The Shattered Sylph by L. J. McDonald Read Free Book Online

them said.
    “We know,” Mace replied. “She was taken by men wearing loose clothes and tattoos, men from a boat. We came here only in order to start looking.”
    Two of the battler masters continued to watch him carefully, but the one who’d spoken nodded. “Men with tattoos and a three-sailed ship?” he mused. “They could be from Meridal. A lot of the sailors from there have tattoos, and a lot of Meridal merchants use triple-sailed schooners. They’re just about on the other side of the world, though.” He frowned. “To be honest, it makes sense. They kidnap and sell girls, the bastards. They agreed not to do it here, though. They want our trade more than our women.”
    The battler master was clearly horrified by the idea of slavery, though Mace reflected with disgust that the man’s attitude did not extend to his sylph. Mace waited, hoping to hear more, digesting the idea of Lizzy being sold and the massive amounts of violence in which he’d like to engage. “Where would they go?” he asked at last.
    “South,” was the answer. “If they are from Meridal, if they grabbed a girl, they’d head out to sea and sail straight there to sell her. They have air sylphs to help push their ships. They would be hundreds of miles away by now, and once they got there they could sell her in a dozen different cities.” The man’s frown deepened. “If they grabbed one girl, they might have grabbed a dozen. You going after yours only?”
    Mace shrugged. “We’ll bring back any women we find.”
    The battler master nodded. He obviously didn’t want them there, but he was diplomatic and grateful for help against slavers. “Good luck in your search,” he told them, then turned and walked off, his battler heeling. Acting as though sixteen foreign battlers on their docks was nothing to be worried about, he headed back the way he’d come, leaving the fishermen and merchants to gape and stare, afraid to return to their work but even more afraid to protest. The other battler masters regarded him with surprise for a moment before hurrying after him.
    Mace looked at his flight, sixteen strong. He looked out at the ocean, huge and inscrutable. He’d never seen so much water. “Spread out,” he told them. “Find her.” The battlers roared, flashing up into the air and away, spreading out across the waves and racing the winds above, hunting for any ship that had three sails and a crew of men with loose pants and tattoos.
    Mace watched them go, shifted to smoke and lightning, and then rose into the air himself. He soared straight south, shooting over the whitecaps as quickly as he dared. Battlers were powerful and they were angry, but they weren’t limitless. The ocean was huge and heavy, and the only energy they could feed from in this world came from their women. Without Lily at his side, Mace could only go so far, and he was already tired from flying so quickly over those mountains. Push too far, and he wouldn’t have the strength to get back. If that ship was hundreds of miles away, driven by winds harnessed by air sylphs, they might never find it at all. They might search a hundred years and never even see a glimpse.
    In the end, he was right.

Chapter Four
    Ever since his injury, when he’d been torn in two by another battler in defense of the hive, Ril had needed to sleep. Before that, in fifteen years of slavery he’d slept no more than a dozen times, each briefly. Now he slept as humans did, lying insensate and feeble as a corpse every night. Useless.
    He’d never been much of a dreamer, even with his increased need for slumber, but now he woke from nightmares he couldn’t understand or remember, shuddering from confusion as images of a small, confined space shivered out of his mind, replaced by a woman shrieking. Every instinct told him to get up, to shift to his natural form and attack whatever threatened, but as he went to do so, he gasped in pain, his entire body rebelling. Agony like a thousand burrowing