Chapter 1244: Change Over Time
Zooey stood at the bridge and looked down at the deck below.
There was no room left. Over a thousand people occupied every horizontal surface the Roland offered — hatch covers, companionways, the open stretches between gun mounts — wedged together shoulder to shoulder in the cold salt air. Most had never been on a ship before. The motion took them quickly. Those who turned green infected their neighbors simply by proximity, and soon the sounds rising from the deck were continuous and miserable. Even those who had never suffered seasickness in their lives were discovering that willpower had its limits when confined in a swaying box with five hundred people who were already sick.
Zooey appreciated, not for the first time, that she could not smell anything.
“Mortals are so weak.” Carol’s voice came from behind her. A pause, and then: “It’s incredible that we used to be exactly like that.”
“Yes,” Zooey agreed.
She knew the context Carol meant.
When the captain had received the orders to support Nail’s unit, he had come directly to the God’s Punishment Witches. The Roland’s primary mission was finding the God’s Stone mine, and the Instrument of Divine Retribution — the magic core from the underground civilization — was already aboard, its bulk consuming most of the deck. Safety concerns alone should have closed the question. Zooey should have declined without deliberation.
In the Union age, she would have. There would have been no internal argument. The rare magic core outweighed a city’s worth of mortals; this was not cruelty, it was mathematics. She would have turned the captain away in a sentence and not thought about it again.
But she did not do that.
She and her peers talked briefly — very briefly — and then she made a decision that surprised her even as it left her mouth. She had the core offloaded at the nearest port city, assigned the garrison there to guard it, and instructed them: if the Roland did not return in time, send the core to Neverwinter yourselves. Then she turned the ship around.
“To be honest,” Carol said, coming to stand beside her, “I thought you’d say no. I was torn too.”
“I hope they don’t fail His Majesty,” Zooey said, watching the horizon. She meant the garrison.
What had changed? She found herself searching back through it — not a single moment, but a gradual accumulation she couldn’t pinpoint to any one source. The First Army at the Holy City ruins, holding the line against the demons with a discipline that had nothing to do with fear of punishment. The nurses in the hospital, matter-of-fact and efficient, who had treated God’s Punishment Witches with exactly the same hands they used on everyone else. The people she had seen in the Dream World, ordinary in every way — faces like the faces of mortals, and yet they could not be distinguished from witches. And Roland Wimbledon himself, who kept confounding her expectations.
“We did complete the mission,” Carol said, patting her shoulder. “And I’m going back to Neverwinter for spicy hotpot the moment we dock. I’ve been thinking about it for three days.” She headed for the bridge door. “My mouth is watering just —”
So was Zooey’s. She heard her stomach agree, loudly, just as the door shut behind Carol.
She was grateful for the timing.
She cleared her mind and turned back to the horizon. The Red Mist lay at the distance, that red-brown stain spreading from the northern edge of the sky, and beneath it, somewhere, demons were moving through cities that had stopped being human cities. The Battle of Divine Will had returned, earlier than any of the ancient records had predicted. The demons had grown. The magic they deployed was more sophisticated than four centuries ago.
And yet Zooey stood on a ship that smelled of seasick refugees and felt, against every expectation, something close to calm.
They were not alone in this. That was the difference.
Hackzord floated above the city.
No smoke. No ruins. The buildings stood intact, undisturbed, as though the battle had been a formality performed by both sides simultaneously. The humans here had barely resisted. Weaker than they had been four centuries ago — if he hadn’t trusted Ursrook’s assessments, he might have suspected this was enemy territory in the Sky-sea Realm rather than human land.
In one week his army had advanced several hundred miles and established outposts in cities that the Red Mist had not yet reached. The speed of it almost impressed him. He was forced to credit a portion of that speed to the humans themselves — a few hundred executions had been sufficient to demonstrate the consequences of resistance, and after that the lords and nobles had supplied his army with provisions and cooperation.
Exactly as it had been in the first Battle of Divine Will.
The news of Snow Reflection Castle burning had traveled fast. It always did.
As the occupation deepened, information arrived in quantity. He still could not understand why the mankind who had once assembled under the Union had fragmented into four separate kingdoms that scarcely communicated. The Union that had defined an era was gone, replaced by internal contests for scraps of territory. What had they spent four hundred years doing?
Yet these four weak kingdoms had produced the man who killed his best commander. Weak did not mean harmless.
Hackzord found that reassuring, in a narrow sense. It meant the enemy was unpredictable — which meant the remaining battles would require his full attention.
He turned his thoughts to the operational picture. The Western Front plan had been executed, with hiccups. The Birth Tower was active, as the king had required. Whatever else might be said of him, he had fulfilled his obligation in a way neither the Bloody Conqueror’s bluster nor Mask’s indifference had managed.
Through a chain of Distortion Doors, he returned to the rupture.
He had already decided what to name this city: Sky. After himself. The clan would remember it.
His guard met him with the latest report.
He skimmed it, then stopped.
A large-scale refugee movement, systematically organized, flowing south from the Kingdom of Everwinter toward the Kingdom of Wolfheart by both water and overland routes. Not the ordinary drift of civilians fleeing noise and fire. This was coordinated — timetables, designated routes, a deliberate structure that bore the marks of military planning. Several units that had tried to intercept had met fierce resistance. The pattern matched what Ursrook’s letter had described before his death.
His Upgraded units had won those engagements, but not completely. The refugees kept moving.
The Birth Tower was in mountainous terrain. Without Distortion Doors, the Junior Demons and Inferior Demons could not reach the human territory independently in useful numbers — which meant he could not simply flood the roads and stop this.
“Where is Nightmare?”
“Her Excellency is still in the Red Mist pond, my lord.”
Ten days in the Sea of Mind. More. Hackzord kept his expression flat. There was no sign of her consciousness being devoured — she showed none of the tells of a mind lost in that deep current — but she had been under an exceptionally long time.
He descended to the bottom of the rupture.
Valkries sat exactly as he had last seen her: cross-legged in the Red Mist pond, posture relaxed, completely still. No distress. No deterioration. Simply absent, somewhere far below the surface of herself. Had this been the Bloody Conqueror, he would have struck him — not out of cruelty but calculation, because the disruption would jar him back and some memory loss was an acceptable price. He would not do that to Nightmare.
But why now? He needed her.
He stood over her for a long moment, frustration pressing against the interior of his ribs. Explaining the refugee situation to the king would be difficult without more concrete evidence of what it signified. The king had already committed two Senior Lords to the Western Front; requesting a third simply to contain fleeing civilians would invite contempt from the other Senior Lords, and he had already strained those relationships by conducting this campaign with less cooperation than he’d been promised.
The Senior Lords dispatched here had their own priorities. They did not subordinate themselves to his command. Without a reliable Senior Lord to organize pursuit operations, an expedition in strength remained impossible.
If Nightmare had been awake, none of this would be a problem.
He looked at her one last time. Then he left the Red Mist pond.
The Western Front would need to be guarded by him personally.
There was no one else.