“Alright. I’m not happy about it, but I’ll do it.”
“Great deeds bring great rewards,” she said cryptically. Then she released Beri, and clapped her hands. “Excellent. Well, I’m sure you have many preparations to make if you’re going to take flight today, so I’ll leave you to them. Beri, show me this marvelous bath that Cerise has been so happy about. It’s been ages since I was able to indulge in such luxuries.”
She dragged the dazed girl out the door. I stood there looking after her for a moment, and shook my head.
“Well, I hope no one is using the bath right now.”
Cerise giggled. “I don’t know, could be funny. Can you imagine the look on Elin’s face? Just lying there soaking in the tub, and a goddess casually walks in and joins her? Her head would explode.”
I shook my head. “Not something I pictured when I was building the place. Well, damn. I guess we have to do this crazy thing. Let’s go tell the girls, and put our heads together on how to organize the expedition.”
Their reaction wasn’t quite what I expected. Tina just nodded trustingly, and said she’d be waiting for us when we got home. But Avilla was seriously upset.
“You can’t keep doing things like this, Daniel. We need you here. I need you here,” she protested, clearly on the verge of tears.
Cerise hugged her. “I’m sorry, Avilla. Hecate called on us herself. It’s not like we can just say no.”
“She did?” Avilla sniffed.
“Yeah. You, um, might want to stay out of the bath for a while too. I think maybe I went on a little too long about how awesome it is.”
Avilla frowned in confusion. “What do you mean? Did she do something to it?”
“No, she just decided she wanted to see it for herself,” I said. “Look, I’m sorry, sweetie. I know you worry. But things like this are going to happen.”
“I know. I just, I thought I’d have more time. I’ve been so busy I’ve barely had a chance to see to the house, and I haven’t made any special meals or baked any servants or even brewed up any elixirs to speak of, and now you have to fly halfway across the world without any blessings at all, and I feel like a horrible failure of a witch and it’s all my fault.”
She burst into tears, and buried her face in Cerise’s chest. I hugged her from behind, pinning her between myself and Cerise. After a moment Tina joined in, taking her hand and awkwardly patting her hair.
“We’ll be fine, honeydew,” Cerise insisted. “You’ll see. We’ll come back safe and sound, just like always. I won’t even let Daniel get himself blown up this time.”
“But what about next time?” Avilla sobbed.
“Next time will be different,” I said firmly. “Avilla, have I been putting too much work on you? I didn’t mean to keep you so busy managing things that you wouldn’t have time for your magic.”
“There’s no one else to do it,” she protested.
“We can find someone,” Elin disagreed. “Despite his appearance Demetrios is quite a learned man, and Pelagia certainly manages her grove deftly enough. Or perhaps one of these elves, or a merchant from Kozalin? You don’t have to do everything yourself, Avilla.”
“That’s right,” I confirmed. “We can get you help, or even get someone else to be castellan if you don’t want the job.”
“I don’t,” she admitted. “I was so flattered when you gave it to me, and I didn’t want to disappoint you. But it’s always so stressful, having to make so many decisions about things I hardly know anything about, and it eats up my whole day. I want to have time to make our home special, and grow my art, and do everything I can to make sure that when you two go out to fight you’ll come back safe. I’m a witch at heart, not a noble.”
“Then we’ll make that happen,” I said firmly. “I promise. We have to leave in a hurry, but when we get back that will be one of the first things I do. Alright?”
“Alright.” She sniffed, and hung her head. “I’m sorry for going on like this.”
“We all worry,” Tina told her. “It’s only natural.”
“Well, you’re going to have one less thing to worry about this time,” Elin said. “Daniel, I should come with you. Someone is bound to need healing before this is over, and you won’t have time to do it. I’ll stay inside the ship where it’s safe, but you need backup.”
I hesitated.
“She’s right,” Cerise said. “I’d take some of the dryads too, if they could handle flying. We’ll want more than just the ship’s crew, though. Maybe the wolfen, or a squad of Rain’s men?”
I was a little surprised that Avilla didn’t tear up again at the idea of Elin going into danger, but if anything she seemed relieved. I suppose she wasn’t nearly as close with the faerie girl as she was with Cerise and I. Which might be a problem in the long run, but today it made things easier.
“We can’t afford to weigh the ship down too much,” I pointed out. “It can only lift so much, and we don’t know how many people we’ll need to rescue. But Elin, you’re right, we could use the backup. You can come, and go ahead and talk to Gronir about bringing a couple of wolfen along. Only two, though. While you do that I’m going to go tell Irithil about this. Maybe he can give me a better idea of what we’re getting into.”
His information proved more fragmentary than I would have liked, but he was at least able to lay one fear to rest.
“There aren’t as many people in Yinthalos as there were in that human village you rescued,” he told me. “I don’t have an exact count, but it should come to about forty clan members and a bit over a hundred retainers. The treasures stored there are likely too numerous to fit in your ship, but most of that is simply wealth that we can leave behind.”
“Good. We’ll take what we can, but we may not have a lot of time to load up the ship. I’ll need someone to come with me, to make sure we can find the place.”
“I shall do so myself,” he declared. “I understand space will be at a premium, so my guards will remain here with Valthenis. Unless you expect to have room?”
I considered that.
“Bring one of them, just in case. Go ahead and get ready, we need to be airborne as soon as possible. I’m going to back the ship up to the gates again while we get everything loaded.”
I was already dressed for battle, since going outdoors always meant being exposed to possible attack. I took the ship for a quick spin to make sure I hadn’t screwed up anything serious with my recent modifications, and then landed and fetched a few ingots of aluminum to bring along in case I needed to repair something. By then the crew had arrived, and I put them to work assembling enough supplies to last us all for a week. Again, just in case.
How was I going to fight these wraiths?
Another consultation with Irithil convinced me that the warmth enchantment on the ship’s hull would kill any wraith that tried to slip through it. Room temperature was lethally hot to these creatures, and they weren’t likely to even try to get inside a magically heated enclosure. But they had some magic of their own, enough to put out candles and even small fires from a safe distance if they had a moment to work at it. So confronting them in the open could be tricky.
Flamers were the obvious answer to that, but I still hadn’t gotten around to making a factory for them. I did have a spare power stone, though, so I loaded it into the hold. I’d have to rectify my little oversight on the trip north.
What about giants? Frost giants were twenty feet tall, and the one I’d encountered before was armed and armored a lot like the human soldiers in this world. I had no idea how well guns and force grenades would work on them, but I was pretty sure Cerise and I could take apart a small group easily enough. It didn’t sound like we were likely to encounter an army, but if we did I could just drop a big bomb on them.
That was probably as much planning as I could do at this point.
Elin came hurrying out with Daria and Embla, all of them carrying bedrolls and hastily-filled packs. The wolfen girls had guns and flame
rs in addition to their usual bows and force swords, so I suppose she must have filled them in. The fact that Gronir had sent two of the pack’s three women on this trip surprised me for a moment, until I realized that they were the smallest members of the group. Guess they were taking my concerns about weight seriously, although that was probably going a little overboard.
Daria jogged up to me, grinning with excitement. “I hear we’re going flying, milord? This sounds like fun.”
“Not afraid of being way up in the air?” I asked. That had been a major problem with my effort to find a crew, and most of the men we’d assigned to the ship were still nervous about it.
She laughed. “I can’t wait to see what the world looks like to a bird, milord. This is going to be great! What do you think, Embla?”
“I’m so excited! How fast does this thing go? Is there someplace we can feel the wind?” The curvy little wolf girl bounced eagerly on her toes, craning her neck in an effort to take in everything at once.
I had a mental image of them both sticking their heads out the windows like dogs in a car, and couldn’t help but laugh.
“No, if there were any openings some idiot would manage to fall out every time we do a rescue lift,” I told them. “But I’m sure we’ll have plenty of other excitement for you two. Head through that door to the bridge, and you’ll find a ladder up to the sleeping compartment. You can stow your bedrolls there. This is going to be a long flight, so I expect we’ll end up sleeping in shifts.”
“I thought we couldn’t fly at night?” Elin asked.
“We can’t land at night,” I corrected. “We can fly just fine, although getting lost could be a problem. We’ll have to see if the elves can help with that.”
Irithil arrived a few minutes later. He’d changed into a suit of the same exotically-crafted light armor that his guards wore, with a sword at one hip and several wands at the other. Yeah, I’d thought he was a mage of some sort.
He and the man he’d brought with him both had oddly-designed packs on their backs, so I waved them towards the far end of the hold. “You can put your gear up there, away from the door. I’m afraid it’s going to be a long trip, although if you have a way to navigate at night that will get us there a lot faster.”
Irithil nodded. “I can find true north, and as long as the clouds aren’t too thick we’ll both be able to see well enough to take in the lay of the land. We’ve never flown before, but I’ve seen the world through the eyes of a bird often enough to find my way.”
He set down his pack, and bent to study one of the exposed beams that made up the airship’s frame. Then his eyes went wide.
“Is this mithril, Your Diligence? Yes, I see that it is. But the whole vessel? It must weigh tons. How did you persuade the dwarves to part with such a treasure?”
Huh. So the dwarves in this world knew how to smelt aluminum?
“I didn’t,” I told him. “Aluminum is one of the most common elements in the Earth’s crust. It’s a bit difficult to separate from the rocks it’s bound into, but earth magic is good at that kind of thing. I made an artifact that conjures ingots of the stuff.”
If anything, he looked even more impressed. “That is rare magic indeed. I do hope you’re careful about selling it, though. If you flood the market the dwarves will have assassins after you in no time.”
“They can get in line,” I grumbled. “But no, I’ve got other ways to make money. Selling conjured iron in Kozalin, charging rent on space on my island, even conjuring gold if I need to.”
“Conjuring gold?” He frowned. “I’d thought only a god could muster such power. Although there are hidden pitfalls to such an endeavor that have nothing to do with magic.”
“I know how inflation works,” I reassured him. “I’m not going to conjure enough to affect Kozalin’s economy. Ah, here’s our pilot.”
Cerise trotted up the ramp with a bedroll and a bundle of gear slung over one shoulder, looking breathless and suspiciously mussed. She kissed me, and her lips tasted of honey and cinnamon. Avilla.
“Get a good farewell in?” I teased. I was actually a little miffed that she’d gotten the sexy goodbye while I had to get everything organized. But I got to take Cerise with me, so what did I have to complain about?
“You know it,” she grinned. “Are we ready to go?”
“Everyone is here,” I confirmed. “Let me do a final check while you stow your gear, and then we can close the doors and get moving.”
We lifted just past noon, rising into an overcast sky with a hint of snow on the breeze. A thousand feet up Cerise turned Intrepid’s prow north, and ran the thrusters up to full power. At the navigation table behind the pilot’s seat Irithil unrolled the map he’d brought, a beautifully illustrated document like something out of a museum. Well, except that the shapes of the continents were actually correct, so apparently the dark elves were better cartographers than colonial era Europeans.
“The location of Yinthalos isn’t marked, of course,” he told me. “Occasionally one of these maps will be lost somehow, and we don’t want our enemies to find us easily. Ah, our maps depict the world based on measured distance rather than travel time…”
“Didn’t have to tell me that,” I said. “I’ve seen both kinds, and I recognize the shape of the coastlines. You said you were hidden in a mountain valley? Just how far north do we have to go, anyway?”
He took another look at the map, carefully checking landmarks, and slowly ran his finger up the line of mountains that form the spine of the Scandinavian Peninsula. And up. And further up. It finally came to rest most of the way up the Norwegian coast, well past the northernmost of the string of lakes that took the place of the Baltic Sea in this world.
“Eleven hundred miles?” I said grimly. “Fuck me. Hecate, I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Chapter 10
The flight over Varmland was a sobering reminder of just how few people had survived the first month of Fimbulwinter.
The landscape was dotted with the remains of abandoned villages. Half of them had been burned by goblin raiders before the landscape was completely choked in snow, and the creatures seemed to be systematically demolishing the rest. Roadside inns and isolated farmhouses had likewise been overrun, and from a thousand feet up the emptiness of the landscape was almost eerie.
Here and there a town or castle still flew the arms of some local noble. Most of them were packed with refugees, and I wondered how long they could survive. A wise lord would have siege stores for at least a few months, but after that things would get dicey. The snow on the ground was deep enough to make travel on foot nearly impossible for humans, especially since the people here didn’t seem to use snowshoes.
On the good side, goblin activity also seemed to be declining. The little monsters could travel across snow a lot more easily than men, and the trolls that usually accompanied them had enough magical strength to fight their way through snowdrifts. But they weren’t immune to the cold, and with conditions slowly worsening a lot of them had apparently decided to go back to wherever they’d come from. That, or they’d joined up with the andregi.
We passed within sight of one army on our way north. A horde of tens of thousands of andregi was camped on the ruins of some hapless town, systematically tearing down the remaining buildings. I was tempted to make a few bombing passes over them, but the sight of winged creatures circling in the sky above the camp gave me second thoughts. The Intrepid really wasn’t designed for aerial combat, and killing a few hundred ape men wouldn’t accomplish much anyway. So instead I gave them a wide berth.
Cerise and I gave our companions a crash course in how to operate the Intrepid as we flew, just in case. As expected Elin quickly got the hang of the controls, although she lacked Cerise’s instinctive understanding of flight. Daria and Embla were intrigued but clueless, and I concluded that it would take a lot of practice before I’d be able to trust either of them with the controls.
To my surprise, Irithil took t
o it almost as easily as Cerise had.
“This is quite an interesting control scheme,” he commented as he adroitly guided the ship through a climbing turn. “Most wizards would have bound a spirit into the ship so that crewmen could give it orders, or else relied on pure intent control. This system of levers reminds me of the mechanical devices that the engineers of Rome used to build.”
“Well, yes,” I replied. “Intent control is almost as tricky to use as it is to enchant, so I tend to rely on mechanical controls for everything except my personal devices. I’ve made a lot of weapons that can be used by anyone with a minimal amount of training, although I may have been a little overoptimistic with the airship. I’d like to be able to train some crewmen to operate it so I can do other things, but it’s looking like that would take a long training program.”
“Perhaps that could be my clan’s contribution to our mutual defense, then?” He suggested. “All of us have at least a little talent with magic, and air is one of our most common affinities. I expect half the clan could learn to fly this vessel competently with a few hours of practice.”
“That would be helpful. I get the feeling I wouldn’t have to explain the hazards of flight to you the way I would with human commoners either.”
He gave the control panel a thoughtful look, and made a slight adjustment to the lift control. “Declining pressure and temperature at higher altitudes, layers of varying wind and weather, thunderstorms, ground fog and the treacherous nature of twilight landings. Yes, anyone who has worked with birds will be familiar with these things. I will, however, admit to being a bit mystified at what holds this craft aloft. Am I correct in thinking that the field of magic above us changes in size?”
Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) Page 15