Prince Maesa, page 17
‘An additional half share to the first one to bring a gheist down!’ Thringsson bellowed. The promise urged his crew on remarkably.
‘Just get it here to my axe,’ growled Stonbrak. ‘All this faffing about with harpoons!’
Maesa counted seven of the great bats. They split as they approached, seeking to surround the Kharadron vessel. Thringsson’s crew was only fourteen in total, but every one was heavily armed according to his own tastes, a selection of pistols of differing designs supplemented by swords, gaffes and other blades, all humming with the power of the duardin’s strange alchemical sciences. One of Thringsson’s officers opened up a locker and passed out long guns to the four not working the ship’s heavier weaponry. He whistled shrilly, and gestured at Stonbrak.
‘Oi! Khazbokigrin!’ he shouted. ‘Want a gun?’
Maesa knew a little of duardin speech, but he didn’t recognise the word. Stonbrak, however, bristled.
‘Why I ought to…’ he growled.
‘What?’ said Maesa.
‘He called me “little mining stone foot”. It’s their idea of an insult.’
The Kharadron Overlord approached and held out the weapon. ‘Pull the trigger here,’ he said, in outrageously accented common speech. ‘Point the–’
‘I know how to fire a gun!’ said Stonbrak, and snatched it from the officer.
‘Not one like this, mud clumper,’ said the officer. ‘And you, fancy elgi, do you want one? Minimal charge, I’ll cut you a fine deal. But I’ll bet knowing your sort you’ll want to keep to your sticks.’ He said this in an altogether insolent way.
‘My bow will suffice,’ said Maesa.
‘Aye, well, make it count,’ said the officer, and returned to his duties.
Flecki Grimsdottir’s Pride lurched upward as energy poured into the aether-endrins. Brilliant light glowed from the portholes set into the spheres containing the mechanisms. For a few minutes the ship had the better of its pursuers. They did not fall back, but neither did they gain upon the vessel. The Argent Gate’s silvery shine grew in the sky.
‘Come on!’ Thringsson shouted. ‘Come on, lads, bring her up. Full power!’
The boat’s bell clanged. The aether-endrins hummed. Slowly, they pulled ahead.
Were it not for a quirk of fate, the Flecki Grimsdottir’s Pride would have outpaced its pursuers, but Maesa felt the wind change, switching capriciously from abeam the boat to astern. The great bats’ ragged wings bellied like sails. Sped on, they came shrieking at the ship.
The sky harpoon flung out its missile again, this time catching one of the Terrorgheists in the wing and ripping away the leathery membrane. The beast fell out of the fight in an uncontrollable spin, fluttering to the plain far below.
‘Aha!’ cried Thringsson. ‘Nothing stops a duardin packet ship!’
‘Take that! And that!’ shouted Stonbrak. ‘Ha ha!’ he cried triumphantly, as aether-bullets from his borrowed weapon drove one of the Terrorgheists back. ‘See that, princeling? I’ll down it yet! I’ll have it properly dead, so swear I, Idenkor Stonbrak!’
Maesa followed another of the beasts with keen aelven vision. When it was close enough, he drew his bow, tracking the passage of the creature below the boat, and loosed the arrow. For a moment it appeared that it would miss, arcing away from the beast, and Stonbrak snorted, but the Terrorgheist moved over currents in the air, pitching up at the exact moment required for the arrow to punch through its left eye into its rotten brain, ending its unnatural half-life. It fell like a wet rag through the sky.
‘Thou wert saying?’ said Shattercap slyly. The duardin muttered something foul-tempered under his breath and fired his own weapon at the foe.
Aethermatic weapons cracked and popped all around the sky-ship, driving back the creatures from its sides. One gheist chanced the endrins, but the crew were quick to defend this most important and vulnerable part of their craft. Stonbrak joined them, and this time he had cause to shout with glee, as his shot punched a big hole in the creature’s side, causing it to scream and flap clumsily off.
The ship was close to its goal. The gate was a shimmering curtain the colour of moonlit rain that screened out the sky.
Stonbrak grinned. ‘Yes, by Grungni and by Grimnir! See the genius of the duardin at work, aelf! We’re home free!’
‘I think not,’ said Maesa.
The Terrorgheists were not done. As the gate filled their view from top to bottom, a beast mightier than the others landed on the prow. The ship dipped. The duardin crew opened fire on it at once, but it clambered on board, smashing aside the foregun with a head as huge as a cart. A duardin was sent flailing over the side by a flicked wing, his safety line paying rapidly out and snapping taut.
The magical gate that led from one realm to another was within a spear’s cast of the boat, but Thringsson grabbed the wheel from his helmsman and spun it hard to the side, sending the ship into a lurching turn.
‘Kill it!’ yelled Thringsson. ‘Get that thing off my ship! We’ll not get through till it’s gone!’
A swivel gunner brought his gun round and blasted a shot from his cannon at point-blank range. It was loaded with scattershot designed to hole the wings of enemies like the gheist, and it shredded the skin to tatters. The beast squealed. Its head plunged down on its long, flexible neck, and bit the gunner in half. The ship swayed as the Terrorgheist knuckled its way up the deck. Duardin fired guns at it, breaking holes in its furred hide. Thick, rotten blood poured from its wounds, and it shrieked again, so high and sharp Shattercap clapped his hands over his ears and sobbed with pain.
Flecki Grimsdottir’s Pride swung away from the Argent Gate. The silver wall gave way to blue sky.
‘What is he doing?’ Stonbrak said. ‘Go through the gate!’ he shouted. ‘Flee, captain, flee!’
‘Not likely,’ shouted Thringsson back. He was still working the wheel hard, spinning it through his hands. ‘The gate is warded on the Sundsfor side, and the magic will break us in two. We’ll go through without it or not at all.’
The beast clambered its way forward, weirdly agile on the deck. It knocked Thringsson’s crew aside and bit off their limbs. Screams mingled with its roars and the sound of overworked engines.
Stonbrak braced himself against the angle of the deck. Maesa stood lightly.
‘Are you not going to do anything?’ Stonbrak asked. ‘Shoot it through the eye or something – you bloody aelves are always going on about how marvellous you are with those bows of yours. Kill it!’
Maesa quietly unstrung his bow, and put it away.
‘Oh, that’s just marvellous,’ said Stonbrak. He hefted his axe. ‘I’ll do it myself then. I’ve lived a long time anyway. Khazuk-ha!’ He shouted a war cry older than the realms themselves, and hurled himself into battle.
Stonbrak joined the Kharadron duardin in a hopeless fight. Their aethermatic weapons chewed into the Terrorgheist’s body, but the beast used its wings to shield its vulnerable parts. Though the skin was delicate, the bones of its massively elongated fingers were hard as iron, and the duardin could not land a telling blow. Stonbrak’s axe shone with runic power. Kharadron blades hummed with arcane science, but the Terrorgheist pressed them back, slaying one of the crew and seriously injuring another.
Stonbrak found himself face to face with the snarling beast. His axe bit deep through fur, bringing forth a welling of necrotic fluid. The creature hit him in return with its forelimbs, hurling him backwards hard, into the rigging.
‘That won’t do, my little friend,’ said Stonbrak, and clambered back to his feet, ready to fight on. He grinned at the creature’s weakened state.
A blur in grey and green passed in front of him. Maesa danced around the beast, provoking it to strike him with its fanged maw. He leapt as it bit, and as easily as if he mounted a stair, stepped onto its neck, and drove his wooden sword down.
A blinding glare of green magic shone from the back of the creature’s skull. The beast doubled, a spectre lifting from the corporeal form. As its mortal body died a second time, the bound soul flapped madly, poised between life and death, before being sucked away into the Song of Thorns with a shriek Stonbrak would never forget.
The others took fright and flew madly away, the last shots of the duardin chasing them back towards their roosts. Maesa stepped down from the back of the creature. Even now, it was desiccating and curling up into itself. Greying lips shrank from sword-long fangs. Eyes shrivelled to black pits. Ears dried and crumbled. Its tendons dried and muscles withered, pulling it into a smaller, pathetic shrivel.
‘What manner of sword is that?’ said Stonbrak. ‘I saw it suck in the souls of the ghasts at the inn, but this…’ He toed the desiccated corpse of the great bat. Its skin broke at the gentlest touch, collapsing to dust that blew off in the wind.
‘Never ask me again,’ said Maesa, sheathing the Song of Thorns. The blade made a wooden clack on the scabbard.
‘Yes, never ask him again,’ said Shattercap.
‘But why?’ said Stonbrak. ‘What are you hiding, Maesa?’
The aelf strode past him. Shattercap hopped around on the prince’s shoulder and stuck out his tongue.
The ship’s bell rang three times.
‘All clear!’ shouted Thringsson’s mate.
The lookout clattered back down to the shattered remains of his post. ‘All clear!’ he called
‘All clear!’ one of his fellows responded from the stern.
‘Make that corpse secure!’ Thringsson commanded. He slid down the rails of the steps leading from the poop to the main deck. ‘I know plenty of sages who’d pay for the remains,’ he said to Stonbrak. ‘Enough to get them bidding against each other.’ He laughed to himself. ‘Bring us about! Back on course, lads! Lower speed for safe passage. We make for Ghur.’
Maesa helped the wounded as best he could. Four of Thringsson’s crew were dead. Another three were badly hurt. The duardin knocked over the side was hauled up by his wire. The ship came about in a wide arc, and headed directly for the Argent Gate.
Shining metallic air confronted them, bright as quicksilver. The ship pierced the veil dividing Shyish from Ghur. Ripples spread across the surface as the vessel passed through, and as the veil moved over them, the sheen became a silvery haze, and the other side was discernible. For a moment Stonbrak and Maesa were in two worlds, blue skies edged with purple over a plain of teeth to the rear, a city basking in an amber noon to the fore.
Then they were through. Shyish was behind them. Ghur spread out its wild lands in every direction. A city of flat-roofed white buildings stepped down an immense, slope-topped mesa. Gargantuan walls protected it. Dusty plains stretched away to a ring of mountains some miles in the distance.
‘Here we are then,’ announced Thringsson as his shaking passengers emerged into the daylight. ‘Gorksmak Crater, and the city of Sundsfor in the kingdom of Estraga. Welcome to Ghur.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
INTO GHUR
Maesa and Stonbrak disembarked at Sundsfor at Kharadron docks built into the top of the mesa’s cliffs. Thringsson wished them well only after they had paid the remainder of their fares. Maesa and Stonbrak collected their luggage from the hold. Thereafter they passed through the Kharadron enclave, which was large, Stonbrak muttering all the while about the odd ways of his cousins, but in truth they seemed not all that strange once they entered the streets of the city.
Sundsfor had a large population of duardin of many nations. There were duardin in exotic robes made for hot climes. Fyreslayers walked and talked with Dispossessed. Wiry warriors in painted leather armour rubbed shoulders with those sweating in heavy suits of plate, and, most scandalous of all to Stonbrak, duardin whose beards were part shaved into outlandish patterns, the bare patches between dark with tattoos. The diversity on display did not stop with Grungni’s folk, and the rest of the city’s inhabitants were drawn from all kinds of creatures, from hulking ogor mercenaries to secretive aelves and rarer beings besides.
‘What I don’t understand is why supposedly intelligent folk pay these sky pirates so much,’ said Stonbrak, as they walked down one of the city’s streets. Not one of them were level, but all comprised broad steps, dozens of feet wide and nearly as many deep, that led down from the mesa’s peak. ‘It’s criminal, I say. And did you see them? They were glad their crewmates were gone! Bigger shares all round, I heard them saying to each other! Where’s their honour? They need some competition. They’ve got arrogant. Those aether-ships are impressive, I’ll grant you, but I’d like to see them out-fly a paraffin vapour gyrocopter.’ He shook his head. ‘That’d give them a run for their money. Times are changing, that’s for sure, and not for the better, mark my words. Time was you’d never get a duardin behave that way. Never!’
Maesa ignored him as much as was polite, dropping as few interjections as possible into the conversation, if it could be described as such. Stonbrak didn’t seem to notice or to mind, but kept up a steady stream of grumbling about the state of the realms, and of duardin and of men, and how things were less impressive than they had been in the past.
Maesa’s own thoughts were occupied with the tasks to come. The acquisition of Aturathi’s eye offered him great hope, so much that he thought his heart would burst with it. He had secured Ellamar’s grave-sand, and if he could restore Aturathi, he could ask the aelementor how to bring her back for good. He sensed the end was near, that his years of wandering were coming to a close, and soon he would hold his beloved in his arms again. Such joy had him in its grip he fought to control it. If Maesa gave in to it, it would overwhelm him, and he might wander far and forget his purpose as he lost himself in sensation. Maesa therefore put his considerable self-restraint into action. Stonbrak would never know that Maesa could have burst into laughter, kissed him and danced wildly down the street-steps of Sundsfor with him in his arms. It was all hidden. Maesa kept his facade intact: alert, cold, dignified, deadly.
Sundsfor possessed three realmgates of note. None would take them directly to Settler’s Gain in Hysh. Quasque had said he planned to travel to Irb and take the gate there, but Irb was distant, and Maesa would know if there were a quicker way.
The Institute of Cartomancers operated in a building dry with the dust of old paper. Robed men went about serious business, their servants pushing wheeled carts piled high with atlases and rolled maps. Whispered conversations hissed through high halls. Giant, framed depictions of lost kingdoms hung on the walls, their ink faded and parchment fragmentary. The maps the prince sought were new, kept as scrolls within towering stacks that occupied most of the establishment.
Gloved hands trembling with age unrolled one such scroll upon a shining table. The man was extremely ancient by human standards, though nothing in years to either the duardin or the aelf. He knew his business, and when he traced the lines linking realm to realm his fingers became firm. A boy servant kept the scholar’s gossamer-fine hair off the map, and he peered through his many-lensed spectacles with grave authority.
‘Departing through the Hyshian Gate of Sundsfor will take you to the Realm of Light, but it is many years’ travel from there to Settler’s Gain in Xintil. I have plotted a route through several realms to see if there is a quicker method of arrival, but such traversals of multiple realmgates can be perilous, and it seems foolish when, like you say, there is a realmgate in Irb that will take you directly to your destination.’
‘I know these ways,’ said Maesa. ‘I am interested in new routes that may have opened in recent years.’
‘How recent?’ croaked the old man.
‘Within the last century, maybe longer.’ Maesa’s perfectly smooth face creased in a frown. A sudden disquiet had him. ‘I have passed this way before. But when…?’
‘You didn’t tell me you’d been here before,’ said Stonbrak.
‘I have. I…’ The memory was elusive. ‘I cannot remember,’ he was forced to say. ‘I have been here, but how and when and with whom, I have no recollection.’
‘I thought you aelves forgot nothing,’ said Stonbrak.
‘I…’
‘Is there something amiss?’ asked the sage. He remained absorbed by his map, clearly more interested in ancient marks than his clients.
Maesa shook his head. ‘It is not important.’
‘Well, there are no other routes than these you see here. Nothing new, nothing ancient reopened, nothing lost rediscovered.’ The sage looked up very slowly, as if afraid his head would fall from the stalk of his neck. He smiled apologetically. He had grey teeth.
‘Then Irb it is,’ said Maesa.
‘How far is this city?’ asked Stonbrak.
‘Three hundred leagues,’ said the sage. ‘It is the quickest route to where you wish to go, and assuredly the safest, though no road through the realms is entirely without danger.’
The sage continued to peruse his map, tracing the loops of the realms’ orbital tracks with his finger, as if he longed to join them in the aether. His velvet glove rasped on paper, but his other hand reached out and patted the plain wooden box at the edge of his table, into which there was set a hole.
Maesa deposited a small Ghyranese emerald. The man, without looking, patted it again.
‘More daylight robbery,’ muttered Stonbrak, as Maesa added a second gem.
‘Tell me, lord prince,’ said the sage. ‘Your kind is well known for their mastery of travel. I am learned in such matters, and know of your hidden networks of glades that link the realms. Why do you not travel that road?’
‘I am not welcome in the greenways any longer,’ said Maesa. ‘Good day, sage. We thank you for your services.’
