The Palace Job (19 page)

"I'm sure everything is fine," Orris declared. "You may not know Archvoyant Silestin like I do, but he runs a pretty tight ship!"

"Be quiet, Orris," Silestin said, glancing at the crowd. The other Voyants were giving him speculative looks. "Let's all move back a bit. Don't want to crowd the ship when it lands."

As the smooth ride went all to hell, Loch darted out of the safety of her invisibility field, grabbed a crewman from behind as he cocked his arm back to hurl a knife at Dairy, looped her other arm between her legs, and unceremoniously heaved him over the railing.

Tern had unsnapped her false shackles and had darted behind Desidora, who was holding four men at bay with great sweeps of Ghylspwr. Dairy whipped out a truncheon, but Kail had thankfully gotten between the boy and any real harm, and was parrying like a madman.

Most airship crews had little combat training, but everyone except the helmsman was slashing and stabbing with skill. Every man had his teeth pulled back in the same vicious snarl, and every man's eyes were dead and cold. It was as if they were wearing masks.

As Loch grabbed her sword from Pyvic's unconscious body, one of the men darted in too close, and Ghylspwr smashed the blade down, arced around in a complete circle that sent Desidora leaping into the air with its sheer momentum, and then crashed down on the thug's head with a cry of
"Kutesosh gajair'is!"
The thug went
down—straight
down, through the deck into the open air below, tearing a good-size hole in the planks in the process.

"Over
the side, not through the damn hull!" Loch shouted. A half-dozen of the crew caught sight of her and moved her way, and she knocked aside one slash, kicked one of them in the shins, leaped aside, and brought her saber down on a line attached to the sailwings. With a horrific creak and tear of metal, the wing snapped out. A coil of rope whipped out taut in one swift motion, clotheslining two of the men and sending them overboard. On the other end of the ship, the helmsman screamed.

A flash of movement caught Loch's eye as the ship heaved to the side and everyone stumbled. Off the starboard bow, four crewmen flew majestically over the railing like ocean spray. Glancing back, Loch saw Desidora with Ghylspwr held in a truly impressive follow-through pose. In the rigging overhead, Icy leaped from rope to rope while crewmen hurled knives at him. One missed him by a handbreadth and continued on its upward path to strike the balloon, only to bounce off harmlessly.

Another crewman lunged in, face still fixed with that same inhuman snarl, and Loch parried the stab, moved in, and hammered the man's arm against the rail, sending the sword flying away. As he stumbled, Loch grabbed his collar, moved in for a throw...

"Loch."

And looking at his face again, past the rictus snarl and the dead eyes, Loch saw Jeridan, the gambler who'd fixed Kail up with supplies in the Cleaners.

"Help me." It was barely a whisper. His face was still snarling, but something warred behind his eyes. Jeridan had never been a fighter. He'd barely known one end of a sword from the other.

Loch hesitated, and Jeridan broke her grip and grabbed for her sword. She punched him in the face and swept his legs out from under him, sending him crashing to the deck. "What the hell happened?"

Jeridan, the man with a glass jaw and a tendency to cry when hit, pushed himself back to his feet. "Loch, help me. I can't... I can't..." He was looking at her sword. "Please."

He lunged, as much at the blade as her, and she spun aside and hilt-punched him behind the ear. "No. Tell me what happened, and we'll—"

Behind Kail, Dairy drew back his truncheon and hurled it. It arced past Kail, threaded a maze of rigging without touching a single rope, and slammed into the helmsman's forehead. He reeled drunkenly and then collapsed across the control panel, pushing countless levers and crystals as he slid to the ground.

The ship gave a terrible wrenching, creaking, cracking, tearing noise that started in the deck and worked its way through Loch's body like the bellow of an ox suddenly realizing that it outweighed the angry farmer by at least half a ton.

The balloon flickered with blue light, and several of the sailwings leapt into motion. Two wings sprang out, one began to extend and retract repeatedly, and one wrenched backward and tore itself from the ship in a crashing explosion of splinters, to sweep across the deck in an enormous arc of wood and canvas.

Loch regained her senses to find herself prone on the deck, her saber quite some ways away and her entire left side sore. There were a few crewmen still on deck, and Hessler was suddenly visible, lying unconscious in a heap by the railing.

Everyone was on the ground, or at least on their knees. Loch tried to get up, failed, and thought she'd taken a shot to the head before realizing that the ship was swinging with wild movements while still moving forward and skyward.

Jeridan clung to the rigging, hanging over empty space. "Free." And with the effort of a man lifting a mountain, he let go.

"No! Damn it!" Loch fought her way to her knees, but he was already gone, a speck far below.

"Sorry!" Dairy called from across the deck. "I didn't mean—"

Loch got to her feet. "You're doing fine.
Don't throw anything else!"
A flash of movement from the corner of her eye was followed by a stunning pain that sent her into the railing. She dived sideways as a boot splintered the wood of the railing where she'd lain.

"Mmrff rrmrrmm," Jyelle growled, and then tore the gag from her mouth and tossed it to the deck, next to the unlocked shackles and the key she'd gotten from Pyvic's unconscious body. "This time,
Captain,
I'll see you dead."

The crowd roared as the passenger ship reared up over the dock like an ancient dragon come to life. The balloon missed the dock itself by no more than a few feet, sailwings lashing the air, and one whipping rope sent a section of planking whizzing past Silestin's head.

On the torn and splintered remains of the deck, men and women were locked in combat. Silestin caught a glimpse of two Urujar women fighting near the railing, and then the ship whooshed over his head and reeled drunkenly over the city with sawdust falling behind it. In the bright morning air of Heaven's Spire, shouts erupted in the streets.

For a moment, the crowd was silent. Silestin gave them a quick look.

Then he turned to Orris and, in a shocked and angry voice, demanded, "Warden, just what the hell was that?"

Kail was still parrying. Desidora was driving most of the remaining crew back on their heels with great sweeping strikes. Dairy was making his way to Hessler, either incredibly lucky or incredibly skilled at avoiding the lashing ropes and flying debris over at that end of the ship. Tern's plate, at the moment, was mostly empty.

"Um, Loch?" Tern called. "If we pass over the city, that's going to negatively impact the plan!"

"Little busy!" called Loch, who was engaged in an enthusiastic knife-fight with Jyelle. "Ever flown a ship?"

"I'm sure it's like driving a wagon!" Tern reached into a pocket and withdrew a vial of purple powder. She tore the stopper free with her teeth and flung the contents past Kail into a crewman's snarling face, and the man yelled and clutched at his eyes until Kail kicked him over the edge.

Tern had never driven a wagon, either, but since Loch was involved in a knife fight, Tern was ready to get outside her comfort zone.

Carefully pulling herself along the railing with a few nasty surprises at the ready in case the few remaining crewmen came her way, Tern made her way over to the helm. She pushed the unconscious navigator aside and studied the helm.

The six levers obviously corresponded to the sailwings, and she was reasonably certain that the large crystal surrounded by a bunch of smaller crystals (many of them blinking red, which was almost never good) had something to do with the big balloon.

"What do you want me to make it do?" Tern looked over. Loch and Jyelle were doing some kind of intricate dance of death, their blades moving faster than Tern's eyes could follow as the two women circled the rubble-strewn deck. Tern wished she'd learned something about knife-fighting, but she was really good at cracking safes, and safes didn't usually stab you in the stomach when you botched the tumblers.

"Land!" Loch shouted, and then stumbled on one of the holes Ghylspwr had made in the deck and barely ducked under a slash that would have taken out an eye. The two women collapsed into a mess of arms and legs and knives, and Tern, who really didn't want to even
think
about the logistics of adding wrestling into the knife-fight equation, went back to consulting the helm.

Landing, landing, landing. Well, if her limited grasp of Ancient was any good, that panel marked
"Oankilar"
probably had something to do with descending, but there were several buttons in that area, and there was probably some all-important procedure to follow with—

"Die!" Tern looked up to see one of the crewmen glaring at her, arm raised to throw a knife. Before she could do anything, he hurled it at her, and then a flash of gold obscured her vision, and all at once Icy was there, crouched in a coiled warrior's pose after leaping from the rigging, one arm flung to the heavens.

"Icy!" Tern cried. "No!"

"There is no need for apprehension," Icy said calmly. "I knocked the blade aside harmlessly." The crewman snarled and went off to find greener pastures.

"No!" Tern grabbed Icy's shoulder and pointed up. "What I was
going
to say was, 'Icy, no, you knocked the knife straight up, and it appears to have torn a hole in the balloon overhead, and now the wind-daemon is trying to claw its way out!'"

Icy looked up at the balloon, where a smoky, mustard-yellow tentacle with a dozen barbed claws was wriggling out of a tiny tear. "Ah. Did Loch not instruct you to land the airship?"

"I'll get right on it."

As the ship's balloon distended, Bi'ul sniffed the air, then smiled. "Wind-daemon. Lovely bouquet."

"Archvoyant, you can't blame me for this!" Orris insisted. "I left before they found her! I wasn't even
there!"