The man grinned, showing his teeth in a show of hateful, swaggering arrogance. “You would not dare. You might hit her. Desperation, my friend. It is a sign that you have already lost.”
Thaddeus moved the rifle just a fraction to the right and fired. There was an almighty sound as the bullet ripped into the stone window frame beside the jeweled man’s head, shattering a hole in the white marble and filling the air with shards as sharp as razors. The jeweled man screamed and raised his arms to shield his face, letting Rémy go in the process. She sagged against the window, gasping for breath.
“Jump!” Thaddeus shouted at her, the airship still rising. “Rémy, for pity’s sake, jump!”
Rémy, still gasping, threw her legs over the window frame and leapt wildly at the ramp, which was now almost above her head. Her fingers slipped, grasping at the wood, searching for but not finding purchase. Thaddeus dropped the rifle and lunged for her, throwing himself down stomach-first on the ramp and grabbing at her wrists.
The airship rose into the air, over the roof of the palace and away. As Thaddeus dragged Rémy to safety, the last thing they heard was the jeweled man.
“Follow them!” he screamed, leaning out of his window, his face bleeding where the splinters of his fine marble palace had struck him with a thousand tiny pinpricks. “Don’t let them get away! Follow them! On pain of your deaths, follow them!”
“Are you all right?” Thaddeus sat on the floor beside Rémy, stroking her hair out of her face. “Rémy?”
She looked up at him, nodding faintly, still trying to catch her breath. There were red marks on her throat where the jeweled man’s fingers had tried to choke the life from her body. “D’accord,” she whispered hoarsely, “d’accord.”
He pulled her toward him, wrapping his arms around her and holding her against his chest. “You have got to stop trying to get yourself killed,” he told her, and had the vague idea that it wasn’t the first time he’d told her such a thing.
He heard her laugh, her breath on his skin warm through his shirt. “You worry too much. Anyway, you say that as if it is always my fault.”
He sighed and pulled back. “Well, that time was, wasn’t it?”
Rémy shrugged and looked around for the puzzle box, still lying on the floor of the airship. “I had to get it back, Thaddeus. I had to.”
She got to her feet and he followed. The airship bumped a little in a sudden breeze, and Thaddeus saw Desai grip the back of J’s chair as he stared at the controls in wonder.
“This is — this is remarkable,” Desai was muttering. “I have never experienced anything like it.”
“She’s a beauty, ain’t she?” J said proudly, rubbing the airship’s control panel with affection.
“It is a wonder,” agreed Desai, and then looked a little wobbly as another puff of wind bumped against the airship. “Oh dear. I think perhaps this mode of travel takes some getting used to …”
“Don’t worry,” Dita assured him airily, “you will soon get your air legs, Mister.”
Desai looked at her curiously and then held out one hand. “I do not believe we have met, Miss …”
“Dita,” Dita told him, shaking his hand. “I am pleased to know you, sir.”
Desai smiled. “And I you, Dita. Rarely have I seen someone so small acquit herself with such aplomb,” he told her, and the little girl glowed in the light of such praise.
“Chitchat is all well and good,” muttered J, “but would someone care to tell me where we’re headed, like? If those fellers are comin’ after us, it’d be nice to know, because I for one could do with somefing to eat and some shut-eye.”
Thaddeus moved to look out over the darkened landscape. They were flying over dense jungle, the moonlight strong but not enough to show them any safe landing spots. “Our map is still back in that clearing where they attacked us,” he said, “and I don’t know this area at all. Desai, can you help?”
His friend frowned. “Well, let me see. What direction did we take out of the palace, J?”
J leaned forward and tapped the compass on the control panel. “I headed due north.”
“North,” Desai repeated thoughtfully. “In that case, yes — I have a very good place for us to head for. Turn her west, J, and follow that heading until you see a river. Once we see that below us, we follow it to its source. It shouldn’t be far to fly in this magnificent machine.”
“You think that’ll be far enough to stop them finding us?” Thaddeus asked.
Desai smiled a little mysteriously. “They may find us, my dear Thaddeus. But I guarantee they will not be able to reach us.”
{Chapter 8}
THE PAST RESURFACES
Hours later, the airship flew toward a huge rock plateau. It rose out of the jungle, a monolith that seemed to have been formed with one strike of an invisible hand. The dawn swarmed around it as the sun rose, vivid streaks of jagged pink and yellow reaching toward them from the horizon. The jungle clustered dense and dark around its base, but on top of the flat rock there was only scrub.
“There,” said Desai, pointing. “That should do, don’t you think?”
Thaddeus had taken over the controls from J some time earlier, and now he gently brought the airship into land. It bumped slightly on the uneven ground before coming to a rest, sitting on top of the world.
“Best let the balloon down for a bit,” suggested J, leaning over Thaddeus’s shoulder. “It’s probably a bit windy out there, innit? Don’t want ’er takin’ off without our say-so, like.”
“I don’t suppose we are going to find any rabbits up here,” Rémy said ruefully, absently rubbing her sore neck as she looked out at the sparse foliage that spread over the plateau. There was barely anything higher than a dandelion, and the grass was scrubby. “I am having trouble remembering the last thing we ate …”
“Don’t worry,” Dita told her, “I checked — we still have some rice left, and plenty of water. There’s enough for all of us to have some breakfast, anyway. I will set the fire now, yes?”
“Rice for breakfast,” J muttered. “It ain’t right, I tell yer.”
“All right then,” shot back Dita, defiant hands on her hips in a pose they had all become used to over the months. “I suppose that means I can have your share?”
“’Ere, that’s not what I said! Did you hear me say that? I didn’t say that!” J called after her as the girl helped Desai drop the ramp and then disappeared outside, ignoring him.
Rémy left Thaddeus and J to secure the airship and followed the others down the ramp. Outside, there was indeed a brisk wind whipping across the flat rock — to be expected of somewhere so high. Rémy walked to the edge of the plateau, looking out over the vast morass of jungle beneath them. The river they had followed glinted in the rising sun, the water tripping and jumping in flurries of sapphire blue and marble white as it rushed along its haphazard course.
She rubbed her neck again — it was almost as if the ghost of the jeweled man’s grip was still clamped around her throat. Rémy had underestimated him — she’d dismissed him as a dandy fop who was all glitter and no substance, easy for her to outwit or outrun. But he had hidden speed and true brute strength beneath those elegant clothes. It had shaken her. She’d felt helpless, and she didn’t like it. Little Bird was not used to feeling helpless.
“Penny for them?” Thaddeus’s voice floated over her shoulder, and she turned to find him standing behind her. He held a shawl in both hands, reaching out to drape it around her shoulders.
“Oh, nothing,” she said, pulling the woolen garment close around her. After the relentless heat it was strange to feel a chill. “Thank you.”
Thaddeus rubbed a hand lightly across her back with a smile. He squinted slightly as he looked out into the bright beginning of the day. “What an amazing place. Desai’s right: even if they manage to follow us, they’ll never m
ake it up here.”
“It is a good place to regroup, for sure,” agreed Rémy.
“Are you all right?” Thaddeus pulled her closer, running the fingers of one hand along her jaw as he cupped her face with the other and gently tipped her head back to better see the marks on her neck. “For a second there I really thought he might …”
Rémy reached up and grasped both his wrists. “Yes. But he did not. And you got me out of there, Thaddeus Rec. Something else for which I should thank you, yes?”
Thaddeus tugged Rémy against him and wrapped his arms around her, her head against his chest. They were silent for a moment, looking out at the landscape that was unfurling before them.
“What if,” Rémy asked slowly, “they have something that can help them get up here?”
“What do you mean?”
She pulled back and looked at him. “The jeweled man. He must have the Sapphire Cutlass, must he not? It is too much of a coincidence, everything that has happened. We know that the Sapphire Cutlass, whatever it is, was somehow behind all those devices that the Comte de Cantal had in his mountain. So what if he has something similar here? What if they are on their way here, right now, with some insane machine that can climb mountains like a goat or — or fly, like the airship?”
Thaddeus frowned thoughtfully, the last shadows of dawn dancing across his face. “That’s a good point. Although I don’t think he can possibly have anything that flies or why would he want our airship? And that place seemed so dilapidated, when you got really close to it … It didn’t seem as if he had much to show, let alone much to hide, did it?”
“True,” Rémy agreed. She stood on tiptoe to look over Thaddeus’s shoulder to where Desai was helping Dita cook the rice. “I think there’s only one person here who can tell us what we want to know.”
Thaddeus kept one arm around her as he turned to look in the same direction. “I think you’re probably right.”
Desai got to his feet as they approached, a faint smile on his face. “My friends,” he said, his melodic voice dancing in the wind. “I owe you a great debt of gratitude for freeing me as you did — for being here at all, in fact. I still cannot quite believe you came here from England to find me, as Rémy said.”
“Actually we came from France,” Rémy told him and then, when a look of puzzlement passed Desai’s face, added, “but that is a long story and I think we would all prefer to hear yours first.”
Desai smiled. “Yes, indeed. Let us sit here as a new day begins, and I will tell you everything. It, too, is a long story — longer than any of you will realize. Please sit.”
Rémy took the shawl from around her shoulders and spread it on the ground so that she and Thaddeus could share it. J appeared from the airship, carrying bowls for the rice that was now bubbling steadily in a pot over the flames.
“Ooh,” said J, “story time, is it? ’Ang on a tick, I want to hear this, too.” The boy set down the bowls and sat beside Dita.
Desai stared at the flames, flickering in the pale light of the rising dawn. “Well, now. Do you remember, my friends, how we first met?”
“Come off it,” said J, making a sound in his throat. “We ain’t likely to forget somefing like that now, are we?” The boy shuddered. “Although I s’pose the Little Miss here wasn’t there. We was all down in Lord Abernathy’s tunnels, see,” he told Dita. “Horrible, terrible place, that was. Right under London. ’E was using slaves to build an army to attack the city with. ’E ’ad contraptions down there you wouldn’t believe, like.”
Dita’s eyes grew large and round as she listened mutely.
Desai smiled. “Indeed. But my question was really meant for Miss Brunel,” he said softly, looking at her with eyes that were at once kind and full of more knowledge than she could possibly imagine. “Do you remember what I told you then, about the circumstances of your birth, and the curse that your parents passed on to you?”
Rémy nodded, feeling the familiar tingle that always passed up her spine when she thought about everything that Desai had explained to her about her parents. “Of course,” she said. “They stole a diamond from a very powerful raja. He had his court magicians place the curse on them, and they passed it on to me when I was born. But what does that have to do with … Unless … unless …” she trailed off, suddenly stunned as the implication of what Desai seemed to be suggesting sank in.
“Yes,” the older man said softly. “Did I not say then that it was strange, how the universe conspires to throw us all together, again and again? The man you refer to as the jeweled man is called Ikshuvaku. He was the owner of the diamond your parents stole, Rémy Brunel. The palace from which we have just escaped is where they performed for him, seventeen years ago.”
Rémy stood, agitated. “But how can that be so? You said then that he was a rich and powerful leader,” she protested. “This man does not seem that way at all. He has jewels, yes — but the palace is crumbling around him, and most of his men are armed only with swords. They do not even have enough rifles to go around all their troops.”
Desai was nodding before she had even finished speaking. “It is true. He is not the raja he once was, though he would still dearly love to think of himself as such — which is, of course, what makes him so very dangerous.”
“Seventeen years ago: 1857,” Thaddeus said thoughtfully. “Rémy had her seventeenth birthday as we journeyed here. I remember that you said she was an Indian baby — conceived here, if not born here. I didn’t believe that you could know that just by looking at her, but …”
The older man smiled. “Ah, yes. So many significant things occurred in that year — for all of us.”
“The Indian Rebellion,” Thaddeus added. “That was 1857 as well, wasn’t it? Is that why the palace looks as if it was in a great battle? Was this raja — this Ikshuvaku — part of the uprising?”
Desai looked at Thaddeus with amusement. “Again, you surprise me, Thaddeus Rec. I had forgotten what an excellently sharp mind you have behind those curiously colored eyes. The Indian Rebellion took place much farther north — but it sent ripples through the whole continent. It gave men like Ikshuvaku a reason to hope that the grip of the East India Company — and therefore the British Empire itself — could be shaken, and it gave the East India Company a reason to clamp down on anyone they considered troublesome, before they could indeed become so.”
“You were here, weren’t you?” Rémy said, sitting down again and feeling Thaddeus’s hand stroke across her back. “So was Abernathy. You told us that you tried to be a go-between for the British and the raja, to keep the peace. That’s why you knew the place and the people so well. Isn’t it?”
“That is true indeed, Rémy Brunel. I made several trips to the raja’s palace on behalf of the British government.” Desai shifted a little uncomfortably, staring into the fire. “What I did not tell you was that during one of those visits, it also became my home.”
“What do you mean?” Rémy asked.
“Sahoj sensed my powers — the ones I had kept hidden from the colonials. He knew my abilities could assist Ikshuvaku’s cause. So they flattered me, and over time I … allowed myself to be flattered. I chose to switch my allegiance. I stayed and became one of the court’s mystics, in Sahoj’s circle. For a time it was wonderfully freeing to exercise skills that few others possess. For a time I was treated like royalty myself, and, I am ashamed to admit, I reveled in it. But by the time the British attacked, I had been banished from the palace walls.”
“Why?” J asked, listening closely even as he held out their bowls one by one for Dita to ladle rice into. “What did you do?”
“It was what I didn’t do, young man, as much as what I did.” Desai sighed, as if raking over the memories of those distant years was painful. “I told you the court mystics were ordered to put a curse on your parents, Rémy. I was one of them — and I refused. I did not think your pare
nts or their unborn children deserved such a fate. Gustave was a different matter, and had that been the only order I would not have hesitated as I did.
“But in any case it made no difference. I was not the only mystic with such power, and no one else objected. The curse was set without me, by a man called Sahoj, who had always been more reckless with his powers than I, and less compassionate in the use of them. My disobedience was the start of my downfall.
“When Ikshuvaku began to make plans to rise up against the British, I knew I could not stand by or, worse, help. I could see that it would be a disaster — Ikshuvaku always did overestimate his strength. An uprising would be crushed, and brutally, it was clear. The northern rebellions had had the advantage of surprise, but the Company was prepared now, and on the lookout. He himself might survive, but the people — the poor, the desperate — whom he planned to press into his army would not. I tried to convince him not to act, but by then I was an object of mistrust. They labeled me a traitor and threw me out. By that time, relations between the raja and the British were completely sour anyway, thanks in part to Abernathy. The diamond he recovered from your parents was not the only one he stole. He took many of the Raja’s lesser jewels. Not that it did him any good — when the East India Company found out, they tried him as a looter because he had not turned his spoils over to the crown. He was thrown into jail.”
“An’ that’s where ’e met the Professor!” J realized.
“Yes, J, that is where he met our hapless friend, the Professor. And so our paths were set, all those years ago. The rest you know.”
“Not everything,” Thaddeus said. “How did you end up back there, and as a prisoner?”
Desai sighed. “A year ago, when I returned with the diamond in order to lift Rémy’s curse once and for all, it was the first time I had approached Ikshuvaku since being banished. I was unsure of what reception I would receive, though I was sure he would welcome the return of the jewel, if nothing else. I knew from the eyes and ears I still had here that he had fallen on hard times — the uprising had indeed been stamped out with a harsh foot.” He paused, spooning up a mouthful of rice and chewing silently, seeming to be miles away, his face lined with sadness.
The Sapphire Cutlass Page 5