All The Turns of Light (23 page)

“Good work, airman Darling. Can you estimate the object’s size or speed?”

“Sorry, ma’am, but not without more observation and help from the navigator.”

“If you had to guess,” Mug said. “Remember, Beastie, you owe me seven dollars.”

Airman Darling frowned. “Just a guess, but I’d say at the far range of seeing. A hundred and fifty miles. That would make it awfully big,” she added. “Big and flying and possibly in flames. What could that be?”

“Trouble,” Mug said. “Beastie, why don’t you take a break. Get something to drink. Grab an off-duty navigator and the watch officer, whoever that is. We’re going to need to know everything we can about this thing, and fast. Scoot.”

The airman looked to Meralda, who nodded.

Beastie saluted and hurried out of the salon.

“My eyes?” asked Meralda, in a whisper.

“Still glowing,” Mug said. “But they’ve gone from bright red to a nice burnt umber.”

Meralda brought her hands to her face, rubbing her eyes behind the spectacles.

Stop it,
she intoned silently.
Stop it, stop it, stop it.

She pulled her hands away.

“Your eyes aren’t glowing,” Mug said. “But you should probably have a look at your hands.”

Meralda bit back a shriek. An egg-sized ball of blue flame hovered above each palm, burning without a sound or any sensation of heat.

“Blow them out, as if they were candles,” suggested Mug.

Meralda lifted her right palm and blew.

The flame winked out. She lifted her left hand and blew. It too expired.

“Fascinating,” Mug said, flying closer. “How’s your head, Mistress? Are you in any pain?”

“A little,” Meralda said, as the beginnings of a fierce headache settled in behind her eyes. “Mug, what is happening to me?”

“Something you’re learning to control,” Mug said. “Watch. Conjure me a gardening spade.”

“I can’t,” began Meralda, but a gardening spade fell down beside the telescope.

“I’d like a nice shower of fresh rainwater,” Mug said.

Rain fell briefly from the ceiling. Mug lifted his leaves and eagerly caught the fat, cool drops.

“Now a nice bag of Mr. Pete’s All-Purpose Mulch,” Mug said, dodging the bag of mulch that nearly smashed him into the floor.

“Enough,” Meralda said.

“Wanted to make a point,” Mug said, hovering close. “If you can’t stop unmagic from happening, Mistress, you have to control it. But first, you have to accept it.”

“It appears I don’t have a choice,” Meralda said. She felt sick and afraid. She wanted to wrap herself in a blanket and hide until the
Intrepid
reached land, and perhaps for a long time after.

“I don’t want this,” she said. “It isn’t
right.
One cannot go about creating matter, or transporting it without expending energy. It’s a violation of natural law.”

“Maybe it’s not so much a violation as a new rule,” Mug said. “But I hear boots tromping our way. You’d better have a look at this mystery airship. You know there will be questions.”

Meralda swallowed back a rude word, and she put her eye to the telescope. She swung it about, trying to find the black ship against the darkening red sky.

“More to the right,” Mug said.

Meralda obliged, and–

— there it was.

She saw only a dark black blot at first, as though someone had hurled a bucket of ink against the sky. It had no clear shape. It was a blob, from which spiky filaments protruded, all concealed by a thick black cloud of boiling, roiling smoke.

The smoke trailed behind it, slowly increasing in diameter until it was an ugly smear against the red-gold sky.

Meralda turned the lens, focusing as best she could on the blob’s center, trying to pick out any detail from within the thick cloud of vapor. An elongated blob? Is it solid? “I should have made a more powerful telescope.”

“Can you make out any detail?” asked Mug, hovering near. “It looks like a fat hairy caterpillar to me.”

“I can’t even make out that much detail.” She stood, letting the telescope swing free. “Of course, there’s another way I can look at it.”

Mug’s eyes turned toward her. “Is that a good idea, Mistress?”

“Close the door,” she shouted to the Bellringers. “I’m about to use Sight. Admit no one until I am done.”

“Yes, Mage,” said Kervis.

The door slammed shut.

Meralda removed her dark lenses.

Mug backed up several feet. “Be careful.”

Meralda managed a smile, then she closed her eyes and invoked her magical Sight.

“Glowing again,” Mug said. “Does it hurt?”

Meralda opened her eyes, and saw.

The salon was awash in faint traces of magic, each residual charge twinkling and shining like a handful of miniature stars plucked from a deep winter sky and sprinkled on every surface. Meralda realized she must be seeing traces of magic that were years, even decades old.

“No pain,” Meralda said. She turned toward the speck on the horizon, and regarded it for a moment before pushing her focus out. The darkness remained a mere blot, though Meralda could clearly see movement among the spikes, somewhere deep in the main mass.

“It appears, at first glance, just as it did through the telescope.” She watched it for a moment, and then she slowly pushed her Sight toward the black mass.

It grew, becoming a monstrous writhing thing. The main bulk was segmented, glistening and wet, heaving and pulsing as though dragging itself across land. The spines moved with the body, tangling and reaching, their ends curling on empty air as they flailed.

“It looks like a larvae, not like an airship,” Meralda said.

“A larvae? Mistress, I’m liking this less and less.”

“I’m going closer,” Meralda said.

She extended her Sight, and in an instant she was within the cloud of smoke that surrounded the thing.

Magic filled the air, as thick as the smoke. Dark magic, Meralda realized, on a scale that shouldn’t be possible.

Nothing sparkled or shone. Instead, filaments of pure darkness filled the air, woven in a pattern so complex it seemed at first to be nothing but one great tangle. The darkness of each filament was unyielding and profound. No light could escape it, were the filaments to tighten and cover the bulbous central body.

“It’s absorbing light.” She concentrated on a short segment of a single dark strand. “Not just light. Heat. Life. Anything warmer, brighter, or more vital than the emptiness of space—it seems to be eating...
everything.”

She shifted her focus from the filament to the heaving black bulk. Magic was woven into it too, dark magic, moving in and out of the pulsating segments like the beat of a great evil heart. There were periodic anti-flashes of the same pure darkness that composed the filaments, each dark flash triggering a convulsion of the segment, lending it a grim parody of life.

She pushed her Sight further, searching for any sign of human presence, any recognizable spellworks she might detach or interrupt.

It was then she felt the bulk’s attention fall full upon her.

It roared, issuing a long wordless howl that carried a single unmistakable meaning—
I come
.

Meralda stumbled away from the force of the black death’s mindless rage.

“Mistress?” asked Mug. Meralda found herself without air and nearly panicked before she realized she could draw a breath. She held up a hand for silence, and met the darkness.

“Why do you trouble me?” she asked. “I have done you no harm.”

A knock sounded at the bulkhead. “Mage?” asked Kervis. “The Captain and the King are here, and they’d like a word.”

Mug flew to the door. “Mistress is talking to the monster right now. Give us a moment, please.”

“
I come
,” replied the black death. “
Unmaker.
”

“I am not the Unmaker,” Meralda said. “What makes you think I am?”

“
I come
,” repeated the black death. It roared again, heaving its bulk toward the
Intrepid
.

Meralda reached out and took hold of a mass of dark filaments. It would be so easy, she thought. Take them and twist them and break them. Make them go away. Can I not wreak ruin on this awful thing? Can I not send it plunging down into the Sea, right this moment, with nothing more than a wish and a twist? And what if I do? What if I use this unmagic, which I don’t understand, to destroy a spellwork no one understands?

Meralda pulled her Sight back, then closed it, and leaned on the telescope mount.

“A moment, then let them in,” she gasped out.

“Your dark glasses,” Mug said.

“Still glowing?”

Mug regarded Meralda’s bright red eyes. “A tiny bit,” he said. “Why don’t you sit down and think about calculus for a moment.”

Meralda looked toward her faint reflection in the salon’s wide glass. Her eyes were crimson embers without pupil or iris.

She hastily donned her glasses.

“Open the door,” Mug said. The King came rushing in, Captain Fairweather on his heels.

“Come and see.” Meralda pointed wearily toward the blot on the horizon. “We’ll need to determine its speed and heading as quickly as possible.”

King Yvin grunted and sighted down the telescope’s brass tube. “Do you believe it’s Vonat?”

“It is,” Meralda said.

Captain Fairweather moved to stand close to the salon’s wide glass. He peered at the object, scowling, as though he could force it from the sky with mere disdain.

“Ugly bugger,” he said. “Still. I’ll get the bridge working on establishing its heading.” He turned to Meralda. “Is that an airship, Mage, or something else entirely?”

“It flies,” Meralda said. “I believe any similarity to an airship ends there.”

The Captain nodded. “Do you think it’s using your flying coils to stay aloft?”

“No. Of that much I am certain. It is not.”

“Good,” said the Captain. “Speed might be our best weapon. We can run for six days without taking on water if we start rationing now.”

“Do so,” muttered the King, as he squinted into the telescope’s eyepiece. “Coils to full. Vary altitude and heading at random for the next few hours. Let’s keep that monstrosity guessing.”

“As you wish.” Captain Fairweather saluted and then withdrew, leaving Meralda alone with the King.

“Never underestimate our friends the Vonats,” said Yvin, straightening and pushing the telescope away. “I suspected they’d take one last wild stab at us, but I wasn’t expecting that thing.” He pointed toward the west. “Any idea what that monstrosity is, Meralda?”

“They call it the black death,” she replied. “It is the culmination of centuries of work, all done with a single end in mind—to ensure that no craft of the Realms ever crosses the Great Sea.”

“So we can assume it is armed.”

Meralda laughed. From the way the King’s eyes widened, she surmised her own eyes might have begun to glow again behind her spectacles.

“We may safely assume just that.”

Behind the King, a pair of shadows took refuge along the ceiling, moving and darting just out of Yvin’s sight.

Yvin shrugged. “We’ve got one thing they don’t, and that’s a pair of five-hundred-foot-long Ovis Flying Coils,” he said. “I’ll need you to babysit them, Meralda. We’ve got to stay ahead of this black death, so we’ll need to run the coils as hard as they’ll go.”

Meralda nodded. “Of course.”

“I’m not going to ask about your, um, ocular situation,” said Yvin. “Unless you need medical assistance?”

“It’s merely a temporary side effect of an experimental spell,” Meralda said. “Think nothing of it.”

“If you say so.”

She tried for her best smile, realizing it probably fell short.

The shadows darted, obviously agitated
. Be still
, ordered Meralda silently.
I shall attend you forthwith.

“I’ll double the telescope and lookout crews,” said Yvin. “We’ll get a fix on its heading and speed, and then leave it far behind.” The King smiled. “You probably saved us all a long swim, putting eyes on the sky,” he added. “Tirlin is again in your debt.”

Meralda inclined her head. Then she turned and made her way quickly back to her cabin, Mug and the Bellringers close behind.

* * *

Mug buzzed angrily about the tiny cabin.

“Strange magics?” he bellowed at the two staves. “A
host
of strange magics? That’s the revelation from your daring spy mission? Mistress, I should fly out there and have a look. I’m sure I can glean more than five words of description.”