by J M Sanford
She turned and watched Bryn at the ship's wheel. They'd journeyed three days northeast without delay, with the winds growing fierce and the rain like icy needles when it fell. Bryn's short fur was adapted for a warmer climate, so under normal circumstances he would have taken his business south for the worst of the winter, but he'd obviously used his time at Iletia wisely, stocking up on warming spices for their rations, and had wrapped himself up in a thick quilted coat. His mobile ears poked out of the hood of the coat, and he even had a sleeve for his tail, with a fluffy pompom on the end. Yes, the Argean guarded carefully against the cold weather. Bessie and Greyfell, on the other hand, carried little of what they needed for the journey and found themselves at the mercy of whatever Bryn had in the way of supplies. As they travelled north, the wind turning increasingly bitter, Bessie had found it a good time to practice a spell to ward off chills. The spell had a practical use for the Antwin Academy's graduates in that it kept the breath from clouding on even the coldest of nights, and could fool those beings that hunted by sensing their prey's body heat. Such a spell could be vital in evading the exotic creatures set to guard certain palaces. Greyfell, who had little to no magical ability of his own, had surrendered to the indignity of borrowing a spare quilted coat from Bryn. Although it had been made for an Argean and didn't fit a man well, Greyfell had belted it with his sword belt. With his stern face he didn't look half so foolish as the Argean skysailor as he paced briskly up and down the deck, keeping the blood flowing. Bessie knew Greyfell regarded magic as the lazy way to get things done, but he must envy her simple spell to stay warm…
He caught her watching him, and he scowled. “Elizabeth, if you must smile, at least try to cultivate a more charming expression than that devious smirk.”
“Yes, Master Greyfell.” A thousand feet below, the wrinkled grey sea passed underneath their vessel. The distant coast was a thin dark line bisecting sea and sky. “How long until we reach Ildorria?”
“We're not going to Ildorria. Not yet.”
“But –”
“I have a suspicion that Ilgrevnia holds the answers to some of our questions, and as luck would have it your Argean friend here knows where to find her.”
Bryn grinned the toothy grin of a tame maneater. “It is wise to know the whereabouts of the rebellious Flying Cities. Like bad currents, or wyverns in the mating season, one would not wish to cross their path unprepared.”
Bessie could well imagine. Even peaceful Flying Cities could move surprisingly fast, great walls of golden stone emerging from the clouds, scattering startled flocks of birds and unwary skysailors. And as for a Flying City intent on war, or even just defending its airspace… As far as she knew, Sharvesh had no weapons, and Bryn never looked for a fight.
“But why Ilgrevnia?” The Archmage she'd spoken to had said Ildorria held the hidden throne room, so why on earth did Greyfell want to waste time anywhere else? “We'd do better to reach the throne room ahead of the White Queen, so we can lie in wait and seize the crown from her on arrival.”
Greyfell shook his head, disgusted at the idea. “This is an appalling farce,” he muttered. “Does no one care for the rules? For the very spirit of the Queens' Contest? The White Queen is crowned, and yet –”
“The White Queen isn't crowned, no matter how many times you say she is!” Bessie snapped. “She has the crown, but it's not on her head yet! And I'm damn well not giving up before her bum's on the throne!”
“Miss Castle! Take out your exercise book and write five hundred lines of 'I will not use language unbecoming of a lady'!”
“How can I? My exercise book's back in Iletia with all the rest of my things!” She'd been lucky to escape with her conjuring rings – it was a good thing she kept them in her pocket when she didn't need them, rather than in a fancy case like some of her classmates did.
“Sir,” Bryn interrupted, “My lady: pardon me, but there is something strange approaching.” He sniffed the air, his nose wrinkling at a smell he clearly didn't like.
Bessie and Greyfell both stopped to look in the direction Bryn's sensitive nose pointed, but could see nothing more than open sky and a handful of large birds. Eagles perhaps, judging by the size. Bryn stared at the birds, his slit pupils opening up into black pools, and Bessie shivered. Those birds were not birds after all… As the creatures altered their course, spiralling closer to the skyship, their avian charade disintegrated in a whirlwind of clashing blades. Their bodies were wrapped in gauze, but of the wings each feather was a blade; each blade was sharp as a new razor. If they had eyes or brains, they didn't keep them anywhere Bessie could see, but they made unerringly for Sharvesh and her passengers.
“Keep them away from the sails!” Bryn shouted, anticipating the first strike. Whether his warning had been meant for Bessie and Greyfell or for Sharvesh herself, the skyship veered away from the encroaching creatures sharply enough to knock Bessie off balance. She tumbled halfway across the deck and stayed low, the cacophonous creatures rattling by inches above her head. As the razorbirds regathered for another attack, she counted three: one for each of them. They flew faster than Sharvesh, and the skyship would never evade the attackers by outmanoeuvring them, not without throwing her passengers overboard. Bryn cowered: his claws and fangs, so fearsome to a human opponent, were no match for enemies composed almost entirely of blades. Greyfell, seeking better reach than his sword would offer, had grabbed a docking pole and hit one of the attackers with all his strength. The creature blew apart, shrapnel littering the deck, scraps of dirty gauze and paper flying away in the wind. Bessie gathered her wits, summoned fire and took aim, dispatching the second of the creatures easily. The third, if it learned anything from the demise of the first two, remained hell-bent on attacking Sharvesh's passengers, and Bessie soon scored her second hit.
“Elizabeth, are you hurt?” Greyfell asked her, still scanning the skies for more assailants.
Bessie shook her head: a few little cuts, but nothing serious. Greyfell himself had taken the worst of it when that first one had exploded so close to him, but luckily the padded coat he wore afforded him good protection, and he'd been quick enough to guard himself. Between them, their quick action had protected Bryn, too. Most of the blood had been shed by the strange bird creatures. Bloodstained gauze littered the deck, and scraps of parchment marked with sharp stark strokes of black ink. Bessie picked one of them up, but couldn't read what it said.
Greyfell snatched it out of her hand, crumpling it up and tossing it overboard. “Don't waste your time with that.”
“But –”
“You've no business learning that sort of magic. Far too advanced for you anyway.”
“Yes, Master Greyfell,” Bessie grumbled. She was good at written magic – better than anyone else in her class – but she didn’t want to accumulate more lines of punishment for whenever she next had access to her exercise book. Greyfell was old-fashioned enough to believe that proper ladies had no place writing magic, and should keep to the more feminine arts of potions and gesture magic.
Bryn had fetched clean bandages and a jar of ointment, and was trying to tend to Greyfell's wounds. Greyfell brushed him off irritably, until the Argean reminded him of the danger of what he called 'blood plagues'. Who knew what diseases those filthy razorbird creatures might spread? Then and only then did Greyfell permit Bryn to dab the ointment onto the cuts and scratches he'd sustained during the attack.
“What were those creatures?” Bessie asked, offering her own cheek for the cleansing ointment.
“Thanks to your impressive marksmanship, we shall never know,” said Greyfell. “Still, those were no creations of nature. I’m certain they were mage-made, and I've no doubt they were sent by the dragon prince.” They weren't quite sure how the old Archmage summoned the cursed dragon prince, but they avoided using his name aloud, just to be on the safe side. “None of them escaped to report back to him, at least.”
Bessie didn't think it mattered much: the very fact that th
ey'd run into mage-made enemies suggested to her that they'd lost the element of surprise. Even though they’d destroyed the plague-ridden razorbirds, she had a horrible suspicion that the blond gentlemen from the docks had somehow survived their fall from the Flying City. After all, hadn't Greyfell said he'd killed them twice before?
~
As Sharvesh reached the fog-shrouded coast, she drifted to a halt.
“What now?” Greyfell demanded.
Bryn stood at the helm, staring out into the distance, his whiskers twitching. He turned to his passengers. “I'm very sorry, sir, but Sharvesh scents hostile skies ahead. She's afraid to spring the next trap.” He hesitated. “I am only a humble skysailor, and no strategician, but the fog may offer enough cover for us to continue our journey in safety, low to the ground.” He immediately saw and understood the looks of doubt on his passengers' faces – it was dangerous enough for a skyship to skim low to the ground in full visibility, but in the fog she'd be wrecked for sure. The Argean smiled ruefully. “Believe me, I would not choose to do this for just any passenger, Miss Castle, but Sharvesh has more than one trick up her sleeves.”
At Bryn's command, Sharvesh sank so low that her belly almost touched the sandy beach. With her passengers safely at the railings, her masts folded flat against her deck, and she let down four enormous tree-trunk legs with splayed hands at the ends, that touched down gingerly onto the wet sand. Bryn bade Greyfell and Bessie hang on tightly to the railings, as the skyship began to walk, lumbering up the beach. Bessie grinned, glad that they'd chanced to hire this intriguingly odd skyship and her amiable captain, but it wasn't long until the rocking of Sharvesh's walking gait made her nauseous. She watched the white haze above their heads for any sign of the traps Sharvesh had sensed, but whatever they were, the skyship and her passengers passed safely underneath them, unseen. According to Bryn's line charts, they would meet with Ilgrevnia by nightfall, even at Sharvesh's slower walking pace, and Greyfell claimed that Ilgrevnia might even hold the throne room, no matter what the mage had said. Bessie, doubting that Greyfell would ever be so dishonourable as to lie to her face, began to accept the fact that she might as well search Ilgrevnia before moving on to Ildorria. Greyfell had already agreed that Bessie would fare best going into Ilgrevnia alone, and now they talked of how she might infiltrate the City:
Early in the voyage, Bessie had turned out her pockets so that she and Greyfell could take inventory of what supplies they had between them. Not much. Now, as they approached Ilgrevnia, Greyfell handed Bessie a spellpaper he'd confiscated from a first year student, just a day before they'd been forced to flee the Academy. Spellpapers were schoolboy magic and (as far as Greyfell was concerned) not meant for girls, but this one granted the user the power of flight, and trumped anything Bessie had managed to bring with her. She tore the spell neatly down the middle, and waited anxiously for it to take effect. She didn't have long to wait: the back of her neck began to prickle, and the feeling soon spread. Sharp quills began to poke out through her skin and her blazer, blossoming into grey-brown feathers. “Ouch!” Pins and needles pains danced up and down her arms, and she tried in vain to shake the feeling out.
“Elizabeth? Are you all right?”
Bessie nodded. “I feel like a pincushion, that's all.” The pain had subsided to prickly discomfort, and even that was fading. Her skin, she thought, had healed almost instantly around the feathers… but the same could not be said for her uniform. It would cost months of her allowance to replace her blazer, if they ever returned to the Academy. She couldn't take the blazer off now, even if she wanted too – she tried, but it just wouldn't come off over the new wings, and it pulled painfully just to try it. Bessie resigned herself to the damage done, too excited by the intended effect of the spell. The greyish brown wings shimmered with new magic: an exciting toy, one of the more expensive and impressive of the spellpapers available on a schoolboy's budget. Bessie flapped experimentally, finding it easy and somehow natural, but she winced at the loud whoosh and thump of her wings against the air. She'd never sneak up on anybody, not flying around on these. A bit of effort got her airborne, and she yelped as she realised how high she'd climbed so quickly, but no matter how high she flew, the spell could bring her to a safe landing. The fog was clearing into a pleasant but brisk day, and the wind buffeted her about, but the way to tame it came naturally, as if built in to the very feathers of her new wings. She touched down lightly on the deck, giddy and breathless, and looked to the horizon where the dark figure of a Flying City broke the rainclouds, a dark speck like a distant bird, moving slowly.
Greyfell instructed Bessie to spend the next couple of hours practising with the wings, and then to rest. “That spell's no more than a toy, so you'll have but a few hours tonight to learn what you can in Ilgrevnia,” he warned. “Be back at least an hour before sunrise – here on deck, or for God's sake at least on solid ground somewhere.”
7: THE PIRATE CITY
The network of Flying Cities had taken Amelia and her companions to the very borders of civilisation. They descended via a small skyship, and on the way down, Amelia stared in amazement at the mist-cloaked mountains to the north. They'd landed before she realised how this node differed from the others she'd visited: no merchant town stood there in the shadow of the City above. As Harold and Percival unloaded what little luggage they had from the skyship, Amelia turned full circle to take in the view. Nothing more than grass and gorse and rocky hills. No shops or houses that she could see, not so much as a barn, although a few shaggy red cows stood at a distance, ambivalent to the thin drizzling rain. She thought for a moment she saw a sprinkling of snow across the sparse thorny bushes, but then realised the white points were tiny flowers in their thousands.
The bells of the City sounded far above their heads, muffled by the distance and the thick clammy atmosphere. Amelia looked up, reeling a little at the vast scale of the rock above their heads, and watched the skyship ascend until it disappeared in the shadow of the City. She sensed then that she'd never get over the sheer size of the Flying Cities – the shadowy bulk that blocked out the sky. As she stared, the City began to move ponderously away. It had little reason to stay for long in this forsaken part of the world.
Amelia’s pet fire sprite Stupid had followed her on her journey, until she’d had to cage him to keep him out of trouble. Now she considered letting him out of his cage for an hour or two so that he could do whatever the fire sprite equivalent of stretching one's legs might be, but he hunched right down in the bottom of the cage, woefully unimpressed with the drizzling wilderness, his usually green flames turning a thin unhappy shade of yellow.
“Marvellous,” said Percival glumly, as the City began to move off, uncovering a sky blanketed in cloud. “Not a scrap of cover for miles around.”
“A bit of rain never hurt anyone,” said Meg. Rain aside, she'd been looking forward to the prospect of fresh air after their stay in the crowded City. “Though you'll have to watch you don't rust, Perce.”
“I might, before the wretched and infamous Ilgrevnia ever materialises,” Percival grumbled. “And my concern was that when she does come, we'll be sitting ducks out here in the open. Come now, Meg, you still haven't shared your plan with us.”
Meg took a deep breath, and Amelia suspected immediately that her mother didn't really have much of a plan. “The less people we send up there, the better our chances of going unseen. So, Amelia will go up –”
“What?”
“It's all right, dear, I'll be after you soon enough. Perce and Harold will stay on the ground, though, for causing a nuisance and a distraction if need be. They're both well qualified for it.”
“I can't go up there alone!” Amelia cried.
“How do you propose she's to get into the City?” Percival demanded, before Meg could say anything else.
Meg grinned. “Now, there's another reason we can't all go up at once…”
~
Harold's piercing whistle echoed across
the foggy wet grassland. Amelia prayed that it might get no answer, but they soon heard a shriek from high above, and a moment later, a dark winged figure came into view.
Harold beamed. “What a good boy he is, following us all the way here.”
The tame wyvern alighted on a rocky outcrop, settling down and folding his wings as Meg came near. Close up, he was recognisable by the pale scars on his head and neck, from the time he’d defended Amelia and her companions from a griffin. “Oh yes,” said Meg, stroking the creature's beak, “he wouldn't come too close to a City, not a big busy one like that, but I was sure I'd seen him out there along the way. Very fond of us all, aren't you, my lovely?”
Amelia found it difficult to match their enthusiasm. Though she still felt affection and gratitude towards the beast for his gallant actions (she had her own scars on her shoulder from an encounter with a griffin) the wyvern seemed to have grown much bigger in the short months since their last meeting. She thought he might even outmatch his sire, soon, and she could see him eyeing the distant cows, as if measuring them up for lunch. She turned to Percival, hoping she might find an ally in him, at least. “Does Meg really mean for me to ride that all the way up to the City, when it comes?” she whispered.
“Well, you've ridden stranger mounts,” said the knight quietly, obviously thinking of the giant snail, “so I've no doubt you're capable. Take heart, and think of us here on the ground: easy targets for those above.”
The wyvern growled at Stupid the fire sprite, who whined and rattled his cage as Amelia handed him over to Percival. Then Meg took her by the arm, pulling her closer to the wyvern, whispering gentle reassurances, possibly aimed as much at Amelia as at the beast. “Let him get used to the sound of your voice again,” she urged, as she fed the wyvern strips of dried haddock.
