INTERLUDE: BEACON OUTPOST
The Unbroken Earthmote, the world-sphere of Talvi 09.05.13.19.18
The whispers were…maddening.
There was nothing that could help a man escape them. No matter how loudly the workers sung their songs and told their boasts, no matter how much of the mission's supply of strong alcohol they consumed, the susurrus of the Shades above could not be drowned out. It crept into dreams and left men too tired to work. It crept into conversations that tailed off as the participants stopped to listen.
The whole mission was going insane from it.
The only refuge was underground. With nowhere to escape, the only recourse was to work, and by working they discovered that the more rock they put between themselves and the surface, the quieter the perpetual noise got. The moment word got around about this, every last one of the miners redoubled their efforts. They had gone further in twelve days than Nils had estimated for twenty and finally, finally they reached a layer where not a single man could hear the Shades talking to each other.
The cheering when Nils announced that they would hollow out a chamber and move the beds down into it was deafening in the confined space. But it was only sensible—only a minor miracle and strong leadership had prevented somebody from murderously losing their mind by now. Forty-eight hours later the whole camp had been moved down below ground, and though the merry fire that somebody started in the middle filled the room with smoke that stung the eyes and lungs, it was paradise compared to the mind-eroding muttering topside.
They got the first decent night's sleep in more than a week, but the mining teams had found that they could sustain the rhythm now and threw themselves into their work with undiminished enthusiasm.
On the morning of the mission’s sixteenth day, however, something went terribly wrong.
What had been the mining face suddenly crumbled inwards under a pick and the whole wall fell apart, revealing an empty space behind it. Before anybody could react, semi-transparent arms of black smoke and obsidian sinew grasped through out of the darkness and three miners were taken, hauled shrieking into the darkness to be consumed.
The light teams rushed forward with their brightest and most powerful lanterns and the Shades fled, chattering and mocking just below the threshold of audibility. They were too late to save their colleagues, however. One was dust, all life stolen from his body and his Shade already gone. The others were caught on the threshold between being consumed and being saved, and their shades still occupied their physical bodies and tried weakly to strip the life force of the men who went to put them out of their misery, their eyes perfectly black from edge to edge. The grim and thankless task of destroying them was made all the worse by watching the mockeries that had once been their friends flee into the shadows, forever lost to an eternity of mindless hunger.
Only when that job was done did the miners and lantern teams look around and see what they had stumbled into.
“Somebody had better go get Mister Civorage...” one of them said at last.
In the middle of the cavern, four robed statues stood around a pedestal, their heads bowed.
And upon the pedestal was a small, unassuming wooden box.
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> “See, an alchemist showed me one time how you can make a gas that sort of works like lift gas by taking two copper wires, sticking ‘em in a bowl of water and attaching ‘em to something he called a generator. ‘But,’ says he, ‘It may be a mite stronger than that stuff what the Keeghans invented, but the guild gas don't burn.’ I asked him what he meant, cause I've seen airships go down in flames, so he put a candle to this floating paper bag he'd made and—WHAM! Took forever ‘fer me eyebrows to grow back. I'm glad we don't use that stuff in the airships. You'd have to be crazy!”
> —Overheard in the Steel and Silver Inn, Crae Vhannog.
THE AIRSHIP CAVALIER QUEEN
Falling from the world-sphere of Sayf 09.06.03.06.04
By a stroke of pure good fortune, only one of the bag’s three compartments had ruptured, and the Queen wasn't falling so much as sinking out of the sky. She was doing so sickeningly fast, but they at least weren't in free-fall, and there was some hope of salvaging the situation.
“All hands up top!” Jerl roared. He cranked the Engine Order Telegraph to signal hard ascent, but it seemed that Derghan was a step ahead of him: the engine outriggers were already turning to blow straight up, their usual mellow drone climbing to a dangerous howl as they took the weight. There was a noticeable sense of deceleration, but the cliff walls were still rolling away upwards in a terrifying stone blur.
Five winged shapes spiraled down from above, banked, and then Marren and his men were a welcome sight as they dropped into the top of the gasbag. Already, half the crew had swarmed up the rigging, and were feverishly extracting the burst bladder while a spare was brought up from the hold, passed hand-to-hand along a line of men.
Alakbir’s edge-cliff vanished, and for a horrible second Jerl feared they might be blown under the earthmote and into Eclipse, but the wind was going the other way, thank goodness. The swirling air shoved the Queen out into the comparative temporary safety of open sky, while Jerl wrestled with the helm as the wind battering his rudder threatened to put the ship into a lethal spin.
“Amir!” he yelled. The navigator lurched across the yawing deck and steadied himself against the wheelhouse. Jerl had to shout over the sound of the wind, the engines and the shouting from topside. “How much sky do we have?”
Amir reeled away, coming dangerously close to tipping over the ship's rail as the deck lurched horribly.
“Eärrrach!” he bellowed.
His meaning was clear. Their current course would see them hit solid land, altogether much sooner than Jerl would have liked. The crew drilled for bag-burst of course, and could hopefully inflate it again in the time it took to fall from one world to the next…but it would be a lot better if they had more time.
“Can we miss it?” he asked. Amir ran across the deck to the opposite side, dropping flat on his back to slide to the other rail as it swayed violently, then raised himself up for a look.
“Hard starboard!” he screamed and raised a hand. The order was heard, and repeated up in the rigging as a desperate cry of “Hang on!!”
Jerl grabbed the wheel with both hands and put all his weight on it, fancying he could feel the rudder creaking against the air pressure. Somehow it held, and after a few seconds Amir dropped his hand. “Forward!”
Jerl rang the bell for one-third forward, hoping that was the right balance between enough forward speed and enough upwards thrust to buy the men in the rigging time. Brass valves were being unscrewed from the old bladder and screwed onto the new as fast as possible, while other men packed the new bladder into place and made sure it wouldn't tangle. They were racing against the clock, but a bad bladder would doom them.
Amir, still at the railing, shook his head despairingly. “We’re going to hit! Full ascend!”
The E.O.T rang in Jerl's hand again, and a second later the engine pontoons returned to full vertical. Derghan and his lads must have been working themselves to the breaking point down there.
Somebody up in the rigging yelled “Fill!” and there was the welcome hiss of gas being siphoned from the Queen's emergency reserves to fill the new bladder, which began to inflate. Men swarmed down the rigging – there was no time to sew the envelope patch into place and they could all see what Jerl could only infer—that Eärrach was now alarmingly close. Now, all they could do was hold on and pray.
The seconds ticked away as the bag filled. Jerl could feel their descent slowing, feel their trajectory start to swing forwards and up, but his back was crawling with the knowledge that any instant now there might be an all-encompassing crunch, and then nothing…
Instead, their descent continued to slow. A wall of rock suddenly loomed up in front of the Queen's nose, but it wasn't an Edge Cliff, but rather the shore of an inland sea. There was a bounce and a hefty splash as the Queen struck the water and skipped off like a pebble: her structure groaned in complaint, but the filling bladder and the thrumming engines had finally won the war against gravity.
Now they had a different problem. Now they were hurtling forward far too fast while rising too slowly. The cliff rushed forward to meet them like a wave of tide-washed stone.
But Amir thrust his hand into his pocket, pulled out a handful of magestones. There was a flash and a crackle as stored energy surged up his arm, he gestured wildly with his free hand and, with a roar of effort, cast a spell. Jerl felt the queen buck violently as a hurricane updraft swirled up and slammed into them from beneath.
It lasted only for a second, but it lifted them just enough.
The cliff face dropped away at the very last instant, and for a moment Jerl’s heart leapt into his throat. They’d survived. They’d fucking survived!
If only fate wasn’t quite done toying with them yet. Hitting the water must have cut the fuel lines: the engines coughed, choked, and fell suddenly silent. Without their aid, the gas bag alone couldn't hold the ship aloft, and so there was a sick moment that made the bottom of Jerl's stomach feel like it had dropped out, followed by a horrible, splintering crash as the Queen’s keel made contact with the ground and disintegrated.
Terrified men clung to the rigging for dear life as the Queen tipped over onto her port side and carved a furrow of churned turf and broken timber behind her that seemed to go on and on. Jerl cringed at every crunch and slam as bits of his ship were torn away but somehow, somehow, the old girl held herself together until at long last she skidded to a halt. Half-rolled over, bag-burst, missing an engine and large parts of her hull…but, somehow, intact.
For several seconds, nobody moved or made a sound. They were all too amazed they had survived. Then somebody issued a delighted yell, which was taken up by the whole crew, only to be replaced by a collective unnerved “woah-OH!” as the gasbag continued to inflate and the whole ship lurched abruptly into its usual upright attitude. Some quick thinkers scrambled to turn off the gas valve before their damaged craft could part ways with the ground.
Jerl patted the wheel. “Thank you, old girl,” he murmured, numbly. “Thank you.”
He let go and wobbled away. Amir was lying flat on the deck with his chest heaving. His left hand was still clutched tight around a fistful of sand and gravel, the shattered wreckage of his magestones. Jerl had never seen anyone draw enough power to do that before.
“You okay?” he asked, dropping down by his friend’s side. Magic was dangerous, an incautious mage who pushed themselves too hard could literally starve themselves to death in seconds.
But Amir was just breathless. He nodded, teetering on the line between panting and manic laughter. “That…wasn't exactly…our finest landing.”
Jerl sat down beside him, rested his head against the wood, and exhaled. His whole body was trembling. “Hey…we'll get to tell people about it. So, it was still good.”
There was a moment of silence. Then, slowly, breathlessly, Amir started to laugh. Jerl couldn’t help it: he joined in.
And it took them a long time to stop.
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Miraculously, they hadn't lost a single soul. Sinikka reported a close call below decks when the ship's untimely touchdown had torn out the wood around her, and one man claimed that he had spent half the descent clinging to the starboard railing after being thrown overboard.
The Queen, alas, had not fared so well. The keel was gone, and several of the other structural beams bore troubling cracks that would need bracing, and that was being charitable. It might just be that the old girl’s back was broken. The port engine had torn off too, and a search party found it a quarter mile behind them, half-buried in its wrecked nacelle. Derghan inspected it with the air of a father checking his child's fever to see if she would live the night.
“Could be worse,” he announced eventually “She’s in one piece, at least. We'll need to scavenge two blades off starboard, bodge together a new distributor, re-run the fuel lines, check the gasket seals…”
“Can she run?” Jerl asked. “At all? Doesn’t have to be perfect.”
“If these weren’t Keeghan engines, we’d be buggered. As it is…” Derghan wobbled his head, then closed the access panel he had been scrutinizing and stood up. “No promises, but I think we’ll be able to limp to the Thundering Hall.”
Jerl exhaled and relaxed, very slightly. “Fuck me upside-down. I thought we were dead ship there, for a minute.”
“The Queen's a tough old lady,” Derghan said, fondly. “Anyway, I'm going to need at least ten men to get this engine back and re-mounted. I'll start diggin’ her out while you fetch ‘em, aye? Oh, and we’ll need to hang a log for keel-ballast, unless you want to spend the whole trip swaying like a bell.”
“I’ll get the lads on it,” Jerl nodded, clapped him on the shoulder and began the walk back.
He was actually quite glad of the five minutes of alone time to collect his thoughts, considering the circumstances, and took the opportunity to light his pipe and think while he walked.
By unspoken agreement they had left the box in Amir's care. He was the one who had the most respect for it, and he was taking the opportunity to study it—carefully—for any new insights. Neither he nor Jerl held out any particular hope of such a scenario, but it would be nice to have some better idea just what it was had brought them so much trouble.
The Oneist connection was what troubled Jerl the most. The so-called Church of the One was only a few years old but its rise was easily the most significant political event since the death of Baroness Taisa Hamlin the Third had ended the Hamlin line and left the Garanhir Baronies, Jerl’s homeland, teetering on the brink of yet another civil war.
Jerl was not an especially religious man. Like most folks from the Baronies he was an eclecticist, collecting whatever scraps of elven animism and Crown-worshiping Aphorist wisdom spoke to him. His spiritual life consisted of a little incense and meditation whenever he remembered, and a whole lot of not really thinking about it.
He certainly didn’t worship the Crowns though. Even if they hadn’t actively discouraged it, there had never really seemed to be much to gain from them. The Summer Prince danced and drunk and feasted and fornicated and that was all he seemed to care for. King Eärrach appeared to merely tolerate things like towns, buildings and airships, and most often it was only the occasional traveler deep in the wilds that even laid eyes on him. Queen Talvi was, appropriately, aloof and cold, and while she did hold court and grant advice and insight to petitioners, her words were usually impenetrably cryptic.
And as for Lady Haust, nobody even had the faintest idea what she looked like. Her name in Feydh was Valkyr, “hidden-face,” and legend had it she preferred to live humbly and anonymously, pretending to be mortal.
No, no matter how powerful they may be, or how intimately they were bound to the Worlds that bore their names, the Crowns simply didn't seem worth praying to. At best, it was a waste of time.
At worst it was a good way to annoy them.
Even these tepid feelings were more charity than Jerl was inclined to give the Oneists at the moment though, given that three of his crew and a number of blameless whores were dead and their cult was somehow involved. He’d read some of their pamphlets out of curiosity, and found…well. Some interesting ideas. Food for thought. He’d even entertained the idea of attending a service and learning more. But now?
Now, he had to wonder what was really going on with them. Suddenly, the street preachers, the little booklets, the temples and the growing congregation all seemed much more sinister.
The thoughts scattered from his mind as the breeze carried, he could have sworn, the sound of an airship’s engines to his ears. Looking upward revealed nothing, though. It was a reasonably clear and dry day, but search though he might, Jerl could not see any dark specks moving across the sky.
Nor, when he listened, could he hear anything. Had he imagined it? He was low on sleep, drained from the adrenaline rush of the fall, and twitchy with the thought of being pursued, so it was possible he’d only heard a paranoid phantom of his imagination…
He uttered the fervent hope to whatever spirits might be listening that it was so, and hauled himself up the ladder onto the Queen's deck. He directed ten of the lads to take rope and a hand-cart and help Derghan, checked in with Sin who was directing the repairs below, then found Amir up on the poop deck.
The navigator was, well, navigating. He had his sextant out and was carefully measuring the angle to various distant landmarks across the sky before comparing them with the Observatory’s almanac.
“Know where we are yet?” Jerl asked him.
“Manaar, one of the lesser earthmotes. About…fifty, sixty miles from Crae Manaan, I think,” Amir replied. His forehead had a number of worried creases in it.
“...Is that a problem?”
“Maybe. Let me show you.” Amir trotted down the stairs and ducked into the quarters behind the wheelhouse, where he had unrolled a map onto the cartographer's table. The corners of the paper were being held down by a pewter tankard, a coin purse, one of Jerl's pistols, and the box. Amir set his notebook down and consulted it as he picked up and employed an assortment of measuring tools, and tacked lengths of string to the map as he worked out the angles.
As he laid down the second string, he hung his head and swore. “Crowns damn it all, sometimes I wish I was wrong.”
The lines crossed, representing their current location, at the edge of a zone marked on the map in red ink. Jerl leaned forward for a better look.
“Gûl Nornacha,” he read. “‘The Cronewood. Beware the nornfey.’ Nornfey?”
“‘Hag elves.’” Amir translated. “Forest elves that King Eärrach punished about eight hundred years ago.”
“Punished how? And for what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Sin could tell you more. All I know is, the cartographers don't put warnings like that on a map unless they're deadly serious. The bad old days of writing ‘here there are Dragon’s childer’ on a boring bit to spice things up are long gone.”
“Out of the frying pan...?”
“I hope not. But I should pass the word to keep weapons to hand. Somehow, I doubt we’re away clean and safe just yet…”
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Jerl eventually found something to occupy his time in the belly of the ship, taking inventory of the cargo and supplies they’d lost when the hold ruptured. It was out of the way as the crew fixed the rigging, sewed the gas envelope and remounted the engine, and he could hear Derghan working in the engine room, whistling as he beat the fuel distributor back into shape. The job could only last so long, however, and so he was treating himself to a well-earned smoke break when he heard footsteps down the stairs and Derghan's distant whistling stopped.
“Sin! To what do I owe the pleasure?” Jerl heard him say.
“Have you got a minute?” If she hadn't been the only woman aboard, Jerl almost wouldn't have recognised Sinikka's voice. He had never heard her sound so…uncertain of herself before. Almost vulnerable.
“For you? I shouldn't say yes, but…” Derghan’s tone changed, from jovial flirtation to open concern. “...Is something wrong?”
“No. No. I just need to…there’s something I want to tell you.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“I’d…rather it didn’t.”
There was a long pause, then a thunk as Derghan pushed some tools aside and sat down on something.
“Okay. Whatever you need to get off your chest, I'll listen.”
“It’s about us.”
Jerl grimaced. There was no real expectation of privacy on a ship, but even so…if he could have slipped away silently in that moment, he would have. This wasn’t a conversation for his ears.
“I thought there wasn’t an ‘us,’” Derghan replied. “You made that pretty clear a while back.”
“You deserve to know why.”
“I’m not stupid, Sin. You’re nearly twelve thousand years old, I’m barely forty. I figure everything I need to know about why is right there. You’re an immortal, I’m a mayfly, you don’t want to put yourself through the pain of outliving me. That about the shape of it?”
Sin sighed. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“Okay…?”
“What I’m saying is…no, that’s not it. We could be together, get old together…it’d work. It’d be a happy memory for the next me, not a sad one, nay?”
“Sounds nice.” There was a slight shift, exactly as of a large man scooting along a bench. “So why don’t we?”
“Chal-an-chal.” Pause. “A life for a life. I’m…we’re paying off a debt. All my selves are, and have been for a long time. It’s a big debt.”
“How big?”
“We’ve barely started.”
Derghan was silent for a second as he absorbed this. “...Okay…” he said slowly. “But why does that stop y—hello? Who’s there?”
Dammit. Jerl squared his shoulders and did his best to pretend his was coming astern from a forward compartment as he picked his way among the hammocks and stuck his head around the engine room door.
“Hey,” he nodded at Derghan, then turned to Sin. “Uh, Amir says we're in hag elf territory, whoever they are. Said you might be able to tell me something about ‘em.”
“The nornfey? Shit.” She nodded and stood, and cast a backwards glance at Derghan. “We’ll…pick this up later,” she suggested.
Derghan glanced at Jerl, then nodded and stood up, picking up his tools. “Aye. I’d like that.”
Sinikka followed Jerl up the stairs.
“How much did you hear?” she asked as they stepped out into the open daylight.
Jerl gave her an apologetic look. “More than I meant to. Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. No such thing as privacy on this tub anyway, nay?” she looked back down the steps. “I’m just worried we don’t have much time.”
“Hey, we’ve got out of some bad spots before. Remember that run in with the Two Sisters pirates?” he tapped his ear, reminding her of the fight that had cost her the pointed tip of her own, in the same knife-stroke that put a nasty scar down her right cheek.
Her hand flew to it, but then she shook her head. “They were the smallest of small fry next to this, Jerl!”
“You worry about the future too much.”
“I’m your quartermaster. That’s my job, nay?”
Jerl stopped by the railing too look overboard. “You want some advice?” he asked.
She blinked at him, then shrugged and gestured as if to say ‘sure.’
“Maybe you need to worry less about the past and future and just try to enjoy the moment.”
“Believe me, Jerl, you’re not the first person to tell me that.”
“So why don’t you?”
“‘Cuz I don’t deserve to. And let’s leave it at that. If there’s nornfey around you need me sharp, not melancholy.” She jerked her head toward the cabin.
Jerl opened his mouth to argue, but one look at her assertively blank expression told him it would be futile. So instead, he sighed and made an inviting ‘after you’ gesture.
Sin nodded and led the way “Too bad he’s not into men,” she commented, a little more lightly. “You could both do with some joy. And you’d make a cute couple.”
Jerl laughed, “Oh, so you do know about that. I’d wondered.”
“Please, Jerl, I’ve known you since you were a lad. Crowns, I’m pretty sure I’m the last woman you ever gave a thoughtful look to.”
“Twenty years ago!” he protested. “When I was a confused and insecure boy!”
“Relax mellwan, I’m just teasing.” She smiled and paused outside the cabin. “Still. You’re one to lecture me on my lack of a romantic life.”
Jerl made a scornful sound in his throat. “I want a heavy coin purse, a pipe of good leaf, a full tankard and a fair wind at our back,” he said, and paused to pat the Cavalier Queen's structure fondly. “Love is at the bottom of my list.”
“Exactly. You have other priorities, and so do I. So you steer your own ship, and leave me to steer mine, nay?”
“...Fair.”
Amir looked up from his books and frowned at them as they swept into the captain's quarters where Jerl sat down at his desk, leaned back in his chair and put his boots up on the desk, lighting his pipe. Sin leaned against the doorframe.
“Did you ever tell your dad?” she asked.
“No. And I don’t think he guessed, either. But I don’t think it would’ve bothered him much.”
“Still. He went to his grave not knowing something important about you. I…for my part, I don’t like leaving business like that unfinished, nay?”
“If only he’d gone to something as restful as a grave…” Jerl sighed, suddenly feeling the full weight of all the hours he’d been awake.
Sin blinked then looked away with a tic of self-irritation. Her fingers unconsciously came up to play with her vamdraech, the suicide dagger that all elves carried over their heart to spare themselves from the one fate that could destroy their soul-line. “Sorry.”
“It’s alright...I do still miss him,” Jerl admitted. “Nine years on and there's a dad-shaped wound in me that’ll never really heal. Jokes I'll never hear again, advice I'll never be able to ask for...and…yeah. Things I was always going to get around to telling him one day.”
Sinikka sat down. “How do you bear knowing that you left that unfinished between you?” she asked.
Jerl shrugged “I try and be present in the here and now. Live and enjoy what I can, while I can. Pay my taxes in pain and grief because that’s just the cost of living, and…don’t fret over what I can’t change or undo.”
“Somebody very dear to me once told me that the only way death can hurt the living is if we waste our lives on mourning,” Amir added.
Jerl gestured agreement and thanks by wagging the stem of his pipe at him. “Quite right. And you have an eternity of lives to waste, Sin. I love you like a big sister, I don't want you do that to yourself. Even if it’s something you’ve been doing for hundreds of lives, you can always stop.”
Though Sin smiled slightly at the ‘I love you,’ she remained silent, and for a moment there was only the ticking of the ship's clock and the sound of the crew hard at work outside. Eventually, she shook her head and stood up.
“Hag elves,” she said. “What do you want to know?”
Jerl glanced at Amir. They traded a shrug, and decided to drop it. They had more immediate concerns anyway.
“Everything,” he said.
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Their city had been Nen Unelmasa—the Dreaming Trees. By human standards, it would barely have qualified as a village, but elves preferred smaller and more close-knit communities. Nen Unelmasa had been woven through the canopy and branches of the Dreaming Trees, and housed a tribe of nearly four hundred on the day of punishment.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
At the time, Sin had been a girl of twelve, enjoying the carefree childhood before an elf came of age and regained their soul-memories. Her tribe had been motekeepers who maintained a caravanserai on one the tiny nomadic islands known as “wandering motes” which, before the invention of airships, had been the only way for travelers to journey between earthmotes.
Even from across the Worlds, they felt it—all the elves did. The emotion that gripped them had been not unlike the feeling of being jilted. Rejection, anger, resentment, emotional pain, shame...they didn't know why, but for just a few seconds they were swept up in a god's rage, which became a cold, horrible resolve and then the sensation passed.
After that great psychic event, The Unelmasa tribe ceased contact. More worrying still, no elves were born whose memories included living in the city at the time of that event or afterwards. In those pre-airship years when travel was so difficult and slow, it took a long time for word to spread and a party to finally be sent to investigate
They never returned. When the investigators were finally reborn, their soul-memories told of elves turned twisted and awful, almost shade-like. They ambushed and cut down the investigators, capturing only one…and even with the cleansing barrier of death and rebirth to dull the experience she was still unwilling to go into detail about what they had done to her previous self.
It was on her advice that the Dreaming Trees and surrounding forest were renamed Gûl Nornacha, and its residents were dubbed the nornfey—hag elves.
“So King Eärrach made them that way?” Amir asked.
Sin shook her head. “No, we’re pretty sure they were the ones who twisted themselves and their city in the first place,” she said. “Though how or why, nobody knows. And exactly what the Huntsman’s punishment was, he’s never deigned to share.”
“Any theories?” Amir asked. Sin shrugged and shook her head.
Jerl poured out some wine for them all. “What about your own research, Amir?”
Amir licked his fingertip thoughtfully so he could turn a page. “Crae Manaan isn’t far from here. The thaighn used to keep a company of rangers watching the woods,” he said. “Apparently during Eclipse the hag elves used to go abroad and raid whatever settlements they could reach. So, people just moved further away, and the ranger watch was disbanded.”
“They went abroad in Eclipse?” Jerl repeated, incredulously.
“Untouched and unmolested by the Shades, apparently. I have no idea how that’s possible.”
“But it’s true,” Sin added, grimly.
“That's...troubling.”
“Highly,” Amir agreed. “And frankly, I doubt they could have failed to notice an airship falling out of the sky and crashing on their doorstep. The sooner we’re ready to fly out of here, the happier I shall be.”
“I'll order a double-strength watch tonight,” Jerl assured him. “When’s the next eclipse in these parts?”
Amir shook his head. “Not until next year.”
“Good.” He stood up. “Thanks. I’ll let you get on with what you were doing.”
Sin nodded and ducked back out of the room. Jerl guessed she wanted to finish her conversation with Derghan. Amir meanwhile set about tidying up his charts and maps. Jerl…
Jerl realized suddenly that he had a quiet moment, and he hadn’t slept properly last night. The smart thing for him to do, most likely, was to turn in early.
Well. Far be it for him to not do the smart thing. He dropped his pistols and saber on the desk, hung his coat on the back of the door, and closed the cabin door, gaining the luxury of privacy and quiet. His bed wasn’t wide, but it was comfortable enough to have him yawning before he’d even taken his boots off.
He rolled onto his side, pulled the blanket over him, and closed his eyes, and tried to let go of his worries, for just a little while.
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As it happened, he slept only a little and uncomfortably. It felt too strange to be sleeping aboard ship without the background noise of the engines to sing him a lullaby, and he couldn’t shake the hunted feeling in the back of his head. He dozed fitfully without ever feeling like he’d actually fallen to sleep, and finally lurched out of bed around midnight to pour himself a stiff whisky and light a magestone. Tired as he was, he didn’t make it particularly strong or bright, but it was enough to examine himself in the mirror by.
Six foot even of lean, weathered and olive-skinned human being gave him an exhausted stare from the other side. Man and reflection raised their drinks, which met with a click of glass on glass, and Jerl noted that he looked fucking rough.
A couple of restless nights would do that. He ran a hand through his hair (dark, thick and getting too long on top) and scratched at his beard stubble (much overdue a shave, but without hot water that wasn’t happening tonight) then decided if he couldn’t sleep he may as well update the log.
For the next twenty minutes or so the only sounds in the cabin were the ticking of the clock, and the scratching of his pen as he recorded the events of the last few days, making careful note of Gebby’s, Tarruk’s and Padrig’s deaths and how much he owed to their next of kin.
Finally, after much writing, he yawned and stretched, job done. As he did so, a floorboard creaked where no foot should have been.
Maybe it was paranoia, maybe it was a lifetime of dodging danger in one deal gone bad or another, or perhaps it was just the fact of the last few days that made him duck, with the result that the garotte only scraped his scalp rather than looping around his neck. He kicked out backwards and felt his foot connect with something which grunted and stumbled away from him.
He grabbed the pistol that had been holding the corner of the map down and turned, only to nearly lose his hand as a sword flashed in the dark and disarmed him. He threw his glass of whisky in his attacker's face instead. This purchased him just enough time to arm himself with the sabres on his desk and ward off a vicious blow.
He was about to shout the alarm when somebody began to ring the bell out on deck. There was shouting and gunfire.
His attacker was an elf, though of a complexion unlike any Jerl had seen before. They had hair as black as a raven's wing, and white skin. Not the matte white of clouds, paper and snow like Sinikka's, but the anemic pale of a corpse drained of blood, upon which were scrawled angular tattoos that seemed to be half art, half language.
It was the eyes that nearly fatally scared the fight out of him, though. He had seen eyes like that before.
It had speed and reach, lifetimes of soul-memory experience, was wearing leather armor and had him on the back foot. He was clad only in his undergarments and was fatigued and faintly drunk.
On pure desperate instinct, therefore, he flung himself forward rather than let the elf attack, swatting at their weapon wrist with his empty left hand as they parried his sword. The result was a stinging gash on his right arm as he slipped inside the enemy's guard, but the gamble paid off. The elf was taken completely off guard, and reeled as he drove his forehead into their nose, which became a river of what should have been blood but instead resembled black ink.
They tried desperately to escape from him and reclaim the advantage, but Jerl was relentless. He drove his empty left hand into the hag elf’s ribs, hard. There was a satisfying crunch and the clatter of a sword being dropped. Then the hag elf returned the favor and delivered a punishing blow to his face that made his vision flash and completely killed his sense of which way was up. He stumbled, hit something solid, and fell.
Nobody that skinny should punch like that...!
It was not a sensible thought to be having at the time, but it was the only one he could muster as the elf stamped on the pommel of their sword, caught it as it leapt in the air like a salmon, and advanced towards him with a murderous grin.
Jerl somehow raised his sabre and warded off the first stroke. The second drove his guard wide, the third disarmed him. Then there was a shot and the elf's head wobbled on its shoulders as one side of their skull became a puff of bone and black blood.
Amir lowered Jerl's smoking pistol.
“Good shot,” Jerl thanked him, shaking his head to clear it.
“I should get out on deck if I were you,” Amir said. “I'll guard the box.”
Jerl nodded. He took the elf's sword, grabbed his second pistol and flung open the door.
Boarding melees were always a mess, but the men of the Cavalier Queen were veterans, and had been armed and ready. Gangs of men were teaming up on individually superior elfish warriors and dragging them down with teamwork. It wasn't all going their way, though: for every spot where Marren and Derghan were fighting back-to-back, or where Sinikka was dueling two of the attackers by herself and winning, there was another warrior had cut through the defenders and was threatening their backs. Jerl could see several of his men were down already.
One of the hag elves saw him emerge from the cabin and charged. They were skilled, but Jerl was stronger, and fought dirtier and more desperately. When the elf darted in to slash at him, he grabbed their wrist, bullied forward, drove the hilt of his sword into their face and then cut their throat while they were still stunned and spitting teeth.
Time stretched as it always did in a melee. A handful of seconds ballooned into a subjective eternity of violence as he saved crewman Vando's life by stabbing an elf from behind, only for Vando to save his own life in turn. They dragged one of Sinikka's opponents off her blade and cut them to ribbons while she turned her full wrath on the other. A third nearly got the drop on all of them, only for a shot to tear out the hag’s throat—they never did find out who fired it.
Then Jerl was spinning in the middle of the deck, looking for a new foe to slay and there were none. Just corpses, bleeding red and black all over the deck...and a splash of red blood on the cabin door’s glass.
“Amir!” he cried, and rushed to the open door just as a bloody hand gripped it at about ankle height, shaking. Amir was trying to heave himself through.
“The box!” he choked, grabbing at Jerl’s hand as Jerl knelt beside him. There was a long knife protruding from his lower back. “They took the...”
He coughed again, collapsed and was still.
There was a long, awful silence.
Sinikka was the first to speak. “Chal fa, mellwan...” she said, wiped her eyes, and spun away to mourn by herself, at the prow.
Jerl could do nothing more than just sit down on the deck and weep. Similar scenes were playing out all over the deck as the crew found their fallen comrades. Marren had his arm around Villo, who was inconsolably cradling his brother's body.
Derghan sank down to sit on the deck against the rail, and dropped his axe. “How many more?” he asked quietly, after a silent moment.
Jerl blinked at him, looked at Amir’s sadly mutilated body, and his strength returned to him in a mad angry rush.
He vaulted up onto the rail and pointed wildly at all the Worlds in general. “Go on then!” he roared, half insane. “Answer the man! How many more?”
There was, unsurprisingly, no response. “How many more?!”
The only answer was his own faint echo, and the sound of trees in the wind.
“Fine! Fuck you!” He hopped off the rail and vanished into his cabin. Shell-shocked crew, none of whom had ever seen him in such a rage, milled around and listened as they heard crashing and smashing from inside. When he emerged, he was wearing not just his coat and boots, but had his gun belt on.
“I'm going after those black-blooded freaks,” he said, thumbing rounds into pistols’ cylinders. Even to his own ears, his voice sounded disturbingly calm after the storm he’d just let out. “I'm going to get the box our mates died for back, I'm going to find out what's in it, I'm going to find out who's after it, and then I'm going to shove it so far up their arse it'll break their teeth out. Marren!”
“Skipper!” Marren was on his feat in an instant.
“Bury the dead, then get my ship running,” Jerl ordered, already climbing down the rope ladder.
Marren nodded, then turned to the crew. “You heard him, lads. Sooner we work, sooner we leave...”
Jerl was nearly to the tree line when Sinikka and Derghan caught up with him. “Not you!” he snapped at Derghan. “I need you on the engines.”
“With all due respect skipper, shove it up your arse,” Derghan said. Jerl stopped and rounded on him, but something in Derghan's expression stopped him. “He was my friend too,” Derghan said, simply.
“We’ll need the ship to get out of this,” Jerl pointed out.
“The engines are ready, Jerl. It’s just the rigging now, and Marren’s got that in hand. They don’t need me, you do.”
“This isn't sensible, what I’m doing,” Jerl told him.
“Shades take sensible!” Derghan snarled. “If that bloody box wants to kill you too, it'll have to go through me first!”
His expression was as set and determined as Sinikka's. Jerl knew his own must not be much different, and there was nothing either of them could have said to talk him out of it, so…
He stared at them for a second, then nodded and turned back toward the woods.
Together, they marched into the dark.
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INTERLUDE: THE AIRSHIP CAVALIER QUEEN
Above the world-sphere of Haust 09.05.14.05.16
It had been the wrong call to fly tonight.
Arneld Holten was not a man prone to bad calls, but now his error of judgment meant the storm he’d thought they would safely outpace had instead swept them up, and only his skills as a pilot were allowing them to surf the atmospheric turbulence the great weather front was pushing ahead of it.
He began to curse himself for not getting those new-fangled “engine” things fitted. With a pair of those they might have been able to descend to the surface of Haust, furl the bag and sails and weather the storm. Now they were flying blind and equally in danger of being struck by lightning or getting caught in a dangerous eddy that would shred the rigging.
Boots thumped on the deck behind him and he glanced over his shoulder at his son as Jerl dropped down off the rigging.
“Port elevator holding, sir!” he reported, voice raised above the wind and eyes narrowed against the rain. Arn knew his son well, though—the boy only called his old man “sir” when things were deadly serious.
“Very good Mister Holten!” he replied. “Talk to the navigator, get me a heading!”
“Aye aye!”
Arn could do little more than squint forward, hoping to catch a glimpse of anything through the clouds ahead. It did him little good. After a few moments there was an “oof!” as Jerl slipped on the wet deck behind him then pulled himself up against the wheelhouse railing.
“No can do, sir! Navigator can't see shit!”
Hardly surprising.. Even the sun and the Roil were invisible behind dense dark walls of clouds, and without those, there was no way to know their current direction. Without being able to see the far side of the worlds, there were no landmarks to calculate their current position. Without either of those, there was no way to know what danger the storm might blow them into next.
“Give me a speed!” he shouted. Jerl rushed away astern to throw a line and count knots. It was make-work to keep the boy from seeing his old man's mounting fear.
Arn was beginning to suspect he'd got them killed.
The storm was definitely gaining, and as it did so a vicious cross-wind almost tore the wheel from his hands. He put his full weight on it, and for a second it held, then he collapsed to the deck as all resistance suddenly left it.
Jerl came sprinting back from aft. “Rudder's broken!” he shouted.
“How bad?” Arn tried the wheel. It turned easily and freely, more so than it would have done on a clear day in open sky.
“Snapped clean off! The wind took it! I—Shit! Look!”
Jerl pointed forward. Arn strained to see, and then ice gripped his heart. The clouds ahead weren't clouds at all. They were cliffs.
There were only two possible fates for an airship storm-swept toward an earthmote’s edge cliffs. If they were very lucky, they would merely be smashed against the rock and killed.
Then he saw that they were too low, and luck had abandoned them.
“Ring the bell!” he cried. Jerl was ahead of the order, diving for the big brass bell that hung on the deck for only one dreadful reason. Its peal was the last noise any airshipman wanted to hear, and across the Queen's deck men froze at its first ring, then sprinted for the companionway, where they could huddle together, light magestone torches and pray to survive the coming darkness.
The ship entered the turbulent zone where the storm winds broke against the great stone cliffs ahead and washed back. Jerl and Arn had lurched only half-way to the cabin when the Queen's prow suddenly dropped, and the deck became a steep slope of wet wood. Both men lost their footing and slid.
Arn felt his leg break as he landed hard and awkwardly in the wheelhouse. Jerl tumbled past him, hit the forward railing, flipped out into open air, and fell.
“Jerl! No!” it was a desperate, forlorn cry, but the boy had more iron in him than his old man, and twisted like a cat as he fell. Somehow snatched at the rigging as he fell past it, and saved himself from the long fall down to Haust by only the narrowest of margins. He waved an arm and shouted, but Arn couldn’t hear him over the maelstrom.
He roared in pain as he hauled himself to his one good foot, and grabbed at the brass levers that controlled the ship's control surfaces. He had to employ a fine touch – too much force and they would go the way of the rudder. Too little, and they would plunge into the darkness under the world with their nose still pointed at the ground.
Jerl swung on the rigging, leaped off and scrambled up the deck, shouting something. Arn could see what he meant now. They had bare seconds to reach illumination and safety. He gave the controls one last wrench, left the ship's navigation to fate, and turned to limp towards safety.
Too slow. Much too slow. His leg gave out beneath him and he crawled, then howled in agony as Jerl picked him up bodily off the deck and started to drag him. But it was too late. Much too late. He could see Sinikka holding the door of the cabin and screaming for them, beckoning with her right hand while the left held the point of her vamdraech so tight to her chest that she was bleeding. But closer still was the wall of blackness they were about to cross.
They weren’t going to make it.
Arn did the only thing he could do now: he braced his foot against the deck, put his hands in the small of Jerl's back, and shoved hard. Caught completely off-guard, the lad tripped forward into Sin's welcoming arms. He screamed and tried to turn back, but the elf wouldn't let him go. Instead she threw the both of them back into the room and kicked the door shut as the Cavalier Queen's inheritor and new captain clawed and fought to be let loose.
Then the dark swept across them, and Jerl and Sinikka were safe in their little cocoon of light. A hundred grasping hands of smoke and darkness tore Arn apart. The last expression on his corporeal face was the smile of knowing that his boy was safe, even as his eyes emptied and his flesh became dust and he blew away on the wind before Jerl's horrified eyes.
His Shade stood there in the rain. Alone of all the ones around it, it had a warm, loving expression rather than a tortured, terrified rictus. A flash of lightning cleared the damned from the deck, and when the darkness returned, Arneld Holten was gone.
Jerl turned his face into Sinikka's arms and wept.
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> “The second law of magic is this: No human may work magic upon their own body, and no elf may work magic upon anything other than their own body. This is the Law of Form.” —The Initiate’s Guide to Magecraft
THE CRONEWOOD
Manaar Earthmote, the world-sphere of Eärrach 09.06.03.06.05
Sin raised a hand above her shoulder and the three of them sank to their knees. There was simply no question of arguing against her self-appointment as scout. She had far more experience than they did, and sharper senses.
After a tense, still moment she gestured ‘come here.’ Jerl and Derghan moved to her side, staying low.
“Trap,” she whispered. Jerl couldn’t see it, but he didn’t doubt her.
“Ambush?” he asked.
“Boar pit. Damn good one, though.”
“First sign of these bastards we’ve seen since leaving the ship,” Derghan muttered, “and it's a bloody pig hole.”
“Hopefully means we’re getting close,” Sin replied as she led them around it. They scrambled up a short cliff of bare earth, using jutting roots for handholds, then paused in astonishment at the top as they laid eyes on the landscape beyond.
Thus far, their pursuit had been through an ordinary forest of healthy deciduous trees, carpeted richly brown in fallen leaves, with only the occasional bush and fallen log to impede them, decorated every so often some mushrooms, and haunted only by the rustling of small animals and the distant sound of a pontificating owl.
Now, it was almost like there was a line on the ground. On their side, a handsome and spacious forest. On the other…the Cronewood.
Trees that should have grown straight and limber were instead as gnarled as gorse and as gray as tombstones, their roots buried in black leaf-litter speckled with rot. Biting insects lurched between the trees from bramble thicket to thorn bush, through spectral shafts of reflected far-light, and the sickly glow of mushrooms.
The transition was so abrupt that when Derghan experimentally laid his foot across it they discovered that he could have his heel in one world, and his toes in another.
The brambles which at first glance appeared as if they might be a welcome source of additional cover turned out to be everywhere, and delighted in snagging on coats, sleeves, and hair. Faced with a choice between rustling like a whole herd of cattle, or a silent but glacial pace, they opted for the latter and their progress slowed dramatically.
It felt like hours. Probably it was only minutes until Sinikka again stopped and raised a hand. This time, she turned her palm flat to the ground and lowered it slowly, and the two men dropped onto their stomachs and wriggled in the disgusting leaf-mold, following her up a bank. As they neared the top, Jerl realized that he could hear a sound.
“Drumming?” he mouthed. Sinikka nodded, pointed firmly to the ground—‘stay here’—and then sprinted for the bole of a tree, making nary a whisper of noise. She glanced around the twisted trunk, and then gestured for them to follow.
There was firelight ahead.
Jerl and Derghan followed her example in ghosting from tree to tree, and Jerl just hoped it didn’t matter that their clumsier footsteps made more noise. It seemed likely: the drumming was already quite loud, and as they got closer it was joined by the shrill voice of some form of instrument, and voices raised in song.
At any other time, in any other place, Jerl would have thought it sounded like a hell of a party. Instead, he felt a chilly knot in his stomach.
His heart jumped up his throat as a vast shadow eclipsed the firelight for an instant, followed by another: figures dancing wildly around the flames. They were getting close now, and rather than blunder straight into the ritual’s heart, Sinikka instead chose to dive down on her belly again and crawl forward through the underbrush, trusting the drumming and singing to drown out any noise they made.
Beside him, Derghan uttered an oath as their quarry came into view. “Haust's blood!” he hissed.
Jerl had heard and seen enough to be expecting a big fire, but the spectacle was greater than he’d anticipated. The bonfire was immense, fueled by whole logs stacked twice as tall as a man. The flames were a tornado, drawing in a wind so strong that the dancing hag elves’ hair whipped and flailed crazily as they gyrated around the blaze, their pallid bodies naked save for bestial death masks of antler, leather, bone and wicker.
All of that, however, paled next to the statues.
There were four; monolithic, taller than the surrounding trees, and clearly intended to be an unflattering mockery of the Crowns. Their faces were twisted into ugly sneers of contempt as they reached one arm toward the center to grasp (or perhaps wrestle over) a stone ring suspended between them, directly above the bonfire.
Jerl had been privileged to see elven fire dances before, but this one was different: this was no joyous celebration of spirit and community, but a conscious and calculated blasphemy. The bitterness and resentment of an entire tribe whipping themselves into a hateful frenzy was almost palpable, like a filthy fog in the air that left him feeling polluted.
He was still staring in appalled awe when Derghan nudged him. “The box!” he hissed, and pointed.
There, on an altar of stone draped in furs, was the box that Amir had died defending. An elf was stood behind the altar, their arms raised towards the flames and mouth moving, though whatever they were chanting was completely lost in the music and animalistic whooping. Their undefended back was turned toward the dark forest.
“Okay, if we circle around to...” Jerl began, and then trailed off as something utterly unexpected stepped into view.
There was a human present, strolling slowly around the outside of the statue circle with his hands tucked comfortably behind his back. He was a tall, older man dressed in a quality embroidered silk shirt, with a pair of exquisitely decorated pistols on his hips, and from a chain around his neck hung the simple steel ring worn by Oneists. He seemed quite calm and casual, almost bored, as though the profane rite in front of him was just a tiresome formality.
His face, however, was instantly familiar. Nobody could fail to recognise those shrewd glittering eyes or that bushy, waxed blond mustache. He was the wealthiest and most infamous man in the Worlds, the owner and president of the Clear Skies Guild, and the mad bastard who’d dug deeper and darker than anyone before.
“What in the fuck is Nils Civorage doing here?” Derghan whispered.
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“I don't get it. The hag elves are Oneists?” Jerl muttered. They had retreated away from the clearing and the immediate threat of discovery, but they kept their voices low and spoke quickly, not knowing how much time they had.
“Seems that way,” Sin agreed. “Did you see the statues? The four Crowns, fighting over a ring?”
Jerl nodded in agreement. “That’s Oneist symbolism alright. The ring represents...everything. All the Worlds and everything in them and everything else besides.” He shrugged when Derghan and Sin frowned at him “I’ve read their pamphlets.”
“You can feel that magic charge in the air, can't you?” Derghan. “Like lightning in m’teeth.”
“Aye.”
“I'll have to take your word for it, nay?” Sinikka said. “So, they're casting a spell.”
“A fuckin’ powerful one, if a muckbrain like me can feel it,” Derghan told her. “I thought elves couldn’t do that?”
“We can’t,” she agreed, casting a grim and worried look back toward the ritual.
“Maybe the nornfey found a loophole and that’s why the Crowns punished them,” Jerl suggested. “There’s a lot going on we don’t understand. All I know is I doubt we’ll like it if they complete that casting.”
“Mm,” Sin grunted and nodded darkly. “So. We get behind the shaman, I slit his throat, we grab the box, and we run like fuck.”
“What about Civorage?” Jerl asked. “I’d bet my last brass he’s the one behind all this. He needs to pay. For Amir and all the lads.”
“That he fuckin’ does, but, Jerl…” Derghan shook his head. “It’ll be a miracle if we make it back to the ship already. We stop to murder that bastard, we won’t stand even that slim chance.”
Sin nodded, agreeing with him. Jerl wrestled with his anger and need for justice for a moment, but…
But if they all died in these woods, it would wasted.
“Fine. Just the box, then.”
Time was against them. The magical energy in the air was by now so intense that it felt like a steady pressure against Jerl's temples. Not painful, but as relentlessly unpleasant and distracting as a blocked sinus. They skirted back around the ritual, flitting between bars of welcoming dark among the great shafts of firelight through the trees until they could see the chanting shaman's turned back only yards away.
Jerl and Derghan took position on either side, rifles at the ready, and Sin went down the center with her fighting knife in hand, low and silent as a shadow.
Ahead of her, the ritual was clearly reaching its climax. High up on the statues’ shoulders, four hag elves had emerged, their bodies and faces painted to grotesquely parody the likenesses of Sayf, Eärrach, Haust and Talvi. They spread their arms wide out at their sides and then, placing their feet in time to the slow pulsing drumbeat, they walked out along the outstretched arms of the statues and into the superheated air above the fire.
“Fuck...are you seein' this?” Derghan asked in a wavering croak. Even from where Jerl was standing the heat was almost intolerable, and the four were utterly naked. Immediately their flesh began to blister and cook, but they showed no sign of pain or fear and continued their steady, slow march without faltering, their expressions ecstatically blank.
Sinikka glanced back at Jerl, clearly shaken by the spectacle herself. Jerl gestured her to hurry. She darted forward, readying her knife to strike.
High on the statues, the four living effigies reached the central ring. They reached out and took each other's hands even as their flesh caught fire. Still in perfect unison and perfect silence, they leaned inward and toppled rather than leapt into the heart of the fire.
Sinikka pounced, and drove her dagger straight into the Shaman's throat. The hag elf died almost instantly, unconscious even before Sin tore her dagger from their neck and stepped over their corpse to grab the box.
Too late: the ritual was complete.
A bolt of lightning flashed up from the depths of the flame, became a glowing nexus of energy in the middle of the stone ring and then lashed out to catch Sinikka full in the chest. It flung her back between Jerl and Derghan with a crack like an earthmote breaking in two: she landed in a crumpled heap, twitching and smoking as the energy squirreled around her body before earthing itself.
They rushed to her side, fearing the worst, but she was already pushing herself up as they reached her, smoke curling from her hair and clothing.
“Fuck….” she growled, and handed Jerl the box. As it landed in his hand, a pattern of green runes lit up just a fingernail clipping's width above the surface of the wood. There were howls of rage from the clearing. Sin glanced back at the ritual circle, then lurched to her feet and took off running. “Go, go!”
Jerl didn’t need telling twice. He stuffed the box into his coat’s inside pocket, put his head down and ran as fast as he knew how, flinging himself through brambles and bushes heedless of the way the thorns tore at his clothing and flesh.
They had a head start, and were out of sight of their pursuers, so they dodged and weaved between the trees, but they were leaving a trail a half-blind city child could have followed, let alone a woods-crafty elf.
Jerl could only trust to Sinikka’s sense of direction, and will himself to keep putting one foot in front of the other. The flight seemed to go on and on, stretching out time in terrible ways as he looked up and realized that the ritual’s climax must have coincided with dawn: daylight had returned, and the Cronewood looked no more inviting for it than it had in the night’s depths.
Less, even. At least in the dark there had been a prayer of hiding.
And Sin was definitely not unharmed. Her gait was neither swift nor sure-footed, and several times, Jerl saw her stumble. But even that didn’t prepare him for the moment she collapsed.
She was laboring to her feet again by the time he reached her, but he could see now what had been hidden before: The shock had left jagged red lines all across her skin, her eyes were bloodshot, and when she wiped her nose while standing she left behind a pink smear on her lip and a matching red one on the back of her hand.
She glared a shut up at him and heaved herself back into a run. Jerl and Derghan caught each others' eye and Jerl saw mirrored in his friend's face the exact same worry that must have been etched into his own.
The worry only deepened when there was a baying from behind them.
“Shit! Dogs,” Derghan swore.
They crossed the sudden boundary between the Cronewood and the healthier trees outside and Jerl's memory leapt. “The boar trap! Sin, where is it?”
She stopped and looked around. “This way!”
“You think...fall into...their own trap?” Derghan asked between ragged breaths.
“They can't all...know where it is...besides...the dogs will...” Jerl panted.
They scrambled down a familiar earthen bank and rushed down an open avenue of trees until, with an agonized grunt, Sinikka leapt. Trusting her judgment, Jerl did the same, landed on mercifully solid ground and kept going, with Derghan following a second later.
Barking behind them was Jerl's prompt to look over his shoulder. Two immense, muscular dogs were bearing down on them at high speed with the stark-eyed, bare-fanged expression of maddened hounds going for the kill. Then a patch of the forest floor folded up under the first dog’s paws and it vanished with a yelp and a sickly crunch that spoke of spikes at the bottom of the pit. The other dog was going too fast to stop and so tried to leap the gap, but misjudged it. Its forepaws scrabbled at the edge of the pit for just a second and then it fell backwards to a similar fate.
Several elves rounded the corner at a dead run, easily moving faster than the exhausted trio. Jerl turned, drew and shot: the lead nornfey collapsed in the middle of drawing back their bowstring.
“Fight!” he roared, desperately.
A throwing knife thrummed past his ear like a startled bird and one of the hag elves collapsed and tumbled through the leaf litter. Despite her wound, Sinikka's throwing arm was still good. A moment later, Derghan’s rifle hammered another archer to the ground in a puff of inky gore.
The survivors closed with reckless disregard for their lives, uncaring of how many fell to Jerl’s pistols and Derghan’s rifle. Then the last two were too close, close enough for the war-dance to begin.
Elves could not normally cast light spells, or heal a wound, or send a thought-message halfway across the worlds. But they had a magic of their own nonetheless: the power to push their bodies to incredible limits. An expert war-adept could run on the surface of water, scale sheer cliffs with nary a handhold, leap over houses and texture their skin to blend with their surroundings.
Or, in this case, they could become a blur of supernatural speed. And if not for many long and grueling training sessions with Sinikka, that would have been Jerl’s end.
The trick was to counter-charge, instantly and madly, at the first flash of unnatural acceleration. Which was why, rather than gut him, the hag elf’s wychwethel instead jammed awkwardly against Jerl’s armor. Now they were close, wrestling, and so long as Jerl could bully the elf with his superior size and mass, he could win.
He smashed the butt of his pistol into his foe’s shoulder with a crunch of breaking bones. The elf lost their grip on the wychwethel, reeled back as Jerl shoved them, and died when he shot them right between the eyes. Black blood spattered his face, but he ignored it, aimed, fired: another archer teetered on their feet and collapsed.
That was his last bullet, though. But thank fuck, the last hag elf was trying to fight Derghan and Sin at once, and didn't stand a chance. They twisted and flowed desperately, evading Derghan’s axe with incredible grace, but Jerl had seen Sin bisect a falling leaf: there was a blur, the wail of a wychwethel’s killing strike, and when the hag elf collapsed to their knees, their head rolled cleanly from their shoulders.
A moment of silent respite. But Jerl could hear whooping and shouting, still far too close for comfort. Panting, he dumped the brass out of his pistols’ cylinders and started thumbing new rounds in while willing his hands not to tremble.
Sin was leaning on her wychwethel, expression tight with pain. “We'll never reach the ship like this.”
“I brought a flare gun,” offered Derghan. “Bring the ship to us.”
“It'll bring the nornfey too,” Sinikka pointed out.
“They'll catch us anyway. At least if the ship comes to us we'll stand a chance.”
Jerl finished reloading, snapped his guns shut, and beckoned for them to keep running. “Do it.”
Derghan took the gun from his belt, aimed it at a gap between the trees, and sent a point of startling red brilliance up to hang over the forest canopy.
“Now we'd better hope they got ‘er fixed,” he said.
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They continued to run, figuring that the further they went the longer it would be before the dark fey caught up with them, and the sooner it would be before they intercepted the ship. Jerl couldn't stop glancing at Sinikka to check on her health. It seemed to him almost as if the pink lines were getting thicker and more numerous, and the thickest of them had creeping cores of blackness, as though her flesh was rotting even as they ran.
She caught him staring, of course.
“Don't say it,” she snarled.
“Sin—”
“Don't say it. Aargh!” She folded up, and her limbs juddered and seized for a few disturbing seconds.
“Sin...” Derghan knelt next to her, anguish creasing his face behind his beard. With a sudden surge of strength she grabbed the back of his head, sat up and whispered something into his ear. Derghan stared at her wide-eyed, asked something that Jerl couldn't hear, received a reply, and finally, reluctantly nodded. Then, completely to Jerl's surprise, she kissed him.
Ridiculous though it was to give them any privacy at this moment, Jerl turned away and listened instead for sounds of pursuit, or the hum of the Cavalier Queen's engines.
He heard both.
“I, ah...hate to interrupt...” he called in a warning tone.
“They're coming. I know.” Sinikka said. She hauled herself to her feet. “Chal fa, mellwanen. Live well.”
“What? No! Sin, come on, the ship's nearly here—”
“And I'm dying. I'm sorry Jerl, I wish I could come with you. But that lightning already killed me, I can feel it.”
“You're going to stay and fight them?” Jerl asked.
“Go.”
“But—!”
“Go! I'd rather die in battle than suffer on the ship. Besides. Chal-an-chal. A life for a life.”
Jerl didn’t know what that meant, but there wasn’t time to ask. The drone of the airship was close, but the howls of pursuit were closer. Behind them, Derghan fired his second flare.
“I want to meet the next you,” Jerl told her.
“Twenty years. At the Winter Bazaar.”
“Do my best.”
“Right.” She hefted her howling-blade. “Love you too, little brother. Farewell.”
The pursuit was right behind the next bush, and rather than wait for it to burst upon them, Sinikka charged in a war-magic blur. The first hag elf to emerge from the undergrowth was dead before they even had time to register the shrieking white thunderbolt that cut them in half.
“Skipper! The ship!” Derghan pointed. The Queen was only feet above the treetops, and he could see men on deck pointing down at them. The long rope ladder was thrown over the edge and hung between the branches. Derghan grabbed it and began to climb, Jerl caught the bottom and hooked his arm around it, signaling with his free hand to be pulled up.
Men began to heave on the ropes and, both its engines roaring, the ship began to ascend. Jerl looked down, and fumbled for a pistol – there was a hag elf aiming a bow at him. They fired before he could get to his weapon, and he twisted desperately on the ladder: the arrow glanced off his armor with enough power to nearly jar his grip loose.
The elf notched a second arrow, aimed at him, drew, Sinikka crashed into them from the side, sending the arrow off-course. Then Jerl's view was obscured as he was dragged through the canopy and they were away. It took only moments for the ladder to be hauled up to the level of the deck and for the crew to help him aboard.
He sat on the deck with an exhausted thump, and then a thought occurred to him and he patted his pockets desperately. Relief escaped him in a rush of air when he found the box still safely on his person. It hadn't all been for nothing.
“We made it,” he gasped. “Holy fuck, we made it…”
Beside him, Derghan sat up with tears soaking his beard, then stood and stumped off toward the engine room.
“No we bloody well didn't,” he grunted, and vanished.
Jerl’s breath caught, and the grief caught up with him. Amir, Sin, so many of his men…
He heaved his leaden limbs into motion, hauled himself up against the railing, and looked down over the Cronewood as the ship climbed and turned. His last sight of it was a patch of ugly dark leaves amidst the forest, then the clouds embraced him, and they were away.
“...See you in the next life, Sin.”
The tears finally came.