Mike Wild - The Crucible of the Dragon God

The parallel with Freiport was more than the sense of wonder, however, because the sights he saw here were in many ways similar to those of that long distant shipping port. Moving slowly into a vast, and only partly natural cavern, hundreds of feet inside solid rock, the airship on which he was being carried aloft was entering its own harbour.

"Amazing, isn't it?" Jenna said, joining him at the rail.

She spent a few seconds leaning in silence by his side, watching as the airship passed gantries and loading cranes and other such devices that projected from rock walls and then, staring ahead, towards a strange cradle-looking dock towards which the airship was heading. "Before we came, no ship had docked here in thousands upon thousands of years. No one even knew it was here."

Hardly surprising, Slowhand thought. Human ignorance of such places was common — how many people had heard of Martak, for one? — but he had to admit there was something different about the place they were entering now. Its location, its position, its isolation suggested to him that it hadn't merely become lost like its contemporaries but had always been designed to be lost. In other words, hidden away from the world, even when that world was capable of constructing such a wonder. But, if that was the case, whatever clandestine purpose it had served was long past. Apart from one isolated area that he could see above him, the harbour was neglected, derelict, ill-maintained. Rusted and warped metal beams framed and criss-crossed the cavern like malformed ribs, twisted and time warped gears lay idle in unused machines, and crates sitting in loading bays rotted away along with their contents. Most telling of all, however, was that there were three more airships like this one — or, at least, once upon a time, there had been — and Slowhand simultaneously frowned and gaped as he stared up at the bedraggled remains of what had once been equally wondrous machines. Their canopies were rotted away now and hanging in strips from metal skeletons which would never take to the skies again. Identifying symbols that hung half obscured upon the rotted cloth left the archer in no doubt as to what he was looking at.

This was the remains of an elven skyfleet.

"You were thinking of Freiport, weren't you?" Jenna said. "The day we arrived?"

Slowhand stared at her, his surroundings momentarily forgotten. "You remember?"

"Of course I remember, Killiam. The Faith would have gained nothing destroying that part of me they valued in the first place."

"Your strategic skills?" Slowhand remembered the position she had held with the Freiport military. "They — or was it just Fitch — destroyed something, though, eh? Your free will? Your choice to leave?"

Jenna stared at him, strangely hesitant for the first time since their reunion. "Perhaps there were other reasons…"

"What?" Slowhand said, grabbing her arm and, as he did, part of her robe fell away to reveal a red choker around her neck inscribed with Final Faith runics. It was a wedding band.

"Outside, your man called you Captain Freel," Slowhand said. "Captain Freel. My Gods, you married one of them didn't you?"

Jenna pulled her arm away, straightened her robe. "Sorry you weren't invited to the wedding, brother. The ceremony was in Scholten Cathedral. The Anointed Lord herself officiated."

"And how voluntary was that, Jenna? Who is he, your husband? Is he here?"

"Lord of All, you never change, do you? No, Killiam, he isn't here. He's on special assignment, just like me."

Just like you, Slowhand thought. And just like Konstantin Munch had been before the shit had hit the fan. "Do you ever think," he said, "that the Final Faith has its fingers in too many pies?"

Again, Jenna hesitated. "They… I…"

"What?" Slowhand demanded. But before Jenna could elaborate, the airship jarred suddenly and he realised that it had just entered the cradle they had been heading towards and that the cradle was, in fact, an elevator. Clamping them into position it then began to rise. Jenna pulled her arm away, suddenly all business once more.

"Mister Ransom, prepare to couple the orb feed. Mister Blane, disengage the canopy locks. Port and starboard rudders down and neutral, people. Let's get this done and get ourselves out of here!"

Despite the sudden burst of activity around him, Slowhand wasn't going to let Jenna's comment go, and he followed his sister as she went about her business, adjusting various dials and levers as the elevator reached its destination and began to turn on its own axis, positioning the airship's strange, pulsating orb before a huge panel. The crewman called Ransom began to link umbilical looking pipes up to it, and while he and the others were professionally adept at what they did — clearly familiar with the airship's workings — a number of things were now becoming clear to Slowhand.

"This isn't your ship, is it, sis? It's Old Race, scavenged from the remains of their technology and put together piecemeal. And this isn't your final destination, either, is it?" As Jenna helped crew position a gantry so that they could reach a rock platform filled with more modern machines and crates, which the crew then proceeded to load, he persisted. "All this equipment? What are you up to, Jenna? Where are you going?"

Jenna span to face him. "Going, brother? We aren't going anywhere. In fact, we're running away from somewhere — as fast as we can."

"Somewhere or something?" Slowhand said with sudden realisation. "On the ship, what you said when those things came. You knew what the k'nid were, didn't you?"

"The k'nid?"

"Yes, the k'nid. The things that attacked your ship."

"Oh, so they've been given a name."

"Is it those things you're running from? What the hells are they? Where do they come from?"

Jenna stared at him defiantly, as if she were not going to answer, but then, as he held her eyes, she seemed to relent slightly. "There has been… a mistake," she said slowly, swallowing. "We need to rearm, reinforce, return to rectify what we have — "

"That is enough," Querilous Fitch interrupted, grabbing Jenna by the wrist and spinning her around. "This civilian cannot be allowed to know the business of the Final — "

"Hey!" Slowhand shouted, moving forward. "Get your hands off this civilian's sister or you're gonna find out just how uncivil he can — "

Fitch's gaze snapped to him and, for a second, Slowhand swore he could see the blood vessels in his eyes dart and writhe like a nest of snakes.

"Or what?" he said disdainfully, and the archer suddenly found himself airborne, though this time with no dirigible beneath him.

The dismissive snap of the arm with which Fitch had accompanied his words had, seemingly without any effort on his part at all, flung him upwards and backwards with such force that he found himself hurtling through the harbour towards the energy panel from which the dirigible crystal fed. He impacted so hard that the wind was knocked completely out of him.

"My Gods, Jenna," he gasped weakly. "What has the Faith done this time?"

Jenna stared but no answer came and suddenly, seemingly instinctively, his left hand shot out to grab a small node on the panel, gripping it tightly so that he dangled there. This, Slowhand found strange, because there was no way — instinctively or otherwise — that he would grab such a device having seen the kind of power it channelled. Sure enough, his whole arm buzzed with a strange energy that spread through his bones to his ribs, but however much he wanted to he found he couldn't let go. In fact, he suddenly realised, his other arm was reaching for the opposite node.

Slowhand felt a bolt of panic. He stared down at Fitch and saw the mage grinning coldly up at him. Damn it, it was the threadweaver who had made his arm lash out. And now he was forcing him to raise the other.