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By Fire Above_A Signal Airship Novel

Page 29

by Robyn Bennis


  The major moved on to Josette, and had more luck. He found, in a patch pocket sewn on her trousers, the two separate letters she’d been writing to Roland. Dvakov read first one, then the other, and stood perplexed by their contradictory messages. Eventually, something seemed to dawn on him, and he handed them both to his orderly, saying, “They must be in code. After breakfast, we’ll see if anyone can decipher them.”

  His nine men were already lined up against the opposite wall, musket butts held at the hip, muzzles pointed at the sky. Dvakov drew Josette’s pistol and cocked it, ready to finish off anyone the fusiliers failed to kill outright.

  “I just want you to know,” he said to Josette, “that it’s a real honor to kill you.”

  “I’m sure your family will be proud,” she answered. “The whole burrow will be all atwitter about it.”

  Dvakov eschewed a biting response, but simply grinned and said, “Aim.”

  It occurred to Bernat that, as biting responses went, it was hard to beat a volley of musket balls. He took one last look at the crest of the wall, thinking that this time he would really see Mistral’s envelope coming over the top like a rising sun, and save them all at the last possible moment.

  But there was nothing there.

  He closed his eyes.

  He never even heard the order to fire, or perhaps he didn’t have time to comprehend it. He heard only the bang, felt only a lurch—no pain except in his ears—and then he was falling.

  He landed on his feet, then collapsed to the ground.

  And realized that something wasn’t quite right about that order of events.

  He opened his eyes to see a column of smoke and fire rising above the city in the direction of the gunpowder magazine. Already, it was a quarter of a mile high and beginning to pillow out at the top. The ground still shook from the colossal, literally earth-shaking force of the blast, but Bernat had acquired some modicum of an airman’s balance, and so he was back on his feet in moments.

  The other airmen were even faster. Josette not only had her feet under her, but had brought her bound hands to her front by swinging them under her legs as she ran slantwise toward Major Dvakov.

  The major and his fusiliers, however, were creatures entirely of the land, and now the land in its upheaval had forsaken them. One fusilier managed to come unsteadily to his feet just as Jutes barreled into him, shoulder foremost, with so much force that he was thrown against his neighbor, and all three of them smashed with brutal force against the wall behind. Bernat followed the sergeant’s example as best he could, running hell-bent for the nearest fusilier.

  He could not replicate Jutes’s performance, but Bernat and the Vin went to the ground together in a disorderly heap. Bernat’s time aboard Mistral showed again as he disentangled himself and rose before the Vin could, despite having his hands free. Bernat used the only limbs available to him, kicking at the fusilier’s face until it was a bloody mess and the man stayed down.

  He straightened up to see Jutes already going after another fusilier. That one recovered his musket just in time, however, aiming the bayonet at Jutes and bracing himself. Jutes had to twist aside at the last moment, missing his target and barreling past.

  But now the rumbling of the ground was fading, the unwounded Vins were all rising at once, and the advantage swung to them. One raised his musket and aimed at Bernat.

  “Bernie, duck!”

  He responded instantly, and heard Josette’s pistol crack behind him, so close he could feel the heat on his back. The man threatening him fell like a sack of beets, a bullet through his skull.

  Glancing back, he saw Josette holding her pistol in her bound hands, Dvakov in a heap behind her. She didn’t tarry, but threw herself on the fusilier who had Jutes up against a wall, and sent him sprawling. Bernat thought better of attempting such a feat, and knelt down astride a dropped musket to cut his bonds on the bayonet.

  It was an inelegant operation. The bayonet was not sharp along its length, as he’d expected, but only had a dull edge within half an inch of the point. He worked the bindings across that half inch with all the force he could muster, and managed to jab himself in both wrists. The warmth spilling over his hands only encouraged him to work faster, for if he was destined to bleed to death from his own carelessness, he was determined to do some good before the end.

  His bonds came free in a blood-soaked mass, and without checking the extent of his self-inflicted punctures, he snatched up the musket and brought the butt to his shoulder. He looked out to see Josette and Jutes still harrying the single fusilier and doing quite a professional job of it, while three fusiliers together fought off the rest of their party, and had already killed or wounded two of them.

  Without a second thought, Bernat shot the man threatening his friends, and didn’t waste any time trying to convince himself that the decision had any tactical reasoning behind it, or served any purpose but keeping them safe. As he bent to pick up another musket, one of the fusiliers, a man he might have killed instead, shot Mrs. Turel in the gut, and bayoneted her for good measure.

  Bernat aimed his fresh musket at the man, eager to take retribution. But just as he put pressure on the trigger, Josette called out, “Bernie, left!”

  With an impulse that carried from his ears to his arms, with barely a stop in his brain, he swung his musket to the left. He saw a fusilier taking aim and, in the same motion he’d already begun, Bernat pulled his trigger to snap off a shot.

  As he peered through the smoke to see the effect, Josette yelled again. “Behind you!”

  He swung around to see Major Dvakov and one of the fusiliers Jutes had tackled, each scrambling to find dropped weapons. Bernat leveled his musket’s bayonet at the fusilier, and was working up the courage to charge at him when the man went down with a bullet in his chest—shot from where, Bernat did not stop to ask, for Dvakov had by now found his sword.

  Bernat charged him, but Dvakov parried the bayonet with ease, engaging it with the flat of his sword and then flinging it aside in one fluid, graceful motion. With the bayonet safely out of the way, Dvakov twisted his wrist to bring the blade into Bernat’s path, where his momentum would carry him onto its point with only the smallest effort from the major. Bernat brought the butt of the musket up to crack it across the man’s skull, a move that would have surely earned him unkind words from his old fencing instructor, but which turned out to be fantastically successful in a street brawl. A splash of blood painted the cobblestones, some of it Dvakov’s and some Bernat’s, flung from his wrists by the swift motion.

  He spun around. Josette was holding the last two fusiliers at bay with an empty pistol, which they would surely come to realize at any moment. He ran, dropping his musket and scooping up another on the way. He halted in front of the Vins, screaming that he would send a bullet into the groin of the first man who moved.

  They threw down their arms, whereupon Heny piped in with, “Any o’ you wanna tell me what in the hell just happened?”

  18

  JOSETTE LOPED OVER to Major Dvakov, answering Heny as she went. “Someone blew the magazine.” She retrieved both her letters.

  “And someone was shooting,” Heny said, as she looked over the wounded. “Same person who blew up the powder, I’d wager. A damn good thing, too, or we would’a been stuck pigs for certain.”

  Josette looked for evidence of rifle fire from the direction of the magazine, but any puffs of smoke were lost in front of the larger plume. “Who it was, and why, I can’t even imagine.”

  Bernat looked up from pressing his wrists together to stanch the bleeding. “Then your imagination must not reach very far.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I’m sure the magazine was so impressed by our valiant efforts that it exploded out of sympathy, and the rubble decided to take up sport shooting.”

  She did her best to ignore him, peeking her head around the corner to look back at the prisoner pen. As she’d hoped and expecte
d, the guards there were standing their ground, either unwilling to leave the bulk of the prisoners unguarded, or—in all the confusion of the blast—unaware that something had gone wrong with the execution.

  But passivity was not one of this regiment’s flaws. They would work out the situation soon enough, and Josette’s present position would be swarmed by Vin infantry. That meant she had to move fast and leave the wounded behind, which struck her as an even greater injustice when she heard the too-familiar sound of Private Corne screaming.

  “Not the leg,” he said, when he’d caught his breath. “Not the leg, too.”

  She looked over her forces. Corne had suffered a bayonet wound in the thigh. A townsman she didn’t recognize had been pierced by a musket ball high on the right side of his torso, and Pesha was attending to his wound. Jutes was tying linen around Bernat’s perforated wrists, which oozed crimson into the bandages.

  And then there was Mrs. Turel, awake but completely silent despite her painful mortal wound. The bullet had gone in over the kidney on her left side, and the bayonet a few inches below her sternum. If there was any goddamn mercy left in the world, she would soon bleed to death, and be spared the lingering agony of a gut wound.

  More pertinently, the pace of the cannon fire on the walls had picked up, which could only mean the Garnian 132nd was massing for an attack. Even with the magazine gone and the Vins rattled, it would be a tough operation with the sun in their eyes.

  Josette found an unlocked door along the street and said, “Put the wounded in here, bar the door, and hope for the best. Everyone who isn’t staying, grab two muskets and a cartridge box each.”

  Bernat had his coat off and was examining it. He asked, “Do we have time to soak these bloodstains?” When he received only a nasty look in answer, he said, “No, no, of course not. I realize that. It’s only, they’ll be so much harder to get out, once they dry.” He waited a moment more, in case that additional fact might sway the company. “But of course, we’re in a hurry. I know, I know.”

  “And what about them, sir?” Jutes asked, still looking at the fusiliers.

  Major Dvakov was just coming to, or perhaps ceasing to pretend unconsciousness. Once he had a grasp of the situation, he only looked at Josette expectantly.

  She kept her gloating to a minimum, despite herself. “Aren’t you going to tell me I’m not allowed to shoot prisoners?” she asked.

  He returned a little sniff, almost bemused. “I would if I thought it would help. I’m a pragmatist, you know.”

  She glanced at the house where her own wounded would hole up, and called to the others. “If there’s a cellar in there, we’ll lock these prisoners in it. If not, we’ll slit their throats.”

  She knew for a fact that all the houses on this street had cellars—she’d played in some of them as a child—but she didn’t like Major Dvakov’s smug little face and wanted to see some anxiety on it.

  Heny and a townsman stayed behind to tend the wounded, while Pesha armed herself and followed Josette. The party ran toward the wall—any attempt to free the Durumite prisoners would be futile. Halfway there, they heard a crisp bang from above, as the Vin fusiliers unleashed their first volley into the Garnian battalion’s forlorn hope. The volley trailed off into the crackle of independent fire, and the Vin cannons joined in, throwing grapeshot into the mass of attackers. “Faster!” Josette called.

  It was Bernat and Pesha holding them back, and now both did their admirable best to get a move on. As fast as they ran, however, they arrived at the line of houses behind the breach to find that someone had beaten them there.

  Josette spent a precious quarter of a minute just studying her mother’s face. All the while, her mother only looked back at her with a little smile, and not even a sad one, as she stood in the middle of the road, hands up.

  “Was that you shooting?”

  Her mother only nodded.

  “And you blew up the magazine?”

  Another nod.

  “How?”

  A shrug. “I walked in, put a slow fuse in a cask, lit it, and walked out. The lieutenant in charge of the guards knows me. Knew me, I mean. Told him I needed powder for my rifle.”

  “This doesn’t change anything,” Josette said. “I hope you know that.”

  Her mother replied with a little laugh. “It changes one thing, Josie. You’re alive.”

  “Oh, very touching. Very touching indee—”

  She was interrupted by another blast of grapeshot fired outward from the wall.

  “Sorry, Mother. We’ll have to finish this later. Between now and then, I suggest you work on a better story.” She turned to Jutes. “Tie her up and throw her in one of the trash houses. There should be a few along here.”

  Pesha caught her breath and asked, “Are we not beating her to death, then? Why not?”

  “We don’t have time to do it properly,” Josette said, looking directly into her mother’s eyes all the while. “This way, if we win, we can come back later. If we lose, the Vins will get her, and do the job as well as we ever could.”

  *   *   *

  WHILE JOSETTE CLIMBED onto a roof to study the disposition of the Vin defenders, Bernat snuck away to make sure Elise wasn’t treated too inhumanely. He found to his relief that Jutes had had the same idea. He’d tied her bonds as comfortably as he could and made a dry platform atop the garbage, out of a door torn from its hinges.

  “Do forgive Josette’s spitefulness,” he said to Elise. “She becomes irritable when she has to give up a fight, and when she’s nearly been executed, and when her mother betrays her, and when her life and allegiance turn out to be a lie, and when … The point is, she’s having rather a bad day, and a certain amount of malevolent wrath is to be expected.”

  Elise clasped her hands in a manner that would have seemed penitent if they weren’t already tied together. “You’ll talk to her, though? You forgive me?”

  Bernat had to stifle his laughter, lest it attract too much attention. “Hell no,” he said. “What in the world ever gave you that idea? No, my dear. When they hang you, I’ll volunteer to tie the noose.”

  She looked at him for a long time, then turned her eyes away and said, “She made you like this.”

  “No, she didn’t. It’s simply becoming more difficult to avoid the resentment of the people one betrays when one commits treason, these days. I read that in a newspaper.”

  She said nothing more, and kept her eyes downcast. Bernat waited awhile, hoping she would say something more. For, though he’d gone over in the first place to see to her comfort, having once embarked upon browbeating, he now didn’t wish to stop.

  “Better be going,” Jutes said, in short order.

  Bernat nodded and set out, but as he turned to take a last look at her through the window of that garbage-filled house, he saw her looking back at him.

  They continued on, stopping ahead of the nearest cross street leading to the pomerium. Josette pressed herself against the wall and peeked around the corner, then made room for Bernat and Jutes to do the same.

  The Vinzhalian defenders stood loosely spaced on the firing step, protected from above by their improvised wooden roof and from the front by stone merlons. They crouched behind these to reload, popping out just long enough to shoot down at the attacking Garnians.

  “We’ll split in two,” Josette said. “One party on each side of the street. If we can keep up a brisk fire, we may give the appearance of a larger force and draw their attention away from the boys in the breach.”

  Jutes pondered a moment, then said, “You can do a poor impression of a musket volley by throwing a handful of cartridges on a fire. If we manage to hit at least one of them to drive home the illusion, they might pull a company off the wall to come and kill us.”

  “I do so love our little schemes,” Bernat said. He looked to Josette. “I’ll stay next to you. That way, if you die, I can console myself with your rifle.”

  “Good thinking,” she said with an
approving nod, which made Bernat glad to learn that his suggestion was born out of sound tactical instinct rather than petulance, as he’d originally thought. “Can you still run on that leg?” she asked.

  “Perfectly well, if I ignore the excruciating pain.”

  She nodded gravely and set everyone to finding wood for making a fire, which the party gathered primarily from splinters torn from window transoms. They piled it up, covered it with a dusting of loose gunpowder, and lit it with a musket’s flint.

  With the fire going, Bernat glanced around the corner, then motioned Jutes and Pesha to make their dash across the street. He took a last look at the defenders before yielding the position to Josette.

  Josette steadied her rifle against the corner of the house, while Bernat stood by with a double handful of cartridges. To take his cue, Bernat didn’t watch her trigger finger, nor the lock of the rifle, but her nearer eye. When he saw in it that she was about to shoot, he tossed the cartridges onto the little fire, and her shot came just in the middle of a sputtering series of bangs. Without pausing to admire his timing, he took her empty rifle and clapped a musket into her hand. He loaded while she aimed, pausing only long enough to trade another loaded musket for a spent one each time she fired. By the time she expended their supply of muskets, he had the rifle loaded, and handed it over.

  From the quick glance Josette cast back along the access street, he guessed this would be the last shot before they retreated, so he gathered up their arms. The moment she fired, she called out, “Fall back!” and turned to run down the street.

  The Vins burst onto the street in a mass, at least a dozen of them crowding into the lane and pounding down it with a whooping battle cry. Bernat ran faster than he had ever run before, injured leg or no.

 

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