by Domino Finn
I frowned. More Celestial words. Did Lilliane put more stock in them than her brother and mother? But then I thought about the question. Was that what being human meant? Part appeal, part curse. The question left a sour taste in my mouth.
"I'm not free," I said wryly. "I haven't been for a while."
Her violet eyes blinked, studying me curiously.
Hard stomps came down the stone. We both turned to see Prince Edric smirking at us.
"Are you finished playing, sister?"
She sat up, still naked. "What is it?"
"It's time," he answered. "The patrols have moved past. We have a window."
Chapter 22
The floating city reached starkly against the gloom. The buildings' edges cut away the dense fog, leaving no doubt that the elements were mastered by this great civilization. Several rings circled a large central tower that dwarfed every other structure tenfold. It was an impressive sight, even in the lowlight and at a great distance.
Rolling blankets of fog reduced visibility but the dragons had a keen sense for danger. We avoided increasing obstacles, almost by instinct, with only a glimpse of warning. Massive sails guiding boats on the thick drift below. Other outposts dotting the sky, piercing blue emanating from the elementals. Each time we would veer away from notice as the dragons flew effortlessly toward our destination.
At one point I was surprised by a party of skags who drifted close. They bayed and squawked. Lilliane just laughed.
"They see us for what we are," she said. "They dare not attack."
For a while it seemed as if we would just fly straight into the city. Then I noticed the structures along the largest outer ring. There were no walls, really. Normal walls were pointless around a floating city. But a tight network of lookout buildings and tariff gates served as wall enough.
"The tower," I said, picking out the highest point of Maqad. "Can you fly us to the top?"
Lilliane shook her head as the wind buffeted past. "Impossible. That's the seat of the shah. It is too well guarded."
"So how do we get over the checkpoints?"
"Not over," she said with a smile. "We go under. Into the drift."
With those words her only warning, she dropped sharply into a dive. Straight down. Through the small clouds that whipped in the wind, sure, but toward the deeper fog. The solid mass that hugged the bottom of the Aether like an ocean.
"The drift? Isn't that dangerous?"
There was no time for an answer. The four dragons, with Tyson and me in tow, plummeted into the surface of smoke. It parted and swirled away from their wings, but folded back over itself and filled the gaps immediately, blinding us. I charmed my eyes with a bit of shadow but it barely helped. This wasn't darkness I was fighting against but something solid, and my ride didn't come equipped with fog lights.
Still, the dragons knew where to go. Or they faked it anyway. I caught sight of the others for seconds at a time before the fog buried them again. They kept in tight formation as if in wordless communication. Tyson was the easiest to spot because of the faint glow drifting beneath his skin.
"It's hard to breathe," I told Lilliane, who seemed not to notice. The air was thick down here, like it was more than air. Visions of being pulled underwater by a mermaid unsettled me. I wasn't so sure Lilliane was any better. "How long do we need to stay down here?"
"Keep quiet," she said. "We don't want to attract the notice of drift serpents. Our fire would spark too much interest from the capital."
I shut my mouth, message received. If there was something the dragons were afraid of, I didn't want to see it. And I certainly didn't want to blow our smuggling operation before we were even in the city.
But there must have been a reason people didn't sneak into the drift all the time. Slowly but surely, I began to sense we were surrounded.
The dragons spread their wings and glided silently, pointing to our flanks. They sensed it too and tried to fly quietly. It was an amazing display of coordination, but we were sinking.
Worse, the air was getting too thick to stomach. It was there, all right, but there was just too much other junk mixed into it. My lungs rejected the substance. I gasped heavily and wished I'd had my breathing mask, but I couldn't take normal objects into the Aether, much less magical ones. I was screwed.
"I can't..." I started, then broke into a fit of coughing. The hacking sound was fifty times louder than it should've been. I mean, there was no echo down here, but the fog carried the piercing sound like it was a physical thing.
"Shit," said Edric.
Suddenly a wall of air blasted us. It was hot and moist and putrid. The wind cleared a pocket of fog in an instant. A giant face loomed before us, a single gargantuan nostril twitching at the end of a heavy exhale.
Oh. Crap. Noodles.
Lilliane and I were framed within the small clearing of air. Some sort of elongated squid head was in there with us. A black beak, a blowhole, marbled inky eyes. Its body extended behind like a snake, not scaled but smooth. A Victorian sea creature and Lovecraftian horror wrapped into one. Rows of tentacles marred the otherwise mirrorlike surface, lazily dragged jellyfish legs.
In a shimmering blur, Lilliane drew her short sword and whisked it at the goliath. The face recoiled, untouched. Then it screeched at jet-engine decibels and dashed past us. The massive body snaked behind it like a long whip. Going and going and going.
"This thing really is a serpent," I said in shock.
"And its beak will snap you in half," she added, kicking her wings and pushing up. As the pocket of air collapsed, I caught sight of the other dragons doing the same.
Even immersed in fog I knew exactly which way was up, and we headed straight at it. I wasn't sure where we were in relation to the city, but it didn't matter. Anywhere was better than this stifling hell pit. The dragons pounded furiously upward in retreat.
Another blast of air cleared a swath below us. Another screech, this one distant. Whales communicating across miles of ocean. Just below, the end of a tentacle whipped into the drift. Then there was a loud scream at point-blank range. It shook us.
Despite Lilliane's wings beating heavily, the serpent's head rolled nearer with an effortless push. The beast spun in a horrifyingly graceful loop before turning and heading straight up for us, beak open.
"I have to blow our cover," said Lilliane. "We can't outrun it." She slowed and spread her hands, calling a warm glow to them.
"No!" I screamed.
I was doing the same thing as her, but forcing shadow into my hands instead of fire. I could take care of this thing. Well... I couldn't really. But I could keep it off our backs long enough to get into the capital.
I thrust a shaft of darkness at the thing's face. The spear glanced off the smooth flesh. I sent out another missile with similar results. I concentrated, improved my aim, and sent another. The beast covered its eyes with some sort of opaque lens, blinding itself but protecting them while on the attack. Although my aim was true, I couldn't pierce the protective barrier.
"You can't stop it," said Lilliane. She spawned a stream of fire from her palms. A bright, lashing explosion of powerful magic. But it sputtered and crackled away in the fog. A match lit underwater. "It's no good," she said, panic overtaking her voice. "The drift. We're too deep."
With a wild surge, she flapped for the city again, but our pause had cost us too much. The drift serpent was incoming. ETA in ten. Nine. Eight.
Like a bullet, the High Sword shot past us from above. The unmistakable flash of light from his royal blade left a contrail behind him.
"Brother! No!"
The metal clanged against the serpent's carapace. It was a slashing strike, designed for a quick getaway in hopes of deterring the charging monster. Easy in, easy out, with no intention of making a real stand. Edric seemed an adept tactician and fighter. One that knew the name of the game was buying time, not total victory.
Unfortunately, Edric had misjudged the great speed of the behemoth.
<
br /> The dragon's body pounded against the serpent's face, bumping and rolling to the side in a wild spin. His short sword snapped from his grip. The unstoppable locomotive barreled forward, unimpeded by the insects on its windshield. Five seconds till impact.
"I won't have you die for me," I said. "Keep flying." Lilliane was too focused on beating her wings to give me much notice. Which helped me out.
I stared at the juggernaut below and unhooked my arms from the dragon. By the time Lilliane spun around in shock, my arms and legs were loose, flailing in the open drift, still shooting upwards from momentum but rapidly giving in to gravity. Lilliane flew higher. The other dragons were gone. And a force of nature like I'd never seen was rapidly coming up from below.
Chapter 23
As the fog collapsed around us, the serpent's blowhole opened another pocket of air. The rush of wind buffered me against the unrelenting fog. It was warm but vile. The breath carried particulate from hundreds of feet of drift-serpent innards. Hundreds of feet of phlegm, parasites, bacteria, and whatever else clogged up the giant snake-squid's airways. It was the mother of all burps and I nearly passed out from the impact.
But there was a much greater collision on its way. I was in the air. Wingless. A freight train was a second away from smashing into me. The behemoth adjusted its course a hair. Not a direction change, just a fractional adjustment, one drivers constantly make along straightaways. The slight movement aligned its gaping beak with my center mass, and I suddenly wondered why I thought I could do better than Prince Edric.
Then I suddenly remembered I was Cisco fucking Suarez.
I willed a wall of shadow into being. It wasn't meant to stop the thing—nothing could do that. The shadow was for me. I placed it just above me at a gentle angle. Only a few seconds into my physics experiment, I was still traveling upward. I hit my own wall and rolled away from it, still ascending, but nudged to the side, out of the path of the sharpened beak.
The squid face hit my wall a split second later, passing through as easily as the drift. Another insect on the windshield. And then it was my turn to splat.
Things were different for me. My wall had been motionless. Edric had been even worse. He was actively charging downward. Two bodies moving into each other can easily double the force of impact. It's what makes head-on collisions so deadly. But I was the bicyclist on the side of the road. The one moving with the flow of traffic. The one lessening the impact.
The wind left me as I slammed into the serpent's face. A yard to my right, the gargantuan beak snapped shut. The sound alone dazed me. Worse than a gun firing by my ear. The sudden crack filled me with great confidence that this thing could snap a steel beam in half if it were so inclined.
Just as Edric had, I tumbled to the side of the serpent's face. But I got my hooks in. My right hand caught hold of something wet and slimy. A precarious hold, mind you, but it stopped my fall.
And just like that I wasn't the fly on the windshield anymore. No. I was that spider. The one that crawls out in a panic as the car reaches speed. The one that hugs the windshield tight until Mr. Toad's Wild Ride comes to an end. The one who hangs onto that porous glass surface with an unbelievable size-to-strength ratio in every one of its eight legs.
Eew. I hate spiders.
I clawed my way to the center of the squid's face, pulling up on my handhold: the circular muscled blowhole. It tensed as I put pressure on it, then quickly clenched shut, dragging me another foot to safety. I widened my stance and pulled my alligator boots under me.
At least, that's what I tried to do. One of my legs was caught. A tentacle had me, just below the knee. The floppy thing had reached up from somewhere along the neck and clung to me. An elaborate defense mechanism. I was a booger stuck in the serpent's nostril hair, waiting to be picked.
Lilliane swooped down, folded her wings over her body, and landed hard with a backflip into a crouch. Her blue sword flashed through the tentacle cleanly. I was loose.
"Now what?" she asked.
I unwrapped the ribbon of tentacle and let it go in the wind. We both rocked to the side as the serpent slowed. Beside us, the dark lens over the eyeball rolled open, and a giant orb focused on us.
Lilliane's sword was quick. It came down hard and true, but the lens snapped shut in a literal blink. The sword rang out uselessly. Metal on metal. Lilliane grabbed the hilt with both hands and tried again. Nothing doing.
Two more tentacles came from the deep.
"Watch out!" I said. The dragon turned her attention to a problem she knew how to solve. Her strikes kept the defense mechanism at bay. The rest was up to me.
I considered the blowhole. Sealed tight by a giant internal muscle. Then I checked the eye. I rested my hand on the lens. It was crystalline and black. A beautifully smooth substance, perfectly thin and perfectly curved, but hard as titanium. I traced my fingers around the curvature to where it met the face. Looking for an opening. If I could just get a grip on the leading edge of the lens, maybe I could pry it away.
The wall was shoved in there tight, though. And deep. I squished my fingers into the moist flesh at the edge of the eye but couldn't reach down far enough to find the end of the lens. The damn thing was simply too massive.
"A little rush, please," said Lilliane, dashing to the side with a spinning strike. She was under assault by several tentacles now. One had hold of the bracer on her left arm. The others weren't just grabbing anymore but whipping at her face. It was all she could do to keep the jabs at bay.
The shadow enveloped my hand. It came quickly and forcefully. It surprised me, almost. I wrapped my fist with layer after layer. A boxing glove of sorts, except the thickness added to the punch. And when I was ready I stood over the eyeball, lifted my hand to my chest, and let it fly with an ear-piercing grunt.
The blow rocked me. Solid and firm against what should have been glass. The black lens dispersed the force across its entire frame. My hand jarred away from the punch without leaving so much as a mark. The lens was perfectly suited to deflecting this kind of damage. I had to change my tack.
Shadow, by its nature, is nebulous. Making it wax and wane, making it sway and drift, these are the fundamental stages of shadow spellcraft. Manipulating it into solid form is where the real power starts. Walls. Wrecking balls. That can take a lifetime to master.
But recently, while fighting a nigh-immortal wolfman, I'd done something different. I'd taken things to the next level. It had just about exhausted my body beyond all measure, but I'd pressed the shadow into a sharp edge.
Imagine that. Something as evanescent as shadow, cutting like a knife.
That had taken a kind of power I was only recently coming to terms with, but I knew I had to try it again. Lilliane's blade hadn't worked, but it was metal. The physics made sense. Against an orb like this, I needed to reduce the impact to the smallest point possible if I had any hope of piercing it. Like cracking an egg.
I folded the shadow in my palm. Let a bit of it drip from my hand and folded that over itself. I was a knife maker, forging from shadow, strengthening my creation by pressing layer after layer together. But something curious happened.
The Aether is made of fire and air. The Aether is immaterial, like my magic. Tyson had said my spellcraft would be powerful here, and I hadn't even pushed it yet.
I willed a knife, but the Intrinsics answered with a sword. The energy coursed through me like I was made of copper. A stronger conduit than ever before, the spirits somehow reached me even in the Aether. And before I knew it, a strong blade shone the color of amethyst in my grip.
A straight Italian longsword, thicker at the base than the point, with a modest straight guard. It wasn't a clunky Final Fantasy sword with gems and a blade as thick as a tree but it wasn't shabby. Its double edge should cut just fine, but I was especially interested in its point.
I didn't hesitate. Somehow I knew the power I wielded. I knew this would work. And I smiled as I brought the magical weapon down into the center o
f the serpent's black lens.
I'd expected a crack. Shattering debris. I didn't get that. Neither did I get the smooth entrance of a light saber. But I did puncture the protective shield.
With a pop of resistance, I buried the blade into the eye, right through a pinhole in the lens. The serpent jerked and wrenched its eyelid open. The sudden movement tore the sword from my hand, which I would've thought impossible. The lens retracted and dragged the amethyst energy across its soft eye tissue, causing a massive amount of self-inflicted damage. The sword fizzled out, the serpent screeched, and his entire mass twisted violently, throwing me off.
I plummeted into the drift. Loose. Alone. The High Justice was swift. Lilliane scooped me from the air and veered up, dodging the flailing tentacles of the beast. The serpent lurched and tumbled, a skyscraper being demolished. We sped a tight circle around it to the safe side and shot to the surface.
"That was a hell of a plan," she said, thin lips in a tight smile.
"Who said anything about a plan?" I shot back. "If I had taken the time to think about it, I wouldn't have jumped."
She laughed as the drift thinned. Her compatriots rejoined her. The prince was there too. Less his jeweled sword, but alive.
"Keep it down from here on out," he ordered.
There was another deep roar from below. The serpent had made enough noise to wake the city, but I figured it was part of the soundscape in these parts. By comparison, a few dragons darting through the drift would be overlooked.
It was still too thick in the shallows to see the underside of the city, but I did catch a part of it. The vertical pipes that dropped into the sea from above like giant tentacles. I'd seen them before. At a distance, they'd looked like stilts supporting the structure. Up close I saw they weren't metal but a textile of some sort. Strong cloth, like a sail, folded around a ribbed skeleton. The pipes were patchwork in places where they'd been repaired, and extendable, probably built from the top down and slowly dropped into the deep. I wondered what they were for as we quietly slalomed between them.
