Skybuilders (Sorcery and Science Book 4) (19 page)

“He’s gone,” Leonidas told Ariella, resettling Marin closer to his chest. “Did you hear what he said?”

“I’m not sure. It sounded…”

“Garbled?”

“Crazy,” she amended. “He said the portal brought them to a different world.”

“Surely, he meant to another part of the world.”

“No. He said to a different world.”

“Is that even possible?”

“I don’t know. There are mentions of such things in Elition lore. The really old stories. But I thought that was just metaphor. I’ve never seen anything like it. But then Silas said he’d visited one. So maybe. It sounds like the sort of thing an Elition elder would know about.”

“Elder?” Leonidas asked.

“A nice way of saying a really old Elition. It would have to be someone over seven hundred years old. Like your guard in Precipice. We can ask him when we drop you back off in your cell.”

“Hey!” he protested.

“Just kidding. The only person we know who seems to have any experience with interworld portals is Silas. But he's gone now.”

Ariella’s voice cracked with such sadness that Marin nearly burst into tears.

“He'll be all right,” said Leonidas. And even he sounded sad. “Silas is the scariest man I know. He'll be all right.”

Ariella cleared her throat. “Well, we can’t do anything for him right now anyway. We need to help ourselves. If the assassin is right, the Helleans will be coming here to ‘clean up the mess’. Let’s not be around when that happens. Marin?”

Marin clamped down her lids even harder and shook her head. She felt a slap on her cheek.

“You'll be ok,” Ariella told her.

She couldn’t know that.

“Marin, we need your help.”

No.

“Leonidas, talk to her. We need a way out, and she knows the Hellean cities better than we do. Get her to snap out of it.”

“I’m not sure what you think I can do.”

“More than I can, I'm sure.”

Leonidas sighed and drew Marin in closer. She rested her head on his chest and tried to fall asleep.

“Marin,” he said quietly.

She surprised herself by answering. “Yes?”

“Is there any way out of this storage tunnel?”

“Service tunnel,” she corrected him.

Leonidas snorted. “Of course.”

“It runs around the outer edge of the city. There are several more levels of them below us.”

“Let’s start with that. Is there a ladder around here that leads down?”

“Yes. Head back toward the hatch, then follow the tunnel about two hundred meters past it.”

She felt Leonidas begin to move in that direction. The assassins had tossed a few gas bombs steaming suspicious purple fumes down that way before Marin managed to slam the hatch shut. That had prevented her from directing Hayden and Ian there, which led to their being cornered in front of the supply closet.

“From the tunnels, is there a way off this city? Maybe by dropping into one of the plane bays?” Leonidas asked.

Marin cracked a lid open just far enough to see that there were no bodies lying around. She decided to brave opening both eyes.

“The bays are too far off the tunnels. That will never work, Leonidas. You should really leave the job of concocting crazy plans to the professionals.”

“And by professionals, I assume you mean you?”

“Naturally.”

“I’m confused, Marin. Which of your ‘professional’ skills do you think are going to help us here? Your uncanny ability to bore everyone with irrelevant tidbits of scientific trivia? Or your knack for blowing things up?”

Marin punched him in the arm.

“Ladies and gentlemen, she’s back,” Leonidas declared with a self-satisfied smirk.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

~
Blizzard’s Point ~

526AX August 23, Blizzard’s Point

LEONIDAS FOLLOWED MARIN two levels down the ladder, and Ariella took up the rear. They hopped off into a narrow rectangular room. It was dark, lit only by a pulsing yellow light switch and an uneven blend of pink and golden light streaming in from a tiny porthole.

Neatly labeled boxes were stacked on metal shelves screwed against the two longer walls, covering them from floor to ceiling. One of the short walls was just large enough to fit the door; the other held the porthole. Marin stepped over to that one and looked outside. She stood there in silence for a few minutes, and Leonidas could almost hear the wheels of her brain churning, hopefully plotting their escape.

“What do you see?” she finally asked them.

A few display panels. Some spare computer parts. Hundreds of boxes marked with unhelpful labels like ‘FCLSFH-50’. A storage closet tight enough to provoke an immediate claustrophobic attack.

Leonidas did not voice his thoughts.

“The Western Continent,” Ariella said, looking over the top of Marin’s head to the world outside.

Leonidas joined them by the porthole. Though small, the tiny glass-covered opening was sufficient to provide a decent view of the ocean churning below them. Far off, a speck of white twinkled in the early morning light. Land. Ice-covered land. It was only August, too early for anything but the Elition Western Continent to be completely frozen over. That chunk of land was what the Elitions called the Tundra, a merciless flat expanse of ice and wind. Not exactly on Leonidas’s list of best places to run off to, though he supposed it was better than waiting around for the Helleans to find them and ‘clean up the mess’.

The only problem was the Tundra was way out there and they were here, smack dab over the ocean. And he hardly thought the Helleans would be so helpful as to steer their city over land. He hoped Marin wasn’t planning to crash the city into the freezing water. That would certainly be a fun catastrophe to climb out of. If they even survived it.

“We are in the floating city of Blizzard’s Point, just east of the Elition Western Continent,” Marin said. She turned toward Leonidas and Ariella, and with her hands she made repeating sweeping movements toward the portal. “The wind is currently blowing west, in the direction of the continent.” She pointed to the nearest wind vane mounted against the outside of the city. “We can use that to our advantage.”

“How?” Leonidas asked her. “Is the wind strong enough to push the city over the continent?”

“Not usually, no. In the early days of the floating cities, there were some incidents involving hurricane winds tossing them from their spots, but the Helleans quickly resolved those issues.”

Marin pulled a roll of paper from one of the boxes—the Helleans’ organizational scheme didn't seem to be a mystery to her—then spread it out over a shelf under the porthole. She drew a large circle with a fat black pen.

“This is the city. There are twenty-four thrusters, evenly distributed along the city’s outer perimeter.”

She popped the lid of a thinner pen, this one red. She drew lines along the circle to represent the location of the thrusters, then wrote numbers beside them: 0, 15, 30, 45, 60, 75…all the way around.

“When the wind is strong enough to shift the city’s location, it compensates by firing these thrusters. Which thrusters it uses is dependent on the way the wind is blowing—and the way the city needs to go. This is usually all controlled by computer. With me so far?”

“Wind, thrusters, computer, check,” said Leonidas.

Ariella nodded slowly, setting her hand to her forehead as though the thought of all this gave her a massive migraine. It probably did. Ariella hated and feared machines as much as most humans did Elitions.

And he was one of those humans. No, not was. Had been. He wondered when that had changed. Sometime during the past week with Ariella and Silas? Or even before that? By the time Marin had figured out what he’d done—distracting the Selpe soldiers in Lear so that Hayden and Ian Selpe’s kidnappers could sneak the boys through—he already regretted his actions. Elitions were dangerous for sure, and the incident with those thieving lovers still smarted, but he shouldn’t have let them force him into condemning two half-Elition teenagers. He should have found another way to…

Leonidas stole a quick glance at Marin, checking to make sure she really was still standing there. He’d tried to redeem himself. Especially in her eyes. And he had done that by fighting to save the very boys he'd betrayed. That hadn’t gone much better than his misguided role in the kidnapping. Hayden and Ian Selpe were gone, whisked away to some other world. He hoped that whoever next took the Selpe throne wouldn't make a point of hunting him down. Leonidas struggled not to squirm. The Selpes loathed traitors, and they took especial pleasure in inflicting a considerable amount of pain on them before finally ending their lives. The lucky ones died on the spot. The really unfortunate ones lingered on for years.

As all patriotic Selpes, he'd never shed tears for a traitor, no matter how cruel their punishment. He'd even tracked down a few in his time and turned them in. Perhaps, it would be one of his former colleagues who turned him in.

He stumbled backwards over Ariella’s foot, and she gave him a hard look. “Pay attention please.”

Marin sighed. “If the conversation does not revolve around girls or guns, Leo finds it nearly impossible to concentrate.”

“Or explosions,” he added. “Which is where I assume this is going? You want us to sabotage the city by blowing up some of these thrusters?”

“Yes to sabotage, no to blowing things up.”

“Not blowing things up?” he asked in mock shock. He set a hand on Marin’s forehead. “Who are you and what have you done with Marin?”

She swatted his hand away.

“It wouldn’t be a Marin plan without at least blowing
something
up.”

“I’m not that bad.”

“You are.”

“Am not.”

He smiled and nodded.

“Well, not this time,” she growled. “This time, we’re going for something a bit more sophisticated.” She pointed at her drawing. “The city is too big. We would need to do much more than just blow up a few thrusters. There’s no time for that. As soon as explosions started going off in their city, the people in the control room would notice and send guards to take us out. While the Helleans are scientific—not militant—in nature, they've developed a great many weapons and robots. And many, many things no one outside of their civilization has even seen. There’s no telling what monstrosities they would unleash on us.”

Thinking back to the horrific creations in those engineered environments, Leonidas could only agree. Beside him, Ariella nodded as well. From the look on her face, he imagined she, too, was reliving their experiences with those ‘mechanical menaces’ as she called them.

“But the Helleans’ strength is also their weakness,” Marin continued. “Even more so than the Selpes or Avans, they're dependent on their technology. When it fails, they are at a complete loss. They don't know what to do.”

“Does it ever fail?” Leonidas asked her.

“Not really. They’ve built everything very robustly,” she admitted. “That’s where our sabotage comes in. In order to escape, we need to negate the Helleans’ technological advantage. We need to push the city close to the Wilderness.”

“Where all their technological doodads will suddenly cease to function,” said Ariella.

Marin inclined her head. “Precisely.” Her eyes drifted up and a triumphant smile fell on her lips. She was silent for a few seconds, lost in her own thoughts.

“And how does that work?” Leonidas asked, pulling her out of whatever jumble of ideas had trapped her inside her own brain.

To his surprise, she immediately snapped out of it, which meant he wouldn't need to resort to tickling or crude jokes to get her attention.

“We’ll need to be stealth.”

Leonidas tapped his chest. “My specialty.”

“Ha!” She smirked at him. “That’s not what I remember. You used to trip over your own cat.”

“My skills have been honed since becoming a spy, Marin.”

Still grinning, Marin returned their attention to the circle. “Ok, back to the thrusters. Remember how I said there are twenty-four thrusters along the city’s perimeter? Well, there are also twenty-four thruster rooms, each placed right at a thruster.” She waved a hand toward the long wall to the right of the door. “We're currently on the thruster room level. The nearest thruster room is just next door.” She pointed back to her drawing of the city, then tapped one of the lines cut across the circle’s edge. “There. The one marked at 180 degrees.”

“What do we need to do to push the city over the Wilderness?” asked Ariella.

“The wind will do most of the pushing itself. We need to break the safeguards that keep the city in place.”

Marin fingered past a few labelled crates, settling on a shelf of stacked slender cardboard boxes. She swiped the top one off the shelf, then slid out a computer tablet. She continued to rummage around until she located a keyboard, which she snapped into it.

“I'll prepare a special ‘update’ for the city’s computer system.” Her fingers began to tap lightning-fast across the keys. “Once uploaded, it will cut off communication between the control room and the twenty-four thruster rooms. The people in the control room will no longer be able to remotely open and close valves, and they won't know the open or closed status of the valves.”

“They will send technicians to fix the problem,” Leonidas pointed out.

“That’s ok,” she said.

“That’s ok?”

“Yes. I won't send the update until near the end of the game. By then, they'll already have other problems to deal with.”

The image of a raging hoard of hellhounds, electric fish, metal birds, and golems stampeding through the city streets popped into Leonidas’s head.

“And what is the ‘game’?” Ariella asked warily. “Please don’t tell me it involves my fighting off machines while you fiddle with that computer.”

“Running. The plan involves a whole lot of running.”

Ariella’s grimace softened a tad. “That’s it?”

“No, that’s not it, but it’s most of what you’ll be doing.”

She walked over to the other rack, paused to scan the labels, then pulled three large black objects out of a box. She threw one each to Leonidas and Ariella. He caught it by a strap. It was a backpack—a really large backpack. The sort of backpack soldiers carried around.