They descended two decks and reached an open ventilator shaft above the engine compartment. The ventilator was four feet square, and the metal grating normally covering it was dismounted and leaning against the aft bulkhead. Hot, humid air rose from the quiescent motor. Sivi risked discovery to gaze down into the engine room. She counted five Dal workmen wiping down the powerstone accumulators with rags, polishing the brass fittings until they gleamed like gold. Sivi sniffed. Mineral spirits… that would burn nicely.
Where were they getting it from? She leaned out farther. The workmen were passing a tin bucket around, dipping their rags in and wringing out the excess. When the bucket was empty, they refilled it from a cask standing nearby. "This is it," she whispered. "Get ready."
They poised themselves around the hole. When four workmen were in sight, Sivi nodded, and they dropped one after the other on the unsuspecting men.
The unarmed rebels surprised the workmen and quickly pummeled them into submission. Sivi was hurling one man headfirst against the bulkhead when the fifth Dal returned with a bucketful of mineral spirits. He dropped the container and shouted for help. Engine noise drowned him out. He turned, but before he ran two steps Sivi unleashed the toten-vec. She made a single underhand cast. With a snap, the knife blade spun through the air at the end of its chain and took the fleeing man in the back. He froze, arms outstretched, as if turned to stone. Sivi yanked the totenvec, and the return impetus spun the man back to fall dead at her feet.
The other rebels looked on in awe. "Did you think it was a toy? Get that barrel over here," she said.
The group wrestled the heavy cask to the starboard side of the engine. Sivi leaned in, and the three of them toppled the barrel over. Brownish mineral spirits washed down the deck, filling the air with a pungent aroma.
Medd turned his head to avoid the fumes. "Someone will notice the smell,"
Someone did. The second after his sentence, a heavy wrench hurtled from above, catching one of the Dal in the forehead. He fell like a poleaxed kerl. The rebels looked up and saw the ventilator opening was lined with moggs, growling, gibbering, and waving hand tools.
A barrage of wrenches and mauls banged off the bulkhead and engine housing. Sivi and Medd leaped one way, Khalil and Langwin the other. A couple of moggs got carried away and jumped into the compartment. The floor was slick with spirits, and they slipped and fell heavily. This didn't prevent other moggs from leaping down on top of their friends. Two of them fell on the helpless Dal who had been hit by the wrench and clubbed him to death. The remaining rebels were divided by the massive engine and a growing swarm of moggs.
A mogg, covered in spirits, got up waving his maul. Sivi flicked the toten-vec blade into his warty chest. It hardly seemed to mind. She and Medd exchanged worried looks.
"They're tougher than they look," Medd observed.
Sivi frowned. "I just have to find a soft spot."
She did, burying the eight-inch iron blade in the mogg's left eye. It shrieked and fell, kicking the deck with its stumpy legs.
"Let's get out of here!" Medd shouted. "Khalil! Langwin! Try to make it to the main deck!"
Langwin dodged a blow and waved that he understood.
"We need a torch!" Sivi cried.
A wrench caromed off the bulkhead beside his head. The tool scraped against his borrowed helmet.
"Flint? Steel?"
"I thought this was a raid, not a camping trip!"
They backed out the forward hatch. Medd slammed shut the door. A thrown maul proved useful in jamming the latch.
Footsteps pounded on the deck above. Sivi and Medd ran forward, eyeing the ceiling.
"Sounds like a hundred," the Dal rebel said.
Sivi looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. "No more than sixty, I'd say." The passage ahead was still clear. "Watch that way!" she said. Medd hovered by the next door, dividing his attention between the corridor and what Liin Sivi was doing.
She spotted a lamp on the wall. It was on a pivot, to freely adjust to whatever attitude the airship assumed. Putting aside the toten-vec, she grabbed the lamp in both hands and succeeded in breaking it off. She adjusted the wick control and the lamp began to glow.
Volatile spirit was leaking under the engine room hatch. Predator was trimmed heavy at the bow because the deck gun had just been mounted, so the spill was slowly flowing forward. Sivi stood back and hurled the glowing lamp at the darkening pool seeping under the door. The lamp shattered. The light went out. "Damn! Their lamps don't use flame." Two workmen appeared in the passage. They ducked when the totenvec came whistling their way and quickly fled. "What now?" asked Medd. "We've got to do some damage," said Sivi. "Could we use the big crane outside? Batter the ship with it?" "That works for me. Let's go!" They ran down the long passage, crossing the hold on a narrow catwalk. The interior of the airship had the same zoological quality as the Citadel, and running through it was like traversing the belly of a great beast. The deck was planked with wood, but the bulkheads and ribs of the vessel were some sort of reddish alloy, between metal and bone.
At last the passage ended, and they found a metal ladder leading up. Sivi climbed. When she poked her head out, a crossbow bolt plunked into the deck. The fletching creased her cheek. She ducked so fast she knocked Medd off the ladder below her.
"Are we trapped?" asked Medd, rubbing his hip.
"Not yet."
She let the toten-vec dangle down the steps. With a quick flick, she tossed the knife head out the hatch and whipped it in the direction the arrow came from. It stuck in something. Sivi tugged; it resisted. She raised her head enough to see she'd killed the bowman, but the toten-vec's cord was entangled in the dead man's crossbow.
The deck was clear. They scrambled out and slammed the hatch. Khalil and Langwin were ahead on the main bridge, besieged by swarms of angry moggs.
"We've got to help them!" Medd cried.
Sivi frantically untangled her weapon from the dead man's bow. "We'll need more than one toten-vec to stop that mob."
More than a toten-vec? Medd looked over his shoulder at the biggest weapon he'd ever seen. He took Sivi by the hand and dragged her along.
"Do you know how to operate that thing?" she asked, sizing up the weapon on the run.
"How hard can it be?"
The deck gun was loaded with a barbed harpoon, with a shaft as thick as Medd's thigh. The breech end of the gun was a hedge of levers, none of which were labeled.
Men and moggs were gathering on the dock.
Sivi saw the glint of sword blades among them. "Hurry!"
Medd pulled a lever. The deck gun swung left. Making a note of that, he tried the lever on the opposite side. The gun obligingly swung right. A lever between those two made the gun elevate or depress.
He hauled back on the left side control. The gun mount rotated rapidly until it was pointed dead astern. Medd let off the lever. He depressed the muzzle until the raked tip of the harpoon was pointing not at the mob of moggs menacing their friends, but at the deck below them. A bolt whizzed by his head.
"Hurry!"
Medd yanked a short lever below the three main controls and was rewarded with a spurt of vapor from the gun mount. Sivi twitched her toten-vec back and forth nervously.
"Try again!" she yelled.
On the elevation control knob was a black button. Medd pressed it.
There was a deafening blast, and the deck gun fired point blank into the rear of the ship. Sivi was thrown to the deck. The enormous harpoon barely cleared the barrel before imbedding itself below the bridge. Planking on the bridge peeled back as far as the harpoon penetrated. The impact hurled moggs through the air end over end.
Sivi sat up, holding her head. A loud clanging filled her ears, and it took her a few seconds to realize the noise was real and not coming from inside her battered brain. Medd dragged her to her feet.
He shouted something. She couldn't hear him. He put his lips close to her ear and shouted.
"They've raised an a
larm! This place'll be swarming with soldiers soon!"
The breech of the gun opened automatically after firing. A brown, drum-shaped object popped out of a shute alongside the gun, and a pile of harpoons were stacked conveniently on deck. Medd staggered to the scattered pile of harpoons and manhandled one back to the gun. It wouldn't feed through the breech, so he loaded it down the muzzle. The brown drum was exactly the size of the cavity at the rear of the gun, so he inserted it and closed the breech.
Smoke from the first firing drifted across the deck to the airship dock. Dock workers had taken cover after the gun was fired, and in their place came heavily armed palace guards. Sivi used the smoke to reach the quarterdeck. Stunned, bleeding moggs lay everywhere. She had to dig under them to find her missing comrades. Khalil was dead, killed by the moggs before the gun fired. Langwin was senseless. She dragged him out and boosted him to his feet.
"You on Predator! Stand away from that gun!" shouted a voice from the dock. Medd pulled the right lever, and the harpoon thrower swung smoothly toward the voice.
"Stand away, or we'll storm the deck!"
Medd leveled the gun in the speaker's direction. He waited until Sivi appeared through the smoke with Langwin leaning on her shoulder.
"Loose!"
A wave of arrows swept the deck. Shielded by the massive gun, Medd was safe enough, but the volley caught Sivi and Langwin in the open. Langwin was hit twice. Sivi let the dead man fall and threw herself on the deck.
"What are you waiting for?" she yelled. "Let fly!"
Twenty-odd soldiers came running through the smoke, swords bared. They were in skirmishing order, so Medd depressed the gun at them and pressed the firing button.
There was a double explosion. The harpoon shaft snapped, and the barbed head plowed sideways through the attacking guards. The butt end of the harpoon shot crazily into the air, ricocheting off the dock and flying into the energy stream. It vaporized in a burst of white light and smoke.
Medd had failed to close the gun fully, firing it with the breech plug unlocked. The resulting explosion completely wrecked the gun.
Bleeding from minor shrapnel cuts to his face and hands, Medd staggered to his feet. Sivi was lying face down on the deck a few yards away. Heedless of the danger, he moved across the smoky deck to reach her. There were no obvious holes in her, but she wasn't moving. He knelt and prodded her with a bleeding finger.
"Sivi? Sivi, are you alive?"
She raised her head. "Of course I am." She stood up and dusted herself off. She coiled the toten-vec in her hand. "You're pretty dangerous with that thing."
"I ruined it."
"Good. That's why we're here."
The dock was still, though the alarm bell still pealed. The surviving rebels ran to the edge of the foredeck and rattled down the gangplank. No one on the dock was alive. The sideways spinning harpoon head had slain the entire squad.
Sivi paused long enough to salvage a pair of daggers. Medd found a sword that hadn't been bent too much by the blast and shoved it in his empty scabbard.
"Come," he said. "We must find Teynel and the others!" They reached the side stairs just as another detachment of palace guards arrived on the main lift. The rebels slipped away in the smoke, leaving a damaged but intact Predator floating easily on its moorings.
*****
He never cried out. Greven admired him for that.
The questioning went on for hours without result. Greven and the mogg warders went through their standard repertory of branding irons, thumbscrews, and pincers. Eladamri never screamed, never begged for mercy. He cursed for a while, then fell silent. His resistance spooked the moggs, and they began to slip away from the session. By midnight no one was left in the cell but Greven and the stubborn rebel leader.
The Vec warrior poured himself a cup of tepid water. He sat down on a low stool and studied the enemy who had so long eluded him. Unlike the common soldiers of Rath, Greven never believed Eladamri had magical powers. He understood-or thought he understood-the mind of a dedicated fighter. But when Eladamri exhausted his interrogators and revealed nothing of his plans, his organization, or himself, Greven felt bereft of understanding. He was just a middle-aged elf, of no great size or physical strength. He didn't preach about freedom and liberty the way some rebel prisoners did. He said nothing. He endured.
"What's your secret?" Greven asked.
Hanging by his wrists, Eladamri twisted slowly with the torsion of the rope. He'd escaped into unconsciousness, but he was still visibly breathing.
The cell door swung open. Greven jumped up, snatching his bare sword from the table beside him. A shadowy figure stood in the entrance.
"Who's there?"
The intruder stepped forward, and Greven saw the hooded figure clearly.
"It's you," he said. "There's nothing to tell. He won't talk."
The hooded one glided into the room. Pale hands emerged from the wide sleeves and gently folded back the cowl. Greven saw the face of Furah.
"Why are you here?" he asked the Kor.
"I've been interested in this one a long time," said the visitor. "Your usual methods failed, didn't they?" Greven admitted they had. "You can't break a warrior like Eladamri by abusing his body. Someone like you, Greven, whose entire being is wrapped up in his physical form, you would have broken by now."
Greven bristled. "I am no stranger to pain."
"Pain isn't the author of submission-fear is. They're quite different. Ordinary men come to this room filled with terror because they know they will suffer great pain. Eladamri was not afraid. His spirit preserves him from mere physical suffering. To reach him, we will have to find out what he fears."
"Do you have time for this? The emissary has been holding out against Crovax, but she can't withstand him much longer. Will you act soon?"
"There's time. I have certain elixirs with me that will open windows into Eladamri's mind. I'll use them."
Greven set his face like stone. He hated drugs. Under normal circumstances, there was a kind of bond between prisoner and interrogator-strength vs. strength, it was. Though he would never admit it to the visitor, he felt Eladamri had qualified for an honorable death. He was tortured, he held out, and the next step ought to be a dignified execution. Elixirs were a cheat. No one could resist them. Eladamri would tell everything now, and his honor would be lost.
He ordered Greven to bring the elf down. Greven untied the rope and lowered Eladamri to the floor. A heavy chair was dragged over, and the unconscious rebel leader was strapped to it. All the while, the visitor busied himself at the table, mixing powders from various vials into a cup. His stirring rod tinkled in the gloomy cell.
He held out the cup. "Hold his nose," he said. "I don't want to be bitten."
Greven tilted back Eladamri's slack head. He held the elf's nose and pulled his chin down. In came the cup, delivered by a slender Kor hand. Greven got a whiff of the potion. It had a sharp odor, like vinegar.
Suddenly a metallic bell began to clang loudly in the corridor.
Greven released Eladamri's nose. "Intruders!"
"The guards can handle it," said Furah, putting the cup to Eladamri's lips.
"I must see to any disturbance," Greven insisted, pushing the cup away. "You should come too."
"Why me?"
"Things are very unsettled. It's a dangerous time for all of us. If you want to keep up with what's going on, you'd better come along."
"You don't want me to administer my elixir. Are you afraid I'll succeed where you failed?"
"The prisoner's not going anywhere. If the alarm is false, or the situation easily resolved, we can returnnothing will be lost," said Greven.
The visitor raised his hood. "Time will be lost, but I take your meaning. Order must be restored to Rath if my plan is to succeed."
Greven quickly buckled on his sword belt. "What do you intend?"
"To take what's mine. Nothing less."
*****
Teynel and his team desc
ended into the bowels of the Citadel in search of an airship docking station. None of them knew their way around, and the deeper they penetrated the labyrinthine recesses of the flowstone works, the more lost they became.
"Don't these people believe in signs?" Teynel asked in exasperation. He'd thought as long as they kept going down, they would eventually find evidence of the airship dock. No such luck occurred. Before long the rebels found themselves negotiating tunnels too low for them to stand in. The air was oppressively hot and humid, and the lower they went, the hotter it got.
They'd not encountered any people for quite some time. This did not mean the tunnels were unoccupied. As Teynel and his men crept along, stepping over ridges in the ribbed floor, they saw strange creatures moving about in the semidarkness.
One numerous creature had an egg-shaped body, about the size of a water pail. It walked on two long legs bent backward at the knee. Covered in bare, spotty skin, it had no discernible head. The creature smelled like rotten meat. It paid no attention to the rebels, who pressed themselves against the wall and let the headless thing hop by.
Moving on, they reached a narrow vertical shaft. The top was lost in profound darkness; the bottom glowed brightly with a pulsating red light. A rushing sound, like deep waters pouring over a precipice, boomed up the shaft.
"There's light down there," Teynel said. "It may be a way to the dock."
His clansman Garnan offered to scout the situation. The walls of the shaft were deeply ribbed, so he had no problem climbing down. The other rebels lay on the tunnel floor and watched their comrade descend toward the throbbing red light.
After a few long minutes, Garnan called up, "Teynel! You must see this!"
"What is it?"
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