The Pyromancer’s Scroll - Chapter 22: Questions En Route

Summer was surrendering to autumn. Trees were turning to fire. Wheat and corn lay heavy on the stalk. Flocks of birds passed daily over Volthorn’s army as they flew southwest, fleeing colder climes to the north and east.

Although Queen Adara had failed to negotiate an official armistice, Volthorn had secured a temporary settlement with Calamar’s front-line commander, General Grimbold. Volthorn allowed the ten thousand soldiers in Calamar’s flanking division to recross the river and join the remnants of their main army. In exchange, Grimbold agreed to retreat to Meradov immediately, without attempting any more battles or raids that season.

In making the arrangement, Volthorn gave up the possibility of hammering the remnants of Calamar’s retreating army. But he also avoided the risk of facing a defeat of his own. Despite his victory, Calamar could still field almost as many battle-ready troops as he could. Many of his battalions had suffered heavy losses, plus he had several thousand prisoners to guard. It was a good thing the Penandre garrison would be arriving in another day or so to reinforce his position.

Another reason was that harvest was near. Between the ongoing haeber shortage and the demands of war, many Elandrian provinces were on the brink of famine. Keeping his conscript farmers another month to score another victory would only mean they’d starve the next spring.

So it was that five days after his victory—which his troops were beginning to call “the Battle of Rainswept Heights”—Volthorn stood watching his last units of seasonal troops march away, disbanded until the next spring. Around six thousand professional full-time soldiers would remain at arms during the winter, encamped in the Arnon Plains.

“Commander Skarr,” an aide said, interrupting Volthorn’s thoughts. “Intelligence report. We’ve received an unusual message from a contact in Calamar.”

“Unusual?” Volthorn said.

“Peculiar,” the aide clarified. “The contact received an anonymous message, written on a note left outside his residence in Imperium. We are puzzled as to its meaning. Here’s a transcription.”

The aide handed Volthorn a piece of parchment, covered in tidy lines of text:

Report to your comrades in yonder land:Evil stirs in the shadows of the night.News I bear that you must heed.Danger from the past returns.History threatens to repeat.An avir’s life is in peril:Ruin, fire, and flames.To the skies, beware.

Volthorn read the poem several times. “Most obscure,” he said. “What do you make of it?”

“We have no idea,” the aide said. “The author’s identity is unknown, although they are probably associated with Elandrian sympathizers in Imperium. Presumably they wrote in cryptic language so that if the note was discovered, it wouldn’t incriminate the recipient or the sender. But we’re worried it’s some kind of hoax or red herring: counterintelligence meant to lead us onto a false trail.”

“If so, it could do a better job of explaining what that trail is,” Volthorn quipped. “Let me read it again.”

He explored each line carefully. The first: Report to your comrades in yonder land. Straightforward. Evil stirs in the shadows of the night. Demons? But they always stalked the night. What else could it be referencing? Some sort of enemy operation?

Danger from the past returns. History threatens to repeat. An avir’s life is in peril. Those lines seemed to refer to King Everborn’s assassination, warning that Adara was in similar danger. But who would know enough to write that? Scarcely two dozen souls in Elandria knew the truth about how King Everborn had died. Who in Calamar would know? Those who had ordered the assassination, of course. But why would they send a message like this, or how would they know who to send it through?

Danger from the past returns. There was only one obvious candidate for what that danger was: Rendhart. And the penultimate line seemed to confirm it: Ruin, fire, and flames.

But what did the final line mean? To the skies, beware. Was this referring to a griffin attack? To some omen in the skies, like a red sunrise?

“Any idea what it means?” the officer asked.

“I believe it’s a warning that Queen Adara is in danger,” Volthorn said. “But the exact danger, or what we must do to prevent it, still eludes me.” He frowned, thinking. “Inform my staff that my brothers and I will be leaving within the hour. With the campaign season over, and now with this strange portent of danger, I think it’s time I returned to the capital.”

* * * * *

Once again, Durrin couldn’t sleep.

This time, he had plenty of things to blame it on: the cramped deck of the cloud frigate, the snoring of Bjorn next to him, the knowledge that they were several thousand feet above the ground, held aloft by some stunt of aeronautical engineering that he still didn’t fully understand.

But he knew the real reason he couldn’t sleep. Questions. A hundred thousand questions.

Questions . . . and the shadows of the night.

Durrin rose quietly to his feet, careful not to disturb the sleeping figures around him. He stepped gingerly across the deck, his way barely lit by the faint red light of the Far Moon. As always when the cloud frigate was free floating, he could feel no wind. The cloud frigate flowed at the same pace as the air around it, like a piece of driftwood in a river’s current.

Durrin made his way to the prow. There he found Twigly on watch, perched atop the ship’s massive ballista. Her long, bushy tail waved in the air behind her, making tiny corrections to keep her perfectly balanced.

Durrin still wasn’t sure what to make of Twigly. The snippen was the only member of the crew who spoke fluent Lurrian. Every time he, Salidar, and Yorid conversed among themselves, he got the feeling she was listening in with her large ears. And he could never tell when she was joking and when she was being impudent.

“Couldn’t catch any dreams, Rendhart?” the snippen asked as he approached. “Or got caught by nightmares?”

Durrin stood at the prow, grabbing a rigging line for support. He had been having nightmares recently: terrible nightmares, of fangs and horns and unending darkness.

But Twigly didn’t need to know that. Durrin shrugged. “Questions, mostly.”

“Ah.” Twigly nodded sagely. “Terrible things, questions. They ruin your appetite, especially when the questions relate to the origin of your supper.”

Casting about for small talk to get his mind off his nightmares, Durrin gestured to the darkness in front of them. “What are you watching for?”

“Mountains, mainly,” Twigly said. “Terrible things, mountains. Come up on you unawares in the darkness, like a lynx in a field of daisies. We also watch our altimeter.”

Twigly pointed to a device stowed under the ballista. Durrin could faintly see a glass tube, illuminated by a small ball of lumen moss. “It shows us our altitude,” Twigly explained.

“And it’s accurate?”

“Mostly,” said Twigly. “Though pressure front fluctuations mean you have to account for the weather patterns, else you can have a high margin of error. Good grief, I sound like my cousin.” She shook her head as if to clear herself of the thought. “Where was I? Lynxes. No. Mountains. Right. And we watch for other cloudships. Griffins. Wyverns.”

“Do wyverns pose a danger?”

“Not if you’re not unlucky. Typically, they’re intimidated by our size. Though if you get too close to their nest, they could get defensive and puncture a hole in your balloon.”

Twigly patted the ballista beneath her. “Which is one of the reasons we carry these. Wyverns—and dragons.”

Durrin snorted. “Dragons are a myth.”

“Ah, so you say.” Twigly smiled that cocky smile of hers again. “But on the day you’re proven wrong, would you rather be caught with a giant ballista, or without one?”

Durrin stared at her, trying to figure out how serious she was. He shook his head and gave up. “Okay. Next question. You’re not really an ensign, are you. You’re the captain.”

Twigly winked at him. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“I may not understand Hakiru,” Durrin said. “But I can tell who’s giving orders and who’s receiving them.”

“Astute.” Twigly twirled, bowing with a flourish. “Indeed, I am! Captain Twigly the Barbaric, at your doorstep.”

Durrin raised his eyebrow. “The . . . Barbaric?”

“But of course!” Twigly drew a knife from her belt and spun it in her paw. She stuck the knife between her teeth and talked through it. “Awen’t I da most barbaric snippen you’ve ewer seen?”

Durrin thought about it. “Well . . . you’re not wrong,” he said. “Why did you pretend otherwise?”

Twigly waved a paw. “I just wanted to pull His Excellency’s leg.”

“But don’t Hakiru cloudships always have to be captained by a griffin?”

Twigly balanced the dagger on one paw. “Traditionally, yes.” The dagger slipped, almost plummeting into the darkness before Twigly snatched it at the last moment. “But I have ways of being . . . persuasive.”

“You bribed someone, didn’t you.”

“Nonsense.” Twigly tucked the dagger into her vest. “I just made myself so annoying that no one was willing to take on the task of ordering me around. I became captain by default.”

Durrin raised his eyebrow. Twigly raised hers in return.

Durrin gave up and changed the subject again. “Twigly—”

“That’s Capt