Iron Jaw and Hummingbird

by Chris Roberson

  “There is no jest in my words, child,” the Bannerman went on, “and I’m not playing a game. You’ve made some powerful enemies, and it’s time for you to move on.”

  Gamine’s smile began to fade. “What enemies?”

  The Bannerman jerked his chin at the camp behind Gamine, where followers hung back, watching intently, partially hidden by canvas and twine that would do nothing to protect them if the squad should decide to attack. “How many of your people here left good jobs behind, these last weeks, eh?”

  Gamine’s lips drew into a tight line. The Combine. If it had been a snake, it could have devoured her leg whole before she saw it.

  Many of the more recent converts in the camp had once farmed their own allotments, but after the drought and quakes they had been forced to find work as laborers on plantations owned by the Combine. When the laborers discovered that their lives under their new masters were not as satisfying as those they’d once known, many of them were hungry for something better, desperate for some meaning in their lives. And many had found that meaning, and that better life, in the Society of Righteous Harmony.

  “I’m told,” the Bannerman went on, “that just a few days ago there as was a mass defection of laborers from a Combine plantation near here, after one of their number attended one of your ‘services’ here and then carried back to the others what he’d heard.”

  “I can’t imagine why the Combine would take offense. You can’t tell me there aren’t more people ready to take their place. There aren’t enough jobs to go around.”

  “Perhaps,” the Bannerman allowed with a slight smile. “But it sets a bad precedent, if nothing else. The Combine has been in touch with the governor-general himself, and word’s come down that your little group has orders to pull up stakes and move along. You’re not welcome here any longer.”

  “And ‘here,’ again, would be where?” Gamine took two theatrical steps to the left. “Is this far enough?”

  The Bannerman’s grin widened slightly, but his grip tightened ominously on his sword’s handle. “You’re no longer welcome in the Great Yu Canyon, child. You’ve been given five days to break camp, pack your things, and be on your way, or my men and I will be forced to act.” He pulled the saber a fraction from its scabbard, the blade gleaming in the last sunlight spilling over the canyon wall. “And trust me, child, you do not want to see us in action.”

  Gamine met the Bannerman’s gaze and felt ice dripping down her spine. She repressed the urge to shudder and tightened her hands into fists at her sides.

  “We’ve never spoken against the Combine and have no desire to interfere with its interests.”

  “That’s as may be,” the Bannerman admitted with a shrug. “But I’ve got orders to move you, and so you’re going to move.”

  At a signal from him, the other Bannermen all drew their weapons, the naked blades of their sabers gleaming in the dying midday light.

  Gamine looked from the Bannerman to the Society followers who stood directly behind her, and the ragged circles of tents stretching out beyond. The followers were looking at her with expressions of expectant anticipation, eager to see what she would do, how she would respond. After all, didn’t the powers speak to, and through, Iron Jaw? If the Bannermen wanted a fight, couldn’t the Society’s divinely inspired leader, invulnerable so long as the spirits possessed her, stand against them with ease?

  Gamine saw all these thoughts and more in the eyes of the followers, and shrank from them.

  “Very well,” she said in a low voice, turning back to face the Bannerman. “Tell your men to stand down, and I’ll have my people break camp.”

  Behind her, Gamine heard the followers gasp in surprise and disappointment, but the Bannerman just nodded, his expression unreadable. Letting his saber slide back into its scabbard, he motioned for his men to sheathe their weapons, and the brief confrontation was at an end.

  Days later, the Society of Righteous Harmony was once more in motion, migrating to the north, following the line of the canyon walls. Their frequent companion, hunger, was now with them always, the mealtime rations growing smaller with each passing day. And not just hunger, but death followed them, as well. A few days out of Yinglong, Master Wei finally gave up the mortal world and moved on to the reward that awaited him in the life to come.

  Wei was buried in the shadow of the Great Yu Canyon’s walls, under a cairn of rocks prized from the slope. When she performed the funereal rites that Wei himself had devised, Gamine could not help but envy the old man, if only a little. His travails were at an end, while hers, she feared, were just beginning.

  As the airship approached Mount Shennong, Huang idly sharpened the blade of his sword with a whetstone. The sword’s blade was rugged, bearing scars and nicks, pitted here and there with age. It held a fine edge, though, and was nicely weighted for his grasp. Huang had taken it off an unconscious foe during a raid on a refinery some seasons before, and though it had yet to replace the red-bladed saber he’d been given by Governor-General Ouyang, which was still Zhao’s prized possession, it had become familiar and comfortable in his fist.

  The pilot signaled from the makeshift controls that the skylight entrance to the Aerie was within sight, and that they’d be touching down in moments. All the bandits on board the airship were relieved, looking forward to getting back into the protection of the Aerie and putting their feet up, if only briefly. This latest foray had taken them farther from home than most, nearly halfway to the Great Yu Canyon, and all they had to show for their trouble were a few crates of machine parts and the knowledge that they’d disrupted the activities of the Green Standard Army in the region for another few weeks at least.

  Zhao had announced a brief respite, a vacation from their routine. Once the airship was landed and unloaded, he would order a feast prepared—“feast” in relative terms, nearly twice the normal rations—and a case of wine cracked open, and then the bandits would have a few days’ vacation. They could all use the rest.

  Even as the airship descended into the skylight, and they saw that there were no lights on in the hangar below, the bandits still did not suspect anything was amiss. The approach of the airship should have sent off proximity signals with the Aerie, alerting the few bandits who had remained behind on this last raid to ready the chamber for their arrival. But the space beneath them was dark as a moonless night, lit only by the thin sunlight streaming down from the thin chimneylike opening through which the airship descended.

  “Maybe they’ve started their vacation early,” Jue suggested, shouting to be heard over the thrum of the airship’s engines.

  Huang smiled, the expression no doubt completely hidden behind his mask and goggles. He gave an exaggerated nod instead. “I can’t blame them,” he shouted back.

  Finally, the airship touched down, and the engines were stilled. As they gradually whirred to silence, the bandits opened the hatch and climbed out into the gloom beyond.

  Sounds could not carry far in the thin air of the hangar, but Zhao shouted for the ground crew to attend, all the same, cupping his hands around his breather mask like a trumpet and bellowing for all that he was worth. As it was, Huang, only a few paces away, could scarcely hear him.

  Then the lights flared on, blinding bright. Huang squinted in the glare, his eyes struggling to adjust from the darkness of a moment before to the newfound brightness.

  Huang saw immediately why the lights had remained unilluminated. The bandits who had remained behind, and were to act as ground crew, now lay bound and gagged on the cold stone floor of the hangar. Those who were not unconscious stared up at them helplessly. And Huang understood in an instant what could render such stout bandits helpless—a full platoon of Bannermen.

  Three dozen heavily armed and armored Bannermen filled the hangar, well entrenched and with their weapons trained on the airship and the bandits now standing before it.

  Huang never knew quite how the Bannermen had come to be in the hangar. The most likely explanation
was that the military had successfully tracked the airship back to the Aerie after one of the bandits’ raids, and had waited until the airship was away on another foray to storm the mountain stronghold and subdue the few bandits left behind, most of whom were too aged or infirm to put up much of a struggle. Then they had only to lie in wait for the airship to return, signaled by the proximity signals of the airship’s arrival, at which point they would take up their positions in the hangar and ambush the bandits when they least expected it.

  Of course, that being the case, why would they have dragged the bound and gagged ground crew into the hangar and left them on the cold stone floor?

  Huang didn’t have to wonder for long.

  The bandits were still squinting in the bright lights, while the Bannermen’s own eyes were shaded by dark goggles, their faces covered from the nose down by armored breather masks, with only their foreheads left visible.

  The leader of the Bannermen, who had a cross-shaped scar above his right eye, carried a loudspeaker of some kind, which amplified his voice loud enough to be heard by the bandits even through the thin high-altitude air.

  “Lay down your arms,” the Bannerman shouted, his voice distorted and amplified by the machine, until it sounded like he was speaking in peals of thunder. “Surrender, and you may yet live.”

  Zhao, brandishing his red-bladed saber, stood his ground defiantly.

  The lead Bannerman only shrugged, and in a single grisly motion whipped his saber from its scabbard and brought it point down into the back of the nearest captured bandit, who lay with his hands and feet bound, facedown on the cold stone floor beside him.

  As the Bannerman swept his saber out of the bandit’s back, dark arterial blood sluicing from its blade, he again addressed the bandits through the loudspeaker. At his feet, the injured bandit jerked upon the floor, punctured lung struggling in agony for breath, his life pouring from the wound in his back.

  “That’s one of your number lost. How many more will follow?”

  There were some sixteen bandits standing before the airship, and by Huang’s estimation a full platoon of thirty-six Bannermen circling them on all sides.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” the Bannerman with the cross-shaped scar said absently. “Can’t have you running off, can we?”

  At a signal from the lead Bannerman, one of his men raised a metal tube on his shoulder, and a torrent of fire gushed from its forward end, trailing black smoke. The mortar struck the airship just above the gondola. The envelope crumpled like paper, and had it been filled with an inflammable gas like hydrogen, the entire hangar would have gone up in the conflagration. As it was, the airship employed nonflammable helium, which did little more than pour from the massive rents in the envelope, filling the hangar. Had the bandits and Bannermen not been wearing breather masks, they would have squeaked at one another in comically high voices until they suffocated from lack of oxygen. The escape of the gas was all but unnoticeable, except for the evidence of the deflated, crumpled airship.

  The gondola, though, was filled with breathable oxygen and caught fire immediately, burning like a magnesium torch, taking with it what little plunder the bandits had brought back from their most recent raids.

  The force of the explosion knocked the nearest of the bandits still standing to their knees, and it was at this point that the Bannermen made their move.

  Despite the cavalier way he’d dispatched the bound and gagged bandit at his feet, it was clear to Huang that the Bannerman did not intend to kill them all, at least not right away. If he had, he could simply have commanded his men to open fire on the bandits with rifles and pistols, all of them having had the opportunity to properly brace themselves against their weapons’ recoil before the airship had even touched down. That he hadn’t given any command of the sort, but instead had allowed a number of his men to meet the bandits with drawn swords in close combat, suggested he’d been ordered to take at least some of them alive.

  More than likely, the Bannerman had been instructed to bring some of the bandits back to stand trial, or to be made examples of, preferably the leaders.

  What that meant to Huang, aside from the fact that they might be better off dead if the alternative was to serve as the governor-general’s example to other potential bandits, was that they had a fighting chance to escape. If the Bannermen were hesitant to open fire and rain bullets upon them, the bandits might just be able to fight their way clear. Just where they would go was still a cause for concern—with the Bannermen controlling the Aerie and the airship in smoking ruins behind them—but anywhere was preferable, at this point.

  With some of the Bannermen retaining strategic positions along the hangar walls, their rifles primed and ready, their leader and a dozen or so of the others drew their swords and advanced on the bandits, their expressions unreadable behind black goggles and armored masks.

  Huang drew his own sword and, taking his place at Zhao’s side, prepared to meet the charge.

  Swaddled in his thermal suit, hidden behind mask and goggles, Huang could hear only the distant echoes of battle sounds through the thin air. It was as if he fought underwater. When he moved, it felt like his muscles were several steps behind his thoughts, dragging sluggishly through heavy mud.

  Since he’d taken over as strategist for the bandits, Huang had fought face-to-face only infrequently. He’d sparred with Zhao on a regular basis, teaching the bandit chief the formal fencing techniques he’d learned while Zhao in turn instructed Huang in the use of more dubious tactics. But those had been only practice matches, with the only blood drawn from nicks and scratches gotten by accident.

  Now Huang found himself fighting for his life, with his sword the only thing between him and capture, or the grave. Perhaps even stranger, in fighting for his own life he might be forced to deprive an opponent of his.

  Huang had never killed another in close combat, so far as he knew. He’d injured other swordsmen, that was certain, as he had when the bandits had taken him prisoner when raiding the supply convoy to Far Sight Outpost, all those years before. But none of those injuries had been fatal, and many of those opponents had gone on to become close friends when Huang joined the bandits’ number himself.

  He’d been responsible for death before; at least, it was almost impossible to imagine that he hadn’t. He liked to entertain the fantasy that all of those within the crawlers he exploded, or the mines he sealed off, or the refineries he blew to pieces, had somehow miraculously escaped just in the nick of time. It was a ridiculously implausible fiction, of course, but a comforting one, and it was a fiction that he clung to, particularly in the long, dark watches of the night.

  In the present circumstances, though, Huang defended his life and liberty, and in doing so was faced with an inescapable decision—fight and live, or surrender and die. And in fighting, there was the very real likelihood that he would have to take another’s life. Without any conditions or exceptions, without the chance that his opponent had secretly survived the encounter and sought medical attention. Without the slimmest possibility that he and his opponent might one day be friends, and that Huang would be forgiven for injuring him in close combat. No, he would have to kill, and see the life leave another’s body, never to return.

  The only problem was, Huang wasn’t sure he could do that.

  As it happened, Huang was not forced to discover whether he could kill. At least, not yet. He found himself facing a Bannerman who wielded his sword like it was a club, with considerable force but no finesse, and after parrying a few attacks, Huang was able to knock the sword from the Bannerman’s hand. Then he’d simply stepped in and delivered a blow with a balled fist to the side of the Bannerman’s head, sending him crumpling to the floor.

  Tightening his grip on his own sword, Huang turned to see how his fellow bandits were faring.

  Not well, it was quickly apparent. Already a handful of bandits were on the floor in various states of distress, some still moaning and twitching, some silent and unmoving. T
hose bandits who remained standing were holding their own, but the Bannermen’s continued attacks were pressing them together in a knot at the center of the hangar, making it difficult for each of the bandits to fight without risking injuring their fellows.

  Zhao was only a few paces away, crossing swords with the leader of the Bannermen. And though the cross-shaped scar over his right eye flushed red with exertion, it was clear that the Bannerman was far from exhausted, though the same could not be said for Zhao. The bandit chief turned aside the Bannerman’s thrusts, but with less energy and enthusiasm with each exchange. And if the opponent whom Huang had faced was clearly ill trained in the use of the blade, the same could not be said for the Bannermen’s leader.

  There was something familiar about the way the Bannerman handled his blade, but Huang didn’t have time to dwell on it. Another of the Bannermen rushed him from the other side, saber in hand, and Huang was forced to turn and face the attack.

  While not as skilled a swordsman as the Bannermen’s leader, Huang’s new opponent was more adept than the fallen opponent who’d swung the blade like a club, and Huang was put to considerably more trouble to keep from being skewered on the point of the Bannerman’s blade. At one point, Huang batted the Bannerman’s blade aside and for an instant had an opening that would have allowed him to end the contest, but the only attack available to him would have required a killing blow. Huang hesitated, not eager to try his hand at murder, even if it would be justified in self-defense. Instead, he continued to trade blows with the Bannerman, parry and attack and retreat and attack and parry. Finally, he was able to score a painful but nonfatal wound on the Bannerman’s upper arm, a long but shallow cut, freely bleeding, that caused the Bannerman to drop his sword and clutch his arm in agony. Huang followed with a kick to the Bannerman’s midsection, driving the wind from him and forcing the Bannerman to his knees.