CHAPTER EIGHT

 

It made sense, Emilie thought as they hurried through the forest. Miss Marlende and the professor must have decided to wait where they were and build a signal fire. On reflection, Emilie could see it was the most sensible course of action and that she and Efrain should have done it as well. But Miss Marlende must have looked for one from them, not seen it, and decided to do one of her own so they didn’t miss each other while running around through the woods and up and down hills. Maybe Dr Marlende and Lord Engal and Mikel and Cobbier had found them as well. With everyone putting their heads together, and Hyacinth’s device for showing the aether currents, they could find a way out of here.

That was what she was telling herself, anyway.

The slopes and bluffs allowed them views where they could spot the signal again and keep to the right direction. “It’s getting thinner,” Efrain pointed out after they had walked about an hour and were only one hill away.

Emilie shaded her eyes to look. The smoke column did look wispier. “Maybe it’s just the angle we’re at, or the wind.”

“Or they need to get more wood,” Efrain added practically, and they moved on again.

As they came down through the thick trees on the last part of the hill, Emilie tried hard to hear voices ahead. She supposed Miss Marlende and the professor could just be sitting around quietly resting, but it must mean the others hadn’t found them. She couldn’t imagine Lord Engal being in this situation and not talking about it.

She could think of a dozen reasons for it to be quiet, but it still filled her with dread. Something’s wrong.

They emerged from the trees above a clearing, studded with a few white boulders. Emilie saw the camp immediately. A spot among the boulders had been cleared roughly of grass, and a fire had been built. A heap of sticks had been piled nearby, ready to feed it, but the fire had almost burned out. There was no sign of anyone.

Emilie’s throat went tight. She hurried down the last slope and among the boulders, Efrain and Hyacinth following. The area around the dying fire showed no signs of a struggle or fight. The grass that hadn’t been pulled up to keep the fire from spreading was flattened a bit, as if two people had walked or sat on it. Then she saw a pack leaning against the base of one of the boulders, its white canvas blending into the gray-white stone. She ran over and snatched it up.

Efrain said, “Where are they?” He flung his arms out. “They aren’t here! It’s not fair; we thought they were here!”

Emilie, sitting on her heels to look through the pack, paused to stare at him incredulously. Efrain sniffed and rubbed his nose, and admitted miserably, “That didn’t sound so whiny inside my head.”

“I don’t know where they are,” Emilie said under her breath. In the top of the pack, she found the professor’s notebook. Everything else seemed as it should be. Her water bottle was still there, the packets of food, and a collection of items that were probably for magic, such as little bottles of minerals. There were also some instruments that might be for navigation or drawing that Emilie couldn’t identify. One she recognized from descriptions in the Lord Rohiro books and from glimpsing one on Dr Marlende’s work room bench. It was a combination clock and aether-compass, with a pocketwatch face on one side and the other a miniature aether-navigator with a tiny bit of aether in a glass bubble, floating a compass needle atop it.

She stood up and looked around again, then walked around the perimeter of the camp. Miss Marlende’s pack wasn’t here. “If they left on their own, they wouldn’t have left the professor’s pack here.”

Efrain looked around uneasily. “If they left on their own. You mean someone made them leave?”

Emilie couldn’t think of any other reason they would build a signal fire to draw them here and then go away, especially without the professor’s things. If Dr Marlende or any of the other men had found them and required help urgently, they could have torn a page out of the notebook and left a message to that effect. She realized she was pacing in a tight circle and made herself stop. “Someone else found them before we did. Someone made them run away or took them away.”

“What someone?” Efrain rubbed his eyes again, clearly fighting back tears. Hyacinth waved its arm blossoms in agitation. There was no telling if it understood just what had happened, but it clearly knew something was wrong. Efrain continued, “What do we do? How do we find them now?”

Emilie drew breath to snap at him, then let it out. Efrain might pretend to be a mature young man around Uncle Yeric, but he was a year younger than she was and he had never been through anything like this before. Standing there, she became aware of how much her feet ached from walking on sliding rocks, how dry her throat was. She should be hungry, but she just felt queasy. It had been a long time since either of them had slept, and the unchanging light of the aether had kept them from noticing. They would have dropped from exhaustion if they hadn’t been so afraid. None of that was going to help her find the others.

She said, “We need to rest first. Sit down and have some water and some food.”

“But…” Efrain hesitated. He scrubbed his fingers through his hair. “All right.”

Efrain sat down and opened his pack. Hyacinth settled next to him. Emilie sat across from them and thought about building up the fire again. No, if anyone we actually want to find could see it, they would be here by now. And more smoke might draw the attention of whoever had come after Miss Marlende and Professor Abindon.

Efrain took a drink from his water bottle and pulled out a wax-paper-wrapped sandwich packet. He handed a second one to Hyacinth. As Efrain ate, Hyacinth picked the sandwich apart with the delicate tips of its blossoms, examined it carefully, then handed it back. Efrain wrapped it up again and put it away. “I guess it does eat sun, like a plant.”

Emilie got her own bottle and food out and made herself drink and eat. It settled her stomach, and after a while, each bite seemed to make it a little easier to think. She needed to figure out how to find the others. She wished Rani was here. Rani had always known what to do and would surely know how to track people through this grass and dirt.

Emilie frowned as she finished off the last crust of her sandwich. Hunters in books were always looking for faint traces invisible to the naked eye. Maybe it wasn’t that complicated. Maybe she should just look and see if she could find anything and not write it off as a lost cause just because she wasn’t an expert hunter like Tagaff, the midshipman from Atalera in the Lord Rohiro books.

She tucked the wax paper back into her pack and got to her feet. “Stay here and rest. I’m going to look around.”

Efrain, drooping over his pack, started to struggle upright. “I’ll go with you!”

“No, I’m just going to be right around here. I’m looking for tracks and evidence. I don’t want you to step on it.” Emilie wasn’t sure what it was but she was pretty certain Efrain would step on it if given the opportunity, especially as tired as he was now.

Efrain sank back down and yawned. Emilie started to circle around the various boulders that surrounded the camp, carefully examining the grass and dirt between them. Hyacinth followed her, watching what she was doing with interest. The first time around, she didn’t see anything, then she turned back and did it again, circling out a little wider. Coming at the camp from the opposite direction, this time she saw a gouge in a patch of dirt between two clumps of grass. Emilie sat on her heels and considered it. Hyacinth crouched beside her. The mark looked too sharp and defined to have been made by an animal. Not that they had seen or heard any hint of animals, birds, or insects here. “I think this was made by someone’s heel,” she told Hyacinth.

It touched the gouge with a tentative blossom.

Emilie started to search the ground in a straight line out from the heel mark, heading toward the forest. Hyacinth had realized what she was looking for now, and lowered itself to within a foot or so of the ground, flowing gently back and forth over the grass, hardly disturbing it. It had gotten a bit ahead of Emilie, and she saw when it stopped abruptly and stood up again, waving its arms at her. She hurried forward.

They were about halfway to the trees on the far side of the clearing from where they had entered it. In an area of patchy grass and dirt, there was a blurred outline of a boot print. Emilie put her own foot beside it for comparison. It was two or three times the size of hers, too big to be a woman, even a tall woman like Professor Abindon.

Emilie’s heart started to pound. Up until this moment, she hadn’t really believed in the mysterious strangers who had made Miss Marlende and the professor leave their camp. She had theorized their existence, but there had been a lot of theorizing by her and everyone else since they had first seen the aether-sailer, and they didn’t know the truth of any of it. But here was proof.

It cut straight through the fog of exhaustion. “We have to get out of here,” she told Hyacinth. She shoved to her feet and strode back toward the camp to shake Efrain awake. Whoever had done this might come back.

 

Emilie made them walk several hundred yards into the forest, until she found a sheltered spot where they could rest. It was a little hollow shielded by another boulder, and Efrain folded up in it and went to sleep immediately. Emilie sat down beside him. She meant to stay awake and just rest her feet, but she woke abruptly, still half sitting up, her face propped on the professor’s pack. She sat up, groggy, rubbing her eyes. Efrain was still curled against the rock, snoring a little. A small pile of white vines was heaped nearby; after a moment, she realized it was how Hyacinth looked when it was asleep.

She squinted up at the tree canopy overhead. The light hadn’t changed at all. Or she had slept through a whole day… She dragged the pack open and got the portable aether-compass out. The clock on it showed that only a few hours had passed. She let her breath out in relief and shook Efrain’s foot.

He groaned. Hyacinth flinched, then popped upright, waving its arms wildly. “It’s all right,” Emilie told it. “You fell asleep.”

The blossoms’ wild motion slowed, and it sank down again and drooped. Emilie wondered what had happened to it, if the other flower people crew members were trapped here somewhere, too. If they were, surely it would be looking for them, not following us around. It was acting as if it was stuck and staying with them was its only option.

She wondered how long it had been trapped alone on the aether-sailer.

Efrain was sitting up and scrubbing his hands through his hair. Emilie told him, “Come on; we need to go.”

“Go where?” Efrain said, still groggy. “We don’t know how to find them.”

“We know they went in this direction.” Emilie stood, shouldering the professor’s pack along with her own. She had marked the direction on the aether-compass before they had left the clearing. Without a smoke beacon to follow, keeping to a straight course through the forest would have been difficult. At least this way they knew they were heading in the same direction that Miss Marlende and the professor had been taken away in, and not just going in circles.

After a few minutes of trudging after her, Efrain said, “Who could have taken them? If this place has been just put together from chunks of other places that got picked up in the aether currents like we think, there wouldn’t be any people still alive here. They would have run out of food and water pretty quickly. Unless a whole lake got taken with them.”

It showed the sleep had made Efrain’s brain start working again. That was a relief. “Unless they were taken recently, like we were.”

Efrain frowned down at his boots. “But you don’t think they’re friendly, because they didn’t let Miss Marlende leave us a note, and the professor left her pack behind.”

Emilie nodded. To give them both something else to think about, she said, “Maybe they’re pirates.” Pirate adventure stories had been Efrain’s favorite when he was younger. Emilie had thought that if there were really that many pirates, there wouldn’t be any shipping at all, since the stories implied hundreds more ships than the Menaen navy had ever needed. But then she remembered how much Efrain had changed in the past year. She didn’t even know if he still read those stories.

But Efrain said, with relish, “Or ghosts.”

“Ghost pirates,” Emilie suggested. Impulsively, she smiled at Efrain, and he smiled back. Hyacinth waved its blossoms at them, as if it felt it should participate but had no idea how.

Then Emilie blinked and looked back at the compass. It had been a long time since she and Efrain had smiled at each other.

Efrain seemed to realize it, too. He shifted his pack uncomfortably and didn’t say anything else.

They had only walked about half an hour according to the compass’ clock when Emilie started to glimpse something gray between the trees ahead. At first, she thought it was mist or a haze; as they drew closer, she realized she was looking at a cliff. She groaned under her breath. The ground had been relatively even through this part of the forest so far. She had climbed and slid down all the steep stony slopes she ever wanted to in this place.

But when they emerged from the trees it was clear this wasn’t just another rock formation. The cliff was only about twenty feet tall, but it was dark gray streaked with a glittering blue, with broken shards of blue crystal sticking out of it. The grassy ground of the forest floor came right up to it with no rocks or stones or anything, and some of the trees were uprooted and leaning against it. It looked like two different places.

“Oh,” Emilie said aloud. “Because it is two different places.”

Efrain nodded. “This part came from somewhere else, and it just got mushed together with the forest.” He looked up and down the cliff, though the trees crowding it made it hard to see very far. “They must have climbed it. We need to find where they went up.”

Emilie thought they must have climbed it, too. With the trees crowding so close, there just wasn’t much room along it, and the base of a cliff seemed an odd place to pick for a camp, anyway. And along the top, they might be able to find more tracks. She went to one of the uprooted trees that leaned against the cliff. “Let’s try to get up this way. It’ll be easier to see where they went from up top.”

She stepped on top of the trunk and awkwardly crab-crawled up the steep angle. The wood slipped under her feet, and the branches were all at the top. Then Hyacinth flowed past her, using all its limbs to rapidly scale the side of the trunk. Then it paused and extended an arm toward Emilie.

They could have it carry the rope up for them, but this was faster. Emilie stretched and grabbed the blossom-covered arm, and it hauled her easily up the trunk as if she weighed nothing. She let go when she reached the branches and could pull herself up and scramble onto the cliff top. Hyacinth made sure she didn’t fall and then went back for Efrain.

Emilie picked twigs and leaves out of her hair, looking around. The top of the cliff was rocky and flat, with blue crystal slabs sticking up from the mottled gray rock, and little veins of crystal between them, glittering like streams of water. It stretched out for a few hundred yards to a forest of light green ferny foliage, clearly completely different from the forest they had just crossed through. Rising up from the forest, perhaps no more than a mile or so away, was a great lumpy hill all of gray rock, hundreds of feet tall, almost big enough to be a small mountain. It was studded with pockets of foliage that must mark various clearings and folds that might lead into little valleys. It seemed to have been here for some time, because she could see streaky white grooves that might have been waterfalls at some point but were now dry.

Then a glint of metal caught her eye and Emilie stared. That can’t be right. She dropped the professor’s pack and hastily dug through it.

Efrain and Hyacinth stepped up beside her as she pulled the little telescope out. She straightened up and peered through it at the gleam of metal on the side of the stone slope, adjusting the lenses to bring it into focus. No, that’s what it is. Sticking out from the side of the hill, as if it had landed on a ledge concealed by the fold of rock, was the metal frame of an airship’s balloon.

Emilie wouldn’t have recognized it if she hadn’t seen the ruined skeleton of Lord Ivers’ airship, after Dr Marlende had burned it. It might be something else that just happened to look like an airship frame, but whatever it was, that was clearly the place they needed to go.

“What is it?” Efrain demanded.

“I think it’s a wrecked airship,” Emilie told him. A blossom arm snaked the telescope out of her hand before Efrain could grab it. Hyacinth jammed the end of the telescope somewhere into the region of what Emilie thought its lower chest was. It had it pointed at the airship frame, so Emilie assumed that was actually where its eyes were. Or at least some of its eyes.

“But how…” Efrain began. “It’s not our airship, is it?”

“No. No, it isn’t.” If it was a Menaen airship, there was only one that it could be. “Come on.” Emilie shouldered the professor’s pack again, tucking the telescope back under the flap as Hyacinth handed it back to her. “They might see us. We need to hurry.”

 

Emilie didn’t breathe easy until they reached the trees. They weren’t very tall, but she and Efrain were both short enough to walk under the ferny foliage without crouching down. It also provided some welcome shade, since she was sweating from the run across the crystal shard fields.

She wasn’t certain how they were going to get up the hill until they got to the base of it. From there, they could see the folds in the rock had formed natural ramps and pathways, much easier to climb than the steep, smooth slopes of stone. The hard part was trying to find a way up that would allow them to spy on the spot with the airship frame without walking directly up on it. After some fumbling on Emilie’s part and some bad advice on Efrain’s, Hyacinth took the lead, climbing rapidly ahead of them, then returning to show them the way it had found.

After a long scrambling climb with skinned knees and bruised knuckles, Hyacinth returned from one of its scouting forays and crouched in front of Emilie. It waved its blossoms and then gently touched her face.

“You want us to be quiet,” she whispered. She glanced back to make certain Efrain had heard, too.

It waved its blossoms again, but seemed satisfied and turned away, moving slowly so they could keep up with it.

It led them up a winding, narrow channel that might have been part of a watercourse at one time, now choked with dark green-gray weeds. They came to a spot where the side of the channel opened into a little cliff. Hyacinth stopped and pointed down. Emilie leaned past it to look and saw another dry water channel below this one, running parallel to it for a short stretch. But this one was carved into wide steps, the weeds cleared away.

Efrain squeezed in to look over her shoulder. They exchanged a grim look. We’re almost there, Emilie thought.

Hyacinth led them around a bulgy curve of rock, and then up the side and out of the channel onto a ridge. Looming above it, Emilie could see the top of the airship frame. Moving slowly and carefully, they flattened their bodies against the rock and climbed to the top of the ridge to look over.

Below was a steep-sided well in the side of the hill, which at one time might have been formed by water. It now held the cabin of an airship, still partially attached to the giant skeletal balloon frame and leaning at an angle. It was a large two-story cabin like the one on their airship, but it was battered and crushed along the bottom and had clearly been in a crash landing, perhaps even dragged over the stone of the hill. Shelters had been built into the side of the cliff with walls of piled rock, and roofs made of slender wooden poles, and there were also a rock fire pit and a square box made of slabs of stone that might be an oven.

And there were people. Menaen people, at least ten of them, dressed in ragged clothing, two carrying rifles… Efrain gripped Emilie’s wrist and drew in a sharp breath. She stretched to look and spotted them: sitting in a small group near the airship cabin were not only Miss Marlende and Professor Abindon, but Dr Marlende, Lord Engal, Cobbier, and Mikel.

They were sitting on the dusty ground, facing two strange people, a man and a woman, who were speaking earnestly to them. Emilie could see Lord Engal’s stiff posture, and the professor’s frown, and knew these weren’t friends.

She edged back, drawing Efrain with her, and Hyacinth followed them. Back in the shelter of the channel, keeping her voice to a bare whisper, she said, “We have to rescue them.”

“How do we know they’re captured?” Efrain asked. “Those are Menaens. They must be explorers who were trapped here, too.”

She shook her head. “Then why did Miss Marlende and the professor not leave us a note? Or say, ‘No, we can’t go yet; we have to wait for our friends Emilie and Efrain, who are here somewhere, too’? Why didn’t the professor take her pack? The ones who came for them didn’t see it where it was lying against the rock, and she left without it, so we could find it and know something was wrong.”

Efrain frowned. “But…”

“Lord Ivers and his men were explorers and Menaens and they almost killed us. The other Menaen explorers were the most dangerous people we met in the Hollow World. Without them, it wouldn’t have been nearly so bad.” She sat back. “Those people have to be the Deverrin expedition. They were lost last year sometime. Miss Marlende knew them. But why are they holding our people prisoner?” Could they think Dr Marlende was trying to steal their work? That didn’t make any sense, but it was the sort of nonsensical idea that explorers seemed to tend to.

Efrain didn’t look convinced. “Are you sure?”

“They have rifles.”

Efrain’s stubborn expression turned troubled. “Miss Marlende and some of the others had pistols…”

It didn’t change the point. “We had pistols because people like Lord Ivers keep coming after us. But the Deverrins are supposed to be friends of the Marlendes. Their brother, Mr Anton Deverrin, asked Miss Marlende to look for them.”

Efrain said, “Maybe someone was after them, like Lord Ivers was after Lord Engal, and they’re suspicious of everyone now.”

Emilie still rather resented it when Efrain said something smart, but there was no denying he had a point. “Maybe. But why would they think it was the Marlendes?”

Efrain lifted his brows. “Because it was?”

Emilie felt her cheeks flush, mostly with rage. Her first impulse was to punch Efrain in the face, or to tell him to take it back, or preferably both. But that was childish and she didn’t have time for it. “I need a plan. And I need to know more before I can make one.”

Ignoring Efrain’s “But what…” she climbed back up the rock to the vantage point for another look at the camp.

The young woman and the man had moved away from the Marlendes and were talking with the others now. The Marlende group was sitting where they had been before, still watched by the two men with rifles, talking quietly together.

She realized the Deverrin party wasn’t guarding their camp like people who expected intruders. There were no lookouts posted, no one watching the approaches to the hill. The elementary sort of thing one learned from playing play-fort as a child, or at least that was where Emilie had learned it. All their attention was on their prisoners, as if they were the only source of danger.

Maybe they were. Maybe the Deverrins had never seen any other people here, and thought the Marlende party was the only threat. If the situation was as tense as it looked, the Marlendes certainly wouldn’t have mentioned the fact that there were a couple of their party still missing.

Emilie needed to get closer to where the Marlendes were being held and maybe try to signal them if she could.

She climbed back down to where Hyacinth and Efrain were waiting. “I’m going around to the other side. There’s a fold of rock there I can use to get down near the airship. From there, I should be able to hear what they’re saying.”

Efrain glared at her. “You’ll get caught!”

“Quiet!” Emilie glared back. “I won’t get caught. I’ve done this sort of thing before.”

Hyacinth stirred uneasily, its blossoms pointed toward them like it was disturbed by their behavior and trying to understand what was wrong.

“Emilie…”

“Just be quiet and stay here!”

Efrain started to get up. “If you’re going to do this stupid thing, I’ll come with you.”

Emilie jaw hurt from gritting her teeth. “Stupid? All right, Efrain, you’re in charge. What do we do next? How are we going to free my friends? How are we going to get back to the airship? Hurry, before the aether current destroys it or snatches up Daniel and Seth and we’re stuck here until we die.”

Efrain stared at her, frustrated. “I don’t know.”

“Then sit here and be quiet.” Emilie hurried away, moving quickly and quietly on the stone. She didn’t look back.

 

It took Emilie a little time to get around to the airship and climb down that fold of rock. It was a good deal narrower than the one on the other side that Hyacinth had led them to, and it wasn’t nearly as good cover. She had to wriggle on her belly through the last section until she could finally hear voices.

Lord Engal was saying, “Believe me, my dear, we all understand your concern. We’ve just come back from an expedition where we were harassed unmercifully and nearly killed by Lord Ivers of the Philosophers’ Society. But I fail to see why you believe that we are a danger to you.”

At least she had been right about that. The Deverrin expedition was suspicious and frightened. But surely we can work that out, Emilie thought. Suspicion was one thing but everyone would want to work together to get out of here before the aether current ripped this place apart or decided to drop a mountain on top of them.

The young woman’s voice said, “My father will explain. I have no intention of being fooled by your false concern–”

“False concern?” Miss Marlende burst out. “I wish I’d never heard of any of you! You’re all as mad as mercury-sniffers.”

Dr Marlende broke in. “Miss Deverrin, you’ve been gone a year. If we had anything to do with it, why would we wait so long to come after you?”

“And why in the world would I participate in it?” Professor Abindon asked. “You, or at least your father, must know our history.”

Emilie was hoping she would elaborate, but Miss Deverrin said, “Perhaps you were duped.”

Her voice acid, the professor said, “Young lady, no one ‘dupes’ me.”

Someone called out and Emilie flinched, but Miss Deverrin said, “My father has returned.” It should have sounded overblown and self-important, but there was a faint quaver in her voice.

It gave Emilie pause. Maybe it did the others too, as no one said anything as Dr Deverrin’s footsteps sounded lightly on the packed dirt. The silence was so tense that when a mild voice tinged with a Menaen country accent spoke, Emilie flinched. He said, “Well, this is quite a surprise. But I suppose you meant to come after us eventually.”

Lord Engal said, “Deverrin, are you seriously suggesting that you believe we somehow sabotaged your expedition? Everyone believed your ship had broken up over the sea. No one had any notion that you were alive and trapped.”

“This is exactly what I expected you to say, of course.”

Professor Abindon said, “How exactly was this accomplished, by the way? I assure you, if Engal or Marlende could force an aether current to do their bidding, they would find better things to do with it than to attack the expedition of an inferior scholar.”

Lord Engal sighed. Miss Marlende said, “Perhaps not the best point to raise, at the moment, Mother.”

Dr Deverrin said, “And what say you, Dr Marlende? You’re being uncharacteristically quiet on this subject.”

Dr Marlende said, thoughtfully, “I say that you’re not Dr Deverrin.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Or at least it was stunned on Emilie’s part. She frowned, baffled by what Dr Marlende might mean. That Dr Deverrin wasn’t behaving like himself? He couldn’t mean that that actually wasn’t Dr Deverrin! Some of these other people were members of the Deverrin family, and they were all known to the Marlende party. It didn’t make sense.

Dr Marlende continued. “I don’t know what you are. I find this a very curious circumstance, and not something I have ever encountered before. You have Deverrin’s face, and his body. But you do not have more than the most rudimentary elements of his mind.”

Someone made a choking noise, almost a sob. Emilie was certain it was Miss Deverrin. After that, the silence stretched again. Emilie’s skin prickled all over and her throat went dry. If someone accused me of not being me, I’d throw a fit. Or something. I wouldn’t just stand there. But Deverrin was just standing there.

Dr Marlende said, “And now you’re trying to exercise some sort of influence over my mind. Very odd. It might have worked, if I hadn’t already seen through your deception.”

Finally, Dr Deverrin said, “I see you’ve gone mad. Perhaps that’s why you attacked us.”

As if he hadn’t spoken, Dr Marlende said, “You see, Dr Deverrin and I were very close, intimate friends when we were young men. We went to university together. We learned philosophy and magic together. We performed spells in tandem. I can’t describe to you, whatever you are, how deep an aetheric bond that can form between individuals. Particularly individuals who already share a great deal of sympathetic connections. We were not as close after university, as he was called on to marry and continue the Deverrin line, which we both knew would eventually happen. So the bonds of that time may no longer be as immediate, but they still exist. I would know if Alaine Deverrin was standing in front of me. And he is not.”

“I see,” Dr Deverrin said, his tone unchanged. “It’s a rather ridiculous accusation, and there isn’t much I can say to it, is there? I assume you hope the rest of your party still on your airship will be able to carry out your plot against us?”

There was a moment’s pause. Dr Marlende said, “How did you know there are still crew on our airship? None of us mentioned it.”

Dr Deverrin just said, “Come away; this is pointless.”

Miss Deverrin said, “Yes, Father.”

Their footsteps crunched away across the dirt and gravel.

Lord Engal spoke first, “That wasn’t some sort of ruse? You really believe that isn’t Deverrin?”

“I wish it was a ruse,” Dr Marlende’s voice was grim. “I have no idea how this could have happened. It must be something that… attached itself to him after his airship entered the aether current.”

“There’s never been any hint of the possibility of something like this in all the years of study of the sea aether currents,” the professor said.

“But there has,” Miss Marlende said. “There have been instances of crewmen being driven mad by the sea aether currents.”

Lord Engal said, “Yes, but some of those men were recovered alive and examined carefully by physicians and aetheric sorcerers. Surely some evidence of this, whatever this is, would have been found.”

“I believe this is something native to the air currents,” Dr Marlende said. “And I think this creature knew about the crew left behind on our airship because it has some contact or connection with the aether-sailer. From the way Miss Deverrin spoke, he leaves the camp frequently, but she seems to have no idea why.”

A ghost pirate. Emilie would have to tell Efrain that they had been right.

Miss Marlende said, “That’s frightening. If he… it… does something to Daniel and Seth or damages the airship–”

The professor said, “Perhaps it, or something like it, is why the aether-sailer was abandoned. If we could speak to that member of the crew we encountered, so many questions might be answered.”

Yes, if we could speak to it, Emilie thought in frustration. She wondered how she was going to get all this information across to Hyacinth. It clearly understood their broad attempts to communicate things like “we’re going this way”, “we’re searching for others”, and “those people might hurt us”. But she didn’t think she had much chance of explaining this, and even if she somehow managed to, she had no chance of understanding its replies.

And if she couldn’t get close enough to speak to Miss Marlende and the others, she had to at least let them know she was here so they could form a plan. She was going to have to try to let them see her without letting anyone else see her.

She crawled along the ridge, heading for the airship frame. It took her what felt like forever to reach it, moving slowly and carefully, the rock scraping her knees and elbows. She squirmed around folds of rock, wriggled between narrow boulders. At the point where the rusted frame hung over her, she began to wonder if she hadn’t made a terrible decision. Or another terrible decision. The folds of rock were covered with gravel and stone chips, and it was like climbing over broken glass. And she had to creep along very slowly to keep from making noise. She knew she should just turn around and go back, but she had come too far and wasted too much time to stop now.

Finally she got to a spot where she could crane her neck and see through a gap between two girders in the frame. She could see the little group of prisoners sitting in front of the airship’s wrecked cabin. Some of the Deverrin crew sat nearby, gathered around a small campfire, their weapons in evidence, but the others were over by the stone shelters. Their attention was still on guarding their prisoners, not on anything or anyone who might come at them over the rocky ridge surrounding their camp.

Miss Marlende was seated with her legs folded and facing this way, though she wasn’t looking up toward Emilie’s position high in the ridge above the cabin. Emilie chewed on her lower lip, then decided to take a chance.

She pushed herself up slowly and cautiously, keeping an eye on the nearest Deverrins, the group sitting around the fire. Miss Marlende still wasn’t looking up. As Emilie drew her feet under her, she felt something shift under her heel. Gravel rattled, slid through a gap in the rocks and clattered down on the metal frame.

Emilie ducked and froze, cursing herself. The sinking sensation of having made a terrible mistake made her stomach want to turn. She wished she had listened to that feeling earlier. Someone yelled, “Up there!” and she heard footsteps crunch on the rock and gravel below.

Cursing herself again, Emilie scrambled further along the fold of rock, moving as fast and as quietly as she could. She came to a dead end, where she couldn’t go any further without climbing up the side of the rock and letting the whole camp see her. But it wasn’t as if they didn’t already know she was here. She gritted her teeth and started to stand, just hoping they didn’t shoot her.

Then someone called out, “There he is!”

Emilie stopped. He? The footsteps all sounded as if they were running away from her now. Oh, he didn’t! A shot went off and Emilie flinched. It echoed against the stone and her skin went cold.

But a few moments later, she heard Efrain’s voice, though she couldn’t distinguish the words. She scrambled quietly back down the fold to where she could get a view of the camp. Efrain was alive, being conducted down the stairs cut into the wall by one of the men. It must have been a warning shot. She leaned against the rock, dizzy with relief. The idiot must have deliberately shown himself, to distract from Emilie’s blunder. What did he think he was doing? Maybe he hadn’t thought anything; maybe he just hadn’t wanted her to be caught. At least Hyacinth hadn’t followed suit. If the Deverrins were this suspicious of the Marlendes, there was no telling how they would react to a flower person.

The man had Efrain by the arm and pulled him off the steps and into the center of the camp. Several of the Deverrins still stood guard over the Marlendes, their guns at ready, but most of them gathered around Efrain. Efrain looked at them all with the wide-eyed innocence that had been so infuriating when he had used it on Uncle Yeric while tattling on Emilie. He sniffed and rubbed at his nose, making himself look even younger than he already did.

Dr Deverrin strode forward. Emilie watched him nervously. This would have been anxious enough if it was just a somewhat paranoid Dr Deverrin in there, but if it was really some sort of aether-being…

Deverrin stared down at Efrain, who sniffed again, blissfully oblivious to the fact that he was facing something strange. Deverrin said, “There was another one, another young person. Where is she?”

Emilie froze. How did he know that? One of the others must have said something, but it was hard to imagine them being so foolish.

Efrain stared, then said, “She’s dead. We… I think the aether current dropped her too close to a cliff, and she fell, and she’s dead!” He choked and sobbed, scrubbing at his eyes to cover up the fact that he wasn’t tearing up. It was a tactic of his that she remembered well from the times when Efrain had claimed she had done something terrible to him. At last it was coming in handy.

Miss Deverrin put a hand to her mouth and the others shifted uncomfortably, looked to Dr Deverrin or at each other. “There was nothing that could be done,” Dr Deverrin said. Which there wasn’t, even if it had really happened, but one usually expressed sympathy first before one got around to the “oh, well, it was bound to happen” stage. At least in Emilie’s experience.

Lord Engal swore and turned to the others, and Emilie saw Mikel and Cobbier exchange a worried look. Dr Marlende squeezed Miss Marlende’s arm, both of them watching Efrain carefully. The professor turned her face away, shielding it from the guards, and said something quietly. They don’t believe it, Emilie thought. She just hoped Dr Deverrin did.