The Window and the Mirror

by Henry Thomas

  It was about three ells long and crested by a strange spherical crystal or glass orb. Norden looked it up and down in the lantern light and nodded, pleased.

  “Very good, very good.” he muttered by way of dismissal. The guardsman went back to his task. Norden continued to look at the rod as he paced back and forth, waiting for the guards to pull away all the ropes and tarpaulins. He walked back up the gangplank and called to her.

  “Captain?” He stood there unimpressively, his hood covering his thinning hair and the ornate bronze rod resting on his shoulder, posed like some bedraggled monarch.

  “Yes, Lord Mage, how can we assist you further?” she asked from where she stood.

  “Further? You shall be loading these machines back aboard your vessel when we are finished here. Kingsbridge is not my final destination.” He was barely containing his rage. It was time to play her hand, she knew. Ryla thought about it for a moment, and then slowly and carefully she spoke.

  “Shall I? I believe I have provided more than enough in terms of what was required of me. I shall be leaving you here to collect your company and move on. I have pressing business to attend to. Best of luck to you, Norden.”

  The mage’s jaw worked for a moment before he was able to speak. “What? Oh no, you aren’t going anywhere, Captain.”

  “The hell I’m not, and if you want to try to stop me, the skies love a volunteer. That means go take a flying leap.”

  “You were paid!” he cried.

  “I was paid for services rendered, now get off my ship.”

  He just stared at her incredulously, but he realized he had slipped; he had drawn all of his guards off the decks and set them to work, and in his haste to accomplish everything in the most rapid way possible he had trusted in the storm too much, and now as the skies were less threatening there was nothing keeping her from flying away and he saw his mistake, and she saw him see it. She walked past the mage and toward the helm without looking back and cried out. “All hands, make ready!”

  She had barely said it when pain exploded into the back of her head and she was laid out on the mid-ship deck. There was blood in her mouth and a ringing in her ears. She thought she heard shouting and felt the deck pounding, but was it just the throbbing pain in her head? Blurrily, she looked up and tried to rise and felt a booted foot push her down and saw the rage-filled face of Norden looking down at her, pointing the bronze rod at her menacingly. He had hit her with that. She felt at the back of her head and her hand came away bloody. That bastard hit me with that rod, Ryla affirmed to herself stupidly, cursing his name and wishing she had never seen him. Her bloody head was on fire, or at least it felt that way. She pushed his foot off of her and rolled back and onto her feet unsteadily.

  “You filthy bitch!” he hissed at her.

  Elmund had drawn his sword and held his knife in the other hand, Galt had his sword as well, and Kipren had the long-handled ship’s axe in both hands, and all of them surrounded her then and faced the mage down. She blinked and tried to clear her vision. Everything was blurred and moving. Her head throbbed.

  “Give me the ship’s key, now!” Norden raged.

  “You heard the captain, get off the ship!” Elmund roared at the little man.

  The Norandian guards had left their tasks and now all stood back on deck and were advancing with drawn swords and shouting to each other in their foreign tongue. She had to do something, this would get out of hand quickly. Someone would die, one of her boys. One more of my boys, she reminded herself. She felt at her belt and worked free the length of bronze she had hung there. Her vision was still swimming.

  “Here, take it then. No more bloodshed.” She stumbled forward on shaky legs and held out the bronze wand with a bloodied hand. The mage snatched it from her and then hurriedly passed it to his clerk.

  “Give that key to the Norandian captain and tell him to guard it with his life!” Norden was puffing with rage. “Put them in the ship’s hold and let them be confined there until I see fit!”

  “Surrender your arms!” The clerk cried.

  “Do it. Stand down, boys,” Ryla said.

  The crew reluctantly placed their weapons on the deck and stood there before the Norandians grabbed them all roughly and shoved them around the deck.

  “Hey!” Galt cried as a stout guard shoved him hard.

  “We know the way to the bloody hold,” Kipren muttered.

  They were pushed down the ladder and confined to the now nearly empty hold. The guards closed the hatch behind them as they left, and Ryla and her crew were sat huddled in a pool of moonlight coming in through a porthole on the starboard side. The skies had cleared for a moment, but more clouds were threatening. She could see them off to the north, or perhaps it was north east.

  Her mind was in a fog, and her head was throbbing with pain.

  “Captain? Are you all right?” It was Kipren.

  “She’s bleeding. Wait until I get my hands on the bastard!” Elmund said. They gave her a handkerchief one of them had doused with water.

  “I’m all right. I think.” She rose and leaned against the hull.

  “We failed you, Captain. I failed you, I’m sorry.” Galt’s jug ears were fiery red.

  “No. It was my mistake. I turned my back on him and thought that he might not hit me because I’m so pretty. I didn’t think he’d hit me, that wasn’t planned.”

  “We’re sorry, Captain,” Kipren said. “We think you’re pretty.”

  They laughed, a little. Not a one of them liked any piece of this business they had been handed by Norden and his cronies.

  “What was the plan, then?” Galt asked.

  “The plan was to make Norden demand the ship’s key from me.”

  The crew looked at her confusedly.

  “Good one, Captain. It worked,” Kipren said dolefully.

  Just then, a muffled voice called out to them from within one of the crates. She had almost forgotten about Bellan.

  “Help him out, lads.” She wiped the blood away with the dampened handkerchief. Her head was still throbbing, but the pain seemed to be subsiding in its intensity. Her vision had cleared to a near normal state, but things were still moving too fast for her eyes to keep up with.

  Bellan was whispering excitedly to them as he was pulled out of the crate, and he stood there stretching his cramped limbs as he jabbered. “I was sleeping when we hit the ground like that. A ‘whallop’ like. That’s what it made, a ‘whalloping’ sound when she hit, didn’t she? Woke me right up, I’ll tell you.” His face grew worried when he caught sight of Ryla with the bloody handkerchief. “Seven bells! Are you hurt badly?”

  “Be quiet now, lad,” Elmund said sharply.

  Bellan paled and looked as though he were about to protest before nodding resignedly.

  “No use in staying crated up now, Bellan. We’re getting out of here.”

  He looked as if he were waiting for more, but then he just nodded again.

  The crew looked to each other confusedly.

  “Begging your pardon lady,” Elmund started, “but you surrendered the ship’s key to Norden less than an hour ago. Maybe you need to lie down, Captain?”

  “Stand down, Elmund. He didn’t hit me that hard,” she snapped. What a fool that man was, she thought, looking at her like she was mad. “I gave him a fake. I swapped it out with the real key earlier. It’s in my cabin.”

  They all looked at her incredulously, and immediately everyone began to ask questions at once until she quieted them.

  “What did you give him then?” Elmund asked.

  “A bracket from beneath the table in my cabin. I shall have to take my meals at my desk for a time, but it will be worth it to be shed of that miserable man.”

  Kipren shook his head and laughed.

  Galt and Elmund were smiling too.

  Bellan no
dded and then tentatively opened his mouth. “How are we going to get out of the hold and get to your cabin?”

  “You can get to a lot of places if you know the way,” she said conspiratorially. “They think they have us trapped? This is my ship. Our ship! We shall see who has who.” She winced and put a hand to her throbbing head. “Double pay to the man who hits Norden in the head at the next opportunity.”

  They would wait for the mage to calm down and for things to grow quiet before they would sneak away, and so they peered out of the portholes to mark the progress of the Norandians and counted the different rhythms in footsteps on the deck above to discern that there were only two guards posted on the airship, eight more on the ground building the machines that Norden had transported from who knows where. As the machines took shape, a dire feeling of dread that had been welling up inside the pit of Ryla Dierns’ stomach had risen to her throat.

  Siege engines of some sort, she realized. That is what those machines were. There was some sort of arm mounted with a harnessing point and a counterweight. Norden was talking excitedly to his clerk and pointing toward the queer small barrels and a curved bronzen basket that extended out above and behind the base of the apparatus. They looked to be siege engines without carriages. Ryla assumed the engines to be a form of catapult, and the barrels were the ammunition. He had three of the bloody things assembled now, and she supposed that was all of them. What was the mage planning, she wondered? He was going to blow a coach from the road, horses and all, by the look of it. He had cracked for certain now, Ryla realized. They could easily slip away, that was not a problem. Ryla knew that there was a trap door that led to her cabin here hidden behind some loose boards in the ceiling. She and all her crew could be up in her cabin in moments and they could easily overpower the two guards and scurry up the rigging, cut the lines, and be away before Norden could even blink.

  The problem was that Ryla could not bring herself to run away knowing that at least two innocent people were riding to their deaths and there was a chance that she could prevent it. She turned back to the others.

  “We aren’t going to let Norden win tonight. We are going to foil all his plans before we leave and rescue Shiny and Pretty in the process.” She had a steely glint in her eye. “I’m going to get some sleep. My head hurts. Wake me up when things get quiet.”

  “Aye, lady, aye.”

  She went to the forecastle and climbed into a hammock and pulled a fur blanket over her and shut her eyes as the ship creaked and groaned in the wind. She drifted off into sleep almost immediately.

  She was gently woken what felt like moments later. It had grown colder, and Elmund’s breath was frosting as he whispered to her. “There’s some activity out there, Captain.”

  “How long have I been asleep?” she asked.

  “A few hours, lady. Hurry up and have a look.”

  A few hours? Her head hurt still, but the throbbing was gone and her vision was back to normal after she had blinked the sleep out of her eyes. She rose to her feet and swayed slightly.

  Elmund reached out and put a hand on her back to steady her. “How’s your head?”

  “Better. I can stand steady now, I think.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes, I’m steady now. You can let go.” She had not meant it to sound harsh.

  “Aye, lady.”

  He stood away and went to the porthole, waiting for her. She steadied herself and stepped carefully to him.

  “What is it then?” she asked as she looked out.

  “They sent scouts out down the road earlier and they came back not twenty minutes ago, and now the whole group’s aflutter.”

  She saw that Norden had swiveled one of his engines toward the road but the other two were left pointing northward. He means to release his engines upon them as they come into view, she realized, and he had staged the engines so that he would have several opportunities should his first attempt fail.

  “Why did you not wake me earlier?”

  “You needed your rest. That was a nasty blow to the head he struck you.”

  “Were you boys worried about me? I’m touched.”

  He smirked and shook his head at her. She heard a snippet of Norden’s shrill voice cut through the air and turned her attention back to the porthole in time to see the Norandians dividing forces. It seemed that Norden had ordered them to send half of their number over the road to wait on the slopes of the hill opposite the one they now occupied. That must be his last line of defense, she thought. He means to run his engines at them first, then failing the absolute success of that his Norandians would sweep in and take care of any survivors. A neat and well-ordered plan, she had to admit. But it was one that was easily ruined.

  “Well I’ll say this for him, he’s predictable.”

  “How’s that? He screams a lot?” Elmund was watching the soldiers’ progress as they trotted down the hill together. “I reckon they’re the ones sent in to do the fine work after these engines spew their loads.”

  She nodded grimly. “I was thinking the same. So we have to make sure those engines miss their marks.”

  “Aye, lady. I’ll wake Galt. He might know best how to deal with them.”

  “Wake everyone. We need to be ready to move quickly.”

  Elmund did as she said and soon a tired-looking Kipren stood next to Elmund as bleary-eyed Galt stood with his hands tucked into his armpits looking out the porthole.

  “There ain’t no wheels on them carriages. How’d they set them like they are now?”

  “I was sleeping, don’t ask me,” Kipren said wryly.

  “I saw him do it, Norden. He walked to each one with that rod and the bloody things floated off the ground like airships.”

  They regarded him incredulously. How could that be possible without some sort of mainsail, Ryla wondered?

  “Then he angled them and brought one to bear down on the road, easy as you please.” He made a motion with his hands to demonstrate the ease with which Norden was able to shift the bulk of the engines and angle them, as though it took no effort at all.

  “That’s problematic. We’ll need that rod then.”

  “Why did he make us load and unload the bloody things so many times if all he needed to do was use that rod and make them float?” Galt looked angry. “That was a lot of wheel work.”

  “It will be hard to get from the mage, he’s fond of that.” Kipren was watching the activity through the porthole. “Better if a sneaky man were to sneak down there and switch them around once they was afloat.”

  He cut his eyes at Galt. “Is that you volunteering me to do something?”

  “You are good at that sort of thing,” Elmund put in.

  Galt scowled at him. “What is the plan then? There’s six soldiers to one side of the road, and four here. Two on the deck and two on the ground. Two more if you count the mage and his clerk.”

  Ryla nodded. “We stay hidden until the action starts, then we move once they are distracted.”

  They listened to their captain as she laid out the plan. It was easy to reference the position of the guards by looking out the porthole, and Ryla knew it was a gamble, but she also felt that they had the upper hand. Norden had been lured into a false sense of confidence. That had been her plan from the start with the ship’s key, and it had worked.

  Now he had divided his troops and he was shorthanded on the ground. Everything had fallen into place so far, but that was no reason for everything else to work out in her favor, she knew. The tricky part would be subduing the deck guards quickly and silently enough to avoid detection by the troops manning the engines, for if that went wrong they may have to abandon the idea of leaving the ship and take to the skies. She could fly back along the road and try to warn them of what lay ahead, she supposed, but there was a large chance that she would not be able to spot them in this weather at night, and
she could not be sure that way. No, she thought, we rush Norden and overwhelm him and leave nothing to chance. By the time word reached the authorities, she would have her revenge and she could lay low in the southwestern isles for a few seasons, repaint the Skyward and rename her, and with Elmund at the helm no one would ever be the wiser. Then what, she asked herself? What will I do once Uhlmet is dead and my people have been avenged? Will I know peace in my heart then, or will it be empty as I stand there and gaze down remorselessly at my fallen enemy? She hoped that it would leave her with some degree of peace, but she did not truly know how she would feel once a reckoning came. It was all she could do and so she had strived for justice. It was all that she would do, let the pieces fall where they may.

  She would stop Norden if it meant getting the prize of Uhlmet, the Magistry be damned. And as loathe as she was to admit it, the girl was special, and she liked the young soldier, and the idea of Norden having his way with either of them was something she could not stand idly by and allow to happen.

  “What about me? What shall I do?” The stableboy was standing there bleary eyed. It must be well past midnight and closer to dawn by now, Ryla thought.

  “You’ll stay below decks.”

  “Captain, if it please you I can—”

  “Do you aim to be a part of this crew?” ahe asked pointedly.

  “Lady? Yes, I mean to say, that’s what I’m driving at—”

  “Then learn to follow your captain’s orders and stay below.” She did not need this boy getting himself killed on her account.

  He looked down dejectedly. Hopefully he would not sulk about like a sullen child. Not that it would sway her; she had other nets to bring in. Still, she could give the lad a task and lift his heart a bit.

  “Here, lad. You are to watch and listen out the porthole for any action and to let me know on the double, are you clear with that?”