“They’re getting over us, Captain!” Voleta repeated. The black Ararat had nearly passed from view, hidden behind the ship’s envelope.
Senlin peered down. They were perhaps a thousand feet from the floor and still descending too quickly. “Fire the element, Mr. Boreas. Slow us down.”
“Aye,” Adam called back.
“If we don’t blow the ballast, we won’t get out from under her,” Edith said, straining over the ship’s edge.
“She’ll get a dozen hooks in us when we pass her,” Senlin said.
“Then we’ll have work to do. Right now we’re the spike, and they’re the hammer. We’re going to be driven into the ground, Captain.” Edith said.
Senlin wanted to keep their course, to wait for a low current to separate them from the shadow of the warship. But the hope was too slight to hang all their lives upon. He beat his palm on the rail and gave the order to blow the ballast.
At the helm, Adam pressed the throttle forward, but halfway through the motion, the lever lost all resistance. The level fell back, loose as a broken limb. He pumped it with growing agitation but not effect.
“The ballast, Adam!” Senlin said, bounding up the stairs to the quarterdeck.
“It’s not working.” Adam squatted and threw open the cabinet under the helm. “There’s a pool of oil.”
“What does that mean?”
“The hydraulic line has a break in it somewhere. I can’t fix it.”
“Iren!” Senlin called through cupped hands. The giantess looked up from the main deck where she stood churning a ramrod in the barrel of a musket. “The ballast hatch is stuck. Can you open it?”
She gave a final tamp of the rod and flipped the loaded gun, stock-first, at Edith who snatched it from the air. Iren mounted the forecastle and pulled up the planks that covered the reservoir. A plume of water shot up when she leapt into the tank.
“I can’t see them anymore, Captain,” Voleta said, sliding down a line back to the deck. She ran from the port to the starboard rail and back again. She pointed at the ground to the east. The shadow of the Stone Cloud swelled and drew nearer, marking their descent. The silhouette raced toward them across the canopies of the Market. The much larger shadow of the Ararat was directly over theirs. The two shadows closed, pinching the narrow crack of light that separated them until they finally merged.
The planks bounced beneath them and the rigging leapt. The hull twisted and bucked like the board of an unevenly pushed swing.
“They’re on top of us,” Voleta said.
A rope uncoiled out of the sky. A second line followed, and then more on every side. The ends of the ropes began to strain and bounce like snakes held up by their tails. Men were climbing down. In a moment, the Commissioner’s agents would begin swinging onto the ship. A moment more, and the crew of the Stone Cloud would be overrun.
Chapter Eleven
“The clan of the Pells is distinguished by their courtly manner. A Pell is always well dressed, sweetly perfumed, and arrayed in the most current fashions. They are harmless in general, but loquacious to a fault; if ever corned by a Pell, one is in reasonable danger of being charmed to death.”
- Anthropologies of Babel by A. Franboise
The young nobleman could not stop fussing with the blue cravat at his neck. He pinched it, dimpled it, pulled and tucked it back into his silk shirtfront each time he caught his reflection in the casement window. Since he could not stop pacing his cabin (which the provincial airship captain had optimistically declared the Marquee Suite), his reflection appeared with maddening regularity. And there was always something amiss with his blasted cravat.
The truth was, the girl had spoiled the entire outing. He was an aspiring ornithologist, and this three-day scientific expedition had been chartered by his father, the influential Treasurer of Pelphia, for the express purpose of establishing his son’s credentials in the field. The young nobleman was supposed to be identifying and recording the passage of migratory birds, in particular the honey buzzard. Instead, the maid who brought his breakfast, tea, and dinner had bewitched him. Her schedule of entrances and exits allowed him just enough time to recover his wits before she appeared again and reinvigorated his desire at the expense of his research.
He’d never seen anyone quite like her. She was as dark as a coffee bean and broad of mouth. Her figure was so extravagantly turned it made the girls of Pelphia seem as voluptuous as broomsticks.
She obviously was not so taken with him. She rose to none of his baiting flirtations. He had tried at first to impress her with the scope of his ornithological knowledge, but she had only shown him the glorious white orbs of her eyes and replied that she “didn’t know a thing about chickens.” He’d showed off the tools of his science—his field glasses, telescopes, and calipers (which he would use to measure the skull and beak of the honey buzzard if he was ever fortunate enough to snare one)—but his fine instruments had seemed as wondrous as spoons to her.
These failures, rather than pouring water on his passions, only fired his lust. If this had been his ship or a vessel in his father’s fleet and not some chartered sloop, he would have boldly impressed upon her the depth of his infatuation. But she purportedly had some family among the crew, and he was too exposed to risk an aggressive romance. He had no choice but to woo her. But how?
There were two minutes until teatime. He absolutely had to have something to say. The weather? Too drab. His heritage? Too imposing. Her heritage? Too depressing. What then?
He allayed his anxiety by tearing off and then completely rewrapping his cravat. He was in the midst of perfecting the scalloped edge when his gaze was drawn to something beyond his reflection in the window. Two ships appeared to be mating in the distance, one small and one vast. He recognized the dominant ship immediately: it was the Ararat, the flagship of the Commissioner’s armada. The Commissioner of the Baths served the Pells, of course, and so, by way of transitive property, this ship flew partly in his father’s service, and so was very nearly the young ornithologist’s own command. Or so it seemed to him.
He threw open the window and trained his field glasses on the paired ships. His sloop was flying low at the moment because the higher currents had developed a chill, and he had complained. How right he had been to complain! Now he had a perfect view of this bit of aerial theater.
It was apparent that the Ararat had accosted a grossly inferior vessel, probably pirates, and was in the process of boarding her. Already a dozen lines encircled the ship, and gallant agents in tidy, navy blue uniforms descended on all sides. The pirate ship was undermanned: he counted a crew of four. They looked as small as music box figurines through his binoculars. A tuft of smoke broke from the muzzle of one of their toy guns, and an agent shinnying down a line lost his grip and fell, clutching his chest.
The young ornithologist reared from his glasses excitedly. “The Commissioner has caught a lively gang. What fun.”
The bell over his door rang and he called, “Yes, yes, come in!” before he remembered who it was that stood behind the door. The comely maid entered with a silver tray on her arm, her eyes trained on the table for which the tray was bound.
“Oh, set it down! Set it down and come here,” the ornithologist said excitedly, returning to his glasses. “One of my warships has caught a tub of thieves!”
The agents on the ropes swung onto the deck while the crew of the Stone Cloud attempted to reload their aged firearms. Adam was tipping black powder into the muzzle of his musket when an agent with a trim beard stomped onto the quarterdeck behind him. Adam slung the black powder sachet at the man while he was drawing his sword. The gunpowder flew into the agent’s face, making him flinch and sneeze. His cutlass clattered to the deck. Adam kicked with his boot heel, and the agent staggered blindly over the balustrade.
Adam turned to see another agent swing onto the main deck. Voleta hung in the canopy of ropes by her knees. She wrestled with a rusted pistol that had broken before she could fire it. Th
e frizzen had come unhinged from the pan. She was determined to reattach it, even as the black powder drained from it. The agent drew his beading new sidearm, his hand tracking Voleta’s distracted swaying.
Without a thought, Adam snatched up the cutlass at his feet, leapt onto the helm and launched himself from the quarterdeck.
Edith dropped her spent flintlock and counted the surviving first wave of agents: five in all. She knew the furnace would be the first target of the boarding party, who would want to cripple the ship, so she stationed herself before the burner and drew her saber. Three men rushed her at once, their swords forming a trident. She parried the first sword and cycled it around past her shoulder. The second blade she grasped with her steaming gauntlet and snapped three-quarters down. The third prong of the attack she narrowly fended off with this broken shard.
Their assault foiled, the men sprang back.
Edith threw the steel fragment at the man who’d surrendered it to her, and his reflexes compelled him to try to catch it. The burnished sliver passed through his hand and lodged in his neck with a bloody spurt.
His compatriots watched him fall and then turned round in time to discover that they were about to follow him down.
“You see, the Ararat, that’s the grand black ship flying all those pretty red banners, has the little ship pinned. It can’t go any lower or it’ll be dashed upon the ground, and it’s too small to lift the warship,” the young ornithologist said to the maid who was staring open-mouthed through his field glasses. At last he’d discovered something worthy of her attention. “So, they have no choice but to yield or resist and be killed.”
“Who are they?” she asked.
“Pirates, of course.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they are being pursued by my Commissioner, and because they were running, and because they are fighting back. Pirates are quite stupid.” He gazed through a spyglass and surreptitiously shifted behind the maid who leaned out upon the sill. She seemed unaware of him. He felt slighted by her indifference toward his intimate presence, but he could hardly blame her. The scene was absorbing.
A pretty pirate girl hung in the tub’s rigging like a cherry in a tree, and beneath her, a pirate lad had leapt onto one of the Commissioner’s agents. “Look at that one! He has an eye-patch and everything. I can’t wait to tell my brothers. A real pirate. Look at how he flails about. It’s obvious he hasn’t a spot of military training.”
“Maybe he loves her,” the maid said, watching the desperate pirate lad wrestle with the agent. The two rolled on and over one another, fighting for control of a single pistol.
“I’m sure he does, a dollymop like that. I’m in love, too. Ah, to be pet by a pirate girl.” They watched the girl with the wild, black hair drop onto the back of the uniformed man who had pinned the one-eyed lad to the planks. She had a hatchet in her hand, and she did something horrible to the back of the agent’s head with it.
The ornithologist gasped.
The maid did not.
“If only she were here to pet you,” she said in a low but audible tone.
He lowered the glass and wasted a most sincere and hungry leer upon the back of the maid’s head. She was spirited. He liked that. The ornithologist licked his lips and peered into his scope again. “Here come reinforcements,” he said.
Somewhere inside the flying fortress that hunkered upon them, somewhere among all those squadrons and cannons, Senlin knew the Commissioner was smirking behind his black rubber mask. Senlin was also certain that Pound would not put himself into the fray again, not after their last encounter, which Pound had so narrowly survived. No, if he ever saw Pound again, it would be at his own execution.
Senlin watched from the forecastle as the next wave of agents slithered down the lines from the shadow of the Ararat. He had already fended off a pair of men, batting them from their ropes with his navigation rod. This violence had affected him like a shot of brandy, leaving him clear-headed and vigilant. It was a surprise to find that violence could work in such a way, and he wondered if it was like brandy in other ways: was violence clarifying in doses but intoxicating in excess? Could one deal out murder responsibly, even civilly? Was violence, like wine, the midwife of philosophy?
A gunshot from behind drove the illusion of lucidity from him. He turned to see an agent facedown upon the forecastle stairs, a smoking hole in his back. From the main deck, Edith looked up from the bead of a pistol and saluted Senlin with the gun. Senlin returned the cool gesture, and came around in time to discourage a man who’d just gotten his boot toes on the rail.
He knew they couldn’t go on like this forever. Pound had more men and powder to spend than they had strength to resist. Senlin guarded the open reservoir from which Iren had yet to emerge. Feeling she had been submerged for too long, Senlin crouched down to look for her. He could see nothing but the sloshing ink of the unlit water and the occasional boil of her breath. If he went in after her, it would leave the bow undefended, and they would be overrun— though that was inevitable as long as they were pinned under the dreadnaught. They were trapped in the same dead wind as the warship with only a few hundred feet of air between them and the Market below. Senlin had seen how the inhabitants of the Market greeted crashed vessels: they took to them like beetles to a carcass. His corpse would probably still be warm when some well-heeled tourist began pulling at his boots.
Iren broke the water’s surface with a gasp. Her hands were green with algae; Senlin gripped one to help her out of the reservoir. “I can’t open it from here. The latch is stuck fast.” She was shivering, and her lips were pale. “I’ll have to break the hinge from the outside.” She snatched up the short-handled axe Voleta had left to cut grappling lines. She passed the hook end of her chain through a sturdy cleat in the deck and wrapped the other end about her forearm. “I just need a minute.” She was about to leap overboard when Senlin stopped her.
“Wait! We can’t buck her yet. We have to get out from under her first, or it’ll be a waste of ballast.”
They ducked reflexively when a shot seethed through the air over their heads. The responsible agent, seeing that he’d missed, attempted to clamber back up the line he dangled from. Iren plucked a belaying pin from the rail and hurled the wooden club at the invader. It struck him in the forehead and he dropped like a stone. “How are we going to do that?” she asked.
Senlin looked down at the Market. They were low enough now that he could distinguish individuals. Camels, litters, and palominos clogged the narrow lanes of the slum. A rotten smell was subdued by the scent of fresh linens. A train approached under a white scarf of steam.
“We have to go down.”
“There isn’t enough air.”
“It’s not air we need, it’s wind!” Senlin said and pulled the harpoon from the cannon.
“There’s a fifth pirate now. A big one! I can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. It just crawled out of the bow. Oh, it’s beaned a man!” the ornithologist had been narrating in a nervous stream for several minutes.
It had dawned on the maid that her curiosity had put her in a vulnerable position. But the scene was so enthralling. She could not look away. The woman with the clockwork arm had beaten back a dozen of the gussied men without assistance. Whenever one of the Commissioner’s aeronauts fell under her gleaming fist, the maid wanted to cheer.
“Are you watching? Watch the bow, dolly,” the ornithologist cooed. “I think the admiral is up to something.” As they watched, the man in the black tricorne hat threw a harpoon into the underbelly of the ship’s envelope. The barb of the harpoon snagged upon the silk and the pirate jerked the line down, opening a gash. The balloon began to roil and deform about the tear.
“It’s like watching an adder strike itself.” The ornithologist said. “But oh, the desperate acts of desperate souls.” He closed the already narrow space between them, pressing against her as if she were a stubborn door.
The maid stared rigidly ahead, wishi
ng she could pour herself through those binoculars and travel the distance to that heroic ship even as it slouched to its ruin.
When the captain threw the harpoon into the envelope, Iren was sure he had gone mad. She had to restrain herself from grabbing him by the neck and shaking him, though perhaps it was as much shock as restraint that stayed her. The gash he opened fluttered, riffled and, after a moment, resealed itself.
A gap opened between the ships. The Stone Cloud slid half free of the Ararat’s shadow before the Ararat pressed down again, though not as evenly as before. Pinched under the heel of the warship, the Stone Cloud pitched astern, then rolled aport.
The dead were carried by the incline to the rails. The aged balustrade creaked with each additional body, then a pilaster snapped and that started a chain reaction down the length of the ship that ended with the entire rib peeling away. The bodies spilled overboard and crashed down onto tents and jitneys and unprepared tourists. Senlin clung to the mounted cannon and watched the bombing. It was a queasy thing to see men turned into missiles, to watch the dead make more dead.
His plan was only half done, and yet all hope ran out of him. He braced himself on the foot of the cannon and reloaded the harpoon. He felt a sudden suspicion that this was not an elaborate escape attempt: it was suicide in a state of denial. Perhaps he was even now acting on that determination that his crew would die before he allowed them to be captured by the sadistic Commissioner. Or perhaps Edith’s misgivings were right, and the bedeviling ghost had so poisoned his mind that he could not be counted upon to distinguish between salvation and self-destruction. He couldn’t distinguish between hope and delusion any longer.
Though it didn’t matter. Even if it was all folly, there was no stopping now.
Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2) Page 9
