Flight Through the Moss

How many paces of falling deadwood could a canopy raider outrun before the void swallowed the branch whole? Tala caught a slick liana with her left hand as the shattered ironwood bough tumbled into the green depths below. The canvas pack swung hard against her shoulder blades, the rigid curve of the rolled mammoth hide biting through the cloth into her ribs. Above her, phosphor flares hissed through the mist, casting harsh crimson shadows across the weeping foliage.

Eight warriors in gilded scale armor dropped onto the adjoining limbs. Their kinetic polearms hummed with amber resonance, and their heavy boots tore into the wet bark.

"Form the ring!" the lead tracker shouted, his visor rimmed with pale gold. "Drive her toward the deadfall shelf! Do not let her unroll that hide!"

Four guards bounded along the upper ridge to cut off the trunk path, while the other four fanned out across the lower boughs. They moved with the stiff precision of hunters accustomed to level ground, their iron-shod soles slipping on the greasy shelf-moss.

Tala hung from the vine, her boots skimming thirty paces of empty air above a bed of jagged thorn-brambles. Her right hand kept a white-knuckled grip on the kinetic club. The amber nodule loaded into the base glowed faint orange against the damp wood.

Directly between the two descending squads hung a colony of native sulfur-spore bulbs. The translucent green sacs clung to the underside of the main fork in bloated clusters, each one filled with volatile phosphorescent dust that the canopy tribes used to signal across cloud banks.

Tala kicked off the trunk with both heels, swinging her body toward the central fork.

The lower guards leveled their polearms, the amber tips pulsing with gathered charge. "Drop the pack, thief!"

Tala did not answer with words. She twisted in mid-air, brought the heavy head of her club down, and hammered the lead spore bulb squarely against the bark.

The kinetic nodule in her club discharged with a deafening crack.

The concussive wave did not just smash the timber; it ruptured the entire colony of spore sacs in a chain reaction. A blinding geyser of emerald flash and stinging sulfur powder erupted through the canopy fork. The expanding cloud swallowed the vanguard in a storm of brilliant, burning light.

Cries of pain cut through the roar of the blast.

"My eyes! The resin is burning through the visor slits!"

"Hold the perimeter! Sweep the boughs blind!"

Two of the warriors discharged their polearms in panic. The kinetic shockwaves missed Tala completely, slamming into an ancient rotten branch above them instead. The heavy timber cracked under its own weight and crashed onto the lower squad, scattering their formation in a tangle of splintered wood and flailing limbs.

Tala landed lightly on a lateral root on the far side of the smoke. The sulfur dust bit at her throat, but she had already pulled the leather collar of her harness up over her mouth. She popped the spent amber casing from her club, letting the blackened husk drop into the foliage, and snatched a fresh nodule from her pack. She thumbed the stone into the breach with a sharp click, leaving thirty-three in reserve.

She did not wait for the smoke to clear. Tala sprinted along the moss bridge, heading west toward the outer edge of the drift-moon where the winds blew hardest.

High above the canopy, the drone of pterosaur-hide sails cut through the fog. The four Sun-Chieftain war-kites circling the upper cloud deck had spotted the flash. Heavy iron-tipped harpoons plunged through the leaf canopy like falling pillars, tearing through branches fifty paces ahead of her path.

The first harpoon sheared through the moss bridge, leaving a twenty-pace gap of empty mist between Tala and the next stable limb.

Tala did not slow down. She reached the edge of the severed bark, jammed the butt of her club against the wood beneath her toes, and triggered the kinetic charge.

The recoil kicked her straight across the chasm. She soared through the opening, caught a descending vine with her free hand to bleed off the momentum, and hit the next branch in a rolling slide. As soon as her boots found purchase, she ejected the spent nodule and loaded another.

Behind her, the pursuers were recovering faster than expected. The lead tracker had cleared his visor, his gold-rimmed armor gleaming through the drifting green smoke.

"She is burning through her charges to clear the deadfalls!" the tracker yelled from two tiers above. "Press her to the gale-shelf! When her stones run dark, she has nowhere left to jump!"

Tala leaped from bough to bough, a streak of gray canvas and russet leather through the endless green. Every chasm demanded a pulse; every falling timber forced an evasive blast. She fired a nodule downward to vault over a collapsing root cluster, then another into the face of a swooping kite-cable that threatened to snare her neck.

Stone by stone, the weight in her pack diminished. She worked with the practiced rhythm of a flint-artisan, thumbing nodules from the pouch, sliding them into the brass firing chamber, and discharging the kinetic pulses without breaking stride. By the seventh leap, the brass housing of the club was hot enough to scorch through her leather wraps.

"Baya's dogs certainly know how to run in gilded boots," Tala muttered under her breath, dodging a spray of crossbow quarrels that embedded themselves into the trunk beside her ear. "Too bad they weigh as much as river anchors."

She fired two pulses in rapid succession against the flank of a massive cedar trunk, ricocheting sideways across a four-tiered waterfall of hanging fern-moss. The double blast threw her clear of the pursuers' line of fire, but the effort cost her dearly.

She landed hard on a narrow shelf of stone jutting out from the roots, sliding three paces across wet lichen before digging her heels into the grit. Her lungs burned with the thin canopy air, and her right forearm ached from absorbing the constant kinetic recoil.

Tala reached into her canvas satchel, her fingers sweeping across the remaining contents.

The carved mammoth hide was intact, its resin seal cold and unbroken against the leather lining. Beside it, the once-bulging pouch of refined amber had shrunk to a modest handful.

She counted the hard facets beneath her fingertips. Sixteen nodules remained in the pouch, plus the single primed stone resting in her club's firing chamber.

Eighteen charges spent in less than a thousand paces of canopy.

She had burned over half her stolen fortune just to stay ahead of the trackers' reach.

A sudden blast of cold, roaring air struck her face, whipping her loose hair across her goggles. The dense canopy ended abruptly.

Tala stepped out onto the gale-shelf of drift-moon Pulo.

Before her opened the boundless expanse of the Amber Wake. Two leagues below the cliff edge, the great atmospheric oxygen river surged through the void like a rushing torrent of emerald and turquoise light. It flowed at terrifying speed, carrying clouds of vapor and migrating sky-plankton between the drift-moons.

Behind her, the ironwood trees groaned as the eight warriors emerged from the brush, their polearms leveled and their gilded armor smeared with green spore dust. Above the canopy, the four war-kites banked into a diving turn, their wing-mounted grapples ready to drop.

The tracker lowered his weapon, his breath wheezing behind his dented visor. "The cliff ends here, raider. Surrender the courier slab, and the Sun-Chieftain may let you keep your hands."

Tala looked across the line of gilded armor, then down toward the luminous green ribbon tearing across the dark between the worlds. The forest behind her was sealed, but sixty leagues of open wind waited below. She pulled the pterosaur-skin flaps snug against her ribs, locked the bone toggle into place, and tapped the warm brass head of her kinetic club against her collarbone.

"Tell Baya he can have his mail back," Tala said. "Just as soon as his heavy kites learn how to swim."