Emilie and the Sky World

by Martha Wells

  She said, “We need to rest first. Sit down and have some water and some food.”

  “But…” Efrain hesitated. He scrubbed his fingers through his hair. “All right.”

  Efrain sat down and opened his pack. Hyacinth settled next to him. Emilie sat across from them and thought about building up the fire again. No, if anyone we actually want to find could see it, they would be here by now. And more smoke might draw the attention of whoever had come after Miss Marlende and Professor Abindon.

  Efrain took a drink from his water bottle and pulled out a wax-paper-wrapped sandwich packet. He handed a second one to Hyacinth. As Efrain ate, Hyacinth picked the sandwich apart with the delicate tips of its blossoms, examined it carefully, then handed it back. Efrain wrapped it up again and put it away. “I guess it does eat sun, like a plant.”

  Emilie got her own bottle and food out and made herself drink and eat. It settled her stomach, and after a while, each bite seemed to make it a little easier to think. She needed to figure out how to find the others. She wished Rani was here. Rani had always known what to do and would surely know how to track people through this grass and dirt.

  Emilie frowned as she finished off the last crust of her sandwich. Hunters in books were always looking for faint traces invisible to the naked eye. Maybe it wasn’t that complicated. Maybe she should just look and see if she could find anything and not write it off as a lost cause just because she wasn’t an expert hunter like Tagaff, the midshipman from Atalera in the Lord Rohiro books.

  She tucked the wax paper back into her pack and got to her feet. “Stay here and rest. I’m going to look around.”

  Efrain, drooping over his pack, started to struggle upright. “I’ll go with you!”

  “No, I’m just going to be right around here. I’m looking for tracks and evidence. I don’t want you to step on it.” Emilie wasn’t sure what it was but she was pretty certain Efrain would step on it if given the opportunity, especially as tired as he was now.

  Efrain sank back down and yawned. Emilie started to circle around the various boulders that surrounded the camp, carefully examining the grass and dirt between them. Hyacinth followed her, watching what she was doing with interest. The first time around, she didn’t see anything, then she turned back and did it again, circling out a little wider. Coming at the camp from the opposite direction, this time she saw a gouge in a patch of dirt between two clumps of grass. Emilie sat on her heels and considered it. Hyacinth crouched beside her. The mark looked too sharp and defined to have been made by an animal. Not that they had seen or heard any hint of animals, birds, or insects here. “I think this was made by someone’s heel,” she told Hyacinth.

  It touched the gouge with a tentative blossom.

  Emilie started to search the ground in a straight line out from the heel mark, heading toward the forest. Hyacinth had realized what she was looking for now, and lowered itself to within a foot or so of the ground, flowing gently back and forth over the grass, hardly disturbing it. It had gotten a bit ahead of Emilie, and she saw when it stopped abruptly and stood up again, waving its arms at her. She hurried forward.

  They were about halfway to the trees on the far side of the clearing from where they had entered it. In an area of patchy grass and dirt, there was a blurred outline of a boot print. Emilie put her own foot beside it for comparison. It was two or three times the size of hers, too big to be a woman, even a tall woman like Professor Abindon.

  Emilie’s heart started to pound. Up until this moment, she hadn’t really believed in the mysterious strangers who had made Miss Marlende and the professor leave their camp. She had theorized their existence, but there had been a lot of theorizing by her and everyone else since they had first seen the aether-sailer, and they didn’t know the truth of any of it. But here was proof.

  It cut straight through the fog of exhaustion. “We have to get out of here,” she told Hyacinth. She shoved to her feet and strode back toward the camp to shake Efrain awake. Whoever had done this might come back.

  Emilie made them walk several hundred yards into the forest, until she found a sheltered spot where they could rest. It was a little hollow shielded by another boulder, and Efrain folded up in it and went to sleep immediately. Emilie sat down beside him. She meant to stay awake and just rest her feet, but she woke abruptly, still half sitting up, her face propped on the professor’s pack. She sat up, groggy, rubbing her eyes. Efrain was still curled against the rock, snoring a little. A small pile of white vines was heaped nearby; after a moment, she realized it was how Hyacinth looked when it was asleep.

  She squinted up at the tree canopy overhead. The light hadn’t changed at all. Or she had slept through a whole day… She dragged the pack open and got the portable aether-compass out. The clock on it showed that only a few hours had passed. She let her breath out in relief and shook Efrain’s foot.

  He groaned. Hyacinth flinched, then popped upright, waving its arms wildly. “It’s all right,” Emilie told it. “You fell asleep.”

  The blossoms’ wild motion slowed, and it sank down again and drooped. Emilie wondered what had happened to it, if the other flower people crew members were trapped here somewhere, too. If they were, surely it would be looking for them, not following us around. It was acting as if it was stuck and staying with them was its only option.

  She wondered how long it had been trapped alone on the aether-sailer.

  Efrain was sitting up and scrubbing his hands through his hair. Emilie told him, “Come on; we need to go.”

  “Go where?” Efrain said, still groggy. “We don’t know how to find them.”

  “We know they went in this direction.” Emilie stood, shouldering the professor’s pack along with her own. She had marked the direction on the aether-compass before they had left the clearing. Without a smoke beacon to follow, keeping to a straight course through the forest would have been difficult. At least this way they knew they were heading in the same direction that Miss Marlende and the professor had been taken away in, and not just going in circles.

  After a few minutes of trudging after her, Efrain said, “Who could have taken them? If this place has been just put together from chunks of other places that got picked up in the aether currents like we think, there wouldn’t be any people still alive here. They would have run out of food and water pretty quickly. Unless a whole lake got taken with them.”

  It showed the sleep had made Efrain’s brain start working again. That was a relief. “Unless they were taken recently, like we were.”

  Efrain frowned down at his boots. “But you don’t think they’re friendly, because they didn’t let Miss Marlende leave us a note, and the professor left her pack behind.”

  Emilie nodded. To give them both something else to think about, she said, “Maybe they’re pirates.” Pirate adventure stories had been Efrain’s favorite when he was younger. Emilie had thought that if there were really that many pirates, there wouldn’t be any shipping at all, since the stories implied hundreds more ships than the Menaen navy had ever needed. But then she remembered how much Efrain had changed in the past year. She didn’t even know if he still read those stories.

  But Efrain said, with relish, “Or ghosts.”

  “Ghost pirates,” Emilie suggested. Impulsively, she smiled at Efrain, and he smiled back. Hyacinth waved its blossoms at them, as if it felt it should participate but had no idea how.

  Then Emilie blinked and looked back at the compass. It had been a long time since she and Efrain had smiled at each other.

  Efrain seemed to realize it, too. He shifted his pack uncomfortably and didn’t say anything else.

  They had only walked about half an hour according to the compass’ clock when Emilie started to glimpse something gray between the trees ahead. At first, she thought it was mist or a haze; as they drew closer, she realized she was looking at a cliff. She groaned under her breath. The ground had been relatively even through this part of the forest so far. She had climbed and slid down
all the steep stony slopes she ever wanted to in this place.

  But when they emerged from the trees it was clear this wasn’t just another rock formation. The cliff was only about twenty feet tall, but it was dark gray streaked with a glittering blue, with broken shards of blue crystal sticking out of it. The grassy ground of the forest floor came right up to it with no rocks or stones or anything, and some of the trees were uprooted and leaning against it. It looked like two different places.

  “Oh,” Emilie said aloud. “Because it is two different places.”

  Efrain nodded. “This part came from somewhere else, and it just got mushed together with the forest.” He looked up and down the cliff, though the trees crowding it made it hard to see very far. “They must have climbed it. We need to find where they went up.”

  Emilie thought they must have climbed it, too. With the trees crowding so close, there just wasn’t much room along it, and the base of a cliff seemed an odd place to pick for a camp, anyway. And along the top, they might be able to find more tracks. She went to one of the uprooted trees that leaned against the cliff. “Let’s try to get up this way. It’ll be easier to see where they went from up top.”

  She stepped on top of the trunk and awkwardly crab-crawled up the steep angle. The wood slipped under her feet, and the branches were all at the top. Then Hyacinth flowed past her, using all its limbs to rapidly scale the side of the trunk. Then it paused and extended an arm toward Emilie.

  They could have it carry the rope up for them, but this was faster. Emilie stretched and grabbed the blossom-covered arm, and it hauled her easily up the trunk as if she weighed nothing. She let go when she reached the branches and could pull herself up and scramble onto the cliff top. Hyacinth made sure she didn’t fall and then went back for Efrain.

  Emilie picked twigs and leaves out of her hair, looking around. The top of the cliff was rocky and flat, with blue crystal slabs sticking up from the mottled gray rock, and little veins of crystal between them, glittering like streams of water. It stretched out for a few hundred yards to a forest of light green ferny foliage, clearly completely different from the forest they had just crossed through. Rising up from the forest, perhaps no more than a mile or so away, was a great lumpy hill all of gray rock, hundreds of feet tall, almost big enough to be a small mountain. It was studded with pockets of foliage that must mark various clearings and folds that might lead into little valleys. It seemed to have been here for some time, because she could see streaky white grooves that might have been waterfalls at some point but were now dry.

  Then a glint of metal caught her eye and Emilie stared. That can’t be right. She dropped the professor’s pack and hastily dug through it.

  Efrain and Hyacinth stepped up beside her as she pulled the little telescope out. She straightened up and peered through it at the gleam of metal on the side of the stone slope, adjusting the lenses to bring it into focus. No, that’s what it is. Sticking out from the side of the hill, as if it had landed on a ledge concealed by the fold of rock, was the metal frame of an airship’s balloon.

  Emilie wouldn’t have recognized it if she hadn’t seen the ruined skeleton of Lord Ivers’ airship, after Dr Marlende had burned it. It might be something else that just happened to look like an airship frame, but whatever it was, that was clearly the place they needed to go.

  “What is it?” Efrain demanded.

  “I think it’s a wrecked airship,” Emilie told him. A blossom arm snaked the telescope out of her hand before Efrain could grab it. Hyacinth jammed the end of the telescope somewhere into the region of what Emilie thought its lower chest was. It had it pointed at the airship frame, so Emilie assumed that was actually where its eyes were. Or at least some of its eyes.

  “But how…” Efrain began. “It’s not our airship, is it?”

  “No. No, it isn’t.” If it was a Menaen airship, there was only one that it could be. “Come on.” Emilie shouldered the professor’s pack again, tucking the telescope back under the flap as Hyacinth handed it back to her. “They might see us. We need to hurry.”

  Emilie didn’t breathe easy until they reached the trees. They weren’t very tall, but she and Efrain were both short enough to walk under the ferny foliage without crouching down. It also provided some welcome shade, since she was sweating from the run across the crystal shard fields.

  She wasn’t certain how they were going to get up the hill until they got to the base of it. From there, they could see the folds in the rock had formed natural ramps and pathways, much easier to climb than the steep, smooth slopes of stone. The hard part was trying to find a way up that would allow them to spy on the spot with the airship frame without walking directly up on it. After some fumbling on Emilie’s part and some bad advice on Efrain’s, Hyacinth took the lead, climbing rapidly ahead of them, then returning to show them the way it had found.

  After a long scrambling climb with skinned knees and bruised knuckles, Hyacinth returned from one of its scouting forays and crouched in front of Emilie. It waved its blossoms and then gently touched her face.

  “You want us to be quiet,” she whispered. She glanced back to make certain Efrain had heard, too.

  It waved its blossoms again, but seemed satisfied and turned away, moving slowly so they could keep up with it.

  It led them up a winding, narrow channel that might have been part of a watercourse at one time, now choked with dark green-gray weeds. They came to a spot where the side of the channel opened into a little cliff. Hyacinth stopped and pointed down. Emilie leaned past it to look and saw another dry water channel below this one, running parallel to it for a short stretch. But this one was carved into wide steps, the weeds cleared away.

  Efrain squeezed in to look over her shoulder. They exchanged a grim look. We’re almost there, Emilie thought.

  Hyacinth led them around a bulgy curve of rock, and then up the side and out of the channel onto a ridge. Looming above it, Emilie could see the top of the airship frame. Moving slowly and carefully, they flattened their bodies against the rock and climbed to the top of the ridge to look over.

  Below was a steep-sided well in the side of the hill, which at one time might have been formed by water. It now held the cabin of an airship, still partially attached to the giant skeletal balloon frame and leaning at an angle. It was a large two-story cabin like the one on their airship, but it was battered and crushed along the bottom and had clearly been in a crash landing, perhaps even dragged over the stone of the hill. Shelters had been built into the side of the cliff with walls of piled rock, and roofs made of slender wooden poles, and there were also a rock fire pit and a square box made of slabs of stone that might be an oven.

  And there were people. Menaen people, at least ten of them, dressed in ragged clothing, two carrying rifles… Efrain gripped Emilie’s wrist and drew in a sharp breath. She stretched to look and spotted them: sitting in a small group near the airship cabin were not only Miss Marlende and Professor Abindon, but Dr Marlende, Lord Engal, Cobbier, and Mikel.

  They were sitting on the dusty ground, facing two strange people, a man and a woman, who were speaking earnestly to them. Emilie could see Lord Engal’s stiff posture, and the professor’s frown, and knew these weren’t friends.

  She edged back, drawing Efrain with her, and Hyacinth followed them. Back in the shelter of the channel, keeping her voice to a bare whisper, she said, “We have to rescue them.”

  “How do we know they’re captured?” Efrain asked. “Those are Menaens. They must be explorers who were trapped here, too.”

  She shook her head. “Then why did Miss Marlende and the professor not leave us a note? Or say, ‘No, we can’t go yet; we have to wait for our friends Emilie and Efrain, who are here somewhere, too’? Why didn’t the professor take her pack? The ones who came for them didn’t see it where it was lying against the rock, and she left without it, so we could find it and know something was wrong.”

  Efrain frowned. “But…”

  “Lord Iv
ers and his men were explorers and Menaens and they almost killed us. The other Menaen explorers were the most dangerous people we met in the Hollow World. Without them, it wouldn’t have been nearly so bad.” She sat back. “Those people have to be the Deverrin expedition. They were lost last year sometime. Miss Marlende knew them. But why are they holding our people prisoner?” Could they think Dr Marlende was trying to steal their work? That didn’t make any sense, but it was the sort of nonsensical idea that explorers seemed to tend to.

  Efrain didn’t look convinced. “Are you sure?”

  “They have rifles.”

  Efrain’s stubborn expression turned troubled. “Miss Marlende and some of the others had pistols…”

  It didn’t change the point. “We had pistols because people like Lord Ivers keep coming after us. But the Deverrins are supposed to be friends of the Marlendes. Their brother, Mr Anton Deverrin, asked Miss Marlende to look for them.”

  Efrain said, “Maybe someone was after them, like Lord Ivers was after Lord Engal, and they’re suspicious of everyone now.”

  Emilie still rather resented it when Efrain said something smart, but there was no denying he had a point. “Maybe. But why would they think it was the Marlendes?”

  Efrain lifted his brows. “Because it was?”

  Emilie felt her cheeks flush, mostly with rage. Her first impulse was to punch Efrain in the face, or to tell him to take it back, or preferably both. But that was childish and she didn’t have time for it. “I need a plan. And I need to know more before I can make one.”

  Ignoring Efrain’s “But what…” she climbed back up the rock to the vantage point for another look at the camp.