The Sapphire Cutlass

by Sharon Gosling

  “Bleedin’ ’eck,” muttered J.

  The carcasses of the statues had reached the bottom of the slope. Rather than crushing the rows of cult members, however, they had been forced to a stop by the collective strength of those outstretched, armored arms. As Thaddeus watched, the second statue crashed into the back of the first: an impact great enough to shake the ground on which they all stood. And yet the cult members still stood firm, arms braced against the first statue. They barely even shook.

  The chant began again — a rhythmic blend of incomprehensible words rising into the dusty air. Then, so slowly that at first it was impossible to see at all, the statues began to shift. The cult members were forcing the stone monuments to move, rolling their damaged bodies back up the slope.

  “Each of those things must weigh as much as my ship with a fully loaded hold,” Kai muttered. “How can they possibly be strong enough to move two of them with their bare hands?”

  “Their hands ain’t bare, though, are they?” said J grimly. “They’ve got that armored nonsense all over ’em.”

  “I’m afraid J’s right,” agreed Desai. “It would seem that their strength is being enhanced already, and I would wager it is not by natural means.”

  “How can we fight these people?” Kai asked as the sound of stone scraping inexorably against stone went on. “The British Army itself couldn’t, rifles and cannon or no. What can we do, with nothing of the kind?”

  “We locate the source of this power and we stop it,” Desai said grimly. “Now, before it has a chance to grow further.”

  Kai shook his head with a brief laugh. “As easy as that, eh?”

  “You said it yourself, Kai,” said Desai. “This is nothing but a children’s story — and what is there to be afraid of in that?”

  “I’m not afraid,” Kai told him. “I just know when I’ve met my match. So I plan on finding Upala, getting out of here, and taking my ship far, far away where none of this nonsense can find us. The rest of you can come if you want. Or not — it’s up to you.”

  “Wherever you go, be it to the ends of the earth or even beyond, it will not be far enough,” Desai told him. “Once this power reaches its zenith and escapes this place, there will be no stopping it.”

  “I don’t know what it is you’re looking at, old man,” said Kai, “but I’m telling you, there’s already no stopping it.”

  “And I am telling you that you are wrong,” said Desai. “Sahoj is behind this, and he may be a mystic but he’s still a man, and at this moment he can still be stopped. Trust me, if not we would all be dead already. So this moment is all we have. If we do not act now, then all will be lost.”

  Kai stared at Desai for another moment, as if weighing a mess of odds in his head. Thaddeus could almost see the cogs working in the man’s mind as his dark eyes flickered in the gloom.

  “You came with Rémy to help,” Thaddeus said softly. “No sense in leaving a job half done, is there?”

  Kai glanced at him. “Actually, I came because she promised me the airship,” said the pirate. “And a fat lot of good that thing turned out to be in a fight.”

  “Well, then I suppose you have a choice to make,” said Thaddeus. “Leave your sister behind and try to make a run for it, or stand up for something. I already know what Rémy would do in your place, however hopeless the situation. She’s already doing it, trying to save Dita instead of just her own skin.”

  For a moment Thaddeus thought Kai might swing the sword he was holding in his direction, but then the pirate shook his head. “You’re all fools.” He looked at Desai. “All right. Lead on, old man. You’d better know what you’re doing, that’s all I can say.”

  Thaddeus paused for a moment, looking back to where Rémy still labored with the lock on Dita’s cage. Then he followed, too.

  {Chapter 23}

  A BRIEF REPRIEVE

  The lock just wouldn’t give. Rémy cursed under her breath and glanced down at Dita. The little girl was holding onto the bars, her knuckles white where they gripped the metal.

  “You can’t do it, can you?” Dita asked, her face a brave mask despite the fear in her eyes. “You can’t get me out.”

  “I’ll get you out,” Rémy told her firmly. “I promised I would, and I will. I’m going to open this lock, and we’re going to use the chain to go back the way I came. All right? Simple. Everything will be just fine, you’ll see.”

  “But —” Dita stopped and bit her lip.

  “What?”

  “The belt,” said Dita, “I can feel it slipping …”

  Rémy glanced down to see that the ancient leather was beginning to split with the strain of holding Dita’s entire weight. She held in another curse and tried the lock again. It wasn’t like any mechanism she had ever seen before — it seemed to have cogs within cogs, as if it were operated not by a key but by something else entirely.

  “I don’t think I can hold myself up,” Dita told her. “Not if it breaks. I don’t think I’m strong enough.”

  “Hey,” Rémy told her, “don’t worry. I’ll have you out of there long before that happens, d’accord?”

  Dita nodded and tried to smile. Rémy smiled back, hoping that the gesture met her eyes well enough to hide the worry that must be lurking there. Even if Rémy did get her out, where were they to go? With the statues dealt with, the pit was once again becoming surrounded by the soldiers of the Sapphire Cutlass. It would take a miracle to get them out of there at all, let alone in one piece.

  A shriek from below her brought Rémy’s attention back to Dita. With a ripping sound, the belt tore in two. Dita clutched herself closer to the rungs, forcing her feet through the bars so that she could use her ankles as hooks. Rémy flung herself down and reached through the bars for the girl, clutching her tightly to her chest. A split second later Rémy saw something plunging down through the cage, a cascade of tiny silvery implements catching the light as they fell, bouncing against the metal and spinning one by one down into the pit. Her lock picks. Too late to worry about them now.

  “I can’t hold on,” Dita sobbed.

  “It’s all right,” Rémy shouted over the noise of the cult. They had started to chant again, a dull, droning echo that got inside the skull. “I’ve got you.”

  Rémy tried to sound more confident than she felt. With every passing second she could feel Dita slipping from her grasp. Rémy readjusted her hold and felt Dita’s grip on her shoulders weakening.

  “I’m going to fall!”

  “You’re not!”

  “It’s no good, Rémy, I can’t …”

  Dita’s sentence was cut short as they both felt the cage move. She heard the chain fastened to the hook not far from her face rattle. Lifting her head, Rémy saw it moving. A few seconds later, she felt the cage swaying as it was lifted slowly from the pit.

  “Do you feel that?” Rémy cried, “Dita? I told you we’d get out of here!”

  Dita sobbed again, tears escaping the little girl’s eyes.

  Rémy twisted around and looked up the slope. Through the murk she could just see the figure of Upala, using the winch at the top of the stone slope to lift the cage. Rémy’s muscles were tiring fast — she could feel Dita’s weight growing heavier and heavier below her, but the cage still wasn’t clear of the snakes.

  Just a little longer, she prayed silently. Just let me hold on a few more minutes and she’ll be safe …

  The cage jerked to a stop, the jolt hard enough for Rémy’s remaining grip to fail completely. Dita screamed, scrabbling for something to grab onto as she fell. She crashed to the bottom of the cage, hitting her head against one of the rungs.

  “Dita!” Rémy screamed.

  Then she realized that there were no snakes to writhe around the little girl’s body. The cage had lifted just clear enough of the bottom of the pit. She was safe, after all — still imprison
ed, but safe all the same.

  Rémy, breathing hard, jumped to her feet on top of the cage and turned to see Upala battling one of the cult members. Sword to sword they fought along the narrow walkway, until the pirate woman bettered her opponent and sent him plunging back down to the cavern floor. More cult members poured past the fallen figures of the statues, kicking up stone dust in their wake as they charged after Upala. Pausing, she turned to look at Rémy across the chasm of space between them.

  “Go!” Rémy urged her, pointing one arm in the direction that their friends had fled. “You can’t help us now. Go!”

  Upala can’t have heard her over the noise rolling around the room, but she understood Rémy’s gesture well enough. She hesitated again, as if loath to leave Rémy and Dita alone. But the soldiers were swarming toward her, just as they were toward the pit in which the cage now swung gently on its chain.

  The pirate woman raised one hand toward Rémy — a gesture of both apology and goodbye — and then fled through the archway, the cult members surging after her like dogs chasing a fox.

  Rémy looked down at Dita, still lying prone in the bottom of the cage, and then at the cult members who had come to stand around the edge of the pit.

  There was no way out, for either of them.

  “Rémy,” Dita called up to her with a shaky voice. “What are we going to do now?”

  “Don’t worry,” Rémy said. “Everything is going to be —”

  A sudden yelp of pain cut her words short.

  “What?” Rémy asked, worried. “Dita? What happened?”

  Dita shook her head. “I don’t know. Something …” she reached down into her skirts and her face grew pale as she drew something out of the folds of fabric. It writhed and wriggled in her hand until she dropped it through the bars of the cage.

  A snake.

  “Dita!” Rémy cried. “Have you been bitten?”

  The girl looked dazed. “I … yes … I think …” She glanced up at Rémy, her face white and her eyes glassy as they lost focus.

  “Dita!”

  The girl slumped to her knees.

  {Chapter 24}

  A FAMILIAR DEVICE

  Thaddeus, Kai, and Desai moved along the wide stone corridor as quickly and as quietly as they could.

  “How do you know we are going the right way?” Kai asked Desai, glancing back the way they had come, the sword in his hand primed for trouble.

  Desai indicated the narrow channel in the floor that had run beside them ever since they left the cavern. “This must lead somewhere, must it not?”

  “That’s all you’ve got?” Kai asked, incredulous. “I was hoping for a little more.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know — you’re supposed to be the mystic!”

  “What is that, anyway?” Thaddeus asked, indicating the channel.

  “Looks like it’s been made to move somefing, if you ask me,” said J. “Whatever it is fits in the channel and gets tugged along, like.”

  “Indeed,” agreed Desai, “exactly what I surmised, too, J. And since whatever it is seems to lead straight into that cavern — the meeting place of what seems to be the cult’s core …”

  “… then whatever we’re looking for is probably at the other end of it,” finished Thaddeus.

  “Exactly.”

  “Give yourselves a pat on the back, lads,” muttered Kai, “with any luck you’ll be able to think us all out of our graves, too.”

  They reached a fork in the corridor. The channel in the floor led down one avenue in the rock that curved out of sight some way ahead. There seemed to be a glow emanating from beyond this curve, a vague light illuminating the route. The other passageway had burning torches on its walls, spaced far enough apart to cast the rest of the route into deep shadow.

  “I says we keep following the channel,” said J.

  “Agreed,” said Desai.

  “Seconded,” said Kai, “but I —” He stopped suddenly. “Footsteps,” he hissed.

  He was right. Echoing toward them was the sound of running feet. Kai listened again and then pointed at the fork without the channel. “It’s coming from there.”

  “What do we do?” J asked.

  Thaddeus nodded to the other corridor. “If we keep going we can be out of eyesight before they get here.”

  “But then what if they comes down ’ere too?” J asked.

  Kai held up a hand for quiet and then listened with a frown. “That’s just one person — there’s only one pair of feet,” he said. “I say we bring down whoever it is. Maybe they can tell us what we need to know. You go ahead — get out of sight if you can.”

  They did as they were told as Kai took a few steps toward the second passageway. Positioning himself in the center of the corridor, he assumed a fighting stance with his sword at the ready. The footsteps echoed closer and closer as the rest of them moved swiftly away from the fork, heading for the curve and the light that glowed beyond.

  Thaddeus heard a cry of surprise behind him. He turned, afraid that Kai had been overrun. The pirate grappled briefly with someone in the shadows, but there was no sign of him raising his sword.

  “Kai!” Thaddeus hissed, starting back up the corridor in the hope of being able to help.

  “It’s all right,” Kai’s voice came back. Then he appeared with someone else by his side — the young woman Thaddeus had last seen across the cavern amid a blur of stone dust. “It’s Upala.”

  The woman striding toward Thaddeus beside Kai was impressive — tall, dark skinned, dark haired, with eyes as bright as stars and wielding a sword as sharp as any he’d ever seen. Upala looked him up and down briefly, issuing a nod and a curve of her lips that could almost pass as a smile.

  “You are Rémy’s policeman,” she said. “From England.”

  “I am.”

  Upala’s clear eyes bored into his. “She is a brave one, that girl.”

  “Yes, she is. Is she — Where —”

  “I lifted the cage. It was all I could do. The rest is up to her.” She turned to Kai. “There are more men behind me — I heard them. We should not linger here.”

  Thaddeus looked back down the passageway. At the point where it vanished, J was standing, waving his arms. Desai was nowhere to be seen. The two men and Upala hurried toward him.

  “You ain’t going to believe this,” the boy hissed when they reached him.

  They turned the corner, and he was right.

  The room they found themselves in was pure blue, as if they had walked into the sky itself. The stone around them glittered with a faint internal light, revealing layer after layer of facets stacked one upon the other. The entire room seemed to be one huge gemstone, still in its natural state.

  “Sapphire,” Upala whispered in awe.

  “It looks as if we’ve stepped inside one of those fings the Professor had knockin’ around his warehouse, don’t it Thaddeus?” J asked. “The crystal fings that looked like boring old stones on the outside, but when you smashed ’em open …”

  “Geodes,” Thaddeus finished for him. “This looks like the inside of a huge geode.”

  “Tha’s the one,” agreed J, his tones still hushed.

  Kai moved farther into the sapphire cavern, stooping to reach for a pile of loose gems that were scattered across the ground.

  “No,” Desai told him sharply from where he had been silently contemplating the room. “Do not touch a thing. Do not take a thing.”

  Kai looked up at him. “You bring a pirate here and you expect me not to pocket at least one tiny stone?” he asked. “It’s not as if this place can’t spare one, is it?” He crouched to pick up one of the loose sapphires, a large oblong gem that almost filled his palm with its uneven cut. “Just one of these would pay for the repairs to my ship.”

  Desai moved to hi
m quickly, knocking the stone from Kai’s hand so that it skittered across the ground, chinking quietly as it rolled. Kai stood quickly, facing the older man with squared shoulders.

  “Kai,” Upala said, her voice soothing, stepping forward quickly to put her shoulder between the two men. “I think we should listen to him, Captain. This place … it is so strange …”

  Kai brushed his hands off on his breeches with a shrug. “True enough. Come on then, mystic. What do we do now? Upala says there are more men coming. We need to act or find somewhere to hide.”

  “’Ere,” came J’s voice, echoing from some way off. Thaddeus realized that he’d wandered deeper into the stone room. The boy was looking past a towering crystalline formation of sapphire that masked whatever he was staring at. “You lot might want to come and take a look at this …”

  The rest of them moved to where J stood. Beyond him was another, larger cavern of pure sapphire, but it wasn’t the sheer amount of the stone that had caught the boy’s attention. It was what was suspended at the middle of it.

  “I don’t know about you,” J said to the collected group. “But that thing there gives me the right willies.”

  In front of them was a large sphere, formed of metal filaments — thin arms of gleaming silver twisting against and around each other to create a pattern of abstract, many-cornered shapes. These shapes fitted together like the delicate segments of a stained glass window, though the space between each metal twist was empty. At the center of the sphere was a plinth, and from the base of the plinth it was possible to see conduits of similar metal plunging into the rock below. Another series of tubes led farther into the depths of the sapphire cave, twisting and tangling around each other.

  “I have seen something like this before,” said Thaddeus. “Desai, this is what Abernathy used to power his contraptions. It’s why he stole the Darya-ye Noor in the first place. What is it?”

  Desai’s face was the most troubled that Thaddeus had ever seen it. “It’s a Sakhi sphere,” he said, his deep voice somber. “I have never seen one, only heard the theory of them.”