‘Against your own folk?’
‘They won’t make any allowances for me if they catch us.’
The two fliers were diverging now to pass by the airship on either side. Tynisa saw that they had two sets of fixed wings and a rear-facing engine, not so different from a craft she had ridden in once, when escaping another airship. She ducked as a crossbow bolt clipped the rail beside her, and just then Tisamon let fly his second arrow. The distance was considerable, but the Wasps had pulled in close to be within crossbow range, and Tisamon’s great bow proved equal to it. The shaft flew true and the man handling the crossbow reeled back with its thin spine jutting from his shoulder.
Achaeos now loosed too, watching his shaft fall short and vanish into the air. On the other side, the second craft was drawing closer, the crossbowman tilting his weapon upwards, still engaged in pumping shots into the balloon, whilst the pilot stretched out a palm towards them. In the next moment the Wasp’s sting flashed at them, but it was nothing more than light by the time it reached them. They saw the flier pull in closer still.
The machine to port was falling further away but overtaking them, with the crossbowman trying to pull the arrow from his body. On the other side the flier was getting recklessly close, and when the sting lashed out again it charred the railing. Then Gaved was shooting back, exchanging shots with the crossbowman on the fixed wing. A bolt ploughed into the imperial flier’s hull up to the fletching, and the flier reeled with the impact, a fine spray of liquid misting from the hole. Then Gaved himself fell back with a cry as a bolt split the rail and peppered him with splinters.
Tisamon and Achaeos were both loosing arrows now but the Wasp pilot swung the flier in and out erratically, letting the curve and plate of the hull take their arrows.
Thalric stepped forwards, his jaw set, and threw an open hand out towards it. summoning the Art of his people.
With this step, I sever one more tie. His own sting lashed out, not at the men but at the machine itself, where the crossbow bolt had pierced the fuel tank. Instantly the flier was trailing fire. He had time enough to see the horror on the face of the pilot, his own kinsman, before the man pulled the fixed-wing into a dive, trying to get to land before the whole fuel tank caught. Thalric followed them with his eyes as far as he could, but the flier was soon out of sight beneath the airship.
Then the second machine was coming back, the cross-bowman trying to manage his weapon one-handed and shooting erratically. Tisamon ran to the prow and nocked another arrow.
The flying machine was speeding straight for them. Tisamon held his breath, string pulled back all the way, and then let fly.
The arrow almost clipped the lip of the pilot’s seat before piercing the man’s armour and burying itself in his chest. The flying machine suddenly went arcing upwards, performing an absurdly graceful loop before plummeting earthwards. The wounded crossbowman kicked out, letting his own wings carry him down. Soon they were both out of sight.
‘Will they send more?’ Tynisa asked Allanbridge. ‘If they’re so much faster than we are?’
‘Faster indeed,’ he said. ‘But they’ve got just the smallest tendency, those fancy fliers, to run out of fuel. My girl’s got a good westerly blowing her the right way, you see, and even if her engine winds down, well, we won’t drop from the sky. No, they’ve had their chance. They’ll not catch us now.’
I am so very far from home, was his thought now, so many days after their escape from the flying machines, as Achaeos felt the encroaching of the night that, for most of his life, had been a time for waking and doing, rather than trying to sleep. I am so very far from her.
Magic was a remedy for that – magic that shunned the waking, sunlit world, but whose chiefest currency was dreams and visions.
In his mind’s eye he had found her, Che, sleeping on a broad bed draped with silken sheets, curled up like a child with a slight smile on her face. His heart leapt to see her there. He had thought he felt her absence, before he tried this scrying, but he had not known just how much so until he bid her face appear in his mind.
‘Che,’ he said softly. ‘I know you are asleep. I have touched you before, like this, when the need was utmost. Now I have found you again so easily. It must be because I love you.’
He knew he had no guarantee that she would ever hear his words, even in her dreams, or that those dreams would be recalled on her waking, but he needed to talk to her, to touch her. Just looking at her made his heart ache, yet it was a love abhorrent to his entire kinden, seemingly against all reason, and despite that one that could not be argued with.
Che, I need to show you what I see, here. We have reached the town of Jerez, you see, which is like no place I have ever been to. I want to show it to you.
Her surroundings – the blur of them that he could make out – seemed almost palatial, with white stone, tapestries and rugs, a window with ornately worked shutters. It was a far cry from the heap of sticks in which he himself was spending the night, and which passed for a house here in Jerez.
He rose from the filthy mat of crushed reeds and went over to the doorway, looking out at Lake Limnia in all its sordid splendour.
I know your city lies by a lake or a sea, Che. Well, this is my lake. It was blood-red with the sunset and, although a far smaller stretch of water than the Exalsee in the distant south, it encompassed his entire northern and eastern horizons. Lake Limnia’s edge was cluttered and uncertain, with stands of reeds ten feet tall springing from the mud, their tangle of brown roots sometimes sturdy enough to walk on and blurring the boundary between land and water. Torn from the lakeside but held together by their roots, similar reeds formed floating islands that scudded slowly across the surface wherever the wind took them. Some of the islands were large and stable enough to build on, for all that there was nothing but murky water beneath them.
Jerez squatted like a festering boil on the side of the lake, a haphazard collection of little buildings made from stick, mud and reed, hundreds of them ranging from single-room shacks to sprawling two-storey excrescences that were rickety, ugly and lopsided, increasing in number towards what was nominally the centre of the town. The only stone building stood in the middle, a fort the Wasps had built for their local governor. To Achaeos’ amusement it was already listing badly as the soggy ground set about the business of reclaiming it, year by year.
Many of the locals lived out on the water itself: some of them on boats, but more on houses built on rafts. Clearly the Skaters liked to be able to move about easily and the shores of Lake Limnia comprised a maze of channels, shifting islands and floating houses. Achaeos had already heard from Gaved that the black market – the Black Guild as it was known – was strong here, since the Skaters could transport almost anything around or across the lake in secrecy. North of the lake began the wild and hilly country of the Hornet-kinden, who were the Wasps’ barbarous kindred, untamed territories that were the gateway to many fabulous places beyond.
The Skaters themselves were still very much in evidence, and Achaeos studied them anew, for Che’s benefit. Do you remember Skrill? he asked her within his mind. She was your uncle’s agent to Tark? I’d guess she must have been part-Skater.
They were a small folk, but almost grotesquely long-limbed. Every step involved a stalking, surreptitious and shifty motion. Though there were plenty of outsiders lodging in Jerez, the Skaters looked on them all with narrow-eyed suspicion, yet looked on their own kind with even more. They were blue-white of skin with long pointed ears, complementing pointed faces and pointed noses. Most of them wore drab, slightly ragged tunics that left much of the limbs bare, but some sported armour of tarnished metal scales. Almost all the adults seemed to be armed, and so far Achaeos had seen bows, slings, blowpipes, daggers, Wasp-pattern swords and even a few crossbows.