A Perverted Path to Victory

Tinvel

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“Go, go, go! Get out of the way!” Tinvel slammed his foot on the rudder pedal, narrowly avoiding his Fulleye chopping a mechanic to pieces.

The aerodrome was in chaos. Every functional plane was being spun up, engines clanking to life within the confines of a metal-roofed building. Deafening was an understatement. He was blindly fumbling underneath his seat even as he tried to guide the Fulleye toward the hangar doors, searching for the speaking tube.

He was third in line. When they’d been building the aerodrome, they hadn’t even known the Empire existed. Everyone had assumed Tulian would have a monopoly on airpower, with all the time in the world needed to deploy their planes in neat, orderly columns. They’d never anticipated the need to build a door wide enough to allow multiple aeroplanes to pass through side-by-side, and so built the doors wide enough for only a single of the anticipated larger generations of planes to slip through.

Stupid. I’m going to change that when I get back.

Tinvel applied the brakes as he neared the next plane, screaming and waving for them to hurry the hell up. The lead plane was stopped dead for some reason, and it was going to drive him mad.

His fingers finally snagged the headset. He jerked it out and shoved it onto his head, cupping the speaking funnel to his mouth.

“Chona! Can you see what’s holding them up?”

Behind him, stuffed into the over-cramped confines required by their temporary three-seat arrangement, Chona stood up to peer over the wing.

“Some of the guards are pointing and yelling! I think there’s something wrong with the runway!”

“Damnit!” Tinvel leaned to one side, trying to see, but it was useless. His vision was entirely blocked by the planes ahead. “Get them moving! Shoot a fireball at them or something!”

“I don’t want to burn— wait!” Chona fell back into her seat, reaching for the buckles. “They’re moving, get ready to go!”

“Thank the gods!”

Sure enough, the line of biplanes began to creep forward. The road-turned-runway outside, once the main thoroughfare leading to Tulian’s university, was thankfully wider than the hangar doors. Tinvel watched the two Halfeyes take their places beside each other, spending no time waiting before they both kicked their engines to takeoff speed.

Shit! Who’s piloting those? Are they ready for this?

With Tinvel and Chona having been kept busy running errands for the powers that be, Affe had been handling most of the new pilot training. Tinvel recognized the faces of the pilots ahead of him, but didn’t know their names. He could only pray that they were actually qualified for combat. It wasn’t like there had been time to organize a defense.

We should have had lookouts, watchposts! He lamented. Then he caught himself. No. Unless they had crystal communicators, there’s no way a message could reach us before the attack did. Shit, how were we not working on this problem? There’s too much to do, too much to think of.

The twin planes roared down the runway, clearing the way. Tinvel let off the brakes, both of the Fulleye’s engines purring as it carried them into the harsh sunlight. He had to squint against the brightness as he kicked the plane to the right, aiming down the runway.

“Ready for takeoff speed?” He asked.

“Ready!”

Tinvel reached forward with one hand, keeping an eye on the twin planes ahead. Compared to the ungainly water takeoffs he’d first trained with, Tinvel had always thought the land-based biplanes practically leapt into the sky. Now that he was watching them when every second counted, they seemed to creep down the runway with all the urgency of melting candlewax.

Come on, come on!

The left plane lifted off first, its wheels spinning freely. The right pulled up shortly after, yawing to the side to help avoid—

A blur of claws and feathers shot through its wings, splinters flying as the weight of a griffon knocked it back into the ground. Both wings were torn off, the plane’s fuselage snapping in half. The engine separated from the airframe, propeller still whirring, the lone block of crystal and steel carrying itself forward through the air for a brief, surreal moment before a blade struck the wall of a home, shattering the assembly to pieces. Parts sprayed across the street, most rolling end over end, save for the bulk of the fuselage, which two massive feet were pinning to the concrete.

The griffon’s eagle beak shoved forward into the wreckage, rooting through the broken wood.

“Takeoff! Takeoff!” Tinvel screamed. “Emergency speed!”

The Fulleye’s crystal engines shrieked in protest as they endured the hard switch from sedate taxi speed to all-out emergency, crystal energy pulses struggling to drag the heavy steel up to meet the speed he demanded of it.

“Right side, get ready! On the ground!”

“I see him!”

Though he couldn’t hear it, Tinvel saw the griffon squawk in victory as its head jerked downward, beak snapping shut. When it pulled back, it was with a bloodied woman clutched in its mouth, her stomach pierced straight through by its hooked beak.

Twin engines clattering at the very precipice of self-destruction, Tinvel felt the plane gain lift in a fraction of the time it had taken the simpler Halfeyes to take off. Tinvel pushed down on the control stick, fighting the plane’s urge to soar higher. Street windows whipped by at eye level, but he didn’t watch. He kept his focus locked on the griffon.

The street was tinted orange by a burst of spell-flame emerging from the wreckage. Cast hastily enough to be voluminous and unfocused, it only caused the griffon to rear up on its hind legs, screeching in fury. The pilot it had been holding tumbled from its mouth.

“Yes!”

The spellflame sputtered out. Feathers smoking, the griffon fell forward.

Its clawed foot landed atop the woman it had dropped. Blood, brilliantly crimson, gushed across the runway. One of the two riders on its back hefted a heavy crossbow, aiming at the spot the fire had emerged from. Their bolt loosed, disappearing into the wreckage.

Tinvel felt something harsh and cold stab into his gut. He forced himself to ignore it. He didn’t have time for conscious thought; they were already there. All he did was pull up while tipping the right wing down, giving Chona a clear shot.

A tornado gust sent blackpowder grains whirling around the griffon. A moment later, a spark.

The griffon disappeared in a thunderclap explosion.

“Got ‘em!”

Tinvel jerked back on the controls, turning their speed into altitude, then pulled back harder still, until they were nearly vertical. He had to swallow several times before his dry throat let him croak out an order.

“Back to combat speed!”

“Combat speed!”

The wheezing engines eased their protests as Tinvel reached the apex of his climb. He used the last of his energy to tilt the plane even further back, until the ground was directly overhead, and then he spun the plane right-side up, so they were floating high above Tulian.

Seen from above, Tinvel had often thought the city resembled a dissected animal. The random weaving of older, poorer streets ran like veins between the stark bones of royally-mandated cobblestone boulevards. The pale concrete of modern Tulian now joined those once district-defining lines, ensuring all regions of the city had equal access to one another. The city, though aged and half-abandoned, seemed to be designed like a living creature.

One suffering from an infection. Like the Professor’s diagrams of microscopic life, Tinvel could see the brown bodies of griffon streaking across the city, pursued by tan canvas blurs. The bacteria and the white blood cells, locked in battle. It was too chaotic to leave him with even a meagre grasp of the whole.

“How many planes have we managed to get up?” Tinvel asked.

“I wasn’t looking!” Chona hollered back. “I count… eight, maybe? Gods, it’s a mess!”

“It’s gonna get messier!” Tinvel pointed at the University. “They’re lighting up the skywreathe the Governess brought back!”

“What?” Chona twisted in her seat, then swore when she spotted the dark column of smoke. “Stupid! We need to study that shit, not burn it!”

“At least they’re trying to help!”

“Doing a bad job of it! The Governess couldn’t bring back much! They’re probably burning all of it!”

“I think we need all the help we can get!”

Tinvel turned away from the University, inspecting the rest of the city as he spiraled upward. Altitude, altitude, altitude. Real-world experience had forged that paper theory into iron reality. If you weren’t diving, you should be climbing. It gave you a better view of the fight and the potential energy to win it. Until he hit the ceiling of oxygen deprivation, there was no reason not to keep climbing.

“Do you see the wyvern?” He asked Chona. “I can’t find it! No way they screwed up a report that bad, though. It’s gotta be here somewhere.”

“I don’t see it, no.” He felt her start rummaging beneath her seat, then felt a click reverberate through the plane. “You sure these are ready?”

“I didn’t load them for fun, did I?”

Tinvel reached up to adjust the newest addition to the Fulleye’s design: a rearview mirror. Tulian had finally improved their glassmaking technique to the point they could be made, and though they were still fairly cloudy, he could still make out Chona wrapping copper wires around her fingers. Two strings on each hand, one to a finger. The thin copper strands ran down and over the side of the cockpit, connecting to one of two long spools set at the inboard trailing edge of either wing.

“Find a target while I work,” Chona ordered. “Give me… thirty seconds.”

“On it.”

Tinvel squinted beneath his goggles, peering down at the city. Fires had begun in various places, filling the air with a thickening haze, but not enough that he could miss the massive griffons. They darted this way and that, diving hard toward some target, usually a group of people or a building, and raked their claws through their unfortunate victims. On one street Tinvel saw a loosely-braced group of soldiers fire off a wild volley at a diving griffon, trying to pelt it with lead, but it was apparent from the creature’s total non-reaction that their shots went hopelessly wild.

The griffon didn’t slow down to claw or bite at the guards. It simply dropped four balled fists low and plowed through them, crushing heads and torsos with the sheer momentum of its dive. A bloody streak was painted on the street, and then the griffon was flapping up and away, apparently no worse for wear.

All across the city, the same story was being repeated. The city guard was out of their depth. Soldiers of the proper Tulian Army now spent most of their time in the North and South Star forts, with only a reserve force manning the city’s walls. Those active on the streets were a militia of those too young or old to be accepted into the military, more comfortable with using wooden poles to break up fights between drunkards than they were with their guns. Firing rifles at screeching griffons traveling in excess of a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour was borderline impossible for even the best-trained of Tulian marksmen. It was all but hopeless for the guards.

“Tin!” Chona suddenly yelled. “I just saw one of the griffon riders shoot fire!”

“What? The Governess said the Imperials only put mages on wyverns!”

“I’m not drunk! Look! 4 o’clock, heading north!”

Tinvel rolled to the right, dipping the wing far enough that he could get a good view.

He swore. Sure enough, a low-flying griffon was flapping hard to regain altitude, a bright line of fresh fire marring the rooftops it had just passed over. It looked exactly like Chona and his handiwork in the jungle.

“We’re going after that one!”

“No shit!”

Tinvel pushed forward on the controls, his stomach leaping into his throat. He didn’t reduce the engine power through the dive, and barely a few seconds passed before the wind began to whistle between the wing spars, growing shriller and shriller with every falling meter.

“Don’t bother with a spell! I don’t want to get that close to an Imperial mage!”

“Already on it!”

Tinvel gritted his teeth as he watched the griffon. They’d only managed to climb to 1600, maybe 1700 meters, which meant their dive was going to last little more than twenty seconds.

The griffon and its pair of riders kept flying straight, steadily regaining altitude. He pointed the plane ahead of their flight path, then reconsidered. That track would take them over the walls, and thus the cannons. They wouldn’t risk that. So they’d have to turn, but which way? Toward the harbor, or back into the city?

The city. If they’ve got a mage, they don’t need as much speed to manage a successful attack. They’ll be happy to coast and burn as they go, just like we did in the jungle.

He pressed down the left rudder pedal, only to be taken by surprise, the Fulleye’s oversensitive yaw controls causing the whole plane to wobble unsteadily in the dive. Chona yelled at him, but he ignored her, giving a much gentler touch to the right pedal, until her palm slapped his shoulder.

“We’re going to miss!”

“They’re gonna turn left!”

“What?” In the rearview mirror, Tinvel’s peripheral vision caught a glimpse of Chona biting her lip. Then she cursed. There was no time. “Shit! Fine!”

Twenty seconds became ten, then five. Tinvel was aiming the nose of his plane ahead and to the left of the griffon. Chona took a deep breath.

“And… release!”

A rattling ka-thunk of disengaging locks reverberated through the plane. The right wing grew abruptly lighter, but Tinvel was already compensating for it.

“Spark one!”

A brilliant spray of white light shot forward, filling the air with swirling smoke. The first spool on the right wing whirred wildly. Barely, so barely that it might have been his imagination, Tinvel thought he could see the copper wire trailing behind the sparks. Tulian’s first aerial rocket was flying exactly as he’d hoped.

The griffon, just as he’d predicted, turned to avoid overflying the walls.

The rocket would have missed, of course. Even with his accurate prediction of its turn. How could it not? Trying to hit a flying, maneuvering target in midair with a single rocket was even more impossible than hitting it with a rifle. It would have been stupid to even try.

Which is why Chona and Tinvel had stuffed the top of the rocket with twenty kilograms of compressed emcotton.

“Spark two!”

Just as the rocket sailed past the griffon, Chona's second spell-spark finished racing down the copper wire.

The explosion was unlike any other. Only the largest of Tulian’s cannons, the 64-pounders of the North Star, could pack so much emcotton into them, and they did so from within a thickly-cast shell, solid iron that absorbed much of the blast energy. The air-to-air rocket Tinvel and Chona had designed didn’t need to resist the force of a cannon launch, and so could use thinner sheet steel across which they’d scored deep lines, encouraging the weapon’s shrapnel to divide itself in an even spray.

Chona’s timing hadn’t been perfect. The rocket detonated maybe ten, twenty feet past the griffon, slightly below its right side.

It was close enough.

The animal seized up, its wings collapsing in the middle of a downstroke, giving it the visage of a man clutching their coat to their chest in a chill wind. It was the last movement the creature ever made for itself. Ribbons of blood rose over the falling griffon as its riders tugged hard on unresponsive reins— all the way to the moment of impact. The griffon struck the corner of a house with a crunch, bones breaking and riders flung free.

“Yes!” Chona hollered, pumping her fist as they pulled up and away. “Fucking yes! I told you I could do it! I knew I had the timing right!”

Below, Tinvel saw a family begin to scramble out of the house the griffon had hit. They probably thought it was going to collapse. When they saw the massive corpse, they recoiled, running the opposite way.

He bit his tongue, swallowing hard. No time. No time at all.

“Good job!” He yelled. “We’ve got one more rocket! Where the hell is that wyvern?”

“I don’t know— shit, dodge right!”

He didn’t question the command. He threw the Fulleye into a snap roll, pulling on the controls with all his strength. A griffon tore through the space their plane had occupied a moment before, all four legs outstretched. The image of it passing seemed to imprint itself on the back of his eyelids, lasting far longer than the actual moment had.

The griffon’s wings snapped open as it overshot, tail feathers twitching to bring it up into a soaring loop. Tinvel shoved the Fulleye forward, diving after it.

“Ready right side!”

“Right side!”

Chona dug in her pouch, taking a fistful of iron-infused blackpowder in her right hand, holding it close.

The front rider of the griffon’s two handlers glanced backward just in time to see Tinvel’s dive. He jerked on the reins, causing the griffon to level out and begin flapping once more, helping them pull away.

Tinvel didn’t let up. He slid the plane to the left of the griffon’s path as their mutual dive continued, sliding closer and closer to the rooftops. The griffon punched through a column of smoke, breaking open a patch of clear sky that Tinvel dove through an instant later.

The griffon was pulling away, but it couldn’t manage that forever. The multi-ton animal was far faster in a dive, but couldn’t maintain a speed equal to a Halfeye, much less the twin-engine Fulleye. As they ran out of altitude, the downbeat of every wing stroke nearly brushing the rooftops of Tulian, the dynamic began to shift.

The chase shot out toward the harbor, crossing the brief empty gap before the wharfs, and then blurred through a forest of masts. Tinvel tapped the rudder and pulled up just the slightest bit, dodging a furled collection of tan sails, then tipped the nose back down.

The griffon’s wingbeats were throwing up ocean spray. Tinvel could make out the faces of the two riders on its back, the lead hunched low over their animal’s shoulders, the other turning in their saddle to aim a heavy crossbow.

A bolt loosed. Tinvel didn’t even bother to dodge. The iron-tipped wood missed by a dozen meters, splashing down in the bay.

“Ready?” He called.

“Go for it!”

Maybe fifty meters separated them when Tinvel abruptly rolled to the right, then kicked the rudder left. The Fulleye yawed violently and pointed skyward, causing the wings to shift out of Chona’s firing line.

A whirlwind of speckled dust twisted through the sky. This time the griffon rider actually saw it, tried to adjust, but there wasn’t enough time. Sparks flew. Blackpowder burned.

The griffon and its riders were enveloped in a blinding flash. By the time Tinvel’s vision readjusted, there was no sight of them. Just a spray of water floating back down into the harbor.

“Good job!” He pulled up, beginning the laborious process of regaining altitude. “How’s the fight doing? Can you tell?”

“Give me a second,” Chona gasped. He glanced up at the mirror. She was foaming with sweat. Wiping it off her forehead, she peered at the city as Tinvel began spiraling back toward the clouds. “Uh… Still a fuckin’ mess, looks like. And… and I don’t see as many planes up anymore.”

Shit.

Tinvel leveled the wings, carefully pulling the Fulleye to its maximum possible climb rate at combat speed. The crystals wouldn’t last much more than a half hour at that rate, but he doubted the fight would last that long. They hadn’t even been aloft for five minutes yet.

“The wyvern?”

“Still no sight… wait!” Chona pointed. “West!”

Tinvel turned to look just as a massive shadow darkened Tulian’s walls. The wyvern emerged from behind the stone barrier, fifty meters of scaled wings spread wide, jaws agape. Something bright sparkled deep within its maw.

“Oh, gods,” Chona gasped.

A torrent of fire unlike anything Tinvel had ever seen vomited forth. Emerging from the wyvern’s mouth first as a white-hot beam, it quickly burst into a broiling wall of flames, one that engulfed a truly colossal area. Dozens of meters of the wall vanished beneath rolling fire that spread out and down, crashing into the street, funneling itself through the road like floodwater. Though he was nearly a kilometer away, Tinvel could still feel the heat. The only thing it could be compared to was Professor Garen’s spells, and even then Tinvel wasn’t sure he’d actually seen the Archmage muster so much energy at once.

Tinvel rolled left, aiming straight toward the wyvern.

“Get ready on the rocket!”

“Ready!”

The wyvern’s mouth snapped shut, choking off the avalanche of fire. The air shimmered with heat distortion around its form, giving its green scales the appearance of an otherworldly mirage. It began to flap its wings once more, every downstroke fanning the flames beneath it even higher.

Tinvel pointed the Fulleye’s nose directly at the creature’s snout. It was massive beyond belief. The shadow that raced over the buildings below darkened a dozen homes at once, stretching across an entire city block. He could see figures on its back, fifteen or twenty of them, each hooked into a spine-length harness of some sort.

As he flew toward it, the wyvern’s head turned. It was looking straight at them.

“Tin!”

“I know!” He reached into the engine compartment. “Emergency speed!”

“You—! Alright, fuck! Emergency speed!”

The pained shriek of magical constructs colliding against steel returned. The plane began to vibrate around him, rattling his teeth. He clenched his jaw as he adjusted their heading.

The wyvern blinked. If it had been born with lips, Tinvel felt certain it would have smiled.

Its jaws opened. Light began to boil within its throat.

“TIN!”

He threw his entire weight against the seat, digging his heels into the cockpit floor to help him pull back on the stick. Control surfaces lifted, jammed, then lifted further, every inch of the Fulleye’s wooden frame creaking in protest. He rolled the plane left as they began to stall, the plane’s engine and controls unable to cope with the brutal turn.

Except, of course, for the overtuned rudders.

Well past the point any other plane would have lost control authority, Tinvel shoved his left foot down. He heard wood bend and snap, some mechanism or another giving way under the strain, but the wings stayed attached as the plane yawed onto its side, giving Chona a perfect angle on the wyvern’s head.

Blackpowder flew. A spark popped. The wyvern was engulfed in an ear-splitting explosion.

Glittering eyes emerged from the smoke, a fire bubbling within its jaws.

Still spinning mostly out of control, Tinvel could only watch as the blinded creature whipped its head left and right. It found them an instant later and, without hesitation, spat boiling fire.

For a moment, Tinvel thought that their temporary blinding of the creature had done enough to save their lives. The flames roared past their left side, missing by several meters. Then his skin began to pulse with pain, hair curling and smoke wisping from every strand and, at the tip of the left wing, there was a spark.

A dozen meters between fire and plane didn’t matter. The heat was so great that the left wingtip of the Fulleye ignited anyway.

“Chona!” He yelled as he wrestled with the controls. The left side of his body felt like it had been shoved against a stovetop, his eyes watering terribly, feeling shrunken in his skull. “Put out the fire!”

“Just land!”

“Where?! They’ll mob us!”

The flames were licking their way down the left wing. He could see them reflected in the copper spool—

The copper spool.

“Put it out!” He screamed. “Wind, ice, fucking something!”

“I told you to land! I don’t want to knock off the wing!”

“The fucking rocket, Chona!”

The fire continued to spread. Though the flames were being fed by the wind, an artifice engine-powered aeroplane didn’t require the volatile fuel of the Earth examples that had inspired them. It wasn’t a raging bonfire, not yet.

But if it reached that blackpowder and emcotton rocket, there wouldn’t be enough left of them to bury.

Tinvel reached forward and reduced the forward engine to idle power, dropping their speed harshly. He wished Chona could cut the rear engine down to cruising speed, but she was holding both hands out into the wind, face screwed up in concentration.

“And… ice!”

A flutter of crystals fell from her palm and were ripped away by the wind. The fire spread further.

“Damnit!”

Tinvel turned toward the harbor, their plane trailing a long semicircle of smoke. The wyvern had continued past them, apparently unconcerned with such tiny prey. It was heading for the wharfs, preparing another maelstrom of firebreath.

Thank the gods for that.

The Tulian Navy spent most of its time on patrol, but not the last few days, not when there was a Carrion Admiral in port. Hundreds of sailors, perhaps the only members of the Tulian military trained to fire at swift-moving targets, began to loose rifle shots at the wyvern. A short moment later, swivel guns opened up, small-calibre cannons mounted to the ship’s railing as the latest of anti-boarding technology.

The wyvern roared in fury as it spat fire. Tinvel didn’t have time to watch further.

“I can put us down in the harbor!” He called to Chona.

“No! I can get it!” She cast another spell, this time producing a large, fist-sized chunk of ice. It fell limply down, thumping against the Fulleye’s side before rolling onto the wing, then off into oblivion.

They were over the water by then. Tinvel began angling the plane down, cursing himself. If he hadn’t switched the Fulleye back to landing gear instead of pontoons, this wouldn’t carry the slightest risk. Now it was a full-on crash landing.

“One more try!” Chona yelled.

“One!”

Watching through the mirror, Tinvel saw her pull her hand back, grabbing another fistful of blackpowder. His eyes went wide.

“What’re you—?!”

The plane rattled as the full force of Chona’s explosive spell shook the sky, enveloping the outer lower wing.

The chunk of the wing that had been aflame was simply… gone. The fire had gone with it.

And the plane began leaning hard left.

“Shit!” Tinvel wrestled with the controls, using his knee to help throw them to the right. The left wing’s aileron wasn’t responding anymore. Because of his stupid over-maneuvering or Chona’s explosive spell he couldn’t tell, but it didn’t much matter at the moment. “Give me some warning next time!” He yelled at her.

“Like we had time?!” Chona sounded like she was holding back manic laughter. “Come on! Back to the hangar, let’s go! Maybe we can hop in another plane!”

“If they fuckin’...” he paused to grunt, fighting a gust of wind that tried to flip them upside down. “Ugh… if those griffons don’t knock us out of the sky on the way there!”

“I don’t know if they will. Look!”

He barked an ugly laugh. “C-can’t! Fighting these… controls!”

“Oh! Uh, the griffons are…” Through the mirror, he saw her squinting into the distance. “Yeah, I think they’re leaving!”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know! There’s six of them heading, uh, northwest! Avoiding the North Star, looks like!”

“And the wyvern?”

“I don’t see it… wait, what?” Chona gripped his shoulder. “Tin, it landed!”

He bit his lip, his mind split as he tried to comprehend that while fighting for his life. “What do you mean? Where?”

“In front of the Carrion ship! I think… oh shit, I think that’s the Governess! It’s talking to the Governess!”

“Why would… it be…” he paused to curse as the plane rattled ominously. “Oh shit, we’re still at Emergency Speed! Cut to cruise speed, Chona!”

“Cruise speed!”

The plane grew noticeably more controllable as their speed decreased. With that, he finished his thought.

“Why would the wyvern be stupid enough to get near the Governess?”

“I don’t know!” Chona laughed. “Serves him fucking right, though!”

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Sara Brown

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Dirt clouded the air as the wyvern landed on the stone wharf, wings wafting radiant heat over her face. The creature was utterly massive, nearly as large as Imperequs, but some Blessing-derived instinct told Sara that she was a young one. Not much older than ten years. Physically mature, technically intelligent, but with an inexperienced and immature view of the world.

With her hands locked firmly onto the Magecraft’s railing, Sara’s eyes ran across the wyvern and her riders. Twelve of them, all Imperials. Four archers, two crossbowmen, five soldiers, and the leader sitting in front. The esteemed Wyvern Rider. He had a deeply scarred eye hidden beneath a black eyepatch and wore a peculiar variety of Imperial armor that Sara didn’t recognize. It was designed for mobility over protection, and so did little to cover the man’s joints. Though it made sense for a wyvern rider who might have to crawl along the back of a twisting, flying animal, it wasn’t something Sara would have liked to go into battle with.

As her eyes swept back along the wyvern’s spiked spine, she did notice something interesting. Several of the riders had scorched clothing beneath their armor, with patches of their flesh looking pink and tender. Signs of recent healing. They’d been wounded, clearly. Chona’s spell hadn’t been entirely pointless.

Of course, she took all these details in before the wyvern’s weight had finished settling on its claws. It shook its head slightly as it came to rest, teeth glittering behind its shining jaws. Her wings came forward, so she was resting on all fours, like a bat, and her long, slender neck snaked forward, lower jaw dropping to reveal her thick, rotund tongue.

“I,” she rumbled, “am the Wyvern Taotri, hatched of the Matriarch Degim and Black Line’s most noble joining, fourth cousin to noble Imperequs Himself—”

“My name is Sara Brown,” her voice boomed, impossibly loud. “And I don’t give a fuck which inbred lizard shat out your rotten egg.”

The sky shook and glass shattered as Sara’s words rolled outward, reverberating through the city. Taotri’s head snapped up and away with a hiss that sent scalding steam pouring from her jaws, violently tossing her head from side to side in reflexive pain. The riders atop her back had to choose between clinging onto her spines for dear life or clapping their hands over their ears, trying to shield themselves from Sara’s words. All of them began to bleed from the ears, several left entirely deaf.

The silence that followed did not last long.

“You dare!” Taotri roared. Her tongue lashed and slapped against the sides of her mouth as she bellowed, approximating the words that couldn’t be spoken without lips. “Have you no respect for the Greatest Kind?”

“No!” Sara snapped, another titanic boom rending the air. She forced herself to rein in her Blessings so that her next shout was merely ear-splitting, not deafening. “But if you have any respect or care for those pieces of shit on your back, you’ll leave before I gut them like squealing pigs!”

The one-eyed rider atop at the base of her neck pulled hard on his reins, calling out, “Taotri, no!”

His wyvern didn’t listen. Her head lunged forward, jaws agape, showing Sara an excellent view of the fire bubbling up from her throat.

Somewhere behind her, Vesta and Oddry screamed. Sara didn’t move a muscle.

A hideous whirlwind of flames spat themselves into reality, boiling a swathe of the ocean beneath, only to splash against an invisible barrier a few inches in front of her face. Runes etched into the air itself flickered to life, turning back flame and heat alike. Not a single lock of Sara’s hair was sent rustling.

An instant later, Taotri’s face slammed into that same invisible barrier, teeth gnashing against sparkling enchantments. For a brief moment, as her head turned aside, Sara locked gazes with the wyvern.

Hocking up as much spit as could be found within her throat, Sara spat a wad of phlegm toward the fist-sized eye. It landed just beneath the wyvern’s lower eyelid.

“Animal!” Taotri bellowed, slamming her head against the Carrion barrier one last time before finally pulling back. “The Barbarian King overestimated you by far!”

“Kinda funny that I whooped his army’s ass then, isn’t it?” Sara leaned forward, until her scrunched nose was brushing against the shimmering protections. “I wonder if you’ll live long enough to be as embarrassed as he was.”

Taotri reared up once more, fury rolling off her every scale, but held herself there when, of all people, Admiral Whistling Ash stepped forward, brandishing his blacksteel spear. All across the Magecraft, Carrion Marines lifted weapons.

“You would be wise to listen to your chosen rider, young wyvern,” the Admiral warned, calling out in Kemari. “A Carrion Ship is our sovereign territory. To attack once may be excused as a product of youth’s hotheaded ignorance.” He lowered his spear, taking it in two hands. “To attack twice is an insult— something the Carrion Navy does not suffer.”

To her credit, and to Sara’s mild surprise, Taotri did not lunge forward. She slowly lowered herself, winged forelimbs returning to the ground amidst a growling snarl.

“You consider an insult reason enough for violence, yet critique me? After what that creature said?”

“Yes,” Admiral Whistling Ash said. “I was not the one insulted, after all. And you, fine wyvern, have just attacked and killed her people. That you think mere words the greater sin is a curious thing indeed.”

“Barbarians!” Taotri hissed. “So ignorant of what is right and proper.”

“Perhaps.” Admiral Whistling Ash turned on a heel, putting his back to the wyvern and her riders as he returned to his men. “Have your discussion, Governess,” he said with a wave. “But do not expect my people to take a kind view to you goading the Imperials into any suicidal attacks. We will not have our vessel made an unwitting weapon.”

“Of course.” Taking a deep breath, Sara managed to unlatch her fingernails from the railing to lift her hands expectantly. “Well?” She prompted Taotri. “You came down here for a reason, didn’t you? What do you want?”

It was the one-eyed rider that responded, this time. Unlike his mount, he kept his tone calm and reasonable, though it still had an edge of steel. He leaned down, resting a hand against his steed’s scales.

“To take the measure of our enemy, of course. There is so much said about you, Chosen, yet precious few of the claims agree with one another.”

Her eyes flashed. “If you think I’m gonna sit here and shittalk back and forth so you can pretend we’re some fuckass characters in an Imperial play…”

The rider sighed. “No. As much as I might have preferred that, your distaste for such behavior is known.” Setting one rein down, he scratched his chin. “Truthfully, I am shocked that you chose to take shelter aboard this vessel. Of the many stories I heard from the Sporatons, I found that those few I trusted as fact were those which described you as anything but a reserved combatant.”

“You should thank my wife for that.” Sara stapled the least cheerful smile imaginable to her lips. “She insisted that I stay safe while I was away, and I care enough about her that I’m trying my best.”

“Your wife?” He cocked his head. “I would not have expected that either. Though I suppose it matters which woman you refer to. The smith or the slave-girl?”

A tooth cracked in Sara’s jaw. Something hot and horrible began to stir in her belly, its limbs stretching, spreading, spindly daggers pulsing against the underside of her skin. The world took on a reddish tint, first from the veins pulsating in her eyes, and then from the smoke that began to leach off her skin.

“Yes,” she snapped, the word cracking like a gunshot, making Seareye flinch. “The slave-girl is the one I promised. And the smith, of course, but the slave-girl, yes.”

“Sara…” Vesta warned from across the deck.

“Who else would care so much for me, if not the mothers of my children?” Blood began to pool in the back of her mouth, welling up from shattered molars. “Of course you’d hardly understand, noble plague-rat that you are. I doubt even your wet nurse could muster a smile when you sucked on her tits, so I can’t blame you for being confused.”

The rider pursed his lips. “I apologize. I did not mean to insult—”

“Oh, come now! Surely you understand, yes?” Sara’s words squirmed and wriggled past her lips like snakes escaping an overturned nest, louder and more painful with every syllable. “We are at war, Sir Seareye, are we not? What is war for, if not making enemies? Blood spilled for insults, insults offered for blood. A merry little cycle, isn’t it?”

The crimson smoke rolling off Sara’s skin began to spill over the deck, pooling atop the sea below.

“Of course, it won’t be much of a cycle between us, will it? Your little attack here was clever! Very, very clever.” Sara waved at the smoking city. “You managed to achieve much. Of course your lizard idiotically attacked the homes of the outer wall, where none yet live, but the stupid little thing is barely hatched. Idiocy is to be expected from spoiled brats. But a cycle?”

Sara laughed. Even the Carrion Marines recoiled from the sound, eyes watering.

“Oh, it won’t be that. You have no idea what Tulian is capable of. I know it might be strange for you to imagine, but this people and their weapons are beyond me now. I’ve given so much power to others that I couldn’t take it back. I couldn’t— and wouldn’t— keep them from preparing for your next attack. I try so very hard to hold things back, to keep this war in check, but I’m not a god. I’m not even a queen. They’re going to know exactly what struck that first griffon down, and they’re going to know they can build more of them, though they won’t have to, because we already have dozens hidden away in storage cubbies they didn’t know about. I’ll tell them, of course, and no, I’m not going to give the order, so it’s up to you to decide when you want to fire.”

Taotri cocked her head.

A lance of blackpowder fire jetted from a bronze muzzle a hundred yards to Sara’s left, its operators hidden in the shadow of an alleyway. A double-load of canister shot shrieked like banshees as it ripped through the air, dozens of lead fists slamming into Taotri’s right side.

Every hell broke loose. Taotri’s right wing rose instinctively, sheltering her riders, but she was far too late to save the half-dozen individuals on her back who suddenly slumped in their saddles, held in place by leg straps alone. Rifle-muskets from Tulian regulars began to pop from the windows and doors across the harborside, deathly-accurate shots zipping toward the riders atop Taotri or at the wyvern’s own head.

Goddamn, those scales are tough.

She hadn’t been the slightest bit wounded. Even the apple-sized lead projectiles from the cannon had smashed to pieces against her wings without drawing blood. The only sign of vulnerability Sara could see from Taotri was the way she closed her right eye when she roared, protecting the sensitive organ from a hail of gunshots slamming into her skull. The wyvern spun in place, tail whipping over the masts of the Carrion Magecraft as she turned to face the harborside.

Sara opened her mouth to scream at the troops to get down, but hesitated. Giving orders to soldiers from the Magecraft’s deck was inarguably a violation of Carrion neutrality. It would ruin the entire purpose of the meeting, setting her work back by months.

Luckily, Tulian’s troops weren’t mindless automatons. After so long working with Imperials, it was an utter relief to see soldiers not wait for the order to sprint the hell away from a furious, flaming wyvern. Rifles were dropped and pistols were abandoned, every squad of troops abandoning their posts without orders and without hesitation. Sara was proud.

Taotri’s flames ripped across the harbor like a tsunami, crashing into the stone and concrete homes that acted as Tulian’s storm barrier. Sara took the time to laugh at her, casting her cruel voice directly into the wyvern’s ears, but even that wasn’t enough to bait the wyvern to stay. She leaped upward, wings pumping faster than Sara had ever seen them before. All the while, even as gunshots chased her into the sky, she was calling out.

“Get them! Sath! Grab her, grab her, she is slipping!”

Taotri’s head was craned all the way around so she could stare at her back, shouting orders to her riders as they tried to help those who had been wounded. It was something Sara had noticed within moments of Taotri’s landing: the wyvern was as obsessed with her riders as the storybooks implied she’d be about jewels. Taotri flung herself up and over the harbor walls, spitting one last wall of fire to prevent the cannoneers from harassing her escape, and then she was out of reach.

The smoke pooling around Sara’s feet began to dissipate. Taking a deep breath, she glanced at Admiral Whistling Ash.

“I’m afraid tonight’s meeting might be a bit delayed. I’ve got some cleaning up to do.”

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