Antal confronted him. “Listen, you furry cretin, you don’t have the skills or the knowledge or the ability to command anything without our help! Have you forgotten, ‘your majesty,’ who put you on your crummy throne here?”
“You are not the only skypeople who are willing to help the Tran. I see that now. Perhaps you are not even the best. I no longer believe your stories.” Again he indicated the icerigger. “Those who fight alongside the other skypeople do not act like the exploited and deceived. I begin to wonder on what they tried to tell me of your intentions. Yes, I begin to wonder. I have decided. We will surrender to them. I am still emperor here.”
“That’s right, you are.” Antal stepped back and gestured sharply. Corfu nodded, whispered to two of the soldiers who had been serving as honor guard. The three of them grabbed Massul fel-Stuovic and carried him to the edge of the parapet.
“Put me down! Put me down this instant!” The wind caught his dan and they billowed tautly around him. “I am emperor here. I am emperor of all Tran-ky-ky, Landgrave of Yingyapin! I command you to…”
A moment later Antal stepped to the edge of the stone rampart and looked over the side. A couple of curious passers-by had gathered around the stain on the ice below. After a while they tilted back their heads to look upward. Then they turned and chivaned off in opposite directions.
The foreman stepped back from the parapet. “So much for one problem.”
“Would that all our problems were so easily solved.” Bamaputra turned to the merchant. “Corfu ren-Arhaveg, I hereby appoint you Landgrave of Yingyapin and Emperor of all Tran-ky-ky. Don’t let it go to your head.”
“At your service, sirs.” Corfu executed that strange sideways Tran bow. “There may be some resistance among members of Massul’s court.”
“We’ll take care of that,” Bamaputra assured him. “You understand what we’re going to do here? We’re going to try and speed up the warming trend.”
“I understand, sir. I think it for the better. Why wait until one is old and stooped to enjoy success?”
“Why wait indeed?” Bamaputra muttered.
Antal put a hand on Corfu’s shoulder. “Keep trying to take the ship. Don’t risk too many of your troops. We want to keep them busy out there so they don’t have a chance to sneak out. Eventually they’ll get hungry and give up. Meanwhile we’ve got to get back to our work. We’ll leave you a communicator, one of our ‘wind-talkers,’ so you can get in touch with us if anything unexpected turns up.”
Corfu straightened. “Friend Antal, worry not. You can rely on me.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why we’ve made you emperor. Should’ve done it months ago instead of sticking with that poor crazy bastard.” He turned to leave.
“A moment.” Bamaputra spoke softly.
Antal frowned, turned back to face his boss. “Something wrong?”
“Very wrong. Listen.”
They did so, until Corfu was moved to ask, “The wind?”
“No. No, not the wind.” Bamaputra’s lips were taut, his expression frozen. “Not the thrice-damned wind.”
“How much longer can we hold out?” Cheela Hwang was leaning over the railing, staring at the distant windswept city. Ethan stood nearby.
“A week,” he told her “Hunnar thinks maybe two or three.”
“Then what?”
“Then we try to strike some kind of deal with our ‘friends.’ ” He nodded in the direction of the harborfront.
“You can’t deal with people like that.”
“You can’t starve to death, either. Besides which we’re running low on crossbow bolts and beamer charges.”
She sighed, turned to study him closely. “Then Milliken didn’t get through.”
“We don’t know that. Not yet. Milliken’s very resourceful. Deceptively so. There’s still a chance.”
“Yes, he’s quietly competent.”
Now it was Ethan’s turn to stare at her thoughtfully. “You sort of like our friend Milliken, don’t you?”
She looked past him, toward the mechanical boom that barred the Slanderscree’s exit. “Sort of.”
He turned away so she wouldn’t see him smile. As he did so he frowned. “You hear something, Cheela?”
She stared over the bow. “Hear something? Only the wind.”
“No, something besides the wind. Higher pitched.”
Others heard it as well. Those soldiers and sailors not manning defensive positions made a concerted rush for the bow. Ethan and Hwang followed, along with the icerigger’s entire human complement.
“Skimmer!” he finally yelled when he was certain. “It has to be a skimmer!”
“Your excitement’s premature, feller-me-lad.” September had come up behind them. Panting hard, he strained to peer past the gate. “A skimmer it is for sure, but whose?” He held the huge Tran battle axe that had been a gift from the Landgrave of Wannome. With its edge resting on the deck, his left ankle crossed over his right as he leaned on the axe’s handle for support, he looked for all the world like some silver-suited ghost resting casually on an ancient umbrella in some posh trendy neighborhood on Earth or New Paris. The barbarian boulevarder, Ethan mused.
“Could the evil skypeople have called another sky boat from somewhere to come and help them recapture us?” Hunnar wondered worriedly.
“It’s possible.” Already Ethan was losing some of the initial enthusiasm the approaching skimmer had engendered. “If that’s the case, there isn’t much we can do about it. They might be supplied by skimmer at regular intervals. The critical thing is, how is it armed? I don’t see them having another cannon. No need for two heavy weapons here. Maybe they had another skimmer out doing survey work and they called it back when the one tracking us didn’t return. What do you think, Skua?”
“I don’t know what to think, feller-me-lad. If our friend Antal had access to more heavy artillery, I think we’d have been treated to a demonstration long before now. So I can’t explain what this one’s doing showing up all of a suddenlike.” He glanced back toward the city. “If this was going to be an attack, they’d be hitting us from both sides.”
“By the same token it can’t be from Brass Monkey,” Cheela Hwang told them. “There are no skimmers at Brass Monkey. Only ice cycles. The presence of skimmers would violate…”
“We know, we know,” Ethan said impatiently. “It’s against regulations to utilize advanced transportation systems in backward regions of backward worlds. Too much of a shock to the natives. I’m getting sick of that regulation.”
The humming grew steadily louder. “I don’t think it’s the one we first ran into out on the ice, the one whose crew we shot up that came back later with the cannon in tow,” September declared hesitantly. “Sounds much bigger, like a cargo shifter.” His wavy white hair fluttered in the wind like a glowing nimbus around his great head as he stared into the distance. Then he pointed with an arm the size of a foremast spar.
“There she is!”
“Can you see who’s aboard?”
September could not, but the Tran could. “Many of your kind,” Hunnar informed them. “It is truly a bigger sky boat than the one that tried to sink our lifeboat.”
“Cannons, guns,” September growled anxiously. “What can you see?”
“I see no such large weapons, no lightning-thrower.” Hunnar leaned over the railing. “I see—by the beard of my grandfather!”