“All right, now that that’s settled,” Dora rolled her eyes, “let’s hear about what you saw in there!”
“My guess is the pickled beets,” Begonia offered. “Or, maybe a bit of moldy goat’s cheese we forgot in there some years ago.”
“We haven’t had goats here in decades,” Dora observed.
“Which is exactly why it would appear in a vision; the sense of smell can take control of the mind.”
“It wasn’t blue cheese.” Epik put an end to their argument. “What I saw was like a ship, but it was in the air. But I don’t think for long. I think—I think it was crashing.”
Begonia fixed a monocle over the eye that wasn’t clouded with white. She stared at him intently. “Did you happen to know where in the realm this ship was?”
“No,” Epik shook his head, “they were in the air. All I could see was clouds and blue sky.”
“Clouds?” Begonia was up out of her seat in five, maybe ten, seconds flat. She struggled for leverage over her cane and made for the back door.
Epik and the other two witches followed.
Outside, the children, with Kavya’s help, were shoveling through the deep snow, clearing a path from the door out to the barn. Another led out in the direction of World’s Eye, and yet another toward the Tabletop Mountains.
Begonia hobbled cautiously down the icy trail. Her eye was fixed on the sky. “Do any of these clouds look familiar?” she asked.
Epik looked up doubtfully. He scanned the sky, quite certain he wouldn’t see anything familiar.
Then his stomach filled with butterflies. He pointed. “That one! The one that looks sort of like an elephant. That’s where it was.”
“No,” Begonia said, “that’s where it will be.”
7
Something Wicked That Way Goes
Churning stomach, shaking legs, ringing ears, nothing was quite like the anxious feeling of heading into battle. Brendan locked onto the safety line and tightened his helmet strap.
“They’ve spotted us!” Amber yelled. Her head peeked over the rail of the crow’s nest.
The airship and its crew were battle ready, hardened over the last months in test after test. This was just one more fight against troops from King’s Way.
Still, Brendan couldn’t shake a nervous feeling—something was different. The odds, he felt, weren’t in their favor.
Cannons at the ready, the airship made a slow but steady descent. All hands were primed to engage the enemy. A regiment of Brendan’s best troops waited near the stern. They would rappel down and engage the troops on the field of battle while the airship’s cannons laid waste to everything else.
What at first had looked like a minor campsite turned out to be something much more. Tents were staked in neat rows about a hundred yards from a ramshackle warehouse. There, the enemy soldiers scrambled this way and that, appearing much like ants boiling from an anthill—an anthill with a freshly stamped boot print.
Unlike Brendan’s crew, these ants were not at all ready for battle.
There was no visible fire, but a trail of smoke stained the sky.
Brendan leaned over the railing and threw up one last time. He was ready.
As they neared the warehouse he took notice of the tracks on either side. The track on the north side went east, and the one on the south side angled west. The southernmost track had a line of carriages waiting. The first in line billowed thick plumes of black smoke. In fact, none of them were normal horse drawn carriages.
On the ground men were swarming the back carriage. Brendan’s heart sank at the sight of an anti-airship artillery catapult.
“Damn it!” Brendan bit his lip. “Prepare to take on fire!”
“Aye, sir,” Peter shouted. The ship began to zigzag downward in an evasive maneuver. Peter was good at what he did. They’d get through this. Or so he hoped.
And at least there’s only one.
But one catapult, Brendan knew, was one too many. The only saving grace was that not only were these troops unprepared, there was no wraith here to help them. The troops had no weapons, no armor. They didn’t look like troops at all, really. Only the carriages mattered.
What are they up to down there?
A sound like a whistle, and the carriages all began to move as if pulled by a team of a hundred horses. The smoke thickened. And the last carriage, the one with the catapult, began to rain fire.
Well, it was an upside-down rain. Shells exploded in the air, some high, some low, some right next to the ship.
“Fire on the artillery!” Brendan bellowed.
“Aye, sir!” The gun-captain relayed the orders and said, “It’s hard enough to hit ‘em when they’s stationary. This one’s moving!”
“That’s true,” Brendan agreed. Below them, the gun deck was still silent with nothing to aim at yet. Soon, the warehouse would come into range, and booming cannons would shake the whole deck. Only the bow cannon fired at will.
Peter called, “Skipper, should we stay on the warehouse or go with the, er, thing?”
If Peter maneuvered now, they’d never get a good shot at the warehouse.
“The, uh, thing, I guess” Brendan said. “Sergeant Tracker, plot the warehouse on the map. We’ll circle back and take care of it later.”
“Aye, sir!”
Brendan took one last look at the warehouse and the dirty campsite beside it. And right there staring back at him was a tall silhouette Brendan knew well.
“Todder?” he whispered.
Todder gaped at the contraption in the sky. It looked like one of the navy’s battleships—wooden hulled and sturdy with ten cannons bristling below the main deck. A larger cannon on a turret at the ship’s bow swung around and fired.
The airship dangled from an organ shaped balloon with fins on each side and a three-pronged tail.
Todder’s body lurched underneath him and he was forced away.
Steam billowed from the front carriage—the, uh, engine, Brendan thought. It propelled all the carriages forward down the track. There were at least twenty and most had a boxy shape. The catapult at the end of the monstrous caravan flung more salvos of flack into the air. Booming explosions were minor punctuation to the constant ringing in Brendan’s ears—this despite the muffs he wore.
He clasped his hands tightly over the muffs and he ran down the deck to the bow cannon which fired again.
Another miss.
“We have to take that thing out,” Brendan yelled to no one in particular.
A chorus of “aye sir” replied anyway. Corporal Causeway sat in the gunner’s seat, maneuvering the turret. He was covered in black powder and soot. He lined up another shot.
He missed but was only about ten feet wide this time.
Brendan put a hand on the corporal’s shoulder, pulled Causeway’s muff from his ear and yelled, “You do see where it’s headed, don’t you?”
The corporal squinted at it then smiled knowingly.
“Take out the track ahead of it and see what happens.”
“Aye, sir,” he said, swinging the cannon around, “good thinking!”
BOOM!
Finally, the cannon hit its mark. A cloud of dirt and metal exploded in the air. When it settled, all that was left of the track was twisted metal and fractured wood. The carriages began to slow. The hissing squeal of metal against metal could be heard through the muffs.
But it was too late. It veered off of the track, tilting precariously on its left wheels, and pulled all the carriages after it. They sliced through the snow, digging a shallow trench in the ground. After what seemed an age, the carriages began to break away from each other, some falling, others, including the engine, ground to a stop and the realm was quiet again.
The catapult could fling no longer, turned over on its side. Brendan’s crew could stop and breathe while their skipper weighed his options. He could destroy the thing with the cannons or leave it and report back to Dune All-En. “What the heck is this thing?” he asked.
But as everyone was still wearing fluffy muffs, no one heard him. “What is that thing?” Brendan yelled.
“I was just thinking of a name for it.” Amber hurried down from the crow’s nest. She shouldered her way between Brendan and Causeway and trained her spyglass on the silent metal beast.
“And?” Brendan remembered to shout this time. He pulled off the earmuffs and waved them at the crew.
“A train,” she said. “See how it’s a line, one after the other. You’ve never heard of a carriage train before?”
“Not one like that.” Brendan scratched the back of his head. “Okay, let’s say we call it a train then. Causeway, do you think you could aim for that engine part at the front?”
“Steam engine,” Amber interjected.
“Right, the, uh, the steam engine.”
“No problem, sir,” Causeway said.
“If you’re going to do it, make it soon.” Amber had turned her spyglass back to the skies.
“Right-oh,” Causeway agreed. He climbed back into the turret.
“Hold on. What is it? What’s wrong?” Brendan asked Amber, scanning the sky himself.
The train had been making for a cluster of mountains with peaks flattened as if someone had swung a sword across them. They looked odd, every peak the same height as its neighbor. But it wasn’t the mountains the airship needed worry about. It was the dark gray, almost black, clouds behind the mountains that sent a shudder down Brendan’s spine.
A winter storm was brewing.
“No, not that,” Amber said. She pointed the opposite direction.
Everyone looked.
Brendan choked.
He knew all too well what was flying toward them now—though he’d seen the gray mist-like form of a wraith only once before.
But once was enough.
8
Avoid Wraiths
“It feels like it may storm.” Schmilda said, shivering.
“Right, that,” Begonia agreed. “We’ll get a pot of stew going for them soldiers. Come along, Dora.”
“Can’t you—you’re not going to…” They brushed past Epik. “Help us?” he finished his thought.
“Help?” Schmilda regarded him. “Help, he asks. Aren’t you the one who’s saved the kingdom?”
“Twice!” Dora smiled oddly.
“Right, I believe he is,” Begonia affirmed, “and he’s also the one who won’t stop bringing trouble to our door.”
“But… But I had help those times.”
The witches lumbered inside as the elephant shaped cloud began to sail away on the wind.
“And you’ve got it this time, too.” Millie joined him along with the other children, Eddis, and Kavya.
Epik nodded glumly.
He took Millie, Kavya, and the twins down the path toward the Tabletop Mountains. The rest were too green, too new. The path ended in a blur of white snow on meadow. They waded through the deepest parts and followed the cloud on its jaunt across the sky.
It was the twins’ first journey from the cottage since their arrival. Neither tried to hide their broad grins. They clearly enjoyed the snow. Millie made snowballs for the twins who whooped and hurled them everywhere. Until one hit Kavya.
“Be serious, you three,” she scolded.
Kavya had reluctantly accepted the role of caregiver. Doug and Gal, the twins, were the last two children in King’s Way with magic. And Epik and Kavya had spirited them away right under the Grand Sovereign’s nose.
The evil wizard had tried to steal Millie’s magic, but lucky for her, she’d already known what she was. And under the Coven’s tutoring, Millie was becoming a fine witch, mastering spells and potions as advanced as the ones they taught Epik.
The twins’ instruction, however, was disjointed. Gal had taken to Schmilda whose doublespeak tripped her up, as indeed it did Epik most of the time.
And Doug didn’t really care to learn magic, not from the witches. Instead, he had taken to following Kavya around as much as possible. When Epik tried his hand at teaching Doug, the boy lost focus and fiddled with anything within reach. He often took things apart but always put them back together. Half the time they were better than when he started. And through some inexplicable yet incontrovertible math, he left twice that number worse.
Both twins had strawberry blonde hair and squished noses. Gal had long hair, and Doug’s was short. But that was about all that distinguished them.
Doug threw one last snowball. It started off okay, but then caught in the wind and veered back toward them. The breezes were in their face now, a telltale sign the storm was headed straight for them.
The Tabletop Mountains were a sort of purplish mountains that never grew taller or closer no matter how far they walked. They were just a constant on the horizon.
“I see it!” Millie cried. Her finger followed the airship’s course in the sky. Unlike the mountains, it grew steadily from a speck against the clouds to a hint, and finally, the ship itself.
It didn’t look like it was crashing, but it sailed fast on the wind. And then Epik saw why.
“Is that…” Millie didn’t finish, just stared at the sky
“A wraith,” Epik confirmed.
“Evasive maneuvers!” Brendan bellowed.
A hailstorm of clicks replied as the crew secured harnesses to the safety lines. Brendan secured his own just beside the wheelhouse.
Peter was already putting the ship through its paces. It climbed steadily but slowly, inching toward a giant cloud that looked like it shouldn’t be able to fly.
“We’re never going to outrun it,” Amber cried, stating what everyone already knew. In one swift motion she closed her spyglass and stowed it in her pocket.
The wraith twisted, turning somersaults through the air as it advanced.
Brendan had encountered only one wraith before. Through sheer luck he had come away unscathed when it brought down another ship.
All but unstoppable, wraiths were indestructible. No human weapon had any effect on them. The ghostly creatures had no skin or body, yet they could wield manmade weapons. This one, Brendan saw, held a sword.
On the other side of the ship, the dark clouds pressed them like the wraith’s disproportionate shadow.
The good thing, if he could call it that, was wraiths appeared to run on a sort of exhaustible energy—only good for one attack before they puffed like smoke, back into nothingness.
In Brendan’s previous encounter, they lost one airship but not the battle. At the time he’d had an armada of three ships.
Today, with only one ship and the wraith pursuing, the only option Brendan could think of was retreat.
But they couldn’t outrun it for long.
“Aeronauts,” Brendan said, “prepare to engage. If that sword touches the blimp, you’ll pay with more than your life.” It was an empty threat, he knew, but it sounded like something a real ship’s captain would say.
“Port side, engage!” his gun captain called.
The men and women on the left deck plunged overboard, rappelling partway down their tethers and held steady to the ship between the hatches. The aeronauts drew swords, and one by one, they kicked off swinging through midair at the wraith.
Two parried its blows while another sliced through the gray mist. Several others missed it entirely.
The wraith didn’t take kindly to this. It sliced through the rope holding the gun captain aloft. He fell from the sky down to the whitened oblivion below. The wraith persisted up past the deck.
If only he’d put more thought into tactics. He’d known the wraiths were a threat, known there were more out there, and still he’d not prepared.
“Dive!” Brendan yelled.
Peter’s actions were so in tune with the skipper’s orders, the airship rocked forward exactly on Brendan’s command. It dove as the wraith soared. The dirigible’s canvas exterior was safe… by mere inches.
For a moment, the ship was weightless. Tethers went taut. The crew hung
in the air, scrabbling to find a hold on the rapidly descending ship. Then Peter pulled her out of the dive.
Brendan scanned the horizon and found the wraith still in hot pursuit. There was really no escape. They simply weren’t fast enough.
The wraith drew level with the blimp and began to slice the canvas, new shreds flapping with every snick.
It would’ve ended quickly—it should’ve ended quickly if it weren’t for the other wraith.
“Another wraith incoming, starboard,” Amber yelled.
Brendan’s stomach lurched. It’s over, he thought.
There was only enough time to watch the other gray ball of mist plunge through the ship.
This one was weaponless. It met the other wraith in a head on collision. Whether from surprise or the effect of being plunged through, the first wraith’s sword was dislodged, clattering down on the deck.
The crew watched openmouthed as two balls of gray gas turned to a single large one. The fight of the wraiths was silent. It looked like the smoke of two fires meeting in the air in a wild tangle. The only sounds were that of the wind and the fluttering of the torn canvas.
“Pete, pull us out of this dive.” Brendan realized they were losing altitude fast. “Pete?”
The redhaired boy’s hold on the wheel was tighter than Brendan had ever seen it, white-knuckled on ten and two. Sweat dripped down Peter’s brow. “I’m trying, sir,” he moaned through clenched teeth.
The ground drew closer at an alarming rate.
Peter glanced up at the dirigible’s blimp, still straining with the wheel. “Sir,” he said. “I can mend that if you take the helm.”
“Right-oh.” Brendan unharnessed and took the pegs at nine and three. Peter unhooked and darted away. Immediately Brendan felt what Peter had been up against. The wheel acted on its own accord, choosing what was easy. At the present moment, the easiest thing was to crash nose first into the ground as quickly as it could.
Sight Beyond Epik Sight: A Steampunk Fantasy Romp (Epik Fantasy Book 3) Page 4