“Now,” said Khora, when all was done, “to business, Theo. I have a job in mind for you. It may be dangerous, it should be interesting, and it might be of supreme importance both to Zagwa and the world. Of course, you must not accept it unless you truly want it; you have already served Zagwa well, and no one will think the worse of you if you turn it down.”
“What is it?” asked Theo. He glanced at his parents. His father looked proud, his mother worried. “What do you want me to do?”
Instead of answering directly, Khora stood up and went to the balustrade, looking out across the bright gorge. “Theo,” he said, “when you boarded that barbarian airship, did you notice anything unusual about her crew?”
Theo was not sure what he meant. “They were easterners,” he said at last. “I remember thinking that I had never heard of easterners fighting for the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft.”
“Nor have I,” said Khora. “Nor has anyone. That aviatrix you captured claims that she and her comrades were mercenaries from the raft city of Perfume Harbor, in the pay of one of the German cities. She has papers that seem to prove that, and we found letters of marque signed by the mayor of Panzerstadt Koblenz in the wreckage of the other airship. We cannot prove that they are forgeries. And yet it doesn’t quite ring true. Some of their equipment was surprising, too.”
“The radio set on the ship I boarded …,” Theo remembered. “It was a Green Storm model.”
Khora returned to his seat, leaned closer to Theo, and spoke quite softly. “I think what you foiled was not an attack on Zagwa by barbarians but an attempt by elements inside the Green Storm to assassinate Lady Naga.”
“Why?” Theo started to say, and then remembered what Lady Naga had been telling him. “Because of what she did to the Stalker Fang?”
“Because they hate me,” said Lady Naga.
“It is not just that,” said Khora. “Lady Naga is too modest to say so, but the recent moves toward peace have largely been due to her influence. General Naga adores her, and does everything she asks.”
“I try to guide him,” said Lady Naga, blushing.
“But of course there are others in the Storm who cannot bear the idea of making peace with the Traction Cities,” Khora went on. “It would serve them very well if Lady Naga were to be killed, and it would serve them even better if she were to be killed by Tractionists. Naga would hardly push for peace with people he thought had murdered his beloved bride.
“That is why they went to all the trouble of disguising their attack as the work of the Traktionstadts. But now that their plan has failed, who knows what they will try next? She is safe while she is here, but they may attack her ship on its way back to Tienjing. They will be watching for her on the bird roads east of Zagwa, waiting for another chance to strike.
“So we have decided,” he said, “to play a little trick on Lady Naga’s enemies. The talks are supposed to last another week, but between ourselves the talking is all but done. Lady Naga has convinced us of her husband’s good intentions, and we have agreed to help him. A few days from now an unremarkable merchant airship will leave Zagwa air harbor and fly northwest across the sand sea to Tibesti Static, then north again toward the heights of Akheggar. But somewhere over the desert it will change course and make for Shan Guo. Lady Naga will be aboard it, incognito, with one or two of her people to keep her company. No one will expect her to travel by such a route, on such a ship, and by the time her own ship takes off, after the official conclusion of the talks, she will already have been delivered safe to her husband in Tienjing.”
“You talk about me as if I were a parcel,” complained Lady Naga, embarrassed at being the cause of so much trouble.
“The ship Lady Naga travels on should have an African captain,” said Khora. “If our enemies heard that a ship commanded by easterners had left Zagwa, they might smoke our plan, but with a Zagwan in charge, she will appear to be nothing more than a local trader. Of course, it will have to be someone who has proved his courage and his loyalty, and who can perhaps speak a little Airsperanto.”
“Me?” said Theo, catching his drift at last. He looked at Lady Naga, then his parents, and saw that they were all waiting for his answer. His father sat frozen with a honey biscuit halfway to his mouth, and as Theo watched, it slowly came in half and the lower part dropped stickily into Father’s lap. “You want me to go?” he said. He felt frightened and excited. To fly north again, to see the world, to be entrusted with such an important mission … He looked around him at the pleasant house, the steep sunlit gardens, then back to the grave faces of his parents. He had defied them once, running away to join the Green Storm’s war. Surely they would not let him leave again?
“Father?” he asked nervously. “Ma?”
“The choice is yours, Theo,” said his father, putting one arm around his wife’s shoulders. “You’ve proved more than capable of looking after yourself, and we know you’ve been restless, cooped up here, longing to return to the sky.”
“Like a caged bird,” said his mother.
“We will miss you if you go, and fear for you, and pray as we did before for your safe return, but we will not stop you from going, if that is what you want,” his father said. “It is a great honor that the air marshal has chosen you.”
“You do not have to decide now,” said Khora kindly. “The ship does not depart until Tuesday, in the dark of the moon. Think on it tonight, and talk with your mother and father, and let me know your decision in the morning.”
But it did not take as long as Khora had expected for Theo to make his decision. Lady Naga had saved his life, and despite all he had been through in the past year, the urge for adventure was still strong in him. And he could not help wondering whether, on the bird roads of the north, he might meet Wren Natsworthy again.
On Tuesday night, in the dark of the moon, Theo walked at the air marshal’s side across Zagwa air harbor, which stood on a low plateau outside the city walls. In a well-lit hangar Lady Naga’s cruiser Plum Blossom Spring sat in splendor. She was the loveliest airship that Theo had ever seen, but he barely glanced at her; his attention was fixed on the ship that sat waiting for him on an unlit pan at the very edge of the harbor. She was not a remarkable ship—in fact she had been chosen because she was so unremarkable—but Theo could see at once that she was well built. A sturdy little Achebe 1040 with tapered engine pods and long, graceful steering fins. Such ships were used all over Africa as freighters and transports, and this one had clearly had a long life, during which she had grown rather grubby and tattered, but she was Theo’s first command, and he was convinced that she was a better ship than even the Plum Blossom Spring. Her name was Nzimu.
Theo had already made his good-byes, and so, it seemed, had Lady Naga, for she was waiting for him at the foot of the Nzimu’s boarding ladder with just two other people: a young officer who had swapped his Green Storm uniform for the shapeless robes of a trader, and the deaf-mute servant girl Rohini. Khora explained that the other girl, Zhou Li, would be staying behind in Zagwa to wear her mistress’s clothes and stand in for her at next week’s official banquet. She was taller than Lady Naga, and Han rather than Aleutian, but they were enough alike that any spies who were watching might be fooled into thinking the ambassador was still in Zagwa.