By Fire Above_A Signal Airship Novel Read online

  He was about to point out that such a delay, in a battalion of such qualities, hardly required unnatural foresight, but he wasn’t in the mood to be thrown to his death right then.

  Two hundred feet below him, the plains were covered with newly budded grass shining a brilliant green, even under sunlight diffused by high cloud cover. The infantry companies had disembarked their train hours ago, and were now milling about on either side of a dirt road which cut the plain clear to the horizon.

  It was the cannons that had held them up. The battalion’s single artillery company possessed four cannons, and not one had yet been unloaded from the train. There was a positively chatty level of signaling going on between Major Emery below and Josette on deck, he waving flags about and she flashing messages on the ship’s signal lamp. From what Josette told Bernat, and from what he’d gathered from her mutterings, the men on the ground lacked some crucial piece of equipment required to haul the cannons off the train and onto their limbers, having accidentally left it behind in Kuchin.

  Now that Mistral had returned, the artillery captain wanted to rig a rope and pulley from her, and use the airship itself as a crane. Even Bernat could see the idiocy of that idea. It would only pull the ship down on top of them if Mistral were to idle her engine, or swing the guns around with deadly abandon if the ship were under power.

  Major Emery was the only voice of reason on the ground, but could not convince the artillery captain even by virtue of superior experience and rank. Indeed, all work on moving the guns without Mistral’s aid had stopped when she approached, so certain were the artillerists in the soundness of their new plan.

  The battalion was stalled with no one doing anything, their train sitting idle and another one—a supply train bound for the front lines—stuck behind it on the track.

  “These are the men who are going to retake Durum?” Bernat asked Josette when she put down the signal lamp.

  She sighed. “They’ll outnumber the garrison by five to one, in all likelihood. And it’s apt to be a garrison of old men and convalescents. And we’ll be attacking from the city’s weakest side. And they’ll have airship support. And perhaps even the support of the citizens inside.”

  “I still don’t like our chances,” Bernat said.

  “There’s the next train, sir,” Kember reported from the opposite rail. “Right on schedule.”

  “What a goddamn disaster,” Josette said. “It is slowing down, at least? It’s not going to crash, is it?”

  “It is slowing, sir.”

  She took some small relief but no particular consolation at this news, still looking as vexed as ever. “Small miracles,” Bernat said, to try to cheer her up.

  She only shot a nasty look at him and said, “What a goddamn disaster.”

  9

  IT WAS ALMOST evening before the 1st Battalion of the 132nd Regiment managed to rig a tripod pulley and get the guns onto their limbers. With night coming on, the battalion marched only a couple of miles down the road before they had to stop and make camp.

  In the morning, Josette woke to a morning drizzle pattering against the top of the envelope, and riggers collecting the rainwater for extra ballast. After breakfasting on ship’s biscuit—was this batch more inedible than usual, or had her palate been ruined by the food in Kuchin?—she went forward and caught Egmont sitting on the companionway instead of standing his watch on the deck as he was meant to.

  The rain stopped just after ten, but the weather remained overcast throughout the morning watch, through the afternoon, and into the evening, which suited Josette just fine. It would make observation by enemy airship all the harder, should another ship replace the scout they’d chased off.

  On the second morning of the march, she breakfasted on disagreeable ship’s biscuit again and came forward to find Hanon sitting on the companionway and an overcast sky. The third day was just the same. It was nominally a three-day march to Durum, but the battalion was making poor time, and the town was still over the horizon.

  Only on the fourth day did Mistral come near enough to sight the green roof and red woodwork of Durum’s single pagoda, standing out against the gray horizon. As they approached, the flat green plains under the keel turned into fenced-in squares of brown farmland, many of them already furrowed for planting.

  Once close enough to pick out smaller buildings, she called for the ship’s best spyglass and studied Durum in detail. Bernat joined her at the forward rail with a glass of his own.

  “What are those things in the town square?” he asked. “Scaffolds? Perhaps they’re constructing a pavilion around the pond?”

  She’d been studying them for some time, and thought she knew the answer. But she waited until they were closer, and had a clearer view, before she said, “They’re gallows.”

  “But there are scores of them!”

  “The Vins have been busy. Oh, look, you can just see Mother’s house there in the southwest quarter. Maybe I’ll drop by when this is over.”

  “Leave something on the stove?” Bernat asked.

  She laughed. “I’ve never left anything important in that house. Well, almost anything.” She wished she hadn’t said that, for she knew his questioning gaze would not let up until she filled in the details. She sighed and lowered her voice. “I did once abandon the Duchess of Almonesia there.”

  Bernat’s eyebrows skewed and pressed together until they nearly touched. “Let me guess … buried in the basement?”

  “No, no. We didn’t have a basement, so I stuffed her into a secret space in the wall of the upstairs room.”

  Bernat only blinked several times.

  “She was a doll,” Josette said, giving a self-effacing laugh. “Her name was Duchess Prettyheart.”

  He seemed no less shocked than when he thought she’d murdered an aristocrat. “You? Played with dolls? And a doll named Duchess Prettyheart, at that?”

  “Don’t speak her name in that disrespectful tone,” Josette said, chiding. “She had to rule her demesne alone from the age of twelve, after her father died heroically in the wars and her mother succumbed to a bite from a rabid horse.”

  Bernat did not laugh, but only looked at his feet with his hand over his mouth, trying to hide his grin. When he finally recovered the power of speech, he said, “I hope you’ll introduce us, after this is over.”

  “Of course.” But then Josette frowned. “Oh. It just occurred to me that she was probably torn to pieces by rats, years ago.”

  “An ignominious end for such an accomplished young lady.”

  “She knew the risks going in,” Josette said. And then her voice increased in volume, and she called to the steersmen, “Bow angle up three degrees until we’re in the clouds. Jutes, pass the word to rig a bucket for low-level observation.”

  The canvas bucket, made of sailcloth and wicker, and connected by line and pulley to the keel near the tail, was usually used to scoop supplementary ballast from waterways, and occasionally as an anchor to assist in making unlikely landings in the middle of battlefields. But now Josette was using it as an observation platform.

  It had been cinched up high enough to put her feet on the bottom and still have her head and shoulders above the lip. It was quite a good platform for spying, she reflected, when the next hour found her occupying it, a hundred feet below Mistral and still in the clouds. She only wished the bucket didn’t smell of fetid stream water. The smell had seeped into the canvas after its last use, and wouldn’t come out no matter how many times it was washed.

  Mistral was completely silent, as ordered, with the steamjack shut down as she drifted over Durum on light winds. Josette was only certain she’d plotted the ship’s drifting course correctly when she smelled the Vedat family’s tannery on the northwest side of town, its pungent odor making the bucket’s seem mellow by comparison.

  She waited and listened, and could just make out, on the very edge of her hearing, footsteps on cobblestones below. She gave three tugs on the signal line, to tell the crew
above to lower her another ten feet. When the pulley above started to creak, it seemed the loudest sound in the world, and she had to remember to breathe as she descended.

  The pulley stopped, the bucket ceased its descent, and she was still in the clouds. She should have been just below them, and fifty feet above the ground, but perhaps the cloud cover had dropped while they were positioning Mistral for the overflight, or perhaps there was some problem with the winch. Whatever it was, she had to get lower, so she gave three more tugs.

  The pulley squeaked above, more hesitant this time, and the bucket slowly descended. She still couldn’t see a damn thing. She caught a whiff of wood smoke, and a moment later felt a wash of hot air coming up from below. No sooner had she worked out the significance of this, than she saw, looming out of the thick fog in front of her, a triangular roof. There was a second-floor window near the peak, where a woman—Josette thought she recognized her as Mrs. Malleville—was taking in her laundry. Yes, it was definitely Mrs. Malleville, looking straight at her now, eyes wide and mouth agape.

  Josette gave two hard tugs on the line, and the bucket began to ascend almost instantly. But not quite fast enough, for while the drifting bucket closed the short distance in seconds, the canvas caught on the peak of the roof and held fast to a jagged bit of wood left over from some poor repair job. It tore through the side of the bucket, and Josette only avoided being skewered by a quick dodge to the side.

  The bucket was not so lucky. It was pierced through and stuck fast, anchored to the rooftop. As the wind continued to carry the ship along, the bucket’s supporting line went taut and vibrated like a plucked harp spring. Somewhere above, Mistral was being dragged down by the line, and would crash into the town if the bucket wasn’t cut free. And if Josette couldn’t cut it free below, the crew would have to cut it free above, leaving her stranded inside the city.

  She leapt out and onto the roof, cursing herself for not bringing a knife along. A shingle came loose under her foot and slid down the steeply inclined roof, to land on the street below. Taking inspiration from it, she pulled out another loose shingle, tore one of the nails from it, and jabbed at the canvas where it was pierced.

  From below, a voice from the window inquired, quite politely, “Is that you, Josie?”

  The tension on the fabric helped tear it away, but it was still slow going with only a nail, and every second brought Mistral closer to the ground. “Yes it is,” Josette said, “but I really don’t have time to talk, Mrs. Malleville.”

  A moment’s silence, while she jabbed at the canvas and another few fibers tore away. She was making an unmistakable racket, but it couldn’t be helped.

  “It’s Mrs. Turel now, dear,” the woman said.

  “Congratulations to you and Mr. Turel,” Josette said, and then leaned down to tear at a particularly tough patch of canvas with her teeth. Spitting out rough, rancid-tasting fibers, she added, “And my sympathies about Mr. Malleville.”

  The lines leading up to Mistral were near a forty-five-degree angle now, the ship dragged halfway to the ground already. Soon they’d either have to cut her loose or come crashing down.

  “Thank you, sweetie,” Mrs. Turel said. “And I hope all is well for you.”

  Canvas tore under the strain and it seemed for a moment that the bucket would come free, but before Josette could clear the tangle of fabric, the tension on the line sank the jagged edge of the roof into the bucket again, as quickly and firmly as a fisherman sinking his hook.

  “I’m quite well,” Josette said, as she struggled to cut it free again, “but unless you know the disposition of the Vin garrison, ma’am, I’m afraid I can’t stay to chat.”

  There was a slight bustle below as Mrs. Turel leaned out of her window and looked up and down the street through the fog. Josette stabbed desperately with the nail, poking holes in the canvas, alternately cursing it and begging it to tear. “It’s five hundred and eighty-six as of this morning, dear,” Mrs. Turel said, with foregone certainty. “From the 64th Fusiliers.”

  While Josette was staring down in slack-jawed awe at Mrs. Turel, the last of the fabric tore away and the bucket slid away along the roof. “Thank you,” she said, saluted her, and ran after it.

  “Anytime, dear!” Mrs. Turel called after her. “You know where to find me.”

  The bucket had slid off the edge of the roof by the time Josette got to it, but she took a running leap and grabbed onto one of its lines over the street, hanging on by her hands alone. She swung straight into the house across the street, but hit feet first and walked her way up its side, clearing the roof and rising into the fog as the line reeled in.

  After what seemed a timeless ascent, a hand reached down to help her back aboard. Jutes pulled her up and, holding the tattered remains of the bucket over his other arm, asked, “Eventful trip, Cap’n?”

  Josette grinned back. “More than I expected, but no matter. We have the information we need. Durum is being garrisoned by the 64th Fusiliers, who number five hundred and eighty-six, after casualties taken at Canard.” She drooped as, in the relative peace of the ship, she finally appreciated the significance of that number. It was too damn many. A fresh Garnian battalion—and most particularly this battalion—would need to outnumber the defenders three or four to one to have a chance in the breach. With less than a two-to-one advantage, even with an airship overhead and their superior artillery, the 132nd couldn’t retake Durum.

  Bernat was looking at her over Jutes’s shoulder. “Your observations indicated precisely five hundred and eighty-six soldiers in the garrison? Not five hundred and eighty-five, nor five hundred and eighty-seven, but five hundred and eighty-six, exactly? And you arrived at this remarkable figure from a few minutes peering through fog and being dragged over rooftops?”

  She only shrugged and said, “Reconnaissance is as much an art as it is a science, Bernie.”

  *   *   *

  IN THE LATE afternoon, the 132nd arrived outside Durum. The battalion immediately set to work digging entrenchments for the artillery company’s guns, and they labored all through the night to extend the trenches within range of the walls. At first light, the cannons began to fire in earnest, waking Bernat only a few hours after he’d gone to bed. He tried to get back to sleep for two more hours, but the cannons didn’t stop, so he washed, dressed, and went down to the hurricane deck to watch.

  After only a few hours’ firing, there was already a great crack in Durum’s east wall, about a third of the way from the southwest corner. It occurred to Bernat that what had once been the wall’s strength was now its weakness. Its interlocking stones, carefully shaped and fitted by master craftsmen in a bygone age, presented a flat face to cannonballs and so had to absorb the entire force of their impact, rather than deflecting it as a modern slope-faced fortification would. And once a stone near the base of the wall cracked, the incredible weight above would come to the aid of the artillery, and so the wall would conspire with the enemy to shatter itself. Adding to that, the Garnians were firing upon the most dilapidated spot on the western side—the side whose repair had been most neglected over the years.

  The Vins were not waiting idly for their walls to come down, however. They had already begun constructing a roof made of thick wooden timbers atop the unbombarded segments of the west wall, as a defense against shells dropped from Mistral. They were also returning fire, with old cannons mounted in bulwarks at intervals along the wall, but so far Durum’s ancient guns had destroyed nothing but a couple of the rock-filled wicker gabions set up to shield the Garnian batteries. These defensive guns seemed to be the same species of cannon that had failed to protect Durum from the Vins two seasons earlier, and were now continuing their tradition of ineffectual fire.

  Mistral landed in the evening, as soon as a stubby, jury-rigged mooring mast was constructed outside of cannon range. When his feet touched the ground, Bernat felt strangely vulnerable. He had left the ship often enough when she was moored in a shed, and once even in th
e middle of a smoke-clouded melee, but now it felt strangely chancy to leave her moored in the middle of a wide-open field, with Lieutenant Hanon in command and only the 132nd standing in the way of the Vins. It felt something like leaving his clothes on a riverbank while he went in for a swim.

  Josette seemed to feel a similar anxiety, for she glanced over her shoulder at Mistral the whole way to the command tent. At the entrance, she took one long, final look and then went inside.

  Bernat, too, paused to look over that ugly, beautiful ship with a sardine’s shape and a shark’s reputation, her envelope gleaming white against the gray sky. He stepped inside, finding the tent stuffy and warm, which was a welcome change from the chill of early spring outside. Major Emery was there, along with Colonel Okura and a couple of staff officers Bernat didn’t know, huddled around a table with maps strewn over it.

  Emery stepped away from the table to approach Josette and Bernat. “There’s a slight delay,” he said. “We’re expecting an envoy from the Vins, to respond to our request for surrender.”

  “And how is life as a junior major?” Josette asked.

  Emery laughed softly. “It leaves plenty of time for gossip. I heard something interesting about your Lieutenant Hanon, from one of the company captains.”

  Josette and Bernat both leaned in close.

  “He led a hope last year, up in Quah, but was never promoted.”

  The word “hope” apparently meant something to Josette, for she gave a low whistle. Seeing Bernat’s confusion, she said softly to him, “A forlorn hope is the first unit to assault a breach. All volunteers, usually, whose only job is to soak up bullets and keep the enemy occupied while other units come up behind. It’s not unusual for over half to be killed or wounded.” She narrowed her eyes. “The officer leading a hope always gets a promotion. It’s automatic, except in cases of extreme cowardice.”

  “Could that be it?” Bernat asked. “He doesn’t have a scratch on him, after all.”