By Fire Above_A Signal Airship Novel

by Robyn Bennis

  Josette shook her head. “No. Our Lieutenant Hanon may be many things, but he doesn’t lack courage.”

  “What about stupidity? Surely an act of true stupidity must exempt the leader of a hope from the usual honors?”

  Josette considered it. “Perhaps, but he isn’t stupid, either. Not exactly. It’s more that he commits himself absolutely to whatever plan his first instincts suggest. I can’t imagine that habit counting against you in a hope, though. The entire point is to charge headlong into an unwinnable attack. His habits could only help him in that.”

  “So he was an unusually old ensign?” Bernat asked. “Or a sergeant?”

  Emery shook his head. “Neither. I asked about it. He received no promotion. No badge of honor. No awards, gifts, accolades. And no one knows why, or if they do they don’t want to say.”

  “Something must have gone very wrong in that breach.”

  “And yet it’s hard to imagine what could possibly go wrong enough to…” Emery trailed off, distracted by a commotion outside the tent.

  The staff officers quickly hid their maps. The tent flap opened and a blindfolded Vin major was led inside by two sergeants. They untied his blindfold at a nod from Colonel Okura.

  “Ah,” the bright-faced Vin major said, in perfectly accented Garnian. “That’s better. Good morning, gentlemen. I do hope the day finds you well.”

  Okura offered his hand and said, “Quite well, Major Dvakov. Would you like some coffee? Anything to eat?”

  Dvakov shook hands and smiled eagerly. “Oh, yes please. I haven’t had good, strong Garnian coffee in ages. I’m ashamed to say, my countrymen have never quite gotten the hang of it. It’s all in the roast, no? I don’t suppose you have any of those wonderful little ginger cakes?”

  At a look from Okura, one of the sergeants left the tent, and came back a minute later with a tin of cakes. In the meantime, Okura poured the coffee himself.

  The Vin major took a sip, and then a bite of ginger cake, and nearly melted with satisfaction. “Better than I remembered,” he said. “I must admit, Garnians understand food and drink as Vinzhalians never will. You even make better dumplings than us, eh?” The officers chuckled politely. Dvakov looked around the tent, from the canvas cover, to the table, to the muddy turf underfoot, and across every face in the room. “How were the roads, coming in?”

  “Muddy, but accommodating in the end,” Colonel Okura said. With a sly smile, he added, “We only had to bring up four guns, after all.”

  “Now, now, sir,” Major Dvakov said, returning the smile with one yet more sly. “It doesn’t do to be boastful. You may have the advantage of firepower, but I slept in a warm, soft bed last night. Alongside a warm, soft woman, to boot. So I ask you, who comes out ahead?”

  This evoked more than just polite chuckles from the staff officers. There was real humor in their eyes, alongside a dash of envy.

  “As to the question of our business today,” Colonel Okura reminded him.

  “Indeed. So you’ve come to blood your battalion, yes?” He grinned into Okura’s suddenly stone-faced visage, tossed the last of a ginger cake into his mouth, and spoke as he chewed, “Yes, of course you have. No other reason to commit so many troops to such a useless town. You want to guarantee the outcome. Give the boys an easy victory before they go north, when it becomes not so easy for them. So you bring overwhelming numbers and array them against a severely understrength Vin regiment, depleted and wearied by battle.” He looked to Josette. “The airship, I thought, was an ostentatious touch. With every respect to you and your crew, of course.”

  “Of course,” she answered, tipping her head.

  “So, to the business at hand.” Dvakov reached into his jacket pocket, brought out a sheet of paper, and unfolded it. He read aloud:

  To Lt. Colonel Haru Okura

  132nd Regiment of Foot, 1st Battalion

  Outskirts of Durum

  Sir,

  In light of your overwhelming superiority of infantry and artillery, I find my regiment’s position as garrison of Durum untenable. I salute your mercy and good conduct in graciously offering to spare the lives of my men. However, I must, with regret, inform you that my orders at this time contain no instructions on the subject of surrender, and I must therefore decline your kind offer, with greatest compliment.

  Yours,

  Colonel Checheg Saihan,

  64th Fusiliers Regiment

  Durum

  “Do you mind if I take another of those cakes back with me?” Dvakov added, without a pause, and only then handed the letter over.

  “I, uh,” Colonel Okura stammered. “Sergeant? See that the major has a fresh tin of cakes. Major, I’m sorry it has to be this way.”

  “Not half as sorry as I’m apt to be,” Dvakov said, with rather less concern than Bernat expected from the second-in-command of a supposedly doomed regiment.

  When Dvakov was gone, Colonel Okura spent a moment staring at the tent flap, then said, “I have the distinct impression that man was toying with us.”

  “He had two messages with him,” Bernat offered, since no one else had noticed. “Did you see the way his hand stopped in his pocket, his fingers feeling around? He was making sure he got the right one.”

  Emery shook his head. “I’ll wager the other was a surrender. But he took one look at us and knew he wouldn’t need it.”

  Okura returned to the table, where one of the staff officers had spread a map out. “Well, Lieutenant Dupre, can they back up their bravado?”

  Hearing Josette addressed by her proper rank, rather than her courtesy title of captain, struck a sour chord in Bernat, but she seemed not even to notice. “I believe,” she said, “that their garrison numbers between five and six hundred. The entire surviving complement of the 64th Fusiliers.”

  Major Emery made a dire-sounding whistle.

  Another of the staff officers muttered, “Good God.”

  The colonel looked at her skeptically, then at Bernat. “Do you agree with that assessment, Lord Hinkal?”

  Bernat wasn’t expecting anyone to ask his opinion, and for a moment he stood dumbstruck. Word must have gotten out about the letter he sent to his uncle, warning of the Vin surprise attack the previous fall. “I do agree with it,” he said. “I’d put it closer to the high end. Call it, say, five hundred and eighty fusiliers, give or take half a dozen.”

  “You were able to count them as precisely as that?” Colonel Okura asked.

  Bernat smiled and said, “Reconnaissance is as much an art as a science, you know.”

  The colonel let out a long sigh. “That’s it, then. We have no hope of victory against hardened troops of that number, and there’s no contingency for a siege. We were meant to remain here no more than a week, then top off our provisions from the town before heading back.”

  Josette spoke up. “We might bring their numbers down by aerial bombing, sir, and by setting Mistral’s marksmen to picking them off. With some luck, and if we can periodically land and refresh our magazine from the artillery company’s stores, we might reduce their numbers significantly in only a few weeks.”

  The battalion’s officers cast wan expressions at each other, and Bernat knew that something had gone wrong. Colonel Okura confirmed it when he said, “There’s, uh, been an interesting development. We sent a rider with our dispatches to the nearest semaphore tower, and had him wait for a response. He got back an hour ago.” The colonel paused, seeming to consider his words.

  Bernat was still at a loss, but Josette’s shallow sigh said that she understood. She said, “You gave them the engineers’ estimates on how long it would take to open a practical breach, didn’t you?” And then she added a hasty, “Sir.”

  The colonel swallowed. “Yes. General Bellamy congratulated us on our progress and informed us that, as we have enough provisions to see us through the siege, and as we can draw from the town after it’s taken, our resupply expedition has been cancelled and sent to the northern front.”

&nbs
p; “We have scavenging parties combing the countryside,” Major Emery said, “but it’s just the wrong time of year for it. Taking the return trip into account, we can stay for two or three days, perhaps four if we stretch things and use up the last of our rations. Then we’ll be marching home on empty stomachs.”

  “Sir,” Josette said, her eyes suddenly brightening, “I may have an alternate plan.”

  10

  “AREN’T YOU READY yet?” Josette spoke into the darkness, quietly lest her voice be heard in the town, not a great distance under Mistral’s keel. She was in the sleeping berths toward the tail and could hear Bernat stuffing clothes into a bag.

  “I’ll hardly be a minute,” he said. Though he spoke quite softly, shushing sounds replied to him from three different directions. He lowered his voice even further. “I just need a few more things.”

  “Why the hell are you even coming along?” she asked.

  “Because I’m the only person on this ship capable of subtlety,” he answered. “As Colonel Okura clearly recognized.”

  She took a few steps toward his voice, but stopped when her face hit damp fabric. “Damn it,” she whispered, “I’ve told you about hanging your laundry from the control cables. It’s bad enough that it could interfere with steering, but consider the weight of ballast lost to evaporation.”

  “I wrung them out first!” he said, and the same trio of shushes again brought his voice down. “You went off like a cannon the time I hung my laundry on the hurricane deck, so what other choice do I have?”

  “You could refrain from washing your clothes while we’re in the air, like everyone else.”

  He made a huffing sound. “When I might be visiting the love of my life? No, I won’t be caught in dirty clothes for that.”

  “This isn’t a goddamn vacation in the country. It’s an infiltration. Jutes and I are dressed as locals, more or less.” Less, on the whole, but at least they’d made the effort. They were both wearing tunics hastily cut and stitched from sailcloth, and closed around the waist with hemp rope rather than a sash. They bore a passing resemblance to the woolen deels commonly worn about Durum, and might be mistaken for the same by anyone who was new to the concept of clothing.

  “It isn’t luggage,” Bernat said. “It’s a small bag. Just the essentials. Anyway, your bag is bigger than mine.”

  Josette’s tightly wrapped bundle contained her pistol and two more from the ship’s arms locker, along with signal flags, phosphorus flares, rocket flares, rations, three rifles, an infantry pattern musket, various cartridges, and three sharp cutlasses. But there wasn’t time to debate the matter of Bernat’s luggage, so she said, “Fine, but hurry. We’re over the town already.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

  “It shouldn’t need to be said. You should be ready on time.”

  The damp undershirt in front of her was whipped away, and she could hear it being hastily stuffed in with the rest of Bernat’s things. He cinched the bag shut and said, “Ready.”

  “Follow me.” She pushed her way past him and went aft, to where the pulley system was rigged. This time, however, it was not a bucket at the end of the line, but a rope ladder specially made for tonight’s operation. “Sergeant Jutes first, then you, Bernie. He’ll guide you down the ladder. There, give me your cane. I’ll put it in with the rifles.”

  After Jutes descended, Bernat stood at the edge of the keel catwalk, probing for the first rung. Jutes guided his foot from below, but it still took him nearly five minutes to descend a few dozen rungs in the darkness.

  Josette followed more swiftly, leaving the warm stuffiness of Mistral for the chill damp of the clouds. She felt suddenly very vulnerable, as if she were a knight who’d lost his horse and stood exposed on the battlefield.

  She couldn’t see Mistral above, but thought she could feel it receding into the clouds as the ladder was let down. Whether this was some haptic sense of subtly changing air patterns or merely an anxious imagination, she couldn’t say. Below, the bottom rungs dragged over a street and Jutes’s feet touched down, but he held firm to the ladder, keeping his weight on it lest the ship ascend and leave him stranded.

  Josette held her breath through the torturous seconds it took Bernat to fumble his way from rung to rung. He let out a yelp, and she heard his feet scrambling frantically against the ladder. “Jump!” she hissed down at him. “Jump!”

  He didn’t have the chance to obey, for Jutes had already pulled him off the ladder, and both landed in a heap in the middle of the street. She climbed down even as the ladder was going back up. She’d only gone down three rungs before the ship’s drift pulled the ladder clear across the street, and a house emerged from the fog ahead. She smacked into it a second later. Above, a rung caught at the edge of a shingle.

  If left in that state, it would drag the ship down just as it had before. The crew would have to cut the ladder loose from above, leaving the Vins with unambiguous proof that some idiot or idiots had dropped into town during the night.

  Josette let go of her bag and climbed up, as fast as she could. She vaulted over the edge of the roof and nearly slid down the slippery, fog-dampened shingles. As soon as she had her footing, she snatched a knife from her belt and cut the snagged rung just as the tension was coming onto it. It came loose and she guided it clear of the roof, following it to the other edge to make sure it wouldn’t snag again. As the rope ladder—the only way out of the town—disappeared into darkness above, she remained frozen in that stance, listening and running through the last few seconds in her mind, trying to recall exactly how much noise they’d made.

  It was enough, evidently, to wake the residents of the house whose roof she was standing on. She’d hoped it was one of Durum’s many abandoned houses, but her luck was not running in that direction tonight, and at least two people were stirring indoors. One of them went to the second-floor window just below, opened it, and whispered something in Vinzhalian.

  She heard the click of a pistol being cocked in the window. Someone inside the house lit a lamp, and its light spilled across a narrow alley to the house behind. It projected a rough silhouette of the man with the pistol, leaning out with his head turned upward.

  Josette had nothing but her knife for defense. The other weapons were wrapped tight inside her pack, and might as well be a hundred miles away, for all the time and noise it would take to retrieve them.

  She leaned back as far as she could, but if spotted she could only run and hope to find a way down before the Vins started shooting. She was about to commit to that very course of action, when from the other side of the house she heard a foppish voice imitating a tomcat’s yowl. She winced and clenched her teeth, dead certain that the sound couldn’t be mistaken for anything but a foppish voice imitating a tomcat’s yowl, but it succeeded in drawing the attention of the men in the room below.

  The Vin’s silhouette receded and the opposite window was opened. Josette stepped carefully back from the edge and knelt down to make herself as small as possible. She barely breathed while she waited, expecting at any moment to see a pistol pointed at her over the edge of the roof, or to hear her companions being shot.

  After a few minutes of whisperings in Vinzhalian, the light of the lamp went out and the windows were pulled closed. A little too soon, she thought. Perhaps they were only trying to lure her out. Perhaps the windows had been left open a crack, and an armed man waited next to each. Jutes and Bernat must have had the same thought, for they made no attempt to signal her.

  She knelt on the roof, perfectly still, standing a gargoyle’s vigil. While she waited, hardly daring to swallow lest the sound carry below, the fog rolled on through Durum, depositing dew on her clothes and on the tips of her unruly tufts of hair. Such a long time seemed to pass that she was watching for signs of the sunrise when the temple bell tolled one in the morning, revealing the improbable truth that she’d been up there for less than an hour.

  But that was all the more reason to wait longer, o
r risk a bullet for her haste. She had done this before, she reminded herself. She regularly stood deck watches in the windy damp for a dozen hours at a stretch. And it wasn’t just deck watches. A far colder, far damper example rose from the distant past, and swelled until it occupied her mind entirely.

  The wolf. She hadn’t thought of the wolf in years, and across that span of time it had faded into a pale shadow of a memory, as if it were a mere story she’d heard, or perhaps read in a book, but not her own experience.

  The wolf had been taking livestock all winter, coming at night and disappearing into the woods by morning. No one could find its lair. It never took the carcasses stuffed with wolfsbane and powdered glass that the townsfolk left for it, preferring instead to kill a live victim every night. Each morning, one of Durum’s herdsman woke to find his flock shorter by one. Those who could, drove their livestock into the town, where they inevitably made a nuisance of themselves. Those who couldn’t spent sleepless nights watching over their stock, or else saw their meager fortunes diminish night by night.

  On reflection, it couldn’t have been as bad as it seemed. There were always more sheep and more goats, after all. The wolf might have taken one a night until the end of time, and there would never be a shortage. But at the time, Durum’s mood was steeped in dread, and it seemed this predator would eat up the whole town if given the chance. It was all the locals ever spoke of. The war faded into remoteness, the news and gossip about Mehmed Dupre’s death were forgotten. Every tavern, street corner, and fireside buzzed with dire predictions of Durum’s impending starvation, or with wild notions of how to prevent it.

  Josette had remained silent through the talk, spoke barely a word during the entire crisis, but every night she dropped stealthily from her bedroom window and carried her rifle and a dark lantern into the packed snow beyond the walls.

  For an entire month, in the very teeth of the winter, she kept to this regimen. And for an entire month she fired not a single shot, for want of a target. Most nights she lay belly-down on the roof of a three-sided shed built to shelter goats, which gave her a slight improvement in elevation and comfort compared to improvising a hunting blind in the snow. Most nights, she detected no trace of the wolf, except that somewhere, out in the darkness of the fields, a sheep or a goat would suddenly scream out in terror before going silent.