Page 68 of Stalk the Sky

At least she’d succeeded in keeping him from firing his gun.

With a roar, the dwarves surged forward. They were on the Mongavarians within seconds, swinging their hammers and taking them down.

Pip stayed where she was behind the pillar, her hands shaking on the gun so much that she couldn’t rack the slide back to put another round into the chamber.

Baragh halted next to her, carefully extracting the gun from her hands. “You did well.”

Pip swallowed and nodded, her legs and hands still trembling.

The crew leader, Yamrarlig, sauntered back toward her, his hammer resting on his shoulder.

Pip rested her head against the pillar behind her as she glanced up at him. “You arrived just in time.”

Yamrarlig patted the handle of his hammer. “The troll warriors had all the fun below, so we thought we’d see about fending off the attack up here. We took out a few of those pesky buggers on our way up here. Cleared the stairwell out.”

Good. Then Pip didn’t have to worry about the Mongavarians who had gotten past them in the initial chaos.

As Pip straightened, a huge thump shuddered the stone beneath their feet. Another whistling sound filled the air a moment before something slammed into the dirt of the airfield just outside the hangar’s mouth.

“What was that?” Pip braced herself against the pillar. Those hadn’t been explosions like the bombs the airships had dropped on Fort Linder and Bridgetown.

Baragh’s brow furrowed as he moved toward the hangar mouth. “Those were shells from the big guns of a battleship. Some of the Mongavarian ships must have broken through.”

With a range of nearly fifteen miles, the Mongavarians wouldn’t have to get far into the ice floes to shell Dar Goranth.

Calling up her magic again, Pip jogged for the mouth of the hangar, circling around where the dwarves were securing the Mongavarian soldiers with great alacrity. At the opening, she halted.

Some of the fog had burned off. Flashes, smoke, and gouts of flames marked the furious naval battle at the edge of the ice floes. The main Mongavarian fleet didn’t seem to have moved as far into the ice floes as the leaders had hoped. But a contingent of Mongavarian ships had fought their way through and now ranged several miles out with their guns facing the harbor.

Above the ships, several airships with the blue and white stripes of Mongavaria headed in their direction as well.

Pip clenched her fists, her heart pounding.

Whatever the battle plan, it had gone horribly wrong somewhere. Dar Goranth would soon be under heavy bombardment, and Fieran wasn’t here to stop it.

As Fieran bore down on another airship, the sun broke through the clouds, burning away some of the fog below.

Ships arrayed on the ocean below, blasting away at each other. Even as he watched, another ship listed to the side before rolling over and heading for the bottom.

More ships seemed to be dueling farther out. Fieran couldn’t get a good look between the lingering fog and the smoke and the airships all around, but it appeared the flank of the Mongavarian battle line had intercepted Battlegroup Hammer, preventing them from pinching the Mongavarians between them as planned.

He had no more time for gawking at the rest of the battle. The airship’s gunners opened fire on him, though they were simply wasting their bullets. Fieran’s magic ate the bullets before they got anywhere close to him.

A swarm of Mongavarian aeroplanes dove around the nearest airship, bearing down on Fieran.

“I got the one on the left!” Stickyfingers was already letting loose a burst of gunfire even as he and Holleran swooped in from the left.

“The ones on the right are ours.” Pretty Face and Lije roared from somewhere above Fieran.

Fieran tried to ignore the other aerial battles going on around him. He tucked his aeroplane close to the airship so that no one would dart in between before he let his magic rage. It burned through his veins, licking over the airship, consuming the canvas, melting the metal.

With a groan, the metal ramp collapsed, falling through the air balloons and tearing apart what was left of the dirigible. The airship’s wreckage plunged from the sky, trailing black, acrid smoke.

Even as that airship fell, two more Mongavarian airships converged on Fieran, their machine guns blasting away as they flew one above the other.

Fieran headed straight for the lower airship, his magic dancing over his aeroplane’s wings and before his eyes. When he was nearly upon the airship, he shoved the rudder, pulling hard on the stick. His aeroplane banked hard, the force pressing his rear end hard into the barely padded seat.

Straining to hold the stick with one hand, he held out the other and unleashed his magic. Bolts of blue magic burned through the canvas and the air balloons.

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