The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

Skyforge Third airstrip

The multirole jet stood on the third airstrip undergoing her final checks while every invitee waited behind the earth bank.

A fitter came down from the port wing, wiped his hands on a greasy rag, and said something to Maerath. Maerath turned round, holding his greased pad against his coat.

"Checks are complete, my lord. She’s ready when you are."

"Tell Renner he has my permission to begin," Lucien said.

Soon the engines lit one after the other, and the sound was nothing like the two aircraft Skyforge already flew.

A propeller engine coughs when it wakes. It catches, misses, catches again, and the airframe shakes until it settles. Everyone behind the embankment had watched the Stormwing do that a hundred times.

This one made a rising, high-pitched whine that climbed until it stopped being a note and became a flat, tearing roar out of both tubes. The grass behind her went flat for forty metres and stayed flat, crushed beneath two white-hot streams of displaced air.

Then she began to move slowly,which felt wrong to everyone. A propeller aircraft shoves itself hard off the mark because the propeller pulls on the air from the moment it turns. This one rolled out gently, almost lazily,like taking a walk in park.

Then she kept adding speed, and kept adding it again and again,the faster she went the better the engines worked.

At six hundred metres she was moving faster along the ground than the Stormwing had ever managed in the sky.

At nine hundred she was faster still, her tires whistling against the airstrip.

At about eleven hundred the tail came up off the ground, the wing had begun to carry her weight.

At twelve hundred metres, with two hundred metres of airstrip left, the wheels came off and stayed off.

Then she went up at an angle nobody at Skyforge had seen an aircraft use, and she kept going up at it, slicing straight through the morning haze.

The sound arrived a second and a half later and rolled across the whole field like a collapsing wall.

She was at two thousand metres before the timekeeper finished writing down the moment she left the ground.

Tomas Renner’s voice came down on the signal set, scratchy with static but flat and unhurried as ever.

"Airborne. Both engines running clean. She climbs better than anything I have flown and I have not asked much of her yet."

"Take your time," Maerath said into the copper mic.

He took eleven minutes and kept her straight and level. One turn each way, gentle first, then more and more demanding. A slow descent, then a slow climb.

"She is heavy on the controls," Renner said. "Not badly. She wants a firm hand and she holds a line without wandering. If anything she is too steady—I have to tell her to turn and then keep telling her."

"Anything you dislike?"

"She will not slow down. I have closed the throttles twice and both times she kept her speed and traded it for height instead, without being asked." A pause over the radio set. "In the Stormwing, when you close the throttle the aircraft knows about it at once, because there is a big propeller on the front dragging at the air. This one has nothing out in front at all. Take the power off and there is nothing to slow her but the air on the wing, and that is not much."

At sixteen minutes he stopped being careful.

He put her on her side and rolled her all the way round to the left, then straight back to the right, fast enough that the note of the engines changed twice as she went. Then he pulled up out of it into a climb that took her three hundred metres in the time it took the men at the plotting table to look up.

"She rolls beautifully. As fast as I can move my hands. She turns badly."

"Explain the difference," Maerath called into the set.

"Rolling is putting her on her side. She does it at once, because I am only asking the wings to swap places." Another pause over the crackling signal. "Turning is coming round a corner. For that she has to drag her whole weight round through the air, and she is heavy and going very fast, so the corner comes out enormous. In the Stormwing I could turn inside my own smoke. In this I could turn inside a small county."

"Is that a fault?"

"It is what she is. But write it down, because it will matter." Tomas’s voice stayed level. "Anything alive that flies will come round a corner faster than she does. She beats all of it in a straight line and loses to all of it in a circle. Whoever flies these gets told on his first day never to get into a circle."

At about twenty minutes the air over the grass beyond the embankment came apart.

A seam of gold light widened into something the size of a barn door, its edges burning with raw mana, and aurethar came through it at speed and hit the ground.

The impact went up through everyone’s boots. Papers came off the plotting table for the first of two times that morning. Two of the newer fitters went over onto the grass, and one of them stayed there for a long moment, staring at the sky doubting his life.

Gold, and enormous shadow, and two wings stretched out wide enough to put the whole earth rise in shadow as he folded them back against his sides.

Nobody reached for a weapon. Half of Skyforge had watched him arrive a dozen times and the other half had heard about it in the taverns.

The great serpentine head came round, and the slit-pupilled amber eyes found the small metal shape in the sky and tracked it the whole way across the northern field.

"Ohh," Aurethar said, his mental rumble echoing so deeply through the earth that everyone felt it in their knees. "And what do we have here?"

Then the dragon folded inward, the gold light collapsing into a tight point, and he was standing in his human shape, walking up the rise and brushing down his fine silk sleeves.

"You have made a new toy," he said smoothly. "There is a thing over your field going faster than I do, and I was having a perfectly pleasant morning thirty miles out until I felt it. I assumed something had gone wrong with the weather."

"That is our new aircraft," Lucien said.

"That is not one of your aircraft. I know your aircraft. Yours has a great spinning fan on the front and goes put put put, and there is always a man in it waving at people, which I have never understood." Aurethar pointed upward without looking. "That has no fan on it anywhere."

"No."

"Then what is pushing it?"

"Fire," Maerath said. "Out of the back. Two tubes of it, one under each wing."

Aurethar stopped brushing his sleeve.

"You are burning something, shoving it out of the back, and the shoving is what moves it forward."

"Yes."

"That is a firework with a man sitting in it. Who thought of that?"

Nobody answered. After a moment Aurethar stopped waiting for a name and turned to watch her come round out of the north instead.

"How long has he been up?"

"Twenty-two minutes."

"And that is the first time anybody has flown it."

"The first time."

"Then I shall stand well back." He did not move at all, his golden eyes wide and unblinking.

She came over the field at twelve hundred metres at twenty-eight minutes, then dropped down the length of the airstrip at two hundred and fifty.

She was in front of them, and then she was going away, and the sound arrived after she had already gone. One of the young fitters sat down on the grass without seeming to decide to do.

The air pressure came over the embankment a moment later. It took Lucas’s hat and a good deal of the field’s topsoil with it.

Everything on that rise went flat at once. The grass flattened to the dirt. The heavy coats on Cedric’s men snapped out sideways like flags in a gale. Maerath’s calculation papers went up off the table and out across the field, still being chased four minutes later by two apprentices who caught none of them.

Gandalf sat nearby on his packing crate. His long white beard lifted, streamed out sideways along its whole length, and settled back down.

Two inches clear of the ground.

The fitter sitting beside Lucas stared at it, his eyes wide.

"We are standing in wet grass," the fitter said, leaning over. "That machine nearly took the coat off my back. And his beard still did not touch the ground."

"Has anybody ever asked him about it?" Lucas whispered back.

"Everybody has asked him about it."

"And what does he say?"

"He says ’mm’." The fitter shook his head. "That is the whole answer. There are eleven of us with money on it in the shop and nobody is any closer to answer than last year."

She landed at thirty-four minutes, flat and fast, and used most of the airstrip doing it, her brakes squealing as she rolled to a halt.

Brakka was across the field before the chocks were under her wheels—at a full dwarven sprint. He went past the cockpit without a glance at the pilot, ducked underneath the port engine, and pushed his bare arm up inside the dark exhaust housing.

He stayed there a while.

"Well?" Ironbreaker shouted, walking up with Lucien and Maerath.

Brakka came out and looked at his own grime-covered hand.

"Warm," he said. "Thirty-four minutes, most of it at full power, and I can hold my bare hand inside the housing. Both linings held. Neither burned through."

Tomas came down the iron ladder and put a hand flat against the cool metal of the wing root.

"Nothing on this continent can catch her," he said. "I flew the Stormwing in the spring and I would have called it the finest thing in the sky. Today I could have run from a Stormwing and made a cup of tea while it was still coming after me."

Aurethar came down off the rise, stepping gracefully over the earth barrier. Men moved out of his way without being asked.

"How long from this field to that ridge?" Aurethar asked, pointing north. "When you went north and opened her up."

"Fifty seconds. Possibly less."

"Forty-one," said one of Maerath’s people at the plotting table, checking his stopwatch, then going very quiet when everyone turned to look at him.

Aurethar said nothing for a moment, his golden eyes narrowing.

"Forty-one," the dragon said softly. "That is what I do."

"You?"

"That is my flying speed. Mine. Ordinary day, wings out,without spending mana" He looked at the aircraft with open, unvarnished dislike. "Eleven hundred years I have been the fastest thing anyone in this world had ever seen, and this morning I was beaten by a firework with a boy sitting in it."

"You could still catch her," Lucien said gently.

"Of course I could still catch her. I would have to try, which is the insulting part." Aurethar turned away from it, crossing his arms over his chest. "Build more of them."

"You want more?"

"I want a great many more." Aurethar shrugged. "Some of what you will be fighting one day flies and there is a great deal of it. Put four hundred of those in the sky and they will have to learn a new way of being frightened. I should like to be there when they do."

Lucien stood looking up at her—blunt-nosed, swept back, ugly, ticking softly as her metal skin cooled in the morning grass.

"Maerath."

"My lord."

"Are the weapons ready?"