Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) (23 page)

In less than an hour the elves filled the cargo bay with an even layer of boxes three feet deep. Then they laid mattresses over that, leaving a bit under six feet of headroom. Groups of humans in livery began arriving, arranging themselves in neat rows along the sides of the cargo bay. Then came the elven women, and then the men. The sun was barely halfway down when Tavrin stepped out of the hold, and waved the last of the guards inside.

“Clan Nethwillin is ready to depart, my lord,” he said formally.

I shook my head. “Damn, that was fast.”

“Nethwillin believes in being prepared,” he said. “Most of us are at least a few centuries old, so we’ve had ample time to master every skill we’re likely to need in an emergency. We started planning the evacuation as soon as Hecate told us you’d be arriving in a flying ship.”

“Well, I’m impressed,” I admitted. “I think you guys are going to be a huge asset. Cerise! We’re closing the doors now. Get ready to lift.”

Sure enough, we barely made fifty miles from Yinthalos before dark clouds started to form on the horizon behind us. When the aft lookout reported them I had Cerise turn the ship so we could get a look, and frowned.

“What did you guys do to get Loki so pissed off with you?” I asked Tavrin.

“I doubt he cared about us one way or the other. Those giants were after our treasury. But they were from the Skyorn clan, which makes them distant kin of Loki’s giantess wife Angrboda. No doubt they petitioned him for aid.”

“I’m sure he’d like to smack us down after our fight with Hel’s army back in Kozalin,” Cerise commented.

“Perhaps,” Elin said diffidently. “I believe that would depend on how much Mara has told him about her adventures there. Hel only sent her forces to Kozalin to aid her half-sister, and I doubt she actually has much care for their fate. But Mara must stand quite high in her father’s favor after freeing him from his torment, and I doubt that she would want to see any of us dead.”

Cerise sighed. “I really wish I’d been able to seduce that girl when she was still undercover. Can you imagine having her in the coven?”

Tavrin choked. “You’ve met the Unraveller?”

I shrugged. “Yeah. She was in Kozalin, pretending to be a human mage while she worked out how to destroy the veil anchor there. We actually parted on decent terms, I think.”

The question was, what did she tell her father about the whole thing? Was he really trying to kill us, or just putting on a show to placate his worshippers? Or was it more complicated than that? Loki was famous for his clever plans, after all, and the fact that the ones in the myths tended to backfire on him was probably propaganda.

Well, it didn’t really matter for now. Our response would be the same regardless.

“Can you muster enough weather magic to protect the ship from that storm?” I asked Tavrin.

He gave the dark clouds another look. “Not reliably enough to make me feel confident about the safety of the children. We aren’t attuned to the airship, so we’d have to rely on air spirits to maintain a sphere of calm around it. That storm is carrying enough hostile spirits to easily break such a defense if they concentrate their efforts on it.”

“What’s involved in attuning to the airship?”

“It would require landing,” he told me. “Then we’d need four hours or so to engrave runes on the outside of the hull to guide our magic, and use those guides to establish a weather ward. With that done we could reliably protect the airship from high winds, but visibility would still be a problem.”

“If we land that storm will roll over us in less than an hour,” I observed.

“True.”

“Alright, we’ll call that plan B. Cerise, turn us south again. Tavrin, have one of your weather experts keep watch with the tail gunner, and keep us informed. I bet the storm isn’t moving that much faster than the
Intrepid
, especially if your people can call up some air elementals to help move the ship.”

“That much we can do.”

“Good. Then we’ll try and outrun this storm, or at least gain as much distance as we can before we have to set down.”

The sun gradually sank below the horizon as we fled south. I made a trip back to the tail gunner’s position to peer out at the clouds, and by the time the light had faded I was sure they were still gaining despite the best efforts of the elves.

Was there anything else we could do, to get just a little more speed out of this airship? Nothing came to mind. Or at least, nothing I wanted to try with a hold full of passengers.

I turned around, and studied them as I thought.

The hold was as crowded as any of the flights out of Varo, but the elves and their retainers were a lot better at making the best of the cramped conditions. They’d started by laying down mattresses atop the cargo, and in the first hour of the flight they’d hung sheets from the ceiling to subdivide the space into two rows of little compartments. A small glowing crystal was stuck to the back wall of each space, lighting them with a warm orange glow barely brighter than candlelight.

Most compartments were occupied by an elf and two or three humans, who seemed to be remarkably cozy with each other. Apparently most of the humans were personal retainers of a particular elf, and it was pretty clear that sex was part of that relationship. That didn’t sit well with my own sensibilities, but I saw enough smiles and affectionate embraces to make it hard to convince myself they were being coerced.

As Irithil had said, they were more subtle than that. How hard would it be for an immortal elf, with magic and beauty backed by centuries of experience, to seduce and beguile a teenager who’d already been indoctrinated from birth? Not hard at all, really. Teenage guys are suckers for hot women, and the girls were practically living a romance novel. Half of them were probably in love with their elves, and if there were any who resented their situation I certainly didn’t see any sign of it.

Here and there I found compartments that were an exception to the general rule. Female elves with a child as well as their servants. Pairs of human women, each with a group of children to watch. Several larger compartments in the middle of the hold, full of human men all uncomfortably piled in together.

I happened upon Sefwin sharing a compartment with the pair of elves I’d seen with her earlier. That was odd enough that I paused to look for a moment, and she noticed me.

“Is there something I can do for you, my lord?” She asked, with just a touch of nervousness in her voice.

“No, not in particular. I was just observing the arrangements, and making the obvious deductions about Nethwillin’s customs. Are you considered too young to have human retainers, or is that something to do with being the heir?”

“Oh, it’s an age thing. We’ve seen other clans become lazy and inept after leaning too heavily on servants, so our rule is that a clan member can’t adopt retainers until they’re a hundred years old. We’re supposed to master every skill we’d expect our servants to have before then, but learning and doing at the same time is a lot of work. So smart… um, teenagers would be the best translation, I think? Smart teenagers team up, to help each other out and spread the work. These are my partners, Amiya and Lashkin.”

Amiya was a pretty girl an inch shorter and a little bit younger than Sefwin, with hair that was such a dark red it was almost black. Lashkin seemed younger as well, though he was on his way to being one of the burlier elves I’d seen. They both wore their hair loose, instead of braided.

“Partners?” I asked.

“We take turns playing at master and servant with one another, my lord,” Lashkin explained.

“We study and practice together,” Amiya added, her voice soft and a bit hesitant.

Sefwin put her arms around both their waists, and hugged them. “Teen partnerships usually last until we start reaching adulthood, so we’ve got another sixty years together. Are you in need of a culture guide, my lord? I’d be happy to handle that for you.”

“I’m sure I’ll have questions now and then,” I agreed. “What’s up with the hairstyles? Braids for adults?”

She nodded. “It’s an accounting of obligations, my lord. The braid symbolizes the bonds of adulthood that all clan members share. The tokens show lovers, retainers and kin, living or dead. The clan head bears only the burden of leadership, hence the tail with a single binding. The heir shares that burden, but also owes obedience to the head.”

“So you can basically read a person’s history from the tokens in their braid. That’s interesting. Sounds like a lot of work to re-do a braid, though.”

“There’s a trick to it,” she said. “Enchantments on the tokens and ties, and a spell that makes everything weave itself together properly.”

The airship jolted suddenly. Just a spot of turbulence, but of course none of the passengers knew that. There were gasps and muttering all around, and several humans who’d been standing up at the time fell. None of the elves had any trouble with it, though.

“Is that normal, my lord?” Sefwin asked.

“Yeah, it just means we ran into a crosswind or something. Don’t worry, the
Intrepid
is actually a pretty tough ship. It would take a lot more than that to damage her.”

It did remind me that I had a job to do, though. I took my leave, and returned to the bridge.

For a couple of hours I actually thought we were going to make it out of the far North before the storm caught up with us. The elves were pushing their elementals as hard as they could, and sometimes it actually seemed like we were keeping up with the storm. At other times the clouds gained on us, a shadow creeping slowly across the sky to blot out the stars.

Then Irithil suddenly leaned forward to peer out the windshield, and cursed under his breath.

“There’s another storm moving in from the west ahead of us,” he pointed out.

Cerise squinted into the darkness. “Fuck. You’re right, those are storm clouds. Think we can make it around them?”

Tavrin shook his head. “It’s moving as fast as we are. We’d get caught over Lake Bothnia with nowhere to land.”

“I really need to get myself some night vision,” I grumbled. “Alright, so we’re boxed in. Anyone see a good place to set down? We need a good-size stretch of flat ground, ideally in a defensible position.”

Cerise and the two elves all studied the ground below. It was all just a shadow to me, so I’d have to rely on them for this.

“It’s forest as far as the eye can see,” Irithil said. “Loki chose this site well.”

“We could set down on one of the lakes if we have to,” Cerise pointed out. “Then Daniel could get out and clear some trees to give us a place to park. But that’s a last resort. What about that hilltop? It looks a little rocky, but there aren’t any trees and it would be hard for monsters to get at. I can’t see frost giants climbing that slope in a storm.”

“Are you certain it’s flat enough?” Irithil asked.

“Ummm…. I think so? I don’t know, I can’t really tell from here.”

“Take us down,” I decided. “We’ll hover over the hill and hit the lights. That should give us a good enough look to see if we can land on it. If it’s close I can just jump out, and do some quick stone shaping to get rid of anything that’s in the way.”

Putting lights on the bottom of the airship while it was in flight had been a bit of a challenge, but as usual the fact that I was using magic items instead of technology had made it a lot easier. I’d just put light spells on the ends of some short rods of aluminum, and then stuck them through the bottom of the hull and fused them in place. They were as bright as the big lights I’d used in the dryad habitats back home, so when Cerise brought us down over the hilltop and turned them on they lit it up pretty well.

The hilltop was mostly bare stone, scoured clean of snow by the wind. Small rocks were strewn about, and there was a large clump of boulders at one end with deep snow piled between them.

“Looks good,” Cerise said.

“Most of the slopes are too steep to climb easily, but enemies could still come up from the east,” Tavrin observed.

I considered.

“We can make it work. Cerise, set us down with the ship’s bow facing west. I’ll throw up some quick defenses before the storm hits.”

Landing turned out to be easier said than done. The wind was starting to pick up as the two storms converged on our position, and the lift cells had a huge sail area. We were buffeted about for some minutes before Cerise finally managed to swing around and come in with
Intrepid’s
bow facing into the wind. She left the skimmer field off, and slapped the lift bar all the way down the instant we touched ground.

The airship rocked back, the bow actually coming off the ground a few inches before it settled back. For a moment I was afraid we’d be blown over, or even carried back off the hilltop. Fortunately the lift cells shrank quickly, and the wind lost purchase. We settled firmly to the ground, and Cerise heaved a sigh of relief.

“Okay, that was way too close,” she said. “We need a better way to do that before we go flying again in this kind of weather.”

“I’d rather not fly in this kind of weather at all,” I said. “I think trying the skimmer field in this wind would be a bad idea. Let’s see if we can make things work where we are now. Elin, can you toss my cloak down?”

Elin peeked down from the loft. “Are we on the ground now? Thank goodness. Here you go, Daniel.”

I pulled the cloak on over my coat, and wrapped it around myself before opening the bridge hatch. A blast of arctic air roared in through the opening, along with a light swirl of snow.

“Leave the lights on until I get back,” I told Cerise.

“Sure thing, Daniel. But I’m coming with you. I’m getting stir crazy cooped up in here.”

“Suit yourself.”

It was even colder than I’d expected. The double layer of protection was enough to keep most of me warm enough, but my face felt like it was freezing. If it weren’t for my healing amulet I’d have frostbite in no time.

I glanced up. Half the sky was completely dark, the stars obscured by clouds. The wind was picking up as well, growing quickly into a gale. Well, that made sense. We’d been doing about fifty, and the storm had still been gaining on us.