Harris stepped through the doorway and sidekicked. The blow caught Duncan in the sternum and threw him off Doc’s body. Harris felt frail bones break under the blow.
Duncan, twisting in pain but not unconscious, crawled away from his enemy. There was hate as well as pain in his voice this time: “Who’s there?”
Harris stared at the shriveled, bloody-faced thing in the corner. Every bit of him wanted to take another two steps and kick the life from Duncan Blackletter.
But Duncan had caught Doc in a trap. He might have others waiting. Harris wouldn’t let Duncan win through a mistake. Even the delay it took to kill him might prove fatal.
He grabbed Doc beneath the arms, pulled him out into the passageway. Doc looked bad, with burns on his arm, smoke rising from his hair and clothes.
“Who is it?” Duncan asked, voice harsh yet quavering. “Talk to me, you wretch—”
Harris let go of Doc. He stepped back into the cabin and swung the door away from the wall. He struck an open-palm blow at the inside knob. The blow knocked it free. “Enjoy your ride,” he said, his voice cold. Then he stepped out again and closed the door.
As he dragged Doc forward, he could feel the liftship tilting down at the bow; the angle increased, became troublesome even before he got into the bomb bay.
Smoke poured down from the access hatch; the air was hot and getting hotter. In a bare minute, he’d be burning. He heard pounding from the direction of Duncan’s cabin. Pounding and shouting.
The gondola was only two or three hundred feet above the ground. Even as he watched, the liftship moved out over the river.
The gear in the bomb bay included a winch. But it was wound with cable and not rope—nothing he could tie around Doc.
With his knife, he cut free a piece of the rappelling line he’d climbed. He tied one end to a loop at the end of the winch cable, the other end to Doc. He hoped the decidedly non-Boy Scouts knots would hold. The skin on his back was blistering from heat before he was done.
“Captain?” he called.
“Not done yet,” the man replied.
Harris shook his head. He gently levered Doc over the lip of the hole in the floor, keeping his grip on the rope, playing it out as carefully as he could; it still tore flesh of his palms as Doc descended.
A moment later, he threw the main lever on the winch, watched the motor turn and cable unspool; he grabbed the cable with both bloody hands, swung out over open space, and rode the cable down, Doc dangling a dozen feet below him.
The heat was scarcely better here. He glanced up, saw the entire surface of the liftship glowing gold and white, a cleansing fire that would burn the last of Duncan Blackletter’s stain from this world.
Witnesses along Neckerdam’s eastern shore and Pataqqsit’s western saw the slate-gray airship sail majestically over the river. The golden glow brightened in the ship’s bow, then swept toward the stern, making an oblong sun of the ship, eating through its rubberized cloth skin, twisting its metal skeleton with unimaginable heat.
Two men made it out of the liftship, descending by cable from the gondola; one towed the other away from the descending wreckage. When the gondola was a dozen yards from the water’s surface, a third man, his back afire, leaped out through the forward windows.
The ship was completely consumed with fire as it touched down on the water. It rested there a long moment, burning, dying, then began its final descent to the bottom of the river.
Tugboats and Novimagos Guard rescue craft approached as close as they dared and picked up the survivors.
Gaby opened her eyes.
The room was dark, but not so dark that she couldn’t recognize Harris’ face above her own. Recognize the feel of him as he crushed her to him. She held on to him with fierce strength.
She was in her own room in the Monarch Building, more tired than she thought it was possible to feel, but not too tired to remember. “Doc?”
“He’s a little burned, a little stiff. He’ll be okay.”
“The others?”
“Everybody’s banged up some. Except Joseph. Joseph . . . didn’t make it.”
“Dammit.” She was silent a long moment. “What about Duncan? And the Changeling?”
“Dead. Really, truly, dental-records-prove-it dead. They scraped Darig off a rooftop the day it happened, fished what’s left of Duncan out of the river yesterday.”
“Yesterday—”
“You’ve been asleep for a couple of days, baby. You wiped yourself out.”
“Did Doc . . . ” She forced herself to ask the question. “Did Doc have to kill him?”
“No. If anybody did . . . I did. And you did, with that marvelous stunt with the exploding talk-boxes. You blew out talk-boxes in the liftship, in the Monarch Building, and all over this part of Neckerdam.” He smiled. “It sort of makes sense. Gaby Donohue, Programming Director. You beat him with TV.”
The stoneware urn held a shovelful of clay. That was all of Joseph anyone had been able to recover.
As the priestess spoke about death and rebirth, summer and spring, crops and trees, Gaby placed a loaf of bread in the urn. Doc, leaning on the cane he’d be using for a few weeks, added a leather pouch of salt.
Alastair contemplated a glass flask of fine uisge before placing it down in the clay. Noriko followed suit with a cup and a plate of fine copper, a fork and a knife of silver. Ixyail added the pouch packed with clothes and coin.
Last in the ceremony, Harris placed the tiny jeweled axe, symbol of warriors and warrior-kings, into the urn. He stepped away and linked arms with Gaby.
The six of them drew away from the graveside. Workers of the cemetery capped the urn, then carefully lifted it and lowered it into the grave.
Harris looked out over the people attending the graveside ceremony. Associates of the Sidhe Foundation. Sturdy construction workers, Joseph’s fellow workers, uncomfortable in dress clothes. A detachment of Novimagos Guard in full uniform, ready to fire the salute for a man who had briefly been, by association with Doc, a guardsman. An interesting gathering.
“Harris,” Gaby said.
He smiled at her. She was resplendent in a shimmering gown of red. He admired the funerary garb of the fair world. He felt foolish in his matching dress suit, but she’d said he was gorgeous and he didn’t mind her lie. “What?”
“This is an interment, not a stakeout.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“So stop giving everybody the eye.”
The priestess carefully poured a handful of grain into the grave. She withdrew. The guardsmen fired their volley. The men and women in attendance rose, freed from the obligation of ritual, and began talking to one another. Workmen shoveled dirt into the grave.
Harris drank in the details. Ladislas and Welthy, too hurt to attend, even after being tended by Alastair, would want to know everything. And Fergus, who was not so badly hurt but who felt unwanted around the associates—and, for the most part, was correct. “Doc.”
“Yes?”
“What are you going to do about Fergus?”
“Just what I promised him. He did very well during Duncan’s assault . . . but I cannot forget that he betrayed us.”
“Oh, well.” He didn’t press Doc. The man had buried his son earlier today. He looked so glum, so inconsolable, it seemed unlikely that a smile would ever cross his face again.
Ixyail asked what Harris never would have dared to. “Doc, how did it happen?” Her voice was soft, full of sympathy; even her Castilian accent was fainter than usual.
Doc didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I’m not sure. I’ve never been sure. It might have been inheritance. I was pureblood, and pureblood Daoine Sidhe and their children are often tainted with madness. One of the prices we pay for being long-lived.” He shook his head, a sorrowful gesture. “Dierdriu wasn’t touched, just melancholy, a sadness I always thought I could end. But when Duncan began to make his name, she killed herself from grief. From shame.