Emilie and the Sky World (10 page)

It made sense, Emilie thought as they hurried through the forest. Miss Marlende and the professor must have decided to wait where they were and build a signal fire. On reflection, Emilie could see it was the most sensible course of action and that she and Efrain should have done it as well. But Miss Marlende must have looked for one from them, not seen it, and decided to do one of her own so they didn’t miss each other while running around through the woods and up and down hills. Maybe Dr Marlende and Lord Engal and Mikel and Cobbier had found them as well. With everyone putting their heads together, and Hyacinth’s device for showing the aether currents, they could find a way out of here.

That was what she was telling herself, anyway.

The slopes and bluffs allowed them views where they could spot the signal again and keep to the right direction. “It’s getting thinner,” Efrain pointed out after they had walked about an hour and were only one hill away.

Emilie shaded her eyes to look. The smoke column did look wispier. “Maybe it’s just the angle we’re at, or the wind.”

“Or they need to get more wood,” Efrain added practically, and they moved on again.

As they came down through the thick trees on the last part of the hill, Emilie tried hard to hear voices ahead. She supposed Miss Marlende and the professor could just be sitting around quietly resting, but it must mean the others hadn’t found them. She couldn’t imagine Lord Engal being in this situation and not talking about it.

She could think of a dozen reasons for it to be quiet, but it still filled her with dread.
Something’s wrong
.

They emerged from the trees above a clearing, studded with a few white boulders. Emilie saw the camp immediately. A spot among the boulders had been cleared roughly of grass, and a fire had been built. A heap of sticks had been piled nearby, ready to feed it, but the fire had almost burned out. There was no sign of anyone.

Emilie’s throat went tight. She hurried down the last slope and among the boulders, Efrain and Hyacinth following. The area around the dying fire showed no signs of a struggle or fight. The grass that hadn’t been pulled up to keep the fire from spreading was flattened a bit, as if two people had walked or sat on it. Then she saw a pack leaning against the base of one of the boulders, its white canvas blending into the gray-white stone. She ran over and snatched it up.

Efrain said, “Where are they?” He flung his arms out. “They aren’t here! It’s not fair; we thought they were here!”

Emilie, sitting on her heels to look through the pack, paused to stare at him incredulously. Efrain sniffed and rubbed his nose, and admitted miserably, “That didn’t sound so whiny inside my head.”

“I don’t know where they are,” Emilie said under her breath. In the top of the pack, she found the professor’s notebook. Everything else seemed as it should be. Her water bottle was still there, the packets of food, and a collection of items that were probably for magic, such as little bottles of minerals. There were also some instruments that might be for navigation or drawing that Emilie couldn’t identify. One she recognized from descriptions in the Lord Rohiro books and from glimpsing one on Dr Marlende’s work room bench. It was a combination clock and aether-compass, with a pocketwatch face on one side and the other a miniature aether-navigator with a tiny bit of aether in a glass bubble, floating a compass needle atop it.

She stood up and looked around again, then walked around the perimeter of the camp. Miss Marlende’s pack wasn’t here. “If they left on their own, they wouldn’t have left the professor’s pack here.”

Efrain looked around uneasily. “If they left on their own. You mean someone made them leave?”

Emilie couldn’t think of any other reason they would build a signal fire to draw them here and then go away, especially without the professor’s things. If Dr Marlende or any of the other men had found them and required help urgently, they could have torn a page out of the notebook and left a message to that effect. She realized she was pacing in a tight circle and made herself stop. “Someone else found them before we did. Someone made them run away or took them away.”

“What someone?” Efrain rubbed his eyes again, clearly fighting back tears. Hyacinth waved its arm blossoms in agitation. There was no telling if it understood just what had happened, but it clearly knew something was wrong. Efrain continued, “What do we do? How do we find them now?”

Emilie drew breath to snap at him, then let it out. Efrain might pretend to be a mature young man around Uncle Yeric, but he was a year younger than she was and he had never been through anything like this before. Standing there, she became aware of how much her feet ached from walking on sliding rocks, how dry her throat was. She should be hungry, but she just felt queasy. It had been a long time since either of them had slept, and the unchanging light of the aether had kept them from noticing. They would have dropped from exhaustion if they hadn’t been so afraid. None of that was going to help her find the others.

She said, “We need to rest first. Sit down and have some water and some food.”

“But…” Efrain hesitated. He scrubbed his fingers through his hair. “All right.”

Efrain sat down and opened his pack. Hyacinth settled next to him. Emilie sat across from them and thought about building up the fire again.
No, if anyone we actually want to find could see it, they would be here by now
. And more smoke might draw the attention of whoever had come after Miss Marlende and Professor Abindon.

Efrain took a drink from his water bottle and pulled out a wax-paper-wrapped sandwich packet. He handed a second one to Hyacinth. As Efrain ate, Hyacinth picked the sandwich apart with the delicate tips of its blossoms, examined it carefully, then handed it back. Efrain wrapped it up again and put it away. “I guess it does eat sun, like a plant.”

Emilie got her own bottle and food out and made herself drink and eat. It settled her stomach, and after a while, each bite seemed to make it a little easier to think. She needed to figure out how to find the others. She wished Rani was here. Rani had always known what to do and would surely know how to track people through this grass and dirt.

Emilie frowned as she finished off the last crust of her sandwich. Hunters in books were always looking for faint traces invisible to the naked eye. Maybe it wasn’t that complicated. Maybe she should just look and see if she could find anything and not write it off as a lost cause just because she wasn’t an expert hunter like Tagaff, the midshipman from Atalera in the Lord Rohiro books.

She tucked the wax paper back into her pack and got to her feet. “Stay here and rest. I’m going to look around.”

Efrain, drooping over his pack, started to struggle upright. “I’ll go with you!”

“No, I’m just going to be right around here. I’m looking for tracks and evidence. I don’t want you to step on it.” Emilie wasn’t sure what it was but she was pretty certain Efrain would step on it if given the opportunity, especially as tired as he was now.

Efrain sank back down and yawned. Emilie started to circle around the various boulders that surrounded the camp, carefully examining the grass and dirt between them. Hyacinth followed her, watching what she was doing with interest. The first time around, she didn’t see anything, then she turned back and did it again, circling out a little wider. Coming at the camp from the opposite direction, this time she saw a gouge in a patch of dirt between two clumps of grass. Emilie sat on her heels and considered it. Hyacinth crouched beside her. The mark looked too sharp and defined to have been made by an animal. Not that they had seen or heard any hint of animals, birds, or insects here. “I think this was made by someone’s heel,” she told Hyacinth.

It touched the gouge with a tentative blossom.

Emilie started to search the ground in a straight line out from the heel mark, heading toward the forest. Hyacinth had realized what she was looking for now, and lowered itself to within a foot or so of the ground, flowing gently back and forth over the grass, hardly disturbing it. It had gotten a bit ahead of Emilie, and she saw when it stopped abruptly and stood up again, waving its arms at her. She hurried forward.

They were about halfway to the trees on the far side of the clearing from where they had entered it. In an area of patchy grass and dirt, there was a blurred outline of a boot print. Emilie put her own foot beside it for comparison. It was two or three times the size of hers, too big to be a woman, even a tall woman like Professor Abindon.

Emilie’s heart started to pound. Up until this moment, she hadn’t really believed in the mysterious strangers who had made Miss Marlende and the professor leave their camp. She had theorized their existence, but there had been a lot of theorizing by her and everyone else since they had first seen the aether-sailer, and they didn’t know the truth of any of it. But here was proof.

It cut straight through the fog of exhaustion. “We have to get out of here,” she told Hyacinth. She shoved to her feet and strode back toward the camp to shake Efrain awake. Whoever had done this might come back.

Emilie made them walk several hundred yards into the forest, until she found a sheltered spot where they could rest. It was a little hollow shielded by another boulder, and Efrain folded up in it and went to sleep immediately. Emilie sat down beside him. She meant to stay awake and just rest her feet, but she woke abruptly, still half sitting up, her face propped on the professor’s pack. She sat up, groggy, rubbing her eyes. Efrain was still curled against the rock, snoring a little. A small pile of white vines was heaped nearby; after a moment, she realized it was how Hyacinth looked when it was asleep.

She squinted up at the tree canopy overhead. The light hadn’t changed at all. Or she had slept through a whole day… She dragged the pack open and got the portable aether-compass out. The clock on it showed that only a few hours had passed. She let her breath out in relief and shook Efrain’s foot.

He groaned. Hyacinth flinched, then popped upright, waving its arms wildly. “It’s all right,” Emilie told it. “You fell asleep.”

The blossoms’ wild motion slowed, and it sank down again and drooped. Emilie wondered what had happened to it, if the other flower people crew members were trapped here somewhere, too.
If they were, surely it would be looking for them, not following us around
. It was acting as if it was stuck and staying with them was its only option.

She wondered how long it had been trapped alone on the aether-sailer.

Efrain was sitting up and scrubbing his hands through his hair. Emilie told him, “Come on; we need to go.”

“Go where?” Efrain said, still groggy. “We don’t know how to find them.”

“We know they went in this direction.” Emilie stood, shouldering the professor’s pack along with her own. She had marked the direction on the aether-compass before they had left the clearing. Without a smoke beacon to follow, keeping to a straight course through the forest would have been difficult. At least this way they knew they were heading in the same direction that Miss Marlende and the professor had been taken away in, and not just going in circles.

After a few minutes of trudging after her, Efrain said, “Who could have taken them? If this place has been just put together from chunks of other places that got picked up in the aether currents like we think, there wouldn’t be any people still alive here. They would have run out of food and water pretty quickly. Unless a whole lake got taken with them.”

It showed the sleep had made Efrain’s brain start working again. That was a relief. “Unless they were taken recently, like we were.”

Efrain frowned down at his boots. “But you don’t think they’re friendly, because they didn’t let Miss Marlende leave us a note, and the professor left her pack behind.”

Emilie nodded. To give them both something else to think about, she said, “Maybe they’re pirates.” Pirate adventure stories had been Efrain’s favorite when he was younger. Emilie had thought that if there were really that many pirates, there wouldn’t be any shipping at all, since the stories implied hundreds more ships than the Menaen navy had ever needed. But then she remembered how much Efrain had changed in the past year. She didn’t even know if he still read those stories.

But Efrain said, with relish, “Or ghosts.”

“Ghost pirates,” Emilie suggested. Impulsively, she smiled at Efrain, and he smiled back. Hyacinth waved its blossoms at them, as if it felt it should participate but had no idea how.

Then Emilie blinked and looked back at the compass. It had been a long time since she and Efrain had smiled at each other.

Efrain seemed to realize it, too. He shifted his pack uncomfortably and didn’t say anything else.

They had only walked about half an hour according to the compass’ clock when Emilie started to glimpse something gray between the trees ahead. At first, she thought it was mist or a haze; as they drew closer, she realized she was looking at a cliff. She groaned under her breath. The ground had been relatively even through this part of the forest so far. She had climbed and slid down all the steep stony slopes she ever wanted to in this place.

But when they emerged from the trees it was clear this wasn’t just another rock formation. The cliff was only about twenty feet tall, but it was dark gray streaked with a glittering blue, with broken shards of blue crystal sticking out of it. The grassy ground of the forest floor came right up to it with no rocks or stones or anything, and some of the trees were uprooted and leaning against it. It looked like two different places.

“Oh,” Emilie said aloud. “Because it is two different places.”

Efrain nodded. “This part came from somewhere else, and it just got mushed together with the forest.” He looked up and down the cliff, though the trees crowding it made it hard to see very far. “They must have climbed it. We need to find where they went up.”

Emilie thought they must have climbed it, too. With the trees crowding so close, there just wasn’t much room along it, and the base of a cliff seemed an odd place to pick for a camp, anyway. And along the top, they might be able to find more tracks. She went to one of the uprooted trees that leaned against the cliff. “Let’s try to get up this way. It’ll be easier to see where they went from up top.”

She stepped on top of the trunk and awkwardly crab-crawled up the steep angle. The wood slipped under her feet, and the branches were all at the top. Then Hyacinth flowed past her, using all its limbs to rapidly scale the side of the trunk. Then it paused and extended an arm toward Emilie.

They could have it carry the rope up for them, but this was faster. Emilie stretched and grabbed the blossom-covered arm, and it hauled her easily up the trunk as if she weighed nothing. She let go when she reached the branches and could pull herself up and scramble onto the cliff top. Hyacinth made sure she didn’t fall and then went back for Efrain.

Emilie picked twigs and leaves out of her hair, looking around. The top of the cliff was rocky and flat, with blue crystal slabs sticking up from the mottled gray rock, and little veins of crystal between them, glittering like streams of water. It stretched out for a few hundred yards to a forest of light green ferny foliage, clearly completely different from the forest they had just crossed through. Rising up from the forest, perhaps no more than a mile or so away, was a great lumpy hill all of gray rock, hundreds of feet tall, almost big enough to be a small mountain. It was studded with pockets of foliage that must mark various clearings and folds that might lead into little valleys. It seemed to have been here for some time, because she could see streaky white grooves that might have been waterfalls at some point but were now dry.

Then a glint of metal caught her eye and Emilie stared.
That can’t be right
. She dropped the professor’s pack and hastily dug through it.

Efrain and Hyacinth stepped up beside her as she pulled the little telescope out. She straightened up and peered through it at the gleam of metal on the side of the stone slope, adjusting the lenses to bring it into focus.
No, that’s what it is
. Sticking out from the side of the hill, as if it had landed on a ledge concealed by the fold of rock, was the metal frame of an airship’s balloon.

Emilie wouldn’t have recognized it if she hadn’t seen the ruined skeleton of Lord Ivers’ airship, after Dr Marlende had burned it. It might be something else that just happened to look like an airship frame, but whatever it was, that was clearly the place they needed to go.

“What is it?” Efrain demanded.

“I think it’s a wrecked airship,” Emilie told him. A blossom arm snaked the telescope out of her hand before Efrain could grab it. Hyacinth jammed the end of the telescope somewhere into the region of what Emilie thought its lower chest was. It had it pointed at the airship frame, so Emilie assumed that was actually where its eyes were. Or at least some of its eyes.

“But how…” Efrain began. “It’s not our airship, is it?”

“No. No, it isn’t.” If it was a Menaen airship, there was only one that it could be. “Come on.” Emilie shouldered the professor’s pack again, tucking the telescope back under the flap as Hyacinth handed it back to her. “They might see us. We need to hurry.”