Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles)

by J. S. Morin

  “Could have plunked ourselves in the middle of the Lumberlands, if you wanted someplace no one would ever look for you.”

  Kezudkan graced Draksgollow with a heavy browed glare. “Let’s be reasonable. We’re not going to live like animals. I wouldn’t ask that of you, and I certainly wouldn’t volunteer myself for exile. We’re hiding away, not turning into vagabonds.”

  “Fine. I’ll get men working on turning this shit hole into a habitable shit hole. I still don’t like the other half of this plan.”

  “First thing’s first. We need to get ourselves hidden safely away. Then we’ll get rid of Erefan.”

  “That rat-eater doesn’t know nuts from bolts. I don’t like losing a machine over him.”

  “Trust me, if we can be rid of Erefan, we’ll be kings.”

  “He knows we’re here,” said Jadon. Though sixteen, his voice had not deepened much. He sounded like a woman. “He sleeps lightly for a twinborn.”

  “He sleeps like a warlock, that’s why,” Denrik said through gritted teeth. “And you were sloppy.”

  The Zaynes, father and son, were cooped up in one of the nicer inns on Tinker’s Island. The proprietress was under the impression that they were paying well, thanks to Jadon’s magic, and settled up through month’s end. Everything in the room was white: curtains, bedding, pillows, walls. All was bleached and whitewashed and starched stiff as a mast. It was the sort of place that hung its hat on being a clean inn, the sort of damp praise offered in seedy waterside towns where being free of lice and roaches was a badge of honor.

  “He’ll tell someone.”

  Denrik stalked across the room and back. “Who?” he asked at length. “The girl knows, and by all accounts has said nothing. I don’t think he gets on with the Mad Tinker at all. They’re like kerosene and water.”

  “We should go.”

  Denrik fumed, chest heaving at each breath. Such power within their grasp, and that spoiled, sadistic Kadrin boy was standing in their way. His eyes settled on his son, so calm by comparison. Jadon’s expression hadn’t changed since he arrived back from spying on Dan. Jadon’s expression rarely changed, ever. He was the rock in a stormy sea, unbothered by the chaos around him.

  Denrik shook his head and blew out a breath to cleanse his anger and settle his thoughts. Heat was bad for the brain, anger bad for judgment, and passion bad for business. “No. No, we can’t waste this chance. Too much, too many rely on our success.”

  “He’ll kill us.”

  “I well bloody expect him to try!” Denrik shouted before remembering that anyone could have been to either side of their room, just the other side of a thin wall of plaster and paint.

  “Letters are better.”

  “What?” Denrik stopped short in his pacing.

  “We leave. Send letters. Madlin can find us if you tell her where.”

  Denrik wagged a finger in the air as he restarted his circuit of the room. “No, that leaves them a perfect chance to set us up for an ambush. As long as we’re in their realm, we will be on our guard. If we go back about our business, we’ll grow lax and lazy about watching ourselves.”

  “Madlin won’t betray us.”

  Denrik sniffed. “Lot you know of betrayal.”

  “Madlin won’t betray us.”

  “You say that like she calls us allies. We’ve merely dangled the prospect in the water. She’s yet to bite or swim off.”

  Jadon remained silent. The boy’s eyes didn’t follow Denrik as he paced.

  “Why won’t she?” Denrik asked.

  “In her heart, she is like us.”

  “‘Piss pot of a world,’ she called it.” Denrik scratched at his beard. He took a decanter from a dainty table by the window and poured himself a glass of brandy. “Think she might join with us? Common cause and all that?”

  “The machine can do it. Guns for magic.”

  “But not if we get killed by that demon child, is that it?”

  Jadon didn’t answer. The boy always seemed to know when keep his mouth shut. It was what he did best, maybe even better than magic.

  “Fine.” Denrik swallowed the brandy in a single gulp. “We’ll leave a letter before we depart. We need to find Stalyart, so we’ll have to find someplace with card halls, whores, and excellent liquor.”

  Jadon nodded. “Marker’s Point.”

  Denrik smirked. “It always seems to come back to there, doesn’t it?”

  The Katamic Sea was in a sorry state, licking against the wharfs of Yekina harbor like a dog begging for attention. The tide was as low as it got, but the wharfs were long and sunk deep into waters that would berth an Acardian battleship, if they had any cause to stop in a Takalish harbor. The Merciful was a ship that carried no painted name on its side, or rather, it carried many different ones, none its own. Today it was the Gallant Net, a sly joke that amused its captain to no end.

  The Mad Tinker counted more Takalish among his employees than any other nationality. Of the six who had been stranded from the Darksmith, four of them called Takalia home. All six spoke the language. It was a fair sight kinder than dropping them at Marker’s Point, which was a day’s sail closer to the desolate island where Tanner and the others had been stranded.

  “Obliged, as always,” Tanner said cheerfully. It was easier to find cheer with a full belly and a head swimming in ale. He leaned precariously over the railing, watching his fellow castaways trudge down the gangplank, the wooden span bouncing beneath each step.

  Tanner’s companion at the rail looped a protective arm around him. A swordsman has an innate balance that even a sailor could envy, but spirits can fog the optics of the finest spyglass. “Mayhap you stay aboard this time. Word of your survival will trickle back and your little friend can cease worrying over your memory.”

  Tanner swiveled his head around, pausing a moment to let the sea and ship stop spinning. He looked Captain Stalyart over as if he had never met the man. He was suave, slick-haired, and olive skinned, tanned to a color his parents would never have known him by. He wore a nobleman’s garb with a scoundrel’s flare, leaving his shirt unbuttoned and his sleeves rolled to the elbow. He wore jewels fit for an heiress at his ears, neck, and fingers. For a moment, Tanner tried to remember whether Stalyart had ever met Dan before. Tanner was fairly certain that he had.

  “I’m sure ... I’m sure he’s all broke up. Pro’bly sacked a city, sacrificed a hundred surgeons in my honor.”

  “I believe it is virgins that are the preferred offering to the gods,” said Stalyart with a twinkle-eyed grin.

  Tanner blew through loose lips, making an obscene noise. “Dan’s ain’t never had no hundred virgins anywhere near him. Sort who’d ... run round ‘n orchard wiff a stick. A stick. Knockin’ apples off.”

  “Mr. Tanner, you have misplaced your liver,” said Stalyart. “I knew a man who wore your face who drank me out of a case of Cerrian Blue. What have you done with him?”

  “Ain’t got proper pissed in ages. Rotten little puke. Hav’ta watch him like a block. A ... a hawk. Elsewise he’s gonna ... bodiesallovertheplace.” Tanner blinked a few times. A moment’s fumbling inside his jacket produced a bottle with a splash of amber liquid in the bottom. He pulled at the cork, but his fingers slipped off each time he tried. He held the bottle out to Stalyart.

  The pirate captain took the bottle and examined the label up close. “Turning Hills. Acardian, but a good year. I think I paid five hundred eckles for this bottle.”

  Tanner pointed a wobbly finger Stalyart’s way, chuckling. “You don’t ... you don’t—you stole that!”

  Stalyart grinned, showing off sparkling white teeth. “I may have, at that.” He drew his cutlass and used the blade to pry up the cork’s edge. There was a little pop as it came free. Tanner made a grab for it as it sailed over the ship’s railing, but came away with only air.

  Stalyart raised the bottle to the sun above. “To old friends, returned.” He swallowed what seemed like a fair half of the remaining liquor. />
  “Ole friens,” Tanner agreed. He took the bottle and swung it up to his lips in one motion. As he tilted his head back to drain the last of it, he kept on tilting until he fell over, thumping with dead weight against the Merciful’s deck.

  In an ancient part of an ancient building, an ancient man hunched over a bowl of lukewarm stew. There were no sparse rooms in the Kadrin Imperial Palace, nor were any small or plain, or made of anything but polished black marble with green veins. The one Axterion had taken for his own was the one he had best found able to turn cozy, to fill with enough flotsam and detritus from his nearly hundred and fifty summers of life that he could feel like he took up the room. In so much of the palace, the rooms ignored you. A human was a speck of dust or a cobweb, as far as the throne room or the great banquet hall cared. Axterion surrounded himself with books and maps, chests of old clothes, footstools and pillows, anything he could think of to bring comfort to the cold confines.

  Axterion was midway through a bite of soggy potato when a knock interrupted his meal. He finished his bite before answering. “Can’t a man sup in peace?”

  “He can,” a young voice called back, “but we’re at war.” The door opened and Danilaesis poked his face through with an insouciant grin slathered across it.

  “Bah, just you.” Axterion stuffed another spoonful of soup into his mouth.

  “Is that any way to treat your favorite grandson?” Danilaesis asked.

  Axterion frowned into his stew. “Remind me again how many I’ve got besides you.”

  Danilaesis’s face fell. The young warlock slunk into the room and shut the door behind hm. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “You ought to try it,” said Axterion, sloshing his words around a bite of carrot and broth. “Mean things more often, and you’ll make less an ass of yourself. And quit carrying that disinterred bit of dragon about on your back. You’re no warlock until I say you are.”

  “If it flies like a hawk, if it has talons like a hawk, if it can spot its prey from above the clouds and swoop down for a kill, is it not a hawk? Call it a chicken or a sparrow, but it’s still a hawk.”

  Axterion chewed in silence a moment, one brow furrowed. “You’ve just come from Logic and Rhetoric, is that it? I may need to have a cross word with your Arveron if he keeps filling your head with nonsense about hawks to dump beside my supper.”

  Danilaesis set his sword down on a table piled with books, balancing it precariously across Dweomers of the Age of Gehlen and Musing on the Conscience of Man. With a somber mien, he picked up a stack of Imperial Circle reports from the chair across from Axterion and took a seat in their stead. “Grandfather, I didn’t come up here to bother you.”

  “Best news I’ve heard all day. I’ve finally cracked completely, and I’m just imagining you.” Axterion dug deep in his bowl, giving the watery meal his utmost attention. “Finish a meal in peace,” he mumbled.

  “Grandfather, I’m serious!” Danilaesis took the old man by his spoon arm. It was enough to draw a glare that would have sent shivers through an army seventy winters ago. “I got hold of some books in Tellurak.”

  “What sort of books?” Axterion asked slowly. There was something urgent in Danilaesis’s manner that piqued the old sorcerer’s curiosity, one of the few parts of him not decayed to ruin with extreme age.

  “They’re written in Arcane.”

  “Unusual for Tellurak, certainly.”

  “Exactly! The Korrish twinborn think it’s just gibberish written in daruu. They’re letting me copy them so I can bring it here for translation.”

  Axterion set his bowl aside and slumped back in his chair. This sounded like something worth settling in to hear. “I take it, then, that you did not immediately confess to being literate in the dragons’ tongue?”

  A sly, toothy grin was all the answer he required. “The books are crazy. I don’t know who wrote them, but they weren’t from Korr, or Veydrus, or Tellurak.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because they’re written to help someone who’s been stranded. It’s like they’re manuals for being shipwrecked. They keep calling the reader ‘traveler’ and refer to a bunch of worlds as the lands of savage children, ours included.”

  “And this is how they built that machine you told us about.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the half of what’s in there. There’s diagrams in there that probably make more sense to the Korrish, but they can’t read the text. I’m actually a little impressed that they built a working machine, now that I’ve seen the books. I couldn’t do it. Then again, without reading Arcane, they couldn’t have brewed this.”

  Danilaesis reached into his pocket and pulled out a vial the size of his finger. A clear liquid oozed about inside as Danilaesis leaned the vial back and forth, trying to tantalize.

  “What is it?”

  “What you want most of all.”

  Axterion snorted. “You young folk. Think you know it all. What I want is a back that doesn’t ache no matter whether I stand or sit, a bladder that’ll leave me in peace the night through, and enough wind in my lungs to manage the stairs without a stop halfway.”

  Danilaesis held out the vial. “Then here you go.” He wasn’t an earnest boy, as a rule. Not one bit. He was a braggart and a bully, a sly prankster and a cruel friend to those few who would even dare call him such. With more than a fair inkling of the budding tyrant he had grandsired tempering his curiosity, Axterion took it.

  “What is this?”

  “If your supply of youth elixir should run short during your time among the savages, fear not, traveler! This simple concoction works nearly as well.” Danilaesis quoted, putting a hand to his chest and enunciating each word like a boy who had just come from his rhetoric class. “And like bloody piss it was simple! I needed Torbur’s help to brew it. Half the ingredients need aetherial preparation, and the Academy apothecary barely had enough of a few things to make that much.”

  “This will make me young again?” Axterion asked, his voice fading to a whisper. He shook his head to clear it. “How much younger? Does the book say?”

  “No, and I wasn’t about to try it myself. I could end up playing toy soldiers in the gardens with the princes.”

  “Seems awfully risky.”

  “Grandfather, be realistic. How much are you risking? A summer, maybe two?”

  “I’ve hung on longer than anyone ever guessed already.”

  “All the more reason to take your chance while you have it. You could breathe your last any night, just drift to sleep and never wake.”

  Axterion knit his brow. “Feeling all sentimental today, huh?”

  “Me?” Danilaesis asked, pointing to himself. He turned the finger to Axterion. “When I asked you what you wanted most, did your dead children even flicker through your dusty old brain? What about your wife? What about Brannis?”

  Axterion gave a cynical chuckle, little more than a pair of snorts at his own expense. “Can’t say they did. Guess I’d closed those books; just wanted to twist your ear a bit about the problems I face, dawn to dusk and the night through in between.”

  “Well, maybe I did think about my father, and Uncle Maruk, and Brannis and Aloisha, Iridan, Juliana, and Uncle Rashan. Gut you crossways, old man, we’re all the family we’ve got left. Drink the stuff and be done with it!”

  Axterion felt the cool glass between his fingers, and held it up to the light. “Might be nice to work magic again, not waste my whole Source fighting a slow retreat against age.” The wooden cap popped off with a bit of effort; the rim of the vial was tacked with honey. It was the honey he tasted first as he tilted the vial back and poured the contents into his mouth.

  The elixir itself tasted like ... sunshine? Axterion had expected something foul and acerbic; he hadn’t even dared sniff the stuff, lest he lose his nerve. Instead, warmth oozed through him like spilled syrup, starting at his tongue and spreading through the whole of him.

  When he dropped his arm to the s
ide and let the vial slip from his fingers with a sigh more fit for a bordello than an elderly man’s lunch table, he found Danilaesis staring him with eyes like coins.

  “How do you feel?” Danilaesis asked. His eyes locked onto Axterion’s, which drooped under an unaccustomed languor.

  Axterion picked up his spoon and bowl. “Famished.”

  Chapter 20

  “If you can’t make do, all you’ll make is don’t.” -Cadmus Errol

  Rynn paced the cargo hold of the Cloudsmith, her mismatched gait coming more naturally now than when she had first hobbled around her own cabin. Rumor had spread about her mechanical leg, of course, but one would hardly guess by looking. She wore baggy trousers and a matched pair of boots. She could have been a war hero come home with a limp, for all an unknowing observer could tell. So what if there was a hiss of air with each step or a faint grinding of metal every time she turned? The smell of lubricating grease hung about her often enough that a bit more was hardly worth noting.

  There were many observers there in the hold with her. Every twinborn not on duty had showed up to watch, along with most of the one-worlder crew. The hold was packed with rebel humans, though they gave a bit of respectful (and fearful) space around the world-ripper machine and its attendant equipment. They also kept clear of the dozen rebel soldiers selected for special duty, who stood ready by the aperture.

  In the machine’s view was Glenwood Sky Aerodrome, a vast expanse of poured-stone littered with stone buildings and parked airships. Kuduk soldiers and workers saw to whatever daily tasks were required of the menial oppressors of humanity. All wore uniforms of one sort or another. The Grangian military favored dull grey for their troops and pale grey for the mechanics and laborers. The base would be quieter at night, but the plan needed light to make it work.

  “Get a good look,” said Rynn, letting her voice carry well beyond the dozen who required instruction. The hold was quiet save for her voice, the hum of the world-ripper at idle, and the occasional cough or shuffled foot. At a gesture from Rynn, Erefan swept the view down a row of liftwing airships. They were of a different design than the first Ruttanian models the rebellion had stolen, with just a single seat. The Grangian ships were smaller, too, but not small enough for the wingspan to fit through the world-ripper’s frame. “I want eight ships off the ground within thirty seconds of the hole opening. Is that understood?”