Spear of Destiny James Baldwin (free romance novels .TXT) 📖

quazi by the wing from the air as it wheeled over the deck of the ship, and slung it around as she launched herself into the sky with a bellow of challenge. I crouched down, bracing the Spear as we gained altitude, and got a picture of the battle from above: the four Dakhari ships at the rear were pulling away, but six of them now locked in combat with ours. The Salamander had been boarded. I tracked the path of the retreating ships – they were headed for the defenseless dredgers and cargo ships massed over Withering Rose.

Karalti roared, striving after the galleons. She could fly twice as fast as the ships, limited only by her Stamina. She closed in on the engines of the straggling ship, weaving out of range of the cannons and blasting their engine array with fire. The crystal cracked, melted and exploded under the assault: first one, then another. The ship lurched, an alarm pealing up from under decks. Quazi riders lifted into the sky – then fell as Karalti opened her mouth and sang them the song of her people. The desert amplified her Queensong to an extraordinary degree. Riders retched, quazi panicked, and the other ships swung south, desperately fleeing our assault.

“Get out of here!” Karalti scolded them, belching another gout of flames along the engines. “And tell Violetta to go screw herself while you’re at it!”

The ships let off covering fire, but the bigger the ship was, the more difficulty it had aiming and firing at something as nimble as Karalti. The fleet pulled away from here as the one ship went down, crashing into the fallen corpse of the Voidwyrm, where it exploded in a blue-tinged fireball.

I looked back to see the rest of the ships were following their lead. The Dakhari hadn’t been expecting us to be as well armed as we were, and they were paying for it. The Salamander was listing, but the Dakhari had lost five ships. They were now running as fast they could, chugging back toward the west.

“Yeah! We did it! Again!” Karalti eased into a glide, saving her remaining stamina.

“Wait.” As we flew back toward our armada, a dark thought slid into my mind, hooked up with what we were seeing here, and connected. “If Violetta… no, this doesn’t make sense. These are probably some of Dakhdir’s weakest ships, and she’s not here with her dragon. Which means… FUCK!!”

“What!?” Karalti bellowed in alarm at the force of my anxiety.

“Dakhdir was supposed to provide reinforcements for Ignas!” I drew a deep, startled breath, clutching the saddle grips. “And if they’ve betrayed the treaty, then… fuck, fuck, FUCK! Teleport to Taltos, now! We have to warn him!”

Karalti tensed, preparing to follow my order, when the World Notifications I had dreaded suddenly flashed up on my HUD. World Alert: Revala

After a decisive battle, the Kingdom of Revala has been conquered by the Ilian Empire. This is a server alert to announce the new Regent of Revala, General Lucien Hart, Knight-Commander of the Eyrie of St. Grigori.

“Suri! Karalti and I are teleporting to Taltos now!” I snarled over the PM.

“Go! We’ll handle things here!” Suri’s voice was flat, cold, and angry.

Karalti drew a deep breath, steeled herself, and warped into the void. We hung there for half a minute, and burst out in the Vulkan Keep courtyard into a scene of pure chaos. Soldiers were swarming the castle like ants, and Karalti roared to clear them out of the garden so she could land. I slid down, stunned, to see a trio of people headed for us: Simeon wheeling Rutha in her chair, Masterhealer Masha by her side. All of them looked shocked and pale, and before Rutha even opened her mouth, I knew what I was going to hear.

“Hector, Dakhdir betrayed Vlachia,” she gasped, her lilac eyes huge in her face. “And Mercurions attacked Jeun from the north, preventing reinforcements from arriving. The Second Fleet… Ignas…”

Simeon drew himself up, graven, his hands shaking. “Voivode Dragozin, I’m afraid to report that Lucien Hart has taken our king.”

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Author’s Note

Well, what can I say about 2020 that hasn’t already been said? It was crazy, it was insane, it was stressful. When I started Archemi in 2016, I had no idea that pretty soon, we would be facing a global pandemic. A lot of these story elements – HEX, the role of viruses – organic and digital – were things I planned to write about from the series’ conception.

Spear of Destiny is probably the darkest book in series so far, but I hope I was able to communicate the main message of the Archemi Online series: that no matter how scary things get, there are always people who rise to the challenge. Sometimes those people are like Hector (and Gar, though we don’t know him very well yet), bold, courageous, unwilling to give up. Sometimes they’re like Suri, Vash and Istvan: tough, resilient, emotionally capable of handling and processing even the worst