Leviathan

The Stormwalker drew closer and closer, and Deryn realized that Dr. Barlow had gone barking mad. She wasn’t even trying to get out of the way. The walker was keeping a steady pace, just a squick slower than the sledge.

She pantomimed confusion for Dr. Barlow, and the lady boffin made climbing gestures in reply.

Deryn frowned, then saw the ladder hanging from the Stormwalker’s belly hatch. It flailed in the air as the machine ran, trailing behind like some daft child’s broken kite string.

“Oh, you’re not thinking I should grab on to that,” she muttered. The ladder was all chains and metal rungs— heavy enough to knock a tooth out!

Deryn crossed her arms. She could climb up into the walker once the sledge came to a halt, couldn’t she? Of course, the quicker she got aboard, the sooner they could go help the Leviathan.

Across the ice, the Clanker airships were making their first pass. Machine guns flickered from their gondolas, a cloud of flechette bats swirling around them. She could see how small the zeppelins were now—barely two hundred yards long. But the Leviathan was almost helpless beneath them, her flocks hungry and battered from last night’s battle.

“No barking choice, I suppose,” she muttered.

The Stormwalker drew nearer, so close that its giant feet were kicking snow back into her face. But the ladder flailed just out of reach. Deryn edged to the front end of the sledge, balanced precariously on a barrel of sugar. Still, she couldn’t reach it. She was going to have to jump.

Deryn readied herself, flexing her hands and trying to see some pattern in the ladder’s thrashing.

Finally she leapt into the air …

Her fingers closed around a metal rung, and she found herself swinging forward between the walker’s legs. The engine noise was deafening. Gears and pistons clanked and gnashed about her, and a pair of exhaust pipes hissed hot black smoke into her face. Her grip was jolted with every giant step, her feet swinging wildly. The ladder twisted in the air, whirling Deryn like a drop spindle.

She thrashed her feet until one boot caught a lower rung, anchoring the ladder—the world stopped gyrating.

Glancing up, she saw Bauer and Hoffman peering down from the darkness of the belly hatch. Bauer’s hand was out. All she had to do was climb a few meters.

As if that were easy.

Deryn reached up to grab the next rung. The metal was jaggy, gripping her gloves with little teeth. She pulled herself grimly upward, trying to ignore the spikes arrayed around the hatch.

“CLAMBERING UP INTO THE GEARS.”

Finally she was close enough to reach up and take Bauer’s hand. Hoffman grabbed hold, and the two of them pulled her inside in a squick.

“Willkommen an Bord,” Bauer said with a smile, meaning “Welcome aboard,” of course.

Blisters, but Clanker-talk was easy.

THIRTY-TWO

“You’re white as a ghost!” Dr. Barlow said.

“It’s only flour.” Deryn pulled herself the rest of the way into the pilot’s cabin with a groan. Her hands ached from clinging to the flailing ladder, and the muscles in her arms were howling. Her heart still beat like a hammer.

“Flour?” Dr. Barlow said. “How odd.”

“Well done, Dylan!” Alek was twisting at the controls. “I’ve never seen anyone come aboard a walker that way!”

“I wouldn’t recommend it.” She plonked down on the lurching cabin floor, panting hard. Tazza crept over to nuzzle her hand, then sneezed out a snootful of flour.

Within moments Deryn felt dizzy from the walker’s motion. The trip out to the castle had been bad enough— the screech of metal against metal, the smell of oil and exhaust, and the endless, murderous noise of the engines. But at full trot, riding in the walker was like being shaken in a tin snuffbox. No wonder the Clankers wore those silly helmets; it was all Deryn could do to keep her head from banging against a wall.

Klopp, who was peering out the viewport through field glasses, said something in German to Alek.

“I thought he wasn’t helping,” Deryn muttered.

“That was when we could hide,” Dr. Barlow said. “Now that the Germans have certainly seen us, he’s changed his tune. If we don’t shoot both of those zeppelins down, they’ll report about our Austrian friends.”

“Well, he might have made up his mind a bit faster.” Deryn looked down at her aching hands. “I could’ve used some help cutting that chain.”

Dr. Barlow patted her shoulder. “You did well, Mr. Sharp.”

Deryn shrugged off the compliment and stood up. She’d had enough of being bounced about blindly. Grabbing on to two hand straps that hung from the ceiling, she pulled herself up and out the top hatch.

The cold hit her full in the face. It was like being on the spine of the airship in a storm, the horizon lurching around her with every step.

Deryn squinted into the eyeball-freezing wind. The zeppelins were skimming low, dragging ropes along the ground. Men slid down them, landing in the snow with guns and equipment on their backs.

But why bother? If they wanted to destroy the Leviathan, they could stay up high and use phosphorous bombs.

She dropped back inside. “They’re putting men down.”

“Those are Kondor Z-50s,” Alek said. “They carry commandoes instead of heavy weapons.”

“It seems their objective is to capture our ship,” Dr. Barlow said.

“Blisters!” Deryn swore. A live hydrogen breather in the Clankers’ hands would be a disaster; they’d learn everything there was to know about the great ship’s weaknesses. “But aren’t they afraid of us?”

“They’ll have anti-walker guns aboard,” Alek said grimly. “They can’t fire them from the air. But from the ground, they’ll give us a fight.”

Deryn swallowed. It was bad enough, riding in this contraption. But the thought of being broiled alive by some armor-piercing shell made her ill.

“We need your help again, Dylan.”

She stared at Alek. “Do you want me to drive this barking contraption now?”

“No,” he said. “But tell me, do you know how to fire a Spandau machine gun?”

Deryn knew no such thing, but she’d fired an air gun plenty of times.

This was quite different, of course. Like everything else made by Clankers, it was ten times louder, shakier, and more cantankerous than it looked. When she gave the trigger a test squeeze, it rattled like a piston in her hands. Bullet casings spewed from its side, bouncing from the cabin wall in a hot metal hail.

“Cripes!” she swore. “How do you hit anything with this?”

“Simply point it in the general direction,” Dr. Barlow said. “What the Clankers lack in finesse they make up for with blanket ruination.”

Deryn leaned forward, squinting out the tiny peephole. All she could see was snow and sky bouncing along. She felt claustrophobic and half blind. It was the opposite of watching from the Leviathan’s spine, with the battle spread out below like the pieces on a chessboard.

She glanced over at Klopp, who was manning the other machine gun. Instead of looking out, he was waiting for