The Rifts of Psyche by Kyle West (i love reading .txt) 📕

Sorceress-Queen have. The prisoner would have to be Serah since the Queen would want nothing to do with a Burner. And since Serah’s companion was a Thermalist, it makes sense he met that end. Perhaps with a misdirected stream.”

“Is there another option?” Lucian asked.

“Pretty much the same thing as the first, except Serah got away and the Darans are chasing after her.”

“You don’t think this could have been one of the Rift villages?” Fergus asked.

Cleon shook his head. “No. This cave is far outside the bounds of the lower Deeprift, and they wouldn’t risk coming this high unless they had a score to settle. And we already know the Queen is out in force. Maybe these men came seeking information. But it’s hard to imagine it being the same men from the Greenrift. It’s too far. So this has to be another group.”

“Seems far-fetched,” Fergus said.

“I’m working with incomplete information here,” Cleon said. “If we want to find out what really happened, we need to follow those footprints.”

“That’s the strangest part,” Fergus said. “Why would they go up rather than to the Snake Pass if they were trying to find us?”

“At the time, they didn’t know I was down in the Deeprift,” Lucian said. “They do now.”

“So that means they might be headed back this way.”

Everyone looked back outside, but so far, there was no sign of hostiles.

“If they were trying to get to Snake Rift, then they couldn’t use the pass,” Lucian said. “It’s buried.”

“Even so,” Fergus said. “The Upper Reaches are a death trap, especially for outlanders. It seems strange.”

“It’s a puzzle to be sure,” Cleon agreed. “And it tells me that Serah most likely got away rather than being taken prisoner.”

“How do you figure that?” Fergus asked.

Cleon shrugged. “If she wanted to lose those men, she would have gone up rather than down. As you said, they are outlanders. They don’t know the Upper Reaches like she does, and being from the Golden Vale, they don’t have the lungs for it. And she would know all the hidden caves to shelter in. All she’d have to do is outlast them.”

“Well, if she can hide from them, she can probably hide from us, too,” Fergus said. He sat on a nearby rock, next to the ashes of the fire Lucian had sat around not three nights before. It was a surreal feeling.

“One other thing,” Lucian said. “She would have never left Ramore unburied. That means she was forced to leave, or she was taken by force.”

“That too,” Cleon said. “I didn’t say as much because the point was obvious.”

“Thanks,” Lucian said, sarcastically.

“The question is,” Fergus said, “what do we do with the information we have?”

“Other than hope I’m a better tracker than the Queen’s men?” Cleon shrugged. “I’ve got nothing.”

“Assuming it’s the Queen’s soldiers,” Lucian said, “then how is it possible that they came from above? You said there’s nothing up there of interest.”

“The final piece of the puzzle,” Cleon said. “The Zephyr.”

“Of course,” Lucian said. “If the confrontation in this cave took place two days ago, then the Zephyr must have dropped those men off somewhere close to this cave.” It suddenly came to him. “They were placed by my drop pod! Of course, that’s where they’d want to start looking. From there, the men tracked me to this cave, where they found Serah and Ramore. There was a fight. Ramore died while Serah escaped. They decided to chase Serah, figuring she probably knew something about me. This was before the Sorceress-Queen learned my true location from Morgana.” He nodded. This had to be the complete picture. “Serah must have escaped, otherwise she probably would have told them where I am by now, and that group of soldiers would be at Kiro’s gates.”

“Bingo,” Cleon said. “Couldn’t have put it better myself.”

“The only thing I don’t understand is this airship,” Lucian said. “How big is it? What is it capable of?”

“Her airship is guided by mages,” Fergus explained. “Binders can pull it every which way across the face of Psyche. It floats through the efforts of her court Atomicist, Nostra. She creates the helium that makes it float. The ship itself is rather large if reports are to be believed.”

Cleon nodded. “The Zephyr is a doozy. And Mage-Lord Nostra is largely responsible for building Dara itself, creating material that simply wouldn’t exist on this planet otherwise. The Zephyr is her crowning achievement, though. Granted, the ship is of limited use in the Riftlands. It can only go so high before the air becomes too thin, and the rifts themselves are difficult to navigate. Still, it can move faster than people on foot.”

“It’s hard to believe such a thing exists,” Lucian said.

“Well,” Cleon said, “it does. I’ve seen it, for rot’s sake. But try convincing Rifters it exists when Dara is over a thousand kilometers away and most haven’t seen the Golden Vale. There are many here who don’t believe anything exists above the sky. They think things like the Hundred Worlds and the Mage War are only stories told to children. Another fifty years of isolation, and not even the old ones will be around to keep things straight.”

“This is beside the point,” Fergus said. “If she does have the Zephyr, and she is using it, then it would go a long way to explain how her men can be everywhere at once.”

“I think so, too,” Cleon said. “That ship can crew up to two hundred men. And you can bet a good portion of them are mages, if only to have enough firepower to keep the wyverns away.”

“The air is too thin up high,” Fergus said. “The Zephyr still has to fly within the rifts for the air to be breathable. She must be very desperate to find Lucian if she’s willing to risk the crown jewel of her military in the Riftlands, especially by flying into the Upper Reaches.”

And neither of them had mentioned the most obvious thing. The Queen herself was probably on board, but