by Kin S. Law
“Mercenary…but you shot down the Balaenopteron over the Kremlin,” Blair said aloud. I hadn’t caught the rest of the conversation. “And you are shooting indiscriminately between Muscovite soldiers and us civilians. I take it Valima Mordemere intends to take Red Square, and he doesn’t want a soul to be on it when he does.”
“Very clever,” the sniper replied. He nudged the still scalding barrel against his enemy’s hands. “But it won’t help you.”
“Gahhh, sure it will. Now we know where to stand for the interview.”
The Square was still quiet, and the sniper was beginning to lose patience. He paced back and forth, so I alternately saw the front chest panel and the brassy gas cylinder at his back. No way I was going to hit his face from this angle. The abomination wouldn’t stay in the open for long, never mind Blair’s distractions. Soon enough he would shoot Blair and hunt us down. What was he waiting for? Had Mordemere told him not to damage the remarkable architecture of the Square? But I had no guarantee of that.
There was only one thing to do.
“Shit,” I said, and stepped out into the open.
“Finally,” said the sniper. Good. He had mistaken me for Captain Sam. “Come here.”
I was far enough away for the sniper not to risk firing as yet, but even from across the Square in front of the Cathedral of Vasilly the Blessed, I must have cut a strange figure. Bandanna, goggles cracked across the lenses, gloves raised high into the air. I didn’t have my coat, and he could see only two pistols at my hips. Nothing with enough range to hit him, as far as he knew. If he fired I could still dive behind another car.
“Come slowly towards me,” the sniper demanded. He did not bother to ask me to drop my weapons. At the first sign of a draw, he would simply fire. His new arms could probably hold the heavy repeaters up indefinitely.
“How many of you are there?” he asked his hostage, who maintained a stoic silence even after a vicious kick to the kidneys. Blair gasped. The sniper put the repeater right up against Blair’s head, pushing his neck out at an uncomfortable angle.
To my surprise, the threat drew a response. Captain Sam appeared out of a ditch beside the kiosk where he must have rolled to a stop, hidden. The sniper trained his right repeater on Sam. His left stayed pointed at the hostage. I took the opportunity to draw Victoria. Captain Sam was of course holding a similar piece on the sniper, an enormous Colt. Stalemate.
“Now you just drop them fancy gats, boy,” Captain Sam announced. I tried not to look at the familiar white face with its magnificent mustache beneath. He was wearing an unimaginably white suit under a thick Russian fur coat. “That there Irishman got nothing on me. You kill him proper if you like, but I’ll shoot you either way. And I’ll definitely shoot you if you touch my boy.”
“The ginger is fake,” I said, really not sure what else to say. I wasn’t his fucking boy. Suddenly the Red Special was in my hand, pointed at the sniper. I didn’t even remember drawing it.
“We got our beef, boy, but we’ll settle this later,” Captain Sam said. He seemed nervous, twitching at the mustache.
It took a moment for me to figure out it was the Red Special, the gun itself, not staring down a muzzle, that frightened him.
“I ain’t your boy!” I hollered. The sudden Southern accent surprised the sniper. You could spoon the creamed corn off our matching drawls. Damn. I hated when I spoke that way.
“This ain’t the time, Al!”
“I waited fucking years!” I said. Both my guns were shaking from anger.
“Fellas, please,” the sniper said. “If you’ll look over here, you’ll notice I am essentially bulletproof.” He seemed exasperated, and maybe trying to decide which of us to shoot.
“From here you’re quite phenomenally ugly,” said Blair. What the hell? Was he trying to get himself killed?
“Oh, shut up! I’ve had it with your jabber!” said the sniper.
And he pulled the trigger.
“Blair!” I screamed, but when I looked through the sudden puff of smoke, there he was, stumbling away with all his might. Then I saw the sniper himself, and did a double take.
I can’t say whether having his clockwork arm blown off in an explosion would hurt, but it sure as hell looked like it did.
“Oh,” said the sniper.
He couldn’t raise the other repeater. He couldn’t even stay standing. The steam was venting from his body through the ruptured elbow joint. He was going pale, probably bleeding somewhere. Then the sniper held up the smooth enamel and shining tip of a fountain pen. I recognized it as Blair’s. It still had a piece of gearing stuck in it from when he jammed it in the cogs of the sniper’s repeater, like an arrow tipped in centaur blood.
“A pen. Heh. That’s pretty funny.”
That’s when I pulled the trigger on the Red Special. Whether it was an act of mercy or simply because I couldn’t stand looking at the abomination any more, I couldn’t say.
27
The Maid, the Mother, and Rosa Marija
Rosa
I found Inspector Hargreaves first, sitting on the pavement of the steel bridge closest to Red Square. My steps felt heavy, even though practically all my knives had been thrown or broken. That fight had taken a lot out of me, and when I reached for my cameo, I hadn’t found it. Looking back, the entire river was boiling with the broken bridge dumped into it. I would never find it.
Besides, Albion needed me.
The darkness under The Nidhogg was nearly complete, but the gas lamps lining the bridge hadn’t been ignited. Of course, with the burning sky overhead, even the army’s municipal workers had been evacuated. There were very few arclights in Moscow. Burning points of fires lit on the enormous Balaenopterons raged all around us instead.
Smoking, steaming wrecks came down all around us now, somehow not directly overhead, but terrifying nonetheless. They were smaller ships, corsairs or junks, some no more than lifted gliders exploding like flies caught in a lit wick. In the dark of evening and cataclysm, it seemed we stood on the bottom of some abyssal plane, watching the titans of the deep circle in combat overhead.
At first, I thought the Inspector had been crushed underneath the bulk of Mordemere’s monster, there in the middle of the bridge. Matte copper plates hid much of her body. Her legs were splayed out to one side. When I got closer, I could see the flames overhead glinting off Hargreaves’ golden hair. One arm hung loose at her side. She was bent over a pale form, too small to be a soldier. It lay in a mass of India rubber cables and metal mesh lines, as if Mordemere’s abomination had disgorged a morsel of unpalatable innocence. Like a monster under the bed, finding it had no taste for children.
“Anubis and Isis, is that a child?” I cried.
“Yes. She’s very weak, but I can feel a pulse. What do I do, Rosa?”
I did not know. I skidded to a halt, my abused body almost betraying me into sprawling all over the bridge. But looking into Hargreaves’ eyes, I couldn’t see how I could tell her there was nothing I could do. Her face was sappy-wet, the light makeup washed into ugly streaks.
The child was small, and nude under the impotent warmth of Hargreaves’ coat. Raven hair lay matted to her cheeks and shoulders, and every surface of her steamed with some inner activity. I gasped when Hargreaves lifted the coat to show the girl’s legs gone below the thigh. Each one was capped neatly with porcelain. A line of little brassy nubs protruded in a progression up every vertebrae of her spine, some connected by ports or cables to the monstrosity.
“If I pull her out, she might die,” Hargreaves said, a slight whimper fluttering in her throat.
A rapid tattoo of gunfire interrupted our shock. It came from the Red Square end of the bridge, hidden behind the ornate buildings.
I looked around. With The Nidhogg so close, I didn’t like being at the edge of anything. The right—or wrong—sort of dumb luck and the cutting beam we had heard so much about could lance through this very bridge.
“If we don’t move her, sh
e will surely die. We can’t stay here any longer; we have to get to Red Square,” I said.
“But Mordemere intends—”
“Exactly. At this point getting her back aboard his mad ship might be the only way to save her,” I reminded. I tried to be gentle. “Gorgeous, either we do this now or we could die out here. Who knows how long this thing can hold out, she might freeze once it stops keeping her warm.” I thumped the abomination for emphasis. It gave a slight groan, settling on hydraulic hips, and I fell on my bottom. Hargreaves laughed, a nervous, jerky giggle.
We both whirled round as a little tinkle of laughter came from below. The girl was awake, looking at both of us like a kitten unsure of its new owners.
“Hello,” Hargreaves said kindly. “I’m Vanessa. Who are you?”
“Je m’appele…” she started, then changed tack. “My name…is Cezette. Cezette Louissaint.”
“It’s a beautiful name, gorgeous,” I said, smiling. “Did you hear?”
“Yes. You want to pull me out of this…thing,” Cezette said haltingly.
“Someone did a very bad thing to you,” Hargreaves supplied. “Don’t…no, don’t look down.”
“I know about my legs,” Cezette said more confidently. “The gray man said I spent too long in the grass and dirt with my feet cut open. I got an in…infa…”
“Infection?” Rosa guessed.
“Infection,” Cezette agreed. She seemed to say the word like she had read it, but had never formed the sounds herself.
“Barbaric, cutting off a girl’s legs,” I hissed.
“But judging from the sophistication of his steamworks, Mordemere did it very well,” said Hargreaves. She stroked the air over the stubs, inspecting the girl. I felt an argument coming on, but decided against it.
“I think I will be all right,” Cezette said. She reached, and before any of us could stop her, uncorked one of the cables from her back. One of the abomination’s fingers twitched, but otherwise all was well.
“Grand. Let’s do this carefully,” I said, undoing the spell freezing all of us in place.
I was acutely aware of the situation in the Red Square itself. There came a din suspiciously reminiscent of the explosion from Albion’s new gun. But I couldn’t focus on that right now. This little girl needed us.
With Cezette’s help, we managed to undo all the various tentacle-like cables and lines from Cezette’s back. Whatever mechanism kept her warm, it continued to do so, even when we unscrewed the last thick bundle from Cezette’s tailbone. We could only wince at the various ports and nodules left embedded in the flesh. We managed to wrap the little girl up in Hargreaves’ coat. I groaned, once, when the weight opened up a fresh cut, but soon we were carrying Cezette alongside the limping Hargreaves, making for Red Square. Cezette seemed to like the feel of being carried, but she often turned to touch the weakened Hargreaves, who smiled and held her hand.
I began to wonder which of our four merry mates had gotten the worst of the deal. Hargreaves was visibly injured, and I was plumb out of every barb and shank in her arsenal, papercut in a dozen places. Still, it seemed the worst battle was being waged here, in the Red Square. I hastily motioned us behind one of the abandoned sandbag barriers.
The tourist’s photogram hotspot had been turned into a literal war zone, but the worst of it was centered round the beautiful cathedral, rendered an ominous warlock’s keep by the coming darkness. Man-shapes sprawled all around it, baptizing the Square the color of its namesake. The familiar debris cloud of the recently fired Red Special hung over us. Gunshots could still be heard, followed by the shattering sounds of bullets gone off their mark.
“Hand it over, Sam! You don’t know what Mordemere intends to do with it!” Albion’s voice suddenly rang out clearly across the square.
“I know what I intend to do with it, sonny!” A scratchy smoker’s voice answered him. It was thick with the sound of the South. “I’m going to hijack Valima’s ship!”
“That’s the captain!” Hargreaves exclaimed, but when she tried to go faster she fell onto one knee. “He has the crystal!”
“Stay down, Inspector,” I cautioned.
“What do you want, stop the Ottomans from starting another Great War?” Albion asked. “Bring arclight to deep Africa? Feed every starving mouth in the Commonwalth? It won’t make up for what you’ve done, you old hypocrite! And I don’t believe you’d do anything for anyone other than yourself!”
Another shot rang, and from it I pinpointed Albion behind a red cabriolet, steaming from bullet holes in its side. I made out Captain Samuel hidden in an amazingly intact newsstand, wielding a large brown Colt. They were exchanging potshots, but the breaking windows were only punctuating their shouts.
“Men,” Hargreaves muttered. I shook my head, exasperated.
“I didn’t mean what happened to you, my boy,” Captain Sam began, but he was interrupted by another shot. “But you went too far, stranding me in Australia like that!”
“No? No? I treated you like a father! You just wanted to have a little Chinese dog! I was right to leave you stranded in the outback. I gave you a head start!”
So there it was, the real reason Alby wanted to find Captain Sam again. Whatever happened aboard The ’Berry long ago, Albion had respected his Captain Samuel enough to give him a way out. Now the two were together again, and Albion would give no quarter. He wouldn’t even believe that Captain Sam had the best of intentions. I had often wondered. As much as I wanted to let Albion work out his frustrations with his adoptive father, now wasn’t the time or place. Cezette wriggled in my arms as if to drive this point home.
Hargreaves prodded me, and we peeked out over the barricade to find a shadow approaching. Hargreaves’ .22 was out, in her left hand, but she quickly lowered it when they saw it was Elric Blair, a bit shaken up but seemingly unhurt.
“The hell happened?” I demanded.
“Long story. I’m not sure how to stop them,” Blair said, nodding in Albion and Sam’s direction.
“I’m not sure you can,” Hargreaves said.
I nodded agreement. Pirates had to settle their scores like pirates. There was no other way. But we had to find a way to get aboard The Nidhogg when she took the Kremlin, and right now the doors were shut.
Just as I was resigned to the duel happening until both idiots ran out of ammunition, a light winked into existence far above us, like some untimely sun.
“The Gray Man,” Cezette murmured in my arms. I shuddered.
The column of fire was supposed to be a surprise to none. We had heard about it in the reports, but seeing it was a different story entirely. Everyone but Cezette stopped to stare at the line of light streaming from the cloud into the ground. It dove straight for the river, sending up a plume of steam. Then it began to cut, swiftly, through the necropolis and the red walls of the Kremlin. As we watched, it circled round the beautiful Kremlin fortress gates and the Tsar’s residence. It momentarily lit up the Cathedral, sending planes of illumination coursing over the onion domes like some festive attraction. Then it moved on, returning to the river to join the first cut.
“It’s taking the Square! Not the Kremlin!” cried Blair.
“Everyone hold on!” I said.
Even Albion and Captain Samuel grabbed hold of anything they could reach. There was a rumbling like an earthquake, and the taste of iron in the air, then everything unanchored seemed to leave the ground, hanging about a foot over any and every surface. Bricks, bits of kiosk, half-empty bottles drawing spirals in drops as they spun into the air.
“We’re rising….There, I see The Gwain and The Dinadan. The Percival looks like it’s in retreat,” the Inspector said.
Hargreaves peered over the lip of the Square where the remains of the bridge hung out over empty air. I followed her gaze. Beyond the bridge the titanic forms of airships slowly drifted down toward us. An eerie blue glow backlit them. The Percival was easiest to see, dipping low and lit by multiple deck fires. I realized the glo
w was all around them. We were the ones lit by it.
Slowly, everything returned to ground, the whole Red Square rising resolutely upward. Another second later and the gunshots resumed.
“We have to stop Albion,” Hargreaves said. It became difficult to hear her, as if the air was denser between us. “And accomplish the mission!”
“We have no obligation to finish your mission. Captain Samuel is right there!” I found myself saying. No, that wasn’t quite right. Albion might be out of his mind, but I was not. I knew, without a doubt, if Mordemere’s hand reached out and procured the crystal in Captain Sam’s possession, the alchemist would be free to indulge in his every megalomaniac psychosis.
I wasn’t no damn do-gooder, but I didn’t like the prospect of a man looking to own my skies. When Albion calmed down, he would undoubtedly agree.
Besides, Cezette Louissaint looked up at me expectantly. I’d be damned if I didn’t show the girl what it was to be a woman pirate in what was too often a man’s sky.
“All right, hold on,” I said.
I set Cezette leaning on the sandbags, where she looked quite comfortable. Then I leaned over and grabbed the Inspector’s arm.
“Wait, what are you—arghghh!” Hargreaves screamed.
I had wrenched her bicep in a nauseating angle. Now it popped, audibly.
“Dislocation. I’ve popped it back in, but we really ought to get a poultice on that,” I recommended to the Inspector. She writhed in pain, and looked about to go into hysterics, but the arm was moving and clawing, no longer hanging uselessly.
“Just who are you?” Elric Blair murmured, wide-eyed.
“Ehh…spent a few months in the Kowloon Walled City. Picked up a few tricks from a nice bonesetter there. Too bad he got hacked up by the syndicate for his gambling debts.”