Behemoth

“What in blazes are you doing?” Newkirk cried.

“Something barking daft!” she called as the tip of the metal-jointed trunk reared up before her. She readied herself on the rocking surface of the elephant’s head.

And jumped …

Her arms wrapped around the shining steel. The segments rasped and clanked as the trunk flexed, carrying her high above the crowd. Her feet swung out from the centrifugal force, as if she were riding the end of a huge whip whistling through the air.

The blur of passing shapes resolved around her—she was swinging toward the starboard foreleg. The impostor pilot stared, wide eyed, as she aimed both feet at him.

But he ducked at the last second, her dress boots whistling over his head. As she swung past, Deryn’s palms skidded on the shiny metal trunk, her grip sliding.

The man scowled at her and drew a knife.

There was something about his face—he was paler than most of the protesters in the street.

“Dummkopf!” she shouted at him.

“Sie gleichen die!” he yelled back. Clanker-talk!

Deryn narrowed her eyes—this was no Turk, or Vlach, or Kurd, or whatever else they had here in Istanbul. The man was a German, as certain as anything.

The trouble was, how to get rid of him? She didn’t fancy her dress boots in a fight against that knife.

She glanced up at the howdah. Dr. Barlow was shouting something at the howdah pilot, and Deryn hoped whatever the boffin was cooking up would work quickly. With every lurching step the elephant took, her grip on the polished steel loosened a squick.

The trunk began to flex again, swinging Deryn low over the street, a blur of paving stones passing below. She wondered what sort of boffin-inspired strategy she was expected to figure out while hurtling through the air.

Then the trunk came to a shuddering halt, the pilot keeping her steady as the machine lurched along. Deryn glanced down. She was hanging just above a table piled with spices.

“What in blazes?” she muttered. Did Dr. Barlow expect her to tempt the German off his perch with a home- cooked meal?

But after a moment of hanging there, a tickle started in the back of Deryn’s throat, and her eyes began to burn. Even an arm’s length away, the spices were fiery enough to notice.

“Not bad, Dr. Barlow,” she muttered, then sneezed.

Deryn reached down, snatching up the reddest and meanest-looking bag of spices.

The trunk swung back into action, whipping her back toward the German driving the starboard foreleg. She could see the cold look on the man’s face as she zoomed toward him, the knife flashing in his hand.

“Try this for dinner, bum-rag!” she shouted, and flung the entire bag straight at him.

The momentum of the speeding trunk redoubled the force of her throw, and the sack hit the German like a cannonball. It exploded against his chest, enveloping him in a dark red cloud. Spice billowed in all directions, swirling back at Deryn.

Red-hot fingers clamped shut her eyes. She gasped for breath, and liquid fire spilled down her lungs. Her chest felt stuffed full of embers of coal, and her grip was slipping.…

But she landed softly—the howdah pilot had set her down. She lay there coughing and sputtering, her body trying to expel the spices from her lungs.

Finally Deryn forced open her burning eyes.

The metal elephant stood motionless. Both its front legs were bent, as if the huge machine were bowing down to her. The back legs alone had not been enough to keep it moving.

Deryn saw flashes of blue slipping through the crowd, the two other impostors running away. But the German she’d blasted with spice lay in a pile of red dust, still coughing and sputtering.

As she rose to her feet, Deryn looked down at herself.

“Barking spiders!” she cried, then sneezed. Her uniform was ruined.

But the loss of one middy’s dress slops was nothing compared to the trail of destruction that stretched down the street—overturned carts and wagons, a donkey-shaped walker squashed as flat as a metal bug. The gathering crowd was quiet, still in shock at what the rampaging elephant had done.

A gangway descended from the walker’s belly. Two of the ambassador’s assistants grabbed the spice-addled German, while Newkirk and Eddie Malone ran through the crowd to her.

“Are you all right, Mr. Sharp?” Newkirk cried.

“I think so,” Deryn said as Malone’s camera flashed with a pop, blinding her again.

“Then, we’d better get back aboard,” Newkirk said. “These chaps could get unruly again.”

“But someone might be hurt.” Deryn blinked away spots, looking down the street. Were there bodies anywhere among the splintered wood and broken windows?

“Aye, that’s why we’re in a hurry. We need to find our pilots and get moving again, before things get ugly!”

“Things already look ugly to me,” Eddie Malone said, feeding a handful of sugar cubes to his firefly. He aimed his camera down the devastated street.

Still blinking away red spice, Deryn followed Newkirk back toward the Dauntless. She wondered how many people had seen the impostor pilots coming aboard a hundred yards back. Would anyone realize that the elephant’s British crew hadn’t caused this disaster?

Even if the crowd had seen what had happened, the newspapers wouldn’t report it that way. Not the ones the Germans owned.

“You saw, right?” she said to Eddie Malone. “It was impostors driving! Not our men.”

“Don’t you worry. I saw them,” the reporter said. “And we only print the truth in the New York World.”

“Aye, in New York,” Deryn sighed as she climbed the gangway. The crowd was already stirring around them as the shock of the rampage faded away.

The question was, would anyone believe them here in Istanbul?

THIRTEEN

Alek waited in the machine room, wondering when the signal would come.

He loosened another button on his jacket. Dr. Barlow had made the room as hot as an oven tonight. She always seemed to add more heaters when Alek watched the eggs, just to annoy him.

At least he wouldn’t have to suffer much longer. He could already hear the distant rumble of glow plugs firing in the starboard pod. Klopp, Hoffman, and Bauer were up there, pretending to work on the engine. And being noisy about it, so no one would be surprised to see Alek heading up to help.

After the disastrous start of Dr. Barlow’s mission today, the escape plan had changed. Alek had watched the elephant-shaped walker’s hasty return, carrying no supplies, its side spattered with some sort of red dust. Rumors had spread through the ship that the walker had been attacked, an incident in which dozens of civilians had been injured.

Within an hour angry crowds had arrived at the airfield’s gate, threatening to attack the Leviathan. Guards were posted at all of the airship’s hatches now, and a ring of Ottoman soldiers surrounded the gondola. There would be no sneaking out through the cargo deck tonight.

From his station up in the engine pod, however, Klopp had reported that no one was guarding the mooring tower. It was connected to the airbeast’s head by a single cable that hung eighty meters in the air. If the five of