“I’m here, and I will come to you after this is over. I love you. Be safe.”
“I love you, too.”
The call ended, and Honovi ignored the soldier frantically gesturing at him to head down into the basement in favor of ringing Caoimhe. As the ranking military officer on their flight, she had her own televox, and she picked up after the first chiming ring.
“Jarl,” she said, sounding a bit breathless, as if she were running.
“I’m with the Duchess Auclair. Blaine is safe with Caris,” he said.
“They’ve closed the city gates, but I’m hoping to get through to the airfield with the other military assets.”
“Are you going to launch?”
“Being anchored makes us a target.”
“Will you go for altitude, or will you fight?”
“I’d be a poor aeronaut if I ran from a Daijalan airship. We didn’t go searching for the fight; it came to us.”
It might not be enough of an excuse for the commanding officers back in E’ridia to accept, but Honovi would back her if she faced a disciplinary board. “May the Dusk Star guide you true.”
Caoimhe didn’t respond, the repetitive sound of an ended call echoing in his ear. She’d do her duty while Honovi hid, and it galled him that he couldn’t be on the flight deck with her. Tucking the televox away, he descended the stairs to the basement, where Meleri and Dureau huddled with their people and a handful of soldiers as well for security reasons.
Someone had brought Meleri a coat, and the duchess was wrapped up in warm wool to ward off the chill in the underground space that acted both as storage and safety. Honovi could see areas of the cement floor that were less stained than others, whatever crates that had once been there now removed, most likely to make room for moments like this. While some people appeared frightened, most were quietly resigned, with a weariness in their faces that spoke of having been in this exact situation before.
Honovi went to sit beside Meleri on an old wooden bench, Dureau scooting over to make room for him. She nodded at his approach, lips pressed into a trembling line, the gas lamps burning in the ceiling casting a sickly sort of color across her face. Still, she kept the fear she must be feeling off her face, and her voice, when she spoke, was steady enough.
“Winter storms kept Daijal’s airships grounded more often than not. With the weather clearing, I fear they’ll try to wipe this city off the map and Caris with it,” Meleri said softly, her words meant for Honovi alone. “You see now why we need E’ridia’s air force?”
Honovi had nothing to say in the face of her plaintive statement, knowing that the promises he wanted to give her were meaningless when bombs would soon be falling on the city above while revenants clawed at Cosian’s walls.
Nine
AARALYN
Memories of the time before the first city they’d ever built on Maricol were like fragmented pieces of clarion crystal—shattered moments that never quite fit after all these many years.
The sound of Aaralyn’s footsteps echoed against the walls of the catacombs beneath Amari as the North Star walked the length of a tunnel. She trailed her fingers across the cold metal walls that had survived the Ages on this planet and the one that came before, between the stars. Starfire dripped from the Wolf constellation tattoo wrapped around her right arm, providing never-dying illumination there in the dark.
She wandered below, aware of the weight of prayers above in Ashion’s capital city from all the people hoping to escape the noose of Daijal’s rule and those who didn’t mind it. The catacombs were quiet, though, the prayers once whispered within those expansive walls long since lost to history. But Aaralyn knew what they had prayed for, once, when desperate people had dug into the poisoned earth to survive.
Much of the catacombs had fallen into disrepair, hallways and rooms blocked off by past efforts, the full map of the underground city lost to those above, even the ones who purported to know it. They didn’t, not truly, not how Aaralyn once had.
This had been home, their beginning before the aether ate through their veins.
Before they were changed.
What the Duchess Auclair and those in the Clockwork Brigade didn’t know was how deep the catacombs truly went. The underground tunnels they walked merely scratched the surface of places hidden away in the dark for Ages. But the barricaded entrances, hidden behind packed earth and other efforts, weren’t a problem for a star god. Aaralyn passed through them all like a ghost, breathing in cold air and dust that reminded her, there beneath the ground, of the coldness found in a sleep with no memories that lasted years and years as they streaked through an impossible darkness like a comet.
Some vast, distant part of Aaralyn remembered the relief she felt when the stars fell on Maricol so long ago, like finally reaching the shore after so long at sea. She remembered, too, the husband she’d first breathed the fresh air with, before they knew about the spores and the poison and the revenants and the aether that would not let them go.
Down, down, she walked between cold metal walls, through closed doors and barriers of earth, the dark easy enough to see through when lit by starfire. Aaralyn made her way with unerring steps to a room where the metal walls were painted black, with flecks of gold that would have gleamed in the light of starfire if not for the thick layer of dust blanketing everything.
They’d called it a reflecting room, a place to pray and remember the dead burned above. The stars they would become were painted across the walls and ceilings, so different from the ones they’d left behind in some other life, some other Age, some other world.
But they could not leave each other, and Aaralyn would not break the vows she’d sworn at the start of their journey. Innes looked the same now as he did then, ever her husband, ever her regret in moments like this.
“Husband,” Aaralyn said into the deep, deep quiet there below the living, her voice echoing in a room that hadn’t heard sound in Ages.
