across the entire continent. The druids of Dral named the phenomenon the Silent Blight and wondered if it signified the coming War of Disjunction, when the demons would cross the ocean to destroy human language.
Francesca was about to ask Cyrus what he thought about the Silent Blight when he stopped casting spells along the rig’s suspension lines and looked at her.
“Something’s just occurred to me,” Cyrus said. “There are maybe a hundred hierophants working the wind garden. The marshal can send them to Avel if the city’s in danger.” He paused. “Francesca, no more games. What happened in the sanctuary? I need to know everything you do so I know what to tell the wind marshal.”
She shook her head. “Deirdre ordered you not to trust other hierophants.”
“But can we trust Deirdre?”
“Perhaps not, but let’s not include more people about whom we are uncertain.”
“There’s something important you’re not telling me.”
“Several somethings,” she agreed. “I’ll explain when we land. Meantime, has that airship gotten close enough for you to tell me why it worries you?”
He looked north. The white speck that Francesca had seen before had grown into a long white arrow.
“She has,” Cyrus said after a moment. “This is a bad omen.”
“Better tell me quick then.”
“I think she’s the Queen’s Lance. I can’t swear to it until we’re closer. I flew as her first mate for a year and half.”
“And why is that so bad?”
“She’s a Kestrel.”
Francesca could only look at him blankly as a twinge of guilt moved through her. When they had been lovers, she would occasionally sneak onto the infirmary’s roof and fly a blue flag from one of the corners. If Cyrus could get away from his patrol duty, he would land his rig for a rendezvous.
He would point out the distant airships flying to or from the wind garden and talk about a particular ship’s merits or flaws. Francesca had always been too preoccupied with her studies to remember or care about what he had described. Cyrus had always taken an interest in medicine and her life in the infirmary. After half a year together, he could recite all the bones in the wrist, but she could not tell a lofting sail from a foresail.
Judging by the way Cyrus’s eyes narrowed, he was now remembering his past irritation at her disinterest. “A Kestrel is a particularly dangerous kind of ship,” he said shortly. “The Kestrel class of cruisers can … oh you wouldn’t understand. Here, maybe this will help: common airships are written on linen. Most cruisers are written on cotton. But Kestrels, they are written only on Ixonian silk.”
“Oh!” Francesca said in surprise as she tried to guess the cost of so much silk.
Cyrus continued. “Before the Civil War, when Spires was still a polytheistic realm, every deity maintained a fleet—a few flocks of lofting kites, a destroyer or two, maybe a cruiser or a carrier loaded with warkites. When Celeste and her canonists set out to unify Spires, they wrote five Kestrels. The polytheists never had a chance against the silk ships. The Kestrels tore apart their fleets one by one. At war’s end, the monotheists had lost only two Kestrels.”
“Lovely,’ Francesca grumbled before asking, “So a Kestrel is a symbol of Celeste’s monotheistic Spires?”
“Exactly. Of the three still flying, only one is in the western fleet. She’s named the Queen’s Lance, and I bet that’s her now, flying in unscheduled from the Lurrikara wind garden.”
“And you’re worried that she might be here to demonstrate Celeste’s power over Avel and the canonist Cala?”
“Exactly.”
Francesca wondered if the ship’s arrival was connected to what had just happened in the sanctuary. Cyrus seemed to be wondering the same thing. “Do you have any idea what this might mean, Fran?”
“I might have one or two ideas,” Francesca said mildly. “I’d even tell you about them if you could be as clever as a parrot and learn to say Francesca.”
He closed his eyes and flatly said, “Francesca.”
“Land us on the garden tower, and I’ll explain.”
Blessedly, Cyrus did not argue but turned to the jumpchute.
About a mile ahead of them, the massive Auburn Mountains traded their redwood forests for knee-length coastal grass and sank to sea level before rising up again. This created a lush pass dotted with massive gray boulders that ran through the mountains. By chance it was wider toward the sea, narrower inland.
Cyrus had once explained that during the rainy season the pass acted as a funnel, intensifying the ocean winds. During the dry season, hot air above the savanna rose into the sky and so drew in cooler and heavier air off the ocean. As a result, the pass was one of the most consistently windy places on the continent. By harnessing this wind, Avel’s hierophants produced more hierophantic text than any other wind garden.
As they flew into the gap, Francesca could see about two dozen windcatchers—the massive wind-powered rigs that made up a wind garden. Each windcatcher was written on white linen sailcloth and was, in essence, a giant cylindrical kite. Seeing all of them facing out to sea made Francesca think of a school of fish swimming against a current, their mouths open.
Cyrus flew them over a windcatcher anchored to a boulder. It was perhaps a hundred feet long with a mouth thirty feet in diameter. Its tail pointed slightly downward. When Francesca had first seen this tilt, she had been confused. She hadn’t thought a cylindrical kite could fly or that it could be angled upward in a wind that blew horizontally. But then she had remembered the box kites children flew during the Festival of Colors. A simple box kite was tilted in the same way a windcatcher was.
In any case, the wondrous part of a windcatcher was what happened inside. Francesca tried to peer into the one they were passing over, but just then Cyrus grabbed her arm. “We’ve got to double canvas to get up to the garden tower. Hold on.”
The tall garden tower was a narrow building, made of sandstone, redwood spars, and spell-invested cloth. It stood at the seaside end of the gap—upwind from all the windcatchers—and was shaped like a shark’s dorsal fin.
Cyrus touched the cloth that was wrapped around their legs and it shot forward to form a second jumpchute. Even with twice the thrust, they flew up the gap at half their previous speed.
As they approached the streamlined tower, Francesca caught a glimpse of the ocean as a dark blue strata covered by billowing gray clouds.
The vertical, downwind edge of the narrow tower held a stack of landing bays: rectangular, penlike structures made of redwood spars and tight sailcloth. With some rapid editing, Cyrus landed them feetfirst in one of the bays.
Francesca disentangled herself from the jumpchute’s harness. Without the rush of wind, the world seemed unnaturally quiet. So she was startled when a girl’s voice called out, “Welcome, pilot. The tower warden asks your name and purpose.”
Francesca turned to see a short, green-robed hierophantic apprentice. Her headdress covered everything but her dark eyes.
“Cyrus Alarcon, Air Warden of Avel,” Cyrus answered, “making an emergency evacuation after a possible attack on the sanctuary. The day’s words are granite fire south. My compliments to your warden and permission to enter the garden tower for an audience with him and the wind marshal.”
The apprentice hurried through a flap in the landing bay’s wall.
Francesca took a long breath. The cool air smelled of the sea. All around her sounded the creaking of rope and cloth. Seagulls squabbled and complained.
Francesca rubbed her cold-numbed cheeks. For the first time, she appreciated the protective qualities of a hierophant’s headdress.