… hills. Not very big hills, but big enough. Anton watched the clump of trees on the hill in front of them grow rapidly nearer. It would be a very near thing, but he thought they might just…
Another loud tearing sound. The hole in the envelope grew larger. The airship lurched downward and twisted, and the tip of a towering pine, the tallest tree on the hilltop, tore through the side of the gondola like a blunt knife. The impact threw Anton forward; only a frantic grab at the rigging saved him from being tossed out.
In the stern, the tip of the pine slammed into the Professor’s left leg. Anton heard the bone break, a sickening sound, then the wind flowing over the hill tossed the airship skyward again, ripping the tree free of the gondola.
The Professor dropped to the bottom of the gondola, eyes wide with shock. Anton scrambled toward him. The burner continued to roar, but Anton knew it couldn’t last much longer. At the Professor’s side, he peered out through the splintered hole in the wickerwork. Forest, a river… a road? A house? “Professor, there are people down there!”
The Professor’s eyes, which had closed, fluttered open. “Inhabitants? Inside the Anomaly?” He tried to roll over and look, but groaned with pain and flopped back. A sheen of sweat covered his white face.
“Maybe they can help us!”
The Professor closed his eyes. “If the gas won’t lift us and the ballast is gone, lad, no one can help us but God.” He coughed and smiled weakly. “Too bad I don’t believe in Him.”
The torch flared hugely and went out. The Professor’s eyes fluttered open, and he looked up at the envelope’s torn blue silk. “It appears He doesn’t believe in me, either,” he said softly.
With the roaring of the burner gone, the only sounds Anton could hear were the creaking of ropes and the rush of wind in the treetops below… and not very far below, at that. “Hold on, Professor,” he said desperately. “I think we’re almost down.” He guided the Professor’s hands to one of the rope-loop handholds in the gondola wall and seized one himself. He closed his eyes. “Any second now.. .”
Ten seconds passed. Twenty. And then…
They struck.
Crunching, tearing, ripping sounds; tumbling, no up or down; a flash of green, then white; violent blows to his body; a horrible stabbing pain in his leg… it all happened in an instant.
For a timeless period, nothing… and then Anton abruptly opened his eyes to find himself hanging headdown, tangled in ropes, six feet above the snowy ground. The gondola hung upside down above him. The burner had ripped out of it and lay steaming in the snow. Folds of blue silk hung like a stage curtain all around.
Something dropped past his nose. Where it struck the ground, the snow turned red. As he watched, another red drop fell, then another. It took him a long, dazed moment to realize the drops were blood… his blood.
He felt suddenly dizzy and sick and swallowed hard, fighting not to vomit yet again. “Professor?” he called weakly, but heard no answer.
Instead he heard footsteps, crunching through the snow, coming nearer at a run. And then a girl appeared beneath him. She wore an enormous fur coat, its hood thrown back to reveal tumbling curls of dark brown hair. Her eyes, just as dark, peered up at him from a pale, heart-shaped face. She said something to him. It sounded like a question, but he couldn’t quite understand the words…
“I need… help…” he said, and then promptly threw up all over her. The retching seemed to tear something loose inside him, and agonizing pain bludgeoned him once more into darkness.
Brenna gaped at the… thing… that had appeared from nowhere in the ragged gray sky. It was a huge bag of blue cloth, shaped like a loaf of bread, with a round opening at the bottom. A kind of giant wicker basket, badly broken, hung from it on ropes, and as it swept away from her, she glimpsed a white face inside that basket. A tall chimney rose from something like a heating stove in the center of the basket, but instead of belching smoke, it shot a roaring tongue of blue flame, like the manor’s Magefire, into the interior of the blue loaf-shape, lighting it up like a lantern but somehow not setting it on fire. At the back something like an overgrown version of a child’s whirligig spun lazily.
She took all of that in in an instant as the thing shot past. She heard shouts from inside the basket-there had to be a second passenger she couldn’t see-and then, suddenly, the fire turned orange and went out. For a few seconds the thing flew down the slope in eerie silence, lower and lower…
… and then it crashed into the forest at the bottom of the hill.
The big blue loaf-shape, which she now realized was made of cloth, collapsed in on itself. The basket upended. The Magefire-like burner ripped free with a tremendous noise and smashed into the ground, releasing a huge cloud of steam that obscured everything even before the blue cloth settled over the scene like a shroud. Yet even as the thin fabric drifted into place, Brenna was scrambling down the slope as fast as she could. There had been people in that basket. They must be hurt… or worse.
But even with that horrible thought in her head, another part of her jumped up and down like a little girl at her first Moon Ball. They were flying! she thought. Like birds… well, like dandelion seeds, anyway. But still, they were flying!
No one that she had ever heard of-not Lord Falk, not First Mage Tagaza, not even the First Twelve-had ever been able to use magic to fly. I’d give half my life to fly like that, she thought. Fly right out of Falk Manor. Fly right over the Great Barrier, even…
Over the Barrier…
Could it be…?
The possibility, if it were a possibility, both thrilled and horrified her. If people from outside the Barrier could fly over it, then Brenna’s whole world-the whole kingdom of Evrenfels!-was about to change forever.
All this time she had been hurrying down the slope, slipping and half-falling more than once, catching herself with her hands, sliding a few feet, then running once again. Ahead she could see the blue tentlike canopy the loaf-shape had made as it deflated and settled over the treetops. A confused heap of metal, ropes, and crates lay beneath it. She pushed through the undergrowth and cautiously stepped under the hanging fabric. She looked up to see a young man, her own age or slightly younger, tangled in a mass of ropes like a fish in a net. Blood dripped from him, flowing steadily from a hole in his leg. It wasn’t spurting, though-she knew enough to know that would have quickly meant his death. Punctured the muscle but no major blood vessels, she though clinically, pushing the horror of the blood and the wound into the back of her mind by concentrating on what her tutor, Peska, had taught her of anatomy. He might have a permanent limp.
His eyes were open. He was looking at her, though he seemed to be having some trouble focusing.
She opened her mouth, not sure what to say to him. She didn’t even know if he spoke her language. Maybe that was why what actually came out was quite possibly the most inane thing she had ever said to another human being. “Are you all right?”
He didn’t seem to understand her. He said something, his voice a hoarse croak-and then he groaned, his eyes rolled back, his mouth opened, and bloody vomit poured down on her head.
She ducked at the last instant to keep it out of her face, but she felt the hot stickiness foul her hair and dribble down the back of her neck. Screaming, she threw herself backward and promptly tripped over something in the snow.
When she saw what it was, she spun away and threw up her own breakfast.
The glazed, open eyes of the body on the ground watched her dispassionately, the viscera and pooled blood that had spilled from the enormous gash in its belly still steaming in the cold air.
After several minutes of cleansing her mouth and hair with snow, she regained her composure enough to go back under the blue canopy and look up at the surviving passenger of the… flying device.