Nat looked to the horizon. They were close enough now that they could make out the citadel on the Durkon Peak. Close enough to make out its tower thrusting from the earth like an arm breaking free of a shallow grave. A shudder ran through her.
Eathon noticed Nat’s discomfort and pointed her the other way. “Look, down there,” he said.
She turned to see a half dozen flat, winged shapes soared along on an undercurrent behind them.
“What are they?” she asked.
“They’re called phanta rays,” Eathon replied. “Watch…”
The rays turned their noses skywards and began to climb. Up and up they went, skyrocketing over the top of the balloon, and then, as they reached the apex of their climb, something extraordinary happened.
They vanished.
“What the hell…?”
Eathon grinned. “They’re still there, up above us. It’s camouflage. Their bellies mirror what’s above them so they can swoop down on their prey undetected.”
“Are they going to attack us?” Nat cried.
“A vessel this size? I’d be more worried about them mating with us.”
The phanta rays blinked back into existence as they overtook the aircraft and plunged past its bow to reveal their topsides again. Dropping back, they continued to pursue the aircraft, chasing it’s tail like dolphins after a schooner.
Nat shivered with excitement. “They’re beautiful,” she cooed.
Eathon took off his coat and draped it about her shoulders for warmth. Given that she was already wearing Goldie’s pelt there, those were about the only parts of her that weren’t chilly, but she didn’t complain. Instead, she smiled and leaned into him.
“Can you two concentrate on the matter at hand?” hissed Galanthre.
“What’s wrong, sister?” asked Eathon.
“Listen...”
Even Nat could hear it. A high-pitched humming noise that tickled her ears and set her teeth on edge. Soon the source of the sound revealed itself as a number of objects appeared on the vessel’s starboard.
“What are they?” asked Eathon, narrowing his almond eyes. “Arrowhawks?”
“Too small,” replied Galanthre. “Razor bats?”
“At this height?”
Nat squinted. “I don’t suppose they could just be pigeons?”
The shapes came into focus. Drones. A buzzing swarm of mechanical aircrafts, borne aloft on metal wings.
“No, of course they couldn’t,” Nat sighed.
As the drones crowded the balloon, Nat got a better look at them. They were the size of pigeons but built to look like locusts, with armoured bodies, antennae and camera lens eyes that regarded the intruders with robotic indifference. They could only be Drensila’s doing: state-of-the-art technology running on pure voodoo.
Spooked by the arrival of these unidentified flying objects, the tailing phanta rays broke off and headed for safer skies. The swarm of drones surrounded the balloon and hovered there ominously, motorised mandibles clacking as they considered their next move. Meanwhile, the balloon’s passengers huddled together inside their basket like sheep under a tree.
“What do we do?” asked Galanthre.
“We do this,” said Ashley, reaching into a sack of ballast and lobbing a rock at the nearest threat. The drone remained conspicuously airborne. “Where’d my rock go?” asked Ashley.
“You know that thing you were aiming at?” replied Galanthre.
“Yeah?”
“Nowhere near there.”
The swarm closed in. Landing on the balloon, the locusts gripped its canvas in their claws and tucked into it like ticks on a mangy dog. Their jagged metal teeth tore holes in their fabric, allowing them to burrow through one side of the balloon and tunnel out of the other. Within moments, the one thing keeping Drensila’s enemies afloat had taken on the consistency of Swiss cheese.
The balloon began to plummet. Panicking, Nat hit the gas hard. The drequon let out a great belch of flame, but the shredded balloon refused to hold the hot air.
“Someone has to get up there and fix those holes!” Nat screamed over the rushing wind.
“How?” asked Ashley, clinging on for dear life as the balloon continued to vent air.
“Don’t you have any of that silver tape you LARP guys use… what’s it called… kidnap tape?”
“Duct tape?”
“That’s the stuff.”
“Even if I did have it, how would I get up there to use it?”
It was a fair point. There was nothing to be done. They were going down.
*****
EYES FIXED TO a bank of TV screens, Drensila watched the airship plunge from the heavens and hollered with glee.
Such sweet calamity!
A tear of joy rolled down her cheek and she wiped it away, smearing her Cleopatra eyeliner. It was finally was over. The meddling interlopers were gone, soon to be dashed upon the rocks of Sky Fells and never heard from again. And to think, she’d only built the drones to spy on her not-so-loyal subjects. Intercepting the “Chosen One” on her way to the citadel had been nothing more than a happy coincidence.
Drensila let out a long sigh as weeks of animus drained from her body. She stroked one of the monitors and chuckled. After all that bother, the meddlers had been felled by a mob of mechanical insects. And none too soon. If the intruders continued to evade her clutches any longer, she was making ready to do something drastic. So long as it meant an end to Nat Lawler, Drensila was prepared to desecrate her land with a radioactive crater that would have annihilated life for miles around. Thankfully, she hadn’t needed to resort to such measures. The job was done. Now she could take a breath, wipe the slate clean and get back to the business of world domination.
Or so she thought.
For despite possessing a grasp of military technology far in advance of her otherwise barbaric civilisation, she had failed to familiarise herself with the nuances of the modern age, in particular its recreations and entertainments. Had she taken the time to immerse herself in a movie or two, she’d know what any casual cinema-goer knows: that no enemy is truly dead unless it was seen to happen on screen.
*****
THE BALLOON SPILLED from the sky, more stone than ship. Nat and her crew jettisoned any remaining ballast, but it only served to adjust the craft’s descent to a razor sharp incline rather than a straight drop. Wind whistled through the balloon’s many holes as it hurtled towards the arid fells below. They were coming down hard, and not on friendly ground. Beneath them lay pools of lava, which spouted from the earth like angry red geysers.
Courting death, Nat took the proverbial wheel and piloted the stricken vessel into the prevailing wind to slalom between two towers of gushing lava. The heat was enough to singe eyebrows, but the last-minute steer managed to save the crew from a fiery end. They gasped at their near escape, but their relief was premature. The balloon was on a collision course with another pool of lava. The Chosen One and her cohorts were about to score a suicidal hole in one.
With muscles taut as fiddle strings, Nat released the Drequon’s choke to give the balloon one last, feeble blast of lift. The basket skimmed the lava close enough that its crew could feel its heat through the thick leather soles of their boots. Sailing over the pool, the vessel set down on the other side as gracefully as a gazelle… that had been darted twice with a tranquiliser gun. The basket clipped a rock and lurched forwards unstoppably, then the ground ahead fell off as it disappeared into a deep trench. The crew clung on for dear life as the basket went bouncing down the escarpment, turning over and over before finally coming to a halt in a loose pile of scree.
*****
“SO, LEMME GERRIS right,” said Tidbit, stroking his hairless chin. “The place ye come from is called Earth?”
“That’s right,” replied Neville, supping his pint.
“As in dirt? As in ye could nae think o’ a single thing better t’ name the place?”
“That’s pretty big talk for a guy w
ho lives in a hole in the ground.”
“Fair play,” said the dwarf, clinking his flagon.
*****
THE CREW OF the SS Suicide were alive. The drequon was alive. Nat was alive. Feeling like a hippo had riverdanced on her, but alive nonetheless.
“Is everyone okay?” she asked, crawling from the wreckage.
“Man, that was sick!” replied Ashley staggering from beneath the balloon.
The others emerged and surveyed the damage. Remarkably, they all remained intact. The basket too. The same could not be said for the balloon.
“We’re going to need to make some major repairs if we want to get airborne again,” said Eathon.
Nat gathered her senses. “We can use scraps of clothing to patch up the holes,” she suggested. “What do we do for thread though?”
Galanthre had an answer. Darting out a hand, she seized hold of a large lizard basking on a nearby rock and wrung its neck. “Here,” she told Nat as she handed her the creature’s corpse.
Nat failed to see how this solved their problem.
Thankfully, Eathon did. Taking the lizard from his sister, he laid it belly-up on a rock, sliced it open from throat to loins and pulled out its innards by the fistful. While Ashley tried (and failed) to hold onto his lunch, Nat watched with a certain detached interest. Back home she’d been training to be a doctor, and this wasn’t her first dissection.
Eathon steeped the extracted intestines in water from a nearby rock pool then laid them out flat beside the dead lizard. He stropped at the innards with the flat of a knife while Nat watched, fascinated, before twisting the remaining fibres together like catgut. It took a while, but Eathon worked patiently with what he had, until he’d managed to amass several yards of tough twine. Finally, he reached inside the remains of the creature, snapped off a rib and sharpened it into a point.
“Over to you,” said Eathon, handing Nat the needle.
“Why me?” she replied, curtly. “Because I’m a woman I get to do the stitching? Is that it?”
Eathon raised a brow as he fed the lizard’s carcass to the hungry drequon, providing it with some much-needed fuel. “No, I’m giving you the needle because you’re a doctor, which means you know how to perform a decent suture.”
“Oh,” said Nat, getting off her high horse. “In that case, thank you.”
After a brief powwow, the party arrived at a system for getting their vessel back in the sky. Galanthre and Ashley would hunt for more lizard gut, which Eathon would prepare so Nat could use it to patch the balloon’s holes. With a production line established, the party worked tirelessly through the night, labouring by torchlight until the sun returned to the sky. Scouring the local area, Galanthre and Ashley succeeded in hunting down three more lizards. They even managed to recover some items that had shaken free from the basket on impact, including the mysterious metal lunchbox Neville had given them.
After a couple more hours of Eathon feeding Nat braided gut while she slaved at the needle, the aircraft was starting to look salvageable. Only a couple of holes remained in the balloon now.
“Does anyone have any more cloth?” asked Nat, seeking fabric for patching.
Her companions shook their heads. They’d given all they could, in fact Galanthre had donated so much clothing she was beginning to look borderline indecent.
Nat removed Goldie’s pelt from her shoulders. She held the glittering unicorn skin up to the light of the rising sun and sighed. “Thanks again for the help, boy,” she whispered.
She sliced the pelt in two and used the pieces to patch the balloon’s remaining holes.
Galanthre leaned across and inspected Nat’s needlework. “I thought you were a physician,” she said. “I’ve seen better stitching on a Sunday joint.”
Somehow, in a fit of utter sanity, Nat stopped herself grabbing the elf by the hair and tearing out a chunk of mohawk.
*****
TERRY HAD COME to the end of his journey. Somewhere along the road he’d taken a blind curve and now here he was, barrelling through warning signs and heading for the end of a half-constructed bridge.
This was his execution.
Shackled, and shivering against the cut of an icy wind, Clive marched him along the citadel’s ramparts to his inevitable doom. After a short trudge, his bare feet landed upon a wooden plank that passed between two parapets and led to a half-mile drop into the Durkon Chasm. Clive had summoned the plank from thin air, just as he’d summoned Cleaver, who he used to encourage Terry’s progress along the wobbly slab of lumber. Needless to say, the floating sword was not thrilled at being used as a slaver’s whip, and let fly with a stream of invective that could have melted a sailor. It really was something to behold; truly he shaped profanity as Michelangelo shaped marble.
Seeking silence, Clive cast a spell that fused Cleaver’s metal lips tight, then watched gleefully as the helpless sword prodded Terry towards the end of the wooden runway.
“I’m going to enjoy this,” Clive chuckled, content with his chosen method of execution.
“You can kill me all you like,” Terry called back, “but this won’t end well for you.”
“Is that right?” replied Clive, using the mute sword to nudge the condemned closer to the precipice. “And how do you work that out?”
“You’re a Game Master, right?”
“I was,” Clive groaned.
“Can you think of a single game where the madman in a black robe won the day? You’re the villain, Clive. You’re the villain and you’re going to lose the same way all villains do.” Maybe he wasn’t a hero—maybe he was just a man—but that didn’t mean he had to stop believing in justice.
Clive used Cleaver to drive his prisoner forward another step and Terry tottered, fighting to stay upright against the howling winds.
“This is real life now, Terry, but if you want to keep on acting like it’s make-believe, fine.” Clive waved his old friend goodbye. “Game Over, pal. I’m tearing up your character sheet.”
Terry’s toes curled over the lip of the plank, and he teetered there like a drunk at his ex’s wedding. Clive was about to give his former companion one last spur when a troll’s voice cut across the wind.
“Incoming!” it cried.
A shadow fell across Clive and he whirled about to find a large object with the sun to its back heading rapidly in his direction.
“Oh, come on!” he protested as a bulb-shaped silhouette swooped in for an airborne assault.
The crew of the S.S. Suicide steeled themselves for battle. This was their first, up-close look at Drensila the Black’s home, and it was even more fearsome at this distance than it was reaching from the horizon like a black claw about to haul after it some great, crawling leviathan.
No, the Disney castle this was not.
Nat cut the gas and made for a final descent, passing over two figures stood on the citadel ramparts. One was dressed in flowing black robes, the other wore a loincloth coloured rust-red with blood. What they were up to was a mystery, and Nat didn’t have time for guessing games. In the courtyard below, trolls spilled from their barracks and raced to their posts, ready to meet the invaders. Nat was about to bring the aircraft down to engage them when she heard a bang and saw something rip through the fabric of the balloon.
One of the trolls had taken a potshot with a weapon that had no place in this world. A device that looked very much like a musket. The device was operated by Thrungle, who re-armed it via a hand-powered crank before taking another shot.
BANG.
The blast put a hole through the basket this time, narrowly missing its occupants. Thrungle cackled and cranked the weapon again for another shot. Apparently, the machinery of Drensila’s abattoir had taken another aggressive technological leap.
“We’re balls-deep in steampunk, yo,” yelled Ashley, putting the situation as plainly as he knew how.
Other gunners appeared in the courtyard, and within moments the air was laced with bullets. Panicking, Nat fired up
the gas and sent the punctured balloon climbing into a cross-current that whipped the vessel in an easterly direction. The occupants hung on for dear life as the balloon swung about, increasing its distance from the enemy and avoiding a second volley of lead.
The firing squad reloaded, determined to take down the intruders. Had there been more of them, they’d surely have found their target with the next salvo, but thankfully the trolls were thin on the ground. Many had lost their lives at the Battle of Bludoch, while others were in transit, having been ordered to march on the dwarf dungeon after Carnella’s failed assassination attempt. Since replacements for the absent soldiers were still germinating in the troll hole across the Durkon Chasm, the citadel had been left to operate under a skeleton crew. Nat had timed the attack well, but her team were still grossly outmatched, both in terms of armaments and numbers.
“We won’t last long up here,” Galanthre screamed over the wind. “You have to get us down there.”
Nat whirled to the elf. “Don’t be such a… backseat balloon driver,” she shouted back, bringing the airship around.
Galanthre was right though, they were either going down in the citadel or down in the chasm, and Nat had come too far to fall at that hurdle.
“Take the wheel,” she told Galanthre, and handed her the chain to the drequon’s choker.
Nat reached into her satchel to find Neville’s gift, the iron box he’d given her before takeoff. Turning it over in her hands, she was surprised to find a scar across its surface where it had deflected a stray bullet. She breathed a sigh of relief. Not only had the box likely her life, it had also succeeded in shielding its contents, which were nothing if not volatile. She flicked a catch on the box, opened it up and plucked out one of the carefully packed items inside: a metal flask about the size of an old fashioned milk bottle. Next to it she found a lighter—Neville’s lucky Zippo—and attached to that a note.
“In case of emergency,” it read.
Power Playing (Trolled Book 2) Page 7