“That’s where they keep the cages,” Corin whispered. “And that’s where all the hatches are that open out into the air.”
Jessie nodded, and then slowly crawled along the wall until they could get a better view of everything going on. Each and every hatch in the floor was open. The larger ones had cages dangling over them by chains, while each of the smaller ones, probably over a hundred of them, had a rope dangling over it from an overhead winch and a raider standing at the ready with a cross bow. None of the raiders were concentrating on the task at hand, however. Each of them was staring at the captain, who stood at the far end of the room near one of the stairways. And coming down the stairway, her chest heaving like she had run all the way here, was Lock.
“Oh, this is so not good,” Corin said.
“How did she get out?” Jessie asked.
“Maybe she screamed for help and someone heard her. And I can probably guess what she’s telling the captain.”
Jessie felt a crossbow press against her back. “She’s probably saying we have a no good traitor on the ship.” Jessie slowly turned her head to the sound of the voice. Apparently the harpoon launcher bay hadn’t been as empty as they thought. Three raiders stood with crossbows pointed at Jessie and Corin. The one in the lead, a tall yet incredibly skinny woman with matted hair, had apparently been the one who spoke. Jessie knew her face, but Corin was the one who said her name.
“Weasel,” he muttered under his breath.
Weasel pushed them out into the main room and called across to Vestra. “Hey, captain. I think I found what happened to our engines.”
The captain looked over to see Jessie, and Jessie couldn’t be sure where to begin in describing the look on her face. Surprise may have been part of it, maybe even a little bit of betrayal. But on top of it all was rage. The captain started to stalk across the room towards them, but she wasn’t able to finish. She was interrupted when bells starting going off all across the ship.
The captain looked around herself as though trying to find the source of the noise, then snapped back to her senses. “The raid is cancelled!” she yelled. “Battle stations! Harpoon launchers at the ready! Everyone else with a crossbow to the deck! I think this is for real this time. They were just waiting for us to make our move.” She gestured at Weasel to follow her as she ran back to the stairs. “Bring those two up to the deck. If we all make it through this I want them executed immediately after.” Both the Captain and Lock disappeared up the stairs, and Weasel and her two cronies nudged for Jessie and Corin to follow.
“What’s going on?” Corin asked Jessie. “I heard those bells the other day, but no one would tell us what they meant.”
“Remember earlier when you asked the goddess Vestra to help us? I think those bells are her way of saying ‘no.’”
13
The deck was chaos. Many of the women had left their rooms and were on the deck, yet none of them seemed to know what they were doing. Most of them were searching the night sky while others were running to their stalls in some panicked attempt to save them from any damage. Although the tilt of the ship from the damaged engines was slight various items in the stalls had fallen off whatever shelves they’d been on and were slowly sliding down the incline. The air all around them was lit only by the fires from below. And there was a sound in the air. It was hard to hear exactly, but Jessie thought it might have been the distant beat of many wings.
The captain led Jessie, Corin, Weasel and several squads up to the deck from a stairwell near the captain’s tower, and a woman slid down the ladder from near the top.
“Tilly!” the captain said. “Are you the one who raised the alarm?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the woman said. “I first saw them a minute ago approaching from the north. I wouldn’t have been able to see them in the dark if there weren’t so many of them.”
“How many of them?” the captain asked.
“Three squads, twelve in all. I already ordered the ship into evasive maneuvers, but something’s wrong with two of the engines and the ship isn’t moving right.”
The captain turned to Jessie, and spittle flew from her lips as she talked. “I hope you’re satisfied. You may have just killed every single woman on this ship.” Then she turned to Lock and Weasel. “You keep an eye on them. If either of them do anything else, go ahead and push them right over the side.” Captain Vestra turned on her heels and went out among the crowd of people. The raiders all stood at attention on the deck, and despite their professional manner Jessie could see the fear in each of their eyes.
“Everyone who is not armed needs to get her sorry ass below the deck this instant!” the captain called out. A few of the panicked woman heard her and ran for the nearest stairwell, but most either didn’t hear her or else didn’t care at the moment. The captain didn’t pay them any more mind. There wasn’t time to herd them all back below, Jessie figured. “All warriors, formation eight! Remember your training! If our intelligence is right then you need to aim for some sort of cockpit that…”
The air split open with the sound of twelve roars, but they were not the roars of living things. They were the roars of boilers, of gears and metal grinding against metal. The air overhead burned hot, and Jessie instinctively ducked even as she looked up. She had the briefest glimpse of lizard-like forms and bat-like wings coming in over the captain’s tower as balls of blazing oil rained down from the sky. Corin grabbed Jessie and pulled her closer to the relative protection of the tower as one of the fireballs hit right next to where they had been. The deck around it caught as the burning oil spread, and Weasel jumped out of the way, barely missing getting singed as the fire formed a wall between her and Jessie. Lock, however, wasn’t so lucky. The fire spilled over to her legs before she could move, and she screamed as her clothes all caught. In her panic Lock instinctively ran away from the center of the blaze. Maybe she couldn’t see as the fire boiled her eyeballs right in her skull, or maybe she was just in too much pain to care, but she ran straight toward the edge of the ship and fell from Jessie’s view.
“My gods. I never thought I would see the day,” Corin said, and Jessie followed his gaze out across the deck. Twelve identical firebombs had rained all across the deck, and whatever booths in the bazaar hadn’t been destroyed by the initial impacts had quickly caught on fire. Many of the warriors had been hit, and whichever ones had not shared Lock’s fate were scattered, all thoughts of fighting formations gone as they simply tried to find a safe spot to stand their ground. And in the light of it all, flying across the length of the ship just above the level of the propellers and starting to swoop around for another attack, were the steam dragons.
Had she not been seeing them in the light caused by their destruction, Jessie may have very well mistaken them for their legendary namesakes. These were not living and breathing creatures of flesh and bone, however. Their metal bodies shown silver and crimson in the firelight. They had clawed feet and triangular heads at the ends of long necks, but Jessie could only guess that these were mostly for cosmetic purposes, the better to remind their victims of what they were supposed to be. Long, segmented tails with fins at the end lashed out behind them, steadying their progress through the air. Their wings beat, but not quite with the fluid motion of a living thing. The metal frames of the wings were webbed with a leathery material, and from their torsos Jessie could see glass bubbles on both their chests and their backs. That would be where the pilots would be, she realized. Each of the heads ended in some sort of open nozzle, and Jessie could see fires from inside.
“They’re beautiful,” Corin said. His voice was a whisper, and Jessie could only barely hear him through the sound of the fires. “They’re everything I dreamed they would be.”
“And they’re about to kill us!” Jessie yelled.
Corin looked at her, and for a moment he appeared to be in a trance. Then the moment passed, and fear suddenly came to him face. “You’re right. We have to go below deck. They’ll be coming back around fo
r another attack!”
Jessie nodded, and they both started to run around the captain’s tower. The other side hadn’t been hit with any of the firebombs, and they immediately started towards a stairwell.
“We’ve got to get back to the third level!” Jessie yelled. “It’s still the only way off the ship.”
“But we’re still too far up in the air!”
“No choice. We’ve got a better chance of surviving down there than we do up here.”
“How dare you!” someone screamed, and Jessie and Corin stopped just before the stairs to turn back and look. The voice had clearly belonged to Captain Vestra, but she wasn’t anywhere that they could see. “You have no right!”
The voice was coming from somewhere above, and Jessie looked up at the tower. The captain had climbed to the top of her glass room, but she wasn’t facing Jessie and Corin. She was turned toward the steam dragons as they banked around. Instead of the straight on attack they had just used the dragons splintered into three groups. Two swooped down to fly out along the sides of the ship while the four remaining dragons prepared for another strafe on the deck. With one hand the captain shook a fist at them. With the other she held a crossbow.
“She’s got to be insane,” Corin said. Jessie had to agree with him.
“You have no right to be here!” the captain screamed. The four dragons formed a wide line and flew on back. Jessie’s view of them was temporarily blocked by the tower, but she could see that one was too far out to the side and hanging out over open air. It looked like its wing might have been malfunctioning. “This is my sky! Mine!” There were three more belches of fire and three more shadows streaked overhead. The fourth steam dragon, however, didn’t appear to see the harpoon that fired up at it from below. The harpoon sliced right through the wing, and as the pilot tried to correct its course it started to spin out of control.
“Oh, I guess that would be a flaw in my design,” Corin said. “This is very bad.”
“What…”
“Jessie, get down the stairs now!”
Corin ran down the stairs, but Jessie hesitated long enough to look back over her shoulder at the captain. The damaged dragon was headed straight for the tower, but Captain Vestra didn’t move. She stood her ground, even raised the crossbow to fire. “Mine!” she screamed one last time. Then the dragon crashed through the glass room beneath her. The captain was thrown into the air, but Jessie couldn’t stay there long enough to see what happened to her body. The dragon, with a storm of shattered glass and shredded paintings trailing behind it, was falling right towards where Jessie stood.
Jessie dived down the stairs, and she could feel the air shudder around her as the dragon’s giant metal form hit the deck right above her. Glass rained all around as she tumbled down the steps, and there was an additional shudder and wave of heat as the fire bomb mechanism in the thing’s mouth exploded. Corin dragged Jessie out into the landing at the first level as burning hot scrap pelted their skin. Jessie could feel instantly that something was wrong with her left hand. She had landed on it wrong, and intense pain shot through her as she tried to move it. As she cried out Corin tried to take a closer look at it, but before he could the entire ship shook with an explosion.
“They must have gotten another engine,” Corin said. “That’s the kind of hit and run tactics the steam dragons were designed for. The ship won’t be able to stay up for much longer if they get any more.”
They quickly ran down the rest of the stairs. The stairwell to the third level was no longer guarded, and the whole level was empty now. The hatches were all still open, but the cages and ropes now hung at an angle. Corin ran to the nearest rope winch and hit some sort of release. The rope started to play out through the hatch towards a grassy plain below, and they tried to keep their footing as they stood at the edge.
“The ship is losing altitude,” Jessie said. “The ropes are maybe two or three stories long, so if we slide down them we should be able to drop safely.”
“Unless the ship is dropping too fast, then it won’t make a difference. The fall could still kill us.”
“We don’t have time to discuss this,” Jessie said. “Just get on the rope and ungh…”
Jessie felt the impact before she felt the pain. She looked down at her right shoulder to see the tip of a crossbow bolt sticking out of her skin. She turned around to look where it had come from, and for a second she could see Weasel standing at the base of a stairwell with an empty crossbow in her hand and a triumphant smile on her face.
“Jessie!” Corin yelled. Her legs gave out beneath her and she started to fall towards the hatch, but Corin caught her and pulled her away from the drop.
“Traitor,” Weasel said. “If the Twister is going to die, then you’re going to die with it.” She started to reload the crossbow, but the ship shuddered as another engine exploded and she fumbled the bolt. It hit the floor and rolled until it fell through an open hatch. The ship righted itself slightly, but the wind coming up through the hatches increased.
“Get on the rope,” Jessie said. “You go down first.”
“I’m not leaving without you,” Corin said.
“I’m not telling you to, idiot,” Jessie said. “I know what I’m doing. Just trust me.”
Corin hesitated. He knew as well as she did that what she was saying might not be true. One hand was broken and the other was useless because of the bolt. She wouldn’t be able to hold onto the rope no matter how hard she tried, and Corin could see that. He really was smart when he was sober, and ironically enough that was bad right now. He saw her standing there, wounded with a crazed woman ready to take her down on the other side of the room, and thought she was about to sacrifice herself to save him. And if that was what it came down to, she was willing to do that. On the night of the attack she had sought out to rescue him, and it was a mission she had every intention of carrying out no matter the cost. But that didn’t mean sacrificing herself was the first option.
He leaned forward and gave her a quick kiss, then grabbed onto the rope and started sliding down. She looked out over him and called out one last thing, “Make sure you run as soon as you hit the ground!” She wasn’t sure if he heard her or not, because that was when Weasel hit her from behind and knocked her to the floor. They tangled on the floor for a moment with Weasel on top and trying to choke her, but Jessie was able to give her an uppercut to the jaw with her broken hand. The pain was enormous, but it knocked Weasel off her long enough for Jessie to get to her feet and run towards a cage. With the ship slightly righted the cage now hung entirely over the hatch, its door slightly ajar and swaying in the wind. A release lever stuck up from the floor right next to it, and Jessie pulled it. The cage started to lower, and as the top reached floor level she jumped on and wrapped her good arm around the chain.
The roof of the cage had gone about five feet below the floor when Weasel jumped down after her. She landed hard and the cage swayed. The ship wasn’t just going down but forward as well, and while it wasn’t at a great speed it was still enough for the cage to trail behind as it dangled. Weasel almost lost her footing but regained her balance and then threw herself towards Jessie. She had to let go of the chain to avoid the woman, falling to her knees to keep her balance, and Jessie hooked the side of the roof with her right armpit to keep from flying out into the air. The door clanged open with all the motion, and Jessie suddenly had one last idea.
With a final battle cry Weasel got back to her feet just long enough to launch herself at Jessie again, but this time Jessie didn’t move from her spot. Instead she reached out and grasped the woman’s arm, having to scream at the pain in her hand, and used the woman’s momentum to swing her over the side. They were close enough to the ground now that the fall might not kill Weasel if she went over, but that was not what Jessie intended. Instead she held on just long enough that Weasel swung through the open door of the cage. Then Jessie let go, sending Weasel to the far side of the cage, before slamming the door shut. She
could hear the click as the door locked.
Weasel screamed at her as Jessie jumped from the cage and fell twenty or so feet. She tried to roll as she hit the ground, but she felt a horrible pain in her foot as yet another bone broke. Even with the pain she got to her feet quickly and did her closest approximation to a run. The ship was only maybe thirty feet over her head now and it wasn’t moving fast enough to clear her by itself. She pumped her legs as hard as she could, and the pain in her foot was excruciating. The edges of her vision started to go fuzzy and black, and still she forced herself to keep moving. If she slowed, if she stumbled, that was it. There would be no time to get up again. She concentrated on every movement of every muscle in her legs, forcing them to go so far beyond anything she had ever done to them before. Just a few more feet, just a few more…
Then she was out from beneath the shadow of the Twister. She thought she could hear the screech of metal behind her as the cage was crushed beneath the ship’s unimaginable weight, and the ship hit the ground. The entire earth around her shook with the hit, and the air rippled. Then her vision finally went black, and she passed out from the pain.
14
After that Jessie remembered nothing until she woke up in her cell.
To say that she was disoriented was an understatement. She wondered if maybe her memory was malfunctioning and she was just dreaming of the moment she had woken up on the Twister, but she was definitely awake. The horrible pain in every portion of her body was a testament to that. And this wasn’t the same cell. It was smaller, for one, and she couldn’t hear the perpetual drone of the engines anymore. The world seemed way too quiet for her comfort.
The Twister Sisters Page 8