Again. ‹Please.›
‘Your revolution has run its course, child of Pairdan. Your city is about to live again.’ Quest beckoned Veryann over. ‘See that our guests are sent off on their way.’ He mounted a velocipede and was driven away towards the tomb.
Veryann secured Amelia to a seat next to the agent of the Court of the Air.
‘How does his plan sit with you?’ asked Amelia.
‘It is the plan of my liege-lord,’ said Veryann.
‘That doesn’t sound like much of an endorsement.’
‘It has a cruel logic,’ said Veryann. ‘That which is fit, prevails. That which is not, perishes. It is the way of life and the code of our free company.’
‘The code of the Catosian city-states,’ said Amelia. ‘How much of Catosia will be left after the Camlantean death mist drifts across your lands and people?’
‘We will be left,’ said Veryann. She looked out. The hull was nearly ready now, the linesmen fitting in support struts to strengthen the airship’s catenary curtain. ‘And we are no longer counted as true Catosians by our people. We were banished.’
‘Banished for losing one of the codified little tournament wars your cities hold to settle disputes,’ said Amelia. ‘Hold far out on the plains, so that the cities are not damaged and the innocents in them are not hurt by hostilities. That is your warrior’s way, isn’t it?’
‘He is our liege-lord,’ repeated Veryann. She got down from the rear cabin and pushed the collapsible steps up into the pocket airship’s floor.
The expansion engines on the side of the pilot cabin coughed into life, rotors spinning up, the airship starting to rise above Veryann’s golden hair. Amelia shook her head in sadness and looked down at the officer. ‘Enjoy Camlantis.’
‘Goodbye, professor.’
Before the pocket airship could depart, one of the sailors standing by an anchor rope twisted his mooring stake back down into the ground, kicking his colleague off balance, a second boot lashing out to smash the linesman into stillness. The renegade lifted a cutlass out of his belt. ‘Let’s save our goodbyes for later, lass.’
Amelia’s heart leapt. Commodore Black!
Veryann slipped out her Catosian sabre, her eyes glancing up at the pocket airship listing at an angle against the anchor as it tried to break free of its mooring. ‘You should have stayed hiding in the apartments of this ruin, Jared.’
‘Don’t be dying for that rich madman you call master,’ pleaded the commodore.
She warily circled the paunchy submariner. ‘I don’t intend to.’
A line of soldiers running towards the two fighters from the other side of the square suddenly scattered, shouting in alarm. The heavens above Camlantis were dark with hundreds of skraypers. Steering-cables trailed up to their lashlite masters, the organic zeppelins tamed by skin hooks. Thousands more of the winged lizards rode the currents of the upper atmosphere in intricate formations, slowly drifting chevron V’s, pointed hexagons, arrow- braided columns — the talons of Stormlick and the other fierce gods of the winds.
‘It never rains but it pours,’ said the commodore. ‘They must have heard you’re holding their fine-feathered friend Septimoth in a cage.’
‘Then they’ve come a long way for his corpse. They can have his lashlite bones back for a harp,’ spat Veryann, slashing the single line holding the pocket airship to the dirt. No longer bound to the ground, the stat rose away from the square, arrowing off low to avoid the beating wings of the lashlite battalions above them.
‘Head for Mechancia,’ Veryann yelled up towards the pilot cabin. ‘Deliver those steammen to the Free State at any cost.’
‘Tell the lashlites to bring us down!’ Amelia cried down to the commodore on the ground. ‘We’re a steamman plague ship, we’re-’ then the craft was pulling away into the sky, the rest of her words muffled by her air mask and the crosswinds blowing over the city.
Amelia was gone, the pocket airship diving between the spires to evade a passing skrayper, destined for Jackals and the Steamman Free State. Death and plague for both lands following close in their wake.
Commodore Black turned a sabre cut and pulled his cutlass back as Veryann tried to catch the edge of the sword and rotate the blade out of his hand. ‘This is a very different board for our little game of chess, lass.’
The air above them was afire as the
Veryann’s form angled sideways and her blade cut ahead and forward, her right boot stamping down with each flourish. Commodore Black wheezed as he parried the attack.
Veryann struck again with renewed vigour. ‘Yes, but you’re twenty years and as many pounds ahead of me on this board.’
It was true. Her shine-swollen muscles made her a tigress, a living weapon of muscle, trained and honed for a singular purpose: war and its victory. An airship sailor reloading his rifle to their side spun around behind Veryann as a plummeting lashlite lance found its mark in his chest.
Commodore Black mustered his strength and ignored the ache in his arms, giving her a taste of her own medicine, but she was so much faster than him, meeting each blow with a clang of steel and pushing him away every time with an intricate counter lunge.
He was soon back on the purely defensive, the vapour from his regulator soaking his forehead. ‘You’ve a sophisticated style about you, lass. As befits a Catosian maiden.’
She feinted left then cut up, severing one of the tubes from his mask, the rubber cable hissing half his precious air reserves away into the thin atmosphere. ‘Yield now, before your heart gives out.’
‘Ah, you’ve already broken that, girl.’
Their swords sparked in the centre of the ancient Camlantean square, the clashing of steel lost behind the rumble of one of Quest’s tracked carriages as it cut a corner, its stubby cannon emptying a shell towards the lashlite formations spiralling above.
‘Yield, and I can hide you away in one of our spare sleeping capsules.’
‘Your blessed new world would be a sight too tame, clean and quiet for old Blacky,’ wheezed the commodore, the mask hanging off his face. ‘A sight too quiet for a Catosian fighter, too.’
She closed in for the kill. ‘Then it’s time for a different kind of sleep, old man.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Amelia jerked against her wrist ties, but the leather loop was too firmly stretched between her hands and the chains on the wall. She tried yelling and whistling for the lashlites, but failed to attract their attention over all the carnage in the sky. Two of the Jackelian airships were still in the air — the
Rifle and cannon smoke drifted over the city. Flights of the winged lizards dived down, striking with unerring accuracy from their gliding formations, leaving hails of lances falling behind them, any lashlite warrior who survived the answering volley fire from the ground pulling up to rejoin the sky-borne armada. Camlantis had known centuries of peace locked to the Earth and centuries more in her cold banishment; it had never seen an explosion of violence of this magnitude. No quarter was asked for. No quarter was given. Wounded Catosian mercenaries inching bloodily across the white pavement were left still and pin-cushioned by swooping keen-eyed lashlite braves. Lashlites unlucky enough to be downed alive were mobbed by Quest’s academy soldiers and airship sailors, their wings torn by bayonets, skulls crushed in a frenzied flurry of rifle butts.
Amelia yelled out again to the lashlites, her voice cracking with the effort.
