“Down the road, Little Red.”
She reached for the latch and threw it clear, then turned and bolted up the stairs without looking back. In seconds she was topside again, surprised to find sleet had turned the world white. She ducked her head against the bitter sting of the wind and slush and moved to the aft railing. The rope Hunter Predd had used earlier to climb down to Obsidian was still tied in place and coiled on the deck. She threw the loose end overboard and watched it tumble away into the haze. She could just barely make out the dark contours of the Roc’s wings as it lifted into place below.
She looked back once at Black Moclips. “You’re a good girl,” she told her. “Stay safe.”
Then she was gone into the gloom.
Minutes later, Redden Alt Mer stood at the port railing of the Jerle Shannara and watched his sister pause in her climb up the rope ladder. She had gotten off the Roc all right, taken firm hold of the ladder and started up. But now she hung there with her head lowered and her long red hair falling all around her face, swaying in the wind.
He thought he might have to go down the ladder and get her.
Thinking that, he was reminded suddenly of a time when they were children, and he had gone high up into the top branches of an old tree. Rue, only five years old, had tried to follow, working her way up the trunk, using the limbs of the tree as rungs. But she wasn’t strong yet, and she tired quickly. Halfway up, she lost her momentum completely and stopped moving, hanging from the branches of that tree the way she was hanging from the rope ladder now. She was something of a nuisance back then, always tagging along after him, trying to do everything he was doing. He was four years older than she was and irritated by her most of the time. He could have left her where she was on the tree—had thought he might, actually. Instead, he had turned back and yelled down to her. “Come on, Rue! Keep going! Don’t quit! You can do it!”
He could yell those same words down to her now, to the little sister who was still trying to do everything he did. But even as he considered it, she lifted her head, saw him looking at her, and began to climb again at once. He smiled to himself. She came on now without slowing, and he reached out to take her arm, helping her climb over the railing and onto the ship.
Impulsively, he gave her a hug and was surprised when she hugged him back.
He shook his head at her. “Sometimes you scare me.” He looked into her wet face, reading the exhaustion in her eyes. “Actually, most of the time.”
She grinned. “That’s real praise, coming from you.”
“Flying Black Moclips all by yourself in a bad piece of weather like you did would scare anyone. It should have scared you, but I suppose it didn’t.”
“Not much.” She grinned some more, like the little kid she was inside. “I took her away from the witch, big brother. Crew and all. It was hard to give her up again. I didn’t want to lose her, though.”
“Better her than you. We don’t need her anyway. It’s enough if the witch doesn’t have her.” He gave his sister a small shove. “Go below and put on some dry clothes.”
She shook her head stubbornly. “I don’t need to change clothes just yet.”
“Rue,” he said, a hint of irritation creeping into his voice. “Don’t argue with me about this. You argue with me about everything. Just do it. You’re soaked through; you need dry clothes. Go change.”
She hesitated a moment, and he was afraid she was going to press the matter. But then she turned around and went down through the main hatch to the lower cabins, water dripping from her across the decking.
He watched her disappear from sight, thinking as she did that no matter how old they grew or what happened to them down the road, they would never feel any differently about each other. He would still be her big brother; she would still be his little sister. Mostly, they would still be best friends.
He couldn’t ask for anything better.
When she reemerged, the wind was blowing so hard it knocked her sideways. The rain and sleet had stopped, but the air was cold enough to freeze the tiny hairs in her nostrils. She wrapped her great cloak more tightly about her, warm again in dry clothes and boots, and pushed across the deck unsteadily to where her brother and Spanner Frew stood in the pilot box. Ahead, the mountains loomed huge and craggy against the skyline, a massing of jagged peaks and rugged cliffs piled one on top of the other until they faded away into the brume-shrouded distance.
She climbed into the pilot box, and her brother said at once, “Put on your safety harness.”
She did so, noting that all of the Rover crew on the decks below were strapped in as well, hunched down against the weather, stationed at the parse tubes and connecting draws.
When she glanced over her shoulder, she found the world behind had disappeared in a thick, dark haze, taking with it any sign of the pursuing airships.
Big Red glanced over. “They disappeared sometime back. I don’t know if they broke it off because of the weather or to go after Black Moclips. Doesn’t matter. They’re gone, and that’s enough. We’ve got bigger problems to deal with.”
Spanner Frew yelled something down to one of the Rovers amidships, and the crewman waved back, moving to tighten a radian draw. Big Red had stripped back all the sails, and the Jerle Shannara was riding bare-masted in the teeth of winds that sideswiped her as badly as they had Black Moclips. Rue saw that the radian draws had been reconfigured, strung away from two of the six parse tubes to feed power to the remaining four. Even those were singing with the vibration of the wind, straining to break free of their fastenings.
“I left a ship in better shape than this one,” she declared, half to herself.
“She’d be in better shape if we hadn’t had to leave quite so suddenly to find you!” Big Red grunted.
That wasn’t true, of course. They would have had to leave in any case to flee the enemy airships, no matter whether or not they were searching for her. Repairs of the sort needed by the Jerle Shannara required that the airship be stationary, and that wasn’t going to happen until they could set down somewhere.
“Any place we can land?” she asked hopefully.
Spanner Frew laughed. “You mean in an upright position? Or will a severe slant do?” His hands worked the steering levers with quick, anxious movements. “First things first. See those mountains ahead of us, Little Red? The ones that look like a big wall? The ones we’re in danger of smashing into?”
She saw them. They lay dead ahead, rising across the skyline, barring their way. She glanced sideways and down and saw for the first time how high up they were. Several thousand feet at least—probably more like five thousand. Even so, they weren’t nearly high enough to clear these peaks.
“Heading ten degrees starboard, Black Beard,” she heard her brother order. “That’s it. There, toward that cut.”
She followed his gaze and saw a break in the peaks. It was narrow, and it twisted out of view at once. It might dead-end into the side of a mountain beyond, in which case they were finished. But Redden Alt Mer could read a passage better than anyone she had ever sailed with. Besides, he had the luck.
“Brace!” he yelled down at the crew.
They shot between the cliffs and into the narrow defile, skimming on the back of a vicious headwind that nearly drove them sideways in the attempt. Beyond, they saw the opening slant right. Spanner Frew threw the wheel over and fed what power he could to keep them steady. The passage narrowed further and cut back left. Rue felt the hair on the back of her neck lift as the massive cliff walls tightened about them like the jaws of a trap. They were so close that she could make out the depressions and ridges on the face of the stone. She could see rodent nests and tiny plants. There was no room to turn around. If the passage failed to run all the way through, they were finished.
“Steady,” her brother cautioned to Spanner Frew. “Slow, now.”
The winds had shifted away, and they were no longer being buffeted so violently. The Jerle Shannara canted left in response to Spann
er Frew’s handling of the controls, sliding slowly through the gap. They rounded a jagged corner, still close enough that Rue could reach out and touch the rock. Ahead, the defile began to widen, and the mountains opened out onto a deep, forested valley.
“We’re through,” she said, grinning in relief at her brother.
“But not yet safe.” His face was tight and set. “Look ahead. There, where the valley climbs into that second set of peaks.”
She did so, brushing away loose strands of her long red hair. There were breaks all through this range, but the movement of the clouds overhead suggested that the winds were much more turbulent than anything they had encountered before. Still, there was nowhere else to go except back, and that was unthinkable.
Spanner Frew glanced over at Big Red. “Where do we go? That gap on the right, lower down?”
Her brother nodded. “Where it might not be so windy. Good eye. But stay hard left to give us room to maneuver when the crosswind catches us.”
They navigated the valley through a screen of mist, riding air currents that bucked and jittered like wild horses. The Jerle Shannara shuddered with the blows, but held her course under Spanner Frew’s steady hand. Below, the forests were dark and deep and silent. Once, Rue caught sight of a thin ribbon of water where a small river wound along the valley floor, but she saw no sign of animals or people. Hawks soared out of the cliffs, fierce faces set against the light. Behind, the entire sky was dark with the storm they had left on the other side of the mountains. Everywhere else, the horizon was hazy and flat.
Rue listened to the wind sing through the taut lines of the vessel. It always seemed to her that the ship was calling to her when she heard that sound, that it was trying to tell her something. She felt that now, and her uneasiness grew.
When they reached the far side of the valley, they angled right, toward the draw that her brother had spied earlier, a deep cut in the peaks of the second range that offered clear passage to whatever lay beyond. More mountains, certainly, but perhaps something else, as well. She glanced skyward to where the clouds skittered over the peaks in frightened bursts of energy, blown by winds that channeled down out of the north. Since the weather was all behind them, she realized that these crosswinds must blow like this all the time. They would be dangerous, if that was so.
The Jerle Shannara lifted through the gap, catching the first rip of crosswind as she did, slewing sideways instantly. Spanner Frew brought her back on course again, keeping her low and down to the left. Ahead, more peaks and cliffs appeared, slabs of stone jutting from the earth like giant’s hands lifted in warning. But the defile wormed through them, offering passage, so they continued on. Below, the floor of the canyon rose steadily as the mountains closed about, and they were forced to fly higher.
Rue Meridian took a deep breath and held it, feeling the tension radiate through her.
“Steady, Black Beard,” she heard her brother say quietly. Then a burst of wind slammed into the airship and sent her spinning sideways for endless, heart-stopping seconds before Spanner Frew was able to bring her back around again.
Rue exhaled sharply. Big Red glanced over at her and broke into one of those familiar grins that told her how much he loved this.
“Hold on!” he shouted.
They bucked through the gap’s twists and turns like a cork through rapids, knocked this way and that, fighting to stay steady at every turn. The winds thrust at them, then died away, then returned to hammer them again. Once they were blown so hard to starboard that they very nearly struck the cliff wall, only just managing to skip past an outcropping of rock that would have ripped the hull apart. Rue clung to the pilot box railing, her knuckles white with determination, thinking as she did so that this was much worse than what they had encountered coming through the Squirm, ice pillars notwithstanding. At any moment they could lose control completely and be smashed to bits against the rocks.
They climbed to a thousand feet as the floor of the pass rose ahead, forcing them to gain altitude beyond what Rue knew her brother had hoped would prove necessary; the winds at this elevation were too strong and unpredictable.
Then the mountains parted ahead, and far below they saw a vast forest cupped by the fingers of scattered peaks, deep and impenetrable and stretching away into the haze. There would be a landing site there, a place for them to set down and make repairs.
She had no sooner finished the thought than the aft port radian draw snapped at the masthead and fell away.
At once, the Jerle Shannara began to lose power and slip sideways. Spanner Frew fought to bring her nose up, but without both aft parse tubes in operation, he lacked the means to do so.
“I can’t right her!” he grunted in frustration.
“Mainsail!” Big Red shouted instantly to the crew.
Kelson Riat and another of the Rovers leapt up at once from where they were crouched amidships and began to unfasten the lines and run up the sail. Without the use of the aft parse tubes, Big Red was going to rely on the sails for power. But the crosswinds were vicious; there was as much chance as not that they would fill the big sail and carry the airship right into the cliffs like a scrap of paper.
“Steady, steady, steady . . . ,” Big Red chanted to Spanner Frew as the shipwright fought to hold the Jerle Shannara in place.
Fluttering and snapping, the mainsail went up. Then the wind caught it and drove the airship forward with a lurch. She bucked in the wind’s strong grip, and another of the draws snapped and fell away.
“Shades!” Redden Alt Mer hissed. He snatched at the wheel as Spanner Frew lost his footing, struck his head on the pilot box railing, and blacked out.
They were still falling, but they were accelerating toward the gap, as well, the mountains widening on both sides. If they could stay high enough to miss the boulders clustered in the mouth of the pass, they might survive. It was going to be close. Rue willed the Jerle Shannara to lift, begged her silently to level off. But she was still falling, the rocky surface of the pass rising swiftly to meet her.
Her brother threw the levers that fed power to the diapson crystals all the way forward and brought the steering levers all the way back. The airship shuddered anew, lurched, and rose a final time. They surged through the gap, breaking into the clear air above the forest below. But even as they did so, the keel scraped across the boulders beneath them, making a terrible grinding, ripping noise. The Jerle Shannara shuddered and then dipped, the bow coming down sharply, pointing left and toward the forest a thousand feet below. The crosswind returned, sudden and vicious, snatching at the crippled vessel. The mainsail reefed as several of her lines snapped, and the Jerle Shannara plunged downward.
Rue Meridan, clinging to both her safety harness and the pilot box railing, thought they were dead. They spiraled down, out of control, the canopy of the trees rising to meet them with dizzying swiftness. Her brother, still struggling to bring the bow up, cursed. Crew members slid along the decking. The safety line broke away on one, and she caught just a glimpse of him as he flew out over the side of the ship and disappeared.
Then the crosswind shifted, ripping along the cliff face and carrying the Jerle Shannara sideways into the rock. Rue had just a moment to watch the cliff wall fly toward them before they struck in a shattering crunch of wood and metal. She lost her grip on both her safety line and the railing and flew into the pilot box control panel. Pain ratcheted through her left arm, and she felt the stitches on her wounded side and leg give. Her safety line snapped, and then she careened into her brother, who was hanging desperately onto the useless steering levers.
A moment later, everything went black.
Twelve
As he finished tying off the bandages around Little Red’s damaged torso, Redden Alt Mer was thinking things couldn’t get any worse. Then Spanner Frew lumbered up the steps to the pilot box and knelt down beside him.
“We lost all the spare diapson crystals through the tear in the hull,” he announced sullenly. “They’ve f
allen somewhere down there.”
His gesture made it clear that somewhere down there was the jungle below the wooded precipice on which the Jerle Shannara had finally come to rest, an impenetrable green covering of treetops and vines that spread away from the cliff face for miles.
Alt Mer rocked back on his heels and stared at the shipwright as if he were speaking in a foreign language. “All of them?”
“They were all in one crate. The crate fell out through a hole ripped in the hull.” Spanner Frew reached up to touch the gash in his forehead, flinching as he did so. “As if I needed another headache.”
“Can we fly with what we have?”
The shipwright shook his head. “We’re down to three. We lost the port fore tube and everything with it on landing. What’s left might let us fly in calm weather, but it won’t get us off the ground. If we try it, we’ll just go over the side and into the trees with the crystals.”
He sighed. “The thing of it is, we came through this all right otherwise. We’ve got the timbers to repair the hole in the hull. We’ve got spare draws and fastenings. We’ve got plenty of sail. Even the spars and mast can be fixed with a little time and effort. But we can’t go anywhere without those crystals.” He rubbed his beard. “How’s Little Red?”
Redden Alt Mer looked down at his sister. She was still unconscious. He had let her sleep while he worked on her injuries, but he thought he’d wake her soon in case she had suffered a concussion. He needed to know, as well, if there was damage inside that he couldn’t see.
“She’ll be all right,” he said with a reassuring smile. He wasn’t sure at all, but there was no point in worrying Black Beard unnecessarily. He had enough to concern him. “Who went over the side?”
“Jahnon Pakabbon.”
Big Red grimaced. A good man. But they were all good men, which is why they had been chosen for the voyage. There wasn’t a one he could bear to lose, let alone afford to. He had known Jahnon since they were children. The quiet, even-tempered Rover had a gift for innovation in addition to his sailing skills.