VALKYRIE MOON

Chapter One

Tonight is a four-moon night. Red, gray, and violet light from the Forge, Wolf, and Raven Moons mingles with the blue glow of the Dragon Moon as though cast through some celestial stained-glass window.

From where I stand on the lip of a forested hill, the light is more than enough to see the twisted ruins of the Fafner-class dreadnaught Indivisible commanding the entire horizon. Rounded girders, tall as a palace and draped with ragged veils of greenery, arc over the trees like the desiccated ribs of a leviathan. At first glance, it’s a strange place for a clandestine meeting, but who would venture into those distant forested ruins at this time of night?

If all goes well tonight, those ruins will provide the answers I need. The answers that will protect my family.

“…and all I’m saying,” comes a voice from behind me as my brother lifts a low-hanging bough to stand beside me, “is that I could use a little recognition around here. You get it, don’t you, Rupert?”

I sigh. What’s a man got to do around here to dramatically brood in peace? “Y-y-yes, C-c-caspar.”

My elder brother has been going on in this vein for at least a mile, despite the urgency of our mission tonight. At least he’s keeping his voice down. “It’s a tall order, asking Father to take note of all of his sons. If I hear another word about Bruno’s unparalleled genius, I’ll take a hot poker to my ears. And you’d think Klaus farted gold and pissed bottles full of the finest Graflheim red.”

“D-d-d-don’t speak th-that way of Klaus,” I murmur, continuing down the path. “He fights p-pirates in the Yggdrasil b-belt, for D-donar’s sake. And B-b-bruno—”

Caspar snorts. “Just because you’ve been following Klaus around like a besotted puppy ever since you were old enough to walk doesn’t mean the rest of us have to worship him, too.”

My cheeks heat up. “I d-d-don’t worship him.”

“You haven’t set up a shrine and offered him the ceremonial mead yet, if that’s what you mean,” says Caspar. “But don’t you see? The fact that Klaus has done as much as you say he has is precisely the problem. When will Father give any of the rest of us a chance?”

I’ve heard this particular song before, so I simply put one foot in front of the other, wending my way along the track.

We landed a drachenkopter a half mile back and hid it in the brush, wary of being seen. I wish we could have taken a drachenkopter all the way, but there’s nowhere to safely land this close to the wreck. Now we’re making good progress, even carrying our hunting rifles, toward the ruined spacecraft that is to be our rendezvous point.

Caspar’s automa stride along behind us, hardly making a sound or varying their speed. The arcane creations—a pair of bronze-colored constructs in the shape of armored men—are laden with extra ammunition for our rifles, food, and a pair of crag hens we shot to add authenticity to our cover story of a pair of young nobles out hunting. If anyone encountered us in the woods, they would have no reason to suspect Rupert and Caspar von Donner, grandsons of His Majesty the Lunarch himself, are on a clandestine mission.

Perhaps it was a mistake to bring my brother along. Unlike me, Caspar isn’t on a secret assignment from my mother, the Lunarch’s personal spymaster. Quite the opposite: Caspar left our ancestral castle on the Thunder Moon to join the social scene here on the mother world of Aerda. I’ve spent the last few months among our grandfather’s court, gathering what intelligence I can, while Caspar has mostly spent the time seducing half the Grand Imperial Ballet Company.

But I asked him along for three reasons: First, I may need him if tonight’s rendezvous goes poorly. Caspar, whatever his priorities, is good with both gun and sword. You don’t grow up as a prince of the Lunarchy without becoming adept in the art of poking holes in people. Second, inviting Caspar along means inviting his bodyguard automa, useful since I have no automa of my own—can’t have automa of my own.

And third, though I haven’t told Caspar this, we may need to beat a hasty retreat from the planet Aerda this very night if things go poorly. I won’t leave my brother behind at the mercy of our enemies.

“I suppose I don’t blame Father,” Caspar mutters. Behind him, his automa glide wordlessly along, branches cracking under their metallic feet. “With Klaus as a son, what use does he have of me? Caspar the wastrel, Caspar the drunkard, Caspar the libertine.”

“You sell y-y-y-yourself short,” I tell him, and though I’m trying to keep his focus on our mission, I do mean what I say. “Father will know your w-w-w-worth soon enough, m-mark my words.”

Caspar looks over at me, looking a little mollified. “You think so?”

“I d-d-do,” I say, and I’m not lying. For all his faults, Caspar agreed to go on a dangerous mission for the good of our family, and that counts for something. “You’re here, aren’t y-y-y-you? We’re g-g-going to save our house t-t-tonight.”

Caspar holds his head a little higher after that. What I don’t say is that he certainly acts the part he claims to despise. There’s hardly been a tabloid or society page in the last six months without a lichtotype picture of that roguish grin, wavy black hair tumbling over his forehead, and cheekbones so sharp you could slice cured ham. He also wears the runeglyph shal’goroth tattooed under one arm, for charisma. (It’s considered rude to ask what glyph one wears, even among family, but I glimpsed the tattoo last summer when we stripped down to swim Lake Donnerbach.)

In contrast, I’m not exactly the ballerina-seducing sort. I’m a little shorter and my own auburn hair can never quite achieve the artfully messy state Caspar’s dark locks maintain. If he’s a classical marble statue given life, I’m a cheap knockoff of that same statue to sell to tourists. Unremarkable, in other words. Combine that with the fact that people tend to look the other way when I start stammering at them and I may as well be invisible, a quality that works to my advantage when I need to blend in and do a little spying. 

There’s hardly a disadvantage that can’t become an advantage in the right light.

Caspar spits in the dirt ahead of us. “That’s enough self-loathing for one day, I think,” he says, mostly to himself. He adjusts his rifle. “We’ve got to be almost there, don’t we?”

As we walk, we find ourselves threading through an otherworldly labyrinth. Chunks of rusted debris the size of houses lay half-concealed beneath new foliage. Nets of vines clutch jagged sheets of metal like spindly fingers dragging the wreckage into the undergrowth. Yes, we’re getting close now. The metal blots out the light of the moons, but I, too, have a glyph at my disposal, tattooed on my upper arm: shal’zur, for sight, a passive glyph engraved with a few radical marks to specify the ability to see at night. The edge of each shard of metal or tree is outlined as though by a pale shred of light, leaving nothing obscured to my enhanced vision. It’s thanks to that glyph that I was able to break into the Ministeriat’s sanctum last night. I hope it serves me just as well tonight.

Caspar turns to the pair of automa bringing up the rear of our little party. “Hastfalag. Increase to one-fifth speed.”

I’ve stepped off the trail to try for a better view of our destination, so I have a good look at the automa as Caspar’s voice activates the relevant runeglyphs carved into the hardened aethyrium of their bodies. The automa are perhaps seven feet tall, every movement accompanied by the faint whining of hidden gears. Each pauldron, greave, and gauntlet of their aethyrium armor is ornamented with delicate filigree tracings that evoke the shape of storm clouds, tokens of our house. Blue eyes glow from within imposing, thunderbolt-crested helms. Swords rest at their sides.

You often see armamatons—automa built for combat—employed here on Aerda as bodyguards. Most people just take them for granted. Like Caspar, for instance, as he activates the glyph for give just to tell the automa to hand him his canteen. “Thar’leth. Give from your hand.” He’s using the bloody power of creation like he’s telling a favorite hound to roll over.

I have to tame the jealous little serpent that coils in my belly. I’ve never harnessed that power to activate a runeglyph. Never commanded an autom or even activated a glyph on my own. The runeglyph I wear on my arm, shal’zur, is a passive one, the sort that only has to be activated once. When I first got it tattooed on my arm, I had to ask my brother Bruno to activate it for me.

I’m not just an imperokrat, one of the Lunarchy’s nobility. I’m a moons-damned prince. The power to command runeglyphs, the Word, is the birthright of all the Lunarchy’s ruling class, so there’s more runeglyph-commanding power in my blood than firepox in a Kraken Moon brothel.

What I’d give to be able to actually use it…

I remind myself of my own thoughts a moment earlier, about disadvantages becoming advantages, and vow to let myself know the moment I discover what the bloody blazes the advantage is in this case.

No time for that now. “I th-th-think we’re here,” I tell Caspar, shielding my eyes as I scan the treeline above.

Once, the LIS Indivisible was the flagship of the Crown Armada. Now it lies shattered around us. Birds and wyrms roost where Crown Armada sailors once manned their battle stations. Gun batteries droop from the twisted hull or molder in mangled heaps on the forest floor. I can still make out the runeglyphs for speed and firing weapons engraved on the metal despite the dirt smeared over the grooves.

This is just the aft half of the ship. And no, the irony doesn’t escape me. When you name a ship the Indivisible, there’s no clearer invitation for some idiot to come along and divide it, probably through the use of high-speed projectiles. That’s what happened fifteen years ago, when the ship was shattered by both the force of atmospheric reentry and the pounding of Rothbart guns, taking with it two thousand gallant men and women. Including my uncle Franz.

It’s hard not to be consumed by a sense of sepulchral awe, like stepping into the silence of a cathedral. I can hear the constant chitter of birds and other forest life, but it’s not a lack of sound that invites such reverence, it’s a heavy sense of loss. We won the battle that smote the Indivisible to the planet’s surface, though it was a near thing. The Shrike Lord Leonid von Rothbart’s siege of the mother world was broken only with the arrival of my father and his Lightning Armada. Father came just in time to corner von Rothbart and end his ill-fated Shrike’s Revolt, but not soon enough to save the Indivisible, the majority of its crew—or his brother.

Now we’re alone but for the ghosts of the Indivisible’s crew, their whispers found in the screeching of birds and the whistling of the wind.

“Creepy place.” Caspar takes a deep draught from the canteen. “So, these people we’re meeting …” He trails off in open invitation.

“Archdivinex K-k-k-konrad von Lieberholz,” I supply. “And a t-t-t-templar who s-s-serves as his accomplice. N-never got the t-t-templar’s name.”

“And this von Lieberholz fellow said for certain there’s a conspiracy? He used that exact word, did he?”

I give Caspar an exasperated look. “I’ve b-briefed you t-t-t-twice now.”

My brother flashes his winning smile. “I’m the empty-headed socialite, remember? I can’t be expected to store all these big, complicated concepts in my simple brain for long.”

I roll my eyes. “Yes, he said c-c-conspiracy. And th-that the Ministeriat and several of the High Houses w-w-were involved.” 

“And you knew to meet with von Lieberholz in the first place … how?”

I’m about to scold him again for not paying attention, but to Caspar’s credit, that detail wasn’t part of the briefing I gave him earlier, when I shared the situation but not the background.

My mother has always run her spy network from our ancestral home on the Thunder Moon rather than the Lunarch’s court here on Aerda, receiving regular reports from her various agents around the Lunarchy. Two months ago, her chief spy on Aerda, old Grumman, mentioned he was recruiting spies to pose as servants in my grandfather’s palace. Flies on the wall, as it were. I offered my services, happy to find a role that suited my particular talents, even if it involved the sort of work one might expect to be beneath a prince of the Lunarchy. But I grew up on the Thunder Moon rather than Aerda, and my face isn’t well known here, so it found it easy to melt into the ranks of palace footmen, unnoticed by the high and mighty. 

“A w-w-week ago, a nameless Ministeriat agent left a message in one of the secret drop-boxes only M-m-mother’s spy r-r-ring is supposed to know about,” I told Caspar. “He c-c-claimed to have information.”

Caspar knows what came next: Last night, I gained access to the Blessed Sanctuary of the Arrival, the headquarters of the Holy Ministeriat, where I met my contact in person. But the promised information, it turned out, would be given only in exchange for safe passage off-planet for himself and an associate. Naturally.

So here we are, trekking through the woods at night.

“I see.” Caspar frowns, looking up at the trees. “That’s a lot of bait to dangle… I suppose it’s too late to wonder if he’s led us into a trap of some sort, isn’t it?”

“M-maybe.” I frown. “But what if th-there is a conspiracy and w-w-we let it slip through our f-f-fingers?” It is a risk, letting my informant choose our meeting place. And perhaps I rushed into this, but there wasn’t time to send home for reinforcements. I’m no naturalist, but I know it never ends well for the fly when the spider invites him into his lair. 

“Well, more fool me for coming along, if there’s a trap,” says Caspar. “Even if it did sound more interesting than watching yet another performance of Bertoldt and Ilsa at the Grand Imperial.”

“Th-that’s why you’re along,” I tell him. “To k-k-keep me out of t-t-trouble. If any—”

I break off as a low rumble sounds in the distance. At first, I mistake it for thunder, but I freeze when I realize the sound is too rapid, too regular.

Gunfire.

Caspar and I both drop into automatic crouches behind a cluster of boulders as the sound grows louder. Caspar barks the order for his automa to hide. A moment later, a small craft darts over the nearest ridge, flying with all speed. Two batlike wings flap around a central rounded cockpit, which narrows into a long tail.

A drachenkopter. The same model I have parked in the woods a few miles away… plus what appears to be a small aftermarket repeater gun mounted under the nose.

“Von Lieberholz said he and the templar were arriving via drachenkopter, yes?” Caspar observes, his voice taut with trepidation.

Then the ’kopter’s pursuer heaves into view. With my shal’zur glyph, I can make out details in the moonlight. There’s something of a giant insect to the jet-black craft, from the bulbous primary cockpit to the belt-fed automatic guns sticking out from pods on both sides like wiry antennae. A pair of forge-engines drive it forward after its prey, their rumble bringing to mind a swarm of angry locusts.

A nachtjäger, it’s called: a night-hunter. The Ministeriat’s favorite craft for pursuing blasphemers through the dark night between the moons.

“Well, there goes this rendezvous,” says Caspar. “If there really is a plot against us, I think it would be prudent to make ourselves scarce while we still can. Cut our losses.”

“If th-there’s a plot?” The Holy Ministeriat, the ultimate spiritual authority in the Lunarchy, doesn’t show up with guns blazing to shoot down one of its own people if there’s no nefarious plot afoot. Bloody Hel below! A part of me has been hoping our informant was wrong, that the Ministeriat wasn’t secretly plotting against us. The odds are stacked against anyone foolish enough to go against them. Even the Lunarch and his family.

Would it be too much to hope that the people plotting to overthrow the crown might be someone other than the second most powerful entity in the Lunarchy? If only we could have made enemies of a nice merchant consortium instead. Maybe a local cheese shop with a grudge?

“You’re right about that,” Caspar says. “Good thing they haven’t seen us yet. Time to go.”

I grind my teeth in dismay as the nachtjäger lets out another burst of fire. The drachenkopter weaves and ducks, dodging with skill that I find myself admiring. It banks enough to angle the nose-gun at the nachtjäger, spraying more bullets. Then the smaller craft puts on a burst of speed, and for just a moment I’m sure it will escape the range of its pursuer’s guns, but at the last moment the nachtjäger fires again, tearing a ragged hole through the canvas stretched over the ’kopter’s right wing. The smaller craft careens through the air, left wing flapping gamely while the right one stutters. Then it breaks into a tailspin, hurtling toward the ground. I follow its trajectory until it vanishes within the vast metallic ruins of the Indivisible.

Above, the nachtjäger cuts its speed and starts circling around. What’s it doing? Why isn’t it pursuing?

Then I see the black smoke trailing from one forge-engine and the way it’s making a slow clockwise spiral. The drachenkopter pilot didn’t go down without a fight. Now the nachtjäger is working to correct its descent, but if the engine damage is bad enough, they might not have much control over where they land.

I point to the bowels of the wrecked Indivisible, where the drachenkopter crashed. “If we hurry,” I tell Caspar, “we can still r-r-reach them.”

Caspar’s eyes widen. “Are you mad? We have to—”

I take a step closer to him. “The n-n-nachtjäger’s damaged. It will t-take them a few minutes to get it under c-control. And von L-l-Lieberholz and his accomplice m-m-m-might still b-b-be alive. They kn-know everything about—”

“You want to go up against a squadron of armamatons or templars or whatever they’ve got aboard that nachtjäger? Because I sure as Hel below think that’d be a shameful waste of our lives. If they see us here, they’ll recognize us—or at least me—”

I wave away that particular concern, my heart’s tempo reaching a lively allegro. “I b-b-brought Bruno’s m-m-masks along. We can use th-th-those.”

“You did? I’ve always wanted to try—” Caspar seems to realize he’s giving ground and sputters, “But no! Even if they don’t recognize us as Caspar and Rupert von Donner, they’ll put two and two together, figure we’re here to meet von Lieberholz and his friend, and take a short leap of logic to guess that we’re at least Donner agents. And they’ll probably execute us on the spot. Interfering with justice is the First Blasphemy, if you recall your bloody catechisms.”

“Th-that’s not p-p-punishable by d-d-death.”

“They’ll find a reason.”

“Th-they c-c-can’t legally—” I want to point out that the Ministeriat, as the spiritual authority in the realm, cannot execute anyone. But of course, if they want to kill us quietly in the woods, they’ll kill us quietly in the woods. Nobody but Wotan Himself will be the wiser, and if the Father God has an issue with his servants indulging in a little light murder, He has yet to come down and say so. “We have a ch-chance, C-c-caspar. If von Lieberholz and the t-templar are down there, we have to go after them.”

“We already know the Ministeriat is involved in the plot against us,” Caspar argues. “Isn’t that enough?”

“And w-w-what about the other c-c-conspirators? What about p-p-proof? We could s-s-s-save everyone, Caspar. W-w-we could do it right here. Right now.” Caspar hesitates, giving me an opening, and I drive my point home. “R-r-remember wh-what I said a minute ago? When’s the l-l-last time Klaus or Bruno f-f-f-foiled a full-scale plot against our d-d-dynasty? Wh-what will F-father say when we succeed?”

That does it.

Caspar barks to his automa, “Shulgrafal!” That’s the runeglyph for protect. Then we’re sliding through the underbrush, stumbling occasionally, rifles still in hand, as we near the plume of smoke that now issues through a ragged gap in the Indivisible’s lichen-encrusted hull. I can hear heavy autom footfalls behind me, along with another, lighter pair of feet. Landing among snow-white waves of edelweiss flowers, I never lose my momentum. I half fall, half run, until I reach a great wall of ragged metal that towers over my head. I slip through an opening in the wall, parting curtains of overhanging greenery, and arrive at the crashed ’kopter.

Some of the craft is made of aethyrium, which—once fired from its natural claylike state—is stronger than steel and lighter than aluminum. Hardened aethyrium can only be damaged by more aethyrium. But aethyrium is too expensive for anything but automa to be built entirely from it, so much of the ’kopter is just mundane aluminum alloy and canvas, and everything that can break is shattered like bone. The left wing is mostly intact, though it’s beyond the point of flapping. The right wing has torn off at the joint, leaving strips of ripped canvas fluttering through the trees like the banners of some defeated king. The fuselage has held fast, runeglyphs for speed and maneuverability still visible inside the cockpit, but the glass canopy that crowns the cockpit has shattered on impact, and smoke rises in wisps from the mangled forge-engines.

I set my rifle against one of the Indivisible’s half-buried girders, which rises from the earth like a twisted tree, supporting a canopy of rusted metal hull. My shal’zur glyph reveals another glyph engraved in the metal of the ruins, nearly invisible. It’s ygathra, for support. Thank Wotan that glyphs like this haven’t weathered away; they’re half the reason the ruins haven’t collapsed on themselves. It’s a fact a note with some reassurance before I run to the cockpit, searching inside.

Where I expect two men, there’s only one, and it’s not Archdivinex Konrad von Lieberholz. Whoever he is, the poor drachenkopter pilot isn’t getting up on his own power any time soon, that much is clear. One leg is bent at an impossible angle, while a piece of jagged white protruding from the man’s sleeve makes me want to empty my dinner into the bushes. But I hold down my vomit and lift up the man’s flight goggles. His eyes are closed, an ugly red slash across his face where a branch or glass from his shattered cockpit has caught him.

I catch a glimpse of something shiny beneath his flight coat and draw out a black-iron emblem hanging from a chain. The Ministeriat’s sigil, a stylized eye—the single Eye of Wotan—is bisected by a sword. Lieberholz’s templar accomplice, almost certainly. Where is von Lieberholz himself?

I press a finger to the man’s neck.

“There’s a p-p-pulse,” I tell Caspar in a low voice, “but it’s f-f-f-faint.” 

Caspar bends over the man, having left his own rifle in the hands of the closest autom. “What the devil is this?” He points to something clutched in the man’s hand. He pulls it out—the templar makes no move to resist—and holds it for me to see. A small leatherbound book, pulled closed with a black ribbon.

I take it from Caspar. As I thumb through the pages, my excitement fades to confusion and dread. These pages are blank. One after another, all I see are blank pages. All until—

No, the final pages have something scrawled on them. Not just something: a dozen or so runeglyphs. A list of radicals accompany each glyph to signify potential modifications to each. The trouble is, there’s no sort of legend or key, no way to tell what these glyphs might do. No names with which to activate them. There’s not even an explanation for the radicals.

The pendulum of my heart swings back from dread to excitement as I realize the potential import of what I’m looking at. Runeglyphs inscribed on aethyrium define an autom’s capabilities; runeglyphs inscribed on a person’s flesh (using aethyrium-infused ink) have a similar effect. The Ministeriat keeps a list of ninety-nine sanctioned runeglyphs like the ones engraved on our automa; the use of anything off-list is one of the Five Blasphemies, a grievous sin against Wotan himself. It’s a spiritual crime worthy of execution.

My gut tells me none of these glyphs are on the Ministeriat’s approved list. Why else would this nameless man smuggle them out?

The glyphs are useless without their names, but of course it wouldn’t do to leave those where just anyone could find them. Perhaps this man memorized the names instead?

“We’ve got t-t-t-to get him to s-s-safety,” I murmur.

“How?” Caspar is incredulous. “You’re going to carry him back to our drachenkopter? It’s got to be a mile away through a bloody forest! There’s no—”

Then his eyes fall on the runeglyphs. He comes to the same conclusion I do, judging by the way his eyes widen. I tear out the final pages and stuff them in my coat. Then I hurl the book with all my might into the ruins on the opposite side from where we last saw the nachtjäger.

“What was that for?” Caspar demands, his eyes following the book’s trajectory to where it disappeared into the undergrowth.

“If th-th-they’re looking for an entire j-j-j-journal,” I say, “th-they might not think to search us f-f-for a few pages.”

Caspar nods, hissing, “That’s assuming they catch us here.”

“Help me g-g-g-get him out. You go over th-there—”

A crescendoing buzz interrupts his words. We both look up to see a great black hulk descending from the sky through the gap in the Indivisible’s rusted hull, forge-engines whipping leaves and branches as though they’re caught in a hurricane. Even the great ruined girders of the downed spacecraft shudder with the wind. 

The nachtjäger has come.

There’s no time to think. I pull Caspar behind the fuselage, momentarily out of sight of our visitors, leaving the poor templar in his shattered cockpit.

Caspar hisses something at me, but it’s lost in the roar of the nachtjäger’s forge-engines. He calls it again, louder: “What are you doing? They’ve already seen—”

I fish in my pack and pull out a pair of smooth metallic masks. I hand one to Caspar and push the other onto my own face. “The r-r-r-runeglyph’s w-w-w-wethnazh.”

“What?”

“S-s-say it!”

“Wethnazh—aaarggh!” Caspar hisses, yelping as the glyphs on the inside of his mask glow blue and the mask affixes itself to his face. I feel the heat as my own mask melts onto my skin. There’s an instant of pain, and then a strange, clammy feeling steals across my forehead and cheeks.

I inspect the mask, to run my hands along its strange false flesh. 

The nachtjäger sets down—thought its descent is a little ungainly, one engine still trailing smoke. Spindly legs emerge, further reinforcing my initial impression of a great, ugly insect. No sooner has it touched the ground than a ramp drops and a column of figures marches downward from a slit in the nachtjäger’s belly. A single giant autom lumbers next to them. 

Men and machine file through the ruins, raising their rifles to aim at Caspar and me.