The Quest to the Uncharted Lands

by Jaleigh Johnson

  He sat down and hooked his feet on the stool’s bottom rung. “Your language was the first hint,” he said, sounding out of breath. “All our expedition members learned it, of course, but you speak with such ease and clarity that you can’t be anything but a native speaker.”

  Stella tried again. “That’s fascinating, but listen—”

  “No, there’s more to it,” the Tinker interrupted again as if she hadn’t spoken. He scratched his chin, staring at her as if she were a specimen preserved in a case. “I suppose it’s something in the way you move. You can really see it when you’re running. We olarans are not so…fluid…when we run. Maybe I’m the only one who would ever notice. You see, I’ve been studying humans for a very long time.” He pointed to the wall behind her.

  Stella swiveled on her stool. On the wall was a map of Solace. She’d caught a glimpse of it when they first entered the tower. Now that she looked closer, though, she saw that it was a map of the uncharted lands and her side of Solace, with the Hiterian Mountains splitting them down the middle. It was the most complete map of the world she’d ever seen.

  “Did you draw that?” she asked, turning back to the Tinker, her curiosity getting the better of her.

  “I did—as well as these.” He opened the cracked leather book to a certain spot and handed it to her.

  Stella had expected a page full of notes, so she was surprised to see a pencil sketch of a young boy and girl. The boy was small and thin, and the girl had wild, tangled hair and a wide smile.

  “Who are they?” she asked. “Are they human?”

  The Tinker nodded. “Our earliest expeditions didn’t have a crew,” he explained. “We sent our ships to your side of the world to map your geography. One of them was gone a very long time. So long we thought it was lost. It eventually returned, and I pulled this image from its memories. There was quite a bit of affection associated with these two individuals.”

  Stella stared at the sketch. Cyrus had told her about the olarans’ airships, but she still had a hard time imagining being able to tap into a machine’s memories to create a picture.

  “You remind me of them,” the Tinker said thoughtfully. “I think it’s your eyes.”

  Stella flipped to the next page. More sketches covered the paper. She ran her fingers over the faces, pausing at the image of a familiar boy.

  Her heart lurched.

  Cyrus.

  He shared a page with a sketch of a young girl with dark hair and an open, inquisitive face.

  “Those are olarans,” the Tinker said, eyeing the page that she’d stopped on. “Members of our expeditions to your lands.” His eyes clouded. “There are about a dozen of them in all—the ones we lost track of.”

  Lost track of. Stella heard the sadness and regret in the Tinker’s voice. “You mean the ones who were left behind,” she said.

  “Yes. I hope we may find them someday.” A wistful smile creased the Tinker’s face. “Ah, Stella, I had so many hopes for our expeditions to your lands. I’ve been pestering the alagant for over a year, begging her to make contact with your people. It’s long past due, I said! There’s so much we can learn from each other!”

  His eyes sparkled with excitement and determination. Stella understood then why Cyrus had sent her here. Of all the people on his side of the world, the Tinker was definitely the one who would want to help her the most.

  “Well, you’ll be happy to hear that at least one of your lost explorers has been found,” she said. If that didn’t get his attention, nothing would. “That’s why I’m here. Cyrus needs you.”

  The Tinker gasped at the news and rose from his stool, but Stella held up a hand before he could interrupt her again. “Please, I want to tell you everything, but we just don’t have time. The heart of it is, this boy,” she said, tapping Cyrus’s portrait, “is my best friend, and I need your help or he is going to die.”

  The Tinker’s eyes widened. Slowly, he sat back down. “By all means,” he said. “Tell me how I can help.”

  Stella gave Cyrus’s note to the Tinker. After he read it, she told him the story of what had happened with Cyrus, of the Faceless man and the crash of the Iron Glory, as fast as she could get it out. She even played the Faceless man’s message back on the beetle. She finished and sucked in a breath just as the Tinker could no longer sit still. He sprang up from his stool and paced the room, stopping only long enough to make more adjustments to his strange machines. Then he snatched a tattered knapsack from a hook on the wall and began stuffing it full of things from around the lab. Stella hoped that meant he was packing his things, prepared to come with her. Every so often, he’d pick something up—a machine part or a tool—scowl at it, then toss it aside. An expression of fury spread across his face.

  “Are you all right?” Stella ventured. She hadn’t gotten up from her seat, half afraid that the Tinker would bowl her over in his haste to pack.

  “The situation is much worse than I thought,” he said, walking toward the map of Solace and tearing it down, leaving remnants of the ripped corners stuck to the wall. He folded it up to a manageable size, and it too went into the knapsack. “I never dreamed that one of our own—a Faceless, a member of the expedition, no less!—would betray us like this.” His voice rose until he was almost shouting. “The aletheum is a rare resource, to be sure, but to murder for it is madness! Peace and communication between our peoples is the key to the future. We can do so much more together than we can apart.”

  Like the Merrow Kingdom and the Dragonfly territories, Stella agreed. Working together, moving forward, was their best hope.

  But Stella had her own share of hopes, and right now, they all rested on the man in front of her.

  “Can you help me save Cyrus and the others?” she asked. “We aren’t too late, are we?”

  “Too late?” He stopped pacing and shook his head, eyes blazing with determination. “No, I don’t believe that. But you’re right, we don’t have time to waste either. Cyrus had to have used an enormous amount of power to save your airship—more than his body can regenerate on its own. Right now all of his vital systems are straining just to keep him alive. He needs an artificial boost to his regenerative capacitor or he won’t make it.”

  Stella tried to make sense of what the Tinker had just said but gave up after a few seconds. “Can you give him that—the capacitor boost?”

  “I’ve already packed the tools,” the Tinker said, gesturing to the knapsack, which was overflowing now. He stripped off his apron but kept on his lab coat, then grabbed two pairs of goggles and threw one of those to Stella. “Come upstairs,” he told her, “and get that beetle ready to record. We don’t have time to make a full report to the alagant, but I’ll send a message to let the palace know where your ship is. With any luck, the guards of the royal house will be right behind us, ready to provide support.”

  “What about the Faceless man?” Stella asked, hurrying up the stairs behind him. They climbed all the way to the top floor of the tower, to the room with glass walls that had reminded her of a lighthouse. More piles of junk littered the room, but in the center, a space had been cleared for a large object covered in a white sheet.

  The Tinker’s face darkened. “He doesn’t stand a chance,” he promised.

  “But I told you he has my parents!” Stella grabbed the Tinker’s arm. He looked down at her distractedly. “If we just show up with an army in tow, he’ll kill them!”

  “We’ll have a head start on the guards,” the Tinker assured her. “We can go in quietly, with our own smaller force. The wolves will be waiting for us outside the city.”

  The mechanical statues—Stella shuddered involuntarily at the memory of being chased by the giant terrors. “But you said they weren’t alive, that they don’t eat people.”

  “Yes, well, in the strictest sense of the word, they aren’t alive,” the Tinker said as he picked up the edge of the white sheet. “But they are made of a rarer form of aletheum, which, without getting into too much det
ail, means they are very close to sentience. And they do bite, but only if I command them to attack.”

  Stella tried to digest this. “But how is that sentience possible?” she asked, bewildered. “The aletheum is just metal—it’s in the invisibility suit and the Iron Glory’s gasbag.”

  “A diluted form of it is,” the Tinker corrected. “You’ll find diluted aletheum all over Kovall. It’s quite plentiful, in fact. But in its purest form—which only I and a handful of others are authorized to work with—aletheum is a living material.”

  That stopped Stella in her tracks. “Wait a minute. The metal is alive? And you used it to try to bring the wolves to life?”

  The Tinker shook his head. “It’s more accurate to say I tried to give the aletheum a form in which we could establish a rapport. We’ve had success in the past with a handful of our airships, living vessels with enormous capacities for memory and communication. Like the airship I told you about earlier. The wolves are a poor imitation of that, but I’m working on them. Until then, they can be programmed individually or as a group, and I can also control them with the instruments on this.”

  The Tinker snapped the sheet and yanked it off the object in the center of the room, flapping his arms with a grand flourish and an explosion of dust.

  “Behold, our rescue vehicle—the ornithopter Irregulum!” he said.

  Stella coughed and blinked at the small craft. It was essentially two seats surrounded by a metal cage, with a pair of folded-up wings, which the Tinker proceeded to unfold and lock into place as Stella watched. The last words she would have used to describe the ship were “sturdy” and “safe.”

  “Hold on,” she said as her overwhelmed mind slowly comprehended what the Tinker intended, “you mean this thing actually flies? We’re going to fly in it?”

  “Of course it flies.” The Tinker looked a little hurt. “I built it myself. It’s not sentient, mind you, though it is a little temperamental in high winds,” he said with a chuckle. “Lean over the side if you feel sick. But not too far,” he added helpfully, “or you’ll tip the craft and fall out.”

  “I’ll…try to remember that,” Stella said, already feeling queasy.

  One thing was certain: if she survived this flight, she was going to have an incredible story to tell Cyrus.

  But remembering Cyrus made her think of the Faceless man, what he might do to her parents, and what he’d said about her people being the doom of the olarans.

  “Is that why the Faceless man is doing all this?” she asked, feeling the truth of it all dawning on her as she spoke. “He’s not just afraid of us because we went to war over resources. He wants to protect the living aletheum, doesn’t he?”

  The Tinker nodded sadly. “I’m afraid so. The aletheum’s secrets are closely kept by our people. The Faceless man likely fears that even a little knowledge of it will be too much for your people to resist.”

  “But you just told me the secret,” Stella pointed out, eyes widening. “Are you supposed to do that?”

  “No,” the Tinker said, smiling at her, “but Cyrus said in his message that he trusts you, and I also consider myself an excellent judge of character. You’ve brought Cyrus back to us and risked your life to protect him. I’m confident you’ll be able to protect the secret of aletheum as well.”

  He clapped his hands together. “Now, we have no time to waste! We need to send our message to the palace, and then we can be on our way.”

  Stella handed Cyrus’s beetle over to the Tinker, and he recorded a quick message for the alagant. He spoke in the olaran language, so she didn’t understand what he was saying, but she assumed he was explaining the situation and requesting immediate assistance for the Iron Glory.

  While she waited for him to finish, Stella put on her goggles and pushed her hair back out of her eyes. Climbing into one of the ornithopter’s seats, she strapped herself in with a flimsy safety harness that didn’t do any more to quell her fear of falling out of the ship. The Tinker strode to the wall of windows, which Stella realized were actually glass doors with several folding panels. He unlatched and peeled them back, opening the whole front of the tower up to the sky. Then he sent the beetle flying off to deliver its message.

  “Why is it named the Irregulum?” Stella asked as the Tinker returned to the craft and strapped in next to her, his knapsack clutched in his lap and his hands flying over the controls.

  “Irregular flight patterns,” the Tinker said absently, “and sometimes it handles like a lump in the sky. I’ve been working on its engine—experimenting with internal combustion and its effects on aletheum, the usual testing.” He shrugged. “It’s quick, but it doesn’t always fly straight. The key, for our purposes, is its size makes it fast. We’ll make the journey back to your Iron Glory in a fraction of the time it took you to walk.”

  That was what Stella wanted to hear. She sat back in her seat as the ornithopter’s engine roared to life, its vibrations rattling every bone in her body through the seat. Sputtering and clunking, it inched forward on its landing gear, wings extended and prepared for takeoff.

  She hoped, anyway.

  “One thing,” the Tinker said as they neared the edge of the tower, which offered Stella a stomach-churning view to the lawn below. “It takes a second or two for the engine to kick in, so prepare yourself for a bit of a drop.”

  “What do you mean by—”

  But that was all Stella managed to get out before the ornithopter ran out of floor. Instead of soaring into the sky, the craft dropped off the edge of the tower like a stone and plummeted toward the ground.

  A scream ripped from Stella’s throat. The lawn was coming up to meet them…so close…

  With a deafening roar, the ornithopter’s engine caught and surged, its wings straining against gravity. An instant before they would have hit the earth, the craft leveled off, dipped once more, and then launched into the sky.

  Suddenly, they were flying so fast and so high that Stella was dizzy. All she could do was hold on tight to the craft’s metal cage as the Tinker’s estate fell away beneath them. They flew over the city, and when Stella worked up the courage to look down, she was treated to a breathtaking view of the Baluway River, busy with steamboat traffic and divided by bridges with more mini trains running back and forth across it. These moving metal wonders got smaller and smaller with distance, and all too soon, Stella and the Tinker had left the city behind them.

  “All right now?” the Tinker asked, grinning at her. “I can’t promise a smooth ride, but the view is unbeatable.”

  Stella couldn’t argue with that. Feeling bolder, she leaned over the side of the craft to get a look at the ground. She drew back in surprise and tugged on the Tinker’s sleeve. “Look,” she said, pointing.

  Directly below them, the pack of six mechanical wolves fought to keep pace with the ornithopter.

  “Excellent!” the Tinker shouted. “They’ll be incredibly fast over the open fields once we’re out of the city. We’re on our way, Stella! We’re on our way!”

  Stella sat back in her seat, wishing she shared the Tinker’s excitement and confidence. But her mind drifted to Cyrus, and her worry about his health returned. The Tinker said he could heal him, but what about the Faceless man? He had her parents prisoner, and even with the army of metal wolves charging to the rescue, she still didn’t know what they would find when they reached the Iron Glory.

  Rummaging in her sack of supplies, Stella took stock of her own resources. The beetle was gone, and the only weapon she had was the Lazuril rod. She still wore the invisibility suit, of course, but with the tear in the fabric, it no longer worked properly.

  But maybe the suit wasn’t what was important, Stella thought, running her hands over the shimmering fabric. If it was as powerful as the Tinker claimed, the aletheum could be put to other, more specialized uses that she might be able to take advantage of.

  She tugged the Tinker’s sleeve again to get his attention. “Tell me more about this suit,” s
he said.

  “Happy to!” the Tinker said, and immediately launched into a lecture. While he talked, Stella planned, and they flew on through the late afternoon and into the evening. By the time night had fallen, Stella could tell they were going to reach the Iron Glory’s crash site before morning. And the Tinker had been right: the ship ran quiet as it flew over the countryside. The only light came from the moon and stars above, and the glowing red eyes of the wolves below. Unless the Iron Glory had keen-eyed scouts posted around the ship, no one would see them coming.

  After another hour, they could see the ship. From the air, it was hard to miss. The Iron Glory had torn up a substantial portion of the ground in the crash.

  “She used to be so beautiful,” Stella told the Tinker, her heart twisting. “Now she’ll never fly again.”

  The Tinker angled the ornithopter toward the ground. “Never say never—don’t forget, we olarans are fairly experienced machinists,” he said jovially. “Now, hold on tight!”

  Stella grabbed the metal cage and braced herself as the craft spiraled down and came in for a bone-jarring landing, skidding across the field several yards from the Iron Glory. Blades of tall grass whipped through the cage and against Stella’s legs as they slid to a stop.

  The ornithopter’s engine sputtered and died. Stella spent a moment just being grateful they were back on solid ground again. Then she unbuckled her safety harness and eagerly climbed out of the craft. The Tinker fussed over his control panel a bit longer before joining her.

  In the tall grasses, the craft was rather hidden, and the pair only had to wait a few moments for the pack of wolves to catch up. Stella took off the invisibility suit—what was left of it—and stashed it under her seat. Then, with the wolves in tow and looking like the strangest rescue party ever formed, they hiked the rest of the way to the Iron Glory.

  Stella’s hands shook as she went over the plan she’d concocted during the flight. If the Tinker’s wolves didn’t intimidate the Faceless man into backing down, she knew she’d only have one chance to surprise him with her secret weapon. But she dearly hoped he would back down and that none of this would be necessary.