The Harbors of the Sun

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The flower door opened at Shade’s touch. Jade flung herself through but no Hians waited beyond. It led only to a corridor winding down in a spiral. It was barely fifteen paces wide, too small for Stone’s shifted form.

Hissing under her breath, Jade went first, with Stone and Rorra and the others behind her. A tight sensation grew in her chest, the feeling that the delay had been too long, that they had lost their chance.

As she rounded the third turn down, a wooden disk from a fire weapon clattered against the wall barely half a pace from her head. Jade snarled a warning to the others and dove below the stream of fire, then leapt forward into the legs of the Hian with the weapon.

The Hian screamed and went down, the weapon’s fire flowing over the ceiling. Two more Hians stood behind the first, and one tried to run and the other tried to trigger her weapon. Balm, Saffron, and River leapt over Jade and slammed into them. Jade ripped her claws across her Hian’s throat and pushed to her feet.

“They know we’re up here,” Balm said grimly, shaking the blood off her claws.

“Then we have to hurry.” Jade flung herself around the next turn. The corridor opened into an empty round chamber with an opening in the floor. Painful doubt made Jade freeze for an instant. There were no doors. But the Hians had come this way . . . Or at least, had thought this chamber worth guarding.

She motioned the others to wait, then stepped to the opening.

It was a short vertical shaft. A climbing bar spiraled around it, but the bottom rungs had been broken or melted away. She couldn’t see into the chamber it led to, because it was blocked by a dark flat shape, suspended in the air not far below the end of the shaft . . . Jade leaned closer, squinting to see. It was a stone, like a piece of slate, and red spots of light glittered on it, flowing across it like water. Aside from the red lights, it looked like the thing that Vendoin had described to Rorra and the others. She drew back. “That has to be it.”

Spark stepped forward to look, and her spines signaled agreement.

Jade pushed away from the edge and turned to the others. “We need to—” She caught sight of Merit’s face and froze. Merit’s expression was like someone had gutted him. He met her gaze and looked away, but his flattened spines didn’t even twitch.

He’s had a vision, Jade thought. A bad one.

Stone saw her and turned to Merit, but Rorra handed him her fire weapon. “Hold this, please.”

As Rorra pulled the flying pack off her shoulders, Jade forced her spines down and tried to make her expression neutral. We’re not dead yet, she told herself.

Rorra was saying, “I used most of that canister getting through the blocked shaft.” She opened the flap at the top of the flying pack and the acrid scent of the moss flooded the room. River winced and Briar sneezed. Rorra pulled out a ceramic container, a tall thin jar with a stopper on both ends.

“Is that more moss?” Shade asked, stepping closer.

“Yes, this tool and the pack work off the same sort of canister.” Rorra handed him the flying pack, took the fire weapon back from Stone, and began to fit the canister into place.

Jade waved her forward. “If you can lean over the edge, I can hold onto you.”

Rorra stepped forward to peer down the shaft. “I want the best angle I can get. Can you hold me out over it?”

Jade wrapped her arm around Rorra’s waist and crouched. She leaned down and caught the top bar, and dangled Rorra directly over the shaft. The others gathered around.

Then below, someone shouted in Kedaic, “They’re above us!”

Jade hissed, “Now!”

Rorra swung the weapon up and pulled the first trigger. Wooden disks shot out and clattered against the stone surface below. Jade heard thumps as something struck the wall beside them. It was the Hians shooting up at them. But Rorra hit the second trigger and the shaft below disappeared in a wash of fire.

Rorra held the trigger down, fire flowing out of the weapon, her face a grimace of effort. Then the fire slowed and cut off. Rorra gasped, “That’s it!”

Jade hauled her up and dragged them both out of the shaft. Stone caught Rorra’s arm and pulled her away and Jade rolled onto the floor. Balm hissed with alarm and wiped something off Jade’s shoulder. She held her palm out, eyes wide. It was a wooden disk. Jade hissed and looked at Rorra in time to see Stone pluck one off her forehead.

River and Shade leaned over the shaft, trying to angle for a view. Saffron grabbed Shade’s frills and bodily hauled him back, snarling, “Careful!”

River reported tensely, “The slab’s still there. I didn’t see any difference.”

Jade held her breath to keep from snarling with fury. Rorra spat out a curse in Kedaic and reached for her pack again.

From below, a voice shouted in Altanic, “Raksura, we have your consort Moon here. If you stop, we will leave him alive.”

Jade went still, rage and terror constricting her chest. Stone’s furious growl vibrated through the floor. Rorra, jamming a new canister into the stock of the weapon, froze.

“She’s lying,” Balm whispered, aghast. “He’s not down there.”

River looked at Merit and started to speak, then let the question die as he registered the expression of horrified resignation on Merit’s face.

Jade twitched her spines in a negative. Of course the Hian wasn’t lying. For all Moon knew, we were dead in here, she thought in anguish. Of course he would look for another way in, would try to get to the Hians.

Stone grated out the words, “She’s not lying.”

The warriors all stared at Jade. She forced her jaw to unlock and made herself say to Rorra, “Go on. We’ll try again.” We have to, she didn’t say, they’ll kill us all, they’ll kill the Reaches. It was effort enough to get those words out and if she tried to say more her control would shatter.

She saw Balm’s throat work, but Balm didn’t protest. Shade’s spines wilted in despair.

Rorra jerked her head in assent, fixed the canister into the weapon. From below, the Hian said, her voice more urgent, “Your Fell ally is here too. Stop and we will spare them both.”

Stone hissed and pressed his hand over his eyes. Jade didn’t understand. Fell ally . . . Then she snarled under her breath. The Kethel. It was more proof the Hian wasn’t lying. Rorra grimaced in dismay and pushed upright again. She looked at Jade and nodded.

Jade took a sharp breath. The Hians were ready for them so there would be no other chance, no matter how many canisters of moss Rorra had brought with her. Jade caught her around the waist. Rorra lifted the weapon as Jade fell forward and swung them both out over the opening.

The fire from Rorra’s weapon filled the shaft. This time Jade felt a vibration through the climbing bar, a reverberation as though something large had snapped. The fire ceased and Rorra shouted, “That’s it!”

Jade dragged them both back, her burden lifting as Stone pulled Rorra out of her grip.

Then the whole room jolted and Jade hit the opposite wall, Balm on top of her. The floor rippled like a wave moved through it. The structure’s steady downward motion turned into a headlong plunge. Beside her, Balm gasped, “You did it!”

Jade pushed away from the wall. “We need to—” Above her head, with a sound like screaming, the walls started to come apart.

Chime kept searching the cabin with Lithe, looking for symbols, looking for anything. Feeling the groove along one of the lower windows, and thinking how odd it would be for anyone, even a mysterious forerunner, to put something needed to steer the ship there, Chime hissed at himself in sudden realization. He sat back on his heels and told Lithe, “We’re doing this wrong. This is forerunner, and we’re treating it like the foundation builder city.”

On the opposite side of the chamber, Lithe turned, her brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

Chime waved his hands. “We shouldn’t be looking for symbols. There weren’t any in the other forerunner places I’ve seen.”

Lithe considered it, her spines flicking in thought. Then she stood and stepped to the center of the room, facing Chime. “Maybe that’s because the forerunners don’t need symbols. Maybe they were all like mentors.”

Chime thought it was the only real option. “So you should try to . . . find their magic.” The chances that they could control anything the structure was doing from here were dim, but at least they could try. “Try to think ‘stop.’”

Lithe shook her head. “I’ve been trying that already, since we first got in here, but I don’t have the right kind of magic. You do.”

Chime’s spines flicked in frustration. “I don’t, I’m not a mentor any—”

“You do,” Lithe said. “I’ve seen it.” Chime shook his head, dropped his spines to a negative, but Lithe didn’t stop. “You’ve got magic, Chime. Turning into a warrior didn’t take it away, it just changed it. Just try.”

Chime dug in, stubborn. “My abilities are—I can only hear strange things—”

With the firm patience of a good mentor, Lithe said “Strange magical things. Everybody in Indigo Cloud knows you have it, they’re just confused because you keep explaining how it’s not good for anything. Just try.”

Chime hesitated. “It didn’t work in the foundation builder city. I mean, it opened the door so we could get in . . .”

“From what Kalam said, those symbols were probably meant for forerunners, coming to the city after the foundation builders left. Whoever built the rest of this ship, this steering cabin is forerunner,” Lithe said. “Just try.”

Chime had thought of about three other uses this place could have besides steering cabin, but outside this bubble of calm he could sense the ship’s movement getting faster and faster, and they didn’t have time to look for another option. With the wind risen to terrible strength, he was terrified of what was happening to the others.

Lithe took his wrist and squeezed gently. Her claws were different than an ordinary Arbora’s, longer and thinner, like an Aeriat’s. It was a reminder that she was half-Fell, and it surprised him that he had forgotten, that at some point the darkness of her scales just meant that she was Lithe, and not anything else. She said, “It’s just the two of us, Chime. If you try and nothing happens, I won’t blame you and we won’t tell anybody.”

She didn’t add that if no one could stop the weapon, there wouldn’t be anybody to tell, and that they probably wouldn’t be around any more to talk. Chime took a deep breath and pushed those terrifying thoughts away. He stepped to the wall and put his hand on it, hoping the symbolic connection to the ship would help. “Think ‘stop,’ right,” he muttered. He pressed his eyes closed.

For a long time there was nothing, not even the drifting sensation that he had felt when they found the right symbols on the foundation builder city’s door. There was nothing else to do so Chime kept trying. Please stop, he thought toward the ship and through it the docks. Reaching toward them, the way you needed to reach into someone’s head to look for Fell influence.

He was distantly aware that Lithe had put her hand on his shoulder, that she must be reaching through him too, trying to use her mentor’s skills to help.

Then something light and sharp flowed through the carving under his hand, a sudden shock, like sticking his hand into a fire. He hissed in startled fear as Lithe flinched. Then it was gone, leaving only a fading memory of the brief pain. He opened his eyes, still frowning in concentration. “I think I felt something. Or heard something. But—”

A metallic groan rose outside, so loud it overwhelmed the roar of the wind. Chime stepped to a relatively clear patch of window. All he could see was the top of the nearest wheel structure. He snarled and scraped at the crystal, then froze. The wheel was moving, falling away from them . . . No, the whole ship was falling. Whatever protected the cabin kept them from feeling it, except for the sense of their altitude rapidly dropping. He said, “Something happened!”

The floor moved underfoot and he jolted forward to bang his head against the crystal. It must have knocked him out for an instant because in his next moment of awareness he was shoved up against the window. Lithe lay crumpled in a heap beside him. The view through the crystal swam back into focus and he saw swirling water—He took a sharp breath, the spike of fear clearing his head. The wall of water towered above the skewed stern of the ship, looming over it like a mountain. He croaked, “I think we made the ship move. We hit the side of the passage.”

Lithe braced an arm on the window and pushed herself up with a groan. “Do you think that helped?”

“Maybe,” Chime began. Then another jolt rocked the cabin and metal screamed like a dying grasseater. “Uh, that sounded—”

“—like the ship is falling apart,” Lithe said and pushed up off the wall, dragging Chime with her.

Once on his feet the floor swayed. The whole cabin was unsteady, as if some of the pillars supporting it had given way. “I think we have to get out of here,” he said.

They made it down the climbing bars to the lower cabin. The view out the door confirmed Chime’s worst fear: the outer stairway was sheared off and the unobstructed view was of the sky, the blue mottled with gray in cloud patterns Chime had never seen before.

Breathless with nerves, he said, “We’ll need to climb out. Hang onto me.”

Lithe wrapped herself around him and hooked her claws in his collar flange. Chime swung out the door and scrabbled up the side of the cabin to the roof. Out here the sway of the ship was terrifying, the wind pushed at him with the force of a slap from a kethel. He had to keep reminding the part of him that was still Arbora that he could fly.

Once atop the cabin, he looked toward the dock and hissed in astonishment. The ship had snapped free of its mooring, the big cables whipping dangerously in the wind. The jolt must have been more than the ancient structure could stand, because the whole central flower-stalk column of the dock was breaking up. Sections slammed away into the wind, the curved stems and the petals of the pods breaking and tumbling out and away. He gasped, “Did we do that?”

Lithe twisted to look and tightened her hold on his collar flange. “Maybe?”

“But where is everybody?” Chime said, all the implications dawning on him. They were inside there . . .

Then Lithe said, “There’s the wind-ship!”

Chime turned and spotted the Golden Islander boat. It waggled back and forth in the tumultuous wind in a way he had never seen a wind-ship move before. It couldn’t be good.

He looked back at the dock as another graceful petal gave way with a tearing shriek. They couldn’t stay here. “We have to go to the wind-ship. Hold on.”

Lithe ducked her head down and buried it against his shoulder so she wouldn’t affect his balance. Chime braced himself, wrapped one arm around her, and thought, you can do it, you have to do it. He leapt into the wind.

It shoved him back toward the docks but he kept control of his wings and didn’t let it tumble him. He fought his way up but it was like scaling a cliff wall that rippled continuously. He told himself he wouldn’t give up but the words I’m not going to make it were in his head. At least there was no fancy flying trick that he had failed to learn; he just wasn’t strong enough to beat this wind.

Then something shot past them. Chime flinched away and fell sideways. Then Lithe shouted in his ear, “It’s a rope, from the boat!”

Chime caught the movement again in the corner of his eye and saw the rope whipping in the wind. He ground his teeth in effort, and tilted his wings. It sent him back the other way across the rope’s path. Lithe let go with one hand and grabbed, her claws sinking into the skeins.

Chime wrapped his hands around it, managed to pull his wings in, and climbed the rope. They swung wildly around, the wind still buffeting them mercilessly, but at least they knew where the wind-ship was. Then he realized the rope was pulling them up, that the wind-ship was reeling them in.

The elegant and extremely welcome shape of the bow appeared abruptly and Chime freed one hand to grab the railing. A scaled Raksuran hand caught his arm and then Lithe’s and yanked them both over the rail.

Chime collapsed on the deck, looking up at the Opal Night warrior Flash. Niran stood beside nearby, beside a winch device that had been clamped to rings on the deck. Bramble crouched on top of the rail, her claws sunk into it to hold her steady. All of them wore harnesses attached to ropes secured to the rail along the steering cabin.

“Tlar, Beran, we need harnesses!” Niran bellowed over the howl of the wind.

“Don’t get up yet,” Flash said, keeping a firm grip on Chime and Lithe. “You need ropes or you’ll be swept off the boat.”

Chime nodded, too tired to flick his spines, breathing too hard to talk. Lithe said, “Where are the others? We split up.”

“Don’t know yet,” Bramble said, all her attention on the sky as she scanned it anxiously. He couldn’t tell if her spines were flared or it was just the wind.

Tlar hurried up carrying two bundles of harness straps, already roped to the rail. She gave one to Lithe and handed the other to Chime, saying, “It doesn’t fit over wings and spiky things, but if you put it on backwards, it works.”

Chime hastily shrugged it on and figured out the way to buckle it across his chest. He fastened the strap that went around the back for Lithe, then turned so she could do his. “This is a good idea,” he managed to croak.

“Before we got everyone fastened on, Flash had to catch several people,” Tlar said. “It was very frightening.” She yanked on the ropes to make sure they were attached correctly.

Lithe pushed to her feet and gave Chime a hand up. He stumbled to the rail, his joints still trembling from the effort of fighting the wind. Then he looked down and gasped in dismay.

More pieces peeled away from the dock, circling it like dirt and grass running down a bath drain. The others are still in there, Chime thought, shocked to numbness. He hadn’t really believed it before. He had thought he would see them in the air, fighting to reach the wind-ship.

Below the docks the ground was visible, the yellow-green of a field of tall grass. It looked nothing like the frozen sea that the dock had rested in. They really had moved through a passage from the world above all the way back down to the lower continent. The wind was warmer, free of the stinging ice crystals.

Then the giant metal ship swung away into the maelstrom. Everyone on the rail screamed and ducked, but it shot back up to disappear in the roiling clouds above. Chime eased to his feet again, staring after it. If the wind-ship had still been above it, it would have smashed it like a gnat.

Beside him, Niran said grimly, “That’s one messy death averted.”

“One down, how many to go?” Flash wondered.

Someone yelled from further down the deck and Chime whirled around. Lien hung over the rail and pointed frantically. “There! I saw wings!”

Chime reached her in one bound and gripped the rail so tightly his claws scored it. He spotted the movement among the swirling debris immediately. It was in the lower part of the structure, where a whole section with attached petals had just sheared off. “It’s them! There!”

From the bow, Niran called directions to Diar. The wind-ship angled down but Chime doubted it could get any closer.

Bramble and Lithe stood on the rail beside Chime, while Flash helped Niran and the other Golden Islanders with the winch. At the steering cabin wall, Tlar was attaching more harnesses. Chime realized Kalam was beside him. He said, “The direction is wrong for the rope.”

Distracted, Chime looked toward the bow, thinking about the angle of the wind. “Right, we have to get around the other side—”

Bramble tensed. “Maybe not! That’s Stone!”

She was right, it was Stone, his dark shape fighting its way out of the flying debris.

Chime tightened his grip on the railing, watching as Stone’s wings beat powerfully up away from the docks. “He doesn’t see us! He’s going the wrong way,” Kalam said in alarm.

“No,” Flash corrected him before Chime could, “he’s following the wind, he’s going to use it to get around the docks and back to us—Here he comes!”

Stone hurtled toward the wind-ship and everyone on deck scrambled to make room, either plastering themselves against the rail or flinging themselves through the nearest doorway. The wind-ship had closed its masts to protect the sails from the wind, and Stone swept in and caught one, curled his body around it. The warriors clinging to his body scrambled down. Deft lost his grip and tumbled. Flash hissed in alarm and leapt straight up to pluck him out of the air. Bramble and Lithe grabbed Flash’s harness line to reel them back in.

Balm, with Merit tucked under her arm, bounced off the cabin roof and Chime leapt to catch her. They landed on the deck in a heap. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a dark shape with Rorra clutched against its chest swing down from the roof, and his head swam with relief. But when he pushed up on his arms, he saw it was Shade, not Moon.

Above, Stone shifted to groundling, Jade caught him, and climbed down the mast to the cabin. The wind-ship’s deck swayed as Diar turned it away from the docks and the flying debris.

Chime pushed up away from Balm and Merit, and found himself facing Jade. “Where’s Moon?” he asked.

She met his gaze, and the raw despair in her expression froze his heart.

Then the wind-ship shook, the wind stopped abruptly, and they were floating over an open grassy plain. In the distance a cloud rose as the docks collapsed and fell to the ground.