Chapter 79 – Reconnaissance

The next cycle, Mirian rushed to the site of the airship. It was empty. She set alarm wards down in the area, but by the end of that loop, they’d never triggered. Militia scouts didn’t encounter it there, or in any other part of the forest near Torrviol they investigated.

“Maybe they land somewhere random each time, based on a whim. Maybe even small changes in how the spies are captured or how we word the letter to your uncle shifts things. Damn! How do I recreate the circumstances when I don’t even know?” Mirian ranted one evening to Nicolus.

Nicolus didn’t say anything, because he quickly learned each cycle that Mirian just liked to vent her frustration sometimes.

“I’ll narrow down the possibilities. We’ll try wording the letter to your uncle exactly the same next cycle, and see what kind of variations that brings. Thanks.”

“Happy to help,” Nicolus said, still lounging in his chair, snacking on an exotic cheese. “How’s that training with Luspire going? Still extremely weird to watch the shy girl with anxiety suddenly casting spells with the big mage-man himself.”

“Miserable. I never worked this hard for classes, I just thought I did. His theory is by casting a wide enough array of spells, the brain creates new conceptualizations that make casting any spell easier, because the subconscious mind is making connections, even if the conscious mind is overwhelmed by the information.”

Nicolus nodded. “That’s a lot of fancy words.”

Mirian leaned over and punched him lightly in the shoulder. While Nicolus pretended to be grievously injured, she said, “Anyways, it means on any given day I’m casting one hundred different spells in practice cycles. The Academy scribes keep getting these looks of total dread every time Luspire walks in to tell them what he wants in my spellbook next. Or rather, my second spellbook, he filled the first one.”

“Is it working?”

“I think so. Something is working. Most of my spells are measuring at 60 myr on the tri-point energy meter. That’s non-fire spells, by the way, because fire spells are always measured at a higher relative output so Luspire’s assistant isn’t including them in the average.”

“Oh. That’s pretty good. What’d you start at?”

“I was topping out around 36 myr with my best spell. That was embarrassing.”

Nicolus raised his eyebrows. “Wow. That’s… that’s a hell of an improvement. You’ve been at this for just over two years? That still puts you in apprentice territory, but that’s what your average certified mage hits. Why the focus on power, though? It seems like a knowledge problem.”

Mirian looked out the window, remembering the fleet of fishing boats packed with civilians as they crossed the lake, only to be vaporized. “Because it’s the battle that I think is critical. I can stop the Akanans from destroying the Divine Monument. I just need to get on one of the airships.”

She watched as Nicolus’s face shifted through three different expressions. Then he said, “Ohhh! That’s why you want the Eskanar lessons. The ships must take off from somewhere, right? You can sneak aboard before they do.”

“Sort of. But not quite,” Mirian said.

***

The first night of the battle, Mirian dipped out of the command center and walked to the gardens by the Myrvite Studies building, just south of the forward trenches. She’d already said her goodbyes to her friends, and had told Luspire she was buying him more time to get the Monument working.

Likely, the battle would go far worse this time because she wasn’t helping organize the critical actions in the Underground, but it would be worth it in the end.

It was dark in the gardens, except for the occasional flash of light from the fighting. The gardens themselves were still and empty. She shed her cloak and changed clothes, the night air chilling her as she did. The Akanan uniform she put on wasn’t a perfect match, as it was the work of one of the local tailors referencing an out-of-date book on military dress and Mirian’s half-remembered descriptions of the uniforms she’d seen on the airship. It wouldn’t hold up to close scrutiny, but it would reduce the amount of mana she’d need to use in her illusion spell, and that was key, because she was about to burn a lot of mana.

In her left hand, she held a mana elixir. In her right, the wand of levitation.

Mirian channeled, and felt that exhilarating vertigo as her feet left the ground. The wind tore at her with freezing claws. Her hands felt like they’d been dipped in ice water, but the elation overcame it as she flew up. A thousand feet up, the view of the battle was heart-stopping. All across the miles of front around Torrviol, she could see spells and shells splashing bursts of light around the battlefield.

She changed the angle of her wand slightly so that her flight path took her northwest, over the Akanan lines. Even in the dark sky, with the clouds hanging low, the Akanan airships stood out because of their sheer size. That, and the flashes of the guns as they came in for another bombardment. A flash of light illuminated the hull of the lead ship. Both began to curve across the sky as Mirian approached, rising fast.

She could feel her aura stripping itself bare, and popped open the stopper of her elixir and gulped it down as fast as she could. It was more difficult than she’d anticipated, and the wind splashed some of it in her face. As it did, her flight path changed as her right hand moved slightly. Mirian was relying on inertia to help her reach the airship, but it also made her flight harder to control. She adjusted as best she could, aiming to land at the rear of the second airship. Hopefully, this was the ship without Marshal Cearsia.

As she approached the deck though, Mirian realized she was coming in way too fast. Desperately, she tried to correct her course, but with her aura nearly depleted, she found it impossible to put out enough force. Panicked, she redirected the angle of the wand, but then she was flying too low. She slammed into the side of the airship—

***

—and woke up in her bed, the ceiling dripping.

The next time she tried it, she adjusted her angle, and brought along a feather landing wand, a spell that used overlapping force shields to cushion falls, and adjusted her angle. She still came in way too fast, smashing into the aft deck like an incompetent meteor. The force cushion bounced her off a wall, which let her tumble down from the second deck to the main deck, banging her shin on something metal at some point in the jumbled tumble.

Hissing in pain, she stashed the levitation wand and pulled out her minor disguise wand. She’d worked with Professor Marva to get the details on looking more Akanan right. A subtle shift in skin tone, a slight change in facial structure, and making her hair dirty blond did the trick. She checked herself in a pocket mirror, then stood and dusted herself off, just as two crew members rounded the corner.

“What’s going on?” the first man said.

“Sorry. Bit embarrassing, I tripped,” she said in Eskanar.

The second man looked up at the walkway. “From there? Do you need medical attention?”

“No, no, I’m fine. I got lucky, I know that could have gone a lot worse.”

She expected them to interrogate her, and she’d have to deploy her story about being new to the airship, and also her family was from west Akana Praediar hence the accent, but they just told her to be more careful and went back to their duties. Either spotting or maintenance, she thought. Her nighttime flight had another advantage: most people were below decks. No one wanted to be up top where the freezing winds scoured away all the heat unless they had to. Clearly, they hadn’t seen her come in. Hopefully, no one had.

Mirian’s instinct was to slouch and keep her head down, but Marva had coached her to keep her head high and act like she belonged, so she tried to do that, correcting her posture when she noticed herself slipping. Mirian had no information about the airship, and Nicolus’s uncle hadn’t been able to get them anything, so her plan was to just figure out how it worked.

Mirian strode to the nearest stairwell and headed below decks to find out what she could.

***

Getting caught, when it didn’t involve the bridge and Marshal Cearsia, usually meant being thrown in the brig. She actually preferred getting tossed overboard, because that was fast, whereas in the brig she languished for a day or two until the Akanans blew up the Monument and the airships fell from the sky. The anticipation of waiting for that death, knowing it was soon, was miserable.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Over the course of six more cycles, Mirian continued to map out the Akanan Dreadnought Class airships. Republic’s Justice was the airship she usually landed on, and it had the benefit of not having Marshal Cearsia on it. The Might of Liberty was the flagship, and the crew was more alert and had better wards up. They usually caught her within hours of her landing, whereas the other ship’s less disciplined crew often let her wander about for a whole day.

The process of learning the ship had sped up considerably when Mirian ate lunch with one of the engineers on the Republic’s Justice who kept trying to flirt with her. Mirian managed to talk her way into having him show her a schematic of the ship, complete with neatly labeled decks.

Once she knew where to find things, she spent more time in command and control, and more time mapping out what the colossal spell engines on the ships did. She memorized glyph sequences, though at this point, she could read arcane glyphs better than she could read Eskanar. Here, a conduit sequence. There, a heat regulation ward. She learned the divisions on board, and got better at pretending to be a maintenance mage.