Council of Blades (23 page)

"The principle is based on a flying sycamore seed." The artist began feeding excess rope off to one side.

"The rope is wound about the drive shaft; a weight is dropped from a height, pulling on a rope, and the rope whips free, accel-erating the rotor blades to high speed. Lift is produced; we stand on the lower ring and grip the upper while the shaft turns between us, and the whole assembly will fly up into the sky!"

"Brilliant!" Miliana was utterly impressed. "So we fly over the school walls?"

"And we'll then join Luccio in an escape-out through the city's river gate-to freedom."

Miliana watched Tekoriikii threading the pulley ropes and checking the fastenings one by one.

"So how do we drop a weight?"

"Aha! There we must trust to science once again!" Lorenzo rubbed his hands together with glee. "A feather fall spell is used to slow the descent of a falling body through the air. How does it achieve this? By reducing the specific mass of the target of the spell."

Miliana blinked. Lorenzo lectured on:

"Well, don't you see? A pound of feathers falls slower than a pound of iron, yes?"

"Um…" The girl felt a fallacy somewhere in the offing. "Well, yes, I suppose…"

"Right! So lighter objects must fall slower than heavier ones. The feather fall spell make objects lighter in order to slow their fall." Lorenzo made a proud gesture at Tekoriikii, who sat puffed like a canary beside the mag-nificent new flying machine. "We have with us the heavi-est anvil in the kingdom-the perfect counterweight. All you do is throw the spell; Tekoriikii carries the weightless anvil up aloft across the walls and ties it tight to the rope. When the spell wears off, the anvil falls… and we have our motive thrust!"

The girl fixed Lorenzo with a heavy-lidded stare.

"You brought what with you?"

"An anvil! A gigantic anvil!" Lorenzo stuck his thumbs beneath his arms "A great big anvil we left just outside the gates…"

Miliana wearily hid her face inside her hands. Lorenzo bit his lip, and sensed that he had made a slight faux pas.

"Look… um… We invent a new type of acid that can tunnel through the school's wall-"

The girl hit him with her hat; it seemed the only thing to do.

At this juncture, the forces of the headmistress inevitably came racing back into the fray. Massed squads of teachers armed with rocks, meat cleavers, and school benches held like battering rams charged into the court-yard, whipping themselves into a lather of righteous rage.

A hundred enemies surged into the courtyard. Miliana and Lorenzo somehow shot up the marble punishment column, where they perched aloft like monkeys shaking fists at a storm. The tutors ignored the flying machine and instead tried climbing up each other's backs to reach their prey. Miliana stuck the point of her hat into one woman's eye and cursed angrily at Lorenzo's rear.

"Use your lightning sword! Knock them all out!"

"I only have one charge left!" Lorenzo brandished his rapier, parrying weapons left, right, and center.

The whole column shuddered as battering rams struck against the base. "They'd all have to be wet-unless we can somehow convince them to all join hands?"

The column shook, and Miliana ended up perched upon Lorenzo's back like an ungainly crab.

"What do you mean you came here with only one power charge?"

"It isn't as simple as it looks!" Lorenzo unsuccessfully tried to remove Miliana's bare foot from his eye.

"You have to attach copper cables to the two canine teeth of a sleeping blue dragon! Either that, or fly a kite up into a thunderstorm."

"I'll fly you up into a storm in a minute!" Miliana bal-anced on Lorenzo's back, desperately trying to find useful spells inside her hat. "Some damned rescue this turned out to be!"

Intrigued by all the action below, Tekoriikii fluttered down and perched on a gargoyle just above the yard. Miliana punched a teetering pyramid of singing tutors, watched the amateur athletes fall, then fixed upon Tekoriikii with panic in her eyes.

"Tekoriikii! Scream! You know-scream, like you did the other night!"

The bird made a "Krrrrrr" of curiosity and fixed Miliana with one golden eye. The girl dodged a passing stone and opened her arms out to the bird.

"That battle scream, you dodo! The one that knocked out all those men! Come on-get angry or something!"

The bird had no real inclination to hurt anyone. To his eyes, Miliana and Lorenzo seemed to be engaged in some sort of dance rather than a fight; each of his friends took it in turns to tread upon each other while gangs of snarling teachers shook the column back and forth. The bird ruffled out his feathers and creased his brows into a puzzled frown.

"A-all right, just sing a song, then! You know… like you do when you feel happy?" Miliana struck upon a sud-den inspiration. "Your tail! How does it feel to have your lovely tail back?"

Tekoriikii drew a breath of excitement. He spread out his streaming tail feathers like a courtier's fan and shim-mered them back and forth in glee. Filling his chest, the bird opened up his beak and caroled out a scintillating song of pride.

Lorenzo and Miliana ducked and blocked their ears; the teachers lacked the benefit of their victims' hard-won experience. With the shock front of a god-flung tidal wave, Tekoriikii's song swept clean across the open yard.

Tekoriikii's high notes loosened eyeballs in their skulls and cracked the marble facing all along the courtyard walls. The luckiest of the teaching staff simply fell from their half-built human pyramids and dropped uncon-scious to the ground. Those with greater stamina, but less native luck, managed to hear the second chorus before fainting clean away.

Uncorking his fingers from his ears, Lorenzo gazed about a scene taken from a hideous battlefield. A hun-dred women lay strewn in heaps about the cobblestones; some heaps stirring weakly as a semiconscious victim tried to knock her head against a wall. Tekoriikii settled into a magnificent sulk and turned himself away from his ungrateful audience.

Lying behind her troops was the headmistress-sever-al hundredweight of iron-hard flesh. Lorenzo leapt down from the column and snatched up the rope which pow-ered his flying machine.

"Excellent! We'll use her as a counterweight! Tekoriikii-come over here and help." The inventor and the firebird began trussing a rope beneath the gigantic woman's arms. "She'll hit the city dung pit; she'll be all right…"

Lorenzo pulled the last knot tight, laughing as he heard the sound of soldiers hammering at the bolted gates.

"Right! Now all we need is that feather fall spell-Miliana?"

He looked about, only to find the princess crawling about the courtyard on all fours; an empty pair of wire frames were clamped above her nose.

"My spectacles! He broke my curse-damned specta-cles!" Miliana groped her hands in front of her, as blind as a mole. "That's the second pair he's done that to so far!"

The school doors shuddered as unseen soldiers tried to force their way in. Lorenzo heard the roar of male voices, and orders calling for battering rams and heavy cross-bows.

"Miliana-the feather fall!"

"I can't read!" The girl snarled in ill temper, waving a hand across her eyes. "I'm blind as a bat without my spec-tacles!"

"But you can't read the language the spells are written in anyway!"

"I still need to visualize the symbols in my mind!" Miliana bumped herself into a wall. "Maybe someone has a telescope someplace?"

Outside the school, fireballs and lightning bolts crashed against the gates; it would only be a matter of moments before the doors came crashing down. Lorenzo ripped off Miliana's hat and began flipping frantically through the spell sheets one by one.

"How does it start? Can you remember what the page looks like?"

"There was a sort of curly thing… it looked like a pot." Miliana faced Lorenzo with a nearsighted scowl.

"I don't know! I've never really cast the thing before. I thought it was a spell for magic missiles…"

A pot-a pot-shaped symbol. Lorenzo frantically sorted tiny scrolls, each scribbled in Miliana's shocking hand-writing.

"Aha!" He found something that looked like an invert-ed cup. "Here's a pot, but it's upside down."

"That's it!" Miliana clamped her pointy hat upon her brow. "That's the one!"

"You never said it was upside down. How was I sup-posed to find it if it was upside down?"' "It doesn't matter!" Miliana tried to cuff Lorenzo on the ear, and missed him by a mile. "Now just try to retrace the symbols on something big-really, really big… so I can see!"

A fireball lit the courtyard with a bang; the gates sagged, hinges turning red-hot from the blast of magic flame. Lorenzo tried to choke down the panic, looked across the courtyard, and felt a new idea strike home to his mind.

"Wait-just wait. I'll only be a minute."

Capable of seeing nothing but the vaguest blurs, Miliana moved cautiously to her feet. If she strained her-self, she could just make out the curtain walls; Tekoriikii was either the vague orange wobbly thing to her left, or else the warm surface she was currently standing on. The princess wandered slowly forward as the gates cracked clean in two, then suddenly felt herself grabbed by the arm.

"There! Will that do?"

Lorenzo seemed triumphant; the girl adjusted her empty frames out of habit, and squinted closer at the courtyard floor.

The shapes of spell symbols stood out in bold gray lines. Miliana murmured words under her breath, sud-denly remembered the gestures to the spell, and felt her-self light into a smile.

"That's it! I've got it!" She reached out with groping hands as she settled the spell formula in her mind's eye. "Where's the headmistress?"

Miliana was led to the great fallen whale; the Princess waved her hands, spoke a loud, triumphant syllable, and cast one of Tekoriikii's down feathers to the winds. Lorenzo saw the headmistress's body flicker with purple energies, and signaled Tekoriikii to take off into the air.

The bird latched onto the ungainly burden and effort-lessly carried her aloft. The drive-rope trailed neatly behind, the slack slowly disappeared, and Lorenzo led Miliana to the flying machine to clamp herself against the steering rings.

Another fireball detonated, and the school gates exploded with a roar. Standing clasped about the shaft of his new flying machine, Lorenzo had to shout above the screams of charging warriors.

"How long does that feather fall spell keep working?"

"I don't know!" Miliana felt the desperation of uncer-tainty. "Someone told me it depends on the weight!"

Tekoriikii gave a squawk as his burden suddenly dropped from his claws. The headmistress plunged toward the city cesspits, the rope whipped tight, jerked the flying machine hard against its brackets, and sud-denly the drive shaft began to blur with speed.

The propeller blades whirred, the rope snapped free, and the headmistress hit the dung pile with a meteoric splash. As a hundred pikemen and halberdiers came thundering across the fallen bodies of the teaching staff, Miliana and Lorenzo shot skyward and up across the school walls. A storm of crossbow bolts followed them aloft-one passing mere inches from Miliana's hat.

Clutching blindly to the handholds and feeling a storm wind blowing past her ears, Miliana could only blink her eyes and frown.

"What was that?"

"Nothing." Below Lorenzo, the dreadful school dwin-dled; outraged soldiers worked to break up Miliana's spell formula which had been laboriously formed from the posed bodies of unconscious home economics tutors. The wind blew, the bright sun shone, and it felt marvelous to simply be alive. Tilting his face like a hound sniffing the wind, Lorenzo thrilled to the joys of flight.

Beneath the noisy rotor blades, the sounds of crashes, swordplay, spells, and cries of anger and fear hung loud across the city. Lorenzo gazed down across the streets far below, staring at the war-torn thoroughfares in dismay.

The flying machine worked quite well; Lorenzo con-fessed himself to be well pleased. The bearings whirred, the body balanced well, and the sensation of flight sent a dizzy rush of freedom through his veins.

Tekoriikii circled happily nearby, noisily flapping his wings as he gave a cheery cry.

"Tekorii-kii-kii!"

Feeling her captivity sliding far away, Miliana risked loosening her handhold and groped for Lorenzo's arm.

"Lorenzo?"

"Yes?"

"Well done."

Swelling with pride, Lorenzo gazed below as he felt the craft begin to descend.

"Ah, good-there's Luccio-and there's the river now."

Miliana gave a great relieved sigh. "So we're landing by the river?"

"Um… not exactly…"

Miliana had enough time to blink, then gave a great unhappy wail. The flying machine plunged neatly into the drink-inventor, princess, silly hat, and all.

Tekoriikii watched the whole process from above, then landed gracefully on the wagon Luccio had parked on the riverbank. Luccio and the bird watched as Miliana and Lorenzo struggled damply toward them through the river mud.