Salute the Dark

Elsewhere, the Creev’s Nameless Warrior danced with three Wasp orthopters. The halfbreed slave, the finest pilot of Chasme, had a ballista bolt jammed through his leg, pinning him to his weakening hull, though he barely felt it. He had no Art-flight anyway, and if his ship died, so would he. His rotaries, four of them, spat out their bolts, and span together about one axis to make a storm of shot, smashing one Wasp flier entirely, shredding its wings to ribbons, leaving a punctured carcase of its hull. He was faltering, though, his body and ship both wearing thin. He would die above his enemies’ city unmourned and unseen by any save for the Wasp that would bring him down – but not yet. He had some killing left to do before the end.

Axrad was now flying straight, and Taki knew that he would soon end it one way or the other. The Esca was shaking in unfamiliar ways: the poor ship had taken her share of beatings in this fight.

She pulled the trigger even as Axrad did, and she saw furrows raking into his hull before her rotary jammed altogether, and his shots slammed into the Esca’s undercarriage.

Oh.

She must dive aside now, but when she did he would find his place behind her, and then she would be lost. Another shot lanced past her, through the broken cockpit, heading for the engine casing.

She counted. Three bolts passed her by and one tore straight through the flesh of her arm. She screamed.

Taki pulled the release, and the broken frame of the cockpit fell away, and she kicked up, despite the pain, letting her wings flower.

Axrad pulled up at the very last moment, pulled up late because he had been so determined to bring her down that he had not realized he had already succeeded.

She was nearly caught between the two craft. Only a Fly-kinden’s swift reflexes saved her as the empty, abused Esca Volenti drove straight into Axrad’s flier, their wings snarling instantly, the Esca’s nose snapping on Axrad’s underside and then breaking through.

She did not notice if he was able to fly clear, as the two dying ships span madly down towards the earth.

She had a dagger, and the Starnest, which blotted out her sky, was very large, but even so it was all right because someone else had a larger blade than that.

She should have known that Hawkmoth, the old pirate, had preyed on airships before. Who knew how many he had assailed in the sky, and sent plummeting down to the Exalsee, where his shipbound confederates would be waiting? Over the Starnest’s taut canvas the Bleakness dipped low, a black and evil-looking flying machine, armoured and squat, with all the natural grace of a scarab in flight. From beneath it had unsheathed two curving blades, each the length of a man. There was no subtlety in it. The pirate simply threw his machine against the airbag and unseamed it, from stern to fore, with twin gashes seventy feet from end to end.

At first it seemed that even this had not affected this pride of the Wasp airforce, but then the difference told, the lighter gas venting out from the violated compartments, until the colossal bulk of the Starnest was dipping, sagging, and then falling down upon the city it had been sent to conquer.

* * *

He would not come to bed. Stenwold, instead, sat at his desk with reports and maps and tried to make sense of it.

‘You must sleep, surely,’ Arianna urged him. She was standing at the door to his study, wrapped in a robe of his that was vastly too large for her. ‘Stenwold, they will want you on the walls again tomorrow.’

‘And I shall go,’ he said. She noticed his hands were shaking. ‘Look at all this they have given me. The curse of this city is paper! We have a war on, and every man feels he must put it down on paper for me to read!’

‘Then don’t read them,’ she said. ‘They’ll tell you nothing you don’t already know.’

‘But there might be something,’ he said. ‘How could I go to the wall tomorrow knowing that I might have missed the one thing, the flaw, the gap…’ His fists clenched.

She approached him, put her hands on his shoulders. ‘Stenwold, please, come to bed.’

His whole frame was shaking. ‘What am I going to do?’ he demanded.

‘Sten… We fought the Vekken, didn’t we?’

‘The Empire aren’t the Vekken. Their general even told me as much, but I didn’t listen. The Vekken never hit us this hard so soon. The Vekken had not so many men who could just leap over our walls. I have lost…’ He choked. ‘I have lost one man in three of my own command already, after just two days’ full fighting. We cannot hold them.’

‘But-’

He blundered up out of his chair with a cry of rage and anguish, turning the entire desk over, scattering papers across the room. His face was distraught. She recoiled from him and he smashed a fist into a wall.