CHAPTER 16On the fifth day approaching dawn, the Sullen Harpy was beginning its long, careful descent toward Scientia. Vespa had heard Syrus mutter off and on about how the ship was going to crash horribly throughout the voyage, but when questioned, he would never answer directly as to what he was talking about. He had stopped mentioning it after the xiren had been discovered. Perhaps he felt he’d averted disaster.
But what if the poison had indeed given him the gift of sight, as it was reputed to do?
If such a thing was going to happen, it would have to happen in a hurry, she thought. They were very nearly there.
This dawn she watched the sun spread seeking fingers over the mountains that loomed to the north and east. Far away a white jewel floated on the bosom of a raised hill—Scientia, she guessed.
Bayne came to stand beside her.
“Did you ever think you would see it again?” she asked.
“No. No, I did not.” As ever, it seemed there was so much under the surface of his words that she could barely trace all the emotions there.
She wanted to ask him how it felt. It wasn’t hard for her to imagine. Being in the Museum and seeing the destruction had been difficult, even as she owned that the Museum’s very existence had been founded on dubious principles.
“Are you happy?” She regretted it as soon as she’d said it.
The blue fire of his gaze lashed her before he said, “I don’t know what that means.”
“I wish you did.”
“I do too,” he admitted with a sigh.
She decided to leave that one alone and said instead, pointing toward the distant white walls, “That’s where you grew up, then?”
“Yes,” he said.
The hill was densely packed with tiers of buildings and walls. “Where are we supposed to land?”
He pointed to a spit of land that thrust out into the scarlet waves of the Winedark Sea.
“There.”
Vespa blanched. “Why?” was all she could say.
“Because it would be a long walk to the palace otherwise.” He shrugged. “It can get a bit blustery, but it should be fine.”
She could already feel the sea wind buffeting them as the Sullen Harpy nosed into it.
“Landing one of these is definitely not for the fainthearted,” he said.
“I can see that,” she said.
“Sir, madam,” the purser called to them. “Best go prepare for landing. It can get a bit rough. We should be fully down in an hour at most.”
“Thank you,” Vespa said.
Bayne helped her back up to her cabin and then returned to the one he shared with Syrus. She could already feel the ship bucking and being buffeted by the sea wind. Though she’d wanted to see how by all the false saints they were going to get the ship properly moored, in some ways she would be just as happy not to know.
Vespa wished she had the dream book to study while she waited. She’d left it in the Imperial suite where they spent the evenings trying to understand the cipher, while ignoring the growling of their stomachs. Supplies were so low that only the children had been fed this morning.
She hesitated, but it was an hour of waiting with nothing to do. Might as well go seek out the book Syrus had brought her and see if it yielded any answers. In the latest dream, she’d been in the chamber filled with gold, looking for something she couldn’t find.
Vespa went out into the corridor and, as she turned the corner, the airship tilted, and someone fetched up hard against her.
“Excuse me,” she said.
Then the person looked up, and the golden shadowspider markings shimmered on his forehead.
“Xiren,” she whispered. Another one.
He looked just as surprised as she was. He hesitated, and then there were voices of crewmen coming upstairs. He dashed down the corridor away from her.
Vespa considered trying to stop him with a blast of etheric energy, but she knew how poor her targeting skills still were. Add that to the fact that they were on a ship full of volatile mythgas, and so she shouted instead.
Bayne came out of his room just as she was weaving as best she could toward it.
She told him what she’d seen and which way the xiren had gone.
“All right, then. Get back in your room and lock it tight.”
Part of her wanted to heed his advice, but she just couldn’t.
“Business associates, remember?” She smiled. “I can help you.”
He nodded then, and they stumbled as best they could in the direction she’d indicated.
Vespa realized as she ran that she didn’t really know much about what the xiren were capable of, despite the few things Bayne and Syrus had been able to find out about them. If they could change into spiders, would they be so small that they could easily hide? And if that were true, could the ship literally be crawling with xiren agents?
The thought definitely made her flesh creep.
When they came to the end of the corridor, the xiren was nowhere to be found.
“Which way?” Bayne asked. “We must find it!”
They looked at each other with the same thought. Syrus had told them that the other xiren had wanted the Empress. “Olivia!”
Bayne lunged up the stairs, taking as many at a time as he could. Vespa followed, hating the encumbrance of her skirts and the way it felt as if she might trip over her own pounding heart.
When they entered the solarium, they were relieved to find Syrus and Olivia hunched over the cipher while her maid sat nearby darning a stocking. It was a deceptively tranquil scene of domesticity.
Syrus and Olivia looked up. “I’ve figured it out!” Olivia said. “I know what it says!”
Then she saw Bayne’s face. “Is something wrong?” Olivia asked. “The Captain had told us to prepare for landing. This seemed much the best way.”
“There is another shadowspider aboard,” Bayne said.
Syrus looked at them in alarm. “And you can’t find him?”
Bayne shook his head.
Syrus rose and was rocked back on his heels as the ship plunged against the sea wind. “If I can wake Truffler, he might be able to sniff him out.”
He looked toward Olivia for permission.
“Please,” she said. “If you find him, retain him for questioning.” She said this with a hard set to her mouth that Vespa almost hated to see, even as she knew it was necessary. “We’ll talk about the note when you return. The news it brings is not much better, I fear.”
“Your Majesty.”
All of them bowed, and then they were racing down again to Syrus and Bayne’s room. Syrus woke Truffler with great effort and not a little bribery involving certain things the hob loved—the promise of mushrooms, for example.
“Can you find this xiren for us, Truffler?” Vespa asked when the hob finally crawled out of his blankets. “We would be most grateful to you; you will have done something very important if you can help us catch it.”
Truffler grunted and sniffed the air. Without bothering to even answer, he was out of the door and down the hallway, sniffing and swinging his head this way and that like nothing so much as a dog hot on the trail of a pheasant.
They followed him and were about halfway down the stairs toward the hold when they heard shouting from the control room they’d just passed.
“Syrus,” Bayne said, “go fetch the Empress! I want her closer to the escape gliders, just in case.”
Syrus nodded and hurried back the way they’d come.
Bayne and Vespa hurled themselves back up the stairs and through the control room door. The xiren was fighting the navigator to get control of the ship’s wheel. While there were several officers with sidearms, none of them would fire for obvious reasons. A sidearm was usually a last resort or used to keep pirates from taking the ship from the outside. The navigator gave a good fight, but he was no match for an expert assassin with poison at his disposal. The others, unable to get round the struts and other support instruments, slunk out of the way.
The navigator soon slumped to the deck, and the xiren gripped the wheel, turning the airship so abruptly that it tilted quite dangerously.
Vespa watched, frozen with horror.
Bayne crept toward the xiren. It was too close on the navigation deck for Bayne to use the magical sword Vespa had seen him use in the past, so he attempted to cast a sleeping charm.
The xiren shook it off with ease. Bayne tried something stronger, but it rebounded. Evidently, the xiren were capable of producing shields when the situation warranted it.
The etheric energy bounced around the room, and Vespa prayed it would just go out, against all the Laws of Magic. She thought for a moment her prayers had been answered until she saw smoke pouring out of the control panel, and the smells of melting wire and metal drifted across the cabin. The officers started screaming.
Vespa looked around for any sort of extinguishing equipment, but it was all up closer to the control area, not on the observation part of the deck where she stood.
“Put it out!” she yelled to the people who were still on the control deck. But they were too terrified to act, and getting around Bayne and the struggling xiren wouldn’t have been easy.
Vespa closed her eyes and concentrated. She tried sending dampening power out to the fire. But it seemed to have the opposite effect. Whether it was the presence of the mythgas or something else, the fire, which had previously been smoldering, burst into full flame.
Finally, the xiren must have realized he wasn’t going to get out of the situation. He disengaged from Bayne and stepped back, all the way into the burning control panel.
Vespa watched in horror as he allowed himself to catch fire. She wondered why at first, but then she understood when he vaulted off the control bridge and barreled past her out the door.
“He’s going for the mythgas!” Bayne yelled.
The flaming xiren dove for the wall of one of the ballonets that lifted and lowered the airship. Bayne came after him, only just managing to tackle him before he went through the wall, which breathed over them like the gullet of some giant Unnatural.
While Vespa watched, gripping the railing until she thought her knuckles would crack, the two rolled over and over. The flaming xiren was bent on getting to the ballonet, and Bayne was just as bent on keeping the ship from exploding. They fought on the small landing until the flames were smothered. For good measure Bayne delivered a strong blow to the xiren’s head. He went limp.
“That should hold him for a while,” Bayne said.
Vespa had just sighed in relief when a small explosion rocked the control room.
She and Bayne looked at each other in terror.
“Damn!” Bayne said. “We should go below and secure a glider. We shouldn’t be that far from the ground, but getting everyone there will still be treacherous.”
Truffler had come down the stairs from the upper deck, but he was mesmerized, watching fire blooming from the control room door.
“Come, old man,” Vespa said, climbing up to him and taking his hand. She led him past the unconscious xiren and down the stairs.
The hold was chaos. People screamed and cried as crewmembers tried to herd them away from the oncoming flames. They wrestled one another for access to the little pods of escape gliders that were attached to the bottom of the airship, while the poor Elementals huddled together—the dryads going leafless in terror.
It was the attack on New London all over again. Except this time they were one thousand feet in the air above rock and sea. And there was no one to fight.
Vespa wrestled with her own terror. She didn’t think she’d ever been this afraid in her life, even when it looked as though Charles was going to win. Even when it had been hopeless, she’d kept her head down and tried to solve the problem.
But this time she didn’t have the same surety. She wasn’t certain how to deal with creatures who could blend into the shadows and were so ruthless and single-minded about achieving their agenda. Charles had certainly been ruthless, but she had had the Heart to stop him. She didn’t know how to stop a fire from spreading to the bubble of mythgas over them when she couldn’t rely on her own magic. Without proper control of her magic, she didn’t think she could stop even a sylph.
“Bayne, what can we do?” she shouted. “There aren’t enough gliders for everyone. We must do something else!”
Truffler held Vespa’s hand, but he was moaning in utter terror.
Bayne cast about, searching the smoke-choked hold for anything that might be of use. “There’s likely to be a big explosion soon; we’re minutes away from it. We just need something—a sail, a canvas—that can catch the wind and float us free of the blast, like the other xiren evidently used to escape. We’ll use magic to keep it steady, like a flying carpet in the forbidden tales.”
“That doesn’t sound all that promising!” Vespa said, looking around. She didn’t really see anything that might be of use.
“Staying here doesn’t look so promising either!” Bayne yelled.
“Let’s ask the Elementals—maybe they can help!”
She dragged Truffler over just as another explosion rocked the ship and more rescue gliders detached from the underbelly of the cargo hold.
Vespa raced over to the huddled Forest Elementals. The fauns stared at her with sullen eyes, and the dryads were nearly naked, having shivered off all their leaves in the smoke.
“We’re trying to find a way to get us all safely to ground. Will you lend us your magic so that we can all do so?” Vespa asked.
They all looked at her without saying anything. Truffler said a few strong-sounding words that she didn’t understand.
“Vespa!” Bayne cried.
She heard the detonation of the mythgas just as a great jet of green flame burst through one of the ballonet walls. In front of it ran Syrus hand in hand with Olivia and Piskel buzzing around them in mad terror. Olivia’s maid was a few paces behind them, and Vespa watched helplessly as she was swallowed in gouts of mythfire.
There was no more time to think or plan. Vespa enclosed everyone nearby in a giant protective shield. Luckily, this time it worked.
Bayne was nearest her, and she took his hand. She could only force out three words: “I need you.”
To keep a protective shield of such size viable in a cauldron of fire, especially after not having done such work in a long while, nearly drained Vespa dry. Then she felt Bayne.
He was there in her mind again as he had been long ago in that golden country where sylphs had floated around them. Everything danced in a whirl of mythfire, golden leaves, bits of burning things following them on their journey through the sky above Scientia. Vespa was dimly aware of the wounded airship limping away from the City before the final blast sent the remains careening down into the scarlet waves. The escape gliders circled, some crashing into the sea, some into the walls, some very few landing on the strip before Scientia’s gates. The magic pressure eased as a griffin and a young dragon who had been escorting the airship took the sphere and nudged it between them toward safe ground. She felt the Elementals within lending their strength too, holding them up, keeping the shield impermeable to the flames.
Bayne was looking at her in that way he’d said he never would again on the road to Ximu’s lair.
Bayne, Vespa said, deep within the country of their magic. Does this mean . . .
His eyes were blue, so blue and full of things that she knew if only she could just find the key, she could unlock all he wanted to say. She knew also in that moment that she could compel him to tell her, but she knew the price of that.
What is it? Vespa asked.
He looked down at their joined hands. The green and gold fire swirled around them in patterns she could barely track.
I swore, Bayne said at last, looking up. The pain there, the absolute regret, nearly stopped Vespa’s heart.
And then everything unraveled around them. For a moment Vespa thought they were still falling through the air, until she realized that they were actually safe on the ground. The dragon and griffin stood near them, and the other Elementals huddled between them, still slightly stunned and likely sick from giving over so much magic. Syrus and Olivia were nearby, and Vespa saw their fingers slide apart while they both blushed and pretended not to look at each other.
Here and there, people were climbing from the few battered gliders. Guards and other crewmen raced across the cracked red earth toward them.
Vespa turned to Bayne. “You swore what?” she said. Her throat burned as if she’d swallowed the ship’s fire.
She was exhausted, so exhausted that her very bones vibrated with it. She took a trembling step toward him, not sure he’d heard her. “What did you swear, Bayne?”
But he would not look at her, nor would he answer. He turned away and faced the burning dawn.