Tinker's Justice (25 page)

“Princess Anju is safe here,” Anzik said softly, so as not to let the girl overhear. She was a strange creature, ever growing. If he was away a month or more, he came back to see a different girl in her place, recognizable but certainly not the girl he left. He wondered what she would change into before she was of age to become his wife.

“For how long?”

“Long enough for me to put an end to Danilaesis Solaran,” Anzik said. He took one final look at Anju, tucking away the image of her in his memories to compare when next he saw her. “I need to be getting back.” He tromped off into the jungle, with General Kaynnyn in tow.

“We could use you here,” she said to his back.

“Of course you could,” Anzik replied. He held up a hand and flashed through a series of signs. “I could be a great use in many places. If there were a dozen of me, we would be faring far better than we are. If we had a hundred of me, we’d have won this war easily. But we must make do with the one of me we’ve got.” A world-hole opened, with Kaia sitting just on the far side attending the controls. “And for now, the best place for me is with the Korrish rebels. They hold the key to our salvation.”

Changed back into his proper attire and with his feet washed clean of the jungle dirt, Anzik felt more like himself. General Kaynnyn’s objections weighed on his mind. The Megrenn Alliance needed him; that much was undeniable. But the general was an old cavalry soldier. She wanted to fight a war that looked like a war, and that wasn’t what they were faced with. Anzik knew his mind held greater breadth than the rest of those in the Alliance. It was up to him to fight the war their enemies had brought them. It was up to him to know how best to do it.

The walk from his room to Madlin’s workshop was eighty-seven steps. Long enough to come up with a plan of action for the near term. The fourth-dimensional geography involved was one of the key components of the war. Interconnected worlds. Indefensible fortifications. Impossible reconnaissance. It was chess with a million pieces and a board that folded in on itself. And it was everyone’s turn. But even a seemingly infinite problem still consisted of a number of finite tasks, and Anzik needed to narrow those down, chop the problem into tasks he could accomplish. The first was clear in his mind before he stepped foot into Madlin’s workshop.

The screech of metal always bothered Anzik’s ears. The pitch was wrong, too shrill. He stuck fingers in his ears to dampen the sound, and heard his own voice echo weirdly in his skull as he called out. “Madlin, I need a moment of your time.”

Madlin raised her head from the machinery. She wore muffled cups over her ears to deaden the sound of her own work. “What for?” she shouted back.

“My people are being slaughtered,” Anzik shouted, still plugging his ears. “Too quickly, too erratically to be airship strikes. I think Danilaesis has gained access to a world-ripper.”

“Piss on that!” Madlin shouted back. “That’s the last thing any of us need.”

“I was hoping you might allow me to evacuate my people along with your own. Tellurak has room enough for all of them.”

“We’ve got enough trouble with logistics as it is.”

“Please,” Anzik shouted. “They’re human too. They’ve done nothing. It’s my job to protect them, and I can’t do it without your help.” There was greater than an eighty percent chance that the appeal to their common humanity would be enough to get Madlin to concede his point.

Madlin’s shoulders rose and fell in a sigh that went unheard. “Fine,” she shouted. “But you’re going to have to teach me something to make a worthwhile trade, something I can use. Work it out with Kaia and Jamile; we don’t need to tie up the
Jennai’s
world-rippers for this.”

“Thank you,” Anzik shouted. Madlin nodded in acknowledgment and returned to her work. Once he closed the door behind him, Anzik unplugged his ears.

She doesn’t want the
Jennai
involved.
A jumble of thoughts jostled in Anzik’s head as he meandered to the central chamber of the lunar facility.
The
Jennai
is where the Korrish rebels have their military power. She doesn’t want it distracted from its primary mission. Its primary missions are to deal with the threats to the Korrish humans, and to keep the rebels safe and hidden.
A thought clicked into place. A second thought fell in beside it. Then a third.

They need for Danilaesis to become a threat to the
Jennai,
then they’ll deal with him.

“Throw a rock or something,” Danilaesis shouted through the transport gate. The farmers he berated were jumping one by one off an embankment that overlooked a pond. “Bleeding winds, you cowards sicken me. I’m burning your homes and killing you like hogs on a feast day morning. At least die like men!”

Of course, Danilaesis didn’t speak a word of Ghelkan, so he swore and spat and raged at them in his native tongue. He doubted they would have heeded him even if they understood his words. They weren’t soldiers or sorcerers, merely peasant farmers. That was all he found of late. The sensible ones, the tradesmen and the moneyed, had all scattered like dandelion fluff on a windy day. The only ones who clustered in numbers worth stopping the machine to slaughter were the farmers, enslaved by the land they worked, yoked to it until death.

It was sickening. Worse, it was unbefitting a warlock. Danilaesis was worth so much more to the Kadrin war effort. Burning the countryside was a siege tactic that might pay off in starvation if the war dragged on long enough. Danilaesis had always hated sieges, even when reading about them in histories. It was a quartermaster’s way to defeat a general. Cut off supply caravans. Foul the water upstream. Poison the wells. Cluster your enemy in close quarters so disease might take hold among them. They were cowards’ tactics. Danilaesis wanted a foe he could dull his blade against. None was to be found. The Ghelkan cities were mausoleums. The smaller towns all but deserted. Where the people had gone remained a mystery, but most likely they had fled any way they could, either hiding in the wild countryside or taking ships to lands across the seas. Danilaesis would get to those eventually. The missing armies were more of a worry. There ought to have been too many to conceal. He had not done so much damage to the Megrenn Alliance that their military had crumbled.

Danilaesis loosed a bolt of lightning into the pond, assuming that anyone in the water was as good as dead. Turning his back on the gate, he waved a dismissive hand and heard the sound of burning farmhouses end abruptly.

Reflecting for a moment as Gederon sought his next target, Danilaesis came upon an irksome realization: he was bored. There was no challenge in chasing villagers around with lightning and fire, even if they were technically enemies. The benefit to the Kadrin Empire was nil.

“Let’s try something a little different,” Danilaesis said, using the common tongue of the Korrish and daruu. “Switch this thing to look into Korr.”

“Of c-course, sir,” Gederon replied. The daruu had a stuttering voice that was going to get on his nerves one day. “Whe-where should I be l-l-looking.”

“To the skies,” Danilaesis replied, forcing a cheery smile. “I think it’s long past time I found Madlin’s flying barge. It took two of them to kill me, and if I can’t find Anzik Fehr, I’ll find Madlin Errol.”

Axterion clung to the ship’s railing with less dignity than he would have preferred to display in front of a bunch of navy men. The
Dragon’s Kiss
drifted amid the trees, picking its way as through a patch of brambles. Podawei Wood was a blot in the heart of the Kadrin Empire, a forest deep and ancient that had defied exploration, logging, and even hunting beyond the nearest reaches of new growth at its edge. It was a place that made it seem the gods had fashioned it before deciding that trees should ever stop growing. The Kadrin airship passed among trunks that could have been carved out and made into towers, dodged branches that could hold three wagons driven abreast. There was a gloom of twilight upon the place, the midday sun held back by an ocean of leaves that formed the canopy above.

“We have no heading,” Captain Mulrak reported. “We’ll have to climb above again to check the sun.”

“Just keep going,” Axterion replied. “We’re not here to find, so much as to be found.”

The pieces all fit. Years ago, he had helped Brannis unravel the mystery of the demons’ hiding place. Though he had never reported back about it, Axterion had long suspected that the boy had found them. Direct intervention was the only explanation for why the interior of Podawei could remain unknown to the Kadrin Empire despite history’s greatest sorcerers and warlocks originating from within their borders. To think that mere happenstance or some natural phenomenon could keep so many curious eyes from learning their secrets defied logic. Many had never believed in the existence of demons; that was one great defense their secret had. But Axterion believed. He had known demons—by the winds he’d had tea with them. Now he finally had the impetus he needed to go looking.

Hours passed. The trees betrayed nothing. No stump marked a logger’s work. No trail wove among the gnarled and serpentine roots that broke the forest floor. No cut or rope around a trunk marked a trail. The
Dragon’s Kiss
flew low, for most of the branches started higher than the rooftops of Kadris, and posed the greatest threat to their flight—as far as the crew knew. Axterion held rank enough that he needed no justification for his orders. Being known as gruff, crotchety, and the only one who kept Warlock Danilaesis in line, kept most from arguing.

If only he
could
keep Danilaesis in line.

The mood of the crew was tense. It didn’t take a captain’s keen instincts to tell that much. It also didn’t take a naturalist’s study to know that the trees around them were obscenely old. The buildings in Kadris—some of them, anyway—dated back more than a thousand winters, but they were stone and all stone looks the same when runes preserve it through the ages. The mountainous trunks humbled the sky sailors, and it was not a humility that became them. They had become ants at the feast table, just noticing the gods that loomed above.

Several times more, the captain looked at Axterion with a question poised on his lips. A glare would shove that question back to where it came from. Let the men grumble and gossip and fret. There were more dangerous duties they could have been called to, and ones with far less urgency for the empire. Axterion had no patience for soldiers who didn’t soldier.

The ship stopped. Axterion had given no order, and neither had the captain. But it was not the drifting halt that required an anchor. One moment the
Dragon’s Kiss
had been drifting along, the next it was not. Glancing around for answers, Axterion noted that the sailors had stopped as well, frozen mid-action in whatever task had occupied them.