Ilse Witch

He watched his Rover crew scramble up the masts, lofting the sails and fastening the radian draws in place. Airships were marvelous things, but operating them required a mindset that was sorely lacking in most Federation soldiers. The Southlanders were fine on solid ground executing infantry tactics. They were comfortable with throwing bodies into breaches, like sandbags, and relying on the sheer weight of their numbers to crush an enemy. But put them in the air and they couldn’t seem to decide what to do next. Their intuition vanished. Everything they knew about warfare dried up and blew away with the first breath of wind to fill the sails.

Rovers, on the other hand, were born to the life. It was in their blood, in their history, and in the way they had lived their lives for two thousand years. Rovers did not respond well to regimentation and drill. They responded to freedom. Flying the big airships gave them that. Migratory by nature and tradition, they were always on the move anyway. Staying put was unthinkable. The Federation was still trying to figure that out, and they were constantly sending observers aloft with the Rover crews to discover what it was their mercenaries knew that they didn’t.

Trouble was, it wasn’t something that could be taught. The Bordermen who fought for the Free-born weren’t any better. Or the Dwarves. Only the Elves seemed to have mastered sailing the wind currents with the same ease as the Rovers.

One day, that would change. Airships were still new to the Four Lands. The first had been built and flown barely two dozen years earlier. They had been in service as fighting vessels for less than five years. Only a handful of shipwrights understood the mechanics of ambient-light sails, radian draws, and diapson crystals well enough to build the vessels that could utilize them. Using light as energy was an old dream, only occasionally realized, as in the case of airships. It was one thing to build them, anoth1er to make them fly. It took skill and intelligence and instinct to keep them in the air. More were lost through poor navigation, loss of control, and panic than through damage from battle.

Rovers had sailed the seas in trading ships and pirate vessels longer than anyone had, and the jump to airships was easier for them. As mercenaries, they were invaluable to the Federation. But the Southlanders continued to believe that if they could just learn how the Rovers managed to make it all look so easy, they wouldn’t need them as Captains and crews.

Hence, his passengers, three more in a long line of Federation hopefuls.

Resigned, he sighed. There was nothing he could do about it. Hawk would fuss enough for the both of them. He took his station in the pilot box, watching his men as they finished tying down the draws and securing the sails. Other ships were preparing to lift off, as well, their crews performing similar tasks in preparation. On the airfield, ground crews were preparing to release the mooring lines.

The old, familiar excitement was humming in his blood, and the clarity of his vision sharpened.

“Unhood the crystals, Hawk!” he shouted to his Second Officer.

Furl Hawken relayed the instructions to the men stationed at the front and rear parse tubes, where the crystals were fed light from the radian draws. Unhooding freed the mechanisms that allowed Alt Mer to fly the ship. Canvas coverings and linchpins securing the metal hoods that shielded the crystals were released, giving control over the vessel to the pilot box.

Alt Mer tested the levers, drawing down power from the sails in small increments. Black Moclips strained against her tethers in response, shifting slightly as light converted to energy was expelled through the parse tubes.

“Cast off!” he ordered.

The ground crew freed the restraining lines, and Black Moclips lifted away in a smooth, upward swing. Alt Mer spun the wheel that guided the rudders off the parse tubes and fed power down the radian draws to the crystals in steadily increasing increments. Behind him, he heard the hurried shift of the Federation officers toward pieces of decking they could hold on to.

“There are securing lines and harnesses coiled on those railing stays,” he called back to them. “Fasten one about your waist, just in case it gets bumpy.”

He didn’t bother checking to see if they did as he suggested. If they didn’t, it was their own skins they risked.

In moments, they were flying out over the flats of the Prekkendorran, several hundred feet in the air, Black Moclips in the lead, another seven ships following in loose formation. Airships could fly comfortably at more than a thousand feet, but he preferred to stay down where the winds were less severe. He watched the twin rams slice through the air to either side of the decking, black horns curving upward against the green of the earth. Low and flat, Black Moclips had the look of a hawk at hunt, soaring smooth and silent against the midday sky.