“You know it won’t work out that way, Morayo.” Riuza shook her head. “The Songhai won’t care about a couple of dead scholars, and even if they do, they’ll probably just use it as propaganda against Marrakesh, not Aegyptus, and definitely not Eran. I don’t know what the right answer is right now, but we have a few days to figure it out. And in the meantime, you’re going to put down that sword and no one is going to hurt Mister Bakhoum. So put the sword down, now.”
The engineer sniffled and the tip of the sword began to droop lower. But then she winced and shook her head sharply. “What is that? Who’s there? What’s that sound? Who is that?”
Oh God!
Omar stood up. “Morayo, you have to listen to me. Ignore the voices, ignore the faces, and listen to me. You need to put the sword down. Just put it down carefully on the floor. You need to ignore the voices and put the sword down!”
“What voices?” Riuza asked.
“No, stop, get out of my head!” Morayo spun in a drunken circle, swinging the seireiken in wild flashing arcs. Twice the tip of the sword scorched the walls and once it melted the edge of a window.
“Crap.” Riuza leapt forward and grabbed her lieutenant’s arms, struggling for control over the sword. Omar scrambled out of his narrow slot beside the toilet and stumbled as the Frost Finch shuddered under his feet. He tried to catch himself, but his bound hands slipped off the rail and he fell into Garai’s empty seat by the fish.
In the center of the cabin Riuza and Morayo were locked in a vicious knot of arms and the blinding white seireiken blazed in between them. Omar could hear both women gasping and grunting as they struggled for the sword. The Finch shuddered again and the slender bar wedged against the steering column popped free and fell to the floor of the cockpit. The flight stick leaned forward and the entire airship pitched forward with it. The two women fell down the uneven deck into the cockpit with Morayo sitting on Riuza’s chest. The lieutenant had the seireiken poised over her captain’s chest, the blazing tip just inches from Riuza’s leather jacket. “Stop it, all of you! All of you, shut up!” the young woman screamed, shaking her head in violent circles.
Omar lurched up across the tilting cabin and fell face-first onto the women’s legs. He got his own feet under himself and shoved up, slamming his shoulder into Morayo’s back. The engineer pitched headfirst over the captain and crashed into the thick glass of the forward windscreen. The glass crackled and a sudden draft of freezing wind shrieked into the cabin. Morayo lay very still, her glassy eyes staring up at the ceiling.
“The sword! Grab it!” Omar hollered over the wind.
The seireiken lay on the deck just under the pilot’s seat and wedged under the flight pedals. The brass plates and controls were already deforming, melting, twisting, and dripping down to the deck. Riuza yanked the sword out of the floor just as the pedals collapsed into the deck and she shoved the weapon into Omar’s hands. As he fumbled the seireiken into its scabbard with his bound wrists, Riuza climbed into her seat and grabbed the flight stick and throttle, but when she pulled back on the stick it snapped off in her hand. “Crap.”
“What do we do now?” Omar shouted over the wind screaming in through the broken windows.
Riuza pointed out the forward windscreen. “Not much we can do now.” She reached over with a small utility knife and cut his hands free.
Omar rubbed his wrists as he looked out into the darkness and saw the moonlight falling on the frozen sea. But just ahead the ice sheet ended and he saw dark waters lapping on a dark shore, and above that rose the black shapes of mountains against the starry sky.
“Welcome to Ysland, Mister Bakhoum.”
Chapter 8. The end
The Frost Finch was still pitched down and descending quickly. Riuza cut the throttle and for the first time in seven days the engine fell completely silent. Omar crouched beside her in the cockpit, watching the dark island grow larger below them.
“So it would seem your theory was right,” Riuza said calmly. “There’s no snow on your island, or not much, at least. Since we’re going to die here, would you mind telling me what this was all about?”
Omar glanced down at the still form of Morayo Osaze staring up at him from the broken corner of the window. “It’s about this.” He held up his sheathed sword. “This metal. It’s very rare, and very dangerous, and very strange. We call it sun-steel. In its raw form it looks like dark gold. It attracts the aether mist like a magnet, and if a soul is drawn into the steel with the aether, then the metal grows hotter and brighter. For years I’ve been trying to find more of it, trying to learn more about it. And then I heard a story about an island in the north where the earth shone like gold, and it was always warm, and the living walked side by side with the dead.”
“So you think this Ysland has more of your sun-steel?”
“A lot more.” He nodded. “So much that the very ground under their feet is kept warm by it all year round, even here at the top of the world. With so much of it, the people here must be masters of it. They must know everything about it. Some of my people back in Alexandria know how to make weapons from it, like my sword, and to make other more useful tools as well.” He reached up to touch the lump of the golden pendant under his shirts. “We can even talk to the souls trapped in the steel. But these people, these Yslanders must know far more than we do. To them, sun-steel must be as common as tin. It’ll be everywhere, in every aspect of their lives. And here they are. Look there.” He pointed at a shimmer of yellow light on the dark plain of the island. “A home. People. We’re not going to die, dear lady. We’re going to live for a very long time.”
They had several long minutes together in the cold dark cabin of the wounded Frost Finch to watch the island loom up larger and larger before them. The fiery dot on the shadowed plain grew larger as well, and soon burst apart into a dozen lights, and then a hundred.
“It’s a town,” Omar said.
Riuza spent a few moments banging around the cockpit, but she gave up trying to salvage the controls and came to stand back in the center of the cabin beside him with one hand on the overhead rail and the other hand holding the collar of her heavy jacket closed tight around her neck. Omar saw a wisp of pale steam curl off the woman’s shaven scalp.
“It’ll be very soon now,” she said.
The cold wind blasting through the front windscreen grew more wild and all of the nets and bags and sacks and strings inside the cabin danced and whipped through the air around them. And out in the darkness, the scattering of lights continued to grow.
“That’s no town,” Omar said softly. “It’s a city!”
“I think you’re right.” Riuza nodded. “It is a city. It even has a… get down! ”
She tackled him to the floor just as the airship collided with a tall black spire. The dark tower of jagged rock scraped along the port side of the gondola and they heard the terrific ripping sound of every layer of the balloon overhead being shredded open to flap violently in the wind. The Finch nosed down more steeply and a quiet scream rose in the air as they fell faster and faster toward the ground.
Omar sat up, clutching Riuza to his side as he tried to wedge himself between the cabin wall and an empty box of dried beef. “Well, dear lady, it certainly has been an adventure. I’m sorry it had to end this way.”
She snorted and a small smile curled her lip. “I thought you said we were going to live.”
“Yes, well, I’m the optimistic sort. So…” He leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth, luxuriating in the warmth of her soft lips and tasting the salty sweetness of her tongue in his mouth. He leaned back and smiled at her.