“Sir,” he whispered, as the other councillors drew closer, “there’s been a sighting in the North. The Cuttlefolk, they’ve massed an army. They have come around the Margin, two days, maybe three and the city will be under siege. Already their messengers are attacking dirigibles and Aerokin.”
Staid cleared his throat; fumbled in his pockets for a cigar. He needed time, but there just wasn’t enough of it. Had there ever really been?
There, he thought, fingers clenching around the cigar. He found his lighter. They watched him, as though he could really do anything now.
“It’s beginning, as we always knew it would, for us as it did for all the metropolises of Shale.” He lit the cigar, clamped it between his teeth and puffed once, blowing out smoke. “And not at all the same, there will be no lovely view of the Obsidian Curtain for Mirrlees. The Roil’s reach has lengthened, as we feared. It is time to evacuate the city as best we can. Let the bastards have it. Ready or not, we’re going to the Underground.”
“What about the refugees?”
“If there are any, well, they’ll be in for a nasty surprise. Though, if they survived Chapman this little misadventure will be nothing to them. Gentlemen, we are all refugees now. Every one of us.”
Outside, it had stopped raining. Already the clouds were clearing. Yes, the end would come swiftly.
He looked to his Council and laughed, a hollow petulant sound that widened their eyes with shock. Stade glared at his councillors. Every single one of them would shoulder this burden. They had fought tooth and claw to reach these positions. Well, they had their power, now they would face, as he had faced, the consequences.
Responsibility.
Roil take them all. Roil take them all and him.
And, at that moment, he was almost certain it would.
Chapter 48
One of history’s great surprises is that so many survived the hasty evacuation of Chapman. Such had been the violence of the city’s conquest that all previous plans of escape had been discarded. Though some reflect that the absence of Buchan and Whig had much to do with this, it is undeniable that there was no slow and steady progress, but mad flight.
Yet again, the Roil revealed hitherto unknown resources. No one expected to be pursued and so rapidly.
• Deighton Histories
THE SKY ABOVE SHALE, DISTANCE FROM ROIL INDETERMINATE
The wind struck David as a capricious creature. No matter that it was driving them all north, it also seemed intent of taking each airship and Aerokin a slightly different way north. It scattered the escapees of the Festival of Float, and carried them on separate breaths and eddies. Within a few hours, he could no longer see any of the other craft, except one. Blake’s Aerokin, the Arrogant Spice. It was oddly comforting to know the great pilot and his craft were so close, not to mention the heavier armoury it contained.
Storm clouds scudded in, and Kara Jade warmed the interior of the Roslyn Dawn, dropped some ballast (David didn’t ask how this was done, but it stank) and lifted them above the storm. But not by much, it was as though they skimmed the surface of some angry conflict of electrical giants.
Watching lightning beneath his feet was an eerie experience, and one not at all comforting, particularly after the sun had set. It seemed as though they sailed a storm-tossed sea, and in a way they did, only it was a sea seeded with dynamite. They drifted over and through odd cloudscapes, visible only when the lightning flashed below; dark columns of cloud; weird weightless grottoes through which Kara and the Dawn navigated.
David had never seen such things nor imagined that they would ever exist above the mundane slab of drizzling grey that roofed his city. His discomfort soon faded. The beautiful sky enchanted him, almost enough that he could momentarily forget everything that had happened to bring him here. Cadell and Margaret were trapped in their own thoughts – in fact both looked like they were trying to sleep – certainly not intent on the world outside.
Which was why he saw the dark shape first.
For a moment, he wasn’t sure what it was he saw. Perhaps another airship, only it moved too quickly. He watched it a while, until he realised that it was getting closer.
“What’s that?” he asked Margaret, who sat nearest him, nudging her with an elbow.
Margaret moaned and elbowed him back. She opened her eyes so slowly that David was frightened she would miss it.
She blinked at him. “What?”
David pointed. “That,” he said. “Just west of the Arrogant Spice .” Margaret peered into the darkening sky.
“Ah, I see it! I don’t know, but it’s approaching quickly. Very quickly.”
David called Kara Jade over. She brought with her a brass telescope, which proved hardly necessary, for when she arrived it was clearly visible.
“Some kind of metal airship,” she said. “I’ve not seen its kind before. The Roslyn Dawn is new bred, but this is something else altogether. And rocket powered.” She breathed out enviously. “What I wouldn’t give to possess that speed.”
David was almost tempted to say something about new bred Aerokin but decided the better of it because, as they watched, the ship raced towards the Arrogant Spice. Blake had obviously seen it; his Aerokin had begun to descend towards the cloudbank. The iron ship immediately changed its angle of approach.
“Or that sort of manoeuvrability,” Kara Jade said.
A brief exchange of fire followed. The Spice’s heavy guns boomed followed by the spat, spat, spat of the smaller iron ship’s weaponry. The iron ship drew first blood.
Flames ran up the Spice’s skin a blazing sheath that drove their shadows hard against the interior of the Roslyn Dawn. The Arrogant Spice’s screams echoed over to them.
But this was not the end of the exchange.
The iron ship fired once more, and the Spice’s bioengines ignited with a bloody rupturing. The Aerokin began at once to tilt, nose down towards the ground.
The Roslyn Dawn groaned in sympathy.
The iron ship looped around and rammed into the Spice’s control gondola. It paused there for a moment, or hovered, as though inspecting the contents of the airship, or feasting upon them.
When it was done, it pulled away in a burst of fire: blood and flame jetting from the wound.
Blake – it had to be Blake, his beard flaming, wielding a steel bar or a sword – had clambered onto the iron ship’s nose. He swung his weapon against the cockpit window once, twice, the distant cracking of the blows followed moments later.
The sight was at once absurd and terrible.
Blake got in two or three hard blows, cracking the windscreen but not breaking it. He took another swing, the iron ship dipped and looped. Unbalanced, he slid from its edge, his legs flipping up as he tumbled away into the clouds.
The Arrogant Spice was ablaze, all four engine nacelles ruined and its control gondola torn open. The beast had lost all its grandeur, its tilt deepened and its flagella hung limp and still, smoke streaming from its gondola and bioengines.
The iron ship rushed towards it. At the last moment, the Spice’s Flagella stiffened and lashed out. It grabbed the iron ship and together they fell.
“She’s going out fighting,” Kara said, pride and horror fighting for dominance in her voice.
But there was all too little fight left.
Fire flashed from the rear of the iron craft and it tore free of the Spice’s grip. The ship looped up and around lightning quick and crashed through the skin of the Spice. The explosion hit them like a thunderclap.
The Dawn howled.
Little remained of the Arrogant Spice but a dark cloud of flaming fragments tumbling down, down into the storm below.
Out of that dark cloud burst the iron ship.
Kara sobbed and howled and shook her fist at the ship. “No… that’s not right. There’s nothing in the sky that can do that.”
“Until now,” Margaret said, pulling free her rifle and sighting along it. The weapon hummed, the muzzle remained unw
arped. Not that it would be enough.
She activated one of her rime blades, tested the edge with her breath and watched it freeze. Margaret knew who they were looking for, and she would sooner die than let them take her. “Where will we fight the ship? Because you can’t outrun it.”
Kara Jade ran from the rear window to the cockpit controls, and began her consultation with the Dawn. “Can’t outrun it, but I’m damned if I’m going to make it easy.”
The gondola shuddered with the vibrations of bone gears clunking solidly into place and they dove down, the Roslyn Dawn shaking as it hit different streams of air, lurching this way and that.
“We’re heading into the storm.”
Fear beat its drums within him. Not again, David thought. All this running, and every time it’s something worse. He glanced over at Kara Jade. She had not looked this afraid when they were in the Roil.
Now she was frantic. Her and the Roslyn Dawn both.
“We’ve weapons to assault airships, even other aerokin, but nothing for an iron ship.”
He watched her check over her control panel – sweat dripping from her ashen brow – fingers dancing across the board, coaxing more power out of the bioengines, while trying to keep the Dawn calm.
“That’s as fast I dare push her. And I’m going to descend another five hundred feet. Maybe this iron ship will be afraid of all that lightning.”
David doubted that, but he knew he was terrified of it.
Margaret’s wan face gleamed with sweat and her eyes stared too brightly down at her hands, as though she did not know what to do.
“What’s wrong?” David asked.
“Everything,” she said. “David, I think they’re coming for me. That ship it’s my mother’s design, I know it. It’s looking for something. If it just wanted to kill, it wouldn’t have bothered ramming the gondola. Those weapons are powerful enough to destroy an Aerokin in minutes.”
“Nonsense,” David said. “You’re safe here. Well, safe as anywhere.” He couldn’t even make it sound convincing.
The iron ship veered towards them, obviously intent on proving him wrong.
Cadell stood in the aft of the Roslyn Dawn, watching the fast approaching ship.
“Margaret,” he said. “Could you join me please?”
They stood in quiet conversation for a moment. Margaret shook her head.
A blast of flame shot past the Aerokin. Kara returned the fire but her assessment of her weaponry was accurate. The Roslyn Dawn was not a battle craft, and her tiny ordnance bounced off the armoured airship to little effect.
“So what are we going to do about it?” Kara shouted back at them. “We’re an easy target.”
“Without a doubt,” Cadell said. “The very definition of an easy target.”
Kara Jade looked over at Margaret. “Should I just shoot him now?”
Margaret shrugged. “No need to waste the bullet,” she said quietly.
Cadell reached for a coil of rope by the doorifice, he gripped a loop of it with both hands and tugged it tight with a snap of his wrists – it cracked but did not give. “This strong?”
“It has to be. Light and strong: it’s for work in the air. The mothers wove that, they did.”
“Then it will serve.”
Kara Jade’s eyes widened, Cadell had managed to get under the bombast. “No… you’ve got to be kidding.”
“What?” David asked.
Kara shook her head. “He means to go out there,” she said.
Cadell tied the rope around his waist. There was a metal karabiner at the end of the rope. He attached it to a sturdy bar by the door and yanked. Satisfied, he touched the doorifice: it opened.
A cold wet wind blasted the interior of the cabin, papers scattered and the exhalation of the engine nacelles was suddenly deafening. The air, part engine, breath and storm, burned David’s lungs. Ice crystals formed against his skin.
“You can’t mean to do this,” David yelled. “It’s madness.”
Cadell’s shoulders slumped, and David had never seen him look so tired. “Madness is all that’s left to us,” he said. “Up here, the cold is on our side. It need only breach the iron ship’s defences for those ships to fall, and I intend to breach them. Kara Jade, you must keep us above that ship and if not above then as close as possible, closer than ever would be wise. I doubt they’ll trade shots with you, I should be something of a distraction.”
“I’ll do my best. Good luck, Old Man.”
“The ship’s almost below us,” he said. “I must go, now.”
Cadell, looked at David one last time, took a deep breath and leapt into the air: out in an arc that started gracefully and all too quickly became a tumble.
David watched horrified as Cadell plummeted. The tails of the Old Man’s morning coat lashed at the air. Cadell pulled himself into a ball then, at the last moment, he straightened, gained a modicum of control and landed on the roof of the ship.
Cadell crouched there a moment, David could see his lips moving, as he scrambled towards the window.
The iron ship fired another round. The Roslyn Dawn shrieked and began a slow dip.
“We’re too close,” yelled Kara Jade.
“We have to be!” David said. The Roslyn Dawn dropped.
“Are we falling?” David clutched at a rail by the window. Holding as tightly as he could, he peered out the open door. Bad idea. He couldn’t even see the ground, just darkness and wisps of cloud.
Kara grinned briefly. “Aerokin float, they do not fall. That was just a gust that caught us off guard,” she said. “Still, my darling’s wounded. I’m going to have to take a walk outside.”
Kara glanced over at Margaret. “You’ll have to put down your weapons.”
She dragged Margaret over to the controls and quickly showed her how to work them. “You said anyone could fly one of these, now’s your chance. Keep her steady, keep her calm, if it gets too rough I won’t be able to do anything.”
“I’ll keep her steady,” Margaret said. “You just get out there.”
Kara Jade snorted and grinned. She grabbed a mask, filled a bucket with some gel from a storage growth at the heart of the gondola, and dashed out the rear doorifice of the Roslyn Dawn. David watched her clamber up the side of the Aerokin with all the grace of someone who simply didn’t care they were thousands of feet above the ground. And as she climbed the iron ship rose too, until it was level with the Dawn.
Cadell had reached the scarred window of the ship, the rope a long umbilicus dipping between the Aerokin and the Old Man. David could see where he had bound the rope to the ship with ice. Then the ship plummeted and was lost to sight for a moment. The Aerokin shook and dropped to the left, throwing David to the floor.
He looked back at Margaret, hunched over the controls, cursing.
Someone was calling him. Kara Jade. He ran to the doorifice, Kara’s rope had tangled.
“What’s that pallid slip of a girlfriend of yours doing?” Kara shouted.
David was about to shout back that Margaret was not his girlfriend when a steel ball exploded in the air behind Kara. Kara Jade crashed forward, striking her head on one of the main linking struts. She tumbled backwards, held to the Aerokin only by her rope, and hung limply in space, blood spilling from her skull.
David stared wild-eyed down into the abyss of the sky. All he could see were clouds, and even they looked like they were a long way down. Such a terrible, terrible drop. Still he grabbed a rope, connected it to the rail and linked it to his waist, hoping that he had done it correctly.
He slipped on a mask. It was heavy, yanked at his hair and smelt faintly and ridiculously of onions. Kara had said they contained enough oxygen to last around half-an-hour. Surely more than enough, the idea of staying out there for longer than five minutes terrified him.
David crawled through the rubbery doorifice, and warmth gave way to cold.
Twice, the Roslyn Dawn dipped and fell, he held on so tightly that his knuckles w
ere in danger of popping out of his hands. Rope or no, David doubted his chances if he lost his grip. And, with every rise and fall, his ears popped painfully, no matter how often he cracked his jaw.
He grabbed a fist around Kara’s rope, and tugged it towards him, pulling her close. Kara Jade, blinked at him groggily.
“Good to see you,” she said, right into his ear. “But this is hardly the time or the…”
David winced at the blood streaming from a shallow wound in the side of her head.
“We’ve got to get you back inside,” he shouted.
Kara Jade rubbed at the side of her head, then peered at her fingers covered with blood. She blinked again, slowly. “What are you doing out here?”
“Saving your life.”
“Ha!” She slipped out of consciousness again, the weight of her almost dragging David into the sky.
David yanked her to him, startled by the warmth of her body and the rapid beat of her heart. His own heart beat pretty fast, particularly when he threw a glance at all that empty space beneath him. Bad idea.
Her rope had tangled and he struggled to free it, but it had knotted too tightly. David gave up and pulled out his pocketknife. He sawed through the rope quickly, hoping all the while that the Dawn wouldn’t drop suddenly. It did, his ears popped yet again, the muscles in his arms burned and his breath struggled in his chest but he managed to hold Kara Jade against the walkway.
I am going to die, he thought. I am too weak, too small, too drug fucked for this. And he was, but somehow he managed it.
He inched backwards to the doorifice and was happier than he had ever been in his life when he felt it open. He shoved Kara Jade through, then toppled after her, careful not to tangle or get in the way of Cadell’s line. Not an easy task as it whipped about the opening, striking David so hard that he nearly fell back outside.
Kara Jade grabbed and steadied him, helping him over and away from Cadell’s line, they both tumbled to the floor of the gondola.
“You’re back with us,” David said.
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