Read Online The Harvest by Chuck Wendig - Free Book Online Page B

living by the urges he felt in his pants, discarding wife after wife—as her grandfather got older, his wives got younger. And he still wanted the children to call them “grandmother.”
    Puke.
    “Let us walk back outside,” he says, relinquishing his grip on her jaw.
    As he turns and points that long stride toward the door, she rubs her jaw, and Heron gives her a look. She scowls, turns away, a red rage rising to her cheeks. Heron hurries after the Master Architect, waving her on.
    The Master Architect: overseer of all new flotilla construction and of all the Grand Architects beneath him. He, like they, is master of his own flotilla, too: the Luzerne Garam Ilmatar, built by—who was it? Luzerne’s great-grandfather? Great-great? Whatever. That, again, is history and she can no longer peer too deep in the past lest she overlook those events in recent memory. She is the hand of vengeance. She is the one who will reclaim the honor and might of the Empyrean. It is with her spear that she will remind the Heartlanders that their place is either kneeling in the dust or hanging on the end of a godsdamned pike.
    She scowls and follows after. Why come inside if they were just going to go back outside?
    Wind whips.
    The Harpy nods her head as they all pass.
    Luzerne walks to the edge, gazes out on the construction spanning miles of mountain peaks, some connected with walkways and cables, others independent. Not far, welding skiffs hover and bob as they approach, firing mooring cables into the mountain rock to hold steady. It’s a dangerous job. Fire the anchoring piton into the wrong spot and boom :
    Avalanche.
    “We would usually build this flotilla in the sky,” he says, stating something both she and Heron already know. “But the Yong Heron Herfjotur is valuable enough to warrant hiding it from the . . . raider scum below.”
    “I agree,” she says.
    “It is not your place to agree,” he chides her. “Agreement from you sounds as if you are also afforded the chance to disagree.”
    I am. This was all my design. All of this. You think I’m just some dumb little girl and you hold my mooncalf grandfather in the highest regard, but all this is happening because I was smart enough and angry enough to demand that all the Grand Architects listen.
    And listen they did.
    Over the last year, she’s been working tirelessly. Losing sleep training an army of young girls like herself—children orphaned by the fall of the Saranyu, children whose parents were on the flotilla when it fell but who were themselves studying on other flotillas (as is the Empyrean way these days). They scarred their faces and marked them with ash and ink to ensure they will always be seen as the Harpies that they are. Creatures of vengeance.
    It was her idea, too, to construct a new flotilla to replace the Saranyu—and not just another floating city. Not some island of pretty buildings and vineyards and scholarly white towers. This would be a warship, a city built to tame those animals scrabbling in the dust bowl below. A flotilla designed with one goal: to punish the terrorists for thinking they could tear down the sky.
    Herfjotur. All her idea.
    Just a girl.
    “The flotilla will fly in a matter of months,” he says. “Perhaps sooner?”
    “Yes,” Heron offers. “Sooner is the goal.”
    “But,” Enyastasia says, jumping in, “the Harpies are ready. It’s time to enact Project Raven. The Initiative is in full swing, but the mechanicals can only do so much. Their use as soldiers is valuable but ill-fitting and incapable of the finesse necessary—”
    “Project Raven is dead.”
    “Wh-what?”
    “It is over. I have found it unbecoming of a young girl in our care—the granddaughter of one of our own architects, no less—to be carving up her face and the faces of other Empyrean children to serve as assassins. It is ludicrous.”
    She makes a sound somewhere between a laugh and a howl of rage. “You’re kidding. You’re seriously