Alcatraz versus the Scrivener's Bones by Brandon Sanderson Read Free Book Online Page A

and crafted in the Fields of Potatallia.” The knights were not amused. Maybe I should have used my carrot instead.)
    Draulin stepped across the head of our flying dragon, her armored boots clinking against the glass. Somehow, she managed to retain a sure footing despite the wind and the shaking vehicle.
    The jet fired a beam from its Frostbringer’s glass, aiming for another wing. Bastille’s mother jumped, leaping through the air, cloak flapping. She landed on the wing itself, raising her crystalline sword. The beam of frost hit the sword and disappeared in a puff. Bastille’s mother barely even bent beneath the blow. She stood powerfully , her armored visor obscuring her face.
    The cockpit fell silent. It seemed impossible to me that Draulin had managed such a feat. Yet, as I waited, the jet fired again, and once again Bastille’s mother managed to get in front of the beam and destroy it.
    “She’s… stand ing on top of the Dragonaut ,” I said as I watched through the glass.
    “Yes,” Bastille said.
    “We appear to be going several hundred miles an hour.”
    “About that.”
    “She’s blocking laser beams fired by a jet airplane.”
    “Yes.”
    “Using nothing but her sword.”
    “She’s a Knight of Crystallia,” Bastille said, looking away. “That’s the sort of think they do.”
    I fell silent, watching Bastille’s mother run the entire length of the Dragonaut in the space of a couple seconds, then block an ice beam fired at us from behind.
    Kaz shook his head. “Those Crystin,” he said. “They take the fun out of everything.” He smiled toothily.
    To this day, I haven’t been able to tell if Kaz genuinely has a death wish, or if he just likes to act that way. Either way, he’s a loon. But, then, he’s a Smedry. That’s virtually a synonym for “insane, foolhardy lunatic.”
    I glanced at Bastille. She watched her mother move above, and seemed longing, yet ashamed at the same time.
    That’s the sort of thing they expect her to be able to do, I thought. That’s why they took her knighthood from her – because they thought she wasn’t up to their standards.
    “Um, trouble!” Australia said. She’d opened her eyes, but looked very frazzled as she sat with her hand on the glowing panel. Up ahead, the fighter jet was charging its glass again – and it had just released another missile.
    “Grab on!” Bastille said, getting ahold of a chair. I did the same, for all the good it did. I was again tossed to the side as Australia dodged. Up above, Draulin managed to block the Frostbringer’s ray, but it looked close.
    The missile exploded just a short distance from the body of the Dragonaut.
    We can’t keep doing this, I thought. Australia looks like she can barely hold on, and Bastille’s mother will get tired eventually.
    We’re in serious trouble.
    I picked myself up, rubbing my arm, blinking away the afterimage of the missile explosion. I could feel something as the jet shot past us. A dark twisting in my stomach, just like the feeling I’d felt on the runway. It felt a little like the sense that told me when an Oculator nearby was using one of their Lenses. Yet, this was different. Tainted somehow.
    The creature from the airport was in that jet. Before, it had shot the Lens out of my hand. Now it used a jet that could fire on me without exploding. Somehow, it seemed to understand how to use both Free Kingdoms technology and Hushlands technology together.
    And that seemed a very, very dangerous combination.
    “Do we have any weapons on board the ship?” I asked.
    Bastille shrugged. “I have a dagger.”
    “That’s it?”
    “We’ve got you, cousin,” Australia said. “You’re an Oculator and a Smedry of the pure line. You’re better than any regular weapons.”
    Great, I thought. I glanced up at Bastille’s mother, who stood on the nose of the dragon. “How can she stand there like that?”
    “Grappler’s Glass,” Bastille said. “It sticks to other kinds of glass,