Heart and Soul (7 page)

And that, at long last—having traveled half the world over in the last six months, and seen women of every race and description—he’d not found anyone who might make him feel that way.

No, he would go back home afterward, to his parents. He would like to imagine they would be happy to see him, but he knew better. No matter how much they loved him, he could never replace their firstborn, Carew, in their heart and soul. They would wait for him till the day they died, and it wasn’t possible for Nigel to tell them that Carew had died—a deserved death—in a far off savannah of a land they would never visit.

So he would go back and establish his routine as his father’s heir, but without ever openly telling his parents he was the heir. He would do accounts, and he would look after his parents’ magical responsibilities, keeping storms from the Oldhall domains, healing the cattle and the tenants, and whatever else he could to protect the little parcel of the world with which he’d been entrusted. And he hoped, maybe at some point, he would achieve contentment, since he could not achieve the happiness of love.

With a shrug for that wild passion he would never experience, he turned his attention to his charts and maps. The flight deck was on the lower level of the carpetship—next to the crew quarters and the kitchens, and the various other appurtenances necessary to make the voyage as painless and seamless for the passengers as possible. Unlike the well-appointed, fashionably furnished rooms above—at least in the top deck, where the first-class passengers lodged—this floor had an almost spartan beauty. Not uncomfortable, but furnished only with the bare minimum. And the rooms could resemble the cells of a particularly demanding monastical order.

But the flight deck, as Nigel had learned through his several travels, was undoubtedly the most wonderful room in any ship. It ran across the entire front of the vessel, on the bottom level, and was entirely glassed in, so that from it the flight crew commanded a complete view of the sky all around, save for one side. That side was covered by seeing spells, run by one of the more experienced magicians on board, and the result projected—like a miniature landscape—on the center of the work table, on which was piled—as well—various maps, charts and navigation implements. On the
Indian Star,
the table was warm honey oak, which shone like polished gold in the early-morning sun.

There were chairs around that table, where the various crew members met to discuss the charts and the flight plans drawn by the flight magician and approved by the captain. The flight magician’s chair was not there, however. Instead, it sat apart, like a throne, with its back to the table and its front to the glass and the wide-open skies. This was because, despite carefully filed flight plans, it was not unusual to meet with some disturbance.

Sometimes, small, local carpetships or—the bane of every carpetship magician—flying rugs, would dart right across the path of the carpetship. And sometimes, some magical event—battle or mass healing or even sometimes building-shoring-up spells—taking place beneath the flight path would cause the carpetship to tremble and falter. There were even natural magical zones—ancient places of worship or of some great working—that caused the carpetship to lose altitude. Most of those were marked, but when flying, as the
Indian Star
was now, over the coast of Africa, not all places were as carefully charted as the flight magician would hope them to be.

When faced with the unexpected in such a way, it was up to the flight magician to make sudden corrections and sudden improvements—to turn abruptly, or to use his magic to maintain level flight.

Nigel, early awakened, looked out at the bright pink sky of palest dawn, calm and serene as an angel’s heart, and smiled. He took a sip of his morning hot chocolate—in a mug that fit into an indentation on the arm of his chair, so that it shouldn’t tilt even in turbulence—and permitted himself to look sideways at Mr. Perigord, who stood beside his chair, looking out at the same landscape. “We should make landfall in the Cape within two days,” he said. “Those tailwinds past Guinea surely helped.”

Mr. Perigord nodded. “They did, but it takes a good flight magician to predict the weather as well, and to steer with it, not against it. Why, on our last voyage, from Africa to India, we were almost three days late because we were fighting the winds, and Mr. Smith, as he called himself, could do no more than bleat that he was no weather magician.”

Nigel permitted himself a small smile and nod, but he didn’t enlighten Mr. Perigord. It was not up to him to tell the man that, of course, he knew how to predict the weather. It was a necessary ability in the son of a man with an estate to tend. Without predicting and controlling the weather, you could lose all the crops in the field before your tenants had the time to bring them in.

“I wonder, sir, if perhaps—” Mr. Perigord started.

Whatever he was going to say got drowned in a shriek of magical sirens. The alarm was so activated that it echoed in everyone’s ears as though it were being sounded just beside them, a claxon of screaming fury. At the same time, or perhaps just before it, the ship faltered and trembled, in a flutter of wood, a tinkle of glass and a confusion of screams.

Nigel grabbed hold of the flight field as soon as his mage sense felt it falter, and before, even, the physical tremble communicated itself through the soles of his feet. He gritted his teeth and threw all of his—not inconsiderable, since he was a direct descendant of Charlemagne on both sides of his ancestry—magical power at keeping the ship going, and keeping it steady.

And yet, even though the carpetship stopped trembling, the sirens still sounded, screaming fury all around them. If it were a mere disturbance of the flight field, then stabilizing it would stop the alarms. If the alarms still went on, there was more to it.

Nigel looked at Mr. Perigord, to find the man drawn and white-faced, staring back at him in as much confusion as Nigel himself felt. Because the sirens made them all deaf, he pronounced, with exaggerated care so the man could read his lips, “I wonder what could be causing the alarm?”

Mr. Perigord shook his head—but whether he was unable to hear what Nigel was saying, or unable to answer, Nigel did not know. Nigel, in turn, thinking of all the confusion that could be caused by the approach of a magical flying creature—say, a dragon—and knowing that not all such creatures were friendly, reached into the box he kept beside his flight chair for the lion’s tail and ears. The magic in the powerful fetishes, imbued with Masai incantations, allowed Nigel to envelop the whole ship in a protective field that would repel any magical interference. And yet, the alarms went on.

Now, joining the alarms, came screams. Unlike the first screams Nigel had heard when the ship fluttered—which came a bit from all over the carpetship—these came from the upper levels only. The levels in which the passengers lodged.

“What the—” Mr. Perigord said, his pale lips forming the words, which Nigel couldn’t hear above the din. He turned, clearly with every intention of heading for the wrought-iron spiral staircase at the back of the room.

At that moment, from either side of the glass wall that ran across the front of the flight room, dragons appeared—one blue, one red, one pale green and yet another an indefinable shade of violet. It took Nigel a moment to recognize them as dragons because they were nothing like the dragon that his friend Peter turned into. Peter’s dragon wouldn’t have been out of place gracing the prow of a Viking ship, but these dragons were mere zigzags of color, like lightning bolts given animated form—flying serpents with no visible wings.

“Chinese dragons,” Nigel said to himself—because he was not foolish enough to think anyone else could possibly hear him.

And yet Mr. Perigord’s voice echoed behind him: “Man your stations. Grab your powersticks,” he bellowed with certainty and command, loud enough to pierce the noise of the alarms.

The other men in the flight room—the minor magicians, the map experts, others who allowed Nigel to do his job, ran to the rack at the back. These were strapped with Smith-Henry powersticks, charged with enough loads to conquer most of a small country. They took positions on either side of Nigel’s chair, in classic style, one knee on the floor, bracing the powerstick for a possible shot. Nigel wished that, as aboard the
Victoria Invicta
on his trip to Africa, there had been a group of Royal Were-Hunters aboard. But there weren’t. And most powersticks aboard carpetships were not spelled against weres, the dangers of finding weres on most routes being vanishingly small—and from Europe to Africa, nonexistent.

The dragons flew closer, seemingly heedless of the danger. Suddenly, as if on command, they all flamed. A curtain of flame covered the glassed-in front of the room, blazing red and orange and gold and obscuring everything else from sight. Nigel sat, holding his fetishes and refusing to get up, while he gritted his teeth and kept the ship flying, despite all the disturbance.

He was fairly sure that the men on either side of him discharged their powersticks, but the magical charges got lost in the dragon flame. The glass pinged, turned red hot and melted. A blast of fiery air, as from an open furnace, burst in on Nigel and the others. For a moment, he felt as if he were breathing heat. Not air. Not oxygen. Just heat. His hair seemed to curl away from his face in the blistering heat. His eyes teared.

The flame ceased as soon as it had started. Blinking away the tears that the heated air had brought to his eyes, Nigel found himself staring at the blue sky and surrounded by howling winds. The dragons had moved to the side, and in front of the ship as far as the eye could see was a flotilla of Chinese ships. There were barges and junks and rafts, such as he’d seen only once, during a visit to Hong Kong a few months back. He’d seen whole multitudes of them, seemingly crowding every possible river, had been told that many families lived their entire lives on water that way.

But there was only one set of such barges that flew—those of the feared Chinese pirates. The very same who had destroyed the
Light of the Orient.
Until just a few years ago they’d been thought legends. But then Englishmen flying in China had started being assaulted and learned they’d long been a scourge on the locals. And then they’d started striking all along the Asian coast. And now here.

Nigel swallowed, and concentrated on flying the ship—a superhuman task now that the magic of his auxiliaries had been withdrawn.

“Steady, Mr. Jones,” Mr. Perigord told him in that tone that pierced through all ambient noise. “Do not try to be a hero. We need you to keep the ship flying.”

Nigel had no intention of being a hero. Not only was he aware that the carpetship and every life on it was dependent on him, he was also aware that his mission—returning the jewels to their avatar and their guardians—was more important than saving the property of his employers, or even their passengers.

But it was hard to stay on course and to think only of flying the ship as more and more junks—painted with eyes in their front and outfitted with wildly multicolored sails—boarded the carpetship by throwing ropes that magically attached to the front of the ship. Across the ropes, Chinese pirates came dancing.

While Nigel maintained course and altitude, battles raged around him. Whatever these pirates had in the way of magic must be very powerful, indeed. He saw several men withstand discharges from magical powersticks, and at close range, too. Unless, of course, every one of these attackers was a were. For weres, it took specially charged powersticks to kill them. The idea of that many magical shape-changers was almost impossible, but it seemed to be the only explanation.

Nigel heard screams and smelled blood, and was dimly aware of the hollow sound that could only be a head hitting the polished wood floor, after being severed from its body by one of the vicious sabers in the hands of the boarders.

None of this made sense. It was like a dream, in which the impossible happens despite the sleeper’s attempts to wake or to set the record straight. In carpetships that were attacked—though Nigel had never been in one, he’d read about them often enough—the pirates usually went for the top decks and made off with whatever they could get before the crew—which always had a certain number of men with military background—came after them.

They stole jewels and clothes, furniture and sometimes women. They did not attack the flight-deck crew. And what were Chinese pirates doing this far from Chinese shores anyway?

As Nigel thought this, a man came running toward him, holding in his hand what looked like a vicious saber. The sight of a man running full tilt at the flight magician, without whom the entire carpetship would collapse, was incongruous enough. But the man was stark naked, his salt-and-pepper hair and his amazingly thin and long moustaches his only covering.

Nigel half stood, preparing for the onslaught. With a desperate, almost instinctive wish for a weapon, he gestured with the lion tail. A saber came flying through the air, the handle toward his hand. Nigel grasped it in the same hand as the lion tail.

His would-be attacker stopped a step from Nigel, saber raised. He looked at Nigel as though Nigel was not at all what he expected. “The jewels,” he screamed, in English spoken with the accent of someone used to a tonal language. “Give me the Jewels of Power.”

“Never,” Nigel answered, before he quite knew what he was going to do. While part of his mind still firmly grasped the flight field, making sure the carpetship stayed in the air, he lifted the saber to parry the assault, just as his attacker’s saber came descending upon his head. The blades met, echoing in a clash of metal.