The Aeronaut's Windlass, Page 49

  She never saw the Auroran Marine before the man emerged from a cross-corridor and collided with her. Bridget fell with a cry, trying to keep Benedict from landing on his head as she crashed to the floor. The impact hurt. The Auroran landed near her, and something metallic clanged on the floor.

  Bridget stared at him for a second in wonder. The man had been wounded. There was blood on his tunic and more on one leg—and a swelling lump the size of a child’s fist on one side of his head. His eyes were glassy and dilated. Had he been knocked unconscious, out of sight of his companions? Surely the Aurorans had been in a hurry to leave as well. He stared at her blearily.

  Bridget’s eyes dropped to the source of the clinking sound. The man’s copper-clad blade lay on the floor between them.

  She looked up again, met the Auroran’s eyes, and felt a sudden surge of terror, of confusion, of certainty that this had just become a deadly encounter—and saw the same feelings mirrored in his eyes as they stared back.

  Merciful Builders, Bridget realized. I’ve managed to get myself into a duel after all.

  Except that there would be no rules, no marshal, no supportive friends, no crowd of observers.

  If Bridget lost this duel, no one would ever know it.

  The Auroran let out a slurred cry and threw himself toward the sword.

  Bridget’s foot got there first, kicking the weapon from his grip. The man lunged at her, hands grasping. She twisted in the defensive maneuver Benedict had taught her, and caught one of his arms instead. The man jerked his arm away, and seemed startled when he could not free it from Bridget’s fingers.

  Bridget whirled with the man, using his own strength to begin the motion, and swung him into the nearest wall. The impact made his knees wobble and he fell to the ground, with Bridget keeping the hold on his arm. He threw a punch with his other arm, and though Bridget managed to roll in the same direction to lessen the force of the impact, the blow made her see stars. There was no time for astronomy in ground fighting, she thought, and her sudden hysterical laugh turned into a scream of fear.

  The Auroran got some of his weight on top of her, his hands scrambling for a hold on her throat. If that happened, she knew, she was likely as good as dead. A proper choke hold could leave her unconscious in seconds, and in the frantic terror of combat, the amount of force required to crush a human windpipe was a surprisingly minor effort. At the same time, she realized that the Marine was faster than she was, and stronger, and had more experience at this kind of business. The only reason she was still alive and fighting at all was that he was clearly injured and disoriented, barely able to move upright.

  She got her forearms lined up on his chest, intersecting one of his arms and holding his weight off of her as he tried to secure a grip. One hand got to her throat, but she hunched her neck muscles against its crushing pressure and kept it to one side, where it could do less harm. The other she held off with both of her arms, straining, knowing that the longer she had to fight against not only his muscle, but against the weight of his body, the faster she would tire. She struggled to throw him clear, arching her body, but he was too strong, simply too big for her to move. She fought for what seemed an eternity, though she knew less than half a minute went by, and felt her arms weakening, felt the fingers of his other hand brush against her throat.

  So she took a terrible gamble. Instead of trying to push him again, she abruptly relaxed her arms—and slammed her head forward, into his, as he came down. She heard a significant-sounding crunch.

  The Auroran reeled back, blood fountaining from his nose, and fell, banging his head against the floor as he did. Bridget gave him no time to recover. She rolled atop him and began slamming her fists down at his skull in elemental brutality.

  The Auroran tried to hold up his hands in a feeble defense, but only for a few seconds. Bridget pounded his head into the ground, and once his hands were down, she seized his hair and began using that to bash his skull onto the floor, again and again. She barely realized that she was terrified and screaming at the top of her lungs.

  The smoke thickened and she began choking on it, struggling to get her breath. She stumbled away from the now-limp body of the Auroran, back to Benedict. She felt so tired. The fight had been only seconds long, but she felt as though she’d been running for twenty-four hours straight.

  Once more, Bridget managed to lift Benedict to her shoulder, if only barely. At least she’d had the presence of mind to pick up the book first this time. She could not stop coughing as she staggered forward, onto the path—and realized, with a dawning sense of horror, that she was lost.

  This was an intersection of corridors. Paths wandered off down all four of them—and the fall and the subsequent fight had disoriented her completely. She could not tell which hallway led out. She felt her head getting lighter, her balance beginning to waver. She did not have time to choose incorrectly. If she didn’t get out of the smoke, and soon, she would fall, and could only hope that neither of them would awaken when the fire claimed them.

  She turned slowly, hoping to gain a clue, but the smoke now obscured anything beyond a few feet, and it all glowed with firelight. Her already teary eyes began overflowing, and she let out a scream of rage and fear and frustration.

  “Littlemouse!” called Rowl’s voice.

  Bridget’s heart surged with sudden energy and hope. “Rowl! I’m here!”

  The cat suddenly appeared from the smoke, his tail flicking in agitation. “You are rude. And this smoke is in my nose so that I could not track, which is also your fault. And we must leave.”

  She managed not to choke on a sudden burst of terrified laughter, and tried to answer in Cat, but her throat seized on the smoke and she began to cough instead. She nodded and gestured for Rowl to take the lead.

  They had not gone twenty feet before the beams began to give way with earsplitting screeches, and the masonry of the temple began to collapse around them.

  Chapter Sixty

  Spire Albion, Habble Landing, Temple of the Way

  I don’t like it, Skip,” Kettle said in a quiet tone, meant for Grimm’s ears alone. “Girl running into the fire like that.”

  “She’s not some helpless schoolgirl, Mister Kettle,” Grimm replied. “She’s one of the Spirearch’s Guard.”

  Kettle snorted. The grizzled aeronaut had come through all the scuffles of the last few days with nary a scratch, Grimm noted, which was better than he could say. Kettle had a knack for standing in the right place at the right time during a fight.

  “And it’s not our job to babysit one of the Spirearch’s Guard, Skip?”

  Kettle asked.

  “That is correct,” Grimm said.

  “And you don’t like it either.”

  “No, Mister Kettle. I do not.”

  “Then we go in after them.”

  “Don’t be foolish. I’m not ordering the men to rush into a burning building.”

  Kettle drummed thick fingers along the hilt of his sword. “So it’ll be just you and me then, Skip.”

  Grimm ground his teeth. He was concerned about Sir Benedict and Miss Tagwynn, and his instincts were to go to their aid—but he didn’t know the building, and if he went some of his men would, in all foolish probability, follow him into the inferno. Enough of his crew had been hurt for one day. If he led his men blindly into that smoke, he might as well truss them all up himself and toss them into the building to die.

  “No, Mister Kettle,” Grimm said. “We wait.”

  Kettle grunted. “How long we going to give them?”

  “Not long,” Grimm said in a frank tone. “If they aren’t back out in the next few minutes, they aren’t coming out.”

  Just then, several hollow, thumping, whooshing sounds shook the air, and Grimm whirled around to stare intently out the temple gates to the habble proper.

  “God in Heaven,” Kettle muttered. “Skip, was that . . . ?”

  “Incendiary charges,” Grimm said bleakly. “Maybe a quarter mile tha
t way.”

  “In the habble?” Kettle blurted. “God in Heaven help us. All those wooden buildings . . .”

  “Yes,” Grimm said. Even as he spoke, he heard an alarm bell beginning to toll frantically. “No one’s going to be able to think about anything but fighting the fire for a while. A rather convincing distraction that will allow the Aurorans to escape to the shipyard quite neatly, if they’re quick about it.”

  Kettle snarled under his breath. “Then they’re already on their way.”

  “Don’t worry, Mister Kettle,” Grimm said. “We’ll have our opportunity to make them answer for it.”

  “How?” Kettle asked.

  “Trust me,” Grimm replied. He took a short, sharp breath and said, “Unfortunately, this means that we need to leave immediately, before the fire spreads and traps us in this corner of the habble.”

  “But, Skip . . .” Kettle said.

  “For all practical purposes we are now at war with Spire Aurora. We each have our own duties, Mister Kettle,” Grimm said. “The Guardsmen will have to look after thems—”

  He was interrupted by a roar from behind him, as the high portion of the temple, the enormous chamber of the Great Library, came crashing down upon itself, taking various sections of the building with it. Dust and smoke billowed out in a vast cloud, and the fire—that which hadn’t been smothered by the collapse, at any rate—was suddenly exposed to more fresh air and blazed up wildly.

  “God in Heaven!” one of the men gasped, and the cloud of smoke and dust enfolded the entire area.

  “Gather on me!” Grimm shouted, his voice hoarse in the thick dust. “Gather here! Here!” He kept calling out, and his crew appeared out of the dust, squinting against it and shielding their mouths. They were covered in a thin layer of dust and dirt that gave them a phantomlike appearance in the grey flatness of the dust cloud.

  Grimm took a quick head count and began to give the order to move out, when he paused to see one last phantom appear out of the haze. For a moment he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. Then the phantom stepped closer, and he could see.

  Bridget Tagwynn trudged out of the haze, covered so thickly in dust that she might have been an animated statue. She moved slowly, her face locked in a rictus of determination. Sir Benedict’s limp form was draped over one of her shoulders, his arms swinging loosely where they hung down her back. She held one arm wrapped around the back of his thighs, keeping his weight balanced. In that hand, she clutched a dustcovered volume.

  In the other hand she carried the limp form of a dust-covered cat, presumably Master Rowl. One of her booted feet left partially bloodied prints in the thin layer of dust on the ground, but she had not let the injury stop her. She simply walked, putting one foot steadily in front of the other in small, deliberate, balanced steps.

  Grimm felt his eyebrows climbing higher, and for a moment he was at a loss for words. A sudden silence spread through the men of the Predator as they took in the sight themselves. Bridget’s steady footsteps were suddenly loud in the fire-lit dust.

  “Kettle,” Grimm said quietly, and the two of them stepped over to Bridget.

  The girl blinked when Grimm stopped in front of her. She paused, her balance swaying. It took her a moment to focus on Grimm’s face, and then she nodded to herself. “Captain Grimm,” she said. “I’ve two for the doctor here.” The hand holding the book twitched a few times. “And this is for the Spirearch.”

  With that, she swayed on her feet, and one of her knees buckled. Kettle caught Sir Benedict’s weight across his stout shoulders, and Grimm braced Bridget and kept her from falling or dropping Rowl, who lifted his head slightly and swept a bleary, unfocused gaze around the area, before his head dropped exhaustedly again. Grimm saw a line on the cat’s skull where dust and blood had caked into a scab as thick as Grimm’s smallest finger.

  Grimm caught up Master Rowl before Bridget could drop him, cradled the limp cat in one arm, and took the modest-sized volume from her stiff-fingered hand. To one side, Kettle and some of the men were rigging a makeshift litter upon which to carry Sir Benedict. “Very well then, Miss Tagwynn,” he said, pocketing the book. “Can you walk?”

  “Oh, of course,” Bridget said. “I’ve been practicing daily for a good while.”

  Grimm gave her a dubious glance, but before he could call one of the men over, the little etherealist’s apprentice, Folly, appeared out of the haze and calmly slipped herself beneath one of Bridget’s arms, supporting the larger girl. “The grim captain is surely observant enough to realize that Bridget has a large bruise swelling on her cheek. She is obviously stunned and in pain. He will also surely note that she has friends.”

  Grimm regarded Miss Folly for a moment before sweeping both of the young women as low a bow as he could manage. Then he checked on Sir Benedict. He was being bundled onto a shipboard coat donated by one of the men. Half a dozen hands would share the burden of carrying the unconscious young man.

  “Kettle?” Grimm asked.

  “Silkweaver venom, Skip, from the swelling on this arm,” Kettle replied, his voice bleak. “And we got another half a dozen men down the same way, in the tunnels. Maybe if we get him back to the etherealist. Bagen said he can’t do a thing with it.”

  “Master Ferus is unfortunately out of action,” Grimm said. “But we’ll do all we can.”

  “What did he say?” Folly asked, her voice incredulous. “The master is . . . did something happen?”

  “Madame Cavendish visited,” Grimm reported shortly. “She offered to trade your lives for Master Ferus’s collection. He agreed.”

  Folly’s eyes widened. “Oh,” she breathed down at a crystal strung on a bit of string about her neck. “Oh, that is not good at all. That was filling a rather large hole.” Her eyes became distant, unfocused. “Where are the wagons now, I wonder?”

  “Cavendish took them,” Grimm replied. “Odds seem excellent that she had them thrown off the shipyard platform immediately after.”

  She blinked her eyes and suddenly they were alert and focused again. “He is a very good captain, but would seemingly make a very poor gambler,” Folly told her crystal. “The wagons are actually moving down a street toward the shipyard. The puppet lady probably expects to riddle out some kind of pattern that would give her an advantage in future encounters.”

  Grimm arched an eyebrow. “Young woman. Do you mean to tell me that you . . . have the ability to simply locate Master Ferus’s collection?”

  “That seems rather obvious,” Folly confided to the crystal. “Certain articles within it, at any rate. It might not be arrogant to say that I am its caretaker for good reason.”

  “Cavendish kept the collection,” Grimm mused, thinking.

  Folly smiled. “It seems that he understands. Clearly the master hoped to buy the grim captain enough time to rescue me so that I could recover the collection in turn.”

  “And perhaps he meant more, Miss Folly,” Grimm said. “We shall make haste back to Predator.”

  The trek through the streets was frantic, which surprised Grimm. He had expected pure pandemonium.

  A large section of the habble in the northeastern quadrant was burning. Smoke was a haze in the air that kept growing thicker, though at least the copious ventilation shafts spread throughout the habble by the Merciful Builders were circulating enough air to prevent the place from becoming an immediate deathtrap. Crews of citizens had turned out to fight the blaze by a variety of means—through hoses being pumped full of water from the habble’s many cisterns, through lines of men passing buckets of water from hand to hand, and through crews frantically knocking down expensive wooden buildings and dragging the materials away to create a firebreak.

  In fact, Grimm thought, there was a great deal too much organization in the chaos. As an experienced officer, he knew what it meant to hold command in a crisis situation—mostly it was, to use a particularly apt metaphor, rushing around to put out fires, one after another. It often required a great deal of shouti
ng and potentially the measured knocking of a few heads, to one degree of literality or another. Grimm knew what chaos looked like.

  And someone had taken steps to forestall it.

  Firefighting crews were being directed mostly by men whom someone uncharitable would simply call thugs. Though they wore no uniforms and did not bear common gear, the men all had a certain demeanor about them, one to which their fellow citizens of Landing seemed to react. An actual evacuation was taking place—women and children being walked in calm, careful groups toward the nearest transport spiral, to retreat to a lower level of the Spire and away from the blaze. Adult men and women, freed of the need to fear for and protect their children, were able to turn their hands to fighting to save their homes and habble.

  The guilds, Grimm realized. The criminal guilds of Landing had organized the response to the emergency. Which made sense, he supposed. If the habble burned down, it would take their livelihood with it along with the rest of the habble’s residents. But still, the situation had developed no more than an hour ago. By all rights, the habble should be in a state of bloody-minded panic.

  Someone had warned the guilds, told them to be ready to act in the event of trouble.

  Grimm’s little force moved steadily through the streets. They drew attention from the guildsmen moving through the city, picking up a few shadows who followed them as they progressed, but no one tried to stop them.

  They started finding bodies as the group clattered down the last few streets leading to the shipyard. They lay scattered here and there, mostly citizens of Landing, mostly armed. Here and there lay a uniformed Auroran Marine among them, but only a very few. The Aurorans knew their business well, and had been moving swiftly and working together. The scant handful of citizens and guildsmen who had opposed them had been dispatched with ruthless efficiency.