“Just get away from—” Cedar coughed and pulled his shirt over his nose. He paused to loose another rifle shot at the airship, though it thudded harmlessly off a turret.
A sweet stench like burned honey trailed them up the hill. Not trusting it, Kali held her breath.
A copse of evergreens rose at the crest of the hill, and it seemed like as good a place as any to make a stand. The airship wouldn’t be able to maneuver through the trees, and Kali could throw a grenade at anyone who tried to steal the SAB.
A giant metal claw on a chain clanked onto the rocks to the left.
“Uh?” Kali said, for lack of anything more intelligent.
A second claw landed to her right, then a third one struck down a few feet ahead. As one, the devices swung toward her.
“Uh!” she blurted and scrambled backward.
Kali bumped into Cedar and was surprised he wasn’t moving more quickly. A glaze dulled his eyes, and confusion crinkled his brow.
“Move!” Kali tried to shove him out of the path of the claws, but he was heavy and didn’t help her at all. She didn’t seem to have her usual strength either. A strange heaviness filled her limbs, and numbness made her fingers tingle.
That honey smell. It had to be some kind of sedative.
The nearest claw scraped closer. It swung in, angling for Kali’s torso. She ducked and dove beneath it, but the lethargy in her limbs stole her agility, and she landed in an ungainly pile and skidded down the slope. Mud spattered her, and rocks dug at her through her clothing.
Something landed on her. Rope?
Kali tried to bat it away, but it was everywhere. Not just rope, she realized. A net.
Before she could reach for a folding knife in her pocket, the ropes tightened about her, scooping her up like a fish in the river.
“Kali!” Cedar shouted.
Now, he woke up. Great.
The net constricted movement, and Kali couldn’t get an arm free to dig into her pockets. It swung her into the air. In fits and jerks, a rope slowly pulled her up. Clanks sounded above her—someone winding a winch.
Kali snarled and thrashed without any strategy, aside from an overriding desire to damage something. She was angry at herself for running up the hill without a plan, and for being captured like some dumb animal. Her thrashes did nothing; the net merely tightened.
Then something rammed into her from behind.
“Tarnation! What now?” Kali demanded.
“Sorry,” Cedar said from behind her ear.
Kali twisted her neck—even that was an effort in the suffocating rope cocoon. Cedar clung to the outside like a spider. His eyes still had a glazed cast to them, but his jaw was clenched with determination.
He drew a knife and started sawing at her ropes. “I thought you might like to get down.”
“Yes, thank you.” Kali could be calm and polite when someone was working to set her free. So long as he finished before whoever was working the winch got them on board. Already, they were nearly twenty feet from the ground. The fall would not be pleasant.
“Get him off!” a man yelled from somewhere above. “Shoot him!”
“I believe someone is making plans for you,” Kali said.
Cedar’s swift cuts were opening up her prison, and she gripped the ropes above her head with both hands so she wouldn’t fall free when the support disappeared.
“Not plans I’m partial to,” Cedar said. “I’ll have you down in a second.”
Wood creaked above them, and Kali looked up, fearing they might weigh too much for whatever winch was operating up there. She wanted freedom, yes, but she didn’t fancy the idea of a long drop while still entangled in the ropes. A man wearing a black bandana around his head and holding a shiny steel six-shooter leaned out through a trapdoor.
“Look out,” Kali barked, afraid Cedar, intent on cutting her ropes, hadn’t seen the man.
But he was already in motion, not jumping free to escape the gun like a sane person would do, but shimmying up the rope. The pirate’s finger tightened on the trigger, but Cedar was already pumping an arm to throw his knife. The blade spun upward and lodged in the man’s chest.
The revolver fired anyway.
Kali buried her head beneath her arms, but no bullet pierced her flesh. Before she could lift her eyes to see if Cedar had also avoided being hit, something slammed into her. The force snapped the remaining ropes still binding her into the net, and her legs flew free. Twine seared her palms, and she almost lost her grip, but she clenched her fingers tighter around the rope. The dead pirate tumbled past her and smashed into the rocky shoreline below. Cedar had disappeared into the airship.
Gunshots sounded above, followed by a clash of steel. That meant Cedar had his sword out. He might need help, but storming a fortress wasn’t anything Kali was trained for. She’d have to try something else.
Kali swung her legs up and found a toehold in part of the netting that had not been cut. She climbed a few feet up the rope, but stopped well below the trapdoor. Twenty feet away, mounted on the bottom of the hull, the twin-ducted fans hummed along.
While gripping the rope with one hand, Kali dropped the other into a pocket and withdrew a grenade. Wind battered her, whipping her hair free of its braid and into her eyes. She squinted, trying to judge the distance for a toss to the closest fan.
“Cedar!” Kali yelled. He would be better at this.
A battle cry—it might have been his—and another long clash of steel answered her. Kali took that to mean she was on her own.
She took a deep breath, thumbed the trigger on the grenade, and watched for the spark. Yes, there it was. She counted to two and tossed the weapon.
It sailed through the air, clanked off the fan casing and dropped. It exploded uselessly a few feet above the river. A couple of men rowing a fishing boat and gawking up at the airship screamed and threw themselves into the water.
“Not good,” Kali muttered.
She had one more grenade, but only one. She gripped the cold metal, felt the grooves dig into her hand, imagined the hours she had spent patching the exterior together from scrap and carefully measuring out gunpowder and even more carefully building the trigger device…. She resolved not to waste this one.
Kali thumbed the trigger, held the grenade half a second longer than the first, and lofted it toward the fan.
This time it clanked into the horizontal cylinder containing the propeller. Kali held her breath. The grenade bumped against the inside of the casing and skidded toward the fan. She cringed at the idea of it sliding past the blades and falling out on other side.
Before the grenade came close to that fate, it exploded with an echoing boom. Orange flashed, gray smoke filled the air, and shards of metal flew.
One whistled toward her face, and Kali ducked, throwing up her free hand. Her other hand slipped, and she lost her foothold and zipped down the rope. Fire seared her palm, tearing into her skin, but she growled and forced herself to hold on. She caught the bottom of the half-destroyed net, but her feet dangled free, swinging thirty feet above the earth.
On the hull above, the only thing left of the fan was a singed stump of metal. Holes and charred wood marked the hull as well. If it were a sea-going vessel, it’d be leaking faster than the bilge pumps could bail, but up here, holes just meant poorer aerodynamics. Already, though, the airship was listing to one side, heading out over the river. With one working propeller, it’d simply float around in wide circles until someone fixed it. That meant they’d have a hard time chasing anybody.
“Cedar,” Kali called again. “It’s time to go!”
She scanned the countryside below, ostensibly looking for her bicycle and to see how far upstream they had floated, but a part of her had to admire the view, a view usually reserved for the birds. One day, she would sail in the skies with her own ship.
A boom sounded above, not rifle fire this time, but a shell gun or cannon. What in tarnation was Cedar doing up there?
Kali
was debating whether to climb up and join him—whatever he was doing, he might be getting himself in trouble—when a familiar shout pulled her eye to the side.
“Man overboard!” It was Cedar, leaping over the deck railing. He clutched a bag in one hand and his sword in the other. “Let’s go, Kali!” he added before he splashed into the river below.
“Someone stole that man’s rudder,” she muttered.
Above her, a man with a bloody face leaned out of the trapdoor. From the pained snarl on his lips and the gun in his hand, Kali decided it was indeed time to go. After a quick check to make sure she was over water, she released the rope.
She dropped thirty feet and plunged into depths so icy they shocked her to the core. The calendar might say summer, but this water came straight out of mountains still smothered with snow. Her feet brushed the bottom, and she pushed off. She popped above the surface and tried to suck in a breath of air, but her lungs, stunned from the cold, scarcely worked. An icy wave washed into her eyes.
A hand gripped Kali’s arm, helping her stay up.
“That was brilliant!” Cedar exclaimed. The water dripping into his eyes couldn’t dull their gleam.
Kali shook her head and swam for the shore with frenzied strokes, hoping to warm her already-numb limbs. She only paused long enough to make sure she was swimming in the right direction. It was a testament to how cold she was that she reached the shore before Cedar. She was tempted to jog back to the SAB—and rip dry clothes and Cedar’s bedroll off the back—but she figured she had best wait and see if he was injured or needed help. She wouldn’t put it past him to race into battle and roar with excitement while having a life-threatening wound.
While she waited, she watched the airship veering inland, smoke still wafting from the charred hull. Maybe it would crash, the pirates would abandon it as unsalvageable, and she could claim it for her own. That thought warmed her cold limbs more than a little. If the hull was in decent shape, she could commandeer it and not have to construct one from scratch. Oh, she’d want to build her own engine from the ground up—no telling what piecemeal garbage these pirates were using—and she had ideas for dozens of modifications, but if she didn’t have to build that cursed hull, she’d save months of construction time. She flexed her cold fingers. Maybe a few digits endangered by that saw as well.
Her mind filled with daydreams of reconstruction, Kali almost missed Cedar slogging out of the water downstream. He had sheathed the sword, but he was still carrying that bag, a small but bulging canvas tote. It made him lopsided as he strode toward her. Some of the glitter had faded from his eyes, but he was still grinning. “Are you all right?”
Kali wrapped her arms around herself for warmth. “I could have done without the bath, but I suppose dropping onto land would have been worse.” She gave him a once over, decided he was uninjured, and headed along the bank toward her bicycle. Puffs of steam still wafted from its stack, and nobody seemed to have bothered it. The skirmish had cleared the river of boat traffic.
“True.” Cedar strode along beside her. He pointed at the airship—it was drifting on the other side of the river now, going nowhere fast. “It looks like your grenades proved useful.”
“Of course,” Kali said.
He walked in silence for a moment before glancing at her and asking, “Aren’t you going to ask what I was up to in there?”
“Judging by the sounds, you weren’t attending a quilting bee.”
“Nope. I had to fight my way out of their cargo hold. At first I had a notion of singlehandedly taking control of the ship, but there were a lot of them, and they were well-armed and reasonably accurate with their firearms.” Cedar touched a rip in the sleeve of his duster. “They cured me of my notion, but I was able to make my way up top, and I spotted some of their stolen loot on the way.” He hefted the bag. “I figure this might be that old man’s claim earnings. Getting it back might ease his crankiness a tad.”
“Huh,” Kali said.
It sounded like a good adventure, and she might ask for more details later, but she wanted dry clothes first and a blanket around her shoulders. Having the sun come out would be a nice perk, too, but if anything the fog was growing denser.
Cedar sighed. “I see you’re still a hard lady to please.”
“I’m pleased.”
“You are? How would one know?”
“I’m listening to you instead of contemplating upgrades to my next batch of grenades.”
“I see,” Cedar said. “That is a high honor.” He probed one of his soggy pockets, pulled out a knot of beads, and handed it to her.
Kali untangled the snarl to reveal the patch of decorated hide he’d been fiddling with all through supper the night before. “Good that this survived, I guess,” she said, not sure why he was showing it to her.
“No,” Cedar said, delving into a different pocket. “This survived.” He pulled out another talisman, this one unknotted. “That I found next to the sack of gold.”
“Oh, hm. What do you think the pirates are doing with an identical one? Is it something they found? Or are they behind the murders?”
“It didn’t come up when we were slinging bullets and curses back and forth at each other.”
Kali shook her head and tsked. “Men are such poor conversationalists.”
“There were a couple of women shooting at me too.”
They crested a rise and came to the crater the airship had blown into the trail. Kali slowed down. Her bicycle waited on the other side, but so did two people. One was the old man from the boat, and the other was a boy of ten or eleven years. He had raven-colored hair and bronze skin with a face still chubby with baby fat. He stared at them—no, at Cedar—with opened-mouthed astonishment.
“That’s mine!” The old man stabbed a finger at the sack.
“Figured it might be.” Cedar laid it at his feet.
The old fellow grabbed it, dragged it several feet, sent slit-eyed glares at Kali and Cedar, then whipped out a small black revolver and aimed it between them. “You two stay right there. And you too boy.” He backed away, holding the gun with one hand and lugging the sack of gold with the other.
Cedar watched blandly. Kali shook her head. The old man caught his heel on something, tripped, fell onto his backside, and cursed mightily. He stuffed the revolver back into his belt, hefted the sack with both hands, and jogged—if one could call such lopsided, wobbly staggers a jog—back to his boat.
“Grateful fellow,” Cedar observed.
“Less good than you’d think comes out of helping people in these parts,” Kali said.
The boy was still staring at Cedar, eyes wide, jaw slack. When he noticed Kali looking at him, he clamped it shut and swallowed.
She was about to try talking to him in Hän when he tilted his head back to look Cedar in the eyes and said, “That was amazing.” He pointed toward the sky half a mile across the river, where the airship was descending into the woods. “I saw you fighting. All of them at once! Up on the deck. I could see it all from here!”
“Just making the best out of a tricky situation,” Cedar said. Though he spoke as if his heroics had been inconsequential, he did give Kali a pointed look, as if to say, “See? This is how you’re supposed to respond to my heroics.”
Kali propped her hands on her hips and told the boy, “I was up there doing stuff too.”
He blinked at her, a blank expression on his face, then focused on Cedar again. “Where’d you get that sword? That’s the beatingest pig sticker I’ve seen.”
Kali gave the boy a closer look. He wore a hooded caribou jacket, and she assumed he was Hän, but his command of English was excellent, if one could call the local miners’ slang English.
“It’s from the Orient, though I got it down in the swamps of Florida.” Cedar drew the blade. “Do you want to see it? I could show you a few moves.”
Kali lifted a hand, afraid the “boys” could play at swordfighting all day if she let them, but the youth’s shoulders
slumped and he did not accept the sword.
“I’m no good at fighting,” he said, “on account of my leg.”
For the first time, he took a couple of steps, and Kali noticed a pronounced limp.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Couple of summers back, I climbed up with a smoker to get some honey from a bee hive. The branch broke, and I fell a long ways and broke my hip. Medicine man fixed me up the best he could, but…” He shrugged, eyes still cast downward.
Cedar took the boy’s hand and put the hilt of his sword in it.
“What’s your name?” Kali asked, heading over to check the bicycle for damage—and to see how she might get it around the crater that had destroyed an eight-foot swath of the trail.
“Tadzi,” the boy said, his gaze riveted to the blade. He took a few experimental swings and grinned.
“Tadzi, have you ever seen anything like these?” Cedar held up the beadwork patches.
The boy lowered the sword and scrutinized them. “No, sir. Not very good work.” His face brightened. “Want to see something I made?”
“Yes,” Cedar said.
Kali knew him well enough to hear the hint of disappointment in his voice. What had he expected? That a ten-year-old kid would know something about talismans of power?
“That’s very good,” Cedar said.
Kali glanced over to see what the boy was showing him. Some sort of block of carved wood. Cedar caught her eye and crooked a finger.
“We should get going,” Kali said, though she came over to check on the youth’s handiwork. She froze when he held up a carving of an elk, a seven-point bull elk. Though the entire figurine was no larger than her hand, she could count each individual tine on the antlers. They even appeared fuzzy, like the real thing. “That’s beautiful,” she breathed.
Tadzi twitched a shoulder. “I can do scrimshaw, too, but ivory’s hard to get. That time with the honey, I was hoping to trade for better tools. It didn’t happen. I got stung a bunch, on top of breaking my hip.”
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