Ude cleared his throat. “In case the message got lost… I am incredibly proud of all the work you have done. You have proven that you can do anything you set your mind to with sheer determination alone. If anyone can pull this off, it’s you. You will take us home. My father would be proud; you remind me so much of him.”
Oleja sat there for a moment, unsure of what to say. Eventually, Ude got to his feet.
“Get some rest. You have a big day tomorrow,” he said. He picked his way down the stairs and walked off with an unsteady gait, never taking so much as a backwards glance. Oleja watched him go: the closest thing to a friend and a parent that she had in the world. Everything that happened at dawn and afterwards, she did it for him, and for everyone else down in the canyon.
Chapter Five
When dawn broke, Oleja was ready.
Just as the morning prior, she rose early and readied her things. Her glider straps hugged her body, winding over her shoulders and around her thighs. She double and triple checked that each of the straps would hold—there was nothing like falling out of the sky to end a perfectly good escape plan.
Her tinkering bag hung at her hip. She wore her quiver across her back where it fit snugly atop the glider, cover latched, locking the arrows within—she had added the feature for this very moment. Losing all of her arrows mid-flight would be disastrous, leaving her with only the knife sheathed at her side for defense. Her bow, which she carried in her left hand, would be useless with nothing to fire from it.
She stood at the base of The Heap, preparing to climb the slopes for the final time. With a deep breath and one last look back to the village behind her, she began her ascent.
This time, it didn’t matter if anyone saw her. In fact, if she was going to be the first in history to escape, she wanted others to see her do it. She wanted to be a legend and a hero, like Tor, but finding success in the end. Let them watch.
Oleja crested the pile of metal and did a round of final checks. The straps still held her glider secure. The wings deployed as designed. The quiver latch was fastened tight, and everything else was bound tightly to her body. With her checks done, she settled into place on her end of the catapult and waited.
Time moved slowly. Her heart did not. She waited with eyes skyward as she watched the walkway far above. Her fingers drummed on the surface of the wood beneath her or plucked at her bowstring. She wanted to open her bag and pull out her tools to busy her hands and calm her nerves, but that struck her as a bad idea. She would only have so much notice before being launched into the air, and having her tools scattered around her at the moment of takeoff was a surefire way to lose them.
Relief filled her when distant noises came at last from the walkway above. Relief, and a flare of anxiety. Mere moments remained of her final chance to turn back, and after they ticked away, she would be launched—literally—into a new world from which there could be no return.
She did not move from the catapult. This was it.
Down in the village below, a few figures moved about, unaware of the events about to unfold. Among them, she could pick out the unmistakable form of Ude. He was the only figure not moving, the only one with something to watch. In the middle of the street he stood, eyes turned upwards to the pinnacle of The Heap, or perhaps the walkway far above. He was too far away to tell.
Oleja looked back up. The edge of the cart stuck out over the lip of the walkway.
And then things were falling. Scrap metal raced down towards her, among it the monstrous silhouette of something big, framed by the sky, plummeting towards her. As it neared, she tracked the trajectory to the opposite end of the catapult—exactly what she needed to send her airborne. Smaller pieces of debris rained down around her. At the last second, she spotted a twisted piece of a metal frame falling towards her. She held up her arm on instinct. Pain shrieked through her as the metal tore her skin, the frame missing the rest of her by an inch and clattering off down the side of The Heap.
Blood poured from the wound on her left forearm, but she had no time to examine it. Her limbs and head snapped back with a paralyzing force as her end of the catapult flung upwards. Up she went, the speed dizzying her. The walls of the canyon flew past until they were gone. For the first time in her life, Oleja looked out past the canyon walls. Before her, stretching beyond her in distances she had never even imagined, lay the rest of the world.
Hills dotted the horizon, farther away than Oleja could even fathom. Flat, red landscapes reached out in all directions below her, and behind her—beyond the grey stone of the north wall—stretched more water than Oleja thought could exist in the whole world. It looked like the ground itself was made of water for miles across, waves glittering in the morning sunlight. It stole the breath from her lungs. Or perhaps that was due to the fact that her body hurtled through the open air.
But what she saw off to her left, to the east of the canyon, seized her attention and refused to relinquish it. Spread across an immense swath of land below lay the eclipser camp. It was big—bigger than expected.
Much of the area housed crumbling structures of stone—or what might once have been structures, but now looked like no more than the discarded husks of old buildings. A wall of stone and metal surrounded the nearest section, encircling a squashed cluster of towers and huts—enough to contain hundreds of eclipsers.
Shouting on the walkway below caught her attention just as her ascent began to slow. Oleja reached her right hand behind her and found the cord dangling from the base of her glider. Foolish as it seemed, the functionality of her glider was the one thing she had never tested—after all, how could she have? For all she knew, the wings were too feeble to bear her weight, or too small to keep her aloft, or improperly balanced. It was a gamble she was forced to take, since she lacked other options. She couldn’t simply take a test flight. Either the glider worked, or she died. And dying was not an option.
With one quick tug of the cord, the wings unfolded. For a brief second, Oleja started to fall, but then the wings snapped to their full positions and carried her forward. The glider worked.
A quick glance down to her village showed many figures running about and pointing to the sky, but her gaze snapped back upwards as something sailed by just beneath her.
She turned to see a tall tower standing upon wooden stilts below her and to the left. Beneath the cover of the roof, she could just make out the shape of an eclipser drawing back another arrow, readying to fire.
In a panic, Oleja tried to make the glider go faster by leaning forward. Her face tilted towards the ground and she began speeding towards it at a dangerous pace.
A whistle rang out as the arrow sailed by. Oleja didn’t know how closely it flew past her, but judging by the lack of fresh stabbing pain she could be relatively sure it missed. The ground—which she still hurtled towards—would be harder to dodge, however.
With some awkward squirming, she managed to get her descent back under some semblance of control. She leaned left and right, causing her to swoop back and forth in a zigzagging pattern. More arrows flew by. Up ahead lay the gate—she just had to make it a little farther.
As she neared it, she could see that a smaller canyon led to the gate, the bottom sloping down from ground level to create a winding ramp that led to where the doorway into the village stood. She took note of the details as she flew overhead. Cursing, she tried to hasten her descent, missing her target once but now making attempts at circling back.
She leaned forward to speed up her descent, but once again began to plummet at a rate that would result in an unhealthy collision between her body and the hard stone ground. Hastily trying to rectify her mistakes, she tried to lean back, but given that she was already leaning left in an attempt to turn around and fly over the gate again, she only managed to flip her glider over.
The world spun as she went upside-down. When she righted herself again, the ground was coming at her fast. Quickly she tried again to pull up. She managed to slow herself slightly, bu
t not enough—she was going too fast.
Oleja threw her legs out beneath her as she tried to land running. She took one bounding step, and then two, but her legs couldn’t keep up with her and she tripped, landing on her right shoulder and rolling over in the dirt, a cloud of sand rising up behind her in an orange haze. Snapping and splintering echoed in her ears. Her bag clattered and quiver rattled as everything she carried with her jostled together, thrown about in her crash landing. Soon she came to a halt, lying on her back in the dirt. Her ears rang. Her head spun. It took her several seconds to figure out which direction was up, though she never questioned which way was down. Down was the direction of pain.
Scrapes covered most of her body, though nothing worse than the cut she got just before takeoff. She had no doubt that time would reveal a whole host of bruises as well. It seemed nothing was broken—the only relief she received.
As she got to her feet, her previous reassurances were proven wrong. Something had broken, just not her bones. Her glider still clung to her body by the straps around each of her limbs, but little more remained intact. A large crack ran down the side of the main casing, and the left wing hung by nothing but the fabric. The right wing was in worse shape, however, evidenced by the moments it took for her to locate the piece. It had snapped clean off and lay in a crumpled mess a few feet away. Fortunately, her other belongings seemed fine; no harm had befallen her bow, and for that she was beyond grateful. If her flight gave her any taste of the fight to come, she would need her primary weapon functional. Her quiver was mostly fine as well—a dent marked the side of the metal cylinder, but nothing she couldn’t fix.
Shaking off the haze of her crash, Oleja drew her knife—a blade the length of her hand and curved until it came to a honed point—and cut the straps of the glider, freeing it from her body. It fell to the ground in a heap. She hated to leave it behind, but it served no purpose in its current state, and she couldn’t afford to drag it around with her. Haste was her best asset now, as stealth appeared to be off the table. She spun the knife in her hand and slid it back into its sheath.
A large building with a sagging roof sat to her left. It was not a fine structure, pieced together from scraps of wood of various sizes. Beyond it stretched a large fence-rimmed field of dry yellow grass. A few creatures she could not name roamed around, ripping up mouthfuls of grass and chewing mindlessly, unconcerned with the girl who had just crash-landed nearby.
Over the animals peeked the sun in its early-morning debut—east. She turned her back on the building. The gate lay just to the west, if she remembered correctly. With her bearings returned, she started off in that direction.
“Hey!”
Oleja paused and looked back over her shoulder to the building. A boy shimmied through an opening between two sections of the wooden wall. He waved to her with one arm, trying to get her attention.
He looked about her age, with the same dark, tanned skin, though his was a bit lighter. A mess of loose dark brown curls framed his face, bouncing around as they fell in front of his eyes and over his ears down to the top of his neck. Patchy facial hair dotted his chin. He ran towards her.
She had no time to babysit this boy, wherever he had come from, so she turned away and resumed her course west.
Another tower of wood loomed up ahead, raised on a set of stilts just like the one before—guard towers. A fair distance remained between herself and the structure, but Oleja wouldn’t risk being spotted. She went left, making her way around. As the smaller canyon leading down to the gate came into view, she ducked behind a boulder and poked her head around, surveying the path ahead.
Another set of footsteps just behind her caught her attention. When she turned, she saw the boy running to join her in her hiding place.
“Hey! Who are you? What are you doing?” asked the boy in a whisper, breathing hard as his lungs tried to catch up with him, though that didn’t slow his rapid-fire questions. Oleja looked him up and down. Muscular arms hung at his sides, just as her own—another slave, most likely. Even still, he was thin and looked underfed, a state she had become used to seeing. He stood taller than her by a few inches, but now that she could see him up close, she guessed he was younger by two years at least; seventeen, perhaps? He was unarmed and carried with him nothing but a small bag. He could offer little help to her here.
“Oleja Raseari; escaping and freeing the people in the canyon,” she said, answering his questions in one breath and then turning away in dismissal. She had to focus.
The guard tower before her seemed to have heard the alarm. Bellowing boomed from the top floor, though no eclipsers came into her line of sight from the ground. After a few moments, a hatch in the floor opened with a loud thud and an eclipser emerged, clambering down a short ladder and then rushing down the staircase that led to the ground.
Oleja had never seen one up close. Its skin was light grey, with an appearance like it had once been bone-white but then stained with soot. Pinkish-red scars marred its body and made it look like the skin was scraped raw in patches. Frizzy, unkempt hair of silver matted its head, though cut too close to the scalp to be tied up. It was somewhere between eight and nine feet tall, with arms of thick muscle partially obscured by armor crafted from glinting metal and thick leather. Sheathed at its side bounced a sword too big for any human to wield.
On the other side of the tower, the small canyon sloped downwards. The uneven ground created a rough path—a ramp in some places dotted with a handful of stairs in others. Abruptly ending at the bottom, the base of the gate cut off the path from continuing unimpeded into the village. On the wall just beside the door, a few features stuck out from the stone, the grey of metal contrasting the orange of the stone so that they showed in plain detail. First was a lever, its thick, arm-sized handle pointing upwards. Next to it was a crank attached to a wheel. A few gears—some bigger than Oleja’s head in diameter—dotted the wall higher up, and cables ran up, down, and around, crossing in various directions Oleja could not follow. Regardless of how odd the mess looked from a distance, the purpose was clear: the machinery opened the gate. All she had to do was throw the lever.
“What’s your plan?” The words snapped her out of her concentration. She had nearly forgotten about the boy.
“See that lever?” she asked, pointing down to the gate. The boy peeked around the boulder to where she indicated, then nodded. “I need to pull it to open the gate and free everyone in the canyon. That’s my plan.”
“I’ll help,” said the boy, a steely look of determination crossing his face.
Oleja rummaged in her tinkering bag for a moment, eyes flicking between the gate and the eclipser running down the stairs of the tower. She let touch guide her hand until her fingers found a cool, flat object, slightly chalky to the touch—a safety net, hopefully unnecessary, but she had come too far to take any chances. Alarm swept through the eclipser camp, and the search for her would only intensify—she couldn’t afford to wait any longer, even if it meant a mad dash for the gate. As long as she prepared herself for anything, she’d be fine.
“Thanks, but I’m all set,” she said, and then slipped the object from her bag into her mouth, tucking it along the inside of her cheek.
She ran from the hiding spot, sprinting as fast as her legs would go. It took only a moment for the eclipser to see her. He sped down the stairs and vaulted the railing, falling the final ten feet. As soon as his feet hit the ground, he charged towards her, sword drawn, gaining on her with every step. Oleja already knew she wouldn’t make it to the lever.
She spun in an instant and raised her bow, throwing her right hand back. With her thumb she unlatched the cover to her quiver, and then plucked an arrow from within. She nocked it, drew back, and fired just before the eclipser got within range to skewer her on his sword.
And she missed.
Pain ebbed through her wounded arm, the intensity hitting her as she released. She winced but pushed it down. The arrow sailed to the left of his head an
d imbedded itself in the stilt of the guard tower. As Oleja followed it with her eyes, she saw the hatch in the tower floor open once more and a second eclipser dropped onto the staircase.
Her focus returned to the fight as her attacker swung. Oleja dodged right and danced around to the eclipser’s left. He turned again to face her, giving her the moment she needed to nock another arrow.
She loosed the second, and this time her aim was true. It slammed into his chest, the metal tip striking his armor. A loud clang reverberated through the air as the arrow bounced off his breastplate and landed in the dirt.
Oleja backpedaled, assessing the weaknesses of the eclipser’s armor. Leather comprised the majority of the suit, not metal, which cloaked only the upper torso. Piercing the leather would not be a problem, though she had hoped her arrows were strong enough to punch through metal as well—they worked perfectly against her test-armor down in her workshop. Clearly the eclipser’s armor was of a finer make or of thicker metal.
The eclipser continued advancing, swinging wildly with the sword. Either the brutes knew little in terms of fighting forms, or this one just sucked. Or, perhaps her self-taught form was just too advanced for these lowly abominations. Facing two at once would still present a challenge, however. She had to take care of this one before the second reached the ground.
He swung again and she barely jumped out of the way. Oleja went left and tried to put distance between her and the eclipser. She had the advantage of being able to attack from a range, while his reach was limited by the length of his sword. But while he remained close to her, she did not have the opportunity to load and loose another arrow.
Oleja stopped backing up and stood her ground.
The eclipser grabbed his sword in both hands and raised it over his head. He swung downwards, poised to cleave her in two. Just as the blade was about to strike her, Oleja ducked out of the way. She dashed past his right side and drew her knife as she went. Using the speed of her movements, she raked the blade across the side of his upper thigh, cutting a gash that leaked dark blood. It was darker than her own, a deep brown bordering on black with only the faintest tinges of red. The eclipser snarled at her as he pivoted, slowly due to his wound, but Oleja already sprinted away behind him.
Skyborn Page 5
