The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) (36 page)

Hayden admitted,
“We don’t. But we don’t have kings, either. At least, not anymore.” A thought occurred to him, and he made a surprised noise and looked at her, for a moment forgetting to feel self-conscious. “So is your mother not the queen, then?”

Talfryn snickered, leaning over to confide in him,
“
Someone
has to be the Over Delegate, Hayden. I’m surprised you don’t know more of this. You seem…learned.”

“
In matters of science, maybe. I mean, I find it all very interesting. I just…never really saw myself leaving Honora.” With that, Hayden’s good humor evaporated. He stared out the window as a snake-like creature wound like a ribbon around a glass pole topped with a sphere of white energy—a lamppost, he supposed—and then slinked fluidly away.

Talfryn startled him by poking him in the side and making his squirm.
“Do you want to see something a little more…
sciencey
?” The word sounded all the more ridiculous for her heavy accent.

“
Is that Northern?” he teased weakly, and with a laugh, she waved for him to follow her as she slipped down a less-travelled corridor with thin curtains of water pouring down either of its glass walls.

A set of brawny guards were posted at the end of the corridor. As Hayden and Talfryn approached, they simultaneously crossed their dagger-tipped spears, their bare arms heavy with muscle and flexed in a warning Hayden thought they’d be wise to respect. But Talfryn simply said a few quick words in Northern, and without so much as blinking, they withdrew their spears to let her and Hayden proceed into what looked like a gallery of sorts.

Artifacts and ancient automata sat on pedestals draped with silk while skylights on the ceiling shone down on a spiraling mosaic drawing them in towards the middle of the room like a whirlpool. Framed on all sides by a waist-high basin of sparkling water, the room was long and broad rather than tall, making Hayden feel like he had to duck even though he had more than enough room to stand.

“
Is this a museum?” he asked, stooping to squint at a piece of burnt-out circuitry sheltered in a dome of glass.

Talfryn glanced dismissively at the display.
“Not just. Come.” She waved for him to follow her deeper into the exhibit. He trailed her curiously but slowly, fighting the urge to stop at every pedestal to translate the golden plates affixed to each display. Rushing through a collection like this, he felt like Reece, who had always sped right to the Food from Epimetheus exhibit and bypassed what Hayden considered the most interesting artifacts in favor of free samples.

He was so busy trying to look four directions at once, he ran right into Talfryn, not realizing she’d stopped. While he stammered out an apology, she giggled and helpfully picked up his bifocals from where they’d clattered against the tiled floor.

“It’s no trouble. Here…this is what I wanted to show you.”

Blinking rapidly as he slid on his spectacles, Hayden peered past her, trying not to show how confused he was. Make no mistake, the new display was beautiful…he just didn’t know what the tall, tubular fountain was supposed to be. Its water trickled more than it fell, running down in a shimmering sheet over a crust of precious stones he didn’t recognize. Red and gold and teal, they pulsed with light, like fireflies, or beating hearts. The water steamed about them. Hayden’s glasses fogged as he leaned close.

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”

Talfryn mimicked him, leaning forward and bracing her hands on the lip of the basin. The pulsing gems, each as big as Hayden’s hand with all his fingers splayed, made fairy lights in her eyes.

“These,” she whispered, “are the city’s power source.”

Hayden stared.
“What?”

“
They were recovered from the trenches between Haldon and Lumiel, just west of here. The other cities all have one of their own, but of course, since Neserus is by far our biggest city, we require the most. Our scientists believe they actually fell from space, perhaps as many as a thousand years ago.”

“
But what
are
they?”

She shrugged.
“Stones. We call them
anai
. You are familiar with the concept of naturally-occurring energy?”

“
You mean like solar energy.”

             
“Yes, but more specifically,
nuclear
energy. The fusion of two nuclei, resulting in trace amounts of their atomic masses being converted into pure energy.”

             
Hayden nodded, following along. This was more or less straight out of Galfrey’s
Deeper Concepts of Deep Space
, which he’d studied in his free time between classes just last year.

             
Talfryn sat sideways on the edge of the basin. “The anai are like…self-contained stars, fixed on a loop, if you will. They’re creating their own energy as we speak.”

             
It took remarkable willpower for Hayden not to lean back as he said a little uncertainly, “That would mean they’re giving off radiation.”

             
“Yes, but hardly enough to do you harm just by standing there. They may very well be the only ones of their kind. For all our extensive research, we’ve come no closer to knowing how they were made, or
if
they were made, and by who.”

             
Though the bit about the radiation was hardly comforting, Hayden nonetheless took a seat across from her and looked at the glowing stones with interest. And wariness. The Kreft had supposedly been rooted in the Epimetheus galaxy for a thousand years. They had been trying to subjugate it and fighting The Heron for at least half that long, that or making them suffer for destroying their powerful weapon. But according to Nivy, the weapon hadn’t been destroyed, but hidden. Or perhaps more accurately,
lost
. Not even The Heron knew where or what it was; that knowledge had belonged to their ancestors, the earliest opponents of The Kreft. Could it be that maybe these stones, these anai, were a part of their history too? A self-sustaining, independent energy source would certainly change the tides of a war.

             
According to the duke’s research, Oceanus had yet to be touched by The Kreft except where waves from other politicking planets rolled over them—or else Reece would never have steered Aurelia here. Hayden hoped, now more than ever, it never was.

             
Oblivious to his wonderings, Talfryn reached with a hand and grazed the curtain of water turning the anai into shimmering, molten things. “I held one, once. Just for a moment.”

             
The wistfulness in her voice dragged Hayden away from his thoughts. “What was it like?” he asked.

             
“Like…holding a star,” she answered dreamily, then shook herself and looked embarrassed. “That sounded silly.”

             
At great risk of sounding very silly himself, Hayden tried to reassure her, “But not untrue.” She smiled gratefully, and he decided the risk had been worth it.

             
They chatted by the fountain for some time before Talfryn noticed his yawns were growing longer and more frequent. With some regret—on both their parts, Hayden thought—they started back for the guest chambers. They made it maybe two corridors before the sound of applause and broken clicking and Hayden’s curiosity pulled them onto yet another detour.

Not three minutes later, he found himself sitting amid stacked benches in a round room with vaulted ceilings and a polished, hardwood floor. If not for the way the domed glass ceiling was a blatant reminder of their underwater backdrop, he might squint and think he was back at The Owl, rooting for Reece at a fencing tourney. On the floor below, two men dressed in padded uniforms and face-guards thrusted and parried back and forth, evenly matched and strikingly fast.

“Hannick is posting again,” Talfryn murmured, frowning at the taller of the two swordsmen. Hayden hadn’t recognized him before. A tuft of red-orange hair showed out the bottom of his netted mask, but Hayden was one of the few in the room who
didn’t
have some shade of red hair.

“
Posting?”

“
Shifting his hand further down the grip, to lengthen his reach.” Talfryn demonstrated, miming with her hands. “He’s hardly ever penalized, but he ought to be. He—” She broke off with a sigh as her brother lunged, straight-backed, and caught his challenger with a hard poke in the chest. The scattered crowd about the room clapped without much enthusiasm.

As Hannick straightened, he tugged off his mask with a happy laugh and tossed it over his shoulder so a waiting servant had to scramble to catch it.

“Not bad,” he said loudly. “It’s too bad you won’t be around for the tourney in three days’ time, Reece. You make some of the fencers from Haldon especially look like clumsy half-bears.”

Reece peeled off his mask and shoved his sweat-soaked bangs back from his forehead, saying something that made Hannick snicker and shrug in half-agreement. Surprised but not entirely pleased and not sure why, Hayden started to stand to get Reece’s attention, but Talfryn’s hand on his sleeve kept him down. Her eyes darted back and forth between her brother and Reece as they walked from the room, joking like old friends and conversing in the complicated language of fencing.

“Wait,” Talfryn urged in a low voice. The crowds were dispersing, filing from the room and chatting mostly about Reece, but she still waited until she and he were alone in the stands before going on. “I’m sorry. Hannick would have been…curt, had he seen me here.”

Glancing the way her brother and Reece had gone, Hayden frowned.
“Why?”

With a satisfied smirk, Talfryn stood and dusted off her strange, billowing trousers.
“I think he hopes if he forbids me from practicing, people will forget who won the last tourney. It certainly wasn’t Prince Hannick Pryor.”

It took Hayden a moment to work through that. When he did, he blinked at her, half-awed, half- dismayed.
“You fence?”

Talfryn nodded, skipping down the benches. Her descent slowed as she reached the floor, and she turned on the spot to look back at him with a little crease between her eyebrows.
“Hayden, you ought to be wary of my brother spending too much time with your captain. He doesn’t usually take an interest in visitors. It puzzles me, that now of all times…”

With more care and clumsier slowness, Hayden padded down to join her. He hadn’t formed an opinion of Hannick either way, but if anyone was safe with someone dangerous, it was Reece. Gideon had the guns, but Reece’s skill with people wasn’t limited to mere intimidation.

“We’re only here till dawn,” he finally said.

The reminder seemed to make Talfryn sad as she nodded, but she perked up a beat later, when she gazed across the hall and spotted the tall wooden rack of needle-nosed swords and practice sabres.

“Shall we have a match?” she suggested.

Hayden’s protest died as a choked whine in his throat as she loped to the impressive array of weapons. He would have pointed to any two and called them both a sword, but he knew they all had specific names based on their weight or length or shape. He was more concerned with their blades, honestly. Weren’t they supposed to be sharp?

Clearing his throat, he admitted, “I can’t fence, actually.”

Even without the anai to make lights in Talfryn’s eyes, they seemed to sparkle at him, bright and young and a little like Sophie’s in that regard. She selected a sleek sword with a spiraling hand guard and tested it out with a whip and a spin, turning the blade into a smear of silver.

“Then I shall have to teach you.”

XVIII

Theft!

Night in the underwater city was spectacular. It was a shame Reece was only semi-conscious as he dragged himself back to the guest chambers.

As the sun on the topside set, trails of domed white lights flickered to life in the darkest crevices and deepest niches of the city. The night felt twice as heavy and dark under water, but the lights made the ocean misty and green, eerie but beautiful and dappled with motes, like nebulae. Nocturnal creatures began lurking about in the shadows, and Reece was sort of glad he could only see their shapes, because some of those were monstrous enough. He couldn’t be certain, but he was pretty sure that last silhouette had had as many as eight legs.

Torches burning sea foam green lined the corridors. They weren’t doing anything for the heat—somehow, the city had become even
steamier
by night—but he nonetheless felt great. Exhausted and worn, but in a good way, for once. After the extra hours he’d put in on the helm today, the rigorous fencing match he’d gotten coaxed into, and the rich Oceanun food Hannick had shoved on him (as it turned out, those edible rocks he’d always loved actually had a name…
vill
), he knew he had a good night’s sleep ahead of him. Not even Mordecai’s dying bimotor snore would keep him from that.