The Floating Islands (20 page)

“Anyone who knows about steam engines would tell you the same!”

“I’ve no doubt of you,” Wingmaster Taimenai said firmly. He laid his hand for a moment on Trei’s shoulder. “It’s understandable you would wish to prove your loyalty, Trei. But you needn’t try quite so hard.”

“But—”

“I will pass on what you’ve told me. I assure you that I will.” The wingmaster inexorably turned Trei back toward the door. “Now go back to the novitiate, please, and I will ask you to stay there.”

Trei couldn’t bring himself to argue. He went out, and back down the long stair, and back into the novitiate. Everyone stared at him. Trei could hardly stand to look back at them. He said, “He doesn’t believe me.” This was less painful than saying,
He doesn’t trust me,
which was what Trei knew was actually the truth. But it was hard enough.

“He should!” Rekei said fiercely. “Uh—
what
doesn’t he believe?”

“If somebody could get to Teraica … if there was a way to make the engines too hot …”

“Wait, wait,” objected Rekei. “Don’t you put coal in them to
make
them hot? Can they get
too
hot? Isn’t heat the whole point?”

Trei flung up his hands. “That’s what the wingmaster said.”

“Well, then—” said Genrai.

“I know. I’m from Tolounn,” Trei said bitterly.

“Oh, yes, and even more importantly, you’re a fool,” Rekei said vehemently. “
We
all know you’re kajurai.”

“I
don’t
want Tolounn to win!” Trei declared—straight to Genrai. “I would stop them if I could! But I can’t—I can’t do
anything
if the wingmaster won’t believe me!”

“You’re Ceirfei’s friend,” Genrai said slowly. “Ceirfei trusts you.” He shrugged, looking uncomfortable as everyone stared at him. “All right. All right, Trei. You’re kajurai, and you don’t want Tolounn to win. But what are we supposed to do to stop it?”

“If the engines get too hot, they
will
explode.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Kojran objected. “Well, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t! If you burn a great fire to make magic, then making the engines hotter ought to make the magic stronger.”

Trei groaned. “That’s what the wingmaster said!” He flung himself down on his bed and put an arm over his face. “Never mind, then!”

Genrai said after a moment, “They have steam engines where you’re from, do they?”

Trei moved his arm. “My grandfather got rich from boats with steam engines. They’re faster going upriver than any keelboat. And my … my father’s brother in Sicuon, he uses steam engines to lift ore out of his mines. We use steam engines a lot in the north.”

“Well, but … what can we do? Make the engines too hot, you say. But how could anyone make the engines too hot?”

“I don’t—”
know,
Trei meant to say. But he stopped without saying it. He said instead, slowly, “My cousin—” and stopped again.

“Your cousin?” Genrai asked patiently.

“My cousin in the hidden school—”

Tokabii, Kojran, and Rekei all exclaimed simultaneously, “You have a cousin in the
hidden school
?”

“Your cousin is a mage?” Genrai asked with more restraint. His dark eyes held intense thought.

“Studying to be a mage,” Trei amended. “If sh—if he could do something, give me something—something small and light and easy to carry, something that would make the Tolounnese engines overheat. If he could give me something like that …”

“The wingmaster might really listen to you if you had something like that,” Tokabii said, sounding impressed.

“He won’t listen to me,” Trei said definitely. “But …” He looked at Genrai.

The older boy said slowly, “If your cousin knows a way to carry a lot of heat, all bundled up. Like a piece of coal, only … more. If he could give you something like that … we might keep it for later, do you think? For if things look … really bad. Is that what you think?”

“Yes!” Tokabii cried enthusiastically. “We could all have hot coals to carry. If everything is desperate, we could fly to Teraica and make the engines hot—we’d all be heroes—let’s do that!”

“Yes, let’s!” agreed Kojran, sitting up and looking interested at this talk of desperate circumstances and heroes.

Genrai said with more restraint, “Well. All you need to do is talk to your cousin. Isn’t that right? Maybe he won’t be able to give you anything like that. But if he can … if things don’t go badly, you can always just give it back, and then all you’ve done is talk. Isn’t that right?”

Trei was grateful for Genrai’s steadiness and good sense. “I think that’s right. I really think it is.” Then he added, “If Ceirfei does come back …”

“We’ll tell him everything,” said Genrai.

“No. You can’t tell him
anything.
Because if you tell him, he’ll go straight to Wingmaster Taimenai. Or to his … his uncle. You know he will,” Trei added when Genrai looked blank. “He’ll have to. You
know
that.”

“I guess,” the older boy said, not looking happy about it.

“Besides,” Trei said, realizing something else, “even if that wasn’t true, if Ceirfei knew we were going to do something dangerous and against the rules, you know he’d insist on coming with us—
and
on taking the most dangerous part himself.”

Genrai held up his hands, conceding the point. “You’re right about
that,
” he said, this time with conviction.

Trei got to his feet and said, “All I’ll do right now is
talk
to my cousin.”

Genrai nodded. “Exactly. Just talk. But I think … I think maybe you should hurry. We’ll wait for you. But I think there’re some things we can do while we wait. Rekei, don’t we have a map of the waystations between here and the coast somewhere?”

Trei found his crystal pendant, laid his hand on the nearest door—it happened to lead to the bathing room, but when he whispered Araenè’s name and opened it, it didn’t open to the baths. It opened instead to a spacious twelve-walled hall, with a curving balustrade where a narrow stair came up in the middle of the floor, turned three times in a neat spiral, and disappeared again into the ceiling.

A warm yellow glow fell across an incredible array of spheres. All the walls were lined with them: shelf after shelf. Stone of every kind, glass of every color, polished wood and rough-textured clay and polished metal; some of the spheres were larger than a man’s head and some smaller than the tip of a finger. Some of them glittered brilliantly with light; others seemed to
absorb
light; one, near at hand, glowed as though it contained its own internal fire. And mirrors on every wall doubled and redoubled the number of spheres until they seemed as uncountable as stars in the summer sky.

Araenè sat cross-legged in the midst of all these spheres and mirrors. She was holding a small one—brown, swirled with patterns of darker brown and sulfur yellow—in one hand. In her other hand she held a quill. A book lay open beside her, its page half filled with small, cramped writing. Other books lay piled haphazardly across the floor.

Araenè had been gazing intently into the brown sphere, but now at last, perhaps realizing she had heard a door open, she turned to look over her shoulder. Her eyes, wide and distracted, met his. “Trei!” she exclaimed.

Trei, only half aware of the other boys murmuring in surprise behind him, stepped forward and let the door swing shut behind him. “You’re thinner,” he said, staring at his cousin. “You look …” He was unable to put his impression into words, and crouched down instead to take the quill out of Araenè’s hand before she could blot her page. “Are you all right?”

“Well, of course!” Araenè said, too quickly. She put the sphere down on the floor and started to get to her feet, but swayed. Trei caught her arm to steady her, but Araenè jerked back and stared at him.

Trei looked around at the many-sided room, the spheres, the spiral stairway. He hadn’t asked himself what Araenè might be doing, how she might be spending her days in the mages’ school. Now he felt guilty for that thoughtlessness and bewildered at the place in which he had found his cousin.

He looked at her in concern. Her chestnut hair seemed … darker than he remembered, rougher, though perhaps that was only because it was so short now. Or because she was pale. Though that might be the quality of the light … but he was sure she was thinner than she had been a week ago. Her eyes were huge and dark in her fine-boned face, and they held a new kind of strain that worried him. “Do you always study so late?”

“Sometimes,” Araenè answered stiffly. She glanced around, distracted, at the clutter of spheres. “I need to work—”

“This late?” Trei asked her, dismayed. “With the ships coming? Master Tnegun’s so hard a taskmaster?”

“Well—”

“We can’t talk here.” Trei waved a hand to encompass the room. “It’s too strange.”

Araenè gazed at him for a moment. At last her brow creased and she nodded. “All right. This way.” She led the way toward the central stair. Trei, glancing back, found that the door he’d come through had disappeared. Not only that, but there seemed no place for any door in these walls lined with spheres and mirrors.

“What did the door look like from this side?” Trei wondered aloud. “A frameless door set right into the air?”

“Yes, exactly. Doors are untrustworthy,” Araenè said over her shoulder. “But here, this might do.” They’d descended nine turns of the spiral stair to reach a landing, and Araenè opened a door that seemed made of glass and pewter. It opened onto a cluttered room filled with smoke, light, crashing sounds, and voices shouting.

“No,” Araenè said, shutting the door again quickly.

“But were those people all right?” Trei asked, trying to decide whether he should be alarmed.

“Oh, yes. That was Jenekei and Taobai; they’re always smashing up the workroom, but they’ll clean it up before Tichorei wants it in the morning. Here—” She opened the door again, but this time it opened on a much more ordinary room, lit by round porcelain lamps. Blue walls, dark furniture, and a window open to the humid warmth of the night: this was far more comfortable.

“Yes. My apartment,” Araenè said, and stepped through the door with an odd wariness that Trei didn’t understand. She kept a foot on the threshold while she waved Trei past her, then followed him into the room and shut the door—and relaxed, suddenly and visibly. She said, as though struck by a sudden thought, “Trei, if you’ve come to find out if we know anything about how to stop the Tolounnese warships, we don’t. Or if the masters do, they haven’t told us.”

“That’s not why I came.” Trei explained in a few words about the Teraica engines and what the Tolounnese mages were probably using them for and what he thought might be done about them. For several minutes after he was done, Araenè said nothing at all, and Trei began almost to wonder whether his cousin might think—actually might wonder—

Then Araenè said, “I have this, um. This … um.” She shook her head, crossed the room, and knelt to dig through one of her drawers. Then, turning, she held out to Trei a large glass sphere filled with fire. “This,” she said.

“What is it?” Trei touched the sphere warily with the tip of one finger. To his surprise, it did not feel hot to the touch. It certainly
looked
hot. He looked admiringly at his cousin. “Did you make this?”

“It’s nice you think I could. Um. This is, um.” Araenè looked embarrassed. “A fire dragon’s egg. I, well. I promised to, um, quicken it. That means …”

“I think I know what it means.” Trei stared at the egg. “You think it would hatch if someone threw it in one of the engines at Teraica? Why would that help? How did you … You promised a
dragon.…
”

“I wasn’t supposed to,” Araenè admitted. “You’re not supposed to promise dragons anything. But I did. And I saw … that is, I think I saw … I
did
see your engines. The dragon showed them to me when it gave me the egg. Three iron buildings on a gray shore, with fire inside them and beneath them. Those must be your engines, Trei, what else would they be? I think you ought to take the egg, Trei, I really do. I think I’m
supposed
to give it to you. The dragon said I should, um, ‘cast it upon the winds and into the furnace of the earth.’ If I give it to you, isn’t that casting it upon the wind? And if you throw it into one of the engines at Teraica, isn’t
that
casting it into the furnace of the earth?”

Trei looked doubtfully at the egg. “But would an engine get hotter if a young fire dragon hatched inside it? Why?”

Araenè handed the egg to Trei, jumped to her feet, and got a thick book off the top of a stack piled on the floor. “Look,” she said, bringing the book back to show it to Trei. “I got this out of Master Tnegun’s library. I’m supposed to be studying about numbers, but this one has a lot about dragons in it; that’s why I really got it. I was trying to see how I could quicken the egg, but I couldn’t figure out … But now look, when it’s talking about volcanoes … um, something about eggs hatching and violent fires, hmm, oh, here it is—‘The cracking of the egg of the fire dragon is attended by violence and raging heat, the very stone shatters, molten stone is forced to the surface.…’ Oh, and here, all this part is about volcanoes and fire dragons, see?”

Trei looked at the illustration his cousin showed him, a fiery mountain and flaming dragon, done all in vermilion ink and gold leaf. It looked very real. Too real. He thought about Mount Ghaonnè, about the huge cracks torn into the mountain’s side, about the living fire within … about the dragon he’d dreamed he’d seen within the burning mountain. He shuddered.

“Oh, Trei. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.” Araenè tried to take the book back.

Trei shook his head, holding on to it. He studied the illuminated image of the volcano, deliberately refusing to look away. “No, it’s … that’s all right. You think that if, um. If someone threw this egg into one of the Tolounnese engines, its hatching would create heat enough to break open the earth underneath the furnace? Or is molten fire only found … underneath the mountains of the north?”