by P. K. Lentz
In their rush to repel the unlikely boarder, the ballooonmen had left their craft's most fearsome weapon, the shard cannon, unattended. Arriving at it, Blaik spun it to find it incapable of being pointed back inside the gondola; likewise upward at the balloon. Sensibly, blocks were in place to prevent accidents. Her Majestrix's servants were not always the brightest of creatures.
No matter, since it seemed Qilliara was now firmly in control of the gondola. The last few surviving crewman were pleading with her or trying to escape. Blaik watched long enough to see her catch one and toss him over the rail, and then he turned his attention to the skies around them.
The dark shape of the second balloon hung not far off. In between the fading screams of the crewmen Qilliara was tossing overboard, Blaik heard the angry shouts of the other crew. Until now, there had been nothing they could do to help their embattled comrades. But now that their fellows had lost, the other crew might get the same idea which Blaik currently had.
To be sure that he was first to act on it, he swiveled the shard cannon and bent to put his eye behind the metal ring through which he surmised the operator was meant to aim the thing. Adjusting until the second balloon hung in the center of the ring, he set his arm to turning the crank on the cannon's side. The weapon shook and rattled, and black blurs burst from its muzzle in the direction of the other craft. Blaik aimed high, at the balloon itself, with the intention of tearing it.
There was a fresh burst of shouting and frantic motion in the other gondola as its crew did exactly as Blaik feared: opened fire with its own shard cannon. Holding steady, he kept the enemy balloon in the cannon's sight and cranked as quickly as he could, even as whizzing fragments struck the hull nearby with metallic pings.
A rope near his head was sliced, and its end fell to the deck. Already crouching, Blaik made himself smaller still and continued to spin the crank with his eye to the cannon sight. Unpiloted, the balloon which he and Qilliara had commandeered was drifting; the other was likewise in motion, and so the cannon's aim needed constant adjustment. At this distance, it was difficult to see whether his effort was meeting with success, but it seemed it must be. If the enemy shrapnel was reaching here, then his was also reaching its target.
Suddenly the rattling noise which had been filling Blaik's ears ceased and was replaced by nothing but a gentle squeal from the turning crank. Empty. He cast his eyes over the area of the gondola deck surrounding him and saw some rusted drums, but nothing he could be certain contained the cannon's ammunition. Even if he found it, he did not know how to reload. Surely he could figure it out if the enemy would obligingly cease their fire, but that seemed unlikely and so he did not long consider that course.
When he looked back down the barrel of the cannon, he found that the second balloon had lost significant altitude. A dark spot and fluttering shred of fabric near the top of their balloon spoke of a tear.
After a few more shard strikes to the hull beneath Blaik's feet, the enemy's cannon fell silent.
Issuing a spiteful “Ha!” Blaik rose and went to the rail. Qilliara appeared beside him. Behind them, the gondola stood empty but for a small number of motionless, green-jacketed corpses.
She detached one blaster from her hip and aimed it with outstretched arm at the sinking second balloon. The weapon made its crack sound three times, flashing blue fire, and the balloon's descent accelerated.
“It was taken care of,” Blaik protested, his pride a bit dented. Then he yelled at the falling aircraft, “Take that! From the Blue Fire Army!”
Qilliara returned the blaster to her hip. “Our balloon also has a tear.”
Craning his neck, Blaik looked up to see a few small holes in the fabric. What other damage might lie out of sight, he could not know.
“Doesn't feel like we're falling,” he remarked hopefully.
“We are descending slowly.”
“Can you still fly it?”
Without bothering to answer, she said, “Throw out any unneeded weight, starting with the bodies.”
“Aye, Cap'n,” Blaik said. “In future, could you please tell me in advance about plans like this?”
“No.”
Staring up at the balloon's rigging, Qilliara made her way to the gently whup-whupping propellers. Behind each was mounted a large metal plate which moved left or right depending on whether she pushed or pulled two hinged metal shafts protruding from a slot in the gondola's deck. While Blaik dragged dead bodies of various shapes and weights to the rail and heaved them up and over, Qilliara studied the horizons, settled on a direction and adjusted their course using the shafts and vanes.
Blaik could not be certain if the heading was correct, but it was not entirely wrong. The sky was grayer in front of them and brighter behind, which meant they must be traveling toward the center of the world and away from the Great White Wall that surrounded it.
Right direction or wrong, something told Blaik that finding the Witch-Queen was going to be the least of their troubles. Very soon, if not already, Majestrix Jaxitza would wish nothing more than an intimate meeting with the two heretics who already had killed more of her servants than anyone Blaik knew.
* * *
Four
When he was done throwing out bodies, ballast, and (after inspecting their contents) various containers, Blaik set to figuring out reloading the shard cannon. While he worked, he broke an uncharacteristically long silence to address the vessel's new captain.
“If you're open to suggestions—”
“No.”
“We should land soon. The Sky Wing is not just balloons. It's... things with wings. Flyers. Maybe those weapons of yours will take them down. I don't want to find out.”
“This craft will crash due to the damage. That's when we'll land.”
“Crash, right.” Blaik found and opened the port on the cannon into which one evidently was meant to pour the metal shards contained in nearby drums. “And by crash, you mean a sort of gentle crash, right?”
“Sure.”
“You're a bad balloon captain.”
Qilliara made no reply to this criticism, which Blaik took as a positive development. Previously even his inadvertent insults had resulted in one chance warnings. Either her balloon captaining skills were not personal enough to her to warrant offense, or he was growing on her.
The latter, surely, Blaik opted to believe as he whistled while tipping a rusted drum of shrapnel into the cannon's loading port. When it was done, he chucked the drum over the gondola rail.
Since she liked him so much now, Blaik thought, she might be receptive to a perfectly sensible, legitimate request.
“Listen, if I'm going to protect you while you play dead for thirty-seven m... mee...”
“Minutes.”
“—I think—”
“Think. Adorable.”
“—you should allow me to use your weapons, if that's possible. Maybe even teach me to use them.”
Qilliara did not shift her gaze from the hazy desert horizon.
“Sorry. Would you please allow me to use your weapons? Just one, and only when you're not able. It's more for your sake than for mine.”
She tugged a steering shaft, adjusting the balloon's course slightly. She said at length, “I was planning to.”
“I'm not busy now. You?”
With a faint scowl, the bad captain abandoned her post at the gondola's stern. From the cannon at the prow, Blaik walked back and met her mid-ship, where she removed one of the blasters from her hip. The fingers of her free hand danced on its surface for a moment before she held the thing toward him, handle-first.
The last time Blaik had set his palm to that handle, it had caused a fair amount of pain. As such, he found the hand reluctant to chance it again.
Plus Qilliara was mean. He would not put it past her to trick him. For fun. Even though she never laughed.
Looking up (for she was taller than him by a nose) into her violet eyes, which stared back opaquely, Blaik held his breath and
clasped the weapon's handle.
It chirped, which caused him to tense momentarily in alarm, but no pain came.
Snatching it back, Qilliara reaffixed that weapon to her hip, drew its twin, and repeated the process.
“Coded to you,” she said. “If I'm down, you can draw them. They are called razers. Aim and squeeze. No recoil. You'll manage. Or not. If you lose one, you will not live long enough to apologize.”
Her violet eyes said the threat was not idle, if any she made ever were.
“Understood,” Blaik said. “Somehow, I don't think you take my job seriously.”
Offering no reply, she returned to the steering shafts.
“I do,” Blaik affirmed. “Saving the universe is dearly important to me. Mind-collapsing the... Grand ... Thinker-thing. Winning the war for us good guys. All of it.”
“I can't take you with me.”
“Can't, or won't?”
“Both.”
“You'll change your mind,” Blaik said, not because he believed it but because he hoped his positive attitude might sway her. Couldn't hurt, anyway.
He found it encouraging that Qilliara declined to deny the prediction, even though it was likely because her attention by then was focused on some mechanism which apparently fed the fire above their heads. Presumably flame had something to do with keeping balloons aloft.
With the goal of encouraging Qilliara to change her mind, Blaik kept quiet for a while, leaning on the shard cannon and keeping a somewhat nervous eye out for black shapes in the sky, particularly ones with great-big bat wings that flapped.
He took a brief break, without consulting (or looking at) Qilliara, to relieve himself over the rail of the gondola, driven as much by necessity as why not?
It was while looking out for creatures of the Sky Wing that he saw something else of note, not above but below.
“Hey, hey, Qil!” he called out, then corrected himself: “Qilliara. See, down there? That line is a rail.”
He ran closer to her. She glanced down in the direction he was pointing.
“I know you'll think I'm saying this out of self-preservation,” he said, “but all rails lead to Witch City. Maybe we should land and follow it.”
Qilliara looked at the ground, which had begun to turn to grasslands as they approached the desert's edge, then back to her controls. She yanked one of the metal shafts, and the balloon slowly began to adjust course to follow the tracks far below.
“We'll land?” Blaik asked.
“Land... crash. One of the two, eventually.”
“Can it be the first one? Soon. Please?”
Seeing that Qilliara was looking past him, Blaik turned and followed her gaze. There, ahead in the direction of their travel, he saw the sight he had been dreading: distant black specks over the horizon.
“Sky Wing,” he said. “We need to land, now!”
Qilliara walked to the prow, drawing her two razers. Blaik followed to man the shard cannon next to her.
“Listen to me,” he pleaded. “ This is my world, and as much as you don't want to admit it, I'm useful. If even one of those flyers reaches us, it will rip this balloon to shreds and we will fall straight down. Maybe you can survive that. I can't.”
Qilliara, aiming both razers at the ends of outstretched arms at the distant airborne threats, paid him no attention.
“Fine...” Blaik said. If his life was not in her hands, then it was where it had been all his life: in his own. Stalking to the stern, he went to the brass dial he had seen Qilliara use earlier to make the brazier overhead burn stronger. If she wanted it stronger to keep flying, it stood to reason that he wished the opposite.
The dial refused to move in the first direction Blaik tried spinning it, being at its limit, so he spun it in the other. The hiss of flame overhead grew quieter.
Qilliara, rock steady with weapons trained, turned her head to deliver a brief glare of sorts, but she made no move to stop him or reverse his action.
Blaik continued to spin the dial until it could turn no further. The sound of the flame and its orange glow in the brazier above diminished to nothing. Within a short span, the combined evidence of stomach, vision, and his legs on the deck told Blaik that the gondola had begun a descent which, for the moment, felt of the non-catastrophic variety.
That result achieved, Blaik raced back to the shard cannon to set its sights on the cluster of steadily growing black shapes.
“I'm getting past the Wall for this,” he said to Qilliara, who yet stood still with razers aimed.
“You're not.”
He ignored her. “How many are there?” he asked.
Blaik could count just fine, but her violet eyes were probably better than his.
“Nine.”
The answer made Blaik glad he asked, but also not. Squinting, he could only make out six. For now, they were still black blotches, but in the past he had seen Jaxitiza's flyers a few times from as close as he cared to, when they had flown overhead. About as long from snout to tail as a man was tall, with a wingspan twice that, they had fat, lizard-like bodies with great leathery bat wings and sharp, oversized buzzard-talons. The beasts' riders were the smallest of Warpies, some fully formed with stick-like limbs, others practically just heads with fingers attached.
A sharp crack and blue flash announced that Qilliara had opened fire. An instant later, with the flyers in his sights, Blaik began turning the crank of the shard cannon.
“Stop!” Qilliara snapped. “They're not in that thing's range yet.”
Blaik stopped and set to watching as Qilliara fired intermittently, one careful shot at a time instead of rapidly as she had in Scratch. Through the cannon's sighting ring, he saw the shapes scatter as one plunged downward on an erratic path, recovering briefly before resuming its fall.
Maybe she would take them all down after all. Peeking over the gondola rail, Blaik noted gladly that the ground was closer now. Still easily far enough to ensure death if they crashed—but closer.
The shot-down balloon was a brownish serpent gently undulating on a meadow, its gondola laying on one side.
In the sky, the incoming flyers had separated and flew in wild paths. Qilliara's razers tracked them, her two arms moving independently of each other. She loosed several more shots, and another flyer veered erratically and fell. The beasts were close enough that Blaik could see the beating wings, the giant claws hanging underneath, the twisted, tiny shapes of the varied riders.
“Start shooting, Qilliara ordered.
Blaik's hand had been waiting on the crank handle for that very signal. The cannon roared to life, vomiting a stream of shrapnel into the sky.
The seven remaining targets, now far apart and flying evasively, proved hard to keep in the sight-ring, and the shard-stream lagged behind Blaik's adjustments of the cannon's aim.
In short, he was hitting nothing. But Blaik prided himself on an ability to learn quickly, and so he persisted as the beasts' eyes and teeth began to show white inside their black heads, and their screeching wails penetrated the tiny gaps in the cannon's staccato. He chose just one target and tried to lead that creature's flight with the cannon, anticipating its path so that it might wind up flying into the shard-stream.
Two more, meanwhile, fell to Qilliara's blue fire. Five remained, growing uncomfortably near. Their screeches rang louder now, black scales glistening. Blaik's target persisted in eluding him. At any moment, he would be forced to stop and reload.
Then, a gift: some movement outside the cannon's sighting ring activated instinct honed over the course of the last few moments, and Blaik abandoned his first target for this fresh one. A small adjustment, and—
The beast's wings spasmed and went off-time. The small figure of the rider separated from the lizard body and fell while the mount spun wildly. Blaik kept the creature in the stream for several more beats until the cannon informed him with a squeak that its chamber was empty.
Ducking behind the gondola wall and the legs of Qilliara, Bla
ik pried the lid from the second and final drum of ammunition. He batted the loading hatch open and tipped the container, filling the cannon's rusted reservoir with bits of jagged metal. When he popped up again behind the cannon, he was in time to see another flyer fall victim to blue fire.
Three remained, and they were close now—their sharp claws just heartbeats from the fragile fabric that kept their vessel aloft. Blaik had no idea whether a crash landing, even of the gentle variety, was survivable by now, and there was no time to look and ponder. Quickly choosing a target, Blaik spun the crank. No longer was it necessary to aim ahead of the beasts, for they were near enough that he could have thrown shrapnel and scored a hit. Bat wings and long-tailed lizard-body and enormous talons filled the sighting ring.
Black blurs, like insects swarming in a line, spewed from the cannon's muzzle and could hardly have missed. The creature's screech increased in pitch and volume, and it veered away with a tear in its wing. Blaik tried to track it—only to run into one of the blocks on the cannon's mount which kept it from firing on the gondola, rigging, or balloon itself.
Fortunately, Qilliara's arms had no such block. She fired through the rigging, and her shot struck the beast's belly. They were close enough now that Blaik saw the wound blossom and trail black blood into the air.
Having temporarily halted his own fire, Blaik swung the cannon round to put another creature in its sights. He found one coming straight at them with talons spread wide, just in time to see black holes ripped in its underbelly and in the bulb-like head of its miniature, skeletal rider courtesy of Qilliara's razers.
Hand ready on the crank, Blaik looked all around and saw no more movement. But had they taken down nine...? Or—
A shriek sounded from above. Blaik looked up into the interior of the balloon. Qilliara aimed her razers there, but wisely held fire. A second later, a tear opened in the fabric and a patch of sky became visible—sky and the last of the flyers, which had a hole in its leathery wing. The gondola lurched, along with Blaik's stomach. Feeling suddenly, alarmingly lighter, he grabbed the nearest section of rail. There was nothing to do but that: hold on tight to the gondola and hope they had descended enough by now, thanks to his snuffing of the flame, that a crash would not prove entirely fatal.