The Riders of Thunder Realm

by Steven Lochran

In Thunder Realm we make ’em tough,

  As strong as stegosaurs, twice as rough.

  So heed our words and don’t you blunder:

  Never ever muck with the Realm of Thunder!

  The crowd cheered, slamming their tankards together. Joss and Sur Verity quickly slipped through to find a table in the corner of the room.

  ‘Hey! I know you!’ one of the patrons shouted over the noise as he grabbed Joss’s elbow. He was a burly man with a beard that looked to have absorbed more of his drink than he had, his chin dripping with foam. ‘Sur Wallace Wundamore! Right?’

  ‘Er –’ Joss wavered.

  ‘That was a tidy bit of work at the Tournament, if ’n I may say so. Y’sure put that haughty Wolfsbane in her place –’

  The bearded man’s grin curdled as Sur Verity slid into view. Staying resolutely silent, he let go of Joss’s arm, picked up his tankard and shuffled to the far end of the room.

  Eating quickly and quietly, Joss and Sur Verity had no sooner finished their meals than they both excused themselves to their rooms for the night, where Joss’s sleep was interrupted every few minutes by the crowd performing yet another song at the highest volume they could physically manage. He groaned in frustration as he wedged his head between his pillows, blocking out the music.

  Joss found himself consumed by thought in the unnatural silence that followed, obsessing over what awaited him at Tower Town and all the dangers that lay ahead on the Way. He twisted and turned restlessly in his sheets until finally he pulled the pillow from his head and flung it across the room. He far preferred the noise downstairs to that of his own thoughts, no matter how loud.

  They set off the next morning through the dawn mists, Joss yawning through his tiredness. Thankfully, at this hour, the roads were quieter than the inn had been. The only other traveller that Joss could see was a man hunched atop an ankylosaur-drawn wagon that was overladen with caged microraptors.

  With fog still blanketing everything, the driver failed to see the deep pothole in front of him until it was too late. The wagon hit the hole with a loud crunch, and three of the cages sprang from the top of the pile to smash open on the ground. Suddenly free, the microraptors scattered in every direction.

  ‘Muck!’ the wagon driver bellowed, watching as his livestock raced for the bushes on the roadside and on towards freedom. But then an eerie, lilting tune filled the air, and the raptors all froze.

  They looked up at Joss in unison, or at least that was how it seemed. Turning, Joss saw that Sur Verity had pulled her song sword from its scabbard and was spinning it above her head. The runes along the blade’s face glowed as she traced patterns in the air, swiping the song sword as if it were a conductor’s baton and the microraptors her orchestra. The little thunder lizards all swayed to her song, hypnotised by its melody.

  ‘Thank ye for the mighty kindness, m’lady,’ the driver said with a tip of his floppy hat as he scrambled from his wagon. Grabbing a couple of the emptier cages from the tray, he started scooping up the loose microraptors from the road. Silvery feathers flew everywhere as he dumped them in, while Azof huffed beneath Joss and scraped his foot in the dirt. Joss pulled gently on the reins to quiet him down.

  ‘Not at all,’ Sur Verity said, waiting until the driver had dropped the last of the thunder lizards into the cage before sheathing her song sword. The melody ended, the microraptors returned to their shrill screeching. ‘The smaller ones are easier to control. If it was your beast there that had gone charging off, we’d have had a much harder job on our hands.’

  Sur Verity gestured to the ankylosaur, which was busying itself by slurping the moss off a nearby boulder. The driver chuckled and pushed his hat back from his forehead to reveal a bright but crinkly smile.

  ‘Well, I thank ye. And Lord Ignatius of Axehead Flats thanks ye. That’s where these little fellas are bound. He dunt have any hatching facilities, so his Lordship pays me to rear ’em on his behalf until he has a use for ’em.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Sur Verity replied, offering the driver a faint glimmer of a smile. Joss tried to hide his amazement. ‘In that case, please let his lordship know that Sur Verity Wolfsbane of Round Shield Ranch sends her regards.’

  The driver’s smile fell away. His jaw went slack. Yanking the hat from his head, he dropped to one knee and cast his eyes to the ground in front of him.

  ‘Yes, m’lady. Which is to say, yes, Sur Verity, I’ll do just that. And thanken you again for your help. I’d have been lost without it.’

  ‘Not at all.’ Sur Verity bowed her head towards the man before flicking her reins, her mount shifting into an amble. ‘Ride well.’

  Joss watched Sur Verity go for a moment before following her, nodding at the driver as he went. The driver waved back hesitantly, then returned to his wagon.

  ‘I think you’ve won a fan there,’ Joss said, pulling alongside her as they rounded a curve in the road.

  Sur Verity harrumphed. ‘All I did was my duty, in the simplest way and with the least amount of effort. If you’re looking to win fans, you’ll have to wait until the next Tournament is held.’

  Does she need to make a point of everything? Joss wondered with a frown, though rather than say anything he simply slowed Azof ’s pace and kept a distance from Sur Verity and her barbed words.

  Eventually the fog lifted and the day brightened. The two riders soon came upon a town that had been built among a series of giant crooked girders, the rusty red of the metalwork all but lost to the green of the ivy that choked it.

  Scattered among the girders were dozens of hovertrain carriages in just as many colours. A white carriage served as the town’s library, a blue carriage had been turned into a tavern, a black carriage was now doubling as the warden’s office, while green carriages had been made into homes with planter boxes decorating their windows. An old woman was sweeping the front step of her carriage house as Joss and Sur Verity rode past, while schoolchildren rushed to the red carriage of their classroom.

  ‘Years ago, this town didn’t exist. Not until the disaster,’ Sur Verity said, stirring from her silence without ever actually looking over at Joss. ‘It was meant to be the world’s biggest, fastest, safest hovertrain, and the first to link Thunder Realm with Illustra and the rest of Ai. The Resilient, they called it. But its designers hadn’t taken into account the bindings that the spriggan people had erected centuries prior.’

  ‘Your ancestors?’ Joss asked.

  Sur Verity offered a small nod, the emerald streaks in her hair glistening. ‘The spriggans used magical barriers to keep their herds from straying and their enemies from invading, and it’s those same barriers that have kept Thunder Realm from ever constructing any significant infrastructure. The train designers thought their refined technology would be enough to circumvent the archaic spellcraft. They were wrong. And nearly a thousand souls were lost due to their hubris.’

  Sur Verity paused in telling her story to point out a marble pillar in the centre of the town. It looked to have been softened over time by the wind and the rain, but Joss could still see the countless names that had been inscribed on its surface.

  ‘From the wreckage they built this town, and they called it “Resilient” in memory of what happened here. T
he carriages couldn’t be moved past the same barriers that had triggered the crash, so they’ve been painted and put to good use. And so too do they serve as a reminder; ignore the old ways at your peril.’

  Joss was still considering Sur Verity’s words later that evening, long after they’d left Resilient and its carriage buildings behind them. They had set up camp on the edge of the Searing Sands – the red desert at the heart of Thunder Realm – with the promise of an early start the next day.

  Thinking over what Sur Verity had said, Joss agreed that the Resilient’s designers should have shown more care, but he couldn’t help feeling that there was more to the story than that.

  ‘You can take hope from tragedy, and build something new from the wreckage of the old …’ he muttered, the words springing from someplace deep within him as he stared at the pot of chilli cooking over the fire pit.

  ‘What was that?’ Sur Verity asked, stirring the chilli before tapping the wooden spoon on the edge of the pot and replacing the lid.

  ‘Nothing,’ replied Joss. ‘Just something my father once told me.’

  For the second night in a row, they ate together in silence. The sky was still streaked with red and gold when Sur Verity told Joss it was time to turn in, insisting that they not end up caught in the Searing Sands under a midday sun.

  As he lay in his bedroll, Joss clutched the Champion’s Blade close to his chest. Though he tried not to draw any attention to it in front of its former owner, he was quickly finding that the sword served as so much more than a trophy. It was a talisman, offering him courage and confidence where he lacked it. Its presence helped him to ward off any lingering doubts as he settled into sleep, Sur Verity’s warning about the Searing Sands still ringing in his head.

  Joss saw the wisdom of her words for himself the next morning when he looked out across the horizon to see it already shimmering with heat. Thankfully he’d heeded the other piece of advice that Sur Verity had offered, rationing his water enough that he still had some left by the time they came to a rocky peak stretching almost as high as a mountain.

  ‘Ancestors preserve me,’ Joss gulped as he and his mount started up the incline. Azof whickered louder and louder as he struggled with each step, the path that led upward made of the same pulverised bone as the previous tracks.

  ‘Don’t worry, boy. Not long to go now,’ he assured the raptor, and hoped that he was telling the truth. As always, Sur Verity and Levina were outpacing them both, scaling the hill with the speed and endurance of a mechanoid spider.

  Gradually the ground levelled out, bringing them to a plateau with a view across the desert to a tower made from what looked to be scrap metal. It rose from the salt flats like a giant railroad spike, nailing the sky to the earth. Pterosaurs circled among the many airships that had all been tethered to the tower’s peak, while a shanty village below was nearly lost in the building’s colossal shadow.

  ‘There it is. Tower Town,’ Sur Verity said, pausing to take in the sight before mushing Levina onwards. ‘Try not to gawp too much.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  A WORLD AT THEIR FEET

  IS it meant to be doing that?’ Joss asked as they rode down the hill towards Tower Town. The whole building was swaying back and forth so much that it looked like a reed bobbing around in a swift stream.

  ‘Between the quakes and the twisters they have around here, they had to make the tower flexible so it wouldn’t topple over,’ Sur Verity said. She added with an odd smile, ‘Just wait until you’re on the top floor. It’s like standing on the deck of a ship in the middle of the ocean.’

  Joss wondered, given the sourness of Sur Verity’s expression, if that comparison was meant to spook him. Instead he found it oddly comforting, thinking of the hammock he had slept in during his time at the Orphan House and, even further back than that, the dim memory of being aboard his father’s ship as it crashed through bright blue waves on its way back home. Not that swaying hundreds of storeys up in the air was the same as being on the bow of a Daheedi boat, but at least it got him to stop thinking about how something so tall could possibly stay aloft.

  Negotiating their way down the hillside was far easier than riding up it, and before long they were racing across the salt flats that surrounded Tower Town like a gleaming moat. It was only as they were closing in on the shanty village at the building’s base that Joss spotted the long stretch of highway that wove through the desert directly to the tower’s doors.

  ‘We could have been on a proper road this whole time?’ he exclaimed in shock, while Azof snorted with frustration.

  ‘Of course,’ Sur Verity shrugged. ‘Though if you’d prefer to be stuck in that traffic, be my guest.’

  She gestured to the line of autowagons and caravans and grounded jet-carts, all of them honking at one another as they waited to enter a tunnel that opened directly beneath Tower Town.

  ‘Down there are the tower’s loading bays,’ Sur Verity said before Joss even had the chance to ask his next question. ‘I hear it can take near a full day to access. Not that we need worry about that. Participants in the binding ceremony are granted immediate entry … so long as they know where to go.’

  Slowing their raptors to a trot, they came to the shanty village. Many of the structures were nothing more than tents, their tarps fraying at the edges. Some had been slapped together from metal sheets to slump against each other like exhausted travellers. Only occasionally would there be a freestanding building with an actual framework and concrete walls, though even then it was often hard to tell if it was half-built or half-demolished.

  But more than buildings, there were people. Grandmothers sat on tattered blankets, selling cheap trinkets. Children chased stray animals. Women carried bundles of washing. Beggars rattled tin cups, and men leant in lopsided doorways with their hands in their pockets, watching the crowds.

  ‘I didn’t expect so many people to be outside waiting to get in,’ Joss said, looking around at the gathered hordes.

  ‘They aren’t,’ Sur Verity replied as they pushed on towards the scrap-metal skyscraper. ‘Even with how big it is, Tower Town can only support so many people. This is the overflow. Many of them were once farmers whose lands ran dry or were lost to the bank when payment couldn’t be made. Now they sell what simple wares they can to make ends meet, while others have no option but to beg.’

  Among the crowd, Joss could see an old man in a wobbling hoverchair. His face was rough, his clothes grey and unwashed, and his right leg nothing more than a stump. He carried no song sword, no thunderstick, no whip. He had no mount or armour, and he wore no emblems or colours. But there was something about the way he sat in his chair as it trembled through the makeshift street that told Joss everything he needed to know.

  ‘And paladeros?’ he asked quietly. ‘They live here too?’

  ‘Aye. And paladeros, too. There are many like Sur Wallace who battle with a corrosive influence and finally succumb to it, whether it be drink or some other evil. More than that, there are those who found themselves grievously injured while conducting their duties, and who belong to orders far less compassionate than ours. An injured paladero with no order has few places to go.’ Sur Verity finished by looking down at Joss with an air of foreboding. ‘Disobedient prentices and those who fai
l the Way have even fewer.’

  Joss didn’t give her the satisfaction of showing any sign of nerves. Only when she looked away did he relax again, watching the old paladero as he steered his hoverchair into a nearby saloon, its doors swinging shut behind him.

  Finally they came to the base of the tower, wider than the walls of Round Shield Ranch, wider even than the stadium at the Tournament. In the shadow of this great building sat a spindly mechanoid, a camera set in the middle of its face like a single bulging eyeball.

  ‘State your business,’ it croaked, peering over the panel that looked to control the many elevators running up and down the tower like the veins on a brachiosaur’s neck.

  ‘Sur Verity of Round Shield Ranch, escorting prentice Josiah Sarif. We’re here to see the Grandmaster Council,’ replied Sur Verity.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ the mek tapped at the elevator’s control panel and a metal cage zipped down to land in front of them, its doors rattling open.

  ‘Thank you kindly,’ Joss said to the mechanoid as he and Sur Verity rode past it and into the cage. The mek didn’t reply.

  There was a brief pause before the doors shut behind them, and then the elevator shot up in a rush of force. Joss felt himself growing light-headed, watching as the earth flew away from them and the floors of the building sped past.

  Just as he was considering how discreetly he could be sick in the corner, the elevator slowed to a stop and the doors shuddered open to reveal an antechamber made entirely of pipes and metal grates, with swords and thunder lizard skulls fixed to the walls. Other than that, the room was as silent and empty as the desert at dawn.

  Sur Verity rode inside to dismount. Following her, Joss did the same. He landed clumsily on the slippery metal, his boots clanging like a hammer striking a bell. Sur Verity glared at him, of course, but the noise was enough to alert their hosts to their presence.