Call of Fire

by Beth Cato

  Mr. Roosevelt acknowledged this with a dip of his head. “With that said, I will inform you that the Gaia Project is creating a flying citadel. The likes of which has never been seen before. It will be shielded and armed, and transport a full ten thousand soldiers while flying at the speed of a Behemoth-class airship.” Delight shone in his eyes, even as Cy shrank back in his seat. “It’s being built in Atlanta as we speak.”

  “Ten thousand! That means that many deaths if the citadel crashes, not to mention the damage such a device could cause to the ground.” Cy looked physically ill.

  “If this is Ambassador Blum’s pet project, shouldn’t it be stopped?” asked Ingrid.

  “Certainly, Miss Blum has orchestrated it. She wants the citadel overseas to finalize matters in China and to quell the encroachment of both Britannia and Russia. She intends for this citadel to be used specifically for the benefit of Japan.” His face reddened as he scowled.

  Of course Roosevelt wanted this magnificent weapon to stay in America. Ingrid didn’t need to ask Cy what he thought of the matter. He was certainly opposed to the citadel’s very existence. Mr. Sakaguchi would feel the same.

  Ingrid wasn’t sure how to feel. If it could be used for America’s defense, that would be the better option, but who was most likely to conduct a widespread attack on American soil now?

  The Chinese.

  Who would make an ideal figurehead for such an effort, if he was still alive?

  Lee.

  “Pardon me. I think I need something to eat and drink,” she said as she stood. Mr. Roosevelt and Cy immediately stood as well. She masked a grimace at both the pain in her arm and the quivering in her legs. A tiny fever lingered in her veins, too. Maybe only about ninety-nine degrees, but that was enough to worsen her fatigue.

  She could use kermanite to drain the energy away. It’s what Cy would want. She just couldn’t make herself reach into her pocket. Some power was better than none, consequences be damned.

  “Can I help, Miss Ingrid?” Cy asked. He phrased the question casually enough, but she knew he was worried about her.

  “I’m fine. The kitchenette is across the hallway. You men continue your conversation, please.”

  Two guards stood in the hallway, Siegfried and another man. She murmured greetings to them as she passed.

  The kitchenette’s food stores sat in contained boxes and trays like on the Bug, but here they also stocked fresh fruit. She grabbed two oranges and a box of rye crackers. She stood by the window as she spiraled the peels from the oranges and scarfed down the fruit in minutes, then followed it with the crackers.

  She wasn’t satiated, but the snack would have to suffice for now. Roosevelt said the staff would serve up a basic supper in the evening; they wouldn’t dock in Seattle until sometime during the night.

  Ingrid wondered what damage had really been done to her body back in San Francisco. By holding magic as she did right now, how much was she setting back her recovery?

  Mr. Roosevelt and Cy had said very little since she stepped aside. The guards murmured among themselves. Everything seemed peaceful. But still something caused Ingrid’s attention to jerk to the porthole window. Something felt wrong. She rubbed at her ears as if bothered by a sudden pressure change.

  The scenery below looked much like that of southern Oregon. Trees, mountains, and scattered little lakes that reminded her of Miss Rossi’s awful grave. Ingrid breathed in, focusing. This peculiar sensation wasn’t like the magic of the earth. She was reminded of being in proximity to selkies in the ocean, of how their distinct power needled her skin and made her tongue taste brine.

  She didn’t taste anything remotely like the ocean up on high in the Bucephalus, though. Instead, she heard a sudden, sharp whistle of wind, though no breeze stirred the cabin.

  She dashed to the parlor. “Cy, Mr. Roosevelt, something is—”

  Klaxons began to blare, the sound aggravating the increasing ache within her ears. The vessel tilted, sending Ingrid stumbling forward. Cy stood up in time to catch her as his back met with the wall.

  “Sir!” The tinny voice came from a speaker above. “We’re under attack from a thunderbird, a sizable one, we may not be able to evade—”

  The ship rocked again, this time sending Ingrid backward into Cy’s former chair. Cy landed over her, his body braced on the chair arms. Mr. Roosevelt waited a few seconds for the ship to stabilize then rushed away. The airship rumbled again. Ingrid felt momentarily weightless as the ship dropped in elevation, her stomach slow to catch up to the rest of her body. She put a hand to Cy’s shoulder. Barely any power thrummed in her body, but if the ship was going down, she’d pull whatever energy she could to form a bubble and keep them both alive.

  Foreign emotions flickered through Ingrid’s consciousness, the sensation of powerful wings like a ghost in her mind. “The thunderbird is angry,” she whispered.

  Chapter 9

  Klaxons continued to blare throughout the opulent airship. The vessel swayed to and fro, dropped in elevation again, then surged up. Ingrid’s stomach didn’t know quite which way to go.

  “Guests, please restrain yourselves until advised otherwise,” said the voice over the speaker. The man sounded impressively cool-headed considering that they were being attacked by a massive, legendary bird.

  “Cy, do thunderbirds usually—”

  “Sometimes they attack like this, especially in spring. I’m going to the cabin. I might be able to help.”

  “Do you think that perhaps my magic . . . Maybe the bird senses me here, as if I’m invading its territory.” She didn’t want to say much more. She doubted anyone was eavesdropping in the thick of an attack, but still.

  His brow furrowed. “Like with the selkies? I don’t know, and now’s not the time to dwell on it.” He walked away with a wide stride and caught himself on the doorway as the Bucephalus lurched.

  “Cy, I need to stay close, just in case.”

  He opened his mouth as if to argue then granted her a small nod. Ingrid followed him into the hall. After a few unsteady steps, she dropped to her knees and crawled. Her shoulder cracked against a doorway.

  “Good thing I’m not on the ground,” she muttered to herself, wincing. They had better not be on the ground anytime soon either. This Pegasus class with its tapered gondola wouldn’t meet the dirt with any sort of grace.

  The ship shook violently and she swore she heard the booms of a storm. That didn’t make a lick of sense—the skies had been clear when she looked out the window minutes before. Ignoring the pain in her shoulder and arm, she crawled to the control cabin.

  Ingrid recognized the back of Mr. Roosevelt’s head in a central chair. Beyond him, the curved cabin window stretched from waist height to the ceiling and granted an extraordinary yet awful view. Clouds boiled around them, the world rendered an impenetrable gray. Thunder cracked and caused the airship to shudder.

  “Two points abaft the beam, starboard side,” called a man. Two more crewmen echoed the statement. To Ingrid’s surprise, she heard the patter of gunfire. She crawled to just inside the cabin. The craft bulged out to either side, like the eyes of a frog, each side with a gunners’ station. Cy was strapping himself into the one on the right side, while Siegfried was already in the left. She’d seen such technology in newsreels but never in person.

  It said a great deal about the seriousness of the situation for Cy to take a gun in hand.

  She glanced back at the control cabin window in time to see a flash of gold and red in the mist ahead, an outstretched wing as large as the Bucephalus. She gasped as its rage blew into her like a tornado.

  The crew continued to call out positions as the thunderbird circled them. A bolt of lightning seared her vision, the clap of thunder instantaneous and deafening. Gunfire drummed all around her. Roosevelt’s shoulders moved in a way that revealed that he controlled a gun from his position in the center of the room.

  “I believe it to be a Brontoraptor occidentalis,” said Mr. Rooseve
lt, “in contrast to the maximus found in southern climes. These in particular are known for their relentless pursuit of prey. There’ll be no outflying this one, I fear.”

  Die. Die. Die.

  The clear statement walloped Ingrid across the head as the thunderbird fully emerged from its nest of storms. She had seen Miss Rossi’s black-and-white postcards of thunderbirds, but the images did the creatures no justice. The creature resembled a hawk or eagle, a magnificent bird of prey, with a curved golden beak and eyes as intense as the sun. Feathers were colored in a range of earth tones—gold, red, brown—each vivid and almost aglow. The thunderbird soared hundreds of yards away, yet its palpable presence created a sort of wind-tunnel sensation within her head.

  She could see why the thunderbird was venerated among the native tribes of Cascadia. This wasn’t simply a magical creature. It was . . . raw majesty. Something ancient and incomprehensible.

  The broad wings flapped, and lightning cracked again. The ship dipped. Ingrid’s hands and knees remained suspended in air for one second, two, then she smacked the floor with a soft grunt. Blue sky was visible for all of an instant and then the clouds coiled around them anew.

  The thunderbird cried. It was a sound terrible and sad, gripping her emotions like the plaintive wail of bagpipes. If the others felt it so poignantly, she couldn’t tell. The crew’s full concentration was on getting them out alive.

  Maybe the thunderbird could get out of this alive, too.

  Ingrid crawled down the short side passage to Cy. There were no straps to secure herself, so she shamelessly wrapped her body around his right leg, her own legs braced against the orichalcum plating of the lower wall.

  “It’s angry. It knows humans are on board and it wants us to die,” she said.

  Cy cocked his head toward her; he had donned a leather cap with thick padding over the ears. Thunder crackled from the starboard side as the crew called out more positions. “Are you able to talk with it?” Gunfire pattered.

  “I’m about to try. I keep getting flashes of emotion, but I don’t think it’s trying to speak with me. Its rage is carried by its power, like a leaf on a breeze.”

  Brown and gold flashed through the clouds. Cy fired his gun. She cringed at the loudness and pressed her forehead against his knee. Closing her eyes, she breathed in and out as if in meditation, and let her awareness expand beyond the ship. Her sense of terror dissipated, replaced by the emptiness of Zen. Mu. Nothingness. She made herself a hollow vessel, one receptive to whatever came.

  The thunderbird’s might buffeted against her; its very magic, its essence, rivaled hers. Ingrid didn’t let the horrible pressure dissuade her. She breathed and tried to ignore the eerie roar in her ears, the stench of ozone strong.

  Stop, she thought at it, and imagined a sapling utterly still, a wide river unmoving.

  Rage lashed her. Emotion thrummed along the length of every feather. Die, die, die.

  Ingrid repeated the imagery. The anger faded, only a touch, tinted by a sense of surprise. The thunderbird hadn’t known that Ingrid, a representative of earth’s magic, was there in its realm. Damn it—would its awareness of her presence provoke an even more violent attack?

  She imagined a full view of herself, her hands faced outward in a universal gesture of helplessness. She meant no harm.

  A feeling that she could only describe as indignant flashed at her. She saw a high mountain peak. A nest formed of whole trees, dried and uprooted and woven together like a basket. In the middle: a broken egg leaking fluid. Dips in the nest marked the places where other eggs had been.

  GONE. Grief lashed Ingrid like a hurricane-force wind. The nest still stank of humans; the thunderbird would kill humans. She didn’t differentiate between one person and another.

  “People stole her eggs,” she said aloud to Cy. Her voice sounded far away, maybe because her spirit was far from its home.

  Ingrid reminded herself that this was still a bird, revered and ancient as it was. Like the two-headed snake, this mother wasn’t sentient in a human way.

  She presented the image of herself again, her hands empty. She didn’t take the eggs. She didn’t know where they were. She let her own sense of grief creep into her power, let it say that she knew about the loss of home, of family. That she was sorry.

  GONE. Rage blasted into the silence. The thunderbird didn’t care that Ingrid didn’t have the eggs. To this bird, the loss of the eggs was a fait accompli, her hatchlings dead. More images flickered by, showing spring and snow and a rotating swirl of stars to mark the passage of time, the nest empty through it all. The laying of eggs was a rare event. Blessed. Holy.

  The ship trembled and bounced. Thunder crashed around them. Tears slid down Ingrid’s cheeks as she shivered and pressed closer to Cy.

  She imagined the thunderbird dying and spiraling to earth. She didn’t hold back her reaction to that thought: intense sadness that the nest would now be completely empty. That the skies would be empty.

  Her nose fiercely tingled from electricity, the pressure in her head intensifying. A boom rocked the ship and popped her ears. Then nothing.

  The prickling rage was gone.

  The thunderbird was dead. Her absence left a sudden gaping hole in Ingrid’s awareness of the world.

  Ingrid felt numb as she untangled her limbs from around Cy’s leg. He flung back the restraints on his lap and chest, and tossed aside the protective cap. The back of his hand touched her forehead. “Lord Almighty, you’re like ice.” With both hands, he stroked her face, his eyes searching hers. Far in the background, she heard whoops from the crew. The window before them revealed dissipating clouds and a painfully bright blue afternoon sky.

  Ingrid leaned into Cy’s touch. Bone-deep exhaustion weighed her down, but his presence both uplifted and grounded her.

  “Talk to me. Are you in there?” Cy tilted up her chin.

  “Mostly. I think.” Her voice rasped, her throat parched as if her body had directly felt the magical vortex around the thunderbird. “The thunderbird is dead. I tried to get her to stop, but she was too angry. I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t make her understand.” Grief swept through her again.

  “Ingrid.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “We can’t let Roosevelt and the crew know about this particular skill of yours. Can you get up and walk?”

  “You’re right.” Sheer grit and aggravation empowered her to rise to both feet. She leaned on the chair’s back. “I’ll be damned if I let them think I’m some lily-livered female in need of smelling salts after that.”

  A smile brightened Cy’s face, even as worry lingered in his eyes. “Watch your pride, Ingrid. Better to let them underestimate you than for them to know what you’re truly capable of.”

  “You. Jennings. Miss Carmichael.” Siegfried’s gruff voice carried down the short corridor. “Come on out of there. We need to bring in the guns.”

  Ingrid leaned on the wall to walk. She hoped that the recent turbulence affected some of the men, too, so that maybe her unsteadiness looked normal. As she reached the main corridor, she heard a mechanical whirring sound behind her. The gunner’s nest had retracted about five feet into the ship to create only the slightest bulge. She couldn’t see what happened to the gun but it must have folded away somehow; she hadn’t noticed any exposed weapons when she viewed the ship from outside. Augustinian had outdone themselves with this ship design.

  “Our position is noted? Excellent!” Mr. Roosevelt’s high voice carried. “As soon as we land in Seattle, deploy the Sprite to return here and guard the thunderbird until the wagon arrives for the body—”

  “Excuse me.” Ingrid stalked into the control cabin. “Mr. Roosevelt, you’re going after the thunderbird?”

  She knew very well about his obsession with birds. Mr. Sakaguchi had several specimens that Roosevelt had shot and stuffed himself. The very idea that the thunderbird would become some . . . some . . . ornament caused hot anger to chase away the coldness in her skin.

  Mr.
Roosevelt turned to face her. He held his glasses in his hand as he wiped his sweat-soaked face with a handkerchief. “Yes, as soon as is feasible. God forgive us for the necessity to kill a creature of such power and beauty! We should forget the eagle as the symbol of America and summon up the imagery of the thunderbird as tribes have done for centuries. They have the right of it.” A fervent, patriotic gleam lit his eyes. “If other men find the bird’s body, Miss Carmichael, it’ll be dismembered, the feathers individually sold for fool’s talismans, the meat peddled with the promise of eternal youth and divine power!” His voice rose along with his fist. “I won’t have it! If a man were starving, yes, let him eat such a creature, but I won’t see it carved up and used to steal away the funds of the desperate, like some poor medieval farmer buying the proclaimed bones of a saint.”

  Stunned, humbled, Ingrid felt her anger evaporate. “What will you do with it, then, sir?”

  “Brontoraptor occidentalis,” he said again, this time pronouncing the Latin like a benediction. “A new natural history museum is being built in Seattle. A creature of such glory will be preserved for all to appreciate.”

  Ingrid pictured the map of Cascadia she had viewed, time and again, in one of Mr. Sakaguchi’s texts on Hidden Ones. “We’re flying over the home of the Yakama tribe, correct? They lived with thunderbirds for a long time. Perhaps they would have some thoughts on the matter.”

  “Pagan thoughts,” muttered one of the men. Another chortled.

  “It’s my understanding that most of them have been moved to work in canneries,” said Roosevelt. He dismissed the suggestion with a wave of his hand as he turned to another man. “Make sure that the wagon team knows to . . .”

  She recognized the light pressure of Cy’s hand on her back. She let him guide her down the hall to the parlor. Her feet stumbled some, as did her thoughts. Roosevelt’s contradictory nature infuriated her. Or it would have, if she weren’t so blasted tired. She knew how he and Mr. Sakaguchi would argue sometimes, their voices piercing the ceiling to where she slept on the floor above. Oh, Ojisan. He would grieve for the thunderbird, too. He would understand, if he were here.