Breath of Earth

by Beth Cato

“An Ambassador—not Roosevelt—is involved? Damn,” muttered Lee.

  “Not personally, though, but I think Cy had dealings enough for both of us.”

  “Fenris,” Cy growled.

  Fenris responded with a flippant shrug as he tapped a panel above. A pair of binoculars attached to a brass arm dropped down, and he adjusted them to his eyes.

  Ingrid blinked. “Maybe it’s the fever, but is Fenris suggesting that you and Blum were . . . a couple? But she’s . . .”

  “An Ambassador, yes.” Cy had flushed and stared at the floor between their seats. “I didn’t know that at first, as I told you.”

  There were times for tact. This wasn’t one of them. “Actually, my first reaction was that she’s . . . old. She has to be in her sixties at least.” She sat up straighter as if she could distance herself from him.

  “What?” Cy looked genuinely confused. “She’s near our age. That’s why I never guessed she might be an Ambassador.”

  “Maybe Ingrid met her grandmother?” asked Lee. “What did she look like?”

  “Long red hair, curly. Blue eyes. Freckles,” said Cy.

  Beautiful, in other words. The kind of pretty face that sold cigarettes at the Damcyan, that could sell pretty much anything. Had Cy kissed this younger Blum? Ingrid shifted her mouth in revulsion, as if he’d spread contamination to her lips. Had they done more than kiss?

  “That’s not who I met,” Ingrid said, voice thick. “Like I said, she was much older, though gracefully aged. She looked Japanese, spoke English without an accent. Captain Sutcliff couldn’t cut her hand off. She was definitely an Ambassador.”

  “That’s about the most extreme way to verify an Ambassador.” Cy’s brow creased in a heavy frown, causing the red layer on his skin to crackle. “How peculiar.”

  “Captain Sutcliff. He acted terrified of her.” Ingrid said the name again as thoughts slipped into place. “He knew who she was by name, but he didn’t know her by her face. That’s why he tried to cut off the ring.”

  “Like she had more than one face?” asked Lee.

  The way that dogs reacted to Blum. Her keen senses. The way she manipulated Ingrid while always saying the absolute truth. The thickness of her dress at her derriere. That necklace she made sure to show off to Ingrid. “My God,” Ingrid whispered. “She wore a hoshi no tama.”

  “A star ball?” said Cy. As soon as he said the words, he blanched. He was raised among the New Southern Nippon; he knew Japanese fables.

  “Blum is a kitsune.” Ingrid shivered, suddenly more terrified of the woman than she had been before. Fenris still looked blank, but Lee sucked in a loud breath. “A Japanese fox spirit, a shapeshifter that can look like a woman with fox tails. The more tails they have, the longer they’ve lived, the more powerful they are, the more forms they can take. Her dark Reiki was like nothing I’ve ever seen . . . I . . .”

  Blum was a fantastic. A very old and very powerful one at that. How many tails did she hide beneath her skirt? That woman—that thing—had personally tortured Papa, and knew exactly how to torture Ingrid. That spirit would use Ingrid like hellfire to destroy an entire people.

  She looked at Cy. Kitsune were tricksters and seductresses, but he hadn’t seen Blum’s tails or even the onion-shaped pendant at her neck that was said to contain part of her very soul. Ingrid felt an odd sense of relief.

  “Forget Blum for a bit. We’re nearing San Bruno Mountain and I see some curious activity down by the beach.” Fenris made a sharp motion. Cy pulled down another pair of binoculars and began to scan. Ingrid stood to get a better look out of the window.

  “Ingrid!” Lee yelped as he stood to help.

  “I’m holding on to the seats,” she snapped.

  “Here.” Fenris tugged on the hinged brass arm and brought the binoculars farther down. “Follow that dirt road toward the beach. No, not on the mountain’s side, but on the Pacific.”

  As viewed from their elevation, water flanked both sides of the peninsula. San Bruno consisted of a long, green ridge that looked squat from so high up. Sinuous lines of smoke trailed into the sky. The earthquake’s devastation extended far out into the hills, likely into the San Joaquin Valley.

  Leaning on the seat, Ingrid pressed the binoculars to her eyes. A tree sprang into her vision in such stark detail that she pulled away in surprise.

  “These things are powerful!”

  “Military grade. Not technically for civilian use,” noted Fenris.

  “It’s impressive how many things can fall off the back of a truck,” said Lee.

  “I found people down there,” Cy said. “Took me a while. Fenris has eyes like a hawk.”

  Whereas Ingrid had bleary eyes that had been sporadically blinded over the past hour, and it didn’t help that the miasma tinted everything in blue. She found the coast and followed it along until she spied a road and some large vehicles. “Is that a modified Durendal?”

  “Yes,” said Cy. “That model uses a hefty kermanite engine to haul logs or other heavy freight. There’s a canvas over the back. If you look over to the right, there’s a small airship.”

  It was a small passenger craft, about the same size as the Palmetto Bug, but designed for direct ground landings. Large, rubber-lined wheels skirted the sides of the gondola. Blue energy lapped the craft as if it rested in a wading pool.

  “Direct landers aren’t that good,” muttered Fenris. “They crash easily. The tires often blow out on contact with anything sharp or hot and they’re generally—”

  “I’m not seeing anyone on the ground now,” said Cy. “Engine on the truck just started up. Whatever’s on there isn’t simply large, but heavy.” He glanced over at Ingrid. “That might be your missing kermanite.”

  “You’re both machinists. How long would it take to build a weapon that could use kermanite of that size? Mr. Sakaguchi thought it would take a large effort, maybe all the factories in Atlanta.”

  “That’s likely an exaggeration, but I reckon it depends on what you want to do with it. My question for you as a geomancer, Miss Ingrid, is how that kermanite could be filled so quickly.”

  She pursed her lips. “It couldn’t be. Not yet. Even if a dozen average geomancers crowded around to touch it during the earthquake that just happened, it would barely pour anything into a crystal of that size. It would be wasteful to hook it up to anything before it was filled, too.”

  “Which means we’re unanimous in that we have no idea what that is and how it works, but we know it or something near it just destroyed San Francisco. Dandy,” said Fenris.

  Ingrid’s gaze panned back over to find the truck. The broad vehicle rattled down a narrow dirt road. Whatever it carried could definitely be the size of a horse, or larger. “It is leaving, which is good. Except . . .”

  “Except what?” asked Lee.

  “There’s more involved here than the Thuggee weapon, than how animals have been acting for days, than Mr. Sakaguchi’s namazu dying. I’d bet anything there’s a Hidden One beneath the earth that’s downright irritated. They don’t calm down easily. There’s one tale about a man climbing inside the shell of a Hidden One turtle and tickling it with a feather. The turtle convulsed later at the memory of the incident, causing more earthquakes.”

  “Doesn’t sound like these Hidden Ones are very hidden,” said Fenris.

  “They usually are. Be on the lookout for any large fissures in the earth. We might actually be able to see something. Most sightings by natives along the Pacific Coast are from north of Sausalito and up as far as Vancouver.”

  Fenris adjusted some toggles. The noise of the engine changed as the airship entered a vertical climb. Turbulence rocked the dirigible as a layer of cotton draped over the cockpit. Ingrid could barely see snippets of blue-tinted green through shifting bands of moisture.

  “There. We’re hidden for a bit. We need to make a choice here,” said Fenris. “What do we want to follow, the truck or the airship?”

  “Airship.”

  �
��Truck.”

  Ingrid and Cy looked at each other.

  “I don’t know. Does this thing have guns or bombs we could use to stop them?” asked Lee as he stood.

  Fenris scowled. “It’s a Sprite class. It’s not designed for heavy freight or weapons.” Lee sat down again, disappointed. “Hurry, people.”

  “The man I overheard last night with Miss Rossi must have had an airship to get here this morning, and maybe he’s still on board now,” said Ingrid. “Follow them and maybe we can see what they have planned next.”

  “I’m guessing that the truck has the kermanite. If we have that, maybe we can prevent their next attack,” said Cy.

  “Oh, hell.” Fenris scowled at them. “I’m breaking the tie. I say airship.”

  “You just want to chase another airship and prove yours is better,” said Cy.

  “I don’t need to prove it. I know it.” Fenris patted the mahogany dashboard. “So, Ingrid, what exactly do these not-so-Hidden-Ones look like?”

  “The one in our area is said to be a massive double-headed snake,” she said.

  “A massive double-headed snake!” Lee brightened in that particular teenage-boy way, even through his bruises.

  The truck drove out of sight. Anxiety twinged in her chest. Maybe they should have followed that instead, but she couldn’t miss a chance to confront the man who had murdered so many in the auxiliary.

  “Massive? How massive?” asked Cy.

  “I don’t know. It depends on how old the fantastic is, I suppose. In Japan, the magical sort of namazu is said to be so big that his head is under Hitachi and Honshu’s on his back.”

  “The ship is lifting off!” Fenris practically cackled. In anticipation of movement, Ingrid grimaced and pressed a hand to her stomach. Cy stood, stooped, and squeezed past her.

  “Which way are they going? I can’t see!” cried Lee.

  “North,” said Fenris. “Probably want to check on their handiwork. There’s plenty of cloud cover for us to trail them.”

  “Here, miss.” Cy pushed a tin into her hand and slipped back into his seat. Ingrid opened the lid and found divided sections of ginger cookies and salted crackers. She knew from Mama’s pregnancy that these were foods to quell an upset stomach. Cy and Fenris had taken care to pack this for her first airship flight.

  “Thank you,” she murmured, and sat back to eat.

  “Are you sure they won’t see us?” Lee leaned way over Fenris’s shoulder to look out, and Fenris applied a quick jab to Lee’s torso to force him back. Lee crumpled with a whimper. Ingrid stuffed the rest of a cracker in her mouth and dove to the floor, motioning Cy to stay seated.

  “Oops. Sorry. Forgot about the ribs,” said Fenris.

  “Forgot? Forgot! Because I always look like this?” Lee moaned and returned to his bench seat. More turbulence rattled the craft.

  “Buckle up,” said Cy, reaching for his own harness. “The crosswinds here can be pretty strong, and the heat of those fires will affect the weather up here, too.”

  Ingrid slipped on the harness, wincing at the strain in her shoulder. Lee cringed in a similar way. Clouds thickened as though they flew into a pillow. Jostled and exhausted as she was, the lack of a landscape made her nausea even worse. She shut her eyes and shoved cookies into her mouth. They were hard, store-bought, and not at all as good as the ones Mama used to make at Christmastime, but after all the foulness, they tasted divine.

  “Damn,” Cy whispered, the word almost lost against the soft purr of the engine and gushing vents.

  She couldn’t help but open her eyes. The clouds had cleared and afforded them a view of San Francisco from another angle. She hated looking, hated the sight of it, yet she couldn’t look away. The patchwork blocks of the city she loved were slowly yet surely being eaten away by flames. Not even the fading blue fog could hide the devastation. The waterfront looked utterly gone, most of the dirigibles cast away or blending with the omnipresent blackness. Smoke suffocated the morning sun and cast a strange red glow.

  “They’re not turning to Oakland, not unless they’re doing a wider pass to come back,” said Fenris. Clouds whipped against the window and stole the view again. Ingrid couldn’t even imagine how Fenris remained so cool and in control while flying blind.

  “Are you sure they didn’t see us?” she asked. Lee’s hand snaked over to grab a fistful of crackers.

  “Am I sure? Of course not. But it’s unlikely. We’re in their blind spot, and in clouds. And before you ask, we don’t have a blind spot. I have mirrors, see?” Fenris pointed to disks located at various angles along the console and directly overhead where the glass met metal and showed a tinge of frost. Since she wasn’t in his seat, Ingrid hadn’t noticed that they were actually mirrors and not simply more dials. “Also, we’re at about max elevation for an airship because of temperature regulation. No one is over us, and if they are, we have viewers at the back that I’m sure Cy will check on sporadically.”

  Cy took the hint and unbelted again. “Because Cy loves walking like a hunchback through these hallways,” he said, deadpan, as he walked past.

  “Our next airship will be a Tiamat with nice high ceilings, then, huh?” Fenris yelled back.

  “As if you’d trust anyone other than me to be crew!” Cy called. Fenris grunted in reply.

  The craft rumbled again. Ingrid rubbed the back of her hand against her forehead. It came away sticky with sweat and blood. Her body temperature, along with the necessary heat of the craft, made her feel swampy. A glint of light caused her to look out of the cockpit again. They had cleared the smoke and another patch of clouds. Below lay the fast oval of the smaller airship. Dark spots—cows, she guessed—moved through the blue miasma that coated the hills. A jagged line in the earth caught her eye.

  “A fissure!” she cried. “That’s far larger than the one in downtown.”

  “They’re landing!” yelled Fenris.

  With heavy steps, Cy returned to the doorway. “Maybe they’re meeting compatriots out here? And, Fenris, some of the vents at the back weren’t angled right, so the mirrors iced over.”

  Fenris dismissed this with a flick of his wrist. “It’s her maiden voyage. There’re bound to be some problems. What’s our plan? Are we landing, following . . . ?”

  “A ground confrontation isn’t in our favor,” said Cy. “What weapons do we have? One rod . . . ?”

  Lee managed to flare back his jacket enough to show a pistol holstered by his armpit.

  “And me,” Ingrid added quietly.

  Cy nodded. “And you.”

  “It’ll be damn hard to find a mooring tower out here, anyway,” said Fenris. “I don’t think cattle can manage a tether line.”

  “What was it you were saying about ground landers before?” asked Cy.

  Fenris gave him a quick gimlet eye. “They might crash and burn yet.” He checked his mirrors. “However, we’ve lost our cloud cover, and no one else is in the sky here. If we’re going to stand out, let’s be extra nosy. Ingrid, can you see anything big and serpentine in that hole in the ground?”

  She unsnapped her belt just as the craft made another lurch. She gripped a handle and willed her stomach to obedience as she looked over Fenris’s shoulder. The Bug had dropped substantially. Trees looked alarmingly close. Fenris pointed straight ahead, and Ingrid forced her eyes that way.

  Since she had grown up in the company of geomancers, her only experience with fissures had been in textbooks or moving-picture presentations at the auxiliary. By any scale, this crack in the earth was massive—a minimum of ten feet in width, as broad as twenty in spots. The energy flow here was so potent that blue poured out of the chasm like a waterfall in reverse.

  She could well imagine Mr. Sakaguchi and other wardens being outright giddy about such a discovery, but if they had been here, this never could have happened.

  “Looks like that’s their destination,” said Fenris.

  She studied the figures that disembarked the craft. Thick mag
ic eddied against their knees. The lead figure was a tall man in a brown suit. Next came a woman with a high coil of black hair, toting a tripod and several other satchels.

  “That’s Victoria Rossi!” Ingrid looked back and forth from Rossi to the crevice. “Oh! Of course. She wants to photograph the Hidden One.”

  “Are you saying that they just leveled San Francisco and now they’re going to stop and take pictures?” asked Lee, incredulous.

  “She already spent the past few days taking pictures all over the city, showing it as it was. As it should be.” Emotion choked her voice. “The mayor’s graft killed her photography business. She wanted revenge. If she can actually photograph a Hidden One—well, her career would be set for life.”

  Victoria Rossi had preserved all the beauty of San Francisco on film, and then willingly assisted in its utter destruction. Ingrid’s hand curled into a fist as heat bloomed across her skin again.

  “That man there might be the one you eavesdropped on at Quist’s?” asked Cy.

  “Maybe. I never saw him.”

  Airship turbines churned overhead as another man debarked. As soon as he stepped onto the ground, a slight blue sheen overlapped his form.

  “That’s a geomancer!” Ingrid gasped. “It’s Mr. Thornton!” Relief left her limp. He was alive and he looked well enough. He wasn’t shackled—indeed, he looked dapper as ever. He turned, one hand holding his bowler hat in place, and scowled up at them.

  Ingrid’s relief was quickly replaced with dread. Mr. Thornton didn’t look like a captive. He wasn’t a captive.

  The man she’d overheard at Quist’s had a British accent, and Mr. Thornton . . . He had never fit her image of a Thuggee with his pasty complexion, groomed mustache, natty suit, and a red rose near his lapel. No weighted scarf. No cries of glory to Kali. But the modern Thuggee cause? The fight for his beloved India? Yes. It described him so well, and she had never allowed herself to see it.

  Mr. Thornton had been the one who had closed down the basement for so-called fumigation. That’s where the bombs had been planted. His car at the workshop had kermanite from the auxiliary vault. It was him.