Leviathan 01 - Leviathan

by Scott Westerfeld

  Deryn held up the satchels. “Sorry, ma’am, but I’m here to ask you—”

  “Time is of the essence, Mr. Sharp. I’m afraid your business can wait.”

  Deryn started to argue, then realized that the top of the cargo box had been pried off. Heat rose from the insides, a few wisps of steam ghosting the freezing air. Straw packing was strewn everywhere—the secret purpose of the trip to Constantinople at last revealed.

  “Well, I suppose so,” Deryn said. She made her way across the slanted floor, careful not to slip on the hay and rolly bits of metal. Tazza bounced along beside her like he’d been born on the side of a hill.

  It took a moment to see into the box’s shadows. But as her eyes adjusted, twelve rounded shapes resolved in the soft glow of the wormlamp.

  “Ma’am…are those eggs?”

  “Indeed they are, and quite close to hatching.” Dr. Barlow scratched Tazza’s head and let out a sigh. “Or at least, they were. Most are broken. This wasn’t the smooth ride you promised me, Mr. Sharp.”

  Deryn looked closer, and saw cracks running across the shells, a yellowish liquid seeping out. “I reckon it wasn’t. But what are they the eggs of?”

  “Despite our grim situation, that remains a military secret.” Dr. Barlow gestured to the four eggs closest to her. “These seem to be alive, Mr. Sharp. And if they’re to stay that way, we’ll have to keep them warm.”

  Deryn raised an eyebrow. “Do you want me to sit on them, ma’am?”

  “A delightful image, but no.” Dr. Barlow pushed both hands into the straw and withdrew two small jars that shone with a rosy light. They looked like the bottles of phosphorescent algae that the middies dropped for altitude checks.

  Dr. Barlow gave the jars a shake, and the glow grew stronger, steam rising in the cold air. She tucked them back into the hay.

  “The electrical heater was broken in the crash, but these bacterial warmers should keep the eggs alive for now. The trick is keeping the temperature exactly right, which won’t be easy.” She pointed at a mess in one corner of the box—red shivery droplets amid shattered glass. “You’ll have to clean up the remains of that thermometer, by the way. Be careful of the mercury; it’s quite poisonous.”

  “Could you use a new one, ma’am?” Deryn dug into one of the satchels Alek had given her. “I happen to have a few with me.”

  “You have thermometers with you?” The lady boffin blinked. “How very useful of you, Mr. Sharp.”

  “Glad to be of service, ma’am.” Deryn handed one over, then opened another of the satchels. “I’ve got two more, I think.”

  When Deryn looked up, Dr. Barlow was still staring at the thermometer.

  “Does the Air Service generally use Clanker equipment, Mr. Sharp?”

  Deryn’s eyes widened. Was the lady boffin a barking mind reader now?

  “But how did you…”

  “Again you underestimate my eye for detail.” She handed back the thermometer. Deryn took it and stared at both sides. It seemed normal enough to her.

  “Note the red line at 36.8 degrees,” Dr. Barlow said. “Body temperature in Celsius. And yet in all my interactions with the armed forces they have never used the metric system.”

  Deryn cleared her throat. “Well, we’re not Clankers, are we?”

  “Or scientists.” Dr. Barlow plucked the thermometer from Deryn’s fingers. “So why isn’t this red line at 98.6? You don’t seem like a Clanker spy, Mr. Sharp, unless you’re a particularly incompetent one.”

  Deryn tried not to roll her eyes. “I was going to tell you, ma’am, but you wouldn’t let me. There was this strange boy…out in the snow. That’s where I got these kits.”

  “A boy? And I suppose he just walked up out of nowhere, bearing thermometers.”

  “Aye, more or less. When I woke up after the crash, he was standing there.”

  “I find this story difficult to believe, Mr. Sharp.” Dr. Barlow placed a cool palm against Deryn’s bruised eye. “Took quite a bump to your head, didn’t you?”

  “It’s not my head, ma’am. It’s this whole mountaintop that’s dizzy. A boy just came out of nowhere! His name was Alek.”

  Dr. Barlow shared a dubious look with Tazza. “Mr. Sharp, we both know you’re not above a bit of fibbing.”

  Deryn gaped at the boffin, black affronted. “I may have misled the Service about my…particulars when I joined up, but that doesn’t mean I’d go telling lies for no good reason!”

  “Well, if you are telling the truth, then this ‘Alek’ is possibly quite interesting.” Dr. Barlow took the thermometer back again, then gave it a shake and slipped it into the hay. “Did he say where he lives?”

  “Not really.” Deryn frowned, trying to remember Alek’s exact words. “He mentioned a village at first, but mostly talked about his family. I reckon they’re outlaws—or maybe spies. He looked nervous the whole time, as bouncy as Tazza here. Then he pulled a pistol on me, and was about to blow us all to pieces! But I wrestled it away from him.”

  “How fortunate,” Dr. Barlow said distractedly, as if she routinely was saved from a fiery death. She reached for one of the satchels and arranged its contents on the slanted floor. “Field dressings, a tourniquet—no, Tazza, these aren’t for sniffing—even a scalpel.”

  “A bit fancy for some wee village on a mountaintop,” Deryn said. “Don’t you think?”

  Dr. Barlow lifted a box, squinting at its label. “And this is marked with a double-headed eagle—Austrian military issue.”

  Deryn’s eyes widened. “We’re not too far from Austria, ma’am. But Switzerland’s meant to be neutral!”

  “Technically, Mr. Sharp, we are in violation of that neutrality.” Dr. Barlow turned the scalpel in her hand, and its blade flashed. “This is an alarming development. But I trust we’ll be taking off soon?”

  “I doubt it, ma’am. The ship’s a barking mess.”

  “But surely we can depart once the skin is patched, and make our repairs somewhere warmer? My eggs won’t last long in this cold.”

  Deryn started to say that she wasn’t certain, having mostly been unconscious since the crash. But Dr. Barlow didn’t look in the mood for blether. And from what Deryn had seen climbing over the wreck, the answer was obvious.

  “Not for a few days, ma’am. We’ve lost half our hydrogen, at least.”

  “I see,” the lady boffin said, sinking down against the side of the cargo box. She pulled Tazza closer, her face pale in the green light of the wormlamp. “Then I’m afraid we may not be leaving at all.”

  “Don’t be daft, ma’am.” Deryn remembered the way Mr. Rigby always put it. “This ship isn’t some dead Clanker mechanism. It’s a living creature. It can make all the hydrogen it wants. I’m more worried about the engines.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not so simple, Mr. Sharp.” Dr. Barlow gestured across the slanted room to the porthole. “Have you looked outside?”

  “Aye, I’ve been out there half the night!” Deryn remembered the word the strange boy had used. “It’s what they call a glacier, ma’am.”

  “I’m familiar with the concept,” Dr. Barlow said. “A great sheet of ice, as dead as the poles themselves. How high in the mountains do you suppose we are?”

  “Well, the Clankers hit us at eight thousand feet. And maybe we dropped a thousand or two before we hit the snow…”

  “Well above the tree line,” Dr. Barlow said softly. “My grandfather’s bees won’t be finding much nectar out there, will they?”

  Deryn frowned. She hadn’t seen a single living creature out on the snowy waste. Which meant no flowers for the bees, no insects for the bats.

  “But what about the hawks and the other raptors, ma’am? They can fly a barking long way to hunt.”

  Dr. Barlow nodded. “They might find prey in a nearby valley. But the Leviathan needs more than a few mice and hares to heal herself. This place is a biological wasteland, empty of everything she needs to survive.”

  Deryn wanted to arg
ue, but the ship had to eat to get healthy, just like any natural creature. And there wasn’t a scrap of food out on that bleak expanse of snow.

  “You mean there’s nothing we can do?”

  “I did not say that, Mr. Sharp.” Dr. Barlow stood up, pointing at a pile of jars on the slanted floor. “First we shall get these eggs to the proper temperature. Give those warmers a shake.”

  “Right, ma’am!”

  “And then I want to meet this mysterious boy of yours.”

  Alek was miserable, humiliated, and tired. But he was too cold to sleep.

  Smashed windows and bullet holes were everywhere in the wounded airship, and icy winds howled down the slanted corridors. Even Alek’s cabin, with a locked door and closed porthole, was freezing. Instead of an oil lamp to warm his hands against, the cabin was lit by the same green worms that covered the ship’s skin. Dozens were stuffed into a lantern that hung from the ceiling, squirming like glowing lice.

  The whole wreck was overrun with godless vermin. The awful six-legged dogs swarmed its wilting gasbag, and flying creatures filled the air. Even here inside the gondola, reptiles of all sizes scuttled along the walls. While the ship’s officers had interrogated Alek, a sticky-footed talking lizard had tromped to and fro across the tilted ceiling, repeating random snatches of their conversation.

  Not that Alek had said much. The answers to the officers’ questions—where he’d come from, why he was here—were beyond their understanding. There was no point telling the Darwinists his real name; they’d never believe he was the son of an archduke. And when he’d tried to tell them how dangerous it was to keep him here, the warnings had sounded like empty, pompous threats.

  He’d been such a fool—this vast creature, these people were so alien. It was madness to try to cross the gulf between his world and theirs.

  Locked in the cold, dark cabin, Alek wondered if his noble intentions had been a joke from the beginning. As if anyone could carry food for a hundred men across that glacier, every night and in secret. Perhaps he’d come here only out of morbid curiosity, drawn like a child to a dead bird on the ground.

  Through the cabin’s small porthole the black horizon was slowly turning gray. Time was running out.

  Otto Klopp would soon come to take the second watch. A quick search would prove that Alek wasn’t in the castle, and it wouldn’t take much imagination to figure out where he’d gone. Within a few hours Count Volger would be gazing at the grounded airship, drawing his plans and pondering the fact that the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was a complete idiot.

  Alek set his jaw. At least he’d accomplished something.

  “A TILTED TALK.”

  That young airman, Dylan, might have frozen to death if he’d lain in the snow all night. But Alek had saved him from frostbite. Maybe this was how you stayed sane in wartime: a handful of noble deeds amid the chaos.

  Of course, Dylan had betrayed him five minutes later.

  Where was the sanity in that?

  Keys jangled in the corridor, and Alek turned from the porthole. The slanted door swung open, and in walked…

  “You,” Alek growled.

  Dylan smiled at him. “Aye, it’s me. I hope you’re well.”

  “No thanks to you, you ungrateful little swine.”

  “Now that’s a bit rude. Especially when I’ve brought you a bit of company.” Dylan bowed, sweeping an arm toward the doorway. “May I present Dr. Nora Barlow.”

  Another person strode into the room, and Alek’s eyes widened. Instead of an airman’s uniform she wore a gaudy dress and a small black hat, and held the leash of a bizarre doglike creature. What was a woman doing on this ship?

  “Pleasure to meet you,” she said. “Alek, isn’t it?”

  “At your service.” As he bowed, the strange beast nuzzled Alek’s hand, and he tried not to flinch. “Are you the ship’s doctor? If so, I’m quite unhurt.”

  The woman laughed. “I’m sure you are. But I’m not a medical doctor.”

  Alek frowned, then realized that her black hat was a bowler. She was one of the Darwinist fabricators, a practitioner of their ungodly science!

  He looked down in horror at the creature snuffling his trouser leg.

  “What is this? Why have you brought this beast here?”

  “Oh, don’t be afraid of Tazza,” the woman said. “He’s perfectly harmless.”

  “I’m not telling you anything,” Alek said, trying to keep the fear from his voice. “I don’t care what this godless animal does to me.”

  “What, Tazza?” Dylan let out a laugh. “I reckon he could lick you to death. And he’s perfectly natural, by the way. What they call a thylacine.”

  Alek glared at the boy. “Then kindly take it away.”

  The Darwinist woman settled herself on a chair at the high end of the tilted cabin, looking down at him imperiously. “I’m sorry if Tazza makes you nervous, but he has nowhere else to go. Your German friends have made rather a mess of our ship.”

  “I’m not German.”

  “No, you’re Austrian. But the Germans are your allies, are they not?”

  Alek didn’t answer. The woman was just guessing.

  “And what would a young Austrian be doing so high in these mountains?” she continued. “Especially now, in wartime?”

  He stared at Dr. Barlow, wondering if it was worth trying to reason with her. Though she was a woman, she was also a scientist, and the Darwinists worshipped science. She might have power on this ship.

  “It doesn’t matter why I’m here,” he said, trying to use his father’s tone of command. “What matters is that you have to let me go.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because if you don’t, my family will come to get me. And believe me, you don’t want that!”

  Dr. Barlow narrowed her eyes. The ship’s officers had only laughed at his threats. But she was listening to him.

  “So your family knows where you are,” she said. “Did they send you here?”

  He shook his head. “No. But they’ll guess, soon enough. You don’t have much time to let me go.”

  “Ah…time is of the essence.” The woman smiled. “So your family lives nearby?”

  Alek frowned. He hadn’t meant to give that away.

  “Then I suppose we must find them, and quickly.” She turned to Dylan. “What do you suggest, Mr. Sharp?”

  The young airman shrugged. “I suppose we could follow his tracks backward in the snow. Maybe bring a present for his ma, so there are no hard feelings.”

  Alek shot the boy a cold look. It was one thing to be betrayed, but quite another to be mocked. “I was careful with my tracks. And if you do manage to find my family, you’ll only get yourselves shot. They hate strangers.”

  “What unsociable people,” Dr. Barlow said. “And yet they hired English tutors of the highest caliber for you.”

  Alek turned back to the porthole and took a deep breath. Once again his speech and manner were giving him away. It was infuriating.

  The woman continued, amused that he was upset. “I suppose we shall have to use other means, Mr. Sharp. Shall we introduce Alek to the young Huxleys?”

  “The Huxleys?” A smile spread across Dylan’s face. “That’s a brilliant idea, ma’am!”

  Alek stiffened. “Who are they?”

  “A Huxley isn’t a who, you ninny,” Dylan said. “It’s more of a what, being mostly made of jellyfish.”

  Alek glared at the boy, certain he was being mocked again.

  They led him through the ship, a busy warren of slanted corridors and strange smells. The other crewmen hardly glanced at Alek as they passed, and his only guards were Dr. Barlow and Dylan, who looked as skinny as a rail. It was all rather insulting. Maybe the creature Tazza was more dangerous than they’d admitted.

  Of course, running was pointless. Even if he found his way out of the ship, his captors had taken his snowshoes, and he was already half frozen. He wouldn’t last an hour on the glacier.


  They went up a spiral staircase that was tilted, like the rest of the ship, at a precarious angle. The smells grew stranger as they climbed. Tazza began to sniff the air, hopping on his hind legs along the slanted floor. Dylan came to a halt beneath a hatch in the ceiling and stooped to gather the beast into his arms. He climbed up through the hatchway, disappearing into darkness overhead.

  As Alek followed, he sensed a huge space opening up around him.

  His eyes adjusted slowly. The high, curved walls were a mottled translucent pink, and a segmented white arch stretched overhead, the air heavy with unfamiliar smells. Alek realized how warm he was, and the truth hit him.

  “God’s wounds,” he murmured.

  “Brilliant, isn’t it?” Dylan asked.

  “Brilliant?” Alek’s throat closed on the word, a sharp taste in his mouth. The segmented arches around him were a giant spine! “This is…disgusting. We’re inside an animal!”

  Suddenly the tilted walkway beneath his feet felt slippery and unstable.

  Dylan laughed, turning to help Dr. Barlow up through the hatch. “Aye, but the skins of your zeppelins are made of cattle gut. That’s like being inside an animal, isn’t it? And so’s wearing a leather jacket!”

  “But this one’s alive!” Alek sputtered.

  “True,” Dylan said, heading down the metal walkway with Tazza. “And being inside a dead animal is much more awful, if you think about it. You Clankers really are an odd bunch.”

  Alek didn’t bother answering this nonsense. He was too busy staring at his feet and staying in the exact center of the walkway. It was tilted more than the rest of the wrecked ship, and the thought of slipping off and actually touching the pinkish innards of this godless monster was too awful to bear.

  “Sorry about the smell,” Dylan said, “but this is the beastie’s digestive tract.”

  “Digestive tract? Are you taking me to be eaten?”

  Dylan laughed. “We could probably use your hydrogen!”

  “Now, now, Mr. Sharp. Don’t give me any ideas,” Dr. Barlow said. “I simply want to show Alek how easily we can find his family.”