Tycho followed her. “I’m afraid so.”
“And all because you have a church and they have a temple?” Wren sighed.
It’s all so stupid. It’s not over gold or food, or even revenge. They’re killing each other over the gods, as though the gods could be made or unmade by a sword or a fire.
Whatever exists in paradise or the nine hells won’t change just because a different person sits on the throne of Constantia.
And meanwhile, people are dying.
Soldiers.
Fishwives.
Children.
She kept walking across the courtyard past the broken columns and burnt timbers and shattered windows. “I have a better idea. Come on.”
They walked together through the ruins of the palace and out into the wide snowy park beyond. She glanced at him, and he smiled at her, and she could tell he wanted to say something, but he didn’t, and she didn’t ask what was on his mind. Eventually they reached the sea wall, which had been teeming with young soldiers and younger marines just a few hours earlier and now were bare and silent. They climbed the iron stairwell in the north watch tower and stepped out onto the platform high above the water and looked out across the channel at the burning homes of Stamballa and the burning homes of Constantia.
They look exactly the same, don’t they?
Wren pushed her glasses up her nose. “We need to make the airships go away. And then make the warships go away.”
Tycho laughed. “Yes, that would be nice.”
“Then I’ll make them go away.” Wren placed her hands on the cold stones of the wall in front of her.
It’s still the middle of the afternoon, still too warm. But Yaga could gather the aether in the daylight, and the valas taught me to pull it from the earth. It should be enough.
“Wait, what are you going to do?” Tycho put his hand on hers. “You said you can only move aether, and souls. You can’t move ships.”
“No, I can’t. But there are people in those ships, aren’t there?” Wren nodded up at the flying behemoths. “Remember how I pushed Omar and the marines across the water, and they pulled their boats with them? Well, this is exactly the same. Only bigger.”
“Wren, you don’t have to do this. In fact, I don’t want you to do this,” Tycho said. “This war has been going on for years, and this siege is just one more battle. There’ll be more. More people will die. It’s the way of things, I guess. But it’s not your responsibility. It’s not your fight. And there’s no need for you to dirty your hands with it.”
“I know it’s not my fight,” she said softly. “It’s my choice. Now get behind me. I don’t want to pull your soul out of your body by accident. You’d die, and I’d be sad. So get down.”
He squeezed her hand and then moved around behind her.
Wren took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and began to spin her soul. It was even easier than the last time, and the shivers quickly gave way to gooseflesh, and then the pulsating waves of heat racing round her body. The silver bracelets on her wrists buzzed and hummed against her skin. She opened her eyes and watched the wisps of aether flying up out of the ground, swirling up through the wall and into the air above her.
I’ll need a lot. More than before. A lot more. Those ships are awfully far away.
She stood very still, enjoying the rippling sensations running up and down her legs and across her breasts and throat and face as her whirlwind of aether grew ever taller around her. And then a very different sort of heat and shiver ran through her hips, and she smiled.
Wren raised her hands and pulled the aether down between her resonating bracelets, pulling the cold mist in, grasping it tightly, and holding it in front of her where she could watch it fly around and around in a blinding sphere of white and silver light.
“Get down, Ty, and stay down.”
She ripped her hands apart, tearing the sphere out into two endlessly long whips of aether that spiraled out and out into the northern sky, reaching across the vast empty air for the airship above the harbor of Constantia.
When the aether whips struck the distant souls of the men and women aboard the ship, Wren felt the aether shudder in her hands, and she began to pull. She pulled, not with her arms, but with her whirling soul, reeling the aether back in toward herself, and dragging the four souls of the airship crew down, down, down toward the black waves of the Bosporus, and with those souls, came the airship itself.
The crew must be crushed against the floor and walls. If I pull too hard, I’ll crush the life from them, but if I take too long, they’ll die all the same, only slower.
The flying machine moved slowly at first, and then faster, gradually gaining speed as it sank down toward the earth, and just as the cabin reached the surface of the water, the edge of the huge balloon touched the edge of a jagged broken wall along the harbor, and the balloon tore open. It ripped apart and quickly began to deform, collapsing in upon itself and dropping the cabin into the water, and Wren released her grip on the souls of the crew and drew her aether back into the sphere between her hands.
“My God,” Tycho whispered.
“Shhh.”
Wren threw her arms out a second time, casting her aether whips across the sea and seized the crews of the other two airships high above Stamballa, and she pulled them down, one with each hand. They came down faster than the first one had, and they came together just above the water, their balloons scraping and rubbing against each other until some bolt or buckle snagged the fabric and tore them open, spilling their gas upward into the sky and dropping the cabins into the sea.
Again Wren gathered the aether back between her hands, and again she felt her hips shudder and her knees wobble as the whirling of her soul set her whole body to tingling.
“Ty?” she said softly. “Show me which are the Turkish warships, and which are the Hellans, and which are the fishing boats.”
“Sure, sure.” Tycho leapt up and moved to the edge of the wall a few paces away, and he began pointing. “There and there, those are the Turks. And there and there, and back there, are ours, and just about everything up that way are the commercial ships.”
“Thank you. Now get down again.”
He dropped back down behind her. “So you’re going to sink the Turks?”
“No. I’m sending them home. I’m sending all the warships home.”
“What do you mean, home? And what do you mean, all?”
Wren drew in a deep breath and hurled out her aether lines for the third time, but instead of a whip in each hand she hurled a slender white wire from each finger tip, half to the south and half to the north, and she seized the crews of all the Turkish ships and all the Hellan ships. There were hundreds of souls packed into the warships, and as she grabbed hold of them she could feel all of their little bodies fly across their tiny wood and steel rooms and flatten against the walls as she hauled the ships from their anchorages.
The huge warships groaned and popped and creaked, and then they began to move. They dragged their anchors, grinding slowly through the waves, heaving up and down against the pull of the aether, but they did move and then began to move faster. Tiny rippling wakes formed around their armored hulls, and then those wakes rose higher and foamed white and green as the massive warships surged through the Strait faster and faster, and when they were all whistling through the spray, nearly skipping over the waves, Wren twisted her hands and turned them all aside.
The Turks bore off toward the docks of Stamballa as she let them go, and their tremendous momentum carried them on, crashing through the cold black waters and then crashing up onto into the wooden piers and stone quays of the Turkish city. The ironclads slashed inland like a dozen enormous hatchets slicing into the shore and grinding up higher and higher, crushing the docks and sea walls and houses and roads, until they finally shrieked to a halt, all leaning at sharp angles on their exposed hulls above the high tide line.