The passage through the shattered ruins of the Dragon’s Maw felt like descending into a subterranean furnace.
Beyond the collapsed pillars of the Widow’s Fang, the ocean ceased being water and became something thick, oily, and crimson: the Blood Shallows of Sun-Grave.
Centuries of alchemical run-off from the imperial refineries on the mainland had saturated the coastal shelf with heavy cinnabar and red sulfur, dyeing the waves the color of arterial gore. The air tasted of copper shavings, bitter almonds, and scorched bone; even Cinder, circling three thousand feet above the armada, flew with his nostrils clamped tight against the caustic haze.
Lyra stood on the forecastle of the Iron Sovereign, leaning her weight against the forward gunwale.
She wore a fresh tunic of dark serpent-leather, the sleeves cut off to let the ocean breeze cool the tender, newly healed skin of her forearms. The star-iron circlet was cool against her brow, but inside her chest, her awakened senses were vibrating like an over-tuned bowstring.
Beside her, Gideon leaned his massive frame over the rail, his scarred hands resting on the pommel of his star-iron claymore.
His dark hair was tied back with a leather thong, his jaw set in that cold, unyielding mask he wore when the scent of a slaughter was in the air. His broad shoulder pressed firmly against Lyra's, an anchor of solid muscle, cedar warmth, and mountain iron that held the nausea of the red water at bay.
"We have company," Gideon rumbled, pointing a calloused finger toward the jagged coastline two leagues ahead.
Through the ochre smog, the imperial harbor of Sun-Grave emerged like the open jaws of an iron monster.
Built across a natural fjord of black volcanic basalt, the port was not designed for trade. It was a fortress-foundry.
Massive terraced iron slips stretched along the shoreline, housing the skeletons of thirty partially built battleships. Enormous blast furnaces vomited plumes of black smoke and orange sparks into the bruised sky, powered by colossal waterwheels that churned the red tide.
And anchored in the deep water of the bay, arranged in three disciplined defensive crescents, were one hundred and twenty ironclad dreadnoughts of the Imperial Home Fleet.
"Their vanguard hasn't sailed yet," Korina Drake said, stepping up to the rail beside Gideon, checking the edge of her boarding machete with her thumb. "The wind shifted north two days ago when you collapsed the Maw. Their sailing masters couldn't clear the shoals against the headwind."
"Which means their two hundred thousand legionnaires are still in the barracks on the bluffs," Talia added, lowering her brass spyglass with a sharp, predatory grin. "They're trapped in their own harbor."
"They aren't trapped," Lyra said softly, her violet eye flaring with sudden, cold scrutiny.
She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her teeth.
The scent of the bay was foul, but running beneath the sulfur and cinnabar was a thread that turned her stomach: cold iron, rotting entrails, and the distinct, oily sweetness of a necromantic ward.
"Look at the water between the ships," Lyra pointed.
Gideon leaned forward, his amber-gold eyes narrowing.
In the gaps between the three crescents of dreadnoughts, the red water was not flowing naturally with the tide.
It was swirling in unnatural, counter-clockwise eddies around eighty massive, submerged buoys forged from lead and human bone. Suspended from each buoy was a heavy iron cage containing the bloated, preserved carcasses of deep-sea leviathans—monstrous serpents and great sharks whose rotting flesh had been stitched together with wire and enchanted with Coven blood-seals.
"Grave-Buoys," Varis whispered, stepping up from the companionway, her silver braids whipping in the hot wind. "The ancient necromancy of the Deep Coven. If an enemy hull passes over those buoys, the enchantments rupture. The necrotic flesh dissolves, turning the water into an acid that dissolves timber and rots living flesh off the bone in seconds."
"A minefield of corpse-rot," Korina spat into the red sea. "The Emperor's favorite trick when he doesn't want to waste his own powder."
"Can the wyrms dive beneath them?" Gideon asked.
"No," Lyra replied, turning to look back at the ship's wake.
The four Sun Wyrms had halted two miles outside the mouth of the bay, their golden scales bristling with agitation. The elder wyrm was circling nervously, its massive head raised out of the water, letting out low, distressed whistles that vibrated through the hull of the Iron Sovereign.
"The necromancy is toxic to their marrow," Lyra explained. "If they enter that red water, the corpse-rot will enter their gills. It would poison their blood before they reached the second line of ships."
"Then the fleet stays outside the bay," Gideon growled, his jaw tightening until the scar on his cheek turned white. "We drop the longboats, scale the outer sea-wall, and take the shore batteries by hand."
"No," Lyra said, stepping into his path, her hands coming up to rest flat against his broad chest.
Beneath her palms, his heart was beating with that fierce, protective rhythm that had become the cadence of her life. The silver-red cord between their souls flared, wrapping them in an aura of shared, unbreakable power that pushed the sulfur stench away.
"We don't send the longboats, Gideon," Lyra said, looking up into his burning amber eyes with a fierce, feral smile. "And we don't scale the sea-walls."
Gideon looked down at her, his brow furrowing. "Lyra... we can't sail thirty dreadnoughts through a field of corpse-acid."
"We aren't going to sail through it," Lyra whispered, her fangs lengthening against her lower lip. "We are going to use it."
She looked up at the sky.
"Cinder!" she called out, her voice carrying the ancient, dual-harmonic authority of the Ash Court.
High above the ochre smoke, the colossal, sixty-foot obsidian war-drake folded his wings, dropping through the clouds like a falling mountain. He banked hard three hundred feet above the Iron Sovereign, hovering on massive, rhythmic downbeats of his leathery wings that whipped the red sea into a frenzy of pink foam.
"Varis! Talia!" Lyra commanded, turning to her officers. "Anchor the fleet two miles out! Form a defensive perimeter with the captured dreadnoughts! Korina, take command of the flagship's batteries!"
"What are you doing?" Korina demanded, her jade eyes wide with shock.
Lyra didn't answer with words.
She caught the heavy leather harness hanging from Cinder’s flank as the drake swept low over the deck.
With effortless, feral agility, she swung herself upward into the high war-saddle behind Cinder’s armored crest.
Gideon didn't ask questions.
He didn't hesitate.
The warlord leaped from the forecastle railing, his massive hands catching the secondary stirrup-brace of the saddle, hauling his colossal frame up behind her in a single, fluid explosion of raw muscle.
His heavy arms locked around her waist, his chest pressing against her back like an iron shield, his breath hot and ragged against her ear.
"You and me, little bird?" Gideon growled, his deep bass vibrating with terrifying, savage joy.
Lyra leaned back into his heat, her antler knife drawn in her right hand, her violet eye blazing with incandescent, sovereign fire.
"You and me, warlord," she whispered.
She leaned forward over Cinder’s neck, her fingers pressing into the warm obsidian scales.
"Cinder," Lyra commanded. "Target the Grave-Buoys."
The war-drake let out an earth-shattering roar that shook the very foundations of the basalt cliffs.
He banked hard toward the bay, his jaws parting to reveal a churning, apocalyptic sphere of cobalt-blue volcanic fire.
"LIGHT THE BAY!" Lyra roared.
And Cinder dove.