“Don’t be stupid, lieutenant. Get back to your station.” But Riuza kept her gaze on her one remaining passenger.
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Omar said, raising his empty hands. “I didn’t even know these gentlemen before you introduced me to them. Why would I kill them?”
“So you could get to your damn island,” Morayo said, her face darkening. “With Garai dead, we spent almost no time on the ground looking at the plants and things. It sped up the flight for you, didn’t it?”
Omar shrugged. “Maybe. But why would I kill Kosoko? He stopped his map-work hours ago. He wasn’t holding me up.”
“Maybe not now, but this morning he sure was. Maybe you poisoned him then and he only just now died of it. You’ve had your hands in the food the whole time. And you cooked for us right before Garai died. You could have poisoned his food then,” the engineer said. “What do you think, captain?”
Riuza frowned. “I think we need to stop making wild accusations and start being sensible. We’re a long way from home and this is not the time or place for a grand jury. The chart says we’re nearly at this island of yours, Mister Bakhoum. If we find it, we’ll set down there for the rest of the night and let off Mister Abassi. We’ll refill the boiler and head home in the morning and let the authorities sort this all out then. In the meantime, you’ll be shackled. Your sword, please.” She held out her hand.
Omar winced as he rested his hand on his weapon. “Is that absolutely necessary? I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Maybe Garai and Kosoko just happened to die on the same trip for the same reason. Maybe it was just a bad piece of fish. And maybe you killed them both. I don’t know, and right now I don’t care. I just need to get my ship home in one piece, so I’m asking you for that sword. It’s not like you need it right now, do you?”
“The sword!” Morayo’s eyes widened. “Remember how it burned that big beastie’s skin so it didn’t bleed when he killed it? Maybe he stabbed Garai and Kosoko somewhere we wouldn’t see, like in their mouths, or up their backsides!”
Riuza grimaced and shook her head. “Maybe. Like I said, I don’t care. Let’s just focus on getting home. We’re six days out at least, and that’s a long time to be stuck together, so let’s all just keep our heads. Mister Bakhoum?”
With a sigh, Omar tugged his seireiken free of his belt and placed the short sword in the captain’s hand. “Please be very careful with it. Whatever you do, don’t touch the blade. In fact, you shouldn’t draw it at all.”
Behind the two women, he caught sight of the shade of Ito Daisuke staring down at the little engineer. Slowly the samurai looked up at Omar and said, She never spoke to the dead men, did she?
But when Omar let go of the sword, the ghost vanished and he was left to wonder what the dead warrior had meant.
Riuza frowned, then handed the weapon to Morayo so she could pulled a length of twine from the overhead bins. “Your hands, Mister Bakhoum.”
“This really isn’t necessary,” he said as he held up his wrists together for her to bind.
The dim cabin brightened suddenly as though the sun had risen in the center of the gondola and Riuza turned to see Morayo holding the naked sword in her hand, its sun-steel blade shining like the full moon.
Omar felt every muscle in his back tense at the sight of his ancient and deadly weapon in the young woman’s hand. And then he realized what the samurai had meant. “You never spoke to them.”
“What?” Riuza said.
“Never once. Not even when we were working together to tie up the ship. Not even to pass the salt at supper.” Omar glanced up at the captain. “In the last seven days, I’ve never once heard your lieutenant talk to Garai or Kosoko.”
“So what? It’s not a crime to ignore someone.”
“No,” Omar said slowly. “She didn’t ignore them. She shunned them. Except when she gave us the ginger as we were leaving Tingis. But even then, she only looked at me, and never at them.”
“Huh.” Riuza looked back at her engineer. “Come to think of it, I don’t recall you ever really talking to them on any of our expeditions. Not even to give them a hard time. And you give everyone a hard time.”
Morayo glared at them, her face nearly chalk-white from the blazing light of the seireiken. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Tell me about your family,” Omar said. “Do they live in the south, near the Songhai border? A man in Tingis told me that last summer the Songhai raiders came over the border and killed the homesteaders up in the hills, but there was no retribution because the Mazigh queen refuses to declare war on the Empire.”
“Lieutenant?” Riuza stepped closer to the engineer. “Put down that sword and answer the man’s question. Was your family involved in the attacks last summer?”
“Yes,” the young woman whispered. The bright sword in her hand crackled with electric arcs and the air around it began to warble and ripple like a mirage on the desert sand. “They killed my parents, and my little sister. They even killed my dog. Burned the house to the ground. Burned the orchard to the ground. They left nothing alive.” Morayo face twisted with rage. “And what did the queen do? Nothing. She’s too damned scared to defend her own people, so while she’s safe up in her palace in the sky, we’re the ones dying. We’re dying, captain!”
“So you killed Garai and Kosoko?” Riuza asked softly. “Because they’re Songhai?”
“You’re damn right I did! I poisoned the ginger. It should have killed them all sooner, but Kosoko was such a damn baby about eating it. And you, it didn’t even bother you, did it!” she yelled at Omar.
The Aegytpian said nothing, but he remembered the stomach pains he had the night that Garai died. If I could die, I would have.
Bright tears spilled down the young woman’s cheeks. “I mean, what the hell were they even doing here? You can’t tell me there aren’t any Mazigh mapmakers or naturalists who could do their jobs! They’re Songhai! They’re goddamn Songhai! And I’m glad they’re dead!”
“All right, Morayo, it’s all right.” Riuza stepped a little closer. “It’s all over now. It’s done. Here, let me take that.” She reached for the seireiken.
“No!” Morayo lurched back and raised the sword.
“Watch out!” Omar yelled. “Don’t touch the blade!”
“I heard you the first time, Mister Bakhoum,” Riuza said coldly. She reached behind herself to the harpoon gun and yanked the winch handle off the wire spool. She held up the steel handle as a club. “Morayo, put that thing away before you hurt someone. We’re a long way from home and the nearest living Songhai is over three thousand kilometers away. So just settle down. You’re not going to kill me, and you’re not going to kill our Aegyptian friend. Do you hear me?”
“But don’t you see, captain? We can pin it on him, easy. We can just go back home and say Omar killed them, and then we killed Omar in self-defense. So maybe when the Songhai find out, they’ll go to war with Aegyptus or Eran, and they’ll stop coming after us. You see? We can fix it all, you and me.” She sniffed and wiped her sleeve across her face. “All we have to do is tell a little lie.”
“You know it won’t work out that way, Morayo.” Riuza shook her head. “The Songhai won’t care about a couple of dead scholars, and even if they do, they’ll probably just use it as propaganda against Marrakesh, not Aegyptus, and definitely not Eran. I don’t know what the right answer is right now, but we have a few days to figure it out. And in the meantime, you’re going to put down that sword and no one is going to hurt Mister Bakhoum. So put the sword down, now.”
The engineer sniffled and the tip of the sword began to droop lower. But then she winced and shook her head sharply. “What is that? Who’s there? What’s that sound? Who is that?”
Oh God!
Omar stood up. “Morayo, you have to listen to me. Ignore the voices, ignore the faces, and listen to me. You need to put the sword down. Just put it down carefully on the floor. You n
eed to ignore the voices and put the sword down!”
“What voices?” Riuza asked.
“No, stop, get out of my head!” Morayo spun in a drunken circle, swinging the seireiken in wild flashing arcs. Twice the tip of the sword scorched the walls and once it melted the edge of a window.
“Crap.” Riuza leapt forward and grabbed her lieutenant’s arms, struggling for control over the sword. Omar scrambled out of his narrow slot beside the toilet and stumbled as the Frost Finch shuddered under his feet. He tried to catch himself, but his bound hands slipped off the rail and he fell into Garai’s empty seat by the fish.
In the center of the cabin Riuza and Morayo were locked in a vicious knot of arms and the blinding white seireiken blazed in between them. Omar could hear both women gasping and grunting as they struggled for the sword. The Finch shuddered again and the slender bar wedged against the steering column popped free and fell to the floor of the cockpit. The flight stick leaned forward and the entire airship pitched forward with it. The two women fell down the uneven deck into the cockpit with Morayo sitting on Riuza’s chest. The lieutenant had the seireiken poised over her captain’s chest, the blazing tip just inches from Riuza’s leather jacket. “Stop it, all of you! All of you, shut up!” the young woman screamed, shaking her head in violent circles.
Omar lurched up across the tilting cabin and fell face-first onto the women’s legs. He got his own feet under himself and shoved up, slamming his shoulder into Morayo’s back. The engineer pitched headfirst over the captain and crashed into the thick glass of the forward windscreen. The glass crackled and a sudden draft of freezing wind shrieked into the cabin. Morayo lay very still, her glassy eyes staring up at the ceiling.
“The sword! Grab it!” Omar hollered over the wind.
The seireiken lay on the deck just under the pilot’s seat and wedged under the flight pedals. The brass plates and controls were already deforming, melting, twisting, and dripping down to the deck. Riuza yanked the sword out of the floor just as the pedals collapsed into the deck and she shoved the weapon into Omar’s hands. As he fumbled the seireiken into its scabbard with his bound wrists, Riuza climbed into her seat and grabbed the flight stick and throttle, but when she pulled back on the stick it snapped off in her hand. “Crap.”
“What do we do now?” Omar shouted over the wind screaming in through the broken windows.
Riuza pointed out the forward windscreen. “Not much we can do now.” She reached over with a small utility knife and cut his hands free.
Omar rubbed his wrists as he looked out into the darkness and saw the moonlight falling on the frozen sea. But just ahead the ice sheet ended and he saw dark waters lapping on a dark shore, and above that rose the black shapes of mountains against the starry sky.
“Welcome to Ysland, Mister Bakhoum.”
Chapter 8. The end
The Frost Finch was still pitched down and descending quickly. Riuza cut the throttle and for the first time in seven days the engine fell completely silent. Omar crouched beside her in the cockpit, watching the dark island grow larger below them.
“So it would seem your theory was right,” Riuza said calmly. “There’s no snow on your island, or not much, at least. Since we’re going to die here, would you mind telling me what this was all about?”
Omar glanced down at the still form of Morayo Osaze staring up at him from the broken corner of the window. “It’s about this.” He held up his sheathed sword. “This metal. It’s very rare, and very dangerous, and very strange. We call it sun-steel. In its raw form it looks like dark gold. It attracts the aether mist like a magnet, and if a soul is drawn into the steel with the aether, then the metal grows hotter and brighter. For years I’ve been trying to find more of it, trying to learn more about it. And then I heard a story about an island in the north where the earth shone like gold, and it was always warm, and the living walked side by side with the dead.”
“So you think this Ysland has more of your sun-steel?”
“A lot more.” He nodded. “So much that the very ground under their feet is kept warm by it all year round, even here at the top of the world. With so much of it, the people here must be masters of it. They must know everything about it. Some of my people back in Alexandria know how to make weapons from it, like my sword, and to make other more useful tools as well.” He reached up to touch the lump of the golden pendant under his shirts. “We can even talk to the souls trapped in the steel. But these people, these Yslanders must know far more than we do. To them, sun-steel must be as common as tin. It’ll be everywhere, in every aspect of their lives. And here they are. Look there.” He pointed at a shimmer of yellow light on the dark plain of the island. “A home. People. We’re not going to die, dear lady. We’re going to live for a very long time.”
They had several long minutes together in the cold dark cabin of the wounded Frost Finch to watch the island loom up larger and larger before them. The fiery dot on the shadowed plain grew larger as well, and soon burst apart into a dozen lights, and then a hundred.
“It’s a town,” Omar said.
Riuza spent a few moments banging around the cockpit, but she gave up trying to salvage the controls and came to stand back in the center of the cabin beside him with one hand on the overhead rail and the other hand holding the collar of her heavy jacket closed tight around her neck. Omar saw a wisp of pale steam curl off the woman’s shaven scalp.
“It’ll be very soon now,” she said.
The cold wind blasting through the front windscreen grew more wild and all of the nets and bags and sacks and strings inside the cabin danced and whipped through the air around them. And out in the darkness, the scattering of lights continued to grow.
“That’s no town,” Omar said softly. “It’s a city!”
“I think you’re right.” Riuza nodded. “It is a city. It even has a… get down!”
She tackled him to the floor just as the airship collided with a tall black spire. The dark tower of jagged rock scraped along the port side of the gondola and they heard the terrific ripping sound of every layer of the balloon overhead being shredded open to flap violently in the wind. The Finch nosed down more steeply and a quiet scream rose in the air as they fell faster and faster toward the ground.
Omar sat up, clutching Riuza to his side as he tried to wedge himself between the cabin wall and an empty box of dried beef. “Well, dear lady, it certainly has been an adventure. I’m sorry it had to end this way.”
She snorted and a small smile curled her lip. “I thought you said we were going to live.”
“Yes, well, I’m the optimistic sort. So…” He leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth, luxuriating in the warmth of her soft lips and tasting the salty sweetness of her tongue in his mouth. He leaned back and smiled at her.
She gave him a wry look. “I would hit you, but you’re handsome enough, and we’re about to die, so I’ll let it slide. Just this once.”
And the Frost Finch crashed into the earth.
Omar had half a second to hear the steel frame of the airship keening and wailing as it twisted and bent around him. He heard glass shatter and fabric tear, wood splinter and flesh thump. There was the grinding of stone and the groaning of brass pipes. And in the distance, there was shouting. But that half a second ended when Omar flew forward with Riuza still in his arms and he collided with the front of the cockpit.
The world ended, for a time.
When he opened his eyes, the sun was high overhead. He was lying on a cold bumpy street and he could see the sides of stone buildings around him. There was a giant smoking skeleton of steel off to his left, and to his right there was a group of people standing and kneeling around the body of Riuza Ngozi. The pilot coughed and her hand moved.
We’re alive. We’re both alive. We made it to Ysland. The airship is destroyed and three people died, but we made it. I made it. I’m here. Ysland, at last!
A scowling old man knelt down over Omar and the Aegyptian looked up int
o the wind-burned and bearded face. In his best Old Rus, Omar asked, “Is this Ysland?”
The man raised an eyebrow, and nodded. “It is.”
“And is there much sun-steel here? The hot gold? The bright metal?”
The man shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said slowly. “I have no gold. But you, you’re hurt. It’s very bad. I’m sorry.” He reached across Omar’s chest and lifted up a heavy cloth lying on the man’s shoulder. Omar rolled his head over and saw the stump where his left arm used to be.
A wild giddiness swam up into his brain at the sight.
My arm is gone. All gone. I’ve lost my arm. I’m sure I had it a moment ago. What did I do with my arm?
The ground shone with dark blood as far as he could see in every direction.
My blood. All of my blood. It shouldn’t be outside like that. That’s very wrong.
His teeth chattered for a moment, but he rolled his head back and reached up with his right hand to grab the old man’s wool shirt and pulled him down close. “I know there is sun-steel here. Where is the gold that keeps this island warm? Where is it? How much is there?”
The old man chuckled and shook his head as he loosen Omar’s grip on him and straightened up. “There’s no gold here, friend. Iron a-plenty, but no gold.”
“I don’t care what you call it, old man!” Omar felt his arm shuddering, felt his mind slipping back toward oblivion. His skin was cold and his vision was growing dim. “What keeps this island warm? Why isn’t it covered in ice?”
The old man shifted back and pointed at the northern horizon, and then to the east, and then to the south. Omar followed the man’s finger to see the huge smoking mountains around the city. Omar shook his head. “Volcanoes? No, no, no. But the stories. The stories said… I thought…” He clawed at the old man’s arm and hauled himself up onto his knees. He teetered off balance from the missing weight of his arm. Gripping the old man for support, he stared at the northern volcano with a terrible icy emptiness in his belly. “The stories were wrong. I was wrong.”
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