Page 53 of The Affair of the Mysterious Letter
At mention of the pirates, I stared a moment at the crumpled remains of their captain. “How did he manage it?” I enquired. “They travelled swiftly, and through the air, and must have done so with nothing more than they have about them now.”
“They catch the wind in knots, then unleash it where useful. There’s a sort of religious aspect but, like most religion, I suspect it’s mostly for show.”
Mr. Ngoie looked down at me. “This is another terrible idea. The sky-pirates stay in these mountains for a reason.”
“You say that,” drawled Ms. Haas, “but it’s always struck me as evidence of a tremendous lack of vision.”
“So we could fly a storm to Vedunia?” I endeavoured not to sound too hopeful.
To which Mr. Ngoie answered “no” and Ms. Haas, looking somewhat more engaged than she hitherto had, answered “possibly” at the same moment.
“Shaharazad,” Mr. Ngoie continued, “even you would not be foolish enough to try to reverse engineer stolen magic and put it to a purpose for which it was never intended.”
She gave him a haughty look. “I’m sorry, have we met? I’m exactly foolish enough to try to reverse engineer stolen magic and put it to a purpose for which it was never intended. And to think I didn’t want to come on this journey.”
With frankly unbecoming enthusiasm, Ms. Haas bounded over to the mangled corpse of the pirate captain and began rifling about his person.
“It... it was not my intent,” I said hastily, “to suggest that you do anything reckless. To rescue Miss Beck would be honourable, but I’m not at all certain this is an appropriate course of action.”
Ms. Haas was no longer listening. She had retrieved from the body a skein of knotted cord, which she now inspected with some interest. “Ah,” she murmured. “Of course. I believe if I...” She teased one of the knots apart. The moment she began, I was conscious of a gathering chill, which grew deeper and more biting as she worked.
“Ms. Haas, I really think—” I got no further for, with the thread untied, a veritable gale swept across the mountainside, churning the snow into blinding flurries and snatching the breath from my lips. Then, all at once, the wind was gone as Ms. Haas retied the rope with commendable dexterity.
“How interesting.” She tried another, and the skies darkened, bombarding us with rain that froze on contact. “Don’t worry, I’m getting the hang of this.”
A perfect bolt of forked lightning speared from the sky and struck the head of Mr. Ngoie’s vast suit of mechanical armour, through which it was channelled harmlessly into the earth. Still, he did not seem best pleased. “You have not got the hang of it.”
There was a brief shower of hail, a gust of surprisingly warm air, and then the clouds dispersed.
“No, no,” said Ms. Haas briskly. “I definitely have. Come, Wyndham. To Vedunia.”
Having inadvertently encouraged her towards this course ofaction, I felt it would be both churlish and pointless to resist it now. Climbing to my feet, I brushed off the snow and joined her.
“I take it you won’t be coming with us,” I asked Mr. Ngoie.
Although the metallic face of the armoured statue was motionless, the look he gave me with it was staggeringly expressive. “No. Definitely not.”
“And you will be able to return safely to Khelathra-Ven?”
“More certainly than you will.”
Ms. Haas waved the cord impatiently. “Are you two finished? You do remember we’re trying to save an innocent woman’s life?”
Without giving either of us time to reply, she took three knots between her fingers and held them in a convoluted pattern. Gradually she began to draw them apart. The winds rose up around us and, rather more gently than I had feared, lifted us skywards.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Granny Liesl
Throughout my (thoughI say so myself) not uneventful life I have travelled by a bewildering variety of conveyances, but nothing has quite reached the unadulterated clarity of flying on a storm. Although at the time I was not wholly able to appreciate it, owing to my keen awareness of the possibility that we might at any moment plummet to our ignominious deaths. In retrospect, however, and secure in the knowledge of my survival, I look back with fondness on the journey. There was a great sense of liberty in moving swiftly, and unsupported, through the open air, unconstrained by propriety, society, or gravity.
We traversed the entire territory of Lothringar in record time and without incident, rolling hills and placid lakes sweeping beneath us at incredible speed. We soared above red-roofed towns with cobbled streets and, wary of the possibility of countersorcery against aerial incursion, skirted well clear of the impossibly delicate white palaces that nestled in the forests. As morning broke and we crossed the border into Nivale, I became increasingly aware that the winds around us were growing erratic.
Rain began to fall in intermittent bursts, and at least twice I saw lightning sheet from Ms. Haas’s fingertips. Though I had not at that time known her long, I had already seen that my companion was skilledat concealing the degree to which her supernatural endeavours taxed her strength, will, and vitality. But given the ever-growing turbulence of our flight, I was forced to conclude that she was, indeed, feeling the strain quite acutely. I could only hope that our passage, marked as it now was by gale-force winds, a torrential downpour, and occasional thunderbolts, did not overly distress the sensibilities or damage the property of those Nivalians over whom we flew.
As the wooded vale that sheltered the city of Vedunia came into view, we began to lose height rapidly. What her sudden loss of control over the wind said about my companion’s state of health I was not sure, and though I am ashamed to confess it, in the moment, my more pressing concern was the rapid approach of the ground. Some hundreds of feet from the forest floor, the winds failed entirely and we responded as might any pair of flightless organisms finding themselves abruptly unsupported and well above the treetops. That is to say, we plummeted earthwards, our garments and hair whipping about us as the wind (a phenomenon my more learned friends inform me was, in fact, caused by the air remaining motionless while we passed through it) grew ever stronger and the ground grew ever closer.
By some miracle of mental fortitude, Ms. Haas had just the wherewithal to break the last knot on her cord, bringing forth one final updraught, which retarded our descent sufficiently for us to at least reach the canopy. From there, we plunged rather ingloriously through a curtain of pine needles before tumbling to the moss below.
