by Chuck Wendig
His eyes go wide. His mouth opens just slightly.
Message received.
The thought comes back to her like a boomerang:
Okay. Let’s help them.
His eyes roll back in his head.
So do hers.
Killian roars. He spins the sonic cannon toward the ketch-boat coming up on the starboard side and lets fly with a screeching blast that knocks it off-kilter, punching a hole clean through its side. Then he rolls out of the seat, ducking a hail of blasts from within the corn somewhere—he has to get to the next cannon while this one recharges. He’s a one-man war machine—he and the old blast-pocked trawler—and he cackles, half dizzy, body no longer hungry for the Pheen he’s been sticking down his throat, but ravenous for retribution and violence.
But a little part of him knows this battle is lost.
The trawler is jammed up. The line of Empyrean just ahead is unyielding. He can’t press on—can’t push forward. And the others in the raider fleet are already dropping like flies. Even now he peers over the trawler’s railing and watches a trio of mechanicals leap forward like metal rabbits and land atop the bow of a skiff—the skiff’s nose dips into the corn, and the one poor raider captaining that boat (a young woman, Sally Forthright) screams as they drag her into the corn. The boat drops with her.
Killian bolts for the next cannon—
And a mechanical clambers up onto the deck right in front of him.
The raider captain skids to a halt.
“Out of my way, you soulless tinbody,” he snarls.
The thing stomps a hard foot forward, aims its cannon-arm, and fires. Killian leaps out of the way of the blast—it shrieks past him, and something in his side stitches tight. Haunting pain from the ghost of his old injury (ironically, from the last time he tangled with one of these horrible things, he realizes). He hits hard on his shoulder, his head gonging against the deck of the trawler. He scrambles to stand as the thing pivots at its hip and points its arm once more, the cannon’s tip wheeling on him—
There’s a moment—a precious, strange, distant moment—when he feels Lane’s fingers in his hair like a comb. Hands untying the cloth binding his hair in the warrior’s knot. Tossing it aside. Breath on the back of his neck. Hand flat against his chest. Lane’s whisper in his ear: Come home, now. Killian feels loved in this last moment. It washes over him like the warmth of the day’s sun.
And then the mechanical’s head jerks sharply right as a cornstalk spear pierces it. Ka-chang! Sparks fly. The sonic cannon never fires.
The metal man tumbles off the side of the boat.
“Crowsblood,” Killian says. In awe of what just happened, but also with grief over what didn’t happen: He failed to die and did not meet his love anew. Odd, that—to be disappointed in the lack of one’s death.
But he has little time to consider it.
He hears the sound before he sees what’s making it.
A ripping. Snapping. Breaking like bones.
Out there, in the corn.
Pollen begins to stream up and into the air, a haze of gold dust. Everything gone bright, so bright that he can barely see the shape that rises up out over the corn—a twisting, living thing. Like a lightning bolt that never flashes back to nonexistence—like a tree (Remember those? he thinks) that’s shot up out of nothing and is thrashing its way through the stalks.
Then he realizes: It’s not crashing through the stalks.
It is the stalks.
The corn is whipping about and joining a twister—a narrow tornado—made of more corn. Stalks upon stalks, corkscrewing together into a whirling, hungry thing—he watches it slam into a ketch-boat, splitting it in half before the sudden piss-blizzard swallows it all up.
He doesn’t know how they’re doing it, but they’re doing it.
They’re opening the door for him.
Which in turn opens the door for them.
Killian yelps, then hurries back to the wheel. He drops to one knee, kisses the forehead of Lane Moreau through the drapery of the red flag, then swings himself back up to the wheel of the trawler. Hell with pain. Piss on what’s lost. It’s time to get something back.
The great beast, the Sleeping Dogs’ trawler, pushes on through the hole—a hole in the blockade smashed open by the whirling twister given life by Cael and Wanda. Wanda, mostly, Cael thinks.
They hear Killian hooting, shouting, cursing.
And then the trawler charges forward. Three other Sleeping Dogs ships make it through, too, slipping through the opening.
It works. The Empyrean line breaks. The ships follow after while the rest move on to Pegasus City to pillage and plunder its bones.
“It’s time,” Cael whispers.
One by one, they get up and push on through the stalks.
PRESSMAN
“LAST I SAW YOUR FATHER,” the old raider Pressman says, “he had just seen a rather peculiar video of you and your girl over there tearing the Empyrean a new hole. Seems he thought you were dead.”
Cael nods. “I was awful close to it, sir.”
“You don’t need to call me sir, Cael. Pressman’ll do.”
The two of them sit together on the ruined, ransacked front porch of Pressman’s house. The windows are broken. The front door, too. Inside, it’s an even worse mess. “Sorry about your house.”
“Empyrean want what they want. Least we were able to hide in the cellar when they came through. Most homes don’t have cellars, and ours is hidden well enough.” He sighs. “Thanks to your people for helping us put it back together again.” Inside, the others help Pressman’s wife, Kallen, straighten up. “How’d you find me out here?”
“Tracked Pop’s movements through my sister. She knew he was coming here, so.”
“I’ll be sure to contact your sister. Let her know where you are and tell her as much as I can about what’s happening.” The old raider runs his hand over his scalp, sucks air through his teeth. “These are curious times. You really gonna go up on one of them flotillas?”
“We’re damn sure gonna try. Ride should be here soon.” Balastair secured them a skiff to the Ilmatar. Friend of his—some bartender named Kin Sage, survivor of the Saranyu; he got off the flotilla before it fell.
“I’d say that’s it there.” Pressman lifts his chin as a gesture. In the distance, a glinting shape.
“I suppose it is. Thanks for taking care of Gwennie’s mother and the two kids. This ain’t your obligation. We’ll make sure you’re square somehow.”
“Boy, these days we all gotta be obligated to one another. If we can’t do that, then we deserve to be turned into metal. Least then we’d work together.”
He laughs, but Cael can’t quite share in it.
“Thanks.”
“You scared, Cael?”
“I am. But any fear I got going on is nothing compared to my desire to just see all this done and over with.”
“I hear that, boy, I hear that.”
Pressman and Cael hug. The man’s rust-barrel arms hold him tight, and when he lets Cael go he claps the teen on the shoulders with big hands.
Cael sighs, nods.
Then he calls to the others: “Incoming. Time to catch that ride, y’all.”
The Maize Witch watches. The corn truly has ears—and eyes, and all the senses and then some. With them she can feel Cael and Wanda and the others leave the small house in the middle of the swaying, shuddering Golden Prolific. Everything is in motion now. Which means she needs to get moving, too. And here her mind wanders not to the present or even to the past, but to a vision of an eventual future: Hiram’s Golden Prolific, razed to the hard dirt. Little teeth and tiny legs. A squirming carpet of gleaming blue jewels. Her precious Blightborn finally having their day, finally claiming a place at the table. Thanks in part to her son and the genius—and rebellion—he manifested at such an early age. She quietly thanks Balastair, her dear child, and then she tells the others it’s time to go. Mole asks if he can come, too, and she
says: “Of course you can, my boy. What harm could it do?”
PART FOUR
THE HARROWING
THE ILMATAR
“COME,” KIN TELLS THEM, waving his hands impatiently. “Come!”
The six of them bolt across the street, under the violet eventide sky.
Cael thinks: We don’t have doors like that down below.
Then he thinks: We don’t have anything like this down below.
Even poking through the wreckage of the Saranyu—or flying through it oh-so-briefly before the whole thing collapsed in the first damn place—he never really got the scope of it. The way the flotillas are layered upon one another. How they’re not one whole city but rather several buildings and neighborhoods chained together and made buoyant.
Everything is lush. And crafted—none of it seems wild, nothing haphazard. All of it designed: the placement of every brick, of every flowering tree, of each softly glowing bulb. Statues at every intersection—many of some wispy, naked woman, her hair blowing as if in a wind, her belly round like she’s about to pop. “That’s Ilmatar,” Balastair said when they passed the first, obviously noting Cael’s goggled eyes. “The mistress of the air, a virgin impregnated by the wind that blew up from the cold Atlas Ocean.”
“You people are crazy as an outhouse cat,” Cael said to him.
Balastair just shrugged and offered a sad smile before moving on.
They pass down narrow alleys. They cross over and underneath long bridges that look like mirrored scales, like each bridge is a snake dissected and stretched, its skin and bones forming a beautiful—if absurd—way to bridge the sky. While crossing, Cael feels his breath get trapped in his lungs—Gwennie tells him not to look down, but anything you tell him not to do, well, it’s a good bet he’s gonna do it. And sure enough, he does: He looks down long enough to see all the way through the Engine Layer to the green corn far, far below—corn lit by the setting sun, green leaves on fire—and for a moment, he almost can’t move because he feels like he’s falling all over again. Falling through clouds toward the endless waves of Hiram’s Golden Prolific. All parts of him screaming in panic.
But then Gwennie touches his arm and says: “It scared the hell out of me, too, being up here. But we gotta keep moving.”
That earns her a side-eyed stare from Wanda, but Cael gives a gentle shake of his head as if to say, Don’t worry about it.
They keep moving.
And now, here they are.
Kin says: “This is it. The House of the Sky.”
Ahead: a doorway framed with decorative flames cut from hammered, etched copper—the door itself is round, and the flames around it make it feel as if they’re entering into the eye of the sun itself.
They hurry through the door into a firelit room—the room shaped like the round bell of a clay oven. Pillows lining the edges of the room. Wooden birds—some small, some large, all of them almost skeletal in their construction—hanging from red threads above them. Gently swaying with the motions of the flotilla beneath them. Cael feels another bout of vertigo.
Balastair steps forward and greets a small woman, her skin the color of long-steeped tea. Her arms are inked with what look like words. Like passages from a book. Her purple dress—if it can be called that, Cael’s never seen anything like it—is bound up with a sash the color of fire.
“I know you,” Balastair says.
“Our meeting last time was informal,” she says. “I’m Amrita.”
He bows his head to her, and she kisses his forehead. Then he returns the kiss, too—Cael and the others watch this ritual unfold.
“The hell is this place?” Boyland asks.
“My friend’s rudeness aside,” Cael says, “I’m wondering the same.”
Kin Sage—a small man with almond eyes and dark hair bound up in a fountaining topknot—says: “This is the House of the Sky. A temple devoted to the worship of the old gods.”
The woman clucks her tongue. “Not precisely. Some of the old gods are gods of the hearth, the ground, the sea. We remain focused on those of the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars. Saranyu. Ilmatar. Oshadagea. Mader-Atcha. A pantheon of goddesses to which we are the priests and priestesses.” She smiles. “Though your visit today is hardly spiritual, I recognize.”
Rigo steps forward, gawping. “I’d like to hear more.”
“Rigo,” Cael mutters, “she’s pretty, but now ain’t a good time.”
The boy nods, utters a nervous hehehe, and steps back.
“Something I need to know first,” Balastair says. “Are you working for my mother? That question goes to you, too, Kin.”
Cicero the catbird chimes in with what sounds like an accusing chirp.
Kin and the woman, Amrita, share a look.
“I’m not,” Kin says. “Never did.”
Amrita smiles, clasps her hands together as if in prayer. “I do her work sometimes. As I did when I visited you in the birdcage that night.” She bows. “Your mother and I have different devotions, but our aims sometimes overlap.”
Kin says to Balastair: “Why do you ask?”
“Because this is about her. She wants us to get something. But I don’t know what it is, and she wasn’t particularly eager to give up the ghost on it, either. We’re grasping at straws, so we’ll take whatever we can get. Things have gone completely off-kilter in the Heartland.”
“It’s chaos,” Wanda says suddenly.
Everyone nods.
“Things have gone strange up here, too,” Amrita says. “We are no longer allowed to be who we have always been. Many of the Grand Architects are dead. The flotillas are no longer guaranteed the autonomy they once were. We have been told that because we share the same sky, and because we share the same resource—the fuel to keep us aloft—then we must share the same ideals, habits, securities, rituals. Our freedom is being locked down.”
“Piss on your freedom,” Boyland erupts. “You all don’t know a hard shit-squat what it means to have your freedom locked down.”
Cael shoots him a look, but it’s Gwennie who steps in. She puts a hand on his chest and says firmly, but kindly: “Not. Now.”
Boyland growls, but he shuts up.
“No, the young man is right,” Amrita says. “We don’t know. This is only a taste of what the Heartlanders have been experiencing for a very long time, and you’ll find that we are increasingly sympathetic to this. The winds of change are blowing here, two opposing gales—and it remains to be seen which is strongest. But even as the Dirae locks us down and demands further control, the people of the flotillas struggle against it, just as they have struggled against the Initiative and the Education Reassessment and the Lottery and the Obligations and all the other rituals that have been forced upon you.”
Wanda’s hand finds Cael’s and squeezes. A gesture of love? A reminder that the two of them are Obligated?
“Who is this Dirae?” Balastair asks.
“The granddaughter of Stirling Ormond,” Kin says.
Balastair looks taken aback. “Her? How is that possible?” He sees the bewildered looks of the others and says: “She was something of a scandal. Not . . . her, specifically, but what was done to her. Her father was an abuser. Kept the girl locked up in a box. They took her away. They said rehabilitation, but I always assumed she was locked up in some . . . floating asylum somewhere.”
“She was,” Amrita says. “At least, as I understand it. But there she made friends with other girls. She rehabilitated herself. Physically, at least. Emotionally, perhaps not so well. Later, she founded a small guild of girls—a cult, some would say—made up in part of children orphaned by those who died on the Saranyu. Orphans of the fallen city. She cut up her face and cut up theirs and . . .”
The woman keeps talking, but Cael feels the world dip and shift beneath him. Once more, that sense of vertigo, but this isn’t physical—this is the vertigo of memory, the rushing sensation of standing at the apex of revelation, staring down into a dark pit of truth.
<
br /> “I think one of those girls killed Lane,” Cael says.
Balastair gasps and nods. “We were attacked by girls with scarred faces. . . .”
“The Harpies,” Kin says.
Amrita leans forward. “Was she there? Enyastasia Ormond?”
Everyone looks at one another and shrugs.
Amrita clarifies: “You’d know her. Her face is scarred, too. Scars she’s painted with . . . ahhh. Gold dust, I think.”
Another wave of vertigo. Cael nods, mouth suddenly dry. “That was her. She’s the one who came for Lane, then me.” He lets out the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. “Lane got her good, though. Broke a bottle over her head. Cut up her leg or foot. That’s how we got away. Lane saved my life.”
Kin and Amrita come together. “Maybe she’s dead,” Kin says.
“Even if she’s not, she’s hobbled. Literally and figuratively,” Amrita says.
“The Herfjotur still exists—”
“But it can’t attack us. Now’s the time, Kin.”
Balastair waggles his fingers. “Uh, hello? Time for what?”
“For revolution, of course.” The way Amrita says it, it sounds to Cael like, Uh, duh? Kin nods and plants both hands on Balastair’s arms, then says:
“The winds are shifting. We need to retake the skies—”
“Who cares?” Wanda blurts out. She squeezes her fists, and her arms ripple—the flesh suddenly studded with thorns. Her eyes are swallowed by a shimmering wave of green, and then a foul perfume rises up around her—an acrid, corpse-flower stink. “Your revolution. That’s cute.”
Cael sees her—thinks her look is beautiful, though the odor is foul. He doesn’t know whether to bow before her or recoil in fear. He recalls a similar reaction when he saw the Maize Witch do her thing, too. Still. He wets his lips, nods for now. “She’s right. Your problems ain’t a damn thing to us. We’ve been fighting our revolution for a long time. Lane understood that. Took me a while to come around to it, but I did, and here we all are. You want to revolt inside your pretty houses and your robotic elevators, then you do that. But before you do, get us where we need to go.”