Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (46 page)

He stared through a gap in the banister where the wooden rails had been blown to sawdust by Eldritch and down at the ballroom in horror. He barely registered the small piles of fire sitting here and there on rubble-turned-kindling, or the big black tarry spot on the marble floor, or the lingering smell of burstpowder, like sulfur. Nivy and Hayden. Where were Nivy and Hayden? Where was Liem?

Almost as an afterthought, he noticed the flicker of color and movement that had been tracing lines back and forth across the scene. As he homed in on it with some effort, he felt a hysterical laugh rising in his chest. Whatever else Hayden had done, he’d had done this much right. There was fire in the Streams, and it was racing the path to Eldritch like a spark running the fuse to a pile of explosives. The ball of fire zipped through a Stream a few paces beneath the balcony ledge, and Reece squinted against the bright orange heat, sweat instantly beading on his face.

A whole of ten seconds had passed, but each one suddenly felt like a loss. That fire was coming here.
Here
. He gaped over his shoulder and up at the gas pipes and the open-bottomed balloon carrying the body of the sickly
Jester
. He wasn’t a chemist—he’d barely passed his chemistry class with a .3, for crying out loud—but he didn’t have to be to know that coal gas was highly flammable. In another thirty seconds, he’d be charcoal.

As Reec
e rolled onto his stomach and awkwardly pushed up onto his knees, the piercing death scream cut off, the white seething mass twitched, and Reece knew The Kreft’s eyes were on him, and that they wanted him to see him dead. Almost but not quite as much as they wanted to live.

There was a pause of indecision, and then The Kreft bolted over the banister, a smear of light diving into the ballroom. Reece’s brain sputtered in surprise before forcing the rest of him into blind action; he tripped more than jumped off the balcony and into the fresh Stream left by The Kreft.

It was like landing in a somehow solid steam, warm, moist, clammy, breezy. He jerked as the momentum of his fall redirected into a slanted downward glide and held his stomach as it tightened at the sight of nothing but a thin vapor keeping him from a body-shattering fall to the ground. One of his legs dangled out of the Stream, and he was sure that any second, gravity might decide this was more than he should get away with and yank the rest of him out as well. But he couldn’t readjust—he couldn’t move at all. The Stream felt like steam, but it held him in place like concrete. He must have used up all of his panic. He was stuck—he couldn’t fall, but he couldn’t pull himself to safety either—and all he really felt was exasperated, as if the worst joke in the world had backfired on him.

He was coming up fast now on Eldritch, who at the end of the Stream (or the beginning of it), had come to a stop over a cowering body spread prostrate on the floor, and was bellowing something at it, his voice like a gust of winter wind.

Liem’s voice screeched back as he leaned up from kneeling in reverence, “You promised! You promised I would be king! You—”

He yelped like a kicked dog, and Reece felt an unexpected welling of pity for him as Eldritch shrieked wordlessly and struck him again and again, because he knew what Eldritch much want—Liem’s body. Safety from death. Why hadn’t he just taken Reece’s?

The Stream-borne fire reached the observation deck, the pipes of coal gas, and the balloon. There was a flash, a roar that swallowed even Eldritch’s screams—a tug on Reece’s exposed leg, wrenching him from the Stream—a warm body enclosing him in safe arms—

The darkness was hedging in on Reece’s vision again, but he saw enough. The explosion could’ve competed with the sun for brightness, heat, and violence; it tore at the whole ship, but the balloon caught the real brunt of the inferno, and burned from the inside-ou
t. Before, the fire trapped in the Streams had moved like a spark meandering down a fuse…now it sped like a bullet of roiling, blistering flames, tearing through the final Stream, racing the track to Eldritch until at last, with a whoosh of wind and a crack like thunder, blinding fire collided with and overtook brilliant white. The mass that was Eldritch and the small shape that was Liem disappeared in a storm of brightest color, hottest heat, and deepest sound.

Reece was being hefted over someone’s shoulder, carried at a run. He didn’t know by who. He didn’t know where they were going, or if they’d get there before the ship plummeted planetside. He heard screams and shouts and
The Jester
drawing shuddering breaths and felt lost in the chaos.

He shut his eyes, and time must have passed, because when he opened them, he was lying on his back on the dark bridge of the heliocraft, looking up into the duke’s face. Reece knew it because his grip on reality was less than stable at the moment, but for a second, even though the spasming of
The Jester
and the fluttering in his stomach told him the ship was definitely crashing—he thought everything might be alright after all.

“Lie still,” the duke ordered calmly, his face smooth but his eyes grim.

That sounded appealing, but Reece’s body and brain seemed stuck on different frequencies. He unwillingly sat up and glared about. Sophie, Hugh, and Abigail were strapped into the crew seats against the back wall, and all three were staring at him like he’d sprouted wings from his ears. Or like he’d just come off the bad end of a battle with a Kreft and had a few new deformities to show for it.

As Reece grimaced and glanced
towards the flightpanel, Gideon, who was still at the yoke, growled, “Get him buckled! All’a you, get buckled!”

That “all’a you” was meant for Po and the duke. Po’s
bare feet, the only thing sticking out from under the flightpanel, kicked. Gid grabbed her by the belt and dragged her one-handed out across the floor.

Po pushed her half-unwound braid back from her oil-stained face. “I can—”

“There ain’t nothin’ you can do now!” Gideon shouted over the various warning alarms sounding from the panel. “Now
sit
, before I bleedin’ make you!”

“What’s happening?” Reece slurred, letting the duke half lead, half heave him to the crew seats, where he collapsed numbly next to Hugh. He patted his side absently. A wad of fabric had been bound against his cut.

“I would have thought it’d be obvious,” the duke answered flatly as his hands glanced across Reece’s seat and expertly buckled him into place. “There’s no saving the ship, now. We’re crashing. The best we can hope for is a smooth landing.”

“Bleeding bogrosh,” Abigail whispered fervently.

His arms tight around the sniffling Sophie, Hugh leaned forward and asked with fearful eyes, “Reece…where’s Hayden?”

Hayden. Maybe Reece did have a little panic left in his system, after all.

He wasn’t quick enough to mask his emotion. Hugh’s throat and jaw went taut, and he nodded once and then put his face into his daughter’s hair, almost as if bracing himself, not against the impending crash, but something else, something worse. Reece clenched his bloodied fists and felt his pulse hammering hard. Much worse.

The pressure back behind his naval told him they were gaining speed, while the view out the canopy window showed they were losing too much altitude too fast. Gid was trying to steer the ship down in a spiral to coast out their momentum, and he was doing a good job, but the ship just wouldn’t—or rather couldn’t—cooperate with what his hands were trying to make it do.

Suddenly, the ship heaved hard to starboard in a jolt that made Reece rise up against his safety harness and then crash back into his seat with a grunt. Steam gushed out of the flightpanel; a new bell of warning started sounding with all the rest, a shrill, woeful peal. Gid spat a Pantedan oath and reached to pull the emergency temperature-control lever just as the ship pitched to port. His head snapped forward and struck the flightpanel with a muffled but solid
kkrrch
that Reece related to a dropped melon splitting open on the ground. He slumped over sideways in his seat and didn’t move again.

“Gideon!” Reece screamed, hands jumbling with his harness. “Gideon!”

The Jester
careened wildly to the left without hands to hold her yoke, and Reece and the others thrashed to the right, pasted against their seats by the centrifugal forces at work. Reece felt like his insides were being flattened against his backbone, turned to jelly, and he could feel a similar pressure against his face, kneading his cheeks.

Po, glued to the copilot’s chair, reached with a scream for the secondary yoke and steadied it with effort. As soon as the invisible fist of gravity stopped grinding Reece back into his chair, he snapped free of his restraints and fell
towards the flightpanel and Gideon.

“Blast it all, boy!” the duke’s growl, and then a sequence of clicks, followed him despite Abigail’s cry of, “Thaddy!”

Gideon looked bad. Paler than usual beneath the glaze of blood coating his face. With a gasp of effort, Reece tried pulling him from the captain’s chair and onto the floor with his good arm and only made an inch or so of impact.

And then the duke was there, firmly pushing him aside, stooping, and hoisting the limp Gideon up and over one of his broad shoulders.

“Well?” he snapped when Reece stood there staring like a numpty. He glared meaningfully at Gideon’s vacated seat before shuffling towards the back wall, where Hugh had unbuckled and was standing, prepared to help. Like Hayden would be, if he were here.

Hayden…

“Cap’n!” Po squeaked.

Reece spun down into the captain’s seat without another thought. As soon as his palms closed over the smooth golden handles of the yoke, Po let go of the co-pilot’s yoke and sank back into her seat, rubbing her wrists. Reece grit his teeth. The yoke strained against him, vibrating as if it might take flight all on its own, and each vibration bit into his bad shoulder like a hungry nightcat.

He made a quick assessment of his surroundings. He’d only flown a heliocraft two or three times, not counting simulations, but they were all the same. Standard applicators and levelers, Class-A Synthetic Gravity Inducers…

The balloon was gone, but
The Jester
still had her rear propellers and her tiller, and if the rest of the ship hung in there long enough, those might be enough to ease her into what captains called a Skid-Down. A sliding landing, rather than a sudden, potentially deadly stop. All Reece needed was the right landing surface, and for that, he had an idea.

“Po, what’s the engine got left in her?”

“Not much.” Her voice rattled with the ship. “The Quadrant 7’s hardy, but the explosion sucked up all her coal gas. She’s runnin’ on fumes.”

Reece’s shaking fingers curled around the yoke, sweating. He felt hot, but knew from being able to see his breath cloud before his face that he shouldn’t. Like
The Jester
…he was on his last leg.

“Shut her down,” he barked, his voice cracking.

Po’s eyes widened. “What?”

“The Quadrant…shut her down. But be ready to bring the propellers back on to full on my mark. We need to save every bit of juice the engine has left for that one burst. Can you divert any more power to the Quadrant from nonessential systems? Any lighting that’s left, thermal generators, sonic muters—”

“—divergence compensators, coolant trappers.” Po’s little hands sped across the golden flightpanel with easy know-how. Reece felt a dip in his stomach when the propellers went offline. “Done.”

The airship sank down and down, still reeling and spasming even with Reece’s hands clutching the yoke in a death grip, until the weedy tops of the tallest oaks at Emathia began skimming the bottom of the canopy window. They were close, now. The mansion zoomed by in a smear of bright lights far on their left. The motor vehicle stables. The gardens. The forest.

The lake.

“
Now
!” Reece cried, bracing himself against his seat.

Po smashed both of her hands down on a bar above her lap, and
The Jester
jetted forward in a gush of energy, her noise tilting up towards the sky.

Shouting, Reece slammed the yoke forward. Moaning like a great, airborne whale, the heliocraft unwillingly tipped back down again, so that the patchy white ground rolled by beneath them, leading them
towards Emathia’s lake.

With
The Jester
slanting ever closer to the ground, still shooting forward at nauseating speeds, Reece began to lose his fight against himself. His eyelids were drooping, his shoulders were slumping, his head was nodding. It felt like his body was caving in on him. He wanted to run away from it, and yet he
needed
it, needed his arms and his hands to hold on to the yoke, needed his eyes to judge the distance to the water, which was close now, close enough to reflect the dark mass of the airship’s shadow, rippling and wrinkling…

His struggle felt totally internal, but Po must have seen something of it on his face.

“Hold on, Reece!” she screamed, and put both her hands on one side of the yoke to help him hold it. “Hold on!”

Reece screamed through his teeth with her and thought he might rip apart from doing what she said, and holding on too tight. The darkness was coming back. It felt thicker than before. Unforgiving.