“Everyone knows about the Great Desert,” Kennick said as they descended, “but this is a much more interesting place.”
Brennan looked out, waggling the Naga a little to give him a better view.
It didn’t look all that interesting to him, mostly just a nearly unending stretch of brown and white. The white was a little startling, though. He’d heard about the area, however, and managed to dredge up the bit of trivia to mind.
“This is where the empire produces salt, isn’t it?”
“Righto, kiddo,” Kennick said with a laugh, “though it’s more accurate to say that this is where we mine salt. All that white you see below is nearly pure salt, just waiting to be processed for the table. It’s the remains of an ancient seabed that dried up long before we arrived.”
Brennan had only read about seas before, though he knew that they’d existed. The empire had lakes and a few small rivers, but a body of water grand enough to be called a “sea” was something out of children’s stories.
“What happened to it?”
“We don’t know,” Kennick answered. “There’re signs that there used to be a lot more water here than there is now, but it was lost somewhere, somehow. One more mystery, I’m afraid.”
“Since I left the palace, I seem to be finding more and more of those, and fewer and fewer answers.”
“That’s ’cause you were taught the basics, which aren’t exactly lies, but they’re geared for general consumption. The empire doesn’t publish everything it doesn’t know, kid,” Kennick said. “I’m sure you’d have learned most of this eventually. Can’t imagine the emperor letting you slide, even if you weren’t the heir …”
Kennick hesitated, then grimaced. “Sorry, kid.”
Brennan sighed, but he didn’t feel like making a big deal about it. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not the heir, and I hope never to be. My brother would have done the job well, but Lydia … I think she was born for it.”
“I hope you’re right,” Kennick said honestly. “I really hope you’re right.”
They glided lower over the flats for a while before Kennick had Brennan deploy the sails and bring them back around.
CHAPTER 19
William Everett stood on the deck of the cruiser, one of the largest skimmers ever built, and looked out over the thick layer of clouds moving in. So far they’d had little luck tracking down the Andros Pak and her erstwhile captain, but now it was only a matter of time.
Corian was on the move as well, his eyes spreading out across the empire, and someone was going to locate the corsair sooner or later. William only hoped that it would be the loyalists and not Corian’s thugs.
“Commander Everett, sir.”
William turned and nodded to the attaché who’d stepped up behind him and straightened to attention. “News?”
“Yes, sir.” The attaché handed him a modular interface and returned instantly to attention.
William turned back to the rail, looking again at the clouds before he clipped the module into his own system and retrieved the secured message. It was a communiqué from one of his contacts, and for the first time in many weeks, William Everett smiled.
“Tell the captain we have a course and a destination.”
“Yes, sir!”
Corian scowled from the secure command deck of the Caleb Bar, his eyes on the myriad interface displays that circled him. So far the Andros Pak had remained undetected, and with it his key to securing his position among all the remaining sides of the conflict.
Having the Scourwind heirs under his control would end most of the infighting and secure the cooperation of the majority of the loyalist supporters. Few from those ranks actually cared about the heirs. They just preferred that an unbroken line of succession be maintained. It was partly tradition but also partly useful propaganda that kept the masses in check.
The heirs would also provide excellent figureheads to take any of the ire that his coming plans dredged up. A few years of running the peasants into the ground and he might just be able to do away with the Scourwinds and their name entirely.
First, however, he had to find them.
Mira Delsol.
The woman’s very name dripped with venom in his mind, as though even the thought of her was enough to cause injury. It was a name that seared his mind every time he felt a phantom pain in his missing leg and every time someone snuck up on his eyeless left side without him spotting them.
Corian would remember her name until the day he died; he had no doubt.
At every turn, it seemed, she was there to throw a stumbling block in his way. It was a perverse commentary on reality that one woman, no matter how competent, continually stood between him and his goals when armies had failed. He didn’t know if it were entirely intentional, couldn’t see how it could possibly be intentional, but Corian somehow knew that, intentional or not, he and Delsol had unfinished business to attend to.
Unfortunately, while his spies and informants had been unable to locate Delsol and her blasted corsair, they had found out that there was a new gathering of loyalist forces being marshaled.
He wasn’t particularly concerned. Thus far the loyalists had started off weak and grown only weaker and more disorganized, but it was yet another distraction.
He had to find her, then destroy this latest gathering, and once and for all locate the center of their organization, such as it was, and end it.
The Andros was cruising a little over four hundred miles per hour just below the second wind layer as Mira stepped on deck and nodded to the officer of the watch. He nodded back and stepped aside from the wheel as she took his place.
Strictly speaking, the Andros hardly needed a hand on the wheel. The ship was quite capable of cruising the winds autonomously, so long as they were settled into one of the three main jet streams that roared over the empire. In between those zones, however, you could find more efficient winds for the job, but they could also be less predictable and, for those times, a hand on the wheel was not merely a good idea but a necessary one.
More than that, though, it was custom to have someone at the helm and both a duty and a pleasure to stand watch on a ship in flight.
Mira herself preferred to command from the open bridge, looking forward over the decks and to the sails as they filled the sky above or below the lifting body of the ship. At their current altitude the temperature was chilled, but few people needed more than a light breather and some warm clothes to walk the decks, and she needed even less. Only in the very high atmo did Mira need a breather; part of her training with the Cadre and in mastering her Armati allowed her to more efficiently process oxygen than most.
It was a useful skill, but one a Cadre member and most knights could pull off. Her personal best for functioning entirely without oxygen was almost sixteen minutes, and it was far from the absolute record.
A record held by a civilian, no less.
“Skipper,” Gaston said as he walked over.
The engineer was wearing a light breather and heavy clothes and still looked rather uncomfortable in the lighter atmo they were flying through.
“What is it, Gas?” Mira asked, half smiling as she brought her mind back to the present.
“We’ve an offer on some of the items we pulled from the cache and depot,” Gaston said. “Came through loyalist channels.”