The Witches of Ne'arth (The Star Wizards Trilogy Book 2)

by Joseph Schembrie

  Matt flung open the starboard engine hatch. The air blast hit and he gasped as Ivan compensated for the temperature drop. Health indicators flashed yellow and red at the bottom of his field of vision.

  “Matt,” Ivan said. “The frigid temperature you are currently experiencing is life threatening.”

  So, Matt thought, was the wind that was trying to blow him off the engine strut and into the sea as he sidestepped with one hand clutching the jug, the other the lantern. Snowflakes whisked by his face, the wind howled, the cold metal of the strut tried to peel the skin off his fingers. And the worst, he knew, was yet to come.

  “Quick question, Ivan,” he said. “Is the burning point of Sarkassian silk above that of rum?”

  “I have no data on the burning point of Sarkassian silk.”

  We'll find out, Matt thought.

  Because the alternative was to swirl around in the vortex of the storm until the ship was battered enough to leak enough gas to sink into the sea.

  He reached the cowling, pried and shoved it open. Upending the jug, he splashed rum on the engine, then backed away, shielded his face, and touched a finger to the wetted casing.

  “Ignite,” he said.

  Foof! The glare of the fire was visible around his arm and through his eyelids. As it faded, he opened his eyes. The trickles of flame died as the last of the rum was consumed.

  “Go!” he shouted.

  His voice would not have carried above the wind, but from the hatch Savora relayed: “Go!”

  The propeller windmilled and the engine clicked, coughed, and chugged to life.

  Matt closed the cowling, crept back along the strut, shut the hatch, wordlessly passed Savora in the cabin, and repeated the procedure on the port engine. The ship turned into the wind and surged westward once more.

  “I understand, Matt,” Ivan said. “Your procedure is similar to how Russian soldiers started their vehicle engines in subzero weather during the Great Patriotic War.”

  “You mean, you knew this was a way to start the engines?”

  “I did not know, Matt. I merely have anecdoctal information in my archives.”

  Nonetheless, when Matt returned to the forward cabin, Prin gushed, “Your Ivan has come through again, Matt!”

  “Yeah,” Matt mumbled, realizing there was no way to correct Prin's perception without sounding petty.

  Andra glanced at his hands. “Matt, you're badly hurt!”

  “Ivan's taking care of it,” Matt said.

  As he inspected his burned and frostbitten yet pain-free hands in the restored cabin light, he realized again how much he relied on Ivan. Losing a bit of credit now and then was a small price to pay.

  The engines hummed and the ship coursed through the storm. The buffeting lessened, and Ivan confirmed that they had entered the center. Snow turned to rain, then the rain stopped. Sunlight streamed through the thinning clouds.

  Matt's hands were by then almost restored, but the memory of the experience still had in him shock. Just to get halfway, he thought. He hoped there would be no more surprises, but he'd been on Ne'arth long enough to know that was not how the planet worked.

  Several minutes later, Andra cried:

  “What is that?”

  She was pointing through a cloud break, to a distance of several kilometers. Matt whirled in time to see only the shadow cast upon the clouds. He pressed to the window and said, “Cut the cabin lights.”

  He surveyed the cloudscape intently for about a minute, then glimpsed what must have provoked Andra's cry: a long, sinewy outline weaving between the cloud banks. It was no tiny bug this time. To be seen at that distance, the thing was huge.

  With Ivan's magnified, computer-processed vision, Matt gaped in awe.

  It was tubular, about fifty meters wide and five hundred long, the dimensions of a skyscraper. It flew as fast as an airplane. The sides were armored in overlapping plates each the size of a man and on top were a series of jagged, vertical fins that stretched the length of the body like the masts of a row of sailboats. From the front trailed long ropes – cables? antennae? – that whipped pulsatingly. Overall the skin was colored a dark, metallic green that shimmered with sunlight and flashes of static electricity as it scraped through the turbulent air.

  Matt thought the apparition might be another airship, until he saw the head.

  The doors of his mouth, the lamps of his eyes were understatements. The golden irises of the eyes were like search lights. The nostrils were geysers of vapor. Framed by stalagmite and stalactite teeth, the cavernous mouth could have swallowed a barn.

  The creature turned toward the ship, open jaws revealing a void that threatened to engulf the gondola. With the sinuous, side-winding movements of an aerial eel, it approached, features rapidly expanding beyond Matt's magnified field of view. Ivan's imaging zoomed back, but not fast enough.

  “Go to Mag One,” Matt said.

  “Magnification is already at One,” Ivan replied.

  This cannot be, Matt told himself in detachment from what seemed to be his imminent death.

  Eyes had no reason to be that big. What were the teeth for? Why did it have ears? Were those ears – or a type of radar? How did it get here? What did it eat? It couldn't eat airships, they were not nourishing. So why was it attacking them?

  Andra steered hard, but the creature was already veering from collision. It streaked alongside, a massive train of the sky that rumbled like thunder and shuddered the ship with its wake. The windows on one side of the gondola were blotted by a wall of scales. And then the impossible creature passed behind them and was gone.

  The churning air violently jostled the ship. Andra struggled with the controls and Prin aided and they stabilized. For a moment, no one said anything. Catching their breath, they absorbed the relief of an empty panorama of clouds. The sky was clearing, but Matt would have welcomed another blast of storm rather than a return of that.

  “What the blazes was that thing?” Prin said. He was shouting.

  Matt opened parched lips. “Some . . . some . . . some kind of genetically engineered lifeform.”

  “It's alive? How can a living thing be so huge?”

  Concentrating on objective facts helped Matt regain his composure. “It's huge in volume, not weight. It's mainly just a balloon, like an airship. I'll bet it masses less than a blue whale.”

  “I assume that a 'blue' whale is a very large kind of whale.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Will it return?” Andra said. “Will it attack?”

  “I . . . I don't know. Be ready to take evasive action, I guess.”

  “What kind of evasion is possible? It moves faster than we do at full speed.”

  Matt had no idea how to answer, but an answer wasn't needed. The creature never appeared again.

  The trip through the other half of the storm front was uneventful. Savora kept the filter screens clean and the engines kept humming. The rain faded to a drizzle and the lightning ceased, and the sky brightened. Buffeting subsided and the gondola steadied. There were no more spiders.

  Visibility expanded to kilometers and the blanket of clouds thinned and broke to reveal the surface of the sea once more.

  Slumping, Prin wiped the perspiration from his face. “Well, if crossing from one side of the world to the other means having to contend with that much excitement, no wonder it's done so rarely!”

  “A wall of storm,” Andra said. “I wonder if it truly is intended as a wall. Matt, what do you think? Is such a thing possible for the Lords of Aereoth?”

  “I suppose it is,” Matt replied. He was somewhat hazy, for the picture of the creature charging at the ship still had claim on his thoughts. “Don't ask me how or why.”

  “I can see the 'why' plainly enough,” Prin said. “They made a wall of storm to prevent passage from one side of the world to the other. I would also venture that they created those sky monsters as a kind of guard dog, also to prevent passage.”

  “But why prevent pass
age?” Andra said. “And if they went to such efforts to prevent passage, how did our little ship pass through so easily?”

  “You call what we just went through easy?”

  “A few meters closer, those teeth could have shredded the skin of our envelope. So yes.”

  Why did it spare us? Matt asked himself. It had come so close, it seemed it must have had intent to attack them. Yet at the last instant, it had seemingly changed its mind. Why?

  Savora asked, “Down there. What kind of ship is that? Is it on fire?”

  She pointed to a speck on the waves several kilometers to the south. It was trailing a column of smoke. The ship was not on fire, it was belching the smoke out of a smokestack. Though it had masts, the sails were tied down. The vessel was plowing through the sea solely by the power of side-mounted paddle wheels.

  “Someone has taken our design for an airship engine,” Prin said, “and adapted it for the propulsion of a watership. I wonder if they too use rum for fuel. People already say the Roman Navy runs on rum, but someday it could be meant literally.”

  Matt reviewed Ivan's spectral analysis of the smokestack emissions. “It's not internal combustion. It's a steam ship.”

  “Meaning?” Prin asked.

  “Steam pushes the pistons. According to Ivan, the steam on that ship is heated by coal.”

  “What is coal?”

  “Something your world isn't supposed to have,” Matt replied. “Not according to planetologists.”

  Savora lightly coughed. She was standing at the starboard forward window, spyglass in hand, pointing south. “There is land in that direction.”

  Matt went to the window and stared. All he saw was a horizon of haze, even at Ivan's maximum magnification. “Are you sure?”

  “I am certain. It was an island with trees, and I think I also saw an airship above it.”

  “I don't see anything.” Matt frowned. “It's not on satellite view, either.” Which he admitted to himself didn't mean anything under the current circumstances.

  “The break in the clouds was only for a moment,” Savora said. “But I am certain I saw land.”

  “Matt,” Andra said. “During training and test flights, Savora has always been able to spot details in the distance before I can. If she says she saw something, I believe it.”

  “What have we got to lose?” Prin asked. “Any landfall is a good landfall, given that we haven't the slightest idea of where we are.”

  Matt thought to correct again, that with Ivan's inertial guidance system recently updated, they knew within ten meters of where they were in terms of latitude and longitude. Once again the real problem was that, due to the deception of computer generated augmented reality overlays, they didn't know where anything else was. Islands, seas, cities, mountains – without accurate charts, they had to rely on visual sightings, no matter how fleeting.

  Realizing he was the only holdout, Matt bowed. “Okay, let's check it out.”

  The island became visible half an hour later as the weather cleared before them. The land mass was about fifty kilometers long, twenty kilometers wide. Being located at the same temperate zone as Britan, its low mountains were covered with what Ivan's spectroscopic analysis confirmed were the same species of evergreen trees as on Britan. The mountains north and south dipped in the middle of the island, forming a wide plain that had been cleared to make way for an agricultural checkerboard pattern of browns and yellows. In the center of the western side of the island was a bay, and encrusting the bay was the regular grid of a street system. A splotch of smog marred the sky over the bay. Several airships puttered through the haze, ascending and descending.

  “A city!” Prin exclaimed. “Not far short of Rome in size, by the looks of it!”

  Ivan provided Matt with a telescopic view. By Earth standards it was a small town, but assuming all the buildings were inhabited, the population would be about twenty thousand, similar in size to that of Londa, the Roman provincial capital of Britan. Unlike Londa, however, many of the buildings were several stories tall. Perhaps that was why Prin had so greatly overestimated the population. Coming from a pre-industrial civilization, he couldn't comprehend that degree of construction per resident.

  The major difference between Londa and the city ahead was the airfield south of the bay. The airfield had hangars and mooring towers and in the center arose a control tower – a hundred meter spire atop which was an incessantly blinking lighthouse-sized lamp.

  Prin read the blinks: “C . . . D . . . X . . . 5 . . . . “

  “I didn't know you knew Morse Code,” Matt said.

  “Morse code? It's Roman Signal Code. Or perhaps it's something else, as it doesn't seem to make sense in the way that I am transliterating.”

  Matt observed the blinking, while Ivan provided 'subtitles' in his view. “It could be a command code for directing airships in the traffic pattern.”

  “Traffic pattern? What is that?”

  “See how the ships flying around the field are blinking in response to the tower? They're communicating with it, and I'm guessing it's directing their flight paths so that they don't collide.”

  “We don't have the code or a lantern to signal,” Andra said. “How do we enter the 'traffic pattern?'”

  “It seems to be an open port,” Savora said. “Look at all the different ships in the bay. Maybe we don't need authorization to enter. As for a signal lantern, I'm sure I could rig something.”

  Matt shook his head. “Maybe later, but I don't want to be blundering around. It would call attention to ourselves.”

  “Why not do so?” Savora asked. “If we're the first people to cross the storm barrier, we might be considered heroes. That could be advantageous for our mission.”

  Matt was taken aback, for he seemed to recall that Savora had argued against making their presence known. It was Prin, however, who counterargued: “We might instead be seen as invaders. I agree with Matt. Let's be cautious about revealing who we are and where we came from, until we know how we'll be received.”

  “I'd still like to explore the city,” Matt said. “I wish there was some way to get down there.”

  “I see a small lake to the southeast,” Andra said, pointing. “It's in the middle of a forest without any houses nearby, but see the road that passes near? It goes onto the city. We could anchor over the lake and lower the boat, and then follow the road and enter the city on foot.”

  Matt said tepidly, “It looks like a lot of walking.”

  “Only ten kilometers,” Savora said. “That would take only two hours at most.”

  “Yes, and two hours back.”

  All three of them were looking at him like, So what's the problem? And he realized that, being Pre-Industrials, for them it wasn't a problem.

  Finally, it was decided that only Matt and Savora would make land and visit the city, while Prin and Andra tended to the ship.

  “It'll be a short visit,” Matt said. “Just walk into town, scout around for a while, see what we can learn about this side of the planet.”

  “To learn if there are legends about your brother,” Savora said. “This will be so exciting!”

  She made a soft squeal. To Matt, it sounded much like the noise Synth used to make when she was excited.

  “Anyhow,” Matt said. “Andra, be ready to take off if there's any sign of trouble. Don't worry about leaving us behind. We can rendezvous later.”

  “Any sign of trouble?” Prin asked. “Such as angry villagers with pitchforks?”

  “I was thinking more about guns.”

  “Guns? Oh, like the staff of Archimedes?”

  “No, a lot worse. These people seem to have at least a nineteenth century level of technology, which means they could have high-powered rifles. The effect on the ship would be just like from a flaming arrow, but the range is over a thousand meters.”

  Prin and Andra exchanged glances, but there were no protests. The Good Witch headed inland. All the while descending, they passed over beaches, the
n a forested hill, then farmland. Matt watched a farmer lift eyes from plow, stare briefly and resume plowing. Airships apparently were not a terrifying supernatural experience on this side of the world.

  “I hope you're not going to be wearing that,” Savora said.

  Matt turned from the window, saw her scrunched mouth and followed her gaze to his neon-blue jump suit. “What's wrong with it?”

  “It's rather attention getting, don't you think? I thought we didn't want to attract attention.”

  “It's self-cleaning and self-repairing – “

  “Why don't you try the uniform that I made for you?”

  Matt remembered that Savora had measured him for one of her uniforms, but still it surprised him that she had the forethought to bring them along. Or maybe, he thought, it didn't surprise him. She opened a cabinet and presented the gray shirt, sweater, pants, and jacket.

  “We've no idea what these people wear,” Matt said. “This might be as out of place as my jump suit.”

  “I doubt anything is as 'out of place' as your jump suit,” Savora replied. “Look, Matt, I'm the daughter of a merchant. I know what people are starting to buy and wear in civilized places these days. You say you don't want to be noticed? At least this is not so bright a blue that it outshines the sky.”

  Matt refrained from grumbling, took the clothing to the aft cabin and closed the door. He had to admit that it was a good fit. Well, his problem with Savora wasn't about competence at tailoring. It wasn't about her attitude either. He wondered what was his problem with Savora. Well, he knew he had one.

  When he returned to the front cabin, Andra was swooping over the lake. Prin yanked the anchor deployment lever and the bucket sheet drooped and scooped water, causing a mild jolt. With engines idled, the ship hovered.

  Matt and Savora lowered the boat by the system of rope, pulleys, and crank. They climbed the ladder, loosed the lines. Prin and Andra waved as the two young people paddled to shore. The ship ascended eastward, over the sea and into clouds. Matt enlisted Savora to help drag the boat into concealing brush.

  “Rendezvous in six hours,” Matt said, citing their agreement with Prin and Andra. “Two hours to walk there, two hours to scout around, Two hours to come back. It's afternoon, so it'll be dark when we return.”