Verona, heavily guarded by a series of checkpoints manned with the Cipher’s own security detail. They stopped just short of a steep hill and hiked to its icy precipice overlooking Brakkar Gorge. Welding sparks flew like confetti below, the finishing touches of a war machine in assembly. Another completed just beyond.
“Have you gone mad? You’re building ships in a canyon.”
“Skyships, General,” Eli replied. “A galleon of steel and oak designed to sail the clouds. It’s amazing what a balloon, some propellers, and wing flaps can do. That’s the prototype there.”
The general wasn’t sure he had understood Eli correctly. “The ship, it flies?” he asked.
“It flies.”
There was a moment of pause—an appreciation for the fact that the world would never be the same again.
“Incredible. How many?”
“Just the two there for now. But we plan to have a fleet of twelve ready for the Harvest Festival.”
“And the benefactor knows about this?”
“It was his idea,” Eli replied. “His blueprints.”
They watched as the operational prototype was being fitted with artilleries and munitions.
“Merrick, what exactly do you know about this benefactor?” asked Arun, his eyes never leaving the skyship.
“His name is Magog Siberion,” the duke replied. “A Veshalic national who believes the whole of Groveland should be united under the crown, as it was in the days of old.”
“Why should a Silven care what becomes of Groveland?”
“He doesn’t. He cares what becomes of the Republic. Before he founded the Machina Investment Group, he was a Red Dragon in the Reznevayok Special Operations Command in the Liberation Army of Veshale. He is no friend of the Republic.”
“An ‘enemy of my enemy.’ But do you trust him?
Duke Thalian faced Arun. “I have seen him without his mask. He wears it to conceal a grotesque bloodstain in the shape of a handprint tattooed across his face. Not many are privy to that. And then, there’s this.” The duke held out his hand over the gorge. “So yes, Arun. I trust him.”
The general nodded, eyes still glazed with wonder. Then he softly said, “This will change everything, Merrick. Forever.”
CH 06
A NEW BEGINNING
Thirteen years had passed since Dale left for the Academy, seven since his graduation and subsequent enlistment, four since his commissioning, and three days since his resignation. At twenty-five years old, Dale’s military career had come to an abrupt end.
He had since learned to enjoy the simple pleasures of life—the scent of a bathed woman’s hair, a ballad on the oboe, a smoke in the cold, and not least of all, a long, quiet, train ride. He watched the world scroll past the windows, the canopies of trees mushrooming over the morning mist, the migration of buffalo across prairieland, the grass swaying in the wind, and wild horses under the moonlight. The world on the other side of the train window was a world unlike the one he’d known for the past thirteen years—a world full of tightly structured days and nights, of endless duties, of class after class. There were training camps, anxious patrols through dangerous trade routes. And death.
“Life,” Staff Sergeant Weylin had said while leading Dale’s company through a village they had just raided. “So frail and so goddamn meaningless. Pile ‘em up and burn ‘em!”
It was a world growing distant with each rhythmic rattle of steel on tracks. And Dale couldn’t be happier for it.
As a commissioned officer, Dale spent most of his tour in the south patrolling bandit trade routes and protecting Republic interests in Loreland; that is to say, protecting Republic-occupied natural resources on foreign soil from the Shaldean Riders. His first kill was a Shaldean, an Emmainite villager barely old enough to be considered a man.
In retaliation for a string of attacks on copper mines owned by Republic corporations, Dale’s unit had been sent in to a nearby village suspected
“Have you gone mad? You’re building ships in a canyon.”
“Skyships, General,” Eli replied. “A galleon of steel and oak designed to sail the clouds. It’s amazing what a balloon, some propellers, and wing flaps can do. That’s the prototype there.”
The general wasn’t sure he had understood Eli correctly. “The ship, it flies?” he asked.
“It flies.”
There was a moment of pause—an appreciation for the fact that the world would never be the same again.
“Incredible. How many?”
“Just the two there for now. But we plan to have a fleet of twelve ready for the Harvest Festival.”
“And the benefactor knows about this?”
“It was his idea,” Eli replied. “His blueprints.”
They watched as the operational prototype was being fitted with artilleries and munitions.
“Merrick, what exactly do you know about this benefactor?” asked Arun, his eyes never leaving the skyship.
“His name is Magog Siberion,” the duke replied. “A Veshalic national who believes the whole of Groveland should be united under the crown, as it was in the days of old.”
“Why should a Silven care what becomes of Groveland?”
“He doesn’t. He cares what becomes of the Republic. Before he founded the Machina Investment Group, he was a Red Dragon in the Reznevayok Special Operations Command in the Liberation Army of Veshale. He is no friend of the Republic.”
“An ‘enemy of my enemy.’ But do you trust him?
Duke Thalian faced Arun. “I have seen him without his mask. He wears it to conceal a grotesque bloodstain in the shape of a handprint tattooed across his face. Not many are privy to that. And then, there’s this.” The duke held out his hand over the gorge. “So yes, Arun. I trust him.”
The general nodded, eyes still glazed with wonder. Then he softly said, “This will change everything, Merrick. Forever.”
CH 06
A NEW BEGINNING
Thirteen years had passed since Dale left for the Academy, seven since his graduation and subsequent enlistment, four since his commissioning, and three days since his resignation. At twenty-five years old, Dale’s military career had come to an abrupt end.
He had since learned to enjoy the simple pleasures of life—the scent of a bathed woman’s hair, a ballad on the oboe, a smoke in the cold, and not least of all, a long, quiet, train ride. He watched the world scroll past the windows, the canopies of trees mushrooming over the morning mist, the migration of buffalo across prairieland, the grass swaying in the wind, and wild horses under the moonlight. The world on the other side of the train window was a world unlike the one he’d known for the past thirteen years—a world full of tightly structured days and nights, of endless duties, of class after class. There were training camps, anxious patrols through dangerous trade routes. And death.
“Life,” Staff Sergeant Weylin had said while leading Dale’s company through a village they had just raided. “So frail and so goddamn meaningless. Pile ‘em up and burn ‘em!”
It was a world growing distant with each rhythmic rattle of steel on tracks. And Dale couldn’t be happier for it.
As a commissioned officer, Dale spent most of his tour in the south patrolling bandit trade routes and protecting Republic interests in Loreland; that is to say, protecting Republic-occupied natural resources on foreign soil from the Shaldean Riders. His first kill was a Shaldean, an Emmainite villager barely old enough to be considered a man.
In retaliation for a string of attacks on copper mines owned by Republic corporations, Dale’s unit had been sent in to a nearby village suspected
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