“You’re right. There’s nobody here.” Tolemek sighed. The tiny arrow-slit window faced north, and it was too dim inside the room to see much.
A clatter sounded back in the direction of the stairs. “Careful, Moshi, you’ll spill eggs all over me.”
“Because you were in my way. Mind your own platter, you big oaf.”
“Inside,” Tolemek whispered, stepping through the doorway.
Sardelle entered after him. Something clanked, tipping onto the floor, and Tolemek grunted. Sardelle rushed to close the door, afraid the sound would have traveled down the hallway. She hoped the guards would think it had come from one of the other rooms.
“What are these?” Tolemek grumbled. “Paint cans?”
Sardelle created a soft orange ball of light that shouldn’t shine too brightly to be seen from the hallway. She gasped in surprise at what it revealed. When she had been imagining a freshly painted room, she had assumed it would be of the same boring milky gray that adorned the stone walls in the hallway. But this…
Mouth agape, she turned slow circles, taking in the colorful fields, skies, lakes, mountains, and dragons painted all over the walls, ceiling, and even the floor. There must have been twenty dragons flying, striding, or swimming in the various scenes, all silver, all similar in features: the long tail, powerful torso, four legs with clawed reptilian feet, and wings familiar from cave paintings and illustrations of old, the figures magnificent even in the two dimensional form.
As beautiful as they were, something about seeing them here, now when Ridge had this mission to search for dragon blood, made an uneasy chill run up Sardelle’s spine. The two quests were unrelated—the king shouldn’t even know about Tolemek’s sister—so they couldn’t have anything in common, but it struck her as strange, nonetheless.
People have been painting dragons for centuries.
I know.
At least we can be sure the girl isn’t a member of the Heartwood Sisterhood. All the dragons would have spears through their hearts.
Thank you, Jaxi. You’re very helpful. Sardelle touched one of the paintings, where the great dragon seemed to be gazing out of the landscape and into her soul. “This is incredible. I wouldn’t have expected her—anyone in this privy hole—to have access to paints.” She looked at Tolemek, wondering if he had known this artwork was here or not.
He was scowling down at the paint cans. “My father isn’t a complete bear. He sent her paints and books. She always liked art.”
“Was she always this—” the word that came to mind was obsessed, but Sardelle changed it mid-sentence, “interested in dragons?”
“Not as a little girl, but in her teenage years, yes. She had painted a couple of these the last time I was here.”
Sardelle tore her gaze from that of the dragon. Tolemek was still staring at the paint cans. She sniffed, wondering if they were the source of the fresh paint she had smelled, but they didn’t appear to have been opened yet.
“She’s gone,” Tolemek said numbly.
“Yes, but we can check the file room, and find out where they moved her. As you said.”
He was shaking his head before she finished speaking. “She didn’t get moved to another room. She was taken away. Why else would they be up here, preparing to paint over the murals? They probably just took her.”
“You can’t know for sure that they didn’t move her to another room for some… administrative purpose.” That sounded pathetic even as she said it. Obviously, his sister had been in the same room, one chosen with their father’s approval, for years, for long enough to paint all of this. Why, indeed, would she be switched to another room after years in this one? “You believe they knew you were coming somehow?”
“Why else would she have been moved? Hidden?”
“I don’t know, but maybe we should check that file room before making assumptions.”
Tolemek stared at her for a moment, then nodded. “Yes.”
He stepped over the paint cans and strode for the door, but stopped before his hand reached the knob. As with the rest of the room, the oak was covered in vibrant color. Tolemek was staring at… an image of himself. In the picture, he was clad in the sleeveless hide vest, shark tooth necklace, and spiky bracers he’d worn the first time Sardelle saw him, and the black ropes of hair hung about his face as they did now. A landscape unique to the door lay behind him, a dense tangle of jungle foliage such as one might find in Southern Cofahre or on the islands around the equator, perhaps even on Daguboor, the big continent in the Southern Hemisphere.
“Your wardrobe hasn’t changed much over the years,” Sardelle noted.
She was teasing and didn’t expect the wide-eyed expression he turned over his shoulder. His bronze face had gone a few shades paler. “But it has,” he whispered. “My hair was shorter the last time she saw me, and I wasn’t wearing…” He looked thoughtfully toward the ceiling for a moment before deciding, “I had the shark tooth, but nothing else.”
“Ah. There are seers among those with the gift, people who can sense what’s happening, especially with close friends and loved ones, across hundreds or even thousands of miles.”
“What about this?” Tolemek stepped back, revealing a portion of the door his body had been blocking, and pointed.
At the bottom of the picture, red paint spelled out, “Help me. They are taking me here.”
* * *
Wan morning sunlight filtered through the camouflage netting the pilots had stretched over the fliers and onto the snow-dusted earth. Ridge watched the pattern of shadows and light on his gloved hand as he maintained a rigid single-armed push-up position.
“Seven,” he said and lowered himself until his chest was an inch above the ground, then rose again.
“Seven?” Duck complained. “That was at least seventeen.”
Duck, Ahn, and Apex were spread out in a circle, their bodies also in rigid push-up positions.
“We’re not counting the ones we did on the other side,” Ridge said. “Eight.” He hated one-armed push-ups as much as the next person, but they made the regular ones seem easier than swigging beer, and the squadron had its athletics tests coming up next month. He would be remiss in letting training slide when they had time for it. And they had too much time, in his opinion. He hated sitting on his hands and waiting. They had moved the camp the day before, set up camouflage to hide the fliers, and were now back to waiting. “Nine. Ten. Eleven.”
“Eleven?” Duck moaned. “Didn’t you say we were only doing ten?”
“I don’t remember announcing a number ahead of time. Twelve… you keeping up?” Ridge’s own arm was starting to quiver, but what was new? He always ended up doing more than his body considered wise in these group exercise sessions. A squadron leader couldn’t let himself look bad in front of the young pups.
“He’s too busy complaining to keep up, sir,” Apex said. “And it’s rather pathetic considering Ahn isn’t complaining.”
Lieutenant Ahn’s eyebrows were in danger of twitching, but she didn’t respond.
“Ahn weighs eighty pounds,” Duck said. “What’s she have to complain about? Try putting a couple of machine guns on her back and see if that little arm can still do a push-up.”
“Little?” This time her eyebrows did twitch.
“It’s slender. I’ve seen you with your sleeves rolled up.”
“It’s proportioned. And I weigh more than eighty pounds.”
Apex flexed his back. He might not complain, but his arm was quivering too. “Duck, did it ever occur to you to wonder why you have such a puny nickname, compared to Raptor?” He tilted his head toward Ahn.
“I assumed it was because of my swimming ability. I’m like a fish out there.”
“Something we never would have known if you hadn’t crashed your first flier into the harbor twice. And then complained about how poorly it handled.”
“How about we all stop talking so we can finish this set and don’t have to stay like this all da
y?” Ahn suggested.
Ridge smiled. Ever the practical one. “Thirteen,” he announced and led the team in a few more to bring it to twenty.
Duck collapsed.
Ridge felt like collapsing, too, but he pushed himself to his feet and walked out of their little camp, intending to check the steppe and the foothills behind them. He halted before he had taken more than a step out from under the camouflage. An airship floated in the air to the south, its dark wooden body and gray balloon standing out against the pale blue sky. He backed up a few steps and watched it from a hole in their netting rather than from outside of it.
“Problem, sir?” Ahn came up to stand beside him and answered her own question with an, “Oh.”
“They’re more than two miles away and shouldn’t be able to distinguish our camouflage hump from the surrounding foothills.”
“But?” she asked, correctly assuming he would say more.
“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 l
ashed 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.
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