Kai turned to look at her. “Four people?” he said incredulously. “This man Desai believes you must fight an army — and he brought only three people with him?”
Rémy looked down at her feet. “He didn’t bring us. He was imprisoned by the raja. We came looking for him and freed him.”
“So … these people you brought with you,” Kai said. “They are soldiers? Fighters of the first order? Fearsome warriors, able to fell armies as easily as the girl in the story. Yes?”
Rémy shifted uncomfortably. “Not exactly.”
“Oh?” She could feel Kai watching her with sharp eyes. “Tell me, then. Who are they, these people who will defeat a supernatural army?”
Rémy shut her eyes. “One is a policeman. His name is Thaddeus Rec, from London. He is a brave and honorable man who will stop at nothing to do the right thing.”
“A policeman,” Kai repeated, his voice flat. “Well, I hope you are starting at the bottom and working your way up, Rémy Brunel.”
“Then there is J,” Rémy went on, her heart sinking at her brother’s unimpressed tone, but carrying on regardless. “He is swift and brave — I met him in London, too. He was a pickpocket then, but —”
“A pickpocket?” Kai interrupted her, his disbelief growing further. “This man Desai must be a fool. Who else but a fool would bring other fools with him to a battle?”
“J built the airship,” Rémy said. “He built it from nothing but a book of words and scraps he found around Limehouse.”
That shut her brother up. His eyebrows rose in surprise, and he looked over her head toward the craft sitting silently on the shore.
“Appearances can be deceptive,” Rémy told him, “and I would have thought that a pirate, of all people, would know that.”
Kai looked at her and grinned, his teeth straight and white apart from a single, black gap where he had lost one. The absence made him look fierce and reckless, and she longed to hear of the life her brother had led. Maybe they would have time, someday, to swap stories — of her life on the road, of his on the ocean. But not now. She could tell that despite his interest, Kai was far from convinced by her story. She decided not to let on that two of Desai’s party were children. Let him find out for himself if he agreed to help. And if he didn’t — well, there would be no need for him to know in any case.
“And the final member of your little fighting force?” Kai prompted, as if he could read her thoughts. She wondered briefly if he could, but his question seemed genuine enough.
“Dita,” Rémy said, scuffing her toes in the sand. “Small, wiry, and quick. She speaks many languages, has a head for heights, and is as brave as they come.”
Kai looked out at the dancing pirates, once again finding Upala in the crowd. “Could she have a hope of bettering Upala in a fight?”
Rémy smiled privately at the thought of little Dita, who would barely reach Upala’s waist, clashing blades with the female pirate. And yet … “She would do her best,” Rémy told him truthfully, “and she would fight with her whole heart.”
Kai nodded. “As Upala does,” he said. “As it should be.” Her brother sighed. “I admire you and your friends, little sister. It takes courage and spirit to go up against something with so few hands, especially with so little knowledge of what you may encounter.”
“Then help us,” Rémy urged. “If you truly live your life to help others, help us — and in doing so, help all of India. All of the world, perhaps. Help us before it is too late.”
Kai shook his head. “Even if I thought it would make a difference — my people are fighters on water, not on land. On the ocean I can keep them safe, but on land they will be easy prey before we even reach the valley you speak of. Every one of them has a bounty on his head, put there by the British, who will kill them if they are caught. I will not lead them to certain death on the basis of a story,” he said, holding up a hand before she could interrupt, “and a story is all you have, Rémy. Can’t you see that?”
Rémy was silent for a few minutes. Then she said, “What if I gave you the airship?”
Kai looked surprised. “What?”
“Help us, and afterward, I will give you the airship. That would give you an advantage over the British, would it not?”
The pirate threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, little sister — look around you. If I wanted your ship, I could take it from you in a flat second.”
“But you wouldn’t know how to fly it,” Rémy countered. “Help us, Kai, and when it’s over I’ll give you the airship — and I will teach you how to use it, too. You have my word.”
Kai looked at her as if he were sizing up the truth of her statement. “And what about this J, who built it? Won’t he be rather upset that you’ve given away his contraption?”
“Desai sent me to find you, Kai. I see that now. He knows we need your help. J will understand if it is the only way to secure it.”
Kai looked over to the airship, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. He stood up, and Rémy followed as he crossed to where it waited patiently in the sand. Her brother ran his hands over the wood of the hull, and she could tell he was interested. What pirate wouldn’t be? To be able to attack from the air — it would make Kai the undisputed king of the ocean.
Rémy heard a noise behind her and turned to see Upala approaching, her dark cheeks flushed pink from dancing. She stopped beside Rémy and put her hands on her hips, watching Kai as she caught her breath.
“What are you thinking?” she asked him over the noise of the party continuing behind them.
“That this would give us the advantage we so desperately need,” Kai said as he continued to contemplate the airship.
Upala nodded, crossing her arms. “Then it’s fortunate we have the anukarana to teach us how to use it.”
“I’ll teach you, if you help me,” Rémy said firmly.
“Help you do what?” Upala asked, looking between the twins suspiciously.
Kai turned and walked back toward them. “Upala. You and the rest of the crew take the ship back to our safe harbor. I’ll join you there — with the airship — when I can.”
“Why?” Upala asked. “Where are you going?”
“To see whether what my sister has told me about the Sapphire Cutlass is true.”
“I believe it is,” said Rémy, “and if it is we need more help than just you, Kai.”
“Well, I am all you’re getting, little sister. I’ll not drag anyone else along for what could be a one-way trip.”
“You’re going with her?” Upala looked appalled. “It could be a trap!”
“Yes,” agreed Kai, watching Rémy steadily, “it could be. But somehow I don’t think so. Or if it is, it’s not one set by her. So I will go with her and find out.”
Rémy held her brother’s gaze, feeling her heart flood with relief. It wasn’t what Desai had been hoping for, she was sure of that — one extra pair of hands against whatever they would have to face. But it was better than nothing — and if they could be on their way immediately, then so much the better.
By now the rest of the pirates had realized that something was afoot. The music and dancing had stopped, and Kai’s crew had formed a semi-circle around them, quietly watching what was going on.
“I’m coming with you,” Upala declared. “I will not let you go alone.”
“It’ll be safer if you —”
“Safer!” Upala scoffed, cutting him off. “What do I care about staying safe?”
“I care,” Kai told her, the quiet, clipped words seeming to kill all other noise around them save for the crackle of the fire. The two pirates stared at each other, and Rémy realized that something significant had happened in that one, small moment. She had assumed they were a couple, but perhaps she was wrong. She remembered, then, her brother’s reaction when he’d learned they were no longer cursed. Had he been h
olding back? Had he kept his distance from Upala because he knew about the curse?
“I am coming with you, Kai,” Upala said into the quiet. “If you don’t let me travel with you I will follow on foot. Do you understand?”
“If we are going to go at all,” Rémy said into another silence, “then we should go now.”
{Chapter 17}
INSIDE THE MOUNTAIN
He was on a trapeze, and he didn’t like it.
Thaddeus could feel himself swinging in midair — back and forth, back and forth — but around him was only darkness. He couldn’t see the ground, or even the contraption that was holding him up. He felt queasy and wrong, but he didn’t know how to stop the swinging. Back and forth, back and forth …
Thaddeus!
A voice soared to him out of the darkness. He had heard it before, he realized as he heard it again, but it was farther away this time. Or perhaps he was the one who had been farther away — perhaps they were both on a trapeze.
Thaddeus!
Who did he know who would be comfortable on a trapeze?
Thaddeus!
Rémy Brunel! It could only be her up here, swinging with him in the darkness. Wherever “here” was — at the moment he couldn’t tell, because everything was so dark, and the trapeze just would not stop moving … He tried to twist around and see what was behind him, but in doing so, he almost slipped from the swing completely. He flailed with his arms, clutching at anything he could. His hands found cold, hard rungs and he held on.
“Thaddeus!”
The voice shouting at him suddenly got much louder. Thaddeus frowned. It wasn’t Rémy after all. It was —
“Mr. Rec! Would you please just bleedin’ well WAKE UP!”
J!
Thaddeus jerked awake and immediately wished he hadn’t. Pain smashed into his temple as if someone had cracked it hard with a rock. He clutched his head, wondering for a split second if he’d been in The Grapes the previous night, before remembering that he hadn’t been at the Limehouse drinking spot for months.
“Thaddeus!”
“All right, all right,” he mumbled back. “I’m awake, I’m —”
He turned around, slipped, and fell. He cried out before something abruptly broke his fall a second later, or rather, two somethings that were part of a larger something all together. Thaddeus blinked, trying to clear his head enough to focus. He could feel his legs dangling into thin air, and there was that infernal swinging again — back and forth, back and forth — through chilled air.
Even with his eyes open, it was dark, although not quite as dark as it had been in his dream. There was a faint light coming from somewhere — yellow, like a burning torch. It gave enough of a glow to show him where he had fetched up.
Thaddeus Rec was in a cage.
“What the —”
“Are you all right?” he heard Dita’s voice call from behind him. Thaddeus turned his head and saw that she was in a cage, too, hanging beside him, her small hands clutching at the golden bars that imprisoned her as she stared anxiously at him.
“Thaddeus? Are you hurt?” That was Desai, on the other side of him, in another cage, peering through the dim light and the obstruction of yet another barred prison, this one holding J.
Thaddeus looked down at himself, still dazed from the pain of whatever blow his head had encountered. His legs had fallen between two of the rungs of his prison and he was dangling out of the bottom of it — their cages were suspended, apparently hanging above the ground, which he could not see through the darkness.
He struggled, pulling himself up and balancing his feet on two of the rungs — crouching, as the others were. It wasn’t comfortable, but then presumably whoever had built the cages hadn’t been very concerned about the comfort of their prisoners. They hung there in a line: Desai, then Dita, then J, then Thaddeus, in four cages each just large enough to hold a grown man, cubes made of golden bars not quite far enough apart for agile little Dita to squeeze between them. Thaddeus looked up to see that the roof of his cage bore a hatch, and beside the hatch was a sturdy ring through which had been threaded a hook, and from this hook led a chain as thick as Thaddeus’s arm. It led up to a large metal track set in the roof of the cavern that stretched away into the gloom around them. It instantly reminded Thaddeus of what they had found in the Comte de Cantal’s mountain catacombs.
“Where — where are we?” he managed, his voice rasping. His mouth felt as dry and dusty as the floorboards of the Professor’s workshop.
“Where’d you fink?” J asked. “Looks like it didn’t turn out to be as ’ard to get into the ruddy mountain as Mr. Desai fought it were going to be, eh?”
Thaddeus put a hand to his head as he looked up again. The throbbing was diminishing a little, but he’d have given his best trousers for a cool glass of water.
“Are the rest of you all right?” he asked. “None of you are hurt?”
“It looks as if you got the worst of it, my boy,” said Desai.
Thaddeus looked around again, trying to see where they were. Their voices echoed as they spoke, he noticed. Wherever it was that they had ended up, it was large.
“Have you shouted for anyone?”
“Other than you, you mean?” J asked. “Yeah, we’ve shouted. Nuffin’ doin’. No one’s come to see us at all since they stuck us in ’ere. But I suppose they don’t need to, do they? Seeing as there’s no way any of us can get out.”
Thaddeus looked up at the roof of the cage again.
“Makes you wish Rémy were here, don’t it?” J added. “She’d be up there picking that lock in no time. As it is, none of the rest of us can manage it.”
“I have tried,” Dita said softly. “I’ll keep trying, but I’m just not as good as Rémy is.”
“Don’t you worry, Miss,” J soothed. “It ain’t your fault. No one is, are they?”
Thaddeus looked over at Desai, whose face he could only just make out in the darkness pressing in on them. “Any ideas, Desai?” he asked. “You haven’t got … I don’t know, anything hidden in those robes of yours that might get us out of here?” Several times in the past Desai had surprised them all by producing potions capable of amazing feats — the ability to melt metal being one of them.
Desai shook his head. “My apologies, Thaddeus. After so many weeks in captivity at the Raja’s behest, I am afraid my supplies have been well and truly plundered.”
Thaddeus nodded slowly, and then wished he hadn’t. He shut his eyes briefly, trying to close out the pain, but doing so just made him more aware of the gentle swing of the cage. J was right — Rémy would be in her element here. Little Bird, the girl who could fly without wings, and whom no cage had yet managed to enclose — at least, not for long.
“All right,” he said. “Well, let’s look at this rationally and see what we can come up with. It’s reasonable to assume that we’re still inside the valley, isn’t it? And we’ve most likely been taken by the Sapphire Cutlass. Which means we’re probably inside the mountain — in the mines themselves. Yes?”
“I would say that is a reasonable deduction,” agreed Desai.
“Fat lot of good that does us,” J muttered loudly.
“J,” Thaddeus sighed. “Look, I know you’re angry, but —”
“Damn right I’m angry!” J burst out, his knuckles white where his hands gripped the rungs. “I told yer — didn’t I? I said we should turn back, and now look where we’ve ended up! You can be rational all you like, Mr. Rec, but we ain’t getting ourselves out of ’ere in a hurry, are we? We’re stuck, and gawd only knows what the people who put us in ’ere ’ave got planned fer us!”
“J,” cried Dita, “don’t say that!”
J looked past Thaddeus to the girl, his face softening. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. We’ll be all right. Course we will. It’s just …”
A n
oise swelled below them, quiet at first, but growing. Thaddeus felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck as he realized what it was. It was voices, chanting — the same chant that had surrounded them out on the fogged valley floor was rising to them again from somewhere below their cages, a collective murmur growing louder and louder, the sound of too many voices to count united in one repeated mantra.
“Where the bleedin’ ’eck ’ave they come from?” J cried. “’Ave they been down there all along, just being really quiet, like?”
For some reason, the thought made Thaddeus shiver. Then, somewhere off to his distant right, there came a noise like the sound of a giant match being struck: a harsh rasp, a fizz as a new flame added more light to the darkness. They all scrambled to the other side of their cages, stepping clumsily from one rung to another, careful not to slip into the spaces between as the motion jerked and shuddered their dangling prisons.
A large wooden torch had been lit. It burned brightly in the darkness, illuminating a yellow circle around itself. It had been pinned to hewn gray stone above a narrow walkway cut from more of the same rock. Another torch was lit farther along the wall, then another and another, tracing a route that circled where Thaddeus and his friends hung in their cages.
“If we ever get out of here,” came J’s plaintive voice as their surroundings slowly came into view, “I ain’t never going anywhere near a mountain again. You hear me? Not a mountain, not a cave, not an underground bleedin’ tunnel. Never again. I’s seen enough of ’em to last me five lifetimes!”
They were in a large cavern. J was right — it could have been Lord Abernathy’s submarine base beneath London, or the one housing the Comte de Cantal’s metal army in France. It made sense, Thaddeus supposed. If one were drawn to nefarious deeds, it was natural to find somewhere such as this to hide them. Although, he reflected for a moment, there was nothing natural about any of the things they had found in such places. He felt exactly as J did — that if they made it out of this particular predicament, he had had enough of dark places to last him a lifetime. Give him sun, blue sky, and a beach that stretched for as far as the eye could see …
The Sapphire Cutlass Page 11
