City in the Sky (41 page)

The last thing Erik remembered was the dark silhouette of the man who'd brought him to Newport, framed against a backdrop of brilliant light.

Kolanis led the handful of greens around him in fleeing the battle. Once that fleet arrived, there was no way any of the Draconans could survive. They had to get out of Newport. If they didn't, they were going to die.

He felt guilty about it, both his honor and his sense of responsibility said he had to go back and fight, had to at least try and find and extract his
own
men. His mind, however, knew that if they went back, they would die.

When the screams of another group of dragons sounded above them, Kolanis was stunned. He looked up, and saw ten black dragons descending on his handful of greens. The man on the lead dragon gestured to the ground.

For a moment, Kolanis considered running, but he knew it was foolish. The crys-bows mounted on the blacks would annihilate his small group before they could escape. Unwilling to die just yet, he led his men to the ground and dismounted on the cobbled street of the Aeradi's floating island.

To his surprise, all of the blacks followed them down, leaving no one to prevent them leaving, and the leader dismounted. As the Skyborne approached him, Kolanis realized with a shock that it was General Adaelis.

“Sky-Major,” Adaelis said quietly, “you are very lucky.”

“Sir,” Kolanis said flatly, straightening to attention.

The Draconan general shook his head. “I'm not here to censure you, Major,” he told Kolanis. “One of the scouts managed to warn the command group. We can't fight that fleet.”

“What do we do now?” Kolanis asked. If there was any solution, any way that they could retrieve anything from this situation, he trusted Adaelis to know it. The general
had
to know it.

“The blacks and browns aren't fast enough to escape,” Adaelis said bluntly. “The greens are. The scouts and the greens of the command group are waiting at the southwestern edge of the city. You're the only officer not tied up in that accursed battle who rides a green.”

“Your orders, sir?” the Major asked, unwilling to accept what he knew had to be coming.

“I've already issued orders to the Claws to surrender once the Fleet begins landing Marines,” Adaelis told him. “By that point, it will all be over. I'm going to take the blacks and browns of the command group into that melee and try to organize things. I'm going to send the greens back to you, and take the blacks and browns against the Grand Fleet.”

“To me, sir?”

“Yes, to you,” Adaelis confirmed. “I want you to rendezvous with the command group greens and lead them and your own survivors back to the base on the Hellitian shore. I want you to wait there for two days, to collect any others who manage to make it out of this
firefuck
, and then head back to Black Mountain.”

“We can't abandon you, sir!” Kolanis objected. He may have been prepared to run before, but that didn't mean he was ready to leave Adaelis behind.

“Someone has to tell the greens to run, and their riders will only obey me,” Adaelis told him gently. “I'll buy you as much time as I can, Edrin,” he continued, surprising Kolanis by using his first name, “but I have to go. Besides,” he said, almost bitterly, “your greens can't carry passengers. Just you.”

Kolanis braced to full attention and saluted. “I'll do my best, sir.”

“You'll succeed,” the General told him. “I know you will.”

With that, Adaelis turned away from Kolanis, turning back to his dragon. The major watched his back for a moment, and then spoke again.

“General Adaelis, sir!” he snapped off, and the general turned back to look at him. “It's been an honor,” he told the man who'd led them all to this defeat.

“Indeed it has, Major,” the General replied sadly. “Indeed it has.”

Erik came to on the foredeck of the
Tarverro
. Neither the whine of overcharging crystals nor the crackle of burning fires was audible, suggesting they were okay. Everything he could see was a blur, but finally one blur resolved itself into Dekker
sept
Corens.

“Harmon?” he asked the other Aeraid as he struggled to a sitting position.

Dekker shook his head, offering his hand to help Erik to his feet. “He did break the crystals,” he told Erik, an offering of what the man had to know was scant help. “The power surge was sufficient to lift us over the city, and it stopped the overload.”

Erik looked behind the ship, and saw the edge of the floating island, only a few hundred yards away.

“How long was I out?” he asked.

“Only a couple of minutes,” Dekker replied. “There's more, Erik,” he said after a moment.

“What?” Erik asked, almost entirely unsurprised at the second shoe dropping.

“The aft crystal room is gone, entirely, and the fore room was damaged in the fight, though not so badly,” the Wind Guard officer told him.

“We don't have enough lift?” Erik asked, knowing the answer.

“We don't have enough lift,” Dekker confirmed. “Nor enough control to try and land. We're going down, gaining speed as we do. We'll hit with enough force to shatter the hull and kill us all.”

Erik's lips twitched at the bitter irony. They'd turned the tide of the battle, saved everyone, from Arien to Elysia.
Then
they'd managed to prevent the ship blowing up over the city. Having done all that, they were
still
all going to die, and he'd woken up just in time to do so while awake.

Kolanis turned Lalen back as they reached the edge of the city, watching the battle behind them. The Fleet hadn't reached the Draconan host yet, but the ships that were already there were doing enough. The vast majority of the dragons were pinned, with no hope of escape.

Somewhere in that maelstrom of ships and dragons was the Green of Third, the battalion he'd led here. Some of them might even make it out alive, he didn't know. There was no way he could know.

Adaelis was in there too, sacrificing his life to buy as much time for those who could escape to do so. His life for his men's lives, the ancient code of the Draconan leader. A code that said Kolanis should be back among that melee, spending himself to bring his people home.

He couldn't do that. He'd been charged with a greater duty, to save as many lives as he could and to bear warning to his people. Now the passion of the moment had failed, every bone in his body strained to return to the battle, to die with his people if he couldn't save them.

His mind knew that die is all he would do, and his death would gain nothing. Only his
life
would allow him to achieve anything. His life, for his men's. Today, he'd failed his men. He would spend the rest of his life repaying that debt.

They had done damage – damage that Newport would be years in the repairing. Thousands of Regulars had died and dozens of ships had been destroyed. The outer forts alone would be a decade or more in the reconstruction. The rebuilding would weaken Newport, which would be essential now.

The war was coming, and for the sake of the men under his command who'd died here today, Sky-Major Edrin Kolanis bond Lalen would be part of it. There were all the reasons that had driven a man into the Skyborne, all the reasons he understood and agreed with for this war, and now there was one more. If it were within his power, none of those men and dragons would have died in vain.

His oath sworn, Kolanis turned his gaze back to the dragons and riders around him, the Bonds he
could
save from the insatiable cauldron of war.

“Let's go.”

The oncoming water held a terrible fascination for Erik. Partially, it was the knowledge that it was going to kill him in only a few moments, but mainly, it was the life-long fascination of the half-human, half-Aeradi boy raised by the sea.

Love of the sea and the sky had brought him to Newport, to his grandmother and his father's people. His own sense of duty had done the rest, and ended here, aboard this battered ship. He knew that most of the fires were out, but they hadn't even bothered on the lower decks. They'd be swallowed by the ocean soon enough.

Less than twenty Aeradi, including himself and Dekker, still stood on the deck of the
Tarverro
. The rest had died in the nightmare that had led to this moment. The nightmare was over, now, for the crew of the
Tarverro
.

Somehow, knowing that death was inevitable made the moment more peaceful than it could ever have been otherwise. The breeze was cool on Erik's face, and the ocean he watched was calm. Nothing could change anything now, and he accepted his fate with an odd calm.

Then the war-scream of a Wing Lancer's roc cut through the air and shattered his reverie.

Erik rose to his feet, gazing around him in wonder. Over twenty rocs had descended out of the sky onto the yacht, and they hovered around her, their great wings beating. The Aeraid Erik guessed to be their leader waved at Erik with an odd spear, then gestured to his wing-lancers with it.

Each roc and its rider swept over the ship in sequence, hanging down ropes from the bird's talons. Several birds hovered over the central deck, where the
Tarverro
's impromptu crew had been taking care of the wounded, as soldiers tied their wounded comrades into the rope harnesses hanging down.

No orders were necessary; if they didn't go, they would die. Each roc acquired its passengers in turn, until finally the leader swept in to pick up Erik. The rope slipped by Erik quite quickly, but he managed to grab it and pull himself up into the crude harness.

“Hold on!” the wing-lancer yelled down, and Erik almost laughed. Hysteria, he suspected, but he was going to hold on no matter what.

He was one of the last lifted off, and just in time. The 'Lancers had only just pulled the last of the yacht's crew clear when she finally hit the waves. She entered at an angle, the rear of the ship hitting first with a tremendous CRACK.

A second later, the latter third of the vessel was torn off by the force of the waves, and sank in moments. Erik found himself weeping as he watched it go under, knowing that it bore the body of Harmon
hept
Ikeras to the old soldier's final resting place under the sea.

The rest of the ship almost looked like it was going to lift away. It rose into the air, the lift of the one crystal room almost enough with only half of a ship. Too many lift crystals and foci points had been lost, however, and she merely described a long arc from where the aft half went under to where the rest hit.

She hit with more force this time, and the last remnants of the yacht
Tarverro
shattered into splinters and debris, bearing the bodies of those who died aboard her in her first – and final – battle to the watery depths.

After a short eternity of hanging on only by his arms, the 'Lancers delivered Erik and the rest of the late
Tarverro
's impromptu crew to the decks of a large battleship flying the winged-ship flag of Newport.

On closer inspection as they approached, Erik realized that the ship's flag also bore the numeral two, with a small star above it, marking her as the flagship of Newport Sky Fleet's Second Squadron.

The rider of the roc who'd borne Erik to the ship swung down from his bird to join Erik on the sky ship's deck. Wordlessly, he offered Erik his hand. Erik took, and the man shook it firmly.

“Wing-Master Delts
hept
Kelnar,” he introduced himself. “I cannot begin to say how much we owe you.”

“You know what happened?” Erik asked.

“We had Mages scrying all the way in,” an older, deeper voice said from behind Erik. The
septon
Tarverro turned to find Admiral Bor
septon
Alraeis, commander of the Second Squadron of Newport Sky Fleet, standing behind him.

“We saw it all,” the Admiral continued. “You managed to do our job for us, and make our panicked rush entirely unnecessary.”

“I wouldn't say
entirely
unnecessary,” Erik demurred.

“When I heard the reports of the attack on you, Lord Tarverro, I
knew
that the assassins weren't in Newport for you,” Alraeis told him, ignoring Erik's comment. “Given the man in question, you probably
were
a target, but not the sole target. I
knew
there was a real attack coming.”

“And he managed to convince the rest of the Realm of the Sky to have their ships ready to fly at moment's notice,” Kelnar said quietly. “And had Mages quietly scrying the city, so the instant the first explosions occurred, we knew. We were probably on our way before you even left your house.”