by Phil Foglio
The Storm King nodded, squared his shoulders and allowed himself to be led away to his destiny.
The Muses watched him leave, and then, as one, swiveled about to look down upon the approaching procession.
“Because, my King,” Artimo said softly, “It is too late to change anything.”
CHAPTER 1
SCENE; A small cottage. Table. 3 Chairs. Shutters on the windows. Sturdy door. PRINCESS VIONA & Her three SERVANTS are center stage.
SOUND EFFECT; KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK
PRINCESS VONIA; Now who could that be?
THE FIDDLER (softly); Please let me in. I want your light.
PRINCESS VONIA; My light? How peculiar!
THE SERVANT MADE OF ICE; Princess! Remember! These are the Wastelands! Don’t open the door!
THE FIDDLER (softly); But I’m so dark. I need your light.
PRINCESS VONIA; But he sounds so weak.
THE SERVANT MADE OF LEAD; Princess! We were warned! These are the Wastelands! Don’t open the door!
THE FIDDLER (softly); Please. You are using so very much. I need it. Just open your door.
PRINCESS VONIA; Why, surely a little light couldn’t hurt.
THE SERVANT MADE OF WHEELS; Princess! There is something wrong here! These are the Wastelands! Don’t open the door!
ALL THREE SERVANTS; Don’t open the door! Don’t open the door! (TO THE AUDIENCE) Help us before it is too late!
SERVANTS AND AUDIENCE (louder each time); Don’t open the door! Don’t open the door! Don’t open the door!
PRINCESS VONIA; Surely a peek will not hurt. (OPENS DOOR) Oh!
(LIGHTS GO OUT)
—Act 1/Scene 1, The Heterodyne Boys and the Mystery of the Thrice-Dark City
The little airship was losing altitude fast. Agatha could see the wild pine forests and mountain outcrops growing ever closer, and this worried her. She had guessed that her quick patch-job wouldn’t hold for long, but she had hoped it would last long enough for the stolen ship to get her over the mountains before nightfall. Now, she wasn’t so sure. She aimed toward a promising gap in the peaks, then, locking the wheel so the course would hold, killed the engines.
She turned to the center of the gondola and tugged at a likely ring in the floor, stumbling backward slightly as the heavy hatch first stuck, then swung open as if spring-loaded. She quickly scanned the mechanism it revealed, humming softly to herself. Then, she dragged a leather roll of tools to her side, flipped it open with a deft movement, and began to work.
She wasn’t even sure what mountains they were[1], or where she was, exactly. She knew she was traveling east, toward the sun rising behind the peaks.
Agatha had been insensible on the trip from her home in the University town of Beetleburg to the great airship city Castle Wulfenbach.[2] She now realized, with some annoyance, that in all the time she had spent on Castle Wulfenbach, she had never bothered to discover the present location and route of the gigantic airship as it continued its endless patrol of the Wulfenbach Empire. This morning’s escape could have begun practically anywhere over Europa.
Well, she thought, as she slammed the hatch and re-started the engines, it hardly mattered at the moment. Putting the mountains and their turbulent air currents between herself and any pursuit seemed like her best shot at escape. Once on the ground, she could worry about where she was. For now, anywhere but Castle Wulfenbach was her goal.
“Krosp—wake up.” She called to the gondola’s other occupant, a large white cat who yawned and stretched.
“What is it, Agatha? Pursuit?”
“No, but we’re starting to lose altitude.” She tapped a fingernail against a dial face. The needle within flicked briefly, then continued in its slow decent. “Pretty quickly, too, thanks to that hole Othar[3] shot in the envelope.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think that patch would hold long.” The two of them scanned the ground. Dense forest covered a jagged landscape that occasionally revealed rocky spires. Patches of late snow still clung to the higher, more shaded dells. A multitude of streams and small rivers coursed through the numerous valleys. It looked like an absolutely terrible landscape to travel on foot.
“Can we at least clear that?” Krosp stopped licking one paw long enough to gesture toward an especially craggy mountain that loomed to one side of the gap.
“I think so.” Agatha said. “I’m going to try. I’ve made some changes to the ship’s engines—they’ll give us more speed for about twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes? Then what?”
She considered this. “Then, they’ll start to explode. But don’t worry. The envelope doesn’t have that much time left anyway, from the look of it.”
Krosp gazed at her for a long moment. “I’m reassured. Thanks.”
Agatha continued, oblivious to the sarcasm in the cat’s voice. “But it should get us over the mountains before we’re scraping the tops of the trees. That’s assuming that the winds here don’t tear us to shreds, of course.”
Krosp’s ears twitched. “...Of course.”
The wind certainly tried. Krosp’s voice was drowned out by a sudden, screaming blast that hit the tiny airship from the starboard side—knocking the cat off his feet and sending him tumbling across the deck. He landed hard against a roughly carved trunk and grasped frantically at the netting that held it firmly lashed in place. As she lunged for the ship’s wheel, Agatha spared a glance backward, reassuring herself that Krosp hadn’t been blown over the side. There was nothing she could do for him in any case. She would have to trust in the cat’s own terror and claws to keep him safely on board through the worst of it.
The airship bounced to and fro. The wind first tossed it dangerously close to the sharp mountain crags—now nearly level with the ship’s engines, then picked it up and flung it even higher into the air. For a couple of sickening seconds, the gondola was blown fully sideways as the ship shot upward, just missing the cliff below.
Through all of it, the modified engines roared in protest, driving the ship ever faster ahead. Agatha hauled on the wheel, fighting to keep the ship—not steady, that was impossible—but at least pointing in roughly the right direction through the madness. If she could keep the ship above the tearing rocks below and pointed toward the gap in the mountains ahead, there was a chance she could get them through alive.
The winds whipped her hair into tangles across her face, tearing it from the strip of greasy rag she had used to tie it back while working on the engine. At least the flight goggles someone had left hanging from the dirigible controls fit over her glasses, but vision was still difficult. There was moisture in the morning air, and a cold mist was continually forming on the goggle lenses, then streaking away as the droplets condensed and blew aside.
The air above the mountains was icy. Agatha’s gloveless hands were growing raw and numb, making it difficult to hang on to the wheel. She grit her teeth, braced her feet, and hung on. Whenever she flew higher, vicious blasts of air—full of tiny particles of ice—stung her cheeks painfully. She winced and hung on, as the winds finally seemed to cooperate, driving the airship hard forward.
Suddenly, they were on the other side, the ground below dropping away as the rocky peaks turned to scrubby, bracken-blanketed slopes, then wooded, boulder-strewn foothills.
The wind was less ferocious here, but now the engines had nearly given out. The ship was roaring along—still forward, but now heading toward the ground at an alarming rate.
A quick glance upwards confirmed that the high winds over the mountains had torn out the patch and enlarged the hole in the ship’s envelope. The little craft would not remain airborne much longer. Agatha squinted at the landscape ahead: the glare of the newly risen sun made her eyes water, but as she looked out across the approaching valley she could see fields here and there between the trees, and light flashing on the surfaces of streams and ponds. She shut down the engines, allowing the ship’s forward momentum to carry it on its course.
“Aim for that fie
ld!” Krosp shouted. He had been hiding under a blanket during the worst of the trip over the mountains, but had now returned to Agatha’s elbow.
“I’ll aim for that pond!”
The ground was approaching faster now. Too fast. Mentally, Agatha paged through the manual she had studied, then glanced down, and kicked hard at a pedal on the floor beneath the controls. A series of jolts ran through the entire vessel—the emergency chutes had engaged. With luck, they would slow the ship to the point where its passengers might have a hope of surviving a crash landing.
Her concentration was broken by Krosp’s scream of anguish. “No! Anything but that! Land in the field! The field!” He grabbed the wheel with his small furry hands, and with his full weight, dragged it to the left.
“What are you doing! Stop that!” Agatha screamed as the ship lurched sideways. She jerked the wheel back, disengaging Krosp, who fell off with a furious yowl. The sudden lack of thirteen kilograms of frantic cat-creature dragging on the wheel caused Agatha to spin it much too hard in the opposite direction.
The ship missed the pond, skittering, bouncing, and then juddering through scrub bushes like a giant sled before coming to a rest neatly among the rocks on the pond’s bank.
After some minutes, Agatha realized that she was still alive and no longer moving. This was good. For several more minutes, she lay still, clutching the edge of the wrecked gondola and noting with a detached interest how long it took for her breathing to return to normal.
Gradually, she became aware of her surroundings, and the voice of Krosp somewhere nearby. “Agatha? Agatha! Hey! Agatha! Are you okay?”
Agatha moved her head. “Uhhh... yes... I think so...”
“Can you move?” Krosp’s voice sounded close. Where was he?
She answered. “Ughr... yes, I think so...”
“Then get off me!”
The tumbled heap of the gondola’s contents shifted beneath her as she hastily rolled to one side, and Krosp, grumbling, hissing, and slightly flatter than before, clawed his way out.
Agatha sat up and gingerly swung her legs around until she was sitting on the edge of the battered craft. She eyed the chaos with chagrin. Debris was smeared across what looked like almost a hundred meters, bracketing a huge scar that had been carved into the ground. It was obvious the airship wouldn’t be going anywhere.
She glared at her companion. “Look at this! It’s completely destroyed! There’s no way I can repair all this. We’re lucky we’re even alive! Why didn’t you let me land in the pond?”
Krosp glared at her, then his green eyes narrowed and he turned away to lick one paw. “Jeez. Then I would have gotten wet.”
Agatha rolled her eyes weakly, and let it pass. After a few long breaths and a quick self-examination, she realized that she was mostly unharmed. True, her clothing was torn and singed, she was covered in small cuts and bruises, and a large scrape on her leg was still bleeding, but none of that mattered. The important thing was that she could, she discovered after some wobbly experimentation, walk. Good. When the inevitable pursuit from Castle Wulfenbach arrived, she would be long gone.
Somewhat unsteadily, she got to her feet and watched Krosp. The cat had already shaken off the panic of the crash, smoothed his fur, and was now rummaging through the remains of the airship.
“Well, so much for traveling easily.” She said in disgust.
Krosp flicked an ear. “Yes, yes, mistakes were made. Now we should see what we’ve got to work wi—hey hey!” He sounded triumphant. “You know that chest we couldn’t open? Weapons locker!”
He pulled a decoratively etched metal cylinder out of the demolished box. It was connected by bare wires to a piece of unidentifiable machinery that had been housed in a now-shattered glass casing, and another ornamental piece that looked like it had once been an inlaid wooden grip. He held it up for inspection, its damaged parts dangling forlornly from his paws.
Agatha frowned as she leaned past Krosp to examine the rest of the stash. “They all look pretty messed up. I think something in here exploded. See? This box was smashed open from the inside.”
Krosp glanced at it again. “I’ll take your word for it. Can you fix them?”
Agatha looked at him askance. “Are you serious?”
Krosp nodded. “Absolutely. You do understand that we’re in the Wastelands, right?”
Agatha swallowed. It was true. Lost though she was, she could see that plain enough. After all, “The Wastelands” was simply a convenient, catch-all term for the parts of Europa that were not under direct human control... and there was a lot of that.
At their best, the Wastelands were simply vast stretches of untouched forest and wilderness, places where humans had never held sway. The dangers in these areas were usually those of the natural world, which, admittedly, could be formidable. But at their worst, the Wastelands could be terrifying.
The Sparks that had fought each other in the chaos that came to be known as “The Long War” had unleashed upon each other a most astonishing range of creations—monstrosities born of madness and fury that had left whole towns—whole kingdoms abandoned. The Wastelands at their worst were full of hazards of all descriptions.
Agatha had heard stories of roving bands of half-human brigands, mysterious poisoned fogs, and a vast bestiary of Spark-created monsters.
There were always explorers chasing rumors of lost civilizations, hunting rare beasts, or searching for treasure. Many of the once-inhabited areas of the Wastelands were now desolate due to the actions of Sparks.
In larger cities, and in University towns like Beetleburg, there was a brisk market for Spark-made devices salvaged from such ruins. It was common for adventurous undergrads from the University to brave the abandoned laboratories and castles in search of the secrets of their past inhabitants. Agatha thought of all the times these teams of explorers didn’t come back. Then, with a shudder, she thought of the other times, when they did come back. She remembered the bizarre stories they told, and the unspeakably strange specimens they often brought back with them. Perhaps some kind of weapon would be handy...
“There were some tools, I’ll see what I can do.” She lifted a brass tube, and then another, examining them with interest and making increasingly happy “hmm...” noises. Perhaps there was enough to work with here.
Now, Krosp was all business. “Right, then. You get to work. I’ll get everything we can use and try to cover the wreckage a bit. No point in making it easy to spot from the air.” He dived back into the wrecked gondola and retrieved a full pack, obviously left by one of the small airship’s previous passengers. There was a woolen blanket attached to the pack with leather straps. Krosp unbuckled it and laid it out on a clear space near Agatha.
“You can use this as your work bench, and I’ll stack what I find over here.” He said. “Hey! Are you listening?”
Agatha nodded distractedly. She was humming now, and laying out parts from the weapons locker and the nearby engine of the airship in neat rows along the edge. She found the roll of tools she had used on the engine. As she waded back through the debris, she gathered armfuls of interesting-looking stray parts. Finally, she staggered back to the blanket and dropped the lot with a crash.
Opening the roll of tools, she extracted a medium sized hammer, a chisel and a trio of wrenches. She spent several minutes tearing select items off of the airship’s now useless engine before once again carting an armload of interesting potential components back to her makeshift base.
Only then, surrounded by a satisfyingly varied amount of raw material, did Agatha begin to work.
About two hours later, she sat back and noticed a small stack of airship biscuits on a rock beside her. They were chewy and contained flavors Agatha had never encountered before, but she was so hungry that they tasted delicious.
Looking around, she saw that Krosp had been busy. All of the smaller boxes and items had been sorted and stacked around her. She vaguely remembered finding components readily to hand. She
frowned. Sparks could be dangerously oblivious when they were deep within the grip of creation. She would have to try to keep this tendency under control, at least while they were out and exposed. The ability to construct a battle clank was of no use whatsoever if an enemy could simply walk up and brain you with a rock while you were busy tightening the screws.
The bulk of the wrecked ship had almost disappeared under a covering of stones and artistically arranged brush. A movement caught her eye. It was Krosp, climbing clumsily about in a tree, trying to detach the now deflated balloon. She hurried over and between the two of them, they managed to get it down and flat on the ground.
Krosp sat and surveyed it with annoyance. “How much of this do you think you can carry?”
Agatha lifted a corner of the treated silk and aero-canvas. “Depends how much else we have to haul, but it’s pretty light stuff.”
Krosp nodded. “Cut enough for a tent, and some more to keep you warm at night. We’ll have to cover the rest. I don’t want anything visible from the air.” Involuntarily they both peered up into the sky.
She unfolded a standard airshipman’s multiplex knife, and hacked free several square meters of fabric.
Aided by Krosp, she then folded the rest and stowed it out of sight beneath the closest stand of trees.
Then, she returned to her makeshift workbench, and returned with a strange device cradled in her arms. It was about sixty centimeters long and had obviously been constructed from parts of various weapons, as well as bits of the airship control panel, the ship’s generator, and one of the emergency pack’s can openers. It was held together with balloon sealant and wire. Krosp’s shoulders sagged. “That’s the best you could do?”
Agatha hugged the weapon possessively. “It’s what I had to work with.”
“Does it actually do anything?”
“Theoretically...” the rest of her statement wilted under Krosp’s unnerving stare. “...I hope so,” Agatha admitted. She swung the stock up to her shoulder, and found a chunk of the airship rudder that had escaped Krosp’s clean-up. It was several meters up, wedged in a crack in the rocky hill. She sighted on it and squeezed the trigger.
