Syfax blinked. “Who?”
“The guy who was sitting behind you. Where is he?”
“Oh, he’s not my friend. He just sat down behind me when we boarded. And he hasn’t said a word this whole time either. His snoring was pissing me off though. I’m glad he’s gone.”
The men exchanged annoyed looks and continued up to the next car. Syfax saw them point out Kenan, but they continued past without speaking to him.
As the starry sky blossomed overhead, the blunt peaks of the Atlas Mountains melted into charcoal sketches against the blackness. Syfax thought of his early army training climbing those peaks and hiking those trails with his heavy pack digging into his shoulders and his rifle jostling against his hip. Above the tree line, the mountains offered nothing but cold, sharp stone in infinite varieties for weary young soldiers to march across, day after day.
Simpler times.
As the train plunged into the first mountain pass, Syfax noted the black iron spire on a rock ledge above the tracks. A watch tower. He smiled, remembering the long, miserable nights he had spent huddled in one of those towers on watch, and he wished the poor bastards on duty a warm and quiet night.
Chapter 36. Taziri
Ghanima shifted her buttocks in the pilot’s seat. “This is the comfiest chair I have ever been forced to sit in for hours on end.”
“Isoke had it made special.” Taziri stared dully at her gauges and needles.
“Well, when we get back to Tingis, you need to introduce me to her, because she is a woman with excellent taste in chairs.”
“Yeah, sure.” Taziri tried to smile, genuinely happy that the young pilot had come back and they were finally on their way back to their normal lives. But the exhaustion had hit her all at once as soon as they took off from Arafez and they saw the city burning. She tried not to think of the people in those buildings, in those homes. She tried not to think about the flames.
The irregular snoring of the little Hellan doctor broke up the silence, punctuating the soft rhythm of the Halcyon ’s propellers. Ghanima said, “I’m still getting used to these controls, but I already like them. Everything feels tighter, more responsive. More powerful, too. Turns and corrections are so easy. Captain Geroubi did an amazing job with this.”
“Yes, she did.”
“Hey, come on.” Ghanima touched Taziri’s shoulder. “You know she’s all right, right? She’s lying in some hospital bed, resting up, doped up on opium, and in a few days she’ll be good as new with a scar that makes her look sexy and dangerous. Cheer up.”
“We don’t know that yet, not for sure.” Taziri looked back over her shoulder. “Sorry. I just need to know that she’s all right. She took a huge risk on me once, she gave me everything, this career, and now I’m off in her boat while she’s…wherever she is.”
“Well, trust me when I say it’s better knowing there’s a chance she’s alive, a chance that she’s perfectly all right.” Ghanima squeezed the flight sticks and gazed out over the dark landscape of rolling hills and rocky mounds. The jagged ridges of the Atlas Mountains stood black against the night sky. “It’s a lot better,” she said softly.
Taziri sat up. “Hey, listen, whatever happened on the Crake wasn’t your fault, you know. Chaou shot your captain and the major is going to arrest Chaou and throw her in the deepest, darkest hole he can find, right alongside Hamuy.”
“Yeah, but, if I hadn’t tried to grab her…” Ghanima shivered and straightened up. “Hey, did I hear you go out last night? I thought I heard your door squeaking. It was late. You were gone a long time. I got a little worried.”
“Why were you awake?”
“I wasn’t tired, I guess. I don’t sleep much.” She wiped her eyes. “So where did you go?”
“Telegraph office.”
Ghanima smiled. “Yeah, that sounds familiar. Late night telegrams to my sister. Writing those little broken phrases on the form. Watching the clerk tapping it out. And then standing around like an idiot, thinking I’ll get an answer right then, straight away.”
Taziri laughed. “I was just going to say that.”
The first cannon shell exploded over a hundred yards in front of them, and the noise reverberated faintly through the airship’s hull. A dirty black cloud hung in the air, slowly expanding and then drooping as gravity and wind dragged it apart.
“What the hell was that?” Taziri leaned forward to peer down at the ground beneath them. “We’re barely into the mountains. It must be one of those watch towers.”
“You think they’re shooting at us? On purpose?”
“If they’re not shooting at us, then they must be really hungry for a taste of eagle, because that’s the only other thing up here.” She leaned back into her seat and began fiddling with her knobs and switches. The cabin lights snapped off, plunging them into a perfect darkness. Taziri slammed her good hand down on the console. “Damn it. We were scheduled to come through here yesterday. I never filed a new flight plan, and with the riots in Arafez and the Crake fiasco, they must be on high alert or something. We need altitude. We need to get above their range.”
“No time.” Ghanima shoved the controls forward and the Halcyon responded by promptly dropping her nose and beginning a rapid descent.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting inside their firing solution.”
“That’s exactly where we don’t want to be!”
“Wrong.”
A second shell whistled past the starboard window, and a moment later they felt the low crack of it exploding somewhere above them.
“Okay.” Ghanima pulled back and the airship began climbing to port. “We get about two minutes between shots. That’s good.”
“Turn us around, we need to get out of here.”
“Around? You mean back to Arafez? I thought we were going to get the doctor to Orossa?”
“So did I, but someone with a very big gun has other ideas. Turn us around!”
Ghanima squinted into the darkness. “I’m not going to run away from some speck on the ground throwing rocks up at us. This is an airship, Taziri, the sky’s the limit for us.”
“This is not a debate, we’re-” A third shell detonated just below them, sending a hard shudder through the deck beneath their feet. Taziri lurched up and leaned over her. “I’ve got better things to do tonight than die, Ghanima. Turn around!”
“Sorry, but you don’t outrank me, lieutenant.” Ghanima pushed the throttle up and felt the Halcyon surge forward as her propellers sang louder and higher.
“Where do you think you can go?” Taziri demanded. “The High Road canyons are the fastest, safest way to the capital. The winds over the mountains are murderous. Unless you know another way through?”
“Nope. I’m just not afraid of a little wind.”
Taziri kept both eyes on the inky patch on the ground where she thought the watch tower stood. As they flew across the canyon entrance, she saw the pinprick of light where the cannon’s muzzle flashed, and Ghanima pushed hard to port. The shell flew harmless to starboard and exploded so far away they didn’t feel the vibration. It left another dark cloud hanging in the sky like a bit of black wool caught in a spider’s web.
“All that gun did was force us up out of the canyon. If we had a little sunlight, I wouldn’t mind trying to sink back down into it,” Ghanima said
“You realize that’s crazy, right?”
“Of course. So we’ll just fly over the mountains. In the dark.” Ghanima swallowed. “Against the wind.”
Taziri leaned over her. “You’ve done this before?”
The young pilot shrugged. “I’ve done a lot of night flights and storm flights. I’ve seen all kinds of weather and never scratched the paint. How hard can it be?”
Taziri drummed her fingers on the back of her chair. “All right. But no crashing!”
Ghanima smiled. “Fine, no crashing.”
A quarter hour later, Ghanima was frowning into the darkness. The mountain peaks lo
omed out of the night and as the heavy clouds rolled overhead, their black-on-black shadows slithered over the jagged ridges and massifs, changing their appearances from moment to moment. “Taziri, flood lights?”
“Here.” She flicked the switch and a dull yellow glow appeared at the edge of the window at their feet. The view ahead remained pitch black.
“Wow, that’s almost entirely useless.” Ghanima smiled. “Here we go.”
As the Halcyon nosed out of the lee of the first peak, a sudden blast shoved them straight up several yards. Ghanima gripped the sticks tighter but managed a casual shrug. “It’s just an updraft. No worries.”
Taziri grimaced at the darkness. What happened to getting home in one piece? Why the hell am I letting her do this?
A few minutes later, the vicious drag of the high altitude winds grabbed the airship and they began to slide to port. Ghanima compensated. “It’s like sailing. You have to position the gas bag like a sail and force the wind to slide off and to the rear. It’s not efficient, but you can stay on course.”
“Huh.” Taziri swallowed. “A sailing airship? Isoke had some ideas like that. But the things she sketched up didn’t look like any sailboat.”
As the wind grew fiercer and whistled louder through the cracks in the hull, the Halcyon began sliding sideways even faster. They were still moving forward, but they were also gliding steadily to port. Taziri squinted into the distance on her left, wondering if the darkness concealed a mountain or just more empty night sky. Ghanima nudged the throttle up.
“Mountain.” Taziri pointed at the window. “Twenty points to port.”
“I see it.” The clouds parted enough to allow the starlight to play gently over the rough edges of rock wall to their left. It stood higher than they were flying, but it ended abruptly just a few hundred yards ahead. Ghanima pushed the throttle to full. “We’ll pass in front of it.”
And they did, barely. Ghanima kept her eyes on the eerie sea of cloud and shadow and the rocky islands rising sharply around them. Thunder rolled overhead like a thousand drums softly tuning up. “Weather?”
“Sounds like.”
“Anything I need to know? Anything special about this boat of yours?”
“Nope.” Taziri tapped at one of her waving needles. “We’ve never had any trouble in a storm before. A little rain isn’t going to-”
A sudden flash of lightning painted the Atlas Mountains in perfect black and blinding white, burning the landscape into the aviators’ eyes long after the charge vanished. An instant later, a deafening thundercrack shook the Halcyon.
“Whaa!” The doctor sat up sharply, clutching his chest. “Where? What?”
“It’s all right.” Ghanima glanced back at him. “Just a storm. Go back to sleep. We’ll be there in a little while.”
Evander nodded and lay back down, mumbling in Hellan.
Ghanima nudged Taziri with her elbow. “What about lightning?”
She shrugged. “Shouldn’t be a problem.” She froze. Oh no. How could I be so stupid?
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” Taziri blinked. “It’s nothing. Probably nothing. Almost definitely nothing.”
The cabin lights went dark.
Taziri swallowed loudly. “Uhm.” The cabin lights came back on. She exhaled. “See? Nothing to worry about.”
“What just happened to the lights?”
“It’s nothing, really. It’s just that, well, passing through an electrical storm can subject the ship to a lot of fluctuating electric fields forming between the earth and the clouds, which could, momentarily, disrupt our electrical systems.”
Ghanima swallowed. “But on this ship, all of the systems are electrical systems.”
“Yeah. They are.”
“Regulations say we should make an emergency landing in the event of catastrophic weather conditions. So, do you think we should land?”
“No,” Taziri said quickly. “We stay up here. We’re insulated against a direct lightning strike, and there are fewer pointy rocks in the sky than on the ground. What’s the worst that can happen?”
“We could lose both engines and drift into a mountain, or the gas bag could split open and ignite. Early retirement.”
“Instant retirement.”
“Whatever. Hopefully this storm won’t last very long.”
The minutes ticked by and the view remained an unhelpful blur of dark shapes, and soon fat drops of rain began thumping and tapping on the gas bag overhead, and then it splashed the windows around them as the gusting wind began hurling the downpour sideways. The clear splatters and streaks on the glass made the cloudy view of the outside world bubble and twist and run.
“This reminds me of those late nights heading in to Carthage during the rainy season,” Taziri said softly. “Isoke and I would argue about music to take our minds off it. I don’t remember when we started doing that.”
Ghanima smiled. “You two argue? I was starting to think she could do no wrong in your eyes, the way you talk about her.”
“She’s a great captain, a great woman, but she has the worst taste in music of anyone I’ve ever met. She’s obsessed with all the new love songs, and she doesn’t know any of the classic-”
The flood lights below their feet flickered out, followed by a sudden silence from the port-side propeller. Ghanima tapped her foot lightly on the pedal. “I’m not feeling great about our decision to fly through this storm.”
“Neither am I, but flying through a storm still beats landing in a storm, in the mountains, at night. Don’t worry. The motor will come back in a minute.”
The Halcyon continued to float above the Atlas peaks, and while the view revealed nothing, they could feel the airship shivering and shuddering as the wind pushed them farther and farther to port. Then the port engine suddenly droned back to life and the ship once again felt solid and sure-footed in the sky. “That’s a little better.”
The flood lights flickered back to life as well and a jagged wall of weeping mountain rock appeared, filling the windows to their left only a few dozen yards away. Ghanima jerked the controls and the airship bore hard to starboard, nosing straight into the easterly wind, and for a moment the Halcyon merely drifted in space beside the cliff face. For the longest seven seconds of her life, Taziri listened to her blood roaring through her ears, felt her arms almost weightless with adrenaline, and shivered as a cold sweat trickled down her back. She pictured her daughter’s face, the soft bump of her chin, the soft bounce of her hair, the bright… her name, what’s her name? I can’t remember her…Menna! She blinked at the darkness, trying not to cry out. Then, slowly but surely, Halcyon crept away from the mountain, swimming upwind as the rain drummed louder and faster on the gas bag overhead.
“Not to worry.” Ghanima tried to smile. “We’re still on the right side of the horizon.”
She barely had time to look at the view ahead when the soft humming from Taziri’s control board dropped half an octave and several decibels. “What was that? Did we just lose something?” She squinted around the cockpit.
“Yeah, the heater. Looks like the coil burned out a connection.” Taziri motioned at a tiny yellow light on her board. “I can’t fix that until we’re on the ground.”
“You have an electric heater?”
“Of course,” she said. “I turned it on just after sunset, like always. Never had a problem with it before, not in four years. It’s all right. The motors should actually run a little better if it’s a few degrees cooler back there.”
“It’s not the motors I was worried about.” Ghanima took her hand off the stick long enough to blow a warm breath over her fingers.
Then the cabin lights died again.
Taziri laughed.
“This isn’t funny.”
“You’re right.” She continued chuckling. “But it’s pretty ridiculous.”
“Wait, there! I see it!” Ghanima pointed at the dark window in front of her. “Wait…there it is again! That’s the beaco
n light at the southern edge of the Lower City. See? A blue-white light on a three-second interval. We’re on course!”
“Yeah, good work.” Taziri peered into the gloom. “I can’t see it, but I believe you. Is it far? It must be. And with this crosswind, we’re not going to get there any time soon.”
The flood lights cut out again.
Ghanima laughed. Even as she shivered in her cold seat in the pitch-black cockpit, she laughed, and Taziri laughed with her.
“Okay, can I at least get a light on the compass dome here for a minute?” She tapped the glass in question.
“Sure.” Taziri’s search through the tool rack was noisy but brief. “Here it is.” In the darkness, a small disc of soft yellow light appeared at the end of the flashlight, a heavy tube containing a conventional battery that could be relied upon for almost ten minutes of use in its entire lifetime. The light shuddered, faded, and vanished. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.” She banged the side of the light. “It’s dead.”
“So that’s it? We’re out of options? The only thing still working are the motors, and they could cut out at any moment. And we can’t see outside, so we could be flying into a mountain any moment now.”
A bolt of lightning lanced down through the darkness ahead to starboard and in that instant the stark topography of the mountain range was burned into the aviators’ eyes, left to hover in their vision as a discolored after-image as they blinked and squinted in the swallowing dark. Thunder roared through the cabin in waves and the drumming of the rain quickened.
“Well, good.” Ghanima nodded. “No mountains dead ahead. At the moment. Did you see anything out there?”
“No.”
“There you go, then.” She heaved a deep sigh. “We’re fine.”
Chapter 37. Syfax
Syfax sat listening to the rain pattering lightly on the train’s thin metal roof. It came in gusts, sometimes softly and sometimes violently, but never for very long. The irregular winds in the deep canyons hurled much of the weather into the rock walls, and through his window the major could see the rainwater streaming down the cliff faces in bright, shining lines.
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