The Queen of Death

27

Kandler’s tumbling came to a stop at the base of the main deck beneath the bridge. As he jumped to his feet, the airship’s deck pitched hard, and he had to fight to keep standing.

A fiery ball of pitch soared past the airship. It had come close enough to pierce the ring of fire like a stone thrown through a hoop, but it hadn’t hit a thing. Then something smacked into the aft of the ship and Kandler found himself on his knees again.

He dove for the nearest gunwale and stuck his head over the edge. Below, it seemed like the entire fortress had mobilized to attack them. Ballista bolts and balls of burning pitch sailed through the sky toward them from every direction.

“Get us out of here!” he shouted.

Sallah didn’t say a word. She just bared her teeth and concentrated on what she had already been doing.

Kandler scanned the deck. Back toward the port-rail, Burch stood crouched over Esprë, who huddled beneath him, still holding Xalt by the arms. The shifter had his crossbow out and seemed to be training it on any incoming attacks, as if he thought he could knock them from the sky with a good shot.

Esprë seemed unhurt, which was the most important thing to Kandler. She started to crawl toward the wall under the bridge, which offered just a hair more protection than the middle of the open deck. Xalt crept along with her, ready to throw himself into the path of any attack if need be.

Toward the bow, Monja knelt over a still form that seemed to smolder where it lay. It took Kandler a moment to recognize it as Te’oma. As he watched, the changeling sat up.

The justicar dashed to the aft of the ship and yanked himself up on to the bridge. “Where’s Duro?” he asked Sallah.

“He sacrificed himself,” she said, not turning to look at him. The ship’s nose pitched forward then, and another ballista bolt skipped off the prow.

“What?”

“He dove into the guards on the dock so we could cut the ship free.”

Kandler grabbed the wheel. “What happened to him?”

“I don’t have time for this now!”

Kandler wanted to object, to pull Sallah’s hands from the wheel and make her tell him what had happened, but right then a ball of pitch soared into the Phoenix’s ring of fire.

The elemental fire incinerated most of the pitch at once, but what was left exploded out from the ring and spattered down like flaming drops of rain all over the fore section of the main deck.

Esprë screamed. She’d been climbing on to the bridge when the ball of pitch had burst open.

“Take the wheel!” Sallah said to Esprë. “I need to help Monja!”

Esprë nodded and dove for the wheel, wrapping her hands around it and taking control of the willful airship. The instant the girl’s fingers touched the wheel, Sallah shoved herself away from it and leaped down to the main deck.

Seeing Burch and Xalt race up after Esprë to protect her, Kandler snapped a salute at them and chased after Sallah. Looking around, he saw that they had just cleared the east wall of the fortress. Within moments, they would be far beyond the reach of even its most powerful weapons. They just had to hold on a few moments longer to escape.

When he jumped down to the main deck, Kandler saw that the burning pitch had clumped into little fires all across the bow. Because of the nature of the source of the airship’s power, the Phoenix had been magically fortified against flame. The blazes would not spread.

One of them, though, had landed on Monja. As the halfling burned, Te’oma knelt over her, trying to beat out the tongues of fire with her bloodwings. The pitch proved to be a stubborn fuel though, and it kept scorching the young shaman in its sticky grip.

Kandler smelled the horrible stench of burning flesh as he got nearer. By the time he reached Monja, Te’oma had managed to put out all the fires on the halfling, although many splashes of nearby pitch still crackled along.

“Is she dead?” he asked.

Te’oma turned her face up toward him—her own face, not that of Shawda or anyone else—and he saw nothing but desperation there. “I don’t know,” she said.

Sallah shouldered the changeling aside and knelt down next to the halfling. Monja’s skin had blistered all over—at least where it had been exposed—and large, black flakes already peeled off it in the wind from the airship’s rapid flight. For a moment, Kandler thought she couldn’t possibly be breathing, but then she let loose an agonized scream.

“She’s not dead yet,” Sallah said. “With the grace of the Silver Flame, I may still be able to save her.”

The lady knight put up her hands in supplication and bowed her head. She murmured a soft but sincere prayer to her distant deity, and her hands began to glow with a silvery light. As she spoke, though, Monja cries turned to a horrible, hacking cough, and blood started to spurt from her mouth.

“Hurry!” Te’oma said. “You have to hurry,”

Sallah gave no indication she even heard the changeling’s words. Instead, she finished up her prayer and brought her hands down to cradle the halfling’s crispy head.

Much of the hair had been burned off it, leaving only blackened scalp behind. Kandler guessed that the burned flesh might still be hot enough to scorch Sallah’s fingers, but if the lady knight felt any pain she showed no sign of it.

The silvery glow flowed from Sallah’s hands and engulfed Monja’s head. As it did, Sallah continued to murmur prayers to the Silver Flame, praising it for its mercy as she petitioned it for yet more aid for her fallen friend.

Burch came up behind Kandler and stood mute as he watched the halfling heal. “Damn,” the shifter said. “I’m about ready to thank the Flame myself.”

Kandler looked over at his friend. The shifter sighed and said, “Telling a friend his child is dead is one of my least favorite things.”

Kandler frowned, then patted Burch on the shoulder. As he turned to go back to the bridge, he said, “Then it’s a good thing we don’t know Duro’s father.”

When Kandler reached Esprë, she said, “We have to go back for him.”

The justicar squeezed his stepdaughter’s shoulder and shook his head.

“We can’t just leave him there,” she said, her voice rising as she spoke. “They’ll kill him.”

Kandler put an arm around Esprë shoulders and hunched down next to her. He spoke softly into her ear, to make sure she could hear him. “You see what happened to Monja down there?”

Esprë nodded.

“If we go back, that could happen to any one of us—maybe to all of us—and even if we got through all that, we’d have to fight our way through an entire fortress filled with elf warriors to even get near to Duro. That’s assuming we’re not already too late.”

Esprë looked like she wanted to throw up. “I—I know you’re right,” she said, “but I just can’t stand it. The thought of him lying there dead on the dock, maybe hacked to bits like—like Shawda …”

“We don’t know he’s dead,” Kandler said. “Valenar elves are a hard but fair people. If they capture him alive, they’ll bind his wounds and nurse him back to health.”

He didn’t mention that it would likely only be so that the dwarf would be well enough to stand trial. The justicar didn’t know much about the Valenar system of justice, but he suspected that Duro might find a death sentence to be getting off easy. A dwarf could live a long time, and even if Kandler had the fortune to die in bed with his boots on, Duro might still be rotting in Aerie’s prison when it happened.

He promised himself that once all this was over he’d come back to discover Duro’s fate, whatever it might be. He knew the odds against him being able to manage it were staggering, but he tallied it up yet one more mark under the heading “Why I Can’t Die Yet.”

“Thanks,” Esprë said, pressing into Kandler’s arm while still keeping her hands on the wheel.

“For what?”

“For trying to come up with a way to make me feel better.”

Kandler snorted softly and squeezed Esprë tight. “It wasn’t just for you.”