Yes, it was the heathen Pārsans who first studied the stars, trying to read omens in the sky to divine whether their crops would succeed or fail, whether their priest-king would rule well or whether a revolt would ravage the land. But here in our university, we have developed their mysticism into a science. Go ahead, try to find a functioning telescope in Raetia or Narvonne.

* The Commentaries of Aram ibn Bashear

☀

11th Day of New Summer’s Moon, 297 AC

The Hunter’s Boon pulsed in time with Trist’s heartbeat as he ran, fully armored, through the streets of Rocher de la Garde, following the bright, fiery cord that would lead him to Clarisant. He ran faster than he’d ever moved before: the surging, recently bolstered power of not only the Hunter’s Boon, but the Fae Touched Boon as well pushed him forward so recklessly that when it came time to take the first corner, he nearly spun out of control, skidding across the rough cobblestones until the toe of his right sabaton finally dug into stone with a crunch. Cracks spread out under his foot, with dust and a spray of small gray chips flying off behind him, and then he was off again.

The thread led him north and east, toward both the River Rea, and the wall where the siege engines were most active. The air grew thick with smoke: unlike the shadows cast by the sun or the moon, Auberon’s magic did not do anything to help him see through this. Trist could taste the burning wood in his lungs, and found himself hacking and coughing as he sprinted. Small boulders rained down from beyond the city walls, smashing into homes and shops to either side of him. A pot of pitch, or perhaps oil, traced a flaming arc through the air, then cracked against the roof of a glove-maker’s shop, where it spilled down the angled roof, spreading a pool of fire as it went.

“Claire!” Trist shouted. If he was having a hard time breathing and seeing through the smoke from the burning city, how much worse would she have it, with no faerie-magic to protect her?

A boulder broke through the smoke above him, and Trist only managed to leap out of its way because of his enhanced reflexes. It smashed into the street where he’d been an instant before, destroying the cobblestones and leaving a crater as wide as a man was tall, and as deep as his forearm.

Claire would never be able to dodge something like that.

Trist sprinted forward again, careening off the corner of a baker’s shop and tearing a chunk of brick out of the wall before he lurched off again. It was just like Acrasia had warned him: he wasn’t used to the changes to his body, and it was making him clumsy. But he didn’t have time for that right now. The Hunter’s Boon was drawing him onward, and it seemed to mirror his own desperation.

He spilled out into the avenue that ran north-south, along the river wall above the Rea, and saw that the thread led to an alley a block north of him. Trist hacked up a gob of spit mixed with dust, then ran forward to the mouth of the alley.

“Claire?” he called again.

“Trist!” She was crouched against the wall of the northernmost building, low and mostly below the smoke, but speaking made her cough anyway. The hem of her dress was filthy and torn, her face streaked with soot, her hair tangled and wild, but she was alive, and she had a great wood-bound book clutched to her chest.

“You’re alive,” Trist said, exhaling in relief. He was careful to slow down as he ran up to her, and gathered Claire gently in his arms. Not for the first time, he cursed his armor, because it prevented him from feeling her heartbeat against his chest. He pulled off his helm and set it on the dirty stones of the alley, and leaned in to press his lips to hers.

She was trembling, shaking, and she cupped his face with one hand as they kissed. When they broke apart for breath, Claire didn’t pull back, but kept her forehead leaning against his. “They snuck into the Cathedral,” she said, the words tumbling out like the Rea over a cascade. “Four of them. Etoile held three of them back, I don’t know what happened to her-”

“Wounded, but she will live,” Trist broke in. “I found her in time. The fourth?”

“Sagramore,” Claire answered. “He followed me into the catacombs. I have to thank my father,” she said, with a grin. “I lost him in the dark. He’ll be turned about, wandering somewhere down there among the skulls and bones. I came out beneath one of the river stairs.”

“I’ll thank him with you,” Trist said, allowing his eyes to close for a moment. The urge to simply stay here with her, and to forget everything else, was strong. Or to ask Claire to lead them both back down into the catacombs - she might be safer there.

“The daemons? My brother?” Claire asked.

“He was alive when last I saw him, commanding the north gate,” Trist said, opening his eyes again. “They opened a portal inside the west gate, and sent Zepar through with the mercenaries, like they did at Camaret-à-Arden.”

“You stopped them?” She asked.

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“Aye,” Trist said. “Zepar is dead. But so is Sir Carados.”

Claire swallowed, wincing at the news. “He won’t be the last, Trist. They’re destroying the city.”

“We have to hold until the king gets here,” Trist reminded her. “If we can do that, he will lift the siege. He’s coming with three thousand men, and three Exarchs.”

“Can we actually do it?” Claire’s eyes were wide, her lip trembling. The mask of formality, the image of the perfect noble-woman she wore in public had been torn aside by the chaos and devastation around them.

“We can do it,” Trist said firmly. If he sounded like he believed it, perhaps she would, as well - but then, Claire always seemed much better than him when it came time to sort the truth from lies. “Come along with me,” he said, grabbing his helm up from the street and settling it back on his head. Then, he reached out a hand for hers, and drew her up with him when he stood.

“Where?” Claire asked. “I have the Codex. And I think I know what you need to do.”

“To the north gate, then,” Trist decided, even though he would rather have not brought her along. “We’ll find your brother there.” He leaned over, putting one arm under her shoulders and the other under her knees, and swung his wife up into his arms.

“Trist!” Claire exclaimed. “I can walk!”

“Not as fast as I can run,” Trist told her, and sprinted back out of the alley, dashing north three blocks to the city wall. Being so close to the stone rearing above them meant that the missiles from the enemy siege engines did not come near: instead, they arced high over the wall and dropped well to the south. Trist passed a gang of men hauling buckets from the Rea, fighting the fire that threatened to consume half the city, but he didn’t bother to pause or even slow down.

Instead, he didn’t stop running until he’d reached the north gate, where he carried Claire up the stairs to the parapet. There were wounded men lined up in rows, bleeding through their bandages, but neither Sir Gareth nor Sir Florent were among them. Trist set his wife back down on her feet, and she picked out her brother from the crowd before he did.

“Gareth!” she called, and he looked up from where he was assisting a trebuchet crew.

“Claire!” Gareth shouted, and stalked over with a frown. “What are you doing on the wall?”

“They snuck men into the city and attacked us in the Cathedral,” Clarisant explained. “I escaped into the catacombs. But I have the Codex.” She held up the book she’d been clutching to her chest the entire time since Trist had found her.

“Good.” Gareth nodded, then turned to Trist. “The west gate?”

“They sent the daemon Zepar through,” Trist told his brother-in-law. “I killed it, but we lost Sir Carados. The gate was under the command of someone named Merek when I left.”

“Right. Come into the guard tower,” Gareth said, guiding his sister with one hand on her shoulder. “Sir Florent, you have command until I return.”

“Aye, m’lord,” Florent shouted back. “Come on you lazy bastards! Load those stones!”

Of the two guard towers that stood to either side of the gate, the one on the left had been decapitated by siege engines, leaving behind a dangerous tumble of fallen rock. The one on the right, however, still stood three stories above the parapet, and it was into this structure that Gareth led Trist and Clarisant now. The room was spare, containing little more than a long wooden table and two benches, upon which the barber-surgeon attached to the north gate worked, and a stone stair along the wall, leading up. Gareth took them to the stair, all the way up to the top floor of the guard tower, which was crammed half full with oversized bolts for the scorpions on the roof.

“We can get a moment of quiet here,” Gareth said, removing his helm, and Trist followed suit.

“They came at you hard while I was gone,” Trist guessed.

“Aye,” Gareth said. “Softened us up a bit, then tried with ladders and a ram. We turned them back, so they’ve gone back to just lobbing rocks and fire at us.”

“They were hoping that an attack from three directions would overwhelm us,” Trist concluded. “Now that it hasn’t, they’ll likely keep it up all night. Rest their men in shifts while they exhaust us.”

“That’s about what I thought, and Florent as well,” Gareth said, with a nod. He turned to his sister. “What did you find? Do you have a solution for that monster out in the bay?”

“I have a beginning, at least,” Claire said, carrying her copy of the Marian Codex over to one of the crates of bolts which had not yet been cracked open. She used it as a table, and the two men gathered at her shoulders. Claire flipped through the pages, quickly finding what she was looking for: an entry with the heading, “Forneus, the Leviathan.”

“Don’t say it aloud,” Trist cautioned Gareth, who scowled.

“I always thought that superstitious nonsense,” the older knight grumbled.

“Hush, you. Safer not to risk it,” Claire chastised her brother. “Just call it the Leviathan. It is a shape-changer,” she continued, tracing the words of the manuscript with one finger. “That sea-monster form is only one way that it can appear. Marius says here that they chased it along the Raetian coast for three days and three nights, until it was too exhausted to stay in that form any longer.

“So we need to wear it down,” Trist said, with a frown.

“The bad news is that I don’t know if you can do it alone,” Claire told him. “When they defeated it three-hundred years ago, they had three Exarchs to do it with, not one, and ships to chase it. We don’t have three exarchs, and I don’t know that we have any ships left at dock that are sea-worthy.”

“How bad did it hit the docks?” Trist asked, turning to Gareth. “Did you get word back?”

Gareth nodded. “We mostly managed to evacuate the area without loss of life, but we lost a lot of supplies. The docks are splinters, from what I’ve been told. It will take weeks to clear out all the shipwrecks and open up a safe route for ships to move in or out of the harbor again.”

“I cannot say that I truly understand your magic, husband,” Claire said, turning to meet Trist’s eyes. “But I have seen you do incredible things. Things that no normal man could do. Do you have any magic that would help against this beast?”

“That depends,” Trist said, musing. “If you can get me to it,” he said to Gareth, “I can try to fight it. Jump onto its back, maybe.”

“If you fall off, you’ll sink straight to the bottom of the bay!” Claire protested.

Trist shrugged, his armor creaking with the motion. “It is the best I can think of, at the moment.”

“Then think again,” his wife scolded him. “Because it also breathes fire.” The three of them looked at each other, and the silence spread. If they couldn’t come up with some kind of plan, Trist realized, Forneus would be free to attack the city whenever it wanted. And the chances of Rocher de la Garde holding until the arrival of the king were looking smaller all the time.