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Synopsis
The Divide separating the east from the west, the realms of death from the realms of life, has fallen.
Sarine and her champions find themselves overwhelmed, assaulted on every side by swordsmen, assassins, and skinchangers infiltrating, killing, and twisting even their most loyal allies against them. Every victory hides a defeat, and yet there is still hope.
If Sarine can learn the true nature of her powers, she can make a final stand against the Regnant, to challenge him and remove his death grip on the world's heart. To find the truth, she must journey to a new continent and find new allies, rallying their strength, and wielding every strain of magic in the world in a final battle between life and death.
Read the final book in this sweeping epic fantasy, perfect for readers of Brandon Sanderson, Brian McClellan, and Miles Cameron.
The Ascension Cycle
Soul of the World
Blood of the Gods
Chains of the Earth
Release date: December 5, 2023
Publisher: Orbit
Print pages: 736
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Chains of the Earth
David Mealing
Library
The Gods’ Seat
The air shimmered in front of her, and the pages of the book in her lap turned without being touched.
She sat cross-legged on the cold stone floor. Shelves of books lined the walls, tomes more ancient than the oldest, most decrepit scrolls in the best-preserved libraries in the world. She’d chosen a stack that lay piled beside her, books written in long-dead languages covering metaphysics, strategy, religion; anything that might touch, however obliquely, on the coming war between her and her enemy, between Regnant and Veil. The selections had been hers, but today’s reading was prompted by the shimmering man-shape rippling the air in front of her. She sat, waiting, as the pages turned, seemingly of their own accord, while the Watcher thumbed through the volume, seeking whatever it was he wanted her to see.
He’s frustrated, Anati thought to her. Her kaas lay perched atop another stack of books, the ones she’d pulled aside yesterday that had yet to be reshelved. Anati’s scales seemed to shine, as though reflecting an unseen light of purple and soft blue. He’s looking for something he can’t find.
“I thought this was his library,” she said. “And he’s been here for what, tens of thousands of years? You’d think he’d know it all by now.”
“The ghost giving you trouble today, sister?” Yuli asked. The Natarii clanswoman sat on the opposite side of the chamber, in a chair that seemed designed to match the tattoos on her face, hides stretched over sharply pointed bone. A massive tome of Jun Imperial history lay open on her lap, each of its pages illustrated in rich color.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “This is the third book he’s had me stare at while he flicks the pages. Anati says he’s looking for something.”
“That’s positive, then, isn’t it?” Yuli said. “You’re close to something he considers important.”
“Maybe,” she said. “How about you? Learning anything about our enemies?”
“Not really,” Yuli said. “Except did you know Tigai was born under the sign of the Rooster, according to their sky-scholars? Supposedly it means he is hardworking and industrious, though that fits him about as well as gloves on a falcon.”
“Well, if it says anything about their armies, or weaknesses in their strategic thinking,” she said. “Let me know so we can add it to Erris’s lists.”
Yuli folded the tome delicately closed atop her lap. “Armies?” she said. “I thought this was going to be decided by champions, ours against theirs, once the Divide comes down.”
“It is,” she said. “Or, it should be. I don’t know. Some of the Watcher’s reading is making me ask questions. All of the more recent books only talk about champions, but some of the earliest ones go on and on about armies and battles, wars that cover every continent. He seems to want me to read those especially. I’m not sure why.”
There, Anati thought. He’s found it.
She turned her attention back to the book lying open in her lap. Suddenly the pages had stopped turning, and the left page was depressed, as the Watcher pushed an invisible finger into the second paragraph.
The script was one of the ancient ones; the characters blurred and became readable in her mind without her needing to think or study them too closely. One of many benefits to her bond with Anati, and an especially useful one in a library as old as this. She started reading where the Watcher’s finger dented the page.
“See, this is another one,” she said. “It says here they ‘could devise a game to control for the chaos of war, where a champion might’… wait.”
“A champion might wait?” Yuli said. “What does that mean?”
“No, I mean… wait,” she said. She read the passage again. “Anati, who wrote this?”
Doesn’t it say on the spine? Anati thought to her. Or inside the cover? That’s how your books are usually made, isn’t it?
“Yes,” she said, inserting a finger to hold the place. “This book is Meditations on Light and Shadow, written by a man who calls himself Dominus. But people have other names. I’ve read three books I’m sure were written by Axerian now, using three different names, and this is in a similar style… only it’s older. I’m sure of it. The way this writer talks, it’s as though all of this, all of the champions and the war between Regnant and Veil… it’s as though…”
“As though what?” Yuli said. “What does it say?”
She scanned it again, starting from the place where the Watcher’s finger had indented the page.
“It’s as though it hadn’t happened yet, when this was written,” she said. “Listen to this: ‘We could divide the world in two in the regenerative stages, isolating the systems bound to her, and to him. Using champions as proxies, a game structure for power transitions minimizes risk of interference from the apex lines of emergent strains not bound to either master.’ It sounds like whoever is writing this is talking about instituting the whole thing. The champions, control over the Soul, all of it.”
“That sounds like a stretch,” Yuli said. “Are you sure it couldn’t mean something else?”
“No,” she said. “Here, it actually calls them by name: ‘Absent direct interference by Regnant or Veil, the proposed Divide-based game structure ensures retention of control by isolating powers that might theoretically contest the champions at the fulcrum point of each transition.’ Anati, where did this book come from?”
What? Anati thought. You plucked it from the shelf, over there.
“No, I mean, ask him,” she said. “Who wrote this, and how did it get into this library?”
The Watcher sat still and unmoving, an unseen finger still firmly planted in the page. Then slowly the air rippled in the shape of a head nodding.
He says it was written by who it says on the spine. “Dominus.” “The Master.”
“The Master,” she said. “One who came before the Regnant and Veil?”
The air rippled again.
She slid the book out from under his finger, closing it gingerly and saving the place.
“Erris has to see this,” she said, rising to her feet. “I have to study this. This could change everything. It talks about the whole thing, the champions, the Divide, the struggle for control of the bloody world, as though it were a game. Something they devised to keep outsiders from interfering.”
Yuli joined her on her feet, falling into step with her as they left the library behind.
“How could they devise anything together?” Yuli asked as they walked. The cold stone from the library floor extended through the passages, spiraling outward toward where the Gods’ Seat had made rooms for her, and each of her champions. They’d been here since the last ascensions, her and Yuli, Erris and Arak’Jur and Reyne and Tigai. Trapped, or at least in stasis, with only the map room and Erris’s Need bindings for contact with the outside world. “Aren’t the Regnant and Veil mortal enemies?”
“As far as I know,” she said. “Maybe they were, and this ‘Master’ devised his game to keep their conflicts in check? I don’t know. I’ve only read a few pages. We need to study it to know for sure.”
“But why would it be printed and published?” Yuli said. “Did this ‘Master’ have an audience for his thoughts on how to devise systems to control the world?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “You’re right, though: It’s not like the Veil’s journals. This was printed and bound.”
“I’m only asking because I want to be sure we’re not misinterpreting,” Yuli said. “Maybe this was fiction, and it only sounds like it does because that’s what you want to find.”
“I agree, we need to be cautious, but it referred to them by name,” she said. “It sounds clear to me. We’ll see what Erris thinks.”
“It mentioned ‘others,’ too,” Yuli said. “Others… peers of the Regnant and Veil? I wonder who it might mean.”
She left that part unanswered, ignoring the chill she felt at Yuli’s words. It was only a few paragraphs, but already the book threatened to shake her understanding of where they were, and why. A game? If the Regnant and Veil were playing a game, she was entirely ignorant of the rules. And rules could be broken. Games could be set aside. Too many had died already; how many more might die with them if all of it up to now had been a game?
She and Yuli took familiar passages spiraling outward from the Soul. The library room was one of the closest to the burning light at this place’s heart. Their private chambers lined the halls leading outward, toward the map room and a handful of other, emptier chambers whose purposes she hadn’t yet been able to discern. The strange art and sculpture here was slowly being replaced by the familiar, the longer they stayed: Sarresant paintings had begun to appear on the walls in place of the smeared inks and wrought iron, at least near her, Erris’s, and Reyne’s chambers, whereas Tigai’s hall had murals of Jun soldiers, and Yuli’s had plinths with limestone sculptures of fearsome warrior-women as marked and tattooed as she was. None of them, so far as she knew, had asked the Watcher to change the décor, yet it had changed all the same. More mysteries of this place, and always too many for her to unravel.
A rap on the carved white door was met by silence from within. She opened it anyway, and stepped inside.
Erris’s desk was covered with papers. Loose parchments and three separate inkwells had been pushed to the edges, while maps spread out across most of its surface. More maps and parchments scrawled with notes lay on the low table between two of her couches, marked with blue bars and lines to denote the current disposition of the Imperial armies of New Sarresant, Thellan, and Gand. The Empress herself sat behind her desk, slumped against her ornately carved chair, both eyes rolled up into her head so only the whites gazed out over her papers and maps. For anyone else she might have panicked, rushed to offer aid in the form of Life and Body. For Erris, it meant her consciousness was elsewhere, sent to attend meetings or deliberations through one of her vessels, through the power of Need.
“May as well sit comfortably while we wait,” Yuli said. “I wonder if the Watcher will have anticipated us coming… mmm, and there it is.”
A tray of tea sat atop one of Erris’s cabinets, piping hot, with a plate divided between Sarresant biscuits and what Yuli had called Natarii dipping cakes. Yuli fetched the tray, carefully folding one of Erris’s maps to clear space on the low table.
“There are some parts of this place I’m going to miss,” Yuli said. “Hot tea ready and waiting before you even know you want it. Like having an army of Jun palace servants watching over you, and not one of them inclined to sell your secrets to your enemies.”
She sat across from Yuli, tucking both legs under her atop the cushions and reopening the Watcher’s book to where she’d saved the place. Erris would return from her Need connections soon enough. Until then, she might as well make good use of the time.
The virtues of a game-structure would be twofold in principle: First, to ensure a regulated transition with minimal oversight between the Regnant and Veil while inuring their systems from influence from the outside; second, to select for refined genetic stock to be bred among survivors into each of the program’s next phases.
Most of the words made sense as she read them, though the broader picture eluded her. Yuli was right to be cautious. But this was describing the Regnant and Veil, it said so in specific terms. And something else, these “outsiders” and “others” the text made mention of. She thumbed ahead looking for the word, and found it again three paragraphs down:
On exceptions to the point of non-interference: The rival claimants would of necessity need to be rebuffed by the principals; both Regnant and Veil must be free to respond to the threat of the others imbuing champions of their own to contest each cycle’s victory.
Champions of their own rang in her ears as she read it. There were champions bound to her, and champions bound to him. That was supposed to be the end of it; whichever side killed the others would gain control of the Soul of the World.
“Yuli,” she said, rereading the passage again to be sure she’d gotten it right. “Take a look at this. I think it says there could be other champions. Here, and here.”
She pointed, turning the book around to face the opposite couch.
The couch was empty.
She hadn’t heard Yuli get up to leave, and it wasn’t like Yuli to go without saying anything, no matter how absorbed she was in whatever books or scrolls she was studying. She frowned, glancing toward the door. Still closed, and she hadn’t heard the hinges or the latch. Even Yuli’s tea was still there, sitting on a stand beside the couch, with a half-eaten dipping cake lying beside the cup.
“Sister?” she called toward the door. Erris wouldn’t hear or notice anything while her senses were wrapped up in Need. “Yuli?”
Nothing.
She closed the book, turning to face Erris’s desk.
Erris was gone, too.
All the maps were still there, the ornate desk chair still as it had been when the Empress sat in it. Impossible for Erris to have returned from her Need binding and left with Yuli without either of them making a sound. She’d been studying the Watcher’s book for no more than a minute or two. A few cautious steps toward the desk gave her a view of Erris’s sleeping room, adjoined to her workspace. Nothing.
“Erris!” she shouted, hearing agitation creep into her voice as she left Erris’s chambers and returned to the stone hallway. “Yuli!” When nothing came she added the others: “Arak’Jur! Tigai!” And even finally, “Reyne!”
No response, other than the echo of her own voice as it rebounded through the stone.
She ran through the twisting halls, still calling for her champions. Tigai’s chambers were as empty as Erris’s had been. Arak’Jur’s were silent. The Gods’ Seat had never been welcoming, or familiar, whatever comforts had been put here on their behalf, but at least she hadn’t been alone. She’d spent many late hours studying in the library, knowing that only Erris was likely to still be awake in her chambers. The silence was different now, the silence of empty halls instead of quiet ones.
She checked every room as the halls spiraled outward. Empty. Finally she reached the last, the room they’d arrived in, farthest from the light of the Soul burning at the Gods’ Seat’s core. It had been decorated with crude wall drawings and wrought iron sculpture then; those were gone now, leaving the space empty save for the device that gave the room its name.
A map of the world spread atop a table more akin to a stone altar, covering the back half of the room. Details sculpted onto the map made it come alive; it was as though every mountain, every tree of every forest had been replicated atop its table in all their textured contours, as though you were a God reaching down to touch the world whenever you stood over it. No sign of her champions here either. But something on the map had changed. Lights shone from either side, beams of pure white rising from the map’s edges.
She stepped into the chamber, and a voice thundered in her head the instant her footstep touched the stone.
IT BEGINS.
The sound came from everywhere, and nowhere, reverberating in her ears as though her head were an orchestral hall.
She froze, waiting. Nothing changed. The lights on either side of the map pulsed. She went to the device, feeling her heart thundering as though Anati had pumped her full of Red.
The continents and textures were all the same. There were still thick forests covering the westernmost continent, where New Sarresant nestled on the ocean’s shore. Broad mountains rose on the eastern landmass, burning deserts in the South, deep jungles near Jun cities, rolling arctic plains in the North near Yuli’s home. But the Divide was gone.
Always before when she’d looked down on the map, a searing black line had separated east from west, running directly down its center. She’d stood in the towering shadows that line had represented, crossed through them, felt the screaming in her ears as the shadows closed around her and her companions. Seeing it here had never done it justice, but now it was gone. The land ran unbroken from east to west, the Bhakal continent undivided as it had been by the line of shadow cutting across its sands, jungles, and rolling plains.
Five lights rose from the western edge of the map. Eight from the east. She braced against the tabletop, studying them. Five. Yuli. Arak’Jur. Erris. Tigai. Reyne. Her champions had vanished, but perhaps…
She studied one of the western lights. It gave no indicator where its source was on the map; all thirteen of the beams rose from the outer edge, beyond the surfaces depicted in the center. But they seemed to call to her, too. The more she focused, the more the light drew her in, pulling her senses. Her eyes focused on the beam, and her skin, too, feeling its warmth and heat, her tongue and nose tasting the smells on the air, her ears filled with the sounds of… birds?
Suddenly she was there. Watching from above.
A clearing in a forest. A decrepit log cabin, long abandoned. Wild grasses grew over and through a broken fence. Cracked glass decorated its windows.
Erris stood next to a stone well, in full military uniform, as she’d been dressed sitting behind her desk in the Gods’ Seat. Her champion seemed to be in a daze, disoriented, as though she’d only now come to, as shocked as Sarine to find out where she’d gone. Sarine tried to call to her, tried to say something, and heard only the sound of her voice echoing in the map room. Erris gave no sign she’d heard. Yet, after no more than a few moments of surprise, Erris pivoted toward the house, searching for something. Sarine tried to call out again, and once again heard only her own voice.
She leaned back, pulling away from the light, and her senses returned to the map room.
Erris was alive. All her champions were; those five lights were her people, wherever they’d been scattered across the world. She looked in on another to confirm it, and found Arak’Jur running through a thick forest. She tried another, and saw Reyne laughing to himself on a street corner she didn’t recognize. The other eight had to be the Regnant’s. She peered to look at one of those, and saw a woman in red silk robes kneeling in the middle of some kind of ceremony, surrounded by what looked like monks dabbing her with a cloth. Another, and she saw a man in white retrieving a sword mounted on a wall, fastening its scabbard to his belt.
It begins, the voice had said, still echoing in her ears. Was the Regnant in a room like this somewhere, looking down on her champions? No way to tell precisely where they were unless she already knew their surroundings, but who could say what the Regnant would be able to discern from a forest, a street corner, an old log cabin. She had to reach her people and warn them.
She blinked, searching for the starfield and the strands. For weeks she’d been kept here, unable to leave the Gods’ Seat. Neither she nor Tigai had been able to sense the strands. Now the waiting was over. Her champions were down there, in danger, but alive. For the first time since their ascensions, she could sense the stars, and the blue sparks of Life, offering her a way to leave the Seat. Whether all of this was a game or no, whatever else the Watcher’s strange book promised to reveal, the voice had been right: This was a beginning, and she meant to find a way to see it all through to its end.
Village of Verkhon
Clan Hoskar Land
IT BEGINS.
Yuli heard the voice in two places. One in Erris’s chambers in the Gods’ Seat, where she sat atop too-soft cushions enjoying a delicious cake of honey and flaky dough with her tea, watching Sarine engrossed in her latest find from the Watcher’s library. But by the time she understood the words sounding in her ears, she was somewhere else.
A dark room lit by early-morning sunlight, with hexagonal walls, a low table stocked with hard bread and cheese, and a man, a woman, and their child, suddenly frozen and staring at her.
The woman screamed, staggering back from the table, while the man moved to protect their child, a girl of no more than five. The Twin Fangs rumbled inside her, a stirring of predator scenting prey. For a moment her emotions mirrored the Twin Fangs’: This was wrong. She wasn’t supposed to be here. She was supposed to be with Sarine, safe and waiting in the Gods’ Seat for the true war with the Regnant to begin.
But she recognized these people’s tattoos. A black mark like a falcon’s wings was inked on the man’s cheekbones. A wolf’s paw covered the woman’s cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Two small dots were inked on either side of the girl child’s face, markings that would grow fuller when it was clear who she was meant to be. Hoskar tattoos. The Gods’ Seat had begun to feel like home, especially in Sarine’s company, and in Tigai’s. But this was her true home. This was Hoskar territory.
“Forgive me, good mother,” she said, bowing where she sat, on the opposite side of their table. “I’m not sure how I came to be here, but I’ve intruded, and spoiled your morning meal.”
The woman fixed her with a look of distrust, but her words, spoken in the Hoskar tongue, softened the feeling between them. The Twin Fangs still stirred in her belly, but it relaxed as the mother did, and the man followed her lead, though the child still stared at her in wonder.
“Magi trickery?” the woman asked.
Yuli nodded. “Has to be.”
“Share bread with us, then,” the woman said, making a ward with her fingers, quickly repeated by the man, and their child. “You are in Gornat Hard Paw’s house, in the village of Verkhon.”
“My mother was from Verkhon,” she said. “It’s my honor to return. I’m Yuli Twin Fangs, daughter of Vannar Long Stride Khan Hoskar.”
The woman made another sign with her fingers, this one to honor the dead.
It seized her heart. No Hoskar would make that sign unless the one they spoke of was laid to rest, dead and mourned. Her father was dead. If not for the bond she shared with Sarine, strengthening her control, the sight might have sent the Twin Fangs into a frenzy.
“You must have been long away, Yuli Khansdaughter,” Gornat said. “Hyman Three Winds leads us now. Your father returned to the earth some months past.”
Tears formed in her eyes, and the Twin Fangs rose in her blood. She longed to let it come, to howl and run and find an animal to kill.
“Are you a warrior?”
The child’s voice pricked through the haze of the Twin Fangs’ rage. Gornat’s husband tsked at the rudeness of the question, but Yuli wiped her eyes and turned to face the girl.
“Yes, little daughter,” Yuli said. “I am.”
The girl stared up at her, and Yuli leaned forward over the table.
“You may touch my tattoos, if your mother allows it,” she said.
The girl glanced at Gornat for permission, before turning back to Yuli, reaching up to run tiny fingers over the Twin Fangs tattoos. A sacred thing, and she remembered well the first time she’d seen the elaborate lines of a warrior’s markings on her mother’s sister’s face, when she’d been no older than this little girl.
“Where are our warriors called to assemble?” she asked, keeping her face low enough for the girl to trace the lines of the claw marks on her forehead.
Gornat and her husband exchanged a look. “Hyman Three Winds has issued no call to war,” Gornat said.
Yuli leaned back. “He must have. When I left with Isaru Mattai, the Empire was already on the brink. Now…” She left the rest unsaid, but in the weeks she’d spent with Sarine and the rest at the Gods’ Seat there had been talk of little else. It was never the way of Clan Hoskar to sit out, or let others fight their battles.
“No,” Gornat said quietly. “We’ve heard rumors. But our Khan has said nothing, nor issued any summons.”
A moment of quiet passed between them. War was nothing to be looked for; she’d seen enough of blood and death already to know it. But this was no time to be sitting idly, leaving soldiers harvesting fields and warriors attending the Khans at court. Somehow she’d come here from the Gods’ Seat. It had to mean that the true war, between Regnant and Veil, would soon start in earnest, if it hadn’t already. Not a time to leave the clan’s warriors without direction. She was far from the most senior among her sisters, no matter her father’s standing as Khan. But she was bound as champion to Sarine. She had to lead, or, failing that, to push them to be ready.
“Where is he?” she asked. “Hyman Three Winds?”
“The Khan makes his seat in Tiansei,” Gornat said.
“Thank you for your bread, then, good mother,” she said, rising from the table and offering them a bow.
“You will need horses, and supplies,” Gornat’s husband said. “My brother will see you provisioned, as soon as we can rouse him.”
She shook her head. “Thank you, but no. I must go at once.”
“But it’s a week’s journey to Tiansei,” Gornat’s husband said.
“Not for the Twin Fangs.”
She bowed again, and left.
Snow crunched beneath its feet as the Twin Fangs loped through the trees. It longed to be in control always, to seize the muscles and bone and tissue of this body and change them to reflect its true form. When Yuli had control they were smaller, pale-skinned, narrow-faced, long-haired, with only the tattoos on her face and upper arms to suggest the majesty stirring under her skin. When the Twin Fangs ruled their form they towered over others of her kind, head and shoulders taller than any human, thickly muscled and hairless, with a properly elongated snout, honed and full of sharpened teeth for their enemies. Its limbs surged with power as they ran, bounding on all fours, claws retracted as they pounded through the snow.
Yuli’s emotions stirred deep inside the Twin Fangs’ belly. Fear. Relief. Sadness. Grief. Love. The Twin Fangs felt only hunger; it had been too long since it had been sated. But the two were one now, and had been since the pairing of their souls. Some part of Yuli bled into its emotions as it ran. So the Twin Fangs howled, for its hunger, and for Yuli’s father, and the forest shook with the force of its grief.
The sun had reached its apex when the Twin Fangs scented a man.
A half league distant, but they were well enough away from any Hoskar village. Yuli cautioned it to be careful, to make certain its prey was not a traveler, trader, or fellow clansman under her people’s protection. But no; the scent coursed through its senses as they tracked toward its source. A Jun smell. The Twin Fangs ran in a low crouch, careful to plant its paws in deep snow to mask the sound of its approach. The wind was good. It could hear the Jun man’s heartbeat now. Soon it would eat.
The Twin Fangs roared in frustration as Yuli seized control. Its claws receded. Its jaw shortened, framing a human face, with human skin as she wrenched their body from its grasp.
“Tigai?” Yuli said.
The Jun nobleman stood out against the taiga, wearing the same yellow coat he’d worn to visit her chambers the night before. He was clumsy, with none of a clansman’s grace, and he nearly fell as he staggered away from her, the pistols slung from his belt burning wisps of smoke where they touched the snow.
“Bloody fuck,” Tigai cursed as he recovered his footing. “That creature… I’ll never see that thing as you, aryu fuck my eyes if you didn’t have me bloody pissing myself. I almost hooked myself to Gantar Baat.”
She covered the distance between them and wrapped him in her arms. They almost fell together, but she kept them upright. Tigai was well-muscled, and pretty to look at when she could get him out of his coat and silks, but he was a Jun lord, short-statured and soft compared to Hoskar men. She would have wagered on herself in a wrestling match between them, and the Twin Fangs could crush him and never notice he’d been in the way. But he had other gifts, not least where their mutual nakedness was concerned. He loved like a wolf, loyal beyond life and death to his pack, rather than the tiger he tried to pretend he was on the outside. With the burden of her father’s death on her shoulders, she needed that love now, and she took it, holding him close as her tears returned.
“All right, all right,” Tigai said, trying to pull away. “What’s happened? I heard that… voice… and I woke up in Yanjin Palace, in Dao’s chambers, before I came here.”
“The same for me,” she said. “I heard the voice, ‘it begins,’ then I was in Verkhon, my mother’s birth village. I received news of my father’s death there. But how did you get here?”
“Your father?” Tigai said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t… I mean, I’m sorry, for your loss.”
“Wait a moment,” she said. “How did you get here?” They were well away from any settlement, another hour even at the Twin Fangs’ pace to reach the town of Tiansei.
“I could sense the strand connecting us together. It was near enough to an anchor I’d set before, and I figured—”
“You bastard!” she shouted. “You set an anchor outside Tiansei so you could move your pirates to attack the town. You’ve raided her
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