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It was too early to be called “morning” yet when I broke into the floating fortress. I know because the night peacock was still preening itself on the floating castle’s top spire, its dark plumage trailing down proudly over the round turret and its nocturnal-bred eyes presumably keeping watch over its citizens. I watched it closely for any sign of alarm as my stolen bird carried me closer until we flew under the castle and I could no longer see it.
My bird, a crow that I had found tied to a fence post the day earlier—some wealthy farmer’s steed, I’m sure—was a clever thing, and needed little guidance to silently maneuver into one of the many cubical stalls along the bottom of the fortress where birds were meant to land. It was a traditional landing room, with a post to tie the bird and a floor made of wooden bars for it to stand on, between which the gaps showed a very long drop to the earth below. The bird quickly discovered that there was still a few inches of corn feed left in the bottom of the trough, and it happily started chowing down. I dismounted carefully, avoiding the gaping openings in the floor to reach the platform of planks and the entry door. I took note of the landing stall’s number, then made my way along the hallway deeper into the castle
The people who design floating fortresses like this don’t like to talk about it, but most of their designs are identical to each other. This is in large part because of a culture of rampant inauthenticity and blueprint theft among floating fortress designers. I mean, hey, stone fortresses are incredibly difficult to force into floating, so every architect in the business makes sure to have contacts and spies in every other architect’s organization, so whenever one of them finds a new way to do it, everyone else has the same design within the week. (Here’s a life tip for you: Never play cards against an architect. They’re cutthroat, man.) This means that once you’ve broken into one of these hovering fortresses—which I had—you’ve broken into them all.
The hallway brought me, as I knew it would, to the throne room. It being the middle of the night, there were no royals in the room, so there were no guards around (save for the singular man on night watch in that wing who was cycling through all the rooms like a lost sleepwalker). I slipped through the dark places at the side of the room behind the ostentatious ionic columns and quickly found the pair of double doors leading off the room marked “Research & Science Wing.” When I opened the door and jumped inside before the guard could wake up enough to notice me, a blast of cold air rushed over me. I shivered and ran in.
There were only a few doors in the long hallway. My target was small enough that it could be behind any of them, and I had to work quickly, so I wouldn’t have time to search all the rooms. Thankfully, scientists know the value of labeling things, and while all the plaques on the doors were written in the phrases native to the scientist tongue, I’d worked with enough scientists in my time to know a little of their language, so when I saw that one of the rooms was labelled “biologist” with a little bit of paper tacked to the beginning that said “micro,” I knew I’d found my door.
I opened it and my nose burned. The windows were closed, so there was none of the awful windchill that so often plagued those floating castles, but the natural consequence of an absence of ventilation in a room filled with scientists funded by the Queen to allow their inquisitive hearts full freedom was that the air was heavy with dizzying fumes still left from the day’s work, a mighty fog of smoke and unidentifiable vapours.
I had to stand in the doorway for a few moments to become accustomed to the noxious atmosphere of the room before I could dare to venture farther inside. In that time, my eyes also became acclimated to the candle-less darkness of the empty laboratory, and I began to make out the shapes of workstations. The tables were fixed to the floor in regimented rows, their neatness contrasting sharply with the chaos spread across their surfaces. There were stacks of nearly-toppling paper sheafs that looked like twisted and storm-weathered trees on a mountainside, as if the paper was trying to return to its original form. The undergrowth bristled with vials, beakers, Erlenmeyer flasks, pipettes, and petri dishes, throughout which roamed wild teacups and coffee mugs and the occasional rare decanter of what looked like whiskey. I thought that the drinking supplies should probably be rounded up and penned somewhere separate from the rest. This was before the laboratory regularly laws that were passed, of course—though I suppose I was proved right about the need for organization when that poor James Barney bloke exploded when he mistook his own formula for his morning coffee.
Though the room was unlit by manmade means, the moon was shining just enough through the closed windows that I could begin to search for my target. I started by shuffling through the stacks of paper on the tables, which was a difficult endeavour, as I had to keep from tipping any of them over by accident. I couldn’t find it in those haphazardly growing cospes of paper trees, so I switched my attention to the cabinets of assorted supplies that lined the far wall. I found enough bottles of pure chemicals to poison the whole royal household, which was good to know for future jobs, but not what I sought. It was only when I happened to glance over the windowsills that I finally saw the heavy tome, its title glinting proudly in silver-stamped lettering on the leather skin. I snatched it up and marvelled at it. According to my client, this book contained science so revolutionary that it would change how people saw the world for the rest of time. I shook myself out of my awe and was just considering how to best carry my unwieldy prize when I heard a little gasp from the dark behind me.
There was a man in a chair in the back corner of the room. He had been so unmoving that I had mistaken him for a pile of something or other heaped on the unfortunate chair. His head was lolled back awkwardly, its weight on his shoulder in such a position as was sure to put a crick in his neck, and his legs were stretched out before him in a lazy posture which, along with the position his hands had taken (folded and resting contentedly on his protruding stomach) gave the impression of a man asleep. He wore suspiciously coloured robes of a scientist—was that blood? Ink? Something else entirely—and I suspected he must have fallen asleep on the chair sometime the day before during his work, slept there until now, and had held the position that he had woken up to avoid alerting me to his presence.
When he saw that he had been found out, he raised his head from its awkward position and blinked slowly at me. “So that’s what you were looking for,” he said in a voice that came from years of smoking and breathing in his own experiments. “Funny. I expected you to go for one of the poison vials. You seem the type, what with all the…” He made a vague gesture towards the black shapeless clothes and deep hood that made my thief’s outfit. “...apparel.”
“Terrible assumption to make, sir. Didn’t anyone ever teach you to avoid jumping to conclusions?“ I said, stalling. I didn’t have a weapon. Bad enough to risk getting caught creeping around the king and queen’s floating castle. At least if they captured me instead of killing me outright, I could try and convince the jury that I was just visiting and got lost, or was just a big fan of science. A weapon, though, always looks bad in court, and I wasn’t good enough at combat to make the risk worth it. “Maybe I’m just a tourist.”
Ignoring me, the man rose to his feet. He was closer to the door, and he knew it. I’d have to go through him.
“I’m afraid that the book is private property of the Queen herself,” he said casually. “After all, she funded the research for it, so it’s only fair. Don’t worry about your punishment for trying, though. You’ll be kept alive. We always need more test subjects.”
There was a fire poker on the table in front of me. Its tip looked corroded from some abrasive chemical, but the handle appeared untouched. Hopefully, it was safe. I slowly closed my hand around it, keeping my eyes fixed on my opponent.
He watched with amusement. “A fighter, eh? Then perhaps you can help me with a little question of mine.” He put his hand into his robe. “Have you ever been shot, intruder?”
If he had a gun, there was nothing I could do. “No.”
He sighed in resignation. “That’s unfortunate.”
I readjusted my grip on the book to make sure it was secure. “Why?”
“I was hoping you could tell me whether being shot hurt more or less than this.” He drew his hand from his robes, revealing a knife that glowed slightly yellow in the dark room.
It was a soul flayer—a type of cursed blade that was invented to entertain a cruel prince whose desires none had dared to challenge, much to their own destruction when he grew from a cruel prince to a cruel king who destroyed his country with the drain of constant war. The blade was the standard of his soldiers, and though the country had been dismantled decades ago, there were enough originals and replicas floating around that every thief worth their sticky fingers knew about them and what to do if ever faced with one: Run.
So run I did. I hurled the poker at the scientist and made a dash for the door, hoping that fat old researchers who fell asleep in chairs and slept in rooms full of weird and distrustworthy fumes wouldn’t be good at combat. I was right: He yelped and curled away from the oncoming poker, allowing me to dash through the door into the hallway.
I bounced off of the opposite wall before racing away towards where the birds were kept. Behind me, I heard a snarl of anger quickly followed by the heavy thump thump thump of the scientist. When I glanced back, I saw that he was indeed following me, his knife arm swinging forward wickedly with every other step, its blade bathing his face in rhythmic flashes of its vivid glow. It was like watching a giant firefly having a seizure.
“Thief!” he bellowed. “Guards!”
That wasn’t good, but his call didn’t concern me nearly as much as it might have in another castle. That kingdom’s real terror was in the malleability of their justice system, not their enforcers; the royal guards of that region were notoriously inept, completely incapable of properly murdering someone in cold blood, which probably explained why the scientist kept after me instead of allowing the paid protectors to take over. Indeed, I was almost halfway to the bird houses before I even saw a guard besides the dazed sleepwalker who merely stared at me muzzily as I flew past. Then a door hidden behind a panel in the wall swung open—nearly catching me in the forehead as I dashed past, by the way, which was uncalled for—and poured out a team of brutes, their helmets jammed on haphazardly over hair still mussed from sleep, their armor much askew. One spotted me quickly, though. She pointed, hollered, and led the charge behind the scientist.
I now had a scientist and a pack of guards pursuing me down the hall towards the landing stalls. The noise of the chase was incredible, with armor and scabbards knocking against each other and the walls and all of them yelling at each other in an attempt to discern who I was, with the scientist shouting loudly over all of them a refrain of “They have the book! They have the book!” Such a commotion in the early hours was bound to draw attention, and indeed, doors lining the passageway started cracking open as the workers of the castle were startled awake and looked into see what the noise was about. Some of the people even wandered out into the hallway, groggily asking questions and getting in the way. This entanglement with the commoners slowed the guards down, but the scientist only had held aloft his knife for the crowds to part before him, so he followed my trail far ahead of the royal defenders.
Soon, he and I were almost alone in the chase, for though I could hear the guards’ cacophony, they had been encumbered too much by the people to come close to catching me. I expected to lose him soon, too, for though his weapon was fearsome, the man himself was weak, and quickly falling behind. I could hear his laboured panting and the increasing heaviness of his steps, and when I glanced back, I saw that his face shimmered with sweat in the light of his knife like he was slathered with oil. He was tiring. He knew it, too, as evidenced by his red hue of embarrassment and the furrowed eyebrows of his rage. He must have seen his defeat reflected in my delight, for he suddenly stopped running and threw the soul flayer at me.
It was a poor throw, and the projectile was not made to be hurled, but the knife still arced towards me with the glow of the Grim Reaper’s lantern. Before it clattered to the ground, the spinning blade just managed to catch the skin of my left wrist.
The pain was like someone was speedily cross-stitching a curse upon my life into the skin of my arm using a jellyfish tentacle for thread. Its trail of agony spiralled up the afflicted limb at such a racing pace that I had no time to even clench my teeth before it had gotten as far as my shoulder, the knife’s wound apparently too shallow for its effects to go farther. I screamed, obviously—anyone who tells you that they took a soul flayer’s blade without crying out is either plain lying to you (likely) or extremely bad at identifying blades (not likely)—but just managed to switch the book to my other hand, focusing on the direction of the hallway and not crashing into any walls despite the pain’s distraction. To stop outright would have been to collapse into the clutches of the guards and this kingdom’s corrupt justice system, but the agony forced me to slow down, and it wasn’t long before I could hear the riotous guards closing in on me.
I finally reached the stall where I’d left my crow. The bird was shifting uneasily on its legs and flapping slightly, clearly eager to flee the scene of the chaos that it could hear from my hunters. The searing pain in my arm made it difficult to untie the knot that tethered the bird inside, and I nearly dropped the book while trying to mount the crow, having only one arm to both hold the book and grasp the reigns. I was so slow that the armored lug-heads were able to catch up, and we dove out of the castle just as they swarmed through the door—one of their swords almost caught the crow’s tail feathers.
The night air was cool to the touch, though the air movement aggravated the skin of my arm whenever a gust of wind managed to throw itself up my long sleeve. Still, I felt pretty good about getting away from my first round of pursuers, and I let myself relax slightly into the saddle.
“After we deliver this thing, I vote we celebrate,” I whispered to the crow. It didn’t reply, but I patted its side as if it had agreed. “Then it’s settled. First round’s on me.”
But the calm was quickly split apart by the piercing screech of the night peacock, which had evidently spotted my escape in the wash of moonlight and had taken it upon itself to inform the moon of my crimes.
Immediately, there came the shouting and clamour from the turrets of the castle that meant that the guards were preparing to rain pain down upon me in the form of arrows and bird nets, despite being unable to pinpoint our location in the dark. I pressed my heels into my crow, and the intelligent thing sped up, flapping like there was a live scarecrow coming after it. Each pump of its wings sent a jolt up through my bones and sparked another flare of pain in my left arm, and it became impossible to even hold onto the reigns with that hand. I wadded up my hood and bit into it to keep from shrieking again with the agony, because while being loud would have felt cathartic at first, it would feel a lot worse when the archers identified my location and made me a pincushion. But my silence worked; the bird nets and arrows that finally whistled into our fly zone all missed the bird and I by great measures. My crow carried on despite the threat, its wings almost moving faster than my racing heartbeat, with the lacework of agony in my arm pounding at the same speed. Eventually, we crossed the outer edge of their range.
The net-casters must have eventually reported that they had not caught me and that I was probably beyond them by then, because soon a chorus of vicious cooing rose on the wind. When I turned around, I saw that a squad of birds was descending from the bottom of the castle. Their riders were holding aloft what I thought was too many lit torches to carry on birds’ backs, but whatever. By their light, I saw the shine of armor that told me my pursuers were mounted guards (which explained the stupid idea of bringing torches on birds) on sleekly-molded birds. Meiser’s pigeons, bred by Hal Meiser two decades ago for war—an out-of-date bird model now, though these ones were probably hatched last year, but still effective enough under proper conditions. This was the guards’ mistake: While I had practiced flying diurnal birds at night for the exact purpose of escaping castles post-theft and knew how to compensate for the birds’ disorientation, the guards had clearly over ever ridden their pigeons in full light, which would explain their torches.
The pigeons, confused by the darkness (and probably irritated by the heat and brightness of the torches) jostled each other, colliding and falling out of formation until the birds were fed up with the mess and began to fight their riders. Two birds rolled mid-air, and one even succeeded in dislodging its guard, who hung from the saddle by one hand for an awful moment over the long drop. I watched as the guards gave up and flooded back to the castle.
I slumped over the saddle horn in relief, then hissed as that aggravated my arm. But eh, I’d had worse, and this was definitely worth it. The book of new science was still firmly in my grasp—Germ Theory: The Origin of Illness. My client would be pleased.