“But we’ll pack everything up and ready the fliers. According to our latest intelligence, this isn’t one of their flight paths, commercial or military.”
“Think they’re looking for us?”
Remembering the aircraft he had shot down—and the one Sardelle’s sword had utterly destroyed—Ridge nodded. “They may not know who’s here exactly, but they know an enemy has been flying through their skies.”
“Will we move the camp again tonight?”
“We’ll see.”
The more they moved around, the more chance they would be spotted in the skies, if not by official military watchers then by shepherds wandering around with goat herds. Everyone was a potential spy here.
The airship turned, heading toward the mountains. They weren’t coming straight toward the fliers, but on their new trajectory, they would pass within a half mile of the camp. The white-and-tan camouflage netting worked great at a distance, but the closer one came, the less natural it looked.
Ridge faced Ahn and the others—Apex and Duck had both come to peer out across the steppes too. “Prepare to fly. We’ll hope they don’t discover us, but if they do, we have to be ready.”
“Ready to run, sir?” Ahn asked. “Or ready to fight?”
Ridge stuck his hand into his pocket and rubbed the back of his dragon statuette. None of his people appeared daunted by the idea of battling an airship, even with only four fliers, but it was the mission as a whole that he had to consider. Right now, the Cofah might suspect an Iskandian incursion, but they couldn’t know for sure yet. The empire had many enemies, and most of them had flight technology. But if they left an airship riddled with machine gun fire, and if witnesses identified him and his team, their chances of escaping the continent would go down. Even if they did escape, Iskandia risked retribution.
“If they spot us, we’ll run first, try to lead them up into the mountains—” Ridge waved toward the craggy peaks north of the steppes, “—and if they follow, we’ll fight them there. If we can force them down on a high mountainside or in a deep canyon, it’ll take them a while to hike back to an outpost to warn the rest of their people.”
“Would it be better if… everyone died in the crash, sir?” Ahn asked.
She wasn’t lobbying for that, he knew, but she was pointing out the most logical scenario. If there was no one to report back, the Cofah would have no way of knowing what had happened out here, and it might be days or weeks before they even found their downed aircraft.
“It would be better if we weren’t discovered at all.” Ridge gazed toward the approaching airship. “As to the rest, we’ll figure it out if they follow us and we manage to take them down. That’s not a given, especially if their airship has some of those unmanned craft to throw at us.”
“Would it be considered evil if a person would rather shoot at Cofah airships than go back to doing push-ups?” Duck asked Apex as they walked away.
“It would be considered egotistical, perverse and possibly psychopathic.”
“But not evil?”
Apex frowned at him before climbing into his flier. “You’re lucky you received as noble a nickname as Duck.”
Ridge gazed out at the airship and took his cap and goggles out of his jacket pocket.
He had a feeling they would be flying within the hour.
Chapter 9
Help me. They are taking me here. The red paint strokes had been made hastily, with the last two words barely legible, a definite contrast to the precision of the murals.
“Wherever here is, it isn’t anywhere around this part of the empire.” Sardelle looked out the narrow window, toward the valley beyond, a valley cloaked in snow.
Tolemek was still staring at the painting, his fingers tracing the mural, his eyes searching. For more clues? “This could be anywhere. Well, not anywhere, but at least two continents and countless islands and smaller land masses.” He pushed his hair away from his face; he looked like he wanted to tear it out.
“Not anywhere.” Sardelle pointed at a rich purple cascade of bell-shaped flowers falling around a central stem. “This is a…”
Marsoothimum, Jaxi?
Yes. As a soulblade, Jaxi had traveled the world countless times with her previous handlers, and she had a memory that Sardelle never failed to envy.
“Marsoothimum,” Sardelle said. “It’s native to Daguboor and some of the islands around the northern horn. Some of this other foliage seems familiar too.” Know any of these other flowers, Jaxi?
Just because I traveled the world, doesn’t mean I ever had a handler interested in botany. Hektor used to eat flowers, but that’s not the same thing.
“We can look them up,” Sardelle said.
Tolemek stepped back. “I’ll try to be optimistic and not think that all we’ve managed is to narrow things down to a continent. Or a lush greenhouse at any random point in the world.”
“That’s unlikely. We might be able to refine our guesses further later.” Sardelle touched the three other flowers that were represented in enough detail to suggest they were real rather than random background creations. She tried to memorize them. If the marsoothimum was real, these other flowers should be too.
“I want to check the file room anyway,” Tolemek said. “There might be a record of where they took her.”
A clank sounded in the hallway, reminding Sardelle they weren’t alone—and that there was an unconscious man in a downstairs closet who could wake up at any time. The two guards were the ones responsible for the noise, making their way closer as they delivered breakfast to the patients—or inmates, as she kept wanting to call them. A man in a nearby cell started singly loudly. The utterances piercing the walls were nonsense except that the word breakfast came out in every line. Judging by the indifferent attitudes of the guards, this was a common occurrence. Sardelle thought of trying to dig Tylie’s location from their thoughts, but unless they were thinking about her, it would be hard to glean that information from their minds. They probably wouldn’t have been told anyway.
Tolemek had his ear pressed to the door.
“They’ve both gone into a room if you want to try to sneak past,” Sardelle said. It would be safer to wait until they were done serving breakfast, but that guard downstairs might wake up before then.
“Let’s go.” Tolemek slipped a leather ball out of his pocket and opened the door.
Sardelle walked into the hall after him. He slowed next to the open door—the obnoxious singing was coming from that cell—and glanced back at her before passing it.
“Can’t he just eat without it being a dragons-cursed event every day?” one of the guards growled.
They were standing in front of the patient, feeding him by hand. A restraint jacket kept the man’s arms secured around his torso. Sardelle nodded at Tolemek, and they slipped past the door.
They hadn’t gone more than three steps when one of the guards said, “Who was that?”
Erg, he must have seen them out of the corner of his eye. Sardelle flicked a hand, unfastening the patient’s restraint jacket. The man lashed out, knocking the breakfast tray from one guard’s hands and leaping onto the back of the other. She raised a gust of wind and blew the door shut, then disabled the lock as she had done below.
“Go, go,” Sardelle urged, shooing Tolemek toward the stairs.
His face was grim. He knew it wasn’t likely they would have a chance to spend much time in the files room now.
“If you don’t care if they figure out who was breaking in, head for the files room,” she said as they ran down the stairs. “I’ll keep them off your back while you search.”
Tolemek turned left at the bottom of the stairs, running toward the front of the building instead of back toward the kitchen. Sardelle shook out her arms, loosening her muscles as if she were about to jump into a physical battle, and readied her mind for what might become a large-scale confrontation.
The main hallway was still empty, but four people were working at desks
in the front room that Tolemek charged into. He tossed his leather ball into the middle of them, then backed out. Sardelle almost crashed into him, but she had seen the ball work before and realized what he planned. She scrambled back into the hallway, knowing the smoky air that wafted out would affect them if they were too close.
“Who are those people?” someone shouted.
“Get them!”
Despite the order and the ensuing footfalls, nobody made it to the hallway. A thump sounded as someone bumped into a desk, staggered, and collapsed to the floor. The other three people slumped unconscious before making it two steps from their seats.
Sardelle took the moment to destroy the locks in other doors off the hallway. There were more offices, furnace rooms, and storage areas down here, so there weren’t as many doors to deal with as on the floor above. Still, it took a few minutes, and Tolemek had already charged inside by the time she finished. He must have a way to extinguish his device once it had done its job, because the smoke had already cleared.
Someone in the room across the hall had heard the shouts from the admins and had already discovered he was locked inside. He banged at the locked door. There were more people in that room. It wouldn’t take long for someone to grab an axe or other heavy tool to force his way out.
Sardelle joined Tolemek inside a storage area full of shelves and boxes adjacent to the main room. He had already found a lantern and was skimming the labels. There wasn’t another exit, so they risked being trapped inside.
“Here.” He grabbed a box that wasn’t as dusty as the others and tore off the lid. He flipped through the files and yanked one out. Two seconds of reading was all it took before he started shaking his head. “Transferred by order of the emperor. Two days ago.”
“The emperor?” Sardelle wouldn’t have thought the emperor knew of Tolemek or his family’s existence. His dominion was a hundred times more populated than that of her homeland, and in all the stories and histories, he had always been a far more distant figure than the kings of Iskandia.
“It doesn’t mean he personally gave the order.” Tolemek stuffed the file back into the box. “It could have been one of the thousand-odd peons authorized to carry out the law in his name. There’s nothing about where she was sent.” He looked like he wanted to kick over one of the stacks of boxes, but he settled for slamming the side of his fist against a wall and striding for the door.
The bang of a pistol echoed from the hallway, followed by the slam of wood against a stone wall.
“Someone found a way past my disabled door locks,” Sardelle observed. It hadn’t even taken an axe.
Tolemek poked his head into the hallway. They weren’t far from the front door.
“Maybe there’s still time to run for the exit,” Sardelle whispered.
Tolemek jerked back inside at the same time as a gun fired again. A bullet smashed into the wooden doorjamb where his head had been.
“Maybe not,” she amended.
“Guard the door,” Tolemek said, slamming it shut. He locked it and shoved a heavy desk in front of it, then ran for the file room again, his hand dipping into his bag.
Concerned about what he was planning—so far he had proven he preferred non-fatal methods of dealing with people, but he was irritated now—Sardelle brushed across his thoughts. An image of an explosion flashed across the front of his mind.
“Uhm.” She noted the four unconscious people in the main room with her, people whose only crimes were working in an inhospitable asylum. “You’re not planning on bringing down the building, are you?”
“Just a part of it.”
Footsteps thundered up the hall, stopping in front of their door. There were four people out there, and they were shouting for more to help them. The knob rattled.
Tolemek ran out of the file room, slamming the door behind him. “Can you make it so nobody can go out the front or through the kitchen for the next ten minutes or so?”
“I can try… so long as you’re not blowing up the building in a way that people might be trapped and crushed inside.”
His head tilted. “I’m not blowing up anything, simply removing a portion of the exterior wall.”
That… wasn’t what she had seen in his mind. “You were only thinking of blowing up the building?”
“That bit of fantasy might have crossed my mind, but, no, I’m not causing an explosion. Your sword is far better at that than I. Should I be offended that you were reading my thoughts?” His face grew a little sad, as if he knew she didn’t trust him.
A dozen excuses popped into Sardelle’s mind—it was one thing to snoop in another’s thoughts and another to get caught doing it—but she admitted that she wasn’t in the right here. “Yes, you should be. And I should be ashamed for doing so.”
Guns fired in the hallway, and she dropped to a crouch, expecting bullets to plow through the wood. The oak was thicker than that though, and she made it to Tolemek’s side without injury.
“Are you?” he asked.
“Am I what?” She was focused on the men in the hallway. One had an axe now.
“Ashamed.”
“Yes. There are—were—a lot of rules about respecting people’s privacy and not rifling through their thoughts. There are, admittedly, a lot of surface thoughts you receive simply by opening yourself up to those around you, but most sorcerers learn early on to block them out. It’s amazing how tempted you are to break rules when there’s nobody around to enforce them.” An acrid stench reached Sardelle’s nose. “Is that your work?”
“Yes. The doors?”
She lifted a hand and pushed her thoughts past the men knocking the hinges and doorknob off with their axe and to the front entrance. She broke the latch assembly so it would be stuck in the extended position. Such finesse was a little harder across a larger distance, and a twinge of pain started behind her eyes, but she managed to break the kitchen backdoor lock too. She would have a headache all day, but had doubtlessly needed the practice with fine-touch kinesis, anyway.
“Done,” she said. “It’s a good thing the windows are all too small to climb through.” The idea of trying to break a hundred more locks made her brain hurt even more.
Tolemek led her into the file room, where a cold draft and a surprising amount of light greeted them. A large circular hole in the back wall now provided a window onto the snowy ridge beyond the building. The wall was more than six inches thick. Smoke wafted from the edges of the hole.
“You did that with a vial and an eye dropper?” she whispered, following him to the new exit.
“A flask and a specially treated wire brush, actually.” Tolemek made sure nobody was waiting outside, then hopped through, landing in the snow. “I suggest we run.”
Sardelle clambered through awkwardly, not wanting to touch the smoking edges with her hands, but took off at top speed as soon as she landed. They slogged through the snow, this time heading straight down the steep slope instead of bothering with the road.
“We’ll have to steal horses,” Tolemek said over his shoulder, checking on her and the looming towers of the asylum as well. “No trains in the station, and the guards down there are probably on their toes right now anyway, watching for vagabonds.” He waved at the empty tracks running through the middle of the town.
“Not surprising.” Sardelle sucked in large breaths of cold air. Plowing through the snow wasn’t easy, and she stumbled more than once. “We might have to steal skis instead of horses. Or a dogsled.”
“The main road into town has been cleared,” Tolemek said dryly. “The tracks too.”
“And where are we going with our stolen horses?” Sardelle was ready to return to Ridge, but she didn’t know if Tolemek would want to beeline for the nearest library to look up those flowers.
He hesitated before answering her. “Wherever she is, we’ll probably need airships or sailing ships—or fliers—to reach her.”
The fliers may not be available.
What?
The camp has visitors.
• • • • •
Ridge sat backward in the cockpit of his flyer, a spyglass to his eye as he tracked the airship through the holes in the camo netting. The craft was still sailing along on the same course, heading toward the mountains, but there was a lot of activity on deck. The soft thwump-thwump-thwump of its propellers drifted down from a thousand feet in the air. Its massive balloon blotted out the sun and much of the sky.
“I think they’ve figured out we’re in here,” Ahn whispered.
All of the fliers were packed and ready, everything except the camouflage stowed for takeoff. They would have to abandon the poles and netting and take it as a loss. Their propellers weren’t running yet—the noise would be a giveaway—but they could start them at a touch. The fliers’ glowing energy crystals were covered, so the light wouldn’t seep out. It shouldn’t be noticeable from afar in the daylight, anyway, but they couldn’t risk that something would glint or gleam. Even a spyglass reflecting the sun could be visible from a long distance away, and that would instantly tell those watching that something fishy was going on inside the mound tucked into the base of the foothills.
“Maybe not,” Duck whispered. “They haven’t stopped. They’re still floating toward the mountains.”
They hadn’t stopped, but they weren’t moving at anything near their full speed. And all those people running around on deck made Ridge nervous. He slid into the cockpit, fastened his harness, and rested his fingers on the propeller ignition button. He ought to give the order to fly right now. Only his knowledge that the greater mission was at risk of failing if the fliers were discovered stayed his hand. More than that, Nowon and Kaika would be at risk if the soldiers guarding the installation were alerted.
Still, he had a hunch they were in trouble if they didn’t move.
“It’s time,” Ridge said. “We’re taking them on.”
“Are you sure, sir?” Apex asked.
He was going to have to be. Ridge mashed on the ignition switch, and his propeller ripped to life. “Follow me,” he said, then remembered to tap the communication crystal to activate it. Otherwise his people wouldn’t be able to hear him over the noise of their own propellers roaring to life.