They defied and boggled the mind. Moveable fortresses, tactical strongholds that could be positioned as defiles or inching juggernauts, the foes of which had but one realistic maneuver: a slow relentless rout.
But against the comparative agility of zeppelins, the cumbersome heavies could only wait, hoping an airship would blunder within range—something not likely to happen even if a zeppelin captain showed gross incompetence and total disregard for all things sane. The crew would mutiny long before coming within a mile of such a monster’s reach.
But when the gold and blue fireworks discharged behind the Byun-Ghala the Iscan heavies stopped launching conventional missiles of steel and stone.
They filled their guns with tunsia-reinforced holomorphic glass.
Cannonballs filled with souls.
Brobdingnagian compression units sent a volley of solvitriol bombs into the air. They were rudimentary. Untested. Caliph saw the heavies fire but lost track of their supersonic ammunition.
His stomach twisted three directions at once. His bowels needed sudden emptying. Everything depended on this moment.
Had Alani really done his job?
Caliph sweat profusely.
For unbearable moments nothing seemed to happen. He scanned the sky for any trace of success. His eyes moved from one dirigible to the next. Keenly attentive despite agonizing discomfort.
The Iscan heavies gave another volley, compression cannons rolling like thunder across the hills.
No visible effect.
So that’s it? Nothing?
“Fuck thunder!” It was not a curse of rage. Fear filled Caliph from the boots up. Isca was doomed. The worm gang youths had truly died in vain!
His flesh went clammy. He felt himself surrender to prickles, uncontrollable convulsions and finally retching fits. His head would decorate the walls at West Gate: a distinctly irritating but not entirely inconvenient method of escape.
But he wasn’t being honest. After all, he did care. Not for himself. He still had to pay for the worm gang murders. Sigmund had lied, but the High King had authorized the project. No. Caliph didn’t have much hope for himself, but he did wish the unaffected best for Isca.
He didn’t really care that he was about to become a piece of history except that many hundreds of loyal men and women were dying on his behalf.
He chuckled at what he guessed would be tomorrow’s headline:
Saergaeth Puts End to War!
And then:
High King Saergaeth Brindlestr
m restores order to the Duchy of Stonehold after months of conflict and scandal. Caliph Howl, whose family name had suffered a history of alleged political impropriety and corruption was arrested sometime this morning and taken into custody on charges of treason and witchcraft.
Caliph’s execution would take place in Nevergreen along with the other traitors. Caliph felt torturously ashamed of that.
People are going to die because they followed me.
Who am I? Some misanthrope out of Greymoor? Incapable of planning any kind of war or strategy that works!
Caliph was gagging.
Three of the airmen unlatched his tether and dragged him into the stateroom. Warm lights fluttered on the walls. The piano stood silent. Outside, detonations filled the air with a pungent biting stench.
Caliph unzipped his flight jacket, tossed his earmuffs and goggles aside and stumbled into a cramped closet outfitted with plumbing and a tastefully decorated stool.
He jerked his leather pants down between his ankles and dropped onto the seat, colon exploding with pent-up anxiety. His guts tightened, struggling to wring out every drop of stress.
Klaxons sounded.
Caliph laid his head in his lap, exhausted. He focused on purging himself of any residual disquiet.
Again the horns. Urgent. Sequacious. Unremitting.
Detonated wood paneling and a sudden spray of splinters suffused the air. Winter wind howled through the tiny bathroom.
A ragged opening just above Caliph’s head yawned brightly, somehow comical and grotesque.
A gun-stone must have torn through the Byun-Ghala’s hull leaving a trail of like-sized holes. The opposite wall was similarly destroyed. Beyond it, the floor. Strake smashed. Planks flinderized. Wind screaming underneath.
Caliph swabbed himself, agony devitalized by fresh crisis. He buckled his belt and crawled out of his ruined water closet.
The hole in the stateroom floor showed a jagged picture of war-torn landscape several thousand feet below.
Caliph gritted his teeth, donned his gear and marched back out to the observation deck. He reattached his tether and got to work on the Pplarian gun.
No, he told himself.
You conceited prickish ass! They aren’t fighting for you. They’re fighting for Stonehold . . . for themselves . . . for the place they want to live. And you, as the High King, owe it to them not to give up before it’s through.
Every firing shook the cannon’s inner mechanisms so that after three such volleys certain bolts had to be readjusted.
Off the starboard side, one of Saergaeth’s airships listed oddly. As Caliph worked he noticed its decks devoid of movement. The flaps in the tail were banked hard. The bloated bloodred thing was going in vast protracted circles.
The Iscan heavies fired again.
Caliph saw the shot this time by virtue of the obscene chance that the propelled tunsia sphere actually impacted one of Saergaeth’s gliders. Caliph’s attention was drawn to the missile’s arc just after impact.
The glider had turned to fragments of wood, metal, leather and gore and the faint orb that had destroyed it had left a visible wake of fumes from the glider’s cell. It had also slowed tremendously. Caliph could tell it was about to begin its return trip, plummeting through clouds to lodge deeply in the frozen fields.
But something astonishing happened instead.
It did not fall.
Its velocity increased. It changed direction. It swooped like a gumball on a string. Swung in a smooth arc, impacted an Iscan airship, tore relentlessly through and accelerated toward an invisible gravitational pull. It hit another of Saergaeth’s gliders, disintegrating the aeronaut and his lighter-than-air craft into a spray of tiny bits.
Caliph could follow it with his eye because its track was faintly visible. Not a trail behind, but its path ahead. And it was growing clearer every fraction of every second. Like the negative image the Pplarian lightning left on his brain when he closed his eyes, a dark line, a blackish foreshadower materialized, showing where the ball would go.
Then Caliph lost track of it amid the chaos and the noise.
What could it mean?
At least some mechanic of his plan must have succeeded. Alani must have installed the devices on a portion, no matter how small, of Saergaeth’s fleet.
Hope returned as the heavies fired again. Roaring lions. Angry personifications of some overused political symbolism.
“Tell the captain to board that ship!” shouted Caliph.
He pointed to the derelict zeppelin cutting mindless circles in the sky.
“Yes, sir!”
The Pplarian gun concussed the air and another gout of lightning split the sky.
Fifteen minutes later, they were docked above the Mademoiselle. The coupling was tricky. A set of additional controls existed in a kind of inverted crow’s nest below the Byun-Ghala’s observation deck. The copilot had climbed down via an exposed spiral staircase.
He used the secondary controls to put the upside-down steeple into a coupling dead center on the other zeppelin’s crown.