I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1484: The Wreck Of The Bright Oath

The vanguard flagship ground to a shuddering halt.

The impact came as one long shriek of imperial timber dragging against solid ice. The warship pitched hard to port, and sailors and legionaries went sprawling across the pitch-sealed deck. Rian kept his hands deep in the pockets of his frayed black coat, letting his knees bend just enough to ride out the lurch. He stayed planted while the men around him scrambled for their footing.

At the prow, the Fire-Sages and Tide-Sages cut their essence flow at once, and the newly carved channel sank back into silence.

Captain Ysolde Vaertia stood by the helm with her boots braced against the tilted deck.

”Damage report,” Ysolde ordered.

Her voice was as dry as parchment. She stepped up to the port rail, and the silver lion on her collar caught the grey light of the sky and gleamed dully.

Rian walked up to the rail beside her.

The fleet had spent days forcing its way through the Ice Line, carving a narrow road through the frozen continent. But the flagship had not struck a random floe. It had run into the iceberg that formed the port wall of the channel, a cliff of ice that towered over the masts. The ice here was not the pale blue of frozen seawater. It was old and densely packed, and in the fading afternoon light it was nearly clear.

And there was something trapped inside it.

Deep within the sheer face of the iceberg, preserved like an insect caught in amber, rested the hull of a ship.

It was an Imperial warship. Its masts had snapped, and thousands of tons of ancient ice had closed around its hull. The vessel sat tilted at a steep angle, pinned forever at the moment the floes had crushed it.

Bosun Grael climbed up to the quarterdeck.

The veteran sailor did not speak. She walked past Ysolde and stopped at the rail, her scarred face gone nearly as pale as the ice. She gripped the freezing wood so tightly that the knuckles of her right hand popped. Her left hand clamped down just as hard, and bare timber showed through where three of her fingers should have been.

Grael stared at the frozen wreck, her breath coming short and fast.

”The Bright Oath,” Grael whispered.

Her harsh, grinding voice had lost every trace of its usual foul-mouthed authority.

”I lost my fingers on that deck,” Grael said, the words slipping out into the freezing wind. ”Three decades ago. The ice took the hull in a storm, and the commanding officer ordered us to abandon ship. We walked south across the floes for two months. Only twelve of us made it back to Skell.”

For a moment, Ysolde looked at the bosun. Then her eyes went back to the wreck in the ice.

”We are holding the channel while the Sages recover their essence,” Ysolde said practically. ”We need to know what failed them. Prepare a boarding party.”

Rian tipped his chin half an inch.

’Grave robbing it is, then.’

The Eleventh Squad deployed onto the pack ice to secure the perimeter.

The footing was treacherous, a jagged field of shattered rime split by deep, hidden fissures. Han wrapped his wool coat tighter around his ribs, his breath pluming white as he scanned the empty horizon. Baletta stood at the base of the iceberg with one hand resting on her sword hilt, watching the dark overhang above them. Doron let his shadow-soul fog bleed out across the snow, and it seeped into the hidden cracks, mapping them beneath the surface.

Rian walked across the ice behind Ysolde and Grael.

The collision had sheared away the port side of the iceberg, exposing the upper deck of the Bright Oath to the open air. The boarding party climbed a steep ramp of collapsed ice, slipping and catching themselves on the slick surface, until they reached the shattered rail of the wreck.

The air inside the frozen vessel was different.

It did not carry the sharp salt of the open ocean. It smelled of old dust and stale pine, and under both, the shut-in smell of a tomb. Frost lay over everything on the deck in a thick, unbroken crust.

Sailors lay near the broken mainmast.

They were frozen through, their skin gone a waxy, translucent blue. Some still clutched iron wedges. Others had simply curled into small balls against the bulkhead. The cold had taken them so fast, and so completely, that decay had never been allowed to start.

Grael walked past the bodies of her old crewmates without looking down.

She moved fast and stiff-backed, leading them across the deck toward the raised quarterdeck at the stern. The oak door to the captain’s quarters was sealed shut behind a thick sheet of rime.

Grael did not hesitate. She drove the heel of her sea-boot straight into the lock.

The old wood split inward with a sharp crack, and the sound rolled away down the frozen corridors of the ship.

Rian followed the two women into the cabin.

He kept his hands in his pockets and his Shingan suppressed behind his soul gates. He did not need the Demon Eye to read this room. Everything in the captain’s quarters had its place. A large nautical chart lay frozen to the ironwood desk, and in the exact center of the desk, held shut by a brass clasp, sat the ship’s leather-bound logbook.

Ysolde walked up to the desk.

She drew a small, silver-handled dagger from her belt and wedged the blade beneath the frozen clasp. With a sharp twist of her wrist, the brittle metal snapped. She cracked the leather cover open. The vellum pages were stiff with cold, but the ink had held.

Ysolde began to read.

Her face gave nothing away. Her eyes tracked the faded black ink, moving methodically down the columns of numbers and the hurried notes of a dying imperial commander.

”They were tracking the northern bloodlines,” Ysolde said quietly.

Grael’s head came up. The bosun turned around, her pale eyes fixing on the open logbook.

”What?” Grael rasped.

Ysolde turned the fragile page and ran a gloved finger down a long list of names and coordinates.

”The Bright Oath was not a simple mapping expedition,” Ysolde said evenly. ”The log explicitly details a secondary objective. They were hunting the Beija. They were cataloging the false eyes.”

Rian stood by the shattered doorway and did not move.

The board clicked into place. The Empire had not suddenly decided, in this generation, to launch an eradication mission. It had been trying to push across the deep sea for decades, sending fleet after fleet into the crushing dark under the name of exploration. The Luminous Order’s ledger was not a new project. It was a harvest, handed down from one generation of the Empire’s fleets to the next.

Grael looked down at the open book.

Her broad shoulders sagged. She lifted her left hand and turned it over, looking at the gap where three fingers used to be. She had bled for this ship. She had watched her friends freeze to death on the open ice, believing they had died fighting the cold, uncaring northern sea.

She had not known.

”We died for eyes,” Grael whispered, and her voice cracked on the last word.

Ysolde closed the logbook. She did not offer comfort. She simply tucked the frozen book beneath her arm.

”The mission remains,” Ysolde said flatly. ”We return to the flagship.”

Rian turned away from the desk and walked back out onto the frozen deck.

He looked at the sailors huddled by the mast. He looked up at the iceberg towering above them, thousands of tons of it bearing down on the wreck. The Emperor was a man who planned his violence in centuries, sending thousands of his own soldiers into a frozen meat grinder again and again until the gears finally caught.

’History really does just run in circles.’

They climbed back down the ice ramp and left the Bright Oath to its silent watch.

The Eleventh Squad formed up without a word as the boarding party approached the flagship. Baletta looked at Grael’s rigid back, then raised an eyebrow at Rian. Rian shook his head.

They had just crossed the boarding ramp when the brass bell on the quarterdeck rang out.

”Captain!”

The shout came down from the crow’s nest, cutting through the howl of the wind. The lookout, crusted white with frost, was leaning over the railing and jabbing an arm toward the northern horizon.

Ysolde stepped onto the main deck, her head snapping up.

Rian turned his gaze north.

The endless field of pack ice was breaking up at last. Far in the distance, barely visible through the driving grey mist, a jagged black line rose against the sky. It was not another iceberg. It was not a frozen wave. It was solid earth.

The dark shoreline of the Northern Continent had finally broken the horizon.

Landfall.