Skyborn

by Eric Asher

  Furi blinked. “I should have told you sooner. I’m sorry.”

  Alice rubbed the back of her neck and grimaced. “You told me now, and that means a great deal. You have nothing to apologize for.”

  Furi tried to understand Alice’s reasoning. Furi had hidden Ballern’s plot from her, from someone she was starting to think of as a friend. That wasn’t the kind of thing that was easily forgiven in Ballern. The people she knew in Ballern held grudges like their lives depended on their bitterness. The thought reminded her of Kura, and a knot of dread coiled in her stomach.

  “There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you, too,” Alice said as they reached the maze of booths and shops sprawled out beneath the docks. “But I’m afraid you won’t want to help us anymore.”

  Furi frowned. What could possibly make Alice think that? Furi had already told her about the incoming attacks planned by Ballern. And she didn’t have any regrets over that. “What is it?”

  Alice was quiet as she said, “I was on the ship that shot down the destroyers.”

  “I’m sure a lot of people were. Those Porcupines are massive.”

  “No, I mean the small ship. That bombed them from above.”

  Furi frowned as she remembered watching the strange vessel that moved like a schooner but was better armored. And, slowly, she remembered the faces that had appeared over the railing, and the shock of red hair. The bombs that had fallen, tearing out the turrets, killing Mei and the others. That had been … Alice? But that meant her own people had been trying to kill Alice and her friends, and Furi ground her teeth as she realized she felt closer to Alice than anyone in Ballern who wasn’t Skyborn.

  “Furi? I understand if you—”

  Furi held a hand up to stop her, shaking her head. “You couldn’t have known. My friends died on that ship.”

  Alice cringed at those words.

  “But we were there to kill. It’s not as though our ship wasn’t firing on you. It’s not as though we were a peaceful envoy.” Furi wanted Alice to understand she didn’t hate her for that. They didn’t even know each other, and it was a conflict stoked by rulers detached from the people they’d sent to die. “It was war, it is war, and it’s horrible, but is it so hard to imagine we were both wrong?”

  Alice took a deep breath as they stepped into an enclosed lift, riding it into the skies as the only sound was the whir of the motors and pulleys. She met Furi’s gaze. “No. No, it’s not.”

  When the gates opened, they exited onto the docks, and Furi looked at the small ship anchored nearby. An odd ship she’d seen before. The Skysworn.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Samuel let out a long sigh when they rounded the cape at the southeastern tip of the Deadlands. Drakkar kept the shore in sight at most times, but on occasion, they’d be so far out Samuel could see nothing but the clear blues of the Southern Sea.

  So long as the waters stayed calm, he didn’t much care about anything else. The nauseating journey from Cave to the Spires was one he wouldn’t soon forget.

  “I still think it would have been easier to take an airship,” Samuel said.

  Drakkar steered them around a shallow reef and grinned at the Spider Knight. “Even if Pirate’s Cove is not so populated as it once was, you understand they are pirates, yes? They will take what they can from the skies, including an airship. But this old boat will not be of interest to them.”

  Samuel shook his head and went back to studying Charles’s notebooks. While many of them were filled with schematics and designs the old tinker had given up on; others were more like journals. And those were what had kept Samuel’s attention. Stories from the Deadlands War. Precise accountings of the engagements Charles fought in. It was both riveting and horrifying, knowing what Charles had been capable of.

  The more he read, the more he understood why the people of Cave had feared the man they once simply called Atlier. Several of Charles’s inventions at the height of the Deadlands War were absolutely barbaric. To think the same mind that invented a device to fire a twenty-foot wall of flame at enemy lines was the same mind that had sacrificed so much for the good of Ancora was hard to swallow.

  And it wasn’t just the invention of those devices that made Samuel’s skin crawl. It was the plain, matter-of-fact accounting for the fatalities after each field test. And the old man would tweak the assemblies to make it worse. Samuel made it to the last page, a summary of the deaths of twenty-three Fel soldiers, before he tossed it aside in disgust.

  Samuel had long been a Spider Knight. Had fought, had killed, to protect the people of Ancora. But this was different, this glimpse into Charles’s wartime battles. Samuel could have never seen those writings and been all the happier for it. Nonetheless, some of them would help Jacob. He had no doubt of that.

  He held the notebook with the firebombs over the water, ready to drop it into oblivion.

  “Not what you wished to read?” Drakkar asked.

  Samuel hesitated. “I wouldn’t want Jacob to see this.”

  Drakkar shrugged. “It may not be so terrible. For him to see what Charles once was, versus the good he did in the world.”

  “It’ll break his heart.”

  “No,” Drakkar said with a smile. “There is little that will deter our friend, Samuel. I do not think he would cower from the truth of things, and I do not think you should make that decision for him.”

  Samuel slowly pulled the notebook back over the boat. He took a deep breath and stuffed it into his pack. Perhaps Drakkar was right. Either way, he had time to decide before they saw Jacob again.

  He picked up another of the journals and re-read a passage that reminded him of the man he knew. The story of an orphan and a widow who survived the destruction of a small village not far from the Skeleton. He’d sheltered them and abandoned his post to escort them to Bollwerk.

  Charles’s superior officer had wanted him tried for treason after deserting his post, but Archibald put a stop to it. Archibald, who had attained the rank of Magister, but was not yet the Speaker of Bollwerk, and wouldn’t be until the end of the war and the assassination of his predecessor.

  The boat tilted to the side as Drakkar spun the wheel, steam billowing away as water splashed onto the boilers. “Make ready!”

  Samuel looked up at Drakkar’s words, turning to see what the Cave Guardian was looking at. One thing he learned the deeper they traveled into Pirate’s Cove: while many of the structures along the shore had long since rusted into ruin, it wasn’t entirely abandoned.

  In the scraps, more than one airship waited, concealed by tarps and netting.

  “Are they trying to camouflage?” Samuel asked.

  “Yes, and avoid the worst of the heat. It serves two purposes. It keeps the Dragonwings at bay and is much harder to spot if any pirates decide to break the covenant of the cove.”

  “The what?”

  “An old agreement that the cove remains neutral. It is the only way to keep the pirates from killing each other. Or was, in older times. Pirates are a bit more civil now, what with those like Mary and Smith in the skies.”

  Samuel arched an eyebrow. He tried to get more information out of Drakkar, but the Cave Guardian would say no more about Mary and Smith.

  “It is not my story to tell. Ask them the next time you see them.” Drakkar pointed off to two short towers in the northeast. “If the old lab is still here, that is where we will find it.”

  Samuel grumbled and stuffed the last of Charles’s notebooks into his pack.

  “And Samuel,” Drakkar said. “This area has long been outside the rule of law. Trust nothing.”

  * * *

  The farther into the cove they traveled, Samuel started to understand what had once been there. The wreckage of old fishing vessels littered the shore in places, flanked by collapsed piers. But beyond that, he could make out the ruins of waterfront villages, long since lost to time.

  As the shoreline curved in, the ruins revealed more of themselves. And some, thoug
h they might have once been ruins, had been restored with care. The architecture reminded Samuel of the Skeleton—all sharp lines and harsh edges and too much glass—but here, modern stonework and brick mosaics swallowed the buildings’ bones.

  Drakkar slowed the boat, angling for a deep inlet beneath a cliff. It hadn’t looked high at first, dwarfed by the Dragonwing Mountains in the distance, but the closer they got, the higher it loomed, finally hiding their view of anything beyond.

  “Are we going to have to climb that?” Samuel asked.

  “No, we are going underground. Last time I was here, the Stone Dogs were more of a threat than any man.”

  “Great,” Samuel muttered. “Why did I agree to come here again?”

  Drakkar smiled at the Spider Knight before stepping away from the wheel and picking up a length of rope. The Cave Guardian slowly steered the ship into the shadows, where it took Samuel’s eyes a moment to adjust. Samuel couldn’t follow the quick motion Drakkar used to tie their boat off to a wooden piling. Drakkar fastened another rope to a cleat and then shut the engine down.

  Samuel followed Drakkar onto a stone platform that served as a dock. He glanced up and his steps slowed. Above them sat the remains of a great avalanche, as though a peak from the Dragonwing Mountains had collapsed onto the city.

  The more he studied the random piles of rubble and decayed ironwood trees, the more he was convinced that was exactly what had happened.

  “Avalanche?” Samuel asked.

  Drakkar shook his head. “The story long told here is that one of the bombs that destroyed the Skeleton buried this city too.”

  “A bomb brought down a mountain? How is that even possible?”

  “Big bomb.”

  Samuel glanced at Drakkar, finding a broad grin on the Cave Guardian’s face. “Still technically an avalanche, though. You have to give me that.”

  Drakkar inclined his head, leading the way to a set of narrow stairs. When they reached the top, Samuel froze. Pirate’s Cove wasn’t sunken deep underground like Cave and the outpost beneath the Sea of Salt. Instead, it was carved into the very rock of the fallen mountain; a jagged stone as large as the Lowlands themselves towered over them.

  A handful of old buildings had survived, or been restored to some degree, and the effect was jarring. Stonework sat beside open-air towers protected by little more than canvas tarps and thick rope. But other sections were clad in iron, rusted by salt and water, but looking no less secure for it.

  Closer to where they stood, a shadow moved. A person, Samuel thought, but as soon as he’d noticed the shadow, they were gone again.

  “Be on your guard,” Drakkar said.

  They passed a small bar, bottles lining the shelves behind it as a bartender wiped down a series of glasses. It meant he’d either recently had more patrons than the one drunken sailor currently sitting in the corner, or he rarely washed the barware.

  Either thought made Samuel shiver.

  The bartender glanced up, frowning at Samuel before offering a nod to Drakkar.

  Drakkar returned the gesture, and they continued on.

  They started up a long ramp that wound back and forth before leaving the pair standing before a squat square building, an armored pod Samuel had seen from below. So close to it, he realized each pod was much larger than he’d thought. At least as broad as Bat’s home. His home, he corrected himself. And some two stories tall.

  Something skittered across the ground and vanished into a shadowy hole near the door.

  “What was that?” Samuel hadn’t gotten a good look at it.

  “I believe it was a Stone Dog,” Drakkar said, as casually as if a Pill-Bug had strolled across their path.

  Samuel stifled a shiver.

  Drakkar reached out to the door.

  “What are you doing?” Samuel hissed.

  “Going into the workshop, of course.”

  “That’s where the Stone Dog went!”

  “Yes, as I said. Look where you step.”

  “You never told me to look where I step,” Samuel grumbled. But his irritation was soon forgotten as he crossed the threshold behind the Cave Guardian.

  Samuel froze when he stepped inside. This was not a building left abandoned, rusting away beneath a layer of salt. The chime of a small hammer on metal, steady and deliberate, greeted them.

  “Someone’s here,” Samuel whispered.

  “Obviously,” Drakkar said. “Now, announce yourself lest we find ourselves dead.”

  “Hello!” Samuel shouted.

  The rhythmic hammering paused and then continued. “What is it?” someone called.

  “We’re, umm, we’re looking for the old workshop of Charles von Atlier?”

  “Is that a question or a statement?”

  Samuel grew flustered at the question, but Drakkar appeared to be highly amused.

  The Cave Guardian stepped deeper into the workshop. “I apologize for my friend’s wavering resolve. We seek the history of the work done on Biomechs here.”

  The hammering stopped entirely. Something squeaked before a heavy thunk sounded on the stone floor. A small man who looked old enough to be Charles’s father rounded the corner, switching out a lens over his eye to better study his visitors.

  “Ah! Master Spider Knight. I wondered if you had survived the battle in Ancora.”

  “Do I know you?” Samuel asked.

  The old tinker’s smile wrinkled his face. “No.” He turned to Drakkar and held out a fist. Drakkar placed his hand over it.

  “For the Steamsworn.”

  “For the good of all.”

  “Now, what are you prattling on about? Looking for Charles’s work?” He barked out a laugh. “Young sir, I am Charles’s work.”

  Samuel stepped around the wall and gawked at what waited there. The old tinker was missing a hand. Well, that wasn’t entirely accurate. His hand was mounted in a metal vise while the tinker replaced a series of bolts and joints.

  “They get squeaky after a while. It’s worse here by the sea, but I always said I’d die by the waters, and I intend to do just that.”

  “You’re a Biomech,” Samuel said.

  The old tinker glanced at Drakkar. “Not the brightest Spider Knight I ever met. Rather think I’m more fond of Bessie.”

  “You know Bessie?” Samuel asked, confusion pulling at his thoughts.

  “Aye. I know your friend Jacob too. Met him beneath the Highlands. He asked me to evacuate the people in the catacombs, he did.”

  Samuel slowly put the pieces together in his mind. This man must have been underground with him and Bessie when he was knocked unconscious. But as he tried to understand the timeline of what had happened underneath the streets of Ancora, a Stone Dog shot out from under a workbench.

  “Look out!” Samuel screeched, trying to draw his sword, but cracking it against the wall instead.

  He stared down at the spiny-backed creature, wide black eyes studying him as thick claws pinched at the air.

  The old tinker clucked his tongue, and the Stone Dog retreated, climbing up the tinker’s leg until it finally came to a rest on his shoulder.

  Samuel stared in horror.

  “They aren’t so bad once they get used to you. Don’t want to startle them, though, young sir. That’s a good way to get dead.”

  “Oh, he is well aware of that,” Drakkar said. “I once had to drag him out of a nest.”

  “Unconscious?”

  Drakkar nodded.

  “Seems you lose your mind quite a lot, young Spider Knight.”

  Samuel spluttered.

  The old tinker scratched the Stone Dog between the eyes. The long quills on the creature’s back shivered and lowered until it looked more like a disfigured crab than a monster. The old tinker held his arm out. The Stone Dog scurried down it, leaping onto the workbench before vanishing into another hole.

  “Now, you find Stone Dogs in the wild, don’t hesitate to put them down. Bad way to die, that. Bad way to die. But here, you
’re safe. Now, if you knew Charles, you must have stories about him. Come, tell me what you know of the man called Atlier. And if I like your stories, and you help me with this hand, perhaps I’ll tell you some of what I know too.”

  Samuel and Drakkar exchanged a glance. Samuel wondered if this strange man was what they were looking for. Or if he would be a distraction to keep them from helping their friends.

  Time would tell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Jacob stood on the edge of the lift platform as it lowered from the supply ship. It was a beautiful view above Midstream, the small homes and taller groundwork for buildings of industry spread out before him. Worn mountains dotted the horizon, and a few rose close to the southern edge of Midstream.

  “Not a view we often get,” George said, smiling at Gladys.

  The princess was quiet, watching the city rise from below.

  Jacob’s grip tightened on the cable in his hand when the airship rocked. He looked to the north. Far in the distance, he could make out more foothills and the wandering shadows of two Fire Lizards. He listened to the ship’s captain shout back and forth with the crew, returning his gaze to the earth below.

  Another minute and sand billowed out from beneath the lift. Jacob hopped into the pilot’s seat for the Titan Mech arm. “Hold on!” he yelled when some of the Midstream crew started to board the lift.

  He saw George ushering the men back, leading them away from crates filled with traps. Gladys trailed behind, sparing a glance and wave to give Jacob the all-clear.

  Jacob pulled the firing knob below the levers that controlled the arm. Flames erupted from the sides, boiling the water in the closed system in moments. He waited for the pressure to rise high enough before swinging the arm around, careful to keep away from several onlookers. He couldn’t help but smile at a few of the shocked faces.

  Jacob and Frederick had replaced the rail car with the treads of a crawler for Midstream’s arm. It allowed the entire system to rotate in place, and Jacob almost wished they’d included the same option on the other arms. He’d mentioned it to Frederick, but the other tinker had only shaken his head, rightly pointing out that treads would do no good on a train track.