Brotherhood of the Strange (Kingship, Tales from the Aether Book 1) Read Online Free Page B

clean it took a full two seconds for the pain to hit and longer for the full implication of what that pain represented. Degory Priest fell to his knees, grasping for an arm which was no longer there, an arm he had trained in the gentlemanly art of fencing since he was a boy, an arm that was now on its way to the future. Blood soaked his suit and spilled onto the floor as both the chair and door gave way allowing guards entry into the room. His vision blurring, Degory saw familiar faces, some he could trust, others he could not. He heard the cry go out to fetch a doctor, of which the Brotherhood had more than a few. As his mind faded into the oblivion of shock, Degory realized he at least had his alibi.



Chapter IV
     
    Four months later…
    Captain Vance Williams looked out of a port side window of the Kingship, idly smoking his unadorned, but well used meerschaum pipe. He tried, as he often did, to blow a smoke ring. He was never sure if his repeated failure was due to the fact that he never really got the hang of it in the first place, or that since he no longer smoked tobacco. Instead, a much more palatable mixture of burning spices, most notably that of cinnamon, did not make a smoke which was conducive to blowing rings. The ship’s cook, Afa had been the one to convince him to stop smoking tobacco leaf. The large, quiet man always saw to Vance’s best interests. When he had protested asking what he should smoke instead, he was given a pouch of various spices Afa had collected in their travels around the globe. Cinnamon from China, vanilla from Madagascar, ginger from India, mixed with a hint of black pepper, the blend stimulated the mind while quieting the soul. Even though Vance had never been one to smoke to the state of addiction, the change had taken time. Now he found no pleasure in the smell of tobacco smoke, be it from a pipe, cigar, or the ghastly American cigarette, and wondered how he had ever enjoyed the vice in the first place. No longer being exposed to it on a daily basis, as he had been while captaining a warship in Her Majesty’s Royal Air Navy, was certainly a factor as nearly everyone smoked on those aetherships.
    Some small fair weather clouds drifted by as he mused. The sky was that of bright royal blue which carried the smell of summer on this beautiful June day. At least it was sunny at this altitude; the ground some four thousand feet below was shrouded in a white blanket, whether or not it was raining below Vance did not know, though he guessed it probably was. From the rate the clouds had moved past his window he could tell they were making good time. Leaning forward, he rested his arms on a rail that had once held a plasmatic cannon, a section of the long unused gun port. When he had undertaken the sizable goal of restoring his grandfather’s ship and making it sky-worthy again he had found a chaotic assortment of parts that needed to be fixed or replaced. The energy cannons however, had been nowhere to be found, nor had Vance found any record of them being sold from his grandfather’s notes and ledgers left on board. Most likely they had been retained by the commanding body when the ship had been mothballed some forty years ago. It didn’t really matter anyway, as Vance was a successful merchant now and seldom had need of the firepower this vessel once packed. In fact, for a ship of her relatively diminutive size, Vance would have considered the amount of weaponry overkill, were it not for the tales his grandfather once told him. His life was now one of near serenity and he seldom even carried his sidearm anymore, a habit which had been far more difficult to break than switching from tobacco to cinnamon.
    Knowing the sounds of his ship as well as any good captain, Vance could hear the lift in the engine room above him begin its decent from the upper section of the vessel and through the connecting dorsal to come to a rest on his level. He knew, tobacco or cinnamon, he was about to get an