Chapter 29 #2
“Listen.” He had a manic glint in his eye. “What if he couldn’t? What if you could fight him on his turf? Well, turf doesn’t really apply, but you know what I mean.”
She stared at him, uncomprehending. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You’ve got far more control of that fire now, yes?” he asked. “Could probably call it without thinking?”
“Sure,” she said slowly. The fire felt like a natural extension of her now; she could extend it farther, burn hotter. But she was still confused. “You already know that. What does that have to do with anything?”
“How hot can you make it?” he pressed.
She frowned. “Isn’t all fire the same temperature?”
“Actually, no. You get different sorts of flames on different surfaces. There’s a difference between a candle flame and a blacksmith’s fire, for instance. I’m not an expert, but—”
“Why does that matter?” she interrupted. “I couldn’t get close enough to burn Feylen anyway, and I don’t have that kind of reach.”
He shook his head impatiently. “But what if you could?”
“We’re not all geniuses like you,” she snapped. “Just tell me what you’re going on about.”
He grinned. “Remember the signal lanterns before Boyang? The ones that would have exploded?”
“Of course, but—”
“Do you want to know how they work?”
She sighed and resigned herself to giving him free rein to talk as much as he wanted. “No, but I think you’re about to tell me.”
“Hot air rises,” he said gleefully. “Cool air sinks. The balloons trap the hot air in a small space and it lifts up the entire apparatus.”
She considered this for a moment. She was starting to understand where he was going, but she wasn’t sure if she liked the conclusion. “I weigh a lot more than a paper balloon.”
“It’s about the ratio,” Kitay insisted. “For instance, heavier birds need larger wings.”
“But even the largest bird is tiny compared to—”
“So you’d need even bigger wings. And you’ll need a hotter fire. But you have the strongest heat source in existence, so all we had to do was get you an apparatus to turn that into flying power. The wings, if you will.”
She blinked at him, and then looked down at the pile of leather and metal. “You’ve got to be joking.”
“Not in the slightest,” he said happily. “Do you want to try it on?”
She gingerly unfolded the apparatus. It was surprisingly light, the leather smooth under her hands. She wondered where Kitay had found the material. She held it up, marveling at the neat stitching.
“You did this all in a week?”
“Yeah. I’d been thinking about it for a while, though. Ramsa came up with the idea.”
“Ramsa did?”
He nodded. “Half of munitions is aerodynamics. He’s spent a long time figuring out how to make things fly right.”
Rin was somewhat wary of gambling her life on the designs of a boy whose greatest passion in life was watching things explode, but she supposed that at this point she had very few options.
With Kitay’s help, she fastened the strap over her chest as tightly as she could manage. The iron rods shifted uncomfortably against her back, but otherwise the wings were surprisingly flexible, greased to rotate smoothly with every movement of her arms.
“You know, Altan used to give himself wings,” she said.
“He did? Could he fly?”
“I doubt it. They were made of fire. I think he just did it to look pretty.”
“Well, I think I can give you some functional ones.” He tightened the straps around her shoulders. “Everything fit okay?”
She lifted her arms, feeling somewhat like an overgrown bat.
The leather wings looked pretty, but they seemed far too thin to sustain her body weight.
The interlacing rods that kept the apparatus together also looked so terribly fragile she was sure she could snap them in half over her knee.
“You sure that’s going to be enough to keep me up? ”
“I didn’t want to add too much to your weight. The rods are as slender as they’ll go. Any heavier and you’ll sink.”
“They could also break and send me plummeting to my death,” she pointed out.
“Have a little faith in me.”
“It’s gonna hurt you if I crash.”
“I know.” He sounded far too giddy for her comfort. “Shall we go try this out?”
They found an open clearing up on the cliffs, well out of range of anything that was remotely flammable. Kitay had wanted to test his invention by pushing Rin off a ledge, but reluctantly agreed to let her try levitating over level ground first.
The sun was just beginning to rise over the Red Cliffs, and Rin would have found it exceptionally lovely if she weren’t so terrified that she could hear her heartbeat slamming in her eardrums.
She stepped out into the middle of the clearing, arms raised stiffly over her sides. She felt both exceedingly scared and stupid.
“Well, go on.” Kitay backed up several paces. “Give it a try.”
She gave the wings an awkward flap. “So I just . . . light up?”
“I think so. Try to keep it localized to your arms. You want the heat trapped in the air pockets under the wings, not dispersed in the air.”
“All right.” She willed the flame to dance up her palms and into her neck and shoulders. Her upper body felt deliciously warm, but almost immediately her wings began to smoke and sizzle.
“Kitay?” she called, alarmed.
“That’s just the binding agent,” said Kitay. “It’ll be fine, it’ll just burn off—”
Her voice rose several pitches. “It’s fine if the binding agent burns off?”
“That’s just the excess substance. The rest should hold—I think.” He didn’t sound convincing in the least. “I mean, we tested the solvent at the forge, so in theory . . .”
“Right,” she said slowly. Her knees were shaking. Her head felt terribly light. “Why do I let you do this?”
“Because if you die, I die,” he said. “Can you make those flames a little larger?”
She closed her eyes. Her leather wings lifted at her sides, expanding from the hot air.
Then she felt it—a heavy pressure yanking on her upper body, like a giant had reached down and jerked her up by the arms.
“Shit,” she breathed. She looked down. Her feet had risen off the ground. “Shit. Shit!”
“Go higher!” Kitay called.
Great Tortoise. She was rising higher, without even trying—no, she was practically shooting upward. She kicked her legs, wobbling in the air. She had no lateral directional control, and she couldn’t figure out how to slow her ascent, but holy gods, she was flying.
Kitay shouted something at her, but she couldn’t hear him over the rush of the flames surrounding her.
“What?” she yelled back.
Kitay flapped his arms and ran in a zigzag motion.
Did he want her to fly sideways? She puzzled over the mechanics of it. She could decrease the heat on one side. As soon as she tried it she nearly flipped over and ended up hanging awkwardly in midair with her hip level with her head. She hastily righted herself.
She couldn’t drift laterally, then. But how did birds change direction? She tried to remember. They didn’t move straight to one side, they tilted their wings. They didn’t drift, they swooped.
She beat her wings down several times and rose several feet into the air. Then she adjusted the curve of her arms so that the wings beat to the side, not downward, and tried again.
Immediately she careened to the left. The swift change in direction was terribly disorienting. Her stomach heaved; her flames flickered madly. For a moment she lost sight of the ground, and didn’t right herself until she was mere feet away from the dirt.
She jerked herself out of the dive, gasping. This was going to take some practice.
She flapped her wings to regain altitude. She shot up faster than she’d anticipated. She flapped them again. Then again.
How far could she go? Kitay was still shouting something from the ground, but she was too far up to understand him. She rose higher and higher with each steady beat of her wings. The ground became dizzyingly far away, but she had eyes only for the great expanse of sky above her.
How far could the fire take her?
She couldn’t help but laugh as she soared, a high, desperate, frantic laugh of relief. She rose so high that she could no longer make out Kitay’s face, until Arlong turned into little splotches of green and blue, until she had even passed through a layer of clouds.
Then she stopped.
She hung alone in an expanse of blue.
A calm washed over her then, a calm that she couldn’t ever remember feeling. There was nothing up here she could kill. Nothing she could hurt. She had her mind to herself. She had the world to herself.
She floated in the air, suspended at the point between heaven and earth.
The Red Cliffs looked so beautiful from up here.
Her mind wandered to the last minister of the Red Emperor, who had etched those ancient words into the cliffside. He’d written a scream to the heavens, an open plea to future generations, a message for the Hesperians who would one day sail into that harbor and bomb it.
What had he wanted to tell them?
Nothing lasts.
Nezha and Kitay had both been wrong. There was another way to interpret those carvings.
If nothing lasted and the world did not exist, all that meant was that reality was not fixed.
The illusion she lived in was fluid and mutable, and could be easily altered by someone willing to rewrite the script of reality.
Nothing lasts.
This was not a world of men. It was a world of gods, a time of great powers. It was the era of divinity walking in man, of wind and water and fire. And in warfare, she who held the power asymmetry was the inevitable victor.
She, the Last Speerly, called the greatest power of all.
And the Hesperians, no matter how hard they tried, could never take this from her.
Landing was the tricky part.