by A. C. Cobble
“Now,” hissed the priestess.
Ainsley called loudly, mimicking a tropical bird from Imbon, which she suddenly realized was a rather grim choice, but her men below heard it and understood. The bank of cannon under the deck exploded, sending a blistering volley of scattershot into the flank of the ship just thirty yards away.
Splintering wood and falling sail could barely be heard above the echoing boom from the big guns. A second volley followed heartbeats later, the aft guns run out on the starboard side where the sweeps normally emerged. It gave them two bites at the apple, so to speak.
As soon as the second fusillade was unleashed, Ainsley called to fly. The lines were cut, and the Cloud Serpent rose into the sky. The captain drew her pistol and seized the deck gun beside her, aiming it down. She pulled the trigger on her empty pistol, striking a shower of sparks which caught the deck gun’s fuse. The three-incher barked, blasting an apple-sized ball of iron into the ruined ship below them.
They rose quickly as the lines had been the only thing holding down the bone-dry levitating stones in their ballast. Westundon, dark and foggy on the cold winter night, faded away, only surprised shouts and rising alarm bells chasing them into the sky.
“You know that shot wasn’t blessed,” said the strange priestess, nodding at the deck gun Ainsley had fired. “It didn’t do anything expect smash a little timber.”
Grinning, Ainsley claimed, “Sometimes smashing a little timber is what is called for.”
Blinking at her, the priestess shook her head.
“Three days if the weather holds,” said Ainsley. “We’ll approach from the sea, staying out of sight of Glanhow and then coming to land north of the Sheetsand Mountains. There might be a few stray shepherds or hermits, but I can’t avoid all eyes. Anyone who sees us ought to be several days from a glae worm station, if they can be bothered to make the trip.”
“I’ll tell the duke,” offered the priestess.
As she walked way, Ainsley called, “Are you sure those… those things cannot follow us?”
“No,” said Sam. “I don’t even know what it was we just fired on. Shades, wolfmalkin, something worse? But I’ve never heard of any of them flying. While it’s my fervent hope that blessing the iron did the trick and banished whatever it was they sent, there’s no certainty in this, Captain.”
The priestess disappeared into the captain’s cabin to speak to the duke, and Ainsley turned to look at the vanishing lights of Westundon.
“The Cloud Wolf was the only ship within fifty leagues of here that could keep up with us,” said Pettybone. “We’ve got a head start, if nothing else.”
“We’ve got the time we need,” assured the captain. “We’ll set the duke and the priestess on the slopes of the Sheetsands and then find ourselves somewhere to lay low. It will be a week before anyone even knows where we went, if they ever do.”
“They’ll know we’re the ones who fired on a Company airship,” remarked Pettybone. “We were the only other vessel tied to the bridge. By morning, they’ll find out we switched the paperwork, and it was the Wolf and not the Serpent that took the beating. Once they know that…”
“The duke’ll protect us,” claimed the captain.
“You’re making a rather large assumption that the man lives through the next few days,” complained Pettybone. “What’s your plan if he doesn’t? You think the king is going to listen to some wild tale that his son told us to fire on a Company airship, which would personally cost Duke Wellesley a fortune, and then he told us to deposit him at the most dangerous location in all of Enhover? We won’t get half the words out of our mouths before they string us up.”
Ainsley glanced around the deck, ensuring the crew was hard at work and out of earshot. Then, she leaned close to Pettybone. “If the duke and his priestess do not survive, then we do not return to Westundon. If they die, we’ll have to leave Enhover.”
“What?”
“You’re right, Pettybone,” she said. “The Crown, the Company, either one of them would have us hanging from a yardarm the moment they captured us. If the duke dies, we can’t go back. There’s nothing we could say that would explain what just happened. The duke himself is our only ticket home. But if he dies, well, at least we’ll have our own airship. There are worse things, Mate Pettybone, than having your own airship.”
“You aim to turn pirate,” accused the first mate.
Ainsley winked at him.
Her first mate crossed his arms and opened his mouth to protest.
“I know about your time in the Vendatts, Pettybone,” she advised.
His mouth snapped shut.
“The spirits have put us in the service of the duke,” she said. “I aim to serve him faithfully as long as I can. And when I can’t, well, there ain’t never been a pirate airship before, has there? Our dreams of dying rich don’t end with the duke.”
“Rich,” huffed Pettybone. “I want to be rich, not dead.”
“We all die, First Mate. We all die sometime.”
The Priestess XV
The pale light of morning shouldered its way through clouds, hard and gray. In the far north, the sea, the light, the clouds, and the raw stone underfoot melded into a bleak tableau. It reminded Sam of a short stint she’d spent in Glanhow’s gaol some years ago, but at least then there’d been other inmates to speak to.
Now, it was just Duke and Captain Ainsley, and Ainsley looked like she’d rather be anywhere but the slopes of the Sheetsand Mountains, peering down over the ruins of Northundon.
“There,” said the captain, pointing to a sharp outcropping half a league to the east of them. “We’ll have good visibility there and can easily swoop down and drop a line.”
“It looks like a bit of a climb,” remarked Duke.
Ainsley shrugged.
“There,” said Duke, pointing far below them at the grim city. “The peaked tower. That is Northundon’s Church. Several blocks north of that structure is a flat-topped tower. It’s half the size, but it still rises above the buildings around it. That’s Northundon’s keep. You can drop a line and pick us up from there.”
“You want me to fly above the city?” questioned Ainsley.
“The shades can’t reach you,” assured Duke. “Remember, my father spent days floating above this place dropping bombs down into it. From a height, you’re as safe over the city as you are on these slopes.”
“What if the keep is damaged?” wondered Sam.
“I don’t think it will be so damaged we can’t make the top,” replied Duke. “It was built by the druids long before the Wellesleys arrived in Northundon. It’s been through a lot and has always stood strong. Red saltpetre bombs may have damaged it, but you can see from here, they didn’t knock it down. The interior should be intact.”
“Druids lived in the heart of Northundon?” wondered Sam.
“Aye, Northundon and near some of the other cities as well,” replied Duke. “There is a massive keep just across the river from Southundon.”
“I always thought druids lived out in the forest and talked to squirrels,” said Ainsley.
Duke shrugged. “Maybe they did. They were gone long before we walked this land, long before our grandparents did. From what I understand, though, they were interested in all life. Life in the forests, but life in the cities as well.”
“Interesting,” said Sam, which she supposed maybe it would have been in other circumstances. Now, standing above Northundon, a city turned graveyard, it wasn’t.
“It’s grim to think of now,” said Duke, “but back when I was a young boy, the rumor was the keep was haunted.”
“Haunted?” questioned Sam.
Duke waved a hand dismissively. “It’s an old druid fortress, and there are always rumors about those places. I spent several summers in the keep here. It wasn’t haunted, not like the rest of the city is now.”
“If you make it to the top, light the flare. We’ll see it and be on down,” said Ainsley, peering at the r
uins, absentmindedly toying with the trigger of one of her paired pistols. “I’ll have a man watch the roof constantly with the spyglass.”
“If you’re not careful, you’ll set that thing off,” remarked Duke, eyeing her pistol.
The captain smirked. “You’re one to lecture about being careful.”
Together, the three of them turned and looked down the harsh slope of the mountain. Three leagues away, shattered stone and tumbled walls marked the outskirts of Northundon.
“Do you think the spirits can see us?” wondered Duke.
“No, not yet,” assured Sam. “They can’t see at all, really. They’ll sense us, though, when we draw close.”
“If I don’t see you again…” murmured Ainsley. “Well, good luck, I suppose. If you don’t return, I’ll take care of the Cloud Serpent for you.”
Duke snorted.
“I wanted it said,” declared Ainsley.
Without word, Duke clasped the captain’s arm. Sam gave her a quick embrace, and they both started down the slope. They stepped carefully from rock to rock, making sure not to slip on the lichen, the only life growing on the barren terrain. Below lay the city of the dead.
They crouched in a culvert that followed the line of Northundon’s main highway. Peering over the road, they studied the city in front of them. She glanced to the left nervously, seeing the pale, yellow sun hanging disturbingly close to the horizon.
“Are we really going in there at sunset?” asked Duke.
“Do you want to camp out here overnight, two hundred yards from a haunted graveyard the size of a city?” wondered Sam. “I’m not sure sleeping nearby is any better than walking through those ruins. Could you even sleep? I couldn’t.”
“We should have timed this differently,” worried Duke, glancing back behind them and grimacing.
They both knew they couldn’t have safely made it down the steep slope at night. They would have tumbled to the bottom and been lucky to only break one or two bones each. Besides, Ainsley had timed the approach to shore so that the Cloud Serpent passed Glanhow’s fishing fleet in the night. They were counting on no one knowing where they’d gone after the little incident back in Westundon, and the fleet had a history of reporting what it saw.
When they did return to civilization, even Duke would face some tough questions about why his airship opened fire in the middle of the city on her sister ship. He rightfully didn’t relish the idea of explaining that they’d tricked a gang of sorcerers into thinking they were aboard, hoping to destroy the spirits the group sent after them, to destroy any chance of pursuit, and to get away cleanly. They’d thought there might be a chance the sorcerers would reveal themselves, but the only thing they’d seen were shadows.
The timing of their arrival outside of Northundon’s broken walls was unfortunate but inevitable. Still, it didn’t mean the thought of proceeding into the spirit-infested ruins at night was pleasant.
“You’re sure they won’t, ah, come after me?” asked Duke.
She shrugged. “Kalbeth seemed reasonably certain.”
He frowned at her. “Kalbeth also seemed like she wouldn’t mind sticking one of her tattoo needles into my eye.”
“She didn’t, though,” retorted Sam, and he shifted. “If she wanted to kill you, she would have, and if she wasn’t confident that we could survive this, she wouldn’t have let me come with you.”
“That’s fair,” he murmured, looking ahead at the darkening city in front of them.
“It’s only logical the spirits haunting Northundon are the shadows of what you saw in your vision,” she said, trying to convince herself as much as the peer. “They did not attack you there, so it stands to reason they will not attack you here.”
He grunted.
“They tried to help you,” she reminded. “That’s what you said, right?”
“They invited me to come to Northundon,” he said, his voice tight with tension. “Can shades from the underworld be friendly? Can they make a choice not to attack someone? This might be another trap, you know.”
“They do what they are bound to do,” explained Sam. “If they were loose, they would attack us. If their summoner set them to another purpose…”
“They attacked the citizens of Northundon,” reminded Duke. “They overran the city and killed everyone in sight. Then, we suspect, those killed rose again and continued the carnage.”
“They were bound to a task,” insisted Sam, shifting in the culvert, eyes on the ruins in front of them. “They’re still here. That means their task is not complete. If they were set to merely kill everyone inside of the city, they achieved that decades ago. We have to risk it.”
Grim-faced, Duke agreed. “We have to risk it.”
“Come on,” she said.
She climbed out of the culvert. Ducking low, she scampered across the highway, dropping to the other side, and then in a crouch, hurrying toward the abandoned city.
The black ink injected into her skin, formed into swirling patterns that covered half of her back, should offer her some protection. If the spirits were not specifically directed against her, they’d have a natural aversion. She’d be invisible, in a sense. Duke, however, they hoped would find allies amongst the shades. In his vision, they’d invited him to Northundon. They’d promised answers.
It had seemed a better idea when they were back in Kalbeth’s apartment.
Sam clutched Thotham’s spear in her hands, feeling the sweat on her palms rapidly cool in the bitter chill of the northern winter. Duke held a spirit-blessed obsidian dagger. It was a small weapon, tiny even. He’d asked for something bigger, and she told him it wasn’t the size of the blade but how you used it that mattered. That wasn’t entirely true, and she certainly wouldn’t want to rely on such a small weapon, but it was what they had. The peer had been kind enough not to ask for one of her kris daggers. That, or he hadn’t thought about it. Either way, the weapons were special to her, one more link to Thotham. She wanted to keep them herself.
Hand brushing his basket-hilted broadsword, a weapon sure to be useless against the shades, the little dagger clutched in his other fist, Duke trotted ahead toward the weather-beaten ruins. She would be most effective if the shades turned on them, but he knew the way through the city.
“Do we wait for one to appear?” he asked, glancing back at her.
She shrugged. “The ruins should be thick with them. Some may have been ground by the wheel over the last two decades and returned to new life, but I suspect many remain. It shouldn’t be long before we see them.”
He nodded and stepped over a pace-long block of stone that had fallen from Northundon’s broken wall. The wall, as far as she could see on either side of them, had tumbled out, collapsing in a scattered heap, only tall towers still standing. Half a dozen, maybe more, she’d seen as they approached. Evidently, someone had constructed the towers of sterner stuff than the walls. More influence of the druids, she wondered? Duke didn’t have an explanation when she mentioned it, and now, she pushed it from her mind. There were more immediate concerns.
Entering the city, they hoped to find a shade on the outskirts and see if it attacked them. If it did, they’d have no hope of fighting their way through the legion and searching the Wellesley’s old palace. If attacked, their only hope would be to turn and run. If they could test their theory, that the shades would not assault them, then they’d have some meager comfort before surrounding themselves with thousands of the spectres.
By unspoken agreement, they fell silent as the granite walls of Northundon rose above them. Duke, still holding his tiny obsidian dagger in one hand, clambered over the head-high remains of Northundon’s outer wall and then jumped down inside to land on a stone street. She followed him and quietly dropped into a crouch.
Inside the city, old snow drifted in the corners and between the buildings. Outside, a constant breeze off the sea prevented accumulation, but here, it was as still as the grave. She shivered, wishing a different comparison had occur
red to her.
Duke hesitantly moved forward, his feet crunching softly on the thin layer of snow, his eyes scanning windows and doorways already darkened an hour before sunset. The buildings were ruins, destroyed in the initial attack by the Coldlands, further wracked by Enhover’s own bombing campaign. And the structures that survived were still subject to the deadliest enemy of all — time.
But the northern city had been built tough, built to stand against the brutal winters and violent summer storms. The granite blocks had survived generations of harsh weather, and a little war wasn’t enough to knock them all down.
They passed a block in peace, the street clear of both debris and the spirits of the dead. Then, Duke froze. She stopped behind him, looking over his shoulder at a ghastly shadow that drifted across the open avenue in front of them.
It slowed and turned.
She tensed. In the fading daylight, the shade was barely discernible, just a darker patch in front of gray stone. It was still for a moment and then drifted away, evidently losing interest in them.
She released an explosive breath. Her heart was hammering. She adjusted her sweaty palms again on Thotham’s spear. The shaft was warm, comforting, and she hoped it signaled they were making the right decision. If they weren’t, she supposed they’d be joining her mentor soon enough.
Duke started moving again, climbing over rubble when they could, routing around spots where they could not. It seemed half the buildings had been destroyed, but the damage was sporadic and random. Sometimes, an entire block had collapsed into the street. Other times, it looked as if people could return at any moment.
In addition to the destruction to the buildings, they saw evidence of the old violence that had washed over the place. Bodies, desiccated after two decades in the open, littered the streets. More of them were piled in the buildings, where she guessed citizens had attempted to hide from the unnatural marauders. Occasionally, some bit of steel or clothing survived, but the corpses themselves were bare bone or covered in dry, jerky-like skin. Her stomach roiled in protest at the thought. She shook herself. The bodies were of no concern, now. The souls that had departed those physical forms were what she was worried about. Those souls still lurked in the streets, still stirred restlessly. Why? Why did they not pass to the other side?