The Immortal Storm (Sky Chaser Book 1)

by Wilkes, S. D.

  Kite shivered, iced with cold and fear. He wouldn't be that lucky twice. So silently he slipped away. Back down the dune. Back to where Ersa was hiding and there he told her everything he'd seen.

  The Waste Witch worked her gums and spat in the sand. “Scientists,” she said. “Always up to no good those lot. Always looking for things best left hidden.”

  “Let's go, Ersa,” Kite said.

  All at once the dunes shook around him. Engines roared. Searchlight beams lanced across the dune-tops, carving the dust. Kite dived to his belly and scooped sand over his patchcoat. The Monitor was above him now, turbines beating against his back. He covered his ears, choking on the exhaust fumes; greasy and metallic like old coins in his mouth.

  Any second now Kite expected a lookout's call and the searing pain of electrocution. He covered his ears and scrunched his eyes shut and thought the noise would never end.

  The engine noise changed pitch and faded with acceleration, soon replaced by the wind's hiss and the chaotic hammering of his pulse.

  Something hard poked him rudely in the backside.

  “You can get up now,” Ersa said.

  Kite shook off the sand and spat the greasy chemicals from his mouth. The navigation lights of the Monitor were heading inland, sparkling over the darkening dunes. A sudden tide of relief washed over him. He almost cried.

  “Pull yourself together, boy,” Ersa said, already shuffling back toward the sandboat. “They've gone back to their city. That’s the end of it. Now get us home.”

  Three leagues east from Hurts Deep, near the skeletal markers of the Bone Roads, Kite was still a sack of nerves. Sat at the stern with his boots planted on the thwart he nudged the tiller, navigating the rackety sandboat between the dunes. His hands still shook. Everyone now and then he'd glance over his shoulder, fearing the flicker of lights and the sound of deadly engines.

  “Calm down, boy,” Ersa said. “They're long gone.”

  How could he be calm? The First Light Foundation had been here. Here, barely a dozen leagues from Dusthaven. There was nothing in the Old Coast for the Foundation so Ersa had always told him. That's why she had them hiding there. But now Kite wasn't so sure. The sooner he got them back to the bothy the better.

  Jawbone markers rattled on the dune-tops warning Kite to alter his course. The outrigger lifted a little in the crosswind, skimming the sand. The mainsail swelled in the westerly, giving the sandboat a satisfying kick. Soon she was doing a steady seven, maybe eight knots.

  Tight in her seat near the bow, knuckles tensed white on her stick, Ersa huddled against the wind. She was always like this. Kite was certain she hated anything man-made. If it contained a cog or moved on a wheel the thing was possessed.

  The sandboat crested the next dune. For a weightless, breathless moment the bow pointed to the endless Undercloud, studded wheels turning on the air. He imagined great skymetal wings sprouting from the sandboat's hull and catching the wind, he soared. Slicing away the clouds, rising into a star-flickering night...

  “Slow down, boy!”

  Kite scrambled back to reality. He loosened the lines, spilling the wind from the mainsail. The sandboat slowed to a couple of knots, easing her way between the dunes. Sometimes he wished flying away from the Old Coast could be more than a dream...

  “Your head's always in the clouds,” Ersa grumbled. “You think too much that's your problem.”

  Kite stuck his tongue out.

  Suddenly Ersa twisted in her seat, her eyes narrowed to slits. Did the old crow have eyes in the back of her head? But for once her fierce eyes weren't looking at him this time. “Curse them,” she said.

  A moment later Kite heard it - the roar of engines rising on the wind. He twisted around. The Undercloud darkened over the Bone Roads and the storm cleaved apart, torn by an armoured keel. The First Light Foundation had found them.

  3

  The Weatheren

  Kite swung the tiller, forcing the sandboat off the track. His heart rattled like the whale-bones markers on the dune-tops. Somehow he had to escape the Foundation airmachine. Their only chance was to lose them in the dunes.

  Then the shriek of stuttering engines rose on the wind. And Kite could see through the swirling dust that the Monitor was losing altitude, bleeding smoke from her turbines. She was falling.

  Kite veered between the dunes but the Monitor seemed to follow. Down and down the airmachine plunged, filling the sky with black metal, closing on them like a coffin lid. A blinding tide of hot sand and choking fumes flooded the deck. Kite screamed but the curdling roar of engines and backwash drowned his cry. And in the confusion, as Kite grappled to keep control, he heard a voice. The sweet sing-song voice of a child, repeating a rhyme:

  “When stormy is the weather and thunder shakes the sky. The Children of the Sun will ask the question why.”

  The engines stopped.

  Kite stared in horror. The screams of the Weatheren crew filled the air. The airmachine began plunge from the sky, a slow fatal arc. Dead metal dropped bow-first into the ancient seabed, impacting with a titanic crunch.

  The dunes shook. A furious ball of bright fire turned the Undercloud the colour of blood and bronze. There came a blast wave so fierce it sliced the dune-tops and sucked the mainsail inside out. The tiller snapped from Kite hands and the sandboat careened up the face of a dune, teetering on her wheels before pitching them both overboard. Over and over he rolled, gear and scavenge crashing all around him, until he finally came to shivering stop.

  For a moment Kite lay in total darkness, ears full of sand and fizz. Then instinct seized him. He kicked and clawed, fighting himself upright. Wrenching back his hood and gasped for air, his heart rattling under his ribs.

  The stink of hot burning oil filled his nostrils. A vile tower of oil-black smoke drifted low over the dunes, raining soot flecks that swirled in eddies around him. A short distance away the sandboat had ended up on her side, wheels still slowly turning. The day's haul had been scattered on the sand.

  In a tumble of ropes and rigging the Waste Witch flailed like a stricken beetle, hollering for her boy. Hurriedly Kite found Ersa's stick and helped her to her feet.

  “Quick, boy!” Ersa said, shoving him aside. “Might be something left for us!”

  Kite followed the Waste Witch reluctantly, fearing what he might find. A whole dune had been levelled. A black crater scorched the sand in its place, scattered with smouldering wreckage. A black knot the size of a house lay flaking soot in its centre - all that remained of the Monitor's fuselage.

  Kite stepped by blue-flame oil puddles, covering his mouth to block out the stench of burnt oil and treacled sand. A turbine cowling lay on its side, housing peeled open to reveal the undamaged props within. All else had been warped and shredded. The crew too. Bits of men had been scattered like a butcher's bad work. Shreds of scarlet and yellow flapped from jags of twisted metal. Kite pressed the scarf over his nose, swallowing down the urge to vomit.

  Snip snip.

  “Don't look at me like that, boy,” Ersa said, trimming buttons from a dead Weatheren soldier's uniform. “He won’t be needing brass where he's headed.”

  Something wasn't right here. What had brought her down? Mechanical failure? Grit in the intakes? Even the salvor's mechanics had to deal with that menace.

  Salvors.

  “We'd better go,” he said, glancing about the dunes. “They'll see that smoke for leagues and -”

  “Hello?”

  Kite spun around. He quickly picked out a bloody hand waving limply from the far side of the wreckage.

  Ersa was quick to her feet, her scissors held dagger-like.

  The injured Weatheren called again. “Hello, is anyone there? I need help.”

  Kite began checking his hood and goggles. “I might be able to help,” he said. “He won't be able to see who am I.”

  “If he's not dead now he soon will be,” Ersa replied coldly. “Leave him to the Sand Eaters.”

  Kite b
unched his fists. “I might be able to help,” he said and broke into a run before the Waste Witch could stop him.

  The Weatheren survivor was one of the yellow-coated scientists. Kite stepped between debris, showing the scuffed palms of his gloves.

  “W-where are the Constables?” the Weatheren said, trying to sit up and collapsing back, clutching his side. Purple patches spread from a wound in his ribs. He'd crawled some distance and now slumped against a heat-blistered deck plate.

  “They're dead,” Kite said.

  The Weatheren chuckled painfully. “I-I admire your honesty but please don't come any closer,” he said. He was hugging a number of fire-singed objects. “What are you? One of those Murkers?”

  Kite frowned behind his goggles. He’d heard that name whispered in Dusthaven. “I’m no terrorist if that’s what you’re thinking,” said Kite.

  “No, you do not look like one,” the Weatheren said. “A skyless then?”

  Skyless. That's what the Fairweather folk called those who survived out outside the Dreadwalls. Those doomed to a slow death beneath the Undercloud. Kite tried not to show offence.

  “Is that a water bottle?” the Weatheren asked. “May I? I am terribly thirsty. ”

  Kite hesitated. Well water was ten royals a gallon after all. But the Weatheren looked as if he needed water more than Kite at this moment so he unhooked the tin water bottle from his belt and offered it across.

  The Weatheren gulped from the water bottle. Kite crouched nearby and studied him. Blue eyes a shade brighter than his gaudy uniform. Skin bronzed by the mythical sun. Flesh and blood after all.

  “Am I so fascinating?” the Weatheren asked.

  “Never seen a Weatheren before,” Kite replied. “That's all.”

  “No, I don't suspect you have,” the Weatheren said and coughed up a lip of blood. “Do you have any medicine in that bag?”

  Kite shook his head.

  “No, of-course not,” the Weatheren said. “Why would you?”

  Did all Weatherens talk this way? Ersa had told him they had mechanical minds, raised by machine mothers to think and act to a rigid set of rules and instructions.

  “What happened to the airmachine?” Kite asked.

  “The oddest thing,” the Weatheren said, looking passed him at the fire and smoke. “The pilot began to lose all control when the rhyme started. Neither should have happened. Most unexpected.”

  Kite recalled the song on the wind. “The rhyme?” he said.

  “My daughter sings it,” the Weatheren said, shaking his head in disbelief. “My daughter...oh...w-where is the nearest settlement?”

  Kite knew Dusthaven was ten leagues north-east of the Bone Roads. The Weatheren would never make it in his condition and Ersa would never let him on the sandboat. “Too far,” Kite said.

  The Weatheren coughed more blood. “Yes,” he mumbled weakly. “It would…appear…so..”

  Then the Weatheren exhaled with a soft sigh, eyes wide with bewilderment. The salvaged things slipped from his arms. After a moment Kite picked up the water bottle and reattached it to his belt. Death seemed a cruel reward for surviving that horror.

  Scattered at his feet the Weatheren's things was an odd assortment: an empty leather document case, a rolled up tube of fine transparent film and a mechanikin, a fancy mechanical toy, with one of its eyes torn out.

  “Boy?”

  Kite licked his lips. That leather alone had to be worth thirty royals. The mechanikin, even fire-singed, could fetch ten. More money than he’d earn in a month of scavenging.

  “Where are you, boy?”

  After all, Kite reasoned, the Weatheren had no use for leather or toys where he was headed. Ersa had said the same about the buttons hadn’t she? If he didn't take them some other scavvy would.

  “Hurry boy!” Ersa called again, this time with urgency.

  Kite crouched and bundled the items into his canvas scavenge bag. Then he hurried back, but not before giving the dead scientist a respectful nod. Weatheren or not, somehow it seemed the right thing to do.

  A salvage rig circled the crater. A squat, flat-bottomed airmachine with derricks fore and aft, rattling with hook-chains and the chatter of metal-hungry salvors. A Tom Skull flapped from her pilothouse.

  Looking for a hiding place Kite found a door-sized radar dish which had, until a few minutes ago, been mounted on the Monitor's pilothouse. Ersa crouched beside him, scissors at the ready. Not that either of them could do much against sledgehammers and chains.

  The first salvage rig swept down, curling the smoke in its wake. With alarm Kite recognised the patchwork hull and lopsided turbines. The pride of the Savage Salvage Company fleet - the Highwrecker.

  “Gutter,” he whispered.

  Along its keel four exhausts shimmered as the Highwrecker decelerated and crunched down on its runners. A ladder thumped on to the blackened sand. The Savages scrambled down like hungry dogs, whooping at their luck. Some hefted wrenches and sledgehammers while others dragged hook-ended chains.

  Kite didn’t want to be here anymore. He pointed a way through the dunes. He hoped the Savages would be too busy tearing up the wreckage to notice a pair of scavvies this far across the crater. Luckily the Savages had other distractions. Another salvage rig rattled overhead. One carrying Hullgrave's crimson anchor on its flank. Crews from every port would be battling for every last rivet before the day was out.

  Kite quickly gathered up the capsized cargo. With a mighty heave he set the sandboat upright. She rocked back and forth, spilling sand. When she'd settled he untangled the lines and checked the mainsail. A nasty rip but nothing a few well-placed stitches couldn't fix. Other than that she was undamaged.

  “Here, help me up,” Ersa said.

  Kite offered his hand. Without warning the Waste Witch clamped her nails down on his wrist, pulling his face close to hers.

  “What did the Weatheren say, boy?” she hissed. “No lies you hear.”

  “Just something about a voice and some fable,” Kite said with gritted teeth.

  Ersa twisted his wrist, her nails biting in to his pale flesh. “What else?”

  “Nothing! He's dead.”

  She stared deep in to his watering eyes. “When I tell you to do something you do it, you hear?” she said and let him go. “I told you before - all it takes is one of them to find us. Then we're both dead as the whales.”

  Kite kneaded the stinging pink semicircles. He tried to think of something defiant to say - one day he would - but for now he nodded stiffly and got them under way.

  4

  The Bothy

  They were a whisper from nightfall now. Dusthaven's sour lights blinked in the distance. A huddle of muddy orange blobs scattered beneath the dirt-streaked chalk cliffs of the Old Coast. Kite steered the sandboat off the Bone Roads, shivering a little in the gathering chill. He was glad to be finally out of the Thirsty Sea and back to some semblance of safety and normality. Not that anyone could accuse Dusthaven of a friendly welcome. At least there was life here.

  The maze-like container town always came as a shock. Stacked five-high in places the rusted metal boxes rattled with generators and the chop-chop of jury-rigged wind turbines. Here and there patches of vivid colour leapt out, brilliant blues and fiery oranges. The livery of companies that once shipped their wares all over the globe.

  Out of the wind Kite took up the mooring rope and pulled the sandboat through the closed-in gaps between the teetering blocks. The stale air was thick with tobacco and foundry smoke. Lanterns buzzed and flickered with idle moths. Angry voices echoed from graffiti hollows. Feral kids scurried by the sandboat, begging for rivets and salt. Ersa flashed her empty gums and the kids soon fled, whooping and calling out names.

  For once Kite welcomed the distraction. Helping as it did to keep his mind off the secret weight hanging at his side and the knot of nerves twisting in his belly. Every now and then he'd catch himself thinking about the Monitor and how close they had come to being discovered
and his skin pinched with cold dread.

  A forty-foot box of rusted steel and peeling emerald paint, their container was out on the edge of the sand, half-buried in a sprawl of razor-edged tindergrass. Not a home as such, but what Ersa called a bothy - a safe place to hide where no-one would ask questions.

  “Don't forget the firewood, boy,” Ersa said, unlocking the loading doors.

  Kite took down the mainsail, carefully folding the canvas. He unpinned the tiller and unloaded their gear. In a town of scavengers you couldn't trust anyone with anything.

  A salvage rig scratched overhead, deck sparking from busy saws. Kite watched the airmachine circling to its berth in Ruster's Roost, wondering if the bones of the Monitor were hidden its hold.

  “Arshush?”

  A tiny voice, barely a whisper. Kite scanned the backs of the rust-mottled containers stacked opposite.

  “Hello?” he called.

  Nothing. He shrugged it off. Must have been the wind.

  The Undercloud grumbled menacingly and shifted with spectral veins of a purplish light - the merest hint of the hidden moon. But the storm never waned enough to reveal its true light. Kite imagined the Foundation's high-altitude airmachines crawling the stars with their Weatheren crews. Searching. Hunting. Telescopes pointed at the Old Coast.

  Kite shuddered. He gathered an armful of faggots from the pile and hurried inside the bothy, securing the loading doors behind him.

  There had been many bothies over the years. The lean-to on Gullspit, Cloven Crag's smoky hollow and the wind-bleached hut near Broken Beach. Ersa never liked to stay in one place for long. Kite had lost track of how many time they'd had to pack their bags in the middle of the night and silently move on. Always the two of them. The Waste Witch and her boy. If there were other Askians in the Old Coast Kite had yet to meet them.