The King of the Skies

by Robert J. Crane

  He held. Both hands wrapped about my arm, he slid maybe a fraction under our forceful rebound … but he held.

  I had him.

  I’d saved him.

  I hung for a second, catching my breath …

  Pull yourself up, I thought.

  Right. Hanging out here was stupid, with those winds.

  I depressed the button to sail up … and we climbed, rope winding itself back into place, the underside of the Overson crypt getting closer and closer. The window into the floor through which Burnton had fallen filled our field of vision … and then we were past it, over the edge.

  Burnton released me, swinging himself to land safely. I followed a moment later—and like him, I fell onto my backside, clutching my head in my hands.

  I panted.

  I could not believe I’d done that.

  I took long, heaving breaths …

  And then Burnton burst into a laugh—the mad laugh of a man who’d just come within spitting distance of death, and come out the other side of it.

  He howled, head thrown back. His chest shuddered up and down. Eyes closed, chin pointed to the sky, he whooped like I had heard no man or woman whoop before.

  I stared, slackjawed.

  “Are … are you okay?” I asked during a pause to breathe. Even then, Burnton still giggled, his intake of air high-pitched and squeaky.

  “I’m fine,” he forced out—and then dissolved into fits of laughter all over again. “Ooh ho ho, that was … that was grand, missy.”

  “Um.”

  He wiped away tears, doing his best to regain control.

  When his chortling finally petered out and he’d calmed himself, he looked at me with a half-cocked smile.

  “That was a brave feat—the likes of which Seekers will be talking about for generations. But you didn’t have to do it,” he said. “You could’ve won.”

  I shook my head. “Not like that. That’s not me.”

  Burnton nodded. “I believe you … now.”

  We eyed each other for a moment, this brief calm … and then found our gaze drawn to the silver-edged doors beyond the gulf of fallen floor panels. Ten feet tall each, they surely provided access to Overson’s crypt.

  “We’re here,” I said.

  “Certainly are,” Burnton agreed. “Are you ready for this?”

  “We’re starting again?”

  “Absolutely! Fair and square.” He thrust out a hand to me. I took it, and he pulled me to my feet. “You planted? Steady?”

  I nodded, steeling myself. Right. I’d saved him, and that was the right thing to do—but this was still a battle between us, still a race for victory, one I was intent upon winning. We’d had a friendly breather—but now the Lamina Ambroscus called.

  It would be mine.

  “On three?” Burnton said.

  I nodded. “One … two …” I coiled low, ready to leap, connecting with the wall on the left of me …

  “Three!”

  We sprung forward. Adrenaline surged through me, pulsing and electric, overriding the aches and pains that had taken root—

  We charged over the gap, my feet flying underneath me. Despite his longer legs, I kept pace, Burnton’s head and mine bobbing, separated by three feet and one hundred and eighty degrees as we ran along the walls—

  I jumped off at the end, landing nimbly—

  Beside me, Burnton did the same—

  Ten feet to the doors.

  We rushed them as one, arms out.

  My palm connected with cool metal, untouched for thousands of years, and we pushed, both our doors opening at the same time, gliding on hinges that might’ve been oiled just five minutes before.

  I stepped through, eyes hungrily devouring, ready to see Overson’s tomb in this ridiculous burial chamber-cum-factory, adorned with statues and relics, the Lamina Ambroscus among them—

  And found just a square, empty room, with high ceilings … and vats stacked high.

  Like a storage room.

  I stopped dead. “What the—?”

  But this was … this was supposed to be Overson’s resting place. He was supposed to be here! In this …

  … this factory. Because that’s all it ever was. A factory.

  I’d got it wrong.

  My world was turned upside-down for a long moment—then I realized Burnton was still running, hurtling for the pedestal in the center—

  I jerked back into motion—

  But I was too late. Even as I reached for the line launcher, thinking a quickfire draw could close the distance fast enough, Burnton bounded, shrinking those last few meters between himself and a very out of place pedestal …

  And he snatched up the silvery plate upon it, adorned with flowing silver script, and raised it high overhead—

  “THE KING OF THE SKIES WINS AGAIN!”

  —and I lost.

  27

  My jaw dropped.

  Ashen-faced, I stared.

  Burnton whooped, dancing in a little circle. Thrusting the Lamina Ambroscus above his head, he cried with glee, manic eyes devouring it.

  “Yes! Oho, yes, yes, yes! Tyran Burnton does it again! I AM THE KING OF THE SKIES!”

  The cry echoed throughout the chamber, displaced by his laughter.

  Round and round he danced, and I couldn’t tear my eyes free.

  I had lost.

  I lost.

  And I’d lost because I misunderstood some stupid journal, and the shock of my fallibility had floored me for valuable seconds.

  It was the Seeker equivalent of perfectly vaulting every hurdle in a race, then tripping over the last one because somehow I’d thought there were nine instead of ten.

  I failed.

  Still Burnton danced. Arms thrust up and down, he cried, kicking legs—

  And then he saw me on his latest little lap of this … this storage room, and stopped.

  His laugh died twice, the second five long seconds later after its echo faded.

  “Ahem.” Burnton cleared his throat.

  “W-well done,” I said weakly.

  “Yes. Well.” Burnton held the plate, stared at it for a long moment. Grin faded, he frowned, forehead lined.

  He looked up to me, met my gaze—

  “I think this is yours.” And he held out the Lamina Ambroscus.

  I stared. My heart leapt, skipping at least half a dozen beats. A fresh wave of adrenaline pulsed through my, spiky and powerful, a burst like the strongest caffeine.

  “Wh-what?”

  “You won. Not me.”

  My brain couldn’t keep up. A swirling mass of confusion overtook my senses. “B-but …”

  “If you hadn’t stopped to save me,” said Burnton, “you would have won. Which makes this yours.” He took a step closer, plate still extended to me. “The Plate of Immortality belongs to you.”

  I couldn’t blink. Couldn’t speak. Could barely comprehend what was going on at all.

  Tyran Burnton was stood here, the Lamina Ambroscus in hand … and he was offering it to me.

  I could take it.

  It could be mine, nothing unfair about it. I wouldn’t have cheated. I hadn’t done anything dubious on the way here that would make me undeserving.

  I could still win.

  My fingers twitched.

  Take it, I thought.

  Burnton waited, watching expectantly. No smarmy grin now, none of that moviestar-esque, cocksure attitude about him. This was just another Seeker, like me, trying to do the right thing.

  And for me, the right thing was …

  “I can’t,” I said, sighing.

  Burnton blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “I didn’t win,” I said.

  “You saved me. I didn’t do the same for you.”

  “So? Next time, you might think twice about that. Point is, whether I stopped to help you or not, you won by the rules we agreed. Taking it from you now … that’s not a victory.”

  Even if it was really, really tempting.
<
br />   “I did a dishonorable thing when we fought at Biristall,” I added. “That’s not me.”

  Burnton lowered the Lamina Ambroscus slowly. “I stole the first key,” he said quietly.

  “Yes,” I agreed sourly. “But again: next time, you might think differently, make different choices. Or you might not. That’s up to you, isn’t it?”

  He looked down at the plate. “You’re … very wise, for a young girl.”

  That brought the faintest trace of a smile to my lips. “Thanks. I didn’t get there on my own though. It took a little guidance from people … very close to me.”

  I thought over them for a moment: Heidi, Carson, Burbondrer … and Emmanuel, who’d come to rescue me and then set me back on the right path. He deserved my thanks the most.

  Though I’d probably best keep it short. Didn’t want to go stoking the fires of his ego again, after his recent change of character.

  Smiling to myself as I thought about my friends, I hoped they’d come through soon, safe, to this …

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “An atmospheric mining facility,” said Burnton. “This is a storage chamber; deuterium injected with uranium. It’s what fuels the Velocity’s engines. If these crates weren’t so heavy, I’d be of half a mind to bring some back with us.”

  “So this isn’t Brynn Overson’s crypt? But I thought …”

  “Sorry,” said Burnton, pausing by my side. “I didn’t correct your mistakes before—went along with them, in fact—but Overson didn’t construct his crypt here on Harsterra. The Lamina Ambroscus is just another key to access it.”

  “So … so the Chalice Gloria …”

  “Is a key too.”

  D’oh! But now I thought about it, it was all so … obvious. That was how these things worked. So why had I thought that this quest, despite expressly continuing on from the Chalice Gloria quest, would somehow only require the standard two keys and grant access to Overson’s crypt, when neither of those keys were paired with the Chalice Gloria in any way … or, to be really, totally fair about it, even particularly difficult to acquire.

  Simple: my head got stuck up my arse.

  “I’ve been so stupid,” I moaned. And arrogant, self-assured, and overconfident. Not to mention shortsighted … because that? That was a pretty big error to have made.

  “It’s an easy mistake to make,” said Burnton. “The old journals were never very clear. Most of them are simply conjecture, drawing conclusions where none were meant to be drawn.”

  I must’ve looked pretty dejected, because Burnton gave me a light clap on the shoulder—my left one, thankfully.

  “It’s okay,” he said giving me a winning smile. “You’ll get it next time.”

  Next time. Right.

  “Ah,” said Burnton. “You made it, Barnes!”

  I turned to see him—and a handful of other pirates streaming in too—coming through the chamber doors. “Yes, sir, all in one piece. How are—oh, my. Is—is that it?”

  Burnton lifted the Lamina Ambroscus proudly. “Yes, it is.”

  “Well done, sir! Truly remarkable performance, I’m certain.”

  “Yes … remarkable performance,” said Burnton, and he glanced back to me, eyes twinkling. “Barnes, have I introduced you properly? This is my Seeker friend here. Do come over, would you? Barnes, you would not believe the incredible fight she put up. And her guts! Our men would do to take a few pointers from this one, I tell you.”

  “Yes, yes, excellent show,” said Barnes as he pumped my fist. I grinned awkwardly, biting back the stabs of pain.

  “Be careful with her! She’s had a few impacts on the way—well, we all have, haven’t we?”

  “Oh, yes. Patrick and Westley, over here, they both …”

  I let his words flow over me, ignored, partly because I didn’t really care for the guided tour of Burnton’s forces I was being given, but mostly because my own crew had started to filter in now. Heidi was first, looking not at all worse for wear. Carson followed; with him were two pirates, one with a limp whom Carson supported with an arm around the waist, and another whose shirt was ripped down the arm. An ugly gash, drawn along the elbow, was bleeding.

  Burnton’s pirates steered clear of Bub, though they didn’t need to cast quite as wide a berth as usual; Bub’s chest plate had taken a major hit somewhere along the way, and most of the barbs snapped off.

  I felt a swell of pride at seeing them and relief that they were okay. More than okay, in fact. With the exception of Bub’s armor, Burnton’s pirates had come off far worse. Many limped, or cradled their arms. A handful oozed blood. One unfortunate fellow had a fierce black eye, and squatted against a wall as another bowed to peer at it.

  “It really is a beautiful thing, isn’t it?” Burnton said quietly as we were between Barnes’s introductions.

  I glanced to him. He took in the Lamina Ambroscus with a look bordering on adoration.

  It was, I thought, the same sort of reverence I would bestow upon it myself—if it were mine.

  I looked down at it in his hands. Slightly smaller than a plate for a side dish, its silver sheen was marbled and caught the light enticingly. It glittered in places.

  Black script flowed around the rim, disappearing over the edge. I wondered if it meant something, or if it was simply artistic, some fragment of another text laid onto the top of the plate’s design, the larger paragraph cut off beyond the Lamina Ambroscus’s circumference.

  “Yes,” I said, a little sadly, “it is.”

  “You know, this isn’t over,” said Burnton.

  “Huh?”

  His eyes gleamed at me. “You still have the Chalice Gloria … which means you and I are destined to meet again, at the real Overson crypt. So …” He stuck out a hand. “How ‘bout it?”

  The real crypt. Of course. And I still had a key for it.

  I had another shot. It wasn’t all over after all.

  I shook. “Till next time—King of the Skies.”

  He grinned. “Till next time, Mira Brand.”

  28

  Tyran Burnton was, kindly, giving us a ride back to the parking spot in the P’ote-Nihe.

  He was also, kindly, giving us space, leaving the deck to us while we talked things over and he, I guess, celebrated his victory. Which was nice, because right now I didn’t feel too shiny—and I especially didn’t want to put on a happy face and commend him for a job well done as he and his men got merry.

  “I don’t get it,” said Carson, for about the dozenth time. “You stole the second key from him … and then he offers you the—the plate thingy—” he still couldn’t wrap his tongue around its pronunciation “—and you said … no? You said no.”

  “I said no,” I confirmed.

  “But why?”

  “Because he won it, fair and square. No funny business this time. It wouldn’t be right to take it from him.” Even if I had really, really wanted to.

  “Because you realized that …?” Carson began, slow.

  “That these things are only achievements if, one, I actually win, and two, I play by the right rulebook.”

  Carson gasped. “Like a movie!”

  “Yeah,” said Heidi, “or one of your awful valuable-message-each-episode sitcoms.”

  “And what a hilarious episode we’ve had,” I said.

  Heidi smiled, shook her head. “None of those shows are funny.”

  “I like How I Met Your Mother,” Carson said.

  Bub glanced between Carson and Heidi with confused. “When did you meet the Luo’s mother? And what was pleasant about it?”

  “It’s a TV series,” said Heidi.

  “I’ll show it to you later,” said Carson. “You’ll like it, I think.”

  “You kitting out the hideout with a TV and Blu Ray player then?”

  “Well, I did think I could get an Xbox for my room …”

  “Oh no. If you’re buying stuff, it’s going in the study, where we all can use it. I’m sick of
watching YouTube on my phone. Makeup tutorials need to be in at least 1080p, if not 4K. Ideally on a … forty-inch screen?”

  Carson blinked. “Won’t that be kind of expensive?”

  “Err, how much coup do you have in your bank account?”

  “Well, yeah, but if I’m buying—”

  “What are you all talking about?” Clay cried suddenly.

  “Television,” said Heidi, “and the games consoles Carson is going to buy so I don’t have to keep spending all my time reading the ramblings of every halfwit Indiana Jones to ever put pen to paper.”

  “Unbelievable,” said Clay, shaking his head.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “You just had your shot at the Lamina Ambroscus—”

  Carson tried again: “Lamina Abraca … uhm …”

  “—and you just gave it up.”

  “Because I didn’t win it.”

  “But he offered it to you. Why wouldn’t you take that?”

  “Because I didn’t win it.”

  Clay stared at me, mouth open. He squinted, trying to puzzle out something he just could not wrap his head around.

  Then, he said, “I think that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Before, that kind of thing, from Clay, would’ve stung. A lot. It didn’t now though, and I just shrugged it off. “Well, it’s what I did. Too late now. If you want to go see if Burnton will give it to you instead, feel free to go down there.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  He pushed to his feet and stepped away.

  “You’re not seriously going,” said Heidi.

  He hesitated. Looking hard at me, his eyebrows dropped down right above his eyes, pressing in tight. He breathed heavily, letting out a sigh … or maybe a huff of frustration.

  “Unbelievable,” he said—

  And, reaching into his shirt to retrieve a necklace hidden beneath it, he gripped what must have been his own talisman, and cut a gateway in the floor. It opened like a flower, unfolding from a central bulb.

  The moment he stepped through, it spat a mist of color into the air, then vanished.

  “Whoa,” said Carson. “That was pretty.”

  “Someone’s not very happy,” said Heidi. “The idiot hasn’t chucked himself into a void, has he?”