Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles) (10 page)

The furnace cracked and split; lava spewed forth, washing over Chipmunk. Her whole body felt like it burst into flame.

She had waited too long, she knew at once. The fascination with the process and a struggle to understand how it could defy all the physics she knew had cost her time she should have spent mitigating the effect. Chipmunk’s eyes snapped open and sought the water bucket. A scream tore itself loose from her throat as she forced the aether into the bucket. The surface steamed instantly, and within seconds it was boiling so violently that the bucket shook and danced along the floor.

As she struggled to force the aether from her, black spots swam in her vision, rimmed in purples and greens. There wasn’t enough light for her to have seen such colors. Everything in the room was shades of grey. Until it all went black.

Chapter 7

“Great power and knowledge makes them wanton as children. Would that the mighty sorcerers held the wisdom of a common shepherd; to each look after his own and leave the greater world in peace.” -Tallax

The audience hall of the Imperial Palace of the Kadrin Empire murmured with conversation and lilted with the harmony of flute and lyre. There was no pressing business on the schedule, just a series of minor matters to bring to the empress’ attention. The audiences were spaced out to stave off the boredom of the court hangers on. During the ample breaks, servants with trays of delicacies drifted among the self-important and important alike—and were wise enough to tell them apart. Knowing whether the last goblet of wine should be given to Lord Allard’s daughter or one of the empress’ knights was a key to long, fruitful employment. No one got rich serving in the palace staff, but few servants were better off.

A slim black hurricane threw open the doors of the audience hall, sending the door guards scrambling. He strode through the polite gathering with the grace of a pig farmer in his own sty. The servants who knew their business would sooner offend the empress than earn the ire of Danilaesis Solaran, the future warlock of the Kadrin Empire.

On the dais, Empress Celia conversed with the high sorcerer, Danilaesis’s grandfather, Axterion. The two carried their conversation in low tones, with Axterion craning his aging body over the throne to maintain a semblance of privacy.

Axterion looked up, his bushy white eyebrows knitting themselves into one jumble of scruff in disapproval. “What do you want, boy? You should be in ...” Axterion paused and scratched a finger at his bearded chin. “Astronomy, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Clear the hall, I’ve got more important things on my mind than stars. Nothing this rabble needs to concern themselves with,” Danilaesis replied. He continued to the base of the dais, but didn’t set foot on the steps.

“Since when did I say you could go about dressed up as a warlock?” Axterion asked. “I thought I had them put your last outfit in the hearthfire.”

“Letter of the law, Marem did. I cast a ward over the fabric to keep it from burning. I just picked it out once she was gone and sent it to the wash woman to get the smoky smell out. Now just order the hall clear so we can talk about things that matter.”

Axterion looked sidelong at the empress, who had watched the exchange impassively. “Very well,” Empress Celia said, her voice carrying throughout the hall. “Clear the room.”

Guards slipped in from the corridors and helped usher courtiers through the doors. There was muttering and grumbling, but no open protest. Danilaesis knew he was despised at court; it was a goal of his. He could no more stand the fawning, vapid noble proxies than they could tolerate him.

“Send the listener away as well,” Danilaesis said, once the hall was empty of all but himself, Axterion, and Empress Celia. “I’ll fetch him when we’re done.”

“Kaelmar, you may go,” Axterion said. Though there was no sound, Danilaesis could see the aether shadow of the man, even through the warded palace walls. Normally he would remain on hand to summon the courtiers to return once a private audience was ended. Danilaesis wanted no Fifth Circle sorcerer involved in hearing his news.

“Warlock Danilaesis, what would you speak of?” Celia asked, drawing a frumpled glare from Axterion at the use of Danilaesis’s title. Danilaesis had always liked her. She was brutal and shrewd, taking over true rulership of the empire from Emperor Sommick, who did nothing but drink and eat and sire heirs. Celia was young enough and comely enough that despite being more than twice his age, Danilaesis could still harbor boyish fantasies about killing the emperor and taking her for himself. Her sorcerous ability to keep her youth certainly helped.

“I saw it.”

“That other world you mentioned?” Axterion asked. “Korr?”

“It was only a glimpse, but it was enough. It’s real,” Danilaesis replied. The gleam in his eye would have spoiled his deception had he tried any.

“Why is this so urgent?” Celia asked. Her hands clung to the arms of her throne, like claws. Danilaesis could never decide if it was anger, impatience, or just the desire to get up from the throne and pace about in un-empresslike fashion that made her do it.

“This is a world where you’d be a formidable sorceress, Empress,” Danilaesis replied. Before taking the throne, Celia had been nothing more than a Sixth Circle sorceress with a prominent patron. Danilaesis could twist her like a cloth-knot doll. “They have airships that fly on the barest hint of aether, based on designs far cleverer than the
Daggerstrike
, or the sea ships we’ve converted.”

Axterion took two shuffling steps with the aid of his staff, and lowered himself into his cushioned chair near the royal thrones. “Yes, I can see how that could come in useful. Ghelk still fears to move against us, but the rest of the Megrenn Alliance is pulling themselves together faster than we are.”

“Even if they make their own airships, they won’t be able to make them like these,” Danilaesis said. “We’d rule the skies, maybe even pin the dragons in their lairs and keep the goblins in check.”

Axterion shook his head. “No, much as I like the idea, your grandmother always cautioned against the pollution of the worlds. Unintended consequences. Maybe the goblins get a hold of one and make five for every one we build. They could, I reckon.”

“Quit being death’s herald,” Danilaesis said. “Think of it: we sweep the Megrenn Alliance clear, then drive the goblins to extinction.”

“Dragons would never allow it,” Axterion said. “I know Rashan killed one, but you’re no Rashan—”

“Yet,” Celia said.

“Thank the winds!” Axterion added. “There’s ways to deal with folks besides killing, or are you skipping those classes, too?”

“‘Never suffer an enemy to live, once they offer violence,’ my uncle always said,” Danilaesis replied.

“Look where that got him,” Celia replied. “I saw that desperate paranoia firsthand. Anything you saw from him but madness was a painted facade. In the end, he was only happy when killing.”

“Yeah, two hundred forty two years, and we can’t even be sure he’s dead,” Danilaesis said in mocking tone. “Saved the empire in four wars. What a waste of a life.”

Axterion’s eyes narrowed. “Just how did you see Korr?”

Danilaesis smirked. “You got me. Yeah, it was one of the tricks Rashan showed me. He never could say no to teaching me spells. Said I was one of the few bright hopes in the empire. I can only assume he included the two of you in that sentiment as well.” He slathered on the sarcasm at the end, lest the dullards misconstrue him.

“Whose eyes did you use?” Axterion demanded.

“Twinborn girl named Madlin. All fully consensual,” Danilaesis swore, holding a hand to his heart.

“What price are they demanding for knowledge of these airships?” Celia asked.

“I don’t plan on paying them anything,” Danilaesis replied. “I’m going to convince them to build them in Tellurak and in return for empowering them, I’ll get to see the plans.”

“So you would arm one world with devices and teach magic to another?” Axterion asked, pointing an accusing staff at Danilaesis.

Danilaesis spread his hands. “I keep telling you, I only taught them enough to draw aether and vent it off. I’m no fool.”

“Good.” Axterion grunted. “You’ve got as much business teaching spells as you do leading troops into battle.”

“You didn’t need the hall clear for this,” Celia said. “You could have come to me later, in private.”

“Neither of you has ever flown on an airship, have you?” Danilaesis asked.

“Blasted things aren’t safe,” Axterion grumbled.

Danilaesis grinned. “These are. The stories I’ve heard, they have hundreds of troops aboard, like little cities. How can I keep that to myself until classes end?”

“In the future, you will find a way,” Celia said. “Go bring back the listener and have the court sent in.”

“You’ll see one day,” Danilaesis said, holding up a finger. “These airships will sort out our Megrenn problems, and you’ll be kissing my toes.” He spun on his heel and stalked off.

It seemed for a moment that he was going to have the last word. The door was within his reach, when Axterion’s gruff voice echoed across the black marble chamber. “And take off that costume. You’re no warlock yet.”

There were few pleasures sweeter than subverting his grandfather’s edicts. After Danilaesis found the listener and gave him leave to refill the audience chamber with its usual complement of toadies, he searched among the courtiers. He had caught the eye of Lord Allard’s daughter on his way in, and sought to find her again. Sybissa was close to him in age and fair as a spring flower. He parted her from her chaperone as the herd flowed by, and extracted her from the mass of rich, pompous slackwits. She was no better than the rest in that regard, a blushing mess of giggles and shy glances that he led to less populous palace halls. Keeping Dan’s promise to Madlin not to take ungentlemanly advantage as she slept had taken an act of willpower that required repayment. He needed a willing vessel for his yearnings just as urgently as Madlin’s twin had needed a bucket of cold water for her trapped aether. The difference was that Danilaesis knew how to handle his own dilemma.

Chapter 8

“I have felt fate’s kiss, that I had friends who would act from their hearts, rather than do what I asked of them.” –King Jouron, in
The King’s Lament

Chipmunk sat in bed with a makeshift drafting board across her lap. She wore her kuduk-made spectacles and a woolen nightshirt that reeked of stale sweat. The curtain was closed, but an extra light installed by the head of the bed provided plenty of light to draw by. A side table was littered with sheets of paper. Some were reports or manifests, but most were her own sketches. The blankets were littered with pencil shavings from the small knife she used to sharpen it; the knife itself lay amid the shavings.

Time was forgotten. The heel of Chipmunk’s hand was grey with graphite dust, and her eyes were heavy with uncounted hours of staring.

There was a knock at the door. She looked up, but said nothing. Her pencil stopped mid-line.

“It’s me,” Sosha’s voice called through the door.

Chipmunk reached to the bedside and drew her coil pistol. “Don’t even try coming in here.”

“I’m just trying to—”

“GO AWAY!”

She listened as Sosha’s footsteps faded down the corridor.

It took a moment for Chipmunk to slow her thoughts enough that she could lose herself in her work once more. Drawing wasn’t the same as working in steel, but she could envision the result from the lines on paper. She had progressed past the stage of wild imaginings and had moved on to practical schematics to hand over to the welders and mechanics.

There was another knock at the door. “Who’s there?” she snapped.

The door opened before she thought to draw her coil gun. It was her father. “Why’d you chase Sosha off?” Erefan stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

“Because my Eziel-damned foot is killing me,” Chipmunk replied. She slammed her pencil down on the bed. It lacked the satisfying snapping sound she would have preferred to punctuate her statement.

“That doesn’t make any sense. You haven’t got a—”

“Because that butcher cut it off!” Chipmunk shouted. “And yes, it still hurts; gut me if I understand how.”

“Maybe you should try asking that one to your Veydran friends. They’re the ones who nearly got you killed.”

“No thanks to you,” Chipmunk replied. “At least Dan was willing to try.”

“At full risk to you,” Erefan replied, crossing his arms. “He wasn’t in any danger, but he nearly baked you alive.”

“I knew the risks.”

“Yes, but you didn’t understand them,” Erefan said. He sat down on the end of the bed. “You’re pestering the forces of the universe, and they’re going to swat you like a fly. You don’t work around live spark without rubber gloves. You don’t weld without goggles. What make you think a rusted bucket of water was going to protect you from aether. You might as well have kept an onion in your pocket for all the good it would do. Stupid, superstitious nonsense, all of it.”

“All I know is Dan tried to help me and Sosha cut my damned foot off.”

“I heard you gave Captain Toller a time of it about letting Jamile aboard the
Darksmith
.”

“You can thank my Veydran friends for that one, too. They convinced me to let you deal with her when we got home. Dan kept me from shooting her when I woke up.”

Erefan scanned the bedside. Before Chipmunk could guess ahead of him, he picked up the coil gun and held it out of reach as she made a grab for it.

“Gimme that back.”

“Why, so you can shoot Sosha when she comes to change your bandage? Rynn, you’ve got to get this temper of yours under control. People are looking to you for guidance—Eziel help them—so you can’t go sulking off by yourself when unpleasant realities crop up.”

“Unpleasant realities?” Chipmunk grabbed her collar and lifted her chin. “
This
is an unpleasant reality. You want to help, find a way to get this thing off without killing me.
This
,” she whipped back the blankets to show a bandaged stump just below her knee, “is Sosha’s incompetence and a missing foot. She’s no physician, and I don’t want her for a nurse, either.”

Erefan studied the coil gun idly as he sat. “You know, I found myself in Tinker’s Island, sketching up plans for mechanical legs the other night.” He set the gun down in his lap and sighed. “My only daughter is maimed, and all I can think of is to make replacement parts. I don’t know what to do for you, Rynn. Sosha does. Jamile does. If it hadn’t been for her, you’d be dead by now twice over. Once from the black rot, and once from the burning blood.”

Chipmunk glanced down to her arm, where a scabbed puncture wound by the crook of her elbow reminded her of the transfusion of blood she’d received. Missing limbs, someone else’s blood coursing through her ... there was nothing natural about medicine.

“Any of the leg designs seem promising?” Chipmunk asked.

“Not yet,” Erefan admitted. “I won’t go a half-measure on this. We don’t have the facilities here, but once we get the world-ripper running, I’ll have one through from Tinker’s Island.”

“We’re not running.”

“I know.”

“Want to see what I’ve been working on?” Chipmunk asked. She turned the drafting board away from Erefan, pending his answer.

Erefan made a pretense of trying to peer over the top, but he had no angle to see from where he sat. “Two days of secrecy, and suddenly you’re eager to share?”

Chipmunk hooked a thumb at the side table. “Reports are saying most of the holes are patched. We’ll lift soon if I don’t show you.”

“What is it?”

Chipmunk said nothing, but handed the sheet of paper to Erefan. His raised brows told her she had piqued his curiosity. “No vacuum at all?” Erefan asked. He laid the sheet on the bed between them. It showed the two airships joined together by a series of welded scaffolds, with the giant vacuum tanks sectioned into multiple stories of compartments for crew and equipment storage, with stairways down into the gondola.

“We’re already having trouble keeping enough vacuum to stay aloft. There’s a limit to vacuum we just can’t get past. Levitation runes are the only way we’ll be able to keep these things above cloud level without dumping crew and supplies, and I don’t think that’s how this war’s getting won.”

“This could take months,” Erefan said. “I don’t think we can remain undetected that long.”

“We don’t need to do it all at once. I had the ships park this close because I had some inkling of how I wanted to do this. For now, we just need to join the two ships, make sure the walkway between is safe, and get enough levitation runes carved that the vacuum can get us cloudborne. From there, we’ll find someplace remote to set down and finish the work. We’ll get supplies from Tinker’s Island once the machine is ready.” Erefan was bobbing his head along as she spoke.

“I like it.”

Chipmunk smiled.

“I think that’s the first smile I’ve seen from you in days,” Erefan noted.

“First time I forgot about my foot for long enough,” Chipmunk said. Her smile vanished.

“Oh, enough of the self-pitying twaddle. You’ll heal up, we’ll build you a proper tinker’s leg, and you’ll get on with running a rebellion. Oh, and just an observation, but ‘General Chipmunk’ sounds like something you call a little girl who wins all her games of Tunnel Hunt. I haven’t laughed out loud in front of any of your troops yet, but I can’t promise I won’t. I’ve heard it from a few others as well.” He stood and headed for the door.

“I’ll take it under advisement,” Chipmunk replied dryly.

Erefan held up the coil gun. “And I’ll be sending Sosha along shortly. You need tending to, and she’s the only one qualified. I don’t care if you’re not crying and hugging, but you’re going to remind yourself that she saved your life.” The door closed behind him.

The book in Chipmunk’s hands was a soggy romance of questionable literary value. It told the tale of a pair of young kuduk lovers kept apart by family politics and bureaucratic tangles that were fifty years out of date. There hadn’t been many books aboard either ship when the rebellion stole them, and it sounded like the best of a bad lot. It had the advantage of possessing a large cover, which Chipmunk held close to her face so she couldn’t see around it. She glossed over the fact that the characters were kuduk, and replaced them with humans in her imagination in an attempt to lose herself in the pages.

At the far end of the bed, Sosha was tugging, prodding, and washing. It wasn’t happening to Chipmunk, it was happening in another world, a land outside of fictional Sweetrock Deep, where Chipmunk stood beside Melody
Steamheart as a magistrate attempted to explain why her marriage application had been referred to the Moral Hygiene Committee. Chipmunk found herself skipping long passages that detailed the appeals process and why Melody and her betrothed couldn’t get an exemption. She winced as Sosha applied an ointment that tingled, catching her off guard and sucking her back to Korr.

She knew Sosha was nearly done, so she skipped to the end of the book and skimmed the last few pages. License approval. Wedding plans. Marries Thunder Hardstone. She frowned and flipped back to earlier in the book. Her beloved had been Hammer Deepspike. Chipmunk shook her head. Either the author lost track, or there was some twist in the pages she had skipped. She didn’t care enough to investigate which.

By the time Chipmunk had wrung the book dry of the faintest droplet of interest, Sosha had finished and Chipmunk’s leg was snug in a fresh bandage—what little of it remained.

“You sick of this room yet?” Sosha asked.

“Sick of the company,” Chipmunk replied, still holding the book between them, stuck at the final page.

Sosha hooked a finger over the top of the book and pulled it down. “You need to get up and move around.”

“I don’t want anyone to see me like this.” Chipmunk yanked the book free and snapped it shut.

“What’s there to be ashamed of? You escaped kuduk slavery and were wounded in the effort. You’ve paid in blood. The Tellurak soldiers see that and they know they’re following someone dedicated to a cause.”

Chipmunk raised her chin and showed off her collar. “This isn’t enough of a reminder for them?”

Sosha tilted her head. “Our people know what it means; a lot of them wore collars until your father freed them. The Tinker’s troops? They see it, but it doesn’t hit them in the gut. I don’t think anyone knows the frustration of not being able to get a collar off unless they’ve worn one.” Sosha held out a hand. “Come on, show them their general isn’t bedridden.”

“What, are you going to carry me? I can’t get around on a single crutch with one leg.”

Sosha winked. “I’ve got a surprise for you.” She stood and slipped out into the corridor. Seconds later, she reentered with a new pair of crutches. They were cobbled, but cobbled by someone who knew their business. They were of slimmer construction than her own crutches had been, though still based in steel pipe. The shaft was jogged so that the welded grip two thirds of the way up was in line with the lower end. Cushions at the top were repurposed from the chair arms from the lounge in first class. She didn’t recognize the rubber ends they’d attached to the bottoms to keep traction on the floor.

“Who made those?”

“Do you have to ask? Your father finished them yesterday, but I didn’t want to force you up so soon if you weren’t willing.”

Chipmunk took one of the crutches and hefted it. It was lighter than hers, partly due to thinner piping, partly due to a single-post design, compared to hers with its two pipes coming together like streams into a river, with the grip across. The grip of the new crutch jutted from the side and was wrapped in cloth tape. She took the second crutch from Sosha and scooted to the edge of the bed.

Her balance was awkward as she swung herself around; her left side felt too light. She kept the bandaged stump clear of the blankets as she moved, lest she catch it on anything, wary of the pain she expected. It hurt enough already without more help. Chipmunk arranged the crutches under her arms and used her good leg to hop to her feet—or rather, her foot.

“How do they feel?” Sosha asked, craning her neck around to meet Chipmunk’s gaze as she watched the floor.

“Right one’s fine. Left one still feels like someone stuck my leg in a furnace.”

“No, I mean the crutches. Length? Grip? Weight?”