Assassins of the Lost Kingdom (Airship Daedalus Book 1)

by E. J. Blaine

  “I wandered many places when I was young,” he said. “I saw many things. I’m old now. Now I stay here and tend my chickens. It’s nice to have visitors.”

  Doc persisted. “What if someone else found the eye of the world?” she said. “What if they used the true medicine to kill instead of heal?”

  He nodded sadly. “Killing is always easier.”

  “How do we find it?” Jack asked.

  “I would stay away, if I were you,” he said. “It’s very dangerous there.”

  “We have to try,” said Jack.

  The old man smiled. “I suppose you do.” He pointed off into the deep mountains. “Look for the twin pillars. They mark the path.”

  Jack started to push for more detail, but the old man rose suddenly. “And now, I must say goodbye. Chickens are impatient creatures. Short-lived, and they know nothing of the troubles that drive us.”

  They rose and thanked the old man for his hospitality.

  “No, no, thank you,” he said. Then, as he was turning to the steep, narrow path up the hillside, he turned back. “I almost forgot,” he said.

  From a pocket inside his mantle, he produced a stoppered ceramic vial and offered it to Doc. “For brightening an old man’s day with your company,” he said.

  Then he turned and started up the path muttering about his chickens.

  They walked back down the path toward the village, and it wasn’t until the old man’s hut had disappeared around a curve that Padger finally broke the silence.

  “Well that was quite a fairy tale.”

  Doc fumbled through her kit and came out with a paper test strip. She opened the vial the old man had given her and dipped it into the liquid inside.

  “You’re not buying it?” said Jack.

  “And neither should you,” said Padger. “There’s nothing growing back in those mountains. It’s too high, too cold. There isn’t even any dirt. Nothing but ice and bare rock from here to bloody Burma!”

  Jack glanced up into the high peaks. He had to admit it seemed unlikely that there was a place back there full of unknown plants. And a place where the real world and the spirit world overlapped seemed even less likely. “Still, quite a story,” he said.

  Doc gasped and stood still in the middle of the trail.

  “What’s wrong?” Jack asked in concern.

  She showed them the paper test strip. The bottom half had turned a deep black. “This contains the same plant alkaloids as the poison samples from New York. I don’t think the true medicine’s a fairy tale. I think this is it!”

  Chapter 10

  A storm system moved in from the mountains as the Daedalus flew back to Almora. By the time they landed, the sky had grown dark and restive, and the first brief, sudden bursts of rain had begun to spatter against the airship’s skin. Padger said he knew a good inn for dinner, and they hurried there as the winds intensified and the first rumbles of thunder rolled across the hills.

  They reached the inn and made it inside just as the rain began in earnest. They found themselves in a comfortable looking room paneled in dark wood with a long dining table at one end and armchairs and side tables at the other. A door in a far corner presumably led to the kitchen, and stairs led up to a second floor balcony lined with guest rooms. It was small, but homey and welcoming.

  “Auntie!” Padger shouted. “I brought company! Six for dinner tonight.”

  The kitchen door opened and an old woman entered, muttering to herself. She looked up at the crew and shook her head, then put on a wide smile and greeted them with a bow. “Welcome to Almora Summer House,” she said. “Please be at home.”

  Then her smile vanished as she turned to Padger and scolded him in stage whispered Hindi.

  “Well, hire one of the local boys to play waiter for the night,” Padger said, and he embraced the old woman as she pretended to protest.

  “More trouble than I’m worth?” Padger fished a few rupee notes from his pocket and thrust them into her hand. “Pff. Place would go bust if I didn’t go out and drum up business. Get one of Choudhury’s boys. They’re always looking to make a few coins. More trouble than…” He shook his head and raised his voice at her back as she headed back to the kitchen. “Nonsense! Balderdash! And put on some tea!”

  The old woman made an annoyed sound as she vanished through the door. Jack gathered that mutual mock irritation was how they chose to express a long and affectionate friendship.

  They took seats in the lounge at one end of the room and a few minutes later the old woman reappeared with tea. Jack and Doc had filled in the rest of the crew on their encounter with the enigmatic Long Walker. None of them seemed quite sure what to make of it. Padger was the only one with a firm opinion.

  “It’s just not possible!” he maintained.

  Outside, the storm had picked up. The wind howled around the eaves and rattled the windows. Rain hit the side of the building in wind-whipped sheets.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “That poison, or true medicine if you take his name for it, it had to come from somewhere.”

  “Doesn’t have to be here, does it?” said Rivets. “Could have come from the other side of the world for all we know. No offense, Doc.”

  Doc smiled at him. “None taken. I was wondering myself. I thought the poison from New York looked a bit like Himalayan plant toxins, but maybe I just convinced myself because I wanted an answer so badly. Maybe I sent us on a wild goose chase halfway around the world. But when I tested that sample today, I knew. We’re in the right place.”

  “But the plant’s gone extinct,” said Duke. “Where’s the Silver Star getting theirs? Unless you’re willing to buy that ‘sacred valley in the mountains’ story. What did he call it?”

  “The Eye of the World,” Doc answered.

  Padger snorted. “Believe me, there’s no such place. I spent most of a year looking for a route through the mountains to China. Flew all through those mountains. High as the air would hold me anyway. If there was a chunk of the spirit world up there, I’d have found it. Where the devil’s our dinner anyway?”

  The kitchen door opened and a young Indian man in a linen tunic and pants emerged carrying a tray with more tea.

  “Ah,” said Padger, “there you are. How’s the food looking?”

  The young man simply nodded and said, “Tea, sir.” He took the tray to Deadeye, who was sitting closest to him in a thick, stuffed armchair, and repeated “Tea, sir?” Deadeye hadn’t finished his cup yet. He said “no, thank you,” and waved the boy away.

  “I’ll find out what’s keeping her,” said Padger. “Man could starve around here,” he added more loudly, in a voice meant to carry into the next room.

  As Padger disappeared into the kitchen, the waiter turned to Jack and refilled his cup. Jack smelled the warm, flowery scent of the tea as he raised the cup.

  Then there was a deep, anguished wail from the kitchen. Jack froze. Around him the others turned in surprise. The waiter remained in place, leaning over to refill Doc’s cup.

  Then the door burst open once more and Padger strode through it, a heavy Webley pistol in his outstretched hand. Padger fired and the waiter spun away, struck in the chest. Jack and the rest of the crew sprang to their feet as the brass teapot fell to the floor and hot tea soaked into the rug.

  Padger strode forward and fired again, then a third time. At last he raised the Webley and held it against his chest. “The bastards murdered her!” he said, and his voice was strained with anguish. “I wouldn’t touch that,” he added as Doc bent down toward the overturned teapot.

  And then the room seemed to explode. The front door was kicked open with a loud crash. Figures smashed through the windows. Jack caught a glimpse of someone charging out of the kitchen toward Padger, but Padger whirled and fired point blank into his attacker’s face.

  A man in a kurta shirt and tight churidar trousers charged through the doorway, framed for a moment by the storm outside. He had a long, curved blade in one hand and
a black hood. Jack was closest to the door, and before he could draw his pistols, the man was on him with a high-pitched scream. Jack caught his arm as the knife plunged toward his heart, but their momentum carried them backward, and they tumbled over Jack’s chair to the floor. Jack struggled to hold the knife at bay. Around him he caught glimpses of motion, heard shouting and gunshots.

  He slammed his attacker’s wrist against the edge of the low coffee table, then again, until he lost the knife. The hooded man punched him and they rolled against the table. Jack felt himself rolling over the dropped knife. He managed to wrench his right arm free and throw a devastating cross to the man’s jaw. That dazed him long enough for Jack to throw the man off him, and follow up with another punch that put him out.

  Jack drew his twin .45s as he sat up and his eyes quickly took in the situation. Doc had taken cover behind a chair and had her pistol out. He saw her drop another hooded attacker. Deadeye was firing the strange pistol he’d picked up in Madrid up into the balcony. There must be more of them up there. Another one came at Deadeye from his side and Jack opened up on him. The .45s roared and the man fell. Jack and Deadeye traded a brief glance of acknowledgment, then Deadeye sidestepped as a heavy knife thudded into the wall where he’d been standing. He fired back into the balcony again, and Jack heard the railing give way. A body fell beside him and smashed the coffee table.

  There was no time to organize a defense, or even count their attackers. They were each in a desperate battle for their own lives, reacting on instinct as new attackers seemed to spring out of nowhere each time they took one down.

  Jack fired at another one coming in through the doorway. Then he heard a clash of metal and turned to the sound. It was Rivets. He’d gotten his hands on a metal serving tray and was using it as a shield. He blocked a slashing blow with a knife then drew back and slammed his attacker in the head with it. The man staggered back, and Rivets finished him off with another fierce blow.

  “Rivets, look right!” Jack shouted, and tossed him one of his .45s. Rivets caught it and quickly shot another hooded figure coming in through one of the shattered windows.

  They aren’t Silver Star. The thought flashed through Jack’s mind as he realized the bodies were simply lying on the floor instead of dissolving into smoke. He didn’t have time to wonder who they were before someone leapt onto his back from the balcony above, and he crumpled to the floor. The impact dazed him. He saw the hooded face over him, the arm preparing to plunge its long blade into his chest. He willed his body to move, to fight back, but he knew he would be too late.

  Then the man jerked back with a grimace. The knife tumbled free of his fingers, and he fell across Jack’s chest. Behind him, Doc looked down with concern. He nodded to show her he was okay, and she turned and fired her revolver again at someone he couldn’t see.

  As he lay there, clearing his head, Jack saw a pair of high leather boots stride across the floor. He looked up and saw a long, black coat and a trench-modified pump shotgun with a short barrel and an attached bayonet. Jack didn’t know who he was; he hoped the stranger was on their side.

  He heard the shotgun roar as he was climbing to his feet. Then he scanned the room and saw Doc crouched behind her chair, reloading her pistol. Deadeye had gone to a window and was firing out into the night. And Rivets was grappling with one of the hooded men. He still clutched Jack’s .45, but the slide was locked back, empty. Jack strode quickly over and clubbed the attacker in the back of the head with the butt of his pistol. He fell, and Jack quickly scanned the room for another enemy but saw none.

  Then there was a shotgun blast from the kitchen. Jack hurried that way. As he approached the door, something caught his eye and he turned. Padger lay in the corner behind the dining table in a pool of blood.

  “Doc!” he shouted. “Padger!” Then he hit the kitchen door hard with his shoulder and crashed through it.

  The first thing he saw was the man with the trench gun, standing with his back to him. As Jack came through the door he pumped the gun and raised it to fire again. Jack’s eye followed the line of his aim—to Duke, bloody but still in the fight. Duke had apparently just plunged an assassin’s own blade into his chest. He turned to see the shotgun pointed at him and his eyes widened. Jack dove for the man in the dark coat.

  He hit him in the left side, just below the shoulder, as the trench gun roared. The gun flew up and the blast went wide and high, but the man in the coat instinctively thrust the butt back and hit Jack in the chest. Then he whirled and pumped the gun. Jack caught the gun’s receiver, and they each struggled to control it for a moment. The man was strong, too strong to be natural, Jack realized.

  Then he saw Duke in the corner of his eye, steadying the wavering aim of his Luger. Duke’s pistol cracked, and the shot winged the man in the coat. It was enough for Jack to wrench the shotgun out of his hands, spin it, and thrust the bayonet into the man’s chest.

  The man crumpled to the floor and tendrils of smoke rose from him. Within moments he had dissolved into a pile of bones inside the long, black coat.

  “You okay?” Jack asked Duke.

  Duke nodded. “Just a scratch. Or two.”

  The old woman lay dead near the back door. Three of the hooded attackers were scattered around the room. And of course the Silver Star operative. Jack picked up the trench gun and the black coat.

  Back in the main room, Doc was working feverishly on Padger, her arms and torso covered in blood. Deadeye and Rivets had taken up positions at the door and a window, but it seemed the attack was over, if only because there was no one left to attack them. Jack counted more than a dozen of the hooded men strewn around the room, or on the balcony above or the stairs. Jack remembered that Adesh, the servant they’d found at Dr. Rhys’s house, had spoken of a secret society called the Servants of the Nine. Could these be them, working with the Silver Star? The idea was a worrying one. The Silver Star were trouble enough without allies.

  “We have to move him,” Doc announced from the other end of the room. “He needs a hospital.”

  “Can you stabilize him?” Jack asked.

  “For a while. But I can’t save him with what we’ve got here.”

  “Nearest hospital would be in Delhi,” said Duke. “Make that in a couple hours.”

  “It’s not exactly flying weather out there,” Deadeye added from the door.

  “We get him there now, or he dies,” said Doc, and that was the end of it. They carried Padger out into the drenching rain and hurried through the narrow, windswept alleys to the Daedalus.

  As Deadeye had noted, it was not good flying weather. The wind buffeted the ship from the moment Jack took her up. He tried to get above the storm, but that wasn’t working. If anything the air higher up was more chaotic. So he took the ship back down to a thousand feet and pushed her south, toward Delhi.

  In the main saloon, Padger lay on blankets on the deck as Doc worked to keep him alive.

  “Can you keep this thing more steady?” she shouted forward in frustration after an especially rough patch of turbulence.

  “Do you want steady, or do you want fast?” Jack called back.

  There was a moment of silence, then, “fast.”

  As they neared Delhi, they finally came out of the storm into clear sky. The stars blazed above, and they saw the city lights in the distance. Duke radioed ahead and sent a message to a British military hospital to expect them. He checked the ship’s charts and found the closest open landing area and asked that an ambulance be sent there.

  As Duke guided him into what turned out to be a polo ground, Jack could see the ambulance waiting at the edge of the field. He set the ship down and Doc immediately had the hatch open. She and Rivets lowered Padger down to the waiting corpsmen. Doc, Duke, and Deadeye went with them, while Jack and Rivets stayed with the ship.

  While they waited, Jack stayed in the cockpit, nervously checking the ship’s systems and making sure the radio was working properly. He hadn’t known Padger long, but
he’d taken a liking to him. He hated to think they’d gotten him killed.

  Rivets passed the time in the saloon. “Hey, who was the guy with this coat back here?” Rivets called out finally. “And the trench gun.”

  “Silver Star,” said Jack.

  “Great.”

  Then the call came in on the radio. It was Doc.

  “He’s going to make it,” Doc said as Rivets came into the cockpit. Jack let out a sigh of relief and Rivets clapped Jack on the back.

  “It was pretty close,” Doc continued. “If we hadn’t had the Daedalus…”

  “How’s Duke?” Jack asked.

  “Couple shallow knife wounds,” said Doc. “They’re stitching him up now. He’ll be okay. But Padger lost a lot of blood, and they had to do some major surgery. He’s going to be here a while.”

  Rivets leaned over and clicked the mic. “Doc, it’s Rivets. When Duke’s cleared to travel, you should get back to the ship. I was going through the Silver Star’s coat. Came up with something you want to see.”

  Chapter 11

  It was almost dawn by the time Doc, Deadeye, and Duke returned. Duke assured them he was all right.

  “Just a few cuts,” he said. “Worst part of it was losing that shirt. I rather liked it.”

  Doc was able to give them a more detailed report on Padger. He’d taken the bigger part of a blast from the trench gun to his midsection. He’d lost a great deal of blood, obviously, and it had taken surgery to repair damage to his intestines and to remove a portion of his liver. He would be in the hospital for some time, but he would eventually recover.

  “Now what have you got for us?” Doc asked when she’d finished her briefing.

  They gathered in the main saloon and Rivets took the floor.

  “While we were waiting for you, I started wondering if that Silver Star boyo had anything interesting in his coat pockets,” said Rivets. He produced a folded sheet of paper and opened it.