by J M Sanford
“Compose yourself, man,” Greyfell rebuked the skysailor, quietly.
“Greyfell, what is that?” Bessie asked, following the Master’s lead and keeping her own voice calm and quiet. She’d mistaken the thing for a projectile at first, but as it hovered above them, out of range of even the Argean, she realised it had the shape of some kind of bird. She’d seen enough dragonettes zipping around Iletia to know this wasn’t one of them. It gleamed too smoothly, neither as glittering nor as iridescent as a real live dragonette. On impulse, she curled her fist lightly and crooked one arm out high in front of her, as she’d seen men do with their dragonette messengers. Evidently this thing, whatever it might be, was both clever enough to recognise the signal and foolish enough to respond indiscriminately to it. It flitted down towards her, tiny claws outstretched. Bessie bit her lip, hoping that the thin leather of her glove would be enough to protect her hand. The dragonette weighed more than she’d expected, but gripped its perch gently, so that Bessie felt no more than a pinprick of its talons. “Well, aren’t you pretty,” she said, softly. “But aside from that, what are you?”
The clockwork dragonette cocked its head to stare at her with one beady jewel eye, and said nothing.
“A pet?” Bryn guessed. “If somebody is looking for it, they may be very generous in their gratitude.”
“No, it’s all metal. Looks alive, but isn’t.” Bessie glanced at Greyfell, “right?”
“A reasonable assessment. Elizabeth, I have heard of such things before…”
The clockwork dragonette had been following the conversation, its head jerking from one speaker to the next, bright and alert. Bryn might have been right – there was always the possibility that this was no more than the expensive toy of some idle prince. Still, Bessie doubted she had that kind of luck.
“I think I know what you’re thinking,” she said to Greyfell. “It’s some kind of listening device, isn’t it?” Damn the White Side: it simply wasn’t fair for them to have such technology at their disposal. “We don’t know how much it might have heard. We’ll have to –”
The dragonette squawked and kicked away from her hand, out of reach before she or Greyfell could grab it. In an effort to redeem himself, Bryn bounded after it, but it darted overboard before he could catch it.
Bessie dashed to the railings to see the tiny golden figure already diminishing to a single speck of glitter in the wide blue sky. “Damn!”
“Language, Miss Castle!”
Bessie growled and slumped against the railings, not caring much for etiquette at such a time. How could she have been so stupid! Of course such a cleverly made device wouldn’t simply listen; of course it would be able to act on what it heard… And she’d let it just slip out of her grasp.
“Shall I follow?” asked Bryn, bristling and fair vibrating with eagerness as he stared intently in the direction the clockwork dragonette had disappeared.
Bessie shook her head. “No, we know where the White Side are headed for. We just have to get there first.”
18: BEYOND THE END OF THE WORLD
The Storm Chaser cut through the sky, swift and apparently indefatigable. Amelia could only imagine how hard it worked the Captain’s soul to fly night and day. Her conscience still prodded her to visit him frequently and keep him company, and he had become so very quiet, not at all the bright vivacious man she remembered from the beginning of their voyage aboard the Storm Chaser.
“I’m sorry we didn’t manage to get you a new soul,” she said. “Are you sure you’ll be all right? I’m so afraid you’re going to make yourself ill.”
“I’m holding up. But like my Granddad always said: if man was meant to fly, he’d have been born with wings. Not a skysailing man, my Granddad. Never wanted me to fly.”
Amelia thought of the grand skyship, the expense of a soul to buoy it up. “This isn’t a family business, then?”
“Now you’re dead wrong there. My Grandma was a wild girl in her day – a pirate, so they’ll tell you – and the Storm Chaser was hers before she was mine. Sailed all about the world before she met Granddad. Seen the Great Snows and the Siren Islands to the south. She didn’t half have some stories. That’s why Granddad knew he couldn’t keep my feet on the ground: flying’s in my blood. Lucky for you it is, and all.”
“I’m so sorry. We can spare some time to look for another soul, I’m sure –”
“I’ll be well enough,” said the Captain. “Madam Meg says there’s not far to go now. Just this last push into the Stacks.”
“Stacks?”
“One of the greatest natural wonders of our world! Great pillars of rock carved out by the elements. Canyons deep as oceans. Nature’s labyrinth, beyond anything a man could design or build. Something I’ve always wanted to see, and now to see it from such a view as the soulchamber of my own ‘ship! And you,” he boomed, all of a sudden the whole chamber reverberating to the sound of his voice, “are sitting down here in the dark workings, missing all that fine pretty scenery! Get up in the sunshine, woman!”
~
Out on the deck, a summer shower had recently wet the boards, so that the bright sunshine made them gleam almost too bright to look at. Amelia went straight to the bow, curious to see these natural wonders the Captain spoke of, and found Meg there, her face turned to the wind, eyes closed and her jumble of fair curls rain-damp and whipped back around her shoulders. In spite of everything, she looked almost serene, and Amelia gladly joined her. On the railings, gemstone droplets of rain lingered. What did rain smell like, anyway? Amelia took a moment, observed the subtleties of the scent in the air. Like warm dust coming to life, lingering in the air after the rain had fallen, and sweet grass.
The Storm Chaser flew surprisingly low, doubtless so that the Captain could conserve his energy. They skimmed no more than forty feet above the endless plains of tawny grass, the wind whipping it like waves on the sea so that it hissed and whispered, the sound surrounding them, faint but persistent as rumours. Amelia shaded her eyes to gaze out at the horizon, and in the soft haze of the sunny day could just about make out what might be the dark strip of a cliff-side far ahead. As Amelia had guessed, Meg had summoned up some wind spirits, who danced half-visible around the Storm Chaser. Leaping and diving like silvery fish, they had fiercely joyous faces, baring their teeth in broad grins. They seemed to like the game of buoying up the skyship amongst them. Amelia waved to one of them, but it either didn’t see her or didn’t care to converse with mere mortals.
“Where did they come from?” she asked Meg. “I never saw anything like them back in Springhaven.” She was beginning to wonder if she’d just never looked closely enough before; if perhaps she might have spent too much time with her nose in a book after all.
“Oh, they don’t much care for the crowded places,” said Meg. “Never seen ‘em in towns or villages. We’re in their country now.”
Amelia looked down at the boundless waves of grass, the endless undulations of it, like a language she didn’t speak and couldn’t learn. She couldn’t see a town or village anywhere around. A handful of brown and white horses galloped through the high tawny grass, and for a moment she thought she saw human figures on their backs. A heartbeat later she wondered… “Meg? Are those centaurs?”
Meg leaned out precariously over the railings, as if the extra inches would help her make out the distant shapes. Amelia clutched at her arm.
“No need to grab at me, dear,” Meg muttered. “As to your question: they might be. Centaurs do like their peace and quiet, by all accounts.”
Amelia keenly wished that they had the time to stop and investigate, but even as she watched, the herd turned and headed away from the Storm Chaser. “Captain Dunnager said what we’re looking for is in the Stacks.”
“Oh, yes. Won’t be long now, my girl,” said Meg.
Amelia’s chest tightened. It felt like such a long time ago that she’d left the safety of the tower behind her, but she’d never yet thought that her final destinatio
n might now be closer than her home. “What’s going to happen when we get there?”
Meg had been evasive on this subject from the beginning. “I don’t know for sure,” she admitted, finally. “The Queen’s prize lies in a temple in the land of dragons –”
“Dragons? Actual, real dragons?” Amelia hoped the name might be metaphorical, but her experience so far suggested otherwise. The wyverns were bad enough – at least Captain Dunnager had them half-domesticated.
“Yes, ‘actual, real dragons’,” said Meg, annoyed at being interrupted. “There’s a chance we won’t run into any, after all these years, but you’ll have to be ready for anything. You have your magic on your side though. And me.”
~
By the following morning, the great dark cliff face loomed high as a mountain in the Storm Chaser’s path, stretching out on either side as far as the eye could see. The wind spirits had gone: either bored of their game, or Meg had dismissed them before they could dash the Storm Chaser against the cliff face. Amelia, sheltered as she might have been in Springhaven, had seen a shipwreck before. A skyship’s magic might bear it aloft, but grander ships commanded by great admirals had been wrecked on lesser rocks than this cliff. She knew that much.
Meg had ordered Amelia to practice all the spells she could, over and over, and study those she couldn’t safely practice on board, but Amelia couldn’t keep away from the towering horror of the enormous stone wall. While the others ate lunch, Amelia had no appetite, and instead stood at the bow like a worried blonde figurehead. They had ascended to a more usual flying height, or perhaps even higher – Amelia found it so hard to tell, looking down on the homogeneous green-brown of the plains. The cliff top was still far above their heads. After the grassy plains, with nothing but clear blue sky all around, the cliff face grew to engulf everything. Overnight, they’d come close enough to see the bands of dark and light in the stone, smudged with green that must be clinging foliage. Dark cracks, deep and wide, ran from the top of the cliff down to its base. None of them looked quite wide enough for the Storm Chaser to navigate, and so she climbed higher, as Amelia tried to guess what might be on the other side of this impossibly huge wall. She imagined for a moment that there might be nothing at all on the other side; that they had reached the edge of the world and that any skyship sailing over and beyond the wall would lose itself in a wilderness of empty sky. She’d heard of the edges of the world before, in stories, and once the idea had rooted itself in her mind, there was no digging it out, no matter how she reasoned. Soon the Storm Chaser would rise above the level of the cliff top, and then she would see…
“Amelia!” Meg scolded, making her jump. “Stop gawping and get back to your spellbook!”
Amelia stomped off back to the cabin.
~
She studied all afternoon, until her stomach growled in spite of her having more important matters to attend to. She looked up from her spellbook, her eyes dry and itchy from the long hours poring over the arcane texts. The light in the cabin had been growing steadily dimmer, with Amelia scarcely noticing it. The cabin would have been quite dark if not for the fire sprite Stupid illuminating it from his cage.
“Oh, poor thing,” she murmured.
The fire sprite fizzled and sputtered oddly, his sickly colour quite impossible to describe, and certainly nothing Amelia had ever seen before from him. Having had time to cool off, she did regret caging the poor little fire sprite. But if she let him out now, what kind of message would that give him? And what kind of trouble might he get into next, free to roam again? No, he’d have to stay there for the time being. She thought his malaise might have more to do with the altitude to which they had climbed at a startling rate. During one of her chats with the Captain, she had recently learned that this was the cause of her own occasional headaches and nausea. Meg and Percival seemed quite unconcerned by such troubles, although she’d seen Harold looking quite peaky around lunchtime, and he hadn’t eaten as heartily as usual. She hadn’t asked him about it, afraid of offending his manly pride. Putting away her spell book, she fetched the last stale bread roll and a pot of jam, and went to see how they were progressing up the cliff.
As soon as she put her head up above the level of the deck, the expanse of twilight sky shocked her: a deep ink wash of blue, the first glimmer of stars scattered in it. She stared for a moment, and looked all around to make sure they hadn’t changed course without her noticing. But no, they must have surpassed the wall. Below the Storm Chaser, instead of dry brown grassland, she found barren rock. The world was such an unimaginably big place, out of the villages and hamlets of home. Clouds bordered the expanse of rock in a world without a clear horizon. To look at the sky, the Storm Chaser only crawled along. To look down, the ground flashed past at a terrible pace, the skyship’s stern skimming over the rocks by the grace of a mere few feet, in some places. By the fading light, Amelia could make out what looked like dark rivers in the landscape, which when she looked more closely turned out not to be rivers at all, but deep cuts in the rock, leading down into who knew what. The leaves of clinging plants fluttered in capricious and playful winds, losing colour in the twilight, and across the wide emptiness of the landscape, Amelia could just about pick out a few small, stunted trees growing from what meagre sustenance the landscape provided. In the cracks, swallows darted to and from their hidden nests, looping back and forth and piping to one another as the great bulk of the Storm Chaser swept implacably through them on its course. Meg and Percival stood at the helm, gravely discussing the stars, apparently not noticing Amelia. She considered asking them what progress they’d made, how soon they might reach their destination, but decided against it. She sensed somehow that they had already drawn closer than she would like – to have it confirmed would only ruin the tranquillity of the evening. Instead, she crept back to bed.
~
Amelia slept restlessly and awoke in darkness. It must be the small hours of the morning, and she pulled the covers over her head in hopes of snatching at least a little more sleep, but couldn’t. Meg’s bunk looked as if it hadn’t yet been slept in, and she could just about hear muffled voices overhead. Putting on her coat over her nightgown, Amelia crept up onto the deck.
As she came up into the cool and still night air, she guessed what had woken her: after days of constant flight, the Storm Chaser had finally come to a halt. In its path stood an enormous spire, bleak and isolated, blocking out a jagged swathe of stars. A cold wind had got up, and despite the time of year, Amelia shivered a little and pulled her coat tighter around herself. Meg and Percival still stood where she’d left them hours ago, examining the fading stars of dawn by some device Amelia had never seen before.
“Well, this is the place,” said Meg. “Damned if I can see the temple anywhere.”
I don’t understand either,” said Percival. “The stories tell of a jade temple set in acres of beautiful scented gardens. Grounds so vast they had to be tended by an army of gardeners, keeping every bloom pristine, moment by moment. Maintaining it in a state of absolute perfection, worthy of the arrival of the Queen, whenever she should come.”
“So they said. Amelia, don’t creep about in the shadows like that.”
Amelia came forward, looking out over the immensity of the view. The earlier unnatural flatness of the land had turned into a stepped, uneven surface, still alien to her. The ravines opened wider, their unfathomable depths like black water in the scant moonlight. It was from one of these ravines that the enormous jagged column reared into the night sky. Other, smaller peaks stood all around, none of them even a tenth of the size of the biggest one. “So, we’re here?” she asked, feeling more timid than she had in a long time.
“We should be,” said Meg, scowling at the moonlit wasteland.
“The tales are old, Ma’am,” came Captain Dunnager’s voice, emanating from the boards under their feet. “Could it be the ravages of time have knocked the temple down?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Meg leaned
out over the railing again, peering down into the darkness below. If ruins had tumbled down into that abyss, no living man would ever find them. She sniffed, and looked around the bleak landscape as if the temple were something she had momentarily misplaced.
Amelia’s heart ached to imagine the temple ruined a thousand years before her quest had even begun, the army of gardeners died out, the scented garden forgotten and dwindled to weeds and scrubs. She studied the tower. Hard to tell scale for sure in the alien landscape of steps and spires, nothing really to compare to, but it looked a great deal bigger around than the tower where she’d grown up, and more than ten times as tall, not even taking into account how deep its roots might reach into the black depths of the ravine. If she squinted, she could see a stairway circling it. And, while those parts of it in shadow were black as midnight, she thought some of those deep shadows might be tunnels. “This temple we’re looking for,” she ventured, “could it be… inside? In a cave, or, or something?” Yes, that ruled out the notion of it being set in acres of stunning manicured gardens, but old stories grew with embellishments over the ages.
Meg looked dubious, but couldn’t easily ignore Amelia’s suggestion. She drew the line at admitting ignorance, though. “Not an impossible idea, I suppose. You think it’s inside the tower, then?”
Amelia dropped her gaze meekly. “There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”
19: IN THE LAND OF DRAGONS
The first rays of the sun broke across the endless grey plain, lighting the leaves of the sparse trees with fleeting sparks of gold. The golden light picked out the steps of a precarious staircase winding its way up the outer edges of the tower, the platforms and terraces everywhere.
Meg ordered the Captain to set down the Storm Chaser on one of the broad ledges that spiralled the height of the tower, but the skyship proved just too big. As they circled, scouting out their options to land, Amelia searched the surface of the column for likely looking entrances. Then, as they ventured further around the curve of the tower’s circumference, something awful came suddenly into view. Amelia shrank back, crying out in spite of herself.
