Chapter 37
Thirty-Seven
Ilived upon barges most of my life. Suspended by air magic, I suppose you could describe what our barges do as flying. Except it’s more of a slow and steady, ponderous form of levitation.
This was not that kind of flying. It was not that at all.
“Shit fucking hell!” I held on to the ropes as hard as I could as the kwetzel dove. My guts lurched into my throat. Wind roared in my ears and whipped tears from my eyes. Half blind, the ground was a blur beneath us.
Azarin just giggled.
Then Fairly extended one giant wing a bit farther, and suddenly, the ground was on the other side of us.
Everything shifted so fast, snot flew out of my nose.
My body started to rise up out of the saddle, so I squeezed my thighs and did my best to hold on.
Then the other wing moved, and everything flipped around the other way.
“Fuck!” My ass slammed back against the saddle. Then my stomach caught up with all the spinning and it took me everything in my power to not throw up on Fairly’s feathered back. Though at this speed, if anything came out, it would probably just come back and hit me right in the face.
“What a splendid maneuver! She’s got some good mobility for such a big girl. She’s not quite as limber as an eagle, but she’s got a tighter turn than a griffon, that’s for sure.”
We were going way too fast. We were much too high.
This wasn’t right. We shouldn’t be up here.
Through my involuntary tears, I could tell we were now even with the top of the Great Machine.
The mechanical nature of the thing became more obvious this close, as there were metal walls studded with rivets, and through the gaps could be seen gigantic turning gears.
It was the most complicated device mortals had ever built.
And we were going to run straight into it.
I couldn’t help it. I screamed like a little girl.
“Do you mind? You’re yelling right in my ear.” Azarin did something with the ropes in front of her, and then we were tilting so far that down was now sideways. The cords secured to my harness snapped tight and kept me from sliding off. The people in the market were very small below us.
Collision averted, we were now veering away from the Great Machine.
Which was fortunate, as now I noticed there were watchmen stationed in turrets around the top of it, surely prepared to destroy anything that threatened their precious structure.
They watched us suspiciously as we passed by. Azarin waved at them.
“Good girl. When we get you home, I’m going to make sure you get lots of treats. What do kwetzels eat anyway? Herbert mentioned fish. Do you like fish?”
Fairly Dangerous screamed, and hers was far louder than mine.
“Fish it is, then.”
We were gliding straight and flat away from the market. That part wasn’t so horrific. It was the climbing, turning, and swooping that made me ill.
The initial leap into the air had been the worst part.
While Herbert’s men saddled the beast, and Azarin figured out the nature of the reins, Morton had thrown a safety harness on over my clothing.
Then we’d climbed aboard, which by itself was rather frightening, as clambering up a big feathery thing that was big enough to smash you then eat your flattened corpse was no small feat in and of itself.
But then came the crouch and jump, where Fairly demonstrated her muscled back legs weren’t just for show.
The leap had been so powerful, and the acceleration so fast, it must be something like how a bullet felt when being fired from a gun.
“I love this. Isn’t this great?”
While she was having fun, I was so sick, I could barely talk. It was freezing, yet my body was covered in sweat. There was so much wind, we had to shout to be heard at all. “Yeah. It’s great.”
Fairly’s wingspan was enormous. Each wing folded down really compact, and once extended, they seemed to go forever. Every flap was a violent snap that made my teeth clack. Luckily, Fairly was so efficient, she seldom needed to flap to maintain altitude.
“I’ve not flown in forever. Now this is living.
” At least Azarin was having a fine time.
She was in her element. In fact, this was how her people found their magical element, chasing storms across the Plane of Air, on creatures not so different than this.
“Not that I don’t enjoy the snuggling, but could you loosen the death grip just a bit? You’re going to break my ribs.”
I forced myself to relax.
She took a deep breath. “Much more comfortable, thank you. Alrighty, let me work with her for a little bit, get familiar with her quirks, and then we’ll get on with the mission.”
We spent the next twenty minutes swooping around the market.
True to her word, whenever anyone looked up, curious to see what the massive shadow flashing past was, Azarin would shout at them to go to Smorp Brothers.
It was unlikely anyone heard her. If the Smorps decided to keep this up, they’d probably need to invest in a banner.
After a few minutes, my stomach calmed and I’d run out of water to lose in a cold sweat. The view from up here truly was breathtaking. The Core City went on a great distance. The sheer inconceivable majesty of the place was awe-inspiring.
I might have found the point where beauty overcame fear.
Then Fairly banked hard to the side to avoid a flock of ocean birds, the saddle creaked, ropes pulled tight, down was to the side, and I was back to being terrified.
Azarin got our ride leveled out again. “I think I’ve got the hang of this. The way she moves, I imagine Fairly’s kind spend a lot of time circling, riding currents, and watching for prey. You can start doing your thing. Let’s find this magic bullet.”
That was easier said than done. The farthest I’d been able to sense my bowl was after I’d asked Trax to swim down the canal with it, which had been maybe two hundred and fifty or three hundred yards, tops.
And that had taken all the concentration I could muster.
Considering that was farther than I could reliably strike even a big target like a Fire Elemental with a trapper’s rifle, I would normally have taken pride in that accomplishment, but right now, my range was insufficient for our needs.
We were higher off the ground than that, and it was hard to concentrate on sensing magic while getting tossed around and praying to not tumble to your death.
“We need to get lower.”
“Like how low?”
“Closer the better.” As soon as those words left my mouth, I regretted saying them.
Azarin had a gleeful laugh. “You hear that, Fairly? It’s time to skim some rooftops. I want to be able to reach out and touch the shingles. Let’s see how much control you’ve got. Try not to plow us snout-first into the ground.”
Azarin put us into a dive. Fairly shrieked in delight. I swore, held on tight, and squeezed my eyes shut. Not out of cowardice! I needed to concentrate on my magic. At least, that was the excuse I gave myself.
Finding the warming bowl required clearing my head and bringing the formula to mind.
Magic’s done by feel, more art than science.
When you get a spell to bind to an object, there’s a certain moment of connection between caster and element.
When you’re invoking, you’re activating the element, giving that energy a direction, and then letting it go.
Sort of like how Azarin was using the reins to point Fairly in the right direction, and then the kwetzel took that suggestion and did what it wanted.
When you’re enchanting something, it’s more like you’re locking the element in with the power of your will, and that energy remains there, just waiting to release like a compressed spring.
You can feel that built-up energy, sort of like Fairly’s back legs as she’d gone into the crouch, and setting off the enchantment was just like her leap. It wanted to go off.
Having created that enchantment, I was connected to it. I just had to listen for the call of compressed energy.
When I opened my eyes, we were only about thirty feet off the ground and moving so fast, the buildings were passing by like streaks. People were screaming and running from us. I closed my eyes again.
“Maybe I should coax her just a teensy bit higher.”
“Good idea!”
The flapping made me a bit more confident. Flapping meant climbing. I cleared my head and tried to relax. My grip must have loosened a bit, because Azarin asked, “You’re not taking another nap again.”
“No danger of that. I’m trying to concentrate.”
“Fairly and I will carry on, but if you start snoring, I’m going to have her do a flip.”
“Please don’t. Pass over the districts around the bay first.”
The reasoning for starting there was that once word got out to the various powerful factions around the city that there was a bit of Permanence on the loose, they’d all be looking for it.
The wealthier districts would have more potential buyers, but they’d also have a lot more watch presence, and the Council automatically claimed the rights to any Permanence in the Core.
Gerzog would surely prefer to sell it than have it confiscated.
With Carcalla looking for him, Gerzog wouldn’t go anywhere near the Slumps.
He’d kept Dathka as a bartering chip against the Latros, but why risk running into them at all?
The Cult of Tempus was another potential buyer, but if Gerzog went down into the remains of the ancient civilization from before the building of the Great Machine, the cult would just take it from him.
Their goal was to open Time and kill us all, so it was reasonable to assume they weren’t exactly sane or honest in their dealings.
“Why there?”
“The watchmen would arrest him, the Latros would skin him alive, and the Cult would probably do whatever it was that insane mutants do to their victims. Gerzog can’t leave the Core, because he has to stay close enough to be able to show off the goods and make a trade.
He’s likely in a district with enough people he won’t stand out, so probably among the laborers and tradesmen. ”
“Wow. That’s smart.”
I took the compliment but didn’t tell her I’d gotten all that from Rade, because he’d worked for less than honest merchants before and picked up a few things and the movement of stolen goods.
We went over the bay first. From up here, a hundred ships were in view, and farther out in the waves, Korthican’s Warning and dozens of other islands.
Out beyond that, the water went on and on.
Since that ocean would eventually connect to the Elemental Plane of Water, it wasn’t infinite, but it sure was close.
Azarin took us up the coast a bit, but not sensing anything from the docks and boats, we turned inland. We went over neighborhoods full of homes and shops, then over areas of industry where Fairly had to fly between billowing smokestacks, and the ashen air reminded me of home.
From there, we could see but one tiny edge of the city, where the buildings went from dense to sparse, and then it was rectangles of fields as far as the eye could see.
Past that were forests, and beyond that mountains, real ones, even bigger than the artificial Great Machine.
Keep going that direction, and we’d eventually reach the Elemental Plane of Earth.
Up would take us toward the Air Realm. It was doubtful scum like Gerzog would be in the countryside or the city’s upper areas, though.
There weren’t very many maps of the world.
Not that wise men hadn’t figured it out over the last several thousand years, but rather because it was too hard to draw.
The drawing in the Encyclopedia Ettymus had looked like a tangled mass of string.
I’d seen others where it looked like a ball of yarn.
Seven different cords, to be exact, all of them colliding, knotted together, and hopelessly entwined.
Everyone knew the Core was in the middle of the seven intertwined realms, heaven was above, hell was below, and the sun and moon and stars went around the outside. It was all very simple.
We turned back into the city, and I realized that even with this speedy method of searching, it was going to take a lot of luck.
This place was just so damned vast. Expanding for forty-five hundred years, the city covered valleys and hills and crawled up mountainsides and was built into plateaus, all connected by roads and highways.
Then there were islands in the sky and bridges between them all.
Amidst all that were all manner of conveyances, mundane and magical both.
There were canals and rivers and lakes, with smaller craft travelling across all of them.
There were millions of living beings down there, and time insufficient to fly past them all.
We flew back and forth for hours. It was a good thing today was Fireday, which was by far the warmest day of the week, because any other time, I likely would’ve frozen up here.
Azarin was fine. She was used to this. All I could do was try and focus on the magic instead of the discomfort.
Azarin had warned me we were running out of time, because Fairly was starting to get hungry and cranky.
I really didn’t want to see what she did when she was famished and had two delicious meaty snacks conveniently on her back.
Then suddenly…
“I got something!”