The Heavenly Host (Demons of Astlan Book 2) Page 26

  They passed through the red curtains to come on board the bridge. “Permission to come on the bridge?” Gastropé asked the people already there. Gnorbert had told them that protocol dictated that one ask permission before coming up onto the bridge. The idea was that the bridge was the main control center for the ship and that if the situation was difficult, too many people on the deck of the bridge could get in the way. Thus, they stood inside the doorway at the base of stairs that led up to the bridge room.

  “Permission granted,” replied Aêthêal, the Nimbus’s first mate. Aêthêal was a very striking, an amazingly tall woman aetós. They had been introduced to her topside before descending into the ship. She was standing next to Trevin and a tall rialto alfar in a long trench coat with brocaded sleeves. Maelen and Elrose were already on the bridge, as were numerous crewmembers in uniform.

  Trevin stepped forward. “Gastropé, Jenn, may I introduce our captain, Xavier Ehéarellis.” She swept her arm back slightly to indicate the alfar in the trench coat.

  Gastropé and Jenn both nodded their heads to the captain, who nodded politely back.

  “A pleasure to welcome you aboard the Nimbus, my new friends.” The captain smiled politely at the two young wizards. As he said this, a deep bass bell sounded on the bridge.

  “Excellent,” the captain said to Jenn and Gastropé. “You have arrived on the bridge just as we’ve reached sufficient altitude to clear the Rings.”

  Aêthêal suddenly reached up above her head and pulled a hose out of a previously hidden compartment in the ceiling. The hose had what looked like a funnel on the lower end. The upper end was not visible, as it was somewhere in the compartment. She placed the funnel near her mouth and started speaking. “All hands!” Jenn jumped slightly as the first mate’s voice reverberated around them quite loudly. “We have reached Grove departure altitude. All stations are hereby elevated to Defensive Configuration 4. Prepare for departure!”

  “Defensive Configuration 4?” Maelen asked Trevin.

  The Enchantress smiled. “We have six levels of alert on our ships ranging from Configuration 5, which is routine operations, to 2, which is battle stations. Level 1 is in battle; 0 is abandon ship. We hope to never get to that level.” Trevin shuddered lightly. “The ship’s armoring and defensive spells are also keyed to these levels. At Configuration 5 we have no defenses raised other than some repulsion spells for birds and insects; Configuration 4 activates our base level of shielding for potentially hostile territory.”

  “Exiting the Grove is going into potentially hostile territory?” Elrose asked.

  Trevin chuckled. “In the days of the Anilords, we left at either Configuration 3 or 2.” She shook her head as if remembering great unpleasantness. “Today Astlan is quite safe, but remember we are multi-dimensional here so we are crossing more than just a border to Astlan; it’s a single border between the Grove and all Grove-connected realms, some of which are more hostile than Astlan.” Trevin shrugged. “And while we don’t expect any problems, you never know who might want to take a pot shot at us. Or what happens if we stumble onto… say… I don’t know, an orc hunting party on dragonback?”

  “Orcs on dragons?” Gastropé croaked out.

  “It happens. Obviously, dragons like mountains, and what better mountains are there than those around the Grove? Further, there are multiple tribes of orcs that use trained dragons as mounts to swoop down and ransack and pillage villagers. Nightmarish for the victims, I can assure you.” Trevin shook her head.

  “Of course, we would come in at too high an altitude for them to immediately attack us, but we don’t typically maintain this altitude; we tend to go lower, since higher altitudes use up more of the ship’s reserves, and we can’t replenish breathing air and so on.” Trevin smiled and waved towards the front of the room and to a railing at the edge of the bridge’s deck. “Moving up here, you can see where we are going.” On the other side of the railing was a very large mirror, or glass lens—Jenn was not sure which, really. It looked like a large window, but given its location in the cloudship, it could not be.

  Through this lens, mirror or window was a breathtaking view towards the front of the cloudship and the incredible ranges of mountains they were preparing to pass over. “I think you’ll find the view quite breathtaking. I always do.”

  Jenn shook her head in awe; she had never imagined being this high up, Astlan stretching out at her feet, viewing the tops of the insane mountain ranges around the Grove. She could not even really make out much of the detail of the land below, they were so high. Was it her imagination or could she actually see the curve of the planet? It was one thing to intellectually know that your planet was a sphere despite the fact it seemed flat; it was quite another to actually see it for oneself.

  “Oh, my goddess…” Gastropé murmured as he came up beside her.

  Maelen made a whooshing noise. “I can See many things, but this is one I have never seen, or Seen, before.”

  Elrose, standing next to Trevin, asked, “So how high are we?”

  Trevin glanced over to a sidewall, where there was what appeared to be a mirror with colored writing on it. “We are currently at 61,350 feet above sea level, or 3.873 leagues; and roughly 55,000 feet above the floor of the Grove, or 3.47 leagues.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but normal clouds never get that high, do they?” Elrose asked.

  Trevin smiled. “You are correct, my fellow Enchanter. The highest natural clouds, which, as a Sorcerer, you know are mainly ice particles rather than actual air, have a maximum altitude of about three leagues. However, this is no natural cloud by any means. You recall my earlier comments about pressurization and how I just mentioned that traveling at high altitudes like this requires significant resources?”

  The group nodded.

  “We are funneling a fair bit of mana into keeping the cloud stable at this point.” She pointed at several crew members gathered around desks with various gems and mirrors on them. “Those crew members are monitoring the mana flows, and are in constant communication with Gnorbert in the engine room.”

  “Engine room?” Maelen asked. “I’m not sure I understand the term. An engine is an automaton that does work of various sorts, so how can a room be an engine?”

  Trevin chuckled. “That’s the phrase for it; it is more precisely a very large room filled with a great number of different magical engines which perform the hundreds of tasks necessary for all of this”—she gestured around the cloud expansively—“to work.” She smiled and then added, “If you manage to get a look inside one of those flying ships of the Oorstemothians, you will find that they too have ‘engine rooms.’ ” Trevin had a small gleam in her eyes. “However, they have nowhere near as many engines as we have. For one thing, they use mundane materials—wood and non-ferrous metals—in their flying ships, rather than amorphous clouds.”

  “That would seem a bit easier,” Elrose noted.

  “True, but they power them primarily by geomancy and then use aeromastery with the sails for propulsion. This limits their altitude; they cannot get that far from the ground, and being open vessels, they cannot adjust atmospheric pressure. They have a maximum altitude of less than two leagues above whatever altitude the ground is.”

  “But if the mountains rise in altitude, they could repel against that and still climb over the mountains.” Elrose pointed to the large mountains they were now passing over. “I thought you said the Oorstemothians could not scale them?”

  Trevin smiled. “In theory, you would be correct, but they cannot pressurize their ships, so they would run out of air. However, perhaps they could create special suits. The bigger problem is that of propulsion up and down the mountainside. The steepness presents their method with serious problems. Their ability to climb in altitude decreases with the incline of the ground they are traveling above.” Trevin grinned with delight while explaining this. “In other words, geomantic lift works perpendicular to the ground. Steep verticals mean they are pushin
g away from the mountain horizontally. They can correct for that, but they lose climbing capability as the slope becomes infinite. If a mountain slope were completely vertical, up and down, they would have nothing to push off of that would take them up. Add to that the horribly unpredictable winds around such tall mountains and they need incredibly powerful aeromastery to control those winds, fill the sails and not get the ship ripped to pieces.”

  Trevin leaned back against the railing. “I wish balling wizardry had always been what it is today; I would love to have shown you their attempts to serve notice on the Grove four hundred or so years ago. It was most amusing—for us, at least.” She grinned wickedly.

  “So how high could the Nimbus go?” Jenn asked Trevin.

  Trevin made a small grimace as she thought. “Well, technically, it’s only limited by how much mana we have to burn. It’s that resource question again.”

  “So could you travel to either of the moons?” Jenn asked.

  “I’m not at all sure why we would want to do that,” Trevin said with a shrug, “but if we could figure out how to get enough mana, then probably. I suppose I have never really thought about it. There is nothing of interest on either of the moons, so I see no point in going there. It would also take a really long time.”

  Elrose frowned. “The air would be too thin, so how would you move without air?”

  “Well the bigger issue is keeping the cloud and what air we have together; however, we can already do that at this high an altitude. Technically, in the absence of air there is vacuos, which can be manipulated by enchantment, as you know. But it would be slow going. However, I am sure Gnorbert could come up with something. It is an interesting thought, I suppose; an excellent theoretical exercise. Hmm.” Trevin was lost in thought for a moment. “Yes, it would be tricky. I am probably going to be thinking about it all night, unable to sleep.” She made a mock stern face at Elrose. “Thank you for sticking that in my head.” She shook her head. “Fortunately, it’s one exercise we won’t ever have to do for real.”

  Trevin turned slightly to smile at Gastropé. “Maybe I’ll need to figure out something else to keep me occupied tonight?” Gastropé gave her a small, tight grin, presumably being polite.

  Jenn shook her head at the ancient wizard’s more-than-obvious designs on poor Gastropé. She glanced again at the woman’s way-too-revealing clothes. At least she did not have anything to worry about. Gastropé would never fall for Trevin; she was obviously way over a hundred. An image of the woman from last night, dancing on the satyr’s lap, suddenly resurfaced in her mind. She had forgotten that. For some reason, at the bacchanalia Trevin had appeared young and stunningly gorgeous!

  How could that be? How drunk had Jenn been? Did she have something to worry about? Wait— what was she thinking? She had no interest in Gastropé, so why was she suddenly worried that Trevin might steal him away or something? It was not any of Jenn’s business! If the two wanted to... ugh, she did not want to think about that. Jenn closed her eyes for a brief moment to get a grip on herself. It was just her naturally competitive nature getting the better of her. She had seen Trevin’s advances and her competitive streak had just kicked in, creating an artificial interest in Gastropé out of a sense of competition. She did this sort of thing all the time. She was sure it was only the fact that Lenamare was so insufferable that Jehenna’s interest in him had not made her competitive.

  Jenn shuddered. She did not like where this was going; she needed to change gears. She had nothing remotely like any interest whatsoever in Jehenna’s and Lenamare’s personal lives. So why should she care about Gastropé? Yes, he was clearly much more handsome, and much more pleasant—actually quite agreeable. Or at least he was after he stopped trying to kill her. Of course, she had easily beaten him on that front. That was satisfying, from a competitive point of view. Not that he was a slouch in the magic department; he had been really good on the ship fighting the Oorstemothians, and to be honest she had learned some good tricks of combat magic from him.

  Oddly, he had turned out to be a decent friend. Really one of her better ones, other than Rex and Alvea. Of course, Rex was dead and Alvea was now being harangued by Jehenna. Maybe that was it: Trevin’s advances on Gastropé bothered her because they were friends and she recognized that involvement with Trevin was not in his best interests. Yes, that made a lot of sense, Jenn realized.

  “Don’t you think, Jenn?” Gastropé asked her.

  “What?” Jenn replied, realizing she had zoned out the conversation around her. She had no idea what he had asked her. “Sorry, I got lost in my own thoughts staring out this… what exactly is it?” She turned her head to Trevin.

  Trevin grinned. “It’s a sympathetic lens. We have lenses stationed at multiple points around the ship and we can tune this big lens to any of those lenses and see what we would see through them. Not completely different from mirrors. Actually simpler, in fact.”

  “Neat!” Gastropé said.

  “Indeed,” Maelen seconded. “I have seen an amazing number of new things on this short adventure so far. It’s always nice to find new things at my age.”

  Trevin chuckled. “Wait until you get to be my age. I’m almost hoping we actually find this goddess.”

  “There are some new things I’m not so sure I need,” Elrose replied drily.

  Chapter 94

  “Neat!” Rupert exclaimed.

  “What the hell are they doing?” Reggie asked.

  The group had just come over a ridge after a brief walk from the boom tunnel. Boggy and Tizzy had decided that the first stop on their tour of the Abyss would be some place called “Hellsprings Eternal.” Tom had noticed the smell of sulfur immediately upon exiting the boom tunnel. Reggie and Talarius both took a few extra moments to notice it because they were reeling from the boom of the boom tunnel.

  They had trudged up a well-worn path in long-ago-solidified lava rock to gaze into a valley with wide molten lava streams flowing out of a large crater about a thousand feet upstream of them. There were numerous shanties and other odd buildings lining the valley. However, what had gotten Reggie’s attention was the fact that the valley was populated with quite a few demons of various shapes and sizes engaged in strange behavior.

  There were quite a few that seemed to be wading, albeit slowly, in the molten lava streams. Others were lying on glowing red rocks near the lava flows as if they were sunning on a beach. About four hundred feet away, there was a group of demons apparently submerged to their necks in a pool of glowing hot, molten lava, just chatting away.

  “Welcome to Hellsprings Eternal!” Boggy said, waving his hands broadly to announce the place.

  “I haven’t been here in at least a century,” Antefalken said. “I have to admit, after the panic of that stupid spell and our near-permanent death experience at the hands of our new colleague” —he gestured towards Talarius—“a day at the spa sounds wonderful.” He patted his pocket. “The day is on me! If anyone wants a massage or other spa treatment, or just some refreshing blood wine or Denubian Choco-CoffeeTM, just let me know!”

  Boggy grinned. “That’s mighty demonly of you, Anty!” He gestured to the lava streams. “There’s no charge for dunking in the lava flows or just lying on the shores. The services are all at the various huts in the valley and they all list their prices. And all prices include tax.”

  “Tax?” Reggie asked. “Who is charging tax?”

  “Moloch,” Antefalken replied. “He’s the demon prince that owns this part of the Abyss. He charges the vendors a tax on all sales and services. It’s actually not that bad of a tax, as such things go, only fifteen percent.”

  “That’s mighty reasonable,” Tizzy said. “I don’t remember him being all that reasonable, though.”

  Boggy shook his head. “That’s because you were sleeping with his daughter.”

  “Oh, right. Forgot about that.” Tizzy shrugged. “But technically, neither of us was sleeping…” Tizzy grinned lecherously. “If you know
what I mean.” He winked very broadly.

  “What do you mean?” Rupert asked.

  Boggy slapped his head. “Now see what you’ve done—you’ve opened Pandora’s box with the boy.”

  “That’s right! I had forgotten. Her name was Pandora, and I certainly opened her box… that was why Moloch was so mad at me. The young thing was only a couple centuries old when we ‘slept’ together.”

  “I’m confused… I thought you said you didn’t sleep with her,” Rupert said.

  Tom coughed. “Technically, Rupert, demons don’t need to sleep unless they are hurt. So when Tizzy says they were not sleeping together, he just meant they were spending down time together.”

  “We got down, all right.” Tizzy chuckled.

  “You aren’t helping!” Boggy punched Tizzy in his upper left arm. “Just let it drop.”

  “Argh, all right.” Tizzy frowned at Boggy. He then quickly rotated to Talarius. “You up for a dip in the lava, Paladin?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? I. Am. Not. A. Paladin,” Talarius told Tizzy through obviously clenched teeth.

  “Yeah, yeah. You’re one of those knights with a rampant body part,” Tizzy said.

  Talarius clenched his mailed fists in frustration but said nothing.

  “We are here to relax and show our guest a good time. So no baiting him, okay?” Tom scolded Tizzy.

  Tizzy glanced at Tom in annoyance. “You know, you really can be a party pooper.”

  “We want to show Talarius that demons are people too. We like to laugh and play and get drunk, just like people, and there are good demons and bad demons,” Tom reminded everyone.