image [https://i.imgur.com/m6H68P4.png]

Pirates!

Cutlass-wielding, swash-buckling, trouble-making terrors, they roamed the trade routes, preying on lone vessels or the stragglers in caravans. Merchants feared them, militaries fought them, and rulers despised them.

Lord Salidar Aram prided himself on belonging firmly in that third category. He had dealt with many pirates in his day. Before his political career, he had served as an admiral in the South Sea, clearing the salt trade of brigands.

But aerial pirates? This was new.

Salidar stood on a platform overlooking Imperium’s merchant sector. The platform was part of a series of elevated wooden docks, built to service the loading and unloading of one of Zenitha’s marvels—cloudships.

A cloudship was a flying craft, consisting of a gondola hanging beneath a large, pill-shaped balloon. Every few weeks, a caravan of cloudships would sail over the mountains from the far north and dock in Imperium. Their crews would unload furs, pearls, and amber in exchange for sugar and crafted goods, then follow the prevailing winds to lands farther east. All cloudships came from a far northern people called the Hakiru, who carefully guarded the secrets of their airships.

But the cloudship now docked in front of Salidar was different than any he had seen before. It was much smaller, and its sleeker shape and host of outlying fins and sails gave it an aura of speed and agility that the giant merchant ships lacked. Its gondola was small, only thirty feet long. Salidar wondered how the crew, twenty or so in number, ever found enough space to sleep comfortably on its deck.

image [https://i.imgur.com/l20hTXm.png]

This is not a very accurate image, but it’s the best that Midjourney could give me.

Most striking about the cloudship was its warlike character. Rows of brightly painted shields hung from the rails on starboard and port, like seafaring pirate vessels that Salidar had seen in the South Sea. The bow and stern sported mounted ballista, lurking like vultures in their pivots. The gondola’s wood was scored with gouges and burn marks, and its balloon was riddled with patches. A couple arrows stuck out at odd angles from the wood of the gondola, as if left from previous engagements just to add character.

“Most barbaric,” Salidar said to no one in particular.

As Salidar and his bodyguards strode down the platform toward the cloudship, a crewman on the dock turned from where he had been sawing a plank. It was the first Hakiru Salidar had seen up close. The man was massive, towering well over six feet. He wore a green tunic that stretched taut across his muscular chest, a fur cloak tied with a brooch around his shoulders, and enough weapons to equip a platoon. One cheek was defaced from an old scar. He folded his arms over his chest, gazing confidently at Salidar’s party as they approached.

image [https://i.imgur.com/FlgPuwO.jpeg]

Shoutout to Kickstarter backers Larry & Lillian H. for coming up with this character! (His name is Bjorn. You’ll meet him more in later chapters.)

“I’ve come to speak to your captain,” Salidar announced, unfazed by the man’s daunting size. Few things fazed Lord Salidar.

The man shook his head, tapping his ears and uttering something in a strange language.

One of Salidar’s aides leaned close to him. “Most of the crew only speak Hakiru, my lord.”

The massive man turned toward the ship and clapped twice. A moment later, a snippen vaulted over the edge of the gondola, ran down a mooring rope, and scurried up to Salidar. She sported a garish red scarf, an assortment of knives and tools in her belt, and the air of someone who didn’t care what Salidar thought. Well. That would soon change.

image [https://i.imgur.com/78tV0gM.png]

There she is. The Garish Ghost herself.

“Lord of Calamar,” the snippen said, deliberately staring Salidar in the eyes before bowing ridiculously low. “We are honored at your presence. You may call me Ensign Twigly. I’ll be serving as your translator.” She spoke Lurrian fluently, with a local accent. How had she come to join a Hakiru crew from the far north?

“You hail from Calamar?” Salidar sniffed.

“Imperium itself, to be precise,” the snippen said. She added in a low voice, “Think I even had a job in your scullery for a day or two, ‘til I broke something.”

“I see you have forgotten your native customs of respect,” Salidar said.

The snippen didn’t get the hint, instead continuing to stare straight into Salidar’s face. She smiled, as if enjoying her insolence. “The Hakiru have a saying, my lord. ‘All are equal in the sky.’”

“An interesting sentiment,” Salidar said, removing his signet ring and rolling it between his fingers as he studied its depths. “I have often thought the same, but of the grave.”

The snippen opened her mouth, a retort likely on her lips, but something about Salidar’s tone of voice, or maybe the fact that his signet ring identified him as the second most powerful person in the empire, shut her up. Salidar smirked. He loved winning games.

“Bring me your captain,” Salidar said. “I wish to speak to him.”

The snippen whistled, and a moment later, a griffin swooped down next to them. Salidar had heard somewhere that in the Hakiru culture, every cloudship had to be captained by a griffin. That only made sense, although it rendered the motto “a captain must go down with his ship” rather moot.

“Name?” Salidar said, like he would to a servant. No sense in maintaining a fiction of equality.

The snippen translated, the griffin responded in Hakiru, and the snippen translated back into Lurrian. “Wingcaptain Bladebeak, my lord.”

Salidar cut to the point of why he had come. “The city officials told me that they suspect you of practicing piracy. How do you answer?”

More translation, then the snippen’s response. “Some might call us pirates, my lord. Others call us outlaws or mercenaries. We call ourselves adventurers. We have no fealty but to ourselves, no homeland but the open sky.”

Salidar clicked his tongue. “That doesn’t answer my question. Have you ever attacked an unarmed merchant vessel?”

The snippen smiled. “If we said no, my lord, we’d be pulling your tail, except you ain’t got one.”

Cheeky. Salidar didn’t get that behavior around him very often. Normally he’d respond with an execution order, but thankfully for this insolent little rodent and the rest of the crew, he had other plans today.

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“Do you work for silver?”

“Aye, we work for silver, gold, potatoes.”

“What brings you to Calamar?”

“A storm, my lord. Wicked nor’easter hit us by surprise from the northwest. We came here to trade for supplies and make repairs before following more friendly winds east.”

Salidar brought his fingertips to his chin. “You realize that Calamarvan law forbids giving harbor to or making trade with pirates. One word from me, and I could have your ship seized, your crew tried in the courts of the Knights Vigilant, and all of you executed before the week is out.”

The snippen translated this to the griffin, followed by an agitated exchange between the two.

“Or,” said Salidar, emphasizing the word. Both of them looked at him curiously. “I have a business proposition to make. Have you ever performed a kidnapping?”

* * * * *

A thousand miles away, the struggle for the Arnon Plains had commenced.

Volthorn stood at the bank of the first tributary—Elandria’s first line of defense—watching his army retreat. Wagons and horses tramped across to his side of the river on a large stone bridge, while humans, avirs, korriks, and swifters crossed on a series of temporary pontoon bridges built just downstream.

His eyes swept over the ranks, noting the many wounded. These were battalions from his Third Division. Earlier that day, they had fought in a short engagement with the vanguard of Calamar’s army. The engagement had been indecisive, with Elandria withdrawing before Calamar could bring up reinforcements. Perhaps Volthorn could have scored a tactical victory by pressing to the attack. But with the main bulk of Calamar’s army rapidly closing in, it would have been strategic suicide. Volthorn’s withdrawal across the river would be dicey enough as it was.

He turned to his command staff. “News from the Second Division?”

“They’re in battle array a half-mile west as you ordered, shielding the Third Division’s withdrawal,” an officer said. “Calamar’s vanguard is in sight but not yet engaging.”

“Then we may just slip out of their claws.” He turned to his brother Kelzern. “How much of the Third Division is across the river?”

“About half. Trazar’s doing his best to speed them up.”

Volthorn ran calculations in his head, estimating how long it would take for the rest of the Third Division to cross and what needed to happen in the meantime. He turned back to the first officer. “In half an hour, have General Snarltooth pull the Second Division back to the river, prepared to cross as soon as this division is over. Have their heavy infantry hold the rear and be the last across. Captain Walkren?”

Captain Walkren, head of the army’s engineers, stepped forward. “I have crews standing by to dismantle the pontoon bridges. Three crews to a bridge.”

Volthorn nodded. “Good. And the stone bridge?”

“I took your suggestion, Commander. My terramancers have planted liquidation grenades at the base of each arch.” A liquidation grenade was a particularly useful terramancy talisman for demolitions. When activated—which could be done at a distance through a paired talisman—it turned the stone around it to the consistency of sludge for several dozen seconds. The effect on the bridge would be . . . messy.

“Excellent,” said Volthorn. “What do you think about waiting to activate them until the first Calamarvan soldiers are halfway across? Give them a little surprise dip in the river?”

Kelzern grinned at the image, but Captain Walkren frowned. “Too risky. They’ll be expecting that. What if they bring up a quartzite beacon?”

Now it was Volthorn’s turn to frown. A quartzite beacon—the same device he used to ensure privacy in his war councils—would disrupt the signals needed to activate the liquidation grenades. “Good thinking,” he said. “Better blow the bridge as soon as our last battalions are across.”

Their discussion was cut off by an earsplitting scream from the skies.

“Griffin fight!” someone called. “Archers!”

Volthorn scanned the skies. Three Elandrian griffins, their plumage dyed green, shot out of the clouds overhead, their wings tucked in a full dive. In the next second, eight red-dyed Calamarvan griffins appeared in hot pursuit.

“Clear a landing space!” Volthorn bellowed. But the griffins were diving too fast to land. Instead, they pulled up sharply just before impacting the river, their wings skimming the water’s edge as they turned upstream.

A moment later, Calamar’s eight griffins dropped from the skies, slamming into Elandria’s three griffins from above. The river exploded in spray as the griffins plunged into the water, scratching and biting in a melee of wings and claws.

Soldiers plunged into the water, splashing toward the commotion. Officers shouted orders and archers took aim. But nobody could tell one griffin from another in the mad throes.

The fight lasted only a couple seconds. Then Calamar’s griffins disengaged and burst free of the water, scattering droplets in every direction as their wings fought for altitude. Arrows hissed through the air. One enemy griffin screamed and plunged from the sky as an arrow found its mark. But the others wove and turned, evading shots until they escaped out of range.

In the river, several soldiers were helping the Elandrian griffins reach the shore. Volthorn waded into the shallows to assist them. The water ran red with blood.

“Medics!” Volthorn shouted. “We’ll need medics and a surgeon!”

“I’m afraid it’s too late for this one,” a soldier said. The griffin in his arms was limp, the down of his neck stained red with blood from multiple wounds.

“Thunderbeak! No!” cried one of the other griffins. She struggled to her feet in the shallow water, shaking free of the soldiers trying to help her as she pushed her way over. Her desperate eyes landed on the dead griffin in the soldier’s arms, searching for any sign of life.

“I’m . . . sorry,” Volthorn said, as he failed to find a heartbeat. “He’s gone.”

The griffin lifted her head and let out a piercing cry. It split the air, echoing off the stone bridge and reverberating through Volthorn’s bones. He had heard that cry before with griffins. It was the heartbroken cry of losing their second half.

After the scream had died away, Volthorn asked softly, “He was your mate?”

“Of sixteen years.” The griffin nuzzled her dead companion with her beak. “We raised two broods together.”

Volthorn bowed his head in respect. His thoughts turned to his brothers, Trazar and Kelzern, and how devastated he would feel to lose one of them. And yet it was said that the bond between griffin mates was even stronger than between korrik brood brothers. Was that what it would feel like one day when he parted with his brothers to find a mate of his own?

Volthorn shook himself out of his thoughts and turned to a pair of soldiers. “Help her move him to shore, then give her some space to mourn.”

“Yes, Commander.”

Volthorn splashed through the shallows to the riverbank, where the third griffin was getting a gash on his wing dressed and wrapped by a blue-clad medic from the Dawn Wardens. “How do you fare?” Volthorn asked.

The griffin looked up wearily. Volthorn recognized him as a flight captain, one of about thirty in the army. “We can’t keep on like this,” the griffin said despondently. “They have fresh griffins arriving every day. I was taking a wing pair on a routine patrol downriver—not even directly over their army—when they closed on us from three directions. We couldn’t outfly them.”

“Why weren’t there more patrols nearby to back you up?”

The griffin shook his head. “We’re spread too thin. We have to keep tabs on their entire army, alerting you of any breakoff sorties and reporting the movements of each division. And we’re doing our best to screen our own army’s movements. We’re covering a front fifty to a hundred miles wide and twenty miles deep, and we’ve got fewer than five hundred griffins to do it. And that has to be divided into four shifts.” The griffin gestured toward his wing. “And now I’ll be grounded for a week. Not that that compares at all to the loss of Thunderbeak.”

Volthorn listened. He kept his face stoic, but inside, his spirits were sinking. General Embertail had reported that the air battle was an ongoing struggle, but hearing and seeing the details firsthand made the grim reality all too clear.

“I’ll reassess our strategy,” Volthorn said. They couldn’t afford to lose their griffins one by one to enemy raids. Neither could they afford to leave the skies directly above their own army undefended. He’d have to pull back griffin patrols to a perimeter immediately around their army. And that would significantly curtail their ability to gather intelligence. It would save more griffin lives but would put the whole army in greater danger of being outmaneuvered.

Tradeoffs. War was a series of unpleasant tradeoffs, constantly hoping that whatever decision he made would lead to the fewest precious lives being lost.

“Rest well this week,” Volthorn said to the flight captain. “You’ve earned it.”

He looked up at the wound-littered squadrons of soldiers still crossing the river. “We’ve all earned it,” he added to himself. “But this campaign is just beginning.”

A series of mental dominoes fell into place in Volthorn’s mind. The last couple days had been too relentless. His griffin flights weren’t the only units exhausted: his cavalry, his swifters, and his officers were all near the point of collapse from the campaign’s relentless maneuvers. They needed to put some distance between them and the enemy so they could have a day or two of reprieve.

He clambered up the riverbank, back to his cadre of officers and aides. “Change of plans,” he said, wiping the mud from his boots. “Inform each general that as soon as the Third Division and Second Division are across, we’re withdrawing east at a quick march. Calamar has won this river. We’re pulling back to the second tributary."