Aethersmith (Book 2) (67 page)

Juliana brought the ship low, hitting the rune that dropped
the left-nose hatch. The ship lurched as it bumped down against the flagstones
of the marketplace. She saw a stripe-cat enter the marketplace, a rider with
someone seated behind her. Behind them, trailing a bit, were a number of
infantry.

“GET IN, QUICKLY!” Juliana’s voice boomed outside the ship.
The time for even the barest pretense of stealth was now passed. Faolen and his
two companions rushed for the ship.

“Stop them!” the passenger on the stripe-cat called out in
Megrenn as he slipped from the beast’s back, and quickly cast a spell.

“
Eket jimagu denpek wanapi,”
the Megrenn sorcerer
chanted hurriedly. Bolts of flame shot from his outstretched fingers. He had
the control to avoid aiming any at Anzik, but the two other fugitives were
clearly his targets.

Aelon turned to look over his shoulder as the spell was
cast. Hopping to the side, he threw his body between himself and Faolen, taking
the sorcerer’s share of the flaming missiles. The searing bolts of fire scorched
his clothing, setting him aflame. His dragon-like skin felt none of it, though.
He continued onward to the ship.

“Why is Uncle Narsicann shooting flame bolts at us?” Anzik
asked, looking over his shoulder while Faolen pulled him by the arm aboard the
Daggerstrike
.
Despite the distraction, Anzik kept his feet moving in the proper direction.

Seeing that her charges had made it aboard before the
Megrenn sorcerer could manage another spell, Juliana touched the rune to raise
the hatch, and got the
Daggerstrike
moving upward, hoping to get a bit
of air between them and the ground while her new passengers settled themselves
in, and found something to hold onto. That reminded her …

“Grab hold of something,” Captain Juliana said, voice
projecting down into the ship’s interior. “We are about to—”

“Captain, look out!” one of the spotters cried out, terror
in his voice.

They were well up off the ground, the belly of the ship
level with the shorter buildings already. Incredibly, though, the stripe-cat
had made the leap, claws hooking arrow slits and the ship’s railing. The rider
was pressed tight in against the scruff of the beast’s neck as it scrambled
onto the deck. It took a swipe at the left-arse spotter, snapping his safety
harness, and sending him tumbling overboard, likely dead before the straps
broke.

Juliana swore loudly when she realized that the beast was
heading straight for her. She fought back her first instinct, which was to draw
forth her daggers, and fight the thing off. Instead she looked to the ship’s
wheel. The actions were not instinctive yet; she had to search the runes,
frantic, as the stripe-cat was a bound away from reaching her.

The beast’s claws slammed into Juliana at the same moment
she found the rune to put the ship into a right-over-left roll. The ship
lurched as her shielding spell took the impact, forcing her awkwardly against
the ship’s wheel. The deck tilted beneath her feet. She felt the strap attached
at her right hip pull taut against the support pillar that was there just to keep
her in place in such orientations of the ship.

The one thing she had not accounted for was the stripe-cat’s
claws. Her shielding spell had kept her skin from being shredded by the
stripe-cat’s claws, but the harness was just sturdy leather. As the huge cat
panicked and scrambled for purchase on the tilting ship, it caught the straps
that tethered Captain Juliana to her ship. Stripe-cat, rider, and ship’s
captain all plummeted to the ground.

Juliana knew well enough what to do in a fall. Trusting to
her shielding spell, she pushed the stripe-cat away—or rather pushed against it,
and thrust herself away, given the size difference. She hit the ground lightly,
cushioned by magics she knew well enough to perform while drunk if she needed
to. Unlike their domesticated relatives, stripe-cats did not always land on
their feet. If not dead, the beast was at least critically injured. The rider
did not appear to have survived the fall.

The lack of a stripe-cat to fight was scant comfort.
Overhead, the
Daggerstrike
lay on its side, no longer spinning but
continuing to drift upward, well out of reach of any spell she knew. In the
marketplace there was a Megrenn sorcerer, a platoon of infantry, and half the
city likely heading her way. There was only one thing she could think to do.

* * * * * * * *

A hand reached across the table, and grabbed Brannis by the
wrist, shaking him from a daydream. It was a confusing day, and Brannis had
been losing track of himself as he shifted his consciousness to Veydrus and
back. He snapped to alertness, looking to the owner of the grabbing hand,
seeing a desperate look in Soria’s eyes when his gaze met them.

“Send Kyrus. I need help,” Soria said. There was no brooking
an argument. “Now.”

Brannis nodded, not even responding verbally before he
closed his eyes.

* * * * * * * *

“Get out,” Kyrus said to Varnus. “I have to use a
transference spell. You do not want to be nearby.”

“Brannis, are you sure about that. I mean, you said that
last—”

“GO!” Kyrus shouted. He broke the wards that sealed his bedchamber,
scavenging their wreckage for any salvageable aether, and drawing yet more from
whatever was available within the palace.

Varnus realized they were past the point of arguing the
matter. He paused only long enough for one final message before rushing off
down the hall to find shelter: “Good luck. Bring her back safe.”

“Doxlo intuvae menep gahalixviu junumar tequalix ferendak
uzganmanni dekdardon vesvata eho,”
Kyrus chanted, still having the spell
well committed to memory. He had no time for self-doubt, no time to wonder how
he was going to find Juliana, presumably somewhere in Zorren. He had to go, and
there was no time to wait.

A sphere of aether obscured Kyrus, and his consciousness was
catapulted into the vast nighttime of the deep aether once more.

Chapter 37 - Once More into the Aether

“Well now, look what we have,” the Megrenn sorcerer
remarked. “A Kadrin sorceress who has lost her ship. Surrender, and you will be
treated well.”

Juliana looked at the man she had heard the Megrenn boy call
“Uncle Narsicann,” who had flung bolts of fire aimed not a pace from the boy.
There was something about his demeanor, mocking, flippant … cold. She knew that
his words were meaningless. Rashan’s Bargain was an ironic tool in the hands of
a Megrenn, but that was her guess—easier to take her by guile than by force.

The Megrenn ground forces were beginning to arrive in
numbers. Juliana glanced down one street, then another. The marketplace was a
crossroads of sorts, but wherever she looked, infantry were either already
entering the market square or could be seen approaching. Horns sounded, calling
for even more forces to congregate on the area.

“There is nowhere to run. It would be a shame to have to
kill you, but that is the alternative you face,” Narsicann called out to her,
drawing Juliana’s gaze back to him. She noted that he was making no move to
approach her. Cautious. Cowardly? It seemed to matter little, since Juliana was
no match for an army, even if she might take her odds against just the
sorcerer. She looked up at the
Daggerstrike
, still continuing a lazy
drifting upward, lying on its side like a wounded animal.

A few paces from Juliana, an actual wounded animal
whimpered. The huge stripe-cat was trying to pull itself along the ground
toward her, dragging both the limp body of its rider as well as its
hindquarters. She glanced all around, edging away from the beast as she
considered her options.

Her breathing quickened with a rising panic. She was not
liking any of them.

* * * * * * * *

The world of light vanished once more, as it had on Kyrus’s
journey from Tellurak. He knew that his perception of time was altered, that he
had the ability to consider his course. Nevertheless, he felt a pressing need
to make all haste. He drifted up and out of the vicinity of the palace and the
Tower of Contemplation. There were too many wards about, too much aether for
him to see through. He felt nothing as he passed through barriers that would
have stopped most physical and magical assaults.

He remembered his mistakes on Denku Appa. He had relied on
the physical placement of stones to mark his course. Whether through his own
error or—as he rather suspected—the intervention of Tippu and Kahli, that
method had failed him. Kyrus gave brief consideration to the advice he had just
given Juliana a short time ago: follow the Cloud Wall to the sea, and turn left
along the coast. That was all well and good for the world of light, but
mountains were not known for having Sources, nor did they have any noticeable
effect on aether. The sea would be rife with aether along the coasts where sea
creatures abounded. That made a better landmark—seamark?—but it seemed like
there must be a better method, but he had little time for introspection. He
needed to go.

Kyrus stretched his vision out, roughly the direction he
believed Zorren to be. He tried to quiet his mind, remembering the feeling of
being around Juliana. There was a sense of motionless vertigo; the universe
shifted around him. There was no physical sensation to accompany the purely mental
motion, but his mind insisted on trying to insert one on his behalf.

Trees, grass, birds … Sources in numbers his eyes could not
count as they whisked by him. The eddies in the aether seemed like the currents
of a river, but the aethership
Kyrus
plowed through, tacking against the
wind, defying the forces of nature that sought to impede him.

Fields of fresh-planted crops, vast grids of nascent Sources
as germinating seeds began their lives as vegetables … schools of fish, packed
tightly along a narrow ribbon of river … people, pockets here and there:
villages … more fish, vastly more as the sea showed itself … people again, a
coastal city, far more populous than the villages … one person … one Source …
Juliana.

He knew her Source by its look, its
feel
. With
thousands of human Sources all about, hers stood out, unique as her face and
easier to pick from among those teeming multitudes of weakling Sources. He felt
drawn to it, associated it with
her
, not just the abstract look of a
blue-white humanoid form against the backdrop of the lighter aetherial winds.
It evoked feelings of being near her, of her smell and her feel, the warmth of
her skin against his own. It dredged up old, shared memories of Brannis’s as
well, of her as an adolescent girl, tugging Brannis about like a fish on a
hook. Kyrus smiled in his mind, not knowing whether his body mimicked the
thought, way back in Kadris. It was time to arrive in Zorren.

Kyrus fought his first instinct, which would have had him
protect her against all harm by exchanging places with her, letting the spell
deposit her safely in Kadris. Kyrus tried to shake his head, mentally shaking
the universe instead—his view of everything swung wildly, disorienting him. His
view of Juliana’s Source gave him something to keep his bearings by. He
remembered Varnus’s admonishment; he could keep neither Juliana nor Soria
locked away safely somewhere if he ever hoped to understand her … both of her.

The world snapped back into the light. Kyrus found himself a
few paces short of a running Juliana. He had seen the Sources all about before
ending his spell but, Zorren being a city of tens of thousands, thought little
of them. He realized that Juliana’s predicament was every bit as dire as she
had let on.

Juliana stumbled, startled by the massive disruption in the
aether that marked Kyrus’s arrival. What must have been a hundred or more foot
soldiers skidded to a halt, not daring approach the apparition who had just
appeared before them.

“Brannis!” Juliana shouted. “Merciful One, thank you!” she
called out to the sky.

A hail of arrows sought Kyrus as the Megrenn soldiers
gathered wits enough to decide to attack first, and figure out what had
befallen later. Juliana had been a target for capture, but the newcomer
apparently bore no such restrictive orders. The tiny, fletched insects were
nothing to Kyrus. The paranoid shielding spell he had been keeping while going
about his daily routine in Kadris turned them aside without any noticeable
effort. Dragons do not bother to swat mosquitoes.

“Are you all right?” Kyrus asked, walking over to her,
gathering her in his arms. She slumped against him, drawing a shuddering
breath.

“Now I am. If you hadn’t come, I don’t know how long I would
have lasted against them,” she admitted. “This is why I stay away from all-out
wars.” She punched him playfully in the chest in remonstration.

“What happened to the
Daggerstrike
?” Kyrus asked, now
that he was sure Juliana was physically unharmed.

“Up there still,” Juliana said. “Crazed stripe-cat pulled me
free of the ship.”

She raised up the broken leather strap from the harness that
still dangled from her midsection. Kyrus then followed her gaze upward. The
Daggerstrike
continued to float away, the way chimney smoke wafts from the rooftops of
cities. Kyrus frowned up at it. Arrows continued to brush against his shield,
which enveloped Juliana as she nestled against him, her feeling of safety more
than romantic illusion.

Kyrus reached a hand out in the direction of the airship.
Slowly, with the deliberate care of the craftsmen who make ships in bottles, he
righted the
Daggerstrike
. Once he judged it to be level, he started it
on a gradual descent down toward the marketplace once more.

“Brannis.” Juliana got his attention, pointing to the
stripe-cat, still trying valiantly to chase down its prey: a certain Kadrin
sorceress.

Kyrus blinked, distracted from his telekinesis, to see the
beast approaching them. It was obviously mortally wounded and in pain. Its
mewling whimpers made it seem especially feline and piteous.

A blast of aether against his shields diverted Kyrus’s
attention in a third, possibly fourth different direction, annoying him. He
turned to see the Megrenn sorcerer who had just attacked him.
I am too tired
to deal with all this
. Kyrus sighed mentally. He fixed the sorcerer with
his best withering glare, and unleashed a jet of hurled fire.

The Megrenn sorcerer flinched, a reaction to the shock wave
in the aether that accompanied the blast. The stripe-cat’s misery was ended.
There was a scattering of shattered bones and melted scraps of ruined armor
from both the creature and its rider, nothing else. There was a furrow of
molten flagstones where Kyrus’s attack had cut into the marketplace ground.

His glare still fixed on the sorcerer, Kyrus cocked his head
to the side, and raised his eyebrows. The Megrenn sorcerer froze in place, eyes
wide in awe and fear.

Kthoom.

A cannon’s report shattered the air. A hollow bell sound
rang out as the shot slammed against the hull of the
Daggerstrike
. Some
enterprising Megrenn artillerist was apparently an excellent shot. Kyrus saw a
dent in the armor plating of the airship.

Kthoom.

A second shot never reached its target.

There was a rumbling noise of displaced earth and stone as a
massive, translucent barrier grew, encircling Kyrus, Juliana, and the spot
where the
Daggerstrike
was being steered to set down. The barrier rose
up into the sky, shielding the airship from further target practice. As it
formed, it shoved all in its path out of the way, cutting a pace or more into
the ground, and carving its way through stone buildings, pieces of which
crumbled into the streets where insufficient structure was left to support
them. It was the same spell Kyrus had once used to hold back a Katamic Sea
storm. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

“Stop that,” Kyrus ordered. He did not raise his voice. He
had not, he realized, used his voice at all in erecting the barrier.

“Cease fire!” Narsicann ordered. The sorcerer backed away
from Kyrus and the cylindrical wall that glowed with a soft yellow light. The
soldiers followed his lead, withdrawing to positions that offered cover in case
Kyrus tried some sort of attack. A handful who had been trapped on the inside
cowered together near the wall, as far from Kyrus as they could get.

“We are leaving,” Kyrus informed anyone within earshot,
shouting as loudly as he could. Juliana covered her ears. “Do not give me any
reason to change my mind and remain!” The
Daggerstrike
settled a
handspan from the ground. Kyrus lifted Juliana gently up onto the deck. “Open
the hatch, if you would not mind,” he called up to her.

Kyrus stepped into the
Daggerstrike
, looking about at
the crew he had hastily assigned to the ship. He also saw the three escapees
from Zorren that Juliana had been sent to rescue. Faolen’s Source was a tattered
mess, fraying and spilling aether irregularly, but he seemed physically sound
enough. Aelon was bare chested, with his head shaven; Kyrus was sure there was
a story there somewhere that would bear hearing at a later time. The most
interesting, though, was a young boy who bore a notable resemblance to Denrik
Zayne—and Jinzan Fehr, he supposed.

“Are you Tallax from the storybooks?” Anzik Fehr asked.
Seeing Kyrus’s puzzled look, he clarified: “Tallax has a really, really bright
Source and so do you. Are you him?”

“No.” Kyrus shook his head. “Those are just old stories
about a sorcerer who died a long time ago.”

“I like your airship, whoever you are. Faolen just told me
that it was you who made it. Where are we going?”

“Home.”

The
Daggerstrike
, with Captain Juliana once more at
the helm, headed off for Kadris.

* * * * * * * *

A yellowish glow lit the airship as it floated up from the
middle of Zorren. Jinzan watched from the open balcony door of his study as it
turned slowly in the air, bow to the southeast as it shot off, and vanished
into the distant darkness. He stared after it for a time, wondering whether the
clenched fist gripping his heart was just his imagination or some subtle magic
at work upon him. He felt trapped, helpless to make a move; he knew he ought
to, but no action proceeded from that knowledge.

“What are you doing out here? It is too cold to be in just
your nightclothes,” Nakah chided him.

His wife sidled up next to him, huddling against him for
warmth as she wore only a nightgown herself. Jinzan put an arm around her by
habit and reflex, continuing to stare out at the magical glow over his city. In
his other hand, he clutched the Staff of Gehlen, his boon and curse. Word had
reached Zorren of vicious attacks by Rashan Solaran against Megrenn forces.
Now, if he did not miss his guess, Kyrus Hinterdale had just used a
transference spell, followed by several other magics that had wrenched and torn
at the aether around the city, awakening him from a deep slumber.

He should have been out there with the Staff of Gehlen, the
only with who could stand in confrontation against either Kyrus or the demon.
He was the only hope against either of them, and he was Megrenn’s only hope of
victory. Yet he stood watching, unsure of what he could do in the face of the
power he saw, content to let the question rest unanswered for one night longer.

“Do you see that light out there?” Jinzan asked, nodding in
the direction of the glow. The question was rhetorical of course, since it
outshone the moonlight. “One of our enemies has come and gone tonight. I am
spared having to face him for now.”

“Jinzan Fehr came to our bed tonight. Councilor Jinzan awoke
and left us. Zaischelle is worried, but I made her stay inside and warm. Come
back, but leave Councilor Jinzan watching out here if you must. Our husband
needs his rest.”