For centuries the Cinder Spires have safeguarded humanity, rising far above the deadly surface world.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Olympian Affair, the second book in Jim Butcher’s Cinder Spires series—publishing with Ace on November 7.
For centuries the Cinder Spires have safeguarded humanity, rising far above the deadly surface world. Within their halls, aristocratic houses rule, developing scientific marvels and building fleets of airships for defense and trade.
Now, the Spires hover on the brink of open war.
Everyone knows it’s coming. The guns of the great airship fleets that control the skies between the last bastions of humanity will soon speak in anger, and Spire Albion stands alone against the overwhelming might of Spire Aurora’s Armada and its new secret weapon–one capable of destroying the populations of entire Spires.
A trading summit at Spire Olympia provides an opportunity for the Spirearch, Lord Albion, to secure alliances that will shape the outcomes of the war, and to that end he dispatches privateer Captain Francis Madison Grimm and the crew of the AMS Predator to bolster the Spirearch’s diplomatic agents.
It will take daring, skill, and no small amount of showmanship to convince the world to stand with Spire Albion—assuming that it is not already too late.
Chapter Two
AMS Predator, Colony Spire Dependence
This was not a moment for rash action, Grimm thought.
This was a moment to think.
He had a minute or so—enough time to make a single move.
Grimm invested seconds in simply staring at the enemy vessel and observing it more closely.
The dreadnought must not have seen Predator yet. If it had, Conquistodor would have blown them to flinders already. As Grimm stared at the image of the oncoming airship, he noted another detail: the enemy vessel was coming almost directly at them, head-on. If Conquistodor had spotted an enemy ship, she’d have rotated to present her broadside rather than aiming only her limited chase armament (which was larger than Predator’s broadside) from the dreadnought’s bow.
Further, the enemy ship wasn’t coming precisely at them. It was off by several degrees—which meant that Conquistodor wasn’t hunting them specifically. It was blind, bad luck, then, that the dreadnought had cruised close enough to be a danger.
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The Olympian Affair
Grimm had four options: run, fight, hide, or wait.
Fighting was out. Simply running wasn’t an option either—by the time they reeled in the maneuver web and reeled out a sailing web, the enemy would have destroyed Predator and been halfway through supper. Given the enemy’s course, waiting and remaining still wasn’t an option either.
Grimm felt Kettle’s eyes on him. The grizzled sailor watched him, jaw tensed, eyes patient, gaze flicking between his captain and his potential death.
Grimm nodded once, reached for the speaking tube, and said firmly, “Bridge to engine room. I want the quietest direct ascent you can give me, Journeyman. If we make noise, we’re all dead.”
“Aye, Skip,” came Journeyman’s unconcerned voice—he hadn’t seen the enemy vessel from the engine room.
“Take her up easy, Mister Kettle,” Grimm said, resecuring his safety straps. “Our Auroran friends have delicate, passionate psyches. Best if we don’t disturb their evening meal, eh?”
“Aye, Skip,” Kettle said in a subdued tone. He took hold of the steering grips with one hand and with the other moved the lever to throw more power into the ship’s ascension.
Grimm felt the soles of his boots press hard against the deck beneath him, and Predator began to rise. Grimm kept track as his ship simply rose from the ground, supported by the lift crystal at its balance point at the ship’s core. The suspension rig would be under great strain at the moment. Spars and decking and bulkheads creaked and groaned under the strain, but for all of that, the little ship left the earth behind her swiftly, rising with a grace few others could match. The enemy ship was coming nearer, and they were rising to meet it.
Grimm felt like some poor insect trying to avoid a hungry chicken; a singing silver tension for his crew made his shoulders tighten like barrel hoops.
Predator matched Conquistodor’s altitude, barely outside visual range, and the massive dreadnought’s bulk absolutely dwarfed Grimm’s tiny ship. Then they began to rise above her, and Grimm let out a slow breath, beginning to believe that they might escape.
And then a cat let out a yowl of outrage from somewhere in the direction of the infirmary.
There was a moment of stunned silence when Grimm hoped that the piercing sound would go unnoticed.
And then, from less than a hundred feet below him, a lookout shouted in Auroran.
Seconds later, alarm bells began ringing on Conquistodor. Seconds after that, the steam engines of the dreadnought bellowed to life, roaring as it brought its combat maneuver thrusters online.
Grimm seized the speaking tube, caught Kettle’s eyes, and called calmly, “Bridge to engine room. Maximum ascension now if you please, Mister Journeyman.”
Kettle nodded once, clamping his jaw and bracing his legs, and then slammed the lift throttle all the way forward.
Predator surged with power, and Grimm staggered, dropping to a knee while Kettle grunted with effort against his brace and kept his feet. The mist swirled around them and a sudden breeze from above arose as they ascended, Grimm’s ears swimming with painful pressure.
Grimm thought furiously.
What happened next would depend greatly on the enemy commander. It stood to reason that the enemy had spent their day much as Grimm had—hiding in the mist, watching, listening. They too would be tired, tense, and wired up for combat. They too would be wondering about the composition of an enemy vessel, wondering if they were there to swat a fly or fight for their lives.
Had the enemy lookout gotten a clear look at Predator? If she had, then she would simply roll, present a broadside to the sky, and more than likely annihilate them, even firing blind, from this range. He had to get higher above Conquistodor. Dreadnoughts were great, wallowing beasts when it came to maneuver. If he could keep above where his enemy’s cannon could elevate, even with a dreadnought’s limited maneuver capability, he had an excellent chance to escape.
“Serpentine, Mister Kettle,” Grimm noted. “Try to keep us directly above her.”
“Stay in her blind spot, aye,” Kettle replied, and threw power to the port-side maneuver web. The ship dragged itself abruptly to the left just as Grimm began to stand again, and he grabbed on to both safety lines to save his balance as Predator continued to rise. A moment later, Kettle hauled the ship the other way.
From below, the sound of Conquistodor’s turbines redoubled, and Grimm put himself in that captain’s place. He would know that the enemy was present, but little more. He’d expect to be facing a Fleet ship, Grimm felt sure, but Conquistodor could battle any Albion, and her captain knew it. Dreadnought captains were chosen for their cool in the heat of battle, where they were expected to stand in the middle of the deadliest combat known to man without flinching. And the King of Aurora chose his captains for their hunger and aggression.
If Grimm had been in charge of that ship, he’d have sent maximum power to the lift and trim crystals and pointed every thruster he had straight down. Dreadnoughts weren’t terribly mobile—but they were powered by three core crystals ten times the size of Predator’s, and what they lacked in footwork they more than made up for in raw power and endurance. Conquistodor could probably match the ascension rate of any ship in the Fleet.
It was, Grimm reflected, once again an excellent thing that Predator was not a Fleet vessel—she was the personal armed craft of His Majesty Addison Orson Magnus Jeremiah Albion, Lord Albion, Spirearch of Albion, and he had bought her with a brand-new lift crystal meant to keep a far larger battlecruiser mobile in aerial combat.
Predator’s only mobility-related problem in battle was not tearing herself apart with her own maneuvers, so powerful was her lift crystal, and at the moment, she rose swiftly, the mists turning from threatening storm cloud grey to bronze, to glowing orange.
“Topmen to the masts!” Grimm bellowed. “Run out the sailing web!”
Officers relayed orders to the men. The heavy maneuver web was retracted, and moments later, the far finer, longer, wider sailing web ran out, ethersilk webbing springing weightlessly from the ship as the vessel ran electrical current along its length. The web began to spread as they rose, and Kettle bawled instructions to the crew, who struggled against their own apparent weight as the ship continued to rise.
“Maximum power to the web if you please, Mister Kettle,” Grimm said. “Set course for home. Let’s show them our heels.”
As Kettle grinned, he showed Grimm the glowing crystal set in his tooth. The ship’s pilot “angled the sails” of the ship’s web by adjusting the amount of electricity flowing to the dorsal, ventral, port, or starboard web, and Predator leapt forward as the web caught the etheric currents flowing through the skies and drew them forward.
Predator broke free of the mists and into clear skies as the sun was setting in an enormous roiling cauldron of flame. She turned her prow away from the sun, etheric web sending wavery shadows across the deck as Predator banked slightly and danced across the seething surface of the mists.
Excerpted from The Olympian Affair by Jim Butcher Copyright © 2023 by Jim Butcher. Excerpted by permission of Ace. All rights reserved.
