Halcyon The Complete Trilogy (46 page)

Lady Sade smiled. “You’re going to arrest me?”

“Somehow, I don’t think arresting you will do much good.” Kella pulled out the marshal’s revolver from inside her dress and leveled it at Sade’s chest. “Your advocates would have you free and blameless in a matter of minutes and I would turn up the victim of some pathetic accident shortly thereafter, courtesy of your Persian friends.”

Lady Sade’s smile faded. “So you’re simply going to murder me instead?”

“No. You’d die a victim, not a criminal, and your little friends would all go free, and then I would be executed for killing you. Which is not what I had planned for my retirement.”

“A stalemate, then?”

Kella wanted to grin, to look brave or menacing, but she had no strength for it and no stomach for it. A cold, empty pit of horror and disgust gaped in her belly as she tried not to look down at the boy and the cat. “No.” She pointed the gun into the air and fired once, and then screamed, “Guards! Guards! Sade has a gun! Help! Guards!”

Before Lady Sade could react, Kella grabbed her empty hand and shoved the revolver into it, and then pretended to wrestle with the weapon over their heads so that the gun was clearly visible high in the air. The heavy pounding of armored feet echoed nearby.

“Guards! Guards!” Kella gasped from the strain as Lady Sade began to grapple for control of the gun in earnest with both hands. The little boy, now free, darted around the pair and clung to the back of the detective’s dress.

Lady Sade’s face twisted into a hideous angry mask as she tried to pry the weapon out of Kella’s hands. “You idiot, the guards wouldn’t dare shoot a woman in the middle of a struggle like this. They aren’t stupid!”

“I know.” Kella grit her teeth. “They’re going to need a better reason to shoot on sight, aren’t they? Especially if I want them to arrest your whole entourage, too.”

The gun shook in the tangle of fingers and bandages and jeweled rings, and the sound of the running soldiers thundered ever closer.

“So let’s give them a very good reason to kill you right now.” Kella yanked the gun down, prayed that she was pointing it at something she could live without, and shoved Sade’s finger against the trigger.

The shot echoed across the enclosed garden, followed by a smattering of surprised cries from Sade’s companions. Kella reeled back, unable to breathe. She felt the blood running down her side, hot and wet, trickling inside her clothes. The pain was bizarre, a riot of sharpness and stiffness and burning and coldness. She fell and a moment later the ground slammed into her back and a pale blue sky appeared before her. To her left, she saw the scared little boy sobbing and wiping at his eyes. His face was painted red.

Then she heard young men shouting across the garden. “Gun-gun-gun!” Half a dozen rifles cracked almost in unison, followed by another smattering of gasps and screams from the women in the hall. To her right, Kella saw Lady Sade fall, her eyes wide, lips parted in a silent cry of surprise.

Then there was a lot of dull noise: footsteps, muddled voices, screaming and crying, arguing, armor clanking. Men were barking orders, “Down on the ground! Hands on your heads. On the ground now!”

Kella tried to swallow and blink, and out of the corner of her eye she saw a hooded figure dart by, the hood falling back to reveal a tight silver bun behind wrinkled features, and in the crook of woman’s arm was the cat.

A moment later the white uniform of a guard leaned over her, and dimly she felt hands on her face and neck and belly. As she slipped away, Kella heard a young man hollering, “Medic!”

Chapter 44. Taziri

Taziri looked up at the major. “Well? What do you see?”

“It’s Chaou. I can see her silver hair.” Syfax held the binoculars tight against his eyes. “But I can’t see Sade or Othmani. There are a lot of people down there. Royals, kids, servants, the air crew, the guards. Wait, something’s happening.”

“What?” Taziri and Ghanima asked in unison.

“Chaou. She’s moving through the crowd. She’s holding something. It almost looks like a dog. Damn, the crowd is running from her. Servants, kids, all running. But the queen and some others are still between Chaou and the airship. What the hell is that dog-thing?”

“A dog?” Taziri frowned for a moment before the realization struck like lightning in her brain. “There’s something in the dog! Just like the shock device in Chaou’s arm. That’s the weapon, that’s how they smuggled it past the guards.”

“A bomb in a dog. Cute.” Syfax grimaced. “And if she throws the bomb near the queen’s skybarge…”

Taziri nodded. “Then everyone on that field will die.”

“We need to get down there. The guards aren’t doing squat. They’re just pointing their guns at Chaou. They must be worried about setting off the bomb.” Syfax lowered the binoculars. “What about now? Maybe the bomb will keep them all distracted for a few minutes. Will the men at those anti-aircraft guns still shoot at us now?”

“Definitely.” Ghanima nodded, wide-eyed. “We can’t possibly land there now.”

Taziri felt an idea slide up from the back of her imagination, a silly idea, a bit of reckless nonsense that seemed too stupid to actually say out loud, but no one was talking and the need to do something, anything, suddenly felt much stronger than the need to not say something stupid. So she said, “We can crash.”

“What?”

“All airships have a few emergency switches and releases. They’re designed to release the gas bag in the event of a collision or a fire.” Taziri’s hands gestured nervously, illustrating what she was saying. “The idea is that if an airship gets blown off the airfield, or has some disaster near the ground, you hit the release and the gas bag floats away and you don’t explode. If we can trigger the emergency collision switch in the nose of the queen’s skybarge, the gas bag will just float away and Chaou’s bomb will just be a regular bomb, instead of a super-bomb.”

The major nodded. “All right. But how do we trigger the switch from up here?”

“We’d have to hit it. Like I said, we can crash.” The engineer avoided the major’s eyes. “Isoke and I had this idea once that if we had to, if we
really
had to, we could release the gas bag while we were in the air and safely crash-land the
Halcyon
using just the propellers and the stabilizers to control the descent. That’s why we’ve got such long fins on the gondola. It would be a controlled crash. I mean, controlled enough to survive it.”

“Is that possible?”

Ghanima glanced at Taziri, and then at the major. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Syfax frowned.

Taziri swallowed and added, “Plus, it might cause a bit of chaos to have an airship falling out of the sky and crashing into the
Star of Orossa
. The guards may be able to tackle Chaou, or at least get the queen to safety in all the excitement.”
Excitement? I’m plotting my own death, and Yuba will never know what really happened to me. He’ll hear some official statement. My little girl will grow up thinking…what?

The major stared down at her. “If you think you can do it, then do it.”

Taziri touched Ghanima’s shoulder and pointed at the controls. “It’ll be safer for you and the major in the back of the cabin.”

Ghanima shook her head. “Your eyes are lousy, old-timer. I’ll do it.”

“Old-timer?” She sighed. “All right, let’s do this. Line up our approach and get us pointed at the nose of the barge’s gondola.”

“One minute.”

Taziri sat staring at her console, only watching the view of the city out of the corner of her eye. She noted how very clean her gauges looked.

“Got it.”

“Now throttle up to full power and try to keep the bow high.” Taziri watched the airspeed needle. “Stand by to release the bag.” The needle edged higher as the wind blasting through the open cockpit grew wilder. “Stand by.” Over the whine and growl of the wind, she heard the soft, almost muffled sound of cannon fire. She reached across her workspace and opened a small panel in the wall, revealing a thin steel handle painted red. The airspeed indicator notched upward, approaching the
Halcyon
’s best possible speed. “Ready…releasing…now.” She yanked the handle down.

The fourteen struts connecting the gondola to the gas bag snapped free of their housings with a short metallic screech and Taziri felt her stomach lurch up into her throat as the
Halcyon
plummeted toward the rocky mountainside. A moment later, an artillery shell exploded above them, followed immediately by the thundering detonation of the gas bag. Billowing waves of fire spread across the sky over head, filling the gondola with a hellish light.

Then the nose dropped and everyone lurched toward the broken windows. The major crashed forward into Ghanima’s seat as the pilot struggled to brace herself against the controls.

Taziri clung to her console. “More power!”

“That’s all we’ve got!”

Taziri scrambled out of her seat and clawed her way across the slanting cabin floor to the engine housing in the back of the gondola. The propellers on either side of her were growling and snarling, but another sound was beginning to overwhelm them: the whistling wind-scream of the falling airship. Taziri ripped the engine panels away and hauled herself up against the metal box where her massive batteries huddled in three rows, daisy-chained together just below the decoy steam engine.

“Damn resistors!”

She tore the main cable off the lead battery with her bare hand and felt ten thousand bees racing under her skin as the connection was broken and the propellers fell eerily silent. Her utility knife was already open in her other hand and she hacked the fat black resistor off the cable and then jammed it back under the battery terminal’s latch. A fiery shower of sparks leapt toward her goggled eyes as the propellers roared back to life and the airship surged forward.

For a moment, they continued to fall with the
Halcyon
’s glassless cockpit still pointed at the jagged mountain face. But then the deck leveled out and the view raced upward in a blur of rock and scrub brush until a dozen massive temples and palaces and towers appeared ahead. Taziri dashed back to her seat and squinted through her partially scorched goggles at the airfield. The heavy cannons at the edge of the city were still firing and she could hear the bullets whining past them, but she didn’t hear a single ping against the
Halcyon
’s hull.

Taziri focused on the prow of the queen’s skybarge, on the shining cockpit of the
Star of Orossa
. “A little to port! A little bit more!”

“I’ve got it!”   

“Just a little more!”

For a moment, Taziri let her eyes wander a bit to the side and she realized that although they were still falling, it was only at a shallow angle. The
Halcyon
was screaming along, faster than she had ever flown before, but she was almost level to the ground. Suddenly the view was obscured by a wall of gray as the tiny airship plunged into the Upper City, hurtling over a street through a sculpted canyon of stone and steel. Ahead, the airfield had erupted into chaos. People were running in every direction, some toward the queen but most away from the skybarge. Chaou was nowhere to be seen.

Taziri grabbed Ghanima’s shoulder. “Steady! Steady! You’ve got it!”

“I know! Shut up!”

The
Star of Orossa
filled their forward view. There was nothing but gas bag and gondola, and the slender strip of grass beneath them.

“You’ve got it!”

“I said I know!”

A dripping icicle of horror suddenly plunged into Taziri’s bowels as the golden airship and the ground thundered up to smash the
Halcyon.
She wrapped her arms around Ghanima and tried to haul her out of the pilot’s seat, but she slipped and fell to the floor behind the cockpit as they crashed to earth.

The sounds of crunching metal and screaming people rose to such unbearable decibels that all Taziri could hear was a painful screeching white noise as the deck drove into the airfield and everything inside the
Halcyon
that wasn’t bolted down flew forward. Taziri tumbled up against the back of the pilot’s seat, wrenching her neck and shoulders. Through her narrowed eyes, she watched the engine compartment of her ship tear itself in half as the electric motors and propellers plowed into the ground and ripped the walls of the
Halcyon
away. The little steam engine popped free without a sound and disappeared into the air and her batteries full of acid and sharp metal plates tumbled out of the stern and rained down on the three human bodies in the cockpit.

And then everything was still.

Taziri slowly lifted her head, then ran her trembling hands over her own body. She discovered a rectangular, acid-soaked plate impaled in her right kidney. For a moment, she could not process the idea of something stabbing through her body, but the moment passed. She grabbed the plate with shaking fingers and eased it out of her flesh. Her world went white, spinning and hazy, nauseated and cold, but only for a second, and with her left hand clamped over her bleeding wound, she sat up.

The first thing she noticed was that she was sitting on the grass looking at the crumpled remains of the
Halcyon
, which lay half-buried under the crumpled remains of the
Star of Orossa
. The second thing she noticed was that she was no longer inside her airship. The sun had just peeked over the eastern ridge and was stabbing her eyes through mud-caked goggles. Taziri pulled away her headgear and stared around for a moment, dazed and blinking.

Everything hurt, but the pain in her body was distant and confused, obscured by the pain in her skull. Like a puppet on shredded strings, she stood up and stumbled toward the wreckage, not really seeing the great scar in the earth stretching out behind the
Halcyon
, not really hearing the voices of the dozens of people around him. Everything was too unreal, too sharp, too bright.

One by one, a few facts trickled into her head. Words and names came into focus.
Ghanima
.
Syfax
. She glanced around but couldn’t see them. A high-pitched whine of white noise stabbed at her ears while green and purple spots danced across her vision. At her feet, she saw burnt and broken things she knew she should recognize, but didn’t. Bits of glass and metal sparkled in the dirt. A propeller stood leaning in the earth like a crooked tombstone just a few yards away. A wrench. A valve. A gauge. Taziri stumbled through the wreckage, breathing short, shallow breaths through clenched teeth as she clutched her side. She paused and glanced up. In the distance, off toward the west, she saw the gas bag of the
Star of Orossa
spiraling up into the sky, and she smiled.