The Mechanist, Imogen, danced and waved her arms at the back of the courtyard near the stair rising up the cliff. “The bomb is armed! We need to flee!”
Wintermourn ignored her. “Give up, Fengel. We’ll have your whore of a wife—”
Something burst through the Gasworks at his back, raining rubble from the wall out among the courtyard as it went. A huge, brazen object sailed through the air to slam into the granite wall of the terrace cliff with a sound like a ringing gong. Imogen darted aside with a yelp as it landed, and all the fighting paused for an involuntary moment.
Wintermourn stared. It was one of Gwydion’s Brass Paladins, smoldering and barely recognizable. The thing still twitched and steamed, flywheels spinning beneath its heavy armor.
A great roar echoed out across Haventown and the lagoon. It rebounded from the cliff walls, triumphant. Wintermourn glanced back at the Gasworks boundary, which had been blasted open to clearly reveal the rooftops of the Waterdocks and the forest of masts made by the warships in the lagoon beyond. The mechanical Voornish dragon stood there, distant, half-atop a collapsed warehouse out in the middle of the lowest terrace, raising its great maw up to the sky. The thing roared out again, bestial and bloodthirsty, for all of its mechanical nature.
The rippling report of a musket volley sounded above. It was the Glory, her crew taking shots at the pirates aboard the Dawnhawk. The mechanical dragon paused, glancing up at the warring airships. It snorted, and a great fume of steam gushed out. For a moment it stared, as if reminded of something. Then it narrowed the great glass eyes and stomped angrily, crushing a portion of the warehouse it stood upon.
The monster turned away, hunkering low. It seemed to shake and shudder, its interior machinery working furiously. Then it straightened abruptly out, maw open, to breath a lambent bolt of lightning at the Dawnhawk above.
Wintermourn stared. The bolt barely missed the armored envelope of the Glory. Bluecoats still fell from the rigging, spasming to their doom just from proximity. It hammered up into the hull of the Dawnhawk, passing through it and shattering out the deck on top, then up into the gas-bag envelope of the airship before exiting on the opposite side.
Fire exploded out from the Dawnhawk’s envelope. It burst out into the sky and washed across its deck in a wave of red-orange flame. Amazingly, the rest of the airship still hung in the sky, though burned and badly crippled. Below, the Voornish dragon gave a satisfied snort.
“No!” cried Fengel.
“Why are you all standing around!” sobbed Imogen.
Then her bomb went off.
Admiral Wintermourn felt pressure, then saw light, and everything became a confused jumble. The world seemed to wink out, then come back in a completely different orientation. Long moments passed as he struggled to set things to order.
He was lying on his side upon the courtyard boardwalk, his back bent at an awkward angle. Bodies lay all about him. How did I get down here? What happened?
Something was ringing in his ears. He ignored it. Wait. The fight. Captain Fengel and the airship.
His saber. He had to find his saber and get to his feet before the enemy could finish him off. Something was strange, though. The world—it wouldn’t stop wobbling.
Admiral Wintermourn rolled onto one arm, then gasped as a riotous, shooting pain lanced through his side and his wound from earlier. He forced himself through it with the experience of many long years, looking up past the dead or unconscious Bluecoats just in front of him. Then he stopped, trying to make sense of the scene.
Bodies lay all about, Bluecoats and pirates both. A hole gaped in the middle of the courtyard boards. On the opposite side, the cliff wall was moving.
No, passing. It was falling away. Wintermourn realized that the structure he lay upon was rising.
No. No, they won’t succeed. He tried to force himself to sit up and coughed violently. The taste of blood was thick on his tongue.
Movement caught his eye. It was the Mechanist, Imogen. She pulled at a stunned, bloodied, half-standing Captain Fengel, still holding his blade. The short, bulldog-looking fellow, now covered in blood, helped her. He gestured at the airship landing pad above them, then back out at the lagoon.
No. You won’t get away.
Wintermourn licked raw lips and adjusted his wig. “Greene,” he gasped. “Greene! Attend me!” The man was useless. What had ever happened to his adjutant, Sergeant Lanters?
A shadow covered him. He glanced up to see the Dawnhawk on the approach, a madly burning wreck falling straight for the Gasworks. The Glory of Perinault was out of his field of vision, escaping catastrophe for the moment, it seemed.
“Sir?” croaked the body before him. It was Sergeant Greene.
“Get on your feet, soldier,” rasped Wintermourn. He grabbed a saber, not his own, and used the blade like a crutch, forcing himself to one knee. Wintermourn glowered down at the Bluecoat. The man said something, but he didn’t catch it this time. The ringing in his ears would just not stop.
Sergeant Greene was an oozy wreck. His eyes were gone; it was obvious he wouldn’t long survive.
Damnation! Wintermourn glanced at Fengel and his minions, who were slowly climbing the stair away from them, to the landing pad above.
“Everything myself,” he muttered. “Have to do everything myself.”
More movement appeared across the courtyard. A shock of fear shot through him, but no, it wasn’t Revenants. It was a group of still-living Bluecoats, thank the hairy knuckles of the Goddess. Though whether they’d be of any more use than Green was questionable.
“To arms!” he croaked, grabbing up his fallen saber. “Attend me, you whoreson laggards! They’re getting away!”
Slowly, with his lungs burning and black spots dancing in his vision, Admiral Wintermourn straightened his wig. Then he crept after Fengel in pursuit.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Captain Fengel forced himself up the Gasworks stairway. It rang with every step he took, the metal clangor a counterpoint to his own labored breathing.
He ached. Each breath was like fire. His ankle was stiff. Blood ran freely from his tattered clothing and the dozen wounds beneath them. That omnipresent ringing in his ears was fading, though the pounding in his skull couldn’t have been worse if his head were placed in a vise.
Henry Smalls was at his side, propping him up and helping him in his climb. His faithful steward was saying something, but Fengel couldn’t make it out. Ahead of them, giddy with excitement and possibly a concussion, Imogen Helmsin raced for the airship platform at the top of the stair. She stopped to point at the rapidly disappearing cliff wall and then up at the Flophouse Terrace floating above before running forward again.
We’ve done it. We’re aloft. They’ll never catch us now. But how steep the cost? In the courtyard below were dozens of the dead, men and women he’d known for years. Crewmates he’d led to freedom, then victory, and then finally to the skies. Some lived still, he was sure, and he was leaving them even now to the Bluecoats!
Because there wasn’t any time. The Dawnhawk, with Natasha, was coming in hard, crippled by the damnable Dray Engine. Where in the Realms Below had it even come from? And breathing lightning? Never on Almhazlik had he seen it do that.
Not important. It just wasn’t important right now. He felt shame over his abandonment of those still injured below, Lucian and Sarah and anyone else that was left. But his wife...
Fengel grabbed for the handrail, failing because of the saber still clutched tight in his hand. That was surprising; he hadn’t even realized he still had it. Fengel sheathed the blade roughly, stopping Henry with a mumbled command and looking back out over Haventown’s lagoon. Then he stared, monocle falling away. The Dawnhawk loomed hugely just ahead, a falling star awash in flame heading straight for them.
“Brace!” screamed Imogen, all her giddiness gone now.
His airship passed just overhead, so close that Fengel felt the heat from the flames up on her deck. He could have re
ached out and touched it, had he wanted to lose a finger. She tore railing away as she slammed into the Gasworks platform, skidding across it to ram the central smokestack spire rising up from the structure.
Fengel experienced a horrible moment as the entire world seemed to shake. Steel gave way with the screeching snap of metal pushed just too far. The Gasworks—or was it the unmoored Craftwright’s Terrace itself?—shook with the force of the impact. Orange light washed over them all, cutting through the early evening gloom and illuminating the shattered pieces of steel that fell like clattering rain into the Gasworks interior. The Dawnhawk burned up above, a torch for the whole of Haventown.
The shaking ceased as his airship settled on the platform above with a mighty groan. Fengel grabbed a wincing Henry with one hand and gestured up to it, past where Imogen clung to the stair they stood on. “She’s stopped! Henry, if ever you’ve borne me any love, get me to the ship! We can still save them—we can still save Natasha!”
His steward stared at him, appalled and uncertain. Then he nodded, spat blood out over the courtyard, and helped Fengel forward. They stepped past Imogen where she was clambering unsteadily to her feet, and climbed the last few steps up onto the airship landing pad.
It wasn’t large, certainly not like the piers up at the Skydocks. An oval-shaped platform of wood and steel, the Mechanists had built it for their own purposes, and it stuck out from the central smokestack spire of the Gasworks. The Dawnhawk lay perpendicular to it, having touched down in its middle and slid to a violent arrest up against the now-bent smokestacks.
Fengel felt his throat catch. Past the broken boards and burning debris that littered the platform, his lovely airship was dead. Her hull was snapped in two, her uppermost deck presented to him as if to show what would never be again. The great gasbag envelop burned, half-floating, half-dangling from the smokestacks like the awning of some great pavilion.
My ship. My crew. Natasha!
He let go of Henry and stagger-stepped across the platform, oblivious to anything beyond or below it. Images flashed through his mind’s eye of the last time this had happened, of the last time he’d lost an airship. But the Flittergrasp hadn’t been carrying the woman he loved.
A piece of debris reached up and grabbed his leg. Fengel toppled, falling to the creaking platform and slamming hard into it. That had to have been a hand...
Fengel rolled onto his back. He looked down the length of his body at a bedraggled, crumpled figure lying at his feet. It stared back up at him with eyes like hard glass set above a hawklike nose and greying beard.
“Euron?” choked Fengel, incredulous.
Euron Blackheart relaxed his grip. He coughed, then hawked and spat. “Popinjay. Realms Below, but I wish ye were anyone else.”
Fengel couldn’t help himself. “What are you even doing up here?”
The old pirate sighed. He sat painfully upright, debris from the Dawnhawk sliding off of his ruined yesteryear outfit. “What do it even matter anymore?”
Fengel didn’t even feel his temper rise. “I asked you, what—”
“I came up here to watch th’ end,” Euron snapped back at him. “Ye damned mutinous cur! Ye took everything, rose up against me, an’ those cowardly dogs followed! Ye think yer so clever, that ye’d find a way out. So I came up here to watch ye cock it all up.” He shrugged. “Then I smelled light-air gas, and something exploded down below. Then ye arrived along with yer Bluecoatie friends, ye traitor.”
“They’re not my friends,” growled Fengel. He knew the answer, but still felt he had to ask. “And if you saw us fighting down there, why didn’t you come help?”
Euron made a flippant gesture, ignoring the approach of Imogen and Henry Smalls. “What would be th’ point? Ye’d already gotten what ye wanted, ye coward. It weren’t enough to cut and run yerself, ye had to take the whole town! Better death than that. Better to fall before a worthy enemy.” He looked up at the rapidly darkening sky. “It should have been Reddon, back then. Only one ever worth a damn. An’ now I got nothin’.”
A small explosion roared behind them from the envelope of the Dawnhawk. Fengel glanced back to it, feeling all his earlier panic and fear again. He turned back and lashed out at Euron with his right fist, catching the old pirate by surprise and connecting squarely with his jaw. Wooden teeth sailed through the air to bounce off the shirt of a surprised Henry Smalls. Fengel followed through, scrabbling to his knees and grabbing the old man by his ragged shirt before he could fall.
“You incompetent, glory-hungry old fool!” he screamed. “Nothing? Have nothing?” Fengel gestured at the wrecked airship only a couple dozen paces away. “Your daughter is on that ship! She could be burning alive while you wallow here in pity!” He made to climb to his feet, then stumbled. Henry Smalls ran to help him up.
Euron glanced up at him hatefully. He rubbed his jaw, then stopped as if he’d just made sense of Fengel’s words. “Natasha?” He looked back at the Dawnhawk, eyes widening. “But I sent her away! What is she doing back here?”
“It doesn’t matter!” screamed Fengel. He found his balance, then let go of Henry to hobble towards the Dawnhawk. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his father-in-law clamber up after him.
The wreck of the Dawnhawk was complete. She lay not quite sideways, her starboard side facing out, ruined deck shown in full. The hull was cracked in half, and he could see down past her decks almost all the way into the cargo deck. Debris covered her: tangles of rope, mounds of canvas, and torn metal struts from the skeleton of the gasbag above. To say nothing of all the bodies. Jets of flame shot out from the gas bag as light-air cells cooked off, like the breath of angry dragons.
A staggering figure was illuminated by the flames. She was short and clutched a boarding hatchet in two trembling hands.
Fengel put both hands to his mouth and yelled. “Stone!”
Lina Stone whirled, raising up the hatchet defensively. She bled from a myriad of cuts, scratches, and gashes. Upon seeing Fengel she froze but did not lower her weapon.
“Captain Fengel?”
Fengel clambered up the wreckage and through a broken section of the gunwales until he stood on the deck. “Stone, where are the others? Where’s Natasha?”
“They just kept coming,” said Lina. “Not tame like all the others—or like Omari had ever said. They...they just kept coming, and they wanted us dead, and they were clutching at us with dead fingers, and it was just like Breachtown all over again, and I saw Andrea, only she’s not herself any—”
Fengel grabbed the small woman by the shoulders. “Focus!” he snarled, only inches away from her face. “Where’s Natasha?”
Lina stared at him. “Stern, near the hatchway stair,” she said in a rapid-fire monotone. “She’s trapped. Omari and Allen are helping, but I can’t find Rastalak or Runt or even Michael to help.”
Something seemed to give way in her. “Oh Captain, it’s all gone tits up. The ship. She’s dead. There was the Stormhammer, but it was broken, and Euron left a bunch of angry pirates marooned there...look out!”
She shrugged free of his grip and reared back with the hatchet. Fengel followed her eyes, the twist of her arms. He stepped to one side, drew his saber, then whirled. The blackened, wizened head of a dead pirate went rolling down the deck as he cut it neatly from its shoulders. What was left of the corpse fell limply back down to the deck, still reaching for him. Then Fengel’s injured leg voiced a complaint, forcing a gasp from him.
“Come on!” he yelled to Euron and the others as they picked their way aboard the airship. “Aft hatch stairway. Watch out for Revenants!” Then he pushed past Lina and staggered his way down across the deck.
It was easy to see where to go. The Yulani witch and his ship’s apprentice Mechanist worked feverishly to free Natasha, who had both her legs pinned beneath a heavy metal strut. Her awful parrot, Butterbeak, hopped back and forth between the wreckage. The parrot was too fat to fly with its feathers so singed.
“Put ye
r damned backs into it!” snarled Natasha.
“I am not some draft horse!” said Omari.
“We need a pulley,” said Allen, his voice tight with exhaustion and pain, who had one arm bound tightly to his chest with a length of rope and looked as badly off as Fengel felt. “If...if we can attach it to the envelope with some rope, we can—”
A section of that very gas bag fell away, crashing to the deck and sending soot spraying across them both.
“Or...not,” he continued. Allen’s eyes lit up as he spied Fengel. “Captain!”
Fengel swept his arm back and forth to clear the air as he staggered forward. “Natasha!” He sheathed his saber and fell down to his knees beside her.
His wife was gorgeous, as always, even though she was covered in soot, grime, and dried blood. She smelled like an abattoir, though. And part of her hair had caught fire, which also wasn’t doing her scent any favors.
“About time you showed up,” she snarled. Her face froze in a rictus, then she sat up and slapped Omari across her shoulder. “Argh! Be careful! That’s my legs under this thing, not some loose change you’re digging for!” She glanced back at Fengel, face softening. “You look half dead.”
“I know,” agreed Fengel. “I know.” He waved the others over. “Move your feet!”
Fengel staggered over beside Omari and put his hands to the strut. It was made of steel and thick as his torso, buried at one end by a massive heap of canvas. “Here, Omari. You and I both lift. Allen! See if you can jam a lever underneath.”
The young Mechanist grabbed up a much-battered boarding pike with his good arm. But rather than help, he looked around worriedly.
“We have to hurry,” he said. “The...the Castaways are all dead, but they’re not like the other Revenants. They’re almost unstoppable, and they’re recovering from the crash.”
“I told you!” snapped Omari. “They hate you! They really wanted to kill us in life, so they’ll keep on trying in death.”
Beneath a Burning Sky (The Dawnhawk Trilogy Book 3) Page 38