by Ren Cummins
“There’re soldiers on up the Wall, though.” Rom stood back far enough until she could see the upper lip of the Wall through the far edge of the skylight frame. “And they’ve got weapons up there, too. If we fly out, they’re probably going to see us.”
Frowning, Kari paused in her work, but then laughed. “No, I’ve got an idea.” She laughed again, resuming her work. “We’ll have someone give us a lift.”
Chapter 17: Far From the Wall
Although the sun rose late in the day over the Wall to shine down upon Oldtown-Against-The-Wall, in the earliest cold hours of the morning, there was yet much to do in anticipation of the needs of its townspeople. The sky was already a brilliant blue when its people began to mill about, attending their education in the collegiate districts or preparing their shops or markets for the day’s transactions. From the top of the mighty Wall, they were mere specks of color moving across the thick grey textured lines which the Queen’s guard knew to be the roads and thoroughfares of Oldtown. Although the vast majority of the Wallguard had never actually set foot on those streets, they were required to know the names and directions of them all in order to be able to provide adequate reporting on all activities of note.
Rank Two Sergeant of the Azure Squadron Marcos Alundrin was giving new conscript Donnal Ragent a visual tour of the town from their sheltered bunker.
“Yeah, it’s pretty cold down there from what I hear, but they’re a pretty stubborn people, as I’m sure you could figure from the histories. Stubborn enough to give up on this way of life,” he said, pointing a thumb back towards the great city of Aesirium, “so you can imagine they’d do just about whatever it takes to keep themselves moving.”
“Sergeant,” Donnal began hesitantly, “do you think they know we’re up here?”
“Of course they do,” Marcos scoffed. “They’re not complete farmers down there, after all. They have steam engines, still, as well as access to the finest quality second hand tech Aesirium no longer needs. I tell you what, I’d sleep well at night knowing the Queen’s Own are up here on the Wall watching over me while I slept.”
The younger soldier ran a hand across his chin, considering his superior’s words. Fact was, he’d always wondered about the things they’d been taught in school; he’d tried to imagine turning his back on all the technology available here to live some kind of mandatory separatist lifestyle. But he’d never known anyone who’d come back from there, so clearly they must enjoy it. No other explanation made sense.
His sergeant got his attention again by pointing down to some activity on Danner Street. Danner was among the widest of the central roads, wide enough that it had become the main means by which the great Machines made their way through the town. Many townspeople yet walked this street, but at the sound of the thundering tremors indicating passage of a Machine, they scurried for the side streets. This morning, one of the old uprights was carrying a large pallet of equipment back out to the fields from one of the colleges. A large tarp was pulled over the top of it, but it looked fairly heavy and bulky.
“Now that’s a classic, there,” Marcos was saying. “A bona fide relic from the old times, way before we did the full override upgrade back during my grand-dad’s time.”
Donnal had to admit, the movement and balancing equations necessary to keep the enormous machine on two feet must have been unfathomable. He’d never been good at math or programming in school, but he’d learned enough to admire the requirements for such a feat. And it wasn’t only that it managed to walk carrying an object almost half its size, but that it did so smoothly and, in a word, gracefully.
“Now, watch as it’s setting it down – it has to do it manually, since it’s not on grav power like the current models. But it adjusts for the weight and counterbalances – see? Just like that! Like I said, classic.”
Donnal pulled the glasses up to his face and looked down at the fields. With small movements, he found the Machine they’d been watching and watched as a few people scurried out from under the tarp and began pulling the tarp back off the equipment the Machine had been carrying.
“Hmmm,” he said. “That’s strange.”
Marcos pulled the glasses from his hands and looked down. “What the…?” He thumbed the lenses to zoom in more closely. The equipment didn’t look anything like typical agricultural machinery; it was a long billowing column of material, rapidly filling up with air or something that was giving it a bit of lift. Beneath it was a platform with seats and propellers and some sort of engine. The bag was indeed lifting up now, but connected to the rest by heavy duty cables, all in all making it some kind of…
“Airship!” he said, slapping the glasses back into Donnal’s hands and swearing emphatically. He punched Donnal on the shoulder as he ran past, in the direction of the guard’s comm station. “Come on, conscript! We have to put out an alert!”
Donnal took one last look down on the town through the glasses. He could see the four people in the seats of the airship as it lifted up and began moving quickly through the air towards the forests and mountains to the west. As it did so, he could see one person in the back with yellowish hair looking up at him through a small pair of goggles. The person raised one hand, smiled, and waved at him.
Even as Donnal pulled himself away from the strange sight, Marcos had already reached the communications relay and soft howls had begun to sound off through the speakers. His training took over, and he stepped quickly in time to the station, but in the back of his mind, something about this was troubling. Command says they’re a bunch of farmers and religious zealots. But if the people in Oldtown were just farming-philosophers, how could they build an airship? And we were told to be watching for Airships coming towards the Wall, not away from it.
The young trainee looked down at the flashing lights on the communications display, and really hoped they hadn’t just made a horrible mistake.
Chapter 18: Above the Wild
“Sit down, boy,” Favo snapped at Cousins, slapping his arm. “It’s bad enough that we’re making off in direct violation of the law, but you’re going to go about trying to add insult to injury? What if someone saw you?”
Cousins sat back down in the chair, lifting the Looking Glasses back up onto his head. “They did see us - - a couple of soldiers up on the top of the wall. I was just being polite.”
“Maybe if they catch us, they’ll remember how polite you were and let us go.” Favo shook his head, scowling. “And stop smiling, this isn’t funny in the least.”
“I was just thinking,” Cousins mused. “All this time I thought I’d been waving at myself.”
Favo rolled his eyes and made a mental point to get that young man some vacation time.
Rom looked from him to the Wall behind them. It was just a big white line across their vision, still, but already it was starting to decrease in size with their speed. The stone barrier set up by the Machines to keep the monsters out sped beneath them, and Kari pulled a few of the levers to tilt the propellers slightly downwards. The retractable wings on each side of the carriage creaked with the strain of tilting against the wind’s resistance, sending the ship higher into the sky.
“Hold on back there,” Kari called over the wind. Though there was a screen of glass in front of them, the sound of the wind pushing past them was tremendous, forcing them to have to nearly yell in order to be heard, even in the relatively compact space in the seats.
Rom glanced over at Mulligan, who was standing in her lap with his front two paws on the edge. His eyes were wide open, and his wings were flat against his furry back.
“What do you think of this, Mully?” she called out.
He looked back at her as the wind flattened his ears. “Amazing!” he said, turning back to watch the trees quickly passing beneath them.
Cousins leaned forward – as far as the restraining belt would allow – and said as quiet as possible to still be heard above the noise, “Kari?”
She turned her face slightly, nodding. He
r face was resplendent with the enthusiasm of piloting her ship on its maiden voyage, or perhaps with the thrill of the knowledge that she was breaking one of the primal laws of Oldtown-Against-The-Wall. “Yes?”
He smiled broadly, sincerely. “This is…brilliant.” He could see a faint reddening to her cheeks, but couldn’t tell if that could just be attributed to the cool air speeding past them. “And so are you,” he added.
She quickly turned back to the front. The cold wind darkened her cheeks even more. “Better sit down, everyone, we’re getting to some tall trees!”
Cousins smiled, sitting back in his chair. Yes, he thought, feeling a bit of warmth rising up to his own cheeks, seeing Kari’s dark ponytail whipping in the wind and deftly managing the levers and controls of the ship. You really are brilliant.
* * * * *
The woods eventually gave way to open plains. They did see a lot of wild creatures roaming the regions over which they flew, but few seemed to notice their passing – or, if they did, none seemed to care even remotely about them.
Rom noticed that many of the creatures they passed were not the tortured, undying monsters she’d so often had to fight in defense of Oldtown. Most were simply unusual creatures, going about their tasks as normal and unaffected creatures do. But after another hour or so of flight, they saw nothing – but a horizon that rolled out a seemingly unending supply of vacant plains.
Just as they had begun to worry about the lack of creatures present in the lands beneath them, a pack of bulwogs roared into view from ahead of them. They howled and screeched as they passed harmlessly above, but then began to follow along beneath them. Occasionally, one would jump as high as it could, but would fall far short of their ship. However, they seemed to sense something of interest in the airship and continued to pursue it across the plains.
Along the way, additional creatures joined in the procession, suffering the occasional snarl from the bulwogs that had begun the chase. After another hour through the infected region, they had amassed a combined pack of more than fifty creatures, all enthusiastically chasing them.
“This is getting bad,” Cousins yelled out. “We’re going to have to land sometime, right?”
Kari nodded, her eyes scanning the horizon. “The mountains are still a long ways off,” she called back. “But we’re probably going to have to figure out a way around or through them.”
Favo was nervously looking over the edge at the intimidating pack of bloodthirsty monsters beneath them. “I vote we just go higher.”
“I don’t think so,” Kari replied. “I’m a bit nervous going this high; if something happens and we fall from here, we’re going to get hurt, but we probably wouldn’t die. If we go much higher, I don’t know.”
“I withdraw my vote,” Favo said a moment later, looking back at the ground. “But why are they chasing us? Are they really just that hungry?”
Rom looked down as well, but sat back up, shaking her head. “No, once they get to this point, they’re already dead – they don’t need food, they just want to attack anything that’s alive.”
Suddenly, the pack of creatures began to slow down, and, in a few moments, stop altogether. They slowly milled about and then scattered as the airship left them far behind.
Favo watched them fade into the distance. “You know, if I were an optimist, I’d say that this is a fortuitous event; something worthy of a moment’s gratitude.” He turned back around and sat back into his chair, shaking his head slightly. But then he leaned forward, pointing over Kari’s shoulder, ahead of them.
“I see it!” Kari said, anxiety in her voice.
Ahead of them, the spike-covered head of what appeared at first to be an enormous snake emerged from a great hole in the ground. Its head bobbed towards them as they approached, but Kari was already turning to the left, hoping to bank well from its range.
The craft leaned up to the right, its wood and steel groaning with its resistance to the change in direction. The ropes and cables held fast, their own voices adding to the sound and vibration of the gondola and the relative change in the wind’s direction, gradually minimizing as the craft leveled out. For a moment, Rom had found herself looking almost straight down at the ground, biting her lip against the disconcerting sensation of being in even less control over her momentum than usual. Favo, on the opposite side, held tightly to the rail and looked out towards the great reptile. “What is that?” he yelled, hoping his voice didn’t sound too frightened.
The ship straightened out and leveled off, now a bit further along past the giant lizard. Its angular horned head rose up a bit higher, revealing several pairs of legs that had initially been below the visual range of the ground. Continuing to emerge, another two pairs of legs followed, then another and another and it ran behind them for a short while until it appeared to lose interest in them. Its roar of frustration shook the trees, causing several small winged creatures to take to the air.
Mulligan climbed up onto the back of the carriage to look at the creature as it wound its way back to its hole and vanish eventually within.
“I’d have to say… I don’t know,” he confessed. “The only thing I’ve ever seen like is called an Eltimor, but that is only about the size of your hand – it’s just a little thing, nothing to worry about. But that…” his voice trailed off.
“Let’s just move on and be glad we don’t have to fight it,” Favo said.
“Didn’t you say something about being an optimist?” Cousins asked sarcastically.
Favo chuckled. “No, I said ‘if I were’ one. And, for the record,” he added, “I’m not.”
Kari interrupted them, pointing again slightly ahead of them. “Do you see that? That looks interesting.” The other three companions looked in the direction she was pointing, to a great and burned out clearing in the midst of a long green ribbon of trees that curled its way as far as they could see from the north to the south. As they passed over the trees, they realized that the trees covered both banks of a large river. But to the north of their present position, the burned sections were barely visible.
“Let’s take a closer look, shall we?” Favo suggested.
Kari adjusted the wing controls, and dialed a gentle trajectory of the propellers that brought them in a lazy circle northward, closer to the burned areas.
“What are those circles in the ground there?” Rom asked.
Cousins stood up, holding the back of Kari’s armchair for balance. He saw the dull grey scars on the ground, but felt a faint nausea as his eyes struggled to see…more. He slipped his glasses on, changed the lens to view the past and began to dial backwards. Suddenly, he flinched, bringing both hands to his eyes, forcing Favo and Rom to reach up and hold him steady. The young seer adjusted the lenses again, but more slowly this time to fine-tune the moment he sought. He color drained from his face, and his head turned back towards the Wall.
“Remember those lights we saw crossing the sky; the ones we saw right after…well, that night two years ago? This is where they fell.”
Favo looked down. “I see skeletons down there. A serious quantity of them.”
Rom took a deep breath, and pulled Mully from the edge of the ship back into her lap. “The fires must be what scared all the monsters towards us.”
“It’s more than that, Rom,” he answered. “That’s not just fire that was down there.”
Cousins nodded, sitting back down and flipping the glasses back up onto his forehead. “It had the chemicals in it; the poisons that made the creatures here into the dead monsters we’ve been seeing down there.”
Favo pointed to one of the craters that lie halfway into the river itself. “If they put those chemicals into the water as well, it’s going to spread – it will have spread along here to everything that drinks this water.”
Sunlight glinted off a partially-submerged metallic item that lay across the river as well. Cousins pointed this out to Kari, hoping she might have an opinion on it.
She shrugged, calling
back over the whistling winds that blew through the canopy. “Some kind of metal beam, definitely not natural. It’s either a piece of the thing that caused the explosion, or it was here and got hit when the lights fell here.”
They completed a full circle of the impact zone, and Kari straightened out their course, continuing on towards the mountains. They made their way on for the next while in silence, each one lost in their own thoughts.
* * * * *
The mountains to the west loomed ahead of them. Using the Looking Glasses again, Cousins pointed towards the north, just slightly. He assured them that there was a canyon big enough to take the airship through. Another fifteen minutes later, they found it, and Kari maneuvered the ship through.
As the ship entered the canyon, Rom turned to look behind them, watching as the thin sliver of white that was the Wall vanished fully from view. It was strange to her in that moment – it was like a dream to imagine a world without the Wall; it was like the world of spirits, suddenly, and yet here she was with her friends, in a ship that flew in the air itself. Rom smiled as she sat back in her chair, taking a deep breath of sky. The world was suddenly a larger place; a more delightful and wonderful place, and she was once again a part of it.
Kari was enjoying the controls now; she’d designed them almost randomly – before she built this, she’d never imagined building a ship capable of flight. But once Cousins had mentioned even the idea of it, the specifications simply opened themselves to her.
The practical application of the controls had revealed themselves to her only after they’d gone airborne. She still wasn’t entirely certain how she’d known how to make them work in the first place. She’d simply followed that random melody that had intermeshed itself in her mind, and the design had followed her hands.