Crystal Doors #1 (18 page)

Without hesitation Sharif volunteered. He seemed to enjoy telling his story as much as he enjoyed having a large audience. “Not long ago, in the flying city of Irrakesh, there lived a great Sultan who had many beautiful daughters and two fine sons. The Sultan ruled his kingdom with wisdom, justice, and compassion, and his people loved him. He had many trusted advisors, but one grew dominant to the point where the Sultan would listen to no one else.

“The wily and charismatic vizier advised the Sultan with caution at first, but when he was completely trusted, the vizier began to change his advice. He urged the Sultan to dismiss unnecessary courtiers, to suspect former allies of being traitors and assassins, and to impose heavy taxes on his loyal subjects. Only the Sultan’s older son Hashim dared speak out against the scheming advisor. The Sultan did not listen.”

Sharif looked around, and his voice faltered. “No… the Sultan did not listen, until it was too late. Only when, through darkest magic, the vizier murdered poor Hashim, did the Sultan come to his senses. But nothing could bring his older son back. Grieving and broken, the Sultan commanded that the evil vizier be thrown from the flying city.”

Vic saw a glint of real tears in Sharif’s olive eyes, which reflected the light of the sun aja crystals. “When the guards brought him to the high balcony for his execution, the defiant vizier was unafraid. He did not plead for his life, did not recant his crime. He seemed happy that Hashim was dead.

“Before the guards could throw the vizier from high Irrakesh, he began to laugh. His features shifted into a familiar face of evil that every child in the flying city learns to fear.” Sharif narrowed his eyes. “He was
Azric,
in disguise and walking among us!”

Tiaret held her training staff, her dark face etched with a frown. The other students and crewmembers muttered, both intrigued and disturbed by the story.

“Then Azric astonished everyone by leaping from the city. Even as he fell, his body transformed. Sprouting great
batlike wings, he took flight, laughing and screeching as he soared away.”

Before he sat down again, Sharif said, “That Sultan is my father, and Hashim was my brother.” His jaw tightened. “Believe me when I tell you this. Even if he is the most powerful dark sage in the universe, Azric will regret the day I find him.”

THE FIRST NIGHT OF the training voyage would have been more enjoyable if Gwen hadn’t known the merlons were prowling out there. Sharif’s story about Azric — who had, apparently, made the killer whale attack her at Ocean Kingdoms — didn’t help, either.

Captain Dimas and the four sage instructors had interior cabins, while the novs slept in hammocks belowdecks. With the hatch covers open, the students could sway in the fresh ocean breezes that stole down into the hold, and hear the lapping of the water against the hull. Gwen stared up through the hatch at the stars. Each time she found herself searching for familiar star figures like Orion or Cassiopeia, she was reminded that Elantya was an entirely different world.

When she needed to, Gwen nibbled at the shinqroot Kaisa had given her to settle her stomach. It took effect quickly and
she wondered for the fiftieth time why her cousin had not been afflicted with seasickness. It wasn’t fair… but then again it wasn’t fair that her parents had been killed in that car accident. It wasn’t fair that she and Vic had been thrown into this strange world far from Uncle Cap. It wasn’t fair that the Elantyans and merlons were at odds with each other, and that Gwen and Vic could not go home.

But there it was, one of the fundamentals of human existence: Life was not fair. You just had to learn to deal with what you had. Maybe that’s why somebody put “for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health” in the marriage vows: good luck or bad, you never knew what life would throw at you.

“Suck it up,” she muttered to herself as she put her hands behind her head and stared upward. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Beside her, Vic was awake as well. From his own hammock, he said, “I’d feel safer if one of those guardian galleys had followed us. I mean, we’re just a training ship out here on the open sea.”

“Sage Abakas and Sage Snigmythya have read spells to make the bottom of our ship invisible from below,” Lyssandra said. “Swimming merlons will not be able to see us from underneath.”

“Tiaret is worried enough for all of us, though she tries not to show it,” Sharif said. The girl from Afirik had insisted on taking the first watch, pacing the deck in the starlight. Meanwhile, he rested comfortably with his rolled flying carpet stashed beneath his hammock beside Piri’s glowing cloth-wrapped sphere. “I doubt she will sleep.”

“It’s gonna be hard to sleep,” Vic agreed. “At least I don’t get
seasick.” Gwen had a sudden urge to go over and start his hammock swinging wildly, but she was too tired to make the effort.

As she finally started drifting off, Gwen heard a faint buzzing in the air that grew louder, like a swarm of angry wasps. She blinked and sat up.

Lyssandra was also awake, looking up into the starlit night. “Something is coming.” Other students had heard the noise and were stirring, slipping out of their hammocks. Gwen, Lyssandra, Vic, and Sharif rushed up to the main deck with the other students following. Kaisa emerged from her quarters near the galley, rubbed her eyes, checked to see that her daughter was safe, and went back inside.

One of Captain Dimas’s crewmen stood at the bow sniffing the air, his head tilted into the night. Water lapped up against the side of the ship. Tiaret was clearly agitated, pacing over to her friends without taking her eyes from the darkness. “Be alert! There may be danger.”

Cabin doors opened, and the teaching sages came out. Captain Dimas called for his crew, and they scrambled up from belowdecks, ready for a fight.

The buzzing sound in the impenetrable darkness grew louder, more ominous. The vibration grated on Gwen’s ears. The humming grew impossibly loud and was joined by strange high-pitched chirpings and splashes.

Vic stood next to her, anxious. “That doesn’t sound good, whatever it is.”

“It’s all around us!” Gwen ran to the deck rail and peered into the endless darkness. “But I still can’t see what’s making
that noise.” The captain marched up and down the deck, checking ropes and rigging.

Sharif squinted, staring out into the empty night. Finally he pointed. “There! A whole swarm.”

“And they will be hungry!” Captain Dimas said.

The crewmen took up the cry. “They will devour anything in their path!”

“Locusts of the sea!”

As if they had been drilled many times but never faced the actual danger, the rugged crew scurried around on deck. Some grim-faced sailors carried long boat hooks, holding the stout handles in two-fisted grips. Others snatched up spare oars from the lifeboats tied to the side of the hull.

Lyssandra and Sharif stood side by side, tense and alert. Tiaret held up her teaching staff, ready to strike. Gwen looked at her cousin, then waited for somebody to give her an answer. She still couldn’t identify the threat, but she was smart enough to be frightened.

The hum grew louder until her teeth vibrated, as if she were standing in the path of an oncoming tornado. Suddenly, instinct told her to duck and something flashed past her, a flying thing the size of a dove but with silver skin and bright red… wings? Fins? Gwen flinched and another shot in front of her face. Now dozens of scaled creatures filled the air. Flapping spiny fin-wings, they slammed into the ship’s sails, the hull, the thick masts, reminding Gwen of a swarm of giant bugs hitting a windshield.

“Has a flock of birds gone insane?” Vic asked.

When Gwen got a better look, she noticed their
jaws.

“Flying piranhas!” Lyssandra said. “They can gnaw a ship to splinters!”

“Oh dear! Oh dear! They will strip our flesh from our bones.” Sage Snigmythya flapped her thin hands as if to shoo away the attacking swarm.

Sage Abakas was cooler in the crisis. “Not if I can read our spell scrolls fast enough.” The mathematics instructor dashed into his quarters and returned juggling three baskets of scrolls. Lyssandra took the baskets from him, and he began pulling scrolls open and discarding them as he searched for useful incantations. Snigmythya pitched in, grabbing spell scrolls and skimming the complex loops and whorls of silvery aja crystal ink. Lyssandra knelt by the baskets and salvaged scrolls as the sages discarded them.

Tiaret did not wait for spells. She waded in, twirling her teaching staff and using the blunt end like a heavy baseball bat to smack the creatures out of the air.

Gwen and Sharif picked up a pair of wooden buckets and swung them to deflect fish from the sages. Vic threw a small fishing net over a cluster of the predators, but it took them only seconds to chew their way through it.

More and more flying piranhas surged in, squeaking and humming, their long fins flapping. With spiny appendages, they fastened onto anything they struck. Diamond-sharp teeth slashed. The fish gnawed through rigging ropes and sail lines as if the thick braided cables were no more than fine spider silk.

A flying piranha slammed into Gwen’s shoulder, and she
slapped it away, again reacting with an instinct born of her
zy’oah
training. The fish felt hard and slimy, and after knocking it to the deck boards, she stomped hard with the heel of her right foot. She heard scales and fish bones snap, and she kicked the wounded creature away. The piranha continued to writhe on the deck and scratch the planks with its sharp teeth.

Gwen got a good look as the thing lay twitching. The undersea creature seemed to have been built out of a dozen different bad dreams. Its spiny wings were tipped with thorns like the lionfish she had seen at Ocean Kingdoms; its head was crusted with misshapen mossy growths. The serrated needles of teeth lining its jaws were able to slice through rope, cloth, wood, and no doubt, skin. The fish’s face was studded with two main eyes and a row of milky sensors above a set of whiplike whiskers, like those on a catfish. The creature showed no sign of intelligence, only a hunger to chew on anything in its way.

The injured fish died after a moment. And a thousand more took its place.

Flying piranhas kept soaring by, chewing and splintering the deck rails, boring holes through the hull. The students and crew worked together to knock away the fish as soon as they alighted on skin and clothes, protecting their lives above everything else.

Finally, Sage Abakas found a useful scroll. Unrolling it, he uttered incomprehensible syllables while touching his chest, then said one last word. The silvery ink glowed slightly. Since Lyssandra was closest to Sage Abakas, he touched her shoulder
and repeated the incantation. The mathematics instructor moved to Gwen, Sharif, and then Vic. “Now you are all protected.”

Gwen felt no different after Abakas had shielded her with his spell, but suddenly the flying piranhas didn’t notice her. She seemed to have turned invisible; when one of the voracious fish struck her, it seemed to be entirely by accident. Unfortunately, as the mathematical sage erased the piranhas’ potential victims one at a time, the creatures concentrated on the unshielded people, who became all the more prominent targets.

Abakas tossed the scroll aside after he had read from it several times and used up all the stored magic. By then, though, Snigmythya had found another scroll imprinted with the same spell, and she began to read protection onto the students and crew, while Abakas found a third protective scroll to shield frantic fighters.

When the second and third spell scroll weakened, the protected people gathered around the last few to defend them. Gwen’s bucket broke and she seized a wooden awning pole and flailed at the invading piranhas to chase them away.

Next to her, Vic yelled over the buzzing roar. “That’s too small! We need something wide and flat!” Tiaret, thrashing with her teaching staff, was having the same problem. “I’ve got an idea!” Vic dashed into Kaisa’s galley.

Abakas used the dregs of energy in his spell scroll to protect Snigmythya. Lyssandra found one more in the baskets of stored scrolls, and the sages rushed to protect Captain Dimas and finally Tiaret, who did not want to be bothered in the middle of a fight. She barely stood still as the spell was cast on her.

While the warrior girl kept battling, the two sages huddled by Lyssandra over the baskets, sifting through scrolls, searching for anything else that might help in the crisis. Muttering and fumbling, Snigmythya read a spell that summoned up a brief wind storm. The ship rocked, and the attacking fish swirled around in the violent gusts, disoriented, then fell back upon the boat. In the meantime, the blustery air currents snatched the scroll right out of Snigmythya’s hand, and she watched it flutter off into the water. The wind soon died down by itself.

Flushed, Vic returned, holding four of Kaisa’s widest iron pans by the handles. The metal clanged as he ran. “Mom always told me I could make a weapon out of just about anything. Think of this as a big flyswatter!”

He shoved one of the heavy pans at Gwen, who took it with a quick smile. “Good idea, Taz!”

Vic handed a pan each to Sharif and Lyssandra. Sharif nodded his approval. “These are weapons the fish cannot eat.”

Alerted by Vic, Kaisa now appeared on deck wielding a pair of wicked-looking chef’s knives and began slashing at the aquatic attackers.

Vic dove into the fray with his metal pan, smacking at the voracious fish. Gwen could see that her cousin’s childhood
zy’oah
training had also taken over. Like the star player on a Little League team, he swung right and left, sending fish pinwheeling out into the dark sea. Each time he struck an incoming piranha, it made a thunk and a clang. “Home run! It’s out of the ballpark!”