Deryn’s hands tightened on the ropes, but there was nowhere to climb. The bitter-almond scent of hydrogen filled her lungs. The entire airship was primed to explode.
But then a searchlight swept into view. An aerie of strafing hawks followed its arc, carrying an aeroplane net. Its glistening strands trailed from the birds’ harnesses, binding them together in a web of gossamer.
The hawks turned and wheeled in formation, stretching the glowing lace across the aeroplane’s path….
The machine crashed into the net, which wrapped around it, spilling fabricated spider acid from its strands. The acid burned through wings and struts and flesh in seconds. Pieces spun off wildly, the plane’s wings folding like scissors in the air.
The Clanker crewmen, the deadly phosphorous canister, and a hundred metal parts tumbled toward the snowy peaks below.
A ragged cheer went up along the airship’s flank, fists raised as the machine fell. The riggers were soon at work patching the membrane, but a few men hung unmoving in their harnesses, lifeless or moaning in pain.
Deryn wasn’t a medic, and she was supposed to be topside by now, but it took her a long moment to start climbing again and leave the bleeding crewmen behind.
There were more aeroplanes out there, she reminded herself, and the fléchette bats needed feeding.
Topside was covered with crewmen, guns, and sniffers going barmy with the smell of spilled hydrogen.
Deryn stayed off the crowded dorsal ridge, running along the soft membrane to one side. She reckoned the airbeast wouldn’t notice one wee middy’s footsteps after all those bullets ripping through its side.
The Leviathan’s crew was firing back now, air guns chattering from the dorsal ridge and engine pods, searchlights guiding the strafing hawks out into the darkness. But what the ship really needed was more fléchette bats in the air.
When she reached the bow, Newkirk and Rigby were already there, wildly casting handfuls of feed. A few riggers had joined them to make up for the missing middies.
The bosun glared at her, and Deryn spat the words, “Tending to the boffin, sir!”
“Thought as much.” He tossed her a feed bag. “They caught us napping, didn’t they? Didn’t know these blasted Clankers could fly so high!”
Deryn scooped out grain and fléchettes as fast as she could. Most of the bats were already airborne in all the ruckus.
“Get down, lads!” someone cried. “One’s coming in!”
An aeroplane was roaring straight toward the bow. Deryn dropped, landing hard on a stray fléchette. The main air gun fired, and she felt the whoosh of bolts flying overhead. A host of startled bats streamed up in the bolts’ wake.
Deryn glanced up. The air gun had hit home. The aeroplane shuddered, its engine coughing once. Then it twisted in the air and began to spin out of control, crumpling like paper in a giant hand.
Triumphant cries rose up across the airship’s topside, but Mr. Rigby didn’t pause to cheer. He scrambled to his feet and ran to Newkirk, snapping their safety lines together.
“Come on, Sharp!” he yelled. “Link up! We’re going forward.”
Deryn jumped up and ran after them, clipping her safety line to Newkirk’s. The bosun led them off the dorsal ridge and onto the downward slope of the bow. The last few hundred bats always malingered in the nesting coves, and tonight the Leviathan needed all of her beasties in the air.
The bow skin was tougher than the flank, designed for plowing through storm fronts and squalls. Deryn’s boots skidded on its hard surface, the heavy feed bag pulling her off balance. She swallowed—ropes and ratlines were few and far apart here on the airbeast’s forehead.
The slope grew steeper. Soon Deryn could see all the way down to the blinders stretched across the whale’s eyes, shielding them from distractions and the sting of bullets.
Another aeroplane roared beneath them, its machine gun firing at the port engine pod. The sound of shrieking gears rang in the cold air. In answer, two searchlight beams swept to follow the plane, full of dark and fluttering shapes….
Deryn watched with horror. The searchlight crews weren’t bothering to turn the beams red, the signal for the bats to release their fléchettes. They were guiding the flock straight into the path of the Clanker aircraft. The bats themselves weren’t very heavy, but the metal spikes in their guts were enough to shred the aeroplane. The sickening shrieks of the poor wee creatures carried over the noise of ruined engines and tearing wings.
As Deryn watched the aircraft fall, her feet slipped. The ground was shifting beneath her.
“We’re diving, lads!” Mr. Rigby shouted. “Get hold of something!”
Snow-covered mountains tilted into view ahead, and Deryn’s stomach twisted. The airship had never dived this fast! Deryn dropped flat, fingers scrabbling for purchase. The feed bag skidded away, spilling figs and fléchettes into the night sky.
She was still sliding…falling.
Then the safety line jerked, bringing Deryn to a halt. She looked up to see Newkirk and Rigby settled in a nesting cove, bats swirling around their heads.
She pulled herself up into the warmth of the cove. It was full of bat dung and old fléchettes, but there were plenty of handholds, at least.
“Glad you could join us, Mr. Sharp,” Newkirk said, grinning like a loon. “This is brilliant, isn’t it?”
Deryn frowned. “When did you get so brave?”
Before he could answer, the world rolled beneath them again.
“We’ve lost an engine,” Mr. Rigby said.
Deryn closed her eyes, listening to the pulse of the airship. The ship sounded weak. It flew at an odd angle, the airflow turbulent around them.
Clanker aeroplanes still rumbled out there in the darkness—two of them, by the sound—and the Leviathan’s searchlight beams looked almost empty of bats. The beasties were uselessly scattered across the night sky, too scared by gunfire and collisions to reform.
“We need more bats in the air!” Mr. Rigby shouted, and swiftly unwound a rope from his belt, replacing the line connecting Deryn and Newkirk with a fifty-foot length. “There’s a big cove below us, Sharp. Swing down and see if you can scare up a few more of the little blighters.” He shoved his own feed bag into her hands. “Make sure the beasties are stuffed before you boot them out.”
“What about me?” Newkirk complained. Battle seemed to agree with him, but Deryn just felt airsick from it all.
“When I’ve got a longer line on you,” Rigby said, still working his ropes. “Don’t fancy losing my last two middies.”
Deryn climbed over the edge of the cove, trying to ignore the mountain peaks rising steadily toward them. Had the airship lost too much hydrogen to stay aloft?
She forced the thoughts from her head, carefully making her way down toward a dark rift in the airbeast’s skin. The growl of a Clanker engine was building in her ears, but Deryn didn’t dare look away from her feet and hands.
Only a few more yards…
A machine gun erupted behind her, and she pressed flat against the Leviathan, closing her eyes and whispering, “Don’t worry, beastie. I’ll get these bum-rags sorted for you.”
Searchlights flashed across her closed eyelids, and the machine roared away, leaving the foul smell of its engine fumes mixed with leaking hydrogen.
Deryn let herself drop the last few feet, her boots barely catching the lip of the cove. She clung to the rope and swung inside, skidding onto her knees.
The cove was empty. Not a single bat remained to take the air.
“Barking spiders,” Deryn swore softly.
The floor shifted beneath her, and she turned and looked back out. The horizon tilted. Then the mountains disappeared, replaced by the cold and starry sky…. The Leviathan was climbing again!
She pulled herself out of the cove. The slope she’d descended was almost level now that the ship was climbing again. Rigby and Newkirk were out in the open, their harnesses joined by a long rope.
“No luck
, sir,” she cried up. “I think they’re all gone!”
“Come on, then, lads.” Mr. Rigby turned and started back up toward the spine. “Let’s get off the bow before she dives again.”
The three of them spread out to the full length of their safety lines, rousting the last few bats on the way up. Deryn climbed as fast as she could. With the airship twisting and turning like this, being topside didn’t seem quite so brilliant anymore.
The last two aeroplanes still skulked in the distance, and Deryn wondered what they were waiting for. A few strafing hawks were in the air, but their nets looked tattered. Only one searchlight was lit—the crew trying to gather the fléchette bats into a single flock.
Up on the spine things had got worse. The forward air gun was being pulled apart by a repair team. Wounded men were everywhere, and the sniffers were in a frenzy from so much spilled hydrogen. The whale’s huge harness was frayed with bullet holes.
Deryn knelt beside an injured man, whose hand clutched the leash of a hydrogen sniffer. The beastie whined at her, looking up from its master’s pale face. She looked closer. The man was dead.
“CARNAGE ON THE SPINE.”
Deryn felt herself start to shake, unsure whether it was the cold or the shock of battle. She’d been aboard only a month, but this was like watching her family dying, her home burning down in front of her.
Then the inevitable roar of Clanker engines built again, and all eyes turned toward the dark sky. The last two aeroplanes were coming in together, hurling themselves against the airship one more time.
Deryn wondered what the crews in those machines were thinking. They’d seen their fellow airmen fall from the sky. Surely they knew they were about to die. What madness made killing the Leviathan so important to them?
The lone searchlight swept across their path, and one of the aeroplanes shuddered in the air. The small black shapes of bats tore through its wings and the plane banked hard. An impassive part of Deryn’s brain saw how the airflow around the wings had changed, how the plane would soon crumple and fall…
She turned away as it burst into flame.
But the noise of the other growling engine still drew closer.
“Blast! She means to ram us!” Mr. Rigby cried, running ahead for a clearer view.
Someone at the front air gun swore. Its compressors had failed again, but other guns fired from farther aft. Suddenly all the searchlights flared back to life and lanced into the darkness, until the approaching plane glowed like a fireball in the sky.
Tiny black wings fluttered along the searchlight beams, and the aeroplane shuddered and shook as it plowed through the bats. But somehow it kept coming.
A hundred feet away the machine finally twisted in the air. The wings folded, and pieces fluttered in all directions. The gunner’s cockpit broke off, his weapon still blazing. The propeller somehow wrenched itself from the engine, spiraling away like a mad insect.
Deryn felt a trembling under her feet, and she pulled off a glove, kneeling to place her palm on the freezing dorsal scales. A low moan shook the airbeast. Bits of the disintegrating plane were tearing into the Leviathan, rupturing the membrane. Deryn closed her eyes.
One stray spark would turn them all into a ball of fire.
She heard a cry. Mr. Rigby was staggering away down the slope of the airship’s flank, clutching his stomach.
“He’s hit!” Newkirk shouted.
Rigby stumbled a few steps, then fell to his knees, bouncing a little on the membrane. Newkirk was running after him, but some squick of instinct held Deryn in place.
The whole ship was tilting forward now, heading back into a steep dive. The smell of hydrogen washed over her.
Mr. Rigby was sliding down the flank—gravity had caught him. His skid turned into a roll.
Deryn took a step forward, then looked down at the rope connecting her to the others. “Barking spiders!”
If the bosun went over the side, he’d drag Newkirk with him. Then Deryn would be snatched away like a fly on the end of a frog’s tongue. She looked around for something to clip herself to, but the ratlines at her feet were frayed and stretched.
“Newkirk, get back here!”
The boy paused a moment, watching Mr. Rigby slide away. Then he turned back, comprehension dawning on his face. But it was too late—the rope connecting him to Rigby was straightening fast.
Newkirk looked up at her hopelessly, his hand moving to the rigging knife at his belt.
“No!” Deryn cried.
Then she realized what she had to do.
She turned and ran the other way, hurtling down the opposite flank of the airship. Dodging crewmen and sniffers as the membrane fell away, Deryn jumped as hard as she could into the night sky….
The snap of the rope hit her like a punch in the stomach, the safety harness cutting into her shoulders. She rolled into a ball as her body hit the flank membrane, knocking her breath away.
Deryn bounced to a halt, then found herself skidding back up the flank of the airbeast. Rigby had to have yanked Newkirk off behind him—their combined weight was dragging her back up to the spine!
She grabbed at passing ropes, finally snaring one and bringing herself to a halt. But her safety line pulled harder, the harness squeezing the breath from her lungs.
Then the rope went slack, and Deryn looked up in horror. Had it broken? Had Newkirk cut himself loose?
On the spine a squad of riggers held her line, in a tug of war with something on the other side of the ship. They were pulling Newkirk and the injured bosun back up.
Deryn breathed a sigh of relief, her eyes closing. She held tight to the ratlines, trusting nothing but her own two hands to keep her from tumbling into the dark sky. But as the ship tipped beneath her again, she looked down and realized that two hands wouldn’t be enough.
They were all falling.
The Alps rose toward the ship, the tallest peaks only a few hundred feet below. A blanket of snow covered all but a few dark outcrops of stone, like jagged black teeth waiting patiently for prey.
The wounded Leviathan was crashing slowly back to earth.
The old castle stood on a rugged slope, moonlit snow-drifts piled against its half-ruined walls, the windows dark and gaping. Its battlements glistened with ice in the crystal-cold air, their ragged outlines blending into the rocks behind.
Alek leaned back from the viewport. “What is this place?”
“Do you remember your father’s trip to Italy?” Count Volger asked. “To look for a new hunting lodge?”
“Of course I remember,” Alek said. “You went with him, and I had four glorious weeks of no fencing lessons.”
“A necessary sacrifice. Our real purpose was to buy this pile of old stones.”
Aleksandar gazed at the castle with a critical eye—a pile of old stones was right. It looked more like a landslide than a fortress.
“But that was two summers ago, Volger. When did you start planning my escape?”
“The day your father married a commoner.”
Alek ignored the slight to his mother; the details of his birthright were meaningless now. “And no one knows about this place?”
“Look around.” Count Volger pulled his fur collar tighter. “This castle was abandoned back in the Great Famine.”
“Six hundred years ago,” Alek said softly, his breath coiling in the moonlight.
“The Alps were warmer then. There was once a thriving town out there.” Count Volger pointed at the mountain pass ahead of them, its vast expanse glowing white beneath the almost full moon. “But that glacier swallowed the entire valley centuries ago. It’s a wasteland now.”
“I’ll take a wasteland over another night in this machine,” Klopp said, shivering in his furs. “I love my walkers, but I never fancied living in one.”
Volger smiled. “This castle contains unexpected comforts, you’ll find.”
“Anywhere with a fireplace that works,” Alek said, placing his cold and tired hands on the c
ontrols.
From the inside, the little castle didn’t seem so bad.
The roofs under their blanket of snow had been recently repaired. The outer walls were half fallen, but the courtyard stones were solid, holding up under the Stormwalker’s weight as it shuffled through the gate. Stacks of firewood lined the interior walls, and the castle’s stables were full of provisions: smoked meats, barrels of grain, and neat stacks of military rations.
Alek stared at the endless ranks of cans.
“How long are we staying here?”
“Until this madness ends,” Volger said.
“This madness,” of course, meant the war. And wars could last for years…even decades. Tendrils of snow coiled through the open stable doors and across the floor—and this was the beginning of August.
What would the dead of winter be like?
“Your father and I were very thorough,” Volger said, obviously pleased with himself. “We have medicines, furs, a roomful of weapons, and an excellent wine cellar. We’ll lack for nothing.”
“A bathtub might have been nice,” Alek said.
“I believe we have one.”
Alek blinked. “Well, that’s good news. Perhaps a few servants to heat the water?”
Volger gestured at Bauer, who was already chopping wood. “But you have us, Your Serene Highness.”
“You’re more like family than servants.” Alek shrugged. “All the family I’ve got, in fact.”
“You’re still a Hapsburg. Don’t forget that.”
Alek looked out at the Stormwalker crouched in the courtyard. On its breastplate was his family crest: the double-headed eagle devised of mechanikal parts. As he was growing up, the symbol had always surrounded Alek—on flags, furniture, even the pockets of his nightgown—assuring him of who he was. But now it only filled him with despair.
“Yes, a fine family,” he said bitterly. “They disowned me from the start. And five weeks ago my granduncle had my parents killed.”
“We can’t be certain the emperor was behind that. And as for you…” The wildcount paused.
Leviathan 01 - Leviathan Page 13