The Shattered Lands - Chapter Twenty-Two

Bullets were snapping through the wooden railing now, splintering and tearing. Artor glanced up at the balloon of the aership. He could see grazes and dents in the thick canvas, and he hoped none of them were holes.

Two of the freed slaves were dead, and two more had been wounded. Whenever one of them tried for the burner to try and get them clear, they took fire.

“How many rifles have we got?” Artor shouted to Eganon.

“Not enough.” The young man’s face was grim, set and ready. Ready to die, maybe. He wasn’t much older than Artor, and he was ready to die.

Artor wasn’t. Not by a long shot. He peered through one of the bullet holes, out at the settlement. The brigands were starting to approach them across the dock, not quickly, but leisurely. The outcome was a foregone conclusion, and with the amount of fire coming from the ruins of the hall that had dominated the town, no slave could afford to get up and fire at them.

“They’re about fifty yards away.” Artor looked down at the glass bottle in his hand, full of burner fuel that was also soaking the rag stuffed into the neck. Without the burner he had no way to light it … but maybe he could manage it before they killed him.

Eganon wiped the sweat from his top lip and gave a short, sharp sigh. “I’ll take that and throw it. Stay down.”

He reached for the bottle, but Artor snatched it away. “Wait!”

“If we don’t do it now, the rest of us don’t have a chance! Those aerships will run the other two down!”

“Just wait! Wait for the bounty hunter!”

Eganon bared his teeth in fury. “You said he wasn’t coming!”

“He’s not …” Artor felt a strange lump form in his throat, that he was surprised Rand Irellian had earned in his heart. “He’s not coming … bu-”

A deafening boom and a flash of orange fire drew Artor’s eye back to the bullet hole. Debris began clattering against the aership’s hull and bouncing off the balloon.

One of the huts, to the right of the ruined hall, was ablaze, a cloud of black smoke belching into the cavern and creeping towards the open aer. As the brigands stumbled from the shock and turned to it, Artor pushed off the railing and bolted for the burner.

He skidded in a dead man’s blood and one knee scraped on the deck. His feet scrabbled for purchase on the wet planks, but he made it two more yards towards the burner before the ground was good enough to push up from. By the time he reached it, the gunfire was beginning to ring out again.

He twisted the valve, and the flame tripled in size. Two bullets whizzed past him as he felt the deck lurch upwards, and he threw himself down again.

“We’re off! Who’s on the helm?”

Eganon glanced around at the rest of the terrified and injured men on the deck, and gritted his teeth. He ran, bent double, as more bullets cracked into the hull and the railing of the aership. “Light that firebomb!”

Artor stood slowly, but shrank again as more bullets zipped past his head. He tried to breathe, but his chest was too tight, tighter than a bandage around a wound. Were those tears in his eyes? He wiped them away as quickly as he could, before anyone could see them. There was no time for tears.

He held his breath, and reached up with the bottle. He touched the rag in the neck to the flame. It caught the soaked oil instantly.

Artor bolted for the railing. The three remaining aerships sat below, one large and two smaller, waiting for their crews to board them and chase down the fleeing slaves.

He cocked his arm back to throw, and a bullet punched through his chest.

Artor almost fell. His grip on the railing was the only thing that kept him upright. He couldn’t breathe anymore. There was blood in his throat.

No, no, not yet. He couldn’t die yet. He set his jaw, gritted his bloody teeth, and threw the bottle with all the force he could muster.

The force he put into his arm pitched him half-over the railing. He clung on with his left hand, and craned his neck up.

The bottle shattered on the top deck of the closest aership, right on top of the fuel barrels, catching them alight. The fuel they had let out, pooling around the base of the cylinders, quickly caught as well.

Eganon guided their aership through the cavern mouth, pursued by round after round of relentless gunfire from the brigands. As they were halfway out, the first of the three docked craft ignited in a fireball so intense it seemed to overtake every bullet. The flames licked the hull and the balloon, and as Eganon started descending to move out of range of the cannons, the second docked craft exploded.

When the third went up, Artor felt himself begin slipping. His feet left the deck and his belt slipped free of the edge of the railing.

His chest heaved as he let out a series of hacking coughs. Blood dripped from his mouth and into the aer, where it quickly dropped out of sight. Artor stared after it, and into infinity.

The sky didn’t stop. Up, down, left, right, it was just sky and rocks as far as he could see. The incoming night began darkening the violet sky into a deep blue and black. Those star-things the bounty hunter talked about were beginning to twinkle above him.

He slipped further. Where would he land when he went over? Would he even land?

He imagined what he might pass on the way down. Flights of dragons gliding along the paths of rocks. Storms ripping through the wilderness. The cities he had heard about from traders that stretched for miles and miles. Water … water like the stretch of it he’d seen from the Scythe, blue and endless, droplets hitting his face. Maybe he’d land in one of those. He hoped so.

Or maybe … maybe he could just fly forever.

He slipped again, and kept slipping.

Then a hand wrapped tightly around his ankle. Another, further up his leg. And they were dragging him up and away from death.

Eganon and another man laid him down on the deck. Eganon twisted his head around. “Jon, get below and find a blanket!”

Artor grabbed him. “Nokturn Isle. Head … for Nokturn … Isle.”

Eganon nodded. “You’ve got to get us there. You remember?”

“I … think so.”

“Alright. Hold on, yeah? None of us are doctors, so I hope you know one.”

Artor hurt with every breath in and out. He could still taste blood in the back of his throat. Something inside him was broken. But he was alive, and that meant he could give it back.

He looked back at the fang of rock, where fire still licked from the cave mouth. Rand was silent. Still there, trapped. Alive?

He wanted to go back, but it would have meant his death, and everyone else’s.

“I’m coming back,” he hissed through his teeth. “I’ll make Garik come back.”

A blanket was thrown over him by a shadow, and the shadow that threw it cradled his head and tipped a water skin into his mouth. Despite the warmth of the covering, his body still felt cold.

“Come on,” the man said from above him. “Let’s get you below before night falls.”

***

Lord Gourvan stepped over the charred bodies around what was left of the blacksmith’s forge. He could tell who was who easily. The Spiral told him.

None of the bodies belonged to any of his veterans, or anyone of particular consequence. No, here was someone. Grilla. A decent fighter. Someone who certainly earned her place from his bed up to being one of his generals.

One of many who had, and many who could. And in death, she had given him the key to spreading the Spiral’s will across the broken world where life still stubbornly clung.

Her body was charred like the others, but thin and skeletal, with a jagged cut across the dry, crispy skin around her throat. Too dry. As if all the moisture had been sucked out of her.

She was tangled with another body, one that was burned, with clothes that were stained with blood where they weren’t burned beyond use. The coat he wore was now an ashen, hole filled mess. His hat was on the floor next to him, half-destroyed, and his hair was almost all burned away from the back of his head. Half of his face was charred, not completely black, but black in red rimmed patches.

Gourvan knelt beside him. He closed his eyes, and the Spiral wove around his inner-ear to strengthen his hearing.

He smiled. The breathing from the wounded man was ragged and drawn, so faint that one of his men would doubtless have thrown him over the side of the island, mistaking him for a corpse.

He stood again, and smiled down at his fellow Dae Rauko. His fellow chosen … chosen by something that lesser men called a demon. The Spiral was no demon. It was a god. The last god.

Gourvan looked around at the men who were waiting for him around the ruins of the blacksmiths shop. His mouth pulled into a smile.

“Find me a few of your less valuable slaves. I need blood. Lots of blood.”

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