--------------------------------

  David Brown

  --------------------------------

  David stared at the small cube on his desk hard enough that his gaze should have been scorching holes in the wood. He had one finger of his left hand pressed to his temple, his right hand outstretched, trembling with effort. His eyes were lidded, and he was muttering under his breath.

  “Lift... Rise... Come forth...”

  The wooden cube, predictably, was unmoved by his pleading. It sat impcably on the tabletop, taunting him with its inaction.

  “This is stupid,” he finally decred, dropping his hands to thump against the table. That, at least, made the cube jump a touch, but that was a far cry from what he wanted.

  “It may seem so, but if you really have the emotional attachment to the stories you have described to me, I believe this may be one of the more viable avenues of spellcasting avaible to you,” Garen replied.

  “Spellcasting isn’t the Force, though,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “It doesn’t work the same at all. Why would pretending I’m a Jedi make it any easier to be a wizard?”

  “Because it is an ability you have desired from a very young age, and it is closely linked to your mind’s concept of spellcraft at rge. Whether you know it or not, your soul’s dreams have created a pathway through which spells may yet flow.”

  David sighed, deciding discretion was the better part of valor. He had spent months failing to cast the simplest of spells, and his irritation only grew with every new applicant to the University who cast their first spell within moments of receiving Garen’s tutege. He was extremely grateful that the archmage was persisting in his attempts to bring magic into David’s life, but after so long, he’d become convinced the lessons were nothing more than a waste of Garen’s incredibly valuable time.

  When he’d spoken that concern, Garen’s disagreement had been vehement. To the Archmage, whose entire life had been predicated upon the idea that a purehearted desire to explore magic was the surest sign of his god’s favor, teaching David was as much a religious duty as it was practical. To accept that David was unable to cast spells was to concede on one of two equally distasteful propositions: either the god Tavan was knowingly withholding his Gifts from David, or David had no soul to receive them. Garen rejected either premise outright, and so the lessons continued.

  They were practicing, as they usually did, in David’s office. Garen was currently suffering through the least favorite pastime that David had introduced to his life, grading essays, and was only buoyed through the effort by the distraction provided by advising David on his spellcasting attempts. The expansive office desk should have been more than enough for the both of them to work, though so many papers had been spread across its surface that it ended up feeling cramped. The midday sun was shining through an open window, scattering pinkish rays through the communication crystal that had been set on a pedestal in the middle of the desk. Remnants of David’s test experiment y beneath it, copper wires and magnets piled up in a loose, frustrated pile.

  As David began lifting his hand once more, narrowing his focus on the appropriate mindset that Garen had described so many times, the crystal crackled to life.

  “The pontoon storage idea was great,” Tinvel said, breathing hard, “but good gods, we’re gonna need a better way to get things out of here.”

  “They weren’t meant for storage,” David reminded him, gd for the break. “I just mentioned that putting a hatch in the top of them might make them useful.”

  “Yeah, well,” Tinvel paused to grunt with effort, “we’re gonna have to figure out a better way to do this. All the rifles slid to the back, and we can just barely grab them.”

  “And the waves suck!” Chona’s voice yelled indignantly, slightly more distant. “Why did you think a boat pne was a good idea?”

  “If you’ve got a better way to find a runway in an endless jungle, you should have spoken up sooner,” David replied, smiling lightly. He’d always enjoyed the students who had enough of a spine to give him some backtalk- as long as they had the smarts to back it up.

  “No idea how we’re gonna take off again,” Chona snapped, the sound of cnking metal accompanying her words. “Seems like we’re just gonna smash into a wave and tip over the second we get any kind of speed.”

  David frowned, leaning closer to the crystal. “I told you not to nd if the sea was rough. If the waves get too high, you really won’t be able to take off.”

  “It was calm when we nded,” Tinvel said, “but it’s taking so damn long to get the guns out that it’s getting worse. Captain Nora says it’s not going to calm down any time soon.”

  “Is it storming?”

  “Not here, but there’s some rain clouds nearby. Wind’s picking up, too. We had to tie the pne to the boat. We’re both getting pushed around pretty good.”

  David bnched. “That’s risky, Tinvel. Don’t let the pne get crushed up against the side of the ship.”

  “Do not worry, professor,” a strangely accented voice called. It took David a moment to recognize Ignite; they’d never spoken much. “I and my marines are keeping your flying boat in position.”

  “It’s our pne!” Chona immediately called. “Not the Professor’s.”

  “Regardless. The vessel is being held in pce by Marines. It will survive to attempt its flight.”

  “I really don’t like that you’re calling it an ‘attempt’,” Tinvel said. “If the waves actually get too rough, we’re not going to try and take off. We’ll wait it out. Here, take these. I actually managed to grab two this time.”

  David shook his head. He almost wished that he’d been dropped into a bit more standard of a fantasy world, without these long-range communications. It certainly would have been less stressful, to not have to hear all about problems he couldn’t do anything for.

  “How’d the pne perform on the way out, at least?” David asked.

  “Pretty dang good,” Tinvel replied, a touch of cheer diluting his frustration. “I still wish we had a proper way of gauging speed, but I bet we were averaging a hundred miles an hour.”

  “With or without a tail wind?”

  “With, for the most part. Kind of hard to tell when you’re flying, y’know?”

  “I guess that makes sense. And how’d finding the Waverake go?”

  “We’d already be done and on our way back if these maps were any damn good!” Chona yelled. “I can’t believe people actually use this crap to sail with!”

  “When one is searching for a city, rather than a lone ship, it is far harder to overlook your destination,” Ignite chimed in. “So long as the rger trends of ndscapes are represented on the map, there is rarely an issue.”

  “I thought you sailor types did all your stuff by stars and math?” Chona asked. “You’ve got fancy tools for it and everything.”

  “If one must cross the open ocean, yes, such tools are necessary. But other than our fine ship, few brave the Deepwaters unless they must. Best to follow the shoreline until one is at the shortest point of transit, then follow a direct compass heading towards their desired destination.”

  “So you’re gonna be fighting sea monsters with this ship?” Chona asked. Her voice was growing more distant, and David assumed she was using her natural monkey’s grace to climb between ship and pne, delivering armfuls of guns.

  “Daygon willing, no,” Ignite replied. “But it is the nature of the sea that nothing can be certain. If a beast attempts to seize the ship, we will fight.”

  “If you come back alive, you’ll have to tell me all about it,” Chona said, far too chipper for the topic at hand. “I’ve always wondered if all those stories about the Deepwaters are true.”

  “I can’t speak to any specific tale you may have heard, but for the general way of things, I will say that I have rarely heard a story of the ocean’s monsters more fanciful than the realities.”

  “Huh. Hey Tinvel, how many more rifles do we have to get out?”

  “Just… a few more,” Tinvel said, huffing with some serious effort.

  Maybe the kid was right. If David wanted them to use the pontoons for storage, they’d have to figure out a better way to get goods out. But that would probably mean a rger hatch, more leakage, and structural integrity problems. They’d already had to add internal cross bracing because wood wasn’t anywhere near as strong as aluminum or fibergss, and he really didn’t want to add more weight…

  “Shit! Really?” Tinvel shouted, interrupting David’s rumination.

  “Let’s go!” Chona yelled, then nothing. The crystal only transmitted sounds when someone nearby was speaking, so there was a tense moment of silence. Garen and David both looked at each other, concern on their faces.

  “Yeah, that’s all of them!” Chona yelled.

  “Cut us loose!” Tinvel ordered.

  “Aye, captain!” Ignite replied.

  “Wait, what? Are you talking to me? Am I a captain?”

  “You captain a flying boat of sorts, do you not?”

  “Yeah, but I thought you could only be a captain if you were in charge of a-”

  There was a meaty thump, then Chona yelled again, harsher. “Shut up! Let’s go!”

  There was a muttered whisper, and then the ccking of metal stirring the propeller to life.

  David couldn’t take it anymore. He snagged the crystal, calling loudly into it to be heard over the propellor.

  “What’s going on? What happened? Are you in danger?”

  “Ship showed up! Pn starts now! Gotta go!”

  And with that frustrating expnation, the crystal went dead.

  “Oh, boy,” David muttered, running a hand along his scalp. “I hope they know what they’re doing.”

  “They do not,” Garen stated matter-of-factly. “They are the first pilots of our world. Risks must, and will, be taken.”

  “You know what I mean. I just hope they actually practiced a water take-off before they found Nora, like they were supposed to. Pnes like that are really meant to take off on, like, kes and stuff. Not the open ocean.”

  “They are my brightest students, and I know them well.” Garen looked up from his papers, meeting David’s eyes. “Of course they did not practice.”

  David groaned.

  --------------------------------

  Tinvel

  --------------------------------

  “Stupid- fucking- waves!” Tinvel cursed, interrupted by every smming thump of the pontoons against the ocean. It was still a calm day for a ship like the Waverake, which could slice through the foot-high waves as if they weren’t there, but for the Sunrise it was an exercise in frustration.

  “What did you expect?” Chona asked, gripping the sides of her seat hard, even though she was strapped in by a harness. Even her tail was wrapped around a support strut, helping hold her in pce as best it could.

  “More time to get ready at the very least!”

  Every time he felt the deep thuds reverberate through the wood of the pne, Tinvel expected them to come with a sudden crack and brutal jerk to the side, the ocean taking his second pne from him in a spray of prop-driven seawater.

  But as they continued to accelerate, each impact came less harshly, more infrequently. The pne’s nose, which had started off bobbing in a nauseating seesaw motion, began to level off as the pontoons stopped dipping into the wave troughs. Soon they were skimming overtop them, shearing the white tips off every wave.

  Tinvel felt the moment the pne began to lift more than he saw it. The control stick suddenly lightened, no longer jittering against his touch, and he felt the wings flex ever so slightly as they began to bear the pne’s weight.

  He didn’t pull up right away. He was not going to screw up his first attempt at taking off from the sea. Instead he reached down and pressed a finger to the throttle crystals, pulsing Intent into the gems to throw the pne into Emergency Speed.

  Metal shrieked as the crystals nestled within the housing fred to blinding brilliance. After struggling to repair it behind his back mid-flight, Tinvel had decided the Artifice Engine should be as close to him as possible: right in front of him, with a small hinged window giving him direct access to the whirling machinery.

  And now he knew that the first thing he was changing when he got back was repcing the engine door’s gss with something opaque. With emergency mode engaged, he had to squint his eyes against hundreds of green fshes of energy, twelve emeralds aligned with steel rods drawing as much power as they were able from a central chunk of shining amethyst. He tilted his face back, trying to get the rapid fshing out of his direct line of sight just so he could focus on the takeoff.

  In the end, he barely had to do anything at all. The pne struck one particurly high wave, bounced upward, and… didn’t fall back down. They began to creep upward, the pne’s rattle calming in an instant.

  Tinvel immediately reduced the speed to its third setting, cruise, blinking the spots from his eyes. One of his first priorities for the second generation of Artifice Engine had been more reliable speed settings, and his second priority had been making more of them. They now had a ground speed, nding speed, cruise speed, takeoff-ssh-combat speed, and emergency speed. He had no idea how many miles per hour each setting actually represented, but they were each a distinct jump in power draw, so he could only assume the speed tracked accordingly.

  “Where’s the ship?” Tinvel yelled.

  “Four o’clock!” Chona shouted, using the strange terminology David had insisted upon. It would make more sense once Tinvel and Chona had clocks of their own, but until then it was awfully awkward.

  Tinvel tilted the pne to the right as he continued to gain altitude, steering it even more gently than he might normally. Between the morning’s cobblestone takeoff and the teeth-rattling waves, visions of sheared bolts and failed screws were dancing through his head.

  Tinvel spotted the ship a whole minute after Chona had. It was unremarkable, a single-masted merchant vessel, traveling exactly along the southern bearing Nora’s scout had said it would be. Compared to their pne it was barely moving, but Tinvel could tell by its wake that it was actually doing well enough for itself. It would be in the vicinity of the Waverake within the hour.

  “Should we go say hi?” Chona asked, turning her head aside to use the speaking tube. “Y’know, up close and personal?”

  “Why?” Tinvel replied. “We’re here to put on a show, but that’s not exactly what Sara meant by it.”

  “Uh…” Chona considered the question for a second. “I’ll try and see if I can tell what fg it’s flying? That way we can know how soon the story might get around.”

  He thought about it. Considered the fact that there was no good reason to do what he was about to do. Acknowledged that it was all risk, no reward.

  Then he imagined the faces of the sailors seeing a pne race past them for the first time. And he imagined Chona’s rolled eyes and quiet exasperation if he once again chose the safe way out.

  Tinvel twisted the pne around a few degrees, aiming for the merchant ship.

  Chona whooped in excitement.

  Tinvel continued on a direct heading for their distant target, leveling off at a fairly pedestrian thousand feet above the wavetops. If their estimate of the pne’s speed was correct, which it probably wasn’t, cruise mode had them going about ninety or a hundred miles an hour. Combat speed could get them a good bit more speed, somewhere between fifteen to twenty-five percent more, whatever that worked out to. They’d also never bothered to clock emergency speed for any length of time, seeing as it was more likely to shred the engines than give them any useful data.

  Two minutes after Tinvel had id eyes on the distant ship, he was circling overhead, left wing lowered in a dip that let him keep an eye on the vessel through the wing spars. Still at a thousand feet, all he could see were little dots moving about on the deck. Oars were being brought out, he noticed. You didn’t end up a sailor long without learning it was best to get the hell away from anything strange you spotted on the sea.

  Unfortunately for them, the extra few knots rowing might give them still left their vessel dead in the water next to the Sunrise. As he completed another loop, Tinvel rolled to the right, heading away from the ship’s stern.

  “This is stupid!” He yelled to Chona.

  “Yeah!”

  Tinvel tipped the nose forward, bringing the pne into a gentle dive as he ticked the pne’s speed down to nding mode. David had warned them that there was a speed they could reach that would rip the wings straight off the pne. They had no idea what speed that was, but even when he was doing something unnecessary and stupid, Tinvel wasn’t suicidal.

  He leveled out a hundred feet above the waves, some two miles behind the merchant ship, turning the dive’s energy into a tight circle. His body’s own momentum fought him, squashing him into the seat, his spine compressing as if another person was standing on his shoulders. It was David’s oft-referenced ‘g-forces’, and it was something he and Chona had spent time purposefully accustoming themselves to, gaining as much height as they dared solely to descend in a rapid downward spiral. Compared to the G’s they’d pulled during that practice, this one small turn was nothing.

  Tinvel completed the ft loop with the pne’s nose pointed directly at the ship’s stern, returning to cruise speed. He stayed at a hundred feet, careful twitches of the controls keeping them as level as he could manage.

  “Remember to look for the fgs!” Tinvel yelled.

  “Whatever! Get lower! I want to see them piss themselves!”

  Tinvel ignored her terrible advice. The white square of the ship’s sail was growing rger by the second.

  With a gentle nudge of the rudder pedals and an even smaller touch of the control stick, their path shifted to come alongside the right side of the ship, maybe five wingspans away from the sail, still well above it. The painting of a golden sunrise on the left side of the pne would be clearly visible, as well as the green Tulian naval ensign on the rudder. Ill-advised as this stunt already was, he could have gotten far closer, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  Well, he thought, one hand reaching for the throttle gems, maybe a small chance. Wouldn’t want them getting a lucky shot off with a bow or ballistae, right?

  As they crossed the half-mile point, Tinvel switched the throttle to combat speed.

  Light fred within the engine compartment once more as twelve cylinders hopped into a blur, each jumping cycle revealing a fsh of the green energy driving them from below. In terms of power output, emergency speed was as much as the crystals were physically capable of extruding from the engine’s amethyst core, enough to shatter themselves in an explosive spray of crystal shrapnel. Takeoff/combat speed was just a touch below that, the highest level of energy expenditure Tinvel had found which wouldn’t outright destroy the engine.

  And it was a power-hungry setting. They could either fly for an hour and a half at cruise speed, or they could spend fifteen minutes at combat speed.

  The pne’s engine changed pitch as they neared the merchant, gaining a rumble that seemed to rattle Tinvel’s skull as its propellers chopped through the air.

  He kept a careful eye on the sail as they approached, still accelerating, and when they closed to the point that the ship was starting to hide beneath the engine cowling, he nudged the left wing low, peering down.

  Sailors and officers alike dove for cover as the Sunrise roared past them at a hundred-and-something miles an hour, gold emblem glittering in the noonday sun. Tinvel watched two figures hop overboard head-first, diving for safety beneath the water, as well as a mad scramble of others jamming the stairs to the lower deck. A second group, however, just watched in amazement, hands shading their eyes, too entranced by the sight of the flying machine to do anything other than stare.

  To his shock, Tinvel’s concern of being shot at, mostly just an excuse to blow past the ship even faster, proved valid. Several people on the deck drew bows, feather fletchings resting on their cheeks. They tracked the Sunrise’s approach and, as Tinvel zipped past at mast height, loosed their shots.

  Of course they aimed hopelessly, ughably short, the arrows spshing down a quarter mile off-target, but still. He was surprised. When Tinvel had fantasized about seeing civilian reactions to their pne, he’d mostly imagined the first two groups of sailors he’d spotted, either fleeing in abject terror or watching in awe.

  Maybe sailors really are made of sterner stuff, Tinvel thought as the Sunrise raced away. He supposed it made sense; like Ignite had said, there weren’t really tall tales on the ocean. When this group got to their next port and shared the story of a wooden monster screeching past them faster than the fastest bird, the other sailors would grin and nod and unch into their own tales.

  But Tinvel wasn’t just here to give them a story of a strange flying object. Governess Sara had come up with a pn, and he was going to see it through.

  He slowly climbed as they returned to the Waverake, putting his mouth to the voice tube.

  “Did you figure out what fg they’re flying?”

  “How could I?” Chona asked, ughing. “I don’t know anything about ship stuff! There were a million fgs on that thing!”

  Tinvel swore, focusing on his flying. He didn’t know what he’d expected.

  They returned to the Waverake in short order, entering a circling pattern high above. They’d soon need to nd and let the crystals recharge, but he guessed they had half an hour or so of power.

  Unlike the first model of pne, the Sunrise didn’t need to spend nearly so long recharging. The central amethyst at the core of the Artifice Engine was there not so much as the pne’s in-flight power source, but as one massive battery for the dozen tiny emeralds. He’d not yet managed to find a way to enchant a single rge crystal to engage with more than one enchantment, much less the twelve needed to drive the pistons, so he’d been forced to settle on a halfway solution. The emeralds leeched as much power as they could from the amethyst at all times, but in flight that was well below the repcement rate. The emeralds mostly relied on their own internal reserves, and so could only make a profit from the amethyst when the engine was turned off.

  While still not ideal, since the amethyst technically had enough energy in it to keep them flying for hours upon hours, its inclusion at least reduced the recharging time between flights from six hours to a single hour. If they drained the st of the power in their upcoming dispy, all he’d have to do was nd on the water and wait.

  Thankfully, they could begin almost immediately. A solid red fg was run up the mast of the Waverake, ostensibly the Carrion-standard sign for battle, warning other ships to stay away. In this case, as prearranged, it told Tinvel that the merchant ship was close enough for them to begin the show.

  “Ready?” He called.

  “Finally!” Chona cried, her tail reaching to drag a bag from underneath her seat. With her extra limb holding the canvas sack up to her face, she rummaged through it for a moment before pulling out spark crystals in one hand, then a small, string-protruding metal sphere in the other.

  “You stored those in the same bag?!” Tinvel yelled incredulously, fully turning around in his seat to stare wide-eyed at her.

  “What?” Chona asked, tapping the two crystals together near the end of the string. “It’s not like they’re real bombs!”

  Before Tinvel could scream at her further, the fuse lit. Chona tossed the bomb overboard.

  It went off halfway down to the sea, turning from a falling speck into a burning comet of white smoke. Aided by the wind of its fall and the pne’s own speed, what would have been a small streak became a boiling mass, spewing its acrid (but supposedly harmless) chemicals into the air.

  It nded absolutely nowhere near the Waverake, spshing into the water hundreds of feet off the ship’s right side, but it did its job well enough. There was no way the merchant ship could miss the manmade cloud it had produced.

  In response, Ignite’s Marines pointed their muskets at the sky and fired off a volley of bnks, shooting nothing more than smoke and sound at the Sunrise. Even if they’d loaded the rifles it almost certainly would have done nothing, at least at the height they were currently flying at. The only purpose was convincing the merchant ship, which would have hopefully realized the strange flying machine’s markings meant it was Tulian-aligned, had just started an inexplicable fight with the (in)famous fgship of the Tulian Navy.

  Tinvel circled around again, beginning a slow descent to a more reasonable targeting height. This was supposed to be just a show, yes, a mock-mutiny that would let Sara politically disavow Nora’s upcoming actions (whatever they were, Tinvel had no idea), but that didn’t mean it had to be a waste of time.

  See, Nora had agreed to let Tinvel and Chona actually try to hit her ship.

  “Two ready!” Chona yelled, holding two of the smoke bombs by the same fuse, spark crystals pinched in her other hand.

  “Wait ‘till I get a better angle!”

  Tinvel swung the pne around, this time coming at the Waverake from the bow, maybe five hundred feet over the waves. The ship was so massive that even flying this high put its bck sails only three hundred feet below, and that was where Chona and Tinvel had decided to aim. So long as ships were powered by sails, they would be trundling along with one giant fmmable target, and Tinvel intended to take advantage.

  As they roared toward the ship, Chona lit both fuses, tossing one just before they reached it, then one an instant ter, right as they passed over the center of the ship.

  Both bombs sailed hopelessly far past the stern of the ship, dropping uselessly into the water.

  Ignite’s Marines, on the other hand, fired another volley in the split second Tinvel flew overhead, using their new rifles to the fullest. Unlike the flint rifles that Tinvel’s delivery had just repced, these weapons were lit by crystal-tipped hammers, igniting the bckpowder charge the very instant the trigger was pulled. It was an improvement the smiths were trying to push out in record numbers, considering the upcoming six months of rainy season, and the Navy needed them more than anyone else. Tinvel could only guess how well aimed the volley had been, but he knew for a fact he did not want to be in the middle of a cloud of lead.

  Professor Brown seemed convinced that there was simply no way a group of riflemen could ever hope to hit a pne, but Tinvel wasn’t so sure. The professor still wasn’t used to living in a world of Skills and Levels. If even one of the Marines down on the ship had been a hunter with a Skill that, for example, helped them aim an arrow at fast-flying birds, they could guide the entire formation’s volley onto target. Professor Brown had said that such a bow-based Skill wouldn’t work on a fancy rifle, but who knew for sure? Maybe it would. Tinvel had decided to prepare for the worst-case scenario.

  And speaking of the worst, with how bad Chona had missed both times, he didn’t see any choice but to fly lower on the next pass. He hooked the Sunrise around in its sharpest turn of the day, pressing them both into the cloth of their seats, then leveled out, aiming to rake the ship from back to front this time.

  He could see the ship’s wake begin to shift as Captain Nora moved to avoid him, giving him a worse angle, but there was no point. It was like a slug trying to dodge a hawk. He tracked the movement with ease.

  This time they roared over the Waverake a mere fifty feet above its highest mast, and Chona only threw one smoke bomb, taking extra care on the timing of her toss. They were flying low enough that Tinvel couldn’t look back to watch, too focused on maintaining his altitude, but he hoped she’d managed to–

  A chest-rattling boom filled the air.

  “YES!” Chona cried. “Right in the sail, Tin, you wouldn’t believe it! Right in their smug little fucking faces!”

  Tinvel climbed a little bit, turning around in his seat just in time to see the fogbank of cannonfire drifting away from the ship. It was the agreed-upon signal that they’d scored a successful hit on the Waverake, and even more than that, it was a convincing dispy for the now-fleeing merchant ship that the battle was legitimate. They had no way of knowing what a cannon was or what it looked like when it fired, and so the hope was that they’d think the Sunrise had dealt real damage to the Waverake. Not only would that help sell the story that Nora had gone rogue, it might cause whatever enemies she found to underestimate her, believing rumors that her ship had been heavily damaged.

  Tinvel tucked the pne into another swooping reversal, calling out to Chona as he did so.

  “Want to try the dive-bombing tactic Professor Brown was talking about?”

  “What? No! I’ve only got one hit so far! I want to try and get a few more at least!”

  “Okay! But I still think it’s risky to spend so long near the muskets! The slow level attack profile is accurate, but–”

  Chona rolled her eyes as she tugged more smoke bombs out of the bag. “Talk strategy when we’re not half-deaf! Time to fly, flyboy!”

  Tinvel rolled his eyes back at her, but settled back into his seat, a smile still on his face. Scamming an entire shipload of merchantmen, practicing revolutionary anti-Magecraft tactics, all while flying? Even Chona couldn’t get under his skin on a day like this.

  The next half hour was spent slowly refining their attacks, their hits becoming so frequent that the Waverake ended up surrounded in a cloud of smoke that, somewhat ironically, made it harder to find their aim. By the time the merchant ship had fled far enough south that they couldn’t witness the ongoing ‘battle,’ Chona was out of bombs, the pne’s crystals were nearly exhausted, and sweat had soaked into the armpits of Tinvel’s flight jacket.

  I’d just like to see those Sporatons try to get into Tulian again, Tinvel thought, a bubbly anger rising up beneath his joy. The rubble of the Battle for Tulian still hadn’t been fully cleared from the shoreline, and the mass graves outside the city, filled with citizens and enemies alike, were wreathed with fresh flowers by mourners each and every day. During that battle, Tinvel had cowered in the university, hiding behind Garen as Sporaton-hired mercenaries had roved the streets.

  Not again. Not anymore.