For the moment, the Chromeria was winning this battle. Hell, they might win the battle outright, regardless of what happened in the next few minutes to Karris.
But that didn’t make a whole lot of difference right here, did it?
As Gavin had said, ‘Dead winners and dead losers have only one thing in common. Unfortunately, it’s the most important thing.’
Chapter 142
The great, winged machina must have flown directly at the tower, nosed up hard to vertical at the last moment to avoid a collision, and stalled just in time to catch Orholam gently.
In jumping late, Dazen was going to get nothing gentle. He plunged after the falling condor, seeing Orholam nonchalantly pulling Himself into a finely carved wooden seat and tying a rope around His waist, even as the machina fell sideways, slowly spinning.
Dazen fell only slightly faster, head angled down like a boy diving into the water, sword flopping about hazardously in the air.
He realized that the principles of flight, which he’d only been starting to master when he’d made the first condor, also applied to his body. There was probably something smart and dextrous he should be doing right now.
Orholam have mercy, it was as if they were two horses racing each other, and he’d taken the outside track to doom. He started to pass the condor, too far away to grab on to the tail or the seats, coming equal to its nose before the condor, now headed straight down, began falling as fast as Dazen was.
But then the condor swooped, raising its nose and swerving into him. He bounced off its nose, the machina smacking his head and knocking the wind from his lungs, and the sword almost out of his grasp. He slid down its back. Or, more appropriately, up its back, as it was inverted, still falling. As Dazen slid, he grabbed for Orholam’s chair, or his legs—anything. But his three-fingered left-hand grip failed him again. He slid up to the tail, and there clung with his hands and knees gripping the winged machine like a bad rider clamped helplessly to the back of a spooked horse, feet braced against some small protrusions of the tail that hadn’t been there in his version of the machina.
The wind tore at him as if he were as welcome as a tick, but he held on. He wasn’t going to die. Not yet.
“Hey!” a baritone voice shouted at him. “Can you move your feet, please?”
“I’m not back here for fun!” he shouted back.
“Get your feet off the elevator flaps or we’re gonna hit the trees.”
Dazen looked up, not at the speaker, but at the horizon. The condor was leveling out slowly, but it needed to climb rapidly, or it was going to smash into the hills ringing the plain around the mountain tower’s base.
He scooted forward and pulled his feet off the nubs where he’d braced them and instantly felt gears shift and the tail flex. He tucked his head tight against the condor’s back as it shot up into the air.
He didn’t move again until it leveled out. Then he scooted slowly, slowly forward, until he reached the windbreak on the condor’s back. He took the only other chair. Chairs? That was a nice innovation.
No one had even offered to help him.
“Thanks for the help!” he said. “No, I kept the sword, too. No problem.”
Orholam and the captain of the air machine glanced at him as if he’d only just boarded.
“Oh, did you hit your head?” the captain asked. “Sorry about that.”
He didn’t sound sorry at all. “Not your fault,” Dazen said, though Orholam could have given him warning.
“I know,” the captain said. “I meant I’m sorry you hurt yourself. I was being polite.”
Real polite.
Dazen returned the favor by staring at the man. The man had apparently also hit his head recently, as there was an ugly lump and abrasions across his forehead. But that wasn’t the main thing that made Dazen stare. This man was ethnically unlike anyone Dazen had ever seen: fine, straight black hair, broad cheekbones, and skin folded across his upper eyelids.
No, scratch that. This man was unlike any Dazen had ever seen in real life, but not in art. There’d been a statue of a man like this at the beginning of the pilgrimage. Or . . . no. Not a man like this. This man.
Not this man, this immortal.
“Oh, hey, I’ve seen you before,” Dazen said. “It’s an enormous pleasure to get to meet you in person! I saw your statue. You must be really special!” Being overly friendly was sometimes the best way to irritate the surly.
The immortal grunted.
“This your island?” Dazen asked, relentlessly chipper.
The immortal grunted again. Maybe a no.
“Dazen Guile. Nice ta meetcha!”
The immortal glowered at him. “I know who you are.”
“You’re an immortal, huh? How’s that work? What do you do?”
The immortal looked over to Orholam. “My lord? Permission to abandon ship?”
“Denied,” Orholam said happily.
“This is about my failure with V, isn’t it?”
Vee? Dazen felt like a child among adults talking over his head.
“Not a failure, not yet,” Orholam said. “And this is no punishment.”
“Please don’t say it’s a reward”—the immortal cleared his throat and added quickly—“my most gracious lord. I beg you.”
Orholam said nothing.
“So it is a reward,” the immortal grumped. “And since you said ‘Not yet,’ you’re sending me back to her.”
“If it’s possible,” Orholam said.
“What would keep me from going back to—oh.” The immortal got quiet, then squared his shoulders. “So we’re heading into one of those kinds of fights,” he said.
Great. We’re going into a battle that gives the immortals pause?
“There’s victuals and a wineskin in the pack, and blankets,” the immortal told Dazen, nudging it with his foot, but not moving from the wheel. “Eat. Sleep.”
After devouring the best food of his life, Dazen did.
He woke to a hand on his shoulder.
“You’ll want to see this,” Orholam said.
The sun was beginning to lighten the sky. Dazen felt a hundred times better.
Orholam pointed over the edge of the condor.
They had to be hundreds of paces in the air. Dazen felt a brief moment of vertigo, then saw them—streaks in the water. “Are those . . . sea demons?” he asked. “What are they doing here? I thought there were only eight left.”
“Seven of the eight accepted Orholam’s mercy last week,” the truculent immortal said, though Dazen hadn’t been asking him.
“Last week?” Dazen asked. “But I only asked the boon for them yesterday. That was yesterday, right?”
“It was,” Orholam said with a twinkle in his eye. “But I knew you’d ask.”
“But what if I hadn’t?” Dazen asked.
“That’s Karris Atiriel at their head. Unable to reverse Lucidonius’s soul-casting and bring him back home, after her years as Prism, in order to join her husband, she became a sea demon herself.”
“I thought she established the Blackguard,” Dazen said. “Wasn’t half their purpose—”
“Her intention was that no one would ever again do what Lucidonius had done, even as she planned how to copy him herself. Instead, her success proved to others that drafters less gifted than Lucidonius might also succeed. Now, after all these centuries, she’s ready. She’s finally chosen to abandon her husband to the self-destruction that he loves more than he loves her or anything.”