Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [58]
Ignoring the bugs that scurried over my boots, trying to ignore the agony of my overextended body, I bent and looked through the hole. There was a fall of seven or eight feet to what looked like solid earth. I stepped through the opening and dropped, landing in a crouch with the scrunch of candle-bugs under my feet. Tris swarmed all around, their light delineating a tunnel some seven feet high by four across.
It was hot here below ground, very hot, and as my skin grew clammy with sweat I wondered if it was this unusual heat that fed the growth of the jungle above. It didn’t matter really.
The bandages on my arm began to itch horribly and, unable to stand it longer, I peeled them off to gaze at fresh, pink scars where bloody gouges had existed only a few days before. My leg was the same underneath its wrapping of cloth. I wondered how much of it was truly the moths, and how much the magic of Ahrethane the efrinore.
For the first time, then, I became aware that there had been a friendly...presence accompanying me through the forest. It was gone now, the voice in the tree above having been its last and most powerful manifestation. Ahrethane had told me, she could not go “below.” Even in spirit, it seemed. But if I was on my own again now, it had been she who had gotten me here. She and her moths.
“Thank you,” I whispered into the air, though I had no idea if she would ever hear or know what I had said. Then I turned back to the task at hand.
There was only one way to go along the tunnel where I stood, and within fifty paces I began to pick out the gleam of brighter lights ahead that could not have been made by any number of tris. For some reason that fact made my heart pound. I slowed, dropping a hand to my sword for comfort, and in another twenty steps reached a turn in the passageway and rounded it to see that the brightness did indeed provide a reason for fear.
I found myself on a ledge overlooking a cavern beneath the earth that was several hundred yards across and perhaps a third of that in height. Most of it was shadowed, with the dark mouths of tunnels leading off in every direction. Above each tunnel I saw a glyph painted in white on the stone, each different, their twisted shapes flickering in the light of torches that gleamed beside them in brackets of iron.
But it was not the glyphs or the weak glow of the torches that held my attention. In the center of the cavern, wreathed in a pale gray mist and limned by a brilliant fluorescent light that shone from some kind of hanging globes, there loomed a monstrous thing. By its design, it was clearly an airship—one unlike any that had been seen before in Taleran skies. It was huge.
The biggest battleship in the Nyshphalian navy was about two hundred feet long. This beast added another fifty feet to that length. The great vessel’s hull was armored with plate that would block any trebuchet stone, turn any ballista arrow. And there were no masts or sails, only giant screws, propellers really, jutting from the ship’s aft end. Through gaps in the armor at the stern I saw what could be none other than massive steam engines, and worst of all was the row of ports along the side from which protruded the mouths of cannon.
Engines! Cannon!
Immediately my thoughts went to...Bryce.
Gunpowder had been unknown on Talera until recently. I was convinced of that from my readings in the planet’s history. It had been unknown. Until Bryce and I arrived.
I remembered the gunpowder-filled crossbow quarrels that Diken Graye had used against Rannon’s flyer—had it been barely a week ago? I had not thought of it before now, but Bryce knew the formula for gunpowder. So did I. You mixed three-quarters saltpetre with a bit of charcoal and sulphur. As boys we’d made our own firecrackers. And “I” hadn’t shared the formula with anyone. Had Bryce? I began to think so.
As if cannon weren’t bad enough, my experiences with sea vessels on earth had shown me that steam-powered ships were faster and more maneuverable than sail-powered ones. This giant craft would