Morgawr (13 page)

They climbed to a thousand feet as the floor of the pass rose ahead, forcing them to gain altitude beyond what Rue knew her brother had hoped would prove necessary; the winds at this elevation were too strong and unpredictable.

Then the mountains parted ahead, and far below they saw a vast forest cupped by the fingers of scattered peaks, deep and impenetrable and stretching away into the haze. There would be a landing site there, a place for them to set down and make repairs.

She had no sooner finished the thought than the aft port radian draw snapped at the masthead and fell away.

At once, the
Jerle Shannara
began to lose power and slip sideways. Spanner Frew fought to bring her nose up, but without both aft parse tubes in operation, he lacked the means to do so.

“I can't right her!” he grunted in frustration.

“Mainsail!” Big Red shouted instantly to the crew.

Kelson Riat and another of the Rovers leapt up at once from where they were crouched amidships and began to unfasten the lines and run up the sail. Without the use of the aft parse tubes, Big Red was going to rely on the sails for power. But the crosswinds were vicious; there was as much chance as not that they would fill the big sail and carry the airship right into the cliffs like a scrap of paper.

“Steady, steady, steady . . . ,” Big Red chanted to Spanner Frew as the shipwright fought to hold the
Jerle Shannara
in place.

Fluttering and snapping, the mainsail went up. Then the wind caught it and drove the airship forward with a lurch. She bucked in the wind's strong grip, and another of the draws snapped and fell away.

“Shades!” Redden Alt Mer hissed. He snatched at the wheel as Spanner Frew lost his footing, struck his head on the pilot box railing, and blacked out.

They were still falling, but they were accelerating toward the gap, as well, the mountains widening on both sides. If they could stay high enough to miss the boulders clustered in the mouth of the pass, they might survive. It was going to be close. Rue willed the
Jerle Shannara
to lift, begged her silently to level off. But she was still falling, the rocky surface of the pass rising swiftly to meet her.

Her brother threw the levers that fed power to the diapson crystals all the way forward and brought the steering levers all the way back. The airship shuddered anew, lurched, and rose a final time. They surged through the gap, breaking into the clear air above the forest below. But even as they did so, the keel scraped across the boulders beneath them, making a terrible grinding, ripping noise. The
Jerle Shannara
shuddered and then dipped, the bow coming down sharply, pointing left and toward the forest a thousand feet below. The crosswind returned, sudden and vicious, snatching at the crippled vessel. The mainsail reefed as several of her lines snapped, and the
Jerle Shannara
plunged downward.

Rue Meridan, clinging to both her safety harness and the pilot box railing, thought they were dead. They spiraled down, out of control, the canopy of the trees rising to meet them with dizzying swiftness. Her brother, still struggling to bring the bow up, cursed. Crew members slid along the decking. The safety line broke away on one, and she caught just a glimpse of him as he flew out over the side of the ship and disappeared.

Then the crosswind shifted, ripping along the cliff face and carrying the
Jerle Shannara
sideways into the rock. Rue had just a moment to watch the cliff wall fly toward them before they struck in a shattering crunch of wood and metal. She lost her grip on both her safety line and the railing and flew into the pilot box control panel. Pain ratcheted through her left arm, and she felt the stitches on her wounded side and leg give. Her safety line snapped, and then she careened into her brother, who was hanging desperately onto the useless steering levers.

A moment later, everything went black.

Twelve

As he finished tying off the bandages around Little Red's damaged torso, Redden Alt Mer was thinking things couldn't get any worse. Then Spanner Frew lumbered up the steps to the pilot box and knelt down beside him.

“We lost all the spare diapson crystals through the tear in the hull,” he announced sullenly. “They've fallen somewhere down there.”

His gesture made it clear that
somewhere down there
was the jungle below the wooded precipice on which the
Jerle Shannara
had finally come to rest, an impenetrable green covering of treetops and vines that spread away from the cliff face for miles.

Alt Mer rocked back on his heels and stared at the shipwright as if he were speaking in a foreign language. “All of them?”

“They were all in one crate. The crate fell out through a hole ripped in the hull.” Spanner Frew reached up to touch the gash in his forehead, flinching as he did so. “As if I needed another headache.”

“Can we fly with what we have?”

The shipwright shook his head. “We're down to three. We lost the port fore tube and everything with it on landing. What's left might let us fly in calm weather, but it won't get us off the ground. If we try it, we'll just go over the side and into the trees with the crystals.”

He sighed. “The thing of it is, we came through this all right otherwise. We've got the timbers to repair the hole in the hull. We've got spare draws and fastenings. We've got plenty of sail. Even the spars and mast can be fixed with a little time and effort. But we can't go anywhere without those crystals.” He rubbed his beard. “How's Little Red?”

Redden Alt Mer looked down at his sister. She was still unconscious. He had let her sleep while he worked on her injuries, but he thought he'd wake her soon in case she had suffered a concussion. He needed to know, as well, if there was damage inside that he couldn't see.

“She'll be all right,” he said with a reassuring smile. He wasn't sure at all, but there was no point in worrying Black Beard unnecessarily. He had enough to concern him. “Who went over the side?”

“Jahnon Pakabbon.”

Big Red grimaced. A good man. But they were all good men, which is why they had been chosen for the voyage. There wasn't a one he could bear to lose, let alone afford to. He had known Jahnon since they were children. The quiet, even-tempered Rover had a gift for innovation in addition to his sailing skills.

“All right.” He forced himself to quit thinking about it, to concentrate on the problem at hand. “We have to go down there and bring him out. We'll look for the crystals when we do. Choose two men to go with me—and make sure you're not one of them. I need you to work on the repairs. We don't want to be stranded here any longer than necessary. Those airships with their Mwellrets and walking dead will come looking for us soon enough. I don't intend to be around when they do.”

Spanner Frew grunted, stood up, and went back down the pilot box steps. The
Jerle Shannara
was canted to port at a twenty-degree angle perhaps a hundred yards from the precipice, the curved horn of her starboard pontoon lodged in a cluster of boulders. She wasn't in much danger of sliding over the edge, but she was fully exposed to anything flying overhead. Behind her, running back for perhaps another hundred yards, a forested shelf jutted from the cliff face of the mountain on which they had settled. They were lucky to be alive after such a crash, lucky not to have fallen all the way into the jungle below, from which extraction would have been impossible. That the
Jerle Shannara
had not broken into a million pieces was a testament to her construction and design. Say what you would about Spanner Frew, he knew how to build an airship.

Nevertheless, they were trapped, lacking sufficient diapson crystals to lift off, short one more crew member, and completely lost in a strange land. Big Red was normally optimistic about tough situations, but in this particular instance he didn't much care for their chances.

He glanced skyward, where clouds and mist hung like a curtain across the horizon, hiding what lay farther out in all directions. Nothing was visible but the emerald canopy of the jungle and the tips of a few nearby peaks, leaving him with the unpleasant feeling of being trapped on a rocky island, suspended between gray mist and green sea.

“Spanner!” he yelled suddenly. The burly shipwright trudged back over to stand below the box and looked up at him. “Cut some rolling logs, rig a block and tackle, and let's try to move the ship back into those trees. I don't like being out in the open like this.”

The big man turned away without a word and disappeared over the side of the ship. Big Red could hear him yelling anew at the crewmen, laying into them with his shipyard vocabulary. He listened a moment and shook his head. He missed Hawk, who was always a step ahead in knowing what needed to be done. But Black Beard was capable enough, if a bit irksome. Give him some direction and he would get the job done.

Redden Alt Mer turned his attention to his sister. He bent down and gave her a gentle shake. She groaned and turned her head away, then drifted off. He shook her once more, a little more firmly this time. “Rue, wake up.”

Her eyes blinked open, and she stared at him. For a moment, she didn't say anything. Then she sighed wearily. “I've been through this before—come back from the edge and found you waiting. Like a dream. Still alive, are we?”

He nodded. “Though one of us is a little worse for wear.”

She glanced down at herself, taking in the bandages wrapped about her torso and leg where the clothing had been cut away, seeing the splint on her arm. “How bad am I?”

“You won't be flying off to rescue anyone for a while. You broke your arm and several ribs. You ripped open the knife wounds on your thigh and side. You banged yourself up pretty good, all without the help of a single Mwellret.”

She started to giggle, then grimaced. “Don't make me laugh. It hurts too much.” She lifted her head and glanced around, taking in as much as she could, then lay back. “We don't seem to be flying, so I guess I didn't dream that we crashed. Are we all in one piece?”

“More or less. There's damage, but it can be repaired. The problem now is that we can't fly. We lost all our spare diapson crystals through a break in the hull. I have to take a search party down into the valley and find them before we can get out of here.” He shrugged. “Thank your lucky stars it wasn't worse.”

“I'm busy thanking them that I'm still alive. That any of us are, for that matter.” She licked her lips. “Got anything to drink that doesn't come from a stream?”

He brought her an aleskin, holding it up for her as she took deep swallows. “You hurt anywhere I can't see?” he asked when she was done. “A little honesty here wouldn't hurt, by the way.”

She shook her head. “Nothing you haven't already taken care of.” She wiped her lips and sighed deeply. “Good. But I'm really tired.”

“Then you'd better sleep.” He arranged the torn bit of sail he had folded under her head for a pillow and tucked in the ragged folds of her great cloak about her arms and legs. “I'll let you know when something happens.”

Her eyes closed at once, which was what he had expected, given the strength of the sleeping potion he had dropped into her drink. He took the aleskin and tucked it away in a storage bin to one side of the control panel, out of sight but ready to use if he needed it again. But she wouldn't wake for twelve hours or better, if he'd measured the dosage right. He looked down at her, his little sister, tough as nails and so anxious to demonstrate it she would have insisted on getting up if he hadn't drugged her. She confused him sometimes, the way she was always trying to prove herself, as if she hadn't already done so a dozen times over. But better to be like that, he supposed, than to be content with the way things were. His sister set the standard, and she was always looking to improve on it. He could wish for more like her, but he wouldn't find them no matter how hard he looked. There was only one Little Red.

He yawned, thought he wouldn't mind a little sleep himself, then walked over to the ship's railing and looked down at Spanner Frew and the others as they placed the rolling logs under the pontoons. The block and tackle was already in place, strapped to a huge old oak fifty yards back with the rope ends clipped to iron pull rings that had been screwed into the aft horns just above the waterline.

“We could use another pair of hands!” the shipwright shouted up at Big Red as he took in the slack in the ropes with an audible grunt.

Redden Alt Mer climbed down the ship's ladder and joined the others as they picked up the lead rope, set themselves, and began to heave against the weight of the airship. Even after she had been pulled off the rocks and straightened so that her pontoons were resting on the logs, the
Jerle Shannara
was difficult to budge. Eventually, Big Red took three others forward and began to rock her. After some considerable effort and harsh words had been expended, she began to move. Once she got rolling, they worked swiftly. Pulling steadily on the ropes, they rotated the rolling logs under her floats as she lumbered backwards until they got her perhaps three dozen yards off the exposed flat and into a mix of trees and bushes.

After taking down the block and tackle and unhooking the ropes, Redden Alt Mer ordered Kelson Riat and the big Rover who called himself Rucker Bont to cut some of the surrounding brush and spread it around the decks of the airship as camouflage. It took them only a little while to change her appearance sufficiently that the Rover Captain was satisfied. With all the sails down and the decking partially screened, the
Jerle Shannara
might look like a part of the landscape, a hummock of rock and scrub or a pile of deadwood.

“Good work, Black Beard,” he told Spanner Frew. “Now see what you can do with that hole in her side while I take a look down below for those crystals.”

The big man nodded. “I've given you Bont and Tian Cross for company.” He took hold of the Captain's arm and squeezed. “Little Red and I won't be there to look out for you. Watch yourself.”

Redden Alt Mer gave him a boyish grin and patted the big, gnarled hand. “Always.”

They went down the cliff face in a line, Big Red in front setting the pace and finding the most favorable route for them to follow. It wasn't a particularly steep or long descent, but a misstep could result in a nasty fall, so the three men were careful to take their time. They used ropes as safety lines where the descent was steepest; the other sections, where the slope broadened and there were footholds to be found in the jagged rock, they navigated on their own. It was midafternoon by now, and the hazy light was beginning to darken as the sun slid behind the canopy of clouds and mist. Big Red gave them another three hours at most before it would become too dark to continue the search. There wasn't as much time as he would have liked, but that was the way it went sometimes. You had to make the best of some situations. If they ran out of time today, they would just have to try again tomorrow.

The climb down took them almost an hour, and by the time they were inside the trees, everything was much darker. The canopy of limbs and vines was so thick that almost no light penetrated to the jungle floor. As a result, the undergrowth wasn't as thick as Big Red had anticipated, so they were able to advance relatively easily. They quickly discovered that they were in a rain forest, the temperature on the valley floor much higher than in the mountains. The air was steamy and damp and smelling of earth and plants. Life was abundant. Ferns grew everywhere, some of them very tall and broad, some tiny and fragile. Though most were green, others were milky white and still others a rust red. Their tiny shoots unfurled like babies' fingers, stretching for the light. Slugs oozed their way across the earth, leaving trails of moisture, sticky and glistening. Butterflies careened from place to place in bright splashes of color, and birds darted through the canopy overhead so fast the eye could barely follow. Now and again, they heard them singing, a mix of songs that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

The atmosphere was strange and vaguely unsettling, and they could feel the change immediately. The sound of the wind had disappeared. Over everything lay a hush broken only by birdsong and insect buzzes. In the silences between, there was a sense of expectancy, as if everything was waiting for the next sound or movement. They had the unmistakable feeling of being watched by things that they could not see, of eyes following them everywhere.

Some distance in, they stopped while Big Red took a reading on his compass. It would be all too easy to become lost down here, and he wasn't about to let that happen. He had only a vague idea of where to look for Jahnon's body and the missing diapson crystals, so the best they could do was to navigate in that general direction and hope they got lucky.

He stared off into the hazy distance, thinking for a moment about the direction of his life. He could stand to take a compass reading on that, as well. At best he was drifting, tacking first one way and then another, a vessel with no particular destination in mind. He shouldn't spend a moment of time worrying about becoming lost down here given how lost he was in general. He might argue otherwise—did so often, in fact—but it didn't change the truth of things. His life, for as long as he could remember, had consisted of one escapade after the other. Rue had been right about their lives as mercenaries. Mostly, they had been centered on the size of the purse being offered. This was the first time they had accepted a job because they believed there was something more at stake than money.

Yet what difference did it make? They were still fighting for their lives, still careening about like ships adrift, still lost in the wider world.

Did Little Red now feel that coming on this voyage was worth it?