The Velvet Gauntlet Finishing School for Wayward Young Ladies stood coldly isolated from the temptations of the city streets; a blank, monolithic structure that spoke only of despair. Towering walls made from flawless, slick marble-utterly devoid of both window or handhold-had proved insurmountable to hundreds of lovesick suitors. The school balconies looked only inside to the open courtyard, where stood a white, empty pillar, there to remind the girls of the futility of pride.
The pillar also had a second use; disobedient girls were tethered to it through ice-cold nights. Since they acted like beasts, reason held that they should be treated as such. It served as a useful object lesson for the frightened girls.
Linked to the column by an iron chain, Miliana Mannicci stood stiffly in the dust and jammed a sewing needle through a highly incompetent piece of embroidery. Barefoot, dressed in a vile gray dress, and with her long hair stiffly braided back into a bun, Miliana bitterly kept her eyes fixed on the ground.
Needlepoint was just one more worthless female skill Miliana had never bothered to acquire; stealing a few bits and pieces from other girls had been enough to divert Lady Ulia's ire. Now well and truly under supervision, she had no choice but to stitch and sew while planning her revenge.
They had tried to beat her with a cane and had suffered the inevitable results. Watched over by a pair of female tutors, Miliana was now treated with hostility and caution. She had already managed to stab one woman with a sewing needle, and could hurtle the things with enough force to penetrate naked skin. Held tight by her chain, Miliana felt her eyes smarting with hidden tears. Her spectacles hid her eyes as she jammed the needle through her sewing cloth, twisting the tiny blade like a stiletto as she let her mind dwell on vengeance and escape.
From outside the school, there came a distant swirl of sound; crowds yelling, or possibly cheering-the dim crackle of spells, or more of the Shou fireworks. Miliana lifted her head to hunt down the sound; a tutor raised her cane and instantly advanced.
"Keep sewing! The outside world does not exist! Good can only be discovered when the distractions of worldliness and wilfulness are flensed away."
The teacher hissed with pleasure, keen to begin the flensing process anew. Miliana faced the creature like a wildcat and took a turn of her own chain between her hands-either to use as a garrote, a shield, or a flail. Her attacker balked, retreated, and began to stalk Miliana just out of reach of the deadly chain.
"Miliana Mannicci!"
The voice, which could have came from Lady Ulia's evil twin, pealed out across the courtyard like a fractured temple bell. Miliana kept her thin body facing her opponents and flicked a glance at the stairs.
Standing up above the courtyard was the headmistress of the Velvet Gauntlet, a vast woman shaped like a cavalry regiment in a skirt. The woman seared her gaze down into Miliana, then dismissed the tutors with one snap of her fingers.
"Mannicci-since you are obsessed with the offal of the outside world, then you may wallow in offal indeed." The woman stared at Miliana as though she were a particularly noisome form of garden slug. "You are a disgrace to the discipline of home economics. To the kitchens with you! You can squat there and work until supper time."
Tutors edged closer, then decided that discretion was the better part of valor and simply tossed Miliana the keys to her chain. The girl unfastened the collar about her neck, let the chain, needles, and sewing drop into the dust, and walked under the headmistress's hostile eye and deep into the school's narrow corridors.
Miliana was frog-marched down the halls, then halted as locks, chains, and slide-bolts were duly wrenched aside.
The school kitchens were a true anteroom to the Abyss. Vats of hideous porridge boiled, while ranks of pans hung like dented battle helmets on the walls. The door was flung wide open, and Miliana found herself hurtled inside.
"My special provisions have arrived." The headmistress's voice boomed like the slamming door of a tomb. "I want the meat gutted and dressed, the vegetables peeled, the wine barrels decanted into proper bottles-and get those jugs of cream whipped before it's time for my morning scones and tea!"
A trolley held a gigantic serving platter capped off with a silver chafing cover. Beside it stood a wine barrel almost six feet tall.
"It has all been thoroughly checked. The meat has been inspected, and the wine barrel has been pierced with a spear." The headmistress fixed Miliana beneath a violent, suspicious eye. "We perform the same checks on outgoing refuse-lest you think you can hide in the bins and be tossed out with the other garbage tomorrow morning…
"Now to work! And I want that meat sizzling within the hour!"
The door slammed, the locks snapped shut, and Miliana found herself alone in a wilderness of chopping boards and tethered cooking knives. She dejectedly wandered out into the room, noted that the fireplace chimney was blocked by an iron grate, and sank into a sad little bundle on the stairs.
Trapped in her own worst nightmare, the girl cradled her head in her hands. Pale and wan, she stared at the flagstones and silently mouthed a single, silent word.
Lorenzo…
In an hour, the headmistress would come to inspect the kitchens. Weary beyond all words, Miliana made her way to the giant platter, reached up to grab its handles, and hoisted the silver dome up into the air.
"Tekorii-kii-kii! Tekorii-kii-kii!"
An explosion of brilliant feathers filled the room with life. Surrounded by vegetables on the massive serving dish, Tekoriikii spat the apple from his beak and whirred his wings in glee. The creature flung himself into Miliana's arms, madly twining his neck about her face. The princess crushed the bird against her heart and felt her whole world swirl with joy.
"Tekoriikii? Oh, Tekoriikii!" Miliana buried her face in the firebird's soft feather down. Words failed her as she snared fingers through her friend's silly feather crest. The bird gave a shuddering, keening song of purest joy.
Utterly careless of alerting the whole school, Tekoriikii leapt back onto the platter and began a raucous little dance. He bobbed his head over to the left and then over to the right-stuck his left foot into the air and waggled both his wings. He then proudly shook out a great mass of plumes and eagerly presented Miliana with his newly regrown tail.
The girl wept, still almost speechless, and ran the gorgeous length of tail feathers between adoring hands.
"Why, they're beautiful! Utterly beautiful!" Miliana held the velvet-soft feathers up against her face and smeared them with tears. "Tekoriikii-what are you doing here?"
The bird puffed out his breast and swaggered his head, flexing his stubby wings. Miliana blinked at him in surprise.
"A rescue?"
"Gronk nonk!"
"But how?"
The firebird strutted eagerly up and down beside the wine barrel, then made a twirling motion of his wingtip beside his brow.
Miliana scuttled forward in alarm.
"Lorenzo? In there?" The plug hole where a spear had been rammed into the barrel could quite clearly be seen. "How can he be in there? He must have drowned!"
"Nurgle-gurgle!"
The girl grabbed a crowbar, hastily climbed atop a chair and broke the wax seal about the barrel cap. She wrenched the top of the barrel clean away and found herself staring down into a pool of deep red wine.
"Tekoriikii… there's nothing there!"
The bird repeatedly tried to leap up and kick the barrel over; with his small weight, it was like trying to knock an elephant unconscious with a grapefruit. Miliana watched the bird, considered the consequences if she tried to help him tip over the barrel, then let her wits take the place of muscle power. She turned the tap at the barrel's base; scowling when it seemed not to work. Finally a heavy skewer managed to stab a hole into the wood, spilling a purple stream of wine across the floor.
The stinking pool of wine leaked clear across the flagstones to lap against the kitchen door. Finally the torrent slowed; hitching up the skirts of her revolting smock, Miliana stepped back onto her stool and peered down into the barrel.
A smaller barrel lay within the first, anchored firmly to the big container's base. Miliana reached down to knock three times upon the barrel top; wax caulking splintered as the hatch began to rapidly revolve. With a pop, the little barrel top flipped open to reveal Lorenzo crouched inside with a breathing tube clamped in his mouth.
The tube ran out to the big barrel's fake tap-the last place anyone would have thought to check. The artist painfully arose from hiding, shakily reached his feet, then goggled as Miliana wildly crushed him in her arms.
"Lorenzo!"
He held her in his arms, feeling her thin body bore against him. Much to Lorenzo's surprise, he felt his neck running wet with her tears. The artist blinked and timidly ran a hand across her cheek.
"Is anything wrong? Why are you crying?"
"Don't be a fool!" Miliana helped the man clamber awkwardly out from the reeking wine barrel. "What on Toril were you doing in there?"
"It's a rescue! You know… we've come to save our lady fair!" Lorenzo and Tekoriikii both puffed themselves with pride. "Well you are a princess. You have to come to expect this sort of thing."
"But the gates are closed! The walls are guarded!"
"All taken care of!" Lorenzo took a swift stock of the room, still holding Miliana in strong, adoring arms. "Good! The box is here. Now all we have to do is get the thing outside." The man reached behind himself and produced a large package from his hidey hole. "We brought this! Now get your notes and start looking for a feather fall spell!"
"Feather fall?" Miliana unwrapped the package and discovered her own dear pointy hat, a hat well stuffed with her own handwritten spells. "We can't jump from the walls! They're slick marble-there's no way up!"
"It's all taken care of… now just find the spell!"
Miliana clamped the hat across her head, and instantly felt her spirits soar! A grand princess once again, she flipped through her curling lists of spells, feeling sure that she could cobble together the spell effects required. She had never cast the spell before-but she was Miliana-Miliana the sorceress, mistress of her own destiny!
At this precise moment, the kitchen door burst open wide. The headmistress stood framed in the doorway, roaring in alarm.
"So! We have uncovered your perfidiousness at last!" The titanic woman somehow moved aside to reveal a squad of home economics tutors armed with rolling pins and knives.
"Slaughter the male, but keep the girl for punishment.
"Attack!"
With a bloodcurdling scream, a dozen shrieking female tutors charged in through the door, plunging through the lake of spilled red wine. Unconcerned, Lorenzo took the terrified Miliana and hoisted her up onto the table. Tekoriikii joined her, sitting atop a fruit bowl while Lorenzo dangled his own feet high above the ground.
"It's fascinating, isn't it? Magic creates natural forces, but it takes science to actually study them…" The artist touched his rapier to the pool of spilled wine, pulled the trigger, and watched as the teachers squealed, performed little somersaults, and crashed-unconscious-to the ground. "Electrical force, for instance. Blue dragons have it, magicians make lightning bolts, but did anyone ever bother to study the phenomenon of conductivity?"
"Oh, shut up!" Miliana leapt down to the floor, treading on a weakly moving domestic skills tutor. "The headmistress is still out there trying to fetch more help!"
By the shuddering and rumble of the floorboards, it seemed the massive headmistress had charged off into the academy's heart. Miliana and Lorenzo each took one end of his extremely heavy box, and with Tekoriikii helpfully perched in the middle singing songs, they struggled their burden out into the school's open courtyard.
Lorenzo flipped open the box and unshipped a pole, some boards, and a set of gigantic paddle blades. He began to busy himself unloading miles and miles of bundled rope, glancing briefly up the towering walls.
"A hundred feet tall, would you say?"
"One hundred and twenty-five… and faced with marble!" Miliana was almost making handstands with fear. "Will you just hurry up! There're teachers guarding this place night and day!"
"We're working on it as fast as we can-just prepare your feather fall spell!" Lorenzo began mounting a series of brackets down the courtyard's marble punishment post. "Tekoriikii? The pulleys, if you will?"
The bird flew off with a series of pulley wheels dangling from his claws. While Lorenzo happily tested his brackets and frames, the firebird fixed a pulley high atop the curtain wall.
Yells and screams rebounded from the school corridors. Up atop the battlements, a tutor with a crossbow took aim at Lorenzo's back. Tekoriikii swooped down, plucked the weapon from the woman's hands, and sent her tumbling back in terror down the stairs.
A pole well wrapped with rope formed the centerpiece of Lorenzo's collection of parts and pieces. Lorenzo slid the pole down into his brackets, then topped it off with a ring of gigantic birchwood propeller blades. He checked the fit of the rotor assembly, then attached a pair of free-moving rings to the pole to act as handholds and a support for the passengers' feet.
"The principle is based on a flying sycamore seed." The artist began feeding excess rope off to one side. "The rope is wound about the drive shaft; a weight is dropped from a height, pulling on a rope, and the rope whips free, accelerating the rotor blades to high speed. Lift is produced; we stand on the lower ring and grip the upper while the shaft turns between us, and the whole assembly will fly up into the sky!"
"Brilliant!" Miliana was utterly impressed. "So we fly over the school walls?"
"And we'll then join Luccio in an escape-out through the city's river gate-to freedom."
Miliana watched Tekoriikii threading the pulley ropes and checking the fastenings one by one.
"So how do we drop a weight?"
"Aha! There we must trust to science once again!" Lorenzo rubbed his hands together with glee. "A feather fall spell is used to slow the descent of a falling body through the air. How does it achieve this? By reducing the specific mass of the target of the spell."
Miliana blinked. Lorenzo lectured on:
"Well, don't you see? A pound of feathers falls slower than a pound of iron, yes?"
"Um…" The girl felt a fallacy somewhere in the offing. "Well, yes, I suppose…"
"Right! So lighter objects must fall slower than heavier ones. The feather fall spell make objects lighter in order to slow their fall." Lorenzo made a proud gesture at Tekoriikii, who sat puffed like a canary beside the magnificent new flying machine. "We have with us the heaviest anvil in the kingdom-the perfect counterweight. All you do is throw the spell; Tekoriikii carries the weightless anvil up aloft across the walls and ties it tight to the rope. When the spell wears off, the anvil falls… and we have our motive thrust!"
The girl fixed Lorenzo with a heavy-lidded stare.
"You brought what with you?"
"An anvil! A gigantic anvil!" Lorenzo stuck his thumbs beneath his arms "A great big anvil we left just outside the gates…"
Miliana wearily hid her face inside her hands. Lorenzo bit his lip, and sensed that he had made a slight faux pas.
"Look… um… We invent a new type of acid that can tunnel through the school's wall-"
The girl hit him with her hat; it seemed the only thing to do.
At this juncture, the forces of the headmistress inevitably came racing back into the fray. Massed squads of teachers armed with rocks, meat cleavers, and school benches held like battering rams charged into the courtyard, whipping themselves into a lather of righteous rage.
A hundred enemies surged into the courtyard. Miliana and Lorenzo somehow shot up the marble punishment column, where they perched aloft like monkeys shaking fists at a storm. The tutors ignored the flying machine and instead tried climbing up each other's backs to reach their prey. Miliana stuck the point of her hat into one woman's eye and cursed angrily at Lorenzo's rear.
"Use your lightning sword! Knock them all out!"
"I only have one charge left!" Lorenzo brandished his rapier, parrying weapons left, right, and center. The whole column shuddered as battering rams struck against the base. "They'd all have to be wet-unless we can somehow convince them to all join hands?"
The column shook, and Miliana ended up perched upon Lorenzo's back like an ungainly crab.
"What do you mean you came here with only one power charge?"
"It isn't as simple as it looks!" Lorenzo unsuccessfully tried to remove Miliana's bare foot from his eye. "You have to attach copper cables to the two canine teeth of a sleeping blue dragon! Either that, or fly a kite up into a thunderstorm."
"I'll fly you up into a storm in a minute!" Miliana balanced on Lorenzo's back, desperately trying to find useful spells inside her hat. "Some damned rescue this turned out to be!"
Intrigued by all the action below, Tekoriikii fluttered down and perched on a gargoyle just above the yard. Miliana punched a teetering pyramid of singing tutors, watched the amateur athletes fall, then fixed upon Tekoriikii with panic in her eyes.
"Tekoriikii! Scream! You know-scream, like you did the other night!"
The bird made a "Krrrrrr" of curiosity and fixed Miliana with one golden eye. The girl dodged a passing stone and opened her arms out to the bird.
"That battle scream, you dodo! The one that knocked out all those men! Come on-get angry or something!"
The bird had no real inclination to hurt anyone. To his eyes, Miliana and Lorenzo seemed to be engaged in some sort of dance rather than a fight; each of his friends took it in turns to tread upon each other while gangs of snarling teachers shook the column back and forth. The bird ruffled out his feathers and creased his brows into a puzzled frown.
"A-all right, just sing a song, then! You know… like you do when you feel happy?" Miliana struck upon a sudden inspiration. "Your tail! How does it feel to have your lovely tail back?"
Tekoriikii drew a breath of excitement. He spread out his streaming tail feathers like a courtier's fan and shimmered them back and forth in glee. Filling his chest, the bird opened up his beak and caroled out a scintillating song of pride.
Lorenzo and Miliana ducked and blocked their ears; the teachers lacked the benefit of their victims' hard-won experience. With the shock front of a god-flung tidal wave, Tekoriikii's song swept clean across the open yard.
Tekoriikii's high notes loosened eyeballs in their skulls and cracked the marble facing all along the courtyard walls. The luckiest of the teaching staff simply fell from their half-built human pyramids and dropped unconscious to the ground. Those with greater stamina, but less native luck, managed to hear the second chorus before fainting clean away.
Uncorking his fingers from his ears, Lorenzo gazed about a scene taken from a hideous battlefield. A hundred women lay strewn in heaps about the cobblestones; some heaps stirring weakly as a semiconscious victim tried to knock her head against a wall. Tekoriikii settled into a magnificent sulk and turned himself away from his ungrateful audience.
Lying behind her troops was the headmistress-several hundredweight of iron-hard flesh. Lorenzo leapt down from the column and snatched up the rope which powered his flying machine.
"Excellent! We'll use her as a counterweight! Tekoriikii-come over here and help." The inventor and the firebird began trussing a rope beneath the gigantic woman's arms. "She'll hit the city dung pit; she'll be all right…"
Lorenzo pulled the last knot tight, laughing as he heard the sound of soldiers hammering at the bolted gates.
"Right! Now all we need is that feather fall spell-Miliana?"
He looked about, only to find the princess crawling about the courtyard on all fours; an empty pair of wire frames were clamped above her nose.
"My spectacles! He broke my curse-damned spectacles!" Miliana groped her hands in front of her, as blind as a mole. "That's the second pair he's done that to so far!"
The school doors shuddered as unseen soldiers tried to force their way in. Lorenzo heard the roar of male voices, and orders calling for battering rams and heavy crossbows.
"Miliana-the feather fall!"
"I can't read!" The girl snarled in ill temper, waving a hand across her eyes. "I'm blind as a bat without my spectacles!"
"But you can't read the language the spells are written in anyway!"
"I still need to visualize the symbols in my mind!" Miliana bumped herself into a wall. "Maybe someone has a telescope someplace?"
Outside the school, fireballs and lightning bolts crashed against the gates; it would only be a matter of moments before the doors came crashing down. Lorenzo ripped off Miliana's hat and began flipping frantically through the spell sheets one by one.
"How does it start? Can you remember what the page looks like?"
"There was a sort of curly thing… it looked like a pot." Miliana faced Lorenzo with a nearsighted scowl. "I don't know! I've never really cast the thing before. I thought it was a spell for magic missiles…"
A pot-a pot-shaped symbol. Lorenzo frantically sorted tiny scrolls, each scribbled in Miliana's shocking handwriting.
"Aha!" He found something that looked like an inverted cup. "Here's a pot, but it's upside down."
"That's it!" Miliana clamped her pointy hat upon her brow. "That's the one!"
"You never said it was upside down. How was I supposed to find it if it was upside down?"'
"It doesn't matter!" Miliana tried to cuff Lorenzo on the ear, and missed him by a mile. "Now just try to retrace the symbols on something big-really, really big… so I can see!"
A fireball lit the courtyard with a bang; the gates sagged, hinges turning red-hot from the blast of magic flame. Lorenzo tried to choke down the panic, looked across the courtyard, and felt a new idea strike home to his mind.
"Wait-just wait. I'll only be a minute."
Capable of seeing nothing but the vaguest blurs, Miliana moved cautiously to her feet. If she strained herself, she could just make out the curtain walls; Tekoriikii was either the vague orange wobbly thing to her left, or else the warm surface she was currently standing on. The princess wandered slowly forward as the gates cracked clean in two, then suddenly felt herself grabbed by the arm.
"There! Will that do?"
Lorenzo seemed triumphant; the girl adjusted her empty frames out of habit, and squinted closer at the courtyard floor.
The shapes of spell symbols stood out in bold gray lines. Miliana murmured words under her breath, suddenly remembered the gestures to the spell, and felt herself light into a smile.
"That's it! I've got it!" She reached out with groping hands as she settled the spell formula in her mind's eye. "Where's the headmistress?"
Miliana was led to the great fallen whale; the Princess waved her hands, spoke a loud, triumphant syllable, and cast one of Tekoriikii's down feathers to the winds. Lorenzo saw the headmistress's body flicker with purple energies, and signaled Tekoriikii to take off into the air.
The bird latched onto the ungainly burden and effortlessly carried her aloft. The drive-rope trailed neatly behind, the slack slowly disappeared, and Lorenzo led Miliana to the flying machine to clamp herself against the steering rings.
Another fireball detonated, and the school gates exploded with a roar. Standing clasped about the shaft of his new flying machine, Lorenzo had to shout above the screams of charging warriors.
"How long does that feather fall spell keep working?"
"I don't know!" Miliana felt the desperation of uncertainty. "Someone told me it depends on the weight!"
Tekoriikii gave a squawk as his burden suddenly dropped from his claws. The headmistress plunged toward the city cesspits, the rope whipped tight, jerked the flying machine hard against its brackets, and suddenly the drive shaft began to blur with speed.
The propeller blades whirred, the rope snapped free, and the headmistress hit the dung pile with a meteoric splash. As a hundred pikemen and halberdiers came thundering across the fallen bodies of the teaching staff, Miliana and Lorenzo shot skyward and up across the school walls. A storm of crossbow bolts followed them aloft-one passing mere inches from Miliana's hat.
Clutching blindly to the handholds and feeling a storm wind blowing past her ears, Miliana could only blink her eyes and frown.
"What was that?"
"Nothing." Below Lorenzo, the dreadful school dwindled; outraged soldiers worked to break up Miliana's spell formula which had been laboriously formed from the posed bodies of unconscious home economics tutors. The wind blew, the bright sun shone, and it felt marvelous to simply be alive. Tilting his face like a hound sniffing the wind, Lorenzo thrilled to the joys of flight.
Beneath the noisy rotor blades, the sounds of crashes, swordplay, spells, and cries of anger and fear hung loud across the city. Lorenzo gazed down across the streets far below, staring at the war-torn thoroughfares in dismay.
The flying machine worked quite well; Lorenzo confessed himself to be well pleased. The bearings whirred, the body balanced well, and the sensation of flight sent a dizzy rush of freedom through his veins. Tekoriikii circled happily nearby, noisily flapping his wings as he gave a cheery cry.
"Tekorii-kii-kii!"
Feeling her captivity sliding far away, Miliana risked loosening her handhold and groped for Lorenzo's arm.
"Lorenzo?"
"Yes?"
"Well done."
Swelling with pride, Lorenzo gazed below as he felt the craft begin to descend.
"Ah, good-there's Luccio-and there's the river now."
Miliana gave a great relieved sigh. "So we're landing by the river?"
"Um… not exactly…"
Miliana had enough time to blink, then gave a great unhappy wail. The flying machine plunged neatly into the drink-inventor, princess, silly hat, and all.
Tekoriikii watched the whole process from above, then landed gracefully on the wagon Luccio had parked on the riverbank. Luccio and the bird watched as Miliana and Lorenzo struggled damply toward them through the river mud.
"Well, all in all, Lorenzo, I think that was one of your better plans." Luccio reached down to proffer a kiss to Miliana's muddy hand. "Dear lady… so good to see you safe, and at liberty."
Luccio unshipped a bag of snorkels and alighted from the wagon top. "Alas, there is a swim ahead of us. The river is the only means of escape. The streets swarm with ten thousand blades."
"Why?" Miliana stood wringing out her muddy hair, then capped herself with the ruins of her pointy hat. "Is there a bread riot on? What's all the noise?"
Luccio looked at her, unable or unwilling to break ill news. Biting his lip, Lorenzo came forward to gently put an arm about Miliana's shoulders.
Her face had already drained ashen white. Creeping quietly into Lorenzo's touch, she let him quietly lead her away.
Lorenzo softly whispered to her. Luccio began to unpack his wagon, laying out snorkels, food packages, a toadskin book, and spare spectacles salvaged from the ruins of Miliana's room.
"Nurgle?"
"Just a moment, old chap. Leave them together for a while." Luccio quietly placed a hand on Tekoriikii's back. The bird mournfully strained toward Miliana, made anxious by the half-heard sound of tears.
Sunning herself on the riverbanks, there lay a long, exquisite female nixie-a curvaceous humanoid with webbed feet, webbed hands and dainty gills. Luccio introduced her to the curious firebird with a schoolgirl's blush.
"Tekoriikii? This is the Princess Krrrr-poka, of the Akanamere. She… ah, she owed me a favor." Luccio sealed his packages inside little wooden casks. "You can fly over the river; the rest of us will use snorkels, and she will tow us underwater past the armies and the gates."
Beside the river, Lorenzo stood with Miliana leaning on his arm. The young couple gazed in silence in the direction of Miliana's old home, which now formed the center of a distant storm of screams.
Miliana was free.
And Sumbria was burning.