Royal Airs (21 page)

“I don’t know how
other
people know,” Kayle said. “But I can just tell. I am attuned to their essences.” He tapped his own chest. “Man of air and spirit.”

“You can tell, even with me?” Rafe said curiously. “Last time I was here, you didn’t even know I existed.”

“I perceive you now,” Kayle said grandly. “And I can read you as well as I read any other man. I can see you don’t always find it necessary to be honest, but you remain honorable. The two are often confused, but they’re hardly the same thing.”

Which Rafe thought was about as accurate an assessment as anyone had given him. “Well, I’ve already decided to trust
you
,” he said. “So here’s my money.”

It actually took about a half hour to complete a formal transaction which—despite his posturing—Kayle did have witnessed by some kind of official-looking flunky who behaved with a cool efficiency that seemed foreign to Kayle.

“Would you like to see the machinery you’re buying with your gold?” Kayle inquired once the banker type had left the office.

“Yes! Except—didn’t you say the flying car was still ten years away from production?”

Kayle made one of his frequent gestures, as if trying to sweep up useful words that would help him explain complex concepts. “Of course I did, but there are prototypes. There are experimental vehicles. No failures, only designs that taught us something, whether or not they worked.”

“Then let’s go.”

The experimental flying machines were housed in yet another factory, far enough from the bustling port that Kayle commandeered a small elaymotive and drove them there. He was a rapid and wholly terrifying chauffeur, apparently oblivious to the fact that there might be other vehicles—even people—on the road, but handling the car with such skill that he was able to steer past every potential calamity. Rafe was literally clutching the edges of his seat, hoping to hold fast in case they crashed or rolled; he hadn’t felt this close to death since the night the strangers had jumped him.

Once they cleared the narrow, packed streets around the port, Kayle drove even faster. The roads were worse, but the hazards were fewer, so Rafe started to breathe more easily. But he was still hanging on in case they hit a bump and went flying.

They’d traveled maybe twenty miles from the harbor when a series of large, utilitarian buildings rose into view, practically the only things on the skyline for acres of flat, open countryside. The roads got better, not worse, on this final stretch, and Rafe was so surprised that he commented on it. Kayle nodded.

“Of course. There isn’t much traffic out here, so we block the roads off when we need to and use them as running ramps.”

“As what?”

Again, Kayle made that scooping motion, trying to snatch up the right words. “The flying machines. They need a long clear road to drive down at high speeds before takeoff.”

“So you’ve done that much?” Rafe demanded. “You’ve put a prototype into the air?”

“For short periods of time,” Kayle said. “We haven’t figured out how to sustain flights for longer than thirty minutes.”

“It’s not going to take you ten years to figure it out,” Rafe said.

Kayle gave him a quick sideways glance. He was smiling. “Maybe not.”

It turned out there were three mammoth structures this far out from the port, sharing the road but widely separated from each other as if determined to keep their own secrets. “Nelson Ardelay and his boys own those two buildings,” Kayle remarked as they drove by. “Actually, they own all the land out here outside of town. Brilliant investment, brilliant, and years before anyone else realized how valuable this land would be. All my property is in the port, so I have to rent space from them out here. Well, it’s more complicated than that.”

“No doubt,” Rafe murmured.

“And this is my building,” Kayle went on, driving up to the last, most isolated, and most unprepossessing edifice Rafe had seen here or in Chialto. It was huge, the size of four or five factories, made of what looked like lightweight metal soldered together in massive sheets. One whole wall appeared to be missing, though as they drew closer, Rafe realized that it was a wall that doubled as an entrance, and the gigantic doors had been rolled aside as if to allow some kind of monstrous creature to enter or exit.

Inside, he could glimpse three of those monsters, and he couldn’t stop staring.

They didn’t look all that different from the models he’d seen in Kayle’s office, slim metal lozenges sprouting an assortment of wings held in place with various struts and cables. None of them were as chunky as the elaymotives; in fact, there was something about their smooth contours, especially from front to back, that made him think of sea creatures gliding effortlessly through the waters.

“And those things
fly
?” he breathed.

He could hear the amusement in Kayle’s voice. “Not yet, but they will.”

They spent the next two hours inspecting every inch of the three aeromotives, as Kayle was calling them, while Kayle and one of his mechanics answered all the questions Rafe could think of. He learned that the machines were crafted of a specialized new metal created to generate almost no friction even at high speeds and that the designer thought they’d solved the problems of liftoff but were now baffled by creating sufficient forward propulsion to keep the machines in the air.

“We know how to glide forever, at least in a favorable wind,” said the designer, a pale-faced, dark-eyed woman with a fanatic’s intensity. It was no great leap to guess she was wholly elay. “But height. Speed. That’s what we can’t get enough of.”

They allowed Rafe to sit in the small, uncomfortable space built into each machine for the lucky—or insane—person who would handle the controls. This lever would tilt the plane from side to side, they told him; this one would bring the pointed nose up or down. This dial would add more fuel to the combustion chamber, and this gauge would show him how much fuel was left.

“What happens if you run out?” Rafe asked.

“You fall out of the sky,” Kayle replied.

“Or glide,” the elay woman amended. “If you’re lucky.”

Rafe glanced between them. “How many pilots have you lost?”

It was a moment before either answered. Maybe they were mentally adding up the number of crashes, the number of fatalities, the names of the fortunate few who had walked away. “Seven,” Kayle said at last.

“We’re hoping there will only be one more,” the woman added.

Rafe couldn’t help staring at her. “Why?”

“That would make eight. One of the propitious numbers.”

“Maybe you won’t stop till twenty-four,” he said. “Also propitious.”

Kayle nodded briskly. “Well, however many it takes.”

“I hope you don’t run out of pilots before you run out of aeromotives,” Rafe said. “I imagine it’s hard to find volunteers.”

“We pay them,” Kayle said, his eyes on Rafe. “Quite a bit of money.”

Rafe stared back. He was still in the cramped, uncomfortable driver’s box of the last machine, a long slim creature that glowed silver in the bright sunlight flooding in through the open door. It was smaller and seemed lighter than the other two; Rafe imagined it would be mercilessly bullied by a hostile wind, but easily carried by a friendly one. There was a long rip down the slanted wing on its right side, and a handful of Kayle’s inventors were attempting to mend it with blowtorches and some kind of bitter-smelling chemical. The machine was utterly quiescent—Kayle hadn’t even switched on its motor to let Rafe experience its rumble, as he had with the other two—and yet Rafe could feel its impatience coiled just under its prim metal skin. This was a creature that wanted to leap into the air and soar.

“It takes a certain type of person to pilot an aeromotive, of course,” Kayle went on, as if Rafe had asked for a job description. “Someone reckless enough to take risks, but smart enough to avoid stupid ones. Someone who can think quickly in response to changing circumstances.”

“Someone who’s not afraid of heights,” the woman put in.

“A gambler. Who’s stood on a mountaintop,” Rafe said.

“Yes,” Kayle said. “Someone like that.”

 • • • 

T
here was more to see in the factory—a whole room dedicated to parts fabrication and repair—but Rafe’s mind kept drifting back to the implied job offer. What did Kayle Dochenza consider “quite a bit of money”? If seven men had died so far, how many had survived? What was the ratio, what were the odds? Rafe would like to impress Princess Josetta with his cool daring and his accumulated riches, but she wouldn’t feel much admiration if he were dead.

His hand kept going to his pocket where he kept his favorite deck of cards. It was an old habit with him when he was restless, when he was itching to make a bet.

I’d do it if I thought I’d live through the experience,
he realized.
Even if I’d never met Josetta. Just to see what it’s like.

He wasn’t paying much attention when Kayle led him to an out-of-the-way corner in the fabrication room, and the designer laughed.

“This is your project, not mine,” she said, leaving them without another word. Kayle didn’t even glance after her.

“Another prototype,” Kayle said, pointing to a contraption hanging from a row of hooks on the wall. It looked like nothing so much as a dog harness attached to the kind of yoke that horses would wear to pull a plow, except that a heavy cloth bag had been belted on top of the yoke. “Though this one would have no commercial application even if we could get it to work properly. And yet it haunts me.”

Rafe reached out to brush a finger along the worked leather of the harness. “What is it?”

“A single-person short-distance propulsion device.”

“You might have to speak more plainly.”

Kayle enunciated with exaggerated precision, pointing to the various parts. “A man straps himself into this harness, holding the guidebar in front of him. Inside the combustion bladder are a number of chemicals, currently inert. When he introduces a final chemical, there’s a powerful reaction. The bladder swells upward and the man is lifted high into the air. While the combustion continues, he has enough forward motion to travel a short distance, using the guidebar to control his direction.”

Rafe fingered the leather with more reverence. “That would feel even more like flying than the aeromotive.”

Kayle nodded. “Exactly what I thought.”

“But it doesn’t work?”

Kayle seemed to nod and shrug at the same time. “We’ve gotten a man off the ground a dozen times, but not as high as I expected. Twice he’s achieved height, but no sustainability. It’s pointless to introduce directionality if you don’t have sustainability, but it’s even more pointless to simply go up in the air if you can’t send yourself somewhere else.”

“How many people have died on
this
little contraption?” Rafe asked. “Because I don’t see anything that would help you glide down, so impact has got to be a real problem.”

Kayle nodded. “It would be, except the combustion slows at a perceptible rate. It doesn’t just quit and send you plummeting to the ground. It
sets
you down. Though I admit a few of the landings have been rough. Some broken legs. But nothing fatal.”

“So you have an easier time finding volunteers to test it out?”

Kayle shook his head. “Insofar as there is any prestige at all associated with carrying out experiments for a lunatic, most people prefer the glory that comes with the aeromotives. This—this little flying bag—is met with a certain amount of derision, even among my own inventors. But I am used to mockery. I never let it daunt me.”

Rafe looked around the room, then through the connecting door at the three aeromotives, crouched in readiness before the wide entrance. “I don’t think I’d bet against you,” he said.

Kayle regarded him with those misty blue eyes. “No,” he said. “But then, you do not seem like the type of man who has ever been afraid to gamble.”

 • • • 

R
afe left without speaking the words that had risen to his lips a dozen times:
I’d like to pilot one of your aeromotives for you.
Kayle was right, he wasn’t afraid to gamble, but he’d never been reckless about it. Or—that wasn’t right. He’d been reckless plenty of times, but he’d never wagered more than he could afford to lose. Even the largest bet he’d ever made—the gold he’d invested in Kayle Dochenza’s factory—wouldn’t beggar him if he lost.

But betting his life? That wasn’t something he’d contemplated before. There were probably safer ways of catching Josetta’s attention.

Over the next two days, he turned the idea over and over in his mind, unable to decide whether or not to make the wager. He was grateful for the distraction when, late on that second day, he received a note from his brother. Like most of Steff’s letters, it was brief and unhappy.

I hate it here. Nerri is having another baby. Are you ever going to visit again?

“I’m going to be gone for a few days,” Rafe told Samson the next morning. “Don’t give my room away.”

“How long is a ‘few days’?” Samson wanted to know.

“I’ll be back by firstday.”

ELEVEN

P
ublic transportation out to the western provinces had improved during the past five years, Rafe thought, but not by much. The big enclosed cabins pulled by elaymotives covered the distance more quickly than the old horse-drawn conveyances, but they were still at the mercy of bad roads and bad drivers and bad weather.

Fortunately, Steff’s family didn’t live at the extreme western edges of Welce, but owned property in the fertile midlands only two days outside of Chialto. Rafe hired a driver and a one-horse wagon to take him the final five miles of his journey, through endless fields of monotonous green. He made no attempt to identify the assortment of crops on lush display, though during the years he’d lived in this part of the country he’d done his share of plowing and harvesting. Hated every minute of it, too.

He did size up the sprawling farmhouse, which looked as if it had just gotten a fresh coat of paint and maybe a new chimney. Last time Rafe had been out here, his stepfather had proudly showed him the new wing built on in back, big enough to house any number of new babies and half the in-laws besides. He spotted a couple of other buildings that looked new—a toolshed, maybe, and a granary—though he had to confess they might have been on the property anytime these past three years. He didn’t care enough for the place to pay attention.