even this high up, the mast barely rocked. The gaiagate was close now. She wanted to get down before they entered the laneway. If the dampener caused a disturbance, she didn’t want to be caught in such an exposed position.
She was halfway down when Gearbox cried out, “Gate, ho!”
The soft blue glow of Aput’s astral magic enveloped the ship. Everyone held on as the gate swallowed them and the skiff passed from the bleak white of the arctic circle of Highgaard into the star-filled blackness of the void.
The ship shuddered as Ilia stepped once more onto the deck. Perse light like mulberry wine, pulsed from the gaps between boards in the dampener’s crate. Ilia waited, expectant. The hands of the void barometer began to spin indicating nearby interference.
“Keep a weather eye on the horizon, hunters!” Ilia called out.
“Where’s the horizon?” Masak joked, leaning on his shovel, soot staining his torso. There was no need to shovel coal in the void.
“You know what I mean.”
The needles on the barometer ticked faster, and it took on a muted glow.
Whatever it is, it’s close, Ilia thought. She looked for distortions in the starfield but saw none. Simon whined, laying down on top of her feet, nearly tripping her. Ilia could hear the hum of the dampener now, too, and so it seemed, could Aput. The ship’s blue aura flickered before stabilizing once more.
“What was that?” Ilia asked.
“There’s some sort of interference,” Aput said, his breath short. “I have to work harder to do less. Maybe the array isn’t fully deployed?”
Except Ilia knew it was. “It must be the dampener.”
“Could be,” Aput said, sweat forming on his brow.
Ilia extricated herself from the cowering Simon to peer over the larboard railing. Far below she could make out the silvery-pink line of Mellibor, the river of time, where her grandmother held sway. Somewhere beyond that was inky Basalt, Corendar’s prison. Movement behind the ship caught her eye, and she turned in time to see several large distortions as a pod of balechtoplasms floated just beyond the laneway. She let out a sigh of relief. The massive void whales were almost always harmless.
She watched, fascinated, as they oscillated between visibility and invisibility. No matter how many void crossings she undertook, the playful antics of the balechtoplasms never grew tiresome. A deep bellow reverberated through the ship, followed closely by another.
“They’re talking,” Ilia said, the excitement in her voice betraying her youth. She used her commander voice when leading her cadre of hunters, despite their familiarity, but she had never heard void whales sing before. It was a soothing vibration deep in her chest and a dull buzzing at the top of her spine.
“Astounding,” Gearbox replied. He was gazing behind them in what Ilia assumed must be admiration. Like the boiler, there was no need to operate the boom inside the laneway.
The screeching of the largest flock of starwing bats Ilia had ever seen interrupted the resonant whale speech. Thousands of them came careening up the laneway to gather around the mast, flitting and diving, until the entire crew had to shield their faces with their hands. All except Aput, who clung to the focus, and Simon, who overcame his discomfort to snap at the irritating, harmless creatures. Ilia laughed, watching him. The mastiff briefly forgot his fear in his euphoria at so many swooping morsels. Beyond the prow, through a haze of bats, the Gaashian gaiagate glimmered green.
“Hold on, Aput. We’re nearly there,” Ilia called over the din. He did not respond, but Ilia could see it was taking every ounce of the Ankhim’s limited astral ability to hold the shield over the distortion of the dampener. Surrounded by the peculiar creatures of the void, Aput was a sober reminder of what was at stake. If the shield failed, they would all suffocate and freeze to death before the skiff arrived on Gaash. Still, Ilia could not help but stare as a school of mullywugs floated by, their thin tendrils propelling them upward through the void like ovoid bubbles.
Ilia gaped as she caught sight of what appeared to be two children dancing in the void. Their skin the color of dead moons, their eyes coal black and full of stars.
Are those Nefeshi of the void? Ilia marveled. I didn’t know they existed.
Aput let out a groan as he sank to his knees before the navigation panel.
“Djinnar’s blood!” Ilia swore, tearing her eyes away from the astral menagerie to lend her support to the faltering Ankhim. Masak, too, hustled over, and together they hoisted Aput to his feet. His hands never left the focus, though Ilia could see that his nails were cracking and splitting; a thin line of blood trickled from his nose. Their terminus loomed large now. Through the gate, Ilia could discern a low line of hills covered in stubby charro grass. There were boulders strewn about the landscape like toys discarded by giants, and scrubby pinyon juniper clawed its way upward from Gaash’s acidic soil.
“Almost there, big guy,” Ilia said, trying to sound encouraging. “Hold on a bit longer.”
Aput’s hands slipped from the focus, and the ship’s aura winked out. The cold chill of the void slammed into her, nearly knocking the breath from her lungs. It was much more intense than the arctic weather they’d left behind. She could feel her breath crystallizing as she tried to suck in air. What little air there was in the laneway was not enough to sustain anyone for long.
She and Masak grabbed Aput’s hands and placed them back upon the nephrite, which reflected myriad stars and swooping bats in its polished surface. The stellarium aura returned. The deathly cold retreated. Ilia doubled over coughing as heat flowed back into her lungs. When she finally got ahold of herself, she stood up to see that they had left the void behind them. The skiff thumped against the uneven countryside.
“Hold on!” Ilia cried.
Gearbox jumped to the winches, but the boom was of limited use on rocky plains. The Eldarians on Maxon had ships that supposedly sailed the grassy Veldt, but this was not one of them. There was a great rending sound as one of the pontoons tore away. The skiff listed hard to port, the broken strut creating a deep gouge in the dirt. The whole troupe was thrown forward hard. Ilia lost track of Simon as the poor dog pitched over the side and disappeared. Fortunately, the strut had the effect of a handbrake, bringing the skiff to a halt after traversing a clockwise half-circle.
“Everyone alright?” Ilia shouted after she caught her breath. The skiff creaked and popped as the wooden hulk settled. The deck cantilevered precipitously toward the ground. Ilia held onto the main mast’s rigging to keep from sliding off the boat.
“Systems functional,” Gearbox replied. He dropped from the boom onto the ground below, where he stumbled before finding his footing. “Mostly.”
“Fine,” Masak and Aput called in unison. Aput bled from a shallow cut on his scalp, but nothing serious.
“Where’s Coraline?” Ilia scanned the horizon. She spotted Simon first. The mastiff’s green sweater caught her eye, his tail wagging happily. He licked Coraline’s face. The impact had tossed her overboard, knocking her unconscious, but she was coming around, her feet stirring.
“Let’s unload the gear,” Ilia said. “I want to make the cloister before dark.”
The sun sat low on the Gaashian horizon. It was probably wishful thinking on her part, but her map showed the cloister only a dozen kilometers from the gaiagate’s exit point. The ringed gas giant, Solo the Mother Goddess, was more distant here. Highgaard was the second moon out, so the goddess’s presence filled the sky day and night in a way Ilia found oppressive, but here, the mother’s orange glow was more subdued.
Gingerly, they unloaded the void dampener along with the rest of their remaining gear. They shed their winter layers as it was early spring on this part of Gaash and while a winter chill lingered in the air, it was nothing compared to the frigid tempest whence they’d come. Coraline sustained a mild concussion, but nothing worse, and the troupe’s concern at their ungraceful landing was soon replaced with giddiness as they remembered the spectacle of the laneway and the void crossing. None of them had ever seen so much activity before. They worked quickly as a team, distributing their remaining gear evenly across the different packs. Aput carried the dampener.
When they were loaded and ready, they walked westward along the rim of an ancient crater. To the north, the ground sloped gently toward a large bowl where water formed a nearly perfect round lake. To the south, undulating plains marched in ragged lines toward the Strait of Haritha. From their vantage point on the ridgeline they could see for a long distance in every direction.
It was twilight when the ruin of the Daronic cloister appeared on the horizon. The crumpling spandrels, buttresses, and spires of the old temple tower reared up under a star-filled sky, backlit by the last sunset hues of the day. Ruins sprawled across several hectares. The central tower, once a six-story web of stone, lay in a heap of rubble, the top half laid out in a line where it had toppled.
Ilia scanned the ruins for any sign of activity or any indication of where the Shard Key might rest. There was no discernible pattern to the cloister’s footprint, which made sense for a temple devoted to the former God of Chaos. A thin tendril of smoke rose from the chimney of a nearby outbuilding. The building was round, perhaps an old granary, and the roof had partially collapsed. Someone had covered it with canvas, and the flickering light of a cookfire peeked through the unsealed edges.
“Shackled,” Ilia reported. Her crew lay on their stomachs beside her on the hillock.
“Blood and snow,” Aput whispered the Ankhim curse. “How many?”
“Hard to say. All appear to be inside that building.”
“Shackled are like termites,” Gearbox said, “if they’re here, you can bet the swarm is close by.”
“Like glaciers,” Masak echoed.
Ilia turned her attention toward the cloister, “Where’s this key supposed to be?”
Coraline produced a small leather-bound volume from her pack and flipped through the pages. The Litany was the reliquarist’s bible. It contained a record of every artifact known to the Rostovka monastery, and what information various esoteric sources had written about them.
“The Shard Key,” Coraline read, “forged by void mages loyal to Kade after the Usurpation, it is made of…”
“Skip a bit,” Ilia complained.
Coraline skimmed down the paragraph with one finger. “Zymagus writes that he viewed the key in the Chapel of the Nefeshi on the southwest side of the main cloister. Craggin claims it was moved to the vaults below the cloister during the Scourge of the Shackled.”
Ilia scanned the grounds for any sign of movement while she listened. “Djinnar’s hairy arse,” she swore, cutting Coraline off.
“What do you see?” Gearbox asked.
Ilia pointed and the troupe followed with their eyes. The Shackled had constructed a gantry above a large hole in the ground just inside the narthex to the old cloister. It mimicked the kind constructed on Behl to raise and lower miners into the moon’s mineral-rich caverns.
“Looks like the Shackled have read their Craggin,” Coraline said.
Ilia shivered, she did not want to go underground; down into narrow claustrophobic spaces filled with rats, mud, and the deceased bodies of decaying void mages.
“Let’s hope the Shackled haven’t found it first,” Ilia said.
“I’d like to avoid them if we can,” Gearbox said. Aput and Masak nodded their agreement. Shackled blood was so infused with poisonous void particles that it melted iron and steel. It would destroy a sword, or a golem.
“We should be able to gain access to the gantry without arousing suspicion,” Ilia said, “as long as we stay quiet, we can be in and out before the Shackled know we’ve stolen from them. Aput give the dampener to your brother. You’ll stand guard.”
“I can go in,” Aput insisted.
“You know better than anyone that as an astral mage, the dense void particulate down there will be harder on you than the rest of us. Plus, I need your muscles to raise the platform when we’re ready to ascend.”
Aput nodded, unhappy but resigned to his role.
“We’ll move northeast around the edge of the ruin to avoid the Shackled; single file; on me. Everyone, put your void breathers on.”
There was a rustle of leather and fabric, and a jingle of buckles as the troupe of relic hunters donned their masks. They covered the whole face, round lenses providing space for viewing. Air entered through a port below the nose where an aether gem filtered out void particulate. The aether filter provided resistance, making each breath hard work. The lenses obscured her peripheral vision, and a distracting scratch covered part of the left eye. Still, it was better than the alternative. Void particulate in the lungs caused the bronchioles to burst open. It then entered the bloodstream and burned the victim alive from the inside out. Of all possible deaths a seasoned hunter faced, Ilia feared this one most of all.
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