The Last Null

by K L Reinhart

  Despite all of this, the elf’s eyes were naturally drawn to the other things inside the quarry working of the Royal and Ancient Guild—the bodies, hulls, and wreckages of air galleons themselves.

  “Dear Stars . . .” It was Terak’s turn to swear, partly in reverence, but mostly in dismay.

  The hulls of the air galleons were vast—some of them even bigger than The Lady of the North that had belonged to Lord Falan of Brecha, which Terak had flown upon.

  Some of the hulls were devoid of planking, with only broad spars of tar-soaked wood like the ribs of some unlikely and monstrous creature. Others of the air-ships were smaller, with little huts and pointed prows, but whose hulls had terrible rents and splintered holes in their wood.

  Terak was astonished at the sight of these great creatures of the sky—but he was also traumatized at the state that each and every one of them was in. “How are we ever going to get one repaired and built in time before . . .” the assassin’s words fell silent. He was still thinking of the many leagues that it would take to get them to Brecha, let alone the edge of the Tartaruk Mountains and the Black Keep beyond that.

  “This battle-barge works,” Kol reminded him, which was true, Terak conceded. But it was only one boat. And it had no cannon-shot, only white powder of magnesium for effect, he had discerned.

  “And she’s slow . . .” the elf muttered, half to himself. He could imagine seeing the orcish War Burg advancing on them, closer and closer every day. Then it would fling out the far faster moving darts of their wyvern-riders, swamping the slow, ground-hugging barge without weapons easily.

  “Hss!” Terak hissed in the cat-like way of his people when they were annoyed, before remembering his lessons. This sort of agitation and anguish, too, was a form of pain, wasn’t it?

  But will it make me stronger? Even the assassin of the Black Keep had to wonder.

  Yarl Mendip, as it turned out, was also a Doctor, a Chief, a Master, and a twin of Lars Mendip—although he was thin where the latter was large.

  “You told them what!?” the diminutive Yarl Mendip of the Royal and Ancient Guild of Navigators said, his voice rising into a near-shriek from within the confines of his own wispy, red beard.

  The twins of the guild, along with Terak, Kol, Tanwen, and a few others of the Emarii, stood at the end of a large hall inside the fortress of the Navigators. The rest of their number (all excluding the Elder Beings, who refused to enter such an apparently dead stone palace) quietly distributed what food supplies they had and tended to sore feet and aching limbs.

  The central hall of the Navigators was built on a fittingly large scale to the quarry outside, with enough room on its gleaming cream marble floors to accommodate five hundred or more people. Stretching down the sides of the building were gigantic pillars that soared up to a roof three hundred feet or so high. Each one was carved with curling lines of boats and ships of a thousand different types and varieties. Large archways opened out and led deeper into the palace, which clearly extended deep into the sides of the hills that the palace was made out of.

  The twins of the guild sat on two of a line of tall-backed chairs, seven in all. Terak presumed these chairs had once held the backs of other Chiefs and Masters of the Royal and Ancient Guild.

  “I asked you to defend our borders—not invite the invaders in!” Yarl said with apparent distaste at the people who were now in his halls.

  “Masters,” Terak cleared his throat, sharing a glance between them. “Do I need to explain once again the danger that our world now faces? That the Blood Gate is going to open any day—any hour?” the elf said calmly. His voice rang out true and clear across the hall. “In but a short time, good Chiefs, all of the knowledge and expertise that you have been guarding will be the playthings of the orcs, the beastials, the Ixcht, or whatever strange peoples come through the Ungol Gate. At least let the legacy of this great and noble Guild shine forth when the kingdoms of Midhara need it the most!”

  “Hmm,” Terak heard Kol murmur appreciatively. The face of Yarl Mendip creased in confusion, and he proceeded to bite his nails with clear worry and concern.

  “You’ve got a talent for speeches, elf,” the older Emarii whispered at Terak’s side. “When all this is done—perhaps you should come and join us.”

  If anything survives after all this is done, Terak couldn’t help but think.

  Lars Mendip, the larger pilot, cleared his throat and turned to his considering brother. “Brother mine—we have a commission. A new commission.” It seemed that, in the face of sibling rivalry, Lars had lost his earlier reticence to their quest. Or maybe Terak really was that good with words.

  “Pfagh!” The thinner Yarl scoffed. “A commission!? And just how do you think we two are going to fulfil that, my brother?” Yarl saved the largest amount of his bile for Lars alone, it appeared.

  “Have you told your new friends that there are only two of us here? Have you told them that there is no way under the stars of heaven, even with every luck and hope in the world, even with every skill and machine, or great magics that we have, that we could complete and outfit a new air galleon in time before the Blood Gate opens!?”

  Terak’s jaws clenched, and his heart sank as his worst fears were confirmed. We will have to travel onwards on foot. We will be overrun by Ungol and the orcs—and we will have to fight and fall where we stand.

  “Ah, but aren’t you forgetting, brother?” the portly Lars Mendip, Doctor of the Royal and Ancient Guild, said. His voice lowered to a whisper.

  “The Last Boat.”

  There was a distraught hiss from the thinner Yarl Mendip at whatever this mere suggestion was. Terak saw the small man’s eyes squint into two burning embers of bright fury.

  “Sacrilege!” Yarl snarled, half rising from his seat. Just then, one of the Elder Beings burst into the room, half gliding, half bounding in that strange movement.

  “What, who—?” Yarl stammered, looking from his brother to the bird-like Elder Being. One of their kind hadn’t been seen since their world was fashioned . . .

  “Elf-friend!” It was the Elder Scout, and he looked intense and filled with urgent fury.

  “What is it?” Terak was already turning on his heel, his hands moving to his belt.

  “My people have seen movement heading this way. More flying barges—those that belong to the Ixcht!” The Elder Being’s wings flared at the same time as he spoke.

  Oh, wonderful, Terak thought. The insect-men, forever the enemies of all humans and elves, had joined in the war against the free races of Midhara.

  9

  Hornets, Cats, and Birds

  The Ixcht, too, had battle-barges, Terak saw—but they were as unlike the Royal Guild’s craft as wolves were to dogs.

  For a start, we don’t have any cannon-shot! The elvish assassin growled as their own battle-barge started to nose its way out of the quarry, piloted by Doctor Lars Mendip himself.

  The two Ixchtish insect-men barges looked like pulled teeth—a pair of elongated canines whose hulls were a bleach-bone white and appeared to be made of whorled and cracked bone or shell. Their prows were pointed as sharp as spears, and clad in an uncompromising, sharpened steel. They had a myriad of sails that flashed and dazzled in the air with iridescent colors. Even from this far away, Terak could see the small shapes of the insect-men hurrying about their decks as their craft raced low across the hills toward the quarry of the Navigators.

  “Left foresails!” their portly Navigator demanded. This earned a mumble of consternation and confusion from the mixture of Emarii storytellers and Tor citizens that had been pressganged to pilot it . . .

  “That one over there!” Lars shouted again, gesticulating at one of their own barge’s smaller sails at the front of the craft. There was another series of confused cries over which rope to pull when and how and precisely what the Navigator wanted them to do. But one of the Tor citizens had been a sailor once. Although her natural habitat had been the tides and seas, she accommodated
easily to the currents of air that they now negotiated.

  The armless battle-barge of the Royal Guild swerved to the right and started to lift. Terak saw how Lars would seize and pull on one or other of the crystal-headed levers. He moved the barge first one way and then another with the large crystals that sat at the pommel-heads of each lever, flaring and glowing with orange, purple, green, or blue hues at each movement.

  A lot of their battle-barge could be controlled straight through the magic of the Navigator’s chair, the elf realized—but the individual movement of the sails would help the pilot’s efforts immensely. More importantly, the elf saw that if the sails weren’t used in the correct way, then they would impede the pilot’s commands by causing wind disturbances and resistances.

  Which was all to say that their battle-barge was flying badly. And there was nothing that he could do about it, not being given any training in any form of sailing—whether on water or through the skies.

  “Scout!” Terak moved from the prow, tugging his fingerless gloves tighter in his hands and securing their wrist straps as he flexed his fingers. The Elder Scout that he had come to recognize jumped down from the near rigging to the desk before him. Almost all of the bird-like Elder Beings had come with them on the battle-barge. Although they ignored the business of actually flying the boat—they readied themselves on the ropes and spars of the sails with their white-wood short spears.

  “They’re going to out-fly us,” Terak said, earning an avian cough of disgruntled agreement from the Elder Scout. It was clear that the battle-barge was outclassed and outgunned—but Terak could see that they had only one advantage that the Ixcht did not.

  And that is our very own contingent of bird-men. Terak nodded to himself. “We’re going to be asking a lot of you,” the elf said as the barge lurched to one side again under the clumsy hands of the inexperienced sailors.

  “We are ready,” the Elder Scout nodded as Terak detailed his plan. He waited for the Elder Scout’s approval—as the elf knew that it would be their people that would be most at risk—before running to the pilot’s chair and Lars to tell him, too.

  “You want to what!?” The Chief, Doctor, and Master of the Guild obviously thought the plan was ludicrous, not pausing as he seized one handle and then the other. “This damn boat will barely obey my orders—look!” Lars said in consternation. The small human seized one of the handles and pulled it back and forth, for nothing apparent to happen.

  “The gemstone isn’t activating!” Lars growled. “Sixty years of using this boat—and now she decides to start playing up!”

  The Navigator was right, Terak saw. The gemstone pommel of that lever only lit up with magical radiance at every second or third attempt—and when it did, it appeared a much weaker light than before.

  “We don’t have any cannon-shot. This is the only way,” Terak said. The sight of the ship’s unresponsive arcane magics only made the elf more certain that his plan was the only one they had.

  “You’ll get us all killed—” Lars growled as he worked. The Ixcht were moving fast and were swerving to either side of them. Lars attempted to get their own wobbling barge in front of the quarry below.

  “Life will get us killed in the end . . .” Terak muttered, remembering an old favorite maxim of the Chief External. Who is probably dead by now—along with Reticula and all the rest of them . . . The elf pushed the thought aside immediately. Don’t think about it. Accept the pain. Let the pain teach you.

  “Bah!” Lars was clear about his view of the elf’s plan. That did not stop him from struggling to get the boat to do just as Terak had asked, rising in the air still higher and higher.

  “Scout!?” Terak called, to see the Elder Being raise one long, thin arm in agreement and turn to take his position—

  Just as the first of the Ixchtish boats came in range and started firing. Sudden, ugly purple-and-yellow plumes of fire spat out toward them . . .

  “Brace!” Terak heard himself shout, again a borrowed term—this time it was one from the Chief Martial of the Enclave. The Emarii knew at once what it meant. They threw themselves to crouching positions by the high battled walls that skirted the battle-barge.

  Three plumes of acrid, foul-smelling flame lanced toward their boat, and Terak rolled near to the prow as heat washed over his head. The flames were somehow thick and heavy, as if they were made of gobbets of liquid and not air.

  “Sand!” Terak heard Kol shouting. Through the shimmering haze of heat and flames, he saw the old storyteller attempting to spill one of the barrels stored on the mid-deck. In a second, one of the Tor citizens had reached him to help, kicking the barrel over to send a wash of sand onto the sheet of flame that had taken hold on the mid-deck. With a hiss and a plume of acrid black smoke, the flame went out—but there was still more.

  One of the Ixchtish fire-cannons had burst against the underside of the prow. After risking a glance, Terak could see that the flames had fallen from the tarred black wood. One other—the same that Kol and the deckhands were fighting— had managed to hit them square on. The third had only managed to singe one of the fore-sails. The elf saw the flames clutching at the edge of the sail and starting to greedily spread. But there were also a trio of Elder Beings swinging on ropes toward it, cutting away at the burning edge of cloth with impossibly sharpened white-wood daggers.

  The flames on the deck were being contained with more spilled barrels of sand. Although Terak would have liked to wait to make sure that their boat wasn’t at risk of burning out under their feet—he also knew that he wouldn’t have another chance.

  “Lars! Now!” The elf shouted. The Navigator seized two of the red-gemmed handles and pumped them toward him.

  The barge reacted awkwardly as the magical message was sent through whatever currents that the Royal Guild used to the cannons below decks. One complete side of the barge suddenly blossomed with the pounding sounds of white-smoke shot—while only half of the prow-guns fired.

  It’ll have to do! Terak snarled as he was already rising from his huddle. “Scout! When you can!” he shouted. He heard a defiant squawk and saw the shapes of the strange Elder Beings flash toward the sides of the boat and the ends of the prow arms of their riggings.

  Terak was already rising to the edge of the battlement prow, looking over the clouds of billowing white. He had remembered when this very battle-barge had attacked him.

  The clouds obscured the sight of the nearest Ixchtish battle-barge completely. But by the elf’s reckoning, they had to be nearly beneath them.

  Then there was a movement in the smokes, revealing the edge of an iridescent fan-wing, passing just a few yards under their bulk—

  “Now, now, now!” Terak shouted, seizing on one of the bronze handles before flinging himself upwards. One sandaled foot caught the top of the metal-caparisoned wood there. He kicked himself out through empty air.

  It was a foolish, crazy, insane thing to do, the elf knew immediately. But he had no other choice—and their only way to defeat the expert aerial warriors was to use their own tactics against them. Terak had seen these strange people fight before. He had seen how they had attempted to overwhelm The Lady of the North and the Black Keep of the Enclave by flinging their bodies from their battle-barges to attack and kill without mercy.

  At least it might be a surprise. Terak tumbled through the air toward the moving sail, not feeling the cold of the wind, although the roar of it was filling his ears. The elf was suddenly, very painfully aware of the flaw in his plan as he realized that he might miss the sail and go crashing into the deck itself.

  But then, out of the choking clouds of white cannon-powder, the insect-wing sail of the Ixchtish barge was there. Terak kicked, throwing his hands forward, clutching at the daggers that they held.

  “Oof!” The twin daggers of the elvish assassin hit the multi-colored canvas. The shock of the impact reverberated through Terak’s body as if he had been shoulder-barged by Vorg the Unwanted. It appeared that hitting canvas from
a great height and at speed was similar to throwing oneself against a brick wall.

  But the daggers bit, and now the elf was tearing down through a section of green-blue fabric. He hit a stiffened black artery that separated this section from the next—an iridescent orange-and-yellow panel.

  “Ach—” His daggers tore through that strange artery, to cut easily through the next panel of cloth before it reached the black artery below it. This time, he came to a halt that made him bounce and slap against the uninjured cloth below.

  For a moment, the elf could do nothing but breathe as he clutched to the face of the fabric with all of his might, waiting for his limbs to work again.

  And then he heard the chitters, screeches, and shouts as the Elder Beings broke into battle underneath him. A large part of their contingent had copied Terak, jumping from the barge to catch or slide down the sails of the Ixchtish ship, flaring their wings before the talons of their feet hit the deck.

  Terak spared a look to see that the deck below him wasn’t that far—ten feet or so perhaps. He jack-knifed his body with all the cat-like grace and skill of his people, somersaulting through the air to land in a crouch on the Ixchtish deck in the middle of the battle.

  “Tzzrk!” There was a chitter from directly in front of him as the nearest Ixcht charged toward him. The insect men were the strangest of the races of the Midhara. Many believed that they were in fact refugees from the Ungol realm, left here after one of the previous openings of the Blood Gate.

  The insect men had segmented limbs like that of a praying mantis, and stood tall—easily seven feet—but had a thin and spindled stature. Their bodies were covered with scale-like plates of iridescent green, which Terak couldn’t be sure was natural or some form of armor. But the strangest thing was the insect head, with its two small eye stalks that waved and flailed in the air, and the four-set of mandibles that clacked and snapped.