Z-6 Daniel Chace had been born to a father no one feared, so it was no small accomplishment on his part to have had a career—any career at all—in the Global Company. An act of minor blackmail six years ago had given him one choice assignment, which had led to another high-profile opportunity, which had set in motion the chain of events leading to his being selected, in October ‘94, as second pilot of the Known World’s only working airship.
The flat arid grassland seemed harsh, even from on high, and the travelers looked as if this ground had been rolled up and used to beat them, but Chace knew not to underestimate anyone who had covered such terrain on foot. He was glad to see that their pack animals were thin and that the people’s clothes were torn. He hoped he was right that they, like the naked savages of Terosha, fierce but understudied in contests of force, would be no match for an airship full of well-fed and well-rested men, but he had to be cautious and mindful of his advantages and theirs. Alas, it seemed that Farisa was not with the others, and he would need to coerce them to reveal her location. But he had a plan for that.
He said the delicious, historic words. “By the authority of the Global Company, I order you to drop all weapons and lie on the ground.”
#
Chace had met Michael Poor, the Z-2 himself, forty-five days ago, as the engineers ran their final tests on the motors and propellers of the airship, the Cog-Lion II, making too much noise for serious conversation, though Chace figured this to be for the better. He knew, when meeting a man four ranks higher, that it was best to be seen, yes, but not compelled to say anything. He didn’t then consider it a good omen that the airship had been named after an ocean vessel—it had been said that the gondola would double as a lifeboat in event of a water landing, but he had his doubts—but used the environs as an excuse to avoid conversation on the matter. He kept a flat smile, the two men shook hands, and then Chace boarded the airship.
None of the passengers had expected the dirigible to go very far. A gradual leak over land, leading them to settle in southern Ettaso, would have been the best outcome—back home by autumn, no return voyage at sea, promotions intact for the good deed of indulging Hampus Bell’s absurd notions of flight. Just before takeoff, the crew made bets on how many of the eight antique propeller engines would survive the first day. Chace had bet on two; most of the men had put stakes on one or three. To everyone’s surprise, five of them still worked, generating enough power to go forty knots net of wind speed.
The only problem was their paucity of fuel. “Do more with less,” Chace muttered sardonically one morning as he woke up at two o’clock to fix a gas release valve. This company motto had been used to justify the mission’s scant provisions. Truth was, the Company was so cheap, it had once tried to eliminate the preposition in the slogan—do more less—until one of the higher-ups discovered that this could be interpreted not correctly, as a request to reduce spending, but as an invitation to shirk. In this spirit of doing-more-with-less, they’d been equipped with only a few hundred engine-hours’ worth of kerosene, so they had to conserve it, instead relying on favorable winds, raising and lowering the ship in the air column based on Captain Tubmist’s hunches, which were wrong almost as often as they were right.
Still, they reached Portal on November 6. To avoid drawing a crowd, they landed five miles outside of town in the middle of the night. The Company offered little time or provision for repairs, but did restock their pantry and fuel tanks. The only hitch was that they had miscalculated and landed far from the Company depot. The twelve crewmen—save their first pilot, Captain Tubmist, who had gone into town to get his toenails painted—spent hours hauling food and kerosene across the desert.
When they left Portal, it became clear that Captain Tubmist’s knowledge of atmospheric physics was inadequate. Some days, they netted less than a hundred miles, the gondola thrashed by vomit-inducing turbulence the whole time. Chace, less susceptible to motion sickness than the rest of the crew, had grown to enjoy these episodes. There wasn’t much entertainment aloft, but watching other men’s puke fall thousands of feet, either receding invisibility or evaporating like virga, kept him amused. He considered asking the captain to fly lower so he could see it land.
To tell the truth, most of these men weren’t up to a proper soldier’s work. Within the Global Company, “adventurer” was a slur because it was used for those who couldn’t get their promotions in the easier ways, in Moyenne or Doa, who were therefore forced to take risky missions like this one if they ever wanted to provide for families. Dangerous escapades like this did not attract men of social talent; it attracted people like Cowlick, intelligent but thin and acne-scarred, and Beef Curtains, who might have been strong at half his current age, but who was now two hundred and sixty pounds after a dump. Beef Curtains regaled the younger crewmen with his stories of youthful fighting and fucking, when he had been, he insisted, a fit and handsome man. Chace suspected these tales were either someone else’s or total bullshit, but kept silent; coming to blows a mile over the ground, in the middle of the unowned wild, would serve no end. Besides, Beef Curtains was useful—his absurd stories distracted the young from the mission’s meager provisions and absurd purpose.
Chace, even though he gave this voyage a low (but every day increasing) chance of resulting in Farisa’s capture, found pleasure in it. The whores in Portal had been skillful at a level he could not have afforded back home. He could see himself retiring in such a place, if only he could acclimate to the summer heat. Moreover, to be right here, two miles above ground shown on no map, had its charm—aloft in the infinite wild, dawn’s first light came fully ninety minutes before sunrise, and even a hard man could appreciate the beauty of terrain as it shifted from night black to dawn rust to fresh colors that nature had never intended him to see.
The sights were grand; the smells of flight were not. They had all suspected, on the first day, that one of the latrines had sprung a leak. Captain Tubmist explained that the odors came, in fact, from the gasbags giving the dirigible its lift. The balloons had been sourced from cattle offal, butchered hastily, so in adverse winds, the whole airship stank of tallow, blood, and feces. To Chace’s surprise, disgust at this odor was not universal—when they flew low, pale-faced orcs and obese ogres emerged from all corners, chasing the airship’s shadow, in hope of this tenth-of-a-mile-long cattle-gut dinner falling from the sky, which the men driving it obviously hoped against. So far, all the orcs had gone away disappointed, but it was comical to see the stupid little things run after its shadow when it flew too close to the ground.
#
“How much food is left?”
The question had been asked by Cowlick, a Z-7 whom Chace suspected had used a false age and name to enter the Company, because he looked no older than seventeen.
“Not enough,” said Beef Curtains as he stuck a forkful of badly-cooked mashed potatoes in his mouth.
Morale had been fading. They had left home in mid-October, expecting that the mission would be over, one way or the other, within three weeks. It was now November 27. One never fully relaxed aloft. The ground could sway at any time in turbulent air. The beds were hard and the chairs on deck were flimsy ones made of aluminum, chosen for weight rather than comfort. Only Captain Tubmist had a cushioned seat.
Cowlick, his voice cracking, asked, “Are we ever going to find this Farisa girl?”
Tubmist sneered. “Would you like to fly the ship?”
“I don’t know how.”
“My point exactly. Do you even know where we are?”
“I don’t, Captain.”
“I gave you clear instructions. Look for fires on the ground. That’s all you need to do.”
Cowlick pointed to a flickering glow, almost imperceptible, on a southern hillside. “Like that one?”
“That would be,” said the captain, pleased by the finding but upset by the boy being the one to find it so quickly.
That was the thing about Cowlick; he was intelligent enough that, had he been born into a better family, he would have been sent to university and done well, but his status as infantry exacerbated the uncharismatic nature of his cleverness. He was smart in all the ways that made a person not like him.
“It’s probably orcs,” said Beef Curtains.
“I doubt it is,” said Cowlick.
“The boy’s right,” Chace said. “Orcs don’t need light to see at night, and since it’s hotter than Smitz Bell’s cunt down there, no one is setting fires to keep warm.”
The airship deck rocked as the wind howled. Tubmist looked at the others as if he didn’t know what to say next.
Chace said, “This late at night, they won’t see us, but let’s keep our distance so they don’t know we’re watching them.”
That evening, he drank with the other crewmen—there wasn’t much else do to do—and fell asleep around midnight.
When he woke up, just before sunrise, he knew by his crashing headache that something had gone seriously wrong. He’d had hangovers before, but he’d only had three beers, and this morning it felt like his eyeballs were about to pop out of their sockets. Worse, it was quiet in the bunks—so quiet, one could have heard a crow taking a shit—and Son of Schlag, the oldest man on crew, had been such a reliable snorer that the absence of sound from him was alarming.
Chace had never much liked Son of Schlag. Since Portal, the man had shown a lousy attitude, taking twice as long as anyone else to do even basic tasks. He complained incessantly that the food didn’t taste right and Tubmist was flying too high; even asleep, his snores were a whine, but this morning his severe silence led Chace to remove the cover from his face, finding it gray with blue lips. No pulse. The old shirker and shirked for good. Chace ran to Tubmist’s cabin to inform him; the captain, too, had fallen asleep. The altimeter explained Chace’s headache, Schlag’s death, and Tubmist’s somnolence—they were at twenty-five thousand feet. An hour more in this deficient air would kill all of them.
Chace ran to the top deck and turned on the emergency compressor, deflating the airship’s balloon so fast it dropped rather than settled. The men below, oblivious to Chace’s saving of their pathetic lives, cursed the pain in their ears as well as the dirigible’s rattling motion as it fell by five hundred feet per minute. At fourteen thousand feet—low enough to see ground features on this grassy plateau, but high enough to avoid collisions with hills and peaks—he steadied the aircraft. He continued to check the gauges every fifteen minutes until the captain, who should have been doing this, woke up around noon.
“Son of Schlag has died overnight,” the second pilot informed his superior.
Tubmist scratched himself. “Did you care for the man?”
“Not at all,” Chace admitted.
“Me neither.” The captain looked at his pants, glad to see them dry. “That’s good, then. Not that he died, but that it was someone we don’t care enough to haul and bury somewhere. Weight is weight, weight costs fuel, and fuel is dear. I’ll meet you on the top deck.”
“You’re not coming with me?”
Tubmist smiled. “The body’s a one-man job.”
Chace went down to the bunk room. He could have asked the other men to help—he had rank—but they would be useless in their hungover state and it would just take longer, so he wrapped Schlag’s body in a blanket and dragged it up the stairs himself. None of this was difficult until he reached the top deck, exposed to turbulent wind, where he had to keep a square stance to stay on his feet. Contrary to promise, Tubmist did not meet Chace up there; it had simply been a polite way of demanding he go.
He dragged Son of Schlag’s body across the deck to the jettison, a curved platform connected to the rest of the aircraft by a hinge, rim fastened by a taut rope. Chace stepped on the jettison’s pedal, loosened its rope, and watched as the platform tilted down, Schlag’s body rolling along its curve into open sky.
He thought he heard the man scream, but when he looked overboard, the man was still just as dead as before, dropping away with all the grace of a rock. The other crewmen, belowdecks, were whining about the fact that nobody had prepared breakfast.
Someone did get breakfast, though—or some orcs, rather. As soon as Son of Schlag’s body hit the ground, a swarm surrounded the corpse, the bolus of tripe from heaven.
#
That evening, Chace again spotted a camp—they had not set a fire, but someone was using a safety lantern—on the horizon. He convinced Captain Tubmist to cut all engines; intuition told him the wind would carry them over the spot in the dark, when they would not be visible if they flew as high as they could tolerate.
“They’re surely people, not orcs,” said one of the crewmen.
“How can you tell?” asked Cowlick.
“They haven’t eaten that husker yet.”
“We can’t land in the forest,” said the captain. “We’ll follow them till they reach a clearing. Farisa, we must take alive. The rest are negotiable.”
Chace rubbed his hands together.
Tubmist cocked his head. “Are you cold?”
“Not at all.” Chace was beginning to realize that this ridiculous mission had been worth taking after all—they had found, in this new and absurdly vast world, their quarry, and the formerly slim chance had become quite thick. “I am eager.”
“Eager for what?”
“To do the Company’s work.”
They drifted through the darkness. No lights were on and the engines were still. The only ambient noise was Cowlick’s shuffling of a deck of cards—one of those cheap Company-issued packs where the paper creased if you sneezed on it.
Chace had grown tired of the repetitive sound. “Will you fucking stop that?”
“I’m nervous,” the boy said.
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Beef Curtains started to say something, but seemed to think the better of it.
“Good,” Chace said. “It’s good that you’re nervous. They’ve traveled more than a thousand miles through orcish territory and lived. They have a mage. We have numbers and artillery, but if we make a mistake, we could lose a man or two. It’s good that you're nervous, but that doesn’t give you license to be annoying.”
He didn’t reply.
Chace continued. “The smart strategy is to wait for something on the ground to attack them and tire them out.”
“We might be waiting a long time,” said Captain Tubmist. “There were more orcs up north, but I haven’t seen many in this territory.”
Chace nodded. Tubmist was no intellectual giant, but he had a point. It was hard to get a sense of scale down there, but the orcs they’d seen did not seem as large as the ones north of Portal, let alone the freaks bred by the Company for martial purposes in the basements of those gigantic pyramids. Furthermore, the orcs in this savannah seemed to be counted in groups of six or eight, but villages with fifty or more, as in the northern highlands, could not be found.
“Can we even afford to wait?” Beef Curtains asked. “We’re running out of food.”
“That’s because of you. You eat too much.”
“I’ve done the calculations,” said a Z-8. “If we want to get back to Portal alive, we have to turn around in—”
Cowlick frowned. “This airship stinks.”
Chace balled his fists. The fucking young. “Would you stop complaining? We’re all up here in the same tin can. Could you just, for ten fucking seconds, just not whine about how miserable everything is? As long as I’ve known you—all of you—you’ve been bitching about this or that, a left screw or a right bolt, and I’m so, so fucking tired of—”
“I’m not complaining,” said Cowlick. “The airship stinks.”
“You are. You might think you’re not, but I know exactly what you’re doing. You can’t bear to have a bad mood without spreading it the fuck around—”
Cowlick cleared his throat. “It stinks. Do you disagree? We’re under a big balloon of badly-butchered bovine bowels, and we all despise the odor.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Exactly my point. Who doesn’t? Orcs. Ogres. Why don’t we fly low? We have enough fuel to muck around here and use the stench to lure some of them out. We fly over a hundred hungry miles, pull everything that eats flesh from the land, and amass a mob we can throw hurl into their flank, wearing them down before we land.”
You’re fucking brilliant, kid. Chace said, “The boy’s idea has merit. There’s only one problem. We have to capture Farisa alive. Hampus Bell wants to do the eating himself, in public. If we deliver a chewed-up corpse, we fail.”
Captain Tubmist raised a buttock, and an earthen scent filled the gondola. “So what do we do?”
Chase paced a tiny circle on the deck. “Farisa’s why they’re here, right? They’ll protect her at all costs. They’ll make sure she’s the last one to go. As Cowlick suggested, we throw mass at them. The battle will exhaust them. They’re smart and they’re tough and I’m sure they could survive twenty or forty orcs, but at some point, Farisa will be forced to use her magic. If there are any orcs left, we wipe them out with flamethrowers. Just napalm the shit out of the motherfuckers. Then we land. We know mages are weak to blackrue and we have some. We inject her with it while she’s unconscious, and then keep doing so, leaving her helpless. Her magic will be worth all of a shrimp’s dick.”
“Chace,” said Tubmist.
“Yes, Captain?”
The captain beamed. “What twisted whore’s cunt of a God made you such a genius? I’d give you a hug, but I’m not gay.”
Chace lifelessly recited the Company-standard reply. “I’d suck your dick, but I’m also not gay.”
“You’ll suck my dick if I give you the order, which I would never give you because—”
“You’re not gay,” Cowlick interjected.
“The kid gets it!” The captain clapped his hands. “Come morning, we’ll fly low and gather the orcs. We’re going to make this happen!”
#
As day broke, the airship flew over a clearing full of animal bones and weathered shacks. They were no more than five hundred feet over the ground. An orcish child had come out and pointed at them, seeking the attention of adults but getting none. Otherwise, the airship crew failed to get the notice they were after. A bald-headed orc, pushing a wheelbarrow full of yellow meal, didn’t even look up.
“We’re too high,” Cowlick said. “They can’t smell us.”
Chace crossed his arms. “We can’t fly much lower.” There were few trees on this plain, but those it did support rose a hundred feet or more. “No, the problem’s that we're going too fast. They're not going to run after us if they can't keep up.”
“If we go slow, we won’t cover much territory.”
“You’re right,” Chace said. “We’ll figure this out when the captain wakes.”
“If we’re flying high anyway,” said one of the Z-7s, “why not go back north? There were more orcs in the woods.”
“That would have us moving farther away from our target.”
Cowlick pointed west. “What’s that?”
“It is...” Chace ran to the wheelhouse to use the telescope. He yelled back. “Holy shit. It’s a city.”
“What if we went over there, lured out as many orcs as we can, and brought them back this way?”
The captain, sprawled over a dining table after passing out drunk the night before, lifted his waking head. “There it is. Chace, those are your orders.”
The second pilot fired up the engines and took the wheelhouse, gaining altitude gradually, because the ground sloped up as they approached the city. Terrain grew rocky and ragged beneath them. Winds on the top deck reminded them of how fast they were going, and even at this pace—Chace guessed they were around fifty knots due to a tailwind—it took almost an hour to reach the city; like so many features of this vast yellow landscape, it was perennially farther away than it looked, until—and this happened right at once—it was there, around and below them, with outlying farms and dirt roads and houses of increasing size and sophistication until they were over paved roads in a tight square weave, not unlike Midtown Moyenne, though with remarkably less trash on the streets.
The town center stood apart as a diamond, its own grid running at forty-five degree angles to the prevailing pattern. Silver-clad spires and steeples gleamed in the midday sun. Palms and junipers had been planted in alternation on the rim of a lake inside a green park. The city’s central ziggurat, surrounded by three-story residences with spacious courtyards and terra-cotta roofs, sat atop a mound where terraces of flowers alternated, bright yellow and deep purple, to the top. Limestone aqueducts stretched to the mountains farther west.
Captain Tubmist laughed. “You look like you’re about to shit yourself.”
“I just don’t believe it,” Chace said. “Orcs built this? Orcs?”
They could see the citizens now; Chace had halfway expected to see humans, but the town’s residents had, in fact, the orange-white skin tone and large heads of orcs. Still, they looked as unlike the orcish race in all ways, with slim bodies and faces that were pleasing, almost juvenile. Their mannerisms, as far as one could tell through a telescope, appeared civilized: they had fruit markets and public games. They had what appeared to be a woman playing a musical instrument in a park. This did not seem to be a place of violence, let alone the cannibalism for which their kind was known.
Still, as the eleven men aboard the Cog-Lion II were about to learn, the city had no qualms about defending itself. Small explosions—colorful warning shots—crackled around the airship. Chace focused the telescope on an orcish woman in a high stone tower. The glare in her eyes made it clear that she had worse than fireworks in store, if they did not leave.
Tubmist looked at Chace incredulously.
“We... we don’t need to be here,” Chace said. “We’ll go back to our—”
“We fly over the city, as planned,” said Tubmist. “Is angering them not the point of this jaunt? A mob of five hundred is good; five thousand is better.”
“We are outmatched,” Chace said.
They argued as small explosions continued to rattle the sky above them. Then something crashed into the gondola—it jerked to the side, and Cowlick vomited. A second large black stone—a cannonball—flew within ten yards of them.
“You may have a point,” said the captain.
They swung around, engines at full speed, and left the city behind. No such settlement could thrive without an agricultural base, as well as a network of trade routes; the men of the airship would simply have to develop a better eye for the hinterlands, where they were less likely to face cannon fire from public guardians, but could still recruit the hungry.
Through trial and error, they discovered two hundred feet to be the perfect gliding height; at that level, they were clear of even the highest trees, but still low enough to attract orcs. The ones close to the city seemed to find it undignified, anyway, to follow such a scent, but in the outlands one family followed their trail, then another; soon enough, there were at least a hundred machete-wielding, slavering followers beneath them.
Cowlick asked, “How close are we to Farisa?”
“Not far,” said Chace. “A few miles. We just need a couple hundred more—”
They heard a loud crash and were thrown about the gondola. “Shit on a cunt!” yelled one of the men. A glass pot of coffee shattered on the floor. Their ropes above them had likely become tangled, so when the world’s six directions steadied, the floor was a half a degree off. Another boulder, this one the size of a boar, collided with the dirigible’s rear. As intended, the vessel’s odor had attracted orcs and even ogres; they had failed to expect, however, that heavy stones would be hurled at them.
As other ogres readied their throwing arms, two crewmen donned flamethrowers and aimed their nozzles over the side, letting loose streams of bright, thickened kerosene that spattered like flaming piss. Their targets, as easily as the grass and trees, caught fire; the orcs and ogres ceased to be a threat. A few burned alive. The rest fled, so the mob they had wanted to attract dispersed.
Cowlick, struck by blind terror, had run to the stern and released gas from the compressor, causing the balloon to jerk upward violently. The boy had overshot—they were soon rising at fifty feet per second—and Chace’s intervention was required to steady the aircraft.
“That almost worked,” said the captain.
Chace drove his fist into the palm of his other hand. “We fly high, we’re invisible to these orcs. We fly low, they try to kill us. We’re fucked. We’re going to go home with no Farisa.” He growled. “We’ll be a laughingstock.” He kicked an aluminum chair, knocking it over. “Fuck!”
Tubmist interlaced his fingers, making a red double fist. He looked as if he were about to share an idea, but none came.
Cowlick shook his head, then looked out the window. “Are those... cattle?”
#
Cowlick’s idea was heard and discussed. They agreed it was a good one. Usually, a Z-8’s ideas were not even worth rejecting, but these were trying times—they had not found Farisa, they were getting hungry, conditions aloft were uncertain—and they decided that, as far as schemes went, one could do a lot worse.
A line of thunderstorms to the east, as the afternoon aged, counted as a blessing—it would likely keep Farisa’s group, which Chace estimated to be right on the line between the lakebound forest and savannah, in place. They would likely still be there tomorrow.
Tubmist looked at Chace. “Do we have the components?”
“We do,” Chace said. The Global Company tended to skimp on safety, but an airship was precious capital and could not be landed and tethered without a prodigious quantity of rope, cut in segments of variable but very long extent. Cowlick found a piece that was at least five hundred feet long and had already attached a meat hook to the end. One could, with such a device, dangle bait for the orcs while staying out of the ogres’ throwing range. All they needed was the bait itself.
Orcs in these parts raised animals. The crewmen had seen pastures and coops in the city, but no one was in any mood to go back there and risk being shot down so, instead, as the sun set they hovered over a village with only one road, a cluster of small houses and barns with roofs and walls painted the color of the sea. The animals in the fields matched the buildings in color.
Chace scoffed. “What kind of sick fuck paints cows blue?”
Tubmist said, “Does it matter?”
“Not really.”
“This is our place to land.” Tubmist hawked a wad of phlegm into a handkerchief. “Chace, choose three men for ground crew.”
To get to a safe jumping height, the airship had to rise so the parachutes could open on the way down. Chace selected the three best crewmen; he and they donned parachutes and jumped off. The others dropped long ropes that the men on the ground used to steer the dirigible and moor it to a solitary oak tree so the other men could climb down.
The sun was setting by this point. To the east, where Farisa and Claes were, black storm clouds had gathered and shrouded the ground.
“Weather’s going to be bad in sixty,” Chace said. "We have to work fast.”
The other ten men, donning flamethrowers and machine guns, agreed.
“Let’s go!”
They rushed into the village. Evenings like this made Chace want never to retire. They were eleven of the best-armed men in the Known World, sent to butcher one cow—one blue cow in a town painted blue, any blue cow would do. This was the sort of overkill that made Company work so lovely. The road, a path of black soil visible from above and flanked by tall grass, gave no obstacle to the men at running speed. Chace stepped on a small wooden horse, an orc-child’s toy. The doll’s owner came running out of a hut, screaming in an unintelligible language. A Company man fired; the child’s head peeled open like an exploding red onion. Two larger orcs came out. Chace removed them from the scene by machine gun.
He yelled—in times like these, rage was a universal language: “Stay in your houses!” He released a volley of gunfire. “We cannot be defeated, and all we want is one cow.”
They had killed ten or twenty orcs—no one had been counting, as it didn’t matter—by the time they saw the hedge-like wall of tall grass on the pasture where, as they had seen from airsight, the blue cattle grazed.
Chace yelled, “Straight ahead!”
He heard a scream. Beef Curtains, who had begun to fall behind the rest, had misread the canvas covering of a pit as solid ground.
“Mission continues,” Tubmist said.
Chace nodded in assent. It was not the Company way to go back for a fallen soldier. The strong did not get themselves captured or hurt; the fate of the weak was to be left behind. If the weak wanted such things to be different, well, nothing was stopping them from gathering their money and creating a different world.
A horned head, painted blue, poked out.
Cowlick’s voice rose two octaves. “Oh, fuck.”
The orcs had been raising not cattle but huskers.
“Stay quiet,” Chace whispered. His grandfather had been a cattle rancher in northern Bezelia, where the wolves’ ferocity often necessitated including huskers amidst the flock, and he’d heard all about herd rip-outs. “They are docile until they aren’t.”
The boy nodded. “What do I do?”
“We lure one away. Just one. And we make it as fucking quiet as possible.
A Z-7 withdrew his knife and crept.
“Help me, you fuckers!” Beef Curtains, stuck in the sinkhole behind them, screamed. “Don’t leave me here, you craven stacks of whore shit!”
Chace, knowing the man’s shouting would rile the huskers, ran back. Shooting Beef Curtains out of his misery would make too much noise, so he threw a heavy rock down on the man’s head, killing him, but this had been done a moment too late. Six huskers emerged, and more were coming. One butted his head into the Z-7, causing him to fall over. He rolled up into a ball to play dead. A husker gored Cowlick, puncturing his lung, which led to him crying for his mother as blood poured from his mouth. A Z-9, shaking, pointed a flamethrower, shouting, “I’ll use it!” at a charging husker. The beast bucked him into the air and he landed. The animals trampled him. Tubmist grabbed a Z-8 by the shoulders to use as a human shield, but the boy stomped on his toes and broke free. The rout continued until the huskers had had enough; lots of shots were fired and blood was spilled—all human—and it was possible (they couldn’t agree) that one of the huskers had lost an ear to a bullet, but the beasts had delivered their message, had returned to the tall grass, and would not be found again but on their terms.
Cowlick was dead. Beef Curtains was dead. The Z-9 who had brandished the flamethrower was dead. The rest had been scraped and jostled and cut; they would suffer considerable pain from their wounds, because Captain Tubmist’s personal habits had exhausted their supply of painkillers weeks ago.
The captain shook his head. “How many of us are left?”
“Eight,” Chace said.
“All the living are in fighting shape?”
He looked around at the shaken, miserable men. “In this place, it’s not a choice.”
The captain spat on the ground. “An utter failure. Three men dead, no cattle.”
“Three men dead,” Chace said. “We no longer need cattle.”
Tubmist looked at him, but nothing needed to be said.
They were aloft by midnight. From three long ropes dangled one human corpse each. Cowlick’s idea had proven effective: they could fly nearly a thousand feet over the ground and still have an orcish mob trailing them, due to the odors the bodies were giving off. Cowlick’s body was lost around ten o’clock the next morning in a collision with a durian tree. The Z-6 was picked off by the missile of an orcish trebuchet an hour or so after lunch. Beef Curtains, though, he was loyal—his cadaver had lost both legs and one arm, but his severed torso remained in its harness all day, stinking up the sky everywhere they flew. An army of orcs, ogres, and who knew what else had amassed behind the airship, still out of sight from Chace’s enemy, when the crew of the airship spotted Claes’s group, out in the open on a dusty plain, half an hour before sundown on December 1.