Free Swords of Waar by Nathan Long

top of the mesa, and every now and then firing an artillery bolt into the ruins.

CHAPTER NINE
    TOAGA!
    A s I got closer, I saw that the airship’s balloon was painted the same orange as the robes of the priests of Ormolu and had their hexagon with a dot in the middle symbol painted on the side. I also saw something else—more than twenty other airships, all burned and broken and deflated on the rocks around the bottom of the mesa, and looking like the skeletons of dinosaurs right after the comet got ’em.
    My guts clenched at the sight, imagining Lhan had been on one of those ships, and had fallen to his death with all the rest. I didn’t get how it had happened, either. One temple ship against more than twenty pirate ships, and the priests didn’t have a scratch? Even the Oran navy wasn’t that good.
    By that time I was close enough that the temple ship could have seen me if they’d known where to look, so I hid behind a rock and waited a half hour ’til the sun went down, then pulled on my hood and cloak to hide my light skin and started forward again.
    It was creepy as hell tip-toeing through all those dead ships in the dark, with all their burnt ribs looming up on either side of me and their killer floating over my head like a circling hawk. In the dim light of the little moon I could see mangled bodies spilling out of the wrecks, and smell them too. The whole place stank of death and charred wood. Part of me wanted to stop and search through the corpses for Lhan, but I told it to go fuck itself. Looking for his body would mean I’d given up on him being alive, and I wasn’t ready to do that. Not yet. I mean, the temple ship was still circling and shooting. That meant there still had to be somebody alive up there to shoot at, right?
    I kept going until I reached the bottom of the mesa, then started to climb. It was obvious pretty quick why somebody woulda put a castle here back in the day. Even for me, with my Earth strength and my jumping ability, it was an almost impossible climb. The sides of the mesa were nearly as smooth and flat as a stone wall, and sometimes I had to search around for minutes for my next finger hold or foot rest. On top of that, I had to stop moving every time the navy ship came around my side of the mesa, just in case they were on the lookout for ninjas.
    My fingers and toes were cramping before I was halfway up, and my muscles started to burn like I’d been running a marathon. Then, three quarters of the way up, the climb stopped being hard and became impossible instead. I reached a point where the rock face bulged out above me in a smooth curve, like I was looking at the underside of a balcony, except the bulge went as far as I could see in either direction. I was under a lip that seemed to go all the way around the mesa. The frustrating part was that I could see that the rock layer above the bulge was all rough and chunky and full of hand holds. If I could get there, the rest of the climb would be cake, but I couldn’t get there.
    Well, I might be able to, but if I went for it and didn’t make it, I was dead—smashed to a pulp with all the other corpses down among the broken ships at the bottom of the mesa. See, I was in a good spot where I was. There was a two-inch-deep hole for my right foot, and good grips for both my hands. I had plenty of resistance to push off from if I wanted to jump, and I could see an easy hand hold on the lip of the bulge that I knew I had the power to reach, but power wasn’t the problem.
    Fear was the problem. Even just thinking about making that jump was making my sphincter tingle. I had to jump ten feet up and five feet out with my back to a twenty-story drop and no rope or safety net to catch me if I blew it. There would be no do-overs. There would be no take twos. There would be a Jane pancake on the rocks of an alien world and I would never know if Lhan had lived or died. On the other hand, what were my options? Was I supposed to climb down and