“I understand.”
Simeon and his pirates left. Locked the massive, circular door behind them with a long series of rattles and clicks.
As soon as Simeon and Howell were gone, Felgor let out a long sigh of relief. Ashlyn started reading through the documents. There were hundreds of pages of diagrams and schematics. They varied from structural blueprints of the Proving Ground to lodestone charge orientations to a design for some kind of mechanical spider.
“Thanks for that,” Felgor said. “’Bout damn crapped myself if I’m being honest.”
“We’re not in the clear yet,” Ashlyn said, flipping through a dozen pages dedicated to the hydraulic system of mechanical spider legs.
“Right. I’ll leave you to it.” Felgor picked up one of the chicken bones he’d accrued, snapped it in half, and started using one half to whittle the other down. “You get to work on the glove, I’ll see about getting myself out of this here cage.” He stuck his tongue out as he worked.
Ashlyn looked up from the papers. “You can’t pick a Balarian seal with chicken bones. They’re unbreakable.”
“First of all, nothing’s unbreakable. Second, this design’s rudimentary to say the least. No back-bite loops. Only four sequence layers. The ones from the Clock have fifteen, minimum.”
“It’s probably the first one that Osyrus Ward built. The prototype.” She looked around. “Simeon’s armor is a prototype, too. And these pages have the details.”
The pages were yellowed with age and decay. They were definitely Osyrus Ward’s notes—each written in a quick shorthand with a Pargossian date at the top.
19 Etchtar—217
Breakthrough. Blood of Specimen 01 key to preservation of the great lizards. Next challenge is volume.
21 Lomas—218
Infinite and concentrated production loop achieved. Specimen 01 complains of constant and extreme pain from the apparatus, but there is no evidence the process will kill him. Scaled production of preserved dragon bones is underway.
Okinu’s second request is more complicated. Weight. Maneuverability. All obstacles for a viable exoskeleton. But I believe I can employ electrostatic power that taps into the wearer’s biology. Despite the weak charge of the dragon tissue, the lodestones I have mined will amplify the apparatus enough for a prototype. Designs to follow.
“Anything useful?” Felgor asked from his cage.
Ashlyn turned to the next page, where she found the schematic for Simeon’s armor. Eighteen lodestones were mapped to various pressure points, including one against each wrist, which meant there was a lodestone in the gauntlet. Good. Two dragon threads ran down the spine. Scores of equations filled the margins, explaining how everything fit together.
“Very useful.”
“So, you can fix it? Because I kinda got a lot riding on the state of that glove come morning.”
“Pretty sure,” Ashlyn said, examining the lodestones that Howell had put in the cage. They both held a strong attraction to each other, which was good. The orientation process that Osyrus used was confounding, but she didn’t need to completely understand it so long as she had access to two charged opposites.
“Pretty sure?” Felgor asked. “The only thing standing between Simeon’s saw and my balls is a ‘pretty sure’?”
“There wasn’t anything standing between them at all until I said something.”
Felgor muttered something to himself. Went back to working on the lock with his chicken bones. After a few precious, quiet minutes, he paused. “Hey Ashe?”
“What?” she said, trying not to lose focus on the equation she was reading.
“You think Silas survived?”
Ashlyn hesitated. Looked up from the page.
“He still had a lot of Gods Moss in his bloodstream when he took those bolts.”
“But he was facedown in the water. And he wasn’t moving. I watched until the current took him.”
“So did I.”
Ashlyn dug one fingernail deep underneath the dragon thread. Winced at the pain.
“You should get some rest, Felgor.”
* * *
It took Ashlyn two hours of reading to figure out the problem with the glove. And the rest of the night to fix it.
When she finished, it was an hour before dawn. Felgor was snoring in his cage and muttering something about a woman named Kiko. Ashlyn set the glove aside and went back to reading Osyrus’s massive stack of research notes.
7 Crima—219
Prototype complete. The armor will bind to a subject’s blood, just like the Ghost Moth spinal tissue. The apparatus provides nigh impenetrable armor to the wearer, should they be strong enough to operate it. The rulers of Terra would covet the design. But this application is crude. Dirty. Limited. Will use the gauntlet lodestone to experiment with hydraulic triggers, then shelve the prototype indefinitely. I am better than this.
Yet, nothing is wasted. This design opens the door to a thousand new possibilities. The human body is so frail and flawed in its natural state. Simply wrapping the meat sack in armor is a messy, impermanent solution. But with the materials on this island, I can improve the human form beyond measure. Make it perfect. I must return to the basics. The building blocks. Beginning insect trials in the morning.
Ashlyn sifted through several pages of insect diagrams. Spiders and mantises, mostly. They all had different artificial limbs implanted in their bodies. After that, Osyrus moved to larger animals and internal organs. Half a hundred pages were devoted to an acorn-sized heart fitted for a rat. When she’d skimmed through the diagrams, she found more notes. Unlike the previous entries, which were written in a careful and neat hand, these had turned messy and erratic.
26 Osra—219
Months of failure. Specimens continue to reject their implants and perish due to infection.
None of the warren mosses seem to ward away the corruption, as they did for the preservation apparatus of Specimen 01. Frustrating. 01’s survival of the procedures seems to be an anomaly on multiple levels. Must find a way to replicate its resilience on normative tissue, otherwise there is no way to scale.
The next note was stuck to the page above it by a green film of rotted mushrooms. Ashlyn had to peel the pages apart as carefully as possible to avoid tearing them.
11 Sorro—220
Breakthrough. While imperfect, the Cordata mushroom can be manipulated to encase an implant and stave off infection. Remote triggers to the nervous system work nicely, especially in rodent specimens. But the process causes a number of undesirable side effects—fungus eventually consumes host, turns them to madness. But this can be improved in time. Like so many things, nature provides a flawed baseline from which to begin iterative improvements.
I am ready for human trials. Will make contact with Okinu and update her on the new direction of the project. Whether she decides to support my work or not, she will deliver what I require to continue.
The wait will be long. Must excavate a subterranean level and prepare it for the arrival of new specimens. Will install security measures, should they prove … disagreeable.
Ashlyn remembered the missive Osyrus had sent to Okinu. The babble about undignified meat sacks and goddesses. This was what he was talking about. And she remembered that Okinu had sent soldiers and, eventually, a widow after him. Okinu had sent all the specimens that he needed, despite trying to do the opposite.
There was a final note in the stack, scrawled almost three years after the previous one.
11 Etchtar—223
Breakthrough. Human specimen 88 was the key. Moving all research to the lowest level of the workshop. I am near final stage.
Ashlyn put the note down. Tried to think. Other than the bloodstain in her cage, there wasn’t much evidence of human experimentation in this room—just tools, dragon bones, and metal. That meant this wasn’t the lowest level of the workshop. There was more, beneath her.
And she needed to get there.
32
JOL
AN
Almira, Aboard the Time’s Daughter
Cumberland and Oromir hauled Garret into the main cabin and put him on his knees while Iko bound his hands with iron manacles.
“I need some detail here,” Cumberland said, towering over Garret.
The assassin said nothing.
“Why’d you kill that man?” He motioned toward the captain’s cabin.
Again, silence.
When he got nothing from Garret, he turned to Jolan. “How do you two know each other?”
“It’s kind of a long story.”
“We have time.”
“Hate to be a stick-in-the-mud here, boss, but I’m not sure we do,” Sten said, looking out the window. “It appears that our violent entrance is catching up to us.”
Below, the entire fortress was aglow from torches. There was a big crowd of soldiers swarming around the turret that the skyship was anchored to.
Shoshone cursed. Then went over to Septimus—the navigator without his breastplate—who was cowering in the corner and weeping silently.
“If you lie to me, I will cut off your hand. And I will keep cutting things off until I’m convinced you’re telling the truth. Understand?”
Septimus nodded.
“Can they get to the ship from down there?”
He nodded again. “The pulley operates from both sides. Captain Sidu just needs to input his seal, then they can ratchet her down in a matter of minutes.”
“How do we disconnect the cord from our side?”
Shoshone raised her cleaver in expectation of a lie.
“From there,” Septimus said quickly. He pointed to a group of levers near the helm. “But our levitation sack is filled to capacity for tomorrow’s patrol. We’re extremely buoyant.”
“Meaning?”
“If we sever the anchor, we’ll float away.”
“That’s the idea,” Shoshone said.
“You don’t understand, flying the Time’s Daughter is incredibly complicated. General Mun was the only one on board who had the proper training.”
He glanced toward the cabin, as if the dead man might spring to life and help them out of their current predicament.
“Time’s Daughter, is it?” Willem said. “Even for Balarians that’s a stupid name.”
Septimus ignored Willem’s gibe. “I am not lying to you. Flying the ship takes great skill. There are wind currents to read. Constant adjustments to make depending on the conditions.”
“Can’t one of you two do it?” Shoshone asked, looking between the two men.
“Us?” Septimus asked.
“By Aeternita, no!” Quinn finished. “We’re the navigators. We make dozens of calculations a minute. The trigonometry alone is a full-time job, never mind the calculus and gas flows of the levitation sack, which require constant adjustment and care.”
“There is no way that you flew this massive hunk of dragon bones across half the realm of Terra with only one man to fly it,” Shoshone said.
“Of course not,” said Quinn, who was far calmer than his panicked counterpart. “Captain Sidu and his second, Tritian, are fully trained pilots, but they had been in the air for nearly one hundred hours straight, and are both sleeping in the fort barracks. Well, they were sleeping, anyway.”
Everyone was quiet for a few moments.
“Jolan can do it,” Willem said.
“What?”
“Triga-whatever. Calculus. Those things sounded like alchemist stuff.” He motioned to the helm, which was really more of a metallic pit filled with an astounding number of levers and gears. “You’ve been brewing potions and tonics all this time, it’s the same general shit, right?”
“No,” Jolan said. “It is not the same general shit. Just because I can brew a cock-rot tonic doesn’t mean I can fly a skyship!”
“I must agree with the boy,” Quinn said. “Pilot’s training requires many months of careful—”
“Shut up!” Shoshone and Cumberland shouted at the same time.
They looked at each other, trying to think of a solution. Shoshone’s jaw was so tense that the scar on her face turned white.
“We don’t have a choice,” Garret said. His first words. The sound of his voice sent a shiver down Jolan’s spine. “You morons have destroyed my exit and muddied my work. If this ship stays in Black Rock, we are all dead. Jolan. Fly the ship.”
For some reason, Garret’s orders jolted him to action. Before he really knew what he was doing, Jolan was slipping into the cockpit. The wheel was made from carved and polished dragon bone that was fused to a complicated array of machinery that sank deep into the ship. There were levers everywhere, and two pedals at his feet.
“This is truly your plan?” Quinn asked. “To let some alchemist boy fly the Time’s Daughter on a night mission?”
“Shut up and explain how it works,” Shoshone said.
“That will takes days.”
“You have one minute.”
Quinn sighed. “The wheel controls our sky rudder, which in turn controls starboard and port movement. The pedals control the wing and sail orientation so you can tilt. Levers on the left are for the levitation sack’s pressure. The large red lever on the right controls the engine thrusters. That’s the one you’ll need to use the most.”
“What’s this do?” Jolan asked, pointing to a button made from dragon bone that was pulsing with blue light.
“Never touch that!” Quinn shouted.
“Fine, fine,” Jolan said. He put his hands around the wheel. Moved it a little in each direction.
“You ready?” Shoshone asked.
“Not really.”
“Cut us loose.”
Septimus cleared his throat. “Explaining the controls to a clever boy is all well and good. But I must stress that—”
Shoshone backhanded Septimus with the butt of her cleaver hard enough to spray at least three teeth into the far wall, and quite a bit of blood.
“Not another word. Do it.”
While clutching his face, Septimus trudged over to the captain’s cabin, opened the door, and removed a seal from General Mun’s breast pocket. He returned to the controls and inserted the disk into a slot, which caused a series of clicks and whirs. Something unlocked. Septimus lifted the top of a control panel to reveal a series of red buttons. He moved to press one.
“A reminder, Balarian,” Shoshone said, stepping closer. “You will be the first to die if we’re taken back to the ground, or if anything happens besides the release of that anchor. The only way you survive this mess is by getting us out of it.”
Septimus nodded and put his hand on a button. Jolan was fairly certain that it was a different one than he’d originally been reaching toward. As soon as he pressed it down, there was a heavy click in the floor beneath. The ship shuddered and all the wardens reached for something to steady themselves. Oromir swayed, then crouched down at the lip of the cockpit.
“Whoa, that feels weird,” he whispered.
“Very weird,” Jolan agreed, glad that he was in a seat.
“Anchor released,” Quinn said, moving to his controls. Now that the ship was flying, the navigators seemed to compulsively slip back into their duties. Septimus pulled a silk cloth from his breast pocket, wadded it into the place where his teeth had been, and then hurried back to the instrument table that he’d been hunched over when they entered.
“Dropping sails,” he muttered through the wad of cloth, then flipped a few switches.
“Lighting engines four and five with the Kor’s spark,” Quinn responded.
They went back and forth a few times, adjusting levers and levels and calling out numeric readings.
“Okay,” Septimus said eventually. “Our gaseous mixture is at full potency. We’re ready to begin a forward thrust. You remember the lever?”
“I remember.” Jolan put his hand on the cold metal. His hand was slippery with sweat. “Here goes.”
Jolan pulled the lever. The ship roared forward through
the sky. Everyone reached for something to steady themselves.
As they careened forward, the ship started tilting to the right at an increasingly sharp angle. Jolan tried to correct it with wheel, but it didn’t do anything.
“More port-side rotor depression!” Septimus shouted, voice distorted from the cloth in his mouth.
“What does that mean?” Jolan shouted back.
“Put pressure on the right pedal!”
“But isn’t port on the left?”
“They’re reversed.”
“Why?”
“Do you want me to explain the mechanics of rotor depression or do you want to prevent this ship from crashing? Our horizon-line unbalance is approaching twenty degrees. At twenty-five, we capsize. Trust me, it is a much bigger deal on a skyship. Push down the right pedal, slow and steady.”
Jolan gritted his teeth, then applied pressure.
“There you go, that’s it. That’s it.” Septimus watched the orb as it tilted back into a level position. “Level off now. We’re steady.”
Dawn was breaking on the eastern horizon. Pink and orange hues colored the clouds, but the meadows and fields below were still shrouded in darkness.
“Keep level,” Septimus reminded him.
“You’re favoring the starboard pedal a bit,” Quinn added.
“Right. Right.” He made an adjustment and they leveled off. “There we go. Think I’m getting the hang of this.”
For a few moments, everyone just looked out at the sunrise.
“We’ll need a destination,” Septimus said. “So that we can begin plotting a course through any adverse weather or topography.”
“We’re going back to the Dainwood,” Cumberland said.
“I’ll need you to be a little more specific.”
Cumberland thought about that. “Can this thing float?”
“Of course,” Septimus said. “All of the Balarian Empire’s skyships were built as amphibious vessels. However, the machinery is quite delicate, so rough seas are—”
Sorcery of a Queen Page 33
