Andrew Dykstal - [BCS310 S01]

by Fire

  Fire and Falling

  By Andrew Dykstal

  The sky was a river of candles on the night Mir came to Cliff’s End. Streams of white paper lanterns climbed until they would have joined the stars had the spring festival not fallen across a night of storm clouds. For a single, perfect moment, she could see the departing airship banking into that river of lights and running before the wind, its sails bright with stolen fire. It moved with the grace of a living thing. Then the first of the raindrops broke on her cheek, and the lanterns began to wink out.

  She crouched alone on the skydock, hidden in the shadow of a pallet, the Windhover’s other debarked passengers having already vanished into the city’s bars and brothels and opium dens. The spring equinox was a festival night, storm or no, and Cliff’s End had something for everyone. Usually, in Mir’s experience, something with a sting in the tail.

  The first sheet of lightning fell, illuminating limestone villas and the whitecapped seas beyond. The hillside vineyards and olive groves seemed skeletal in that light, all jagged figures footed in shadow, their ranks putting Mir in mind of troops arrayed for battle.

  Mir had been to Mikra before, had traversed most of the country during her training, but this was her first solo delivery. At twenty-one, she was the youngest courier ever entrusted with anything like the set of cipher booklets now concealed in slim packets belted between her chemise and corset. When her mistress handed her the sealed booklets, Mir had felt pride unfold like a living thing inside her, and she’d spent days planning contingencies within contingencies.

  The nature of her parcels demanded nothing less. Random, single-use ciphers were the only known perfect system of encryption, unbreakable even by analytical engines. The disadvantage was that they required all participants to have copies of the random numbers used to encipher the plain texts. Even in an age of telegraphy, the system depended on regular physical delivery of booklets to a House’s embassies, allies, and chartered companies. A lost booklet was expensive to decommission and replace. A compromised booklet—stolen, duplicated, and returned to its owner by an enemy subtle enough to conceal the deed—was a potential disaster.

  Mir was carrying more than twelve hundred pages of cipher bound for her Lady’s interests along the southern coast of Mikra, and someone was following her.

  Mir first spotted her shadower on a boulevard in Flourish: a tall woman settled into beautiful middle age, dark of hair and eye. Mir recognized her at once from the half-dozen sketches and single blurry daguerreotype on file in Hull. No one in Mir’s circles could fit a proper name to the face, but the trail of bodies winding from Icecap to the broken shores of Lemuria had inspired all manner of bloody appellations.

  Mir, confronted with the reality, had chosen a less dramatic name. The woman wore a silver dogwood blossom in her collar. If the red stones tipping its petals were rubies, the pin was worth more than Mir’s entire closet. If the form and colors were a conscious nod to Lord Drenan, whose banners featured a man crucified against a slate gray field, it was probably worth more than her life. And so, in mental self-defense, Mir christened the woman Dogwood.

  The open wearing of the pin had been an invitation of sorts, one Mir had ignored. When Mir departed for Cliff’s End, she had expected to leave Dogwood far behind. Between three days and nights of changing beds, buying new clothes, and suffering progressively less flattering haircuts, she should have lost her shadower long before boarding the Windhover. But Dogwood had claimed the berth across from Mir’s and kept waiting with arachnid patience for her to make the next move.

  For a brief, wishful moment, Mir had dared to hope it was a coincidence; there were fewer than a thousand airships in the world, and the Windhover was the only one leaving Flourish that week. But no—she had quashed the hopeful thought before it could endanger her life. If Dogwood was here, she was here for Mir.

  It was then, in a state of such paranoia that every detail glowed with synesthetic brightness, that Mir realized Dogwood wasn’t the only threat aboard the Windhover. A clergyman paused in front of her and made a show of checking a great copper watch inlaid with hunting scenes, one a near-perfect match for Lord Creel’s banners. Another, an immense walrus of a man whose mustaches seemed midway through a conquest of his face, sat in the smoking room reading a book of poems called A Study of Alternatives, a paraphrase of Baronet Chester Lindt’s family motto. When Walrus saw her looking, he winked. And those were just the obvious overtures. She counted eleven definite agents aboard, and another four probables—more than a quarter of the passenger complement. All watching her and one another, all waiting, the cast of a surrealist’s nightmare.

  The conflict between the assorted Houses and their allies had been simmering for decades. Most of her adversaries aboard the Windhover would know each other; would have prior arrangements and networks of favors owed and owing. Most, when the situation devolved, would have the resources and experience to survive. Mir, unsure even of what they wanted from her, would not. A dozen cipher booklets weren’t worth this level of effort or risk. They thought she knew something, and unless she ascertained what, the concentration of contradictory interests was a death sentence.

  Or an opportunity.

  So Mir had waited until Cliff’s End and the coming of the storm. Then she’d planted a small, silvery clockwork engine in the Windhover’s magazine, gathered her essentials, and slipped from the ship just before takeoff.

  Now, the airship dwindled to a suggestion of movement in the distance, dark on dark, then was lost in a slanting veil of rain. Mir kept staring into that emptiness, adrenaline and doubt drawing little shudders up her spine.

  Then lightning came again, transfixing the Windhover like a needle through the heart of a delicate insect, and it burst. The sound of the explosion arrived a moment later, mingled with the thunder. The violence of it was small and far away, a toy ship falling in slow, fatal pirouette. Lightning continued, crawling from cloud to cloud, and small shapes spun away from the wreck, tumbling into the greater dark over the hills. Some sprouted parachutes. Some did not.

  She counted twelve parachutes against a long sheer of light, then bent over the skydock rail and vomited. She gripped the rail with both hands and tried to settle her breathing. Another spasm took her, convulsive, a fist clenching in her gut.

  Cool hands drew her hair back from her face. She spun away, drawing a knife from her sleeve.

  Dogwood held out a handkerchief. After a moment’s hesitation, Mir accepted it and wiped her mouth. As there seemed no point in clinging to dignity, she blew her nose, coughed into the cloth, and spat over the rail. “Thanks.”

  Dogwood waved off an attempt to return the handkerchief, her attention on the hills where points of flame were still falling in slow arcs. The last ember struck the ground and went dark.

  “Well,” Dogwood said. “Well.”

  Mir said nothing. She was dry beneath her cloak but shivering all the same, half-expecting Dogwood to produce a pistol and kill her then and there. She remembered a moment later that Dogwood’s past accomplishments betrayed a fondness for piano wire.

  But Dogwood merely sighed. “I wonder, love, whether you might have overreacted.”

  Mir, following Dogwood’s gaze out into the restored darkness, wondered the same. Then, considering Dogwood’s perfect calm, she wondered if overreaction was even possible.

  At Dogwood’s insistence, they took a late dinner in one of the more reputable inns on the landward side of Cliff’s End. On the descent from the skydock, she declined to offer any further thoughts on the destruction of the Windhover, a psychological gambit Mir recognized at once and that still worked perfectly well, drawing a bow across her nerves and l
eaving her fighting an impulse to fill the silence.

  That silence only deepened on their arrival at the inn. The dining room was deserted, the upper rooms quiet. Perhaps the establishment was too respectable for such a night as this. Outside, the wind howled.

  Also at Dogwood’s insistence, dinner was soup.

  “Red lentils,” she said, dabbing imaginary rainwater from her face with a napkin. This close, Mir could make out the laugh lines at the corners of her dark eyes and perhaps the ghost of a scar along one high cheekbone. “Just the thing for a rainy night. I had the chef add ginger and lighten the pepper. It settles the stomach, you see.”

  “Did you have him add anything else?”

  “Love, had I wished you dead, I’d have given you a gentle push rather than a handkerchief.”

  Mir conceded the point with a raised hand. Besides, the soup was excellent.

  “Although,” Dogwood continued, “I did once have him add a mysterious white powder to an aging ambassador’s coffee.”

  Mir flipped through her memorized list of assassinations in Mikra over the last twenty years. “You’re the one who killed Javier Fernández?”

  “Hm? Oh, no. That was one of Creel’s people. A disagreeable business, that, and entirely unrelated. No, this was a favor to the gentleman’s wife. She credits me with reviving their marriage, and I do believe you’re a shade young for the details of that.”

  Mir found herself loath to seek elaboration. Her intimate experience with those beyond a certain age was a catalogue of fleshy horrors. She did not need Dogwood adding to them in that cool, teatime voice. The woman’s perfect self-assurance was only slightly less disturbing than her air of familiarity. Somewhere below that elegant persona was a world of piano wire and methods for removing bloodstains.

  “So,” Dogwood said, “I suppose this was your first kill. Quite an entrance. A lightning siphon, I trust? By popular legend, the Lemurian Engineer who invented those was crucified on a steel cross on a hilltop during a thunderstorm, so thoroughly did his colleagues disapprove of a device for killing airships. A true statesman’s weapon, one might argue. Plausibly accidental, plausibly not, and always reduced to just another bit of melted metal among the wreckage. Not the most surgical tool, however. I would have preferred a knife.”

  Mir winced, imagining trying to close against a woman with almost a foot of height advantage, let alone a man like Walrus. Often the winner of a knife fight was the first participant to receive medical aid, and even then, infection killed a fair percentage of ostensible victors. “For fifteen people? I was taught to avoid bladework.”

  “I can see why. You do have a pretty face and—forgive me—rather short arms.” She laid aside her spoon. “Tell me, what is the Lady of Situations calling me these days? I was rather hoping ‘Ladyhawk’ would stick. It seems so bombastic, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ve been calling you Dogwood.”

  A little sigh that might have been disappointment. “And she’s been calling you Mir.”

  Mir made a mental note to go hunting for Dogwood’s source if she made it back to her Lady alive. “You’ve been following me since Flourish. You and all the others. What do you want?”

  “I’ve been following you since Hull. And I would like very much to have a look at your delivery and perhaps make a few small alterations. As for the others... well, I can’t truly speak for them, now can I? And now I suspect you’ll find questioning them rather... inconvenient.”

  Mir blinked, fixing on the puzzle and willing it to block out everything else. An altered one-time pad was useless but not a long-term problem. The tampering would be noticed and replacements supplied within a week or two. Expensive, yes, but that was all. If someone like Dogwood—or Lord Drenan—had a copy of the original, messages sent from Hull in the interim would not be secure, but the opposition calling attention to the security breach made no sense at all.

  The request, therefore, had to be a ploy. Finding out what game Dogwood was really playing, and surviving long enough to get word home, might be just enough professional redemption to blot out the current debacle. “What sort of alterations?”

  “A few characters on each page. Perhaps an inkblot or two. I’ll know more when I’ve had a look.”

  Which made even less sense. That wouldn’t render the ciphers wholly useless; it would just show they’d been tampered with.

  “Why?”

  Dogwood dropped a few coins on the table. “I’m afraid it’s all rather complicated. I’ve bought you a room for the next two nights. Not that I expect you’ll find much sleep.”

  They agreed on that, at least; Mir planned to spend her first minute alone assembling and loading the hold-out pistol hidden in her luggage, and she would spend the next hour barricading the door, inspecting the walls and floor, and rigging the windows with spring-driven shrieker alarms. Dogwood still wanted something from her, which provided Mir a kind of security, but she had never been one to trust in the constancy of inscrutable motives.

  Dogwood was already leaving, headed not for the stairwell but for the front door. “We’ll speak at noon,” she said, pausing at the threshold to don her cloak.

  “Where?” Mir asked.

  “I know where you’ll be.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  A brief, sad smile. “How many parachutes did you see?”

  “Twelve. That’s not an answer. Do you plan on following me again?”

  Dogwood ignored the question. “I saw you counting them. Not everyone would have, you know. This is the moment I’m supposed to tell you killing gets easier. Personally, I suggest the local liquor; if one must be awake, one might as well be inebriated.”

  But Mir did sleep, if fitfully, and her dreams were of fire and falling.

  The wreck of the Windhover was dispersed over an ellipse more than a mile long. The effects of its destruction reached yet further. There would be no outbound flights from Cliff’s End until the fate of its crew was resolved. Even in their constant competition, aeronauts were a tight, slightly mad fraternity. What had befallen the Windhover was their nightmare, and a blend of compassion and fascination brought them out at first light. A dozen ships drifted under light sail over the olive groves, all polished wood and brass composed in sleek lines beneath white canvas, no two alike.

  For Mir, the search for survivors was less stately. She had packed good boots and loose, practical clothing, but she had underestimated both the hills and the sucking mud left by the downpour. She plodded through swaths of shade where the hazel windbreaks obscured the view from above, bone-weary, aware that Dogwood had probably manipulated her into her present errand but unable to act otherwise. Twelve parachutes. Out of twenty crew and fifty-five passengers.

  Killing Dogwood might have been worth it, never mind the dozen or so other agents of rival powers. Insofar as anyone could tell, the woman was an anarchist and a damned effective one. Her assassinations tended less to further political ends than to frustrate them, and she had brought the colonial powers to the brink of war more than once. She had topped the Lady of Situations’ blacklist six years out of the last ten. Having met her, Mir could understand why. And yet she found herself strangely disinclined to try to finish what the lightning siphon had started.

  A pale, oblong object dangled from a branch overhead. A human leg, torn free at the hip and no longer bleeding. Mir stopped for a while, studying it, wondering why it didn’t seem entirely real.

  She found the Windhover’s first officer and captain seated beneath a hazel tree. A parachute was crumpled into a crude cushion for the captain’s broken leg, not that the elevation could fix the bone jutting through his skin. Mir took the vacancy of his expression as a sign he wasn’t feeling much. So she hoped, anyway.

  The first officer, a sharp-featured man named Abelard, watched her approach, unspeaking.

  “I have water,” Mir said, offering her canteen.

  Abelard held out a hand. His eyes were red. So were his hands. He ha
d tied a tourniquet just above the captain’s knee, but the ground beneath was still black with blood.

  He drank and offered the canteen to the captain, who did not stir. Flies had begun to gather. Abelard passed the canteen back.

  Unsure what else to do, Mir sat down beside him. “We could spread a parachute,” she said at last. “The other ships would see it.”

  “I know.”

  “But you don’t want them to?”

  He nodded.

  “The captain needs help.”

  “He’s past help.” He focused on her, frowning. “You’re that girl from Hull. Picked you up in Flourish.”

  “Sir, he’s lost a lot of blood, but we can still—”

  “He lost the Windhover,” Abelard said, his voice rough. “He isn’t coming back. Whoever killed her killed him too.”

  Abelard dabbed a bead of saliva from the corner of the captain’s mouth with a handkerchief. A slim metal flask lay beside him. Mir picked it up, shook it, sniffed at the spout, did a quick calculation. Yes, the first officer was probably still half-drunk. There was only a swallow of gin left, but she would take what she could get. Her throat burned, but the fumes cleared her head.

  “We need to get him back to the city,” she said.

  “That’s not what he needs.” Abelard flicked open a clasp knife. “Look at him, girl.”

  She did, and she saw now that the captain’s face was not vacant. His mouth twitched and his eyes darted in tiny, random motions, his stare flickering through anger, fear, and incomprehension.

  She shifted uneasily. She’d expected grief and pain, and those showed plain enough, but there was a trace of panic she couldn’t explain, as though he’d been struck blind. A day before, the captain had been attentive, professional, an image of perfect competence. Now, whatever mind remained behind that stare was broken, lapsed into aphasia and cut off from the world.

  “He held on for a bit,” Abelard said. “Full minute after the lightning strike, the Windhover’s heart blown out, and he was still giving orders. Wouldn’t make the jump, not even after there was nobody else left on deck. Wanted to go below. Kept saying he had to see, had to stay. I had to clip his line to my harness and jump myself. Damned selfish of me. Should have let him follow her down.”