The Wondermark Gazette

Earning no response from her assault, Rikah abandoned an impact-based strategy and instead seized me by the collar of my ridiculous, puffy blouse. “What did you give him?” she cried. “You monster! What was in that letter?”

“It was just…paper,” I mumbled. “It weighed an ounce and lay flat as a ghost. It was just paper.”

“Paper coated in Chinese jade-powder, obviously!” she screamed. “Which explodes when it touches open air! You must have paid a pretty penny for so much of that deadly dust — whatever did the Mayor do to deserve this? And my Monty — oh, you’ve killed him!”

“I was just the messenger,” I said, grasping her wrists and shaking her violently as an ill-behaved infant. “From the Yam-Runners! They bade me bring the Mayor that letter in person…” And then my blood froze in my veins. “They asked me to hand it to him myself. I was intended for that blast too!”

“The Yam-Runners are a myth,” Rikah spat, and flounced down the hill towards the flaming debris. “Oh, Monty!”

My mind raced. If Ursula never intended for me to return, then what about everything she’d said about the Tome…? “Wait!” I cried, scrambling to bound after Rikah. “They’re not a myth! Where do you think I got such ridiculous clothes?”

Suddenly, the night-time air felt suddenly very bright. The moon had come out — emerged from behind the ominous cloud that had sheathed it for much of the evening.

“What’s that buzzing?” I asked the back of Rikah’s head. As well, a low drone had settled into my ear-drums, and I feared for a moment that my deafness would return, like it had lain latent these past months just waiting for the most inopportune time to re-surface. What a cheeky bloke, that abstract concept of deafness — if I could get fingers round its throat it would sure have hell to pay.

Then something moved above me. I caught a floating sort of motion in my periphery, and obligingly looked towards the sky.

The darkness wasn’t a cloud at all. It was an armada of air-ships, hundreds of them, floating slowly earthwards beneath pendulous gas-sacs, belching thick black coal-smoke from airscrew-turning engines.

“Huh,” I said, which was probably what the nerds call an “under-statement.”

The lower-most ship in the flock belched lightning, an instant of brilliant, crackling energy darting from its hull to the earth, splitting the sky with a shattering green bolt. A half-second later the ground at its target erupted in a furious geyser of mud, wood, and flesh. Rikah skidded to a halt and recoiled, staggering backwards into me. I caught her elbows to steady her.

“The Countess,” Rikah breathed. “She’s returned.”

Then, in the span of one second, the night filled in every direction with millions of forks of green lightning, and the village disappeared in a flash — reappearing only as a cloud of burning, settling ash.

Every building was leveled. Every sales-cart was vaporised. Every living creature turned instantly to char-coal. Rikah and I watched the town before us become the remains of a camp-fire.

“We have to get out of here,” I said, and pulled Rikah away without protest. Perhaps she would compliment me later on my creative use of the under-statement.

The mountain loomed ahead of us, high and forbidding in the shadow of the armada. The sky was black with drifting hulls and billowing smoke; the paths on the ground were unlit, and treacherous, and filled with lots of roots and stuff to trip us. We moved as quickly as we dared through the forest, putting distance between us and the smouldering ruins without thought to direction; but soon we found ourselves turned about, and facing the devastation again.

“It’s no use,” Rikah gasped, folding and clutching her side, and I nearly agreed with her but for fear of seeming nancy. I surreptitiously held my own side, where a stitch had suddenly bound my intestines together, and my fingers found the shape of a disk in my vest-coat pocket. Of course! I retrieved Ursula’s opticle, and fit the slim glass against my eye.

Instantly, the ground was alight with branching, shimmering path-ways, and I took Rikah by the wrist at once. “This way,” I cried, and we pounded the earth with sure, running foot-slaps. We didn’t stop until we broke the tree-line, fearful that the air-ships were sensing our motion; but the heavy cover of leaves protected us, and also shaded and nourished a thriving ground-level eco-system of mosses.

“I have to rest,” Rikah gulped, leaning against a tall trunk; I thought she was going to lose her dinner right there onto the ground, the way she sucked air and paced and dry-heaved and prodded at her tonsils with a thin finger. Behind her, the valley was alight with a solid bed of burning green flame — it looked like a roiling ocean, in its evenness and agitation, and if I listened carefully enough I thought I might have heard the echoes of wandering screams on the breeze. I wondered idly if the ashes of those scores of sick and dying pilgrims might infect my lungs from the inside, and just in case resolved to hold my breath whenever possible from here on out.

For a splitting moment the sky lit again, far across the island, and two seconds later we heard the smashing, rumbling crack of snapping masts and splintering hulls. Then the harbor went up in one massive blast, and I whirled to shield my precious eyes from the searing blaze of green light. Every ship in the harbor had become kindling within seconds.

“No getting off the island now,” Rikah wailed.

I turned my glance back towards the sea, and imagined those long, blinking rail-lines nestled deep beneath the ocean floor. I squinted through the opticle back at the mountain, and traced the web of bright trails farther up the mountain, deeper into the Yam-Runners’ domain, trying to discern which to follow, which would lead us to safety — and which back into the Yam-Runners’ maw. The Yam-Runners who had tried to kill me.

One trail branched from the others, and glowed a duller shade of yellow; it led towards a cliff-side path overlooking the ocean, and out of curiosity more than anything, I took a few steps in that direction.

“Hey - don’t get too far,” Rikah called, and I heard her hurry to follow. It was dark out here, and clearly she, like I, hadn’t put the thought of bears entirely out of her mind. But best not to dwell on that now.

The yellow trail led to a narrow ledge crumbling against a sheer rock-face. From here I could see where Peapoddy’s dirigible had been moored, a half-mile down the coast and lower on the cliff. The occasional blink of green lightning from afar illuminated the debris still littering the shore-line far below. I wondered about the bodies crammed up against those stones, and if the tide had swept them away. I wondered if they would wash up on some far, Irish beach-head, and thought to myself that I would like to see the reactions if they did. Perhaps I could inquire after any humourous accounts, once this whole business with the Tome of the Precious Lore was done and settled.

I fumbled with both hands against the rock-face, and found myself abruptly gaping into emptiness. Cool, wet air found my skin as I took a shaky step deeper into blackness. My shoes crunched on gravel, no longer the soft dirt of the trail. The yellow line in the opticle was hard to see, now; it seemed to jump out of view when I set my focus on it, and only shone brightly when I glanced away.

“Where’d you go?” came Rikah’s voice from behind, and her words echoed back from wet rock walls.

My hands suddenly met a smooth, glassy surface, round and as large as myself. I moved my fingers across the coolness, and a sudden flare of sharp green light over-loaded my vision. I staggered backwards, nearly falling into Rikah; I’d caught her before, and now she re-paid the favour. The touch of her hands on my arms was electric, and with my eyes rammed firmly shut against the light, the pressure of her warm grip filled my senses.

Then she let go, and I tumbled against the cavern wall. My eyes didn’t like the brightness, but they just had to deal; bright light was the score in here, and Rikah was walking towards the source. After a few seconds I was better able to see that it was a massive, egg-shaped stone, the height of a man, smooth as glass but veined with fine cracks and chips.

Rikah stared at the stone, then slowly held up one hand to almost touch it. Her fingers hovered a half-inch from its smooth surface. “Come look at this,” she said softly, and I would have done anything for that voice. (In service of it, that is, not ‘I would have done anything to have it.’ Just to be clear.)

I joined her at the stone. She stared at a depression in its surface, a jagged, triangular hollow where a piece had been chipped out.

“Grenadon’s bright-jade,” she breathed. “I’d know that shape anywhere.”

“What’s that buzzing?” I said.

With a thrumming roar, two small air-ships descended over the mouth of the cavern, floating in place, their air-screws thrashing the darkness with a frightful clatter. The searing light from the stone behind us — the jade — cut their details finely against the black night beyond. These ships were tiny, compared to the others; two-seater jobs, a basket-like pilot’s cabin suspended beneath pulsing, round gas-sacs. It was clear they had seen us.

One of the ships drifted closer to the cliff-side. A leathery figure in black wriggled out from the second seat behind the pilot, leaping nimbly to the mountain. Hand on his head to keep his jaunty cap from flying off in the wind from the air-screws, he crossed the distance from the cave’s mouth in five long strides. When he spoke, it was with a voice hoarsened by the practise of shouting over those fearsome engines.

“Countess Peapoddy sends her regards to the Yam-Runners, reports the initial bombardment as successful, and awaits further instructions,” he said.

NEXT: Into the Mountain

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