“Mad?” Volger grunted, lifting another bar. “For trying to save what little of your inheritance you haven’t already thrown away?”
“This is an airship, Volger. Every gram makes a difference!” Alek pulled another bar from the case. “And you bring gold bullion aboard?”
“I didn’t think the Darwinists would cut it so close.” Volger grunted again, another gold bar spinning away. “And just imagine how pleased you’d have been if I’d been right.”
Alek groaned. Working alongside the Leviathan’s crew, he had absorbed the airmen’s mania about weight. But Volger thought in terms of heavy cannon and armored walkers.
Alek pushed another bar through the window—only six left.
“But we may as well finish the job,” Volger said. “Throw it all out, like the walker and the castle and ten years’ worth of supplies!”
“So that’s what this is about?” Alek said, lifting another bar. “That I’ve thrown away all your hard work? Don’t you realize we’ve gained something more important?”
“What could be more important than your birthright?”
“Allies.” Alek pushed the gold bar out the window. As it fell, he thought he felt the deck leveling beneath him. Maybe this was working.
“Allies?” Volger snorted, then lifted another bar and flung it out. “So your new friends are worth throwing away everything your father left you?”
“Not everything,” Alek said. “All my life you and my father prepared me for this war. Thanks to that, I don’t have to hide from it. Come on, there are only four left. The two of us can lift them all at once.”
“Still too heavy.” Volger shook his head. “Your father was an idealist and a romantic, and it cost him dearly. I always hoped you’d inherited a bit of your mother’s pragmatism.”
Alek looked down at the case.
Only four gold bars… . He wondered what a boy like Dylan would say to such a fortune. Maybe it wasn’t entirely mad, what Volger had done.
“Well,” he said, “perhaps we could save one.”
Volger smiled as he knelt, pulling one of the bars out and sliding it back under the bed. “There may be hope for you after all, Alek. Shall we?”
Alek knelt across from him, and together they heaved the case up, Volger’s face turning red with the effort. Alek felt his own muscles throbbing in his arms.
Finally the case was resting on the windowsill. Alek took a step back, then threw himself against the case as hard as he could.
The last three bars spilled out as they fell toward the snow, spinning wildly and glittering with sunlight. Alek felt Volger’s grip on his shoulder, as if the man thought he would go tumbling after them. The airship pitched up beneath Alek’s feet, rolling to starboard as the weight of his father’s gold fell away.
“But I truly didn’t think it would matter, not on a ship this huge,” Volger said quietly. “I never meant to endanger you.”
“JETTISONING THE LAST INGOTS.”
“I know that,” Alek sighed. “Everything you’ve done has been to protect me. But I’ve chosen a different path now—one less safe. Either you recognize that or we part ways when this ship lands.”
Count Volger took a deep, slow breath, then bowed. “I remain at your service, Your Serene Highness.”
Alek rolled his eyes, and started to say more. But a light flickered outside, and they both leaned out the window again.
Flares were arcing up from the ground. The Leviathan had reached the first German scouts. Their mortars were firing, sending bright cinders aloft. Alek breathed in the sharp, familiar scent of phosphorous, and the rumble of nearby cannon reached his ears.
“I just hope we weren’t too late.”
THIRTY-NINE
“Off your bums, beasties!” Deryn shouted, sending another cluster of bats fluttering into the air.
Mr. Rigby had sent the middies forward to lighten the bow. Something heavy was holding the airship’s nose down. Either that or the forward hydrogen cells were leaking like mad. But the sniffers hadn’t found the slightest rip.
From up here Deryn could see the whole valley, and the view was barking dire. The Clanker walking machine had come to a halt a few miles away. Its scouts stretched in a line across the glacier, waiting for the airship to fly into their guns.
Suddenly the membrane reared beneath Deryn’s feet. The nose had tipped up a bit.
“Did you feel that?” Newkirk yelled from across the bow.
“Aye, something’s working,” she called back. “Keep rousting the beasties!”
Deryn unclipped her safety line and ran toward another cluster of bats, shouting and waving her arms. They turned to stare at her skeptically before scampering—they hadn’t been fed their fléchettes yet.
And they wouldn’t be anytime soon. When the ballast alert had sounded, Mr. Rigby had tossed two whole bags of spikes over the side. If the zeppelins caught up, the Leviathan would be defenseless, her flocks stuffed with plenty of food—but no metal—and now scattered to the winds.
At least the borrowed Clanker engines were working, so far. They were noisy and smelly, and threw out enough sparks to give Deryn the mortal shivers, but blisters could they push the ship along!
The old motivator engines had only nudged the airbeast in the right direction, like a plowman flicking a donkey’s ears. But now that was upside down: The cilia were acting like a rudder, setting the course while the Clanker engines propelled the ship.
Deryn hadn’t realized the whale could be such a clever-boots, adapting to the new engines so quickly. And she’d never seen an airship move this fast. The pursuing zeppelins—some of them small, nippy interceptors— were already falling behind.
But the German land machines still waited dead ahead.
The ship bucked again, and Deryn lost her footing, skidding down the slope. Her foot caught in a ratline, jerking her to a nasty halt.
“Safety first, Mr. Sharp!” Newkirk called, snapping the shoulder straps of his harness like suspenders.
“Pretty smug, for a bum-rag,” Deryn muttered, snapping her clip back onto a ratline. She gave the bats another halfhearted shout, but the ship didn’t seem to need it anymore. The airbeast’s nose was pulling up in starts, another jolt skyward coming every ten seconds or so.
It felt as if they were chucking officers out the bridge front window! But at least the ship was climbing.
Deryn eased forward a bit, until she had a good view of the Germans.
The little scout craft, skittering machines like metal daddy longlegs, were shooting off their mortars. But the barrage was only flares, which weren’t designed to climb very high. They arced a few hundred feet up and burned there uselessly, singeing the air beneath the gondola’s belly.
But now the big eight-legged walker’s guns were elevating, tracking the airship but holding their fire. At the speed the Leviathan was making, they’d only get one shot before she flew past them.
A command whistle began to scream, one long note, pitched almost too high to hear. The all-hands-aft signal!
Deryn turned and ran. On either side of her, sniffers scuttled along the membrane, headed toward the tail. The spine was crowded with men and beasts all running in the same direction, the air gun crews pulling up their weapons to carry them along.
It was a last, desperate attempt to move every squick of weight to the rear of the ship. Done all at once, it would tip the ship’s nose up, driving her still higher into the air.
Halfway back, Deryn saw flickers on the snow below, and glanced over her shoulder. The muzzles of the walker’s guns were blazing, smoke billowing out in clouds.
Before the rumble even reached her ears, the airship bucked again—harder this time, as if someone had tossed a grand piano overboard. The nose flew up, hiding Deryn’s view of the German walker, and the deck rolled hard to starboard. Whatever they’d tossed away, it had been on the port side.
She heard the tardy thunder of the guns then, and shells started arcing past. They
were huge incendiaries, igniting the sky like gouts of frozen lightning.
One flew past so near that Deryn felt its heat on her cheeks and forehead. The air was instantly burned dry, her eyes forced half shut by the shell’s fury. The light from the flaming missiles threw the shadows of men and beasts across the membrane, stretched and misshapen by the airship’s curves.
But the entire barrage was flying too far to port.
The sudden loss of weight, whatever it had been, had rolled the airship out of the way just in time. And the riggers’ work over the last few days had held—not a squick of hydrogen was flaring from the skin.
But Deryn kept running for the ship’s tail, as did the rest of the topside crew. Not just to pull the ship up harder, but to see behind them.
There it was again, the eight-legged walker, now sliding into the distance astern. Its guns were swiveling, trying to spin around and fire once more. But the Leviathan’s new Clanker engines were carrying her away too fast.
By the time the guns blazed again, the burning shells fell hundreds of feet short. They dropped into the snow and expended their anger there, the walking machines vanishing behind a veil of steam.
Deryn joined the cheer that rose up along the spine. The hydrogen sniffers howled along, half mad from all the ruckus.
Newkirk appeared, panting and covered with sweat, and clapped her on the shoulder. “Blistering good fight! Eh, Mr. Sharp?”
“Aye, it was. I just hope it’s over.”
She raised her field glasses to gander at the zeppelins, now silhouetted by the setting sun. They’d fallen still farther behind, hopelessly outmatched by the Stormwalker engines.
“They’ll never catch up now,” she said. “Not with night falling.”
“THE HERKULES’ SHELLS GO WIDE.”
“But I thought those Predators were fast!”
“Aye, they are. But we’re faster, now that we’ve got those engines on us.”
“But haven’t they got Clanker engines too?” Newkirk asked.
Deryn frowned, looking down at the Leviathan’s flanks. The cilia were stirring madly, weaving the airflow around the ship, somehow adding the currents of the sky to the raw power of the engines.
“We’re something different now,” she said. “A little of us and a little of them.”
Newkirk thought a moment, then hmphed and clapped her on the back again. “Well, frankly, Mr. Sharp, I don’t care if the kaiser himself gives us a push, as long as it gets us clear of this iceberg.”
“Glacier,” Deryn said. “But you’re right—it’s good to be flying again.”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath of freezing air, feeling the strange new thrum of the membrane beneath her boots.
Already, her air sense told her, the beast was veering south, setting course for the Mediterranean. The zeppelins behind were an afterthought; the Ottoman Empire lay ahead.
Whatever sort of tangled crossbreed the Clankers had made her into, the Leviathan had survived.
FORTY
The pistons were the trickiest bits to draw. There was something about the way they fit together—the Clanker logic of them—that blistered Deryn’s brain.
She’d been sketching the new engines all afternoon, imagining the drawings in some future edition of the Manual of Aeronautics. But even if no one ever saw them, the warm day was excuse enough for lounging here. The airship was only a hundred yards above the water, the afternoon sun bouncing from the waves and setting everything aglitter. After three nights shipwrecked on a glacier, it seemed the perfect afternoon to lie in the ratlines, soak up the heat, and draw.
But even with the Mediterranean Sea stretching out in all directions, the Clankers never seemed to relax. Alek and Klopp had been busy down on the pods since noon, fashioning windshields to protect the engine pilots. That’s what they were calling themselves—pilots, not engine men or any proper Air Service term. They’d already forgotten that the real pilots were on the bridge.
Then again, she’d heard it rumored that the ship didn’t need pilots these days, Darwinist or Clanker. The whale had developed an independent streak, a tendency to choose its own way among the thermals and updrafts. Some of the crew wondered if the wreck had rattled the beastie’s attic. But Deryn reckoned it was the new engines. Who wouldn’t feel feisty with all that power?
A bee was crawling across her sketch pad, and she waved it away. The hives had come out of their three-day hibernation hungry, gorging themselves on the wildflowers of Italy as the Leviathan headed south. The strafing hawks looked fat and happy this afternoon, full of wild hares and stolen piglets.
“Mr. Sharp?” came the master coxswain’s voice.
Deryn almost snapped to attention. But then she saw the message lizard staring at her, its beady eyes blinking.
“Please report to the captain’s quarters,” the lizard continued. “Without delay.”
“Aye, sir. Right away!” Deryn winced as she heard her voice squeak like a girl’s. She lowered it and said, “End message.”
Gathering her pad and pencils as the beastie scampered away, Deryn wondered what she’d done wrong. Nothing bad enough to earn an audience with the captain—not that she could remember. Mr. Rigby had even commended her on taking Alek hostage during the Stormwalker attack.
But her nerves were twitching nonetheless.
The captain’s quarters were up near the bow, next to the navigation room. The door was half open and Captain Hobbes sat behind his desk, the wall charts rustling in the warm breeze from an open window.
Deryn saluted smartly. “Midshipman Sharp reporting, sir.”
“At ease, Mr. Sharp,” the man said, which only made her more nervous. “Please come in. And shut the door.”
“Aye, sir,” she said. The captain’s door was a solid piece of natural wood, not fabricated balsa, and it thumped shut with a heavy finality.
“May I ask you, Mr. Sharp, your opinion of our guests?”
“The Clankers, sir?” Deryn frowned. “They’re … very clever. And quite determined about keeping those engines running. Good allies to have, I’d say.”
“Would you? Then it’s lucky they aren’t officially our enemies.” The captain tapped his pencil against the cage that sat on his desk. The carrier tern inside it fluttered, its tongue slipping out to taste the air. “I’ve just learned that England is not at war with Austria-Hungary, not yet. At the moment we need only concern ourselves with the Germans.”
“Well, that’s handy, sir.”
“Indeed.” The captain leaned back and smiled. “You’re rather friendly with young Alek, aren’t you?”
“Aye, sir. He’s a good lad.”
“So he seems. A young boy like that needs friends, especially having run away from home and country.” The captain lifted an eyebrow. “Sad, isn’t it?”
Deryn nodded, saying carefully, “I suppose so, sir.”
“And all quite mysterious. Here we are at their mercy, mechanically speaking, and yet we don’t know much about Alek and his friends. Who are they, really?”
“They are a bit cagey, sir,” Deryn said, which wasn’t a lie.
“THE CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS.”
“Quite so.” Captain Hobbes picked up the piece of paper before him. “The First Lord of the Admiralty himself has become curious about them, and requests that we keep him informed. So it might be useful, Dylan, if you kept your ears open.”
Deryn let out a slow breath.
This was the moment, of course, when duty required her to tell the captain all she knew—that Alek was the son of Archduke Ferdinand, and that the Germans were behind his father’s murder. Alek had said it himself: This wasn’t just family business. The assassinations had started the whole barking war, after all.
And now Lord Churchill himself was asking about it!
But she’d promised Alek not to tell. Deryn owed him that much, after setting the sniffers on him the first time they’d met.
For that matter, the whole barkin
g ship owed him a debt. Alek had revealed his hiding place to help them fight the zeppelins, giving up his Stormwalker and a castle full of stores. And all he’d asked in return was to stay anonymous. It seemed impolite for the captain even to be asking.
She couldn’t break her promise—not like this, without even talking to Alek first.
Deryn saluted smartly. “I’m happy to do whatever I can, sir.”
And she left without telling the captain any of it.
That evening when she went to find Alek on egg duty, the machine room was locked.
Deryn gave the door a couple of loud raps. Alek opened it and smiled, but he didn’t stand aside.
“Dylan! Good to see you.” He lowered his voice. “But I can’t let you in.”
“Why not?”
“One of the eggs is looking pale, so we’ve had to rearrange the heaters. It’s all very complicated. Dr. Barlow said that another person in the room could affect the temperature.”
Deryn rolled her eyes. As Constantinople drew closer, the lady boffin grew more and more protective of her eggs. They’d survived an airship crash, three nights on a glacier, and a zeppelin attack, and yet she seemed to think they’d shatter if anyone looked at them sideways.
“That’s a load of yackum, Alek. Let me in.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes! We’re keeping them close enough to body temperature. Another person in there won’t hurt.”
Alek hesitated. “Well, she also said that Tazza hasn’t had a walk all day. He’ll be tearing down the walls of her cabin if you don’t see to him.”
Deryn sighed. It was amazing how the lady boffin could be so tiresome without even being in the room.
“I’ve got something important to tell you, Alek. Shove aside and let me in!”
He frowned but relented, letting her squeeze past into the sweltering machine room.
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