The Floating Islands

by Rachel Neumeier

  Master Tnegun had cupped water in his hands. He did not drink, however, but only gazed curiously into the water.

  “Can we use the pool to see?” Araenè asked him. “Can I … Do you need my strength to see?”

  Master Tnegun made a low, thoughtful sound. “Crystal would be better than water. Even this water. As we wish to see into fire, obsidian would be better still.”

  “If you need my strength …”

  Lifting his gaze at last, the master gave Araenè a sharp look. “Oh, indeed. I have little left, and as I believe you may have a particular gift for vision, you may indeed do this working, young Araenè. If you will kindly permit me to show you the method?”

  Araenè stiffened at his sarcasm. “Show me, then,” she snapped.

  Master Tnegun smiled, a flash of white teeth in his dark face that changed his expression entirely. He looked satisfied and faintly amused.

  Araenè understood that he’d deliberately prompted her proud response but was genuinely pleased she’d made it. “You thought I’d be too afraid?” she demanded.

  The master made a small, pacifying gesture. “Araenè, apprentices older and far more experienced than you would have found our recent exercise frightening.”

  Prince Ceirfei glanced back and forth between them, his eyebrows rising, but he did not ask any questions.

  Master Tnegun said, “Compared to what you have already done, child, this is complicated but not difficult. Can you permit me to come into your mind?” His mind slid deftly toward hers, met the shield that flicked into existence between them, skidded away.

  But this time, after the first startled moment, Araenè found the trick of holding her protective shield below the outermost layers of her mind, allowing the master to touch the upper part of her mind while protecting the inward layers. It seemed so obvious … suspicion dawned in her mind. “Did you show me how to do this?”

  Yes. It was not a word, but a kind of glittering intrusion that opened delicately into her mind. Aloud, Master Tnegun said drily, “A shame to waste a moment in which you were vulnerable to the most rapid and direct instruction. I suspect you will seldom be sufficiently motivated to allow it. Now, if you will observe—water is seldom suitable for vision, but then, this is not precisely water—” A second glittering intrusion unfolded, this one complicated, a structure that twisted around and folded back on itself, then, as she followed it, opened dizzyingly outward.

  Fire filled Araenè’s mind, living flames that rose up and then flattened out, a thin glaze of moving brilliance. She tasted fire: cloves and cassia and a sweet, wild heat that she did not quite recognize.

  “That is certainly a unique manner of, hmm, perception,” Master Tnegun commented. “The fragrances and flavors provide an interesting layer of complication across the magery you perceive. However, at the moment, I believe you might find ordinary senses more useful.” A pause, and then, more sardonically, “Araenè, open your eyes.”

  Araenè hadn’t been aware of closing them. She opened them now.

  The pool was filled with fire. Flames crept across its width, just below the surface of the water: dark lower down and brighter near the surface. And something else moved there: something long and serpentine that writhed and struggled, crying in a voice like shattering glass because the fire was not enough, never enough.…

  “I thought it would be all right,” Araenè whispered. “I thought once it was … was quick, that it would be all right after that.” She looked helplessly at Master Tnegun. “Is it going to die? How can a dragon of … of wind and air break open the earth to help my little dragon of fire?”

  “Ordinarily, a fire dragon’s egg would not quicken to hatching without sufficient fire,” the Yngulin mage answered. “You … cheated. You and your cousin, I should say. When your cousin cast the dragon’s egg into the furnace, the egg did indeed quicken, and when the shell cracked at last, the heat within the furnace increased, and increased again, until at last the capacity of the furnace was exceeded. But then the Tolounnese engine exploded, and the heat the furnace contained was released, yes? And then your trick failed, for there is no longer enough fire in that place to sustain the young dragon.”

  There was no mockery in his voice now. He sounded … tired, yes, but that was not what caught Araenè’s ear. He also sounded … sad, Araenè thought. And something else: he sounded in some way … resigned, maybe. Araenè muttered, “I should have told you.…”

  The master gave her a little nod. “So you should, child. The rules of the hidden school exist for a very good reason. No apprentice actually follows those rules, you understand. But it does work best for us all if you try.”

  Araenè lowered her head.

  “Of course, you did tell me, in the end,” added Master Tnegun, and put his hand out over the pool, smoothing the flames and sharpening the image of the young dragon. It should have been brilliant with fire; Araenè knew that. But it was now nearly black; the fires that surrounded it had nearly burned out to ash. “Now it merely remains to be seen whether we have, against all probability, managed to persuade a sky dragon to quicken success out of imminent failure.”

  “When you have a moment …,” murmured Prince Ceirfei. His tone was not precisely annoyed. Impatient, maybe.

  “Yes,” said Master Tnegun. “In fact, it’s very simple—”

  Araenè bit her lip, but she did not have to suffer through the master’s explanation of her foolishness. The mage did not have time to explain anything. Because, in the pool, the fire they were watching was suddenly whipped to a violent frenzy by a rising wind. Startled, Araenè flinched back and the vision in the pool wavered. Master Tnegun put out a hand; she felt him try to steady the vision, but his strength was not equal even to so small a task. She bit her lip again and tried to steady it herself. Cloves and cassia, cumin and ginger … everything tasted hot; smoke and burnt sugar rolled across Araenè’s tongue and the palms of her hands. But the vision steadied.

  Here by the pool, the air was heavy and flat. But they all saw storm winds break across the Tolounnese coast: neither black clouds nor rain, but winds monsoon fierce. The sky dragon rode those winds down from the heights. Araenè could barely see the stooping dragon: she glimpsed the edges of its wings, a filigree of translucent feathers against the sky, the curve of its long neck, talons sharp and transparent as glass.… The wind lashed the guttering fire where the Tolounnese engine had been, and she caught her breath, expecting the fire to blow out like a candle flame. But it was fanned high instead and towered, roaring. Within the fire, the tiny dragon flung back its head and cried piteously.

  And then, above Teraica, the very wind caught fire.

  Feathers that a moment before had been transparent as crystal caught the red light of the late sun and turned to fiery gold; opalescent light slid through pale eyes, and those eyes caught fire and blazed gold and crimson. The dragon fell through a storm of fire and wind.… The earth below cracked open to meet its dive: great fissures surging with molten fire opened all along the edges of the harbor. The sea poured into the fissures to meet a rising tide of molten stone: great fountains of white steam blasted upward along the lines of that elemental battle. Each of the remaining engines exploded, enormous blasts of fire and black smoke, and a huge portion of the Teraica harbor disappeared entirely. Farther from the sea, the cobbled streets of Teraica cracked to let out gouts of molten stone, which poured heavily down toward what remained of the harbor. Wooden buildings, never meant to withstand so much as a carelessly dropped candle, went up like torches. Some of them simply exploded. Everywhere, men and horses scattered and fled, or burned where they stood.

  The fire dragon that had once been made of wind plunged down into the boiling water and fire where the furnaces had so recently stood, and disappeared. But even that did not end the destruction, for at least a quarter of the city still burned.

  Araenè pressed her hands over her mouth, intensely grateful that the images in the pool were silent. Even so, she could no
t bear to watch; she couldn’t even bear to know that those terrible images were real. Covering her eyes, she did something, and the pool ceased to blaze with light and became merely water.

  A breeze stirred her hair; she could not understand for a moment why the wind was cool. It seemed to her it should burn with the terror and taste of fire. The air was sweet; it should have been bitter with ash. She asked shakily, “The baby dragon?”

  “I do not know.” Master Tnegun’s voice was a weary thread of sound. “I do not know, Araenè. Certainly the dragon broke open the earth—certainly it tried to save the hatchling.”

  She had let the vision go too early. Araenè reached out toward the pool, flinching from the images of fire and destruction and yet still longing to see, to know—then she stopped. She felt dizzy—no. It was Kotipa—it was the very air around them—a sharp wind rose, suddenly, driving down from the heights, and the Island shuddered and rose smoothly back to its proper place, high above the sea.

  Araenè got to her feet and stood, looking into the sky. She could see, barely, the long, sinuous shapes of the sky dragons riding the winds high above. She said, with a sense of astonishment, “We won.” But that wasn’t quite right. She said, “Trei won.” She heard her voice tremble and didn’t even care.

  “We have all won,” Prince Ceirfei said. He tilted his face toward the sky. “Tolounn will not readily answer this blow. So we have stepped out from the very embrace of failure and defeat.”

  Master Tnegun gave a small nod of relieved agreement, put a hand out over the pool, began to reach after some working, and instead folded gradually downward in slow-motion collapse as the last of his strength finally, comprehensively, failed.

  13

  The oubliette was quiet as well as dark and cold. Like a tomb. That was what oubliettes were supposed to be, after all: tombs for the living instead of the dead. Trei had always known that desperate criminals, the sort that were never going to be released, were sometimes imprisoned in deep oubliettes; he had known that most towns had oubliettes close by their ordinary prisons. Not Rounn; it was too cold in the far north to keep prisoners in holes in the ground. He’d never given any thought to the condition of prisoners kept in such confinement.

  Now he only wondered how long it would be before a forgotten prisoner would give up all hope of release and come to wish his prison really was a tomb. Weeks, months? Years? He did not want to think about years. But already he half wished he had flown into the side of Teraica’s steam engine a little harder. Though if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to throw the egg down into the furnace.

  Of course, it seemed now that this failure wouldn’t have made much difference.

  The light shifted, always dim, but becoming both redder and more muted still.… The sun would set soon, Trei thought. And how dark would the oubliette be at night? And how cold? How could it be so cold when there was such steady heat in the air above? But he was glad for the blanket. He sat on part of it and folded part of it behind his shoulders so he could lean back against the bricks, tilted his face up toward the sky, and watched the changing light.

  Since he was watching, he saw the exact moment when the fiery wind whipped across the sky and lashed down across Teraica.

  Trei could not decide what he had seen. He stood up, craning his neck, wishing for the ladder back—wishing to be able to press close to the grate above and stare out at the sky. He did not know what had flown at the leading edge of that wind, but he thought … he almost thought … Could that have been a dragon in the sky? But a dragon nothing like the delicate creatures of the Islands, a different kind of dragon, the kind that flew through his nightmares: a dragon with fire in its golden eyes, fire dripping from its mouth and falling from its wings …

  The explosion cracked through the city while he was still trying to decide what he had seen. Only this explosion seemed a hundred times more powerful than the one he had caused by blowing up the engine. The very earth shook: a hard, abrupt shock that cracked the wall all along one side of the oubliette; Trei staggered and caught at the wall, but even so, a second, lesser shock knocked him to his knees. He could hear things falling and crashing above, sharp, percussive crashes like falling stone and then slower, grinding crashes as wood broke and mortared brick cracked and fell. Or so he thought those sounds might indicate. Some of the crashing seemed very close, but he thought some was much farther away—down in the city proper? There were cries of alarm and terror and pain, also near and far: the shouts of men and, somewhere much too close, the piercing screams of a wounded horse.

  It was exactly as he’d imagined the destruction of Rounn must have been—exactly as he’d dreamed it—and Trei, trapped, frightened beyond thought, crouched helplessly against the wall of the oubliette, squeezed his eyes shut, and waited for the world to end.

  But no other explosion followed, and the crashes and distant shouts died away. After some time, Trei opened his eyes, almost surprised to find himself still alive and still imprisoned in the oubliette.… Dust and smoke rolled through the air above him, closing out even the dim light of the late afternoon. Some of it settled down to the bottom of the oubliette, ash bitter at the back of his tongue … a bitterness right out of nightmares.

  Trei tucked himself down at the edge of the oubliette, closed his eyes, and tried hard to think about the Floating Islands and how relieved and happy everyone would be if the steam engines were gone and the Tolounnese effort failed completely. But the images that pressed against the darkness behind his closed eyes were terrible, and he could not summon up any memories that did not include fire.

  * * *

  The night seemed endless. Trei didn’t think he slept at all. He feared his dreams. So when he could not bear to sit still, he walked in blind, endless circles around the perimeter of the oubliette. The bitterness of the ash coated his mouth and throat. He was not hungry, but he drank most of the water in the flask. Then it occurred to him that the soldiers might well forget their prisoners if the disaster above was as terrible as he suspected; how long would it be before someone threw down another flask? After that he capped the flask and put it aside. Naturally, he at once discovered he was very thirsty.

  Distant crashes and shouting continued sporadically all that night. The sounds were empty of meaning, except for the terror and anger they carried. Trei longed to be up riding the high winds so he could see. Or even in a tower prison. Anywhere but in this deep tomb.

  To distract himself, he ran his hands over the cracks in the wall and tried to imagine that he might somehow use those fingerholds to climb to the top of the oubliette. Probably by daylight, when he could see the fineness of the cracks and the height of the shaft, the idea would seem far less attractive. Anyway, none of the cracks seemed enough to provide a foothold, and he could hardly climb to the top with just his fingertips.

  Dawn came at last … a slow, gray dawn, hazy with ash and smoke. It was less of an improvement than Trei had hoped. He still could see nothing. The occasional distant shout still told him nothing except that somewhere someone still existed. Sometimes he called out himself during the course of that long day. No one answered. Though he listened, he heard no one moving above. No one came to the oubliettes at all, as far as he could tell. Trei drank most of the rest of his water and finally ate some of the food from the soldier’s packet. All the food tasted bitter, like ash.

  At noon, when the smoky light was as strong as it was going to get, he wrapped himself in the blanket, lay down against the curving wall, and fell into an exhausted sleep. If he dreamed, he did not remember his dreams.

  It was dark again when he woke. He sat for a long time, breathing the bitter air and listening. For the first time since the great explosion and for as long as he listened, he heard nothing. The light told him little about the time of day: he could not tell whether it was morning or afternoon or evening. He paced stiffly around the oubliette shaft for a while, trying to ignore his thirst. At last he drank the last mouthfuls of his water, sipping it
slowly to pretend it was more, and lay down again. After a measureless space of time, he slept.

  And woke, in darkness. For some time he could not decide whether this marked the second night he’d spent in the oubliette or maybe the third. Eventually he concluded that surely it was only the second night. Then he could not understand why it had seemed so important to figure that out: what difference could one night possibly make? And then he realized that he was beginning to believe that he would be imprisoned in the oubliette for a long time—he shied away from thinking, The rest of my life. And he felt himself shy away from that thought, and wondered how many months … years … would pass before it seemed merely like any natural thought and not like a nightmare worse than fire.

  Another dawn, and another long day. Trei measured time very simply: dawn to noon, noon to dusk. It was too hard to track the bells in between. He began to chip away at the cracked wall with the shard of a brick. It was something to do, until the shard crumbled under the pressure. He wondered what other prisoners might have used to etch their words and drawings on the wall. He tried to read what they had written, understand their pictures, but little could be made out. Months—years?—of effort, and so little that he could even read.

  But just before evening, as the light failed, someone called down from above.

  Trei leaped to his feet, shouting. No one answered, but a shadow fell across the grate, followed by a clatter, and a rope came down with a narrow bucket of water and a packet of bread. He laid the bread aside on his blanket, poured the water hastily into his flask, and watched the bucket rise out of reach. He found tears in his eyes—he was very glad to have the water, he longed for the man above to stay and shout the news of the city down to him, but even more he was just intensely relieved to know that somewhere there were still people, that the whole city hadn’t disappeared into ash and ruin, he the only one left amid its bones.