by J. S. Morin
“The choice is yours,” Erefan shouted over the ramblings of the freed slaves. “You’re only crated up in here to keep you out of the way; you’re not prisoners any longer, and you’re welcome to make your own way once we’re all safe. The rest of you can stay with me and learn a new way of living.”
The questions and badgering began anew, but Erefan waved his hands in front of his face and backed away. “Later, later. Plenty of time later. Just get the ovens and stoves fired up and cook up food for a lot of hungry people. Empty the larder, it’s going to get crowded soon.”
Erefan’s hands flew over the controls. The noise all around him was bothersome, but unavoidable. His twinborn officers were shepherding newcomers to other parts of the estate, camping them out in bedrooms, libraries and store rooms. Kezudkan had always had more space than he needed—a sign of his wealth in better times—but now Erefan was wondering if it would be enough. Behind him, elsewhere in the workshop, mechanics were making a business of removing collars of all sorts: simple rings of brass or steel, bands with rings attached to them for chaining up, decorative collars plated in chrome or made of brightsteel for slaves that worked in public view, and a handful of collars that bore runes that made them frustratingly hard to remove.
Erefan’s had been like that. They’d had to slip a steel bar under his collar to protect his neck as he stuck his head under a drill press. They wore through three drill bits until enough of the runes were ruined that they could cut the rest away with hand tools. Erefan still felt himself rubbing at his exposed neck, continually surprised to find nothing in the way of his hand.
The view in the world-ripper was of Fairmorn Sky. Ninna and Greuder’s friends and fellow slaves were filing through the hole and laggards were being rounded up. The dynamo was holding up beautifully to the incredible strain Erefan had put it under. Kezudkan had spared no expense in acquiring the finest of modern equipment and had recharged the runes that powered it himself, not a day before the spark-wire had informed him of his sister’s “illness.”
Of course, Erefan had complained just that day that the dynamo seemed sluggish.
When the last of Ninna’s people were through, Erefan opened the switch and the view glossed over, rendering the hole impassable once more. Ninna had been the last, delayed to the end in case Rynn and Jamile decided to circle back after all. Even allowing the dawdlers their time, he had not been able to justify keeping it open longer.
“What now, Cadmus?” Zonnan asked—Tucker’s twin. He had been in the first group to arrive, and had been coordinating efforts, along with Kandrel—Orris’s twin.
“Now we wait, and give Rynn her chance to get here.”
“We should start sending people through to Tinker’s Island.”
“No.”
“But Cadmus—”
“I said no!” conversations around the room stopped. “I have wrought this miracle of science, this salvation for all of us, and I am waiting for my daughter. You see that thing?” He pointed to the dynamo. “If that fails us, we’re stranded. It’s runed, and I haven’t the talent to repair it. The Tellurak hole was a terrible drain on it; it’ll work, but I don’t know for how long. When it opens I want us all ready to get through, and fast.”
“But Cadmus—”
“No buts! You owe me this. You all do.”
Erefan swept the room with his eyes. Men and women who had been watching the exchange suddenly found reason to turn their gazes elsewhere.
“Keep working on those collars, and someone get some Eziel-damned food down here!”
Chapter 25
“Your mother promised that raising girls was easier. I can’t imagine any truth to that.” -Cadmus Errol
“Why are we landing?”Chipmunk asked. They’d flown well clear of Grengraw and any other inhabited areas, but Sosha was bringing them low.
“That foot of yours has me worried,” Sosha replied.
Chipmunk tried to argue, but to no avail.
“I’m your mechanic, and I’m taking you out of service for repairs,” Sosha said, and Chipmunk could offer no argument. Sosha landed them in a flat expanse of scrubland where the prairie grasses had gone dry and brown, but where there was no snow.
A short time later, Chipmunk found herself leaning back against the wheel of the airship and squeezing her eyes shut. The breeze numbed her bare toes. Her blood-filled boot lay in the dead grass and Sosha was unwinding her makeshift bandage. She didn’t want to watch.
“This is going to sting,” Sosha warned. Chipmunk heard the hollow pop of a cork being removed. The breeze was just right for her to catch a sniff of the alcohol before it poured over the bottom of her foot. Its touch was icy everywhere but the cuts, where it burned. Chipmunk grunted through gritted teeth. Her eyes watered.
“There. Can you bandage it back up now?” Chipmunk asked without unclenching her jaw.
“Not yet. I have to close one of them up. The other scabbed fine, but you need stitches.”
“We don’t have time—”
“Listen to me, Rynn,” Sosha said, her voice commanding. “You’ve got a burst pipe, and I’m not about to wrap cloth about it. You’re losing pressure. The pipe needs to be welded.”
Chipmunk listened to the sounds from Sosha’s bag of human-fixing tools. There were metallic clanks and sounds of rubbing cloth and leather. She tried not to picture the various tools Jamile had described to Madlin for the Errol Company metalworkers to build. But with her eyes closed, her mind insisted on trying to put shapes to the sounds.
“When did you become a mechanic?” Chipmunk asked—anything to keep talking and maybe stop thinking.
“About the time I needed to argue with you on a regular basis. Now hold still.”
Chipmunk flinched at the first tiny stab in the sole of her foot. There was a strange tugging at her flesh, then another stab. She lost count of the number of times the cycle repeated. It seemed like her foot was being zigzagged with cords like the back of a corset to be pulled tight together. Images played in Chipmunk’s head: the soldier whose arrow wound Jamile had treated. How bad must her cut have been to take so many stitches?
“There. All done.”
Chipmunk opened her eyes a crack and saw Sosha start winding a clean bandage around her foot. The warm winter coat Sosha wore, with its fluffy fur trimming, hung open to reveal the collar around her neck. Chipmunk studied it as Sosha worked. It was nothing like her own. Sosha’s collar was a circlet of smooth brightsteel no bigger around than her thumb. It had no loop for convenient tethering, and fit tight enough that putting a chain through it would choke her. Chipmunk could see engravings marring the otherwise unblemished surface, but even with her spectacles on she couldn’t read them in the shadow of Sosha’s coat.
Sosha slipped Chipmunk’s boot over her foot and laced it up for her.
“Should I be walking on it?” Chipmunk asked.
Sosha glared at her from beneath a furrowed brow. “You shouldn’t have been walking on it before. At least now you aren’t losing blood with each step.” She hooked one of her arm’s under Chipmunk’s and helped her to her feet. Chipmunk reached for the rungs bolted to the side of the airship and readied herself to climb aboard. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“You got us out of Grengraw Sky, but now that we’re safe, there’s no reason I can’t captain the airship.”
“Piss off!”
“What?”
“I flew it just fine. You need your rest, if we’re going to go sneaking through Eversall Deep later.”
“But I—”
“You’re exhausted.” Sosha reached out, gently pulled Chipmunk away from the ladder, and turned her around so they were face to face. Sosha put a hand to Chipmunk’s cheek, and wiped away tears that had welled there as she was being stitched up. “Look at you. All that’s keeping you awake is adrenaline.”
“But I—”
“Rynn, be reasonable.”
“But I always wanted to fly an airship.”
“We’ll see about cutting that thing off you,” Chipmunk said, sniffing as she regained composure.
“Yours too.”
“Not going to be that easy.” Chipmunk went on to explain what would happen, what the collar had looked like before they’d sealed it around her neck, how she had to keep it fed with aether or be killed by it.
“That’s awful,” Sosha said. She put her fingers to the collar. Chipmunk felt a second breeze, apart from the normal gentle flow of wind. It flowed through her and toward Sosha, cooling Chipmunk inside and out.
“Was that Dan’s trick?”
Sosha nodded. “Worked on the engine of the airship, too. It’s not exactly coal-fired steam that flies it.”
“We should go.”
“Right.” Sosha headed up the rungs and into the pilot’s seat. Chipmunk followed behind, keeping as much weight off her freshly-stitched foot as she could.
“Of course, we’d be fools to land at the aerodrome,” Chipmunk said as she settled into her seat and buckled the safety harness. “Spark wires have probably gone out to half the continent that there’s a stolen airship on the loose.”
“Eversall Sky is on a mountainside, isn’t it?”
“Yup.”
“Where should we go then? I can’t imagine anywhere else being level enough to land. You saw how much turf this beast needs to slow down.”
“Just get us airborne and follow the thunderail tracks.”
“How did I let you talk me into this?” Sosha said. “We’re never going to get away with this?”
“We need to get into Eversall, not just to it.”
Chipmunk peered out from behind a stack of poured-stone thunderail ties, looking to the western horizon through the sight of one of her coil guns. Even with its magnification, she didn’t see anything approaching them.
“Had you considered sneaking in? We can land closer, take the road into Eversall Sky, and—”
“And get there the day after tomorrow. Maybe I look like I’m walking better, but I don’t think I’m cut out to hike up mountainsides. You know what that trip up to the mine in Tellurak was like? Imagine trying that with a sewn-up hole in your foot.”
They were camped out at a deserted supply yard, little more than a dumping ground for the thunderail companies’ spare materials. All around them were iron rails, crates packed with spikes, and more stacks of rail ties. A few small buildings acted as warehouses of engine and carriage parts, as well as administrative offices. No one was on duty at any of them. Chipmunk had already pillaged the warehouses for properly sized ball bearings to fit her coil guns—the original design had used bearings stolen from the Eversall Deep thunderail depot.
“You want the last dumpling?” Sosha asked, pulling one from the basket Tophi had packed for them.
Chipmunk nodded and took it. “Thanks,” she replied with the dumpling already stuffed in her mouth. “Coal for the furnace. Now that we’ve got solid ground under us again, I know it’ll stay down. Can’t wait to have nice solid rock overhead again, too.”
“What’s it like?”
“What’s what like?”
“Living in the deeps.”
Chipmunk turned to look at Sosha, frowning in puzzlement. “You lived your whole life under the skies?” Sosha nodded. Chipmunk scratched under her collar. “Dunno how to explain it. You don’t have to worry about weather, or seasons, or wild animals—at least nothing bigger than a rat or a bat. You know that cozy feeling you get coming home after being out somewhere? I don’t get that with just a flimsy roof overhead. My father’s the same way, which is why our house backs into the hillside on Tinker’s Island. I don’t want a tree falling through the roof while I sleep, or a vacu-dirge crashing on me.”
“Is it always dark?”
Chipmunk shook her head. “Eversall’s modern. There’s spark nearly everywhere now; it’s not even just gas lamps. It’s like my father’s house back home, but not as nice. Don’t go leaking your valves on me; you can do this.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine. I—”
“Wait, I see something!”
To the west, a plume of smoke rose against the cloud-choked sky. Sosha took up a gun of her own, holding it upside down to use the sight like a spyglass. Chipmunk had loaded it—she had loaded them all—but Sosha had been lukewarm at the prospect of carrying the weapon.
“Lucky us that the next one was coming from the west.”
“It’s not luck. We flew over a west-bound train on the way here. They’re good about alternating them to keep the stations from getting overcrowded at either end of the line.”
“So what now?”
“We keep out of sight and wait.”
“What if they don’t stop?”
“Jamile, we left an airship on the tracks. They’d be fools to ram it.”
“Surely that flimsy little thing wouldn’t hurt a thunderail engine.”
“No, but they wouldn’t want to get a bill from an aerotransport company for damaging it, either.”
Chipmunk and Sosha ducked under one of the canvas sheets that covered the iron rails. They huddled together, watching the smoke approach.
“My name is Sosha, you know.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You called me Jamile before.”
“You keep calling me Rynn.”
“But that’s—”
“That’s the name the kuduks know. My friends call me Chipmunk.”
“I like Rynn though, it’s a pretty name.”
“Doesn’t matter. Go back to calling me Madlin if you like, for all I care. Look, they’re slowing.”
The thunderail engineer had seen the obstruction on the track ahead of him and had thrown the brakes. With miles of visibility, the ponderous vehicle still had time to halt a few dozen yards in front of the airship.
Three kuduks got out of the engine and went down to investigate—it was the engineer and two coalmen, by their uniforms. They looked around the airship, under it— one of the coalmen even climbed up and looked into the seats.
“Hullo? Anyone around here? Come move your blasted flying machine off my tracks!” the engineer called out, hands cupped around his mouth like a bullhorn. Chipmunk had always loved the thunderail. If she could grow a beard, she’d have worn it engineer style: two braids hanging below the corners of her mouth as rails, the rest unkempt like smoke.
“You ready?” Chipmunk whispered.
“Do we have to shoot them?” Sosha whispered back.
Chipmunk shook her head. “Not these. I actually think I recognize the engineer.”
Chipmunk threw back the canvas and stood, striding over toward the engine with her coil gun leveled at the crew. Sosha followed close behind, though Chipmunk didn’t look back to see if she had her gun pointed anywhere useful. Each of them carried one of the cases with more coil guns and the exploding dynamos. Sosha was also juggling her medical bag.
“That was ours,” Chipmunk shouted, drawing the crew’s attention her way. “My apologies, but we needed to change modes of transport.”
The kuduks held their hands up. Their thick kuduk limbs weren’t limber enough to reach high, but it was enough to tell they were unarmed and not attempting mischief.
“I refuse,” the engineer shouted in defiance, a stubborn pride in his profession evident in the jutting of his bearded jaw. “You’ll just have to shoot me.”
“I don’t need you to pilot her, Mister Ovark. A long time ago, you were kind enough to show a little human girl how a thunderail engine works. I don’t remember the lesson anymore, but I understood it at five, and I don’t remember it being complicated. So unless you plan on lying down on the track, you’re not going to get hurt today.”
“It takes years of training and dedication t
o—”
“Don’t worry, it’s a thunderail. How badly can we hurt it?” Chipmunk climbed aboard as the engineer sputtered, and the coalmen kept their arms as high as their shoulders allowed and stepped away from the tracks.
Chipmunk set down her case and rifled through the papers at the engineer’s station. There were maps, a log book, thunderail schedules, passenger and cargo manifests, a book of scratch paper and a pencil for ciphering. She looked around but was missing one key item she needed.
“Mister Ovark, I need your pocketclock.”
The engineer’s hands went to his hips, gun pointed at him or not. “I daresay you can’t have it! I’d sooner—”
“Your choices are a few unmeasured hours of inconvenience or a grieving family. Pick one!”
Sosha retrieved a gold pocketclock from the sputtering, red-faced engineer and brought it to Chipmunk.
“What do you need it for so badly?” Sosha asked.
“We’re not taking any sidings. I need to figure out how fast we need to go to avoid the next westbound thunderail. Oh, and would you be willing to point a gun at someone for a few hours to force them to work?”
“I think not!” Sosha replied.
“Fine. You’re our coalman, then. Get shoveling, we’re moving out.”
Chipmunk opened the steam valves and released the brake. It was a simple device, really, just huge. The airship’s controls were far more complex. The thunderail just had a single engine and no steering. There were gauges for steam pressure and speed, a few valve wheels, and a pull chain. As the thunderail chugged and got under way, Chipmunk pulled the chain.
Woooo woooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
A childlike grin spread across her face. She hung out the side door to get a look ahead as the thunderail plowed into the airship. One of the airship’s wheels wedged against a rail tie and that was the end of it. The flimsy lightsteel frame was dashed to pieces as the behemoth or iron and steel drove a wing into the cold ground and kept right on chugging.