by Joseph Malik
He was locking it when he saw two soldiers at the far observation point, looking southeast.
One saw him, nudged the other, and they started coming his way, down the stairs to the roof.
Jarrod waved in a friendly manner. They waved back. Jarrod pointed behind them. They waved again and turned back around to whatever they’d been doing.
“Wow, are those guys gonna lose their jobs,” Jarrod told Adielle. He led her to the northeast observation deck, within about ten feet of the lee-side ledge. “Stay here.” He scooted to the edge and looked over.
It was absolutely sheer, from the observation point straight down the face.
The river was a ribbon of onyx that seemed not nearly far enough below. A mountain, equally sheer, flat black, spanned the world across from them. There were no trees to judge the distance, no rooftops on this side, no people below, of course no cars or streets or any kind of familiar landmarks.
His gut told him it was four hundred feet. It felt like four hundred feet.
But it could have been a thousand feet. It could have been fifty.
He pulled a contraption made mostly from black loops of heavy webbing from a bellows pocket on his pants, clipping them through rings on his packstraps. “Turn around,” he told her.
“What are you doing?”
“Trust me. Step into this,” he held out a loop of webbing, then another. “Arms through here, and here,” he said.
He’d be working at the load limit of the canopy; they were essentially jumping tandem on a reserve chute. He’d run the math ten times. It would technically work as long as the seams held, but it was going to be a fast ride.
“Hurry,” Jarrod said. He clipped rings on her webbing to rings on his, pulled on lengths of straps to snug it all down, then clipped another piece around her chest—which was spectacular, he had to admit—and spun the locking ring.
“Are the pegasi coming?” she asked.
Jarrod pulled at the straps on her legs and shoulders. “We don’t need them.”
Now the soldiers were coming over. Waving and yelling as they descended the stairs.
“What do you mean, ‘We don’t need them?’” she said. “We can’t fly.”
He unzipped the top of the pack and grabbed the pilot chute, shaking loose several feet of cord. “Oh, don’t be so sure.”
A particularly heavy gust nearly knocked them over the edge, and vertigo bludgeoned him as she squirmed. “Stand still,” he snapped, and wrapped one arm around her.
The soldiers had stopped to examine the carabiner. They were still yelling at Jarrod as they worked to unlock it, the words lost in the wind and in Uloraki, anyway.
Jarrod shifted his feet, took another step toward the ledge. Her toes were at the very edge of the wall. “We’re going to die!” she shouted.
“Yes,” he shouted above the wind. “But not today. Close your eyes.”
The soldiers got the hatch unlatched and looked up just in time to see them leap off the edge.
The slam of the canopy opening was mind-rattling. He was jumping at nearly double his normal weight, and the stunt chute hit like a son of a bitch to begin with. Adielle’s head cracked him in the nose. His eyes watered over and he blinked furiously to clear them.
He looked up, checked his risers through the fog of his vision, and saw the purple wing carving the sky, textbook, beautiful. He spilled some air from the front edge to get them the hell away from the mountainside.
Adielle must have opened her eyes, because she said, “You really can fly.”
This was supposed to be the great part. Whenever the chute opened correctly, the rest was an easy stroll. Enjoy the view.
This time, however, it was where the work started. The wind was convection on this side of the mountain; not nearly as strong as the gusts on the west face, but the canyon was channeling the wind right down it, tumbling along the sides making crosswinds in every which way, even straight down.
He felt his risers take a hit, bicycled his legs, spilled some more air, and recovered.
Goddamn, they were heavy.
He blinked a few more times, really hard.
The least amount of buffeting was directly over the water. However, with the princess in front of him he didn’t know if he could reach the Capewells to release the chute before he drowned them both.
Conversely, landing on the shore, if he hit a shear or a one of these squirrelly crosswind gusts, could kill them, or worse, break one of their legs and make for a long hike back to Gateskeep.
They’d be down in thirty seconds.
“Um,” he grumbled.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
At the dock, Bevio, Saril, and Peric had filled two boats with Jarrod’s field armor, all their gear, and a few hundred pounds of food from the cellars. They had then pulled the drain bungs on the other two boats and tossed them into the river along with the oars, all of which now floated toward the Shieldlands.
“What is that?” asked Saril, a small keg of whisky on his shoulder. He was pointing up at a giant purple feather gliding across the sky.
“That’s Jarrod and the princess,” said Bevio after a second. “He’s flying. Son of a bitch, he’s flying!”
Saril set the keg in the boat and cast off, rowing after him.
“We’re leaving,” Peric told Bevio, casting off. Bevio grabbed the oars and laid to.
“But the Chancellor?” said Bevio.
“He knows what to do. He’ll meet us.”
Carter saw the canopy open up out of the corner of his eye, an explosion of purple accompanied by a pop a moment later as the sound reached his ears.
“Holy shit,” he swore.
Jarrod was a hundred yards up and moving like a paper airplane, absolutely screaming with the wind at his back. Carter could see the princess in a tandem harness, and he was able to figure from the angle where they were going to land. From here it was a downhill jog to the riverbank.
He was glad he had worn logging boots and not sabatons. He picked up his feet and made time.
“Legs up!” Jarrod shouted as they skimmed the river. He banked into the wind, aiming for what he hoped was soft dirt on the far side. “Legs up!” he repeated.
His heels skimmed the river over the last ten yards, and they landed in a foot of water with a terrific splash and tumbled onto the bank atop each other in the thick mud.
He popped the Capewells as the chute filled up and threatened to drag him back into the river, then unhooked her from the harness, at which point Adielle turned around, painted with mud, and threw her arms around him and kissed him deeply.
“Wow,” he said when she was done.
“That—was—amazing,” she trembled. “Can we do that again?”
“Let’s try not to.” He started pulling the chute to him as fast as he could. He wadded it to a manageable size and sloshed to the bank.
He saw what had to be Carter, moving like a locomotive down the slope to the far bank a hundred yards away. Jarrod waved his arms. “Carter!”
Carter was flying down the slope like he’d just recovered a fumble. Jarrod noted that he was moving at an astonishing speed, considering he was probably wearing fifty pounds of armor.
Jarrod waved to the boats and whistled, motioning for them to go get Carter, but Saril was already on it.
Carter planted and cut left, and sprinted down the bank as Saril rowed into the shallows and then braked the boat with the oars.
Carter sloshed out to knee-depth and rolled in. “Go! Go! Go!” he yelled.
Saril heaved on the oars, the current grabbing the boat and flinging it away.
Bevio and Peric picked up Jarrod and Adielle on the far side, and then Bevio, rowing furiously, worked to catch up with Saril and Carter.
“Did you get him?” Jarrod asked Carter as they neared.
“He wasn’t home,” said Carter, still gasping for breath. He lay back in the
boat with his wrist on his forehead. “We missed him.”
“Dammit,” said Jarrod.
“I’m too old for this,” Carter decided.
“I’m feeling that way myself.”
“That was pretty awesome, though,” said Carter. “That was really cool.”
“Yeah,” Jarrod agreed. “That was fun.”
“So, now what?” Carter asked, not moving.
“Second star on the right, and straight on till morning,” said Jarrod.
“We sank the other boats,” Peric assured him.
“They won’t have horses?” asked Adielle.
“They have horses,” said Jarrod. “But the banks are too soft to ride at speed. They can’t get down here on horseback, and they can’t keep pace with us on foot. The roads are a few hundred meters off, above the river. They’d have to give chase in boats, and now they don’t have those, either. The best they could do is try to shoot at us, and if we stay in the middle of this river,” he gestured to the dark-green water several hundred yards wide, with hillsides rising quickly on either side, “we’re a moving target at the edge of their range.”
“If we stay out here, what are we going to eat?” she asked, and then noticed the pile of goods in the front of the boat—hams, strings of onions, a crate of apples, casks of whisky and wine, fresh breads, and a wheel of cheese the size of a small shield.
“You really thought this through,” she said.
“We’re not there, yet,” said Jarrod, as Peric poured a wooden cup of wine from a cask and offered it to the princess, who accepted with a smile. Peric handed a second cup to Jarrod.
“A whole lot of things can still go wrong with this,” Jarrod said.
“You know,” the soldier told Mukul, “doing something to scare her. Interrogating her. We didn’t even know that it was the princess.”
“We didn’t even know that the princess was here,” said the other. “How could we know that?”
“We went over to see what he was doing, because it looked dangerous. And then, well, they just jumped.”
Mukul ground his teeth and sighed through his nose. He turned the carabiner over in his hands and clicked the gate a couple of times. The material was amazing; the workmanship, gorgeous; steel ultralight and bejeweled. Some sort of locking device, but he had no idea what its function was.
“And he flew,” Mukul growled. “You’re telling me this man flew away with the princess.”
“On my ancestors,” the soldier said. “He sprouted purple wings and flew away.”
“Purple,” repeated Mukul. “Damn you, I am not going to tell the king that a man snuck in here, seen by no one, defeated two knights with his bare hands, killed a member of the royal guard in the throne room, and then flew away with the Princess of Gateskeep on purple wings!”
“Sir, it’s what happened.”
Mukul clenched his fist. “Well, I’m not telling him. You are.”
So we are now looking for a master swordsman armed with ultralight steel who can not only fly, but apparently turn invisible at will, Mukul thought. Either a wizard, an elf, or something new entirely.
Or, he realized with a stone in his throat, all of the above.
“You two will fix this,” he announced. “You will ride hard to Skullsmortar, tell the king what happened, and accompany Lord Elgast, who I imagine will set this matter straight.”
XII
ALLEGRO ASSAI
“I have a high art; I hurt with cruelty those who would damage me.”
— Archilochus, 650 B.C.
Lord Elgast of Skullsmortar thundered down the black roads on his fine buckskin horse, moving at a pace just past a trot. He had a hundred soldiers behind him, heavily armored in Uloraki mail, including the two idiots sent from the palace. Far behind the horses rumbled carts full of grain and hay.
He was hunting a man with purple wings.
A possibly invisible man, who flew on purple wings.
A possibly invisible man who flew on purple wings, and was traveling with the princess.
There was one road into Gateskeep, and one narrow pass where the road crossed the river at a falls. All the boats had been sunk at Ulorak, which meant the purple-winged man and the princess were either following the road, or following the river. If they were headed for Gateskeep, they’d turn north into the eastern pocket of the Shieldlands. If they were headed for the Eastern Freehold, they’d ride the river through the Ulorak Gap and clear to the Salt Sea. And then. . .
He didn’t want to think about “and then.”
He would overtake them at this pace, run them down on the road if they were on the road. If he didn’t see them on the road, he would wait in the hills, deploy his scouts, and attack from an elevation as the purple-winged man and the princess crossed the great bridge and started the trek through the northern pass into the eastern end of the Shieldlands.
He watched the skies. The purple-winged man might attack from above.
There were no wings.
If the purple-winged man was King Ulo’s compatriot, the swordsman who’d killed twenty men in Falconsrealm, no worry; he’d hit him with a hundred men this time. Then he’d bring the purple-winged man’s head back to Ulorak in a bag.
High above the bridge, near a rock shelter, Jarrod and Carter wrestled their way into their harnesses, belting, buckling, and locking each other in.
They kept the fire small, the smoke minimal, but they’d been eating since morning. They all had. Potatoes, mostly. And lots of water. Both at Jarrod’s insistence.
“He’s going to send an army,” said the princess. “I know you’re a great fighter, Sir Jarrod. I know you killed twenty men—”
“Seventeen,” said Jarrod, stamping his feet. His right boot was laced too tight across the arch, goddammit. Impossible to get to under the steel leggings and half-sabatons and it was already going numb.
“—Seventeen,” she continued. “But King Ulo is going to hit you with everything he’s got.”
“Then he’ll have nothing left when we’re done,” said Carter, ramming his shoulder against a tree and shrugging a few times to seat his breastplate and pauldrons.
“You’re not going to kill an army, Chancellor,” she said.
Carter looked at Jarrod and grinned. “Not alone.”
“We do this here,” said Jarrod, shaking his foot. “We end this.”
Peric, looking down to the river from the outcropping above, let out a pheasant’s call, repeated three times.
Jarrod and Carter came running, with Bevio and Saril behind.
“That’s quite a few more than I was expecting,” Jarrod admitted, at sight of Elgast’s forces. “Shit.”
“That’s a hundred men,” said Bevio.
“They’re going to come this way,” said Peric. “They’re probably going to want this high ground.”
“Not yet,” said Jarrod. “See how they’re fanning out, flanking the river? They think they’re ahead of us. They’ll watch the river for a while. When we don’t show, they’ll come for the high ground to try and spot us at a distance. Then we’ll take them a few at a time.”
“Five of us?” said Saril. “Against a hundred? I’m good, sir, but I’m not that good.”
“They have to come up this hill,” said Jarrod. “In all that armor. It took us all night to climb it, remember? They won’t be able to lift a finger when they get here. They’ll be tired, they’ll be thirsty, their legs will be too worn out to fight, they’ll be moving in small groups. The most tired guys will be at the back, so it’ll get easier as we go. We’re full of high-energy food, we’re rested, we’ve got plenty of water. We get through the first dozen and we’ll take ‘em.”
They all heard it: horses, behind them, and something moving fast and growling.
Jarrod and Carter turned to see Dog, in his war gear, charging pell-mell for Peric, who grinned and slapped the beast on his armor as Dog rowled with delight.
Jack handed Perseus to Jarrod and the other charger to Carter, who shrugged out of his greatsword and hung it on the saddle.
Perseus nosed Jarrod’s shoulder with an affectionate clank.
“That is a big horse,” Adielle admitted. “That is a really big horse.”
“He’s half moose,” said Jarrod. “Say hello, Perseus.”
Behind Jack were a dozen elven knights in their multicolored armor, riding horse-sized elk with sharpened racks of antlers, and half that many knights of the Stallion on horseback.
“I don’t even want to know how he did this,” said Peric to Saril. Jarrod was exchanging greetings with a handful of elves who had arrived on foot.
“Prince Akiel of the Faerie Stronghold,” said Jarrod, “may I introduce Her Highness Adielle Riongoran-Thurdin of Gateskeep, Princess of Falconsrealm.”
“At your service,” said the prince, extending his hand. Jarrod couldn’t help but note that Akiel was carrying one of his swords, a blue-handled tool-steel warsword that someone Akiel’s size would be able to wield like a Claymore.
“Much better odds than I was expecting,” Jarrod admitted. “Thank you for coming.”
“I wouldn’t want to miss it,” said Akiel. “We would have arrived earlier but our wizards could only get us so close.”
“Are you on foot, Highness?” said Jarrod.
“Momentarily,” the elf admitted.
“Well, your timing is impeccable,” said Jarrod. “Our guests just arrived.”
“I do see you have dressed for a party,” said the elf. “You look nice.”
“Thank you, Highness. I lack your fashion sense.”
