by Jack Conner
Janx laughed and clapped Hildra on the back. “You did it!” he said. “Pitted the bull against the bear. Beautiful!”
“And don’t you forget it,” she said. She lit an Octunggen cigarette, and Janx helped her cup the flame against the wind. Smoking, she guided the ship behind a mountain, and the battle vanished from view. Avery hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath until he gasped in a great lung-full. He leaned back against the gunwale. His fingers trembled, and sweat beaded his brow.
* * *
For hours the dirigible drifted over the mountains, heading west. The battle between the Octunggen and the rays was far behind them, if it still continued, which Avery doubted. The Octunggen force had been only a light raiding and scouting party, after all. The rays would be plowing ahead, over the ruins of the smoking dirigibles, their masters hunting Layanna and the other fugitives with the same indomitable will they had displayed so far. At least the Octunggen had bought Avery and the others some time, and he would shed no tears for a party the likes of which had killed Mari and Ani.
He began to see scattered settlements clustered among the mountains, simple stone buildings with goats roaming the fields. To his horror, vultures wheeled over the towns and bodies rotted in the grassy roads. He and the others clustered at the bow, staring down at the carnage in horror.
“Octunggen,” Hildra said.
Janx ground his teeth. “Couldn’t even let the bloody mountain folk alone. What bastards.”
Layanna’s voice was hard. “The mountain people supply meat and produce to the cities. Without food, the cities cannot fight. It’s an old tactic.”
Once Avery had translated, Janx grunted. “Well, me stickin’ my boot up Octunggen ass is an old tactic, and I mean to do it soon as boots and asses allow.”
Avery noticed that the dirigible was drifting slightly off course, and he returned to the wheel. He’d replaced Hildra, who curled up at the stern, an Octunggen blanket thrown over her. A white, stylized bolt of lightning marked it.
Avery steered west, taking them over more and more villages. They were entering Ungraessot, dark scion of L’oh, currently under massive invasion by Octung. He passed over scenes of destruction that churned his stomach, bodies heaped in village courtyards and burned, nailed up on posts, severed heads mounted on fences and poles. Crows picked at the carcasses. In the more recent massacres, batkin feasted on corpses’ half-clotted blood. It was needless destruction, designed to instill fear in Octung’s enemies. Nevertheless, it was obvious that the Octunggen had reveled in the slaughter.
Soon villages became larger, and Avery saw cities sprawling across mountainsides. Some cities spanned more than one mountaintop, as the valleys were too narrow and rocky to support a population; great, sturdy bridges arched over the misty gaps. Many were broken or heaped with the dead, and mounds of burned corpses piled higher than the squat churches in the city squares. Factories had been shelled, mansions sacked, great cathedrals collapsed.
Eventually Avery saw active campaigns, dirigible packs sweeping over mountains, smoking cities on the horizon. Great airplanes split the skies, bombers, rumbling as loud as thunder. A great formation of them returned from some bombing raid. Small fighters grouped around them, protecting them. Many displayed the scars of battle, black scorch marks and pocks like bullet holes. Smoke fumed from several engines.
“The Ungraessotti are fighting back,” Avery noted.
“Not for long,” Layanna said. “They’re nearly beaten. You were asleep last night, but I saw fires on the mountainsides and valleys. Campfires. The Ungraessotti are fleeing the cities. I don’t imagine Ungraessot can hold out for long—a couple of months, maybe, if that.”
He began to see huge zeppelins gliding through the air in the distance. Sunlight glared off massive silver balloons emblazoned with the sigil of the Lightning Crown. They moved through the sky like monstrous torpedoes, straight and sure, but slow, dignified. Avery presumed Octunggen commanders rode the zeppelins, overseeing the war from just behind the battle lines. Others would be leading from the front, in constant communication with these superiors.
Below streamed supply columns, transports, great smoking tanks. They crunched through the ruins of burnt towns, trundled over corpse-heaped bridges, smashing aside burnt-out vehicles and rolling over the dead. Some of the larger, more palatial buildings had been preserved and taken over by the Octunggen. Avery imagined sweaty barracks, soldiers toasting their victory over bottles of stolen champagne, women from towns that had been plundered being raped. Ungraessot was an ancient country, and it had a complex and layered culture stretching since back before L’oh had conquered it and transformed it more than three thousand years ago. The Ungraessotti were renowned architects, stonemasons, engineers and artisans. There would be much loot to steal, and much invaluable treasure inadvertently destroyed. History was being wiped away.
Toward noon Avery noted blinking lights on the steering console. He swore.
Janx looked up. He and Hildra had been playing cards amidships. The cards were Octunggen and featured unfamiliar characters, but, not to be put off, the two had invented a game that loosely resembled Jury-and-Tackle.
“What’s up?” Janx said.
Avery tapped the blinking lights. “I think we’re running low on fuel, or maybe gas for the balloon.” He shrugged. “It’s unlabeled.”
“Crap.”
Avery scanned the gauges. “I think we still have time.”
“For what?” said Hildra.
That was a good question. Avery knew they couldn’t simply stop and ask the Octunggen to refuel them.
“Perhaps we can steal some fuel,” he said.
Janx rubbed his stubbled scalp, big fingers digging into scarred flesh, molding it, wrinkling it up. “We don’t even know what fuel to steal. Or gas. Shit, the fuel depots’ll be guarded anyways.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Maybe steal another ship.”
Hildra rolled her eyes. “You think those’ll be less guarded?”
Layanna, who had been dozing fitfully, glanced up from her pile of blankets. “Keep going,” she said. “Maybe we can outfly the warzone, set down behind Ungraessotti lines and go from there.”
Avery translated, then added, “It sounds like our most reasonable course of action.”
Janx and Hildra reluctantly concurred, and they flew on. Clusters of dirigibles, giant zeppelins and in-sweeping bombers grew tighter and tighter. Airships of all kinds surrounded the commandeered dirigible, some passing very close. Avery feared at any moment the alarm would go up and the ships would converge on them. The group was passing right through the front lines of the enemy. Their colors had saved them so far, but surely, eventually, someone would stop them.
At last, toward dusk, just as Avery was about to ask Janx to relieve him at the wheel, the concentration of aircraft grew very dense indeed. The ships buzzed and zoomed and drifted to the northwest, and Avery stared at the confusion of activity, trying to make it out. There was something there, something large, something at the heart of all that commotion, something ...
He gasped.
That drew the others’ attention, and he pointed. Their eyes roved toward the activity, and, as one, they cursed and made sounds of surprise.
All except for Layanna.
“So,” she said, in musing tones. “They’ve done it.”
“Done what?” said Janx.
Avery’s eyes roved over the clustered zeppelins, roped together, bound together, hundreds of them. They supported great platforms, runways, airstrips, mooring docks for vessels of all kinds. But there was more. Buildings, huge buildings, rose from the highest, most central platforms. The structures loomed—large, monolithic—thick spires and heavy domes. A city, he realized, with dawning dismay. The Octunggen had built a city in the sky. It was unwieldy and bulky. It looked like something that should not possibly exist, that could not sustain itself, support itself, and yet ...
“Done what?” J
anx repeated. “What the fuck is that?”
Layanna rose from her blankets and leaned against the gunwale. “The Over-City. For years, ever since the war started, the generals have complained of the scattered fronts, the need to centralize command, a mobile command that could be on one front a certain day, a different front the next. They built small ones at first, floating stations for the officers. But the high authorities demanded to be involved, to be active in the day-to-day running of the campaigns. So ... they expanded. They’ve been working on it for a long time. They must have deployed it while I was away.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Hildra said, her voice low and filled with wonder.
Crimson light bathed the city in the sky, outlining its buildings and courtyards in red. The buildings were square-hewn and gave the impression of great solidity. Typical Octunggen architecture. But around the city buzzed constant air traffic, fighters racing off runways in large convoys, zeppelins docking and much more. Some of the zeppelins carried large objects dangling below their gondolas. Avery saw cranes, building materials and supplies being unloaded and moved. The city was still being built, even as it flew.
“Amazing,” he said. Unconsciously he had aimed the dirigible toward the Over-City—to get a better look or out of simple gravity he wasn’t sure, but he recovered and veered away. The last thing he wanted to do was get too close.
Layanna frowned and stepped away from the bow, toward him, though not by intent. It was almost as if she were stepping away from the city, drawing back from it. Recoiling. Curious, he glanced at her, and what he saw surprised him. There was fear in her face. Not wonderment, not consternation. Fear.
She reached him and gripped the steering column absently, as if fumbling to keep herself from falling.
“What?” he asked. “What is it?”
Her eyes remained fixed on the floating city. “A Collossum,” she whispered. “A Collossum is in that city. An ... Elder. I can feel him.”
Sudden dread coursed through Avery. He swung the dirigible wide, aiming it directly away from the nightmare of Octunggen engineering. He felt his legs shake. His stomach twisted into a knot.
“I can feel him,” she went on. “And ... yes ... yes, there it is ... oh no ... no, why did it have to be now?”
“What?” Avery demanded. “What is it?” But inside he already knew.
Layanna turned and stared at him, her face full of horror. “He can feel me too.”
Chapter 17
Almost instantly, the ships in the immediate vicinity of the Over-City stirred. It was as if a great confusion gripped them. No. A great urgency. They scrambled about in the air, reversing positions, changing formations. Then, as one, they aimed for Avery’s dirigible.
Janx began cursing in the manner only a veteran sailor could.
Avery no longer cared about preserving the dirigible’s fuel reserves. He punched buttons and stomped pedals wildly, throttling the rear propellers up to full speed. The dirigible shot forward. He aimed it toward a city smoking on a nearby mountain, the same city he had seen the bombers returning from. He didn’t know what he hoped to find there, but if nothing else there was resistance to Octung behind its walls.
He heard a roar of planes behind him. He wrenched his head around to see a wedge of fighters zip past the dirigible, their aluminum skins glinting in the sunlight. The grind of their engines rattled his ears, and the wind from their passing knocked the dirigible off-course and whipped what was left of his hair. He tasted their greasy smoke on his tongue and spat it out.
“Damn,” he said, jerking the wheel back, returning the ship to its trajectory.
“They don’t want to destroy us,” Layanna said. “Not yet.”
“They want you alive.”
“Remember what you promised.”
He looked behind them. Dear gods. Ships, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, raced toward him. Some bore huge guns, some small. Any of them could take the dirigible out. But, if Layanna was right, he needn’t fear the fighters which now flooded the air around him, shouting through loudspeakers for him to draw the vessel to a stop and prepare for boarding. No, what he feared more were the dirigibles, filled with their strange Octunggen weapons, which could, among other things, paralyze him with pain and force him to stop flying.
A hundred dirigibles and a score of giant, glittering zeppelins—likely capable of carrying even larger, more powerful weapons—struck out from the floating city, their red-lit prows aimed directly at him. Even as he watched, he saw soldiers wrestling with bulky machines in the gondolas. Strange lights began to blink on the vague bulks.
“Shit shit shit,” said Hildra.
Ahead, the smoking city drew closer. Individual buildings began to materialize, huge and shattered, burst like rotten fruit by Octunggen bombs. Streets snarled along winding, angled mountain slopes. Portions of the city sat higher while the rest hunched lower along the mountainside. There seemed to be several different wide areas where slopes had been hewn out and made level, and upon these stood the primary buildings of the city, old and proud. Others had been hewn out of the mountain itself. Avery saw a familiar landmark, and his heart sank.
The Amber Ziggurat of Azzara, a wonder from another age that sat on the top tier of the city, was composed of huge amber blocks, each one with a prehistoric insect trapped inside; some alchemy in the blocks’ construction gave the insects the illusion of life, and supposedly when one walked through the amber halls it seemed as if the bugs buzzed all around. The Ziggurat lay smoking and sundered, and shapes that must be corpses littered its now-pocked tiers. Once, long ago, it had been the capitol building of Ungraessot before L’ohen conquerors had relocated the capital to Maqarl, where they had been able to send out armies through the Tunnels of Ard.
Avery expelled hot gasses from the dirigible’s balloon and lowered it from the sky. He pointed the ship straight at the Ziggurat.
Behind him bullhorns called from fighter planes and dirigibles. They shouted in a myriad of languages, trying to make themselves understood, but they all said the same thing: “DRAW YOUR VESSEL TO A HALT NOW OR BE FIRED UPON. PREPARE TO BE BOARDED. REPEAT, DRAW YOUR VESSEL TO A HALT!”
Avery plowed on. Janx, Hildra and Layanna huddled around the steering column, around him, as if seeking protection from the group. Hildebrand clung tightly to Hildra’s arm, his eyes huge and darting all around.
Avery guided the dirigible over the first walls and buildings of Azzara. Ahead he saw a stir of activity. Men swarmed around what he at first thought to be a factory but then recognized as a processing plant, designed to filter the air from Octunggen plagues and defend Azzara from otherworldly weapons. That gave Avery a flicker of hope.
Ungraessotti soldiers on the rooftops wheeled large anti-aircraft weapons around to face him.
As the first ones fired, Avery jerked the dirigible aside. Something exploded to his right. Shrapnel filled the air. He heard it punching into the gunwales, heard the sharp rasp of fabric tearing. Another shell exploded, then another. Black smoke swirled around him, acrid and sooty. He coughed it out of his lungs, blinked it from his eyes. Over the sound of explosions he heard the hiss of air.
The dirigible was sinking.
“We’re hit!” Hildra said, needlessly. She and the others hunkered low against the gunwales, protecting themselves from shrapnel. Avery stood alone.
Buildings thrust up at him. He steered wildly, swung the dirigible around one building, passed down a street. Tanks and soldiers fired at him. A building to the side erupted in stone and glass. Something chipped his arm, his back. Grunting, he steered on. He guided the dirigible away from the soldiers, down a side street, swinging the wheel and shoving gears wildly. His stomach dropped at the sudden turn, and Janx cursed. The dirigible scraped along a building, the dirigible vibrating at the contact; Avery’s stomach lurched. Glass shattered.
Avery swung the vessel back. More soldiers and tanks down this road. His muscles strained as he jerked the wheel a
gain, aiming up another street.
The Ungraessotti down this road were no longer interested in him. He saw pointing fingers and was close enough to see ashen, tense faces. The Ungraessotti had noticed the dirigible’s pursuers. With a look over his shoulder he saw the full fleet of dirigibles, zeppelins and fighters sweep in over Azzara.
Anti-aircraft guns boomed. Tanks fired. The air before the advancing ships filled with explosions and shrapnel. The Octunggen flew on, through the fire and smoke. Several of their craft erupted, scattered in pieces to the roads and buildings below. Heedless, the rest came on.
Avery turned to face the front. His dirigible sank faster—faster.
The road shot up at him, littered with debris and broken cars, bodies strewn between broken pieces of buildings.
“We’re going to hit!” he said. “Brace yourself!”
Everyone grabbed hold of gunwales and ropes. Avery held onto the wheel with both hands, mashed gears, shoved the dirigible up so they would hit level.
The road pitched up—
The impact knocked him off his feet. For a moment, he was weightless. Then his back struck the floor. Air exploded from his lungs. He slid, his back rasping. He bit his tongue and tasted blood in his mouth. The screams of Hildra and the curses of Janx filled his ears. The dirigible had hit the street and gone sliding.
Wood scraped loudly on asphalt. The friction shook Avery even through the hull of the gondola. Rumbling and juddering filled his body. The friction slowed the dirigible, and at last it struck something that squealed with metal. The impact flung Avery toward the bow. He hit something and cried out.