“The paladins fired several energy blasts at the airship as we fled,” Icy said without looking up from the knots he was tying in the rigging. “The airship’s barriers were less than stable to begin with.”
Loch tried getting to her feet, leaning on her walking stick and ignoring how a lot of her body was burning with pins and needles. The airship was shuddering as the balloon flexed and distended, the wind-daemon inside trying to break free. “Is this Hessler’s ninety-one seconds thing?”
“That was only an example!” Hessler yelled. “Also, yes.”
“LLLLOKKKK!” the wind-daemon shouted again.
Loch reached into the neck of her jacket and pulled out the warding charm Hessler had made for her. It was cracked and lifeless. “Think I found the problem.”
“I can help with the rigging,” Dairy said from where he was sitting.
“You can sit exactly where you are,” said Desidora, who still sounded pretty shaky herself. “You were badly hurt, and until we know for certain that you’re all right—”
“Badly hurt?” Irrethelathlialann shot Desidora a look. “That’s a bit of an understatement, death priestess.”
A mustard-yellow tentacle ripped through the side of the balloon.
“Maybe helping with the rigging would be fine,” Desidora amended.
Loch hadn’t really been watching the airship’s progress, focused as she was on getting her legs to work again. She looked now and saw the red glow of the canyon walls beside them. They were nearly to the top, getting there in perhaps a minute more.
Dairy was trying to shove the tentacle back into the rip in the balloon. Ululenia and Desidora were both still sitting. Hessler was watching over Tern, who was grimly loading her crossbow. The airship was shuddering and shaking, the balloon distending wildly now with the shape of something very angry visible inside it.
“Desidora, I need you to brighten my aura. Signal flare, if you can. Ululenia, get me to the top of the canyon.” Loch nodded to the tentacle. “I’m the carrot.”
Ululenia blinked and seemed to come back to herself. Of course, Little One. She shimmered, and a moment later, a great shining white eagle perched on the railing.
Loch felt whatever Desidora was doing to her aura as she leaped over the railing. It felt like being larger without changing size, filling the space she was in more strongly somehow. Then Ululenia’s talons closed gently around her shoulders, and she was rising past the canyon walls.
“LLOKKK!” came a roar from the balloon below her, and the airship staggered up after her.
The wind rushed around them, and the night stars looked almost impossibly silver-blue after the red of the canyon walls. “You all right, Ululenia?” Loch asked.
I am stronger than I was, Little One. I can carry you as long as is needed.
“Not what—”
I know.
Loch let it lie. A few moments later, the airship dragged itself up past the canyon walls. Looking down, she saw the rest of her team leap out onto the safety of solid ground.
“Take us in,” Loch said, and Ululenia coasted down to the top of the canyon, a scrubby plain whose normal and unglowing dirt was an honest relief after all the magic from earlier.
She landed in a roll that turned into a tumble, given that her legs still weren’t working all the way, grunted, and pushed herself back to her feet.
“Time for the stick, Captain?” Kail called over.
“Please.”
Tern fired a bolt whose head Loch didn’t recognize, but it hit the balloon, and the wind-daemon inside it shrieked in pain. Hessler raised a hand and flung out a gray beam that made the daemon scream even more. Desidora gestured at Loch, and Loch felt normal again, as well as keenly aware of how much everything was hurting right then, and then she felt even less than normal, like she was wrapped in a cool blanket that muted everything around her.
“LOCH!” the wind-daemon yelled. “I WILL FIND YOU! YOU CANNOT HIDE FOREVER!”
Loch wanted badly to shout something back, but she stayed quiet, and the airship shuddered and shook, and then Tern and Hessler fired again, and the wind-daemon roared in pain and sank back, and the airship began to fall.
In a moment, it was lost behind the canyon walls. A few moments after that, she heard the sound of a lot of wood and crystal crashing on the canyon floor far below.
“So, Ethel, about your treeship . . .” Kail said.
Irrethelathlialann sighed. “I sent the request shortly after the daemon began acting strangely. Captain Thelenea will be here in an hour.”
“All according to plan, then,” Kail said, and clapped Dairy on the shoulder. “Good to see you again, kid.”
Things had been exciting at the mine last night, Hendris gathered. The door to the processing center had a giant scar in the frame, and an airship full of alchemists and lapitects was sitting at the dock unloading when Hendris and the rest of the miners arrived in the little hopper that brought them from the facilities up top. Golems trundled around cleaning up debris, and judging by the scorch marks on the lift, nobody would be getting any work done until the safety inspectors had cleared everything.
“Got a flare?” he asked the supervisor, who was talking with Jerval, an Urujar kid who’d drawn night work.
“Something like it.” The supervisor glared at Jerval, who looked shamefaced and confused at the same time. “Cleanup duty up here, and whatever set off the magic caused a slide at the Idiot Tunnel. Need someone to check it out.”
“I’ll go.” Hendris had almost as much experience as the supervisor, and no particular love of cleanup duty. The supervisor nodded, and Hendris grabbed the hopper and took it down to the ground.
The canyon walls glowed less brightly in the daytime, although Hendris had gotten used to the red light years ago and actually found normal glowlamps disconcertingly yellow-blue by comparison now. He watched the dock as the hopper descended. It had always seemed strange to him that the mine had been built halfway up the canyon rather than on the ground. It wasn’t as though the walls glowed less at the ground, but Hendris figured that there was some kind of politics around it. Most things boiled down to people in expensive clothes arguing with each other and pissing it down onto everyone else.
He reached the ground, set the hopper to idle—most new squinters accidentally spent a night on the canyon floor after the hopper had headed back up to the dock without them—and hiked over toward the Idiot Tunnel.
Hendris saw the wreckage of the collapse and the resulting slide from a ways away. The scale was massive. The old Idiot Tunnel had crumbled at the bottom, leaving a broken hillside of smashed boulders and dirt-crystal fifty feet high.
Hendris didn’t consider himself a sentimental man, but the miners took Sunrise Canyon seriously. There was a kind of beauty in the glowing, glossy rock, and he actually found the wreckage offensive.
“What the hell did this?” he asked, scratching his head and glaring at the mess. The kobolds did little tricks now and then, when someone scared them or came into the mine wearing silver, but they hardly ever hurt anybody, and they had never done anything on this scale. Something this big would take a damn-fool wizard actually flinging magic into the mine on purpose.
Someone was going to ask if the collapse actually made the tunnel more stable, though, some idiot in fancy clothes. And Hendris needed to have his answer ready, which meant climbing up the damned rockslide and checking the tunnel itself.
He was making his way up through the rubble when a rock shifted beneath his foot and something grabbed his leg.
Hendris yelped, jumped, and pulled away, and then, as he landed, thought that he was being an idiot, that he’d caught his leg between two rocks, which was what it had actually felt like more than anything else. He convinced himself that he was being foolish as he turned.
But something was scrabbling out from under the rocks, something with too many legs, and Hendris stumbled backward, and then it was out and free, and somehow it was actually a sho
rt person, a dwarf, maybe, in a cloak. Hendris saw that the cloak was miraculously free of dust and grime, and thought magic, and then thought about how he’d thought he’d seen too many legs and felt claws on his foot, and he kept moving backward.
“Now listen,” he began, “I don’t want any trouble.”
“Witness,” said the thing in the cloak, with a voice that sounded like it was coming from down a long tunnel. “Witness, trouble.”
“No, no, I haven’t seen anything,” said Hendris, who could see which way the wind was blowing. “Just looking at the rocks, that’s all I’m here to do.”
Then something else came up out of the rocks, not out from between them but through them somehow. It was a great woman, rising up from the stones, and while every miner had that dream once in a while, Hendris had never dreamed about that woman being an ogre. She came out as though climbing through the air, and then she settled upon the rocks and set down what looked like a tangled mass of rope and cloth, until the rope and cloth twisted and moved into the shape of a bony woman in a tattered and dust-covered dress.
“Witness,” said the thing in the cloak again.
“We are not murderers,” said the ogre woman.
“We were ordered to preserve secrecy,” said the bony woman, who was still twisting herself into the shape of a person. “He has seen you, at least.”
“I haven’t really seen anything,” said Hendris quickly. “Please, please don’t kill me.”
And then, from out of nowhere, a man’s voice said, “Good morning, trackers. Did you actually manage to capture anyone, or was this your idea of an evening’s entertainment?”
Hendris looked up, as did the ogre, the bony woman, and whatever the thing in the cloak was, and saw a nobleman looking down from one of the mine’s airships. Hendris had seen the man before, some self-important noble who had come with the black-coated fellows to work in the processing center. At the time, he wouldn’t have minded punching the noble in the face a few times. Now he would gladly shine the man’s boots if it got him out of here alive.
“Why are you here?” the ogre called up.
“I have been put in charge of you,” the noble called down, holding up a small crystal wand. It flared with sudden blue light, and the ogre, the bony woman, and the thing in the cloak all started, then nodded as though they had heard something Hendris had not.
“Understood,” said the bony woman. “We engaged ancillary targets last night, but they triggered the collapse and escaped.”
“Well done,” the noble called down, shaking his head. “I see I have my work cut out for me. Come on, then. Let me land this thing, and we’ll get you out of here and cleaned up.”
The bony woman gestured at the rockslide. “The trail—”
“Forget the trail,” the noble said, waving it away. “The trail tells you where they’ll be going, and you’ll spend the next several weeks chasing that broken-down airship they fled in. Maybe that lets you feel like you’re cleansing the sins of your evil blood, but, personally, I’d prefer you actually accomplish something.”
“You know where they go?” the ogre asked.
“Sometimes the estate gets rabbits,” the noble called back. “Damnable creatures, get into the food, and everyone hates to kill them because they look so cute. You chase them, you’ll be running all day. But eventually, they go to ground in their little burrow.” He smiled. “And then, all you have to do is start a fire where they live and let the smoke drive them to you.”
The noble looked at Hendris.
Hendris knew he’d heard too much. Nobody in fancy clothes said those kinds of things in front of anyone they didn’t know and planned to keep. “Sir,” he called up, “please, sir, I know these tunnels better than anyone. I’m a good miner.”
The noble pursed his lips. “What’s your name, son?”
Hendris was the same age as the noble, but he swallowed it and said, “Hendris, my lord.”
“Well, Hendris,” said the noble, nodding gravely, “the thing is, I don’t really need a good miner.”
He gestured, and the last thing Hendris felt was hot pain slashing across his throat.
Loch and the team spent the next several days recuperating on a small but very well-furnished treeship en route to the Elflands.
The last time Loch had been on a treeship, it had been a massive pleasure yacht, and she had bluffed her way aboard to steal an elven manuscript and stop a war. She’d failed to get the manuscript, succeeded in stopping the war, and had very little time to poke around the vessel itself.
This treeship was pretty, lean, and young, flush with bright-green leaves that caught the sunlight and pulled the craft through the air. Beams were grown, twining about one another rather than hammered into place, and the air near the leaf-sails smelled like freshly cut grass. The doors were wide slats of bark hinging on green stems in the wall, and the beds were lined with soft spongy moss that was warm to the touch. It was strange and elven and also much cleaner than an airship, and if you didn’t mind the smell of bark when you were using the bathroom, there wasn’t much to complain about.
She was leaning on the railing, watching the ground ease past far below, when Captain Thelenea stopped beside her.
“At least this time,” the captain said, “you boarded legally.” The elven woman’s olive-green skin was lined with age and care, and the crystals in her cheeks glittered like diamonds. Still, she was smiling.
“Glad to see you too, Captain.” Loch smiled without looking over. “You’ve changed ships.”
“The Dragon suggested that I might benefit from a ship that dealt with more important matters than pleasure cruises.” Thelenea settled at the railing.
“A promotion, then?”
“I was quite happy sailing around on pleasure cruises,” Thelenea said dryly, “but yes.”
“You were retired,” Loch guessed. “And I knocked you back into active service. My apologies.”
“Life knocked me back into active service. This is different enough from the trolls and dark fey I still remember on the darkest nights.”
Loch shook her head, and at Thelenea’s raised eyebrow, said, “My people are so busy fighting Imperials—and each other—that we forget that there’s a whole other world we know nothing about.”
“The Dragon helps keep us safe,” Thelenea said, “and you have returned his love, who was stolen from my ship. He and I are both in your debt.”
Loch grinned. “If you are willing to forgive me stealing aboard your last ship and my associates knocking a hole in the side of it, I will happily call any debt settled.”
Thelenea nodded, then turned as Kail approached. “We should be at the Dragon’s estate within the hour. If you will pardon me, I have docking preparations to make.”
“Morning, Captain,” Kail said to her as she passed, and then to Loch, “Captain.”
“How’s Desidora today?”
“Her aura isn’t turning all the plants into giant versions of those carnivorous things that eat flies anymore.” Kail smiled, then lowered his voice slightly. “Still pissed about Ghylspwr. Thinking she could’ve killed him if she’d done something different. The usual.”
“Fair. Dairy?”
“Moving great, considering he was briefly deceased. Diz and Hessler are still doing tests, but he seems the same as always. Nice, friendly, superstrong, immune to magic.”
Loch nodded. “We’ve still got that, at least. Ululenia?”
“Man, who even knows with Ululenia?” Kail shook his head. “And stop. We got Dairy out of there.”
“Didn’t stop the return of the ancients.”
“Which I was right about being magic weapons instead of people, by the way, if you’re going to beat yourself up for everything you’ve ever gotten wrong.”
Loch smiled. “Treasure the little victories, Kail.”
Kail drew a dagger from his belt and ran it nimbly through his fingers. “We went in next to blind, and we didn’t just get Dairy out
of there. We got information that tells us what the ancients are and how to stop them.”
“And the enemy knows that we’ve been there,” Loch said, “which means that getting inside again is going to be even harder.”
“I’ve been holding Desidora for most of the day,” Kail said. “It’s apparently something we do now. Let me know if you need a hug.”
“I’m good, thanks.” Loch grinned.
“You’ll figure something out.” Kail balanced the dagger lengthwise across a finger, then flicked it into the air and caught it. “You usually do. We’ll get rid of the ancients, and you can go be a justicar with Pyvic or a baroness at Lochenville, or whatever it is you want to do.”
Loch looked away and laughed to herself. “I was a terrible justicar. I’d likely be a terrible baroness.”
“Good dodge on saying what you want to do, Captain.”
“If we can take out that golden hoop Desidora talked about, that should break the gateway,” Loch said, and looked over at Kail. “What do you think it is?”
“Me?”
“Hey, you were right about the ancients being magical weapons. Who am I to doubt your statistically inevitable blind luck?”
Kail grinned and tucked the dagger and the uncomfortable topics away. “Maybe Mister Dragon has something in that library Dairy talked about.”
The treeship slowed not long after, and Loch saw a fantastic palace—an estate of white marble and flowing pools and fountains that shone through the thick foliage of the Elflands like a diamond hidden in the grass. At first she thought the estate contained multiple buildings, as she saw golden spires rising up and glittering in the pale morning light. Then her eyes adjusted to the scope, and she realized how massive the spires actually were, even higher than the forest around them, with gigantic reinforced beams on their sides like the cross guards of swords. An even half-dozen spires soared over the rest of the palace, leaving a long, rolling field open, and Loch smiled as she finally figured out what the spires were.
Mister Dragon had built his estate with different places to land.
The Paladin Caper Page 13
