Spire City: Occupied

“You see anything?”

Sitting behind her in the navigator chair, Paelesz already had the spyglass to his eye. He was a grizzled-looking man, looking older than he really was. His beard, a badge of pride among some who traced their ancestry far back in the city, was peppered with gray, and his brown skin darkened further by their days out in the sun and wind. “Nothing, captain. Just clouds.”

Captain was perhaps a more grandiose term than she merited. Temli owned the small airship, despite being a dozen years younger than Paelesz. She had skin as dark as his but reddish hair, blown back from her face even when the wind wasn’t blowing.

The sirens surely meant something, and probably something that she wanted no part in. Temli headed for the flat roof of one of the city's spires as the bells started to toll. The sound came from a hundred steeples across the city, mingling with the sirens to form a thunder. Temli dreaded what they would find when they reached the streets.

“Check the harbor. Maybe it’s boats... “

“Through the harbor wall?” Paelesz sounded as doubtful as Temli felt but swung his glass toward the sea anyway.

The great harbor of Spire City bristled with warships, but they were the current occupiers’ armada, not an invading force. Around the mouth of the harbor was a huge, floating wall, a wonder of technology well beyond the tech that kept her airship flying. As far as that, though, the same inventor was behind both — Temli’s second cousin, the great inventor Mendat, had built the airship for her and the sea-wall for the city. And so much more, as well, a reclusive man, but his inventions had come to define so much of the city.

“Not there, either.” He looked up again. “Skies still clear, too. Or empty of airships, anyway.”

“Well, we’re getting out of here.”

“Drop-off is the railyard.”

Temli shook her head, though Paelesz wouldn’t be watching her. “Too far. We'll land and wait this out.”

No argument. There was a time when Paelesz would have, when he accepted that she was the owner of the two-person dirigible but didn’t really trust that she knew how to handle transporting goods across the city. She was, after all, a foreigner, regardless of her connection with the city's great inventor. She’d often wondered, in those early days, if he realized that Mendat had been born in another city as well. Their years together had eliminated that tension, at least, and her skills flying the ship had won him over. They each performed their own roles in perfect tandem.

It didn’t really matter to her who was in control of the city. Pay her to fly, to carry cargo wherever it needed to go, and she didn’t bother about the rest. Money, the skies, and the chance to be left alone. The bigger questions for the city — her cousin Mendat could worry himself about those and invent the solutions the city needed.

The airship dropped in among the beetle-drawn taxis and other flying carriages, their giant beetles following the songs that came from the spires. Temli slowed the ship and looked for an open landing on one of the half-spires.

Some inner sense told her to beware just before the beetles around them went erratic. Their flights veered and twisted, and one carriage went crashing to the cobbles below. Maybe even more than one — she couldn’t be sure in that chaos. Steam cars and the clipped-wing beetles below rushed toward safety from any other falling carriage parts.

Those grounded beetles were acting odd as well, erratically veering about the street and running into walls, and even as she fought to control her ship among the uncertain beetle flights, she noticed how the spire song sounded different. Temli looked at the nearest spire as they flew past.

The singer was there, chained in his usual spot on the peak of the building. And he sang, as always — the lot of the singers from their teenage years until their death. But the song must have changed in response to the sirens and the bells. Or perhaps those other noises disturbed the beetles, somehow, interfering with their ability to follow the singers’ directions.

Even her caution couldn’t keep them from getting hit by the carriage that suddenly rose up from beneath them. The airship bucked and twisted as the beetle team shot upward. Something splintered behind Paelesz’s seat. Temli fought her controls to keep the airship flying. It listed, as if some part of the envelope was damaged.

“Keep us flying straight,” she called back to Paelesz as she climbed from the cockpit. She gave him no time to argue. He would know that she was the better one at flying, especially with it damaged, but she was the only one who knew the ship itself well enough to be able to fix whatever was broken.

Maybe she had something of her famous cousin in her, after all.

The ship jerked about as she climbed up into the envelope. Close to a hundred small bladders of helium crowded the space inside the metal envelope. Even if one popped, it wouldn't harm the ship's ability to fly. The carriage that hit them, though, had torn a large gash in the side. The exposed metal popped balloons by the handful as she watched. Another minute and they wouldn’t have enough to stay aloft. Two minutes and they’d simply fall, whatever remained of their descent. And nothing she could do to fix it.

Temli sped back down, out of the envelope and into the cockpit. She wasted no explanation to Paelesz, but angled the ship down toward the nearest landing. A taxi brushed past, its beetles still in a frenzy. She let them bounce off the envelope. They jarred the ship, set it rocking as she fought to bring it down for a landing. The half-spire below already had two taxis taking up its landing, and the beetles bucked in their traces. Temli slammed her ship between them with a crash.

She jumped out, ignoring the damaged ship, and called to the people on the platform, “What is it, are we under attack?”

“We're mourning.”

Temli looked from the man speaking to those around him for clarification.

“Mourning the wizard,” a woman beside him said. “The Wizard of the Weave has died.”

“The Wizard…” Temli felt her stomach drop.

As if her words had been a question, as if she didn’t know who the Wizard of the Weave was, the woman went on. “The inventor, you know. He calls himself the wizard… or called himself that, anyway.”

Mendat. Her cousin, the city’s heroic inventor, dead, and just when Spire City needed him to invent a way free from this cursed occupation.