Halcyon The Complete Trilogy (41 page)

 “Not to worry.” Ghanima tried to smile. “We’re still on the right side of the horizon.”

She barely had time to look at the view ahead when the soft humming from Taziri’s control board dropped half an octave and several decibels. “What was that? Did we just lose something?” She squinted around the cockpit.

“Yeah, the heater. Looks like the coil burned out a connection.” Taziri motioned at a tiny yellow light on her board. “I can’t fix that until we’re on the ground.”

“You have an electric heater?”

“Of course,” she said. “I turned it on just after sunset, like always. Never had a problem with it before, not in four years. It’s all right. The motors should actually run a little better if it’s a few degrees cooler back there.”

“It’s not the motors I was worried about.” Ghanima took her hand off the stick long enough to blow a warm breath over her fingers.

Then the cabin lights died again.

Taziri laughed.

“This isn’t funny.”

“You’re right.” She continued chuckling. “But it’s pretty ridiculous.”

“Wait, there! I see it!” Ghanima pointed at the dark window in front of her. “Wait…there it is again! That’s the beacon light at the southern edge of the Lower City. See? A blue-white light on a three-second interval. We’re on course!”

“Yeah, good work.” Taziri peered into the gloom. “I can’t see it, but I believe you. Is it far? It must be. And with this crosswind, we’re not going to get there any time soon.”

The flood lights cut out again.

Ghanima laughed. Even as she shivered in her cold seat in the pitch-black cockpit, she laughed, and Taziri laughed with her.

“Okay, can I at least get a light on the compass dome here for a minute?” She tapped the glass in question.

“Sure.” Taziri’s search through the tool rack was noisy but brief. “Here it is.” In the darkness, a small disc of soft yellow light appeared at the end of the flashlight, a heavy tube containing a conventional battery that could be relied upon for almost ten minutes of use in its entire lifetime. The light shuddered, faded, and vanished. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.” She banged the side of the light. “It’s dead.”

“So that’s it? We’re out of options? The only thing still working are the motors, and they could cut out at any moment. And we can’t see outside, so we could be flying into a mountain any moment now.”

A bolt of lightning lanced down through the darkness ahead to starboard and in that instant the stark topography of the mountain range was burned into the aviators’ eyes, left to hover in their vision as a discolored after-image as they blinked and squinted in the swallowing dark. Thunder roared through the cabin in waves and the drumming of the rain quickened.

“Well, good.” Ghanima nodded. “No mountains dead ahead. At the moment. Did you see anything out there?”

“No.”

“There you go, then.” She heaved a deep sigh. “We’re fine.”

Chapter 37. Syfax

Syfax sat listening to the rain pattering lightly on the train’s thin metal roof. It came in gusts, sometimes softly and sometimes violently, but never for very long. The irregular winds in the deep canyons hurled much of the weather into the rock walls, and through his window the major could see the rainwater streaming down the cliff faces in bright, shining lines.

Through the curtains of rain and occasional gusts of steam from the engine, he could still discern the shape of Kenan’s head through the windows. He had not moved except once to look back after the armed men had passed him by. Syfax was about to ask a steward how much longer before they reached the Lower City when the clear outline of the corporal’s hand appeared in the front window.

Time to be elsewhere
.

With his coat still reversed, he stood and moved to the back of the compartment and crossed into the next car. It was identical to the one he had just left and he continued through it with only two quick glances back over his shoulder. Through the night-shrouded spaces between the cars, he saw the two large guards ambling down the aisle toward him.

Maybe they told Chaou what I look like. Maybe Chaou sent them back for me. Maybe, maybe, maybe…

The next car was baggage, a maze of suitcases and small boxes stacked from floor to ceiling and lashed to iron rings in the walls with slender cords and heavy chains. The unsteady piles of containers jostled and leaned as the train rumbled through the mountain passes, and Syfax opened the back door just as he heard the front door open.

Come on, fellas, give it up. No one wants to get shot on a train. Especially me.

Lightning flickered overhead, signaling a fresh growl of thunder and hurling a few momentary shreds of light down onto the train. Outside the baggage car, the major found a wall of wood with no door. The freight car could only be accessed through the long sliding doors on its sides, or possibly by using the rusty iron ladder that led up to the roof. He felt the cold wind lashing his bare hands and face with freezing rain, and the darkness overhead was absolute, without a single pinprick of starlight to brighten his surroundings. Only the pulsing electrical lights of the passenger cars, generated by the locomotive itself, offered him a reprieve from the dark.

Standing on the narrow balcony, Syfax ran his hands blindly over the walls of the car and found a ladder to his left leading up to the roof of the baggage car. A quick jerk of the rungs gave him some confidence that it might be safer than its counterpart on the freight car. He climbed up to the roof.

In the center of the roof he found a thin metal bar to grab. Possibly meant as an alternative means to tie baggage to the roof, it seemed to run the length of the car, and Syfax trusted his weight to it as he crawled away from the ladder. The rain stung his hands and face, cold and needling. Instantly, his hands on the metal bar were aching from the cold and he could feel his back tightening up, threatening to cramp from the tension of hanging on the sloping roof and trying to remain perfectly still.

He heard the rear door of the baggage car open and boots thumping on the exposed balcony. A few words reached his ears.

“…gone somewhere…”

“…not going up…”

“…take a look…”

And then there was the telltale metallic ringing of a heavy climber ascending a fragile metal ladder. Syfax glanced around for assets. He saw only a bare metal roof and a bare metal bar, and some rain. With a grunt, he swung himself sideways, sliding across the roof back toward the rear of the car and thrust the heel of his boot in the direction of the ladder just as a man’s head appeared above the level of the roof. The man shouted and dropped from view.

Still sliding out of control, Syfax rolled up toward the bar and used every frozen, aching muscle in his body to get his feet under him and then scramble along the apex of the roof, his back bent and hands climbing horizontally along the bar for safety. Every footfall echoed like a drumbeat on the roof, and every footfall threatened to yank his boot out from under him in the slick rain. His bare fingers were already numb.

At the end of the car he squatted above the edge of the roof and squinted through the heavy droplets clinging to his eyelashes. There was no ladder down, only a straight drop onto a narrow metal ledge between the cars. The only way forward was a long leap from one slippery sloped roof to the next. When the front door of the baggage car rattled open below, the decision was made for him. He jumped.

There was no time to stand or to back up for a running start. Syfax heard the door opening directly beneath him and he leapt forward, surging up into a wall of rain on two sore legs and two throbbing feet. He landed off-center but with the next car’s rooftop bar between his feet. His left foot shot out from under him and he fell squarely on the bar. The pain spiked up through his spine, but he clamped his teeth together and squeezed his eyes shut until the misery faded.

As he lay sprawled on his back staring up into the black roof of the canyon with the tiny freezing diamonds of water pelting his face, he heard the men yelling back and forth through the baggage car. Again, he could understand only every fourth word, but that was enough. They had heard him land on the passenger car.

Everyone on the damn train must have heard that.

Syfax scrambled to his feet and again traversed the train car by gripping the dripping, frigid bar that ran along the peak of the curved roof. He had just squatted down at the far end when he heard the first gunshot.

The sound was muffled and distorted by the wind and rain and canyon walls, but it was enough for him to throw himself down flat on one side of the roof with his hands still wrapped around the bar to keep him from sliding off the edge of the train. He tested his grip and decided, based on very little evidence, that he trusted his right hand more than his left, so it was the left hand that released the bar and slipped down into his coat to pull out his revolver. The new revolver from Arafez, which he had yet to fire.

Now what, genius? Shout an order? Fire a warning shot? These guys know I’m a marshal, but they’re taking orders from Sade. Who knows what she told them. Hell, they probably think I’m a traitor or an assassin.

Syfax thumbed the hammer back and tried to find a target somewhere in the darkness at the back of the passenger car roof, but all he could see were faint afterimages and nonsense shapes that bloomed when he blinked.

Lightning flashed overhead and a man appeared just a few yards away, crawling on all fours along the bar at the top of the roof. In that instant of illumination, the major looked into his eyes and saw the barest hint of a gun swinging toward him. Syfax fired blind. He heard the man’s gasp followed by the metallic clatter of a gun rolling off the train roof, and then the dull thumping of a man rolling off in the opposite direction.

Syfax grimaced.
Damn it.

He slipped his gun back into his coat. With both hands on the bar, he turned his head back toward the front of the train and saw the wind-battered hair of the other guard. For the second time, Syfax hauled his weight up toward the bar and swung his legs at the man. His boot caught the man’s head and he disappeared from view.

The major slid to the edge of the roof and lowered himself as far as he could reach, and then dropped to the narrow iron lip outside the car door. The guard had fallen on his rear and then rolled backward so that his legs were still on the ledge but everything above his belt was flopping and flailing over the edge, dangling all too close to the rails and rocky earth racing past beneath the train. Syfax grabbed the man’s shirt and hauled him up to a sitting position on the ledge and leaned him against the door of the passenger car. The side of his head was a dull red, his skin torn in a few places that were starting to bleed. The man blinked and shuddered, and his gaze seemed to focus on Syfax. His slack lips tightened into a frown and his right hand curled into a fist. Syfax punched him twice in the side of the head and let him flop down prone on the ledge.

The major grabbed the man by the lapels of his jacket, hauled him up onto his shoulder, and opened the door of the rearward passenger car. He dropped the man across the first bench seat. Straightening up, he found a dozen travelers all staring at him. Syfax glanced upward and he saw the dents in the roof. After a moment of silence, he pulled his dripping coat open to show the blood red interior. “Marshal business. Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep.”

Then he turned and trudged back up the train to his own seat. He sat down, suddenly very aware of how cold and wet he was. Every scrap of clothing on him felt ten times heavier and hotter, and chafed slightly as he moved. Kenan jogged back from the next car and slipped into the seat behind him.

Syfax said, “One’s dead and gone. The other’s unconscious in the last passenger car.”

Kenan nodded. “Sorry, major, I was going to came back to help as soon as they walked past, but then the ambassador came in and she just stood there, right next to my seat. I guess she didn’t get a good look at me back in Chellah after all. I think she was trying to see what her goons were doing and I figured I couldn’t move until she was gone. She just went back to first class, so I was just coming back to find you. Sorry, sir.”

Syfax blinked and a faint afterimage glowed behind his eyelids, the image of the gunman on the roof of the train, a heartbeat before he shot him. “You know, those men just now. They’re probably just Sade’s bodyguards. I know a lot of guys who went into private security after leaving the army. Decent guys taking whatever work they could find. ”

Kenan shrugged. “I guess so.”

“Men with families.”

Kenan shrugged again. “They chose the job, they decided to follow orders, and they knew they were looking for a marshal.”

Syfax grimaced. “The hell with that. Right now, one of them is bleeding to death, alone, lying on the side of the tracks in a canyon, in the rain, with a bullet in his chest. Freezing. In the dark. He’ll be dead in a few minutes, if he isn’t already. This isn’t a war, it’s…our people.” The major slowly pulled his revolver out and pressed it into Kenan’s hands. “Here.”

“I…” He held it awkwardly, not quite gripping it, letting it balance on his hand. “Major, I think you’re going to want this. And soon. Maybe we don’t have all the facts, maybe we don’t know exactly who’s guilty and who’s innocent, not yet, but we know that Chaou and her confederates are killing people. They might try to kill the queen. And since we can’t trust anyone to help us, we’re going to need every asset we can get our hands on between now and, well, whenever this ends.” He held the gun out.

“No.” Syfax stared straight ahead, lids heavy and drooping, back sore and aching.
I wonder where those families in the forest are tonight? Did they make it to town? Did they get caught in the riots or are they huddled under a tree somewhere, starving and cold?
“God gave me perfectly good fists. And I’ve shot enough people, enough of our people, whether they deserved it or not. Just put it away.”

He did. “What about the governor? What’s she going to do when her guards don’t come back? She’ll be suspicious. We need a plan. Maybe if we—”