I’ve been a sinner, and I’ve been a zadik.
Take me over, Miss Rio, and give me that magic.
#
The bullhorn voice came again: “Place all your weapons in a pile and walk away.”
Mazie, though she hoped Farisa and Andor were safe, refused to look in Lethe Tell’s direction. She would not be able to tell, and it would give away their position.
Saito put a gun in a patch of dust amid yellow grass. Mazie recognized the revolver surrendered as a decoy, an unreliable one they’d stopped using months ago.
“We’re not giving everything up,” Claes said quietly. “Keep a working weapon on yourself.”
The hot wind changed direction. The stench of rancid meat filled the air.
Mazie added a couple of old guns to the surrender pile.
Eric screamed after being nearly hit by a knot of flaming rope, covered in naphtha. It landed on a bush, causing it to catch fire.
Claes waved both arms over his head. “We’re surrendering, you assholes!”
Runar said, “I doubt they believe us.”
Claes said, “I’m sure they don’t, but we have to play it out.”
The airship’s voice: “Get down and face the ground.”
As directed, they lay on their stomachs. Mazie rested her head in the crook of her elbow. The ground was hotter than hell; even her phantom arm stung.
#
Captain Tubmist was whistling bars from “Take Me Over, Miss Rio.” Daniel Chace, who scratched his clean-shaven chin, did not consider the man cultured in general, but was somehow not surprised he knew that song. He considered the man possessed neither of a sinner’s courage nor a saint’s wisdom, invulnerable as he may be to Miss Rio’s magic.
Take me over, Miss Rio...
Take me across the...
“They have surrendered,” said a Z-8.
“They have done no such thing,” said Chace. “They didn’t get this far by giving up. Still, we should not open fire just yet. They are light-skinned, civilized people. They will behave predictably and rationally, if given incentives.”
“Where’s Farisa?” asked the captain.
“I do not see her.”
Captain Tubmist spat on the instrument panel. “So we go fucking find her.”
“Bad idea. If we search for her, we give them time.”
“How do we get them to tell us where she is?”
Chace looked down. Half a thousand feet below them, five weary travelers lay prone. They were exhausted; the animals they had brought had a month of capability left, if that. “I know what to do.”
#
Mazie felt sick. As the decaying torso swung like a pendulum from the airship, the sludge of early putrefaction dripped. It could be smelled and heard from here.
An unta squealed. A sniper’s bullet had struck it dead.
The overhead voice said, “You won’t be needing that. We will return you home safely.”
The air fell still; the only sound was the distant chittering of orcs.
“We have no interest in harming any of you. Our purpose is to arrest Farisa La’ewind, twenty-one years of age. Help us, and you will be rewarded. Resist, and you will die.”
Mazie looked over at Eric, whose teeth were chattering.
The airship voice shouted. “Girl! Stand up!”
As ordered—she was the only woman—Mazie rose. She looked around, careful not to move her head too much. Two orcs, both on the small side of average, had started clawing open the dead unta’s belly. A husker swung around to gore one, causing the other to run off.
“Girl, walk three hundred paces north.”
She did so, sipping from a canteen of water turned bitter by the fungal powder—the Flare Powder—she had mixed into it.
“Stop there. Return to the ground.”
She did as told. Her neck grew tense from holding her face up; if she rested it on her hand, her palm would press into the hot ground and burn.
The airship was circling, but the voice from the horn seemed to come from everywhere. She remembered Farisa explaining how, in the blue, sounds tended to grow more intense, higher in pitch, and harder to place. She was experiencing this already; it would have overwhelmed a weaker mind.
Above: “Boy! Yes, you! Stand up now.”
Mazie, in the taut air, could feel Eric’s sense of hopelessness as he compiled.
“Boy, go three hundred paces south.”
#
Captain Tubmist laughed. “Great shot on that unta.”
Chace nodded. By a sniper’s standard, it had been easy. He had not even killed the animal; he had lamed it, and the orcs had finished the job.
When the boy had finished walking north, Chace ordered him to return to the ground. The two of them were far enough apart—from each other, and from the group—that communication would be detected from above.
The captain said, “Send a bullet by their leader.”
Chace looked back. “We’ve already got them where we want them.”
“Do you expect them to comply?”
“It doesn’t matter much. In time, they will. What can they do to us?”
“They could shoot us down,” said the Z-7.
Chace laughed. “The moment they open fire, they’re all dead, and they’re not stupid, so they know that to be the case, so they won’t. The balloon has twelve compartments and could float us on eight. I’m not worried about small arms, and I don’t see a cannon down there. We have every advantage over them but one, which is that they know where Farisa is, and we don’t.” He paused. “That is easily fixed.”
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He raised the trumpet as close to his mouth as he could; the horn was wet with his yell spit.
“Girl! Stand up!”
#
Mazie deftly sprung to a standing position.
The voice overhead said, “If either of you looks at each other, or communicates in any way, or even looks at anything but the goddamn sand, you all die. We have more men than you, and we are sure we have more ammunition.” Machine guns tore up the air. “I’m going to ask some simple questions. To answer yes, wave your arms overhead. To answer no, squat. Do you understand?”
Mazie waved her hands over her head. The invisible right hand fired off a middle finger.
“Are you Mazie Naveed, born five twenty-three sixty-eight in South Exmore?”
She waved her arms over her head.
“Is your brother, Joshua, alive?”
She didn’t know, so she waved her long arm, then squatted.
“We inform you today that he is. He was arrested in Exmore on September 4. Like you, he has taken the grim path of politics. His fate depends on your cooperation. If you give us Farisa’s location, he’ll go free. If you do not, or if you give us the wrong location, he’ll be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Do you know what that is?”
She waved her arms over her head.
“Very good,” said the voice on the airship. “Point in Farisa’s direction.”
Mazie doubted the Globbos had her brother, but she knew they would be asking Eric to do the same thing, and that if the two of them chose differing directions, they would likely be killed.
#
“Leftie gives us that way.” Chace, mouth dry, pointed.
“Do you believe her?” asked Captain Tubmist.
“No. I think she’s lying, but the boy’s about to piss himself. He’ll give up the truth.”
“Who is he, anyway?”
“We asked our best spies in Portal, and they gave us nothing.”
Chace yelled into the horn. “Girl! Give us a wave of your arms for every quarter mile away Farisa is.”
The captain counted. “Seven, eight. That’s two miles.”
A Z-9 said, “She’s missing half an arm. Shouldn’t that be factored in?”
The men aboard laughed for a bit.
Chace yelled into the horn, “Girl, return to the ground. Do anything else, and it’s the end of you.”
#
“Boy! Please stand.”
Eric looked at the knife that lay under his wrist. He had not lived very long, but he had never acquired the hatred of death. He wondered if Alfador, up in heaven, was the gray puppy who fit in a young boy’s arms, or a full-grown dog, as he should have lived to be.
Why had Eric survived, and no one else? The harsh orange air had been so hot, so sharp in the throat, that it had turned him not into a force of courage but a running animal, a scared little boy, unaware of the decision to run until he was already outside the flaming house, which caved in on itself. He had not realized till later—it had been so unreal, so impossible—that his parents and puppy had not escaped. Society had offered no one to tell five-year-old Eric he wasn’t responsible.
If death was good enough for his parents, it was good enough for him. No matter what, it would come someday.
“Your mother and father are in prison,” said the voice. “Arrested six twelve ninety-four. If you disobey our orders, they’ll suffer greatly. Now stand!”
Eric didn’t rise.
#
“He seems to have called our bluff,” said Tubmist.
“Fuck!” Chace screamed. “Fuck this nameless bastard. You do not just get to refuse a Company order. This fucking kid is wasting our time.”
“So kill him.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Chace wanted to throttle the captain, but that would be assault on a superior officer. “It doesn’t matter. If we don’t find Farisa, all of us go in front of Hampus Bell himself to explain why we failed a million-grot mission. Do you shit-snots understand that? For cunt’s sake on a fucking crap cross, I fucking swear I will—”
“It looks like he’s done it himself,” said a Z-9.
“Dammit!” Chace shook his head.
The Global Company had no page in its book for self-sacrifice. It thrived in a world where two bandits separated and caught could be trusted to indict the other, even if both were innocent. Belowdecks were people who would die for each other. This led the Chace to realize what kind of endgame they were in. He might face death here, but that was a better fate than dishonorable return, so he had nothing to fear, and could do whatever he wanted.
“They’ll die for her,” Chace muttered. “Let’s make a few do it. All hands, ready weapons.”
#
Eric, who had chosen a sandy patch to lie down in, had cut a sizable gash into his arm. Blood poured into a narrow but flat ground furrow he had made; the pool would look larger than it was, so the men in the airship would think he had killed himself.
That’s brilliant, Mazie thought, her body facing the ground and her mind and vision floating above. She had entered the blue, hoping to reach Eric to share her false coordinates for Farisa’s location, but had failed to project herself that far—in truth, she could barely see him.
Sandy soil and dried grass darkened. Night’s chilly winds flowed in from the shadow side of the world. She could more easily ride the wind than move against it. She had help, too; Ouragan butted her head against Mazie’s temple, down below all this, and she felt her ability to stretch her presence increasing. The sky and setting sun shook. She shot her point of focus upward, outward—teeth gritted, brow pressed, fists (real and phantom) balled. My body does not matter if I never get back to these people. I can leave it and be dead and that would be better than letting them down. She had never been loved and she had never loved until now. She loved Claes and Eric and all the rest. She loved Ouragan, the silver tabby bunting her head against her face. She loved Farisa. She would destroy every threat to this love she had found. She turned herself into an arrow of pure rage, a glass eagle launched at invisible speed, a bolt of veinless fiery light. The world twisted and stretched around her to yank her back to her bodily place, but the airship loomed ever closer and this intolerable pain meant nothing if she could not protect others, so she let it twist and she let it stretch, and she rode the desert updraft, losing speed and power and influence over space to such an extent that, by the time she had gone as far as she could go, she was no more than a spark.
#
Thoobus, a Z-9 who made inane conversation whenever his nerves bested him, asked, “What’s in the balloon anyway?”
“Hydrogen,” said a Z-8.
Chace huffed. “Would you shut the hell up? We open fire together, on three. One!”
The Z-8 said, “The old one’s Claes, right?”
Chace said, “Two.”
“That Mazie girl’s shaking. Violently.”
Tubmist laughed. “I bet she’s pissing herself.”
“Thr—”
(“What’s in the balloon anyway?”)
(“Hydrogen.”)
A hot wind erupted above. The backs of Chace’s hands turned red and the hairs singed. Yellow flames with tinges of purple spread through the balloon. Men screamed. A sound, like a gunshot but a thousand times louder, drove a spike of pain into Chace’s jaw. He dropped to the deck in a bracing position. His weight doubled as the airship jerked up; the flaming gasses were rising. Then a force yanked him across the floor and his forearm struck a crate of beans. The airship began to buck; two of the crewmen, who had tried to stand, fell screaming to their deaths below. More explosions rattled the hull. Chace felt light in weight this time; the airship, after being pulled up a few hundred feet, was now falling. Shock waves from secondary explosions—munitions in the airship’s rear were going off like popping corn—tore at his chest, ambiguously directed punches, inside as much as outside. His heart was beating faster than rain, but he could still feel the lulls between pulses in it seemed to have stopped. The deck tossed him about; he tried to grab a metal rail, but it burned his hand.
The world was fire and pain in all directions. He knew that, as soon as the airship touched the ground, the flaming tatters of the gasbag would drape over the vessel, entrapping anyone still aboard, so he would have to time his jump to land before that. He rolled over to the ship’s edge to see the grass, orange by the torched dirigible’s light, fifty... forty... thirty yards below. Twenty. Ten. Nine. Eight, seven, six-five-four. He hurled himself, landing on feet then legs then hips—as one did from a parachute—and then rolled into a standing position to run. He did not look back until sure of his distance.
The top half of the gasbag could not be seen for its crown of smoke. The bottom half, still intact, closed over the deck, the whole contraption a skeleton of failing steel and flaming wood. Under the settling flaming curtain that had once been a balloon, shapes beat and kicked like children under a half-ton blanket. Familiar men gave unfamiliar screams as the weight nailed them to the base of the fire.
Daniel Chace stopped to take in the sight.
His ears were numb to sound—he had lost count of secondary explosions aboard the airship—but his eyes caught a small one, a tiny blue flame some distance from the wreckage, triggered by a stray spark. Flashfire! He couldn’t believe his luck; this place was a dried-out flashfire bog.
He looked at the Farisa’s protectors with contempt. You bastards haven’t got a chance. He tossed his handgun aside—if he needed it, he could find it later, but it would do no good in the coming battle—and reached for his sword pommel as he chased the five renegades headed for a hill, a black silhouette against the spent eastern sky.
That’s where Farisa is. They’ll gather there and have high ground. Smart, but not smart enough. They don’t know to expect more than just us Globbos; there’s a thousand orcs at our backs.