“Who will be in charge of such regulation?” May Lin asked.
Again, her penetrating insight left him speechless. For the peoples along the river needed the water levels back where they had been. The people west of the mountains would profit by a river running high enough to take a boat well into the heart of the continent. It was a stalemate, and Alice’s little Chaloupe was going to break it.
“If the men of the ranchos come to the dam to work,” Felipe said, “they will die in the flood. If we must accomplish this thing, it ought to be very soon.”
“Within three days,” May Lin told him. “We will have the spider’s legs attached tomorrow, and the day after, Alice and Ian can take it downriver.”
No one noticed Gretchen until she stepped out from between Felipe and Jake. Such was her ability to sneak … or as Felipe put it, her spycraft. “The day after tomorrow? Even twelve hours is too much. Tomorrow night, no later. The dam is seventy-five percent completed, according to the laundress I spoke to in what is left of Santa Croce. The men from the ranchos are already arriving, and the work is going even faster. They are forced to actually feed the builders now, you see.”
“What do you mean?” Felipe demanded. “Of course they must feed them.”
“The conscripts are—how do you say it? One step from starvation. The Viceroy’s army is not known for its care of those men, only its soldiers.”
“Disgraceful,” muttered Felipe, to whom this was clearly news. “Changes must be made.”
“Oh, they will,” Alice said cheerfully, lest Gretchen think this was an odd thing to say. “The Chaloupe will see to that.”
Gretchen dared a glance at Ian. “Captain Hollys, I—I am glad to see you on your feet again.”
Stiffly, Ian nodded.
“Please accept my apologies again for—”
“I did the last time you offered them.” Ian straightened his spine. “We are fighting on the same side, Fraulein. Let us put the past behind us.”
She slipped away as unobtrusively as she had come.
“She is very good at that,” May Lin said. “So, tomorrow night? We shall have to make an early start of it.”
Alice could not reply. By the time the moon rose again, she and Ian might no longer be alive.
Chapter 13
Six months ago, if someone had told him he would be working for an enemy army, in the company of the husband of the woman he had once had hopes of, and enjoying himself, Evan Douglas would have told them they were utterly mad. Would have said he chose his company better. Would have said he didn’t even know any women of whom to have hopes.
How his life had changed! Well, as a schoolboy he had craved adventure. Now that he had it, he would give almost anything to be back in the schoolroom, the bespectacled professor he had always vowed he would never be.
Almost.
For despite the harrowing dangers he had been exposed to hitherto, there was something very rewarding about operating the behemoth—it made him feel capable. Powerful. And rather possessive of its huge, awkward iron self. Even if all he was doing was lifting horizontal beams into place.
For despite the familiarity of the work, everything was different now. Joe was gone, and in his place working the behemoth’s arms was Captain Fremont. The guards who had shared the pilot’s chamber were gone, and in their place was a modicum of trust. Commander de Sola had not actually believed that he would keep his promise to return, and in his astonishment, he had removed the guard and moved Evan, Fremont, and his old cellmate Dutch into the soldiers’ dormitory. While it had far less privacy than the gaol cell, it did have the advantage of a bed and sink—two gifts for which Evan had learned to be grateful.
Carefully, Captain Fremont dropped the beam into its trusses and lowered the behemoth’s arms. Evan turned them about and they stumped back in the direction of the staging yard to fetch the next one.
“I must say,” he said over his shoulder to Fremont, “I am still having difficulty understanding why you choose to stay when you could be piloting your own steamboat and taking orders from no man.”
“I am not certain myself,” the captain admitted, swinging down from the gunner’s chair, his sailor’s legs adjusting easily to the movement of the behemoth. “But I suspect that this feeling in my gut is simply a need to be on the same side of the mountains as Gloria. If there are fewer obstacles between us, then there is less to prevent my reaching her should she need help.”
Evan couldn’t help but admire such reasoning, since he shared it himself.
“I might ask you the same question,” the captain went on. “Any other man would have broken his word and taken the first train to Reno, Santa Fe, and beyond.”
Evan chuckled, his legs moving in an even rhythm that caused the behemoth’s mirrored movement to eat up the distance far below. “Perhaps. For I would be free … but friendless and alone. Better to be foolish and honorable and close to my friends. And as you say, available to help should I be need—”
Something hit the side of the behemoth with a clank.
Their stride faltered as Evan lost his rhythm. “What was that? Are we being fired upon?”
“That, or someone threw a rock—though few men have an arm strong enough. If you will stop, I will investigate.”
Evan brought them to a halt and Fremont scrambled out of the hatch and down the iron ladder built into one leg. After a wait of some five minutes in which Evan tried unsuccessfully to see what was going on below, he heard scraping sounds. In a moment, slightly out of breath, the captain hauled himself through the hatch once more.
In one hand he carried a familiar brass shape. “I have no idea what this is, but I found it between the behemoth’s feet. Its nose seems to have got a bit crumpled from the impact.”
“Good heavens.” Evan unbuckled himself and crossed the few steps to take it from him. “Have you never seen a pigeon?”
“Only the feathered kind. What is it?”
“It’s an airborne messenger. It carries correspondence between airships.”
“That explains it. I haven’t been in an airship for a decade, much less seen one of these in use. The little blighter seems a bit confused,” the captain observed wryly. “There are no airships in the Royal Kingdom’s skies despite the reversal of the laws against them. Not the most helpful of laws, I must say.”
“Give Gloria time.” Evan opened the cylindrical compartment tucked below the wings and propellers, and in front of its engine. “This must have blown off course. Let us see to whom it was sent and release it on its way.”
Evan Douglas
Behemoth
Evan, if you get this, please reply soonest. We think all Gloria’s pigeons go to things her dad made. This is an experiment to see if it will find you. If it does, send it back—it knows the code for Swan.
We hope you are well. We are all fine.
Yours faithfully,
Benjamin Stringfellow
Gunner second class, Swan
“For heaven’s sake,” Evan said blankly.
“Who is it for? One of the Ranger ships?”
“No, for us. Look. Our address is Behemoth. I must say I prefer that to Colliford Castle or Orpington Street.”
Fremont scanned the crumpled sheet with its blotted handwriting and chuckled. “That little scamp. How did he discover such a thing?”
“I don’t know. We had no pigeons aboard Swan that I know of, and this one looks very new. I suppose if it knows how to find the behemoth, it must have been in a crate with the mechanicals.”
“Wherever it came from, I’m deuced glad to see it. It means we can communicate with Alice, at least. Though I would much rather we had thought to equip Gloria with a mechanical, so that I might write to her.”
“We must certainly keep it a secret—any correspondence going to the witches will undoubtedly be considered treasonous. We will lay hands on paper and ink at the first opportunity and send our reply.”
That evening, when most of th
e soldiers were enjoying games of cards or contests of athletics in the parade yard, Evan and the captain availed themselves of a pencil and paper. Other men wrote letters, so this was nothing unusual. Their advantage was that now they need not wait for a train or a passing friar in order to communicate with the outside world.
Benjamin Stringfellow
Gnr 2nd Class, Swan
Delighted to receive your letter. Further examination of the behemoth reveals a communications cage behind the gunner’s harness, which this unfortunate bird missed. Apologies for damage. We’ve done our best to repair. Fremont is with me. We are well and have been promoted to sleeping in the dormitory with the soldiers. Best to avoid sending during the day to prevent discovery. We hope your captain has been busy and await news every day. Nothing new from the north save that more men come daily to work on the dam. Time grows short in that regard.
Yours ever,
Evan
A moonlit stroll took him to the storage yard, where the sentry recognized him, nodded, and allowed him through the gate.
“I noticed some stiffness in El Gigante’s joints earlier,” he told the man. “I’ll just do a bit of maintenance now, so I don’t lose the time tomorrow.”
He carried a mechanic’s bag with an oilcan on top of the pigeon, its spout poking out rather conspicuously, so the sentry merely nodded and closed the gate. Evan scrambled up into the pilot’s cabin and gave the pigeon its instructions to return to Swan. When he released it through the communications cage, it would know to return to that specific location on the behemoth’s body. He watched it fly away, his only hope that the sentry would not see it, become alarmed at something else flying in the face of God, and shoot it out of the sky.
The night remained quiet, however, and he nodded to the sentry as he left once more, his bag of tools somewhat slimmer … and his heart considerably lighter than it had been since his last sight of San Luis Obispo de Tolosa and the people he cared about therein.
Chapter 14
“Alice—Captain—you cannot do this to us.”
Alice’s blood turned to ice at the anguish in Jake’s voice. She felt sick at the thought of what they must do, and yet … “I’ve got to, Jake. Don’t you see? It was my idea to run the Chaloupe into the flow regulator, so I can’t very well hand off the job to May Lin or Mother Mary.”
“Hand it off to Gretchen,” he said bitterly. “No one will miss her. We’re your crew. How can you leave us behind?”
A suspicious sheen glittered in his eyes in the light of the lamps, and the lump in her own throat nearly choked her. “Because, my dearling, someone must stay alive to tell Claire what happened. Someone must look after Benny, and get him back to London. You are that someone. Ian and I are braving this task together because … well, because whatever happens, I must be with him, and he with me.”
“And you expect me to let the both of you go, just like that?”
“Too many lives are depending on us,” she told him gently. “And I suspect you’ll have a tussle with the witches if you try to follow us.”
“I can’t believe this of ye. We’re a flock, Alice.” His voice broke, and so did her heart.
“Jake—”
But he had already twisted away from her, pushing through the silent crowd gathered to watch their departure, and collecting Benny on the way. Her last sight of her navigator and gunner were their shadows as they disappeared into the vertical chute of rock where the spiral stair lay concealed in the darkness.
Were they really going to attempt that climb, grief-stricken and blinded by emotion? But there was nothing she could do now—except hope the witches wouldn’t find their lifeless bodies at the bottom in the morning.
Mother Mary touched her arm, making her jump. Her nerves were stretched thin, and the bone-deep desire to flee right along with Jake wasn’t helping.
“Our prayers go with you,” Mary said. “Our sisters have been praising your courage.”
“Foolhardiness, more like,” Alice mumbled. “Two of the people I care about most just ran away from me, angry.”
“Great things have been accomplished by people whom others called fools—we live with that. And the boys will not be angry forever. We will look after them.”
“I know you will.” Alice was not the sort who indulged in demonstrations of affection outside of those she considered her immediate family, but this might be the last opportunity she would ever have to connect in the most basic of human ways. She hugged Mother Mary. “Try to get them to forgive me.”
“They love you, sister. They likely already have.”
May Lin crawled out of the Chaloupe. “It is ready, Alice.”
“Then I guess we are, too.”
Ian gripped her hand and helped her in, then settled into the rudimentary harness next to her while May Lin slammed the hatch shut.
As submersibles went, it was about what you’d expect from a boiler fitted out with a viewing port that had been salvaged from a capsized Californio boat, and only the most basic of steering mechanisms. They had air, but not a lot. Gretchen had estimated it would take six hours to reach the dam.
Six hours of navigating underwater, at night, in an unfamiliar vessel.
Six hours of contemplating their own insanity.
Six hours of being together, possibly for the last time.
Helping hands shoved the Chaloupe away from the makeshift pier, the current caught them, and they were under way. Alice could not even look over her shoulder for a final glimpse of the village, for there was nothing behind her in the dark but explosives. And while it was true that a recovery party would venture down to the dam in the morning, there were no guarantees that she and Ian would be in any shape to greet them.
She shook off such unpleasant thoughts and forced herself to do her job. In the upper reaches of the river, they could coast along on the surface. She must keep them from crashing into the walls of the canyon, using the controls for the spider’s legs. She imagined that, from above, they looked like a very clumsy version of those insects that skimmed the water of a pond.
Ian gripped the navigation wheel with both hands, his sharp gaze on their course. “Mother Mary tells me that the Californio lookouts are posted about a mile upstream from the dam. A fallen tree across the canyon is our landmark, and where we must submerge.”
“I’m not looking forward to that. Give me a big sky and a lot of clouds, rather. You can keep your water vessels.”
“You will hear no arguments from me on that score.”
“We’ve yet to have our first argument,” she pointed out, somewhat wistfully. “But I suppose that in the next six hours, anything is possible.”
“As if I should wish to argue with the woman who is roped to me.” He glanced at her next to him, their shoulders pressed against one another in the cramped space, a rope connecting them to each other so they were not separated in the water. “Perhaps we might discuss the wallpaper in the receiving room at Hollys Park. That always put my father in a towering temper—it is seventeenth century, you see.”
“High time it was replaced, then,” Alice said promptly.
“You and my mother would have seen eye to eye.”
“I should have liked to have met your mother, and thanked her for doing such a good job in bringing you up.”
“I should have liked you to have met her, too.” He steered around a double outcropping of rock that forced the river into an S-curve. “Ah well. When we are home again, you shall meet my aunt Dorothea. You will either love her or hate her. No one seems to fall in the middle. It is to be assumed that my uncle falls on the loving side. Papa fell on the other.”
“You are gossiping, Ian Hollys, in order to take my mind off this little excursion.”
“I am indeed. Sadly, my gossip is rather out of date now. I wonder how Claire and Andrew are?”
“I would give a lot to see Athena’s shabby old fuselage in the distance, for true.”
“You will some day, I promise. We ar
e not going to die, Alice. The plan is straightforward.”
“It’s the execution that worries me.”
“Ah, but the execution is in our hands. My greatest concern is for your safety, and yours is for mine. As long as we both crawl out of that water together, hang the dam.”
“Have I told you lately how much I love you?” Alice said softly, hoping her tone would make up for the fact that she must not take her eyes off the walls of the canyon.
“And I love you. I am sorry now to have been such a bear during my convalescence—you would think that having my own mortality cast in my face by our friend Gretchen would have made me both sober and silent.”
“You’re a man.” Alice leaned her head on his shoulder briefly, her hands never leaving the levers. “You can’t help it.”
And so the moon rose and travelled across the sky, and the stars wheeled a little farther in their nightly arc, while Alice and Ian spoke of things both heartfelt and inconsequential. Of rope and string and sewing thread, as the childhood rhyme went. Of cake and pudding and sopping bread.
And then a narrow horizontal shadow passed over them, blotting out the light of the setting moon for less than a second as the current carried them under it. Without a word, Ian set the vanes to vertical and they sank beneath the rolling surface of the water, plunging into gloom. The small engine that propelled them was only enough to keep them ahead of the current. It was of no use in taking them upstream again. There was no turning back now—not that there ever had been a chance to do so.
Suddenly a bolt sliced the water ahead of them, like a spear made of bubbles. Then another, and another.
Fields of Gold: A steampunk adventure novel (Magnificent Devices Book 12) Page 13
