Ilse Witch

“Hold tight!” Alt Mer shouted down to him from atop his precarious station, hauling back on the steering levers to gain more height and speed.

Missiles flew everywhere, dark projectiles against the twin glows of the sunset and the fires in the harbor. Walker flattened himself against the rough wall of the pilothouse, protecting his back. He did not want to use magic. If he did, he would reveal his presence, and he thought it best not to do so. To his right, crouched deep in one of the fighting ports, so close to the nearest ship that he could have reached out and touched it, Spanner Frew was cursing loudly under a hail of bow fire. Across from him, Rue Meridian was dashing recklessly from draw to draw, miraculously avoiding the barrage of arrows that sailed all around her, dark face grim and determined as she set the lines.

Their wild, hair-raising escape was punctuated by the underside of their ship raking across the mastheads of the last attacker as they finally gained the safety of the open skies. All about them, the remaining Rover airships were fleeing into the darkness, skimming across the cliff tops, and disappearing down the coast. Below, their attackers were descending on the settlement buildings, setting fire to everything, and driving the last of the residents into the surrounding forests. Masts jutting sharply against the flaming debris, dark hulls glided everywhere.

As their vessel steadied and their passage smoothed, Rue Meridian appeared at Walker’s side. “Those were Federation ships!” she snapped angrily. Her face was streaked with soot and sweat. “They must be madder at us than I thought! All those people driven out or killed, their ships and homes burned, just to make a point?”

Walker shook his head. “I don’t think it was you they were after.” He caught her startled gaze and held it. “Nor do I think it was the Federation who was behind this witch hunt.”

She hesitated a moment, then let her breath out in a long, slow hiss of understanding.

Behind them, hidden by the cliffs they were fleeing and reduced to a reddish-yellow glow against the darkness of night, Rover buildings burned unhindered to the ground and gutted airships sank into the deep.

THIRTEEN





Provisioned and readied, Bek Rowe and Quentin Leah departed at daybreak and rode east through the Highlands. The day was cool and clear, with the smell of new grass and flowers heavy on the scented air and the sun warm on their faces. Clouds were massing west, however, and there was a clear possibility of rain by nightfall. Under the best of conditions it would take them several days just to navigate as far as the Eastland and the beginning of their search for the mysterious Truls Rohk. In the old days, before invasion and occupation by the Federation army, they could never have gone this way. Directly in their path lay the Lowlands of Clete, a vast, dismal bog choked with deadwood and scrub, shrouded in mist and devoid of life. Beyond that were the Black Oaks, an immense forest that had claimed more victims than either of the young men cared to count, most to mishap and starvation, but some, in earlier times, to the huge wolves that were once its fiercest denizens. All this was daunting enough, but even after navigating bog and woods, a traveler wasn’t safe. Just east of the Black Oaks was the Mist Marsh, a treacherous swamp in which, it was rumored, creatures of enormous power and formidable magic prowled. Below the marsh, and running south for a hundred miles, were the Battlemound Lowlands, another rugged, difficult stretch of country populated by Sirens, deadly plants that could lure and hypnotize by mimicking voices and shapes, seize with tentacle-like roots, paralyze with flesh-numbing needles, and devour their victims at leisure.

None of this was anything the cousins wanted to encounter, but all were difficult to avoid in making passage below the Rainbow Lake. Any route that would take them above the Rainbow Lake would cost them an additional three days at least and involved dangers of their own. Traveling farther south required a detour of better than a hundred miles and would put them almost to the Prekkendorran, a place no one in his right mind wanted to be.