Goliath

SIX

It was Newkirk who spotted them first.

He was up in a Huxley ascender, a thousand feet above the Leviathan in the cold white sky. His flight suit was stuffed with old rags to keep him from freezing, making his arms and legs bulge, like a tattie bogle waving semaphore flags….

T-R-E-E-S—A-L-L—D-O-W-N—A-H-E-A-D.

Deryn lowered her field glasses. “Did you get that, Mr. Rigby?”

“Aye,” the bosun said. “But I’ve no idea what it means.”

“T-R-E- E-S,” Bovril added helpfully from Deryn’s shoulder. The beastie could read semaphore as fast as any of the crew, but couldn’t turn letters into words. Not yet, anyway.

“Perhaps he’s seen a clearing. Shall I go up to the bow for a look, sir?”

Mr. Rigby nodded, then signaled to the winch man to give Newkirk more altitude. Deryn headed forward, making her way through the colony of flechette bats scattered across the great airbeast’s head.

“D-O-W- N,” Bovril said.

“Aye, beastie, that spells ‘down.’”

Bovril repeated the word, then shivered in the cold.

Deryn was feeling the cold too, on top of her night of missing sleep. Barking Alek and his love of contraptions. Sixteen long hours putting the mysterious machine together, and they still had no idea what its purpose was! An utter waste of time, and yet it was the happiest she’d seen Alek since the two of them had returned to the Leviathan.

Gears and electricals were all the boy really cared about, however much he claimed to love the airship. Just like Deryn, who’d spent a whole month in Istanbul without ever feeling at home among walkers and steam pipes. Perhaps Clankers and Darwinists would always be at war, if only in their hearts.

When she reached the prow of the ship, Deryn raised her field glasses to scan the horizon. A moment later she saw the trees.

“Barking spiders.” The words coiled like smoke in the freezing air.

“Down,” Bovril said.

Ahead of the airship was an endless fallen forest. Countless trees lay on their sides, plucked clean, as if a huge wind had blown them over and stripped their branches and leaves. Strangest of all, every stripped-bare trunk was pointed in the same direction: southwest. At the moment, straight at Deryn.

She’d heard of hurricanes strong enough to yank trees up from the ground, but no hurricane could make landfall here, thousands of miles from any ocean. Was there some manner of Siberian storm she’d never heard of, with icicles flying like scythes through the forest?

She whistled for a message lizard, staring uneasily at the fallen trees while she waited. When the lizard appeared, Deryn made her report, trying to keep the fear from her voice. Whatever had cut down these full-grown evergreens, which had been as hard as nails and sunk deep into the frozen tundra, would tear an airship to bits in seconds.

She made her way back to the winch, where Mr. Rigby was still taking signals from Newkirk. The Huxley was almost a mile above the ship now, its swollen hydrogen sack a dark squick upon the sky.

The bosun dropped his glasses. “At least thirty miles across, he says.”

“Blisters,” Deryn swore. “Might an earthquake have done this, sir?”

Mr. Rigby gave this a think, then shook his head. “Mr. Newkirk says all the fallen trees point outward, toward the edges of the destruction. No earthquake would’ve been that neat. Nor would a storm.”

Deryn imagined a great force spreading out in all directions from a central point, knocking down trees and stripping them as clean as matchsticks as it passed.

An explosion…

“But we can’t stand here theorizing.” Mr. Rigby raised his field glasses again. “The captain has ordered us to prepare for a rescue. There are people down there, it seems.”

A quarter hour later Newkirk’s flags began to wave again.

“B… O… N… E… S,” Bovril announced, its sharp eyes needing no field glasses to read the distant signals.

“God in heaven,” Mr. Rigby breathed.

“But he can’t mean ‘bones,’ sir,” Deryn said. “He’s too high up to see anything as small as that!”

She stared ahead, trying to think what letters poor shivering Newkirk might have sent wrong. Domes? Homes? Was he was begging for some hot scones to be sent up?

Deryn wished she could be aloft herself, and not stuck down here wondering. But the captain wanted her standing by for a gliding descent, to prepare for a landing in rough terrain.

“Did you feel that shudder, lad?” Mr. Rigby pulled off a glove, kneeling to place his bare hand on the ship’s skin. “The airbeast is unhappy.”

“Aye, sir.” Another shiver passed along the cilia on the membrane, like a gust of wind through grass. Deryn smelled something in the air, the scent of corrupted meat.

“Bones,” Bovril said, staring straight ahead.

As Deryn raised her field glasses, she felt a trickle of cold sweat inside her flight suit. There they were on the horizon, a dozen huge columns arcing into the air….

It was the rib cage of a dead airbeast, half the size of the Leviathan and gleaming white in the sun. The ribs looked like the skeletal fingers of two giant hands, clutching the wreck of a gondola between them.

No wonder the giant creature beneath her feet was twitchy.

“Mr. Rigby, sir, there’s an airship wreck ahead.”

The bosun dropped his gaze to the horizon, then let out a whistle.

“Do you think it got caught in the explosion, sir?” she asked. “Or whatever it was?”

“No, lad. Airbeast bones are hollow. The force that snapped all these trees would’ve shattered them. The poor beastie must have come along afterward.”

“Aye, sir. Shall I whistle for another lizard and inform the bridge?”

In answer the engines slowed to quarter speed. After two days at full-ahead, the great forest around them seemed to echo with the sudden quiet.

Mr. Rigby spoke softly. “They know, lad.”

As the Leviathan drew closer to the dead airbeast, Deryn spotted more bones among the fallen trees below. The skeletons of mammothines, horses, and smaller creatures were scattered like tenpins across the forest floor.

A growling chorus rolled up through the freezing air. Deryn recognized the sound at once, from during the cargo snatch-up, when the ballast had put too many smells into the wind.

“Fighting bears ahead, sir. Angry ones.”

“Angry’s not the word, Mr. Sharp. Have you noticed that we haven’t spotted any caribou or reindeer herds since we reached this place? With the forest fallen, there isn’t much hunting hereabouts.”

“Oh, aye.” Deryn looked closer at the bones of the smaller beasties. They’d all been gnawed clean, and when the distant roars came again, she heard the hunger in them.

The bears came into sight soon, a dozen at least. They were skinny and hollow-eyed, their fur matted and