Guild Wars_ Edge of Destiny - J. Robert King [14]
Snaff laughed easily. “I appreciate my apprentice. I don’t idolize her. Good luck with your test flight! Just let us pass before you launch.”
Eir murmured, “Test flight?”
“Test crash, more likely. Master Klab’s been working for two years on that puffball—made of milkweed dander and butterfly scales and a whole lot of hastily cobbled spells. Won’t fly, I assure you. But the fellow knows how to glad-hand. He never lacks for a krewe or investors.”
“On three!” came a shout from above. “One . . . two . . .”
“Let’s run,” Snaff advised, and he and Zojja did, which still amounted to only a fast walk for Eir and Garm.
“Three!”
A loud series of pops sounded on the stone slope, sending a blast wave of air across the dandelion puffball. Hundreds of silken sacks inflated, and the thing lifted off the stone slope. The puffball broke free, rising into the air like a floating balloon. At its center, Master Klab hooted excitedly in his harness.
“Heigh-ho, Master Snaff! Running from true genius, are we? Whenever there’s something clever going on, you’re always heading in the opposite direction!”
The little gray master was looking slightly green as he stopped to stare upward at the flying puffball. He muttered, “I’ll never hear the end of it.”
Just then, the puffball rose above the city, where a breeze dragged it suddenly away.
Master Klab shouted to his krewe, “Bring the skyhooks! The skyhooks!”
Eir sniffed, “Maybe you just did hear the end of it.”
“You’re a good lass.”
Eir huffed. “Um, can we get on with setting this thing down?”
“Ah, yes, that. Well—see that small ziggurat down there?” Snaff pointed toward the bowels of the city, at what looked like a temple missing its top. “Home, sweet home!”
They descended a series of switchback stairs and at last arrived at Snaff’s ziggurat.
He piped happily, “Now it’s just up the side, down some stairs, and we’ll be in my laboratory.”
“Good,” Eir said with relief.
Except that the stairs were made for asuran feet. Eir struggled up them to reach the peak of the temple—or what used to be the peak. The top had apparently been blown off by a violent blast, with a single staircase descending into the heart of the ziggurat.
Panting, Eir paused at the brink of the crater and said, “An experiment gone awry?”
Snaff pursed his lips. “No. Why do you ask?”
“I mean, the crater.”
He shrugged. “It’s called a skylight. Saves on candles. Come along!” He scuttled down the stairs into the darkness, with Zojja close behind.
Even Garm pushed past Eir, apparently to make certain this wasn’t a trap. He loped down into the shadows, plunging into a cool chamber with ornately carved walls, tiled floors, and trapezoidal stone tables arrayed across them. Much of the light in the space came through the “skylight,” though some also came from magic lanterns that hung from great chains and sent a bluish glow down over everything. Light also leaked from great vials and beakers and tubes on the tabletops, and from strange mechanical contraptions all around.
“Oh, much cooler!” sighed Eir as she reached the floor. “Where should I put this?”
“Here,” said Snaff, standing beside a table where one of the contraptions sprawled. “What an exciting day!”
Eir ambled over to the table and eased the heavy block down.
“No. Lay it down. . . . Yes. On its back. Right, but shove it up against this mechanism here. . . . Excellent!” he proclaimed, dragging a great red stone from his pocket and setting it on the forehead of the statue.
The stone sank into the forehead, embedding itself and pulsing to life.
“Wonderful! Wonderful!” Snaff cried.
Metal loops rose from the magical creation that lay there, clamping down on the shoulders of the bust and forming a collar. The machine groaned, pitched forward, and sat up—a towering golem with the head of Zojja.
THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY
The moment before the axe-rifles fired, Logan Thackeray swept his hand out in a fan. A blue aura bled