The air cars turned clumsily and fled back toward the distant tower-city.
The dragon ceased its pursuit of the metal and plastic vehicles and turned its interest toward the Steresa’s Dream, its long, sinuous body undulating like a sea serpent’s as it flew between the clouds. Its yellow eyes looked hungry.
“The harpoon gun!” cried Captain Shiolko to his sons. “Man the harpoon gun.”
Shrue shook his head and held up one hand to stop the young men. Checking to make sure that the last of the air cars was out of sight, Shrue raised both arms again—the gray spidersilk of his robe sleeves sliding back—and made motions as if directing an invisible orchestra, and the dragon disappeared with a thunderclap implosion. The passengers applauded.
Later that evening, Shrue came up on deck to another round of applause. The passengers were watching a smaller, greener, but angrier version of his dragon trying to keep up with the sky galleon but falling behind as the wind came strong straight from the southwest, propelling Steresa’s Dream over and away from the last of the mountain peaks and their attendant clouds. Belching fire in the direction of the galleon, the smaller dragon turned back toward the clouds and high peaks.
“I think your first dragon was more convincing,” said Captain Shiolko as the passengers on deck again applauded the magician.
“So do I,” said Derwe Coreme. “This one seemed a tad…less solid. Almost transparent in spots.”
Shrue shrugged modestly. He saw no reason to tell them that the second dragon had been real.
They spotted their followers just after dawn. Shrue and Derwe Coreme were awakened by a son and—after receiving permission from Captain Shiolko—hurried up onto the quarterdeck to the aft railing. The captain, several of his sons, Arch-Docent Hu, Meriwolt, and several of the other passengers were sharing Shiolko’s telescope to study the dots flitting above the western horizon. The morning air was free of clouds and absolutely clear. Shrue’s own tiny telescope folded as flat as a monocle but it was the most powerful instrument aboard the Steresa’s Dream. The diabolist unfolded it and looked toward the horizon for a long moment, then handed the better telescope to the captain. “It’s the eleven pelgranes,” he said softly. “Faucelme has found us.”
“There’s one saddle empty,” said Derwe Coreme when it was her turn to look through the telescope.
“The apprentice seems to have gone missing,” said Shrue. “But you’ll notice that the two Purples are back and in their respective saddles.”
Derwe Coreme’s pale face lifted toward Shrue. “Then your daihak—KirdriK—has failed. If that is true…”
“If that is true,” said Shrue, “then we are all doomed. But it is possible that the two Purples we see here are projections of Faucelme’s. Of the Red’s, rather, since I believe that Faucelme himself has little or no autonomy any longer. They obviously think that our belief that KirdriK has been defeated would hurt our morale.”
“It certainly hurts mine,” squeaked Meriwolt.
Shrue put his long finger to his lips. “No one else need know about KirdriK’s battle with the Purples. Then, projection or no, the morale of our small band will not suffer.”
“Until Faucelme and his Red and Purples kill us,” said Derwe Coreme very softly. But she was smiling and there was a gleam in her eye.
“Yes,” said Shrue.
Captain Shiolko walked over to their group. He and the other crew and passengers knew only what Shrue had felt it necessary to tell them earlier—that there was a possibility of pursuit by another magician and his minions.
“They’re closing,” said Shiolko. “And unless Steresa’s Dream is blessed by stronger winds from the southwest, they’ll continue to close. Will they attack?”
“I think not,” said Shrue. “I have something they want, but what they want most is to reach the place to which Ulfänt Banderz’s nose is guiding us. But as they get closer, I believe I can add a disincentive to any impulsive behavior on their part.” Shrue turned to the seven-foot-tall Arch-Docent Hu and the diminutive Mauz Meriwolt. “Would you two gentlemen be kind enough to accompany me below?”
Ten minutes later, Shrue reappeared on deck leading an eleven-foot-tall figure by the hand. The form was completely shrouded within the blue robes and black veil of a Firschnian monk. Shrue led the towering, if slightly unsteady, figure aft and set the monk’s hands on the railing.
“What if I have to move?” came Arch-Docent Hu’s muffled voice from approximately the chest of the tall monk. “You shouldn’t have to unless they attack,” said Shrue. “And if it comes to that, our little guise will have already been found out. Oh…but if either of you need to use the head, Meriwolt can guide you while one of us holds your hand, Arch-Docent.”
“Wonderful,” came a frustrated squeak from behind the veil.
Descending to their cabin, Derwe Coreme whispered, “What are the chances that the real KirdriK will be victorious and return in time to help us?”
Shrue shrugged and showed his long hands. “As I’ve said before, my dear, a battle such as this in the Overworld may go on for anything from ten minutes to ten centuries of our time. But KirdriK knows the importance of returning as soon as he is victorious—if he prevailed and survived.”
“Is there any chance that the daihak simply fled?” she whispered.
“No,” said Shrue. “None. KirdriK is still well and truly bound. If he survives—and either he or the two Purples must die—he shall return immediately.”
All that day the pelgranes and their saddled passengers grew closer, until the black flapping forms held station a little less than two leagues behind the sky galleon. Shrue urged Captain Shiolko to have his sons practice with the air-powered harpoon gun, which they did diligently through the long, hot day, firing and reeling in the long barbed bolt time after time. A little after noon, the guiding nose of Ulfänt Banderz swiveled due east and the galleon and following pelgranes changed course accordingly.
“I’ve never seen pelgranes that large,” Shiolko said to Shrue late that afternoon as both men studied their pursuers through telescopes. “They’re almost twice the size of the normal monsters.”
It was true. Pelgranes fed on humans—they liked nothing better for their diet—but it would be all a regular pelgrane could do to carry off one adult man or woman in its talons. These creatures looked as if they could carry a man in each taloned claw while feeding on a third in its mouth-beak.
“Some magical breeding of the species thanks to Faucelme and the Red,” murmured Shrue. From the middledeck came a flat explosion of compressed air as three of the sons fired off the harpoon gun yet again. Then the screech-and-whine as they began laboriously cranking back the bolt on its quarter-mile of steel cable.
The eleven flying forms were backlit by the huge setting sun as one of the pelgranes broke formation and began closing the gap to the galleon.
“The saddleless one,” said Derwe Coreme, who was watching through Shrue’s telescope. She and her Myrmazons had all of their weapons strapped to their dragonscaled backs and belts. “Damn!”
“What?” said Captain Shiolko and Shrue together.
“It’s carrying a white and blue flag.”
So it was. Shiolko’s sons did their best to train the ungainly harpoon gun on the approaching pelgrane—and Derwe Coreme’s Myrmazons found it much easier to bring their short but powerful crossbows to bear—but the pelgrane was indeed carrying a white and blue flag of truce in one of its fleshy, pink little wing hands. They allowed it to flap closer and land on the portside railing.
Most of the passengers made a huge semicircle on deck, then half a semi-circle as they tried to get upwind of the stinking pelgrane, as some of the Myrmazons and Shiolko’s sons kept an eye on the other ten pelgranes behind them, making sure this visit was not just a distraction.
Shrue and the captain stepped closer, moving into the sphere of carrion stench that hung around the creature. The diabolist noticed that the pelgrane was wearing smoked goggle
s—they hated flying in daylight.
“What do you want?” demanded Captain Shiolko. And then, as an afterthought, added, “If you crap on my railing or deck, you die.”
The pelgrane smiled a foul pelgranish smile. “Your magician knows what we want.”
“I’m fresh out of Finding Crystals,” said Shrue. “What happened to Faucelme’s apprentice?”
“He became too…ambitious,” wheezed the pelgrane. “As all apprentices do, sooner or later. Faucelme was forced to…punish…him. But do not change the subject, diabolist. Hand over the nose.”
Something about the phrasing of that demand made both Shrue and Derwe Coreme laugh. The others in the mass of passengers and crew looked at them as if they’d gone mad.
“Tell the Red and his puppet Faucelme that their projection of the Purples is a sad failure,” said Shrue. He nodded toward the silent, tall monk’s figure at their stern rail. At least Meriwolt had managed to turn Arch-Docent Hu around so that the black veil under the hood was aimed in the general direction of the pelgrane. “We know how the battle in the Overworld really went.”
The pelgrane looked bored. “Are you going to give me the nose or make Faucelme take it from you?”
Shrue sighed. “Let me show you something, my friend,” he said softly. “Young Shiolko—Arven—could you give me that extra bit of block and tackle? Yes, set it on the deck in front of me. Thank you. Are you watching, pelgrane?”
The oversized pelgrane’s yellow eyes were shifting—hungrily—every way but toward the heavy block and bit of rope on the deck. It licked its foul chops while looking at the passengers, but said, “Oh, is there a birthday party underway here? Did you all hire a village magic-maker? Is the old man going to show us that there’s nothing up his sleeves and then make the big, bad block and tackle disappear? That will deeply impress one of the seventeen Elemental Reds in all of the universe!”
Shrue smiled and snapped his fingers.
The heavy block disappeared.
The pelgrane screamed in pain and horror. Its talons and both of its tiny fleshy hands clutched at its own belly.
“You looked hungry,” said Shrue. “I know that Faucelme and Faucelme’s owner are watching and listening through you. Let them know that they could never seize the nose of Ulfänt Banderz before I send it elsewhere—and to an elsewhere infinitely less retrievable than your foul belly, pelgrane.”
Still shrieking, the pelgrane flapped into the air, writhing and rolling, and then screamed, “I’ll have my dinner from you yet, mortals.” It feinted in Shrue’s direction, but banked suddenly, seized Reverend Cepres’s younger wife Wilva in its talons, and flapped away toward the south, still screeching and shrieking in pain even as Wilva screamed.
“Quick!” cried Shrue, gesturing the frozen Shiolko sons toward the compressed-air harpoon gun.
The Myrmazons needed no impetus. The pelgrane was no more than thirty yards away when six crossbow bolts slammed into the monster’s shoulders, back, and upper hairy thorax—the women warriors were trying to avoid hitting the woman hanging from its talons. The Myrmazons reloaded in an instant and Derwe Coreme raised her hand, ready to signal a second volley.
“No!” cried Shrue. “If it dies, it will release Wilva.” He gestured toward the Shiolko boys to fire, even as his lips chanted a spell and his fingers played the air as if it were the captain’s three-tiered piano.
Guided by the efulsion, the harpoon flew impossibly true, smashing through the pelgrane’s thick thorax. Yellow ichor flew everywhere. The pelgrane’s scream reached into the ultrasonic.
“Quickly!” cried Shrue, helping the sons crank in the metal cable.
“I’ll drop her!” screamed the raging pelgrane. “Let me go, or by Highest Gods you worship, I’ll bite her head off now and drop her!”
“Drop her and you die now,” shouted Shrue, still cranking the pelgrane in. The six Myrmazons had their crossbows aimed unshakingly at its head. “Return her safely and you have a chance to live,” he said. “I promise you your freedom.”
The pelgrane screamed in frustration and pain. They cranked it aboard like some huge, stoop-shouldered, carrion-stinking, feathered fish, and the pelgrane flopped and writhed and bellowed and vomited yellow and green ichor everywhere. But Wilva flew free and Reverend Cepres gathered her up, weeping but alive, in his arms.
“You promised me my freedom!!” screamed the pelgrane.
“So I did,” said Shrue and nodded to Derwe Coreme, who instantly used her longest and sharpest sword to strike the giant pelgrane just above the thorax, severing that hairy body part—larger than Meriwolt, who had to leap and scramble to avoid its thrusting stinger—and sending the thorax flopping on the deck, still pierced by the long barbed harpoon. Shrue gestured again, a backhand dismissal, and the rest of the shrieking pelgrane was thrown overboard as if by a huge, invisible hand. It plummeted a thousand screaming, cursing, ichor-venting feet or more before it remembered it still had wings.
It was a long night and neither Shrue nor Derwe Coreme slept a moment of it. The clouds had closed in and by midnight Steresa’s Dream was enveloped in cloud-fog so thick that the sons had reduced all canvas so that the sky galleon was barely making way. Huddled in the slight glow of the binnacle near Captain Shiolko at the wheel, Shrue and the Myrmazon chief could see the bright lanterns on the mainmast only as the dimmest and most distant of spherical glows. The only sound aboard the ship, besides the quarter-hour calling of the time by one of Shiolko’s sons, was the drip-drip-drip of droplets from the masts and rigging. But from beyond the ship, growing closer by the hour, was the leathery flap of wings from ten pelgranes closing their circle.
“Do you think they will come aboard tonight?” whispered Derwe Coreme. Shrue was interested that he could hear no fear or concern whatsoever in her voice, only mild curiosity. Her six Myrmazons were wrapped in blankets on the damp deck, sleeping like children. And, Shrue knew, unlike children, they could and would come fully awake in a fraction of a second when the alarum was called. What must it be like, he wondered, to have trained and disciplined yourself to the point where fear could be banished?
He said, “It depends on whether the Red controlling Faucelme thinks he has a real chance of stealing the nose.” Shrue patted his robes where the small box was pocketed next to his heart.
“Does he…it?” whispered Derwe Coreme. “Have a real chance, I mean. By magic?”
Shrue smiled at her in the soft glow of the binnacle. “No magic that I cannot counter, my dear. At least in so obvious an attempt.”
“So you’re an equal to the Red and Faucelme in a fight?” The woman’s soft whisper may have had the slightest edge to it.
“I doubt it,” said Shrue. “I can keep them from snatching the nose, but odds are very much against me in a stand-up fight.”
“Even,” whispered Derwe Coreme as she patted the short crossbow slung across her shoulder, “if Faucelme were to die suddenly?”
“Even then,” whispered Shrue. “But even without the Red, the ancient magus known as Faucelme would not be so simple to kill. But that isn’t what’s worrying me tonight.”
“What is worrying you tonight, Shrue?” said Derwe Coreme and slipped her calloused fingers inside his robe to touch his bare chest.
Shrue smiled but pulled away and removed the tiny box from his robes. Holding it near the binnacle light, he whispered, “This.”
The guiding nose of Ulfänt Banderz was levitating in its box, rattling at the glass cover. Shrue turned the box on end and the nose slid to the top as if magnetized, the nostrils pointing up and only a little to their left in the night and fog.
“Above us?” hissed Derwe Coreme. “That’s impossible.”
Shrue shook his head. “You see that dial on the post near Captain Shiolko between the wheel and capstan? The small device in the ossip engine room below sends out pulses from the atmospheric emulsifier in the hull by the keel and those return to a receiver, telling the captain the true altitude of the
ship even in darkness and fog. You notice that it now reads just above the numeral five—five thousand feet above sea level.”
“So?”
“We are in a valley,” whispered Shrue. “We’ve been following its contours for hours. The Ultimate Library is on one of the peaks above us and to the east—probably at about nine thousand feet of altitude.”
“Why haven’t we struck the cliffs around us and died?” asked Derwe Coreme. Once again, Shrue noticed, the only overlay was of mild curiosity.
“We are going dead slow, floating with the breezes,” whispered Shrue. “Also, I devised a little instrument—there, you may notice our good captain playing close attention to those four dials I jury-rigged from Meriwolt’s calliope.”
The warrior chief looked at the wires running from the device toward something in a box set near the binnacle, chuckled and shook her head. “Boys and their toys. But what’s to keep Faucelme and his pelgranes from striking the surrounding rocks in the dark?”
“Ahh,” breathed Shrue. “They know where they and where we are to a much finer degree than we do, I’m afraid. Pelgranes are nightflyers. They navigate by sound waves bouncing back from objects. That’s what my ‘little instrument’ is connected to—our unfortunate pelgrane visitor’s vibrating thorax. The creatures also ‘hear’ through their thoraxes…it’s why I let our friend come so close and behave true to pelgrane form earlier.”
“You needed his thorax.”
“Yes.” He squeezed her hand. Her skin was very cold and damp but her hand was not shaking in the least. “You can sleep if you want, my dear,” he whispered. “I have nothing to base it on but a hunch, but I don’t think the Red and Faucelme and the three Yellows and three Greens and their pelgranes will make their move tonight, in the dark.”
“Sleep?” whispered Derwe Coreme, former princess of the House of Domber. “And miss all this? You must be joking.” Spreading a blanket, she slid under Shrue’s outer robe and pulled him down next to her.
Songs of the Dying Earth Page 68