by Frank Tuttle
“Go kill the monster, dear. I’ll fly the stolen airship.”
Meralda rose. Donchen slipped quickly behind the controls, taking the yoke in his hands. “Steady,” Mug said. “No sudden moves.”
“I love you,” said Donchen. “Go.”
A massive fist battered the Jenny’s tail. Wood smashed, and the air inside the cabin suddenly went cold and thin as a high whistling shriek filled the craft with noise.
Meralda stumbled, climbing along in the dark, crawling more than walking from the Jenny’s upward tilt. She saw dim grey light aft, and realized part of the craft’s hull was gone.
“How bad is it?” shouted Donchen.
“Bad,” replied Meralda. “But we still have both coils.”
A cold, wet wind tore at her blouse and her hair. She found the tiny maintenance crawlway, determined which way was to port, and crawled around the corner with the wind howling in her ears.
By the light from her eyes, she saw the Delighter. It had been tossed about and stood on its end, its silver filigree scratched and its tubes dented. “Don’t be damaged, don’t be damaged,” she said, though the wind carried her words away as soon as she spoke them.
A few more minutes of climbing, and the Delighter was in her hands.
She hefted it, feeling its weight, fumbling with its unfamiliar bulk in the dark. She shook it, dreading the sound of anything rattling inside, but heard nothing.
The Jenny spun. Beams snapped, and the coil beside Meralda crackled and buzzed as Donchen poured more current through the coils.
Meralda turned toward the tiny passageway and hurried out, trying to find the hatchway to the Jenny’s exposed upper deck in the dark.
The Gaunt howled again, so close the force of it rattled Meralda’s teeth. She shoved herself ahead, bruising elbows and knees, unsure of how she’d manage to climb out onto the deck, or even stand if she reached it before the Gaunt struck again.
Donchen put the Jenny into a sudden tight turn, tossing Meralda against the far bulkhead and nearly causing her to drop the Delighter.
The Jenny shook, and again Meralda was thrown from bulkhead to bulkhead. She felt the airship slow suddenly, though the coils buzzed and sparked, and then wooded spars began to splinter and crack, as though the Jenny were being held fast and slowly crushed in a massive, merciless fist.
Meralda reached the hatchway and burst through it, head first.
For a moment, disorientation set in. The sky was a boiling mass of clouds. A gargantuan hand held the Jenny, pulling her close to a face still obscured by the storm.
Too late, thought Meralda. Too late.
Fury grew within her.
“I was lost already,” she shouted, struggling to bring the Delighter through the narrow hatch. “But they could have lived! They could have gone home!”
As the clouds parted from around the face, Meralda brought the Delighter up. She took in a snatch of breath, forcing her Sight to focus only on the Delighter.
Amorp’s elegant spellworks crawled and whirled about the device. Meralda concentrated on the parts of the spell that loosed the lightning, tracing the firing segment back to a raised oval spot near her right hand. Her fingers, slick with rain and sweat, found the Delighter’s trigger. Meralda aimed the device skyward and noticed light spilling from the topmost of the thick tubes. When she looked inside it, she saw a magnified, blurry image of the Gaunt’s face.
The grip Meralda’s left hand had closed about wasn’t fixed. Meralda realized that each small movement of the knobby protrusion shifted the focus in the lighted tube.
Instinctively, Meralda brought the Gaunt’s face into sudden sharp focus.
Another part of Amorp’s handiwork controlled the intensity of the Delighter’s output. Meralda saw that Amorp had graduated his creation’s ferocity into ten levels of increasing fury, and before she could stop herself, her unmagic turned those ten into a hundred.
The Gaunt saw her, and it smiled, drawing the Jenny toward its toothless maw.
Meralda pulled the trigger.
Every storm cloud, above and below, far and near, stopped. Just for the barest of instants, the least sliver of time. Meralda’s new Sight showed her a sudden orientation of wind and clouds and energy, all of which turned toward the Gaunt’s face.
Then came the lightning.
It came from up and down and all around, bolt after bolt of it, arcing and leaping and hurtling toward the Gaunt in a blinding rush of light and heat and noise.
When the bolts struck, they struck all at once, and a brief new sun was born. The sound of it shattered all the Jenny’s glass and knocked the breath from Meralda and would have sent her falling had she not been lying half through the hatchway.
The Jenny was loosed. She tumbled for a moment, but then her coils caught, and she righted herself and went streaking away, trailing sparks and debris but airborne, still airborne.
Meralda shouted. Not a word, just a cry, mostly of shock and surprise at still being alive.
The Delighter was hot in her hands. As the Jenny righted, Meralda crawled out of the hatchway and onto the ravaged upper deck, where she held fast to the port rail and looked out into the sky.
At first, she saw nothing. But she pushed out with her Sight, and her heart sank as she saw a thin form stumbling through the clouds.
Mug popped out of the hatchway, barely able to fight the rush of wind.
“Is it dead?” he shouted.
Meralda shook her head no. “Get back below,” she cried. “It’s coming. Aft of us. Make speed.”
Mug vanished into the hatchway.
Meralda struggled to her feet. “No wonder Amorp hid this thing away,” she muttered. But it isn’t enough. It simply isn’t enough.
The Jenny began to twitch and start, black smoke forming in her wake. “The coils are overheating!” One or both of the insulating oil casings must have been ruptured. She won’t be airworthy much longer, and with no gas bags to keep her aloft…
The Gaunt’s furious roars sounded, and Meralda didn’t need her expanded Sight to see the giant figure drawing near, even through the clouds.
It’s nearly over, thought Meralda. We can’t run anymore.
A strange calm descended over her. “You were wrong about me,” she shouted. “I won’t use the unmagic. I won’t break the world. I’m not the Unmaker.”
The clouds parted, and the Gaunt strode forth. Its face was a blackened mass, burned and ravaged and smoking. But its hands were raised, and its charred jaw hung open, and it cried out in triumph, as the Jenny slowed and began to descend.
Meralda raised the Delighter. Her Sight showed her the black death, right where the Gaunt’s heart ought to be. It was little more than a chunk now, fuming and dropping bits of itself into the Sea.
Meralda focused on that, and just as her finger tightened on the trigger the stricken Jenny was lit by a bright, warm sun.
Meralda gasped. The Jenny emerged from a towering, vertical wall of clouds that reached from the Sea to the heavens above. The water below was calm, and the sky was a perfect deep summer shade of blue.
The Gaunt stumbled out of the wall of clouds and reached for the Jenny.
It stumbled. It turned its ruined face up toward the sun, and in that instant Meralda saw confusion wash across its charred face. Confusion, and something else – sudden, abject terror. It raised its hands, shielding its face from the sun, and it screamed at something in the sky.
Meralda took aim at the Gaunt’s burned heart and squeezed the trigger.
Again time stopped, and again, the Gaunt was struck from all sides by lightning that came from everywhere. Meralda kept the black death centered in the sighting tube, and kept the trigger depressed, and as she watched, the black mass at the Gaunt’s heart shriveled and began to crack.
The Delighter grew hot in her hands. Steam wafted from it, sizzling, but Meralda gritted her teeth and held on.
“Unmaker,” shrieked the Gaunt.
Meralda turned
her Sight on the Delighter, watched for a split second as it coaxed electrical energies from the Sea and the sky with intensities that astounded her.
What was it Tower had said?
“The energy output of the highest setting is incalculable.”
Meralda traced the Delighter’s magic back to the small brass knob set just behind the trigger. She used her thumb to turn it.
The sky exploded. A light was born, sourceless and omnipresent, a light so intense it rendered Meralda’s new Sight blind. She formed a bubble of protective energy about her, about the stricken Jenny, and she held the bubble fast until the awful silent light was suddenly extinguished and the Delighter fell cold and inert in her hands.
Silence. For an instant, Meralda was sure she was blind. But then she saw motion, and realized she was engulfed in a thick soup of spray and steam, through which only a pale wan glow could penetrate.
Her ears rang. Her skin felt hot, as though sun burnt. But she was alive.
Alive, and hungry, and thirsty, and aching from being tossed and battered.
She blinked, seeing no red glow wash out from her eyes. She raised her hand, willed the steam to depart, but nothing happened.
The ringing in her ears softened, replaced now by the whistle of wind, and the sensation of falling.
A muffled explosion rang out as the Jenny’s port flying coil arced and shorted. The launch listed suddenly, throwing Meralda against the port rail and sending the Delighter flying from her grasp.
She gripped the rail as the Jenny fell. She heard Mug cry out from within the launch, and then the craft shuddered as the remaining coil began to stutter.
A few rays of sunlight crept through the steam. As the Jenny spun, Sea and sky changed places, rolling after each other, leaving Meralda unable to do more than clutch at the rail and call for Mug.
The rail cracked, leaning out, weakened by the Gaunt’s final blow. Meralda searched the Sea for him, but saw only empty waves and a quickly clearing fog.
We did it, she thought. Nearly boiled the Sea, but we did it.
The remaining coil simply died, and the Jenny fell, tumbling bow over stern. The rail gave way, and Meralda was flung into the sky, spinning and tumbling like the Jenny. She caught one final glimpse of the launch as it fell, and she reached out toward it, and a black, oily bulk slammed into her back, wrapped her in a dozen boneless greasy limbs, and soared toward the sun.
* * *
It was the next morning before Meralda saw the wheel that crossed the bright blue sky.
She sat atop the black disc, which floated on the calm Great Sea. The flying thing snored as it slept, and the way some of the tubular limbs twitched and jerked made Meralda believe it dreamed.
She hadn’t recognized the flying thing as the one she saved aboard the Intrepid until one of the smaller whipping limbs pressed the scrap of paper Meralda had thrown from the ramp back into her hand.
Of the Jenny, Meralda could find no trace. The flying thing, eager to please, had proven easy to steer – a touch in any direction would send it hurtling that way. Meralda rather imagined it would bark and wag its tail, had it been able.
But search as she might, even flying a scant foot over the Sea, she found nothing to mark the Jenny’s fall.
So she cried, for a time. Cried and railed and cursed the unmagic, which was fled, leaving her alone and adrift on the face of the endless Great Sea.
Thirst finally sapped even her tears. Her mouth grew too dry to speak. The sun turned her skin red, and for a single awful moment she contemplated simply slipping off the flying disc’s back and sliding down into the cool blue water.
It was then that she opened her eyes and saw the silver-white arc hanging just above the cloud wall which marked the edge of the storm.
“Impossible,” she croaked. But there it was.
A great arc, glinting like new iron, spreading in a gentle arc from horizon to horizon.
She recalled the Gaunt’s expression of terror, that moment of hesitation that allowed her to call down the lightning upon it for that final awful blow.
“That’s what you saw,” she tried to say.
What is it?
For a moment, she forgot her heartbreak, forgot the relentless thirst. There is a monstrous metal wheel hanging there in the sky, she thought. Is that what keeps the storm at bay in this place?
Is that the thing from which the Delighter drew such a volume of power?
Is that what the Gaunt truly feared?
The sun shone down. Meralda felt her heart begin to skip a beat, now and then, and she knew her lifetime was measured in hours, and not days.
“We might as well see,” she croaked. She woke the sleeping disc, which rose easily from the waves. Meralda pointed toward the silver arc in the sky, and the disc quivered beneath her, tubes wagging in simple delight.
“Fetch,” Meralda said. The disc leaped skyward, and Meralda hung on.
* * *
The great wheel was hollow, cold, and still.
The disc hovered nearby, slapping playfully at the puddles of fresh water that lay scattered about the interior of the structure. Meralda knelt and drank from her hands until she could simply drink no more.
The water, too, was cold, but clear and unpolluted. “Condensation,” Meralda said to the black disc. “The metal of this structure is cold. Moisture from the air condenses and pools here.”
The black disc waggled tubes at her and darted off, soaring playfully up and down the gentle curved walls of the gargantuan, dark wheel.
Meralda rose and followed. As far as she could see in either direction, the wheel curved off and away, lit at regular intervals by perfectly circular openings set in the outward-facing side. Each opening was large enough to fly a number of airships through, even abreast.
The scale of the empty structure was breathtaking, leaving Meralda feeling small and very much alone as she wandered inside it.
It bore no markings. The metal surfaces were smooth and polished. Meralda could find neither joint nor rivet nor any signs of seams or joinery.
When she called out for the black disc, after it strayed too far into the shadows, her voice echoed for what seemed like hours.
“What keeps it hanging here?” she asked when the black disc returned, darting about her, as if inviting her to play. “Who made it, and for what purpose?”
The disc waggled its tubes and spun.
Meralda walked on toward the nearest opening, with no idea of what to do once she reached it. Fly for home? Seek out the Intrepid, in that awful storm?
She saw the Jenny falling, spiraling out of control, plummeting down toward the deep, merciless sea, and she sank to her knees and cried until the black disc nudged her gently with its bulk and urged her once again toward the light.
* * *
She was sleeping, huddled on the disc’s oily back, when she dreamed she heard the flap of wings.
The disc started and jerked. She gripped the thing’s limbs and sat up, and shouted as she saw the silhouette of a ragged crow pass across a moonlit opening and sail inside the wheel.
Another crow followed, cawing and wheeling as both dropped beside her.
“Nameless? Faceless?”
Aye, spoke a crow, its words barely intelligible.
You live, said the other. It tried to hop on the black disc’s back and failed, falling back to the metal surface with a flurry of angry flapping and awkward hopping.
“I saw you die,” Meralda said. “I saw you both die.”
We will never be dragons again, said the one who had fallen. Or staves.
The Master’s last gift to us was immortality, said the other.
We cannot die.
But we are much diminished.
Perhaps we should have died.
Bugger off.
Meralda scooped them both up and, as they flapped and cawed, hugged them fiercely to her breast.
“Oh be quiet, both of you,” she said. “I am sorry I sent you against tha
t awful thing.”
None of us had a choice, said one, wriggling free.
You did not break the world, said the other. It turned its black eyes up toward Meralda.
Well done, Mage.
Well done.
But we must quit this place.
Now, added the other.
Meralda lowered the crow that remained and stroked its ragged black feathers.
“You know what this is, don’t you,” she said. “And I’ll wager you know what happened to me aboard the Intrepid. The unmagic.”
Speak not of that here, chorused the crows.
All will be told.
But now we must fly!
Before Meralda could speak, the interior of the wheel was filled, not with the echoes of her words and those of the crows, but with a shrill metallic squeal, like the sound of seldom-used hinges being forced slowly but surely into motion.
Fly, squawked the crows, flapping into the air. Bid this beast to flee!
Meralda put her hands on her hips. The squeal lowered in pitch, becoming a rumbling that she could feel through the soles of her boots and the black disc’s misshapen body.
“I’m quite done with being protected from secrets,” she said. “I’ve lost Donchen and Mug and you will tell me what all this is about this very instant or you’ll wish the giant had baked you both into pies.”
We struck you with unmagic, said a crow. The Master crafted two workings before he died, thinking it was he who would face the Gaunt. We used the lesser one to latch unmagic to you.
Without it, the Gaunt would have surely slain you, said the other.
But the Arc is waking. We must go, while we can!
“The Arc. I see,” Meralda said, shouting to make her words heard over the roar. “And just what is an Arc, and what will happen when it wakes?”
The crows circled Meralda.
The source of all magic, said one. The Master found it, long ago.
Found it and sealed it, said the other.
But now it wakes! Flee!
“You said your Master crafted two workings,” shouted Meralda. “What of the other?”
Lost, cried a crow. Lost! We are immortal, Mage, but you will surely perish here!
