Sky Ribbons and War Conches

A three-league drop through open mist was no place to lose a boot, but Tala had already kicked her left sandal loose to grip the braided vine tether with bare toes. Below her swinging heels, the emerald torrent of an oxygen river churned across the void, howling like a herd of stampeding moss-beasts. Far beneath that rushing ribbon of breathable air drifted the swirling gold bands of the gas giant, vast and silent in the abyss. Tala did not intend to plunge into either. Her gaze stayed locked on the sun-kite slicing through the current three hundred paces ahead.

The courier glider belonged to the Sun-Chieftain's vanguard. Its wide triangular wings, stretched from cured pterosaur skin and braced by bleached rib bones, carried two sentries and a heavy hide chest bound for the high watch-crags of the inner rim.

Tala leaned forward into the roaring updraft. The wind tasted of sweet pine pitch and damp cloud-brine. She wanted that courier chest before the kite crossed into the fortified thermal channels, both for the fresh amber nodules inside and to remind Baya's sky-guards that no corridor in the Amber Wake was closed to a canopy raider.

She reached behind her neck, touching the cold horn mouthpiece tucked into the leather collar of her flight harness.

Stealth was an option for scavengers. Tala was a raider.

With a sharp twist of her hips, she kicked the release peg on her tow-anchor. The tension in the trailing vine sprang free with a sharp twang, hurling her forward into the green belly of the oxygen stream.

Air slammed into her chest. Her pterosaur-hide flight flaps snapped open between her wrists and ribs, catching the dense current. She angled her shoulders, reading the turbulence where two pressure curls tangled into a frothing knot of white vapor. A lesser glider would have fought the spiral; Tala tucked her knees, dipped her left elbow, and let the vortex fling her directly into the jet stream.

Her speed doubled in two heartbeats.

The sun-kite grew large in her vision. The two guards stationed on its flat rattan deck had their backs turned, scanning the thick cloud banks ahead. One adjusted a steering line lashed to a bone rudder, while the other leaned his weight on a heavy flint spear.

Tala dropped through the trailing slipstream of the kite. At twenty paces, she whipped the heavy conch from her harness, clamped her mouth over the shell's smoothed lip, and filled her lungs with thick, sweet sky-stream air.

She blew.

The war-conch roared. It was a bellow that rattled teeth, a deep, brassy shriek of an apex predator surfacing from a storm. The sound rolled through the hollow rib spars of the glider and slapped both guards in the back of their skulls.

The spearman spun around so fast he nearly pitched over the safety rail. "Sky devil!"

"Good morning, watchers!" Tala shouted over the howl of the stream.

She slammed onto the stern deck, heel-first. The impact shuddered through the glider's ribbing. The spearman lunged with his flint-tipped pike, jabbing straight for her throat. Tala did not duck; she swung her kinetic amber club upward in a rising arc.

The fist-sized yellow nodule embedded in the hardwood head struck the flat of the flint blade.

The kinetic shock stored within the amber discharged with a crack like summer thunder. A ring of gold light flared at the point of contact, and the concussive pulse hurled the spearman backward across the rattan floor. He crashed hard against the mast, losing his grip on the weapon as it tumbled away into the green abyss.

"One," Tala called out.

The second guard, broader and clad in thick plates of boiled hide, drew a pair of notched stone cleavers. He kicked the rudder lock into place, steadying the kite on its glide path, and charged across the narrow deck with a guttural shout.

"You picked the wrong lane, thief!" the guard snarled.

Tala sprang sideways, planting her bare toes on the low railing. The void spun beneath her left shoulder, thousands of leagues of gold-striped gas clouds waiting to crush whatever slipped past the breathable stream. She pivoted on the ball of her foot, hooking her uncharged club handle around the guard's thick wrist as he swung.

The cleaver carved empty air. Tala drove her knee into his ribs, spun behind his shoulder, and kicked the back of his knee. The big guard dropped with a heavy grunt. Before he could roll, she tapped the side of his temple with the hardwood butt of her club, knocking him flat against the deck boards.

"And two," she said.

The glider shuddered, caught in a crosswind near the turbulent boundary of the river. Tala stepped quickly to the cargo cradle lashed behind the mast. The chest was bound with triple-braided sinew. Drawing a serrated flint knife from her thigh sheath, she sawed through the cords with two clean strokes and flipped the heavy lid.

Inside lay three dozen polished amber nodules, gleaming with internal orange luminescence, alongside a stack of carved flight-tokens bearing the Sun-Chieftain's personal solar wheel.

"Prime harvest," she breathed, scooping the heavy nodules into her canvas shoulder pack.

She slung the pack across her chest and cinched the bone toggle tight. A sharp whistle cut through the roar of the wind above her.

Tala glanced upward.

Two escort war-kites had dropped through the high cloud veil, their narrow, black-stained sails banking hard into her drift path. On the lead glider's bow spar stood an archer in amber-flecked bone scales, nocking a heavy bone shaft to his bowstring.

"Raider on the deck!" the archer bellowed. "Cut her down!"

Tala sprinted toward the stern rail, intending to hook her recovery line into the passing slipstream of an updraft branch. She uncoiled her vine tether from her hip ring, swinging the weighted bone grapple to gain momentum for the throw.

A volley of flint-tipped arrows rattled across the rattan planks. One struck the mast with a splintering thud; another sliced through the leather flap at her left elbow.

The lead pursuer glider surged alongside, its bone outrigger grinding against her captured vessel in a spray of friction sparks. A warrior on the outrigger lunged with a broad flint axe, swinging down with both hands.

The heavy stone blade did not strike Tala. It bit clean through the thick braided vine of her recovery grapple just as she threw her weight over the rail.

The severed line whipped past her face.

Tala fell.

The safety of the glider vanished above her in a blur of gray hide and splintered bone. Her body plunged out of the green, rushing floor of the oxygen stream, tumbling headlong into the cold, silent drop of the endless void below.