By Fire Above_A Signal Airship Novel

by Robyn Bennis

  “Charge!”

  He’d forgotten to draw his sword, and only realized this as he leapt into a run ahead of his troops. Indeed, he’d forgotten to order his small force to ready their melee weapons. And as he fumbled with the hilt of his sword, he dropped his cane. But it was a bit late to stop and tidy up, so he only went on running and screaming.

  Ahead, he saw smoke rise in puffs, and heard the crack of musketry. He shut his eyes, anticipating the volley, but when he opened them, he saw that the Vins had disappeared from the barricade. The fighting was on the far side of it. One of the other companies had reached the magazine before him.

  Despite his aching leg, he pushed all the harder and reached the wall yards ahead of anyone else. He gave one last battle cry and jumped at it. He pulled himself over hastily—so hastily that he fumbled and fell in a heap over the fire step, his rifle coming off his shoulder and skittering away across the cobblestones. But he leapt to his feet with admirable dexterity and pulled his sword free of his scabbard, ready to face any number of Vin defenders.

  He looked about, searching for his first victim, and saw Josette leaning casually against the barricade. She smiled pleasantly at him and asked, “So you didn’t have any trouble finding the place?”

  16

  JOSETTE WATCHED BERNAT try to pick up his rifle in one hand while simultaneously sheathing his sword with the other, which went as well as such an operation possibly could. Yet the dozen-odd people climbing over the wall still looked to him for guidance when they reached the other side. She had to admit he’d performed admirably, fixing the Vins’ attention on his charging platoon, while her platoon and others attacked from behind.

  She made a quick assessment of their situation inside the barricade. The Vins had movable barriers on every street leading out of this intersection, forming an impromptu redoubt. Heny and Pesha were in one corner, tending to the wounded. Five townsfolk had musket balls in them—only one or two of those could hope to survive—and another dozen were down with broken limbs, fractured skulls, and contusions from hand-to-hand fighting.

  “Good God,” Bernat said, when he took it in.

  “The people we’re fighting know their business, and that’s a goddamn fact.”

  He was still looking about the redoubt. “Where did you put them? The Vins, I mean.”

  “We didn’t get any of them,” she said. “They retreated into the magazine in perfect order and barred a foot-thick iron door behind them. We’ll have to dig down to the powder tunnel to get to the magazine. Like I said, they know their business.”

  The layout of their redoubt proved it. The buildings overlooking the approaching streets had their doors and ground-floor windows bricked up, and their second-floor windows barred. If the Vins had more men available, those buildings would have each become its own formidable bastion, bristling with muskets that could shred any war party foolish enough to approach the magazine.

  Jutes approached. “Magazine might be connected to these buildings,” he said, pointing along the streets. “And I don’t like the looks of those second-floor windows.” He looked not at the windows, but at the street, enclosed by barriers but growing more crowded by the minute as straggling war parties and new recruits joined them. “It’d be like shooting cattle in a stockyard.”

  “Put them in order, Sergeant,” she said.

  Jutes went to work organizing the mob, sending some to dig and arraying others behind barricades, but even as he put platoons into position, more would appear and set themselves up wherever they pleased, until the bustling mob outside the magazine resembled nothing so much as a disturbed anthill.

  Josette went to work with a shovel alongside half a dozen men, prying up cobblestones. It was a familiar activity, digging in the streets of Durum, and she had to remind herself that she was searching for the tunnel leading from the magazine to the cannons, and not for the foundation of a long-forgotten city wall.

  As she worked, she searched the mob with her eyes, hoping to find her mother’s face among them. She wasn’t there, of course, and it was becoming harder to escape the conclusion that she’d been captured—captured while skulking about the night before an attack, which gave the Vins every right to line her up against a wall and shoot her.

  She tried to put it out of her mind as she scanned the upper windows along the street again, half expecting to see muskets pointing out of them. There were none, but she dug all the faster at the thought that there might be, the next time she looked.

  When the excavation was waist-deep, her shovel hit a timber beam. “It’s the tunnel!” she called. “Hatchets, over here! Work fast!”

  She climbed out to make room for others to chop and hammer at the planks that made the roof of the powder tunnel. As they worked, she looked anxiously up to the windows again, and this time there really were muskets pointed out of them.

  Too many. So goddamn many that she thought she must have seen it wrong, or been mistaken about the situation, for the Vins surely wouldn’t have spared this many men from the walls to guard a magazine they had no reason to believe was in danger. There were at least forty fusiliers up there, kneeling two to a window.

  “Get down!” she screamed, in just enough time for the few veterans among her party to drop swiftly to the ground, and for the greater number of inexperienced insurrectionists to turn and look at her quizzically.

  The muskets above fired together, so loud and so concentrated in this narrow space that the sound of it stabbed into her ears, producing a pain so sharp that for a moment Josette thought she’d been hit in the skull. It was hard to see through the tempest of roiling smoke, but she knew that her mob must have suffered dearly.

  And the hell of it was, the damned hell of it was, there was nothing to be done. All her mob could do was stay where it was, or scatter over the barricades and be cut down by the Vins stationed in the buildings flanking those slaughterhouse streets. “Stay down!” she called, hoping the smoke might offer some small protection. But she could already hear some of her people stomping down the surrounding streets. As they ran, muskets fired in ones and twos, and with each shot the sounds of running feet diminished by one pair, ending in a thump.

  Some of her riflemen were returning fire, but it was a wasted effort. Their only hope was to break into the magazine and occupy it. Only inside those walls would they find anything like safety, and anything like a fair fight. She took up the hatchet of a fallen man, leapt back into the excavation, and began hacking with a fury driven by pure desperation. Men emerged from the smoke to join her, Jutes among them.

  “Corne and Heny are alive,” he said as he drove a crowbar into a gap Josette had hacked between two planks. “Not sure about the others.” He levered his crowbar hard, putting all his weight into the motion.

  The plank beneath them creaked, then groaned, and the tunnel roof gave way with a crash. The whole work party fell into the void, along with half a ton of earth and cobblestones. Jutes lay still and half-buried, and she desperately wanted to check on him, but people were dying and there was no time. She clambered up the slope of debris, stuck her head above street level, and called out, “To me! To me! Everyone into the tunnel!”

  *   *   *

  BERNAT WAS ON the ground, trying to piece the last several seconds of his memory back together. He’d seen the muskets, heard Josette call out, and dropped just in time. He couldn’t remember the moment the Vin fusiliers fired, only that the air was suddenly filled with smoke and the street with blood.

  And now Heny was kneeling over him, squinting into his eyes. She drew her hand back and slapped him. He was accustomed to having women slap him, but few had ever done so with such force.

  “Yer just dazed.” She gave him a reassuring nod. “You’ll be fine.”

  He blinked up at her, his head clearing. “Is Pesha…” He couldn’t finish the question.

  Heny shot him a sour look. “How come every time something goes wrong, everybody just assumes that one of the two of us
must be dead? That the only right and proper outcome is fer one of us to cop it?”

  “I, uhhh…”

  “Idiots,” she said, and disappeared into the smoke.

  And now he heard a crash and a rumbling noise to his right, and soon Josette’s voice was calling the mob to her.

  “This way!” Bernat said as he went, adding his voice to hers. “Everyone follow me! If you want to get out of here, follow me!” As he passed survivors in the smoke, he grabbed them and pushed them along, until he was close enough to leap down into the excavation.

  He saw Jutes lying unconscious—he hoped only unconscious—and caked in dust. “What the hell happened?”

  “Just the usual, for us,” Josette said, bitterly.

  The mob was pouring in now. Bernat borrowed a tinder pouch from one of the townsfolk and lit the end of a frayed length of rope, which burned with a reeking flame, but lit the murk of the tunnel. To the west, it continued on as far as he could see, its wooden trolley tracks disappearing into subterranean darkness. To the east, it ended abruptly in a dead-end made of planks.

  “Railway ties!” he said. They’d stopped up the entrance with goddamn railway ties, and it would take a quarter of an hour to cut through them. “How the hell were they planning to move powder through here?”

  Josette looked like she might burst from the rage building up inside her. “They weren’t,” she said. “They knew we were planning to storm the magazine, so they made other plans and set an ambush. Someone talked. Someone talked, and when I get my hands on them, they will beg for death.”

  Above, the sporadic musket fire slackened, even as the flow of refugees into the tunnel slowed. There were six dozen already crowded in.

  Corne was one of the last down the hole. “Where’s Heny and Pesha?” Josette asked him.

  “Stayed behind to look after the wounded. Said even the Vins wouldn’t shoot a couple of healers.”

  She made a skeptical grunt and said, “See to Jutes, will you?”

  Bernat crept over. “You don’t suppose Heny and Pesha are the informers?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Believe that I’m going to find out.”

  He froze when he heard the sound of boots hitting cobblestones, somewhere above. “Are the Vins coming over the walls?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Josette asked, with irritation. “Why don’t you pop up and have a look?”

  He peered up at the pale blue sky showing through the excavation, and said, “Because I like my head to not have bullets in it.”

  “We don’t have time to break through those railway ties.” She looked west and took a breath. “So the tunnel into ominous darkness wins by default.”

  Bernat put a hand on her shoulder. “What about Jutes?” he said, quite softly.

  She looked at the sergeant, still unconscious, his breath shallow. By way of answer, she only shook her head.

  As she pushed through the mob to lead the way to the west, Bernat dragged Sergeant Jutes away from the opening, so that at least no further rubble would fall on him, and perhaps the Vins wouldn’t trample over him as they stormed in.

  *   *   *

  THERE WAS A strangely calming simplicity to this tunnel. Josette had no idea what waited for her in the darkness, but there was only one way to go, and she must either lead her little mob down it or watch them die. There was no chance of making the wrong decision when there was no decision to make, no need to weigh the balance of risks when there was nothing to weigh them against.

  None of which changed the fact that she was scurrying through an underground tunnel when she ought to be flying an airship. This was the opposite of her job. This was the exact goddamn opposite of her job, and she tried to work out how the hell she’d arrived at this state of affairs. In the stress of the moment, she couldn’t remember, though she was reasonably sure it was somehow Bernat’s fault.

  Ahead, the tunnel curved right and straightened again, ending in a point of light where the tunnel sloped gently up and opened onto … somewhere.

  She looked back, and could see the vague shapes of her mob in the torchlight. “Stay here. Pass the word back to hold them at the bend with steady fire. Calm, steady fire, now.”

  Ten paces from the opening, she could see the city wall stretching away in the distance, aboveground. The tunnel ran parallel to the wall here, opening into the pomerium, an open space between it and the city. If her reckoning was correct, the west gatehouse was somewhere behind them, and the breach beyond that.

  She crept back, even as rifles began to fire behind her, their muzzle flashes casting a series of grotesque shadows on the tunnel walls. The riflemen fired not in the steady, controlled rearguard action of trained soldiers, but in a panicked volley. The men near her were peering back to see what was going on behind them.

  “Ignore it,” she told them. “We have our own fight. When we come out, the gatehouse will be behind us. That is our objective. We rush out, take the gate, and open it. Understand? We head for the gate. No matter what else happens, we head for the gate.”

  She could only hope the focus on that order would give them some semblance of cohesion. So far, her mob was unbroken only because there was nowhere to run. Once they were in the open, only a blind fixation on the objective could hold them together.

  “The gate,” she said one last time, turned, and ran the remaining length of the tunnel.

  She emerged into the light of morning, the sun risen but not yet showing over the top of the eastern wall. Even this meager light was enough to dazzle her, after the relative darkness of the tunnel, so she had to run blindly along the wall until her vision returned.

  She could see the gatehouse emerge from the brightness ahead. Just before it, stretched across the pomerium a hundred yards away, were three companies of Vinzhalian fusiliers in three ranks, advancing steadily toward her with their bayonets gleaming in the morning light.

  “Forget the gate!” she called behind her. Her saboteurs needed no further encouragement, once they saw what lay between them and their target. Trained infantry would be hard-pressed to break that line, let alone her pathetic little mob.

  She swept her eyes in a full circle, weighing the various ways she could get her people killed. The pomerium was clear in the opposite direction—the direction an undisciplined force would naturally run toward. Which meant it had to be a trap.

  To her right was the wall, and all routes into its bastions or up to its walk undoubtedly closed off. And finally, to her left, on the inner side of the wide grass pomerium, there lay a long line of houses built tightly against each other, side by side with their neighbors and back-to-back with the houses behind them, with only a few widely spaced streets cutting across the blocks. Getting past those houses would not be easy. It was not meant to be easy. They had been laid out with the express purpose of slowing any attacker who managed to get over the walls.

  She turned to her band of insurrectionists. Though only moments had passed during her calculations, one would think from their worried expressions that they’d been standing under enemy observation for hours. She made her own expression as unconcerned as she could and said, “Go for the houses!”

  As she dashed for them herself, the Vins halted and began to fire by platoon. A third of their number fired, and while that third reloaded the next third fired, and while they loaded the last third fired, and by then the first were loaded and ready to fire again. Taken together, their disciplined volleys came every five seconds, and only the long range saved Josette’s force from complete annihilation.

  Between the third and fourth volley, she reached the nearest house and flattened herself into the hollow of the front door. Only a score of men had followed her across the pomerium. The rest were hiding in the false safety of the tunnel, running for the false safety of the opposite direction, or had knelt in the open space to return a pitiful, sputtering fire against the Vins.

  “To me!” she called. “Goddamn you all! To me!”
<
br />   But they didn’t come. She’d lost them. All she could do was take the handful she had left and try to keep them alive. She smashed in a window with the butt of her rifle, climbed through, and unbarred the heavy front door from the inside.

  The house had only been abandoned recently, most likely after the Vins took over, so it was blessedly free of trash. “Axes and crowbars to the back room. Cut through the rear walls and make a passage into the house behind us. Riflemen upstairs. Two to a window. One man fires once the other is reloaded. Aim well and don’t hurry your shots. We only have about as many bullets as there are Vins, so every man you miss is someone I’ll expect you to kill by hand.”

  She stepped back outside, putting herself in plain sight of the enemy as she urged the stragglers to run for the houses. Someone pulled her back, and she was surprised to see it was Mrs. Turel, who scowled and said, “What kind of fool are you, Josie, to stand where they can shoot you?”

  As annoyed as Josette was, she had to admit that she was also a little touched. “It inspires confidence,” she explained.

  “Whose confidence?” Mrs. Turel asked. “Ours or theirs?”

  By way of compromise, she stood in the doorway, half shielded from the Vin musketry that pockmarked the house, and from there urged the others to join her. She thought her efforts had succeeded when the tunnel erupted with Durumites, but then she heard Sergeant Jutes’s roaring voice shout, “If any of you dumb bastards still ain’t out of this tunnel in three seconds, I will skewer you myself and save the Dumplings the trouble!”

  He emerged aboveground last of all, covered in dust and as angry as a badger.

  *   *   *

  JUTES GOT THEM moving, but most of the insurrectionists were running not for the houses but directly away from the Vin infantry. Even Bernat could see that it was a trap, but the mob apparently believed the Vins had been courteous enough to leave a convenient escape route, from which the would-be saboteurs could melt away into the town and tell anyone who asked that they’d slept late this morning.