Vikings battle Zeppelins while forbidden desires spark! (Swords Versus Tanks Book 2) (7 page)

White thighs and copper curls flashed in the firelight, then the green velvet dropped into place. She smoothed out the creases. "Do not be so shocked, Sir Ranulph," said Lady Maud with a smile. "In a nunnery, what other purpose would an invisibility spell serve?"

Ranulph looked from lady to Amazon. He opened his mouth, but no words came.

Jasmine said, "Hurt her, and I’ll beat the crap out of you."

Ranulph eyed the dagger. In this confined space he’d have to use Steelcutter in a half-sword grip or else risk being defenceless while he dropped the sword and drew his dagger. He shifted his left hand onto his sword blade. "This time, you will not find me so merciful."

The shrill whistle resounded through the chamber.

Jasmine half turned her head then dropped into a fighting stance. She switched grip to hold her knife pick-fashion, the blade down for a stab. Perhaps she could even parry Steelcutter if she put the flat against her arm — Ranulph must not underestimate her.

"Are you such a hard-ass without the tin cans?" she asked.

The Invaders sometimes spoke very strangely, but Ranulph guessed the gist of it. "Are you so brave without an army at your back?" He raised his left hand so that sword covered his body.

No matter what skills she had, her attack would be a wild, angry rush – he knew the type. It should be easy to pivot forward, catch her wrist with the edge, and pommel-smash that beautiful round face.

"Put up your weapons! Both of you!" said Lady Maud.

Ranulph returned Steelcutter to its sheath. Jasmine did likewise with her dagger.

"Jasmine, was that whistle for you?" asked Lady Maud conversationally, as if nothing untoward had happened.

Jasmine glanced at the strange silver bracelet on her left wrist. "Pick up time."

Lady Maud’s brow furrowed. "You mean, time to return to your airship?"

The Amazon glanced at Ranulph.

He put on his best swordsman’s expression, giving nothing away.

"Um. No, Princess," said Jasmine. "The airship returns to us, not the other way around." She smiled sweetly. "Pickup is in front of the main gate. Why don’t you watch from the roof?"

"I should like that." Lady Maud offered Ranulph her arm. "Let us walk on the battlements, Sir Ranulph."

"It will be my honour, Milady," said Ranulph. He smirked at the grey liveried Amazon.

The red-haired sorceress raised her voice. "But do not think that I have made my choice. I am nobody’s lady, as yet."

"What’s the matter, big guy?" asked Jasmine. "Not sure you can handle the competition?"

#

Lady Maud bounded up the spiral steps ahead of Ranulph, stockinged ankles flashing marble white in the candlelight.

He raced after her, banging his shoulders on the narrow stairwell. Really, he should be angry or disgusted. Instead, he kept seeing her bright eyes as she offered herself to him back in the Archbishop’s dungeons.

With a sob of laughter, she halted at the top and pressed her back to the wall.

Ranulph closed in, eyes locked with hers, head tilted to kiss her mouth.

She dimpled. "Aren't you going to open the door for me?" she said.

Ranulph flushed. He shoved open the heavy cross-braced door onto the battlements. "Why her?"

Lady Maud brushed past him. "Because I wanted to."

Ranulph drew in his cloak and joined her on the battlements. Three disgruntled Islanders kept watch in the lee of a tarpaulined springald. Ranulph exchanged a nod with them and ushered the sorceress to a corner out of earshot. "She is an enemy," he said.

"That made it all the more exciting." She leaned out between the crenellations and looked back at him over her shoulder. "Besides,
you
wanted to."

Ranulph's cheeks warmed. "
I
would have been safe."

"Really?"

From below came a shouted order and the creak of hinges. Heavy boots thudding, Jasmine and Lord Lowenstein marched out over the moonlit drawbridge. They turned off the road and set out east for what looked like a giant bucket. The device stood on the moor just outside springald range. There was nothing ladylike in Jasmine’s gait as she negotiated the clumps of heather, but she didn’t walk like a man either.

"She moves like a cat," said Lady Maud.

"Or a mountain lion," said Ranulph, then frowned. They were both admiring the same woman for the same reasons.

"Do you recall the Dream of Piers?" asked Lady Maud.

"Pardon?" Ranulph laughed. "Yes," he said, glad to change the subject. "The version I know is somewhat bawdy."

"Well…" began Lady Maud. As she talked, the grey-liveried Invaders faded into the heather, becoming just a flicker of movement in the dark.

The giant canvas bucket rocked – somebody had climbed inside.

Ranulph held up his hand. "Enough, Milady! Before my head aches. An army from the Future. I believe you." He drew in his borrowed cloak and squinted into dark.

A red streak whooshed up from the bucket. Then unearthly lights garlanded the handle. A beehive humming broke the silence.

"There!" Lady Maud pointed. The breeze caught her trailing sleeve making it billow.

An object hung low in the western sky like the Moon’s dark twin. It seemed to change shape, swelling and stretching, until it showed itself to be one of the Invader’s black airships, steering for the source of the firework. It grew larger, filling the sky.

"God's teeth!" said Ranulph. "No wonder we haven’t seen their necromancers – they're still recovering from whatever spell transported this monster."

Maud laughed. "They have no magic! I had not seen anybody look quite so surprised as Jasmine when I used my invisibility charm…" She dimpled. "Not until I saw
your
face when you interrupted us."

Ranulph turned and stared at the red-haired sorceress. In an odd way, it would be good to believe that she had been whoring herself for intelligence, but her whimsical smile said otherwise. "If they really do not have magic, perhaps the Lesser Runes will be enough."

"Look!" she cried.

The buzzing became a continuous rattle. A light winked on the airship's underside, then revealed itself to be fastened to the end of a cable. This slowly payed out until the light was just above ground level.

"How many men did it take to craft your armour?" asked Lady Maud, a little louder.

"My armour is… inherited," said Ranulph. As Prince Hjalti would say, some secrets were not his to share.

"And yet appears so fashionable. And you never did explain the Earth Elementals…"

"A similar war harness," said Ranulph firmly, "would require a master armourer. Perhaps a dozen apprentices."

"Leather workers. Iron smelters. Miners," added Lady Maud.

Ranulph nodded. "Merchants to ship it to the Rune Isles for etching, and back again. So?"

"Now," she said. "Imagine how many men are required to make one of Jasmine’s war machines?"

"Too many to count," said Ranulph. "But they are not here."

"They will be. They have weight of numbers and we have not."

So…" She put a hand on his. "What did Ragnar say?"

"He said that Saint Guthrum stole the Greater Runes on behalf of the Church"

"Absurd!” exclaimed Lady Maud. “Everybody knows the Church can destroy magic, but how could it possibly take it away? You cannot steal an idea." She shrugged. "Perhaps he gave them some sort of runic grimoire, and a Runecaster to complete the Rite of Incineration."

Ranulph nodded. That much he did understand. The Rite of Incineration required the burning of both the necromancer
and
the grimoire. Once performed, the necromancer’s magic was banished from the world.

Maud's teeth flashed in the moonlight. "But I suspected as much. If the Rune Isles still possessed powerful magic, somebody would have been tempted to use it."

The airship sailed closer, now at the leisurely pace of a merchant ship drawing into a harbour. Moonbeams caught on the crystal globe that served as its prow.

Lady Maud turned to fix him with her green eyes. "I can already play with the weather, render a handful of assassins invisible, heal wounds. But there are other spells in my grimoire, and not all of them are
insanely
dangerous and unpredictable." She drew in her cloak. "I shall spend the winter experimenting. You shall have your magic."

Ranulph thought about their precarious arrival on Greater Thule. He did not want to be anywhere near Maud's experiments. "It takes ten years to become a swordsman," he said. "Magic must be at least as complicated, and you propose to become an adept over the course of a season?"

"Then Westerland is doomed."

"You
will
be doomed if you attempt this," said Ranulph. "Magic makes you erratic — "

"
Air
Magic makes me... spontaneous," said Maud. "It corresponds, after all, to the sanguine humour. Earth however is melancholic. I shall experiment with that — "

" — and no doubt render yourself immovably morose instead," said Ranulph and suddenly remembered wanting to be a real,
active
, knight so very badly. "Cheer up, Milady. There are powerful magicians across the Impassable Ocean. I shall find you a tutor."

Lady Maud frowned. "My sylph is limited to this quarter of the Earth." She raised her voice over the buzz of the airship. "I shall rewrite one of the spells. It cannot be that complicated…"

The airship swept past the gatehouse. It was longer than the castle’s north wall, taller than the keep.

"Actually, I thought I'd steal one of those," shouted Ranulph.

"Now?"

Ranulph shook his head. "They are under flag of truce. I'll return to Westerland with a shipload of Ragnar's housecarls and steal one from there."

The dangling light connected with the handle of the giant bucket. The airship soared and the contraption whipped off into the sky, taking with it Colonel Klimt and Lowenstein.

"When I offered myself to you," said the sorceress. "You treated me like a child.
She
treated me as an equal."

"Your pardon?"

"You wanted to know why I lay with Jasmine."

The airship dwindled into a gap between the stars. Ranulph turned away from the moor and went down on one knee, buying time to find the right words. He kissed her hand. The skin was hot, as if the magic really did warm her blood. "You are my superior in most ways, Lady Maud."

She laughed. "But not in the ways that count to the rest of the world. I will come to nobody’s bed, except as an equal." She tugged at his hand. "
Do
get up, Sir Ranulph. You are being ridiculous."

Ranulph rose to face her. "So how will you achieve this equality?"

She kissed him on the lips. "By magic, of course."

"Then I had better get back to Westerland and find myself an airship."

Her eyes hooded. "Indeed." She grinned. "Do you suppose there is any mead left?"

"There is always mead in Ragnar’s hall." Ranulph put his arm around her waist, drawing her hip against his. "And I think we both deserve a drink."

CHAPTER EIGHT

The airship is the ultimate appliance of science to pacification. Its surgical force quickly brings Proto-Elitist primitives into the Egality, at no risk to our brave personnel. Indeed, going forward, the synergies with Integration are quite remarkable.

— Editorial, "The Leveller" (Post Office Internal Publication, 1932)

#

Jasmine leaned over the railing as the doors swung open, letting the cold northern night into the airship's bomb bay. The wind howled through the exposed wires. Below lay King Ragnar’s stronghold, its cement rendering glowing sandy-white in the moonlight.

In the corner of her eye, Jasmine noted the priest recoiling against the firesilk walls and drawing in his white cassock.

“Prepare yourself, cleric,” she said.

He gave her no acknowledgement. Instead he clasped his hands and closed his eyes. His lips moved in silent prayer.

Jasmine shuddered. He reminded her too much of Georgina's husband.

The icy air infiltrated her clothing, puckering her skin. Shivering, she zipped up her flying jacket until the fur-lined collar felt like a neck-brace and cursed the pointless secrecy order.

Field Marshal Williams preferred the rest of the army not to know that he was getting into bed with the Church, so here she was suffering the cold when it would have been much easier to let the Bomb Technician do his job. Everybody onboard knew what was going on anyway — it was not as if you could fail to notice five priests keeping vigil at the altar they’d built in the middle of the Main Deck.

Jasmine shrugged and let her mind return her to a warmer night and another moonlit castle.

On the glorious summer day in ‘26 when the Army of the Egality stormed into shell-shocked Kinghaven, Jasmine had marched up to the door of her original "Princess". Before the War, Georgina's husband had once called her a deviant and threatened her with a trip to Sandhaven Rehabilitation Centre. Now, he chose not to recognise the muscular, course-voiced soldier woman come to take his wife "for questioning".

And so, hand-in-hand, they'd giggled their way down to the war-emptied beach where Jasmine constructed a fortress of sand for her Princess, then claimed a kiss in payment for her toils.

The moonlight forgave Georgina's worry-lines. It was easy to ignore the last ten years. Almost. This time, Jasmine knew what they both wanted, and was armed with a thousand mouth-watering tricks for getting it. Soon her Princess's protestations gave way to louder, happier sounds. It seemed to Jasmine that she was home at last.

But, all too easily, Georgina slipped out of the afterglow, back into clothes and respectability. Watching her lover dress, it occurred to Jasmine that from their first chance meeting, the older woman had been more predator than princess, and her apparent innocence, a snare.

Hours later, Marcel found her still naked, curled up asleep within the ramparts of her sandcastle.

The Bomb Aimer crackled over the intercom, "
Any moment now. Are the eggs ready?
" Jasmine considered the munitions: Mark 19 Single-Use Vertically Applied Demolition Devices. The airship was drifting with the wind, so there was not even the sound of the engines to warn the raucous warriors while they enjoyed the remainder of the feast that she had shared with them.