by R. J. Louis
“Talos’s musty arse,” Wilhelm curses, then lets the power go. The rising storm dissipates, the crackle of unbridled energy whistling away with a small pop of pressure in the Stormward’s ears.
A nearby voyager throws a rope forward, a Singer, his hands twist on the odd lasso, and in the air it shimmers into an entangling vine. Wilhelm darts backward, as the vine loops on itself, attempting to tie itself around him.
“Not fair,” he hisses. It’s not often that he wishes he didn’t have such a powerful divine investment. He could have shown a physical aspect, instead, feathers or storm-cloud eyes, maybe he could have thrown rain instead of lightning. Less effective, less useful, but also less deadly. Certainly he wouldn’t have been so sought after by Archangel.
He moves backward slowly, struggling to keep the tangling vine and all the encroaching voyagers in his line of view. They back him into the corner, as the few crew-members from downstairs clamber out and add to the group surrounding him.
“Give it up, old man,” the captain says. “Come quiet, this doesn’t have to be any harder than it already is.”
“You’re going to kill me,” Wilhelm says. It’s the only thing he can think to say.
“Course we’re not. Just delivering a package. You’re quite the catch.”
“You’re children, little fish cosying up to a shark so that it doesn’t eat you first,” Wilhelm replies.
“Children?” The captain scoffs. “We caught you, old man.”
“Did you?” Wilhelm asks, then turns and leaps for the edge of the ship. He hears footsteps and a curse, something tangles about his leg, twisting him. He kicks out, and tips over the hull, the starlight reflected in the great glass wall of Rezir rushing up to meet him with a heavy smack.
23 - Captain Thunder, Dragon-Slayer
If the dragon they’d fought and fled from was animals stuck together, it would be a wolf and a massive, winged crocodile, a scaly predator, blocky, crusted with gemstones and melted gold, heavy in the sky, but powerful. The beasts that drop down into the sand after scaring off the dragon are different. Winged serpents, crossed with the deadly avian monstrosity of a vulture, with deadly sharp beaks, feathered crests, razor claws, and sinuous, whip-cord bodies.
But those are not the worst parts, as Mudge cringes back from the gleaming scaled reptilian body.
The worst parts dismount from each creature with a lazy sigh, and the number of their captors rises to nine. The pair of wyvern-riders confer quietly with the leader of their party, gesturing up and back the way they’ve come.
“Just let us go quietly, and the ship won’t give you any trouble!” Mudge says, before he can stop himself. He draws their attention, and their eyes burn into him. He suddenly feels very small, as if he was a child again, caught stealing from the collection bowl outside Mithra’s shrine. The large Solarii wyvern-rider steps closer. She draws a heavy, golden red spear from her back, a fine white oak haft inset with six fine topaz gems running up toward the head. She swings it expertly in two practised hands, and the air seems to hum. The blade of the spear gleams like golden sunlight, as it hovers ever closer to Mudge’s face.
“You’ve not earned the right to speak for yourself, Builder,” she says finally. “Neither you, Wolf. Keep silent, or lose your tongues.” A wicked gleam in her eyes tells Mudge not to press the matter.
Mudge swallows a large lump in his throat. He and Jonas had been disarmed, and the Sand Solarii had shown a surprising lack of interest in the Windblade. Their disinterest suddenly makes a lot more sense.
* * *
The dragon flies by them. Dangerously close. Close enough to smell the animal rot in the creatures jaws, to see the dark scaled hide rent with bloody gashes and bruising. Scraps of thick skin hang ragged from its claws. Some of the wounds seem to be glancing cannon-blows, but others are dripping with an unhealthy, poisonous-looking green ichor.
It looks at Erin with one piercing ochre eye. She prepares to yell the command, as they pass by each other side on. The Kingfisher’s cannons have a perfect shot to take down the wounded beast.
She pauses.
“Captain, what are you waiting for?” Artemis asks. “Hit it before it hits us.”
“No,” Thunder says finally. “Let her go.”
“You’re throwing away your shot? Think about the power, the glory... Captain Thunder the Dragon-slayer. We could live like kings.”
“And what for? To see one more creature lying dead in the dirt at our feet?”
“Better than seeing ourselves burnt to ash by it!”
“Look at that dragon, Artemis. It ran its race. The fight is over. It lost.”
“Then we should strike now, while it’s weak. Vengeance for Boss.”
Thunder cracks her knuckles. The crew look on, a quiet tension building on deck. “Kendra, you’re quiet. What do you think I should do?”
The tall Solarii woman looks at the dragon, her eyes narrowing to cold slits. She clenches her fist around the bow in her hand, but doesn’t move. Slowly, she lets out a deep breath, then turns back in the direction the dragon came from.
“We got what we came for,” she says finally. “Gold enough to barter for information, gold enough to trade for Wilhelm. That’s what Boss fought for, that was his choice. Mudge and Jonas are still out there, with whatever hurt that dragon enough to send it scurrying home with its tail between its legs... I don’t think shooting it out of the sky is going to help us find them.”
“What kind of a pirate captain are you?” Artemis hisses, stalking off.
Thunder pauses, her lips pursed. “A good question, that,” she says quietly, as if speaking only to herself.
* * *
Something cracks when Wilhelm hits the glass side of Rezir. His face stings, and his eye tears up. He realises as he skids downward that it was his nose. Blood drips down his face. He’s quietly glad it was his own body, rather than the smooth, dark glass beneath him. The image of the great wall of Rezir shattering, with him falling through it, and the entire city collapsing in a rain of broken glass is not a good one. He begins to slide, and strains to slow his fall, scrabbling on the side of the great pyramid. A thin trail of blood-spatters follow him downward as he slips under the wood and metal frame of the dock, his injured shoulder bumping off a support beam and sending him spinning painfully.
His head throbs as he scrabbles, twisting onto his back, only to find his bleeding nose then flooding into the back of his throat. He gags at the harsh, iron-heavy taste in his blood and spits to one side, trying not to overbalance and tumble end over end down the great wall.
From a distance, the spectacular shining glass pyramid of Rezir is one unbroken, seamless structure.
Wilhelm is now close enough to see that the true make-up of Rezir’s walls is a complex latticework of glass sheets woven together so cunningly that the gaps between each sheet of glass are practically invisible.
He hits each one on the way down, tiny bumps that his boots and fingers clip painfully, shallow grooves that he can’t quite catch himself on. It is perhaps akin to falling through the sky into a tree, and slowed microscopically by hitting each branch on the way down.
Still, if he can be grateful for one thing, it’s that this deadly stunt is happening at night. The thick glass is still warm to the touch, but under the harsh violet shine of the Dark Star under daylight, it would be scalding his skin.
He scrabbles to grip the glass as much as possible with his one limp arm and gnarled fingers. His hands and feet doing little to slow his acceleration. There is a brief, dizzying moment of nausea and fear as he spins wildly, before he hits the soft sand with a heavy thump, and everything goes black.
24 - Never Enough Time
The Kingfisher comes to a slow hover over the great bonfire. They tracked the prints in the sand slowly, after the dragon passed by, Thunder’s sighting of wyverns being ridden by humans taking them all by surprise. On deck, an argument breaks out.
“You should take me with
you,” Kendra growls. She stretches to her full height, but that just barely brings her eye-to-eye with the Captain.
“Maybe you’re right,” Thunder says. “But at the end of the day, if I bring you down there, I’m leaving Artemis, Molly, Lily and Rico to look after The Kingfisher, and while it’s not that I don’t trust them all, they need a firm hand and someone with an even keel. If Mudge is down there, that’s you.”
“Then send me to treat with them, and you stay here.”
“Kendra.” Thunder’s voice is terse, but quiet. “I know you’ve got an axe to grind out here.”
“I just can’t believe they can fight off the dragons...” Kendra says slowly. “If they could do that... why—”
“Why don’t they do more. I know. I’ll ask them. You need to trust me, and you need to look after the ship, and the crew. I don’t trust Artemis in this mood of his, and keep an eye on Izaak too. I don’t know him, and he’s kept his head down fine enough, but I know he’s in the middle of this Archangel thing, and that might be a problem.”
Kendra sighs, then nods. “Don’t go easy on them, Captain,” she says, her eyes harsh.
“They’ve got our boys down there. I’ll do what I need to do to get them back, and if that doesn’t work, we get to find out if our crew can shoot a wyvern out of the sky.”
“Aye.” Kendra stalks off, her eyes glittering, before chivying the voyagers working to repair the scratched and battered sloop, which had been hauled up on heavy guide ropes.
Captain Thunder looks around the deck, her eyes narrowing at Artemis, who stands by the gunwale, staring up at the stars, and the dark space between them. She should speak to him, but there isn’t time.
There’s never enough time.
With the ship in good hands, Thunder grabs a rope and launches off the side, her fingers screaming as they clamp down around the rope, slowing her fall until she hits the sand with a heavy thump and a cloud of burnt Widowgas.
She stands up, to find a circle of spears narrowed at her head.
“Well good evening to you too,” she says, channelling her inner Mudge. “Nice night for a hostage negotiation, isn’t it.”
* * *
Thunder waits in a small, sand coloured tent. The whole place is hardly distinguishable from the desert above, just a small collection of camouflaged tents built around a rocky out-cropping. The only sign that this is an inhabited space is the great bonfire around which a small collection of Solarii sit in somber silence. She waits quietly, staring into the flames. She feels the tribes eyes on her, but she remains still, breathing slowly. Soft puffs of exhaust leave her mouth with every exhale, and the flickering flames turn the indigo haze into a merry dance of visions. It reminds her of the emerald flames Shreek looked into on Evergreen, but there’s less magic here.
Not no magic, mind. Just less.
Finally Mudge and Jonas are brought out before her by the leader of the Solarii, Neyara. She wears the Sun-spear strapped to her back, and it glows dimly in the reflected firelight. That had been a wake up call, when Thunder had dropped to the ground right in front of it, watching the air sizzle.
“We have gold,” she says easily. For once it’s true. They have a lot of gold.
“What need have we of gold,” Neyara says. Her voice is deep and rich, flowing like honey. To Thunder’s eyes, she looks to be nearing forty, and is the oldest of the Solarii she’s seen through the night. A spider-web of wrinkles dusts her face.
“Everyone needs gold,” Thunder says amicably. “You can trade with it, pass it down, it lasts forever, and never goes out of style.”
Neyara laughs, a melodic tinkle that sends the sun-burnt wrinkles scurrying away. “Fuck gold.”
“I—What do you want then?” Thunder asks. “You surely don’t want my voyagers to come down here with their knives drawn. Or fire on you from above. I hold the cards here.”
“Oh? Is that why you were so quick to offer us your blood-treasure? Don’t think we don’t know where it came from. It was a dangerous, foolish thing that you did tonight.”
“Dragon gold is tainted to you? I’ve seen what you ride.” Thunder scans the darkness, but there’s no sign of the wyverns. “Stealing from them is wrong, but taming them isn’t?”
“You reveal your ignorance, Builder.” Neyara’s tone is clipped. “A wyvern is as close to being a dragon as you are related to me.”
“But we’re the same species...”
“We were once. More than seven hundred years ago we were the same. Humanity lived as one, and even then, we fought some, and loved others, based on insignificant differences. We were warring tribes, political creatures. Even then we were different. Now it is worse. Pandora’s light within me sets me further apart, as Mithra’s spark does you. The Gods may not have intended this, but their blessing has made us distinct. That divinity makes us strong, but it also separates us, pushes us to act against each other. We are isolated, and yet we depend on each other. Forced by the broken Shards to work together, we have turned that into a fractious political divide.”
“Dragons and wyverns don’t have that excuse,” Neyara continues. “They are beasts. We know better. We should be better.”
“I seem to have touched a nerve,” Thunder says, when Neyara takes a breath. “So lets be better. Work with me.”
“It’s not up to me. You have upset the balance of the desert. It is a fragile, living thing. There is a reason your kind are advised to stay away from the sand sea. You don’t know what damage you can do, even the most well-intentioned outsider can cause countless deaths by their ignorance, and you... you are not so well intentioned.”
“What does that mean?”
“I know the law of the sky-ships, I know these fools,” she gestures with one graceful hand to Mudge and Jonas. “Are here on your orders. It was your reckless decision-making that forced our hand with Slagyrrn. She will not be pleased. We will have to re-locate before she recovers.”
“The dragon? I could take her out, if you ask. She’s wounded.”
“She belongs here. You do not. For your decisions and your missteps, you will be judged by our elder.”
“You’re not the elder?” Thunder asks, glancing around.
“Oh no. You’ll meet her in there,” Neyara says. She twists her arm back, pointing to a dark crevice set in the shallow rocky outcropping. Her teeth gleam in the firelight.
“And what happens?”
“If you are judged worthy, you can take your men and go.”
“Do I want to know what happens if I’m judged unworthy?”
“I wouldn’t worry about it. You won’t live long enough for it to have a meaningful impact on your life.”
“And my crew. If I’m unworthy, they will be killed?”
“No. They will be sent back to your ship, and they will leave. And if they refuse. Then... they will be killed, though that is neither of our preference. This judgement falls squarely on you.”
“I can tell. Heavy is the head that wears the captain’s hat, after all.”
Neyara grins, crossing her arms as she stares into the fire. “Indeed.”
“Fine. If I have to argue my case to some old desert hag to get my crew back, I will, and if she’s not impressed. Well, we’ll cross that bridge when it comes to it.”
“You think you have... extenuating circumstances?” Neyara grimaces as if the words leave a bitter taste in her mouth. “Why don’t you go make your excuses then, stars guide you.”
25 - Consequences
The back of Thunder’s neck prickles as she steps closer toward the cavern entrance. There’s a whisper on the cool night breeze, a susurrus that sends a shiver through the ancient lizard part of her brain. She steels herself, squinting her cold blue eyes into the darkness.
“Can I at least have a torch?” she calls back, but Neyara just laughs her rich, sing-song laugh. There is no other answer. Thunder reassures herself, feeling the weight of the pistol in her duster pocket. It’s a weapon none could expe
ct, hand-forged specifically for her, and powered by the Widowgas engine that runs her entire body.
They’d tried making cannons small enough for people to hold, and people lost hands. That was why the Wrathhowl had gone so big, it was the only direction left to develop firepower.
But not for her.
The pistols weight steadies her hands, and she crouches, having to duck and twist in side-ways to fit her broad shoulders into the narrow crevice of the tunnel. The ground beneath her feet is a mixture of uneven rocks, gravel, and fine sand, and she steadies herself against the cramped walls to stop from tripping. She slows her movement, taking care with each footstep. A rank animal smell assaults her nerves. It’s no wonder the tribe spends every moment they can outside of this dark stink-hole. She wonders if perhaps the elder can’t make the journey any more, the descent is quite steep, even for her augmented body.
The ground evens out, and the space opens around her. She can’t see, her body blocking even the moonlight filtering through the cavern behind her, but something about the way her footsteps echo in the space tells her she’s reached a wider cave.
“Hello?”
Thunder’s voice doesn’t crack. Hers is what comes before the lightning. The rumble. Exhaust clouds her face, but after a life-time of breathing it, she does not cough. “I’m here to speak to the elder.”
There is a sound then. A slithering deeper in the cave. Despite the misgiving in her heart, Thunder steps closer. She is strong, and powerful, even when alone. Especially alone, when she doesn’t have to answer to the whims of her crew.
A faint line of light outlines her shadow against the darkness as the firelight behind her seeps into the crack in the rocks. “Who’s there?” She calls out, frustration tinging her voice. She reaches into her pocket, wrapping her fingers around the hilt of the pistol.
“Look, lady. I’m here to talk,” Thunder says. “To be judged, apparently. So if we could just get through that nice and easy, then I can get out of your hair.”