Stuart turned to Raphael and Thenele. “Where is this manufactory?” he asked.
“The edge,” answered Raphael. “Straight ahead.” The noise of the beginning panic was growing; he was forced to shout to make himself heard.
“How far?” Stuart shouted back.
The other did not answer, but craned his neck forward past the horses. His look said enough for him: “Too far.”
The horses slipped and recovered. The cart fishtailed but stayed upright. Caelion was actually applying brake to avoid running down the horses. The wheels were beginning to squeal with the smoke. Sianna jerked from her seat across the cart to Piachras. “Piachras!” she shouted. “We need....” The rest was lost.
A crowd of rioters surged out before them, a glittering shape over their heads illuminated by torches. “Drakes!” warned Rigel.
“Forget the drakes, watch the crowd!” exclaimed Haleth.
Caelion swerved away. Piachras, leaping to the seat beside him, landed off-balance and went over. His feet touched the ground as his hand caught the rail, and he leapt back up, unfurled his glaive, and with one broad swing cracked through the drive shaft. “What...!” exclaimed Caelion.
“Just trust us!” Piachras called back. He swung down his second glaive and shattered the left drive shaft. The horses veered to the right, toward the crowd, held only by the reigns. “Let go!” Piachras shouted, and with a third swing he snapped free the reigns.
The cart plunged free before the crowd. The horses neighed and crashed into the scattering people. They hit forty-five degrees. Fifty degrees. Fifty-five. Now they were not only tilting but definitely falling.
A building loomed up before them, the end of the street. Below it, the dark forms of clouds brushed with dawn-ghosts floated crazily along. Piachras drove his glaive into the sideboard and held on. Haleth wove one arm through Jenna’s harness and braced himself on the rails. Caelion pulled full back on the brakes and looked for something soft to hit. Sixty degrees. They all braced.
The cart smashed down into the glider factory at full speed. A rain of splinters and nails peppered the air. Someone cried out. The cart jerked forward, impacted a beam and jerked back—and kept moving, somehow reversed. The wheels were gone: the cart skidded along with the scream of wood on wood. They struck another object that exploded in splinters and blanketed them in a flapping leather tarp. The cart continued to plunge downward, hit another unknown object like the first, rolled on something underneath, went airborne, and spilled its passengers pell-mell into the dark. Then, with a final triumphant roar, it crashed through the far wall of the factory in a swirl of dust and wood—and was gone.
Sianna’s voice called out: “Stuart! Piachras! Anybody?”
“Here, Sianna,” Stuart answered out of the darkness. “Hold on.”
An avalanche of debris rolled down the sloping floor. “Brrrh!” choked a deep male voice. “I’m here...Haleth.” He coughed in the dust. “I’ve got Jenna. She’s all right. And here I think...yes, this is Heao. And Master Delossan.”
“I am all right...I think,” wheezed Jevan.
There was another avalanche. “Who’s that?” called Sianna. There was no answer. “Piachras? Can you answer?”
“Who is it?” Haleth demanded, more alarmed. “Piachras? Rigel? Caelion? Raphael?”
“What?” came Rigel’s voice from the opposite direction.
A litter of loose debris began sliding across the floor. Jevan yelled out suddenly.
“What is it, Jevan?” Haleth asked. There was the sound of someone scrambling across the nearly vertical floor.
“A hand has got me!” Jevan cried. “Wait!” A sword rasped out of its sheath and an inhuman gurgle came from beside Jevan. Sianna scrambled to save him but slid free on the floor to the end of the room.
“Father,” came a weak male voice...and suddenly in the dusty darkness shone the demonic red light of Xaeland’s sword, Grasp—and beside it, Xaeland’s pale face. Then Caelhuin appeared in the light behind him. “Let the Light shine on us,” Xaeland smiled.
Jevan—and all of them—relaxed. “But Piachras?” Sianna resumed.
“There is our lieutenant, Thenele,” said Stuart, pointing grimly to a body in the new light of the sword.
“Is she...,” Jenna began.
“Let her lie,” said Jevan. “This is where she belongs. Her treasure is in the heavens.”
“Blast!” exclaimed Haleth. “Curse it! But she was a good one. Who will guide us now? None of us know where....”
He was interrupted by a shock of such magnitude that the whole world tilted backwards and sideways twenty degrees and began staggering to the left. The roof of the factory crunched inward and sent beams slamming through the floor. A glider that had slid against the lower wall suddenly went airborne, dipped, and plowed through the company. Rigel caught hold of it to stop it and was dragged off his feet by the momentum. Jenna screamed weakly. The glider floated down through the torn-out lower wall and disappeared.
A flash of gold fire, the dawn, reflected through the tilting hole through which the Anthirian general had precessed. The ground rumbled in protest.
Stuart leapt into action. He scrambled past Sianna and Caelhuin to a tangle of overturned gliders and glider parts. He dragged one out and found the main spar fractured at the root.
“What are we going to do?” Sianna asked.
“Those of us who can are leaving before we hit the ground,” said Stuart. He threw away the first glider and moved to the second. “There’s no time to argue. This one’s good. Master Delossan: you and Heao take this one.”
“Sir, I have never....”
“It is as easy as falling off a log,” said Stuart. “I know you well enough: you can do it, and you of all of us must survive.”
Jevan nodded sorrowfully and tapped Heao on the arm. Heao ran to the glider and dragged it back. “Wow, it’s light!” he exclaimed.
“This one is also good,” declared Stuart. He scanned the group quickly and his eyes came to rest on Jenna. “Haleth, you and the girl.” Haleth nodded, no more sure than Jevan, and took the glider. While Stuart turned through the next gliders Haleth secured Jenna’s harness to his back.
“Master Stuart,” Xaeland spoke up, “I do not think I can hold on all the way down.”
“Let Sir Caelhuin hold on to you,” Stuart replied. He bit back a curse, finding the next two gliders both ruined, the spar of one protruding through the canvas of the other. “Can you guide it down?”
“I...think so. Yes.”
“Good. Master Delossan, leave!”
“I am, Sir,” Jevan answered. “We are.”
Jevan and Heao led their glider cautiously along the wall to the edge, then suddenly Heao froze. “I see the ground!” he gasped.
“For heaven’s sake, go!” shouted Stuart. “Everyone try to aim as far away from the isles as possible—and follow each other! Go!” He pulled out another glider and the entire wing collapsed on him.
“Ready?” Haleth asked Jenna.
“Yes, Sir,” she murmured. He took a deep breath and jumped. Jevan watched, grasping Heao tightly in one hand. The glider wobbled and dipped to one side. At the same time the island lurched again with a sound like crashing mountains. He fell free.
“Here!” exclaimed Stuart, lifting a pristine glider and pulling it out. “This is yours, Master Xaeland.”
Xaeland nodded darkly to Caelhuin. “You’re not planning on going down with the ship, are you?” he asked Stuart wryly.
“Not at this hour of the day,” answered Stuart. “I shall reach ground before you.”
“You’ll be riding the dragon down,” said Xaeland.
“I’ve got Sianna to look after,” Stuart reminded him.
Xaeland shrugged and got into the glider with Caelhuin. “May the light gild your path,” he said—and they took off.
Sianna began rummaging through the wrecked gliders with Stuart. “You shall look after me, then?” she asked.
&
nbsp; “I did not say you needed it,” Stuart assuaged. “See ye anything?”
“There. And Piachras?”
Stuart cupped his hands to his mouth. “Piachras! Piachras!” he called. No answer. He pulled out the glider Sianna had spotted and gave it a shake. It was sturdy enough. Without asking, he took her by the waist, got on, and launched.
Immediately the ground below was a blur of rock and scars streaked back and forth by red sunlight. Shadows snaked through the air around them on either side. One, a tiny islet, fled upward past them like a volcano’s top. Stuart yawed away and pulled up on the elevator. They plunged.
Sianna closed her eyes and let the cold wind scorch her skin. She sighed, and the warmth below her sent through her mind mixed pictures of Emeria and he, Stuart the Scribe.
Heao watched wordlessly as the shafts of the new day broke over the falling isles of Aerisia. The stones, the isles, the mountains, streamed bright streaks of flame. He seemed not to be moving. All things seemed not to be moving, a painting of an alien world. Tears welled up in his eyes and froze there, blinding him, numbing him. He could also hear nothing. He wished a moment that he were like the senseless Caelhuin, for there was something immensely right about it in that hour. The actual senses he could feel none of: only the overwhelming impression of what they each meant—that alone remained. Then he understood both Alik and the shards. The power of the shards was power of naming, of realizing the underlying thing beneath the world. But were there words there? Yes, no, the answers seemed to come simultaneously. You do not understand at all. That world was speaking, but with its own language of intelligential power.
“Everything is on fire,” spoke the voice to him. In it were desire as well as pain, fear as well as love, the screams of drakes and the sound of footsteps in a burning snow. “Alik,” he voiced silently in return, “I know where you are.”
VII.i. couris
A
cross the ashy plains of southern Caranis the hymnist, bent to the ground in prostrate misery, lifted up his voice to the streaming embers of the sky:
“Now how hast thou fallen, thou daughter of the sky?
Mother of your forlorn people, whom you bury in your fall.
Our hearts, O Mother, are buried ‘neath your stones;
Our souls cry out beneath the fathomless depths;
Fires burn immutably within the rocks of earth;
Our souls are flickering with the faintness of death.
We burn for you, and within our spirits groan—
How art thou fallen, whose heavenly foundations unflawed
Adorned creation as an adamantine crown on high?
Our hearts are burning, Aerisia, a funeral pyre for you.”
The hymnist ceased, bowing his head and lowering his hands to the ashy ground. A figure that had been kneeling behind him amongst the Aerisian troops arose, a tall woman in a flowing dress and robe, her hair pinned up with a diamond glimmer, her face a bleak but fiery form, flinty black in the dark but gilt around the profile with the first rays of the dawn. Her voice, when she spoke, was mellifluous and high-born. “Your words are noble, but you have over-sung: your song is a line too long.”
“As is history, M’lady,” the hymnist mourned. “History for me has sung one line too long.”
“Although Aerisia is fallen, we yet survive and have our strength,” the lady said.
One of the soldiers, a silver-haired officer with a worn countenance and a thin mustache, marked with the silver arrow pin of the Aenaerians, came up behind the woman. “M’lady,” he spoke, “look up there.”
“M’lady Anaerias,” a second soldier intervened, “the shard-bearer’s trail will be getting cold.”
“No, wait,” the officer said: “gliders.”
Dark specks flashed across the morning in the shower of Aerisia’s falling stones. Rock pelted the little gliders as they soared downward. A drake appeared in the mix. One of the gliders began to tumble.
A long, wild cry trailed through the sky. Piachras and a fragment of glider remains hung askew from a torn glider wing, plummeting through the sky. It had taken him a moment too long to extract his second glaive from the dash of the horsecart when everyone else was thrown free, and he had just managed to catch the spar of a glider wing the cart had plowed through before crashing through the opposite wall into open space. Then he had plummeted like a stone through thousands of feet until the weight of the cart and his own frantic workings had separated the blade of the glaive from the cart. The drake dove for him, and he swung the glaive for it furiously, glad to have it now. It dove out of the way, turned for a second pass, and wobbled, finding to its amazement that its wing was bleeding profusely. Piachras saw it coming back and pulled hard on the right rudder, veering just out of the drake’s range. It came around again and this time, staying away from the deadly glaive, it perched with a malicious sparkle of its eyes on the spar of the glider’s left wing and sunk its teeth in. With a roar Piachras grabbed the glaive and sliced straight through the left wing: drake, spar, and all. The glider rolled. The glaive slipped free from his grip and plummeted free. His eyes followed it down to the ground: far closer than he would have liked.
Two drakes circling over the wasteland of the wreckage of Aerisia spotted the last glider floating away toward the north. No move came from the inhabitant lying across the seat: the rider was either senseless, dead, or simply too stunned by the disaster that had unfolded around him to move. Both the drakes took off at the same time, wing to wing. The glider neared the ground, but still there was no sign of movement from the rider. Shapes darted across the ground ahead of the glider but the drakes were too focused on which would reach the glider first that they did not notice.
“Ready,” Stuart directed, watching the drakes and the glider approach. Six Aerisians fixed arrows on their bows and the first two took aim. The glider passed overhead close enough to plainly make out the murry astroid shield he knew belonged to General Rigel. “Let Aerisia’s vengeance begin,” he spoke.
Two arrows shot through the air, hanging for a moment like diamond earrings…and then stabbed through the hearts of the unexpecting drakes. They tumbled and fell—gone. Stuart turned his attention to the glider as it came in for a smooth, undisturbed landing.
“Hail, brave star of Anthirion!” cried Stuart.
“Scribe Stuart Channethoth! The sight of you is as of sunlight out of a hurricane!” came Rigel’s response. He jumped down from his glider, nearly stumbling, and hobbled over to embrace Stuart. “As the first away, I expected no aid at landing,” he said.
“Yet we flew faster further,” Stuart replied, embracing him. “We have all landed already. Behold: Sianna, Xaeland, Caelhuin, Haleth and Jenna, Jevan and Heao…and even a special blessing, Piachras!”
“Piachras! We thought we had lost you for good!”
“No such luck,” grinned Piachras.
“And here, Sir, is the one you owe for the arrows that saved you: the Lady Reiaena Anaerias.” With that, Stuart introduced the stately woman in flowing black robes waiting patiently behind him.
Rigel, grateful but at the same time abashed by the woman’s stark nobility, bowed. “My lady, thank you. And…my condolences for all of your losses.”
“And mine at yours, lost general,” responded Lady Anaerias. She extended her hand then and beckoned to two of her soldiers, who brought forth on a rope the bodies of the two drakes that had attacked Rigel’s glider. They lay the rope at her feet.
There was a cold silence. Then one of the Aerisians jumped forward, wielding his glaive past the lady’s motionless eyes and severing both drakes in two with one blow. “Drakes of Krythar, Aerisia screams for your blood!” he shouted. “Feel the wailing of those you have brought low—low no longer! Curse Krythar! Curse the drakes! Curse Morin and the northlands forever! Curse the Stone and all its evil! Curse the traitors to Aerisia!”
With each proclamation he struck the corpses again. On the fifth blow the glaive was notched. On the e
ighth blow he paused, and fury eddied over him almost visibly as he surveyed the mashed pulp beneath him. Then, gathering all his strength and fury and with a great roar, he swung the glaive about and shattered it in pieces against a nearby stone. Coolly, the Lady Anaerias extended to him a new glaive as he stood there panting. He accepted it, bowing, and once again took his place in line.
“Go in peace, now, Scribe of Ristoria, and find your lost boy,” Lady Anaerias addressed Stuart.
Stuart bowed. “I thank you for your intelligences and for showing us the path. If you can, seek out the Guardian Prince, you and your house, according to the directions I gave you earlier, and you will be welcomed there.”
“Wait not upon our coming, unless there be conjurers of souls in the Wizard’s Tower as ‘tis said there were of old,” she answered. “I had hoped you would stay to record in verse the last epic of Aerisia…but farewell to higher trails.”
“May the heavenly lights send forth their arrows with yours,” spoke Xaeland, bowing.
Following Xaeland, each member of the company bowed to Lady Anaerias as they parted. She watched them distractedly for a time as they set out into the broken threshold-land of Caranis, then turned away.
One grey drake swooped over a smashed jumble of houses and broken rock, sensing blood. It alighted on the skewed door jamb and clawed into the timbers. The heart’s juices, maddening, clawed deeper and deeper. An Aerisian soldier’s grappling hook and shattered glaive poked out of the shifting ruins.
Every Aerisian soldier is trained what to do in the event of the unspeakable. Those who would fly gliders for the house of Anaerias receive even more thorough training. Yet if one should fall, there is in reality little one can do but keep a clear head…and pray from the heart.
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