Fire in the Wall
Page 34
A man with heavy eyebrows, a strong, crooked nose, and a mass of braids hanging from his head and chin. His eyes were desperate, He looked like he was gasping for breath—he reached out for me.
I think it was the look on his face. There was no anger, no malice. Just asking. Pleading. Without thinking, I reached out, too, and touched him.
A hot, stinging pain exploded in my fingers. I ripped my hand back, clutched it to my chest—it was bleeding.
I saw, to my horror, that I was missing my fingertips—all four, cut off flat, spewing blood all over me.
Sorry, a faint voice oozed into my awareness. So sorry. So sorry.
Blood was pouring onto the deck. I wrapped my fingers, throbbing with pain, in my shirt, and it was soaked in seconds. I’m hallucinating, I thought wildly. Hallucinating, again.
The world was dimming . . . fizzing into darkness, into rocking, fissioning grey, and the tunnel closed in on my vision, narrowing, narrowing until there was just black, and the pain faded.
Nothing.
I was nothing.
It was nice, the darkness. The drifting. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t worry about anything. I didn’t care. Honestly, did not care. And it was wonderful. Such a relief. Like floating underwater, with no need to fill your lungs . . . just watching the bubbles stream from your mouth . . . only no water and no bubbles.
Just . . . nothing.
It felt like no time at all, and also longer than I’d ever thought of, much longer than I’d lived so far. There wasn’t time; time didn’t matter.
Something started ticking . . . or throbbing. Yes, that was it. A throbbing, in my shoulder.
I had a shoulder.
It hurt.
The pain multiplied, rose up over me like a red wave of pain. I heard roaring.
There was talking.
“He’s okay.” A flat statement, emotionless . . . no, full of emotion—the very absence of emotion pointing toward too much emotion.
Lil’s voice.
“He has lost a piece. But he will be . . . fine.”
Eap’s voice. A tremor in it. The first time I’d ever heard him unsure.
“The boy will live.” A strong, mellow voice I didn’t recognize. Curiosity pricked me, so I opened my eyes and turned to face it.
Hans.
I almost didn’t recognize him. His hair was gleaming, clean, and fell down his neck in a regal curling wave—pale silver, almost white. He was looking at me; he smiled when I opened my eyes, gave me a nod. “The boy will be fine,” he said, straightening, raising his hand—it had been on my cheek.
Pain ripped through me as I shifted, preparing to sit up.
“Lie still,” Hans said. “Give your flesh time. You were not blyked, thank God above, but you’ve lost a great deal of yourself. Your body and spirit are working hard to regenerate.”
“Should . . . we go to the witches again?” Lil asked. Her voice was tremulous, and she couldn’t quite look at me.
“Lil,” I said.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Knelt by me. “It’s my fault,” she murmured.
“Everyone was distracted. The wolf— “
“No.” Lil glared. “I mean . . . all. Everything. That we’re here.”
It startled me, the sudden acknowledgement. “Well . . . yeah,” I said.
We eyed each other warily. Lil, waiting for me to grind it in, to flay her. Me, waiting for the apology that wouldn’t come.
I blew my breath out hard, stirring the small curls of gold that framed her wide eyes, gold-tipped lashes, perfect, tilted nose.
“Don’t cut off the rest of your hair, though,” I said. “I don’t think you’d look great bald.”
Lil’s face eased into its usual blank calm. She gave me a slight jerk of the head. And sat back on her heels.
I shifted my weight again, groaned against the pain, and sat up.
We were clustered together in a small space—sticks woven all around and above us to a domed, low roof.
A hut.
A smell worked its way into my awareness . . . the stink of dead rotting meat. “We’re in the dome,” I said. “The wreck.”
“Our firmament,” Eap confirmed.
“New Grandeur,” Hans said, his voice hinting at irony, a distasteful curl on the corner of his mouth.
The glass above us had cracked open. Sunlight streamed down on us. We were a cracked dish of jungle, held up to the sky.
Eap nodded. He was sitting with his legs crossed, the baggy cloth of his pants puddling around him like he was wearing a dark robe. “We lost the ship,” he said. “We had to retreat to the dome.” His eyes gleamed and he gave me a hint of smile. “But it held, Logan. The blyks have all gone. They put up quite an assault, but they could not take the dome. It was too firm. We’d told it too well.”
“We can rebuild the ship,” I said.
“We have firmament,” Hans replied in the same moment. We glanced at each other. Hans turned away, snapping his fingers. The small brown-and-white bird nestled on his shoulder. He stroked it with two bony fingers.
Like Lil, Hans didn’t seem to be one to apologize easily.
I shifted so I could look around, and reached up to touch my arm. It was heavily bandaged. I could feel it sticking to the mass of blood there, twitching as I moved, sending curls of pain through my skin. “We held them off?”
“They fell back against our glass shards,” Eap said. “And the wraiths and witches helped. They didn’t much like being invaded by ragged dogs and mangy birds.”
Charcoal and ruin, that’s what we were sitting in. It was still warm, the ash—and fine, when I sifted it through my fingers. “This is probably fertile,” I said. “Wood and . . . decayed . . . stuff.”
“We must plant seeds,” Hans turned back to gaze down at me, his eyes glimmering. He reached down and touched the ash near his feet. Something stirred. A green tendril. It shot up toward the open air, budding with leaves and pink cups of flowers. Fruit swelled behind the buds.
A pain stabbed me then, searing through my chest. I grabbed at it and groaned as hot tingles took over my hand.
My last three fingers on my right hand were a mess of scabs. The entire last knuckle of my pinky finger was missing.
“I touched a blyk,” I said.
“Come, look at our ship,” Hans called. He’d walked to a shattered gap in the curve of glass that sheltered our hut and was peering through.
We walked over to stand next to him, sticking our heads carefully through the jagged window. The wind blasted us, whipping Hans’ hair around and sending mine straight back against my head.
There it was. Hans had retold it: the long leather-patched balloon. Tear-shaped, wooden-and-iron body. Sleek, spinning steel fans. Rail and cabin of polished mahogany. Elegant prow of wood, and salon with windows all coming to a point.
“Awesome,” I said, feeling my spirits lift slightly. “Uh . . . thanks.”
Hans turned to me with a cool smile. There was a hint of it in his eyes, though. Apology. “A little meager, isn’t it?” He raised his rose-stick, and the ship suddenly gleamed diamond bright in the broad, sunny, unclouded sky.
Glass. He’d turned the entire prow to glass. And he’d added a masthead—a long, gleaming, S-shaped neck. A curve of head and beak.
A swan. Our airboat now looked like a swan drifting in the sky. Suspended by balloon, powered by fan.
“My turn,” Eap remarked, squeezing in next to us. Instantly the balloon was banded with metal filigree, and instead of patched leather, the balloon was black silk, rippling and gleaming in the sky.
“Of course,” Hans jeered softly.
Eap gave him a cocked eyebrow.
Mr. Smiley buzzed past us suddenly, the whir of his wings making a gust of air that knocked me backward, sitting hard in a pile of ash.
Ash.
I grabbed a handful and let it spill through my fingers.
Like mist. Ready for planting with things.
And m
e.
I stood.
Ready for fighting.
Was I lying in a snowbank somewhere, shivering with cold, my brain cells slowly dying out one by one?
Was I stiff and horizontal in a hospital bed, surrounded by machines, beeping out my vital functions, letting a team of worried doctors know just how deep I was buried in my own delusions?
Was I dead? Was this some strange sort of afterlife?
A ragged sound interrupted my thoughts.
Hans, hands flat against the glass. He stood, his tall body stooped like a tree bent by wind. He held the picture up to the glass, to the light. A young, dark-haired girl with a coy, confident smile. Round face, round limbs. But I knew those eyes.
Hans’ face glistened—wet. Something dark dripped down—a spot of blood. It touched the ash and seeped out, in five ragged petals.
Instinct had me shifting to stand, to do something. A clenching place in my gut hated him, hated him so much for what he’d done to Jenny. And to Lil. And for what he’d done to me, but there was so much pain there, in the way his back bent, in the angle of his face turned away from me, looking through the glass.
A square, pale hand landed on my shoulder. I turned and met Eap’s gaze. The pain in front of us reflected on his face, too—subtle in the lines around his good eye, the corners of his mouth. Silently, he pointed.
Lil stood off a ways. She was watching Hans, too, hunched over slightly, a reflection of his posture. She had one hand pressed to her sternum like it hurt.
I wanted to leap up. Wanted to crush her to me, tight. Squeeze it all out like an infection, but Eap restrained me with a grip like iron.
I reached in my pocket. Eap’s pen was still there. I closed my fingers over it, comforted by the prick of the tip in my flesh.
Make sure you also check out S.G. Dunster’s dark Renaissance fantasy series. The Rising Scythe is available for Pre-Order on Amazon right now! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NQ97RRM
For the first twenty years of her life, Shem has been moved from one place to another by her father, who wants luxury and safety for her. But everywhere she goes, the magicks of her heritage claim her. They follow her from dark chapels to gilded courts, to the wave-tossed shores of far-off Goa, and it’s time for her to choose. Will she be a wytch of magicks loose or magicks bound? How can she choose between breath and blood, flesh and fire? But it is time to choose, because with such forces running through her veins, nobody, not even her father, will be able to stop her from becoming whatever she wants to be.
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Sarah Dunster is the mother of nine children, an outdoors enthusiast, a voracious reader, a rabid gardener, and an award-winning poet and a novelist. Her debut novel Lightning Tree was released by Cedar fort in April of 2012 and won the 2011 Segullah short fiction prize. Her 2nd, Mile 21, was released in 2014, and won the prestigious Whitney Award in the category of General Fiction. Currently, Sarah is publishing two series independently. The Caldera Series; Urban Fantasy/Psych Thriller, and the Dumenon Chronicles; Dark Rennaisance Fantasy.
Acknowledgments
Thank you, thank you, to all of you who have helped made this book possible. To people who read previous iterations and gave me wonderful feedback especially Caitlin Sangster, Nichole Huffmire and J.M. Wild, all wonderful authors in their own right. To my editor, Dayna, who is an amazing wordsmith and exceptionally kind as she delivers good and bad news. To my talented and stunningly creative cover artist L.K. Blackham, who made this a thing people would want to pick up. And to my kids and my husband Jeffrey, who have ridden this crazy airship with me, willing to either soar or go down in flames with the best possible attitude.
Fire in the Wall
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
If you loved Fire in the Wall?
Acknowledgments