Moon retracted his claws to run his hands over the door’s surface. “There’s no lock.” He dropped back down to a lower stair so Lithe and Chime could examine the door more closely.
“Wait, there’s one of those forerunner flower locks here, but it’s tiny.” Chime clawed carefully at something set deep into the door frame. “Maybe we could pry it open . . .”
Lithe stepped aside. Shade dropped down and reached past Chime to put his hand on the lock. Moon craned his neck to see, but nothing happened.
Chime grimaced. “That would have been easy. We need a long metal rod—”
Then deep inside the door, something groaned. Chime twitched uneasily but Lithe said, “I think that’s metal.”
Moon snapped, “Chime, Lithe, get back from the—” and then the door opened.
Shade shoved his body in front of the opening, shielding Lithe and Chime, but nothing surged out of the door but a wave of cold stale air, scented of rust and rot.
Lithe dug in her bag and pulled out a glowing handful of Kishan moss. Shade took it and held it out as he stepped inside. “Here’s another stair. And I think we’re in the right place.”
Moon pulled himself up and slipped inside after Shade. Instantly the motion seemed to cease. This chamber was protected somehow, stable no matter what was happening to the rest of the ship. The light gleamed on the dark blue of the walls and the flowing figured shapes of curves that might symbolize wind and water. In the center another set of the oddly-spaced stairs curved up toward the globe above. Even Moon could tell this was forerunner.
The cessation of the wind and the dizzying motion made Moon shake his spines and frills out in relief, shedding ice crystals. Lithe stepped in behind him.
Then Chime twitched. “Uh, I felt something.
Heard something.” Shade stopped with his claws curled around the raised steps. He peered warily up into the chamber above. “Something dangerous?”
Moon asked, “Voices?”
Lithe touched Chime’s arm in encouragement. Chime tilted his head, concentrating. “No, just . . . There’s definitely something here.” He hissed in frustration. “I’m not sure.”
“Then we are in the right place,” Moon said. And they couldn’t stop now. He stepped onto the stairs and started up with Shade.
Moon carefully poked his head up into the next chamber. The discolored crystal windows had cracked and clouded. Only a little light shone through and the view out was barely discernible. It was oddly quiet, though Moon heard the howling wind through the open door below. The narrow sections of wall between the windows were blue and deeply figured. Moon climbed up onto a floor grooved with wave patterns, and looked for something like a steering lever, or a wheel, or anything.
Shade stood beside him, staring around, baffled, as Chime and Lithe climbed up. He said, “But there’s nothing to steer with.”
“This was built by forerunners to control this ship,” Moon said, groping for a solution, “so . . . we don’t even know how forerunners do anything.”
“There has to be something here,” Lithe said, and she started to feel the carvings. Chime hurried to help, poking at the crevices and angles.
Kethel, in its groundling form, appeared in the stairwell, startling a yelp out of Chime. Shade, crouched to search along the floor, growled but didn’t object to its presence.
After what felt like a short eternity of searching, Moon knew this wasn’t going to help. And the others could all be dead down inside the dock somewhere and he had to find out. He shook his spines and said, “I need to go back to the dock and get down to where the others are. You all stay here.”
Chime looked up, appalled. “No, you can’t—”
Shade turned away from the wall he was searching. “You can’t make it alone. We barely got away from there alive. I’ll go with you.”
From the ripping shriek of metal outside, the ship might possibly be tearing itself apart. Moon wanted Chime, Shade, and Lithe up here where escape would be easier if the ship broke up. “No, stay with them. They need you. And you might be able to do something to help here.”
“I’ll take you there,” Kethel said. Its dark eyes were stark against its pale skin, red bruises forming on its jawline from being thrown off the docking stalk. It looked frightened and that was almost more disturbing than anything else.
Shade hissed at it, then said to Moon, “We should stay together.”
Moon flared his spines and snarled, “I don’t have time to argue.”
Shade bristled at him. Moon held his gaze and said, “The warriors and Bramble and the groundlings on the wind-ship are going to need you, and Chime, and Lithe.” If they’re still alive after Vendoin uses the weapon, he thought, and didn’t say it aloud. He didn’t need to. “You might be their only chance to get away from this place. If it gets worse, don’t wait, get back to them.”
Shade tried to stare him down. Moon had been in staring contests with queens and Stone; Shade wasn’t nearly angry enough to win. Shade flicked his spines and subsided reluctantly. He said, “If it’s too late, come back. Don’t—” He stopped.
Don’t die with the others, he meant. Just so Shade would let him go, Moon said, “I’ll try.”
Kethel dropped down the stairwell and Moon swung down to follow. Chime called out after him, sounding desperate. Moon’s throat tightened and he didn’t answer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Jade led the way down as the shaft curved into another passage. The twisted pillars made climbing possible despite the motion that pushed her toward the walls. The jostling was deceptively easy to compensate for, but Jade hadn’t forgotten that first jolt. She looked back to Stone not far behind her, and asked, “If it feels like this in here, what’s it like outside?”
His claws hooked into Stone’s collar flange, Merit admitted reluctantly, “Bad. We’re at the center here, and protected. Outside . . . the dock might be tearing itself apart.”
“Moon can take care of the others,” Balm said, as she climbed along below Jade. “And they have a mentor with them.”
“Shade’s tougher than he seems,” Saffron added.
Jade knew she should agree and pretend to be less worried, but she couldn’t make herself say the words. She told herself to focus on finding the Hians. If they didn’t do that, then it wouldn’t matter what happened outside.
Then Stone flicked at her spines with one big claw. She stopped and tasted the air again. She hadn’t been able to scent anything so far, just dry cold air tainted with metal. But now there was a trace of a familiar scent: the Kishan moss.
Jade signaled the others to move more cautiously, and started forward again.
At the next twisted pillar, she found a scraped off chunk of moss. At least they weren’t on the wrong trail.
Further ahead, the shaft narrowed, but the quality of the light was different, more diffuse. “It opens out down there,” Balm said, keeping her voice low.
As they moved into the larger space, Jade motioned for the others to stay back. She crept ahead.
The shaft ended in a large chamber where one pillar twisted around and formed a ladder-like climbing structure all the way down to the floor below. The chamber was more dimly lit, full of shadows, mostly bare except for the embossed wall panels. Jade spotted an open doorway in the wall, with something around it, some ornamental carving . . . And three Hians. Jade hissed in satisfaction.
Two had the smaller hand-carried fire weapons. The groundlings were always overconfident with those. And one was unarmed. Except that one stood with her hands out, eyes closed in concentration. The other two had their gazes locked on the shaft above them, obviously waiting for an attack.
The unarmed one has the magic, Jade thought. That had to be it. That Hian was waiting for the other two to sight the Raksura, and she was going to collapse the shaft again.
Balm, Saffron, and Briar had eased up beside Jade, River and Deft hanging back with Stone. Jade glanced at the three female warriors, gestured tow
ard each of the three Hians in turn, and got spine twitches of assent. Then Jade rocked up on her heels and flung herself out of the shaft with the force of every muscle in her body.
A twist compensated for the rotation of the chamber and she hit the unarmed Hian with her foot claws before the others knew she was there. Jade slammed her to the ground, her claws cutting through the flying pack harness to contract around the Hian’s throat.
Balm hit the next and the Hian’s flying pack went one way and her head the other. The third lifted her weapon to fire at Briar and Saffron crashed into her from the side and slammed her into the wall next to the doorway.
That was when Jade saw the fourth Hian, who stood in the darkened space on the other side of the door. Jade crouched to leap but the Hian didn’t lift her weapon, she reached to the side—
—and the rippled carving around the door began to spiral out and close.
With a snarl, Jade flung herself forward but she hit the closed door and bounced off the surface. Staring at it, she hissed in dismayed fury. The decorative border was made of petals formed of a hard white material, and now that it was closed, it looked like a huge flower. It was a forerunner door.
Beside her, Balm growled. “Is that—”
“Yes.” Jade ran her hands over it, the material soft but impervious under her scales. There was no catch, no place to pry at it.
She felt the change in the air behind her as Stone shifted to his groundling form. He stepped up beside her and tried to work his hand between the petals in the center. He shook his head. “It’s not there,” he said, his voice grim.
“It’s meant to open only for forerunners,” Merit was telling the warriors. “The one we found before had a place where you could trigger the catch, Lithe and Chime figured out how to open it, but this one doesn’t seem to have that.”
“How did the stupid Hians open it—” River began, then answered his own question. “The weapon. It let them in because of the weapon.”
Jade snarled again and slammed her fist against the impervious petals. This was why they had brought Shade, across half the continent, to open any sealed forerunner doors. And now she had no idea where he was, or even if he and Moon were still alive.
Kethel waited for Moon at the doorway, the wind tearing at his raveled braids. Moon’s feelings toward Kethel were too complicated to sort out, but he had to warn him. He said, “You don’t have to come. If the others can’t stop it, we probably won’t be able to help.”
Kethel said, “I don’t want to live without her and the others,” and lunged out into the wind.
Moon climbed after him, up the stairs curving around the outside of the steering cabin. The cold cleared his head but the wind nearly tore him off the rungs. Ice pellets stung his scales and the shriek of metal tearing sounded like the ship was dying in terrible pain. Kethel shifted to its winged form and held out a clawed hand. Moon leapt to reach it, then scrambled up to just behind the horns on Kethel’s head.
From here, Moon had a better view, not that it was encouraging. Walls of water stretched up all around them, the surface churning with storm waves. The metal ship skewed sideways, creating a vortex of air as the flower of the docking structure still rotated on its axis. Far below, through an obscuring haze of windblown water, Moon caught glimpses of the brown-yellow plain in bright sunlight. He had no idea what would happen once the docking structure got down there, and he didn’t want to find out.
Kethel leapt down to the next wheel and the wind almost sent it off the ship toward the water wall. Moon flattened himself to its scales, trying not to throw off its balance. Kethel landed and scrabbled to get hold of the wheel, then climbed down toward the bulbous towers below. With some protection from the wind, Kethel made its way toward the bow.
They reached the point where the twisted skeins of cables connecting the ship to the dock were stretched tight. Moon wondered if it would help to break them, to set the ship loose. No, it would probably just help the Hians, he realized. Dragging the ship might be slowing the structure’s motion, buying them time.
One of the leaf-shaped pods extended out over the cables. Kethel braced itself, then leapt for it.
Moon ducked down again to reduce the wind interference, for all the good that did. Gusts slammed into them like boulders and Kethel’s claws scraped across the silvery surface. Then it caught hold and dragged itself up.
Moon flattened himself behind Kethel’s horns to hold on, the wind singing in his spines, ice crystals peppering his scales like pebbles. As Kethel climbed, Moon realized the motion seemed to lessen, and when the wind eased, he lifted his head. Moon was so dazed by the constant pressure and sound that it took him a moment to realize that Kethel had just heaved itself over the outer edge of the central shaft and started down. Moon blinked and shook his head, the feathery protective membrane around his eyes reluctant to open fully with all the flying ice in the air.
As Kethel neared the blockage in the shaft, Moon was able to get a good look at the obstruction. He hissed under his breath. Part of the wall had broken loose and jammed across the opening. Moon climbed down off Kethel’s back and started looking for gaps. Kethel dragged its big claws across it, searching for purchase to pry it up.
Moon circled the obstruction twice, digging at narrow crevices until his claws ached, but there was no point wide enough for him to wiggle through. He scrambled back as Kethel managed to dig out some of the debris on the side, but it only revealed how firmly the slab was jammed in. It made him remember what Bramble had reported about the Hians ability to manipulate rock; this had obviously been no coincidence.
Moon shook his head. “We’re wasting time,” he called up to Kethel. “We need to look for another way in.”
Kethel didn’t give any sign it had heard him, just glared at the obstruction. Moon had time to wonder if their unlikely partnership ended here. Then it held out its arm again for him.
On the way back up to the top of the shaft, Moon tried to decide where the best place for another entrance would be. Those petal structures had to be for flying boats, just the way the groundlings had used them in the ruins on the continent below. Even though the forerunners had been able to fly, they must have found flying boats just as convenient as Raksura did.
Just before they reached the top, he leaned down to Kethel’s ear-hole and shouted, “Try to get inside one of the flower pods.” Then the wind hit them at full strength and Moon had to huddle down behind its horns again.
He felt Kethel doing some fairly athletic climbing, then it swung down and the wind lessened again. Moon lifted his head to see they were in the lee of a set of pods. The one directly across had a dark opening deep inside, where the stem met the larger structure. Before the wind choked him, he managed to shout, “There, there’s a door!”
Kethel reached the rim of the pod and Moon shook the ice out of his spines as they ducked inside. The curved interior was sheltered and compared to the outside it was like stepping into a warm cave. Moon jumped down from Kethel’s back, and took a full breath of the icy air.
Kethel shifted to its groundling form, then staggered and sat down heavily. “Are you all right?” Moon asked, catching himself just before he reached to brush the ice off the top of its head. It’s a kethel, he reminded himself.
Kethel shook the ice off and made a vague motion for Moon to go ahead.
The round passage at the back of the pod curved up toward the base of the central shaft. Moon started down it, and after a moment Kethel shoved to its feet and followed him. Moon’s joints hurt and the skin under his hand and foot claws was numb. He guessed Kethel felt worse.
The gray light didn’t fall very far, and Moon couldn’t get a good look at the door blocking the passage until he was almost on top of it. It was a forerunner door, shaped like the carved image of a flower, the hundreds of petals folded into multiple spirals. But it was a crushed flower now, a twist in the shaft having broken it along the right side and detached it from the wall.
 
; Kethel reached his side, dripping icy water from its braids and kilt. Moon said, “This is lucky. These doors only open for forerunners.” Or half-Fell consorts, like the way the lock on the steering cabin opened for Shade.
“Not lucky.” Kethel slid its hand in between the door and the wall and shoved the folded material down. “This flower is near the broken place in the shaft.”
Moon flicked his spines. Right, I should have thought of that. He climbed the wall and used his weight to help the kethel pry the door open enough for them both to squeeze through.
Beyond it was a wide corridor, the floor rounded and the walls lined with vine carvings, as if it was meant for climbing rather than walking. Light glowed faintly from apparently random spots on the carving, and there was a crack along the ceiling, more damage from the collapse in the shaft.
Moon tasted the air but couldn’t scent Hians or Raksura. He started down the passage with Kethel behind him.
Chime turned reluctantly away from the door, forcing his spines down to neutral. It wasn’t easy. Moon had gone off alone with a kethel. They had no idea what had happened to Jade and Stone and the others. Their numbers were dwindling and there was nothing they could do in this steering cabin to help. Panic rose in his throat and it took everything he had to choke it down.
Shade brushed against his arm, and squeezed his wrist. “It’ll be all right, Chime. Moon knows what he’s doing.”
Chime’s laugh came out as half-sob, half-growl. “You don’t know him like we do.”
Shade snorted but didn’t argue. “All we can do is keep looking.”
So Chime continued to search the cabin with Shade and Lithe for anything that looked like a steering lever. Just because it wasn’t obvious didn’t mean it wasn’t here. He forced himself to slow down and check every dark crevice.