The King of the Skies Read online

  The King of the Skies

  The Mira Brand Adventures, Book 4

  Robert J. Crane

  The King of the Skies

  The Mira Brand Adventures, Book 4

  Robert J. Crane

  Copyright © 2017 Ostiagard Press

  All Rights Reserved.

  1st Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, please email [email protected].

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Author’s Note

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Other Works by Robert J. Crane

  1

  August 2017—I think (honestly I’m just not really keeping track anymore). Mainly I think it’s August because it’s bloody hot, and Carson has taken to losing his sweater before ten AM, usually securing it oh-so-fashionably about his waist. Sorry, friend, but that stopped looking cool around the time our grandparents were dating. (Who am I kidding. Carson doesn’t care about looking cool. He’s still toting that stupid manbag around, for crying out loud.)

  Where, pray tell, do you find Mira Brand now?

  Let me tell you:

  About to secure victory.

  I savored it, with just a dash of smugness. Which I totally deserved, just FYI. In case you’ve lost count, here’s a reminder of the big victories for Mira Brand: the Chalice Gloria, located after thousands of years missing, untold numbers of seekers before me failing in their quest. The Tide of Ages—yes, a Heidi quest, but one I was a very big part of, thank you very much, figuring out the obscure little riddle we’d been presented with and using the orb to save Heidi’s life. (Which she still doesn’t know about. Gonna continue to keep that one on the down-low, methinks.) And the lost treasure of Ostiagard. Mainly Carson’s doing, but, y’know … I was there. If not for my gentle encouragement, he wouldn’t ever have worked that one out.

  That is not—I repeat, not—me rewriting history.

  This quest we were on today was not one of the big ones, not a famous artifact or the opportunity to amass riches (and we had riches—oh yes, we were loaded after locating Ostiagard’s hidden cache). And though that made our impending victory less sweet, it was only a little less sweet … even if it was just another notch on my belt at this point.

  Okay. Arrogance getting just a touch out of hand here. Maybe. Probably, considering we hadn’t actually even gone into the temple yet.

  “I like this place,” said Carson. He pushed his glasses up his nose, a little pair of spectacles that, like the sweater around the waist, hadn’t really been in fashion for a decade or three. Speaking of the sweater: a very deep red today. A “treat,” he’d called it, and one of his only purchases with our vast wealth of coup this past couple of months. Hardly seemed that way to me: it was a scratchy-looking thing, something I didn’t think even old men even wore anymore, let alone fresh twenty-year-olds. (Yes, it was a birthday present to himself. Go figure. Heidi and I joked, behind closed doors of course, that our birthday present to him should’ve been wrestling it off of him and burning it. Alas, we were kinder: new loafers. And if you think it’s not a great deal kinder … well, know that I agree with you.)

  “How can you like it?” Heidi asked. “We just got here. You don’t know one thing about the place yet.” The anime pixie girl brought up the rear, trailing behind Burbondrer, the orc who turned our company into an occasional foursome—heavy emphasis on “occasional”, so frequently absent was he. He’d kitted himself out in fresh new armor, still loaded with barbed protrusions that made it impossible to stand very close to him. The function of impaling your enemies upon the spikes being more important than the form of looking nice, I supposed.

  “It’s cooler,” was Carson’s answer.

  I couldn’t disagree with him there. We’d left sweltering London streets to find ourselves in a forest on some world whose name I didn’t know. Vast trees towered hundreds of feet above us. They grew not straight but in undulating curves, and split into swollen tendrils fifteen feet from the ground, forming complicated root systems that created space for animals—or passing Seekers—to duck into. Boughs let through a smattering of light, tinged oddly pink by a canopy the color of flamingo feathers. Sheltered from the blistering sun, my skin almost prickled with goosebumps as I inhaled a rich, earthy scent I could drink in for days. Soft air wafted. It was as if the forest itself was breathing in and out at long intervals, caressing us with Mother Nature’s kiss.

  And before us, as convenient as could be: the temple we sought.

  (It wasn’t convenient. The cut-through point was halfway up the wall on the Jubilee Underground line. Getting Burbondrer through the ticket gate was painful, and ended with an attendant opening the disabled gate for him when it became clear Burbondrer was never fitting through otherwise. Oh, if you could have seen the attendant’s open-mouthed stare as we scurried past shouting something about cosplay behind us …)

  “In we go then,” I said, strutting ahead, leading my team into the wide open temple entrance, a kind of oversized porch that jutted at us.

  “I think I need to put my sweater back on,” Carson said to no one in particular.

  “So put it on,” Heidi said.

  “But what if I get hot again?”

  “Take it off?”

  “Oh. Duh.”

  “Look at these two, Burbondrer,” I said to the orc who Carson had affectionately nicknamed “Bub,” a habit which Heidi had recently picked up as well. “We find ourselves on the doorstep of the Necklace of the Regent Adjunct, and those two are arguing about woolly jumpers. Has this really become so banal? Or are they just a bit … you know?”

  Burbondrer looked at me blankly.

  “Oh. I guess you don’t know.”

  “Err …” he began.

  “I’ll explain it to you later. When these two kids aren’t around.”

  “What?” Heidi asked.

  “Nothing,” I called back, all false innocence.

  The temple entryway was paved with dirty stone. Seekers might have been here a few times, but if so, their visits were rare; there were no shoeprints in the dirt, or at least any that had once been here were written over with a fresh covering of compressed earth. Hoof prints that looked almost deer-esque pressed cute cloven impressions into the surface layer, but there was no telling whether they’d been made an hour or a month ago.

  Down the long porch we went … and then, meeting a tangled web of overground roots, I slipped through a gap. “Uh,” I said, squinting back at Burbondrer. “This might be a bit
awkward for you.”

  “Stand back,” he told me.

  I obliged.

  From his belt he unsheathed his massive sword, which split into two sharp prongs at the end, like a crescent moon. He swiped, roaring a battle cry as if these were not tree roots he was cutting through, but instead the neck of his greatest nemesis.

  Two more swings later, and Burbondrer had cut an uneven, box-shaped opening for himself.

  “Nice job,” I said.

  “Thanks.” He stowed the weapon, then lumbered through the gap.

  “Uh—you’ll need that again.” I hooked a thumb behind me, at another curtain of roots obscuring the temple’s main space.

  Burbondrer looked all too pleased, cutting another opening on the other side.

  He stepped aside, waving a meaty, greyish-green fist, the way a butler might guide you into a house. (Not Lady Angelica’s robot butlers, though; too stiff, even by butler standards.)

  I peered through.

  Lights glowed, illuminating the chamber from below in yellow-white shafts. They cut through the air from a circular pattern in the very center of the otherwise bare chamber. Not perfectly, I might add: the deer creature, plus many others, had trodden in here over the years, sullying once-white stone with earth. The jagged pattern, spiraling around, some twenty feet wide, was mostly obscured.

  Carson and Heidi followed behind, and Burbondrer brought up the rear.

  Carson squinted. “This is it? Didn’t the book say …?”

  “On the pad,” I told him, starting forward.

  “What pad?” Heidi turned her nose up. “Someone’s shoveled half the forest in here.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.” A pause. “Heidi, or Carson, would you happen to have anything by Queen on your phones?”

  “The Queen?” Carson asked, confused. “Does she … write?”

  “Queen. The band.” Heidi fished her phone out. “Yes, assuming my Spotify playlist didn’t wipe on the way through the gateway.”

  “Why would it do that?”

  “To spite my data plan. Mira, what do you want?”

  “A spot of We Are The Champions, I think.”

  I looked back at the edge of the amber lights, to see her roll her eyes. “Now who’s being dramatic? All right …” She began scrolling, taking a few distracted steps forward. Carson lingered at her shoulder, one eye on where she was going—not that there was really anything to trip over. And not that she was the klutz among us. On that scale, Heidi was at the graceful end. I took the middle, and Carson … well, Carson probably deserved the ranking system be named after him, the amount he teetered or slipped.

  She clicked it, and the first bar began to play—

  “Ah, no, no,” I said. “Wait till we’re through.”

  She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “You’re not serious right now.”

  “Do you think it’ll stream to Feruiduin’s Cutlass? You know, while it’s glamoured?” I wondered.

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Just fancy a soundtrack while I do this thing. I’ve always wanted a soundtrack.”

  “Rocky?” Carson suggested.

  “Little cliché, isn’t it? Also about four months late.”

  “What’s Rocky?” Burbondrer asked.

  “I’ll show it to you when we get back,” said Carson. “Heidi, do you want to—?”

  “You will be watching it alone,” she answered flatly, then brandished Feruiduin’s Cutlass, in its Bluetooth speaker form. “Right, Mira, this thing is synched up.”

  “The song is wound back right to the beginning?”

  She sighed. “Yes.”

  “Excellent.” I grinned, clapped my hands together. “Okay, team: let’s go through.”

  I stepped out onto the spiral. It was comprised of interlocked squares of black stone, offset an inch in either direction from each other, though you could barely tell. The glowing bars of light shone up around each block, at least where dirt had not penetrated so deep as to entirely block out the source, whatever it might be.

  We stepped toward the center, all four of us.

  The shafts flickered, turning white, and then—

  With an almost digital-sounding sigh, the temple disappeared, and we instead found ourselves on a stone platform erected around one of the wavy trunks, maybe two hundred feet up. We were most of the way to the canopy, yet still nowhere near close, really.

  Carson looked around. Behind his glasses, his eyes bulged, perilously large. “Oh, geez …” He swayed, and Heidi caught him around the waist.

  “I’ve got you,” she said.

  “Th-thanks.”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “The edge is like ten feet away.”

  “Yeah, but you know Carson. He’s liable to take a running trip and smear his brains over the dirt.” I flashed him an apologetic smile. “No offense.”

  He didn’t look particularly inclined to argue; his face was the color of this stone platform … if it hadn’t also been covered in a layer of dirt. This was thinner than the temple’s interior, but the teleportation mechanism that had brought us up here had clearly brought a handful of animals in its time. Including, it looked like, the cloven-pawed deer whose tracks I’d spied going in. Its footprints circled madly, weaving back and forth on themselves, before terminating at the platform’s edge.

  I tiptoed over, carefully, and leaned to peer down.

  Yeesh. We were high up. And if that thing’s poor crumpled body was down there, it was way too far to pick out against the forest floor.

  “Well, this is new,” said Heidi. “The forest is the temple.”

  Carson made a queasy sort of noise.

  I ignored him and drank it in: the soft breeze whispering about us; the earthy, green scent that you had to stand in, surround yourself with, to really savor its full depth.

  I closed my eyes, breathed out a little snort of a laugh. There were people who truly believed their Yankee Candles could give them a taste of this.

  “Be careful, Miss Brand,” Bub warned.

  “I’m always careful.” Nevertheless, I took a couple of good-sized steps backward.

  Ahead, weaving throughout this part of the forest and stained a faint pink by the light coming through the canopy, were more stone platforms. They were built around the neighboring tree trunks, almost close enough that a running jump could vault the gaps between them. Though it was not immediately clear, if I squinted I could just about see the path they took: a jagged line that swung around, climbing higher, closer to the treetops. As they ascended, the gaps between them grew larger, and the platforms became narrower. The uppermost of them had maybe two feet of available space—not a lot to aim for, and not a lot to bring your momentum to a standstill.

  It was a game of parkour, and I was plenty familiar with those.

  But when you’ve got money, what’s the point of that? There was a lot more fun to be had—and a much simpler path through these things.

  Reaching for my belt, I unhooked the mechanical device affixed at my hip. It was a new addition to my ensemble, alongside the brightly colored umbrella that was Decidian’s Spear in its glamoured form (now getting more than its fair share of baffled looks in the relentless summer heat, I can tell you), and the compass whose glass window provided a look at the worlds on the other side of my gateways.

  The line launcher was like a gun, a Batman sort of contraption, only instead of bullets it fired a line of rope—elvish rope, to be exact; still getting plenty of use from that—affixed to a prong.

  I looked back over my shoulder at Heidi. “Music, if you please.”

  “Ugh. Fine.”

  She thumbed the play button, and a moment later, the glamoured form that was Feruiduin’s Cutlass, cleverly disguised as a portable Bluetooth speaker, kicked out Queen’s We Are The Champions, full tilt.

  I grinned as Freddie Mercury’s vocals filled the forest.

  “Wow,” said Carson. “That really works?”

  Heidi shrugged. �
��Apparently.”

  “Weird …”

  I waited, making a show of taking aim, but really totally waiting for the guitar to kick in …

  And as it did—

  BOOM!

  I fired at the trunk where a platform ahead awaited me. The rope shot forward, carried on the back of miniature arrow—and from the rear of the gun too, jerking back behind me in a straight, silvery line—

  Carson shrieked—

  “Yates!” Heidi belted—

  I pivoted to see him leaping aside before the rear-facing prong impaled him through the face—which it wouldn’t, because I’d told him again and again, the thing was magically guided; it would avoid him, snaking around in flight to find the nearest surface to burrow into—and then Burbondrer leapt after him, swiping an arm around that caught Carson in the stomach, arresting his momentum, as well as slapping all the air out of his lungs.

  “Oof,” he moaned.

  “You fool,” Heidi said. “Why would you do that?”

  “So it … didn’t spike me …”

  “I’ve got you,” said Burbondrer.

  “It won’t hurt you,” I told Carson. “I could fire it at you from an inch away, and it’d still avoid you.”

  “Let’s not test that,” he said. Definitely starting to look green now.

  “Can we get this over with?” Heidi said in a tone of exasperation. She eyed Carson carefully, concern tempering her usually pouty features. “The sooner we’re on the ground, the better.” A moment’s pause. “Actually, why are we even up here? You don’t need us.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “For what?”

  “The round of applause when I get this thing.” And I winked, then jumped, tucking my legs in.

  The line launcher knew exactly what to do. It sped along the line of rope that I’d fired ahead, carrying me through the air along with it in perfectly smooth motion. The wind sailed through my hair, thick with the smell of nature, of earth and foliage, with none of the exhaust fumes of London or the suffocating taste of the London Underground, which was hot and unpleasant and polluted no matter how much they pumped the air around down there—and then I landed deftly below the knothole the line launcher had chosen to embed the rope into.