by Robyn Bennis
“Damn fine work, damn fine work,” Emery said. “You led the force that blew the magazine? Damn fine work! Made all the difference.”
“Well, it wasn’t just me, you know.” It hadn’t been him at all, but long experience had taught him that he should never stretch modesty to excess, when one could make a fair compromise with reality. “The townsfolk and Captain Dupre did their part.”
“Dupre did admirably,” he said. “Damn shame about her mother.”
Bernat had been wondering how he was going to work up to that, and was relieved that Emery broached the subject first. “Has she been found yet?”
“The mother? Oh yes, of course. We learned her location from that woman with the arm wound … Pika?”
“Pesha,” Bernat said.
“That’s the one, poor soul. She told us where to find her. She’s in the town dungeon now—can you believe they still have one?—and she’ll hang in the morning. So will some of this lot, if we can find an eyewitness.”
Bernat followed his pointing finger to three Vin captains, their colonel, and Major Dvakov—his face swollen from the wound Bernat had inflicted.
“There are reports that one or more of them was planning to shoot the prisoners,” Emery said, “but no one can agree on which of them it was, or if they really did it. You don’t know anything about that, do you?”
Dvakov was currently arguing with Colonel Okura, demanding his full rights as a gentleman and a prisoner of war, to parole, to lawyers, and to due process. Bernat walked up to him and grinned, which shut the bastard up in an instant. A silence settled across the gathered officers of the 132nd Garnian and the 64th Vinzhalian alike. They all seemed to know what was coming, and that Bernat would damn Major Dvakov with a word.
Major Dvakov stood with slumped shoulders, waiting for the hammer to fall. Bernat just grinned viciously, stuck out his hand, and said, “Lord Bernat Hinkal, sir. Your servant, and an honor to meet you, after you fought so bravely. Have you had a chance to have breakfast yet?”
Dvakov tried to speak, but it only came out as a jumble of subvocal sounds and unconnected syllables.
Bernat turned to Colonel Okura and shook his head. “Do you mean to say, it’s after lunch, and you haven’t invited these gentlemen to breakfast? I’m surprised at you. War is no excuse for incivility.”
* * *
JOSETTE DIDN’T HAVE to ask where the Ayezderhau came down. She could see the enormous envelope over the rooftops from the moment she went through the gate, and could see as well that it was securely moored, and still buoyant with at least some of its luftgas.
She took the long way getting to it, so that she could walk past the crater of the Vin magazine and see whether it had revealed the foundations of one of the old city walls—of which she’d found four out of a fabled six when she was a girl.
As she got closer, the evidence of the explosion grew. Five blocks away, bricks and clods of earth lay scattered in the street. Four blocks now, and larger stones had punched holes in roofs or buried themselves in gardens. Within a few blocks of the now-simmering plume, so close that the heat of the blast still soaked the cobbles underfoot, once-subterranean boulders had been flung outward in radiating lines. Along these lines, there was nothing but razed buildings, each tipped with the offending missile, wherever it finally came to rest.
Within a block of the explosion, the neighborhood was a smoking hellscape, and she had to slow down to pick her way through the buckled, unstable streets. She reached the lip of the crater and peered into it. No hint of an ancient wall could be seen in the wide swath of Durum the blast had excavated. But as she stared into it, it occurred to her that the crater might prove a boon for the town, if they took to discarding their trash here, instead of stuffing it into neighboring homes. She made her way around it and onward toward Ayezderhau.
When she came into the shadow of the great airship’s envelope, she found Jutes perched on the hurricane deck, holding tight to the rail to keep from sliding off the steeply angled wicker. The deck had wedged between two buildings when it came down, so that a person could now walk from the rooftop of one building, cross the inclined deck, and go through the second-floor window of the building across the street. This second-floor window was how the townsfolk were getting on and off the ship, as they carried loads of miscellaneous ballast to keep it weighed down.
She went up that way herself, to the second-floor room that served as a gangplank onto the captured ship. A townswoman sped past her carrying a basket of cobblestones, handed them through the window to another townsman on Ayezderhau’s hurricane deck, and then saluted Josette on her way out. Josette returned the salute out of habit.
She stuck her head out the window to find Ayezderhau’s bref guns well secured, some of the crew and an ensign sitting with their backs against the far rail, and Jutes standing at the companionway, shouting directions to his ad hoc prize crew about where they should place ballast.
“Well in hand, Sergeant?” she asked.
Jutes grinned back at her, not bothering to salute. “Well in hand, sir. We’re secure fore and aft, and I’m re-ballasting to keep her from settling against any of these buildings and doing herself more damage.”
“The luftgas?”
“Saved almost everything from bag five forward, and maybe half the gas in bag four. Looks like their steamjack’s near enough to ours, too, that we can finally get the parts we’ve been needing. ’Course we’ll have to tear their steamjack apart to get at those parts, which means we’d actually come out ahead if we just renamed this ship Mistral, and passed the real Mistral off as the capture.” There was a sly twinkle in his eyes that confirmed he was joking.
Good thing, too. That twinkle might have saved his life. “I’m going to forget you said that, Sergeant, since I could never forgive it.”
He smirked and said only, “Sir.”
“Their captain?”
Jutes shook his head.
She looked at the Vin ensign, the only officer among the prisoners huddled on deck. “The captain was in frame two when the tail went,” the young ensign said, speaking in thickly accented Garnian. “He was first to fall, because he rushed back there trying to save us.”
Josette swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. “I’m sorry.”
“I was on an airship at Canard, too,” the Vin ensign said, her eyes burning with hate. “So that’s both my captains you’ve killed.”
Josette was silent for a while, as Jutes looked to her for permission to quiet the ensign. She shook her head at him, then met the girl’s eyes, saying, “It’s no easy business we’re in.” She looked at Jutes. “Make sure they’re not mistreated.”
She was downstairs and nearly out the front door, when she heard her sergeant’s boots coming down the stairs. “Wanted you to know, sir,” he said, lowering his voice when a townswoman passed with a basket of cobblestones, “just on the off chance that you didn’t already, that I ain’t gonna tell anyone about your…”
“Dumpling heritage?” Josette asked, quite loud enough to be overheard. “Thank you. I don’t think we can keep a lid on it, but I appreciate the sentiment.”
“Do you need, uh … That is to say, is there…”
Josette couldn’t find the words to Jutes’s question any more than he could, but she knew the question nevertheless. “Someone once asked me why I do this job,” she said. “I’ve thought back on it from time to time, but I never could come up with a good answer.”
By the look in Jutes’s eyes as he cast them up at the envelope of the Ayezderhau, she could see that he was familiar enough with the feeling.
“Today, I’ve been asking myself, ‘If I’d known I was a Vin, would I be doing it for them instead?’” She took a breath. “I wish the answer was as elusive. My mother was wrong about me. I would have … understood, whatever that means. I idolized my father. If he’d told me he was from the moon, I’d probably call myself a Moon-Woman. If he’d confessed to being a Vin, it wouldn’t
even be a question.”
Jutes hadn’t been expecting that. His eyes whipped down, and studied her face for some time before finally accepting the truth of her comment. He grinned with a nervousness that was almost entirely affected—almost. “I saw some spare Vin uniforms in ship’s stores,” he said, pointing a thumb at Ayezderhau’s keel. “I could put a couple of their airmen to work at tailoring ’em for you.”
She made a real effort to not smirk, but in the end it was futile. “I don’t think it will be necessary. I swore an oath to Garnia, and I’ll honor that oath until I die. Still odd to think that it could have just as easily been to Vinzhalia.”
“Loyalty’s a damn peculiar thing,” Jutes, the only Brandheimian in Durum, said softly.
“A damn peculiar thing,” Josette repeated. She was just heading out the door, and he heading back up the stairs, when she spun about and asked, “Jutes, do I have any Vin in my accent?”
Jutes looked genuinely surprised by the question. He shook his head and said, “A touch of Durum, sir, which I’ve always found quite pleasant, but no Vin that I’ve noticed.”
She gave him a nod and headed straight for the tavern. There, she ordered ale in the largest mug they had on the premises, laid her two letters to Roland out in front of her, and drank until she didn’t care who saw them.
Soon enough, she knew what to do. It was all very clear cut. There was only one viable path forward when it came to Roland, and all she’d required to see it clearly was four mugs of beer, a crushing betrayal, and decades of lies—it was a wonder she hadn’t tried that earlier. It all came down to the moment when he let slip that he’d fallen in love with her. The fact of the admission was not the issue, for by now she was convinced of its sincerity. It was the theatrics of it, timed to best throw her off balance, and so allow him to capture her. It had almost worked, but she now realized that she’d had quite enough of that sort of thing, and so took up the letter that began, “Roland, I am sorry to say I don’t love you,” and finished writing it.
She hardly had it signed when a score of young soldiers burst through the door and claimed this tavern in the name of the king. They were checked only briefly by the chagrin of the tavern keeper, and checked not at all by the presence of an airship captain who could have them all arrested.
Indeed, Josette’s presence only inspired more enthusiasm. One young man sat down in the chair next to hers and asked, “How many women aboard your ship, ma’am?”
Before she could answer, another sat down on the other side of her and said, “I was going to volunteer for the air corps, myself, but I have this weird shoulder.” He demonstrated what seemed to her a perfectly ordinary shoulder in every respect, by holding his arm in the air and stretching it until the joints popped in an entirely typical manner.
A third man sat down opposite her on the bench, set another mug of ale in front of her, hunched forward, and pushed it until it nearly fell into her lap—all the while staring silently. While he was at it, a fourth sat down and asked, “Does your face hurt, ma’am?”
Josette folded her letter, slipped it into her jacket pocket, and said, “All right then, who wants to get a game of catch ten going?”
Over the next several hours and dozens of hands of cards, Josette took a fair amount of the men’s wealth. They didn’t seem to resent it, however, or perhaps even to notice it in the midst of their revelries. They behaved rudely, got drunk as fast as they could, made inappropriate advances, and invented all sorts of improbable stories that exaggerated their own personal heroism. In other words, they had at last become proper Garnian soldiers.
Bernat came in as dusk approached, just ahead of another two soldiers from the 132nd. He leaned across Josette’s table and said, “You seem to be enjoying yourself.”
“What’s not to enjoy?” she said, and stuffed a handful of pine nuts from a nearby bowl into her mouth. Speaking around them, she said in a voice quite loud enough to be heard from one end of the tavern to the other, and perhaps even from the street outside, “I’ve liberated a town I hate, I’ve made a bunch of university brats into killers, it turns out I’m a Vin Dumpling, and in the morning they’re going to hang my mother.” At the last item, she swallowed and pointed at him. “Bernie, I’ve been waiting ages for someone to do that.”
At this, the soldiers at the table set down their cards, stood, and shuffled away.
Josette looked sourly at their backs. “What? You don’t wanna play anymore, just because we’re celebrating my mom gettin’ hanged?” She threw her hand of cards at them. “To hell with you.”
Bernat sat down opposite her, tilted his head to the side, and asked, “How much have you drunk?”
“Well, there’s these two here,” she said, gesturing at the empty mugs in front of her. “And one or two others that fell and rolled under the table. That’s all.” Under his withering stare, she added, “Since the last time the bartender came around.”
Bernat took a mug and sniffed the dregs. “Thank God the ale here is watered down, or you’d be dead.”
She gesticulated at him. “Bernie, I don’t need weak ale to not die. I not … die … every … all of the…” She trailed off, puzzled for a way out of the grammatical maze she’d become lost in.
Bernat patted her hand consolingly and said, “Some day, great men will discover how words fit together. For now, my dear, don’t trouble yourself with such inscrutable questions.”
After a few more moments searching for a breakthrough, Josette nodded her agreement.
“The question foremost on my mind,” he said, leaning in and lowering his voice, “is how many more drinks you’ll need—if indeed any, and if indeed there’s anything left that you haven’t already drunk—to help me break into the dungeon and set your mother free.”
Josette laughed, only stopping when she realized he was serious, and then she took a breath and laughed for a while longer. He sat quietly through it all, elbows on the table and hands folded in front of his chin. When it was clear he wasn’t going to offer anything more, she said, “We’d never get the door open.”
He tossed something onto the table. When she managed to focus on it, she found that it was a key.
“Where did you get that?”
“I stole it, of course.”
“Even with a key, she’ll be guarded.”
Bernat pointed to the two men he’d come in with, now playing nine-pins. “Those are the guards over there. There won’t be anyone else along to replace them until two in the morning.”
She was quiet for so long, she worried Bernat might think she’d fallen asleep with her eyes open. But if he did, it didn’t change his countenance. He only sat there, wearing a placid, concerned look on his face. Finally she said, her voice a great deal more stern and sober than the last time she spoke, “Then why haven’t you done it already?”
“Well,” he said, his eyes darting away and then back to her, “it’s the look of the thing, isn’t it? The job wants two.”
“She betrayed the town.”
“Yes.”
“Twice.”
“Yes.”
“And she gave the Vins the plans for my airship.”
“She did.”
“Airmen may die because of that.”
“Yes.”
“People have already died because of her treachery.”
“I know. I was there, if you recall.”
“And it doesn’t bother you?”
“It bothers me a great deal. Perhaps more than anything has ever bothered me, in what I can now see was a rather sheltered life. Yet none of that will be changed by a hangman.”
She looked away. “So do it yourself. I won’t stop you.”
“The job wants two.”
She rolled her eyes up to the ceiling, and kept them there. “How does it take two people to break someone out of an unguarded cell, when you already have the key?”
“The job wants two” was all he said.
She looked back at him and put
on the widest, best smile she could manage under the circumstances. “Then it won’t be done,” she said.
He sat and watched her for a little while, then picked up the key and slipped it into a pocket. “Very well,” he said. “That’s something of a relief, to be honest. That is to say, I could never escape suspicion if she turned up missing. Not after we made love.”
Josette maintained her composure.
“And not just once, but over and over again.”
She chewed on a pine nut and looked away.
“And in such depraved and degrading positions. Yet so inventive! I can see where you get your sense of innovation.”
His only reaction when she threw the bowl of pine nuts at him was to close his eyes. As he opened them again, he remained stone-faced as the nuts scattered all about him.
“May we change the subject?” Josette asked, quite mildly.
“By all means,” he said, rubbing the spot where the bowl had struck his forehead.
She picked a loose nut from the table. “So,” she said, nibbling on it, “what else has occupied your day?”
“You’ll be pleased to know that Pesha will live,” he said, likewise picking and nibbling a nut. “And it looks like Corne will keep his leg, as long as infection doesn’t set in.”
“Heny’s damn good with that sort of thing, whatever one may say about her other predilections.”
Bernat snorted. “Whatever some may say, you mean.”
“Some, indeed,” she answered. “By my accounting, the defenders of that unnatural predilection are made up of a turncoat and the foppish lover of a turncoat, neither of whom I’d call a good character witness.”
“Then I suppose you don’t realize that Jutes—” Bernat stopped cold, as something went on inside his head. It was some internal struggle that Josette might have been able to piece together, if she’d only been a touch closer to sober. “Jutes admires them both very much,” he finally finished.
“Sergeant Jutes admires them?” she asked. That threw her. “Well, if someone as upright and above-board as Jutes has that opinion … Perhaps I’ll have to think a bit more about it.”
