Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

'The Last Line're holding their position,' he replied in a distracted voice. 'They're safe inside the exclusion zone. Looks like Candesce is incinerating or blowing away all the debris around 'em. This will give them plenty of maneuvering room and an excellent look at the invaders.'

'And they?'

'Getting a face-full of smoke and char right now. Having trouble regaining formation. But they have all day, don't they?'

'It's a problem.'

'What does he mean by that?' Leal asked the staffer who'd brought her the tea. 'That they've got all day?'

'They know we're not a threat,' said the man with a shrug. 'They can regroup, then hit the Last Line again at dusk. And they can keep that up until they've battered a way through.'

Chaison bent to look over the short horizon of the Surgeon's hull. 'We've got no choice, then. We have to hit the First Line before they can regroup with Ferance's armada.' Leal heard several sharp intakes of breath from the others.

One of the admirals sputtered, 'But we're no match at all for ... that!'

'Well, it's true we can't fight them in the open, so we won't.'

The admiral looked around at the available cover. 'But sir, with all due respect, you can't mean to use a city as your shield!'

'No,' he said. 'I mean to use that.' Chaison smiled and pointed with the spyglass.

The other admiral, who was from the principalities himself, said, 'Oh...' in a tone of such dismay that Leal was sure whatever Chaison was proposing must involve catastrophic civilian casualties. She looked where they were all gazing now, but once again all she saw was clouds.

Except ... 'Is it just me,' she said, 'or are those clouds green?'

* * *

IT WOULD LATER be called the Battle of the Gardens.

The Sylvan Gardens was the proudest jewel in the crown of the ancient nation of Ofirium. It was a vast volume of air containing countless cultivated groves and clouds of greenery and flowers. Strung along rope and bamboo tensegrity structures miles long, the foliage was arranged into many fantastical shapes; and those shapes changed.

One day the Garden might loom across half the sky in the form of a tableau of vast human shapes. They might be fighting or dancing as the whim of the gardeners dictated. The next morning, a coordinated nighttime rearrangement of forests and lakes might have transformed the sky into a heavenly palace, or a flat painting so gigantic that its far corners were lost in haze. Several times, the Garden had taken on the form of the lost Spyre, and refugees from the ancient wheel had wept to see it.

Chaison Fanning put the Sylvan Gardens between his fleet and the First Line, then once again within the safety of the Surgeon's bridge, gave the order to hurl his battleships forward. 'I learned the value of a tree in Stonecloud,' he announced just before the Surgeon crashed into a 200- year-old ball of elms. Ancient branches ground and scraped along the hull of the flagship. 'Full power,' ordered the admiral.

The rest of the fleet followed his lead, roaring past the incredulous gardeners, demolishing centuries of artistry as they snapped up this or that living bauble as a figurehead.

'Sir,' said the helmsman nervously, 'we've no visibility.'

'Proceed,' he said. The Surgeon passed sixty miles per hour, then eighty. Such speeds were reckless for any vessel in the crowded air of the principalities; doubly so in this forested region.

'Sir, we're burning through our fuel at--'

'Proceed.'

They passed 120 miles per hour. 'Sir? Sir!' The helmsman was practically jumping out of his seat. Chaison glared at him.

'One hundred sixty,' somebody else said.

'Engines idle and deploy braking sails,' Chaison ordered. Horns echoed from the open hatches behind Leal, and then the moderate gravity of their acceleration suddenly reversed: down had been aft, and then suddenly it was to forward. Leal gripped the arms of her chair and listened as protesting branches clutched at and scoured the armored hull again--this time, as the speeding grove left the Surgeon like a ball from a racket.

In this way, Chaison's relief force threw an entire forest at the First Line fleet.

'Fire incendiaries into our little package,' Chaison said. 'Let's see if we can get their hair smoking.'

The First Line had spent their careers among the icebergs and mists of outer Virga. They had trained in total darkness to defend the walls of the world along thousands of miles of empty air. It would be fair to say that none of them were comfortable with the density of the skies here. None had expected to suddenly be facing a wall of flaming forest coming at them at over a hundred miles per hour.

'All ships: knife formation,' said Chaison. 'Let's see if we can cut them in two.' The semaphore men went into their dance, and outside the portholes Leal glimpsed ships peeling off to either side of the Surgeon. Chaison, whose back was to the prow so he could watch the projection on the aft wall, leaned forward, cursed softly, then shouted, 'Fire forward batteries!'

A gigantic sound came, and pulling and overturning and bright light, and Leal curled into a ball and put her hands over her head.

* * *