Andrew Dykstal - [BCS310 S01]

by Fire

  Now Sharpe stood before Dogwood and Mir, expressionless, Abelard at his side, the dead men between them. “Is all this your doing?”

  Dogwood was buttoning a cloth case over her rifle’s telescope. “Not by intent. Our enemy is no friend to the Company, Captain, nor to any of the independents. This day would have come eventually, and perhaps found you less prepared.”

  “Does your enemy have a name?”

  “One presumes so. I don’t know it.”

  “All right. Follow me.”

  “Where?” Mir asked.

  “We’re looking for survivors. Enough to give us answers. We’ll see if they match yours.”

  He left the rest unsaid. Mir felt something hot shivering under the airship’s skin like a fever. Was it the Amaranth’s rage or her captain’s? Was there a difference?

  She shut her eyes and ground her palms against them. When she looked up, Abelard was offering her a revolver and a bandolier of rounds. She accepted the weapon, flipped the cylinder open, spun it. Brass gleamed in the fading light.

  “Your Lady teach you to shoot straight?”

  “She did.”

  “Kneecaps, if you have the choice. We need someone to talk.”

  It was a small team that approached the wreckage: Sharpe, Abelard, Dogwood, and three crew members who had served in one army or another in their former lives. Dogwood carried the long rifle over her shoulder and wore her pistol and rapier.

  “Oh my God,” Sharpe said when they gained the deck.

  Where the deck and hull were broken, Mir could see twisting vines, half of them split and oozing dark fluid. All were pierced by strands of copper wire that ran back to the metal block of the interface engine. A few were smoking, and the air reeked of rotting vegetation and death.

  One of the Folly’s crew stirred. Sharpe put a foot on his chest and a revolver to his head. The man tried to mumble something through a mouthful of blood. Sharpe froze in place. Then, slowly, he lowered the gun. He turned to Dogwood. “You’re the Ladyhawk, aren’t you?”

  Dogwood did not smile. “Among other things.”

  He pointed to the wounded man. “Learn what he knows. Abelard, watch her back. I’ll take the rifle. Miss Mir, with me, please.”

  She followed him below decks. The copper wires ran everywhere, a nervous system or elaborate instrument of torture. A few still hummed with current. She knelt over a dead woman and tore the insignia from her jacket. A stag rampant on a green field, caught within a closing wheel of hounds. “Lord Creel.”

  Sharpe didn’t seem to hear her.

  They detoured around crushed passageways and ducked low where decks had buckled under the impact. Creaks sounded as the Folly’s structure shifted under strain. Nothing was burning, not yet, but Mir kept thinking of the blast that had sundered the Windhover. How large were the Folly’s powder magazines? How close might they be to a sparking brush of copper wire? Then there were the sealed canisters painted with warnings and handling instructions. All were intact, but a few were scratched and dented. Mir recalled the silence of Lycen and her speculations on poisonous gases. She gave the canisters a wide berth and hoped her eyes were watering only from the rising stench of plant decomposition.

  “Here,” Sharpe said at last, stopping before a closed hatch. Every trace of absent-mindedness was gone, replaced by a flat, emotionless intensity. He tried the hatch, found it locked. He touched the hinges, fingertips lingering.

  “Can we shoot them out?” one of the crew asked.

  “Not the hinges,” Mir said at once. “The frame around the bolt. Four or five rounds right there, angled down.”

  Sharpe pointed. “Do it.”

  Five shots sounded, deafening in the confined space. The hatch swung inward.

  Inside was a shipseed.

  It was an angular, man-high bulb with spines and roots that vanished through cutouts in the bulkheads. The seed was the color of dark cherrywood, its surface rippled and glossy except where heavy braids of wire pierced it. There it had begun to dry and shed flakes like rust. A scab the size of Mir’s hand fell away, and a burst of mephitic air spilled from the lesion.

  She couldn’t hear it, but she knew the ship was in agony.

  Sharpe touched the shipseed, eyes closed. “I’m so sorry, sister mine,” he murmured.

  Mir reached out and felt the smoothness of the skin, keeping clear of the dead patches. Sharpe’s crew, she saw too late, had stayed outside, their postures somewhere between reverential and horrified.

  No matter. She was here, and she wasn’t going to back out. “Don’t you have someone who could bond with it? Her, I mean?” she asked.

  “No. Airship captains don’t fall from trees.” He stepped back from the shipseed. “Wouldn’t help anyway. She’s blind. I’m dead sure she’s in pain. Thank God I left Abelard above. He’s already been through this once.” He caught Mir’s expression and sighed. “I’m not oblivious, Miss Mir. You can leave too, if you’d like.”

  She didn’t have to watch. He was giving her the choice. But she was hesitant to leave him alone, to leave him facing the act in isolation. “I don’t think I should.”

  “All right.” He unslung Dogwood’s rifle, slid a round into the breech, and snapped the bolt closed. “I hope to God they killed Traeger clean. That’s not something I’ve had to hope before.”

  He set the muzzle a foot from the shipseed, closed his eyes, and fired.

  The hum of the wires died.

  Sharpe did not move.

  “This is the part,” Mir murmured, laying a hand on his shoulder, “where I’m supposed to say it gets easier.”

  If he realized what she’d just confessed to, he gave no sign. “Does it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  From far away, through a half-dozen open hatches and as many twists of ruined corridor, she could hear a man screaming.

  “Come on,” she said. “It’s done. Let’s see what Dogwood is finding out.”

  They took their council in Sharpe’s mess aboard the Amaranth, all four seated around a white-clothed table topped with Mir’s pouched belt, a chunk of interface engine, one of Dogwood’s bullets, and four glasses of whiskey.

  “Nothing remains secret forever,” Dogwood said. “All the High Lords know what airships are. They have for decades. The Houses have a vested interest in possibilities beyond the current arrangement, and they’ve begun dedicating more resources to pursuing them. The main difficulty, as you might imagine, is the rarity of individuals capable of linking with shipseeds—to say nothing of the measures the Company has taken to limit and control transitions of power from one compatible individual to another.”

  Mir asked, “What measures?”

  Abelard answered. “Three things. Keep passengers from staying aboard for more than a week. Keep crews small to minimize odds of chance bonding. And if it does happen, close the whole business quick. If the captain’s getting old or the crew’s dissatisfied, there’s a duel. Newcomer gets a chance at command. But usually we just chuck the poor bastard overboard, call it an accident. Bad luck for him, but there’s the risk you take.” He pushed his glass over to Mir. “You want this? I don’t. Not now.”

  “All of which means,” Dogwood said, “that possession and control of airships continues to be random. Virtually all captains come to identify more closely with Lemuria than their nations of origin, and none owe fealty to the Houses. For whatever reason, the High Lords have had an extraordinarily difficult time buying any off—”

  “I know why,” Sharpe said. “It’s a fool who gives up his freedom for a purse. Airships don’t choose fools.” He picked up the shipkilling round and turned it through his fingers. “Random? It’s not random. Ships fall in love, just like people do. I’ve never known one to fall in love with a monster. Selfish greedy devils, fine. Adventurers a bit light on conscience, fine. But not monsters. And not fools.”

  No, Mir thought, but apparently one can choose a murderer.

  Abelard reclaimed
his whiskey, raised it in salute, and drank.

  Dogwood smiled politely. “Be that as it may, it seems someone has discovered an alternative—direct control of the shipseed’s nervous system.”

  Abelard snorted. “If you can call it control. Wallowing, more like.”

  “It’s close enough for most purposes, I should imagine. Tell me, Abelard, how many airships have gone missing over the last two years?”

  He glowered and said nothing.

  Mir shivered, imagining a fleet of maimed ships drifting over Hull, bristling with weapons, each screaming in a register no ear could perceive. “Creel,” she muttered.

  “Does it matter?” Dogwood asked. “Would you feel differently were it Drenan or Borgia or even your Lady? They’re interchangeable, love. All of them.”

  Mir had no answer.

  Dogwood continued: “Our late acquaintance from the Folly claims Creel has nine airships fitted with electromechanical controls. Creel has yet to field the others. He’s successfully hidden his capability, at least until now. Given that our source and his compatriots were supposed to destroy four of Lewis’s compounds in southern Mikra and, if possible, intercept Mir and her parcel, it would seem she’s forced his hand.”

  Abelard frowned. “One of Creel’s men was on the Windhover. He even had a diplomatic passport. Why would Creel have his own man killed?”

  “There are other actors in play,” Dogwood said smoothly. “Don’t you see?” She slipped a booklet from Mir’s belt and held it up. “This is Madeleine Lewis’s answer to the likes of Creel. I confess I’m not certain what’s inside, but I’m quite confident it’s a means of seizing control of an airship. A means she was distributing to her holdings along the world’s busiest trade route. They might be instructions for a device like Creel’s, but I suspect something more... exotic. According to my sources, the Lady’s research team included three mathematicians, two alienists, a biologist, and she seems to have suborned a Lemurian Engineer.”

  “Impossible,” Abelard said. “Fanatics, the lot of them. Bolide worshippers.”

  “The question is not of possibility. The fact stands. The question, dear Abelard, is of means, and of what the means imply. Consider what else might be accomplished by a method for altering mental architecture at a fundamental level. Now consider that the criterion for linking with an airship seems to be having a certain sort of mind—”

  Sharpe cut her off. “No. No way in hell. What we have, it’s magic, or near enough. It’s not something you can put in a bottle.”

  “No, but it is perhaps something you can write down or encode in a few hundred pages. Or in a psychoactive fractal. Mir? Perhaps you have something to share?”

  Mir reached out in a direction she’d never noticed and felt the Amaranth’s mind drifting against hers. Felt her sorrow and pain and confusion. Felt a growing desire to lift away from this place, to leave her dead sister in peace under an open sky. It was frightening. And it was wonderful, and it could be hers.

  She looked at Sharpe, at the intensity in his eyes, the perfect certainty written there that that Amaranth loved him. She imagined slitting his throat in the night.

  “Why send it with me?” she asked, trying to turn the conversation. “For the love of God, I’d never even been in the field alone.”

  “I believe that was the point. A low-level courier delivering a sensitive but routine package... who would notice?” Dogwood smiled thinly. “I knew your Lady had one leak. Given the Houses represented on the Windhover, it would seem she has more. But that’s hardly my point. Mir, love?”

  “I never opened the booklets,” she said. “I almost did, but....” But she hadn’t. And wouldn’t. She stood and snatched her courier’s belt from the table and the single booklet from Dogwood’s hand. “I haven’t betrayed her. Not yet. And you still haven’t given me a reason to.”

  Mir left, slamming the door behind her. Anger burned through her confusion. She’d never opened the booklets, had hardly even touched them. They couldn’t have changed her, bent her mind into some new shape. She still felt like herself. She had her memories, her personality, most of her loyalty. She could feel—

  —could feel—

  —could feel wind breathing over her skin, the gentle wash of light from farther stars. The pain in her side dulling as she healed. The outer dance rolling on and rolling high, her own part in it suspended for but a moment while her eyes (she always thought of him as her eyes) saw things that made him weep inside, that made the freedom within him beat like a caged bird’s wings—

  Mir drove her fist into a bulkhead, the pain dragging her back to a smaller reality. “I didn’t ask for this,” she said.

  Nobody asks for it, the Amaranth might have answered. People hope for it, sometimes.

  She slipped into her quarters and sat in the darkness, fighting the impulse to lose herself in the airship. My God, she thought again. Is this how Sharpe feels all the time? No wonder he gets distracted.

  Dogwood returned an hour later and sat beside her. “For what little it’s worth,” she said softly, “I didn’t mean for you to be the test case. I meant to examine the booklets myself, at the right moment.”

  “I was telling the truth. I didn’t read them.”

  “Then you have exceptionally bad luck, love. Or else the mechanism is other than I believed.”

  Mechanism, Mir thought. “How did you know?”

  “The way you’ve been looking at our Captain Sharpe. I count myself a consummate reader of people, and I honestly cannot tell whether you mean to take him to bed or put him in his grave. Were I to guess, I would posit that your feelings for his ship and his ship’s feelings for him do not sit easily together.”

  “Does he know?”

  “Sharpe? No. He’s quite... devoted to the Amaranth. It’s a common flaw in men to suppose the objects of their love return it in equal measure. Though I believe Abelard has a clearer understanding on the point. Caldwell regarded him as an invaluable friend, you know, and nothing more than that.”

  “I knew that much. Dogwood, what am I supposed to do?”

  “Julia.”

  “What?”

  “My name is Julia Longstreet. Or it might be, I should say. It’s the oldest one I remember. Mundane, isn’t it?”

  “I think I like Dogwood better.”

  “It has been growing on me, I admit. Ladyhawk sounds like something that escaped from a penny dreadful.”

  They sat in silence for a while. Dogwood broke it: “You stood out during your training, did you not? A recognizable rising star.”

  “I was. Not the best, but close.”

  “So I’ve heard. Which is itself striking.”

  “Why?”

  “It occurs to me,” Dogwood said slowly, “that what I’d have you do now is continue to draw fire and thereby expose those parties invested in airship technologies. It also occurs to me that I am likely not the first person to conceive of such a plan. I did wonder why the Lady saw fit to include a lightning siphon among your things. It’s a rather specialized weapon, after all, useful only when one’s enemies are gathered in the right place at the right time—though in spring one is guaranteed a thunderstorm at some point on the journey from Flourish to Cliff’s End. And my intelligence was far more detailed than usual, now that I have cause to reflect.”

  “The leak,” Mir murmured. Pieces slotted into place, a picture emerging that made perfect sense if she admitted one—just one—unpleasant truth: the leak had been deliberate. Nausea coiled inside her, slickness gathering in her mouth.

  She seized one of the booklets and ran her knife down the seals.

  The pages were blank.

  “Well,” Dogwood said.

  Mir tore the others open. Blank, all of them. She lit a candle and held a page up to the heat. Nothing appeared. She spat on her fingers, smeared a page with saliva. Nothing. “Lemon juice,” she said. “I need something with acid. Sharpe had vinegar at dinner two nights ago. Or, or—”

&nb
sp; “Mir.”

  “This can’t be it.” She was struggling to breathe. “It can’t be.”

  “I wonder,” Dogwood said, “whether your lightning siphon was armed from the start. Would you have been able to tell? Cliff’s End was the first storm of the journey.” Admiration crept into her voice. “Oh, Madeleine, you magnificent, devious bitch. She’s dealt a blow to a dozen intelligence networks, drawn out Creel, and pointed the wrath of the Company straight at him. And all she had to sacrifice was you. Hm. I wonder if she knows yet that Creel has leveled her lovely embassy. As I said, the man’s a splitting maul. I rather doubt she foresaw that particular outcome. Mir? Oh, Mir.”

  Mir wiped at her tears and fought the shudder building in her chest, the tightness in her throat. But there was no point. She lowered her face to her hands and wept.

  Dogwood drew her down beside her and let her cry.

  “Ten minutes,” Mir said. It took a few tries; her voice kept cracking. “Give me ten minutes. Then, I don’t know, slap me or something.”

  But she cut herself off after five, locking away the pain and sense of vertigo. She sat up, wiped her face, and took a few deep breaths. “All right, Dogwood. Ms. Longstreet?”

  “Julia. Though not in front of our present associates, if you please.”

  “Julia, then. We have six blank booklets everyone is desperate to steal or destroy. The Amaranth is in my head, and when Sharpe finds out, he’ll have to kill me, or I him. Abelard will kill me, too, once he figures out what I did to Caldwell. And my patroness has thrown me to the wolves. Now what?”

  “In the long-term, we warn Lemuria about Creel. I imagine the Company will make a rather public example of him and restore the balance of power. But for now, solve the one problem you can. Dispose of Sharpe and Abelard.”

  She could taste it: a whole lifetime feeling the pulse of the Amaranth and the freedom of flight. Fifty years or more. Seeing the world—seeing more than the world. A new life, and her Lady left far behind. All she had to do was accept that she’d been forced to be free.

  “No.”

  Julia smiled. “I thought as much. I’m going to take what rest I can. You—well, you’re your own woman now, love. You might do anything. I wish you luck.”