The Grace's War by R.A. Fisher

Author:R.A. Fisher [Fisher, R.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Next Chapter
Published: 2021-04-28T22:00:00+00:00

It took the whole of the following day to get to the ruins of Eheene. The once well-used road between Aado and the Skalkaad capital was clogged with saplings and potholes big enough to be called craters. In some places, where it meandered along the high tide line, it had been washed out by winter storms, and they needed to pick their way through the overgrown rain forest that stretched along the coast. No one said anything.

They’d made a cairn for Saphi that morning, at the top of the ridge where they’d first seen Aado. Watery rays of morning light broke over the eastern horizon as they took turns placing stones. The voice had complained about wasting time, but without much conviction. Syrina kept telling herself Saphi was just a lone innocent among hundreds that had fallen in her wake, as if that would make it better. She hadn’t even known the girl, not really, but that somehow made it worse when she looked at Ves and Mann and saw the grief chiseled on their faces. She didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything, feeling guilty about her own sadness.

The sight of Eheene didn’t make anyone feel better. A shanty town had sprung up where the Foreigner’s District once sprawled, pounded together with charred planks and broken bricks. The fallen daystar had reduced the stone and pine wall once separating the District from the rest of Eheene to a jagged, malformed line of charcoal and blasted rock stretching across the back of a slum packed with scavengers, mercenaries, and survivors who didn’t have anywhere else to go.

What remained of the city proper loomed beyond the shambles of the wall, reduced to crumbling black rubble, save for a haphazard smattering of gutted structures somehow still standing. The naphtha reservoirs once powering the city had taken a year to burn themselves out. A few of the tarfuel wells still burned, and more than a dozen black plumes of smoke with feet of yellow and orange belched into the low, stinking overcast. Beyond everything, where the Syndicate Palace and its Fifteen towers once loomed, there was nothing.

In the hours before their arrival, they’d passed a few signs of fighting between Corsairs and the mercenaries who now ruled the north. The others had looked to Syrina for answers as to why Ristro seemed to have such a strong presence, but she could only guess they’d sent people there for the same reason as everyone else: naphtha and the salvaging of knowledge. Eventually they got tired of asking her for details she didn’t have, and they lapsed back into the sullen silence that had consumed them since before NRI.

The trio was ignored as they descended the shallow ridge and entered New Eheene.

“Stupid name, if you ask me,” Ves growled. His eyes scanned the shanties for a bar. Syrina joined him.

Mann shrugged. “I doubt anyone thought it up on purpose. The people who are coming here now, it’s not like they give a shit what anyone calls the place.

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