by Trish Telep
* * *
The wall of valves was a blaze of red lights.
Every single light was illuminated, some flickering intermittently, others pulsing. Then, one by one, they burned out. They exploded, sending speckles of hot glass sizzling across the room.
Martha had discovered a series of pedals by her feet. One was bigger than the rest and set off to the side. Strapping herself into the chair, and with nothing to lose, she put her foot on the pedal and pressed hard. The turbines howled, high pitched and terrifying, the entire airship lurching. All the light bulbs burned black and then they popped and exploded, leaving the room stinking of ozone.
Then she pushed hard on both levers.
The airship's nose dipped alarmingly and Martha found she was looking straight down at the ground. She could see the anchor cables stretched taut, the ground beneath them trembling.
Martha applied more power.
The right front anchor chain snapped close to the ground. A long length of metal chain whiplashed through the air. It struck one of the automata, reducing it to twisted metal. Then the second remaining anchor tore out of the earth, the curved hook still attached to its chain. It bounced along the ground, ripping long gouges in the hard-packed dirt, smashing a dozen of the automata to cogs and flattened metal. One exploded in a ball of steam, its internal wiring sparking and smoking.
"So if I do this ..." Martha murmured. She pushed the lever to the right, and the airship's nose turned to the left.
JW burst into the control room, staggering left and right as the airship lurched from side to side. "If you had a plan," he began, then fell and spun across the floor to fall against the observation window. "Fontaine's heading for the Thunderbird," he yelled.
"Good idea," Martha shouted.
"No, it wasn't a suggestion."
JW crawled across the floor and struggled to his feet behind Martha's chair. He clung to it, fingers puncturing holes in the old leather.
The airship roared low over the converted barn. The dangling whip-like chain scything through the air, slicing automata in two, ripping them apart while the attached anchor on the other chain pulverized everything in its path. The wooden barn walls shredded as Martha deliberately changed course to take her directly over the enormous Thunderbird.
The flailing chain shattered the Thunderbird's glass dome while the anchor smashed through delicate metal, crushing glass windows and ceramic shields to powder. Steam vented from broken pipes.
Cautiously lifting her foot off the pedal, she allowed the airship to sink, dropping down until it was almost on top of the Thunderbird. The dangling chains settled onto the broken metal craft.
"Martha," JW began, "what are you ..."
Then she hit the power pedal and pulled both levers back. The airship rose, and the anchor caught in the Thunderbird's extended wing. It hooked through the skeletal structure, wrapped around exposed wires, struts and cables. The airship throbbed, the weight of the other craft holding it down.
"Help me," Martha said. "We're stuck."
JW leaned across the chair and put his hands on top of Martha's, helping her pull the levers all the way toward her. Engines throbbed violently. Metal screamed and scraped ... and then the Thunderbird's wing ripped off completely. The airship soared straight upward, the broken Thunderbird wing dangling precariously from the anchor, like a huge curved sword.
Martha tapped the controls and the ship shuddered. Vibrations rattled down the length of the chain onto the anchor. The Thunderbird wing shifted, then slipped free. The curl of metal plummeted back into the barn, striking the Thunderbird on its spine, punching straight through it. There was a dull explosion and thick, oily black smoke began to plume into the air. A second explosion rattled through the barn and then the fuel barrels detonated in a huge fireball. A pulse of warm air pushed the airship away from the town of Deadwood.
The passengers howled and cheered their applause.
"You can let go now," Martha said quietly.
JW lifted his hands off the girl's and gently rubbed the palms together. "Now what?" he asked.
"Get on the radio, let the authorities know what's been happening here. Deadwood's days are numbered."
"I meant what about you. What are you going to do?"
"Find my brothers," she said fiercely.
JW came around the chair and knelt down, so that his face was on a level with hers. "That was a good thing you did today, Miss Martha. I'm proud to know you."
She nodded, suddenly conscious of the heat in her cheeks. The last person who'd told her she was proud of her was her mother. Martha blinked hard, embarrassed by the prickling at the back of her eyes. "I couldn't have done it without you," she said shyly. "Thank you."
"We make a good team."
"We do."
JW suddenly stretched out his hand. "You know, I don't believe we were ever properly introduced. I'm Jesse Woodson James."
Martha took his hand in hers. "I'm Martha Jane Cannary Burke. My friends call me Calamity."
Jesse James looked back at the fireball rising over Deadwood and nodded.
"I can see why."
Code of Blood
BY DRU PAGLIASSOTTI
La Reppublica di Venezia, 4 Maggio 1815--La Festa della Sensa
I: NIGREDO (THE HARROWING)
CHIARA DANDOLO WAS in disgrace, which is why she was leaning a ladder against the skylight of a large attic in the Old Prison instead of standing in the Piazzetta di San Marco next to her grandfather, preparing to head out to sea.
It was all a misunderstanding. Yes, she'd been in the Sala dello Scudo last night with the cappelletto Lucio Volpi, but he'd only been teaching her how to play the card game piquet. They hadn't even been wagering money, just buttons.
But her overprotective grandfather hadn't listened to a word of her explanation before forbidding her to participate in the next day's festivities--punishment for her "scandalous" behavior.
He never let her do anything. Sometimes she suspected he'd prefer to keep her wrapped in silk and locked away in the palazzo all her life, like some fragile ornament.
"Brezza?" she asked, looking up. "Is it clear?"
The tiny silfo gusted through the open skylight and danced around her shoulders, playfully disturbing her curls of dark hair. Chiara blew a puff of air at it and Brezza stole her breath a moment, making her gasp and laugh.
Reassured, Chiara adjusted the fabric bag that hung from her shoulder, hiked up her gold-and-crimson silk skirts, and began to climb.
Her dress hadn't been designed for calisthenics. Chiara had considered pilfering a pair of men's breeches and stockings, but only women of ill repute paraded around showing their legs, and she was in enough trouble already.
If she got caught--well, most likely, when she got caught--she only wanted to irritate her grandfather, not shame him.
At last she reached the top of the ladder. Dirt covered the slanted, sun-warmed lead-sheathed roof, but Brezza swooped down to blow it away and clear a spot for Chiara to crouch.
"Thank you," she said, panting a little from the climb. Since nobody else was on the roof, she tugged at the edges of her corset. She'd inhaled that morning while her maid had tightened its laces, wanting it to be a little looser than usual for this adventure, but the stiffened fabric still dug into her flesh.
Music and voices sounded from the piazza below. To her right, beyond the edge of the palazzo roof, rose San Marco's brick bell tower, crowned by its golden clockwork archangel Gabriel. Directly ahead, across the glittering water of the Bacino di San Marco, gleamed the white church of San Giorgio Maggiore.
The breeze off the lagoon still bore an early spring chill, but the skies were bright and clear.
It was a beautiful day for the Festival of the Ascension and the Sposalizio del Mare, the ceremony in which her grandfather ceremonially wed the Adriatic and reaffirmed Venezia's alchemical pact with the ondine who protected the lagoon.
Disgrace or no disgrace, Chiara was not going to
be left out of her favorite day of the year. So she'd taken a page from Venezia's most infamous scoundrel, spy, and alchemist, Giovanni Giacomo Casanova, planning an escape over her guards rather than through them.
She was luckier than Casanova. His familiar had been a gnomo, a spirit of earth--useful for breaking through a lead roof but not much help getting from roof to ground.
Chiara, on the other hand, had an affinity for the silfi, the spirits of the air.
She slipped off her embroidered morocco slippers and crossed the palazzo roof, heading away from the lagoon. She stopped close to the basilica. The Rio di Palazzo, that shadowy canal that ran beneath the Ponte dei Suspiri and adjacent to the palazzo's eastern wall, narrowed here. On the other side was a little street by Sant'Apollonia that was, at the moment, empty.
She set out five small brass trays from her bag, making sure they wouldn't slide off the slanted roof into the canal below. A tiny pinch of tinder on each, and then she thrust an alchemical match into a phial of igniting liquid. Its tip burst into flame. She touched the flame to the tinder and dropped the match, which guttered out on the lead roof.
After re-capping the phial, she sprinkled grains of resin incense over the trays.
Frankincense, myrrh, cassia, and benzoin--the perfumed smoke coiled into the air, and curious silfi began to gather. Air elementals were capricious things, harder to please than earth and fire but less demanding than water. Chiara knew the smoke would win their attention for a minute or two.
"Brezza," she murmured, respectful of the spirits' presence, "would you ask them to carry me down to the street across the canal?"
Her familiar gusted past her face in reply. Chiara set down the bag and picked up her shoes. She'd have to leave the bag and trays; either she'd retrieve them another day or they'd be swept off the roof in one of Venezia's rainstorms.
Wind began to whip around her. The silfi had agreed. She drew in a deep breath and lifted her face. Her exhale began long and slow, but then the air spirits began to drink, greedily sucking the air from her lungs. She closed her eyes against her sharp, instinctive fear of suffocation, trusting Brezza to keep the silfi from taking too much.
Then, without warning, she rose into the air, free again to gasp for breath. Clutching her shoes with one hand and holding down her skirts with the other, Chiara was lifted across the canal and set down, none too gently, on the street on the other side.
She staggered, grabbing a wall to steady herself, and then laughed and straightened up.
"Thank you!" she shouted, beaming and waving. The dust around her feet whirled into the air a moment, leaving a sheen of dirt on her skirts.
"Although I could have done without that," she muttered, brushing it off. When the gold-embroidered silk looked respectable again, she slipped on her shoes and walked around Sant'Apollonia back to the masses who thronged the edges of the Canale di San Marco.
Pushing through the shoulder-to-shoulder mob was impossible. Everybody in the city seemed to have collected along the fondamenta, from fishmongers to foreigners to fashionably-dressed nobles, all pressed together without concern for rank or gender. Nobody seemed inclined to make room for anybody else.
Chiara squirmed and twisted to the water's edge. Ornate, gilded boats bobbed around the massive bulk of the Bucintoro like cygnets around a mother swan. The Bucintoro itself, its great, two-decked body adorned with a riot of gilded clockwork sirens, hydras, putti, and zephyrs, loomed over the Molo. A removable walkway draped with flags and ribbons and wreaths swung from its top deck to the piazzetta.
And there, in the piazzetta, she spotted a crowd of ceremonially-robed councilors surrounding her grandfather, the doge of Venezia, Carlo Dandolo.
Somebody jostled her and she nearly lost her footing. Grabbing the nearest arm, Chiara pulled herself away from the water with a quick apology and then darted from the bystander's merry attempt to catch her around the waist. His laughter followed her as she hid behind a group of heavyset grandmothers who were barreling their way through the crowd with the implacable dignity of age and righteousness. Chiara meekly followed in their wake.
Crossing the Ponte di Paglia was another struggle, but her advance guard of nonne battled through, spitting dire imprecations in fierce Veneziano. Chiara stayed close behind.
She had just set foot on the other side of the bridge when she heard a series of sharp reports. For a moment she thought somebody had set off fireworks, but then an explosion ripped through the air and people began screaming.
The panicked press of the mob physically shoved her backward. Alarmed, Chiara grabbed the bridge's stone railing, holding on tightly. Her eyes instinctively went to the piazzetta, searching for her grandfather.
"Save us, Mother of God!" one of the black-veiled grandmothers cried out, clutching a crucifix close to her bosom. "It's Napoleon!"
Napoleon. Chiara's eyes widened. Impossible. He'd recently escaped from Elba, but the republic had doubled its guard along every border and kept its Three Great Hermetic Gates sealed, banning foreign traffic from the lagoon. Venezia couldn't risk another near-disaster like 1797, when Doge Lodovico Manin had trembled on the edge of surrender. The city was saved only after the Guild of Alchemical Engineers raised the Three Gates and whipped the ondine into a wild April tempest that had driven the invading French fleet aground.
Manin had stepped down, and Chiara's fiercely nationalist grandfather was elected in his place.
Napoleon had detested and coveted Venezia ever since.
"The doge!" someone shouted. "They're after the doge!"
"It's the Austrians!"
"It's the French!"
"Terrorists!"
"Protestants!"
"Grandfather!" Chiara's heart sped up. Her grandfather--the only family she had left--was he alive? She pushed herself away from the railing, fighting against the crowd. Fugitives from the shooting were pouring out of the piazzetta, some of them leaping into the lagoon in their terror. "Grandfather!"
The crowd was a montage of shouting, fear-filled faces, flailing arms, and pumping legs. For every two steps Chiara took forward, she was shoved back one. At last she lurched forward through a gap in the mob, but her foot caught on an irregular paving stone and she nearly fell. As she regained her balance, Chiara recognized the granite columns on either side of her. The one on her left was topped with a statue of St. Theodore and his crocodilian dragon, and the one on her right with a statue of St. Mark's winged lion.
She shuddered and crossed herself. It was bad luck to pass between Venezia's execution pillars.
Shots fired again and she twisted, spotting two dark shapes standing at the top of the campanile, holding rifles aimed down into the crowds. More shots sounded from the other side of the piazza. The attackers, whoever they were, must have climbed into the clock tower or stationed themselves between the four bronze horses of the basilica.
Praying to Theodore and Mark for protection, Chiara wrapped her arms around her shoulders and pushed forward again. Seconds later she stumbled over broken pavement stones and a black-robed body. She cringed. Fallen council members surrounded her, some groaning and crawling for shelter and others lying prone and glassy-eyed.
Trembling, Chiara knelt next to one of the Corner heirs, pulling aside the somber gown of office to reveal bloodstained finery beneath. The young man groaned. Pain-filled brown eyes fastened on her.
"Help--"
"Where's Nonno Carlo?" she demanded, reverting back to the nickname she'd used as a child. "Where's the doge?"
"Ah ..." Blood bubbled against the man's pale lips as he gave her a despairing look. "No."
Her trembling increased.
"Be strong--somebody will come for you," she whispered, touching his cheek. He coughed. Tiny droplets of blood sprayed over her sleeve, staining the fabric.
Swallowing hard, she moved deeper into the wreckage of shattered stone and flesh.
There--she spotted the brilliant scarlet, purple, and white of her grandfather's cer
emonial dogalina and the glitter of the pearls and precious stones on his corno ducale.
"Nonno!" She threw herself past a russet-robed man and onto the broken pavement. Her hands flew to her fallen grandfather's head and she pushed his white hair aside. Blood from a gash in his scalp streaked his narrow, wrinkled face and stained the piazza's pale stone.
Her grandfather blinked once, his dark eyes unfocused. One thin hand rose, bloodstained and weighted down by its heavy gold signet ring, to touch her face.
"Chiara ..." his voice was like a sigh. "Why are you here?"
More shots filled the air. She flinched, throwing herself protectively over his chest. The robed man turned, frowning.
Through momentary gaps in the crowd, Chiara spotted blue-and-white uniformed men pushing into the piazza holding rifles with affixed bayonets. Brave citizens, some military and others civilian, rushed the invaders. Knives, rapiers, and bayonets flashed as the two sides clashed.
Somewhere, somebody began ringing a church bell, sounding the alarm at last.
"Get up," she urged her grandfather. "We have to hide!" If they could get to the colonnaded arcade of the palazzo and take cover behind one of its marble pillars, they might be safe.
The doge struggled to focus on her.
"Go," he said, his voice faint. "The Guild will help you."
Chiara shook her head, standing.
"No. Come, Nonno, we--"
She heard a report and the whine of a bullet that passed close to her head. With a gasp she sat down hard next to her grandfather.
"Stop!" the robed man threw out a hand and shouted a word in Latin. The piazza burst into flame as three large, fiery salamandre materialized, looking much like St. Theodore's squat dragon as they snarled and spat sparks. They lumbered forward toward the startled French invaders as Veneziani cheered and backed out of the way.
Chiara's grandfather took her hand.
"Run," he said. "I'll be all right. It's just my leg."
She looked at him, disbelieving.
"Nonno ..."
"Chiara!" He sucked in a painful breath and turned his head toward her, scowling just as he had earlier that morning, when he'd forbidden her to leave the palazzo. "Stop arguing and obey. You must go, before it's too late. Maestro!"
