Alice shook her head. “Aqua what?”
He pointed to the edge of the stone pier upon which they stood. “You see how high is the water? It has risen at least a foot overnight. It is the full moon, signorina, and the high tide. We shall be flooded by sunset.”
“Flooded?” Maggie sounded worried, and Alice couldn’t blame her. “How high does the water go?”
Wordlessly, he pointed at the row of buildings, painted a cheerful salmon and yellow and blue, down the nearest canal. “You see? There, below the windows?”
With a sinking feeling, Alice saw that the paint had been stained a darker shade all the way up—at least eight feet above the current level. And now that she thought about it, the pavement on the way here had been wet, too, the water in the canals slopping over the edges and creating puddles. She had naively thought it had rained in the night. But clearly there were greater forces at work here in this strange city than mere weather.
“Do you think it will go that high tonight?” she asked the boatman.
He shrugged in the Venetian manner, bringing an ear down to one shoulder. “I have lived on this canal all my life, and my bones tell me that it will.”
“But not before we go sea-bathing,” Maggie said. “Please, signore, it will not rise before we have a chance to do that, will it?”
He gazed at her soberly. Perhaps he was thinking that if Maggie were his daughter, he’d have her safely installed on an upper floor, not galloping about on such a frivolous quest. “I offer a suggestion merely … that you return by noon. The beaches are shallow and the water rises quickly. You will have nowhere to go, and the Doge’s men will not allow you through the palisade to higher ground.”
“I understand that there is quite a large area fenced off,” Alice said. “Are the guards so fierce that they would not allow two young ladies in to find safety?” She tried to look young and defenseless, but wasn’t sure how well she pulled it off.
“They are Justice men,” he said, as if this was all the information anyone needed.
So the impound yard was guarded by men from the Ministry. They had quite the respect for justice around here, didn’t they? Where were the representatives of the Ministry of Fishing, or the Ministry of Culture?
“Sister, please,” Maggie begged. “I so want to go sea-bathing. I promise I will be ready to come back before noon.”
“If you do so, I will take you,” the boatman said, and spat over the side.
They would be well airborne before then, with any luck. “I promise, too,” Alice told him, and the two of them climbed aboard.
The little boat’s triangular sail caught the wind, and within the hour the boatman beached on the Lido’s silvery sands on the landward side. He jumped out and pulled it up so they could disembark without getting their feet wet, and Alice paid him.
“Noon,” he said. “When you hear the bell on the watchtower strike, you must come down here. I will take you back.”
“No, you don’t have to do that. We can find our way back ourselves.”
He gazed at her. “No one comes today.” He gestured to the landing, and to the grassy banks and inlets of the island. “Do you see other foolish ladies here?”
“Well … no.” Clearly they had been frightened up onto that upper floor back in the city.
He grasped the bow of his boat and pushed it down the slope, then jumped in, splashing his canvas trousers to the knees. “Noon,” he said, and set the sail. He was soon out of sight.
“I feel badly about bringing him back out here on a fool’s errand,” Maggie said, picking up her bag and hefting it over her shoulder.
“It can’t be helped,” Alice told her. “Come on. Let’s find a tree and get out of these dresses before we blow away like kites.”
The breeze was downright sprightly even in the lee of the island, blowing across as it did from the open sea. It wouldn’t bother the Lass, though, unless it turned into a proper gale. But it was enough to make wearing a dress inconvenient, wrapping cotton around calves and blowing one’s hat clean off.
“Let it go,” Alice said, when Maggie took two steps after the little straw and ribbon confection. “I’ll never wear it again after today anyway.”
“I’d have worn it.” But Maggie let it go, and turned away.
After they’d changed in the shelter of a scrubby tree, it soon became apparent that locating the Lass would be more difficult than they’d first thought. “All the high ground is behind the wall,” Alice complained. “And what fool called this a fence? The boatman was right. It’s a palisade.”
There was a gate every hundred feet or so, facing the beach where presumably sea-bathers would frolic. And each was guarded by a man in uniform. “This is no good,” Maggie said from where they were concealed behind a thick, plumy tussock of sea-grass. “It’s one thing to walk the beach when you’re one of hundreds. But we’ll be stopped and questioned for sure if we attempt it today.”
“We’re going to have to go in on the windward side, where there are no beaches,” Alice told her. “Come on.”
The palisade might be an impressive wooden barrier when it had to keep out ladies and children, but as they climbed over the rocks at the tip of the island, they discovered that it degenerated after several hundred feet into barbed wire on posts, which wouldn’t keep out anything smaller than a cow. In the act of holding the barbed strands apart for Maggie, Alice saw something in a tidal pool below. Spilling out of it, rather, like a huge tangle of weed.
“Maggie, what is that?”
It was gray and white, and motionless, and some twenty feet long. It was also quite dead, if the ravens inspecting it were any indication.
Maggie inhaled in sudden realization. “It’s a kraken!” she exclaimed. A flock of egrets rose, startled, out of a copse of trees, and Alice instinctively hunched down.
When no alarm seemed to have been raised, she raised her head and indicated that Maggie should climb through the fence. “Poor thing. I wonder what killed it?”
But there was no satisfying her curiosity on that point. She followed Maggie through the fence and continued forward until the trees thinned, and they were high enough to be able to see some way off.
“So many ships!” Maggie breathed.
So many it was difficult to count them from this distance. Single, double, and even a couple with the old-fashioned stacked fuselages, airships were neatly lined up and tied to black mooring masts. The fuselages moved restlessly in the sea breeze, bobbing like guilty children shifting from one foot to another.
“How many people crewed all these ships?” Alice wondered aloud. “Are they all imprisoned and working underwater, like Jake and the captain?”
“It’s shocking,” Maggie murmured, her eyes wide. “I wonder how long some of them have been here. If their crews have … died.”
It was a distinct possibility. For if the entire crew were under water, it left no one to do as they were doing—stealing one’s ship back. “Maybe they sell them when everyone is dead. How horrible.”
“Can you see the Lass?”
“Not from here. Come on. Let’s see if we can move to the west a little, and get a better view.”
Moving in fits and starts, they zigzagged from tussock to tree, staying low until they were close enough to one creaky old dame of a ship to see the lettering on her gondola. Alice had a good look all around them. “We’ll make a run for it across this open stretch, and hide under that old bucket there. I’m pretty sure the Lass is two rows away, about halfway across the field. The color of her fuselage is pretty distinctive, because of the waterproofing we use in the Territories.”
“I wish it were dark,” Maggie said.
“So do I. But ours is the least dangerous job. Think of what the others are enduring at this moment. Ready? Let’s go.”
Hunched over, bags on their backs, they ran for the old airship. Alice dove under her gondola, hearing the wood groan as the breeze tugged on her ropes.
Maggie settl
ed into place next to her, breathing hard. “Were we spotted?”
“I hope not,” Alice whispered. “I haven’t seen a guard yet on this side. They must concentrate all their men on the beach side to keep the ladies and children out.”
Maggie grinned, and then as her gaze swept the field, it faded. “Let me go first.”
“Hardly. We go together.”
But Maggie shook her head. “It’s what me and Lizzie do, Alice,” she said, sounding less like the educated young lady she was than the street sparrow she had once been. “You let me scout, and I’ll call like a robin with the all-clear.”
It was what she had counted on Maggie for, wasn’t it? So Alice nodded, and the girl took off, as silent as the breeze and nearly as fast. When a robin twittered, Alice followed, and, taking ship by ship and row by row, they hopscotched toward their goal.
Crouched under the blue fuselage of what might once have been a military vessel, Alice caught up with her and followed the direction of her gaze. “It’s the Lass,” she said on a long breath of relief. “Not sure what I would’ve done if she hadn’t been on this field.”
“Stolen another,” Maggie said with practical brevity. “Can you tell if she’s damaged?”
“Her gas bags haven’t been deflated, at least, and there are no holes stove in her hull.”
Some of the ships had sustained awful damage before they’d come to this graveyard, sitting forlornly on the gravel with their bags in heaps on their gondolas, looking abandoned and alone. A serving airship never touched the ground, not really, unless it was in a hangar somewhere for repairs. To see a hull tilted on the ground was unnatural, like seeing that kraken cast up and drying out on the rocks, any beauty it might once have possessed gone with the absence of its natural element.
“Let me have a look round,” Maggie whispered. “Back in a tick.”
If Alice, who was watching with every sense on alert, couldn’t see her making a circuit of the Lass, then she dared to hope that no one else would either. When Maggie returned, she nodded in answer to Alice’s silent question.
“Looks all right. Boarding will be tricky, though. There’s a direct sight line to the westernmost tower on the palisade.”
“We’ll stay close to the ground—in fact, look.” One of the derelicts had spilled its innards, and a piece of ancient canvas flapped, caught on a stanchion. Moving quickly, Alice pulled it free and carried it over to their hiding place. “We’ll crawl to it under this. It’s close enough to the color of the gravel that maybe they won’t notice.”
The canvas stank to high heaven, as though a hundred years of mildew had been growing under it since its ship had been impounded. But Alice just held her breath until they had crossed the short expanse to the Lass’s gondola and the hatch directly into the engine compartment.
She heaved Maggie up inside, tossed their bags in after her, and then hoisted herself up past the engine to the deck, kicking the canvas free.
Home.
Alice couldn’t help herself—she put a hand to the battered engine casing that had once been an automaton called Four, and which now cradled Claire’s energy cell. “All right, old girl?” she asked it, gazing around her. The casing was cold, and the interior smelled of dust and gear grease and a faint whiff of whatever she and Jake had last cooked in the galley before everything had gone to Hades in a handbasket. But the ship looked sound. Nothing appeared to have been disconnected or sabotaged.
A quick check of the cargo hold, however, confirmed what she’d suspected all along. “They’ve taken the furs.”
“You didn’t really think they would leave them here, did you?”
“No, I don’t suppose I did. I wonder where they hold the valuables they seize?”
“I don’t know, but I suspect the Minister’s young and pretty wife will have received a new mink stole.”
Alice swallowed her bitterness at the probable truth of this, and they returned to the gondola. “Maggie, have you piloted a ship before?”
“Of course. The Lady taught us all, and to read charts. The only thing I don’t know how to do is repair an engine, but Tigg said he’d show both me and Lizzie a few common repairs on his next land leave.”
“Good. I’m going to fire her up. You take the tiller. The automaton intelligence system has Twelve back here on Claire’s cell, and Thirteen controls the vanes.”
“Aren’t you going to captain her?” Maggie asked, for the first time sounding a little unsure of herself. “It’s not my place if you’re aboard.”
“That’s why I asked you if you’d had any experience. I want to keep an eye on the engine. Sometimes when she’s been standing for a while like this, she needs a little tuning.”
Maggie nodded at last and went forward, taking the bags with her.
Alice pulled the lever that set the movable truss in motion, and then heard Maggie say, “Twelve, prepare for lift. Thirteen, vanes full vertical.”
Obediently, the lamp lit on the console, indicating that Twelve had activated the power cell, and in a moment the familiar smooth purr of the engines vibrated the deck under her feet.
“Good girl,” she said fondly, adjusting current and checking the pistons’ motion with the familiarity of long practice. “Nobody’s going to hurt you as long as I’m here.” She hollered through the portal, “I’ll cast off.”
Dropping lightly to the ground, she ran to the bow and climbed the ladder to the mooring rope like a monkey. This was the tricky part. The Ministry men up in that tower might not have seen them board, and the wind was too loud for them to hear the engine, but a woman swaying on a mooring mast? It would be hard to miss that.
She untied the rope and scrambled down. The ships only seemed to be anchored at bow and stern, so all she had to do was cast off the second rope, jump back in the engine compartment’s hatch, and tell Maggie to lift.
A report like a hunting rifle sounded in the distance, and something whistled over the fuselage of the neighboring ship. The stern rope still in her hand, she turned. What—
Another report. A fraction of a second later, the Lass’s starboard fuselage bobbed and rocked. Another report. And then Alice realized what was happening.
“Maggie!” she screamed, running like hellfire for the engine hatch. “They’re shooting at us! Get her in the air!”
Crack. Crack. The other ships gave the port fuselage some cover, but at this rate frequency would trump accuracy, if the shots were coming from that tower.
And then Alice heard the sound that she never wanted to hear again—the one she had first heard in the Canadas, when they had crashed in the Idaho Territory. The shrill, forlorn whistle of gas escaping from the fuselage. More than one whistle. Three—four—it sounded like a regular choir of hopelessness.
“Maggie, lift!” Alice heaved herself into the engine compartment and slammed the hatch closed, turning immediately to kick the auxiliary engine’s throttle to full ahead. Thank the good Lord that Claire’s cell wasn’t powered by steam or they’d be full of bullets long before the engine was ready to fly.
“The gas in the starboard fuselage is below the red line!” Maggie shouted.
“Tell Eleven to disable it. We can still fly under one.”
“Eleven, disable starboard fuselage. Thirteen, full lift vertical. Up ship!”
As soon as they left the ground, the deck tilted drunkenly, off balance without the second fuselage to hold the gondola level as it hung between them. Everything that wasn’t tied down slid to the opposite wall, and if Alice hadn’t been hanging on to a safety rope, she might have gone clear out the exhaust well.
“Alice!” Maggie shrieked.
“Are you hit? Did you fall?” With one foot on the deck and one braced against the wall, Alice struggled forward. She had no sooner gained a handhold on one of the lamp cornices that she heard the ping! of a bullet striking metal. And another. And a third. Behind her, Four groaned like a man taking a fatal blow.
“No!” Alice shouted. “No! Not
my engine!”
A bloom of flame curled up from beneath Four’s thorax and with a blast that would have killed her had she still been standing beside it, the engine exploded. Alice was thrown the length of the corridor and into the navigation room.
“Alice! Oh, Alice, don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead.” Maggie’s voice came from a long way away.
I’m not dead, she tried to say, but her head seemed to have expanded to the size of the remaining fuselage.
Fuselage.
Gas.
Fire.
She opened her eyes with an effort of sheer will. There was no way on this green earth that she was going to stand in front of Claire and explain how she had let Maggie be killed. Not after what those two had been through in the English Channel. She struggled up.
“Gas,” she croaked. “Abandon ship.”
But the Lass was already rolling, its controls gone, poor Twelve and Thirteen helpless to make the engine obey their pilot’s commands. The corridor was already on fire—she could feel the heat of it from here, and the poor old girl was so old that her teak was dry as tinder. They’d burn right out of the sky unless they jumped, fast.
“Jump!” she ordered. “I’ll try and bring her close enough to one of the other ships that it won’t be too bad.”
“What are you talking about?” Maggie snapped. “If I go, you go.”
“Maggie, no—”
The auxiliary engine exploded and Alice realized they might not even have time to jump. Maggie had already flung on their two bags, crossing them over her chest, but now she grabbed Alice in a hug. Then she rolled them both right down the gangway and out the main hatch.
If they were going to die, let it be together, Alice thought as the sky whirled around her. Then the breath was knocked clean out of her as they landed. On something solid but giving. That smelled like canvas and warm pitch.
“Alice! Grab hold, quick, before we roll off!”
It was all she could do to close her fist around one of the ropes that formed a grid over whatever ship’s fuselage they had landed on, and lie flat on her back, gasping for air. Above them and about fifty feet to starboard, the Stalwart Lass rolled sickeningly as the flames leaped up the ropes and consumed the gondola with blazing speed. The second fuselage caught and there was a mighty boom as the gas exploded in a fireball that felt as though it singed the very eyebrows off her face.
A Lady of Integrity Page 16
