Gods of Earth (41 page)

The Guardian ran up through the forest above Aegweard. Above the steep hills of Lethebion behind the black tower was a great plateau, ringed by forest and mountains. He circled the plateau by following the steep slopes that surrounded it. Birds scattered in bright rainbow flocks as he passed. Black howler monkeys growled at each other, indifferent to the ancient gray being that ran by below. Giant centipedes changed course, too late, after he had already leapt over them.

But the Guardian saw none of the most dangerous, most ancient beasts of the forest—the neoAlbertosaurs, the fierce, knee-high neoVelociraptors, the giant bears. This was as he had expected—the place in the forest of the giant hunters had been fragile, carefully shaped by the Lifweg while the guild had lived. But when Lethebion had been attacked and the guild members all murdered, that had ended. Also, it was said that human hunters in airships had killed all the greatest beasts from the air. If any survived those hunts, then after the war most would surely have starved because there was too little to eat.

The Guardian ascended to the plateau, bursting out of the dense brush of the forest edge into a herd of dwarf elephants. They tossed their trunks in anger, stepping backwards, as he shot through them.

So something of the ancients live still in the plain, he thought.

Packs of small horses turned aside as he raced across the grass. In the distance, he could see a herd of camel gazelle.

At the base of the mountains, where the grasses just died away and scrub covered the rising ground, he found a watering hole. He stopped a dozen paces away. Another nervous pack of skittering tiny horses sneaked drinks from the muddy pool, turning aside almost as soon as their noses rippled the surface.

The Guardian turned in place, carefully watching the bush. And there: there was what he sought. Two eyes, blazing green, crouched in dark bushes nearby. Then another two eyes in the bush beside
that one. He turned aside, circling quickly through the bush, and appeared with a snap of his cloak behind the terrorbirds.

The two wingless beasts leapt up in alarm, turning on him. The Guardian did not move. They rose to their full height, as tall as the Guardian’s reach, and when puffed with alarm they seemed just as massive, with huge black talons large and strong enough to cut clear through a man’s chest. Their feathers were dark green, like the grasses at their feet. The green irises of their eyes flickered, pulsing with interest and concern as they watched him, tilting their heads, shrieking with indignation and shaking their huge ax-beaks.

The Guardian felt a mix of emotions. This was his accomplishment, in part: it was a wonder that these great beasts lived again, millions of years after their passing, and four thousand years after his guild had remade them. And that they had lived through the war and the decline meant they would likely live on for many years more.

But these were also the greatest threat to the Puriman and the others.

One of the two birds, the female of the pair, took one strutting step toward him, a feint, before leaping back. The Guardian did not move. It tried again. The male did the same. Finally, emboldened, the female leapt forward and struck him hard with her huge, square beak. It cut at his chest like a hatchet—and bounced off, the Guardian’s unyielding rock-hard flesh deflecting the blow.

The terrorbird fell back, stunned. It had struck forcefully, expecting soft flesh, and taken a knock as bad as if it had attacked a tree. It wobbled as it found its foothold again. The male shrieked at him, making another feint, but this feint was obviously meant not to prepare for attack but to distract the Guardian while the female retreated.

“Let that teach you,” he said. Let the birds believe that humans are no better food than stone.

“Teach you!” the bird shrieked.

The Guardian started. He knew the birds were mimics, but he did not know their abilities were so good. But then, in the days of his guild, they had not stood beside the terrible predators and talked.

The birds fled noisily into the brush, their great talons tossing up torn clods of dirt.

He sighed. He would have to warn the others about these birds, and require that they move only in a large group.

Time to check the airship. The Guardian looked up at the mountain, toward the steep valley, and its shrouded cave, where his guild had secreted an airship thousands of years before.

“Erd,” he whispered. “I hope you saw to this with the same care you saw to all other things.”

CHAPTER

36

T
he engineering master Sar set about reinventing the cargo hold once the airship took off.

She was fortunate. She could tell by the footsteps that five, perhaps six, stumbling bears commanded this ship. They were noisy and incurious. She had feared the possibility that a wolf, with keen smell, or a soulburdened raccoon, with its insatiable curiosity, or—worst case—that the godling himself might be on this ship. But it was not so.

She took the small light from her bag and shone it about the cramped cargo hold. It was just high enough for her to crawl, and thunderously noisy, and cold. It was not the way she would have preferred to travel.

“Well,” she mumbled, “I’m stuck with it now.”

She crawled slowly about the cargo space, checking each feature. Rough rivets, never sanded down, dotted the floor, and a few of them scratched her hands, or caught at her robe and made tiny tears in the cloth. She cursed, and tried to aim her hands and knees in the spaces between the metal snags.

After a brief exploration, she dragged the airship patch kit from its closet and used the extra patching fabric to partition off a corner of the cargo hold, to hide her scent and muffle any sound she made. She found a bolt in a horizontal stretch of the ship’s water line that she could loosen, while holding a pail beneath it to catch the leaking drops, so that she could collect a drink. She pried open one of the emergency vents and then tied a wire to it, so that with a twist of the wire she could open the outer vent door. This provided a handy way to relieve herself and also allowed her to stick her head outside to track the ship’s progress.

They were over the sea, one of three airships heading north. The Guardian and the boy had left in a boat, as she knew from the reports of other Engineers. The boy had several days’ lead, so with luck, she figured that they would catch up with the boat only as it came to the shores of the northland, nearly under the shadow of Yggdrasil, in about a week. Her food might just last that long without too much discomfort. After all, at her age, she did not eat much. She would be all a-cramp, however, after a week of lying and crawling in the dark. Already her legs were spotted with sores and bruises, and her thighs trembled with the strain of crawling.

“Well,” she told herself. “There’s no sense trying to fix what you can’t fix. Fix what you can.”

Seven days. She had told the apprentice not to bring her any weapon, because she was afraid of what would happen to the boy if he had been stopped by some soulburdened pack while bringing her the stores. So she had nothing but a few tools and a minimum of food.

Over her head, one of the bears roared at another.

“I’m an inventor,” she mumbled. “A creator of Threkor’s line. I need only invent a way to fell the other two airships and to steal this one. Simple enough. Simple enough. Time to get to work.”

She closed her eyes and began to plan.

Sar awoke with a start in the night. She had worked hard for hours, removing parts of the airship, taking them over by the vent so that she could use the sunlight to see her hands as she worked on them, before either replacing them or setting them aside for future use.

But as the sunlight faded, she laid her tools aside, wrapped herself in the coat the apprentice had brought her, and slept, wanting to conserve her lamp.

Now she awoke and knew immediately that something was wrong. The bears were louder.

No, she realized. The bears were not louder. Everything else was quieter. The hum of the ship’s engines had softened, become less strained. The fabric of the airship hull did not snap and vibrate, as if the wind moved with them, and so stood still around the ship. And before there had been a depth to the roar of the engines—the echo, perhaps, of the propellers’ din off the sea. That was gone now.

She crawled to the vent and, working by touch, opened it. Very little wind blew inside as the panel came away. She hung her head down. The waxing sliver of crescent moon cast a thin gray reflection on the sea.

The sea looked strange: fearfully close, as if magnified, and speeding by far faster than before. The shimmering crescent of the reflected moon vibrated erratically. Sar watched it a long while, concentrating, trying to understand what she saw.

Finally she started in surprise.

“Not closer,” she mumbled. “No. Magnified. The space between us and the water is bent. The space all around us is bent. It distorts the light.” And the waves below passed furiously quickly, and this made the moon’s reflection shimmer.

She pulled the vent closed and lay back on the floor of the compartment to think it through. The god was bending space somehow to take them out of the wind and to speed them forward. His strength grew.

She could not guess how fast they flew now. With the distortion of the light and all landmarks gone, it was impossible to judge. But it was fast. Much faster than before, and much faster than a sea ship traveled.

“I’ll have to rush,” she told herself. “I’ll have to rush.”

She began recasting her plans in her mind, abandoning those goals she must in order to get the necessary tasks done as quickly as possible.

“I will not let them win the boy,” she whispered. “By Threkor’s name.”

CHAPTER

37

S
arah flinched when Wadjet shouted at the Guardian. “No!”

She sat with Wadjet, Thetis, Chance, and Seth around a tall fire on the beach, below the flat step where Seth and Chance had talked in the afternoon. Mimir and the Guardian stood nearby.

“First you ask me to leave my ship unguarded for weeks,” Wadjet continued.

“I do not ask,” the Guardian interrupted. “I just tell you you’ll die if you wait here by your ship. The god will not be kind to those who helped the Puriman flee.”

“And now you want to break my ship apart!” She stood and kicked sand into the fire.

The evening had started well, Sarah thought. Wadjet had finally waded ashore. Seth had been digging a trench in the sand, and was tossing sand high in the air when Wadjet came upon him.

“What are you doing, coyote?” she had demanded.

“He’s looking for food,” Sarah explained. “Like mussels, he said.”

“Wait,” Wadjet had replied. She stripped, smiled at Sarah as if challenging her to do the same, and then swam out into deeper
water, just past her boat. She returned some minutes later, swimming side-stroke with some red creature held out before her, its legs flailing ineffectually at the air. Wadjet stood as she came into the shallow water and held up her catch.

“It’s like a giant crayfish,” Sarah said. Sometimes the Purimen ate crayfish from the bright streams that cut steep gorges through the lakeside hills.

“Good food,” Seth barked. He stood on two legs in delight, hands outstretched for the crustacean. “Lobster.”

Wadjet gave it to him and swam back out. Before nightfall she had gathered six of the lobsters, one for each of them. “But two for the coyote,” she said.

Wadjet produced a huge pot from a storage compartment on her ship, and Sarah built a tall fire on the beach. Mimir watched with her silver eyes as they boiled the lobsters, and then ate ravenously, even at first almost ignoring the Guardian when he appeared.

Now the Guardian told Wadjet, “There is no choice, Steward. The airship is in working shape, as I said it would be. But there is no lifting wind. Too long the years for that not to break free. A stream runs near the place. With the metals of your ship’s engine, we can make more.”

“I don’t understand,” Chance said. “How can metals make gas?”

“With power from the airship’s engines, the metals thrust in water will break the water,” Thetis explained. “Water is in part made of lifting gas.”

The Guardian said, “There is no other choice available to us, Steward.”

“I am not a Steward!” Wadjet shouted.

“And I’m not a Puriman,” Chance mumbled. “Get used to it.”

Sarah frowned and shot him a glance to remind him of his promise never to mention such things. Chance raised his hand in apology.

“The god comes,” the Guardian continued. “I ken him, coming fast upon us. We have days, at best. We must do quickly. First of the morning, we will bring the tools and food up the mountain, and make ready to leave as soon as the ship is lighter than air.”

Wadjet kicked the sand again, and then stomped off out of the light of the fire. They heard her steps splash into the sea as she walked out to her ship.

There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Then Seth said with meek hope, “Do-do-do you think she wants the rest of her la-la-lobster?”