By Fire Above_A Signal Airship Novel Page 19

  If, on the other hand, everything went to plan, the patrol would go off-duty about half an hour before daybreak. According to Heny, who had the information from watchers about town, the men on this patrol route always stopped to clear their muskets by firing into the soft earth by the side of the street. At that moment, when the sound would disguise their own fire, the party in the trash house would shoot three of them. Then all Sergeant Jutes had to do was leap from the nearby house he was hiding in and knock the fourth man on the head. Pesha had also hidden herself somewhere along the street and was ready, at Josette’s suggestion, to provide a distraction if anything went wrong.

  But surely nothing would. In fact, it all seemed so easy that Bernat was already thinking of the bon mots he would throw at Josette, to tease her for being so worried. He already had a good one in mind, but it would only work if she made some reference to the cock spring of his rifle, so he’d have to devise some method of maneuvering her onto the topic.

  It was while he was contemplating this that things went wrong in the absolute last way he could have imagined, when a Vin officer strolled down the street from another direction entirely, and stopped to contemplate the very house Bernat was hiding in.

  The man had come from his right, and he wondered just how long he’d been over there, standing in the open in the middle of the street, but entirely hidden from the ambush party’s view. Long enough to hear Bernat’s complaints, or Josette’s admonition that they might be overheard? The Vin was intently interested in the house, in any event, and too damn close for Bernat to point the rifle down at him without sitting up and giving himself away by the sound of rustling garbage.

  Worse, Bernat realized with dawning terror, neither Elise nor Josette could see the man from their hiding places. If either of them spoke, or merely shifted to a more comfortable position, it would remove whatever doubt remained in the Vin officer’s mind.

  In the darkness, the officer’s eyes were two shadowed sockets, but it seemed to Bernat that they ran upward to the roof, scanned along it, and settled right onto the very hole he was watching through. He told himself that his fear was lying to him. But if his fear was lying to him, it was assisted by his imagination, which told him the Vins would burn the house down to root him out, that he’d die in agony, hearing his lover’s screams above his own.

  A second officer came from the right and stood next to the first, and he too seemed to stare up at the roof, and seemed to see straight through the darkness, and to look directly into Bernat’s eyes, now watering from being held open so long.

  The second man flicked a fire striker. The sparks fell into a fold of charpaper held in his other hand. Bernat—seeing visions of a house aflame—jerked up into a crouch, aligned the rifle as best he could in his shaking hands, and was just about to pull the trigger when the officer’s charpaper caught the spark and ignited, and in the light from that small flame he saw that it was Major Dvakov, an unlit cigarette hanging limply from his mouth.

  In that new light, he saw both officers’ eyes jerk over to fix on the hole he pointed his rifle through. Their eyes had not, it seemed, been on him before, but they certainly were now, and they were straining to identify the source of the disturbance above them.

  He could hear Josette breathing to his left, and he was more afraid of the spiteful things she would say to him while they all burned to death than he was of the prospect itself, and even as his heart pounded so hard that the force of the blood hurt his ears and his eyes felt like they would burst, he was made half giddy at the thought that his greatest fear was not a fiery demise, but Josette’s disapproval. He had to bite down on his tongue to keep himself from laughing.

  The Vins laughed for him. “Goddamn saboteurs have us jumping at rats,” the officer he didn’t recognize said, speaking Vinzhalian. “What a couple of fools we are.”

  Dvakov lit his cigarette and gave the charpaper a flick to put it out. He replied in the same language, “Better to jump at the little rats and be a fool, Colonel, than to not jump at the big ones and be a dead man.” They both had another good laugh at that, which gave Bernat the courage to take a shallow breath. “Then again, sir, if you’d only let me loose on the big ones, perhaps we wouldn’t have to jump at all.”

  Bernat couldn’t tell if the comment was friendly or resentful. However it was meant, the colonel responded by giving Dvakov a good-natured slap on the shoulder and said, “The last time I let you loose, Nuri, you hanged half the town.”

  “Surely not half, Colonel…”

  “And what would you do if I let you loose again? I suppose you’d want public beatings and executions for the top names on the suspect list?”

  “Not at all, Colonel, not at all,” Dvakov said. “Public beatings and executions for every name on the suspect list. Then you can be certain the guilty party has been dealt with.”

  “Along with more than a few innocent souls.”

  “If there is such a thing as an innocent soul in this demon’s ass of a town. And if there is, will their god not take care of them, in due course?”

  The colonel chuckled at that, and by now Bernat had recovered enough of his wits to marvel at how very civil they were in debating the points for and against mass murder. “No, no, Nuri. There are rules about this sort of thing, and we have them for a reason.” He looked down the street, to where the patrolmen were just going around the corner and out of sight. “Best not to tempt fate by lingering here in the dark, though.”

  “Indeed. Some innocent souls might come along and slit our throats.”

  They both had another laugh at that. Bernat, clammy and uncomfortable with sweat, his nerves still on edge, was getting rather tired of having to listen to their merriment, and so was glad when they disappeared from view and their voices receded down the street.

  After a long time spent in silence, Josette hissed from the darkness, “Who the hell were they?”

  “The colonel of the Vin regiment, I think, and Major Dvakov.”

  “What were they talking about?” Elise asked.

  “Just routine beatings and murders.”

  “Then for God’s sake shut up about it,” Josette said. “Another word from either of you, and I’ll creep out quietly and give you away to the Vins.” Bernat hadn’t formed a reply, wasn’t even sure he would reply, and certainly hadn’t uttered the slightest sound, when Josette pre-empted him with, “I said, shut up.”

  So he sat calmly for the rest of the night, watching the patrol appear periodically as it went around and around its route. In the times between, he reflected that all that nonsense about fearing Josette’s judgement was just that: nothing more than another freak symptom of his soldier’s heart. Nothing to worry about, outside of the broader problem.

  It must have been an hour before dawn when Elise reached over to wake him. At first, he didn’t realize he’d been asleep, but a look at the lightening sky left no room for argument. He only hoped he hadn’t snored.

  Mistral was just visible to the west of town, her envelope minutely brighter than the charcoal gray of the sky. He had to search to find her again every time he looked away, but even so, her presence bucked up his courage. The patrol came around again, and the dawn crept closer.

  Shortly after, four flashes spaced two seconds apart lit Mistral’s envelope and the cloud cover alike with orange-yellow light. Seconds after the last flash, the sound of the first Garnian cannon reached them. The Vins’ cannons returned fire, but were slower by far.

  The patrol came around for the last sweep of their watch, if Heny’s reports had any truth to them. Bernat trained his rifle on the rightmost man. He aimed for the head, a risky shot, but one which would prevent any call for help. And now the patrolmen stopped and lingered several blocks away, their nightly duty finally over.

  But they didn’t clear their muskets. They only stood there, stretching and gabbing at each other, until the relief patrol came down the street to meet them.

  Now there were eight Vins on the stree
t. Eight Vins with loaded muskets, where there were supposed to be four with empty ones. After a few minutes spent chatting with their relief, the night patrol left by the same street the day patrol had arrived by, but that changed nothing. If Bernat fired now, they’d be back before he could reload.

  “Don’t,” Josette whispered. Bernat noticed that she didn’t even dare to add the word “fire,” lest speaking it cause confusion. The precaution wasn’t necessary in his case. He might be new to this, but even he could see that to act now would be disastrous.

  But Pesha was even newer to it than Bernat, and didn’t possess the natural aptitude for all things that his noble blood had granted him. She emerged from the front door of a house as the patrolmen passed by, and walked toward them from behind.

  “Oh hell,” he heard Josette mutter.

  Pesha had a basket in her arms. She nearly dropped it when Jutes came out of his hiding place and tried to drag her silently out of sight. She pushed him away and they scuffled in such a subdued and stealthy manner that it was surreal to watch. Bernat set his entire mind to willing the Vin patrol to keep looking forward, to not look back, to not detect the faint sound of feet scraping on cobblestones behind them.

  Jutes must have decided that he’d tempted fate long enough, for he ducked into the space between two houses and left Pesha to the fruits of her choices.

  The inevitable finally happened, as one of the Vins looked over his shoulder. He spun around and pointed his musket at Pesha. The other three, having just begun their day and still quite sharp, took one look at the girl and instantly dropped to kneeling positions with their guns pointed in different directions. Their heads swung back and forth as they scanned the houses and street for signs of an ambush.

  Pesha was twenty feet from them, an easy shot even with a musket. She threw her arms in the air, her basket falling. It landed, bounced, and fell on its side, whereupon a dozen furry lightning bolts shot out of it and scattered up and down the street. “My kittens!” she shouted in Garnian. Without seeming to think, without any apparent cognizance of the fact that there was a musket aimed at her, she ran after the nearest cat.

  By the time she scooped it up and was running after the next, the discipline of the Vin patrol had evaporated. The man who had been pointing his musket at her now dropped the weapon so he could make a grab for a kitten that ran between his feet. The man next to him was scarcely more sensible, only slinging his musket before he gave chase. Another patrolman kept his gun in one hand and scooped up a kitten in the other, but finding himself unable to keep a hold on the mewling little fugitive, leaned the musket against a nearby house so he could use both hands.

  Only the fourth Vin had the presence of mind to keep his gun in both hands, and to watch for signs of ambush instead of running after a bunch of cats, and his cool professionalism sealed his fate. Pesha came at him from behind. She dropped her kitten and took a foot of gleaming steel dagger from her blouse. She brought the blade up, and hesitated. Even from this distance, Bernat could see the glint as it shifted in the morning light, shaking in her hand. But despite her reservations, when she struck, she struck with the precision of an anatomist. She slid the knife into his neck and stuffed her other hand into his mouth to stifle the scream.

  “What do we do?” Bernat asked. When he received no answer, he looked to his left and found his companions missing. He looked out of his embrasure to find them running down the street, already halfway to Pesha. Jutes was closer still, having leapt from his hiding spot as a patrolman ran past. Now Jutes had a wooden bludgeon out and, just as the Vin turned around to see what was behind him, Jutes shattered his face. The patrolman went down like a barrel of nails, hitting the cobblestones so hard that some of his blood splashed on a wall ten feet away.

  One of the surviving Vins, the youngest, still didn’t seem to understand what was going on. He saw the facts of the events. He couldn’t have missed them. Indeed, he was looking right at Pesha as she pulled her dagger free of a man’s neck. But he kept running after one of the kittens, staring moonfaced at Pesha until the kitten went through the space in a slatted fence, which he then ran headlong into.

  His inattention damned him, even as attention had damned the first man to fall. He crashed back from his impact with the fence and landed in the street. Pesha walked up to him in a halting stagger, holding her bloody dagger at the limit of her arm’s length, as if trying to keep it as far away as possible. She stood over him and grasped the handle in both hands.

  “Not that one!” Josette cried. “That’s the one we want!”

  It wouldn’t have been too late, if Pesha weren’t in such a daze. She must have heard Josette’s warning, but was too addled to understand it. She knelt down and drove the dagger through the young Vin’s belly and up under his ribs.

  That only left one, who had by now unslung his musket and was aiming from the hip at an onrushing Sergeant Jutes. But Jutes was charging like a goddamn rhinoceros, and didn’t even flinch at the point of the bayonet. He was upon the man in an instant, heaving his bludgeon at the bayonet to knock the musket aside and then using his entire body as a battering ram.

  He hit so hard that neither of them could pick themselves up for some time after the impact. But Elise was there to help Jutes up, while the surviving Vin got the butt of Josette’s rifle for good measure.

  She looked back along the street and called, “Wake up, Bernie, we’re leaving!”

  12

  JUTES AND BERNAT shuffled into Heny’s cottage, carrying the Vin fusilier between them. Josette went down the stairs first, and Bernat heard her say from the bottom step, “Oh, it is lovely.”

  Manhandling their dazed, barely conscious burden down into the basement, Bernat saw that it was indeed lovely down here. The stone walls evoked an old country home, the wine-colored carpet lent the simple elegance of a hunting lodge, and the warm lamplight made it all feel so very welcoming. The sight and smell of five bedraggled Garnian fugitives detracted considerably from the effect, but this only made Bernat wonder at just how lovely it must be without them. He already wanted to visit in the summertime.

  He recognized some of them, despite their greatly reduced frames and lean faces. Private Corne, who had lost one hand and most of the other to a premature cannon discharge, rose from a bed of old blanket and squinted bleary eyes to see what was happening. When he spotted the prisoner, he grabbed a pair of pliers with the three remaining fingers of his good hand and showed his teeth in an eager grin. The man next to him was Private Kiffer. Bernat also recognized three of the fellows from the former air base, all staring like jackals at the helpless prisoner.

  Josette was not pleased. She stared hard at the men and said, “You may put away those goddamn pliers, Private Corne, if you find that they are impeding your ability to salute an officer.”

  The others got the message immediately, snapping into their own salutes. Corne lagged behind, looking first surprised and then indignant, but he finally tucked the pliers into the crook of his left elbow and saluted with his right hand.

  Bernat thought it in rather poor taste, for Josette to single out the man who’d lost so much in service of her ship, but he understood her reasons when she barked, “I see that some of you are very eager to torture this man. It pleases me to disappoint you. You will not harm the prisoner unless I tell you to. You will not threaten him. You will not even attempt to interrogate him except on my order.” Only then did she return their salute, allowing them to relax.

  She motioned to Jutes, and the Vin was handed over to the men from the airbase, who carried him away to be tied into a chair behind a delightful little writing desk in the back corner of the room.

  With the enlisted men out of earshot, Bernat said to Josette, “That was disconcerting. By comparison to the norm, I might almost call you timid in your concern for that prisoner.”

  Elise finished securing the trapdoor from the inside and came down the steps to join them. “I think it was admirable,” she said. For the f
irst time Bernat had ever seen, Elise smiled at her daughter. She put a hand on Josette’s shoulder. “I was worried you’d lost all your principles when you joined the Garnian army.”

  Josette put her back to the room. “Principles? Hell, I’m just trying to salvage something from this fiasco. Take a good look at that man.”

  Bernat did. As Corne wiped his face clean, it revealed a marbled network of previous scars on his left cheek, all older than the bruises and broken teeth he’d received from Josette’s rifle butt. The Vin spat blood on the table and returned Bernat’s gaze, his eyes blazing with defiance.

  “That man,” Josette continued, “has been in the thick of two of the bloodiest battles in this war. He’s marched into musket and cannon fire, charged bayonet to bayonet, been wounded, seen his friends die in front of him—three of them this very day. And you see the green sash on his shoulder? He’s in the light company—the elite company. That means he’s one of the hardest goddamn bastards in a regiment that’s nothing but hard goddamn bastards. Do you think an evening with a pair of pliers is going to break him?” She shook her head. “We should have taken the stupefied boy. I’d wager he was a replacement, and he had the look of someone we could break quickly.”

  Elise’s proud expression was beginning to fade, the corners of her lips turning down twitch by twitch.

  “You were in the infantry,” Josette said to Jutes. “How long do you suppose a man like this one can hold out?”

  Jutes didn’t have to think. “I’ve seen his sort last months, and that’s when you got ways to confirm what they’re telling you. Without that, we could work on him for years and never hear a single word of truth.”

  “Well, we have days, and not many of those,” Josette said. “Any ideas?”

  Jutes thought about it. “Always surprised me how often, if you got to ’em just after they were snatched up, they’d be rattled or confused enough to spill everything without even thinking.” He looked across the room, into the Vin’s defiant eyes. “Not sure that’ll work on this one, though, and asking about the magazine so soon will tip our hand. Mayhap we could play on his passions, instead. I’ve seen that work pretty fast.”