“Huh. That’ll be as much of a hindrance for them as it is for us.”
“I think their original plan was to have the fog going before the ships got here, so the soldiers in the watchtowers wouldn’t see them coming, and we’d be caught completely unaware. But a pirate helped me escape and knock out the captain who thought everything up. He said he disabled the fog machine too.”
The colonel’s eyes narrowed. He couldn’t possibly know who this pirate was who had helped her escape simply on that information, could he? Others could disable a machine... even if only by hurling it against a bulkhead a few times. She wanted to blurt out everything and try to explain how Tolemek had helped her and how he should be... if not exonerated at least not shot on sight. But there was no time. And if Tolemek stayed out of trouble, he might be able to finish his quest and escape before the army learned he was here anyway. So long as she didn’t blab about it.
A rumble and a clank sounded as the big hangar doors were pushed open. Snow gusted inside, skidding past the wheels of the first flier, already in the queue, ready to roll out. Wind railed at the metal hangar roof, too, making it sound as if some giant were grabbing the corners and shaking and kicking at it. Outside, the night sky was utterly white. Cas swallowed. She liked to think of herself as fearless, or at least too focused to pay much attention to fear when she was out there, but this was going to be ghastly to fly in.
“Did they bring a snow-making machine too?” Zirkander asked dryly.
“No, sir.”
“All right.” He patted her on the shoulder. It was probably a gesture of dismissal, but he was looking toward the side door and chewing on his lip. “Hurry,” he murmured, “we could use those devices more than ever for this one.”
The words weren’t for her, Cas knew, but she couldn’t help but wonder at them. “Devices, sir?”
“My archaeologist friend is working on some communications devices from a recent Referatu excavation. I know the thought of magic will make everyone itch, but we’ve been waiting for the techs to figure out their wireless telegraph for ages, and it sounds like this could be a far better option for flier-to-flier communication anyway.”
His archaeologist friend? Was that Sardelle? Magical communications? Cas couldn’t imagine the general approving that for military use. Or any use. The colonel would be lucky if he didn’t get shot for suggesting it. Well, no, maybe not. He was one of the few people in the army who could get away with... a lot.
Cas must have been gaping at him, for he added, “I’ve already spoken to the others about it. We’re a superstitious lot, but the general consensus was that it would make us three times as effective to be able to speak to each other in the air.” He grimaced. “For example, Crash could have told me he saw you on that outpost before we were all the way home. We could have gone back for you right away.”
And gotten everyone mauled by pirates who had solidified their defenses by that point.
“Yes, sir. I was just shocked. I wouldn’t think—”
“Colonel, you leading the way?” someone called from the hangar door. Wolf Squadron and Tiger Squadron were lined up, ready to leap into the white sky. Pilots secured in their cockpits stared down at Zirkander. They wanted him leading the way, Cas guessed from the concerned looks on those faces. Their goggles couldn’t hide the fact that they were nervous about going out there in this weather.
Speaking of communications, Cas wished there had been a way to warn the city ahead of time. Would two squadrons be enough to defend the capital from that many pirates? If the general had been given advance notice, he could have called in the northern and southern continental air defenses for assistance.
Zirkander lifted a hand in acknowledgment and took a step toward his craft, but the side door banged open, snow swirling inside, along with a figure in a cloak and dress. Cas gaped. Given what Tolemek believed about Sardelle, and her own itchy instincts upon meeting her, Cas hadn’t expected her to be wandering around the base. The sergeant from the tram was escorting her in, but he didn’t have a hand on his pistol and wasn’t restraining her in any way. Did that mean only Tolemek knew who she was? What she was? How could Zirkander have kept that hidden if she had been openly fighting with magic at that fortress battle? If a Cofah soldier had seen that, some of the Iskandians must have too. Of course, they were probably still stuck back at that mountain duty station. And Cas doubted there were any telegraphs, wireless or otherwise, snaking up into the Ice Blades range.
The colonel jogged over to the woman. She carried a wooden box under one arm. Something that might have been a sword poked outward under her cloak, but the garment covered it.
Cas watched the door, but nobody else came in. Not that she would have expected Tolemek to wander up here—or be allowed anywhere near the place without being shot at—but she couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to him. If Sardelle had her sword with her, Tolemek certainly hadn’t gotten his hands on it. It hadn’t sounded like he wanted that specific blade, anyway, but what if he had ended up in a battle with the woman? And lost? She wasn’t injured, nor was any of her hair even out of place after walking through the storm.
Zirkander met her a few steps inside the door, giving her a hug and a kiss. This earned numerous catcalls and whoops from the watching pilots. Cas looked away. She might have reconciled herself to the idea that the colonel was never going to be an option for her, but that didn’t mean she liked watching him kiss other women. Especially not other sorceress women.
“That’s one beautiful archaeologist,” one of the ground crew muttered with longing as he walked past Cas.
Archaeologist, huh. She wanted the whole story—and to know if the colonel really knew what he was doing or if she was using him somehow—but there wasn’t time. Zirkander knew it, too, for he kept his kiss short, traded a few words with Sardelle, and accepted the box from her with a wave.
He jogged to the end of the flier line, his hand delving into the box. It riveted Cas’s eyes, because whatever was within emitted a soft blue glow. And Zirkander didn’t seem to think anything of it. Crazy how much one’s world could change in a few weeks away from home.
The colonel tossed a device—yes, that was a suitably vague word for whatever those things were—up to each pilot. Each of them caught it, but the faces ranged from slightly to extremely concerned. Nobody was as nonchalant as Zirkander. Even he might have been feigning it. Cas had always known him to be twitchy at the mention of magic. Before her time, he had lost a pilot because a military court judged the officer’s skills to be too unbelievable for a mundane human being. He hadn’t been sentenced to death, but there had been a lot of questions about the man’s later suicide.
Zirkander tossed Cas one of the glowing devices as he ran by.
The little blue disk almost looked like a jewel. Or a crystal, Cas realized with a start. Like the flier power supplies. She had always assumed them the result of some secret government research—mundane, technologically based research, because that’s what everyone always implied. But was it possible they were also artifacts from the time when sorcerers had walked the continent? And was that time as long past as everyone assumed?
Cas looked at Sardelle, standing near the door, watching the colonel. With concern? Cas couldn’t tell. The woman’s face might have been sculpted from ivory.
“Flying time, Ahn,” Zirkander called, then lifted a hand toward Sardelle and climbed into his flier.
Cas wrapped her hand around the blue object. She had no idea what she was supposed to do with it, but she would have to figure it out later. It was time to go.
* * *
As the snow flew in his eyes, the wind tugged at his cloak, the fog wrapped around his legs, and the cold chilled his bare arms, Tolemek thought of the warm, humid jungles of southern Cofahre. Had it only been three days ago he had been there, arranging to have himself captured and thrown into prison?
The wind snapped at his hood, and he grabbed it again, holding it over his eyes wi
th one hand. Between the siren and the storm, the streets should have been empty, but there were squads of armed soldiers running to battle stations, horses and steam wagons charging about, and civilians of all ages standing in doorways, holding rifles or swords as they watched the gray sky. A pack of boys in an alley were gesturing with slingshots and clubs, making battle plans.
Any one of these people would be happy to shoot Tolemek if they saw his bronze skin. He hadn’t considered wind when he had chosen the cloak to hide his features. Of course, he hadn’t imagined himself skulking through the city, searching for the source of the fog, either.
Sardelle had promised to come help him after she delivered her box, and he could have waited in the shadow of the butte, but this was his responsibility. He had intended to disable the fog machine so it couldn’t be used tonight. He should have destroyed it. That’s what he would do now. One way or another. As soon as he found it...
The fog seemed heaviest down by the harbor, so he was slipping and sliding down the icy streets, heading in that direction. A baby squalled in a nearby building, reminding him that not just able-bodied fighters were in danger tonight. While he had been with the Roaming Curse, the pirates had occasionally raided small towns, but they had mostly preyed upon other ships and aircraft. Being down on the ground, where he would witness what their destruction wrought, he did not relish this.
“So, stop it before it starts, eh?”
Except he feared he was already too late. A boom rang out from some artillery station at the north end of the harbor. The first of the pirate ships must have been spotted. Not surprisingly, they were coming in on the opposite side of the city from the airbase.
Tolemek had been glancing in that direction often, expecting to see the fliers taking off—and also expecting Cas to be in one of them. The snow made it hard to see anything, but when he reached the waterfront, he was closer to the butte, and he spotted the first of the craft shooting over the edge of the butte, its bronze wings outstretched. Others followed on its tail, struggling to remain steady in the wind, but eventually gaining elevation and arrowing across the harbor toward the cannons firing in the north. From the ground, they truly did look like the dragons of old, or at least like the faded pictures in ancient books, even if their wings didn’t flap and their movements were directed by propellers. According to legend, those old dragons had been gold, silver, and bronze, with the gold being the most powerful—physically and mentally. He wondered if the Iskandians had thought it would have been hubris to color their fliers gold, or if the metal had simply been in short supply.
An armored steam wagon clanked past, and Tolemek hugged the shadows. The fog helped hide him, but the wind was a constant enemy. Had the air been quiet, the gray murk would have risen higher and in greater density. Still, it was thicker down here by the water, so he knew he was heading in the right direction.
Following the line of the buildings on the main street, he jogged along, eyeing the docks stretching out into the choppy dark waters. Believing he might find clues there, Tolemek tried to remember which dock Cas had landed the dirigible on. He didn’t see any sign of the big balloon and assumed he was looking for the remains of an explosion-riddled wreck rather than a gently damaged aircraft.
Out beyond the breakwater, the surf roared, competing with the booms from the cannons and the shrieking wind. A hint of something burning reached his nose, something that smelled of charred rubber, cloth, and machinery, not simply of the coal warming the stoves in nearby buildings. He squinted through the snow and down a long dock. Yes, there.
The envelope covering and frame had been destroyed, as had part of the dock—the metal remains of the cabin, the walls peeled back like warped flower petals, were half-sunken in the water. The surrounding merchant and fishing ships were also damaged, and in spots, nothing but a couple feet of the mast remained above the surface to mark their icy graves. Interestingly, the fog didn’t seem to be coming from that spot. Had someone removed the machine before the explosion?
Tolemek waited for another armored vehicle to pass, then trotted down the dock. Halfway along, the boards grew warped, and some creaked ominously under his weight.
A boom sounded, not from the end of the harbor this time, but from overhead. The first of the pirate ships was visible now, a black shadow against the black sky, only a few running lights making it visible at all. It was hard to tell through the snow, but he thought it might be the Night Hunter. Goroth’s vessel, leading the way, whether he was standing next to the helmsman or not.
Standing on the dock with nothing for cover, Tolemek felt vulnerable. He hustled along. Best to get this business taken care of quickly. He told himself that Maktu, the helmsman, couldn’t pick him out from way up there, and wouldn’t know he had turned against the pirates—and betrayed the captain—anyway, but his shoulder blades itched as he advanced on the remains of the freighter.
Spot fires still burned, on the dock and on wood that had been spat into the nearby water. All that awful wood paneling. Tolemek picked his way into the remains of the cabin, searching for clues. At first, he avoided looking in the navigation area or toward engineering, not wanting to see the bodies of the men he had knocked out, men he assumed had been killed in the explosion, but he couldn’t search for clues without looking everywhere, and something soon became apparent: there were no bodies. Either they had been thrown free, or whoever had plucked out the fog machine had arrived in time to pull Goroth out too. Stone Heart? Most of the captains wouldn’t risk themselves for each other, and would just as soon take over another captain’s ship rather than help him return to it, but Stone Heart must have seen some value in saving Goroth. Which meant Tolemek had another enemy skulking around down here. Goroth wouldn’t forgive his betrayal.
The wreckage didn’t offer up a single clue, other than confirming that the fog machine was gone. Tolemek looked up and down the waterfront, then up at the sky. An airship could have come in and extracted everything, but not without the Iskandians noticing. It hadn’t been snowing yet when that explosion had gone off.
With the broken boards of the dock threatening to drop out from beneath him, Tolemek scanned the harbor itself. The sky was less dim than it had been a moment before, for more pirate ships were appearing beneath the clouds, their decks lit, and the fliers were streaking out to meet them, their hulls burnished orange by the glow of their power crystals. Even so, Tolemek’s gaze almost skimmed past the dark shape bobbing in the waves beyond the docks.
“Not an airship,” he whispered. “A sailing ship.”
The Roaming Curse did have some, though they might also have recently acquired this one. He couldn’t see any identification—he could barely make out the ship—but who else would be foolishly sitting out there in the harbor on a night like this? Someone planning to lead the raid portion of the attack?
Realizing he might be visible to whoever was out there, thanks to the fires still burning around the wreck, Tolemek ran back up the dock, into the shadows and fog. He followed the waterfront, eyeing the smaller vessels tied up here and there, and finally selecting a yacht with a lifeboat. There was nobody about on the docks to complain about theft. He dropped the smaller boat, found two oars, and climbed in.
He hadn’t rowed more than five meters when a cannonball screeched out of the sky and slammed into the yacht. Wood shot out in every direction. Tolemek dropped into the bottom of the rowboat as debris pelted its sides and flew overhead.
He gulped when he sat up, returning to the oars. The yacht was still upright, but he doubted it would be for long.
With the fog over his head, he didn’t see how someone could be aiming for him, but it was hard not to think that way. He rowed into the harbor, regardless. If he had to swim over to that ship to disable the fog machine and deal with Goroth and Stone Heart, he would. It had occurred to him, as soon as he had seen the fog, that Cas might believe he had been lying to her, that he had never attempted to disable the machine in the first place and that pe
rhaps he hadn’t left his people behind after all. He did not want her thinking that.
Gunfire spat overhead, one of the fliers swooping low. Tolemek thought it might be diving toward the dark craft in the water, but it came up under one of the airships, scouring its belly with bullets. Was that Cas? He had no way to know. There were more than twenty fliers up there.
Though it took longer than he would have liked, he rowed north first, so he could come at the ship from the seaward side rather than from the city, where the lights might silhouette him, fog or not.
You’re wasting your time.
Tolemek almost dropped an oar. Jaxi, again. After he and Sardelle had parted ways, he had assumed the soulblade wouldn’t communicate with him further. He wouldn’t have expected it to have such range—he was still surprised it talked to him at all. He had assumed that was something reserved for the relationship between blade and handler.
Sardelle isn’t always chatty. I get lonesome.
What do you mean I’m wasting my time? Do you know who’s out there? If it were a boat full of fishermen too cheap to pay the dock fees, he would feel idiotic for this long side trip.
Your people. And they know you’re coming. Might as well go straight up to them.
And get shot?
They’re not going to shoot you. They have something far worse in mind.
Tolemek went back to rowing. The waves and wind were trying to push him to the south, and he would shoot past the craft if he wasn’t careful. What might that be?
Something that I’ll kill you over if it comes to pass.
Given the soulblade’s sense of humor—if one could call it that—Tolemek’s first thought was that Jaxi was joking. But there was no follow-up to suggest that was the case.
Are you and Sardelle nearby? He wondered if he would need help—and if they would be willing to give it—in dealing with the pirates.
Not yet. A family was hurt. Sardelle stopped to heal them, ignoring the fact that if they figure out she used magic to do so, they’ll turn around and accuse her of witchcraft, which will get her killed in this town, no matter who her boyfriend is.