By Fire Above_A Signal Airship Novel

by Robyn Bennis

  The Turels volunteered their laundry basket and the luggage was stuffed into it, after Bernat retrieved his cane from Josette’s bag. Elise and Josette carried the basket between them, while Bernat and Jutes walked slightly ahead, keeping an eye out for Vin patrols.

  “Shouldn’t be too many of the bastards in this quarter of town,” Elise said as they walked. “Bernie, what’s happened to your leg?”

  Bernat wasn’t sure it was wise to chat while sneaking through the streets of occupied Durum, but he supposed Elise knew what she was doing. “Hurt it in a crash, near Kuchin.”

  He glanced back to see equal parts pity and anxiety written on Elise’s face. She said, “Those ships aren’t safe, Bernie. I wish you wouldn’t go up in them. You’re not in the army, are you? Not officially?”

  “No,” Bernat said. “I offered to join, but they told me I was too pretty.”

  Elise laughed. “That was never a problem for Josie.”

  Josette interjected a deep sigh, which shut them both up.

  Apart from a few faces pressed to windows, they didn’t see another soul through ten blocks of walking. Near the north gate, with the daylight nearly gone, they came to what seemed less a house than a cottage, fronting one of Durum’s many urban gardens. Indeed, the garden hardly seemed to stop at the house, which had herbs growing out of its turf roof.

  “What a delightful town,” Bernat murmured, pausing to admire it, while the others shuffled inside. He followed to find the inside of the house just as charming. It was laid out like a country cottage on the inside as well, with one long room tightly packed with hearth, table, and two beds separated from each other by curtains hanging from the bare rafters. The windows were all shuttered.

  Next to the hearth sat an older woman, paunchy despite her thin frame, but bearing that paradox of malnutrition quite well. “Make yourselves at home,” the woman he took to be Heny said, as she ground away at a mortar and pestle. “Pesha will be back any minute.”

  “Pesha was Heny’s apprentice,” Josette explained quietly.

  Bernat wasn’t sure why an apprentice would still live here after so many years. He began to put together a good guess, however, when he sat down on the bed farthest from the hearth, there being only three chairs in the entire house, and noticed the dust on it. It was only a very sparse layer atop the sheets, hardly noticeable except under prudent snooping, but when he probed the hem of the top sheet with his finger, he saw that the dust did not extend to the lower sheet. That was to say, the bed had been neatly made, and then it had sat with the top sheet undisturbed for long enough to become dusty.

  When Heny looked up, he shot her a sly smile, but she only narrowed her eyes back at him as she upturned the mortar into an iron pot, poured water over it, and set it on the hook over the hearth fire.

  Turning toward Josette, Heny said, “Get over here, Josie. Let me see you in the light.” Josette obeyed, standing by the hearth. Heny poked a finger at her collarbone, then squeezed the flesh on her arm. “Staying healthy. Good. Your mother put a lot of work into you.”

  “For all the good it did,” Elise said.

  Jutes, sitting on the other bed, took a sudden interest in the boiling pot on the fire, making it plain that he was most certainly not paying any attention to the abuse his captain was taking, if he indeed had enough attention to spare from the fascinating bubbling in the pot to realize anyone was speaking at all.

  And so Jutes was taken by surprise—quite genuine surprise—when Heny pulled him to his feet, poked at him, and looked him over just as critically. When she marched around the bed to Bernat, he saved some of his dignity by getting to his feet before she reached him, and stood with his head held high, his hands doubled on the crook of his cane.

  After poking and pinching him, Heny threw her hands in the air and said, less in frustration than despair, “Worst bunch of goddamn spies I ever seen. One of you’s the only man under fifty in the whole town who uses a cane, one of you’s the spitting image of Elise Dupre, and the most incognito of the bunch is a goddamn Brandheimian who may as well have ‘Sergeant’ tattooed on his fucking forehead. You could have knocked on the gate and politely asked the Vins to let you have a word with the resistance, for all the effort you’ve put into subtlety.”

  Josette, looking every bit the captain despite her peasant garb, said to Heny, “We didn’t come here to be berated.”

  Heny snorted. “Well you couldn’t have done a better job of it, if that was what you came for.”

  “We came to liberate Durum,” Josette asserted, in a tone so hard it made Heny take a step back. “But the Vins have a larger garrison than we expected, so we need your help to do it. If that doesn’t suit you, I’ll signal my ship to pick us up, and we’ll leave the town as we found it.”

  “Josie!” Elise snapped.

  “Shut up, Mother,” Josette said without even looking away from Heny. “My mother will be coming with us, mind you, even if she has to be gagged and stuffed into a gunnysack. So I’ll have what I came for, and I won’t think twice when I fly away and leave the rest of this worthless town to the Vins.”

  Jutes went from standing uncomfortably near Heny to looming uncomfortably over her. It was a subtle shift, but Bernat thought he pulled it off well.

  “Such a wretched girl,” Elise said. “Don’t you think so, Bernie?”

  “Yes, and not for the first time,” Bernat said, turning a pleasant smile on Josette. “Indeed, not for the first time today.”

  Heny only laughed—rather merrily, considering all the ill feeling going around—and said, “Well, I think she turned out just fine.” She put an affectionate hand on Josette’s shoulder and squeezed. “You know just where you stand, with her.”

  “Likewise.” Josette relaxed, and Jutes went back to merely standing.

  “Mehmed would be proud of you,” Heny said.

  Josette’s mother seemed about to speak up, but decided against it.

  As things settled down, Josette noticed Heny’s apprentice, standing just inside the door. Or, she corrected herself, she noticed the woman who’d been Heny’s apprentice when Josette left to join the army.

  “Hi, Josie,” Pesha said, lifting one hand to shoulder level and giving a hesitant wave from two yards away.

  Josette returned a respectful nod. “Good to see you again. Stayed on as Heny’s assistant, did you?”

  Pesha’s thin lips twitched into a smile that didn’t show her teeth. She gave the smallest of nods, and said in a mouse’s voice, “And washerwoman at the town hall.” She stood, shuffling her feet and looking anxiously from face to face for a few moments, before adding, “In the afternoons.”

  Josette was taken aback by how reserved she had become. Pesha was only a few years older than her, but that had been a big difference back then, and Josette always thought of her as practically an authority figure. It was positively unnerving to see her blushing and aloof, and still doing much the same job she’d been at for over two decades.

  “Washerwoman, eh?” Bernat asked, with a sly inflection on the last sound.

  Pesha’s closed-lip smile came back. “They don’t know I understand Vin, see. Usually they watch what they say anyway, but every now and then…” The smile expanded until a narrow streak of her front teeth showed, which for her must have been like grinning from ear to ear.

  “From what Pesha and some others have gathered,” Heny said, “the Vin garrison is what’s left of the 64th regiment. Started out four thousand strong, we heard, and lost a third of that at the first attack on Arle. They were looking for revenge at Canard, but they got hurt even worse there. Limped back to Durum with around nine hundred men left, stole every scrap of coin from us that some other Vin hadn’t already stole, and got put on garrison duty while they reinforced. Since then they’ve gotten about a hundred men in from Vinzhalia.”

  “Mrs. Turel said they had five hundred and eighty-six.” Josette tried to hold her temper. “If there are a thousand, we’re sunk. Goddamn that old b
at.”

  Heny didn’t flinch under Josette’s angry gaze. “Mrs. Turel’s right,” she said. “As of today, there’s five hundred and eighty-six of them. And you respect your elders.” She emphasized this by sticking a finger hard into Josette’s ribs.

  “So what happened to the others?”

  “Around two hundred and fifty were wounded at Canard so bad they either died later or got sent home,” Heny said. “Twenty-four died of typhus. Eight succumbed to flu over the winter. Six were sent home after they got drunk and hurt themselves. One was hanged for striking an officer.” Heny shared a conspiratorial grin with Pesha and Josette’s mother, before she went on in a sly tone, “And we got the rest.”

  “Good God!” Bernat cried, loud enough that Josette’s mother had to reminded him to keep his voice down.

  “You mean to say that the resistance has killed…” Josette did the math in her head. “A hundred and twenty-five Vin fusiliers?”

  Pesha blushed and looked sheepish. “Not all killed. Some we only wounded or made sick enough that they got sent home.”

  “We got the most with poison,” Heny said. “They made it easy enough, since they stole all their goddamn food from us. We poisoned a couple legs of mutton bound for their stewpots, and we killed over seventy of the bastards in one go. Took hundreds more off their feet for a month, too.” She took a deep breath. “Vins hanged two hundred of us for that. An even two hundred.”

  “That’s when they got Audrey, Madeena, and Sibil,” Pesha said, naming three girls who’d been Josette’s age when she ran away to join the army. “And Mr. Rostom and Kadi Halphin, too, even though they’d both been locked in the dungeon the whole time, and couldn’t have had a hand in it. Only two or three who were actually in on the plan got taken and hanged, and I bet that was nothing but coincidence.”

  “Soldiers make lousy policemen,” Josette said. “Good soldiers most especially.”

  “The other Vins we got one or two at a time,” Heny said. “Arranged accidents, ambushed patrols, and that sort of thing. We’re having a harder time of it now, seeing how they don’t go anywhere in groups smaller than four these days.”

  As impressed as Josette was with the town’s fighting spirit, that last comment made her realize that Durum had cut its own throat. If the town had meekly acquiesced to Vin rule, the 64th would have marched out ages ago, and been replaced by the smaller garrison of invalids and old men Josette had expected to find here. Instead, they faced nearly six hundred of the most experienced infantrymen in the world—men who would be out for blood after losing so many of their friends, hardened by the hell the Durum resistance had put them through.

  “And what about our people?” Josette asked, hoping against all odds for some good news to balance out the bad.

  “Two of the men from your airship are safe,” Heny said.

  “Corne and Kiffer,” Pesha added.

  “You sent them to just the right place, Josie. Anywhere else and they’d be dead twice over: once from the putrid rot in their wounds, and again from the Vins catching ’em. And there’s some folk from the signal base still alive, too.”

  “Where?”

  “Just under your feet, of course. Oh, I forgot!” Heny’s voice became suddenly cheerful. “You haven’t been back since we made a proper room out of the cellar. Oh, you have to see it, Josie. It’s lovely.”

  Pesha nodded along, her enthusiasm turning her from quiet to chatty in an instant. “It really is lovely. Had it done over about three years back. It’s got brick walls now and a carpet and everything. You wouldn’t even know it’s a cellar, except there aren’t windows. It’s like having a whole other floor. You have to see it.”

  “We use it as a day room during the summer, because it’s nice and cool down there,” Heny said, her voice bordering on boastful. “You just have to see it.”

  “It’s lovely,” Pesha added.

  “We disguised the stairs when the Vins took over, so you can’t even tell it’s there if you didn’t know already.” Pesha pointed to a spot on the floor near the back corner of the cottage, but Josette really couldn’t tell where it was, even when it was pointed out.

  “Why don’t you stay down there?” Heny said. “It’s the safest place in town, and I’m sure they can make room for you.”

  “Oh, yes!” Pesha said, clasping her hands. “You’ll love it. I’d take you down now, but it’s a pain to get the boards back in place.”

  Josette sighed. “On the subject of the Vin garrison…”

  Heny looked disappointed at the change in topic, and Pesha even more so.

  “I’m sorry to say that our battalion is no match for them,” Josette said. “We couldn’t beat them even if we faced off on an open field, let alone with the Vins on the walls. And we don’t have the time or supplies for a prolonged siege.” She paused to let that sink in. “However, if we can gather a force inside the town to spike the guns on the wall, or attack the garrison from inside, or just stir up enough trouble to keep them looking over their shoulders, then we have a chance. I dare say you have your own ideas about that.”

  “One,” Heny said, nodding slowly. “The gunpowder.”

  “Blow up their powder magazine?” Josette grinned at the idea.

  “Nothing like exploding a powder magazine for taking the fight out of defenders,” Jutes said. “It’s bloody brilliant.”

  “Only,” Heny said, “they’ve moved their gunpowder storage from the east side of town to the west, closer to the guns that face Garnian territory. The problem is, their new powder magazine’s underground, with tunnels leading to the wall.”

  Jutes was the first of them to figure it out. “And you don’t know where the magazine is,” he said.

  Heny nodded. “Not a damn clue. We been trying to find it for months, but we can’t get anyone in there without being spotted. Half the people that tried are rotting on the ends of ropes in the town square.”

  “Perhaps Mistral can see where it is from above,” Bernat said.

  Heny shook her head. “We managed to get a shrine maiden up to the top of the pagoda to look for it, which took a damn lot of tears and crying out to God, let me tell you. The Vins suspected she was up to something, those heathen bastards. But when she finally got up there, she couldn’t see squat. Wherever they put the magazine, they’ve left no sign of it aboveground. There’s only one way to get the location, but we never had the right mix of talent for it, until now.”

  Josette thought she knew what Heny was getting at, but wasn’t quite ready to accept it. “What do you mean?”

  “Right now, in this very room, we got two expert poachers,” Heny said, nodding to Josette and her mother. “And an experienced hunter,” she went on, looking at Bernat. Then, pointing to Jutes, she added, “And some good old-fashioned army muscle.”

  Josette closed her eyes. “You want us to take a prisoner?”

  “You were always a clever lass, Josie.”

  “Jutes?” Josette asked.

  “Risky. Prisoner snatches are as likely to get the snatchers taken prisoner as the snatchee.” Jutes’s face hardened. “But I don’t see another option.”

  “And, assuming this can even be done, where do you plan to interrogate the prisoner?”

  Heny only pointed at the floor.

  “Oh, it’s just lovely down there,” Pesha said.

  11

  BERNAT HAD DARED to believe he was past spending the night atop piles of garbage, but the needs of Durum’s resistance compelled him to take up the habit again. At least, he consoled himself, it was very old and very dry garbage which had lost most of its smell over the years.

  He was inside one of Durum’s many trash houses. They were buildings left abandoned—some over a century ago—then used as convenient neighborhood refuse dumps until they were filled to the rafters.

  Until this night, he hadn’t believed they existed, despite Josette’s insistence. Now that he could hardly deny the proof, he decided that their presence reflected
no shame on Durum, but rather a resourceful ingenuity.

  He only wished that Durum’s ingenuity was less lumpy, and that it didn’t still smell faintly of rotten cabbage. There were less-lumpy patches here and there, and of course one could always lie on the house’s exposed rafters rather than directly on the trash, but the choices were limited by the surprisingly good condition of the roof. There were only a few places, here and there, where a gap in the beams and shingles provided a space wide enough to shoot a rifle through, and even fewer that pointed along the street they were interested in.

  Elise was the only one of them who got to lie on a rafter beam, at the mutual insistence of Josette and himself. He had further insisted that Josette take the least lumpy, least aromatic patch of garbage to make her sharpshooter’s nest in, even though she assured him that he’d come to regret it.

  “I’m used to this sort of thing,” she’d whispered, and even in the pitch dark, he could tell she was staring off into space and remembering another time. “You’ll be fidgeting all night, and moaning about the discomfort within an hour.”

  He had insisted, nevertheless, and was proud to have proved her wrong, for the pagoda’s bell had rung out the hour twice before he started to moan about his discomfort.

  “Hush,” Josette said, from the darkness to his left. “The Vin patrol’s coming around again.”

  It was a few minutes before he could see them from his vantage point, through an inch-wide vertical crack in the roof which offered little visibility to the sides and could only let him look directly up and down the avenue ahead. They were the same four patrolmen he’d seen twice already, softly illuminated by lantern light as they made their circuit through the southwest quarter of town. He sighted along the barrel of his rifle, keeping it dutifully aimed at the rightmost man and ready to bring him down at a moment’s notice, though the ambush wouldn’t be sprung for a while yet, unless something went very wrong.