by Fire
From the bow of the Amaranth, Mir’s first glimpse of the embassy was a column of black smoke splitting the horizon.
Abelard tapped the rail and made a warding gesture. He’d been withdrawn for the last two days, stoic and given to monosyllables. Now he looked from the smoke to Mir with concern. “Someone’s really after you, aren’t they?”
“They lost my trail at Cliff’s End. So someone must have telegraphed ahead to where they thought I’d be....” She thought of the agent in the hospital she’d left crippled but alive, and she fell silent.
Dogwood produced a telescope from the folds of her dress and glassed the horizon. “Tell me, love, what was the Lady’s troop complement in Lycen?”
“Seventy-two of Dalton’s Fusiliers,” she said automatically. “And a dozen cavalry.” Enough, by conventional doctrine, to hold the embassy grounds for days against anything but artillery. And Dogwood did not need to know about the modified naval cannon mounted in concealed batteries around the embassy’s lower levels.
Behind them, Captain Sharpe was unleashing an auctioneer’s hail of commands, and the Amaranth banked in response, climbing, her sails snapping to billow opposite her motion. For the first time, Mir noticed that they were sailing against the wind. She replayed her memories of the Windhover and a half-dozen other airships, and yes, she’d often seen the sails bowed the wrong way. This was the first time the sight had seemed unusual.
Lycen drew nearer. The embassy was a heap of smoldering rubble, its white arches broken, its grounds cratered and strewn with the dead.
“Abelard,” Dogwood said. “Your assessment?”
He shook his head. “I’m no military man.”
“Mir?”
Mir took a deep breath and fiddled with her harness and straps to hide the tremor in her hands. Lycen was a choice posting. The deputy station chief was—had been—a close friend in her last years of training. She’d even carried a bit of a torch for him. Was he one of those unrecognizable bodies?
“Mir.”
She shut out the memories; spoke: “See the blast damage to the smaller arches? Those were on the top floors. Between that and the cratering right to the inner edge of the walls, I’d say the embassy took plunging fire from heavy cannon.” She tried to count craters, gave up. “Dozens of shells, maybe more. Incendiary and explosive.”
Dogwood nodded. “That’s one possibility. There’s another, and from our rather precipitous ascent, I’d say it’s occurred to young Captain Sharpe as well.”
“And that is...?”
“They were bombed from an airship.”
Abelard inhaled sharply. “The Lady of Situations has never crossed the Company. We’d have no reason to do this.”
You mean she never crossed the Company until four days ago, Mir didn’t say. When one of her couriers killed the Windhover.
Dogwood handed Abelard the spyglass. “If I may point out the peculiar absence of activity in the city itself? One would expect panic or mass egress or perhaps looting. But I don’t see a soul stirring anywhere in the city, do you?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”
There were no signs of counter-battery fire from the embassy—no signs of any resistance at all. No fires in the city; no breaks in its walls.
A few old rumors about the Lemurian Engineers began to congeal in Mir’s head, the sort of ghost stories the warfare instructors told to drive home the distinction between tactical, strategic, and political capabilities. Accounts of noxious vapors and aerosols derived from seawater or phosphor; chemical and alchemical agents that could kill in minutes and linger for days or weeks. Weapons useless on a battlefield but perfectly suited to instilling terror in a populace. A reminder that however useful the Lemurian Engineers were, they would be dangerous if they ever became political....
She plucked the spyglass from Abelard’s hand and trained it on the bodies sprawled in the streets. No birds circled above them. No stray dogs gathered to worry at the corpses. A pair of wagons were stopped in an intersection, their mules dead in the traces.
“They gassed the city,” she heard herself say. Abelard and Dogwood were speaking, but the words echoed in her mind, drowning them out. They gassed the city. Whoever had attacked Lycen had done away with the embassy and tens of thousands of witnesses in a single stroke. It was an act of brutality and excessive violence born of desperation, of pure panic and a wild disregard for collateral damage. It reached beyond the edges of her imagination.
It was also hauntingly familiar.
She thought of the lightning siphon, of how at least one Lemurian had foreseen a future in which they might need to bring down their own airships. Of how strange it was that a lightning siphon had been included among her equipment at all. A Lemurian weapon....
In her mind, a piece clicked into place. “The booklets—they have something to do with Lemuria.”
Dogwood cocked her head. “A shrewd guess, and one possibility. I’d need to examine them to be sure.”
“Never going to happen.” She pointed at the smoking ruin below. “This is an act of war.”
“Not my act, love.”
Mir was spared replying by a shout from astern: “Airship, bearing one-seven-two, elevation zero-nine, range eight thousand or more.”
“Dead sunward.” Abelard said. “Bad manners.”
Dogwood brushed her fingers over her rapier’s hilt. “More than bad manners, I’m afraid. Mir, I believe you’d best check on the captain. I do believe your rapport might be adequate to support a bit more of the truth of our circumstances. Come along, Abelard; I shall need your assistance with my luggage.”
Rapport, Mir thought, fighting down annoyance at Dogwood’s implication. Sharpe’s directness was refreshing, that was all. And he had kind eyes, at least when he troubled to look at anything nearer than ten miles.
She slipped away, heading for the stern while trying to stay clear of the crew’s shifting lines. The Amaranth kept climbing, but there was a precarity in her attitude, as though she might heel over and dive at any moment. Her captain had the same quality in his expression. Still, when Mir climbed the ladder to the quarterdeck, no one told her to leave.
“Miss Mir,” he said, not turning. “Expecting trouble?”
“Always. Dogwood thinks the embassy was bombed from the air.”
Another shout from the stern lookout: “Constant bearing, closing range. Range is seventy-five hundred.”
Sharpe uncapped a speaking tube. “Colors?”
“No colors, Captain.” A pause. “There’s something wrong with her. Some kind of contraption on her decks. Never seen anything like it. Too far away to make out details.”
Mir squinted at the dot in the distance. Seventy-five hundred yards—well over four miles. “Please tell me you have some kind of hidden gundeck.”
Sharpe shook his head. “Do you know how much a cannon weighs?”
“Don’t give me that, Captain. The Windhover had cannon. Well, something like mortars, at least.”
He gave her an appraising look, and she found herself blushing. His faraway expression faded smoothly into perfect focus. “Very well. We don’t have any air-to-air armament because there’s not a captain alive who’d fire on another airship. We don’t have air-to-ground because I don’t take those commissions.”
Again, the voice from the tube: “Seven thousand yards. She’s in a shallow dive, flatsail spread, riding gravity down. Still no colors. Doing a dead-on flying squirrel, Captain.”
Sharpe was still staring at Mir. “You’re someone, aren’t you?”
Lying seemed pointless by now. Time to see whether Dogwood was right about their rapport. “A courier for the Duchess Madeleine Lewis.”
“Oh, her? Huh.” He jerked his chin toward the dot almost lost against the glare of the late afternoon sun. “Thoughts?”
“I’m carrying a package everyone on the continent seems to want. It has something to do with Lemuria.” She bit her lip, thought for a moment. “It’d be hard to find if they
shot us down.”
A puff of smoke from the dot. Then the report of the cannon, dulled and stretched by distance. The shell sailed below the Amaranth an instant later, howling.
“But maybe they don’t care. In related news, I think you’re wrong about one of your counterparts, Captain.” She clipped on another safety line, paused, and replayed the last sentence in her head. “And I’m starting to sound like Dogwood.”
Sharpe’s voice stayed level even as his volume rose to carry above the startled shouts of the crew. “Dive. Make our angle minus ten, that’s minus ten, reef sail, and give the Amaranth her head.” He caught Mir by the shoulders and checked her harness and lines. She could smell soap and sweat on his neck. “They’re higher. That gives them an energy advantage. After we’re forced to level out, they’ll close the range even if we’re evenly matched.”
A voice from the speaking tube: “I recognize her, Captain. She’s the Dancer’s Folly. Traeger’s ship.” A pause. “But she’s not moving like the Folly.”
Sharpe snapped out a spyglass and raised it. “Can’t be. The Folly went down in the Screaming Sixties last year.”
Dogwood appeared on the quarterdeck with the longest rifle Mir had ever seen slung across her back. “Went down or vanished, Captain? There’s a considerable difference.”
Sharpe mumbled something unintelligible and raised the glass again. “She’s the Folly. No question. Yes, there’s something on her quarterdeck... I can’t make it out. A machine of some kind, though.”
Dogwood unslung the rifle and stripped the cover from the telescope mounted above the barrel. “Were I a gambling woman, I might posit the device to be an interface for direct control of the ship. In fact, I find myself obliged to bet my life on it.”
“If you ever bet,” Mir said, “I bet you cheat.”
“Why, yes. It’s how one wins. Permission to engage the enemy, Captain?”
“With that?”
Dogwood held up a bullet the size of her thumb. The tip was hollow and domed with a crystalline bead. “These rounds are tipped with an exceptionally expensive and specialized herbicide. If one strikes the Folly’s core, the ship will be incapacitated or deceased in a few minutes. Probably. You understand, I hope, the limited opportunities for testing.”
Sharpe turned to the bow, where Abelard was back to peering down at the ruins of the embassy.
Dogwood’s voice softened. “Her captain is already dead, Mr. Sharpe. I suspect the Folly wishes she were.”
Sharpe cursed with sudden violence. Then: “Go. Set up by the stern lookout. Be careful with those rounds. And Ms. Dogwood? We’ll have words later about what you’ve brought aboard my ship.”
Mir watched her go. “So they’re alive,” she said to Sharpe. “Airships.”
“The part that matters.” His voice was going distant again. “What you see is just a shell built by the Engineers. The masts are spliced into her spines, the hull plates into—”
Another shell screamed past, closer this time.
“They’ll find our range soon,” Sharpe said. “Miss Mir, I need you off the quarterdeck. Keep at least two safety lines secured.”
She obeyed. As she descended the ladder, she imagined she could feel the great, slow pulse of the airship even through the sawed and planed wood that made up her skin. The pulse was rising.
The next four hours were a study in boredom and terror. The Folly closed the range slowly, her shells arcing nearer, and the Amaranth began to slalom in broad curves.
“Trading speed for lower hit probability,” Abelard told her when she noticed the vessel slowing. “Maneuvers like this always shed airspeed. Sharpe’s seeing if he can draw them into range of that Dogwood woman’s rifle. Airship poison.” He spat. “I’d never have let her aboard with it.”
A shell burst fifty yards to port. Something stung Mir’s cheek, and when she touched the spot, her fingers came away red. Mir showed Abelard the blood. “That poison might save our lives.”
She gripped the rail as the ship swept through a sudden turn northward. The Folly turned to cut her off, gaining another few hundred yards, but the maneuver was slow, sluggish, and the Folly wobbled and bucked before settling on the new course. Mir could just see men scrambling around the strange engine fixed to the deck, pulling levers and twisting wheels.
Abelard grunted. “They’ve taken the gambit. Not smart enough to stand off and wait to get lucky. Gadget’s not perfect, neither. Rough control. Nothing like having a captain.”
“I... don’t know what that means, Abelard.”
“Figure you’re about to.”
Then the Amaranth began to dance. She swept up through a mad, whirling climb, then heeled over and plunged, timbers creaking, wind howling in her masts.
At first, Mir gripped the rail so hard her muscles burned, but then she realized her balance was unaffected. She kept her feet effortlessly, even releasing the rail to spread her arms and feel the speed of their passage rushing through her fingers. The crew were shouting down at their pursuer as the Folly overshot below them, a blend of insults and taunts and wordless challenges. Mir joined in, alive with the raw joy of flight and the flood of adrenaline following each shellburst. Less than a minute later, the other airship ceased fire, unable to keep the Amaranth within the plane of her gundeck.
Abelard remained crouched and held tight to a stanchion, smiling strangely. “We’re bearing north. Canny, our Sharpe. Headed for Lovers’ Valley. They’re faster in level flight, but we’ll out-turn them in there. Run them right into a wall or a rock pillar.” His eyes traced over Mir’s spread hands. She dropped them, suddenly feeling like she’d given something away. He lowered his voice. “You’ve been coping well enough.”
“I have excellent balance.”
A moment of quiet, the crew around them hastening to secure cargo and lines loosened by the violence of the last maneuver. Then Abelard spoke. Mir scarcely heard him. His words slid through her mind, frictionless, and she found herself remembering.
For time beyond reckoning, it tumbled through the dark between worlds, a miles-wide tangle of branches and leaves spread like sails, in search of a likely star.
Then it found one.
It fell for centuries, tacking hard against the stellar wind toward an orb of stone and iron and water, until its leaves burned away and left it plunging unguided down gravity’s curve.
It struck the atmosphere over Lemuria-that-was with all the force of a fallen angel, which perhaps it was. The thunderclap that followed deafened for a thousand miles around.
Those who saw its track and lived christened it the Bolide.
Lemuria became a cracked land, a burned land, a ruined expanse of blackened stumps and the scoured foundations of what future explorers would call wizard’s towers, and none lived who could prove them wrong. A vast crater glowed for days after the impact like a luminous eye veined with lines of glass and seeping lava.
And the Bolide was broken, its branches vaporized or buried or scattered.
But a few of its seeds survived and remembered. And when the explorers who would comprise both the Company and the Engineers came at last to Lemuria, a few were found, and a few were befriended.
“Made to fly, the seeds are,” Abelard was saying when Mir came back to herself. “Thistledown for the whole universe. Caldwell always said that we only saw their shadows, that most of a shipseed was someplace else. Someplace with different winds. It’s why they need a partner to stay here, to fly right. Somebody who can see our world, feel it, show them what to do. It’s not just anybody, either. There’s not a soul in ten thousand can bond with a shipseed. Takes time, too. Weeks. Or I always figured it did.” He finally turned to her. “It’s permanent. Takes over a bit of your brain or some such. And exclusive. One airship to a captain, one captain to an airship. They go mad otherwise.”
“The ships?”
“The people. The ships... they go blind, mostly. Wait for the next captain to come along.”
Lover
s’ Valley spread out beneath them, a broad canyon of cream- and rust-colored rock broken by high pillars. The Folly opened fire again. A shell struck an outcrop and blew shards of rock across the bow.
The danger around them seemed distant, unreal. Mir spoke: “I’ve been having dreams. Like I could feel the wind, only it wasn’t just the wind....”
The sharp crack of Dogwood’s rifle sounded behind them.
“I’m headed astern.” Abelard said, rising and clipping his harness to an overhead line. “Only ever seen one murder before. And Mir? You’d best keep those dreams to yourself for now.”
She followed him. They were amidships when a shell struck home and blew out a chunk of hull. Pain clawed into Mir’s head and side, and she fell, clenching her jaw against a scream and clutching at her vest, at the parcels secreted beneath, expecting to find bloodied flesh and shredded paper.
But she was uninjured, and Abelard was hauling her to her feet. “Hold on,” he snapped.
The Amaranth was slewing, swinging into the shadow of a pillar then climbing hard to crest the top.
The Dancer’s Folly appeared not four hundred yards away, black against the setting sun.
Dogwood’s rifle spoke again, and the Folly convulsed. It shuddered and spun down, sails snapping against the wind, crew running for parachutes or lifelines or the controls of their deck-mounted engine. None had time to save themselves. The Folly struck the pillar’s base with a grating crunch that was not at all the sound Mir had expected.
The Amaranth climbed in a slow arc. Mir clutched at her side, breathing hard, staring into the stillness. The Folly lay broken below them, and sorrow blossomed in Mir’s mind, along with in inexplicable impression of shattered wings.
They landed half a mile from the crash to take stock. The damage to the Amaranth’s hull was minimal, something Mir knew even before Sharpe made the announcement. The ship would heal in time. But two of the crew were dead; one from a sliver of shrapnel in his neck, the other from a long fall through the gash in the hull. Both bodies lay beneath tarps on the deck. Sharpe and his crew had insisted on finding the fallen man even as the light failed.
