Then everything went to madness.
“Bridge!” the man at the large brass tube shouted into the horn. “Mutiny on the engine deck—” Janak was on him, stopping his breath with a quick strike to the throat, and soon he lay in a heap on the floor as well. The man from the back surged forward, readying his shovel to swing, and several more workers lunged for Janak.
He whirled, his hands flat planes and his boots swiping high then low, a spinning figure in the middle of the melee. She didn’t see him actually touch any of the sailors attacking him, but they flew backward, one by one, landing motionless on the floor or slumped against an instrument panel. The man with the shovel lay flat on his back, splayed out, unmoving. His shovel skittered to a stop against another worker’s feet. Janak stood in the middle of the bodies, back straight as an arrow, feet wide and hands splayed, ready for more.
No one moved.
“Now, then,” Karan said, commanding the attention of the remaining workers. “The rest of ye want to question my orders?” There were still eight engine workers left at their stations, but no one so much as twitched an eyebrow.
“Right.” Karan strode to the rudder station, checked quickly on the status, and seeming satisfied there, moved two stations forward, closer to the door, where an array of tiny levers bristled from the instrumentation panel. It also had a larger handled lever like the rudder station, and Karan clacked it down with a heavy mechanical thunk. But when he examined the needle gauge, his face pulled into a scowl.
“Ashoka,” he called out, and the prince, who had stood by Aniri’s side during the entire brief showdown hurried to the control station. Karan pointed to a gauge where the needle was well into a red zone that Aniri could see even from her spot by the door. “The burning glass is still operational. I’ve thrown the main switch; it should have laid all the wings flat, cutting off the rays to the central crystal, but the tube is still hot.” He tapped it. “Could be it will take a moment to cool, but it should at least have dipped.” His face was solemn when he turned to Ash. “There’s a manual override control on the bridge. They could have cut us off before I was able to shut it down.”
Ash ran a hand across his face. “There’s no way to turn it off from here?”
“From here… no. Not if they’re controlling it from the bridge now.” Karan glared at the sailor at the station next to them. “We could try to take the bridge, but…”
Ash gave a small shake to his head, and Karan nodded. They didn’t seem to think that was a viable option. Aniri glanced at Priya: her face was scrunched with worry. This obviously wasn’t part of the plan. Janak appeared by Karan’s side, startling the large man out of his frown for a moment.
“We can turn back to Jungali,” Janak said.
“We can’t return to Bajir like this,” Ash said. “With the burning glass still operational, we’ll just destroy whatever’s in our path.”
“Continuing on to the capital is not an option.” The menace in Janak’s voice made clear he wouldn’t countenance that.
“No,” Ash agreed. “We can’t do that either.”
“We could vent some navia and bring ’er down,” Karan offered, carefully. “Of course we’ll be landing in our own flaming pit of fire, so I’m not keen on those odds, Ashoka.”
The prince glanced at Aniri. She gave him a weak smile and a nod. She knew it might come down to destroying the ship, which would likely mean themselves as well, in order to stop it.
He turned back to Karan. “If that’s what it takes to stop the destruction of the capital, I want you to do it. But I would like to hear any other options you have first.”
“Aye.” Karan leaned a hand against the panel, the other one working the goggles on his brow, as if that motion was helping him think. “If there was some way to get directly to the burning glass…” He studied the small forest of switches on the panel. “It wouldn’t take much, only a few of the panels out of alignment might reduce the power enough… or we could disable it entirely by—”
A loud rattling came from the door behind Aniri and Priya. Aniri had just enough time to shoot an alarmed look to Ash, Karan, and Janak, all of whom had swung to look their way, when a tremendous crack sounded from the door. A split second later the door flew open, catching Priya in the back and sending her crashing into Aniri. They both tumbled to the floor as several sailors armed with blunderbusses stormed into the engine room.
Janak ran toward her, but before he could reach the cluster of armed sailors, a shot rang out, and he flew backward. Aniri stared in horror as he fell to the floor and didn’t get up. She scrambled to her feet, ready to join the fight, when Karan’s voice bellowed out.
“Stop!” Surprisingly, the command brought everyone to a halt. “Garesh, you fool, you can’t fire that thing in here! You’ll burst a boiler or worse. With your aim, you’ll probably put a hole in the bag.”
Garesh stepped to the front of his sailors, blunderbuss extended, a grin on his face. “Then I’ll be careful to aim well, tinker.” But his gun wasn’t pointed at Karan, it was leveled at Ash’s head. “The Jungali people will have to mourn the loss of yet another royal. How appropriate for him to die at the hands of mutineers on board the country’s finest war vessel. But no one will be surprised that the Dharian princess he wanted to marry turned traitor. Such is the bad luck of the Malik royal household.”
Ash bore his taunts with a cold look of disdain, as if Garesh were beneath his contempt.
Garesh cocked the hammer back on his gun, and Aniri didn’t hesitate. She whipped her sword from its sheath and lunged at Garesh’s arm. The tip of her blade barely reached him, but it smacked against Garesh’s gun just as it fired.
Garesh swore and whirled on her. Aniri backed away and looked to see if Ash had been hit, but a cloud of steam billowed out to swallow half the room. Garesh and his men were distracted by the sudden hiss that came with it. Karan bellowed and appeared out of the cloud, tackling Garesh. They went down, wrestling on the floor, with Karan’s massive hand around Garesh’s throat. With his free hand, Karan snagged the goggles off his forehead and tossed them to Aniri. She clumsily caught them.
“Go, fresh,” he wheezed, then pulled his arm back to punch Garesh in the face. Two sailors fell on him, trying to wrest him away. Aniri stared for a split second at the goggles in one hand and her sword in the other, then hooked her arm around Priya’s and dragged her through the blasted-open door.
Aniri didn’t look back, just ran through the corridor, retracing her steps up the stairs to the captain’s quarters where Ash had rescued her.
Ash.
Tears blurred her eyes. She kept her father’s sword in front for any of Garesh’s sailors along the way. Janak was shot for certain—she couldn’t tell where or how badly he was hurt.
Or if he was dead.
The tears made it impossible to see, so she swiped at them. Her boots pounded the metal steps.
Ash could be dead as well. She told herself the bullet must have gone wide—otherwise steam wouldn’t have filled the engine room. Or was that Karan’s doing? Priya followed behind, face drawn. They reached the captain’s quarters, and Aniri paused, making sure they hadn’t been followed. At least not yet.
“Did you see the prince, Priya?” she couldn’t stop herself from asking.
“No, my lady.” Her delicate face was taut with worry. “But I’m sure Karan will protect him, if he can.”
Aniri’s heart squeezed. Priya was as worried about the tinker as Aniri was about Ash. But she had no time for that now.
She held up Karan’s goggles. “Why did he give me these?” She was asking herself as much as Priya. “He said go, but go where? I don’t know if there are escape boats, but I’ve no intention of leaving. Do you know what he meant?”
“No, my lady. But Mr. Karan, he’s…”
Aniri’s heart wrenched further as tears glistened in Priya’s eyes.
“He’s a brilliant tinker,” Priya said. “I’m sure he meant for you to do
something important with the goggles.”
Of course. “The butterfly!”
“My lady?”
“The burning glass, or whatever its proper name.” Aniri sheathed her sword and pulled on the darkened goggles, securing the strap and propping them on her forehead, so she could still see. “Karan mentioned something about getting to it and disabling it.”
“Do you know how to do that, my lady?” Priya’s eyes were wide.
Aniri grimaced. “Not exactly. But I know where it is, and there must be a way up top to reach it.” She glanced down the end of the hall. “Priya, how do I get to the upper decks of the ship?”
“This way, my lady.” Priya scurried with light steps down the hall, past the captain’s quarters, to another set of stairs at the end. At the top, the brilliant summer sun shone through a window in the door. Pounding steps sounded somewhere in the ship—Aniri hurried up the stairs and threw open the door.
It flew back and smacked hard against the wall, carried by the wind that buffeted Aniri’s face as soon as she stepped over the threshold. The edge of the ship was near, a bare wooden railing waist high. It was the only thing standing between her and thousands of feet of empty air. Near the door, a rope ladder was lashed to a cleat on the railing. It was just like the one Aniri had climbed at the airharbor.
Priya lingered at the threshold, giving the railing a wide-eyed look.
“Priya!” Aniri shouted to be heard over the wind. “Do you still have that key? Will it work on this door?”
Priya gingerly stepped onto the wooden deck and wrestled the wind for the door, bringing it around to bang shut again. The key was on a ring, which she pressed into the keyhole. The whirring just carried over the sound of air whipping around them.
“Stay here!” Aniri said.
Priya flattened herself against the wall of the ship. Aniri grabbed hold of the rope ladder, took a deep breath and a final glance at her handmaiden, then climbed up on the railing.
One wrong placement of a foot, and she might get a chance to fall to her death after all. She tried not to look down. Once she had both hands on the rope ladder and both feet on the railing, she felt more secure.
The gasbag of the skyship billowed above her. She couldn’t see the top, but the ladder hugged the balloon all the way out of sight. Downwind, clouds of thick gray smoke stacked on top of one another like great pillows, burgeoning up into the skies. She didn’t know how close they were to the capital, but she didn’t want that fire anywhere near it.
She climbed hand over hand, her saber banging against her leg, her cloak flapping like a winged beast strapped to her back. She should have discarded it before the climb. Scaling the ladder seemed a much longer trek this time, now that she was climbing the skin of the gasbag itself. The wind surged against her in uneven gusts, and the blue fabric of the gasbag smacked underneath her handhold, as if the sky itself were fighting to dislodge her.
She finally saw the tips of the butterfly wings overhead. They focused inward in a perfectly spaced formation; tiny flashes escaped at the corners where the reflective surfaces weren’t completely focused on the burning glass. She slid the goggles down with one hand, the other tight on the rope. The goggles turned the brilliant sunshine dark, but she would be quickly blinded without them.
She reached the top and climbed onto the platform, hunching into the wind. It wasn’t strong enough to blow her off, but it was uneven, gusty, and there wasn’t much to hold on to for steadying. She pushed through the wind to the butterfly itself and drew her sword.
The wooden linkages that supported the big brass plates were only a few inches thick, but they were solid. Her repeated strikes with the saber only reminded her that her hands were still healing. The miniscule cuts she made were going to accomplish nothing. She tried kicking at the linkage, venting all her frustration into every boot pounding, but the wood held steady against her onslaught. Then the platform beneath her heaved, and she fell to the wooden deck, grasping for a handhold between the planks in case the ship decided to simply toss her off for daring to assault it.
What had Karan said? That it wouldn’t take much change in the alignment to stop it? She carefully climbed to her feet. The linkages were wooden beams connected by metal pins and a gear at the base. The control mechanisms must be below, inside the ship. Aniri stabbed her saber into the base gear and tried to leverage movement with that. She pushed to the limits of her blade without breaking it. The gear didn’t budge.
If she couldn’t move the wings out of alignment, maybe she could do something to the crystal. She carefully peered between the wings, afraid that looking directly at the burning glass might be too much, but very little light came from the crystal. Tiny pinpoints inside winked at her, but it seemed all the light channeled down into the fiery inferno below. Waves of heat pulsed from the plates, then were swept away by the wind.
Scuffling sounded behind her.
She turned, saber in hand, in time to see Garesh pull himself to his full height at the top of the rope ladder.
She was tempted to charge him, saber first, maybe push him off, but she would go right over with him. Garesh drew his sword and stalked toward her. His goggles masked his face, but she didn’t have to see it to know what he intended. The platform was barely five feet wide next to the butterfly, not much room for a saber fight, and a painful death on either side: plummeting to her death or falling into the burning plates of the butterfly.
She retreated to where the platform opened up—still only about twenty feet square.
Garesh charged her. Aniri parried and lunged back to strike at his chest, but he had already danced out of her reach. She edged toward him—maybe she could force him off the platform—but he slashed and cut his way forward again, pushing her back. She had to glance at the platform behind her to gauge the distance to the edge. His sword caught her cloak, and the wind snarled it, giving her a split-second to cut up with her blade. She barely missed his angular face with the tip.
He stumbled back.
The ship swayed under them, nearly sending both to their knees. Aniri widened her stance for balance. “Forget to bring your blunderbuss, Garesh?”
He steadied himself on the platform. “I don’t need a gun to kill a royal.” Which Aniri took to mean he had lost it in his battle with Karan. Or maybe realized it would be foolish to bring a gun on top of a gasbag.
She tried not to think of Karan. Or Ash or Janak. But while she and Garesh circled each other, the ship was flying closer to her home, bringing an inferno with it. That thought caused her to involuntarily glance toward the bow of the ship. Clearly visible in the distance was a familiar square perimeter with faint red coloring and a tall building in the center.
The palace. Her home.
Garesh seized on her distraction, and she barely dodged his blade as it thrust past her ear. She shoved into him, knocking him backward, then brought her sword around in a slashing arc, but he blocked. She tried to whip over the top of his handguard, at least draw some blood with the tip, but the blade whispered past his cheek, and he managed to slip out of reach again.
This time he shuffled back, looking shaken.
Aniri was desperate for some end to this that would actually stop the ship. It was just as likely, if not more so, that Garesh would kill her than the other way around. Meanwhile, the burning glass was still decimating the landscape of her homeland. Even if she defeated him, how would she disable the butterfly? All she had was her sword, her cloak, and… her sword.
It was heavily jeweled and the finest steel Samirian smiths could forge. Perhaps it would hold up to the heat within the butterfly and block the light that was finely focused on the burning glass. Karan said even a small amount might make a difference and reduce the flaming torch beneath them.
But without her weapon, Garesh would kill her in a heartbeat.
Aniri didn’t hesitate. She dashed down the side of the butterfly, seeking the platform at the far side. Garesh would surely pursue her, but
moving would give her a second’s time to make a good throw. She rounded the corner, coming out on the far side. Edging as close to the wings as the heat would allow, she gripped the blade of her father’s sword and gently lofted it into the center of the butterfly, hoping her aim would be true. It clanked against the crystal, jumped up onto one of the wings—which made her heart stop in her chest—and then rattled its way back down to the center. The jeweled hilt came to rest directly on top of the burning glass.
As Garesh pounded around the side of the platform, the hilt of her father’s sword popped and sizzled, quickly melting and smoking and oozing all over the giant crystal. Garesh stared open-mouthed at the smoke now pluming up from the center of the butterfly. Aniri held her breath: it had to be working. She couldn’t believe any light, no matter how powerful, could cut through that grayish mass. The wind tossed the smoke, clearing it a little.
Garesh roared in anger and slashed his blade at her neck.
Aniri ducked and fell backward. She scrambled on her bandaged hands and boots as he lunged for her, driving his blade straight down toward her heart. At the last instant, she rolled to the side, and Garesh’s blade embedded itself in the wooden plank. He yanked it out and came after her again, sword raised. A deafening bang sounded off the side of the ship, and the platform rocked, sending Garesh back on his heels and causing his blade to miss her. She leapt to her feet and ran for the ladder. A wisp of gray smoke drifted up over the gasbag from somewhere below the ship.
She froze. Was the ship on fire?
Then she saw a small flotilla of paper lanterns peppering the sky all around the ship, white dots against the brown and gray landscape. As she watched, another one, too far to impact the ship, exploded into a puff of ash and smoke.
Her mother had somehow known; somehow seen them coming. Of course. Janak would have messaged ahead to warn her.
Third Daughter (The Dharian Affairs, Book One) Page 26