Of Bone and Thunder (20 page)

It was an unsettling answer, but Jawn didn't have the stomach for a protracted discussion. The heat of the day was quickly raising the temperature inside the hut and Jawn was starting to feel light-headed.

“Assuming I understand this, which I'm fairly certain I don't, what is it I am supposed to do as part of this Cow and Country mission?”

Rickets smiled approvingly. “For cow and country. You're a wit, you are. We'll have to get that embroidered on something.”

“I'm really not in the mood. Could you just tell me what I'm supposed to do?”

Rickets held up a finger. “Yes, yes, you do need to be apprised of your new role. There have been . . . developments since Gremthyn. Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

“Finding out I've been retasked wasn't the bad news?” Jawn asked.

“Oh, it was, but that was just the appetizer to what is looming on the horizon as one massive shit soufflé.”

Jawn's stomach spasmed. “The good news first,” he managed to say.

“An optimist. Well, the Lux will beat that out of you before long. Fine. The good news is we're going to be working together.
Officially
, I have been retasked with providing all clerical and other duties as required in support of the mission.”

“Together? Us? You and me?”

Rickets nodded enthusiastically. “Two men on an arduous journey through festering swamp and sweltering jungle. They may very well write a
book about our adventures one day, just like the famous Ox and Crink.” Rickets paused for a moment, then continued. “Ah, well, not entirely like them, I should think.”

“I can understand them wanting me, but why you?”

Rickets sighed and looked down at his hands. Jawn followed his gaze. Rickets's hands were strong, the fingers lean and surprisingly agile. For the first time, Jawn noticed a thin lattice of scars on the knuckles. These weren't the hands of a midlevel bureaucrat.

“You keep asking questions you don't want the answers to,” Rickets finally said. He said it without any emotion, which made it sound all the more ominous.

Jawn thought back to their rag ride and Rickets's relative calm, despite the harrowing nature of their flight. Who Rickets really was seemed even less clear now.
Could he really be a spy?
The stories about the Dark Rangers were wild and often drenched in blood. He doubted a tenth of what he'd heard about them was true, but even at a tenth . . .

“
Curiosity doesn't just kill cats
,” one of Jawn's professors, an ancient thaum well into his sixties, used to say right before beginning to teach them a new process. It was an odd motto for a professor, but on the other hand, he did teach mortal thaumics.

“You said good news and bad news. So what's the bad news?” Jawn asked. Rickets's true identity could wait for another day.

“It turns out to be rather fortuitous, as far as that goes,” Rickets said. “One of those crystal contraptions your academy dreamed up for talking over long distances stopped working in a very bad way.”

“You know about those?” Jawn asked.

Rickets looked Jawn over before responding. “We should talk about the details later. It's all a bit complicated.”

“Let's do it now,” Jawn said.

Rickets shrugged. “Control was lost. There was a fire. Two dead. Very messy. The RAT, and . . . other entities, are concerned that there could be a fatal flaw in the system.”

Jawn shook his head and squeezed his hands into fists. “That shouldn't have happened. There are safeguards. We established methods to avoid . . . fires.”

“You're not in the RAT anymore. It gets nontheoretical very fast out here.”

“I understand that, but what you're missing is that thaumics is neither bad or good. It's simply
power
. That's what all of nature is. Everything around us is power,” Jawn said. “Like a boulder on the edge of a cliff. As long as it sits there, it's stable, or at least it appears to be. But with erosion from wind and rain, the cliff beneath wears away until the rock tips over and falls. Now what was once stable is transformed into a massive force of energy.”

“So you're the wind and the rain then?”

Jawn nodded. “In a manner of speaking. Thaums don't create the power—we find it, harness it, and redirect it. The RAT is all about pushing the boundaries of what we know and how we can harness more of it.”

“Like the slyt thaum,” Rickets said.

“Well, yes. If a thaum is willing to die, or wants to, the power he can harness will be huge. We're learning more about the aether and the planes. And the more we learn, the more we discover what we don't know.”

Silence reigned in the hut. Jawn's mind flashed to the gathered slyts in the square. It had been horrific, but it had also been controlled and on purpose. That slyt thaum had meant for the slyts to burn. As much as Jawn wanted to forget it, he realized there was a part of him intent on understanding it, dissecting every aspect of the process. He wanted to know how to wield that kind of power.

“In that vein,” said Rickets, “we need to look into the use of these crystals and make sure they're functioning as they should be. That goes for the RATs operating them, too. We don't want more accidents.”

Jawn's head snapped up and he looked squarely at Rickets. “That's what this is about? You want me to spy on other thaums?”

“We can't have more Gremthyns,” Rickets said.

Jawn felt offended. “That was an enemy thaum.”

Rickets hung his head as he talked. “It was wrong, not because he killed all those slyts, but because he could. That kind of power . . . it shouldn't exist.”

Jawn realized he wasn't going to get Rickets to see this his way. Thaumics was the future and thaums like Jawn would only become more
powerful as they learned to master ever more processes. “Gremthyn was terrible,” Jawn said, not knowing what else to say.

Rickets jumped to his feet, startling Jawn.

“Anyway, it's a beautiful morning in the Lux and we have places to be. Let's get you washed up and looking like, well, the opposite of whatever this is.” He held out a hand to Jawn.

Seeing nothing else for it, Jawn took Rickets's hand and allowed the man to haul him to his feet. The silk that Jawn had taken for a sheet slid down around his ankles and he realized that it was in fact a woman's dress. Worse, he was wearing a pair of women's unmentionables underneath.

“I probably don't want to know about this, do I?” Jawn said.

Rickets smiled. “Oh, no, I'm going to love telling you about
this
.”

“WELL, DAMN WELL FIND
a way to make it work!”

Obsidian Flock leader Vorly Astol stood at attention, his eyes fixed on a three-inch tear in the far canvas wall of Legion Flock Commander Walf Modelar's tent.

Modelar was in full tirade and the air was suffocating. Vorly's head pounded and he thought he might vomit. It took a moment for him to answer.

“Not with those things I won't,” Vorly said.

This was the third confrontation Vorly had had with the LFC in as many days since the crystal incident, and they were only getting worse.

Modelar threw a punch at the side of the tent, driving his arm through the canvas up to his elbow. “You think I'm asking you for a fucking favor?” He yanked his arm back in. “I'm telling you what you're going to do, and you are damn well going to do it!”

“But they
aren't safe
.”

Modelar punched the canvas again with the same results. When he yanked his arm out this time, it left a foot-long gash revealing the dusty quarry yard of the rag roost. Flockmen walking by the tent sped up their pace and disappeared from view.

“Safe?! Druid fucking trees, Flock Leader! We ride big, stupid dragons that explode! Safe?! What in the—may the High Druid . . . safe, he says! You—you . . .”

Vorly knew Modelar was right, but that didn't change anything. Images of the small, charred lump being pried off of Centaurea's scales lingered in Vorly's mind.

“Are you listening to me?” Modelar asked, standing up on his toes to put his eyes in line with Vorly's. A good three inches shorter than Vorly's
less-than-towering five feet six inches, Modelar commanded attention through sheer volume and intensity. With his horseshoe of white hair from ear to ear, large hook nose, heavy brow, and piercing blue eyes, the LFC was known throughout the flocks as Screaming Eagle. Those less charitable, like rag drivers who earned his displeasure, called him Screeching Pigeon, though not to his face, and never without looking over their shoulder first.

Vorly blinked and focused on his commander. “You can court-martial me if you'd like, but I'm not flying with one of those things again.”

Modelar's eyes widened and he drew in a breath. His complexion turned from angry rose to throbbing red, but then he pushed down the air in front of him with his hands and let his breath out, hissing like a kettle at full boil. He lowered himself back onto his heels.

“High fuckin' Druid, Vorly. Are you trying to put me in an early grave?” The moment he said it he was waving the thought away. “Bad choice of words. Do you know you are the biggest thorn in my paw? Any other driver and I'd have strung you from the highest tree long ago. Do you even know how lucky you are, you insubordinate shit? A needle in a haystack, Vorly, a needle in Druid-forsaken haystack, but they found the body of that RAT. Luckier still, the crystal sheets, or what was left of them, were still on the rag when it came back. Do you have any idea the kind of nightmare we'd have on our hands if we lost a RAT or some of their precious crystal?”

“We lost Jate, too, not that they seem to care,” Vorly said.

Modelar massaged his temples with a pained look on his face. “Vorly, no one is happy about what happened. Jate was a hell of a driver, and he'll be missed. But I got reports from every other driver and RAT on that training flight. Something wasn't right with him. Hell, the aether commander
herself
is involved. This isn't your run-of-the-mill accident. This is
serious
. We need to know what happened, and from everything I've heard, Jate was his own worst enemy.”

Vorly gritted his teeth. “Jate said the thaum was casting a spell on him.”

“Mmm. What do you think?” Modelar asked.

Vorly looked down at Modelar. He hadn't expected that. “A spell?” Vorly sighed. “It wasn't anything like that. Jate got it into his head that the crystals went against the LOKAM.” Vorly knew Jate was a devout
Dendrolatrian, but it never seemed to interfere with his ability to fly a rag. Sure, Jate was forever complaining about the drinking and the whoring and taking the High Druid's name in vain, but that was just Jate being Jate. When he started complaining about the crystals, Vorly had chalked it up to one more case of Jate getting on his high branch and preaching. “I should have done something. I had no idea he'd . . .”

Modelar reached out a hand and grabbed Vorly's right arm at the elbow, giving it a squeeze. The two men had known each other fifteen years and been friends for the last nine. “The world keeps moving faster. Not everyone has a strong enough grip to hold on. It's a damn shame all the way around, what happened to Jate, but it doesn't change shit.” Modelar let go of Vorly's arm. He was commander again. “The navy's Third Fleet has been unloading crystals and RATs for the last two weeks and His Majesty Whoever expects us to use them. Every flock in the Lux is going to have RATs and crystals. They're even talking about giving some to the army legions. They think they'll be able to make it so we can talk with the army on the ground while we're flying.”

Vorly opened his mouth to protest, but Modelar cut him off. “I don't want to fucking hear it. If you can't handle this, fine, I'm not going to make you. But your gray matter is boiled pudding if you think I'm going to waste my time court-martialing your sorry ass. You would do well to remember that the transport caravans are always looking for seat warmers.”

It wasn't an idle threat. More than one rag driver had found himself breathing dust behind a team of oxen. For a high-flying ragger, there wasn't a worse punishment than that.

“He burned, Walf. He screamed and he cried and he burned.” Vorly's right eye teared up.
Fucking hell, like meat on a spit.

Modelar looked away. Vorly brought up a hand and wiped the tear from his eye.

“He's not the first driver that's charked, and he won't be the last,” Modelar said, speaking low. “The day you no longer accept that is the day you hang up your spurs.” Modelar turned around and fixed Vorly with his eagle stare. “Your flock, including the RATs, is waiting in your tack room. You get them right with this and get your flock ready to fly, or you keep on walking to the caravans. We've got a war to fight.”

Vorly knew their meeting was over. He saluted, spun on his heel, and headed toward the pens. Until he got there, he wasn't sure if he was going to stop or keep on walking.

The decision was made for him before he reached the pens. Lancer Rimsma came running along the gravel road, his tunic torn and blood streaming from his nose. When he spotted Vorly, he stumbled to a halt.

“Sir! They're fighting!”

This is all I need.
Even though they were from the same litter, rags had separate pens to keep them from having a go at each other. Vorly had learned that most of the aggression they displayed was for show rather than with the intent to injure, but a four-ton rag could still do a hell of a lot of damage to the humans around it.

“Shit.” Vorly grabbed Rimsma by his jacket lapels. “Go find the dragonsmith and round up as many flockmen as you can,” he ordered, but Rimsma was vigorously shaking his head no.