The Floating Islands (24 page)

“I don’t know,” Cesei muttered. He was standing on the other side of the hall, on his toes, craning to see out one of the windows. “How should I know? I don’t know anything.”

The little boy’s mood clearly hadn’t improved while Araenè had been touring the outskirts of the hidden school. Though she sympathized with his frustration, she also found herself rolling her eyes impatiently. Did
she
ever seem so sullen? Struck by this thought, she stared at the boy for a moment. Then, as Tichorei started to put the basalt sphere in his row, she held up a hand and said hastily, “No, no—the glass one.”

“Yes?” Tichorei sat back on his heels and gazed at Araenè. “Why?”

Araenè found herself unable to explain why it seemed obvious to her that glass should come next in the series Tichorei had arranged. Irritated by her own ignorance, she shrugged. “It just seems right.”

Tichorei nodded. “Glass, then.” He put the sphere in place.

“I met this man,” Araenè said diffidently. “Big. Dressed like a Third City man—not even like that, more like a farmer. He said …” She hesitated, then finished, “He said he was going to use basilisk eggs against the Tolounnese. I think that’s what he meant.”

Tichorei had straightened up. He stared at Araenè. “Big, you say? Lots of untidy hair? Was he—” He stopped, then finished in an embarrassed tone, “A little far into his cups?”

“Oh!” Araenè realized where she had met the man the first time: it had been the same man who’d first directed her to the mages’ school. Or … 
had
it been the same? When she tried to think back, she found her image of the man uncertain. “Yes—maybe,” she said uncertainly. “Does he smell …” She hesitated. “Sort of green and wild, like crushed herbs?”

Tichorei blinked. “Does he smell like
herbs
? Not that I ever noticed. More like ale, I should think! But if you met a big man who was collecting basilisk eggs, I think maybe that was Cassameirin.
Master
Cassameirin,” he said hastily. “I met him once. If he’s here now, that’s good. I think it’s good. He’s not—he’s too old to be powerful, but he makes things happen, you know.” He stared down at the spheres he’d lined up, then uncertainly up at the racks of other spheres. “Maybe I should add one for him. I wonder what kind.…”

“That green one,” Araenè suggested, pointing to a sphere of soapy-looking stone she didn’t recognize. It tickled across her tongue with the same complicated herbal flavor that attended Master Cassameirin. “What are you doing?”

“Setting things up so we can see out properly.” Tichorei added the green sphere to his row and studied it critically. He glanced over at Cesei. “You know how to do far-seeing?”

“A little.” Not quite so sullen now that there was something to do, Cesei skirted the spiral stair in the center of the floor and came over to kneel down across from Tichorei. They both bent their heads over the row of spheres, suddenly looking very much alike despite all the differences between them. The first sphere in the row was obsidian. Then came topaz, amethyst, a smoky gray stone that Araenè didn’t recognize, and finally glass and the soapy green stone. The topaz sphere was the largest, the glass one the smallest. The air around the spheres sparkled with ginger and cumin, with undertones of herbs and pepper and cloves.

“Master Kopapei,” Tichorei said, pointing to the obsidian sphere. He went down the row. “Tnegun, Akhai, Yamatei, Camatii, and Cassameirin. Now,” the young man explained, “I’m going to show you both how to set a sphere so you can catch the first moment of someone’s overextension—and then we’ll watch in turn, do you see? If one of the masters overextends, I’ll try to catch him, put him back together. Arei, if I start to extend too far myself, you’ll have to catch me.”

“How?” Araenè asked tensely. She knew already that however one stopped an apprentice mage from overextending, she wouldn’t be able to do it.

“You’ll have to hit me. Hard enough that I feel it.” Tichorei demonstrated, slapping Araenè on the arm hard enough to sting. Surprised, she yelped; the young man looked at her, startled, and she put a hand over her mouth. But the other apprentice only shrugged and put a fingertip out to the first of the spheres in the row. “Now, Cesei, watch me. You’ll have to do this if I, well. For now, you only watch, yes?”

The boy nodded earnestly.

“Now, Yamatei first, and we’ll see if we can still get him back,” Tichorei murmured. He bent over the gray sphere.

That night seemed endless to Araenè. Sometimes shouting and the dim clamor of distant trouble were audible from the hall of spheres and mirrors; more often, not. She supposed it depended on exactly where the hidden school actually
was
at any given moment. Neither she nor Tichorei nor even Cesei ever went and looked out a window, not even when dawn approached. The spheres took all their attention.

The spheres sparkled and glittered … and sometimes dimmed. Usually there was nothing to actually
see,
at least not anything for Araenè. But Cesei sometimes bent low over one sphere or another and told her something like, “Master Camatii is way down underneath First City. I think there’s a lot of men there. He’s very tired.”

Tichorei didn’t look into the spheres, but sat with his eyes closed. He waited for Cesei to spot trouble for him, then sent his mind sliding after any mage who’d lost himself in the vastness of sea and sky. Over and over, growing more confident of her judgment and yet more tense as the bells passed, Araenè watched the older apprentice’s breathing become slow and shallow. Then she would lean forward and shout his name right in his face, slapping him hard. Tichorei would lean forward and shake his head, or stand up and pace around the twelve-sided hall for a few minutes.

“I lost Master Kopapei,” he said bleakly, very early in the morning, shortly after the pearl-gray of dawn began to show around the edges of the shutters. “No, Arei, you were right, you had to bring me back! Cesei, don’t cry; he’s not
dead.
Just, I think he’s very badly overextended. Master Camatii will find him eventually.” He didn’t say anything about the possibility that they might lose Master Camatii next, only put the obsidian sphere carefully aside.

The morning dragged past.

“There’s a lot of fighting,” Cesei said, looking worriedly into Master Yamatei’s gray-green stone. “I thought he’d be all right once we got him back. But there’s a lot of, I don’t know; I don’t like the way Master Yamatei feels now.”

Tichorei came over to look, then grunted and went back to pacing. He didn’t say,
There’s nothing we can do about that,
but Araenè was sure that was what he’d meant.

At fourth bell, Master Yamatei’s stone suddenly splintered with a fine lacework of red veins. Tichorei put it beside the obsidian sphere without comment, but he looked sick. “I shouldn’t have—” he began, then cut that off. And said harshly to Cesei, “I have to rest. I
have
to, do you see? Do you understand how I catch them back when they go too far?”

“I’ve been trying to watch.” Cesei didn’t look sullen anymore. Now he looked frightened. “I haven’t, I can’t, uh,
exactly
see what you do.…”

Too tired to be gentle, Tichorei simply put one hand on the boy’s shoulder, cupped his cheek with the other hand, and looked, with a strange kind of forcefulness, into his eyes. Cesei flinched, his face screwing up, suddenly on the verge of tears. He tried once to break Tichorei’s grip, but the older apprentice didn’t let go and after a moment Cesei steadied again, though his breathing had gone ragged.

“You have that?” Tichorei asked him, his tone still rough. “It’s too advanced for you, I know that. You were brave to let me set the pattern. Can you hold it now?”

Cesei didn’t look quite sure. “I guess so.… It
hurts,
Tichorei.…”

“I know it does. Can you hold it anyway?”

“I—” Cesei’s expression turned stubborn. “I can keep it for a while. I
can.
”

Tichorei only nodded. “Good boy,” he muttered. He looked blurrily at Araenè. “Gotta rest. Wake me up by, by, I don’t know, sixth bell? Or if Cesei can’t hold that pattern, wake me up when he loses it.” He walked across the hall stiffly, as though just walking hurt him, lay down right on the floor, and went instantly to sleep. Except he looked more unconscious than just
asleep.

Araenè and Cesei looked at each other. Araenè thought the little boy was even more frightened than she was. She sat down in Tichorei’s old place and patted the floor by her side. Cesei came to sit next to her. He leaned against her shoulder like the child he was, too tired and scared and hurt to remember his eight-year-old pride.

Araenè stroked his bright hair. She missed her mother, suddenly and intensely: she wished her mother was here. Not just for her, but for Cesei. He didn’t remember his, she recalled. That would be even worse than missing a mother who had died.… She put an arm around the little boy. “Does it still hurt?”

“I’m trying not to think about it,” Cesei muttered. There was a long silence.

Then Cesei leaned suddenly forward, staring at the spheres. “Oh,” he said in a surprised tone, closed his eyes, and was instantly gone after whoever had overextended. Araenè pulled back and watched him, terrified that she would miss the moment Cesei himself overextended and lose the boy—but if she panicked and broke Cesei’s extension too early, they might lose whomever he’d gone after.… Then the little boy gasped twice like a drowning swimmer coming back into the air and opened his eyes. “That
hurt,
” he said accusingly, glowering at the unconscious Tichorei.

“I’m sorry,” Araenè said humbly. She was older than Cesei; she knew she should be doing the hard part. But she could only sit and watch the
boys
do the dangerous work.

It was going to be a very long day. And a
very
long night. And at the end … what chance did they really have, Araenè wondered, of throwing back the Tolounnese? Everyone knew the Tolounnese never gave up.

For the first time since everything had started, Araenè remembered her cousin.
Trei
was Tolounnese, too. Half.
He
didn’t give up, either. Maybe … maybe he would actually get her dragon’s egg all the way to … to wherever he’d said the Tolounnese had their terrible engines. Maybe …

11

A
dozen times that night, Trei concluded that he must have made a mistake in navigation—that he’d lost sight of the right stars or calculated an angle wrong, and so they’d gone wildly far from their path. Then Kojran, best of them all at keeping track of passing time, would sing out the count and Trei would take careful note of the stars and decide they were probably still on course after all.

The air was good, though: the wind wanted to come from the north, but up in the heights it could more easily be coaxed around to come from the west and south. Genrai was good at pulling the wind around behind them. So was Kojran, and the two of them worked the wind for everyone. They could soar most of the time: easy flying.

The sun came up right where it should, ten points behind Trei’s right wingtip. They were flying high, where the air was lightest and the winds easiest to turn. From this height they could see a long way. But all around them stretched out the wide and empty sea. There was no sign of the waystation.

Trei adjusted their course a feather’s width more northerly, and they flew on. And on, over the unchanging sea. His shoulders and back ached; his elbows felt strained out of shape from the unrelieved flight. His wings had grown so familiar that he thought he could feel the separate angle of every individual feather. The great white-winged albatrosses could stay aloft for days—for weeks, Trei had heard. But the albatross feathers woven into the kajurai wings didn’t seem to be providing quite as much endurance as Trei might have hoped.

A bell past dawn. Half another bell. Trei knew they’d missed the first waystation. If they’d passed the waystation, probably they’d been too far to the west. If they struck back a little more easterly, maybe they could still find it. If they kept their course, they’d never make the second waystation, not if they’d missed the first. Not the younger boys, at least. Trei wasn’t sure whether he could fly that far without rest or not. Maybe it was time to think about handing the egg off to Genrai.…

Then Tokabii whooped, spun out of formation into a tumbling somersault, spilled air from his wings, and dropped into a steep dive. Trei back-winged in astonishment, but then Kojran shouted, too, and followed Tokabii. After that Trei, too, spotted the elliptical dimple in the wind where the bulk of a floating island disturbed the air—little more than a large pebble, but enough to create telltale spiraling ripples where the moving air spilled into its lee.

“It’s the right waystation, right enough,” Genrai assured Trei wearily once they were safely down. “A pond, a single tree; look, here’s the mark.” He nodded toward the jagged sign carved into the high lintel of the pavilion’s doorway.

Trei, still adjusting to the idea that his course had been good after all, couldn’t think of anything to say. He couldn’t stop shaking, although the morning was already warm. Genrai had had to work his own wings off and then strip Trei’s off as well; Trei couldn’t get his fingers to steady on the buckles. Kojran was almost as badly off, but Tokabii, stunningly resilient, had already dashed down to the pool to try his luck at fishing.

“Kajuraihi stock every pool large enough to come through a hot summer,” Genrai said, amused at Trei’s expression. “Did you miss Berinai’s lecture about that? Can you make a fist? Can you open your hand all the way? I should have thought to bring salve. Kojran, can you go see if there’s any salve in the pavilion?”

Kojran went without a word.

“Tokabii doesn’t realize how near we came to missing the station,” Genrai commented. “But Kojran does. The kajurai he mentioned, Kerii? Kerii was a kajurai in a play. He dropped out of his formation, stayed behind on a floating pebble like this one. In the play, everyone thinks he’s a coward. But he makes a fragrant cedar fire that guides all the other kajuraihi to shelter when they’d otherwise have been lost in a blinding fog.”

“Oh.”

“The thing is … Kerii really was a coward. It was just the Gods’ grace that redeemed his cowardice.”

“Ah.”

“Tokabii would be my choice to wait here. But he won’t, you know. Kojran isn’t so proud.” Genrai waited for Trei to think this through, then added, “It’s farther on the way back than it is coming. We won’t have to coax the wind around: this time of year the low wind is out of the hard north all the way; that’ll help. But even so, we don’t dare miss this station.”

“No, I see that.” Trei looked around. Bare red rock, thin soil trapped in the crevice where the single tree grew. The pool. The pavilion. Wood stacked inside the pavilion. “Cedar?”

Genrai nodded. “There’ll be coal, too. Black smoke by day, a tall, fragrant fire by night. Enough for a couple days’ burning. It’s a famous play.”

“Can Tokabii make it to Teraica and back?” Trei tried not to wonder whether
he
could. He tried even harder not to wonder whether he wanted to.

“There’s one more waystation. And a scattering of random pebbles, so there’s less chance of dropping into the sea. But from the second station, it’ll be straight in, hit the engines, and straight out—nearly a hundred miles each way. Tokabii will
have
to wait at the second waystation—by the time we reach it, he’ll be ready to admit it.” Genrai gave Trei a long look.

Trei met the older boy’s eyes. “
You
can make the whole round-trip.”

“I think so.”

Trei nodded. He opened and closed his hands, carefully. He could just about open his fingers all the way, but his hands were too stiff to make tight fists. His wrists hurt, too. And his elbows, and his shoulders, and all the way down his back … Genrai didn’t look nearly so stiff. Trei wished fervently that
he
was seventeen, with the strength to make little of a two-hundred-mile flight. He said reluctantly, “I suppose we’d better go on soon.”

“Lie down,” ordered Genrai. “I don’t know what’s taking Kojran so long—I’ll see about the salve. You just rest. Sleep, if you can. I’ll wake you by fourth bell.” He gave Trei his own vest as a pillow and walked away.

The second waystation was much easier to find; flying during the day was just easier in every possible way. Even the air seemed more buoyant. They found the waystation a little before dusk and spent a night that was almost comfortable. Even so, Genrai proved correct: even by dawn, Tokabii remained exhausted enough to be willing to wait at the waystation.

“I hope you paid attention to your lessons,” Genrai told him sternly. “If you don’t see us by late this evening, certainly by tomorrow’s dawn, you’ll know you’d better take word back to the Islands. You have a clear idea of the way?”

Tokabii tried to smile. “Straight south. That’s not complicated. But I’ll expect you. Today’s Gods’ Day. That’s good luck, anyway.” He carefully worked the Quei feathers out of his wings and offered them to Genrai and Trei. “You’ll need the luck.”

Genrai hesitated—then gestured for Tokabii to give all six of the feathers to Trei. His manner was so uncompromising that Trei gave in without arguing and fixed three of Tokabii’s Quei feathers into each of his wings.

“One more hard flight,” Genrai said then, laying out the wings for Trei. “You can manage it.”

Trei nodded.

“I don’t know how,” Tokabii muttered. “You’re not
that
much bigger than me.”

Trei didn’t answer.

But Genrai turned and put a hand on the younger boy’s shoulder. “ ’Kabii … Trei doesn’t expect to make the return flight. Just the flight in.”

Tokabii took this in. He stared at Genrai for a long moment. Then his expression, from petulant, became almost frightened. He turned toward Trei.

Trei found he was feeling a little ill. Having Genrai say it that way, just out like that, plainly … Trei knew there was almost no chance he would be able to fly down to the Tolounnese engines, throw in the dragon’s egg, and get away again. But to comfort Tokabii, he said quickly, “I’m Tolounnese—I can just slip away into Teraica and work my passage back to the Islands after things have … calmed down.”

Tokabii looked relieved. Genrai said merely, “Of course you can.”

“One last flight,” Trei said, and then wished he hadn’t. It sounded altogether too final.

“Black smoke by day, fragrant fire by night,” Genrai reminded Tokabii. “Get a tall fire burning by dusk tonight, yes?”

The younger boy nodded. He said, “
You’ll
come back,” confidently.

Genrai shrugged and looked at Trei. “Ready?”

“I wish we had two eggs,” Trei admitted. He rubbed the hard shell of the one they did have through the cloth of its sling. “I hope it’s all right.”

“Your cousin didn’t say it needed special care? Then I’m sure it’s fine.” Genrai hesitated. “Trei—you’re sure you don’t want me to take it? You don’t even have to go the rest of the way if you, you know …”

Trei shook his head. “I’m the one who understands engines. Those drawings weren’t very detailed. Are you sure you’d recognize the right place to throw in the egg?”

“How hard can it be?”

“I don’t know. But neither do you. We only have one egg. We both know that I have the best chance to use it.”

Tokabii stared from one of them to the other. “Besides, you’re not Tolounnese!” he said to Genrai. “
You
couldn’t hide in Teraica!”

“… right,” said Genrai. He looked at Trei for another moment. “Stay above me,” he said. “I’ll get the wind round for you, get you proper lift. All right?”

Trei nodded.

Genrai nodded back and said to Tokabii, “Help me with my wings, will you?”

The way was, for the first time, more east than north. Trei was too tired, or maybe too emotionally numb, to pay much attention to their direction. He just rode the wind, trusting Genrai to hold it in the right quarter of the sky. They stayed low, letting the dense, warm air buoy them.

The day was clear and fine, without a trace of cloud. The ordinary islands that guarded the harbor at Teraica became visible from a startling distance: a dark lumpiness on the horizon, with a haze of black smoke in the sky above the town.

As they approached the harbor, Genrai rose suddenly, passed Trei, slid into a spiral, slowed as Trei came up beside him, and eased closer still, until their wingtips all but overlapped. He turned his head to call, “Engines?” with a jerk of his chin down toward the edge of the harbor.

Trei didn’t answer. There, where the sand met the sea, stood the three great steam engines, just as Ceirfei had drawn them. Their scale was clear from the ships docked along the harbor, from the warehouses set back from the tides. Gangs of men, tiny at this distance, labored to pour wagonloads of coal down into each furnace. Billows of white steam mingled with the smoke, visible long before the engines themselves came into sight.

Trei slid down the wind toward the engines. They were so much bigger than he’d expected—so much bigger than he’d ever imagined, and he found himself doubting whether it
was
after all possible to overheat so vast a boiler. When the wind changed suddenly, he found himself flying through choking black smoke—then hot white fog—he beat his wings hard and pulled against the air with dragon magic—it occurred to him that it was lucky the Tolounnese hadn’t saved some of the immense power of the furnaces to kill the air around and over Teraica, but maybe they’d need all of that power to use against the Islands.

He broke at last into the clear winds, gasping. He looked for Genrai, couldn’t find him. Then did: well away toward the sea. But there was no point in joining Genrai now. There was nothing to say—at least, nothing Trei felt able to say.

He curved around instead, dropping lower, skirting the billowing smoke and steam. The engines roared: a sound that he imagined might be like the roaring of dragons. He had never imagined anything so big! Trei thought suddenly of Uncle Serfei saying,
Tolounn’s only art is the art of war,
and found himself wishing that his uncle could have seen these great engines. The art of war, yes, maybe, but how splendid an art sometimes! He struggled against a totally unexpected dismay at the thought of destroying something so great and powerful.

What a wonder Tolounn had made, here at the boundary between engines and magic! How could anything the Floating Islands do match this? If the Islands couldn’t defend themselves, then whatever Trei did or failed to do, eventually Tolounn would conquer them—and was that so terrible? Tolounn was generous to territories it conquered. Not like Yngul.

Though … it was true that no land Tolounn conquered ever regained its independence. If Tolounn took the Islands, the king and all his family would surely be imprisoned in Tolounn and a Tolounnese provincar would be put in place to rule.
Tolounn’s only art is the art of war.
It
was
true, in a way, and in the service of its art, Tolounn always required newly conquered territories to provide conscripts. If the Islands were subjugated, few young men would be allowed to become chefs or, or … whatever they might have wanted to become. They would go instead to swell the ranks of Tolounn’s armies—especially if the Tolounnese Emperors saw the Islands as a stepping-stone on the way to Cen Periven. Which they would.
My fault,
Trei thought.
My fault if I can’t do this and then we lose.
Then he blinked, realizing that for the first time he’d thought “we” and not “they.”

“I
am
an Islander,” Trei said aloud into the rushing, smoke-filled air, but the wind roared in his ears and swept the words away as though he had never spoken them, and he found himself uncertain whether he’d spoken aloud at all. Yet he
had
chosen to be Islander, and now he had to take the egg down—had to complete this task, or why had he
come
?

Even if probably the dragon egg wouldn’t do anything to those engines anyway, not even if the heat quickened it, and there was no guarantee even of that, was there? He was suddenly certain it wouldn’t work. Araenè had just been wrong about what she’d thought the dragon wanted—or about what the egg would do if it was thrown into a furnace—even now, at this last moment, if Trei just found a place way out on the edges of Teraica, he really
could
rest there and then, in a day or two, fly back to the Islands. Give the egg back to Araenè, tell her he hadn’t been able to use it after all.