The Aeronaut's Windlass (45 page)

Pulsing streamers of energy flooded through the walls and floor of the Spire, the spirestone drawing it from the sky and conducting it down through its matter to the earth—a lightning rod being continuously struck. She cast a glance over her shoulder and saw the horde of silkweavers shining like an out-of-control fire, every single creature ablaze with clouds of light. Using this portion of her mind to see, Folly could peer through the seemingly solid stone as if it had not been there at all, though it was a rather dizzying, disorienting activity within a Spire. There were myriad flows of energy, going generally downward, but also lancing back and forth through channels in the spirestone, placed there by the Builders so that the Spire’s systems could support the lives of its residents. If a truly complex clock had been manufactured out of translucent glass, Folly imagined, her current quandary might be an experience similar to trying to find a single part located somewhere within it.

They needed a smaller tunnel, something that would let them pass through easily but bottleneck their pursuers, slowing them, and Folly found one at hand. Now, if she could only find an etheric nexus, there might be more possibilities open to her.

“That way!” she shouted to her jar, and abruptly turned down a much narrower passage with a much lower ceiling.

“Folly!” Bridget shouted in protest—but it wasn’t as though the larger girl had any choice in the matter of which way to go: Folly had the only light. Bridget slipped on her silkweaver-slimed shoes, righted herself, ducked, and plunged into the smaller tunnel after Folly. Rowl entered behind Bridget, letting out a snarling, hissing cat scream of warning at the foremost silkweavers as he did, and the three of them fled down the much more constricted hallway.

Their footsteps were loud in here, their breathing deafening. Bridget had to run in a crouch—but the tide of silkweavers pursuing them had to slow at the entrance, like water pouring from a small hole in a large vessel; their pursuers were no fewer in number, but fewer could approach them at once, and that was very nearly the same thing, for Folly’s purposes.

Though, now that she considered it, Folly had never regarded herself as the sort of young woman who had
purposes
, precisely. That was potentially a troubling development—not nearly so troubling as being torn to pieces by thousands of silkweavers, of course, but it was a matter upon which to be deliberated—assuming, of course, that she survived the next few moments.

Folly led them down the choked hallway, slowing her steps slightly so that she could sweep her ether-focused gaze around them for further options. And then, suddenly, she was able to see one of the things that might change the situation—a nexus.

Flows of etheric energy coursed down from half a dozen directions, pouring into a single downward-flowing conduit—and at the point where they merged together, excess energy overflowed the conduit, spreading out into the air of the tunnel in a gossamer backwash. That cloud of etheric force all but sang to Folly, and she rushed forward in a desperate sprint, panting, fumbling for her pistoleer’s holsters as she went.

“Folly!” shouted Bridget from behind her. “Wait!”

There wasn’t time—not if the tide of silkweavers was to be stemmed quickly enough to save Bridget’s life. Folly ripped out the two mesh sacks of quiescent lumin crystals from the holsters and gave them a quick snap, one at a time, dumping their contents onto the floor of the tunnel. Then, without hesitating, she smashed her jar of crystals down to the stones as well.

And for an instant the tunnel went completely dark. Folly could see, of course, by the fey illumination of her ethersight, but she supposed it must have been a terrifying moment for Bridget, who unleashed a despairing shriek.

But that, Folly supposed, was only because Bridget had never seen what an etherealist, even an imperfectly trained one like Folly, could do with a supply of ready energy and vessels to contain it.

“All of us together now,” Folly admonished the crystals, and felt their sleepy, rather muzzily confused sense of aggregate agreement—and then she seized upon the freely flowing etheric energy with her thoughts and sent it coursing down into the crystals.

Infused with energy far beyond that which had originally been stored within them, the little lumin crystals’ radiance swelled from faint, ghostly glows to a thousand merry pinpoints of radiance, a sudden well of white light.

Shrieks of surprise and distress arose from the silkweavers, a surge of raw sound compressed by the narrow confines of the tunnel into a sledgehammer. Folly did her best to ignore its impact, and staggered only a little. Then she threw her hand out toward the tunnel down which they had just fled, giving the flows of energy a quick mental nudge, and sent a spray of little crystals flying down the silkweaver-filled hallway in a glittering cloud that scattered among the silkweavers in an entirely random distribution.

The next part was tricky, and Folly hoped that the crystals remembered her endless practice sessions. Lumin crystals were designed to accept a charge of etheric energy and output a steady trickle of light. But light was really just one of any number of possible expressions of energy. Weapons crystals did the same thing, only with heat and force. Lift crystals expressed that energy in a form of inverted gravity. And the most complex crystals of all, power-core crystals, expressed their energy in another form—electricity.

There was no difference between a lumin crystal and a power-core, really, except that the power-core crystal was grown with the complex pathways needed to route etheric energy into a rising surplus, converting it into bottled lightning. There was no reason a little lumin crystal could not do the same thing, assuming that someone was willing to provide them with a blueprint of the necessary structured paths.

So Folly, as quickly and ably as she could, imagined the precise sort of pathways her little crystals would need to employ. That was a fairly elemental exercise, but doing it a
thousand times
, all at once, was something of an ambitious effort, more so than any she had successfully used in her practice sessions. Of course, the practice sessions had been embarked upon with the precise goal of providing her with the skill she’d need for a moment just such as this.

Goodness, think of what trouble they’d be in if Folly hadn’t practiced.

So because it was right and necessary to do so, she simply imagined a thousand different complex, unique little paths for her baby lumin crystals, all at once. Well, she shouldn’t exaggerate, really, since that was boastful. There were nine hundred and eighty-seven crystals on the floor. So she modestly imagined nine hundred and eighty-seven patterns, one for each little crystal, to show them how to use the energy she was feeding them.

And the hallway behind them—and every silkweaver in it—was suddenly wreathed in a latticework of blinding, blue-white lightning.

The noise of it was really quite startling, a cloud of individual
snap-crack
s that sounded rather similar to the discharge of a weapons crystal—only since there were nine hundred and eighty-seven of them, all within the same second or two, the noise was equivalent to a small army firing a fusillade within the confines of the little access corridor. The heat was fearsome as well, and with the heat came a blast of wind that was, Folly felt, really quite unnecessary to the process, neither adding significant fearsomeness to the unleashed energy, nor accomplishing anything other than to knock Folly and Bridget down soundly, and to scatter her matrix of lumin crystals hither and yon.

Folly lay on the floor after, because it seemed the proper thing to do. She blinked several times up at the ceiling and realized that, without her ethersight, she could not be sure she was in fact looking at the ceiling at all. When one assumed, one quite frequently was correct, but it was hardly a constant.

There was etheric energy spilling from the nexus still, and Folly waved her hands at it vaguely, sending it out toward her little crystals. Without Folly’s thoughts to guide them, they were once more innocent of the knowledge of how to turn etheric force into violent death. The little crystals began to glow cheerfully, lighting the entire length of the access tunnel.

Folly turned her head to find Bridget staring, most definitely, at the ceiling. The larger girl had a scorch mark on her chin, and a long scratch along her hairline that had bled toward her eye without obscuring it. She blinked several times and then looked around them dazedly.

Folly turned her head the other way to find Rowl standing over her. The cat’s fur stood straight out in every direction, though there were uneven gaps here and there where it had been singed away. The cat’s expression, Folly noted, was very catlike.

Rowl swatted her nose firmly with one paw, claws sheathed. Then, with massive dignity, he rose and firmly turned his back on Folly to walk over to Bridget, nuzzling her and letting out an encouraging purr.

Folly continued to lie meekly on the floor. Rowl, she thought, probably had some sort of point. She really hadn’t expected quite
that
much excitement. What would the master think? He did so disapprove of showing off. And besides, she felt quite thoroughly exhausted, at least as sleepy as her brood of tiny crystals.

Bridget sat up slowly. She turned her gaze up and down the hallway. The air was full of the stench of scorched silkweavers, though there really wasn’t a great deal left of them—a leg here, a bit of shell there, a fang there. The hallway was black with fine ash.

The former vatterist shook her head slowly and said in an awed tone, “Folly. Your little crystals did this?”

“Don’t brag,” Folly admonished her crystals firmly. “You couldn’t have if I hadn’t shown you how.”

Bridget blinked several times. “
You
did this.”

Folly sighed and closed her eyes. She really did feel quite tired. “As an exercise,” she mused aloud, “it was really quite simple. Not at all easy, but quite simple.”

“I don’t . . .” Bridget began. “I had no idea . . . That was . . .”

Folly had been trained for this as well. Most folk had no idea how formidable an etherealist’s skills could be when applied properly. When they learned, their general reaction was, she had been assured, one of understandable if irrational fear. Which was a shame, because it had seemed that Bridget might have been a rather lovely friend, and she really didn’t want to start crying. It would be perfectly awkward.

“. . . amazing!” Bridget finished. “God in Heaven, Folly, I thought we were finished. Well-done!”

Folly blinked open her eyes and stared at Bridget for a moment. Then she felt herself smile, and she looked down very quickly, as Bridget’s shape went all blurry. How odd that suddenly her tears did not feel awkward at all.

Then Rowl let out a sharp hiss.

Folly felt it at the very last instant, too late—the awful attention of the awareness she’d sensed before, while they were searching for the Nine-Claws. It was the Enemy; she felt almost certain. She couldn’t think of a better sobriquet for the malevolent presence that had been driving the silkweavers like an enormous threshing machine intent on murdering them. It was as if the spirit of hatred itself had been given a mind and a dark will, and was eager to convey its malice through the medium of the hideous creatures of the surface.

What kind of creature could have such a horrible will? How could such an intangible thing be fought? In a lifetime of strangeness, Folly had never heard of such a thing before, and she found that it frightened her a very great deal.

That same Enemy presence now sent a trio of the little creatures—burned and mangled but alive and obviously dangerous—toward Folly’s weary, recumbent form.

Everything happened very, very quickly. Rowl let out a shrieking snarl and flung himself on the silkweaver farthest to one side. Then there was the howl of a discharging gauntlet, and the second silkweaver vanished, burned and blown to bits by the blast of Bridget’s gauntlet.

The third silkweaver flung itself onto Folly’s face—

—and was intercepted just short of it by Bridget’s fist. The larger girl simply drove her arm down like a steam engine’s piston, crushing the silkweaver to the spirestone floor and ending its attempts on Folly’s life with a perfectly brutal finality.

“Oh,” Folly breathed. Her heart was racing painfully. “Oh, my.”

“There,” Bridget said, nodding in satisfaction. “Rowl?”

The cat had finished dispatching his opponent and approached, shaking one of his front paws in pure distaste. “They are the last,” the cat reported. “Can I use my metal circles to hire a
human
to clean my paws? Is there a human who could do so competently?”

“I shall do it,” Bridget said, rising. She winced and touched her cut lightly.

“But I desire competence,” Rowl protested. “You are too rough with your wet cloths. If you would only use your tongue, as is proper—”

“I think not,” Bridget replied firmly. “I know where your paws have been.” She offered Folly her hand. “Can you rise?”

Folly took her friend’s hand and rose. She wobbled for a moment, but Bridget steadied her until the hall stopped spinning hatefully about.

“Rowl,” Bridget said. “Are these silkweavers grown?”

“They are grown as much as they ever shall be,” Rowl said with satisfaction.

“You know what I mean.”

“I do not think they are mature,” Rowl replied. “My people’s lore suggests that adults are two or three cat-weights, or larger.”

“Hatchlings,” Bridget said, frowning. “Could little silkweavers like this have spun the lines we saw back at the hole in the ceiling?”

“Oh,” Folly said. “Oh, Bridget is clever. In a very horrifying sort of way. No, these little things could not have done so.”

“Adults had to lay eggs, and spin those lines,” Bridget said. “But . . . if only the hatchlings remained to attack us . . . ?”

Rowl growled. “Indeed. Where are the adults?”

Folly’s heart began to race in real panic this time. “Oh,” she breathed, her instincts screaming to her precisely where the Enemy would direct its deadliest weapons. “Master.”