“Oh, right! Terribly sorry,” Nathanial said. “Miss Annabelle Somerset of Arizona Territory, USA, may I introduce Corporal Tolni of the Parhoon Rifles? He, it turns out, is our secret friend.”
“Oh, how nice! Very pleasant to meet you at last. We appreciated your letters ever so much, although you might want to work on your spelling.”
Tolni smiled and nodded, although he seemed a bit confused by the exchange.
Kak’hamish gently took the pistol from her trembling hands and covered the prisoners. “You did very well, Annabelle,” he said softly, and put his arm around her shoulder.
She covered her face with her hands to hide her emotions, which were so confused she could not have put a name to them in any case. After a moment she regained her composure. “Thank you, Kak’hamish. If we have them all, is the adventure over?”
Clack-clack.
“I am afraid not.”
Chapter Seven
“Death Above the Clouds”
1.
kak’hamish strained at the capstan bar along with the others.
“Backs into it,” he hissed, but softly. Voices carried far across the sky at night, and the grey-painted warship drew near on its interception course. The capstan turned, click by click, and slowly pivoted the raised gun mount to make the Lady Zumaat’s only cannon bear to port.
Above them the gun crew slowly, carefully, silently loaded the gun. First came the canvas powder charge, then a solid shot, then on top a metal cylinder filled with cut-shot, a lethal mixture of thumb-sized stones and long, thin metal rods, designed to shred rigging and wings—and any crewman unlucky enough to find himself in their way. The metal cylinder would hold the shot together long enough—in theory—for it to clear their own broad wing.
One shot, he had told them. We will have only one shot. Make it count.
Kak’hamish stepped away from the capstan and looked up. The gunner’s mate, positioned at the back of the carriage by the elevating screw, turned to him and raised his hand. Ready.
He joined Nathanial, Annabelle, Corporal Tolni, and Andan Moorie, captain of Lady Zumaat. Moorie had been reluctant at first, unsure of the legality of a move which seemed like a cross between mutiny and piracy, but a look at the sarcophagi, and the one twitching creature there which had crawled from the second shattered corpse, had convinced him. Captain Moorie now studied the faint outline of the approaching vessel, especially its sail-wing, which reflected more starlight than did the hull and so glowed softly.
“A Bloodrunner,” he said. “Faster than we are with that broad wing rig and narrow hull, and mounting two guns, fore and aft, on pivots. Her hold probably stinks of armed fanatics. If she drops a hook-an-line on us, we’re finished.”
Tolni translated for the others, which felt odd to Kak’hamish after having done so himself for so long. They looked to him.
“The cannon is loaded. We will see what one good shot can do. It may cripple her, but we cannot count on that alone. Once the gun fires, we must change course and run north, as fast as we can.”
“North?” Nathanial said. “Why not south, to Siruahn? We must be close by now. Surely the authorities there will deal with these bounders, once they have heard our story.”
“We would arrive in the early morning hours, shortly before dawn, when the rising is planned to take place. The key elements are the armed men with Shistomo and the men waiting on the ground to strike. Our arrival would trigger the revolt, and in the confusion which would follow, the city could easily fall. No, we must at all costs unhinge the plot to enslave those people. They suffered long enough under the stupid and vain.”
“But we have Jed-An,” Nathanial insisted. “We’ve severed the head of the revolt, surely.”
“The head of the revolt is over there,” Kak’hamish said, and pointed to the approaching wind-wing. “Jed-An is only a useful symbol.”
“If that is so,” Annabelle said, “then why will Shistomo follow us? Why will he not simply proceed to Siruahn, launch the revolt, and find another figurehead to sit atop the throne?”
“Because we have six of his sacred Old Ones. Well, four of them, although he doesn’t know that two have already been dispatched. If they are as important to his cult as the priests indicated, I do not think he can bring himself to let us carry them off and perhaps defile them.”
“That is so,” Corporal Tolni put in. “These Old Ones—horrible creatures, but very sacred to the Worm. They told me that the Old Ones make the dead rise and walk, but I think that is just to frighten people. The corpses in the cargo hold did not walk. But yes, very sacred.”
“They grow close,” Captain Moorie said.
“They will want to hail their party,” Kak’hamish said. “Bring Jed-An up.”
Corporal Tolni ran across the deck and slid down the companionway to the main deck. A moment later he reappeared nearly dragging a bound Jed-An, who struggled to keep both his balance and his dignity, up the steps and across the quarterdeck.
“Hail Lady Zumaat!” The voice from the Bloodrunner carried across the narrowing distance between the ships.
Captain Moorie lifted his own leather speaking trumpet. “What ship?” he called back.
The enemy wind-wing drifted closer, already in range of the cannon’s round shot, but still a bit far for the cutting shot. Kak’hamish looked to the gun platform. The gunner’s mate’s eyes flickered from the Bloodrunner to him, his left hand holding the firing lanyard taught. Across from them, the hostile ship eased its helm and came onto a parallel course, and lifted its nose to slow to their speed.
“Eclipse!” the voice came back, louder now. “Where is the priest called Antaan?”
“He is below. The prince is here,” Moorie answered, and handed the speaking trumpet to Kak’hamish. “I can see their aft gun reflect the stars,” Moorie added softly. “It is run in and centred. They suspect nothing.”
“Remember what I told you to say,” Kak’hamish cautioned Jed-An.
“I remember, Ugly One,” he answered. Kak’hamish held the leather speaking trumpet up to Jed-An’s mouth. “Ambush!” he screamed.
Kak’hamish struck Jed-An in the side of the head with the heel of his hand and the ambassador crumpled to the deck unconscious. Someone barked urgent orders from the deck of Eclipse.
“Fire now!” Kak’hamish shouted.
The gunner’s mate pulled his lanyard, but already Eclipse had begun to drop like a stone. Lady Zumaat’s gun roared and for a moment they were blinded by black powder smoke. When it cleared, Eclipse was nowhere in sight.
“Hard starboard,” Moorie called to the helmsman. “Trim ten points down nose and give us eighth-weight!”
Kak’hamish held onto the quarterdeck rail as the wind-wing dove, banked to the right, and accelerated.
“Trim, two point on the nose. Lighten ship to sixteenth-weight. Helm, come steady on dead north. Where is the bastard?”
“Did we get him?” Nathanial asked in English. All the chatter on deck had been in Koline and so meant nothing to him.
“There!” Corporal Tolni called from the stern rail. “He banked port and lost a thousand yards on us. He’s just coming around to our course.”
Kak’hamish looked back and saw the soft glow of Eclipse’s sail wings, coming out of its bank and falling further behind. It stayed on that course for a few seconds, as if debating its next move, and then dipped its nose and accelerated. The chase was on.
“No, Nathanial, we did not. We are in for a chase and a fight. Annabelle, you may want to go below.”
“Reload!” the gunner’s mate shouted from above them. “Solid shot only. Turning party, crank us to stern.”
Annabelle looked around at the crew scurrying to man the capstan, others bringing more powder and shot up from below, and then looked back at Eclipse, now well below them and still gaining speed. “He will come on us from behind, I believe what they call a stern chase. Yes?”
“Yes, Annabelle.”
“And he
will try to approach from below, both because it gives him the advantage of speed to dive beneath us, and because our gun cannot be depressed to fire at him through our own ship. Is that also true?”
“Yes.”
“Then it appears I will be safer here than below deck,” she concluded
“As you wish, but lash yourself to the railing above the trim station. The manoeuvres are likely to become violent.”
Kak’hamish looked down as Jed-An stirred at his feet. He reached down, pulled the ambassador to his feet by the front of his tunic, and pushed him toward the quarterdeck rail. Jed-An shook his head groggily but when he felt the rail against the small of his back his eyes cleared.
“You still need me,” Jed-An said quickly. “If you survive the fight with Shistomo, but I perish, my government will never believe your story. They will hound you as assassins and pirates, unless you return me unharmed. If you fall to Shistomo, I can keep his hand from your friends. I understand their value, and Shistomo is no fool like those other priests were. Face it, my ugly friend, I am an inconvenient necessity.”
Clack-clack.
“I disagree,” Kak’hamish said, and pushed him over the rail.
Jed-An screamed almost all the way to the ground.
Kak’hamish turned to see Annabelle staring at him, clearly shocked by his act of deliberate murder. “Should we have kept him as a pet?” he asked her.
“Mercy is sometimes―ˮ
“Mercy? Yes, he argued with the Worm priests over mercy, tried to get them to spare Nathanial. You know how? By convincing them to take you instead! He had a much easier death than he earned. Now lash yourself to that rail!”
Visibly shaken by the revelation, she did as she was ordered.
Captain Moorie came to his side. “Can your Queln friend help us in this?” he asked softly.
“She could not keep up with your ship, so fell behind during the day. She would ride hard through the night to make up the lost ground, while we coasted at altitude. But since she would not know of our change in course to the south, she must be somewhere north of us. Perhaps she heard the gun fire, and there will be more firing soon enough. She may yet find us.”
But did he want her to? This was not her fight but she would surely make it so.
2.
all night they ran north. Annabelle had lashed herself to the trim station rail, as Kak’hamish said, and she sat on the deck to rest her throbbing stump. This was as much purposeful walking, as opposed to routine exercise, she had done, and she felt it not only in the sore end of her stump itself, but also in the small of her back.
Nathanial stood beside her and watched in turn the trimsman below, the gun crew, the helmsman, and the pursuing Eclipse. Most of the orders and exchanges on the quarterdeck meant nothing to him, so Annabelle provided as good a translation as she could, although her Koline was not up to all the technical terms covering aerial vessels and ship’s artillery.
Eclipse was the faster ship and Annabelle gathered it could have brought Lady Zumaat down in short order had that been its goal. An hour served to close the distance enough for Eclipse to have the higher position astern, from which it could have made one long, fast dive to below Lady Zumaat, and then discharged a gun into the stern lifting panels. One or two good hits, according to Captain Moorie, would destroy enough of the louvers to render maintenance of proper trim impossible, and leave the merchant vessel to tumble from the sky and crash. But wrecking the kite, and destroying its sacred cargo, apparently would not do.
Instead, Eclipse worked on Lady Zumaat’s rigging. The dive, when it came, left Eclipse below and to port, with its bow gun loaded with cutting shot and cranked aloft. Captain Moorie banked away, Eclipse fired, and the cutting shot made popping sounds as it tore through the port canvas wing. The gun’s recoil bled off Eclipse’s speed and Lady Zumaat drew ahead. Eclipse gained altitude, again falling further behind, then slowly overtook them until again positioned for a dive. And so the chase went for hour after hour.
All the while Nathanial studied the workings of the ship with single-minded focus, almost a desperate determination. At one point, when Lady Zumaat nosed up sharply in a bank, the linen wings fluttered oddly, the ship seemed to hesitate, and the deck seemed to fall away under them for a moment. Then the nose came down, the bank levelled, and the ship regained its stability.
“Hmmm!” Nathanial said, his brow furrowed in intense thought, as if grappling with a problem of enormous complexity.
Lady Zumaat’s own gunners seldom had a clear shot. The capstan turned the platform so slowly, and the aiming screw changed elevation no faster, that it was impossible to track the moving, banking, diving target. Instead, the gunner tried to guess which angle the enemy would choose next, aim the gun there, and sometimes call for a bank to port or starboard to help bring the gun on track. Most of their shots went wide, and each discharge enveloped the quarterdeck with choking, sulphurous smoke. Once they put a solid shot through the port wing on Eclipse, which raised a cheer from Lady Zumaat’s crew, but the enemy kite seemed to lose none of her speed for the small hole the shot made.
The one positive effect of Lady Zumaat’s fire was the recoil, which gave them a little more speed each discharge. Annabelle wondered if this might be used to pull further ahead, but Corporal Tolni explained the merchant vessel did not carry enough powder and shot to keep discharging its gun endlessly—probably no more than a score of rounds were all they carried in the shot locker, he said. That did not seem like a great many to Annabelle, and by the time the western horizon began turning orange with the approach of dawn, they had fired ten or twelve times.
As the sky lightened, she saw the crew around her, faces blackened with powder smoke from the discharges of the gun, and lined with fatigue and anxiety. She was surprised to see her own hand on the rail, grimy with spent powder, and Nathanial’s face was as well. Two ship’s boys carried leather water buckets, one up to the crew of the gun, who drank thirstily, the other among the quarterdeck crew. He came to Nathanial and her and offered the wooden ladle, and she was surprised how parched she suddenly felt, and unlike the others, she had done nothing but sit and watch. The water tasted cool and delightfully sweet.
“She’s ready for another dive,” Nathanial said, pointing up and squinting, as the sun was now full-up to the east. “How many more passes can we take, I wonder?”
“Hands inboard!” Captain Moorie shouted, “Lively, now!” The sidemen were busy patching holes in the port sail-wing, and re-splicing severed lines, hurried back along the spars for the safety of the deck. That wing still looked tattered and frail. Moorie had reduced their speed after the last attack for fear the wing would fail altogether in a steeper dive. That was Eclipse’s strategy, wasn’t it?
Annabelle shaded her eyes and looked up at their relentless pursuer, the ship she now hated as if it were a living thing. With the sun above the eastern horizon, the port side of Eclipse was black with shadow, as if in confirmation of its name. But further to her left Annabelle saw another flicker of movement, a lone skrill in a rapid, shallow dive at right angles to Eclipse. The skrill had the sun behind it, would be invisible to the hostile ship.
“Ha!” Kak’hamish called in triumph, seeing the skrill as well.
Eclipse began to nose over, but before it began its dive the skrill streaked past it, its flight path jogged, slowed by collision with something. Then a long panel of the starboard wing flapped free above the kite and it heeled over sharply to that side, began to side-slip, and then fell away out of her sight. Nathanial ran to the aft rail to see.
“Blast!” he shouted. “The bounders have regained their trim. They’ve lost three or four hundred feet of altitude, though. That will show them!” he shouted, and he shook his fist at them in triumph.
Annabelle now clearly saw the skrill and its rider in a long, gentle banking turn. The rider’s long red hair rippled in the wind and she—for somehow Annabelle sensed this was a woman, although she knew not how—looke
d back over her shoulder at Eclipse below. The skrill levelled, its course now back toward Eclipse, and then dove again.
“No!” Kak’hamish called, and then shouted in a language entirely foreign to Annabelle. Whatever he said, the skrill and rider paid no mind and continued their dive out of her sight.
Annabelle heard the crackle of musket fire, and then Nathanial turned quickly away from the rail, his face twisted with disappointment. Kak’hamish remained at the rail, watching for almost a minute as Nathanial made his way back and sat heavily by her side.
“Shot,” he said. “I saw the beast crumble myself, although it fell through the rigging and seemed to knock something loose.”
Annabelle cared little about that for the moment. Her eyes remained on Kak’hamish’s back and when he turned his face was composed, if sad. He met her eyes.
“The skrill recovered before it reached ground. She may still live,” he said, but with little real hope. Then he turned to Moorie. “Now’s our chance, Captain, while Eclipse has lost way and her rigging’s (something),” he said with animation. She hadn’t understood the last word, but suspected it meant confused, or asunder.
“Helm, hard a starboard!” Moorie ordered. “Trim, five points down-nose, not a knife’s blade more, and give us sixteenth-weight. Gunner, we’ll cut under the bastard and you blow his bottom out.”
“Double shot!” the gunner’s mate ordered as the wind-wing banked and then dove toward Eclipse. The dive was shallow and Moorie ran to the port rail to watch the wing there, anxiety in every line in his face. Would the wing hold? The gunner’s mate sweated as he cranked the elevating screw as fast as he could and the muzzle of the cannon climbed even as the loader rammed home a second round shot and wadding. The gun crew cast anxious glances over their shoulders as they worked.
Would the wing hold?
It held. For a moment the shadow of Eclipse passed over the quarterdeck deck of Lady Zumaat, then the sun appeared again and the gunner pulled the lanyard. Annabelle closed her eyes.
series 01 05 A Prince of Mars Page 12