Chapter Twenty-Seven

It turned out that Beacon's little engineering team was packed with overachievers. They hadn't made one new prototype, but three, each using parts of his design to modify a small engine.

Only two of these exploded. The third went soaring up into the air, visible only by its blinking light in the darkness—which let some people on a quadcycle with nets zip out and catch it once it fell.

The ascent left the crowd in awe. Most of the people of Beacon had gathered here to watch as they were being evacuated from their homes to the larger central ships.

"It ascended so high," one of them said. "Far past where a ship can normally go…"

"This might work," another said. "It actually might work!"

You are so lucky, the hero says, that one of them flew.

"Agreed," Nomad whispered. If all three of those tests had exploded, he might be facing a riot.

The engineers gathered around him as the engine was retrieved. They looked up at him like children, anticipating praise. Storms, he always felt awkward in this sort of situation. Still, he'd been trained in the right words to say. "Excellent job. You just saved this city." He nodded toward the engine. "Flew higher and faster than you thought, eh?"

"It was supposed to hover," Solemnity Divine said. "That's what your design said, at least. It's working too well, rocketing into the sky. We'll do another design run on that. But there's one other thing I wanted to talk to you about."

She pointed to several large ships near the center of the city, each dominated by a cylindrical structure three stories high. The water towers. They were like the enclosure for the Chorus, but more industrial. People were being moved into the other ships that had been chosen for the ascent, including the central hub. But not these three.

"Those should contain just enough to get us up the mountains and then let us control our descent," she said. "We'll put them at the edges of the city, uninhabited, and let you be ready to drop those entire ships off once they are empty. But we were hoping for some help on how to insulate and heat them. Against the cold, you know? We'll crash quickly if our propellant freezes once we get past atmosphere."

"You don't know a lot about space or vacuums, do you?" he guessed.

"Uh, shades, no," she said. "Why would we?"

"You don't need to insulate against the cold," he said. "Though do install some heat sinks—particularly on the piping near the engines. We should be fine, as we'll be dumping heat prodigiously. That's kind of the point of all this. But I would still worry about those pipes."

"Heat," she said flatly. "You're worried about too much heat? Up that high?"

"Trust me," he said. "If we enter a true vacuum—which we might not actually do—the only way to lose heat is through ejection of matter or through infrared radiation, which is extremely slow. There's no convection. No air to conduct heat away. I suggest some fins, if you have time, exposed as much as you can and ready to radiate heat. But my guess is it won't be relevant."

She nodded, taking his word on it, and went off with the others to begin creating new designs. As he stood, watching the people be sorted into the ships, he was surprised to see a break in the clouds above—that was supposedly rare on this side of the sunrise—which let the city pass into the light of the rings again. They illuminated a landscape of jagged and craggy highlands. Rainwater ran down the rugged stone hills in a thousand little waterfalls.

That's a sight, the knight says with awe. Just water and stones, but on such a scale as to be beautiful. Amazing. Why is it we hate traveling these worlds again?

"Because we're being hunted?"

Right, of course, yes. But…I do wish we could pause a little more often and just enjoy the view.

Enjoying views was for someone who didn't have a gun to his head.

Off to his right, one of the ships broke away from the main bulk of the city and fell off, smashing to the ground below and interrupting the waterfalls. A work crew moved on, having recovered the sunheart from that ship. They entered the next one in the outer ring, and soon it detached and dropped off as well. Then a third. They were inanimate masses of metal, yet in this situation they seemed somehow forlorn, even tragic. Gravestones for the city that was no more.

As he watched, he was joined by Contemplation, walking with a cane—her hair wet, despite the protection of a wide-brimmed hat that had been pinned to it. Surprisingly she shaded her eyes against the light of the rings. As if even that dim light bothered her.

"We are getting uncomfortably close to those mountains, Sunlit," she said. "At least that engine of yours seems to be working."

"We should still do a test run," he said. "When we're closer to the peaks, we should take one ship out and let it fly up high to confirm that the engine works as intended."

"We could, perhaps, use the one assigned to you." She nodded to the side, where he could pick out his home on Beacon—a ship with only a few small rooms in it, a wide deck, and a bulbous cab near the back. "It was Elegy's ship, named the Dawnchaser. She had it reinforced, so she could try to push into the great maelstrom at the edge of night, drawing ever closer to the sun."

"Why would she want that?"

"It was one of her ideas for survival," Contemplation said. "The Cinder King leaves people to die in the sunlight, then keeps a force of ships patrolling the edge of the great maelstrom—ready to snatch those sunhearts from the ground the moment it is safe to do so. Elegy wondered if there was some way to travel the great maelstrom itself—that boundary between the rain and the sunlight—and get them before the Cinder King could." She shook her head. "It proved impossible. Even if we could make a ship survive long enough, there was no way to leave the ship and recover the sunhearts."

"The more I hear about Elegy," he noted, "the more I like her."

"Because of failed ideas?"

"Failed ideas lead to successful ones, Contemplation. They're the only thing that does."

She nodded, thoughtful, looking along the slopes, toward that great maelstrom. A place not in the sunlight, but dealing with the effects of its passing. He still hadn't figured out the mechanics of this place. Why that tempest didn't lead to planetwide unlivable weather patterns. Why the sunlight even burned on the level it did in the first place.

"Elegy always did seek the light," Contemplation said. "Then one day the Cinder King rammed it right into her chest…"

Yet another ship collapsed, joining the trail of broken heaps they left behind.

"You know," he said, "in my homeland, we have a story about someone who got too close to the sun. It's a common enough theme across cultures and worlds. It never ends well."

"If it pleases you to reassure me," Contemplation said, hands on her cane, "then you are failing. Since that's essentially what we're going to be doing in a few short hours. But…what is this story you reference?"

He hesitated.

Go on, the knight whispers, it's all right. I want to hear it. Give in a little.

"They came from the east," Nomad said in the local tongue so Contemplation could understand. "Giants, in armor forged of the deepest metals. A horde of death and destruction that ate the land, consumed villages like insects swarming the crops. Ripping. Smashing.

"My ancestors fought them, because what else could you do? Submit to a force that only wanted to devour you and the civilization you stood for? We waited in ranks, each of us smaller than the invaders, but strong as a whole. Walls of honor and training, the only possible way to stem that tide of destruction. They called themselves the Alethi, but we knew them as the Tagarut. The breakers, it means. Those who leave only death.

"It was during the fourth invasion of our Ulutu Dynasty, the dates so old that no scholars can agree on them, but it is generally thought to have happened during the days of our fifteenth emperor. The Tagarut came again, as they were like the storm itself. Regular. Every generation. Another warlord. Another invasion."

"Giants, you say?" Contemplation said, looking up at him. "Compared to you?"

"Yes," he whispered as another part of the city fell. "I've stood among them. Called some friends. They stand closer to the sky than any people I've ever known, Contemplation."

"How do you befriend something so terrible?"

He smiled. "Legend says a change happened during that final invasion of the Ulutu Dynasty. The breakers—tired of falling to our armies—decided to try a new tactic. They decided to conquer the sun.

"‘What a lofty place,' they thought. ‘It must glow with riches to shine so brightly.' The Tagarut found the highest mountain and began to build scaffolding. They brought their greatest war machines, their towers for taking cities, their ropes, and their Shardbearers. And they climbed up to the sun itself, intent on destroying whatever people lived there, despoiling their land."

"They climbed to the sun. So it's a fanciful story." She sounded disappointed.

"Truth and fancy intermingle in almost all stories, Contemplation," he said. "Especially the old ones. You cannot abandon fancy without gutting the truth. But in this story, yes, the central idea is fancy—for they reached the sun, eager to find weapons and tools they could use to finally claim my homeland.

"But the sunlight was too bright. The riches of the vault of the Almighty itself glowed with an intense heat. The Tagarut could not carry the gemstones they found, for they shone so bright as to destroy a man. The proud giants, the terrible warriors, were forced to flee—beaten not by spears or shields, but by the very treasure they sought to claim.

"From that day it was said that their eyes had been bleached by the intense light, like clay cooked too long. Instead of normal dark browns, many Alethi have watery blue or other light eyes. The brilliance of the heavens—where Yaezir himself sits upon his throne—had destroyed their ability to see as common people do. Though they now saw the world washed-out, the gleam of treasure also faded because of this.

"After their loss, the Tagarut began to act like people. No longer lusting only for treasure, they learned to speak. Never to write, but still, a measure of civilization came to them. And that is why, to this day, the eyes of their leaders are light-colored. And why you can finally have a conversation with one—instead of only running for your life."

He looked to Contemplation and found her smiling. She stared forward, watching her city fall to pieces, an ideal abandoned like so many needed to be. "I had not expected to find a storyteller in you, Sunlit."

"I had not expected to become one."

"If it pleases you to say, is that the end? Where is the moral?"

"There is none. It's just a whimsical story."

"Curious. Our stories are never like that. There's always some message. Usually rather heavy-handed, if my bluntness is not too shocking. For some reason, many involve children who get eaten by shades."

"My master likes those kinds of stories," Nomad said. "The kinds with points. It's gotten so he lies and tells people there isn't a point to anything he says, all to keep them from drifting off and ignoring him for preaching to them. But I've found I prefer the ones that are just…stories. No point other than to be interesting."

Contemplation nodded as the building he'd met her in, the one that had been her home here on Beacon, broke away and fell off. "I should like," she whispered, "to live my remaining days in a place where we could afford to tell such stories. A place with no running. A place of peace and…whimsy."

"I understand," he said.

Contemplation and Nomad were forced to retreat from their edge of the city as those ships were dropped off next. They mingled with the many people who stood closer to the center, watching their city be dissected—pieces cut free, like fingers removed to save the arm from gangrene.

Next to him, a child holding her mother's hand pointed at the sky. "Look, Mommy. A new star."

"How would you know, Deborah-James?" her mother asked.

"We study the stars in school," the girl replied. "So we can know where we are. Look, it's new."

Nomad froze, then turned and searched the sky. He found it almost immediately, up and to the right, near the rings. Glowing brightly in reflected sunlight.

Well, storms, the knight whispers. Party is over.

"Huh," Contemplation said, following his gaze. "It is a new star. Or…a new part of the ring, maybe? A good sign. A sign, maybe, that Adonalsium blesses our journey?"

"Yeah, no," Nomad said. "That's not a new star or an asteroid, Contemplation. That's a massive warship in low orbit around the planet. They're called the Night Brigade. Distant cousins of yours, actually. They're here to kill me."