“And that little daughter of yours … what did you say her name was? Tally? I think I’ll keep her for myself. Teach her a few things you never could.”
Kallorek chortled wickedly. He was peering down at his own fat stomach, and so yelped in surprise when Clay’s shadow fell over him. The booker closed his eyes and raised his chin, ready for the punch he assumed was coming.
But Clay Cooper didn’t punch men who threatened his wife—or his little girl, for that matter.
What he did do was grab them by the collar, haul them to their feet, take three long strides to gain momentum, and then hurl them headlong over the skyship’s rail. Kallorek, too surprised to even scream, disappeared into dark oblivion.
Afterward Clay just stood there, chest heaving, blood pounding in his head like a slavemaster’s drum. His hands were trembling, so he gripped the moonstone railing to keep them still. Even the greenest branch could only bend so far, and when Kallorek started into his family something in him had just … snapped.
The monster, he knew. Not gone. Never gone, it would seem. Just … dormant.
His senses returned at the sound of clapping. Moog and Kit were applauding him. The wizard was smiling broadly, while the ghoul wore a grimace likely meant as a grin.
Gabriel appeared at his side, peering overboard into the empty dark. “What the hell just happened?” he asked.
Clay opened his mouth to explain, but closed it, for fear that rage would hoarsen his voice. Instead, he shrugged.
There was a pall above the forest each morning, a grimy black mist that reeked of decay and tasted like ash on the tongue. Most days it dissolved by noon, and Clay would gaze out over the grey ocean of sullen, sinister trees that stretched to every horizon. Come evening the sun burned like a pyre in the west, and soon after the stars would gather to mourn its passing, glistening like tearful eyes, sometimes falling.
On the second day they passed through a patch of violet cloud that reeked of decay and left their flesh cold and wet. Matrick went down with a fever and insisted that copious amounts of Kaskar whiskey were the only cure. Kit, who claimed he’d once done a stint as a battlefield physician, corroborated this. The others were justly skeptical, but Matty awoke the next morning with nothing but his usual hangover.
Twice in the first few days they caught sight of something trailing them, but whatever it was vanished before it could be identified. Clay found himself weighing whether he’d rather Lastleaf or Larkspur attack them up here. His preference varied by the hour, at least until he remembered what that wyvern matriarch had done to Obolon Han.
Despite the extravagant apartments below, the band spent the majority of their time on deck. Gabe’s eyes were fixed ahead, always ahead, while those who had crossed paths with Larkspur back in Conthas cast wary glances behind.
They pointed out landmarks to one another as they passed overhead. There were the ruins of Turnstone Keep, where bands had met to trade news and tell stories, and where Saga, along with Vanguard and the Night Roosters, had turned back a small army of Ferals after a three-night siege. The only casualty had been their bard, whose name Clay couldn’t remember, who was killed by an arrow as he urinated through a gap in the crenellations.
Ganelon nodded down at the remains of Brookstrider, a walking tree even more massive than Blackheart (from whom Clay had carved the wood for his beloved shield). No one knew who or what had killed Brookstrider, but his moss-shrouded corpse was surrounded by the remains of several dozen smaller treants, prompting some to wonder if he’d been the victim of, as Moog had dubbed it, arboreacide: the murder of trees by other trees.
And there was the crater in which they’d happened upon the body of something none of them recognized, a gelatinous mass of throbbing sacks and tentacled limbs that looked as though it belonged in the ocean depths rather than the middle of a poison forest. They’d assumed it was dead, and Matrick had set about poking it with a stick. It wasn’t dead after all, and they’d had to cut Matrick out of its stomach when it finally was.
By the third evening, as the six of them lay sprawled on couches they’d hauled up from the apartments below, Clay discovered his mood perceptively lightening. The sense of dread he’d been harbouring since … well, since the night Gabriel showed up on his doorstep, was slowly starting to ebb. After all, they’d managed to reunite Saga, reclaim Vellichor, elude their bounty hunters, survive a chimera, and escape the destruction of the Maxithon. And to top it all off, they’d lucked into their very own skyship.
To have traversed the Heartwyld on foot would have taken months, if they’d made it at all, and it would have been a terrible, treacherous slog through a nightmare landscape teeming with horrors hell-bent on killing them. It would have meant spending night after sleepless night on the hard ground, fearing the snap of every twig, the whisper of every falling, fetid leaf, listening as the dark itself breathed and hissed around them.
And from what Clay had heard the Heartwyld was as dangerous now as it had ever been. Too many bands were taking the easy way out: mopping up on the arena floor and sleeping in taverns every night. Too few mercs were willing to explore this dank cave or check out that haunted ruin, and only the bravest among them were willing to risk the Wyld.
But no matter: They were flying. And despite the legitimate concerns of Barret and his bandmates, the journey so far had proven mercifully uneventful. Perhaps they’d get really lucky, Clay imagined, and skip the forest, soar over the mountains, catch the Horde unawares and dip into Castia long enough to find and rescue Rose, then return home to find all this bounty business blown over.
Hell, thought Clay, I solved half our problems by tossing Kal overboard. Maybe they could invite Lilith on a “friendly cruise” and do the same to her when they got back.
A soft strumming drew Clay out of his head. Kit had retrieved that bizarre-looking instrument of his and was using his grey-green fingers to pluck a soft, stirring music from its web of silver strings.
“What is that thing anyway?” asked Moog. The wizard had discovered a small library below and was currently leafing his way through a book called Unicorns: Beware the Horn. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Nor will you again, my friend,” said Kit. There was a note of melancholy in his reedy voice. “Batingtings are so rare as to make skyships seem as common as copper coins.”
It occurred to Clay that, if given several hours with which to mull it over, he would be hard-pressed to think of a dumber name for anything than batingting.
“A batingting?” Moog closed his book, leaning to examine the cumbersome octagonal instrument resting in Kit’s lap. “I thought they’d all been destroyed when the Dominion fell.”
“Here we go,” sighed Ganelon, drawing a laugh from everyone except the wizard and Kit.
“As did I,” said the ghoul. “I found this beauty among Kallorek’s many artifacts and decided to relieve him of it.”
“Fascinating!” said Moog.
“Is it, though?” Clay loaded his voice with as much sarcasm as it could bear.
The wizard, unfazed, pressed on. “How many strings does it have?”
“Twenty-six to a side, one hundred and four in total.” Kit pulled a few scintillating notes from it as he said so. “It’s unlikely anyone alive today knows the secret of their making, and I daresay I may be the only ghoul in the world capable of playing one.”