by Frank Morin
Hamish tried to laugh, but couldn’t quite make the sounds come out. “Sure. I’ll scare the scariest person on the planet.”
“That’s the spirit,” Kilian said. “It’s a daring plan. She won’t expect it.”
It was insane, but Connor couldn’t think of anything to add to it. If things went well, they might be able to surprise the queen and turn her expected murder spree into a victory. If they won the day, could they win the war before it really got started?
Connor hated the cold fear that kept whispering to him that they were doomed.
48
A Glimpse into the Heart of Evil
Student Eighteen sent another beam of light with another message, outlining their plan. Hopefully the Mhortair strike teams could coordinate supporting their strike.
The Mhortair sent a reply, and Student Eighteen gasped when she received it.
“What?” Connor and Hamish demanded together. Connor feared the Mhortair were betraying them or something, but Student Eighteen smiled, looking happier than Connor had ever seen her.
In an awed tone she said, “The message came from Mister One himself.”
Hamish muttered under his breath, “I still think those titles are stupid.”
She ignored him. “He sends greeting to each of you and a message. Today we face our greatest threat, but will emerge with our greatest victory. The entire purpose of our people culminates this day, and we will live up to the purpose of our creation. May the great and first leader smile upon us all.”
Connor appreciated his optimism. He hoped Mister One was right. All winter they had been preparing for this fight, but he’d always assumed the final showdown with the queen would take place surrounded by brutal struggle and desperate battle between enormous armies. If they could defeat her, they would save so many lives.
“Let’s hope we all live to thank him for his warm greeting,” Kilian said, then turned to face the distant figure of his mother, still sliding implacably across the land toward Jagdish. They rode in silence for a few minutes as they banked miles around the dread queen.
Student Eighteen eventually whispered, “Today I will avenge my father.”
Hamish muttered, “I wish we had Ilse’s Revenge with us.”
Connor wished they had thousands more mechanicals, but that would mean Verena would be there too. Verena was as deadly as she was beautiful, and part of him longed to see her flying nearby in the Swift, but part of him was grateful she had been spared this fight. Even if things went badly, at least she would not be one of the people who might die there that day.
Kilian said, “She definitely knows where she’s going.”
“I hope she found it in someone’s mind and didn’t decide to lay waste to Maninder to learn it,” Connor said.
Hamish grimaced, looking sick by the idea. The capital city of Ravinder would have been helpless before the queen even though a large Arishat League army was marshaling around Maninder. If she’d traveled that far south, he didn’t doubt she would have destroyed the army and maybe the city in a fit of anger.
The thought helped firm his resolve to fight. Battlefield creativity was one of his strengths, and they were going to need every bit of it before they beat the dread queen.
As they flew, Connor sensed no indication that the queen had noticed them. He felt no movement through the air, no foreign will tugging at his. Shielding air was kind of similar to shielding earth, but very difficult until Connor had ascended the second threshold. Only then did Air seem to pay him much attention and not just look for ways to make his life difficult. If the queen decided to fight him with air, would she abandon him and submit to the more powerful Petralist?
With serpentinite, the landscape brightened with subtle sounds of early morning. Connor enjoyed looking out at the sights as Hamish banked farther to the east until the distant mountains of Jagdish became tiny. They’d begin to come around behind the queen any second.
Hamish had activated a small sightstone, projected on the side window, showing the queen below them. He did a great job keeping the view centered on her and zoomed in close even as he banked wide around her. She was sliding north toward the mountains of Jagdish, her expression regally stern, and did not seem to have noticed them.
As Connor focused on her, studying her regal gown of silver and gold, he noticed that she was holding something in her hand. It looked like some kind of stone. He tried focusing on it, but the distance was so great that even with the viewscreen zoomed in so far, it was hard to make out details.
“What is that thing she’s carrying? Is it a sculpted stone?” he asked.
Kilian frowned and leaned closer to the viewscreen. “She doesn’t need anything. She’s already at the pinnacle of her power. What is she up to? Hamish see if you can magnify this view any more.”
The fact that he looked nervous made Connor terrified.
Hamish said, “It’s zoomed in on max power. I’m beginning our turn. Give me a minute and I’ll be able to focus the front window on her. The magnification is better. Maybe we can figure out what she’s doing before we start our attack run.
Hamish began banking in a long, gentle turn.
Queen Dreokt stopped.
She stood, and her icy throne melted away behind her. She raised one hand, finger extended as if to chastise the wicked city of Jagdish.
“What is she doing?” Connor cried. She was still at least three miles from the mountain.
“Too soon,” Student Eighteen whispered.
The ground beneath the queen buckled under an explosive concussion. But it wasn’t a blast of earth.
It was a blast of sound.
It blazed in Connor’s serpentinite senses like a hundred suns concentrated together. He blinked and cried out, turning away, unable to look at it, even though he was seeing it with serpentinite eyes and not his natural ones. The blast was so bright and overpowering that he felt stark terror replace his previous cautious optimism.
In his mind, the elements recoiled, as if in horror. Earth looked deeply offended and swung his arms out wide. Connor realized with shock that he was striking out at the invisible echoes of serpentinite. What?
Aifric screamed, “I don’t understand. . . . Oh no!”
Hamish oriented the Hawk directly at the queen and magnified the view. Connor was already tapping quartzite to see better. Despite the disorienting twist of the double-enhanced vision, Connor gritted his teeth and magnified his gaze. What he saw through quartzite did not matter. It was what he saw through serpentinite that horrified him.
That concussive blast of sound was spreading like lightning across the land, and the earth was buckling and reverberating like a giant drum struck by an enormous mallet. Vibrations of earth and sound radiated north toward Jagdish, moving so fast Connor did not even have time to shout a warning.
It was like the queen had triggered an earthquake with sound. It struck Jagdish and the mountains above the city like a hammer from the heavens. Sound blasted soldiers from the walls, shattering their bodies before they even struck the stones. Buildings crumbled, and the shockwave blasted up through the canyon like a hundred thousand thunderclaps.
In Connor’s mind, Earth dropped to one knee, his initial shock turning to a towering fury. Air flitted toward him, but he glared at her then sank down out of sight. Connor’s connection with him faded away.
Down on the ground, the shaking of the earth continued, the landscape undulating like a sheet on a line, blown by a strong wind. Every ripple blasted through the foothills, shattering them into loose piles of rubble that cascaded down.
Then the waves of destruction struck the city. The entire canyon buckled like an unruly stallion. The cliff face of the outer wall shivered apart in the first wave, and the mountain peaks swayed like drunkards. As more destructive waves of earth and punishing sound poured in with relentless, unstoppable force, the shaking grew worse and worse. Buildings shattered or shook apart, then as the shaking continued to intensify, they were flun
g into the air.
Connor watched in horror at the devastation unfolding. He felt cold, couldn’t seem to breathe, and gripped the front dash of the Hawk so hard it splintered. Down in the doomed lands, the entire mountain shuddered as the two majestic peaks smashed into each other. Vast stones exploding apart, as if made out of tiny blocks sitting on a table that someone kicked over.
A single beam of light shot away from the city as it fell. Student Eighteen was screaming, and Connor realized he was too as he watched Jagdish fall. In seconds the entire community was sundered and broken into piles of shattered rubble.
He caught the beam of light and drew it in. It was a message in an elderly man’s voice that he instinctively recognized as Mister One’s. It was ancient and wise and immensely powerful, and far too calm to have spoken in the midst of that catastrophe.
“We are fallen! You alone must stop this insanity. I entrusted the treasure you need here. Find it and—” The message cut off abruptly, and Connor knew with a sense of cold horror that in that second, Mister One had died. So had every living soul who had stood to defend their home.
They were all gone, lives snuffed out like ten thousand candles dropped into the sea. The magnitude of the queen’s murder left Connor feeling numb and sick with horror.
Waves of sound and earth continued to beat the broken mountains until millions of tons of stone shook apart. Both peaks collapsed, their deaths concealed by billowing clouds of debris, as if the very world was ashamed of what had happened and sought to conceal the horrific details. Thunderclaps of stones smashing against each other rumbled across the land, like brilliant gold streamers to Connor’s serpentinite view.
He stared, dumbfounded, unable to process the magnitude of what had just happened. He had seen incredible elemental powers unleashed by Petralists, but with that single stroke, Queen Dreokt had revealed a level of power he had not dreamed possible.
A few seconds later, Hamish managed to increase the magnification of the front window to maximum and bank the Hawk toward the broken city. All they saw were billowing clouds of destruction. They waited in silence, while Student Eighteen wept, until the cloud began to disperse.
Absolute destruction. The two proud mountains had been reduced to hills of broken rubble. Jagdish was simply gone.
“I don’t understand,” Student Eighteen wailed.
“It had to be that stone,” Connor said, his voice sounding hollow. He felt shocked, as if he was living a nightmare, but couldn’t wake up.
Hamish pivoted the craft back around toward the queen.
She had dropped to one knee.
In that magnified view, she looked utterly spent. A trickle of new hope burned away some of the despair Connor was feeling. Whatever she had done, it had taxed even her incredible strength to the max. If she was suffering exhaustion similar to what he’d felt rising through a threshold, this might be their best time to attack her.
The others spotted it too and Kilian barked, “She’s down! Hamish—”
Queen Dreokt slowly turned her head and looked straight at them.
Everyone in the cabin gasped, and Kilian muttered a soft curse, one Connor had never heard before.
He placed a hand on Hamish’s shoulder and ordered in a tense voice, “Turn this thing around and get us out of here.”
49
Make Time for the Important Things First
We will send everything we can at once,” Jean assured Verena.
Jean and her flight leaders, along with a dozen other officials and military officers were assembled in her private conference room in her residential palace in New Schwinkendorf. The men and women gathered for the call were somber as they stared at the view of battered Merkland visible behind Verena.
“Thank you,” Verena said with a tired smile. She still wore her dirty, battered armor, her hair a mess, her face streaked with grime. She looked exhausted, as had Rory, who had joined the call briefly.
“Let us know if you need anything else,” Jean offered.
“Thanks,” Verena said again. “I have to get back to work. We have a lot to do before dark.”
The connection faded away and Jean turned from the whitewashed wall where the viewscreen had been projected. Facing her team, she switched to Grandurian and asked, “What can we offer for immediate aid?”
“We have a dozen healthbeds,” Gisela said after scanning a list of supplies she already had handy. Jean always found it fascinating that she spoke Grandurian far more fluently than Obrioner.
“Good. It sounded like those siege mechanicals worked wonderfully, but too many were destroyed. Can we get replacements?” Jean asked, turning to Bruno.
The huge blacksmith, who now oversaw all manufacturing in New Schwinkendorf grimaced. “All units were shipped to Merkland. We are building more, but most will not be ready for a week.”
“We need to send supplies by tomorrow morning. How many can we have ready?”
“Five,” he said after a moment’s thought, then added, “Along with two thousand rounds of ammunition.”
“So many?” she breathed. Five rapid-fire mechanicals were far too few, but that much ammunition could help turn the tide of any new battle.
Bruno grinned. “We’ve got motivated teams.”
Jean glanced to her right, toward the leader of Sender Flight, her transport corps. Vanora was a solid, dependable Builder of late middle age. She was Dierk’s widow and had arrived in New Schwinkendorf a few weeks back, determined to avenge him. She had taken to flying almost as well as Verena, far more quickly than Dierk ever had. She had proven an excellent choice to head up the new Sender Flight and had helped develop the training program for non-Builder pilots.
“Vanora, I want every available craft prepped for lift-off at dawn, packed with everything we can squeeze into them.”
“If the battalions were ready, we could easily transport everything they need,” she said, glancing at Admiral Forfar.
He replied, “Another couple weeks should do it. I can make some of our elongated transport windriders available, if needed.”
“Thank you,” Vanora said. “We may have enough. I’ll let you know.”
Jean appreciated the offer and was glad the two were focusing on helping instead of their growing rivalry. Jean’s Sender Flight had grown quickly to a very capable transport corps of two dozen heavy windriders, among other craft available as needed. Admiral Forfar led the newly christened Grandurian Flying Army.
They might be new on the scene, but they were extremely well funded and their ranks were growing fast. It was becoming clear that any army that could own the skies would gain a vast advantage, and the Grandurian high prince Theodor had personally committed to building the new flying force.
It was a great idea, but Admiral Forfar didn’t like the fact that Jean owned a private flying force not yet rolled into his broader army. He’d begun pressuring her to fold her flights into his army, but now that she was the lady of New Schwinkendorf it wasn’t as easy for him to argue that her legion needed a legitimate chain of command. Hopefully he’d drop his quest to control all flying corps. The Builders would always have their own independent flyers, and so would Jean.
“Dulax, I want a contingent from Defender Flight as escorts. We don’t know if the queen has any other summoned creatures assigned to harry reinforcements,” Jean said, turning to the huge Boulder who led her fighting forces.
He saluted and said in his deep, resonant voice, “I will see it done, my lady.”
Dulax had been one of her first recruits during the Battle of Merkland. She’d chosen him as her first caller, and his powerful voice and commanding presence had helped win over the rest of the forces she’d taken control of. During the terrible battle at Army gate, he’d been badly burned by Captain Aonghus and still bore scars across his face. He was one of her most devoted troops and had proven an excellent leader.
Advie, the Healer who led Mender Flight spoke up. “They have many wounded. We’ll send a contingent
of Healers to assist.” Jean had won her loyalty during the Battle of Merkland too. Advie was one of the Healers who had helped save her life after Aonghus’ fires had nearly ripped the life out of her.
Jean resisted the urge to touch her scarred face or the patch over her bad eye. She’d lost much that day, but preferred to focus on the positive that had resulted since then.
“I recommend we send some of our new semi-autonomous summonings to assist as well,” Rafford added. “The tender shoot trampled by careless tread may yet rise to greet the new dawn.”
The Sapper tried hard to limit his confusing speech. Jean wasn’t sure if it was to make communicating easier with the members of Render Flight, which he led, or if it was simply because Captain Ilse tended to speak more plainly than any other Sapper Jean had ever met. Rafford was slender for a Sapper, and even with only one good eye, Jean could see how devoted he was to Ilse.
“You’ll have to accompany them too. Ilse might be too busy rebuilding defenses to oversee applying them,” Jean said. Rafford grinned enthusiastically. She hoped he was wise enough to wait a lot longer before professing any feelings for Ilse. Lukas’ death had deeply affected her and was still far too fresh.
“Please have your teams review available stockpiles for any supplies that might prove helpful. I want a list of every item we can send. We’ll reconvene to make final decisions this evening. Thank you all,” Jean said.
As everyone filed out of the long room, she finally allowed herself to worry. Verena had said none of their close friends had died, but they’d all faced terrible danger. Verena had looked so battered, it was clear the fighting had been brutal. Jean was so grateful Hamish and Connor had returned in time to save the city, but she worried for them. It sounded like time was short. Their mission was so critical, she couldn’t help worrying.
Jean felt grateful that she could marshal so much aid to send to Merkland. She was still adjusting to her new position as Grandurian nobility. She often felt uncomfortable with how some of her people treated her, as if suddenly she was somehow better than they were. She was gently trying to teach them that she was no different than always, but it didn’t seem to be working.