The Wondermark Gazette

The wind from the hovering air-ships whipped the dust about the green-lit cavern, scrambling my thoughts like so many ostrich-eggs over-easy. The leather-clad aviator seemed to be expecting a response to his greeting, but what could I say? He’d claimed to have come at the service of one Countess Peapoddy, presumably a relation to the late corpulent beast whose waste-engorged entrails I’d splattered about the wave-pounded shore within sight of this very spot. Grenadon had hated Peapoddy the Elder, and I his son; but how many more of this brine-swilling rat-clan still dug worm-holes through this blasted planet?

Three observations fought for primacy in my fore-brain, and gamely, I allowed each its say, so long as it did not exceed a pre-determined syllable count:

Firstly, Rikah had pledged alliance — or, at the least, clemency, which to the villagers was synonymous with fealty — with Peapoddy the Younger, a great enemy of her people, in the name of mercy and compassion. This facet of her character I noted, for possible exploitation anon.

Secondly, the aviator and his hovering noise-ships were expecting to have met an emissary from the Yam-Runners, with whom the Countess Peapoddy was presumably in accord. The Yam-Runners’ long-standing animus against the Shorelanders married well with Peapoddy rancor against the same folk. It was not a stretch to imagine their confederacy.

And, finally, of course, none of these people knew who I was.

“Welcome, friend!” I called to the aviator, stepping forward both to offer a hearty hand-shake with reach-around and also to put distance (and back-ground noise) between us and any objection Rikah might mount. She would have to catch up quickly — having just watched her entire village be atomised, she might not be in the most stable of mind-states, but I hoped she would trust me and match my lead.

Too late, I realised that she had no reason to trust me, the man who had (in her eyes) certainly triggered the attack, and nothing I was now doing gave any indication of subterfuge. For all she knew, everything was going perfectly according to my plan. This might hurt, later, when I told her the truth and she inevitably didn’t believe me. But I had already spoken — now the aviator leaned close, and I could smell brandy and Cologne on his stubbly neck. A man’s man, he was, rugged down to the silk scarf flapping gaily in the air-ships’ furious wind. “Shall we take the Lady aboard to see the Countess?” he asked, peeking back at Rikah.

“Of course,” I smiled, perhaps a bit too toothily, but there it was. I turned back to Rikah, prepared at any moment for a fist in the nose, or a boot in the groin, or a knuckle-jab to the right kidney followed by a teat-twisting to detachment (a.k.a. the Stockholm Surprise), or at the very least a blistering stare to take the skin from the inside rear of my skull. Instead I found nothing — a somber blankness upon her face that was far more unsettling than any show of violence.

I was not familiar with the sublimation of rage. I did not own the proper tongs to handle it.

“He wants to take you to see the Countess,” I whispered to her, a tender breath that she totally couldn’t hear over the din. I had to ratchet the voice up all the way to “harsh snarl” just to reach minimum audibility. “The Countess!” I snapped, altogether too menacingly. “Trust me! I’m just playing along — I’ve nothing to do with it — but let’s not pass this opportunity to face the monster in person, what say?”

I gather that she heard about every fourth word, but to my amazement, she clutched my wrist, and allowed me to lead her to the mouth of the cave. Her fingers were tight and cold, and I apologised to them silently, sending magical thought-messages down through my wrist and into her palm. I gather she got the less decorous ones, as she tensed; I felt bad, but she hadn’t responded to the ones not involving copious amounts of butter.

The night was suddenly red as we left the cavern and its oppressive fire-hose of furious green light. Light from the jade-stone penetrated the sky like a finger picking a pimple on the face of God, casting a faint emerald kiss onto a bank of billowing fog a mile away. Suddenly an air-ship rumbled into the light-beam, barely a hundred feet above our heads, and the green leapt into sharp, close focus: it drew a fine out-line of a distinctive triangle. The light traced Grenadon’s sigil on the craft’s billowing gas-sac.

Then the air-ship was past, and the light was diffuse and distant again; I blinked, and turned to where the leather-clad aviator was gesturing to the pair of smaller air-craft that hovered near us, barely an arm’s grasp away. Their racket was extraordinary, the wind they cast up as they manoeuvred an assault to every sense; but in truth embarking was like stepping into a gently swaying boat, and soon I was nestled tightly into a passenger’s-cage with Rikah, seated in close quarters behind a fresh-faced pilot.

“Hullo,” the man said blandly, and I nodded like a big-shot.

“Take them back to the Countess!” the aviator instructed our pilot, as he himself headed for the passenger’s-cage on the second craft. Before the words were whole out of his mouth he had already begun to diminish in our vision, and my stomach tumbled somewhere north of my eye-balls as the air-ship rose briskly and steeply through the cool evening.

The mountain dropped away, and the sky glimmered with green flame in the direction of the village. Rikah’s eyes never left that sorry land-scape, despite the gyrations that the craft bore on various gusts as it rose, and I feared wearing her half-digested crab-puffs as corsage before the ride was through.

“Lucky thing we read your signal,” the pilot called back to me. “Bright as day, and thanks for that. We’d been told to watch for a green flare on the mountain to meet the Yam-Runner emissary and her valet — and sure ‘nough, there’s that green light, and here you two are. Couldn’t have gone smoother, if y’ask me mum’s son.”

“Ah,” I responded importantly, as we drew ever closer to the menacing shadow of a monstrous air-ship, barely visible in silhouette through a layer of mist that wrapped the mountain’s peak. A throaty drone signaled both its proximity and its weight; we would be breaking through that fog soon, and the Countess Peapoddy’s chariot awaited us beyond. I wondered idly what clouds were like to touch — would it be marshmallow-y, perhaps? Would we rebound from its surface, and have to gather momentum to penetrate its threshold? Would my services with a shiv be required to gain entry to that nephotic nether-realm?

Suddenly a green speck flared on the mountain-side below, a goodly distance from where our jade-light still spat from the cavern like the post from a particularly rocky lolly. Tiny at first, then flickering and brighter by the second, the spot could only be the Yam-Runners’ true signal-flare. The pilot seemed not to have noticed, and I leaned forward as far as I could, to try and block his view should he turn about.

The air-ship, already groaning as it bore our weight sky-ward, rocked with the shift of balance, and the pilot in fact turned about instantly — “Hold still back there, you should, we’ve got a hundred fathoms to climb, yet,” he scolded, before trailing off…and I saw the pin-prick reflection of green light in his eyes as they clouded over with confusion.

I whirled and pretended to see the flare for the first time. “Imposters! They’ve penetrated the camp!” I shouted. “Quickly — we must press on!” I grasped Rikah for emphasis, and she vomited explosively through the cage, soaking the pilot, baptising a passing sea-gull, and spraying a bit on me as well. She was positively pale with vertigo, and secretly I wondered if she had another blast left in her — we might turn this whole affair around yet.

“Ho, there!” the pilot cried, spasming in horror, nearly up-ending the craft with his motion. I threw my weight around the cage, adding to the tumble, ignoring my own innards’ protest — Daddy was working now, I admonished them, and there would be time for proper nausea later. Grasping the twisted brass of the pilot’s entry-latch with blistered fingers, I pulled my weight back with a shove, and the whole air-ship swayed nearly horizontal, like a ship facing the water-fall at Old Benson’s Bligh, the stop-all of the Earth.

My heart stopped for a weight-less second, as Old Benson sucked its crimson nectar through a bamboo straw to test my courage. Rikah, to her credit, performed admirably on cue, heaving up another helping of hors d’whatever right into the pilot’s terror-stricken rictus — he recoiled backwards, against the latch I so helpfully dis-engaged for him, and three clumsy seconds of struggling preceded a sudden and violent surge of vertical motion. We had been freed of twelve stone of dead-weight, and in an instant we were surrounded by the pure, freezing blackness of midnight fog.

NEXT: Pursuit!

Share This