by Fire
Mir kept studying the dying man’s eyes, trying to understand. She had known Abelard was in love with Caldwell, had guessed it her second day aboard, but she was missing a piece, some key fact about the working of the world, or about Caldwell and the Windhover. Suddenly, she was not sure what her destruction of the Windhover meant.
“Help me,” Abelard said. He held up the knife, hand shaking. “Please.”
Mir took his hand in both of hers and helped him cut away the tourniquet and slide the knife into Caldwell’s wounded leg. The blade found the femoral artery, and redness washed over Mir’s hands.
Abelard dropped the knife and held the captain’s head against his shoulder.
After a while, Caldwell stopped breathing. Only then did Abelard release him and take up the knife again. “Can you keep a secret, girl?”
The lie came easily, even if the words had to fight past the thickness in her throat: “Captain Caldwell died of injuries sustained seeing to the evacuation of his passengers and crew.”
“Good.” Abelard stood and dragged out the parachute, cutting the worst of the tangled lines and arranging it into a sling. “Now we take him back into town.” He folded away his knife. “And mark me—when I find who did this, I’ll do things to him they dare not name in hell. I swear it. By Lemuria and the Bolide, I swear it. Witness me.”
“I witness,” she whispered. Then, not quite sure why, she added, “My name is Mir.”
“Not on the manifest, it wasn’t.”
She shook her head but said nothing.
“All right, Mir. Take his feet.”
The barracks where Mir grew up were always alive with sensational stories, more than a few meant to Keep Things in Perspective. For each travail she and the other children went through on their paths to becoming officers or diplomats or accountants or couriers, there was always some fabled group that had it worse. After a particularly scientific beating she sustained for being caught stealing extra rations—and thereby failing her first test in applied thievery—the Lady herself gave her willow bark to chew and told her about an order of monks who bound themselves in barbed wire for the better remembrance of their sins.
Now, ten years later and a thousand leagues from home, she put Abelard up in her rooms and went to wash the last of the blood from her hands. He was from Hull, and their physical resemblance was just close enough that she could pass him off as her uncle. No one was likely to contest the fiction; among the aeronauts his preferences seemed an open secret, and she had no friends or relations in Cliff’s End likely to erupt in moral outrage at a bachelor taking up residence with her. A few of the Lady’s contacts aside, the only other person she knew in Cliff’s End was Dogwood, and Dogwood seemed an excellent argument for posting a large, armed, and suspicious man at her door.
As was the possibility that the Lady’s contacts were compromised. There had been too many hostiles aboard the Windhover to admit coincidence.
Then she went back to the hospital where the surgeons were seeing to the wounded and laying out the dead, Caldwell among them. Counting Abelard, there were nine survivors. Only one was an obvious retainer for a House, and he had two broken legs and a cracked skull. Maybe he saw her. Maybe he didn’t. She left him alone and saw to the corpses. No one questioned her presence. Seemingly everyone in Cliff’s End not hungover from the night’s revels stopped in to gawk or offer help, and after Mir demonstrated a facility for washing and wrapping bodies, a local surgeon set her to work without a second thought.
At least not until a tall, strikingly beautiful woman wearing a pistol and rapier drew her aside and pressed a clean towel into her bloodied hands.
“You’ll need to find another ship soon,” Dogwood said quietly, “if you care to continue your journey with my protection.”
“Protection?”
“You just blew up an airship, love, one of less than a thousand in the world, and one that just so happened to have a measurable percentage of the hemisphere’s intelligence agents on board. I daresay the powers-that-be have noticed. I know that Drenan has some idea of what you carry, and while that dolt Creel has all the subtlety of a splitting maul, he has enough sense to employ clever people. Those are just the two who will kill you out of antagonism toward your Lady. I could list a dozen of her allies who would happily risk war for what is presently ruining the lines of your vest.”
Mir glanced at one of the bodies she had helped wrap for burial. “All this for a few ciphers we could change in a week?”
“Oh, those booklets aren’t ciphers. I thought you’d realized that by now.” Dogwood took her arm and ushered her out to the street. “Do try to keep up.”
“I don’t believe you,” Mir said flatly.
“You can look if you require proof. In any case, as you’ve clearly decided not to dispose of me—or try to, I should say—all that’s left is to hear me out and hope that my formidable skillset is sufficient to keep you alive. After all, I need you to repair the seals on the booklets after I’ve examined them, and I assume your Lady’s representatives are under orders to accept delivery from no one but you.”
Mir disengaged her arm. “You know what has to happen once I’ve learned what you really want, right?”
Dogwood laughed, the sound oddly musical. “If you live a few more years, Mir, I think you’ll find that precious few things have to happen at all.”
Mir declined to argue. If she lived a few more years, it would be by killing Dogwood. Disputing the point felt unseemly.
Abelard was drunk when Mir returned, which was just as well. Beneath his grief was an intelligence canny enough to realize that Mir had to be part of the reason his friends were dead. She’d as good as admitted to being a courier or spy, and now that she had time to reflect, her aid in mercy-killing his captain was likely to have undesirable consequences. She’d seen Abelard broken. Men didn’t tend to forgive that, except by falling in love. That seemed unlikely in the present case.
She washed his face and hands, badgered him into bed, and waited until his breathing grew slow and even.
Sixty-six dead. Nine more maimed, one way or another.
For a while, she listened to Abelard snore. Then she worked the belt of leather pouches out from under her clothes, opened one, and studied the book’s seals. The wisest course might be to destroy all six. Her Lady would have other copies in Hull if they were really something more valuable than a set of cipher pads. Any other strategy risked the booklets falling into Dogwood’s hands, or Creel’s, or only God knew who else’s.
But destroying the booklets would mean ending her mission in failure.
The long game, she thought. Play the long game. Somewhere out there was a good to weigh in balance against sixty-six dead. She just had to find it.
She shook Abelard awake.
“Want to find out who brought down your ship?”
He nodded, eyes still bleary.
“Then find me another one. Off-book. I have a... friend. A specialist. We’re going east, following the southern coast to Lycen, then heading inland for Cadela. If we get back in the air and see who comes after us, you’ll have a shot at them. Fair?”
“Who are you working for, Mir?”
The truth can be a weapon. The Lady herself had told her that. And a coddled weapon is no weapon at all. “The Duchess Madeleine Lewis.”
“The Lady of Situations.”
“Yes. Long a friend of the Company, you’ll remember.”
He lowered his head into his hands. “Politics. I hate politics.”
Mir waited in silence.
“All right. I know a captain or two who can take you east off-book, if you have the coin. East is easy. But you’ll be taking a boat back. The wet kind.”
That was as good as Mir could expect. People, mail, and manufactured luxury items traveled east by air with regularity. But westbound, Mir would have to pay for her weight in black pepper or turmeric before a ship would take her on. Even for someone with her Lady’s resources, that was no
t a trivial expense.
“Fine,” Mir said. “When do we leave?”
“Tomorrow. After the funeral.”
She kept her face neutral. Some small part of her pointed out that she was putting Abelard both in the line of fire and in position to kill her when he realized what she’d done.
Then again, Dogwood had conveniently escaped the Windhover too, and she was far too clever to come across as trustworthy. The right word at the right time might solve two problems at once. Mir could let them eliminate each other after they’d seen her safely to her Lady’s first embassy, then deliver the still-sealed parcels, disappear for a month or two, and find a steamship to take her home, having completed her mission and dispatched one of civilization’s more tenacious enemies. Her Lady might even promote her.
But when she pictured the Duchess Madeleine Lewis, all she could see was the likeness between her and every other High Lord she’d ever met. Something in the eyes, or the set of the mouth. Something Dogwood did not share. Nor Mir herself.
Dogwood’s words returned: Precious few things have to happen at all.
Abelard was still watching her, waiting.
“After the funeral,” Mir murmured. “Of course.”
The ship Abelard chose was smaller than the Windhover and asymmetric in a rakish, dangerous sort of way, its lines crooked by a pontoon on a long boom jutting from the port side. Just why an airship needed a pontoon was beyond Mir. That question invited others, but they all seemed to slither away before they could form, and the sight of the ship’s colors dispelled them completely. The flag at the tip of the mainmast was a slash of black on a blue-white field. It was the first time she’d seen anything but Company colors flown over an airship, and the effect was disorienting. The flag suited the ship, though; something about that careless streak of black complementing the jagged sweep of its hull.
Beside her, Abelard said, “Meet the Amaranth.”
“It looks fast,” Dogwood said. “Wonderfully fast.”
“‘She.’ All ships are ‘she.’”
Dogwood smiled. “Oh? And has anyone asked them about it? I blush to say it, but I’m sure I wouldn’t know where to look to find out.”
That brought Abelard up short. “You care to elaborate?”
Another beatific smile. “No.” She gathered her luggage, a wheeled trunk and a long leather case worn across her shoulder, and set out for the gangplank.
Abelard bent to Mir’s ear. “She’s a dangerous one. I’ll give you that.”
“Why?”
“Knows too much.”
And I know next to nothing, Mir thought. “Tell me about the flag. I don’t recognize it.”
“That’s Elias Sharpe’s flag, or the Amaranth’s. They don’t fly for the Company. Never have. Independent spirit.” A twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Caldwell tried to talk them into the fold every time they met.”
“Them?”
Abelard nodded as though he’d just administered some test and come away satisfied with the results. “Here he is.”
Captain Sharpe was short but well-built, with broad shoulders and an expression that suggested part of him was stargazing on the far side of the world. He also looked too young to be captaining anything, let alone a delicate assembly of wood and line about to be cruising a mile above solid ground. He traded grips with Abelard. “Sorry about Ernest,” he said. “Hell of an airman.” He glanced at Mir. “This is your cargo problem?”
“Half of it,” Abelard said. “Captain Sharpe, Mir. Mir, Captain Sharpe.”
Sharpe took her hand and turned it, studying the calluses with mild interest. “What do you weigh, about one-ought-five?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Don’t be; that’s below average. No rate bump.”
Mir categorized the question as pertaining to cargo and declined to take offense. “One-ten, actually. And my luggage is another thirty.”
“Huh,” he said. He turned and cast an appraising eye over Dogwood, who was sliding a long trunk up the boarding ramp. “And she’s, what, one-forty-five? One-fifty?”
Mir fought down a smile. “You should go ask her, just to be sure.”
“Right.” He gave her a short bow. “Miss Mir.”
Mir watched him go with a blend of amusement and concern. “A bit odd, isn’t he?”
Abelard picked up her satchel. “I’ve known him five years. He’s reliable. And he’s agreed to board a pair of shifty strangers off the manifest. And he can fly like a bloody god. ‘Normal’ doesn’t figure into it.”
Mir thought about that for a moment, reflecting on her brief interactions with Captain Caldwell and his state in the hour of his death. “Abelard, if something were to happen to the Amaranth, what would happen to Sharpe?”
Abelard didn’t even turn. “Ask your associate.”
So Mir did. She and Dogwood were condemned to share an empty cargo hold fitted with a pair of cots and a steep-sided wash basin. Dogwood, already halfway through donning her face for dinner, nodded approval in the mirror of her compact. “Very good, love. Madeleine always did have an eye for the curious ones. People have trouble asking coherent questions about airships, have you noticed? What do you think would happen to Sharpe without the Amaranth?”
“He’d lose his mind.”
“Yes, or a piece of it. The question is why.”
“I’ve heard rumors that airships are alive. But I’ve also heard rumors that they’re magic, and even the Engineers don’t know how they work. An aeronaut even told me once that they’re ghost ships stuck between heaven and hell.”
“Yes, they do seem to encourage the rumors rather indiscriminately, don’t they? Tell me, have you ever wondered why none of the Houses have their own airships?”
Mir frowned, considering. She hadn’t. Every airship in the world was operated by the Company or a nonconformist like Sharpe, and it had never seemed anything but natural.
“Were I a gambling woman,” Dogwood said, “I might posit that the High Lords have been asking themselves that question more and more frequently. The Engineers know, I suppose, but they’d never tell; you’d have to drive one mad first.”
“And why’s that?”
Dogwood shrugged. “Why do you serve the Lady of Situations?”
Mir fought down vague but dark memories of her early life on the streets of Hull. “She gave me everything.”
“No, love. She gave you everything you think you have—after taking everything you had before. There’s a certain class of person more made than grown. The Lemurian Engineers belong to it. They believe the Bolide made them—or made their particular way of being possible. They believe in the divinity and totality of their benefactor. For a while, you did too.”
“I did, did I? But not anymore?”
Dogwood turned her back and stepped into her dress, drawing it up over her slip. It was magnificent, a deep green like a forest at dusk, and fitted to perfection. And, infuriatingly, it had emerged from Dogwood’s trunk without a single wrinkle.
“Button me?”
Mir did, thinking of her own drab attire and fighting down a suspicion that Dogwood was mocking her.
Dogwood turned and took Mir’s hands. “I find my back safely restored to modesty and unmarred by a single knife wound. I do believe you are discovering qualities not owed to your Lady, or at least ones she never intended to give you. There’s a moment, Mir, in the lives of people like you. A moment of atrocity, of breaking strain. And on the other side, a state of being so like falling... well, I must wonder what kind of person you’ll be when you stop.”
Mir pulled free. “I did my job. That’s all the Windhover was.”
“Yes. And there are no sharper critics of causes or persons than those who’ve spilled blood in their name. It’s all a matter of finding that final line of transgression.” A thin smile. “I wonder if you’d feel this way, Mir, had you merely murdered me in my sleep.”
“What about you?” Mir snapped. “I know the stories. What
was too much for you?”
The smile vanished. “A small matter, early in my career, regarding a complication in my former Lord’s succession. As a result of which, I am now the kind of person who kills children. That is what I am.” She threw a silk wrap over her shoulders. “Usually, however, it is not what I do. Come along, love. The fashionability of lateness is greatly exaggerated.”
Mir slept lightly that night, her back to the bulkhead and a knife in her hand. In that strange region between sleep and waking, a curious doubling overtook her thoughts; an awareness of things her reasoning mind would never have accepted. Wind hissed over her skin, and alien sensations of speed and force played through limbs she could not name. And she knew what it all meant; remembered the star blazing over Lemuria-that-was, saw vines curling like fingers about the Earth itself.
She woke in a sweat, gasping. Dogwood was still asleep. Even so, Mir felt the pressure of eyes, or the focused awareness of something that lacked them. The feeling was—what? Reassuring? Comforting? She wondered if this was what it felt like to fall asleep in the arms of a lover rather than those of a convenient lay. Her pulse was slowing, and she could not say why. In the end, she gave up, resettled herself against the bulkhead, and went back to sleep.
The Duchess Madeleine Lewis, ruler of lands indeterminate by rights uncertain, maintained in Lycen an embassy of singular design whose white alabaster walls were visible for miles. The structure was a rising fountain of arches, an intricate mathematics of stress and tension. By popular myth, the calculation time on Lemurian analytical engines had cost more than the alabaster, limestone, and labor combined. Only when the Lady of Situations filled the embassy with teak furniture, linen drapery, deep wool carpets, and a thousand other expressions of opulence did the material cost outweigh the purse paid the Engineers.