Zachary released the last of the straps holding his chainmail and doffed it in a heap with his plate armor. While it might have protected against spirit-lattice ethersteel weapons, it would provide no protection from enemy rifles and pistols. Without an aura to enhance his strength, the armor was too heavy to carry for long. Still sweaty and nearly overheating, he took off his shirt as well. The train burst into the light and wintery air. The sweat dripping from his muscles suddenly felt cold, soothing.

  "An impressive physique," Dame Jill Aden said. "However if you keep removing your clothing you risk becoming a distraction."

  "Sorry to keep you waiting," Zachary said. He cracked his knuckles. "I'm ready."

  He leapt and locked wrists with Sir Torrey, who stood on the roof of the next passenger car. The huge Vjiskaldi man easily hauled Zachary onto the roof. Dame Jill hopped the distance effortlessly, her own strength magnified by a life-aspect weave. The oculomancer named Fia, daughter of Fjenna, stood frozen as if in terror. Ominous, Zachary thought, but he pressed on regardless.

  Sir Torrey launched himself to the far end of the car and slammed his axes down. Lightning arced out in a web at the points of impact. With a hearty roar, he ripped the roof of the railcar away, exposing the stunned soldiers hiding within. Dame Jill slipped down among them noiselessly, slashing the red-blue blade of her short sword with imperceptible speed, leaving cone-like smears of blood on the paisley walls of the railcar.

  Zachary dropped down on one soldier, kicking the man's rifle hard enough to shatter the wooden stock. With his bare fists he swung heaven-life-heaven, life-heaven-life, six swings in three heartbeats. Bloody teeth clattered on the floor, along with at least one dislodged eyeball. The slack-jawed commanding officer, his face a distorted wreck, bravely slung his sidearm from its holster even as he fell. He was rewarded for this effort with a crushing blow to the forehead. Zachary plucked the pistol from the hand of the corpse and slipped it under his belt.

  Sir Torrey threw the door open and marched forward into the freezing mountain air. "That was the last of them," he announced. "It's all flatbeds from here on out."

  "We should get Fia," Dame Jill said.

  They found the oculomancer trembling, muttering to herself, the teal spiderweb fractures pulsing on her face. "We're all going to die. Dead... dead."

  "Fia?" Dame Jill asked. "What's wrong? We need to know what's wrong."

  "There's a witch," Fia explained. She pointed. "On the train up ahead. Instantly. No warning. A witch, one that is much more powerful than the last one you killed. And now that we are outside there is nowhere to hide."

  Zachary rested one hand casually against the pistol on his belt. "I need a new weapon," he said.

  "You intend to fight him?" Fia asked, astonished. "You're not a witch. You don't even have an aura."

  "If he's standing between me and Maxius then I will kill him," Zachary said flatly. "If you will not join us, then I would ask you to surrender that gauntlet of yours. The one that prevents healing."

  "As you like."

  The oculomancer released a latch on her wrist and the leather housing on her silvery gauntlet suddenly inflated with a steaming hiss. She offered it to Zachary with an unsteady hand. He slipped his hand inside and was surprised to find the glove quite roomy, gently pressing against his skin with the soft swell of an airship's envelope. He reversed the motion of the latch, and with a whirring sound the thing deflated, perfectly molding itself to the shape of his hand. As he manipulated his fingers the mercurial tips shifted likewise, spraying magenta liquid into the mountain air.

  Dame Jill Aden extended her spirit-lattice ethersteel short sword with the hilt facing Zachary. "I will fight by your side," she announced. "If it pleases you, my weapon would benefit from a coating."

  Zachary coated the short sword with the magenta gunk, and then he coated the blades of Sir Torrey's war axes. Meanwhile the train chugged around a long bend into a saddle between two steep ridges. The track began to descend in a gentle slope through an alpine glade of snowclad trees. Twisting vortexes of snow blew uphill. From far ahead and downhill there came the sound of a metallic scream, whirring and burning and exploding. And there, half the distance to the steam engine near the bottom of the slope, there arose into the sky one of the little airplanes, drifting up against the wind in arrogant defiance of gravity. The nose of the craft left two streams of orange flame on either side as it ascended, quickly dissipating into black smoke.

  "They're getting away," Zachary growled.

  "They are dead men," Fia said, shaking her head. "The sky belongs to my mother. Nothing good waits for those men up there."

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  The knights went on. More airplanes took off as they approached the ornate passenger car in the middle of the train. Not all of the airplanes succeeded in flying away; some of them wobbled and then dove, nose-first, into the forest to explode in huge fireballs. Acceptable losses, Zachary thought. He was impressed by the successes, given that the sailors most likely had no experience sailing through the fog in such crafts. Remarkably, the vast majority of the airplanes succeeded in getting off the train.

  "I am not a cuckold!" A voice screamed from within the car. Zachary instantly recognized the nasal voice of Maxius the Younger, vastly amplified by wind-aspect weaves. "I will be the one who makes cuckolds of all the lesser races of this world! I can replace the Lawgiver! They will worship their father as a god!"

  "Quickly," Zachary whispered. "I will sneak along the roof to the other side. When I smash the forward door, that is when we all attack. I do not expect that we will all survive."

  "As is the duty of a knight," Sir Torrey said. "I will attack head-on, through this door."

  "And I will attack from the side," Dame Jill said as she leaned sideways over the guard rail, checking the sides of the passenger car. "Through the window near the end."

  Sir Torrey weaved his fingers together and held his hands in a cup, kneeling. Zachary hopped up, and with a boost from Sir Torrey's hands, he crested the lip of the car into the snowy stream of freezing air above. In perfect silence, Dame Jill Aden followed him.

  "NO!" Maxius bellowed. "That outcome must not come to pass! I WILL EXTERMINATE ALL MALES."

  He's gone mad, Zachary thought. It will be a mercy.

  At the far edge of the car, Zachary stopped and regarded the train ahead, searching for enemies. A column of soldiers made their way forward, breaking off one at a time to man the airplanes on the cars near the front. Otherwise the flatbeds were clear. If those soldiers did have rifles, then they were not aiming at Zachary specifically. He clambered over the edge and steeled himself.

  "The girls will be mine alone! Mine! Girls! Girls! GIRLS!"

  Zachary smashed through the door. Maxius the Younger instantly turned to face him with superhuman speed. Zachary had time to see every detail: the way Maxius always raised the three fingers on his right hand when he was about to create a new weave, the way his face betrayed fear upon seeing Zachary, the way he clenched his butt cheeks to prevent voiding his bowels. There was a flash of blue-red light as Dame Jill's short sword spun through the air like a ship's propeller and slammed into his right hand with a spray of magenta mist.

  Zachary raised his pistol. Quickly, far too quickly, Maxius cast a wind-aspect weave capable of blocking bullets, his left hand raising as a substitute for the right. Not enough time, Zachary thought, and in that moment he knew he was a dead man. Strike true, Sir Torrey.

  A sudden blast of fire struck him, but his momentum carried him forward even as the flesh on his left shoulder was incinerated, the pistol evaporating in a cloud of molten metal. Sir Torrey's axes slammed down, causing Maxius to buckle under the weight, his clavicles popping, his spine crumpling. It created an opening, just a fraction of a second of shock, where Zachary was able to reach up into the man's throat. Deeper, deeper, his metallic fingers penetrating through muscles and sinew, into the squishy brain. He wiggled his fingers. Blood, pink sludge, and chemical magenta fluid exploded from Maxius; his mouth, his nostrils, his ears. Gore streamed down Zachary's arm before they both collapsed in a heap.

  "Mother Summer!" Dame Jill exclaimed.

  Zachary gasped for breath and discovered that he only had one working lung. He tasted smoke. His left hand was shriveled, twisted, black and glowing orange from within like a log left too long on a campfire. He could only see out of one eye.

  "He needs healing! Fia! Fia!"

  Sir Torrey roared. Zachary felt the weight of Maxius pull away. The other knight began hacking at the corpse with his axes, his face flushed with rage. Fia arrived shortly after, and while Zachary did not hear everything she said, he caught enough to know that she lacked the skill to heal him, but that help was close. The heat of the flames continued to spread through his bones. His chest hurt. His remaining eye began to fail him, or perhaps his senses, and huge red spikes fell into the forest.

  BOOM!

  A long spike, as tall as a building, red as blood, and pulsing with inner light, fell from the sky and slammed into the cars to the rear. The whole train shuttered and rocked on the tracks. The wheels screeched. Zachary assumed that this collection of sights and sounds was the result of one final bout of madness just before death. If only Kiera was here, he thought with some regret. He was certain she could have healed him. In fact, she was likely the only healer in the world with the skill required to bring a man back from the brink of death.

  His body exploded with green light, and a soothing coolness spread through his blood. A powerful life-aspect weave enveloped him, levitating him off the railcar's tiled floor and up between the pews. He opened his left eye, the socket and eyelid restored, the vision crisp and perfect. The scorched tree branch of his left arm began to rebuild itself. The bone rapidly wrapped with new muscle, followed by fresh skin, pale and smooth. He breathed deeply and felt the clean mountain air fill two lungs.

  Zachary settled down onto his feet and tried to make sense of his surroundings. The front of the railcar had been blasted away by the fire-aspect weave Maxius had used to attack him. Another red spike smashed into the forest to the east, throwing up a huge plume of snow, sending a shockwave through the forest and causing the trees to buckle and sway. He looked up and what he saw sent a freezing chill down his spine.

  An airplane, as big as an ocean liner, roared overhead, with six pods of burning flame suspended from pylons on the wings. It was dropping red spikes into the forest from a perfect grid of slots on the belly of the craft. Directly overhead, blazing with the indigo light of a heaven-aspect weave, there floated, gently and with disinterest, a Purple Dragon whelp clad in mother-of-pearl robes.

  The knights knelt.

  "The etherborne has been subjugated," the Elder Saint observed. "Brave knights, you have done well. Come with me. More etherborne are certain to appear in this region. You will fight at my side and aid me as I subjugate them."