I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1477: The Edge of the Map

Rian pried the crude iron bracer from the frozen limb.

The leather straps that bound it to the severed arm were stiff with old rime, and they cracked apart under his grip like brittle bark. He rubbed his thumb over the stamped, open eye and felt the rough, unpolished edges of the northern metalwork. Then he dropped the bracer into the deep pocket of his frayed black uniform coat.

He did not look at the arm again.

"Load the cart," Rian ordered, turning his back on the blackened storehouse walls. "And keep your hands off the dead."

Han let out a long, rattling breath that plumed white in the air, his arms wrapped tight around his cracked ribs.

"I’m not touching anything in this graveyard," Han muttered, shivering as he grabbed one end of a frozen timber. "I just want to get back to the ship before whatever ate the garrison comes back for dessert."

Baletta and Doron hauled the bundles of seasoned ironwood onto a scavenged handcart, their boots crunching over the unnatural frost that covered the courtyard. Iren hefted a sealed barrel of hard pitch onto his shoulder with a quiet grunt, and his eyes kept darting toward the drag marks running down to the black water. They worked with the brisk, highly motivated speed of border veterans who knew exactly when they had overstayed their welcome.

Rian walked at the back of the formation as they pushed the cart down to the shoreline.

He kept his hands in his pockets while his dark eyes moved across the jagged ice jutting from the ruined watchtowers. Shingan stayed locked down behind his soul gates. For now, he let his ordinary senses do the work, tracking the bite of the wind and the slow crash of the waves against the fjord.

The longboats rowed them back to the flagship in absolute silence.

Once the ironwood and pitch were hauled over the rail, Bosun "Mother" Grael took the deck.

She did not shout or wave her arms. She stood near the helm, spat a dark wad of tobacco into a brass spittoon, and gave clipped, guttural orders to the navy carpenters.

Dozens of sailors swarmed the splintered mainmast and hung from the frozen rigging on hempen lines. They worked through the wind and the icy spray, driving iron wedges into the cracked timber to pry the rot open. The thud of wooden mallets echoed across the fjord, keeping time with the slow roll of the warship. Below them, caulkers boiled the pitch over iron braziers, and the sharp, choking smell of burning tar rolled across the deck.

Rian stood near the port rail and watched a team of master shipwrights brace the ironwood splints against the core of the mast.

They bound the timber with steel-core rope and sealed every fissure with blistering pitch before the cold could crack the wood any further. By late afternoon, the mortal wound in the mast had become a thick, black-ridged scar.

Grael ran her scarred, two-fingered hand over the drying pitch and grunted once.

’Say what you want about the Emperor. His war machine is undeniably efficient.’

Rian turned away from the mast and walked slowly across the busy deck.

He found Nyssira standing alone at a quiet stretch of the starboard rail.

The Princess of Narthrowe had pulled a grey auxiliary cloak tight around her shoulders, and a thick woolen scarf hid the lower half of her face. She was staring at the blackened stones of Grimhaven, at the drag marks gouged into the earth. She did not move. Her hands stayed buried in the folds of the cloak.

Rian stopped beside her and leaned his elbows on the frozen wood of the rail.

He knew the rules of her existence. If she tried to say why she had come south, the Transcendent compulsion in her soul would make her seize and bleed, and it might kill her.

So Rian did not ask a single question.

He drew his left hand from his coat pocket, keeping his palm flat and angled away from the legionaries pacing the quarterdeck.

He set the crude iron bracer on the rail between them.

Nyssira looked down.

For a second, she only looked at the iron band lying against the salt-stained wood, at the single open eye stamped roughly into the metal.

The blood drained from her face.

Her hands shot out of the cloak and gripped the edge of the rail so hard her knuckles popped. A tremor ran through her from her shoulders to her boots. She did not look at Rian. She did not make a sound. Her breath caught behind the scarf, and stayed caught.

For a long moment, Nyssira kept her eyes shut.

Then she forced her chin down in a single, sharp nod.

Rian slid the bracer back into his pocket and turned his gaze out toward the grey water.

The pieces settled. Wandering Leviathans had not wiped out the garrison at Grimhaven on their own. The fierce people of the North had hit the fortress first.

The Asgardian remnant was not simply hiding in the ice, waiting for the Sixth Legion to come and erase it. It was armed and organized, and it was already striking south at the Empire’s forward outposts. Ysolde Vaertia was not sailing her vanguard to a quiet execution. She was sailing it into a war with two fronts.

Rian’s eyes narrowed slightly against the wind.

’Good. I hate a one-sided fight.’

On the quarterdeck, Captain Ysolde Vaertia lowered her brass farglass.

"The splints are holding, Captain," Bosun Grael rasped, climbing the short wooden stairs to stand beside the Ascendant. "The pitch is cured hard. She’ll take the wind."

Ysolde did not smile. Her face stayed as dry as parchment, and the silver lion on the collar of her blue coat gleamed dully. She looked once more at Grimhaven, at the spikes of unnatural ice jutting from its broken watchtowers.

"Weigh anchor," Ysolde ordered, her voice carrying cleanly over the noise of the deck. "We don’t linger in a graveyard."

The iron winches screamed as the sailors hauled the anchors up out of the frozen mud.

The flagship groaned deep in its timbers as the canvas dropped from the yards. The wind caught the sails with a crack like a whip and pulled the warship forward.

Rian stayed by the starboard rail and watched the ruined fortress fall slowly behind them.

The fleet threaded the last of Skell’s jagged black rocks and left the sheltered, iron-grey water of the fjord. Then it crossed the final threshold of the island chain.

The water changed at once.

The muddy grey chop of the shallows gave way to an impossible, abyssal black. Out here, the waves did not break against anything. They rolled in as long, heavy swells of freezing ocean and lifted the warship as easily as a piece of driftwood. Within minutes, the spray began freezing where it landed on the rail, and the wind came howling in unbroken, carrying the smell of deep and ancient ice.

This was the open northern sea.

Rian leaned over the rail and looked down into the black.

Shingan stayed locked down. He was not channeling any essence, and his aura did not reach past the frayed cuffs of his coat. Even so, held entirely inside, Flow Perception still read the motion of the water.

Far below the rolling surface, deep beneath the flagship’s wooden hull, the water was being displaced in vast, rhythmic surges.

It was not the chaos of a storm, and it was not the drift of a deep current. The surges moved together, in wide, deliberate arcs that swept back and forth across the trench beneath them.

Rian watched the black water swell against the hull.

’...They’re patrolling.’