EVERY SKY A GRAVE
Ascendance Series Book One
Jay Posey
Copyright
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Copyright © Jay Posey 2020
Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Jay Posey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008327125
Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780008327149
Version: 2020-09-23
Dedication
For Jennifer, who holds our world together
Epigraph
Respect for the word is the first commandment in the discipline by which a man can be educated to maturity—intellectual, emotional, and moral.
Respect for the word—to employ it with scrupulous care and an incorruptible heartfelt love of truth—is essential if there is to be any growth in a society or in the human race.
To misuse the word is to show contempt for man. It undermines the bridges and poisons the wells. It causes Man to regress down the long path of his evolution.
—Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
1
Elyth knew this world, as sure as she knew her own name.
She held the earth loosely clasped in her left hand, felt its damp weight, its sponged texture cold with the night. She knew this soil, knew the life it gave, the story it told, and the doom it now bore. She had come to know it well over weeks of reconnaissance, sweat-grimed days and nights spent on the trail of her deadly mark, learning its ways and its weaknesses.
But the time for stalking her prey was finished. Elyth had all she needed to complete the kill.
When her work was done, the planet Revik would lie dying at her feet. And none would be the wiser that an assassin of worlds had been visited upon them.
She raised her monocular to her eye, swept the view smoothly from left to right and back again. Through its lens the numerous guards shone like tongues of pale fire flickering along the walls and interior of the palace, some five hundred yards distant. Crouched at her hidden vantage point, Elyth noted the passing of a pair of watchmen by the main gate at the target site below. It was her third night of observation; she had the rhythm of the place now, its breath and its heartbeat.
A quick glance at the sky. Two moons highlighted the seams between the densely packed clouds drifting like ice floes in a lazy current overhead; the third moon was too weak and distant to make itself known. And though she couldn’t see it, Elyth knew between the moons and the clouds lay an armada. Five thousand Ascendance ships, oblivious to her presence on Revik and yet each utterly dependent on her success.
She returned her monocular to its housing at her belt, then removed a small pouch from an inner pocket in her vest. Into it, she let fall the handful of soil she’d gathered. A keepsake; a reminder of what once had been, before her coming to this world.
Time to work.
Elyth sealed the pouch of soil and replaced it inside her vest, then wiped her palms on her pants and stood from her crouch. Roughly three hundred yards of untamed land separated her from the border of the cultivated palace grounds, followed by two hundred yards of open space to her target. She drew on her gloves and slipped her mask over her face, concealing the last bits of exposed skin and cloaking herself fully in the smoked gray-blue of her infiltration attire. So clad, she slipped from her elevated position and began her approach.
Locals called the mountain Heifeld, but its true name was much longer and harder to pronounce, and carried within it all the weight and force of the truly ancient. Elyth had discerned that name in her careful interrogation of the land; the twin-peaked, green-gray mountain had become her ally and also her point of attack. A shallow saddle separated her from the lower but larger, flatter peak, where her target sat: the regional governor’s multitiered, multiwalled summer palace.
As impressive as the structure was, though, Elyth’s actual mark was what lay beneath; one of Revik’s most potent threadlines. A planetary nerve cluster near the surface with deep-run roots, concentrated into a focal point less than a hundred yards in diameter. Humans seemed intuitively drawn to such places of power, even when oblivious to their ecological significance.
Many worlds had died by Elyth’s hand, almost all their deaths wrought in the midst of some thriving city, or imposing government complex, or protected sacred ground.
She made her way down the mountainside and across the saddle, ever watchful. The saddle was peppered with spearlike pines and Revik’s peculiar wispy red-hued firs, and carried a dense, earthy scent; she had to mind her footing as she picked her way across the needle-blanketed terrain, dotted with its little fractal forests of moss.
As she approached the edge of the forest, she paused within its dark borders to take final stock of her target. The palace was mostly unlit, save for the pools of orange from security lights at regular intervals along the walls. There were six of these, each roughly twelve feet high, separating the center-most residential building from the outer grounds. Based on her estimate of the threadline’s size, she judged that she’d have to get beyond at least the fifth wall to carry out her strike. That was a lot of walls to put between her and her escape.
One thing at a time. She’d get within the minimal kill zone and evaluate from there.
She emerged from the tree line and crept shadowed across the open ground toward the eastern side of the palace, pausing whenever guards patrolled into view. Once she reached the outermost wall, she crouched at its base. Its stacked stones were irregular and rounded in the traditional fashion of the region, leaving enough useful gaps for Elyth’s skilled hands and feet. She spidered to the top, laid flat on the wide surface for two breaths to ensure no personnel were immediately below, then slipped over and down the opposite side.
The grounds within the walls had the marks of having been well manicured. Curving paths of hand-laid stone flowed over lush, pale yellow grass, like wide rivers amid prairie; pocket gardens dotted the landscape. But to Elyth’s careful eye, signs showed of disorder seeping in at all the edges. The height of the grass was uneven, overdue for cutting, and the once sharp borders of path and garden had grown fuzzy and indistinct. Elyth navigated from shadow to shade; the second and third walls were as easily overcome as the first.
Reaching the fourth took more care. The previous grounds had been decorative but largely transitional spaces, but here between the third and fourth walls they opened up in a meandering way, punctuated with small structures. From Elyth’s previous observation, she’d gathered these were workshops and general quarters for palace staff. There was little activity but the broken sight lines and patchwork shadows slowed her progress. Patrols moved over the grounds, emerging from blind corners or materializing piecemeal out of the scattered cover of sculpted trees and hedges.
Elyth’s previous patient reconnaissance repaid her; instinct cautioned her to pause, or spurred her to move before she had fully scanned for trouble. Some part of her subconscious fed her patterns of movement that she could not have described, and led her safely undetected to the farther wall.
It was between the fourth and fifth walls that her danger heightened. Sentries patrolled in greater numbers, and in crisscrossing patterns. The increased activity spoke of increased importance; indeed, the various buildings she could see were larger, more ornate.
She navigated her way through the patrols, but as she approached the fifth wall she was forced to stop. Eight pairs of sentries were stationed in a shallow zigzag pattern, each within constant sight of at least two others. Elyth studied them for a time, watching to see which pairs were silent and which were prone to conversation, where focus was strong and where it was weak. As was human tendency, they’d positioned themselves close to or under lights; the gaps between left narrow channels of darkness with little room for error.
She identified her best point of access between two of the chattiest sets of guards. It would be close and nothing was ever certain, but if she stayed low enough, Elyth felt she could slip through unnoticed. She went down on her belly, pressed into the soft grass, and began a slow crawl along a seam of darkness. Her path took her closer to the forward-most pair of sentries; as she neared, she picked up a portion of their conversation.
“—besides, blockades already failed at three other worlds,” one sentry, a woman, was saying. “We got another two weeks at most.”
They spoke casually, in the informal Low Language.
“Two weeks is pretty optimistic. I say another month,” the other sentry, a man, replied. “But you’re right, they can’t sustain the blockade. The Ascendance has no power left. Its doctrine is poison.”
“Its structure corrupt,” the first sentry replied.
“Its truth has failed. It falls, as it must,” the man answered. “And when it is gone, our righteousness will prevail.”
The last part of the exchange sounded rehearsed, robotic in its delivery. A liturgical call-and-response, thoughtlessly practiced and repeated. To untrained ears, the peculiar quality of their speech would have gone unnoticed; but to Elyth, whose life had been devoted to art and skill in the Language, their words dripped and seethed, acidic at the edges, caustic to the mind. Though she could understand every word they spoke, she heard how distorted the intent behind them had become. What the man had called righteousness was nothing more than his personal thirst for vengeance, with himself envisioned as holy judge. Their poisoned delusion angered Elyth.
Here, between these two guards, the danger that Revik posed was laid bare. It was not the speaking out against the Ascendance that had led to Elyth’s deployment; she herself had mixed feelings about the Grand Council and its leadership. But here, on Revik, the Language had been intentionally corrupted, purposefully shaped toward destructive ends.
Left unchecked, that corruption could and would spread to neighboring worlds. Tragic though it was, Revik’s demise would ensure the safety of thousands of planets, and many billions of human lives.
It was the Language that united them. It was the Language that had lifted the human race from the dust and granted them the stars as inheritance. There was power within its words. Every citizen of the Ascendance was meant to guard it. Instead, these remaining citizens of Revik had twisted it, distorted it to portray themselves enslaved; in truth, they were a free people grasping for nothing more than the freedom to destroy themselves.
She continued past and behind them, escaping their notice. Another fifty feet and she would be at the base of the wall. But as she was crossing that final stretch, fortune turned against her.
Without warning, one of the guards broke from his place and began crossing the grounds toward another pair, with Elyth caught between. He’d been standing in one pool of light and was heading toward another, so she knew his unadjusted vision would grant her some extra concealment. But he was going to pass within just a few feet of her, and she couldn’t leave the matter to chance.
Her hand found its way to the collapsed baton on her belt. A single strike could fell him easily enough. But the aftermath might be unmanageable.
As he closed within twenty feet of her, many possibilities were contained within those next few seconds. Elyth needed one specific possibility to manifest.
She would call it forth.
The technique was approved by the policy of her House, though only in limited circumstances and under strictest control. One could not twist the fabric of reality far before its warped threads would draw others best left undisturbed. But human perception was the easiest of all domains to influence and manipulate. She paused a moment to clear her mind, to fashion the words first within before she breathed them into existence. Then, with all focus and attention bent on that single sentry, she spoke.
But her words were not of the common dialect. Now, she employed the secret tongue that undergirded it all, the foundation upon which the Language and indeed the cosmos itself had been constructed. She spoke a sealing phrase to draw upon the hidden Deep Language.
“A shadow upon emptiness; the many darknesses are one,” she said, her words a barely voiced whisper. And then to the man, “Though you see me, you do not perceive.”
The guard reacted at the sound; his head pitched up as he brought his gaze from the ground in front of him to the place where Elyth lay. His features were too cloaked in darkness for her to see clearly, but she could feel his eyes upon her.
And the next moment, she felt his gaze slide over and past her. He continued his path in front of her, oblivious, close enough that she could have stretched out and snatched his ankle had she desired. When he was three paces past, she drew up into a low crouch and made her way as quickly as she dared to the wall, cycling her attention between her destination, the sentry she had dodged, and the other guards still standing at their posts. She paused at the base of the wall, pressed her shoulder to it while she surveyed the grounds. The wandering sentry reached his companions, and the three of them engaged in some quiet huddle of conversation. Everything else continued as it had before, with no sign that her passage had disturbed any of the sentries’ natural rhythm.
Assured that her crossing had gone unmarked, Elyth quickly cleared the fifth wall and lowered herself into the inner court, the central hub of the summer palace. There remained ahead of her only one final wall cordoning off the governor’s personal residence from the rest of the grounds. Whether by design or intuition, the extravagant home was very nearly centered above Elyth’s target threadline. She was tempted to breach that area, to infiltrate the place the governor considered most secure, only to prove to herself that she could.
But the threadline was wide enough that she could do her work here without any loss in efficacy, and there was no need to put yet another wall between herself and her escape. With mild reluctance, she set to scouting the various outbuildings between the walls.
There were a number of these, many of which after investigation she determined had been converted to temporary quarters for what she assumed were the governor’s most loyal supporters. Elyth circled the innermost wall, looking for a location that would provide her sufficient security for this most delicate part of her operation. Once she began the process, she couldn’t afford to be interrupted.
On the side of the palace opposite her initial approach, she found a tall single-story building, a wide and long rectangle, like a warehouse. She crept across an open stretch of ground to it and knelt down by its outer wall, on the darkest end. A high slat window or vent sat above her, roughly ten feet above the ground and set back slightly in the wall. Elyth stepped away, then made a quick dash forward and leapt up, boosting herself with a light step off the building exterior. She caught the narrow lip of the window’s housing with her fingertips and drew herself up enough to peek inside. The darkness within was nearly complete, save for a weak glow from somewhere near the main entrances and a pair of squared patches in the roof where the gloom clung less thickly to the ceiling. Skylights, maybe. She lowered herself back to the full extent of her arms, and then dropped softly to the ground.
She looked up, evaluated the roofline. It arced gracefully over the width of the building, coming no lower than perhaps fifteen feet from the ground at either end. The exterior walls were smooth, with no obvious protrusions. Climbing wasn’t an option, at least on this end. She peeked around the corner and spotted two large double-door entrances, each stretching nearly to the roofline in height and twice as wide. A third door of normal size sat under a light between the two bays. Between her and the first bay door, however, sat several crates haphazardly stacked near the storehouse, backlit by a light source farther beyond.
Though the central door promised the easiest access, Elyth hadn’t seen enough of the interior to feel secure entering that way.
She picked her way to the crates.
There were five of them, metal cubes about four feet to a side, and arranged as though they’d been hastily dumped. Elyth glanced up, judged the distance between the top crate and the edge of the roof. Significant for a standing jump, but not impossible. She scrambled on top of the crate and wasted no time.
Elyth leapt, stretched out, and caught the rounded edge of the roof; she pendulumed toward the building then out again, and used the momentum to accelerate her pull up and over the edge. Once on the roof, she padded in a low crouch to the nearest skylight opening. There she drew out her monocular and switched it to light amplification, no magnification.
It was a warehouse indeed. Like the surrounding grounds, it too showed signs of creeping disarray. From what she could see, the outer aisles were in good order. But closer to the loading bay doors the lines became less regular, until there, closest to the front of the building, it appeared as though large loads had been shoved into careless piles. Whatever the case, she saw no sign of personnel inside. Still, from her vantage she couldn’t see the source of the interior light and that made her wary of trying the front door.
The skylight wasn’t sealed; scratches at the rear corner showed wear from moving on hinges. After a few moments Elyth located a mechanism that raised and lowered the large pane, enabling it to double as a vent; another half minute of work, and she’d bypassed the circuitry and then manually lifted the pane wide enough to gain entry.
High rafters ran along either side of the skylight, but the gap was too great to manage safely. From a pouch strapped to her leg, Elyth removed a small black cylinder about the size of her fist. With the press of a button the top unfurled into a many-fingered hand, each digit willowy and delicate by look. She tugged the upper section free and ran it to the edge of the skylight; a spider-threaded line spooled out behind. When the fronds of the device met the lip of her entry point, she squeezed the handle, and those willowy fingers folded in, grasping the edge from many angles with all the strength of the roots of an ancient oak. The cylinder she hooked onto a small loop on the front of her belt; together the system acted as line and harness.
Secured, Elyth lowered herself through the skylight, feeding out enough line to swing over to the rafter. Crouched there, she unhooked the device from her belt and deactivated the grasping mechanism; it fell free from the skylight and zipped quietly home, its blossom folding neatly closed once back in place. She held position there, perched above the warehouse floor, scanning. And finally, she could see where the sole light was coming from. A guard was posted in a small alcove to one side of the main entrance. But she was committed now; she’d have to see it through.
Elyth navigated her way along and down the support structure to the floor below. For a few minutes, she crept along the long aisles and the incongruous combination of neat stacks and careless piles, evaluating it all for a secure strike point. The single guard didn’t appear to have any intention of leaving his station, but she couldn’t leave it to chance. She would need every ounce of focus for the task at hand.
On the end of the warehouse opposite from the guard, Elyth discovered a door, sealed by a simple passcode lock. Neither light nor sound came from behind, and she guessed it was some sort of storage closet. She scanned the lock with a device from her vest, which after a moment fed her the proper sequence. Elyth punched in the code and eased the door open.
The room was completely dark; she drew out her monocular and scanned the interior. It was roughly six feet wide and perhaps ten feet deep, filled with racks of various cleaning supplies and other goods without clear markings. Elyth slipped inside and closed the door quietly behind her. Judging from the amount of dust gathered on all but the shelves closest to the door, it appeared it’d been some time since the room had seen any regular use.
With the door shut, she decided it was safe to risk a little light of her own, and put her monocular away. She switched on the personal light mounted on her vest and its red-filtered beam cast a wide pool of ember-glow light; in the back corner of the room, she carefully cleared some space for herself to work. She didn’t need much.
Once that was done, she switched off her light, settled herself with a deep breath and exhale and, there, finally, delivered her message. The technique was called Revealing the Silent Gate. It began with ahn, the first letter of the Language, and its hand sign.
“From the void, all come,” Elyth said, uttering the sealing phrase in the Deep Language, “to the void, all return.”
And then wielding the true speech of the universe, known only to and guarded by the select few of her House, she spoke death.
She spoke to the planet directly, intimately, to the complex network of shifting energies and ecosystems that some might call its spirit. It had taken her weeks of careful communion with the world to learn its innermost workings. Now, she spoke of its mountains, and its rivers, and its moss-wrapped forests. She spoke of its ice-white skies, its sun-forsaken deep. And in the Deep Language of the cosmos, she described its collapse.