“Steady, Black Beard,” she heard her brother say quietly. Then a burst of wind slammed into the airship and sent her spinning sideways for endless, heart-stopping seconds before Spanner Frew was able to bring her back around again.
Rue exhaled sharply. Big Red glanced over at her and broke into one of those familiar grins that told her how much he loved this.
“Hold on!” he shouted.
They bucked through the gap’s twists and turns like a cork through rapids, knocked this way and that, fighting to stay steady at every turn. The winds thrust at them, then died away, then returned to hammer them again. Once they were blown so hard to starboard that they very nearly struck the cliff wall, only just managing to skip past an outcropping of rock that would have ripped the hull apart. Rue clung to the pilot box railing, her knuckles white with determination, thinking as she did so that this was much worse than what they had encountered coming through the Squirm, ice pillars notwithstanding. At any moment they could lose control completely and be smashed to bits against the rocks.
They climbed to a thousand feet as the floor of the pass rose ahead, forcing them to gain altitude beyond what Rue knew her brother had hoped would prove necessary,—the winds at this elevation were too strong and unpredictable.
Then the mountains parted ahead, and far below they saw a vast forest cupped by the fingers of scattered peaks, deep and impenetrable and stretching away into the haze. There would be a landing site there, a place for them to set down and make repairs.
She had no sooner finished the thought than the aft port radian draw snapped at the masthead and fell away.
At once, the Jerle Shannara began to lose power and slip sideways. Spanner Frew fought to bring her nose up, but without both aft parse tubes in operation, he lacked the means to do so.
“I can’t right her!” he grunted in frustration.
“Mainsail!” Big Red shouted instantly to the crew.
Kelson Riat and another of the Rovers leapt up at once from where they were crouched amidships and began to unfasten the lines and run up the sail. Without the use of the aft parse tubes, Big Red was going to rely on the sails for power. But the crosswinds were vicious,—there was as much chance as not that they would fill the big sail and carry the airship right into the cliffs like a scrap of paper.
“Steady, steady, steady . . . ,” Big Red chanted to Spanner Frew as the shipwright fought to hold the Jerle Shannara in place.
Fluttering and snapping, the mainsail went up. Then the wind caught it and drove the airship forward with a lurch. She bucked in the wind’s strong grip, and another of the draws snapped and fell away.
“Shades!” Redden Alt Mer hissed. He snatched at the wheel as Spanner Frew lost his footing, struck his head on the pilot box railing, and blacked out.
They were still falling, but they were accelerating toward the gap, as well, the mountains widening on both sides. If they could stay high enough to miss the boulders clustered in the mouth of the pass, they might survive. It was going to be close. Rue willed the Jerle Shannara to lift, begged her silently to level off. But she was still falling, the rocky surface of the pass rising swiftly to meet her.
Her brother threw the levers that fed power to the diapson crystals all the way forward and brought the steering levers all the way back. The airship shuddered anew, lurched, and rose a final time. They surged through the gap, breaking into the clear air above the forest below. But even as they did so, the keel scraped across the boulders beneath them, making a terrible grinding, ripping noise. The Jerle Shannara shuddered and then dipped, the bow coming down sharply, pointing left and toward the forest a thousand feet below. The crosswind returned, sudden and vicious, snatching at the crippled vessel. The mainsail reefed as several of her lines snapped, and the Jerle Shannara plunged downward.