Aethosphere Chronicles: Storm of Chains (7 page)

“Black Blood…” Drish’s jaw went slack, “so
you really weren’t kidding when you said you were a pirate. And now
you’re here to do what… kidnap me?” The noble recoiled under
Abigail’s support, while the motley gathering chuckled at his
expense.

“He’s a real smart one ain’t he, Cap,”
offered the disinterested Candaran with the feral face.

“Seems so, O’Dylan,” muttered Bar out of the
corner of his mouth.

Drish found that to be an ironic statement
indeed, suspecting he would be hard-pressed to squeeze a
thimble-full of intelligence from this herd of dull-eyed thugs.

“We need to get you to safety, Drish.”
Abigail’s melodic voice whispered into his ear. “And Black Blood’s
the place to do it. But don’t you worry about its reputation; the
Ascellan Captains will make sure the son of Arvis Larken is well
taken care of.”

“That is quite alright…I can fend for myself
here on King’s Isle—”

“Geez, he’s like a chattering finch I want
to crush within my bare hands—silence forever,” grumbled the
scarred brute, snarling passed his missing lips and rotted black
teeth.

Bar Bazzon reached back from the doorway and
grabbed Drish by the collar. “We’re leaving,” he punctuated his
words with a tug, “so you best keep that yap of yours shut, or I’ll
let Rook here carry through with that threat of his. We can talk
later about how much of a pain in the ass you are, but until then,
not another damn word out of your damn mouth—comprehend?”

“Please, Drish,” urged Abigail softly, “I
know this is a lot to take in right now, but I don’t understand why
you’re being so resistant. Would you rather be scooped up by the
Empire and thrown into a stockade?”

All around him, Drish was met with hard
stares from a crew of cutthroat pirates, so he held his tongue and
swallowed back his anger in silence.

“Alright, we go on three then,” explained
Bar. “One, two, three.”

Eight forms slipped out of the townhouse on
Cooper Street and into a daytime twilight of snow and clouds. They
stalked along quickly and quietly enough, but they’d hardly made it
half a block when Drish heard the dreadful order for them to halt,
yelled from a block down the street.

What are we going to do…?
He howled
in internal dismay, too scared to even turn.
How can we explain
this away? There’s too many of us…we’ve already broken the
gathering laws by at least four, and each of these men are
armed.

But while Drish was busy thinking and
worrying about what to do next, the brigands around him pulled out
their weapons and fired first. The gunshots crashed and thundered
with startling reverberation, and not since the Siege of Throne had
Drish experienced such violence; though in truth, he’d fled the
Palace and had been safety tucked away in his family’s city manor
when the ground fighting started. He’d been well away from any
actual carnage, watching burning airships tumbling down through the
southwestern skies. But when he first heard the Siege Hulks and
tread-rovers, barking and roaring to the south and east, he fled to
the wine cellar thereafter; spending the remainder of the battle
curled up as the bottles rattled and clinked in time to the
shelling.

Drish dropped to the snowy ground as chaos
ensued outside his home on Cooper Street. Percussive gunfire howled
between the sullen brick-fronts, while stifling gunpowder coalesced
into a rising cloud that hovered beneath the rooflines. Bullets
whizzed close at hand, zipping over Drish’s head, striking parked
cars and pinging off bricks and stone. The pirates around him
roared and yelled, and someone dragged him to his feet and shoved
him from behind, forcing him to a run. The snow and the slush sent
Drish slipping and skidding along while he crouched and cowered and
tried his best not to get shot. A pot next to his head shattered
atop its stoop as he passed, causing the fleeing accountant to
glance back, only to discover the end of the block swarming with
imperial soldiers. Nearby, a kidnapper tumbled to the street in a
crash, and the blood staining the snowbank beneath him confessed
the man would never get back up. Drish baulked at the sight of
death, and it stunned him into a walk until the wolf, O’Dylan, gave
him a shove, just before he himself cried out and grabbed at his
back. The pirate kept to his feet though, and together they
fled.

From behind, more soldiers came spewing
around the block, like ants escaping from a nest, and even Drish
realized there were far too many of them for a simple patrol. No,
this was an entire squad he realized, and no doubt dispatched to
521 Cooper Street with orders to capture a dangerous insurgent.
With pirates running amok, that’s exactly how he was being
portrayed, and so sensing his only opportunity to salvage his
reputation, Drish tried to break free and surrender, but someone
thwarted his attempt, yelling, “Not that way!” Suddenly the
fugitive noble was being pulled sideways down an alleyway, and when
he turned, there was Bar Bazzon himself at the helm.

They made all haste through a narrow canyon
of stone foundations and brick walls, moving towards a dilapidated
delivery truck waiting silently at the alley’s end. Drish took note
that the snow around here had been trampled flat, presumably by the
passing of these ruffians on their way to ruining his life. They’d
befouled everything in sight; even the snow was stained gray by a
film of soot and ash from the junker’s smokestack, which belched
lazy tendrils of smoke. Everything was otherwise placid and the
machine was still, like a slumbering animal. Its hood had been
propped open too, and from it a pair of gangly legs dangled out as
though being devoured by the rust-riddled, mechanized monster.

“Damn it,” grumbled that crass captain as he
jogged up ahead of the pack, “I specifically told that lazabout boy
to keep it running—can’t so much as follow a simple order.” But
Drish felt little sympathy for the pirate; not with the painful
clicking in his jaw from where the captain had sucker-punched him
hard. Every time he panted with exhaustion it hurt, making him wish
evils upon that oaf the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the
reign of the
Enox Unon
.

As they neared the steamer-truck, the
captive aristocrat was shoved towards the bed by the brute named
Rook, while the other bandits took to piling in around him. As
Abigail rushed past Drish, he called out to stop her. “Where are
you going? You’re not going to leave me alone…with them…are
you?”

“Someone has to show these boys where to go,
Drish,” said the woman, with a pleasant smile and a subtle shrug.
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a couple of pirates.”

Drish didn’t have the gumption to tell her
he was. There were too many hostile faces for him to ever feel at
ease.

“Fen!” barked the captain from somewhere
near the front of the truck.

They should have been moving by now, so
Drish leaned over the side to see what the hold might be.

“Fen,” Bar bellowed the name a second time,
“I told you to keep it running! We got less than thirty seconds
before this alleyway’s crawling with tin-soldiers, so if that
boiler’s gone cold you’re up the creek…and us right along with
you!”

From the hood appeared a boy with a face
full of ache and the scant roughage of a pre-pubescent beard. “Hey,
Cap, bout time,” he crooned in a broken voice, but what surprised
Drish the most about this boy was in discovering he was a Hierarch,
and one no older than fifteen or sixteen by the gangly build of
him.

A strange companion to be running with a
crew of Candaran pirates,
he thought.
Is this the son of
some local imperial overseer looking to rebel? Some sort of kidnap
victim they’ve brainwashed into service? Some simpleton moron
willing to sign up?

Whatever the case, this boy was obviously an
accomplice. Hopping down from the truck, Fen was in a shamefully
dirty condition, covered from head to toe in soot, and Drish could
almost smell the caked-grease on him from where he sat.

“I’ve been freezing here waiting for you
guys to show up,” complained the teenage pirate.

“I don’t care, Fen, why ain’t this truck
running?”

“Dunno, it just sort of burned out while I
was trying to get warm, Cap. It was the damnedest thing I ever
saw,” relayed the juvenile Hierarch, scratching dumbly at his
shaggy black hair. It was beyond obvious he’d no idea what he was
doing.

“Thought you told me you knew something
about machinery?”

“Do… sort of… scavenging it for valuable
parts anyway…” shrugged back the dim-witted youth.

“Well what the hell do I even have you
working in the engine room for then?”

“Ah, don’t get all bent out of shape, Cap,
it ain’t my fault we stole the worst truck in the whole city. Thing
just quit to no fault of my own; but I
have
been working
hard to get it going again. Even kicked it a couple times…signature
move that is—”

“When we get back to the
Chimera
,”
interrupted Bar in a frustrated snarl, “you’re in with the
scrubbers.”

“The scrubbers,” groaned the boy, “But
Cap…why not fire control.”

“Because, not only would Tollie have my head
if I put a living disaster like you near the
Chimera’s
powder, but I don’t need you mucking up my bridge.”

But their argument came to an abrupt end
when troops began rounding the alleyway’s corner. Shooting almost
immediately followed. And as bullets zinged off the truck’s metal
exterior, Drish flung himself to the floorboards for cover.
Not
like this
, he prayed bitterly into the grit, as hot bullet
casings came raining down around him from the pirate’s return-fire.
I’m not going to die like this; not on the floor of a filthy
delivery truck; surrounded by lowborn savages from Black
Blood.

Visions of his townhouse flashed through
Drish’s mind…of a comforting fire glowing hot in its hearth, a warm
cup of tea held between his hands, a silk robe draped around him as
he melted into soft sofa cushions. Maybe he’d have a book spread
out across his lap; maybe the phonograph would be playing some
light orchestra music; something from the early Oberarch Dynasty;
nothing as vulgar as the modern dribble that had come spewing out
from the slums last night.

This is all my father’s fault,
Drish
accused bitterly,
if I ever see that man again, I’ll save the
Empire the trouble of executing him by doing it myself.

And then, as though by divine providence,
the truck trembled to life beneath him.

The pirate delivery truck rattled and bounced down
the cobbled backstreet before spilling across the main causeway
with all the grace of a newborn moose. Wheels squalled and spun as
they drifted through the slush sideways, sending two cars
screeching and careening wildly out of control to avoid hitting
them. From his spot, curled up in the dirt of the truck’s bed, like
some newborn in the fetal position, Drish heard screaming people
fleeing in terror. He could only assume that the madman-captain was
putting everyone on the streets in danger with his reckless
driving.

“Hope you’re worth it,” grumbled Lance, and
when Drish looked up, it was to the greasy man glaring out from
beneath the crushing weight of his mechanical pack, while its
antennas shook and waved in time to the truck’s bumpy ride. Above
the man, Drish caught sight of the High Crown’s western edge, its
mountainous terrain standing black against the gray clouds. The
tethered isle seemed abuzz with Iron airship activity today; no
doubt launched from the commandeered airdocks of the Ragnarok
Cloudfortress in order to support the mission below.

“
All this for me,”
whispered Drish as
he pulled his astonished gaze away, only to find the pirates around
him glaring hard, as though they sensed his treacherous nature.

Across from him, O’Dylan grimaced in pain as
he held a hand to his bleeding back. His face had gone white and
his wolfish appearance had waxed to haggard exhaustion. Drish made
a halfhearted attempt to ask if he was okay, but the man just
snarled and turned away. It appeared he preferred the unforgiving
chill of the wind in his face than the nobleman’s attempt at
sympathy. That set the tone for the deration of their high-speed
escape; the worm in a mechanized turtle-shell, the wolf, the brute,
the tattooed Glenfinner…he wouldn’t find any friends in this lot,
and to prove his point, Lance’s earlier words were the only ones
spoken to him from there on out.

It was a bone-chilling drive to the
Lordswater Lake Industrial Park on the southeastern outskirts of
Throne. By the time they arrived Drish was sure that all his
appendages had frozen solid. Even on the floor the wind had been
cutting, pushing him past the point of shivering, to where he
simply felt dead all over, much like the district surrounding him.
This once thriving juggernaut of production was nothing more than a
cold graveyard now. In a different time, the waterfall cascading
off the Shield Veil Wall had powered the machines which provided
for all the floating isle’s energy requirements. During that lost
golden age it was impossible to have ever imagine a time would come
when the machines sat silent and the falls roared for their own
sake. How could anyone imagine, not when UKA warships commanded the
skies of the Sargasso and the Borealis, and to some extent the
Turquoise? When economic trade flowed freely across the Platinum
Thread stretching between King’s Straight and the Breach? When the
noble house Larken drew respect and admiration from the other house
nobles. Back then, these broken husks of toppled smokestacks,
scattered gears, and gutted buildings seemed as timeless as the
Gods’ Bind, glowing blue with exposed atmium as it connected King’s
Isle to the High Crown.