The platform wasn’t like the one they had tested on. It projected from the upper spire of the workshop’s tallest tower, a thick balcony extended with buttressed planks, whipped by frigid wind beneath rushing clouds the colour of burning copper. Thin strips of pallid blue peeked between the trundling formations, while a simmering burnished band grew at the rugged north-eastern horizon. Chel squeezed between boxes on tired legs, never more conscious of the absence of any sort of railing on the projection from the tower-top, trying to keep up with the little Nort steaming ahead.
‘This is … very, very high.’
The former chief artificer had been waiting for them, and was now hunched over the now-familiar boxy construction of silk and thin wood, working at cords like sinew. Beside her, sand-backed crates stood stacked, their lids loosened, and the artificer was attaching something small and dark from within to the kite’s structure.
Rennic and Lemon lingered at the platform’s edge, where the wind-shield, here recognizable as the stalled sails of a windmill, deflected the worst of the wind’s stinging caprice. His load passed on, Foss took a step, felt the platform creak beneath him, and retreated.
‘If it’s all the same, friends, maybe I’ll watch from downstairs …’
Their surroundings remained gloomy, despite the expansion of the glow at the horizon. The camp on the plateau was cast in deep indigo, shaded by cloud and mountains. Lines of torches twinkled along rows of what Chel presumed to be tents. It was unnerving to be able to see it so clearly from the tower-top.
‘How far can the kite travel?’
Kosh looked up. Her gaze passed right through him, stopping somewhere out over the plains. ‘As long as the wind holds, the tethers will hit their reels at a thousand strides.’
‘A thousand strides? You’re sure?’
She shrugged, a muscle beneath one eye twitching irregularly. ‘The weight of the tethers will affect the lift, of course, but they are light, and they are strong. An abundance of silk has many advantages.’
‘Wait, tethers plural? Does the kite need more than one?’
She smiled, loose, deranged, and stepped to one side.
‘Two kites? But …’
‘The munitions we have prepared are small but dense, and each affixing will increase the mass of the endeavour. Our preparations have been rushed and are likely to have incurred a significant failure rate where ignition is concerned, meaning a greater number of munitions may be required for any given target. Beyond a certain threshold, however, it would be simply unsafe to load the vessel any further, given both risk of collapse and accidental detonation.’
‘Aye, that’s reassuring,’ Lemon muttered.
‘Thus, in order to cover sufficient ground given our timescales, two vessels became a necessity. Each can operate independently, dividing the plateau in half.’
Chel stared at the second kite. It looked identical to the first. ‘If there’s another kite, we’re going to need another pilot, yes? Will you be joining me?’
‘The risks are far too great,’ Kosh said, unblinking. ‘It would be an act of terrific stupidity to risk my abilities and expertise on such a thing.’
‘Whereas I, of course,’ Chel said, ‘am inherently disposable.’
He frowned when she said nothing to contradict him. ‘Then who’s coming up with the disposable Andriz? Your friend there?’ He gestured at the former chief artificer, who ignored him.
‘Don’t worry, wee bear, you were born lucky, remember? You’ll be right as rain.’
‘The second pilot needs to be both small enough and light enough to operate the mechanisms without upsetting the flight model, and possessed of enough strength to steer against the volatility of the wind. That rules out my companion, as it does the mercenary, and the large man retreating downstairs.’
Foss was indeed heading for the tower door. He paused, mid-step, a look of shamed apology on his face.
Lemon looked at Rennic. Rennic looked at Lemon. ‘When she says “mercenary”, does she mean—’
‘Me,’ Rennic said.
‘But that—’
Chel split an enormous grin. ‘Oh, my Lemon. You are going to love this.’
***
‘This is against nature’s laws! The Clyde is an earthbound creature!’
‘Be quiet, savage, you are wasting time. Once dawn breaks the camp will begin to disperse.’
‘I’m gonna freeze in that fucken wind!’
‘You should count yourself lucky, you’d be naked for reasons of weight control were it not for the risks of exposure.’
Both kites were aloft, held up by Rennic and a very uncomfortable Foss, while Chel and Lemon were strapped beneath. Kosh and the artificer gave them their final instructions.
‘The payload is delivered via the string bundle – yank each to release a cluster. You will find lift – and therefore range – easier to come by, the more you drop, but ensure you retain enough munitions for the most distant targets.’
Chel stared into the indigo of the silent plateau, its lines of torches still winking in the predawn light. ‘I don’t want to hit anyone, just the engines and their ammunition. How will we see what we’re aiming at? It’s still darkness down there.’
‘Look for where their torches and watchfires are not. They will not want to keep naked flames close to their black powder dumps.’
Kosh signalled the artificer, and she retired to the lever that released the wind-shield. Chel could already feel himself being lifted by the fierce wind that flowed over and past it.
‘One more thing,’ the Nort said as she checked the final coupling. ‘Keep to your separate sides. If the tethers become tangled, you may pull each other out of the sky.’ She leaned in close, immune to Lemon’s screeched protestations beyond. ‘I have to say, Andriz, I am envious of your position, to be able to soar like a bird over this ugly mass, to leave it all behind. But, of course, the risks to me are too great.’ She patted his arm. ‘I hope you are as lucky as they say.’
Chel didn’t even see her signal. The wind-shield dropped, and the full force of the elements blasted over the platform. Before he could speak, the kite snapped tall and out of Rennic’s hands, and then with a lurch Chel followed, his feet lifted from the ground, the handles stubborn and heaving in his hands. From the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of silk and orange and knew that Lemon was away, clear of the platform and screaming with him into the dawn. The tethers spooled behind them, worked by the engineers, kept taut like fishing line, their bulwark against a sudden disappearance into the brightening sky.
Hands on the handles, thick bunches of thin cords wrapped around them, Chel soared. The city fell away beneath his feet, the domes and towers strange and receding from his vantage overhead. Now he could see the terrible damage of the bombardments, the charred craters, the smashed stone, some areas still smouldering, sending belches of dark smoke up into the sky beside them.
Still the wind tore at them, urging them forward, only the tethers and their wrestling of the handles maintaining the serenity of their ascent. On either side of him, dangling from the upper structure, the dark clusters jingled and sang, rattling on the currents of their climb. They were smooth, oblong things, their noses pointed and flimsy, their tops ringed with spiralled silk. Each looked bigger than Chel’s fist, and reeked of menace.
To his right, he saw Lemon rock and swirl in her kite, fighting to keep it level as the wind yanked them onward and upward. He leaned on his handle, pulling closer, although not so close as to risk tangling the tethers.
‘You all right?’ He had to scream to make himself heard over the wind.
‘Aye, wee bear, just fucken peachy!’
‘Can you control it?’
‘If you can control your fucken self!’
The walls flashed below, then the gorge was beneath them, hundreds of strides over the smashed ruin of the bridge and the spindly aqueduct beneath. It seemed utterly black, a chasm of pure darkness. Then the wind tugged at them, and the misty lip of the plateau rolled beneath their dangling feet.
‘Ready?’
‘Fuck off!’
‘Here we go!’
Chel leaned into the handles, and looked for where the fires weren’t.
***
Shapes flashed beneath, dim blurs, pale against the dark of the plateau. Chel tried to steer his kite along a line of torches that marked a road through the camp, fighting against the wind’s own opinions, starting to lose the feeling in his fingers and ears. The clustered weapons dangling from the construction’s wings above his head jingled constantly over the creak and rustle of the kite’s structure, and he began to worry about them knocking together and immolating him in mid-air. Just out of his vision to the right, Lemon was a fluttering white oblong, rising and falling on the waves of air, and no doubt still screaming.
The first rays of dawn had lit the limpid eastern sky, and suddenly he could see, the fuzzy blurs of the plateau taking shape, rows of tents and larger structures, rolling wagons, milling fighters. The camp was already alive. All it would take was for one of them to look up and notice their drifting forms, hundreds of strides above, and things would take an unwelcome turn.
The bundled cords pulled at his numb fingers, anxious to be released. Already his arms ached, his back aflame despite the chill of the wind’s embrace. Needless to say, his shoulder was throbbing, a surly and neglected pulse beneath the rest of his aggravations. The sheer joy of flying in the morning sky had paled as the physical efforts took their toll. A voice at the back of his mind started to whisper that he’d made a dreadful mistake.
‘Fuck this,’ he muttered, fixing his eyes on a largish structure, inherited by the church forces from the refugees who’d formerly occupied the plateau, well clear of any sources of flame. If I’m going to freeze and fall to my death, I might as well make the place interesting before I go.
He realized he had no idea how to aim. Calculations formed in his head, the speed he was travelling, his height and rate of climb, the speed of the wind, the likely arc of the falling munitions. He had absolutely no idea what to do with any of it. He yanked the kite straight, straining and sweating from the effort of fighting the wind, and lined up on the building. The sun was in no danger of cresting the mountains any time soon, but already the plateau was distinctly clearer. Guessing at how far a cluster might travel, he squinted, and pulled one of the cords.
His finger didn’t move, frozen stiff. After a moment, he bent forward, gripped the cord with his teeth, and yanked. The kite lurched immediately sideways as one of the bundles loosed, falling away in the corner of his eye as the cord whipped through the little metal rings along the kite’s structure. A moment later, it was gone and falling, a shrinking blob of dark metal. Chel dragged the kite back on track as the cluster fell away, fighting the kite’s listing inclination now it was unevenly weighted. The bundle fell far straighter than he’d expected, each of the oblongs separating, spinning as they fell, nose-down and picking up speed. He could already tell they would drop short, their paths almost direct, far less than the arc he’d imagined. Half in correction, half to make the kite easier to steer, he counted to three then loosed a second bundle, this time from the other side of the kite.
The first cluster hit, one at a time, along a row of tents that preceded his target. The first did nothing, whumping into a canvas structure and disappearing from view, but the second ignited on impact, spraying fire outwards in a fierce orange halo. The ring of flame caught the others, and suddenly a fireball was ripping through the tents, blasting outward and upward in a crescendo of explosions. Chel felt the kite buck as the shockwave travelled upward through the air, followed by a wash of pleasantly warm air over his frigid skin. Shouts and cries spread through the camp, lit orange as the flames took hold.
Off to Chel’s right, another flare billowed, this time in the midst of a row of wagons. Lemon had scored a direct hit. He could make out her kite, somewhere over the oily smoke and roaring flame, a small, pale box in the violet sky.
His second volley hit. The earth before the building ripped upward, then the door blasted inward and the roof exploded. For a moment, it looked like that was it, then a massive blast tore the structure apart, flattening the camp around it and sending a torrent of flame and smoke into the air. This time, the shockwave knocked Chel sideways, sending the kite swirling on the roiling air, making him battle to stay upright, let alone on course. Sweating and cursing, he fought back against the battering, fists tight around the remaining cords, mindful of their aggravated clattering above his head. Any moment, one would come free, knock another – or his head – and that would be it. Any moment.
The battering subsided, the kite levelled. Off to his right, another explosion ripped the dawn air, setting one of the mobile bell-towers aflame.
Chel found that he was laughing.
***
Chel soared over the churning plateau, rising higher as he dropped one cluster after another. He’d taken to releasing them in pairs, one either side, and had refined his aim with practice. The weight of the tether dragged him and the kite backward and down, even as the wind howled them onward and upward. He’d long ago ceased to feel the cold, the ache in his arms and legs, the loss of sensation in his extremities. He was one with the kite, always ranging, always climbing, the figures milling in panic below now little more than smears against the paling earth. The mountain walls loomed large in his vision, but he was closing on his target: the area at the plateau’s mouth, where workers toiled on their engines, where the church’s pet alchemists must mix and load their murderous compounds. He had four cords left beneath his numb fingers, and he intended to make them count.
To his right, gouts of flame rolled over the distant earth, searing a clump of low buildings. Lemon was keeping up her own contributions. Bells rang out, dolorous, urgent, useless.
Something floated up into his vision, slowing, turning, tumbling away. An arrow, fired from somewhere beneath. His smile broadened.
‘Nice fucken try, pal,’ he said to himself, in an imitation of Lemon’s accent. The confessors had spotted them, at least, but it would do them little good now. As long as the wind held and the tethers kept spooling, it was only a matter of time before those great engines burned.
***
He was closing in on his target when Chel saw Lemon’s kite buck in the air. It jerked as if struck, coming up short, sending the last of its munitions groundward as if in spasmic shock. Before the clusters had even hit, the kite began to veer, strung against its rigid tether, unable to climb, unable to progress over the plateau. With increasing speed, Lemon’s kite began to swing inward, toward the plateau’s centre. Toward Chel’s own tethered path.
‘Fuck,’ he said, blind to the flurry of detonations below the advancing kite. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ Lemon had run out of tether and had lost all forward momentum. She might be able to hover where she was, but she needed to be reeled in immediately, or either the wind would drop or it would drive her into Chel’s own umbilical and down them both.
The kite was veering closer. He imagined he could already hear her abusive screams. He looked down at his own tether, still firmly fixed, but the length of cord remaining on the spool, back on the platform, was a terrifying unknown. He was still a long way short of the line of engines, creeping closer but not fast enough. What if his own tether ran out, and he remained stranded, a sitting duck for the archers below as he floated downward.
Fifty strides to the engines. He had to reach them. Lemon was coming closer; was she steering toward him deliberately? Why weren’t those on the platform reeling her back in?
Without prelude, the wind fell away. The rush in Chel’s ears faded to nothing, and he felt suddenly weightless as his steady rise tailed off, the protesting whispers and creaks of the kite his only companions. The rush returned, not from the wind, but because he was dropping, picking up speed.
But still moving forward.
Forty yards to the engines, a hundred strides below. Chel’s mind worked at triple speed, but he knew he was guessing. Hoping. In his periphery, Lemon’s kite was dropping fast.
But it could work. Only one thing would blow it. As fast as he could move his frigid hands, he bunched the remaining cords together in one fist, then dug for his knife.
***
Thirty strides and falling. Chel gripped tight to the swooping kite, the air now rushing against his chilled and battered face, hands locked by icy willpower. Untethered, the kite was almost beyond his control now, but there was no danger of stopping short. Chel was riding his momentum all the way to the plateau’s end.
Twenty strides, and the figures beneath were growing fast. With them came the engines, their scale only now becoming clear. The machines were huge, their wheels as tall as a man, great black sheets of iron bolted to their extremities, their tender workings within. He had to reach those workings.
Ten strides, and he’d been seen. He could hear the shouts, the panicked cries, as his vision streamed and blurred in the teeth of the rushing air.
Five strides, and he forced the bundled cords from his grip. With a whispering swish the clusters were gone, and he yanked back hard on the kite’s handle, trying to arrest his dive. The little bundles of oblongs fell away faster than he did, the kite’s descent slowing momentarily as the huge engine beneath him began to fill the world. He was still moving forward, still dropping, but no longer plunging.
Something whiffled past his ear, and the side of his head felt suddenly hot. Above him, something tore a rent through the fabric of the kite’s wing, and he felt it give to one side. He had dropped within crossbow range. Another missile followed the first, ripping through the upper tier, splintering wood. Chel felt one side of the handle go slack.
Behind and beneath him, the last of his clusters crunched against the massive body of the siege engine. He felt, rather than heard, the whoomph of ignition, then the cries that echoed around him took on a different pitch. He saw the growing light from behind him reflected by the barren flanks of the mountains in front, then it all happened at once. A blast of heat hit him at the same time as a head-splitting wall of sound and force, and the kite bucked and swirled, this time with enough force to throw him up and over. Tangled in his strapping, he could only watch as explosions ripped through the line of engines, each setting its flames upon the next, even as their panicking operators tried to haul them away before they went. As the blasts lit the plateau, they abandoned their task, fleeing for safety as flaming debris tore through the air. A chunk of something hit the kite, smashing through its upper tier, and Chel saw the desolate ground approaching with gathering speed.
The kite hit first, its impact softened by a combination of the wind’s return and the sudden impromptu thermals generated by the blazing engines. Even smashed and ruined, Chel could still force enough lift from the whirling construction to give himself the chance to cut free. As it collapsed, smouldering, into the hillside, Chel bounced into the scrub, feeling every thump of its prickly embrace as he rolled, arms over his head and screaming.
It took him several minutes in the infernal, smog-choked aftermath to become certain that he was still alive. At least the feeling had begun to return to his fingers, albeit in an entirely unwelcome way. His entire body felt grated, knees and knuckles skinned, and sticky blood crept hot over one ear. His damaged shoulder lurked beneath it all, simmering, vengeful.
Chel looked out over the plateau. Through black and billowing smoke, he could just make out the city perched over the slit of the gorge in the shimmering haze of the fires of the burning engines, all the way across the other side of the plateau. Lemon’s kite was vanished from the sky, her whereabouts unknown. The entire church army stood between him and safety.
‘Well,’ Chel said, wiping at the blood on his brow. ‘Shit.’
***
Shoulder pulsing and knees raw, Chel stumbled down the crumbling slope, toward the roaring flames of his wake. Engines were aflame, their huge blackened frames crackling, and still the occasional fiery pop signalled the detonation of something alchemical within. The heat was intense, even from a distance, but any of the church forces who’d survived the devastation had long since fled. Somewhere behind him the downed kite smouldered among the scrub, and Chel wanted to get as far away from it as he could before someone came looking.
Something moved, something huge, and Chel realized that one of the half-finished engines was rolling free. It moved slowly, as if pushed by an invisible hand, trundling forward even as it belched fire and roiling smoke into the morning sky. Chel followed it, moving in its wake, one battered arm held before his face to stave the burning embers blown clear. A plan was forming, half-baked: perhaps he could follow the burning engine all the way to the bridge as it cleared a path?
He heard shouts, horses, coming from one side. Limping as fast as he could, he scuttled around the far side of the giant, burning wagon, keeping its blazing bulk between him and the oncoming riders. He found himself beside one of its huge wheels, its outsize spokes revolving with almost comical slowness as the engine rumbled on. He looked up at the thick iron rims, scorched and peeling, rolling around higher than his own head, and had a sharp and sudden memory.
A wagon, huge, black, forbidden, wheels the size of the moon, towering over him and stinking of death. Pale skin in the moonlight, a hand dangling free of the wagon’s rail, flaccid, lifeless. Then away, dwindling into the shameful night, Chel’s screams drowned by his mother’s arms, holding him back, blocking his sight and sound. Denied one last sight of his father.
He was screaming now, hoarse and cracked, collapsed in the dust of the plateau. The engine rolled on without him, coming to a gentle stop before its axles cracked and it fell in upon itself in a burst of flame. The chance for escape was gone, he was lost and alone on the burning plateau, an army between him and any hope of safety. Arms wrapped around his head, he screamed again into the dust, his frantic hands gripping his skull as if it were the only way to hold it on.
Hooves sounded beside his head, solid thumps through the insulation of his arms pressed over his ears. His breathing slowed. This was it.
A voice came from somewhere above, muffled through his charred sleeves.
‘Aye, fuck, bear, there you are! Hurry up and get aboard, will you?’