With wrath kindled by the sight of a fallen knight, the watch charged, canisters of acid spreading a strangely ebullient conflagration across bricks and flesh.
In the end, the watch won.
Men and women in uniform heaved the charred remains, took them by the wrists and ankles and swung then onto rising gruesome piles.
Caliph (as usual) had been precise.
Every stone was overturned, every building searched. Ghoul Court would be remade—from scratch.
When Caliph got the report on the sixth, he was horrified. The top page had an antiseptic whiteness with several objectives typed and centered. All were labeled: complete.
It has to work, he thought as he read the report. My plan has to work. If it doesn’t . . . if all of this is for nothing . . . He shook his head. I suppose I’ll be paying another visit to Hazel Nantallium, taking her up on her offer. But now that things were in motion, he wondered if all the votives in Hullmallow Cathedral could save his soul.
CHAPTER 33
Caliph woke from a terrible dream that he couldn’t remember. The report rested on a chair near the bed. It had settled in disarray like a white bird that had struck a windowpane.
There was little time to regret or even think about the day before.
Information had leaked that an Iscan zeppelin had crashed near Bittern Moor along the White Leech—territory now controlled by Saergaeth. It was a massive supply ship called the Orison.
In addition to food, medicine and military correspondence, the Orison had carried weapons. Gas bows, chemiostatic swords and other controlled munitions. Potentially as bad as the loss of troop locations and timetables, government sources had muttered that undisclosed highly sensitive technology had also been on board.
The papers were quick to black extras with headlines that read, ISCAN DISASTER MAY BE WATERSHED FOR MISKATOLL. And: HOW BAD IS IT? ISCAN WAR SECRETS IN SAERGAETH’S HANDS. The news was so stunning that the previous day’s events in Ghoul Court were mostly overshadowed.
CREW OF FIFTY FEARED DEAD AFTER ZEPPELIN GOES DOWN!
Family members of the missing airmen were rounded up and taken to a secluded government estate in Octul Box where they awaited further developments.
By late afternoon, commanders of small arrowy spy dirigibles confirmed that despite the crash’s proximity to Fallow Down, light war engines marked with burgundy emblems had already converged.
Apparently Saergaeth had no fear of the haunted wasteland of Fallow Down. Conspiracy theorists were already speculating that the two disasters were somehow linked.
Saergaeth had an array of sky sharks patrolling the region within hours. The prospect of several tons of food alone would have been sufficient to catch Saergaeth’s attention. Yrisl guessed his troops were being fed from supplies seized at sea before the Iscan dreadnought and her escorts had plowed north to guard Tentinil’s harbors.
Like a beached whale, the downed leviathan was to the rebellion as a carcass laid before the happy bewilderment of gulls and crabs.
Saergaeth’s troops were giddy.
Spies brought Caliph the details: Saergaeth’s soldiers poking gingerly through the wreckage, looking for booby traps. There were corpses strewn everywhere. Blackened and burnt or terribly marked with posthumous bruising.
But nothing sprang from the shredded compartments. No hideous automatons or holomorphic hexes triggered when grunts lifted timbers or huge sections of the punctured gasbag’s drapery of skin.
The booty was tremendous.
Saergaeth’s ranking officer found the schematics, the charts and battlefield maps. Caliph’s spies confirmed that Saergaeth would have the locations of troops hidden in the hills east of Forgin’s Keep. On top of this, there were two dozen chemiostatic swords, fifty gas-powered crossbows, five suits of chor
tium armor and a coffer containing a dozen trade bars in gold.
And then there was the massive reinforced tank covered with pipes and chugging engines that still hummed despite the zeppelin’s violent landing. A circular door, sealed with a great wheel at its center, capped one end of the vaguely cylindrical tank.
When the troops opened it, their astonishment distilled from silence. Drooling icy vapor trickled from its frosty mouth across the tilted floor.
Inside was surreal bounty.
On great hooks, fifty enormous bulbs of unidentifiable meat depended, each several times the size of an entire cow.
A soldier stepped forward and stabbed at one with his sword but the frozen carcass was like granite. His powerful thrust wasn’t even enough to set the obscene hunk of flesh swinging.
There didn’t seem to be many bones. It was all meat. Enough meat, in fact, to feed a huge amount of men. Besides the protein there were bags of flour and canned goods. Pearlums and beans and salted corn.
Lastly, in a vault, were the glass tubes flanged in bolted metal, glowing peculiar hues of purple, electric-pink and blue and other colors impossible to name. They shimmered in the vault like baroque jewels.
One of the sky sharks was signaled down. It dropped tethers and an army of men strained to secure it along the river’s edge.
It took four hours to load all the new cargo into the belly of a ship no longer designed to ferry supplies.
The sky shark had been outfitted like the rest of Saergaeth’s fleet with turrets and ballistae and racks of aerosol bombs.
In order to fit the huge tank of meat, they had to shuttle some of the zeppelin’s munitions into the already cramped war engines chugging nearby.
The two-hundred glowing canisters were left strapped in their vault. The entire closet-sized room was then winched on a crane that extended off one of the engine’s scorpion-like tails and hoisted into the zeppelin’s hold.
Finally, just as night was falling, the sky shark revved its engines and headed into the deadened sky.
When Caliph got the news, he left Isca in the Byun-Ghala, escorted by several zeppelins that emerged like underwater creatures from the steel corrals of Malgôr Hangar. Dark spiny puffers floating out of candent holes, they pummeled the other side of day with their engines, left bands of soot and crossed the enormous double wall of the Hold, motoring into jellied air above the High King’s Moor.
Thick amoeboid clouds clotted the night. The glitter of crofts and villages flecked an indistinct and inky landscape several thousand feet below.
Though they were stocked with epicurean delights, Caliph left the warmth of his staterooms for the chilly observation deck.
He smelled fresh vapors shredding against the propellers. Cold spongy space smacked the deck beneath the airship’s turgid skin.
He had so much to think about that, for a little while, his course into darkness felt almost like escape. He soaked in the clammy wind.
With this small fleet, he had come to personally oversee the transfer of several unexpected prisoners of war. Taken in a recent skirmish west of Clefthollow and held in tiny cells, they had been confined for nearly a day aboard the same spy dirigible that had sent Caliph word of the Orison’s crash.
Thirty miles outside of Isca the rendezvous was about to happen in the dark, like insects coupling on the fly.
Caliph heard the engines shift; strange, auxiliary sounds reverberating through the zeppelin.
He braced himself against the rail as green lights skeletonized the dart-like shadow of some frail craft that had risen through the gloom and materialized above the deck. Like photophores on a deep-sea fish, the luminaries glistered and burned through the ether.