What happened next happened very slowly, but not slowly enough for her to stop it. The child's fat hand grabbed the bag; the bag fell; the bag burst. Across the deck at Varley's feet there went scattering a storm of nuts and washers. Varley, realizing he'd been tricked, let out a yell. Hester snatched her knife and threw it underarm at the man by the door, hitting him in the throat. His speargun went off as he fell, but the spear went high, passing over Hester's head; she heard it thud into the bulkhead above her. Mrs. Varley was screaming. The baby howled. Something struck Hester a sudden, stunning blow on the top of her head. A flash of purple light went off inside her skull. She cursed and tried to turn, confused, imagining someone had got behind her. Things were falling all around her, punching her shoulders, thumping on the deck. She went down on her knees among them and saw that they were books. The dead man's speargun had detached one of Varley's homemade bookshelves from the wall, and it had struck her as it fell. It was a stupid sort of injury, but that didn't make it any less serious. The spilled books seemed to whirl around her. Dodgy Dealing for Beginners. Investing in People. Make Your Fortune on the Bird Roads--and Survive to Spend It! She felt sure she was going to be sick.
Varley had an arm around Oenone's throat. "Come on, lads!" he shouted. "Get her! Get her!" Hester remembered the men outside. Squinting with the pain in her head, she tried to stand up. Footsteps shook the gondola as the heavies from the mooring strut came aboard. Hester reached into her pocket and tugged out her pistol, shooting them one at a time as they came barging through the cabin door. The gas
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pistol made soft coughing sounds, which she hoped would not be heard out on the High Street. The men fell on top of the body of their friend, and one of them kept struggling, so she shot him again. She could feel blood running down her face. She swung the gun toward Varley but fainted before she could pull the trigger.
The next thing she knew, the merchant was wrenching the gun out of her hand. He had a stupid, mad grin, and his nostrils kept flaring. He pulled down Hester's veil, and his grin grew even wider, as if her ugliness were some sort of victory for him. He spat in her face. "Well," he said. He put down the gun (a dangerous thing to use on board your own airship) and pulled a knife out of his belt. "Nobody's going to miss you."
He looked surprised when his wife picked up the gun and shot him. It seemed to take him a moment to understand that he'd been killed. His grin faded slowly, and he sank down on his knees beside Hester and bowed his head and stayed there, kneeling, dead.
"Oh, God," murmured Oenone.
Mrs. Varley lowered the gun. She was shaking. The baby howled and howled. Oenone scrambled across the cabin and helped Hester to her feet.
"You'd better go now," said Mrs. Varley. She pulled a nappy down from one of the lines and started scooping the gold into it.
Hester touched the searing, throbbing place where the shelf had hit her, and her hand came away wet and red. She felt drunk. She held on to Oenone for support and said, "We came to rescue you. Me and Grike."
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"Mr. Grike? He's here?"
"Theo too. There's a ship waiting." With Oenone's help she started limping toward the exit hatch, which seemed suddenly to be miles away. "Gods, it hurts," she grumbled. Somehow they reached the top of the gangplank. Out on the docking strut a man was waiting. He was all alone. He had probably heard that last shot. The wind flapped his long blue greatcoat open, and moonlight shone on the hilt of the heavy saber in his belt.
Hester groaned, nauseous and weary. She had no strength left with which to fight him.
"Lady Naga?" said the stranger. "I'm just in time, I see."
Oenone cringed against Hester as the stranger walked toward her, putting one booted foot on the gangplank. In the dim light from the Humbug's hatchway his face looked stern, but not unkind. He held out a hand. "I am Kriegsmarschall von Kobold. You must come with me to Murnau. Quickly, please."
Hester gripped the gangplank rail and glared at him. "You'll have to get past me first."
Von Kobold looked respectfully at her. Her scarred face did not shock him, nor did the blood that matted her hair and dripped from her chin. He gave her a little bow. "Forgive me, young woman, but that does not seem too great a challenge. I take it you are an agent of the Storm, come to free your empress? Even if you were not wounded, you could never get her away from here. A dozen cities stand between you and your own territory, and not all of their leaders are as understanding as I. Come with me to Murnau, and I shall find a way to send you and your mistress home to General Naga."
A blurt of noise from the docking ring made him look
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around. Someone was shouting; running figures showed against the lighted windows of an all-night Ker-Plunk parlor. "We have to trust him,"' whispered Oenone, and helped Hester down the gangplank. But by the time they reached von Kobold, it was too late; the deck plates were thrumming with the stamp of booted feet. Along the strut toward them came six red-coated men with drawn swords, and behind them, urging them on, the podgy, hopping shape of Nimrod Pennyroyal.
"There they are!" Pennyroyal shouted. "They're escaping! Stop them!"
"Who are you?" barked Kriegsmarschall von Kobold, in such a military voice that the men stopped short. Up on the High Street passersby began to gather at an observation platform to see what was happening down on Strut 13.
"We, sir, are officers of the Manchester Civic Guard," said the tallest and most sober of the newcomers. "We have been informed that a dangerous Mossie is concealed aboard this airship...."
"Blimey!" said one of his comrades, pointing. "It's her! Naga's wife, just like the old man said!"
"What, in that getup?" asked another.
"It's her. I seen her picture in the Evening News. Blimey!"
"You're under arrest!" said the leader, striding toward Oenone.
"Stand back, sir," snapped von Kobold, and drew his saber. "The lady is my prisoner, and I will not deliver her into the hands of your warmongering mayor."
"Now, steady on!" called Pennyroyal, who didn't want a squabble between Murnau and Manchester to ruin his
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chance of some favorable headlines. But before he could say more, the light of a flashbulb blinded him. A small man in formal robes walked out onto the increasingly crowded strut. There was a girl behind him, fumbling a new flashbulb into place on the top of her camera.
"Mr. Pennyroyal!" the newcomer called out pleasantly. "Sampford Spiney of The Speculum. Been looking for you everywhere. Do you have any message for your many disappointed fans?" His voice was affable and faintly snide; it faded into silence as he saw the Mancunians with their drawn swords, von Kobold with his saber, Oenone supporting Hester, who had crumpled to her knees at the foot of the Humbug's gangplank. "I say!" he murmured excitedly. "What's all this?"
But the leader of the Mancunians was tired of talking. He raised his sword and tried to barge past von Kobold, but the kriegsmarschall barred his way. Sparks flew as their swords met, directly contravening Airhaven's strict fire-prevention laws. Up on the High Street people screamed. The Manchester swordsman screamed too, stumbling away with blood running down his arm. Von Kobold turned to face the others. "Defend yourselves!" he shouted, and most of them started to edge back, frightened of this fierce old soldier who seemed ready to take on five of them at once. Only one held his ground. He was a young man, red cheeked and running to fat. In addition to his uniform sword he had a revolver. He pointed it straight at von Kobold, and fired twice.
Theo, waiting aboard the Shadow Aspect, heard the shots. He ran to the hatch. He tried to tell himself that those bangs had
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not been gunfire, but he knew that they had, and he knew that they had come from the direction of Strut 13.
An alarm bell began to jangle. Theo jumped down onto the mooring strut and started to run toward the docking ring. A squad of men in the sky-blue uniforms of Airhaven was storming down a stairway from the High Street, cross
bows held ready. From a docking pan near the town hall a red fire-fighting dirigible was lifting off, ready to train her hoses on any blaze that broke out.
Theo stood helpless, halfway between the Shadow Aspect and the docking ring. What could he do? How could he help?
A horrified scream reached him, blowing on the wind. Another. More shots. He turned and went hammering back to the Shadow.
As Kriegsmarschall von Kobold fell, the man who'd shot him sprang forward, reaching for Lady Naga. Hester heaved herself up to face him and suddenly, although she had done no more than glare at him, he dropped his gun and shouted, "Yaagh!" Looking down, Hester saw the sharp blades that had been driven up through the deck from beneath. There were five of them, and two had gone through the Mancunian's boot and through the foot inside it. He screamed again, wrenching himself free, and the blades slid back through the deck, leaving ragged holes. "Get this, Miss Kropotkin!" Spiney was ordering his photographer.
The deck plate heaved. An armored fist punched up through the quay from beneath; clawed fingers widened the hole, and Grike scrambled out. He flared with light as
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another flashbulb fired, silvering his armor, his fingertips, and his gruesome metal grin.
"Stalker!" screamed the Mancunian gunman, trying to hop away. Grike picked him up and flung him off the edge of the strut; he flailed at the empty air for a moment and then fell with a terrible shriek, and landed bouncing in the safety net. Grike hurled one of his friends after him; the rest turned to run, and collided with the first squad of Airhaven militia arriving from the High Street.
Hester fainted again and fell down on the hard quay, waking a few seconds later when the Airhaven fireboat swung overhead, dowsing everyone with freezing water. There seemed to be a general belief that whole squads of Stalkers had been landed on Strut 13. Dozens of alarm bells were ringing, making horrid discords. At the end of the strut the Mancunians were fighting with the Airhaven men, who had somehow got the idea that they were Green Storm raiders in disguise. "No, no, no!" Pennyroyal was yelling. Below the strut, the Mancunians Grike had thrown off it were scrambling up the mesh of the safety net to the neighboring quay, where aviators from a Florentine highliner leaned out to haul them to safety.
Below that, dark against the cloud layer, the plump shape of an airship moved, rising upward.
"The Jenny Haniver," said Hester, looking down at it through the holes in the deck plate. Then she realized that it couldn't be; it wasn't Tom coming to her rescue this time, but Theo, in the Shadow Aspect.
Grike had seen it too, or heard the mutter of its engines. He picked Oenone up under one arm, as if she were a parcel.
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He turned and reached for Hester, but Hester was dragging herself away from him toward von Kobold.
In the scrum at the far end of the strut one of the Mancunians was yelling, "It was Pennyroyal! Pennyroyal lured us here! Into the claws of the Storm's Stalkers!"
"That's not true!" Pennyroyal shouted, skipping backward as an Airhaven soldier made a grab at him. "I'm the victim here! What about my money?"
The Shadow Aspect came up like a surfacing whale at the end of Strut 13. Hester saw Theo inside the gondola as she turned von Kobold over. The fat Mancunian's gun had made two charred holes in the front of von Kobold's coat. But he was only winded. Beneath his coat she saw the dull sheen of Old Tech body armor. He raised a hand to cup her face. "They breed you brave in the Green Storm's lands," he whispered.
"I'm not ...," said Hester, but there wasn't time to explain.
"Tell Naga that not all of us want this war," she heard von Kobold say. Then she passed out, and Grike swept her up and loped toward the Shadow with the bolts from Airhaven crossbows rattling against his armored back.
Pennyroyal scurried away from the men at the end of the strut and ran into Spiney. The journalist had been directing Miss Kropotkin while she took the pictures that would appear on the front of the next day's papers beneath the headline "Manchester Men Battle Bravely Against Naga's Raiders!" He flung himself at Pennyroyal with a vulpine grin. "What's your part in all this then, Nimrod? How long have you been working for the Green Storm?"
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Pennyroyal shoved him aside. An airship was maneuvering away from the strut with a deafening howl of engines, and he had a sudden, terrible fear that it was the Humbug, taking off with his gold still aboard. "What about my money?" he shouted at it.
"How much have they paid you, Pennyroyal?" called Spiney, stepping into his path again and flapping at Miss Kropotkin to bring her camera.
Pennyroyal gave a feeble roar of rage and pushed Spiney hard with both hands. Spiney fought back, flailing at Pennyroyal's face, grabbing him by the collar. So much was happening on Strut 13 that no one saw the two writers stumble across the quay and plunge off the edge. Their screams harmonized for a brief moment as they fell.
On the Shadow's flight deck Theo pushed all the engines to full power, preparing to shove the airship out into the open sky beyond Airhaven's shadow, but as he reached for the steering levers, a steel hand clamped his wrist.
"THERE ARE TWO ANTI-AIRCRAFT HARPOON BATTERIES ON AIRHAVEN HIGH STREET," the Stalker Grike announced. "AS SOON AS WE CLEAR THEIR AIRSPACE, THEY WILL FIRE ON US."
"But we can't stay here!" shouted Theo, waving at the windows. The glass was already starred by hits from a dozen crossbow bolts, although no one had dared to fire anything more dangerous yet, for fear of igniting a blaze that might engulf the whole of Airhaven.
"GO DOWN," said Grike. "DROP INTO THE CLOUDS. THEY WILL HIDE US."
Theo nodded, angry that he'd not thought of that for
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himself. A moment later the Shadow swung its engine pods upright and forced itself down into the white billows beneath Airhaven.
"Aaaaaaaaah!" wailed Pennyroyal and Spiney, and then, "Oh!" as the safety net beneath Strut 13 caught them and held them safe. They bounced together, as if they had dropped into a giant's hammock.
"Great Poskitt!" whimpered Pennyroyal, thrusting the journalist away from him and trying to stand upright. He had forgotten the net's existence until its thick, yielding mesh broke his fall. "I thought we were done for!" he gasped.
"You're done for all right, Nimrod!" Sampford Spiney cackled. He had been just as scared as Pennyroyal, but he wasn't about to show it. "Consorting with the Storm; taking part in a brawl; accessory to the attempted murder of a kriegsmarschall--here, was that bint on the strut really Naga's wife? That's what your Manchester friends are saying...." Excited at the thought of all the startling reports that he would soon be filing, the journalist began to bounce happily up and down.
"Do stop doing that, old man," pleaded Pennyroyal. "You're making me feel all queasy."
"Not half as queasy as you'll be when you see the next edition of The Speculum." Spiney chuckled, bouncing harder. Odd noises started to come from the net: faint creaks, small twanging sounds.
"Spiney, I really think you should stop! This net looks old, and it's already taken the weight of a brace of fat Mancunians tonight...."
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With a sound like plucked harpstrings the bolts that attached one edge of the net to the underside of Strut 14 started to come free. Spiney stopped bouncing, and let out a strangled yelp.
"Help!" shouted Pennyroyal, as loudly as he could, but although Strut 13 was crammed with people the only one who heard him was Spiney's photographer, Miss Kropotkin. Her face appeared over the edge of the strut. She stretched down toward the stranded men with one hand, but she could not reach them. Pennyroyal started trying to claw his way up the steep net toward her, but only succeeded in pulling some of the bolts on that side free as well. "Oh, Poskitt!"
"Miss Kropotkin!" Spiney shrieked. "Fetch help! Fetch help at once, or I'll make sure you end up photographing pet shows and garden parties for the rest of your worthless--"
And with a presence of mind that ensured she would never have to photograph another pet show as long as sh
e lived, Miss Kropotkin raised her camera as the net gave way and took the picture that would appear on page 1 of the next edition of The Speculum beneath the headline "Writers Perish in Airhaven Death Plunge Horror."
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28 Storm Birds
***
AS THE SHADOW ASPECT sank into the clouds, Grike strode aft. In the curtained-off cabin at the stern of the gondola Oenone was crouching over Hester, using her fingers to try to stop the blood that was pouring from the gash on Hester's scalp. She looked up at Grike. "Is there a medicine chest? Just a first-aid kit even?"
Grike stared at Hester's gray, shocked face. Let her die, he wanted to tell Oenone, then use your skill to Resurrect her. In place of that scarred and ruined face give her a steel mask, more perfect than the Stalker Fang's. In place of her breakable body build her a body as strong as this one. She would forget her life, but Grike felt certain that her spirit would survive. Over the millennia that they would have together, he would help her to recover it. His immortal child.
"Medicine chest!" shouted Oenone. "Quickly, Mr. Grike!"
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Grike turned and found the Shadow's first-aid kit in the locker above the bunk. As he handed it to Oenone, a blow shook the airship. He went forward onto the flight deck again. Theo was clinging to the controls, staring out of wet windows.
"we are under attack," Grike said.
"What?" the boy looked around at him, wide eyes white in his dark face.
"we were hit. a projectile ..."
Theo turned to the window again. "I can't see another ship. I can't see anything. This cloud--"
And then the Shadow Aspect dropped out of the belly of the clouds, and they both saw the flanks of cities rising all around them, the sky between filled with the running lights of dozens of airships. It was raining, and the drops flecked the windows and blurred everything into a kaleidoscope of glowing specks, but Grike could tell by their trajectories that the other ships were not searching for the Shadow Aspect. They were not military ships at all, but freighters and liners, heading west.