All The Turns of Light (36 page)

“You did have a plan,” said Donchen. “Other than dying a hero,” he added.

“I meant to lead the Gaunt away from the
Intrepid
,” Meralda said. The Gaunt’s reaching hand drew near, and she gave the pilot’s yoke another savage twist. “Away from everyone.”

“Change of plans,” Mug said, righting his cage at last. “No more dying. Fight this thing. Kill it.”

“I can’t,” she said. “Not without turning the Sea to ash. Perhaps the world too.”

“Forget the unmagic, then. What about regular old Tirlish magic?” replied Mug. “Surely you can still use that!”

The Gaunt roared, swiping the
Jenny
, its clawed hand passing so close it left a brief rend in the clouds and caused the airship to lurch.

“I don’t have anything—” began Meralda.

But I do.
Amorp’s Delighter. It’s back there, behind the port coil, unless it too was just part of a dream.

“Aha!” Mug said. “She’s had an idea!”

“It’s foolish,” Meralda said. Her Sight showed the Gaunt massing for a leap, and she sent the
Jenny
hurtling into a narrow spiral.

“So is doing nothing,” said Donchen. “What can we do?”

Meralda shook her head. “Someone needs to fly us,” she said. “I may have a weapon. It almost certainly won’t be enough to destroy the Gaunt, but it’s all we have.”

Donchen smiled and slapped his hand down on his knee. “I shall fly this marvelous craft,” he said, his tone as light as if he’d just suggested a picnic in the Park.

“You’re not a pilot,” Mug said.

“True, but you are,” replied Donchen. “You will say push that lever, or twist the yoke thusly, and I will comply. Meanwhile, Meralda will employ her secret weapon, and we’ll all be back aboard the
Intrepid
to face charges by lunch.”

Meralda laughed despite herself.

“You’ve gone as mad as me. It’s hopeless,” she said. The Gaunt leaped, missing the
Jenny
by mere yards, and roaring in rage. “Hopeless.”

“Then we’d best be about it,” said Donchen. Before Meralda could reply, he turned and took her face in his hands and kissed her until the Gaunt roared again, much closer now.

“I will not let you die,” she said. “Either of you.”

“Go kill the monster, dear. I’ll fly the stolen airship.”

Meralda rose. Donchen slipped quickly behind the controls, taking the yoke in his hands. “Steady,” Mug said. “No sudden moves.”

“I love you,” said Donchen. “Go.”

A massive fist battered the
Jenny
’s tail. Wood smashed, and the air inside the cabin suddenly went cold and thin as a high whistling shriek filled the craft with noise.

Meralda stumbled, climbing along in the dark, crawling more than walking from the
Jenny
’s upward tilt. She saw dim grey light aft, and realized part of the craft’s hull was gone.

“How bad is it?” shouted Donchen.

“Bad,” replied Meralda. “But we still have both coils.”

A cold, wet wind tore at her blouse and her hair. She found the tiny maintenance crawlway, determined which way was to port, and crawled around the corner with the wind howling in her ears.

By the light from her eyes, she saw the Delighter. It had been tossed about and stood on its end, its silver filigree scratched and its tubes dented. “Don’t be damaged, don’t be damaged,” she said, though the wind carried her words away as soon as she spoke them.

A few more minutes of climbing, and the Delighter was in her hands.

She hefted it, feeling its weight, fumbling with its unfamiliar bulk in the dark. She shook it, dreading the sound of anything rattling inside, but heard nothing.

The
Jenny
spun. Beams snapped, and the coil beside Meralda crackled and buzzed as Donchen poured more current through the coils.

Meralda turned toward the tiny passageway and hurried out, trying to find the hatchway to the
Jenny
’s exposed upper deck in the dark.

The Gaunt howled again, so close the force of it rattled Meralda’s teeth. She shoved herself ahead, bruising elbows and knees, unsure of how she’d manage to climb out onto the deck, or even stand if she reached it before the Gaunt struck again.

Donchen put the
Jenny
into a sudden tight turn, tossing Meralda against the far bulkhead and nearly causing her to drop the Delighter.

The
Jenny
shook, and again Meralda was thrown from bulkhead to bulkhead. She felt the airship slow suddenly, though the coils buzzed and sparked, and then wooded spars began to splinter and crack, as though the
Jenny
were being held fast and slowly crushed in a massive, merciless fist.

Meralda reached the hatchway and burst through it, head first.

For a moment, disorientation set in. The sky was a boiling mass of clouds. A gargantuan hand held the
Jenny
, pulling her close to a face still obscured by the storm.

Too late,
thought Meralda. Too late.

Fury grew within her.

“I was lost already,” she shouted, struggling to bring the Delighter through the narrow hatch. “But they could have lived! They could have gone home!”

As the clouds parted from around the face, Meralda brought the Delighter up. She took in a snatch of breath, forcing her Sight to focus only on the Delighter.

Amorp’s elegant spellworks crawled and whirled about the device. Meralda concentrated on the parts of the spell that loosed the lightning, tracing the firing segment back to a raised oval spot near her right hand. Her fingers, slick with rain and sweat, found the Delighter’s trigger. Meralda aimed the device skyward and noticed light spilling from the topmost of the thick tubes. When she looked inside it, she saw a magnified, blurry image of the Gaunt’s face.

The grip Meralda’s left hand had closed about wasn’t fixed. Meralda realized that each small movement of the knobby protrusion shifted the focus in the lighted tube.

Instinctively, Meralda brought the Gaunt’s face into sudden sharp focus.

Another part of Amorp’s handiwork controlled the intensity of the Delighter’s output. Meralda saw that Amorp had graduated his creation’s ferocity into ten levels of increasing fury, and before she could stop herself, her unmagic turned those ten into a hundred.

The Gaunt saw her, and it smiled, drawing the
Jenny
toward its toothless maw.

Meralda pulled the trigger.

Every storm cloud, above and below, far and near, stopped. Just for the barest of instants, the least sliver of time. Meralda’s new Sight showed her a sudden orientation of wind and clouds and energy, all of which turned toward the Gaunt’s face.

Then came the lightning.

It came from up and down and all around, bolt after bolt of it, arcing and leaping and hurtling toward the Gaunt in a blinding rush of light and heat and noise.

When the bolts struck, they struck all at once, and a brief new sun was born. The sound of it shattered all the
Jenny
’s glass and knocked the breath from Meralda and would have sent her falling had she not been lying half through the hatchway.

The
Jenny
was loosed. She tumbled for a moment, but then her coils caught, and she righted herself and went streaking away, trailing sparks and debris but airborne, still airborne.

Meralda shouted. Not a word, just a cry, mostly of shock and surprise at still being alive.

The Delighter was hot in her hands. As the
Jenny
righted, Meralda crawled out of the hatchway and onto the ravaged upper deck, where she held fast to the port rail and looked out into the sky.

At first, she saw nothing. But she pushed out with her Sight, and her heart sank as she saw a thin form stumbling through the clouds.

Mug popped out of the hatchway, barely able to fight the rush of wind.

“Is it dead?” he shouted.

Meralda shook her head no. “Get back below,” she cried. “It’s coming. Aft of us. Make speed.”

Mug vanished into the hatchway.

Meralda struggled to her feet. “No wonder Amorp hid this thing away,” she muttered. But it isn’t enough. It simply isn’t enough.

The
Jenny
began to twitch and start, black smoke forming in her wake. “The coils are overheating!” One or both of the insulating oil casings must have been ruptured. She won’t be airworthy much longer, and with no gas bags to keep her aloft…

The Gaunt’s furious roars sounded, and Meralda didn’t need her expanded Sight to see the giant figure drawing near, even through the clouds.

It’s nearly over,
thought Meralda.
We can’t run anymore.

A strange calm descended over her. “You were wrong about me,” she shouted. “I won’t use the unmagic. I won’t break the world. I’m not the Unmaker.”

The clouds parted, and the Gaunt strode forth. Its face was a blackened mass, burned and ravaged and smoking. But its hands were raised, and its charred jaw hung open, and it cried out in triumph, as the
Jenny
slowed and began to descend.

Meralda raised the Delighter. Her Sight showed her the black death, right where the Gaunt’s heart ought to be. It was little more than a chunk now, fuming and dropping bits of itself into the Sea.

Meralda focused on that, and just as her finger tightened on the trigger the stricken
Jenny
was lit by a bright, warm sun.

Meralda gasped. The
Jenny
emerged from a towering, vertical wall of clouds that reached from the Sea to the heavens above. The water below was calm, and the sky was a perfect deep summer shade of blue.

The Gaunt stumbled out of the wall of clouds and reached for the
Jenny
.

It stumbled. It turned its ruined face up toward the sun, and in that instant Meralda saw confusion wash across its charred face. Confusion, and something else – sudden, abject terror. It raised its hands, shielding its face from the sun, and it screamed at something in the sky.

Meralda took aim at the Gaunt’s burned heart and squeezed the trigger.

Again time stopped, and again, the Gaunt was struck from all sides by lightning that came from everywhere. Meralda kept the black death centered in the sighting tube, and kept the trigger depressed, and as she watched, the black mass at the Gaunt’s heart shriveled and began to crack.

The Delighter grew hot in her hands. Steam wafted from it, sizzling, but Meralda gritted her teeth and held on.

“
Unmaker,”
shrieked the Gaunt.

Meralda turned her Sight on the Delighter, watched for a split second as it coaxed electrical energies from the Sea and the sky with intensities that astounded her.

What was it Tower had said?

“
The energy output of the highest setting is incalculable.”

Meralda traced the Delighter’s magic back to the small brass knob set just behind the trigger. She used her thumb to turn it.

The sky exploded. A light was born, sourceless and omnipresent, a light so intense it rendered Meralda’s new Sight blind. She formed a bubble of protective energy about her, about the stricken
Jenny
, and she held the bubble fast until the awful silent light was suddenly extinguished and the Delighter fell cold and inert in her hands.

Silence. For an instant, Meralda was sure she was blind. But then she saw motion, and realized she was engulfed in a thick soup of spray and steam, through which only a pale wan glow could penetrate.

Her ears rang. Her skin felt hot, as though sun burnt. But she was alive.

Alive, and hungry, and thirsty, and aching from being tossed and battered.

She blinked, seeing no red glow wash out from her eyes. She raised her hand, willed the steam to depart, but nothing happened.

The ringing in her ears softened, replaced now by the whistle of wind, and the sensation of falling.

A muffled explosion rang out as the
Jenny’s
port flying coil arced and shorted. The launch listed suddenly, throwing Meralda against the port rail and sending the Delighter flying from her grasp.

She gripped the rail as the
Jenny
fell. She heard Mug cry out from within the launch, and then the craft shuddered as the remaining coil began to stutter.

A few rays of sunlight crept through the steam. As the
Jenny
spun, Sea and sky changed places, rolling after each other, leaving Meralda unable to do more than clutch at the rail and call for Mug.