Taya walked up and down her crude little path, kicking away stones and making sure it hadn’t iced up. She was underweight, which would facilitate a running take-off but make maintaining control in the air more difficult.
The ship began to move. A ragged cheer went up from the encampment, quickly stilled by a sharp command. Taya gazed with awe as the nose of the great, building-sized vehicle tipped upward for the ascent.
The dirigible didn’t move very quickly. She hopped up and down and stretched her arms, loosening her cold muscles while the Alzanan ship ponderously rose out of the valley. At last, when all she could see was its searchlight, she buckled on her flight cap, pulled down her goggles, slid her arms into her wings, and ran.
Running take-offs were always ungainly, and this one was no exception. Fortunately, there was nobody to see her struggling-duck ascent. At last her wings caught the wind and she rode it high enough to kick down her tailset. Her heart was already laboring from the exertion. Two days spent locked in a train without enough food or rest was taking its toll. Freezing air knifed through the buttonholes and cuffs of her flight suit as she searched the horizon for the dirigible’s searchlight. At last she found it and followed.
After ten minutes it became clear that outflying the ship would be a challenge. It wasn’t moving quickly, but unlike her, it moved steadily, without the constant back-and-forth she had to engage in to negotiate unsteady thermals and winds.
Taya flew higher. The clouds were starting to break. The moon’s pale illumination was both blessing and a risk; it allowed her to study the vehicle more closely, but she’d be silhouetted against the stars and moon. Military icarii used black-enameled wings, but a courier’s wings were bright, shiny silver, easy to spot and recognize.
To reduce the risk, Taya beat forward until she was over the ship’s long, vast envelope, her ears filled with the roar of its engines. The Alzanan dirigible’s design was very different from Dautry’s, in size and in construction. It seemed more solid, metallic, and sharp-edged. She dropped closer, spotting something that had been invisible from the ground. On the very top of the envelope stood a small wooden platform with railings and two large, swivel-mounted guns.
Taya veered away, searching for a gunner. Nobody was in sight. That made sense; why would Alzanans station a gunner on top of their dirigible at night, in the cold, so far away from a military target?
But the platform gave her an idea.
She kicked up her tailset and dropped onto the platform feet-first, backbeating to maintain her balance. The soles of her boots hit the wood, skidded, and gripped. She swiftly folded her wings against her body and crouched next to the gun tripods, listening for any sign she’d been heard.
Hearing nothing but the roar of the engines and the creaking of the gun tripods, she straightened and locked her wings close. Gripping the platform’s front rail, she leaned forward and gazed into the star-studded night.
The view from the top of the dirigible was breathtaking— an endless panorama of stars above and night-covered peaks below, their shapes revealed in momentary flashes as the dirigible’s searchlight moved back and forth.
Ondinium’s peacetime flag depicted five silver stars on a field of black. Stars were sparks from the Lady’s forge, the old legends declared, each falling star a newly hammered soul plummeting to Ondinium to be reborn. Of course Ondinium’s astronomers had long since proved that stars were natural phenomena, but here, on top of a gigantic, rumbling weapon of war, Taya felt a touch of the night sky’s eternal magic.
She closed her eyes and prayed for Cristof.
After a while she sat with her back to the prow. Her mind drifted as she listened to the ship’s engines, their roar louder or softer depending on how hard they labored to fight the wind. Several times she nodded off, awakening with a start as she started to slump. Next to her, the tripods creaked as the ship continued its implacable progress.
It’s strange for a dirigible to have guns on top, she thought, sleepily. What could a gunner hit from such a high vantage point? Another dirigible? But nobody else had anything powerful enough to attack this one. Mareaux’s little dirigibles couldn’t carry much more than a few soldiers with rifles.
The only other thing that could fly high enough to come within the guns’ range would be an icarus.
An icarus!
A flash of outrage dispelled Taya’s sleepiness. She stood, pulled off her gloves, and ran her hands over the gun to see if she could snap something off, but it was too solid.
All right, she thought. If I can’t break you, I can dismantle you. She pulled her husband’s leather tool kit out of her pocket. You never know when you might need a screwdriver, he’d told her once, not long after they’d met. Sure enough, he was right.
She couldn’t wait to tell him.
Taking the gun itself apart, she soon realized, wouldn’t be easy. But slipping it off the tripod was possible, although she had to pound a few metal pins out of the frame. She paused after each strike, listening. Nobody came to investigate, and at last both heavy guns laid on the platform floor.
Taya slid her gloves back over her frozen hands.
They’d been flying over an hour, by her best guess. If she was going to get to the border before the Alzanan ship, she’d better get moving. The outpost would keep a lamp lit outside as a matter of course, for use by military icarii and lost travelers. All she needed to do was forge straight ahead and keep her eyes open.
She scowled at the guns by her feet. No point leaving them here. She shoved one off the edge of the platform and gave it a strong push. The weapon slid down the envelope’s slope, picking up speed as it descended, and plummeted over the side.
Pleased, she launched the other gun over the other side of the ship.
Too bad she couldn’t destroy the tripods, too, but that would take better tools than she had. Shrugging, she climbed over the platform railing and unlocked her wings, sliding her arms into place.
This hasn’t happened since the Last War, she thought, staring at the point on the side of the envelope where the gun had vanished. An icarus launched from a flying ship. Before she could think about it long enough to be intimidated, she threw herself forward, kicking hard against the taut material of the envelope.
For a moment the huge, gryphon-painted side of the envelope whipped past her. She spread her wings. The air currents were choppy from the vessel’s passage and she fought for control as she descended.
A bright light swept up and skewered her. She flinched, instinctively closing her eyes against the blinding glare.
Gunfire opened her eyes again in a hurry. She’d been spotted!
Still dazzled, Taya twisted into a dive, hoping she wasn’t close to the forest canopy yet. The searchlight lost her, but she couldn’t see anything, spots dancing before her eyes. She threw her wings out, blinking rapidly, and felt a gear catch in her left wing.
Light engulfed her again. She dodged, but the light followed, moving jerkily as whoever was guiding it sought to keep her spotlighted. She felt sharp vibrations through her wing feathers and heard something whine past her ear.
Stupid! She should have dropped under the gondola, hiding in its blind spot. Too late now. Her eyesight had adjusted. The cliffs, forest, and valley below looked black and white in the harsh glare of the dirigible’s bright spotlight.
The grind in her left wing was getting worse. She was losing air through her feathers, which weren’t closing all the way. A bullet hit her tailset. She cringed, remembering the last time she’d been shot.
Her left wing froze. Taya yanked her arm backward and felt both relief and sickness as, with a grate that shuddered through her entire armature, it moved again. She forced the wing into a spread and began a long, despairing dive to the valley floor.
Her landing was hard and painful, taken on her knees but throwing her sideways as her recalcitrant wing r
efused to backbeat. She staggered to her feet, looking up, and saw the searchlight move on.
Furious, she yanked her arms out of the wings, grabbed the flaregun Cristof had given her, and fired at the ship.
Smoke surrounded her. The missile rose and exploded far overhead in a bright cascade of red light.
She’d missed.
She threw the useless gun away, swearing. Then, in the dying light from the flare, she pulled her floating left wing close, searching for the damage.
There— a line of gears wasn’t meshing anymore, knocked out of alignment by a bullet. She pushed on them, hoping to snap them back into place with her thumbs.
The flare blinked out, plunging her into darkness.
She swore again, frustrated tears burning her eyes.
At last she took a long, deep breath. She locked her good wing up, used her safety line to clip her armature to one of the leather loops on her flight suit, and climbed out.
The light from the stars wasn’t much, but it was enough for her to see the bent and chipped feathers that had been hit by Alzanan bullets. A fresh gouge on the keel cage that had been snapped over her chest made her wince.
She’d gotten lucky.
But, as the Alzanan general had said, not lucky enough. She looked up at the sky, frustrated. There was no way she’d be able to beat the ship to the signal station now.
For a moment she was consumed by an urge to drop down into the snow and give up.
Cristof was captured. She was grounded.
The Alzanans had won.
She took a deep, shuddering breath, clenching her fists.
Not yet.
She wouldn’t give up. The dirigible might beat her to the border, but there were five more ships in that hangar. One ship wasn’t going to attack Ondinium by itself; it must be a scout of some sort, maybe checking to be sure Cristof hadn’t been leading a military operation.
She might, possibly, be able to beat the other ships to the border. If she was close enough, and if she didn’t waste any time feeling sorry for herself.
Filled with grim resolve, Taya bound her broken wing to the rest of the armature and slid herself back into its metal framework. She checked her compass, making a mental note of the direction the ship had been going, and began to walk.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Time stretches in infinite directions in the forest, in the cold, in the dark. Taya’s progress became a mechanical repetition of movements broken only by her occasional stumble over a snow-covered branch or stagger when a gust of wind threw her off-balance. She became preternaturally aware of the crunching of the snow under her boots, the sound of her strained breathing, and the creak of her armature. Noises in the darkness made her freeze, her gloved hand gripping her utility knife. Wolves lived in the Demican woods, and bears, and both had been known to attack lone travelers.
If she hadn’t wasted her flare firing at the Alzanan ship, she could have used it against a predator.
Too late, now.
Taya was concentrating so hard on the sounds around her that even though she saw the lights moving in her direction, she didn’t understand what they meant. Then, abruptly, she realized that they indicated the presence of humans.
She stopped.
“Hello?” she ventured, her voice cracking and barely above a whisper. She cleared her throat and called out more strongly. “Hello? Hello?”
Somebody shouted. The lights changed direction, moving toward her. With belated caution, Taya brandished her knife. The newcomers were approaching from the wrong direction to be from the Alzanan encampment, and they were moving faster than a man could walk.
Then they appeared— three large, bearded men on skis. They skidded to a halt about ten feet away from her in a spraying plume of snow. Two carried rifles over their shoulders and held lanterns; the third carried some kind of long stick. They wore long, embroidered felt coats and bright hats with ear flaps. Their boots and gloves were trimmed with fur, and their faces looked stern.
Taya stood as tall as she could.
“Well met in peacetime,” she said, in Demican. “I am Taya Icarus.”
One of the figures cocked his head.
“Well met in peacetime,” he replied, in the same language. “I am Juha Pasanen.”
“Mika Talus.”
“Edvin Talus.”
They fell silent, inspecting each other. Taya was suddenly, self-consciously aware that she was a very small, poorly armed woman facing three large foreign men with no reason to respect her caste.
“You are Ondinium,” Edvin observed.
“I am.” She hastened to add, “I came here to find out what the Alzanans were doing. Did you see their, their aerostat?” She used the Ondinan word. “The flying ship?”
“We saw it,” Juha said. “And we saw a flare. Was it yours?”
“Yes. The ship is Alzanan. It’s the scout for an invasion. I need to get to Ondinium to warn my people.”
“Why did you signal it, then?”
“I was trying to shoot it.”
“You missed.”
“It was the first time I have ever fired a gun.”
Mika and Edvin chuckled.
“You are an Ondinium flyer?” Juha continued.
“An icarus, yes,” she said, cautiously.
“You are missing a wing.”
“It was damaged by an Alzanan bullet.”
“It will be difficult for you to warn your country, then, will it not?”
“There is a signal station not far from here, on the border. If I can get to it, I can send an alert.” She took a breath and hoped they weren’t sheytatangri. “Will you help me?”
Juha turned to the other men.
“It is your time.”
“We are hunting,” Edvin explained to her, leaning on one of his poles. “We were curious when we saw the big … aerostat … and the flare, so we came out to see what had happened. But a war between Alzana and Ondinium is none of our business.”
Taya debated with herself over how much to say. These three didn’t seem very politically inclined; maybe they didn’t know what was going on.
“Those ships have a white bear’s head painted on them, as well as an Alzanan gryphon. When Ondinium sees that bear, this fight is quickly going to become every Demican’s business.”
The hunters looked at each other. Juha scratched his beard, his eyes narrowing.
“Sheytatangri?”
“The sheytatangri will drag Demicus into the Alzanan-Ondinium conflict,” Taya agreed. Juha glanced at her, then back at his companions.
“Clan Vost.”
“Of course; they always forge ahead on their own.” Edvin sounded annoyed. “Elder Helka will have to call an assembly.”
“Please— I know you need to warn your leaders, but I need to warn mine, too. Could one of you take me to the border?”
“Why?” asked the third man, Mika, who’d been silent until now.
“I—” Taya hesitated. “I have no money with me, but I will tell the Council that your clan is not involved in the attack. And my husband is an exalted; we could arrange to send a reward to you later, or offer you favored trading status at one of the border towns….”
“Is it true that exalted men wear dresses and masks?” Mika asked. Edvin and Juha laughed.
“Yes,” she said, irritated that they were mocking Ondinium customs. But Cristof mocked them, too, so she supposed she couldn’t be too sensitive about it.
Cristof….
“I have no patience for empty promises from Ondinium,” Mika said after the laughing died down. He turned to the other two. “If the sheytatangri and the Alzanans want to wipe them out, let them.”
“No, not without calling an ating first,” Edvin objected. “The sheyta don’t speak for all tangri. Now we w
ill have Alzanans and Ondiniums fighting their war on our land, and who will suffer? Not Vost! It will be our clans, the ones closest to the border.”
“You said that Clan Vost was behind this?” Taya asked, biting back her impatience. “I will tell that to Ondinium’s Council, our elders.”
“Vost is on the northern coast. They trade with the Alzanans.” Juha shrugged. “I have heard that the Alzanans pay some of them to speak against Ondinium in the tangri.”
“That sounds like a typical Alzanan strategy. Which clan do you belong to?”
“Malo.”
“Clan Malo knew there was a foreign encampment in the mountains,” Edvin added, “but we assumed it was another Ondinium mine.”
“On your land?”
“That is Clan Alta land. They allow foreigners to take their metal and wood.”
“Short-sighted,” Juha muttered.
“I will tell the Council that Clan Malo objects to the invasion and that the Council should talk to Clan Alta about the encampment,” Taya promised.
“Listen to her,” Mika grunted. “She does not know one clan from another, and neither do her elders. Her promises are as worthless as her broken wings.”
“All the more reason to explain it to the girl, Mika,” Edvin countered. “I think it would be useful to have an Ondinium exalted in debt to us. Eliina trades in Kovolo.”
“We should keep our heads down and stay out of it.”
“Then what would we do with this girl? Leave her here to feed the wolves?”
“She wants help and I want more than promises.” Mika turned and looked her up and down. “What about sex?”
Taya flushed, her hand tightening on her knife.
“No.”
“Your wings?”
“I’m not permitted to give them away.”
“We could kill you and take them.”
“You could try,” she countered, taking a nervous step backward.
“Oh, shut up, Mika,” Edvin said, sounding exasperated. “Nobody is going to kill you, girl. We can take you to Pekka Lake, at least.”
Clockwork Lies: Iron Wind (Clockwork Heart trilogy) Page 28