by J. S. Morin
“Pull ... FIRE!”
The deafening roar of the liftwing’s propellers chopping up the air thundered through the cargo hold. A hurricane blew in along with it, spoiling the riflemen’s aim. A few recovered enough to get shots off, but nothing had a visible impact. The liftwing lurched and slung itself from the viewer as Erefan failed to keep the dials moving as required to keep on the liftwing’s tail.
“Undo the switch!” He repeated the order, but there was neither comprehension nor quiet enough to make his need known. He took a hand from the dials and opened the switch himself. The hurricane subsided, the noise cut short in an instant. A chill that had gone overlooked amid the chaos sent shivers through the crowded hold as it did not depart willingly.
Eyes turned to him, but Erefan was already back to working the dials, catching back up with the Grangian battleship. “Make ready with the switch, and flip it the other way when I call the order.”
“Yes, sir,” the switch soldier replied.
“Get ready for another try at them,” Erefan said. The liftwing disappeared below the view of the world-ripper. Erefan changed tactics and angled the view downward. Soldiers clambered to get away from the view, which showed the Grangian airship a hundred feet below and the ground uncounted thousands below that. A very real, very fatal fall was just a flip of a switch away. The bravest among them took up marksman’s positions, kneeling just a few paces from the view frame. “Aim for the pilot’s windows at the front.”
Erefan guided the view lower, requiring a third hand he didn’t have, then caught back up and centered the view on the cockpit. They were looking at it from just a dozen feet away; a novice could pepper it with bullets for hours on end without missing.
“Pull.”
The noise of the propellers returned with the opening of the world hole, but not the wind. The wash from the propellers spat out to either side of them and below, but not in the direction of the Errol soldiers crouching aboard the Jennai.
Shots cracked from the barrels of rifles, nearly masking the plinking of bullets off steel and glass. The windows of the airship seemed impervious.
“Close.” This time the order was heeded. Erefan kept the view over the Grangians as the switch closed.
Vaulk returned with Kandrel in tow, both men puffing for breath. “You need me to get the boy up?” Kandrel asked. He gave a meaningful look at the intact airship taunting them from the other side of the view frame.
“No,” said Erefan. Another schematic was piecing itself together in his mind—a much simpler one. It involved: “Rope. Gather it in bunches and bring it here. And we’ve got rails around here somewhere. I saw piles of the stuff from the thunderail job that got moved out when we brought the machine in. Bring me four good sections.” Men looked at him expectantly, as if he had more to say. “GO!”
Soldiers dropped rifles to the floor and ran pell-mell for the other stores aboard the Jennai. Erefan let them slip from his mind as he focused on keeping the liftwing in his sights as he readjusted the angle of the view.
By the time the soldiers returned, he was ready for them. “Rope yourselves up. Lash to the ship. Enough slack that you can get to the hole but not put so much as a foot through it.” Errol Company men obeyed, sparing worried glances at the gigantic propellers that whirred in silence, taking up the whole of the view screen.
Erefan spared a glance down at the rails. Good, sturdy steel, thick as a fist and about twenty feet by his eye. Perfect. He backed the view off by a wobbling twenty five feet or so, and brought the view a bit higher than the propeller’s hub.
“Get as many men on one of those rails as you can. I want a good running start and heave it through.” He waited for a crew to arrange themselves and take up one of the rails. There were enough hands that it hefted easily. “Pull.” The switch opened and the propeller was less than ten paces away. “Go!”
It was a shuffling run, a threat to no speed record of human, kuduk, or daruu, but the Errol Company soldiers got the rail moving, and as the rope slack caught them, the front most peeled away two at a time. The rail tumbled through the hole.
With a crash that ended sooner than any would have guessed, the propeller was gone, shattered to a thousand steel shards that fluttered back away from the hole, carried by the wind. Erefan gave them no rest. The liftwing lurched from the loss of one engine, but he got out in front of it again and repeated the process three times more. The loss of a single engine wasn’t enough to drop a liftwing that size, just slow it. The loss of two was cause for an urgent landing at the nearest practical aerodrome. Losing three was time for prayers and a controlled crash. All four engines out, and those prayers went unanswered.
As they watched the Grangian airship plummet from the sky, Erefan slumped back in his chair. Thoughts of how to build those steady dial-turning devices boiled back to the surface of his brain.
Chapter 21
“Too much.” -Cadmus Errol, in response to the question “What have we got to lose?”
Jamile’s eyes snapped open in the darkness. Her legs kicked, arms propellered, trying to twist upright before she drowned. There was no scream. Breath was too precious to waste. The tangling of the blankets was her first clue that she was not below the surface of the Sea of Kerum. The linen of the bedding beneath her was wet, but it was her own sweat, not seawater, that soaked it. She gasped and found herself choking with nothing in her throat. Rolling to the edge of the bed, she hung her head over the side and coughed until the sensation passed.
Sosha’s last memories were a blur in her head, like someone had smudged fresh ink in a panic before it had a chance to dry. Flying. Falling. Jumping. Blackness. Sheets. She’d heard of the falling dream. Tending little children at the sanctuary had blessed her with a wide vocabulary of nightly visions as she comforted the sleep-wrought terrors away. The dream can’t hurt you. It was all your imagination. She’d given that lecture a dozen times and now wondered if she had perhaps been comforting twinborn, shocked awake just as their twin had died.
The room was chilly, the stone of the floor a step removed from ice. Jamile slipped bare feet into boots and threw a jacket over her nightshirt. Her hands were trembling. The buttons vexed her, so she clutched the jacket closed in her fist as she ran off through the Errol house and out into the night. The sea wind bit into the exposed flesh at her collarbone and shins, numbed her fingers, nose, and ears. Luckily it was only a few streets over to the world-ripper machine, or she might have frozen on the way.
She shouldered open the door and barged inside. Heads turned, as the machine was manned around the clock. Jamile was known. A hand might have flinched toward a rifle, but no more than a flinch.
“What are you doing out this late, girl?” one of the guards asked. Jamile didn’t know his name, but he was thin and slouched in his chair. He leaned forward and squinted her way. “And why ain’t you dressed? No night to be out wandering in—”
“I need to get to Korr.” There was no time for pleasantries.
Four guards on duty, and none replied. They looked to one another: eyes looking for eyes with answers in them. They all knew her, knew she was friendly with Madlin. It often got Jamile a cut in line at dinnertime or a door held for her by someone who might otherwise have considered himself too busy. It wasn’t buying her a ticket to another world.
“Please!”
The oldest among the guards rose. “Miss Jamile,” he said in a voice that sounded raw from a lifetime of pipe smoke. “We got one job: keep folk away from the machine ‘til morning.”
Jamile stabbed a finger toward the viewing frame of the inert world-ripper. “I might be dead!” That was the rub: she didn’t know. She had no sense of Sosha—not that she ever did while awake. She knew their waking hours overlapped; both slept less than half the day. But even when both had to be awake, she couldn’t see through Sosha’s eyes, nor Sosha through hers. She could be unconscious and slipping beneath the Sea of Kerum, awake and treading water, or floating dead with every
bone of her body shattered. “I need to get help.”
“Even if we could, none of us knows how to work the thing,” the older guard said. He didn’t meet her eyes, and clutched at his hat in both hands.
Jamile shook with the cold she’d carried in with her. Shivers and nerves forced her to shift from one foot to the other. She needed to act. She strode for the machine. “Just let me try. Maybe they left it on—”
All four guards rose. They didn’t bring weapons to bear or anything so unfriendly, but from their reaction she knew she could not lay a hand on it. Jamile froze in place—it was easy, since she was half frozen already—and held her hands out to her sides. Sparing a glance back over her shoulder at the door, she took a step back. “Maybe I’ll just go wake Madlin.” She nodded, hoping to draw nods of agreement in turn.
The older guard sprang forward, hand out to stop her, despite her being a good twenty paces distant. “No, Miss Jamile. I can’t let you go back out to catch your death.”
“You don’t understand. I’ve got to—”
“I’ll go.”
Heads turned to the thin guard who’d spoken up. He slipped on a jacket from the back of his chair and scooped up his rifle and hat as he left his post. Jamile gaped at him. “Thank you. Please hurry.”
The thin guard offered a wink for reassurance. “If I survive waking Miss Madlin, I’ll have her back here in a whistle.” A cutting wind blew through the door as it opened, causing Jamile to shiver even after the door slammed shut behind the guard.
“C’mon over here, Miss Jamile,” the older guard offered. He waved her over to the chair her messenger had vacated. “Warmer away from the door.” Taking tentative steps, Jamile shuffled over, hugging herself inside her jacket for warmth. One of the other guards helped her into her seat, and the last one poured hot chocolate into a mug and handed it to her. She sipped at the piping hot beverage.
I’m drowning. I’m sitting here drowning and having a nice cup of chocolate. The controls to the world-ripper were two paces away.
She took another sip, eyes fixed on the door, waiting for Madlin.
The Kelleb was a smaller vessel than the Ruttanian vacu-dirges, but similar in design. There would be work involved in joining it to the other three airships, but that was a problem for after Rynn was finished stealing it. The kuduks firing rifles at them had not given up their claim to ownership yet, and there was still the matter of the mammoth liftwing that had taken off ahead of them. Rynn still heard the crackling of gunfire from the ground as she steered them clear of Glenwood Sky. She hoped that her coil gunmen were making judicious use of their ammunition. Liftwings the size of the one ahead of them were built solid; rifle bullets weren’t liable to do much damage to one. They’d need every bit of firepower they could muster to take it out of the air if it turned on them.
A ship’s wheel suited her, Rynn decided. Tinker or no, she’d take her turn as a ship’s helmswoman. It was certainly within her purview as General of the Rebellion. It wasn’t a formal rank, of course, since there was no authority that grants anything to rebels. That was largely the point of rebellions. Still, a thought nagged in a corner of Rynn’s brain as she blotted out the fading gun battle and searched the skies ahead for enemy vessels: We need a bit of organization. With work proceeding on turning the Jennai’s vacuum tanks into crew and cargo space, they’d soon begin gathering up recruits from across Korr, freeing slaves and taking pockets of rebels under their protective wings. She couldn’t manage everything with an informal command structure of close associates.
General Rynn. Colonel Erefan. Majors Kandrel and Vaulk. Captain Bosley. Lieutenant Sosha.
She tumbled the ranks around in her head, wondering why the words changed from language to language, but the basic structure was the same for all kuduk nations and half those of Tellurak. The Kheshi knightly class still held military rank as an exception to the rule, and the Feru military was an enigma to Rynn, but the rest all followed the pattern. She wondered if Veydrus was the same. Surely Dan would know.
Miss Madlin!
Rynn’s thoughts stuttered like a jostled phonograph. Had someone called her Telluraki name? She looked over each shoulder, and the two soldiers on guard at the door nodded in acknowledgment. No hint that either of them had spoken her name.
Too much going on. It was her imagination. Everyone wants my time. Rynn breathed deep, sucking in the cold, thin air that snuck in through gaps in the airship’s windows. It was just enough to invigorate without cutting to the bone.
A cloudless sky and an easy course. Father will find a way to shoot down the liftwing and Miss Madlin, please, it’s urgent, we can chain this thing behind the Cloudsmith and tow it along.
Rynn kept her head still, but checked the corners of both eyes. She had no prickling feeling of someone sneaking up on her. Yet there was something amiss. She knew the sound of her own voice, and the sound of the voice of her own thoughts. Why the two differed she couldn’t guess, but they did, and she was well acquainted with both. Someone else was talking in her head, mixing their thoughts in with her own, but the voice of those thoughts was familiar despite her not being able to put a name to it.
“Getting a bit dry up here,” Rynn said over her shoulder. “Someone check if there’s ale aboard.” It was a long shot, since few kuduks had the taste for alcohol and fewer humans the coin to purchase both passage and refreshment. “If not, get me anything wet.”
She was developing a pounding headache.
The room was black as tar and quiet as the inside of a drum. Madlin squeezed her eyes shut again when the pounding repeated.
“Miss Madlin, it’s urgent.”
Gut me, the voice in my head was here. Madlin grunted and rolled herself to the edge of her bed.
“I’m awake,” she mumbled toward the door. Fumbling at the bedside table, she found her spectacles and pulled them on. “Coming.”
She shuffled across the icy stone floor barefoot, the sudden jolt of cold helping to force her alert. She opened the door and saw a guard in an Errol Company uniform. The sight of them had become so commonplace aboard the Jennai that she had to remind herself that she was on Tinker’s Island and wasn’t Rynn. A few seconds of reflection could have given her the same answer when she noticed two cold feet on the floor instead of one.
“What is it?”
“It’s Miss Jamile. She needs your help at the world-ripper. She thinks she might be dead.”
That shot a wave of a panic though Madlin’s slumber-soaked mind. There were mental contortions required to determine whether she was Rynn or Madlin when she woke in the night, but twinborn logic still made sense to Madlin’s thinking. She knew that it had to be Sosha in trouble. “Let’s go!”
Madlin owned nightclothes—even wore them on occasion—but commonly slept in her dayclothes. She needed only to pull on her boots and grab her hat and jacket on the way out. Gloves were tucked in the pockets, waiting for her. She pushed past the guard and led the way.
The night outside was polar, winds howling from the north, carrying a winter’s chill that cared nothing for calendars. Madlin hunkered down inside her coat and held her hat on with one hand, the collar of her coat closed with the other. It was nights like this that Madlin wondered whether her father should have just gone the whole mile and built the city as a Korrish deep. You couldn’t blame the kuduks for having a good idea here or there; he’d copied half a hundred of their designs as it was.
When the door slammed shut behind them in the world-ripper’s workshop, Jamile was waiting for them. She hastily set down a mug and ran to meet Madlin halfway as she approached.
“Madlin! My liftwing went down. It was defective. Fell to pieces. There was a big liftwing and it shot at me and when I turned the ship it broke its propeller clean off and then ... and then ... bloody winds, I don’t know!” Jamile was panting, having blown the whole story out in one breath. “I’m probably floating in the Sea of Kerum, but it’s all gauze in my head.”
“Y
ou had your floating vest on?”
Jamile nodded, jittery and a few more times than was needed to convey her agreement.
“You activate the runes?”
Jamile opened her mouth, then closed it with a grimace and a shrug. “I don’t—”
“Did you jump out?”
Jamile replied with a sheepish smile that carried no reassurance. “I think so?”
Madlin strode over to the control panel of the machine, removing her hat and gloves as she walked, depositing them on the guards’ table. “You know I’ve never used this thing, right?” Madlin flipped switches and the bulbs around the machine’s viewing frame lit one by one. When the last of the bulbs lit, the interior of the frame dissolved into a view of the Jennai’s plaza. “You got lucky.”
Taking her seat at the controls, Madlin spun the view to get her bearings. In halting, jerking twists of the machine’s dials, she stumbled the view around until she found herself in the cargo hold of the Cloudsmith, with the Korrish world-ripper. Even the machine is twinborn, she mused. Sitting in a chair identical to her own, Madlin watched her father’s hands as they spun dials in lazy circles. He wasn’t in a hurry for anything, it seemed. She would change that, soon enough.
With a wince in case she had missing some key step, Madlin yanked the main switch closed. The dynamo’s hum, which had been relegated to background noise, climbed to a screeching whine as the view turned real. Her first reaction was relief that the process had worked; her second was the shock of seeing rifle barrels in soldiers’ hands, pointed through the hole.
“Get down!” she shouted, and took her own advice, throwing herself from the chair even as Jamile and the guards hesitated. “It’s me! It’s us! Don’t shoot!”