Airborne

Taylor was afraid, and he didn't know why. The dusty wizard and his feathery companion weren't doing anything that should alarm him. It was more like they had decided something, and they knew he wouldn't like it. He stopped well short of the pair and tossed a used disk to Reginar, who glanced at it for a few seconds before throwing it back.

"You came out of this with more mana than you had going in. How did you learn about Heverdam's theory of induced compression? It's not published anymore."

Taylor had never heard of Heverdam, but he knew plenty about mana and its behavior in different materials. "My library has some old books in it," he half-lied, "there's interesting stuff in it."

He threw the bag of crystallized mana at the tenuit's feet. "Job's done. Give me a receipt, and you can report to the governor."

"Keep it." He reached down for the bag with onyx-nailed hands and tossed it back to Taylor. "We're not going back to the governor. Or to Mourne."

Taylor shrugged and tried to hide his apprehension. "Then I'll be seeing you."

"Climb up. You're coming with us."

Taylor stepped back. "We've met twice, and I've been afraid for my life both times. I'm going home."

"I'm taking you to Rossignol, for your own good."

"I'm not going anywhere with you." He stepped back again. "I don't trust you."

It was hard to identify under the mountain of white fur, but Reginar made a face. It could have been surprise, pain, or anger. "Sorry, pup, but you don't have a choice."

This time, Taylor was ready for the grip of pure force that tried to snatch him. He turned tail and ran, fast enough to dodge the invisible hand, faster than he had ever dared to in his life, leaping downhill, downstream, into the forests below the otter dam. He didn't listen to Reginar's shouts or Silvain's response, he just stuck to the forest to get cover from the gryphon. He charged through branches, trusting his body enhancements to shield him from serious damage.

He had to slow down as he came to a high meadow and make a decision: run through, or stick to the trees. Desperately, he tried to sense where his pursuers were, but couldn't find any traces of mana. It was too much to hope they'd simply given up.

Running around with magically enhanced speed and durability was like burning a bonfire at night, so Taylor lowered his enhancements as much as he dared, used a camouflage spell, and carefully backtracked fifty yards before circling clockwise around the meadow, dampening the sound of his passing. He cinched his bag hard against his body to keep it from making noise.

"Scurry all you like, Bilius!" Reginar's voice was all around him: in front and behind, far away and leaning over his shoulder. "You can't get away from me."

If the fuzzball was taunting him, Taylor must be doing something right. He kept his mana profile low, his concealment tight, and his progress quiet. Twice, he paused to look into the sky but couldn't see any sign of them. He was playing against someone with centuries of practice, and whose partner was a greater spirit. Who knew what capabilities Silvain was hiding, in addition to being a giant gryphon who could fly at the speed of sound?

"You don't belong in this backwater. The Rossignol Court can teach you everything you're missing. Imagine what you could do with a real teacher." Taylor doubted Reginar could be better than the sum of all his great teachers in the past. In any case, he wasn't going anywhere with a violent pouf of fur.

A front of powerful wind blew across the forest, twisting and wracking trees until they threw down their lesser branches and gave up their newly-grown leaves to the zephyr. It was a ploy to force him to spend mana by shielding himself, so he did the opposite: lay flat on the ground behind the largest nearby trunk. Sticks and leaves pelted him at high speed, but Taylor kept his position and concealment as the front of compressed air blasted his surroundings.

Trees swayed in the blast's wake, bare of leaves, open to the sky. Those reckless idiots were damaging the forest just to get to him! Reginar was suspiciously quiet, and he couldn't see the oversized buzzard, Silvain. Instead of sensing mana, Taylor tried using his eyes. Not to look for them directly, but to watch for signs of their passing. A massive gryphon should cause equally massive air displacement as it passed, leaving behind gusts of wind, vortices of leaves and debris, or condensed vapor. But Taylor couldn't sense anything from them.

Cautiously, he started walking up the mountain, back the way he came. Either they could see him or they couldn't. If so, it didn't matter what he did. If not, they would look downhill, expecting him to head for home. He would find a place to hide, maybe in thick underbrush, and wait until morning.

They hit him without any warning. A wall of air smashed him like a padded sledgehammer, threw him headlong into a tree, and knocked him into darkness.

Helpless. Again. Caught in Reginar's Grasping Fist like the child he was. The ancient magician's non-systemized magic was as smooth and seamless as anything Taylor could do in any of his lifetimes. Struggling against it was useless, so Taylor tried to think. Which was hard to do from the back of a speeding gryphon.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

A creature like Silvain did not fly by physics alone. In fact, it was an open question how much her flying depended on physics at all. She looked like a creature with wings, but she didn't always move like one. She climbed without beating her wings, gaining altitude like a Megnindian jet fighter. The combination of sudden altitude changes and the damage to his head forced bright spikes of pain behind his eyes. His ears screamed at him, but he couldn't tell if it was tinnitus or the wind. Before him, the horizon receded, curved, and nauseously tilted.

Conventional wisdom said healers shouldn't heal themselves, but Taylor did it anyway, thinking Spellscript words to himself while focusing on his skull. Reginar didn't seem to care or notice, and the pains eased as the mild regeneration effect took hold.

"By morning, you'll be in your new home!" Reginar had to yell over the wind. Silvain partially protected them from the hurricane forces of her flying, but her idea of gentle wasn't human-scale.

"I don't want to go anywhere with you! Let me go!"

"It's for your own good!"

He was done being nice to these people. "You and your big chicken don't give a shit about me! You hurt me, I'm altitude sick, and I'm freezing! You're a violent bastard, and no child should ever have to deal with you. And how dumb do you have to be to kidnap a legate? They're not going to let this pass!"

"Reg, he has a point. Do we really want to be called up by the emperor again? Can Rossignol afford it?" Silvain leveled at around twenty thousand feet and adjusted her course. Fingers Lake was ahead of them and slightly to the right. At that height, Taylor had to pull in his breaths with deliberate force. He tuned up his body enhancements, but that didn't give him more air per breath.

"We'll think of something."

When Taylor realized the Grasping Fist was gone, he didn't stop to think.

He jumped.

A few lives back, Taylor had been an orbital drop-trooper, and stayed alive long enough to die in his third engagement. As far as past lives went, it was short and brutal, but he learned a few things. He didn't just slide off of Silvain's back, but threw himself down as hard as he could, with arms crossed tightly over his chest. He locked his ankles, tucked his chin, and hit his captors with the loudest, brightest noise bomb he could summon up. Silvain had never seen his Flare and wasn't ready for it. She banked away just as Reginar was trying to grab hold of Taylor's departing ankle.

He fell beneath the gryphon's upturned wing, through her bubble of relative safety, and hit normal air like bellyflopping onto water after a hundred-foot drop. The impact forced a pained cry from him. Sudden drag yanked him away from his captors, but also sent him spinning while gravity acceleration pulled him down. It was mayhem.

His brain knew how to get control over the tumbling, but his Bilius body flailed for precious seconds before he started to get a feel for it. He got into a good belly-down arch and spun, looking up for his adversaries. Silvain was already lined up to make a pass at him, banking smoothly in her sky-ice plumage, matching his descent. Taylor could fall faster or slower, but he couldn't hope to outmaneuver her in her native element.

With fifteen thousand feet left before he hit the ground, he pulled in his limbs and took a steep, fast angle flying on his back. He had to struggle against his satchel's asymmetry, which kept trying to flip him over.

Silvain came on with terrifying speed, easily adjusting to his course change. He waited for her wings to spread to slow her down for the collision, for her talons to lift, ready for the grab.

Taylor channeled mana into his pants cuffs. They were ridiculous things, part of the mode of dress in Estford. They gathered a gentleman's pant legs above the calves and kept his socks up at the same time. Most sharp dressers tied off their cuffs with silk bows, but Taylor used clips of wyvern bone, engraved with a custom barrier spell. It shielded him from high-velocity wind with an eight-foot-wide concave disk. Hurricane winds were reduced to breezes, and free-falls were slowed to under twenty-five feet per second. He made the praxis as a lark, because it was interesting, but this was the second time he had to use it.

His sudden deceleration sent the gryphon on a course to pass under him at the last moment. He had a brief look at Reginar, and he was grinning, black lips pulled back around his sharp teeth. Just as Taylor thought they'd pass him by, Silvain flipped and put her rear claws upward to grab him.

Taylor hit her with powerful Slices, three in quick succession, aimed at her exposed belly. She snapped her wings closed around her body to ward off the magic attack and hit him with an explosion of wind that was more than his praxis could handle. She finished her somersault while he was lifted above her (relatively speaking, because they were both falling fast) and sped away, almost too far for him to see.

Ten thousand feet. He could identify specific features of Fingers Lake below him. Silvain banked up and shot into the sky, gained a good thousand feet, barrel-rolled, and dove toward him. This time, Reginar was standing tall on her back while she was diving. He was going to match his speed to Taylor's, and then snatch him with that damned Grasping Fist.

Taylor disabled his praxis and fell, sitting like he was in a chair, so he could watch the tenuit dive for him, hands outstretched as if to welcome a new apprentice to his collection. As soon as he was within range, Taylor started throwing Slice and Spear at him, attacks Reginar tossed aside with the backs of his hands, looking for all the world like he was having his best day in years. Keeping up his defense was preventing him from using his grabbing spell, but the attacks weren't hurting him. The free-fall stalemate continued until they were nearly close enough to touch.

Then came the Dragon Shot. Fifty pounds of conjured tungsten carbide sabot traveling at five times the speed of sound. It was an effect Taylor had to use a spell for, but he could cast the spell at the same time he used his weaker non-systemized magic.

Taylor could see it in his face: Reginar knew he'd made a mistake. He could feel the power Taylor released and knew there wasn't time to counter it. It should have hit the obnoxious beastkin in his chest, but his reflexes and his partner saved his life. They turned aside just enough to save his life, but Reginar's arm disappeared into a mist of blood and shattered flesh. The red cloud got left behind, and seven feet of white fur was thrown off his mount. Silvain had to pull away to roll over and try to catch him with her hind legs, then disengaged.

Taylor restored mana to his praxis, with maybe three thousand feet left to fall. As he slowed, he swung his bag around and dug for his sword. Things had gotten out of hand. Standing on his disk of Slow Descent, he drew his weapon. With the spell-breaking sheath in one hand and mana-channeling blade in the other, he was better prepared for whatever came next.

Silvain circled, keeping her distance. As she turned, he saw she had a gap in her wing, and a limp white form carried in one talon. Despite the distance she kept, he could probably hit her with Dragon Shot. But if she was willing to let the confrontation end, then he was willing to let her go. Otherwise, someone was going to die.

She turned toward Mount Bakarik, beat her wings once, and left contrails behind her.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.