“Damn,” gasped Leonis. “Getting… real lightheaded.”
Jova was shaking Juniper. “Ignite already!”
Juniper nodded drunkenly, her chest rising and falling, and then inhaled raggedly and sat up.
One by one his companions did the same till at last only Naomi remained, her features pale, her hair soaked and plastered across her face, her whole body swaying and not just with the rocking of the ship.
“Naomi?” Scorio reached out to touch her shoulder. “Ignite!”
“Not… yet.” She gritted her teeth, clenched her eyes, and he saw her will herself to persist. “Not… yet.”
“That’s beautiful,” Lianshi said, rising carefully to her feet to gaze at the clouds. They rose and fell like a field of ivory boulders, lights flickering in their depths, columns rising here and there to meld with a soft, cottony overhead layer that occasionally broke to reveal the sun. It was an unearthly sight, surreal, and Scorio moved up beside her.
Lianshi grinned at him, took hold of his hand, and squeezed.
“Coal vortex up ahead,” called Ydrielle, voice stern. “Asses on benches. Hold on.”
“Vortex?” moaned Leonis.
Nobody spoke. Scorio reached out with his Heart but couldn’t “see” much farther than a dozen yards beyond the prow of the ship. Just how sensitive was Ydrielle to the mana fluctuations?
She called out sharp orders. Evelyn executed them with her hair and The Sloop yawed steeply to starboard. Everybody held on as the deck assumed a forty-five-degree angle.
Only for something to pull on them. Scorio felt the ship shudder and begin to slide. But instead of feeling terror as his stomach clenched up, he felt a thrill. He wanted to help, to leap in and take hold of the rigging, help reef the right sails and—but no. None of The Sloop’s sheets made any sense.
“Releasing Bronze,” whispered Ydrielle, her words just barely audible over the rising wind. Scorio strained to sense what happened below and was rewarded by seeing the bright glow of Bronze mana emerge like a great and supple stream of ruddy honey.
Only to be immediately caught up by Ydrielle’s will and layered back and forth just below their portside keel. The thick river was stretched thin, interlaced, and formed into a matrix whose repulsive effect on the ship countered the pull.
Scorio wiped the rain from his eyes and marveled. Ydrielle’s control was beyond masterful. He hadn’t even realized that kind of mana manipulation was possible. Suddenly his paddle technique seemed more than crude, it felt absurd; he’d never in a million years be able to manipulate mana so finely with his current approach.
Then he felt her throw a spiral of Bronze mana behind the ship itself, as elaborate as a spiderweb. It was a cone whose base was the stern, and just as the ship began to right itself Ydrielle collapsed the cone, slamming the outline into a flat disk that was flush with the ship’s rear.
The effect was like a giant booting the ship into high speed. The Sloop leaped forward like a startled deer and burst through the rising cloud cover, tearing itself free of the vortex’s pull.
Naomi groaned and fell off her bench, would have slid to the extent of her tether if Scorio hadn’t leaned down and snagged her arm.
The second they pulled free of the vortex, Ydrielle cut the Bronze mana flow, and Scorio even sensed her managing to draw a fraction of it back into the containers below deck.
“How is she doing that?” whispered Lianshi in awe.
“Almost there,” called Simeon reassuringly. “Naomi all right?”
Her eyelids were fluttering, her mouth working, but she was all but insensate. Scorio gave Simeon a rapid nod then hauled her up and off the deck across his lap.
“My favorite part,” said Dameon, casual and collected as if they were riding a pony trap. “Here we go.”
And they shot out over the edge of the Rain Wall at full speed, trailing a V-shaped wake of clouds behind them as the Farmlands broke into view half a mile below them.
Rainbow fragments were everywhere, wisps of cloud, and The Sloop began to sink into the ambient Copper.
But with the Wall behind them, the turbulence disappeared; their descent was a smooth glide into another world, an afternoon land of verdant fields and crimson barns, of glittering rivers that snaked back and forth and the occasional copse or massive boulder emerging from the land.
“Naomi?” Scorio helped her sit up. “You’re not going to want to miss this.”
“Hmm?”
He carefully pulled her sodden locks of black hair away from her face. “You with us?”
“I…” She blinked blearily, color slowly returning to her face. “I had this terrible dream…”
“It’s over now.”
Everybody was crowding at the railings, gazing out in wonder at the expanse of fields that gradated to tiny, mist-blue mountains that encompassed everything in a distant curve.
Naomi pressed her cheek against his chest. “I dreamt that you were gone, and everyone hated you, and I alone kept the faith…”
Scorio hesitated. She nuzzled against him, as if settling down to sleep, then inhaled deeply and froze.
A second later she came back to herself and stared up at him in a mixture of horror and mortification. She flailed and spilled out of his lap, crashed to the deck, got tangled up in her tether, and then righted herself with her unnatural agility.
“Hey, easy,” said Scorio, raising both palms.
Leonis was openly grinning. “Scorio’s lap that awful?”
She whipped around to scowl at him so fiercely his eyes widened and he drew back.
With immense dignity, she drew herself up and turned away from the amused stares only to catch sight at last of the Farmlands below.
“Oh,” she whispered.
Their descent was as sublimely peaceful as their crossing had been chaotic; they swooped down the outer rim of the storm wall and then leveled off abreast the clifftop edge from which the countless waterfalls tumbled.
Scorio stared in wonder at the caravans laboring up the encarved roads; at the crews laboring in the fields, little more than specks; at great saurian birds gliding below them, their wings leathery and rainbow-hued. He inhaled deeply of the rich, humid air, breathed in the scents of crops and loam, and couldn’t help but shiver with a primal vitality.
“We’re out over Hydra land here,” said Evelyn conversationally, still suspended in her web of hair but drawing closer. “We left on foot on the opposite side.”
Scorio nodded and raised his gaze. In the far, far distance, he thought he could make out the faintest of golden glimmers, a shadowed shape overhead. The Golden Circuit. Beyond them lay the tiny mountains, though they had to be huge to be visible from this distance.
“Maybe we’ll get out there one day,” said Evelyn softly. “The valleys. Each filled with ruins older than time and choked with delightful fiends just waiting to be harvested.”
Those Scorio recalled from the maps. Each valley was carved between the mountain chains that extended toward the Golden Circuit like spokes in a wagon wheel, with the outermost perimeter of the Plains completely enclosed by a final circular wall.
“There’s just so much to see.”
Evelyn laughed, the sound husky, and when he met her eyes he saw pity and something akin to fondness in their depths. “Oh, Scorio. How little you know. Live long enough and you’ll see such wonders that trifles such as the Golden Circuit and the Rain Wall will feel commonplace.”
“And you’ve left the Plains?”
“Sure have. Seen the Iron Weald and once—this was early on, when Jarisca our Imperator was still with us—we all traveled into the Telurian Band.” Evelyn’s expression turned nostalgic. “Someday soon we’ll return. All of us. And this time we won’t turn back, no matter what happens.”
Scorio gazed back out over the Farmlands, sought the floating fleck of glory that was one of the islands out over the Golden Circuit, and gave a grave nod of agreement. “No stopping till we reach the Pit.”