The Aeronaut's Windlass (75 page)

The walls and floor and furniture were all made of wood, so she must be on an airship. There were a number of wounded men in the room on pallets. Several of the men had faces she recognized from the desperate battle in the ventilation tunnels, so it stood to reason that she was back aboard
Predator
.

Bridget frowned, trying to put together her memories of the period between now and that battle. She remembered a fire, and a terrible weight on her shoulders, a sharp blow to her head from a falling stone.

And a man. A man in an Auroran uniform. A man she had killed with her battered hands.

She remembered that perfectly.

Bridget contemplated that in silence for a moment. She decided that she neither liked nor regretted the act, and that it had been absolutely awful. If she had not done it, neither she nor Benedict would have—

Bridget shot to her feet abruptly. Benedict! Where was Benedict?

The wooden room swayed, and she felt herself sink back into the chair before she fell down. She had to grip the seat of the stool beneath her to keep from falling off.

“Easy, easy,” said a young woman’s voice from next to her. A hand on her shoulder steadied her. “You look as though you’ve had quite enough adventure for the time being.”

Bridget looked up at the speaker and blinked twice. “Gwen?”

Gwendolyn Lancaster looked exceptionally odd. In the first place, she was wearing men’s clothing that was much, much too large for her. The clothes were covered with grease and soot, as was perhaps two-thirds of her face. Her right hand was so thickly wrapped in bandages that it could not be seen as anything but a lump, and her hair, beneath another stained bandage, resembled the spreading wings of an airship’s charged ethersilk web, standing out from her head in a small cloud.

“You look awful,” Bridget said.

“You’re one to talk,” Gwen said. She sighed, leaned back against the wall, and slowly slid down it until she was sitting beside Bridget.

“What happened?”

Gwen waved her bandaged hand. “I learned that one ought to be extremely cautious when connecting live wires during free fall.”

“Are you well?”

Gwen grimaced as she looked around the room. “More so than some, it would seem.” Her eyes came back to Bridget. “And you?”

“I feel ill. And my leg hurts.”

Gwen nodded toward the center of the room, where a pair of aeronauts were carefully lifting a wounded man down from an examination table and over to a pallet. Doctor Bagen, looking worn, tired, and bloody, nodded to another pair of aeronauts, who lifted the wiry young man named Stern onto the table. “Doctor Bagen doesn’t think your injuries are life-threatening. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait the longest to be seen.”

“Sitting quietly sounds quite agreeable at the moment,” Bridget said. “Where is Benedict?”

Gwen’s face clouded. “On a pallet on the other side of the table. He’s unconscious.”

Unconscious? Unconscious meant alive. He was still alive. Bridget slowly unclenched her hands. “What is his condition?”

The smaller girl pressed her lips together into a line, and her expression became a careful mask. “Less than ideal. Like several of the crew, he has been poisoned by silkweaver venom.”

“Then he’s”—she couldn’t bring herself to say “dying”—“in serious condition.”

“He’s dying,” Gwen said.

Bridget felt her stomach clench.

Gwen continued in a level voice. “They all are. Apparently Master Ferus can help them, if we can recover his gear from the
Mistshark
.”

Bridget nodded. “And Rowl? I remember he had a cut on his head.”

Gwen glanced up toward a set of cabinets on one wall and flipped her bandaged hand toward them. Bridget followed the direction of the gesture, and spotted the ginger cat asleep on top of a cabinet. One side of his head was wrapped in a clean white bandage. “He’s quite the hero at the moment. The men say he saved their lives.”

“Well, yes,” Bridget said. “Though I almost feel that they shouldn’t go about saying it aloud. He’s already impossible to deal with.”

Just then the world lurched sideways. Bridget all but fell off the stool. For a second she thought her head injury had caused her to lose her balance, but then she realized that several of the pallets on the floor of the infirmary had slid half a foot across the floor before being brought to a halt by tethers attached to odd rings in the walls.

“What was that?” she asked.

“Crosswind. We’re under way, in pursuit of the
Mistshark
,” Gwen replied. “We have been for nearly two hours.”

Under way? On an airship? Then there was nothing around them. Nothing at all. No walls, no Spire, no ground. Just the vast and empty reaches of the sky. Bridget’s heart labored quicker, and the aches in her head and leg increased. Rowl hurt. Benedict dying. Terrible, irrational fear knotting her guts. Blood on her hands.

That was enough for one day, she supposed.

She bowed her head and began shuddering with silent tears.

“Oh,” Gwen said. Bridget could sense her make a few abortive motions before she patted Bridget on the shoulder and said awkwardly, “There, there. It’s all right. All’s not lost yet. Captain Grimm is quite confident we can bring the
Mistshark
to battle.”

“Yes, of course,” Bridget said, nodding. “But if it’s all the same to you, I’m going to take a few moments to cry, in any case.”

Gwen was silent for a while. Then there was the sound of ripping fabric, and she pressed a length of somewhat stained cloth torn from her too-large shirt into Bridget’s hand.

The small gesture of kindness broke something. Bridget leaned toward Gwen, sobbing.

Gwen grunted a bit with the effort, but braced herself and held the larger girl steady with an arm around her. Bridget leaned against her and wept so hard that stars spun across the insides of her eyelids—but she did not make noise doing it. She simply couldn’t.

She didn’t give herself long. Five minutes, perhaps, passed before Bridget forced herself to steady her breathing. She sat up slowly and wiped her face with the cloth, then blew her nose. She nodded to Gwen and said, “Thank you.”

“You are welcome.” The heir of the most powerful family in Spire Albion regarded Bridget soberly. “I’m not a very good friend,” Gwen said. “I’m willful and blunt and arrogant, and I’ve not had a great deal of practice. Frankly . . . I’ve never been good at stomaching the company of the other children of the Great Houses.”

Bridget let out a short, subdued laugh. “Neither have I.”

“Well, then,” Gwen said. “Common ground.”

Just then, outside the infirmary, a bell began to ring.

Bridget looked at Gwen in question, but the other girl shook her head. She didn’t know what the sound signified, either.

“General quarters, lads!” Doctor Bagen called.

The room stirred with sudden activity. The men assisting him immediately began belting the wounded man down to the examination table with straps apparently made for the purpose. After that, they methodically, quickly did the same to the men on the pallets, while Bagen himself began clipping leather straps attached to a wide leather belt to rings set in the examination table. Another pair of aeronauts began putting jars and bottles and other supplies away in close-fitting storage cabinets, apparently determined to leave nothing sitting loose around the compartment.

“Here,” Gwen said. She reached down and produced a similar wide leather belt, and began passing it around Bridget’s middle. “If you don’t strap up, and the ship is forced to maneuver quickly, you could be thrown into the wall or the ceiling with enough force to kill you.”

Bridget let Gwen secure the thick belt on her. Then Gwen showed her how to clip the straps to rings set into the walls and floor all about the compartment, evidently for this very purpose, and how to cinch the lines in tight. Bridget felt a bit like a vegetable hung up to dry by the time the process was over, but she could see the need for it.

And then a terrible thought struck her.

“Gwen,” she said. “What about Rowl?”

Gwen blinked and then turned to Doctor Bagen, who had resumed work on Mister Stern. “Sir? What about the cat? Is there a belt for him?”

“No,” Bagen said, without looking up. “Nothing that small.” He finished tying a knot in a length of suturing thread and looked up, frowning. “But we can’t have the little blighter flying about my infirmary, can we?”

The rhythm of the ringing bell changed, and Bagen cursed. “Maneuvers! Get hold of him, quick!”

“Rowl!” Bridget called, opening her arms.

Rowl rose up, his movement slower and less fluid than it normally was, and leapt toward her.

Predator
lurched, and a weight like a loaded tank from her father’s vattery pressed her mercilessly to the deck.

Chapter 65

DMS
Mistshark

M
ajor Espira looked around the hold of the
Mistshark
at his command. His Marines had performed with most excellent discipline. Their losses had been serious but not utterly outrageous, and if they had not accomplished absolutely every objective on their mission, their main objectives had been achieved. The presence of his force had inflicted a paralytic fear on the citizens of Spire Albion. The Landing Shipyard had been destroyed, and it would take months, if not years, to rebuild after the internal economic chaos bound to ensue in Spire Albion. Cavendish had recovered her book, though Espira had not been made privy to its significance, and every duplicate copy of the volume had been destroyed with the monastery.

He had led his men on a mission of extraordinary ambition, and extraordinary danger. More important, thank God in Heaven, Espira had also led most of them out again. His losses had been lighter than he’d dared to hope for.

Of course, he’d paid a price to do it. He’d led an attack on a Temple of the Way and its resident monks. He’d set fire to a habble full of civilians—enemies, true, but civilians nonetheless. If he hadn’t, there was no way his men would have made it out with such light losses. He had traded the lives of people he did not know for those of men he did.

That was, he supposed, human nature.

He was proud of his men. He was proud of what they had accomplished, how hard they had trained, and how that training had paid off. He was proud of the blow they’d dealt to the Albion menace. He was proud that he’d taken command of them, knowing that he had a better chance to bring more Marines home alive than any other commanding officer available for the mission.

But he was not proud of the things he’d had to do to get them home again.

And, he reminded himself grimly, they weren’t home yet.

The weary men were stacked fairly closely in the airship’s hold. Most of his Marines, being good soldiers, were already asleep. Some were still too wound up from the action and were speaking quietly together. Some of the wounded lay quietly suffering as they waited their turn with
Mistshark
’s doctor. A quartet of seasoned veterans had simply broken out a deck of cards and begun playing, despite the dimness of the hold.

The mood wasn’t as joyous as it could have been. Men had been wounded. Men had fallen. The elation that each man felt in having survived the mission was tempered by the knowledge that others like him had not been so fortunate. No, not joy. But definitely relief. Relief that it was over. Relief that the Reaper had not chosen them today. Relief that they were going home.

Though, he reminded himself again, they weren’t home yet—but they had a good running start toward getting there.

Ciriaco approached through the gloom. The tall sergeant ducked under the beams that supported the airship’s deck above them, nodded to Espira, saluted, and said, “She wants to see you in her cabin, sir.”

“Of course she does,” Espira said. He sighed and pushed himself up from his comfortable bed of lumpy cloth sacks. “Time enough for sleep when I’m dead, I suppose.”

Ciriaco made a grimacing expression that passed for a pained smile. “You want me to come with you?”

“No, Sergeant. I expect that if she was going to snap, she’d have done it before now. I’ll be fine.”