Soulblade (32 page)

T
olemek rolled his knockout grenade across the lumpy ground toward the hot air balloon. Four soldiers stood around the basket, which was tied to a stump, ready to lift off at any time. With the men staring toward the dark sky over the harbor instead of watching their surroundings, Tolemek and Kaika might have walked up and clobbered them over the head with their rifles. Instead, they crouched in the shadows, waiting for the grenade to do its work.

A sea breeze gusted, batting at the balloon, and Tolemek worried the knockout gas might dissipate before it affected the soldiers. When one slumped against the basket, his firearm clunking to the ground, he exhaled with relief.

“Corporal?” another asked, stepping toward the man losing consciousness.

“Sarge? I feel—” The man collapsed.

The sergeant took three steps, then joined his comrade on the ground. The remaining two men must not have inhaled as much of the gas. They spun toward the trees, their rifles coming up.

Tolemek dropped to his belly. He held his pistol, but he didn’t want to fire and alert all the soldiers on the ships of his presence. He glanced toward where Kaika had crouched beside him, but she had disappeared. Circling the soldiers to attack from behind, he hoped.

A dragon roared again, this time from farther inland than before. Tolemek guessed Phelistoth was leading the female dragon away from the harbor. To what end, he didn’t know, but those roars were distracting the soldiers, and that was a good thing for his tiny team of two.

One of the men stiffened, then collapsed. This time, it had nothing to do with the gas. The last soldier standing whirled toward his fallen comrade’s back, and Tolemek leaped to his feet. He ran toward the man, intending to help Kaika, but the Cofah was knocked to the ground with the others before he got there.

“Your basket awaits, Prisoner Tolemek.” Kaika gestured grandly at the hot air balloon.

“Should I feel emasculated by the fact that you’re doing all of the grunt work?”

“Probably, but I won’t tell anyone if you use your magic scientist skills to make me some special grenades someday.”

“Anything in particular you’re looking for?”

“I’ve been wondering for a long time if underwater explosives could be made.” She gazed thoughtfully toward the ships floating in the bay. Imagining them going up in blazing infernos? “But any improvements to the weapons that mundane technology can currently put into my arsenal would be excellent. I’d settle for bigger booms.”

He snorted. “I’ll see what I can come up with if we make it home.”

“Did you just call Iskandia home?” She thumped him on the shoulder.

“I—uh.”
Had
he called it home? When had he started to think of Iskandia that way? When Cas had started talking about house hunting? “I like the lab the king gave me.”

“That’s good to hear.”

Tolemek rested a hand on the lip of the balloon basket and gave the device a cursory examination. It was comprised mostly of lightweight wicker woven inside a crisscrossing framework of slender metal bars. Hooks clipped to the bars held ballast weights for landing the craft. Tolemek started unhooking them.

“Do you know how to fly a hot air balloon?” he asked.

“I assumed you did. There’s gas in it. You’re handy with gas.”

“There’s gas in the airships. These things get their lift from the heated air. I’ll do my best to steer us to the right ship, if you agree not to use me as bait.”

“How else will we get close to the emperor?”

“With stealth and ingenuity,” Tolemek said. “Look, I don’t want to risk becoming his prisoner. My parents still live in Cofahre, and he could use me to hurt them. Or he could use them to manipulate me. I don’t want to betray Iskandia, but I don’t want to betray my family either. You might be able to walk away after selling me to him or whatever your plan is, but I won’t be able to escape from all of his imperial bodyguards, not when the first thing they’ll do will be to remove all of my gear.” He patted his vials and grenades. “Let’s sneak in and grab him without alerting them to our presence.”

“That might be hard if we’re going up in their hot air balloon.”

“We just have to overpower the guards at the top and throw them overboard.” Tolemek gauged the distance between the airships and the bay. It wouldn’t be a
fun
drop for the soldiers, but it should be survivable.

“And have them swim to one of the naval ships to raise the alarm? This isn’t the plan Colonel Quataldo had in mind.”

“He’s not here.”

“No, because you sent him off to babysit your sister.”

“Kaika...” Tolemek extended a hand toward her, groping for an argument that would work. “We can do this. I’ll make you some underwater explosives if we both survive.”

“You think that’s possible?”

“Of course. It would just be a matter of creating a waterproof shell to protect the components from moisture.”

Kaika sighed. “Stealth and ingenuity, you say?”

“That’s the plan.” Tolemek threw a leg over the side of the basket. “Do we need to tie up those soldiers and stuff them somewhere?”

“I don’t think so.” Kaika hopped into the basket with him. “By the time they wake up, we’ll either be done... or we won’t.”

Right, they would have either found the emperor—or they would be dead.

Tolemek cut the rope and fired up the burner. He had flown models of these as a kid but did not know if that would give him enough experience to get them up to the appropriate airship. As far as he knew, there were no steering controls, and one had to simply hope the wind was blowing in the right direction.

He needn’t have worried. The balloon lifted diagonally, attached to a slender cable he hadn’t noticed in the dark. It was almost like the tram cars in the mining outpost. His shoulders slumped in chagrin when he saw that the cable wasn’t taking them to the right ship. He also spotted two soldiers leaning over the railing up there and looking down at them, the sides of their faces highlighted by a nearby lantern. They appeared alert and curious. Wondering why the balloon was making an unexpected trip up?

“I believe the big one is the emperor’s craft.” Kaika pointed to the airship
next
to the one they were heading toward. “They’re anchored close to each other, at least. I have some rope in my pack and a collapsible grappling hook. We might be able to shimmy across.”

“We have to deal with those soldiers first.” Tolemek dipped into another pocket, debating between knockout gas and smoke. He grabbed both.

“Can you throw them up something to think about?”

“Maybe.”

The huge balloon blocked part of his view, and it would be hard to loft the grenades up and over the railing without them bouncing off the balloon or the hull of the ship. If Cas were here, she would make the throw look easy.

“I don’t like maybe. Give me a yes or no. If it’s no, I’ll do something to distract them. Take my shirt off perhaps.”

“Does that work?”

“Of course. Would you shoot a woman wiggling her bosom at you?”

“It depends on if she’s wiggling grenades at me at the same time.” Tolemek leaned out of the basket, lining up his throw, eyeing the narrow gap between the balloon and the railing. It only grew smaller as they continued to float higher, guided by the cable.

“Monarch butterfly,” one of the Cofah called down.

“Passcode,” Kaika whispered.

Having no response for it, Tolemek tossed his first grenade. He threw the second before it landed. The first sailed upward and over the railing, clunking onto the deck behind the two men. Smoke spewed forth, and one turned toward it. The other lifted a rifle, pointing it at Tolemek. He ducked into the basket as the second grenade landed, this one bouncing off the top of the railing and almost hitting the soldier in the face. He jerked his rifle up, deflecting it. He clipped it, and it ricocheted onto the ship instead of falling over the side. Good.

Crouched in the basket, Tolemek waited for shouts to arise from above. It always took twenty or thirty seconds for the knockout grenades to work, even in ideal conditions, and with the sea breeze stirring the air, this was less than ideal.

“Climb out,” Kaika whispered.

“What?”

They were less than ten feet from the railing, with the hull of the ship blocking most of their view now. The deck would be in sight in seconds.

“That was too easy,” she whispered and slithered over the back side of the basket with a dagger in her mouth. She hung from the lip, then lowered herself further by gripping the metal framework.

Tolemek hesitated, then slung himself over the side as well. His foot slipped as he tried to find a grip that would allow him to hang on the outside, using the basket to block the soldiers’ view. He looked down, the water of the bay appearing black in the weak pre-dawn light. The warships looked like toys. He gulped. Had he truly intended to toss the guards over the railing? A drop from this height would not be good for one’s health.

Kaika hung on the basket beside him, her head below the level of the lip. “I think we’re past stealth and ingenuity. Do we make a ruckus here, or go back to the barter-you-as-bait plan?” She spoke around the dagger in her mouth, her teeth clenched on the back of the blade.

“We threw grenades at them. You don’t think we’re past bartering?”

“They weren’t
deadly
grenades.”

“Dragon!” came a cry from the deck above them, from the front of the airship.

“So?” someone much closer to the balloon responded. “It’s our ally. The emperor made a deal with it.”

“This is a
different
dragon. A silver one.”

The basket bumped as it made contact with the railing.

“Now, while they’re distracted,” Kaika whispered, then disappeared around the side of the basket, crawling as easily as if she were a spider.

Tolemek wasn’t sure the soldiers would be
that
distracted, but his arms and legs were already tired from holding his body weight from his fingers.

“Where are they?” someone by the railing asked. “The basket is empty.”

“
Someone
threw that grenade. Hawibbs is knocked out.”

With more daylight, the men would have easily seen Tolemek’s fingers, which gripped the lip of the basket. He poked his head around the corner opposite the one Kaika had gone around, thinking he might be able to clamber over to the railing and pull himself onto the ship before someone noticed. But a row of soldiers waited at the railing.

“There,” someone cried.

Tolemek ducked back as a soldier fired. The hells with that plan. He lowered himself, his forearms aching from the effort. He had to let his legs dangle as he maneuvered under the basket, gripping the metal bars with shaking fingers. This was idiotic. Why hadn’t he let Kaika use him as bait? They might have gotten all the way to the emperor before being shot at.

He found Kaika dangling from the bottom of the basket already.

“We have a problem,” she whispered. “There are eight of them up there.”

Rifles fired, and the basket splintered above them, bullets slamming into the wicker. The soldiers thought they were still hanging from the back side. Sooner or later, they would figure out that Tolemek and Kaika dangled from the bottom instead. Not that it mattered. Their arms would give out whether the soldiers started shooting lower or not. Unless...

Tolemek eyed the side of the ship. Were they below the level of the deck? Maybe.

He made sure he had an excellent grip with his left hand, then let his right go long enough to dip into one of his trouser pockets for the corrosive compound he had used in the jail. In a move he could never replicate in a less desperate moment, he used his teeth to unscrew the lid.

“Got a hand free?” he whispered.

“Possibly for up to twenty seconds,” Kaika whispered back.

“I need a bunch of that—” Tolemek jerked his chin toward the jar, “—smeared on that.” The second chin jerk went toward the hull. “There’s a brush attached to the bottom of the jar. Make sure not to touch the substance inside with your hands.”

More gunshots sounded right above them.

“As if a burn is the largest of my problems right now,” she muttered.

He did not tell her that it would do more than burn, that it would eat all the way through to the bone and into it. He didn’t want to alarm her further. Their positions were already cause for plenty of alarm.

“Did we get them?” an eager soldier asked. He sounded like he was leaning over the railing.

“I didn’t see anyone fall.”

“It’s too smoky up here to see anything. Someone kick that grenade over the side.”

Kaika maneuvered herself close to the hull and let go with one hand to find the applicator brush for his compound. It was a good thing she had long arms. She swabbed the brush in the jar and reached for the hull, barely touching it with the end, but she did manage to spread a circle of it. Not as large of a circle as Tolemek would have liked, but he thought they could make it work.

“Is that enough?” she whispered.

“The dragon’s landing on the emperor’s ship,” someone called. “Do we shoot it? Or let them deal with it?”

“Is it attacking? Maybe this one wants to make a deal too?”

Tolemek winced at the idea of Phelistoth making a
deal
with the emperor. “Can you put the lid back on and—”

Kaika’s hand, the one gripping the bottom of the basket, slipped. As her fingers fell away, Tolemek dropped the jar and reached for her, horrified as he imagined her plummeting all the way to the bay below. She surprised him by grasping onto his legs before she had fallen more than a couple of feet.

The extra weight startled him, and he nearly lost
his
grip. He jerked his other hand up, barely catching a bar. His already weary arms trembled under the additional burden, and only sheer terror gave him the strength to hold on. Between Kaika and her pack full of gear and explosives, that had to be close to two hundred pounds hanging from him.

“Sorry,” Kaika whispered, even as she climbed up him, trying to get to the basket again. “My natural instincts are to grab on.”