Sena levels her eyes and marches past.
She takes a carriage to the keep, dashes up the steps and into the foyer. Her feet echo down the hall, up more stairs, pulling a breeze with her that moves the tapestries.
A serving man opens a door into the passage, recognizes her and turns back, pretending to forget something. He shuts the portal with a click as the High King’s witch storms past.
She takes tertiary hallways to minimize the chance of being stopped.
Reddish bands of light from the arrow loops slash her face. The steam of her breath vaporizes in the halls she leaves behind.
With anxious rapidity, she moves up even more stairs and out onto the sun-raked parapet that encloses the massive roof.
Here, the sun still shines over the eastern mountains and gleams icily off slate and lead. Her feet jump the gutters. The gargoyles seem to watch.
She opens a small door to the high tower and goes up, forever turning to the right. When she reaches the top, she throws open the door.
The highest room in the city is empty.
A surprised bird lifts out a window as Sena steps cautiously inside.
Carefully rolled maps rest on the war table along with small wooden figures of men and horses. Eleven of the wooden figures are more painstakingly carved than the others. They sit by themselves in a little group.
There is a halgrin with picked-out wooden scales, and standing by itself, the figure of a king.
She picks it up, turns it over. On the base are crude hand-carved words: For Caliph.
The wind from the sea whines harshly over the sills. Up here, she can see beyond the low mountains of the peninsula to where the sun, in scalloped pink, drowns in a cloudy film of waves.
“Miss?”
Sena jerks her head to see a young woman in black and white. She is wiping her hands on a cloth and looking both shy and concerned.
“His majesty just left, though I haven’t any idea where. Would you like me to bring you something? Coffee?”
Sena shakes her head almost imperceptibly.
“We haven’t seen you for days,” the maid offers. “Welcome back.”
Alani helped his fellows escape their fleshy prisons: nine handpicked agents under his command. The refrigerated compartment had been fitted with a door that also opened from the inside.
His team removed the insulated suits and helmets, strapped on their gear and weapons and sprung the groaning metal door as softly as they knew how.
They gave hand signals in the blue-lit cargo hold and disappeared into the labyrinth of crates.
Quietly, the ship changed hands.
Alani’s men went through the berths. They examined papers, identification cards, diaries and personal effects. They isolated their captives, told each of them that all their mates were dead.
They asked bizarre questions.
Which of the crew were loners? Which hadn’t any family? Who had the fewest friends?
Some of the crew began to suspect the obvious deception. Truth remained irrelevant. They could coordinate no logical resistance. Even if they could, the bag of gear Alani clutched inside his frozen cyst contained (among other things) mostly superfluous implements of suppression.
Two would-be heroes were soothed with needles that out-flowed powerful tranquilizers. When they lulled into glassy stupors Alani’s men moved them to the galley.
The period of solitary confinement came to an end.
The unmarried, the orphaned and the misanthropic were stripped of their uniforms. Naked and terrified, they were held down and injected with hypodermics full of yellow drug. Their captors didn’t bother to sterilize the needles between injections.
In several minutes it would not matter.
Ten nude airmen were untied. They stumbled around the compartment in a narcotized trance while Alani’s men herded them toward a shuttered hatch.
Outside, the sky blew dark and torrential.
One by one, the men were hurled into space. They fell for several thousand feet before landing with unheard thumps and clatters like bags of broken sticks among the rocks or soggy moors west of the Somber Hills.
It was messy work.
The spies did not think about it. Their mission turned Saergaeth’s airmen into packages—each one nothing more than perfidious jetsam.
The remaining eight (that had not been drugged) were forced to watch. They screamed and clenched their teeth and eyes and tried to look away.
“Sorry mates,” Alani whispered when all the doomed were gone. “That’s the sentence for traitors to Stonehold.”
His men put on the defenestrated crewmen’s uniforms. They held them up, eyeballed fit like shoppers. They traded. Mixed and matched.
Eventually even Alani resembled one of Saergaeth’s low rank flyboys.
One of his men had medical expertise.
He took the remaining crewmen and by means of a strange contraption forced back their upper and lower lids. Carefully he distended each man’s left eyeball and inserted a bead of holomorphic glass into the underlying socket. Then he popped the eye back in place.
After an hour, all the implants had been done.
Alani’s spies thoroughly explored every cranny of the ship. They gathered for the pep talk they knew was coming.
The eight remaining members of the crew were untied.
They sat nervously in wooden chairs listening to the thunder, eyeballs aching.
Alani looked ghastly in the fluttering weirdness of several lamps. At least he hoped he did. He had chosen this spot for the effect. His pocked cheeks and bristly dome would enhance his gaunt, sinister mien. He lit his pipe and puffed while resting his foot on the seat of a chair.
He could tell the crew was frightened. They paid sedulous attention to every word he spoke. They were men who ferried metholinate, not professional soldiers. Enamored with Saergaeth’s leadership, they made the easy, popular choice, siding against Caliph Howl—a man whom none of them had ever seen.
“You are traitors,” said Alani with slow congenial syllables. “But can still avoid a traitor’s fate.”
He began the propaganda he was an expert at delivering and explained that the bead in their eye was holomorphically linked to a single bead in his hand. If he crushed the one, the other eight would shatter. They were filled with toxin that would go directly to the brain.
“If any one of you should betray the High King again by compromising this mission, you will die. And you will have killed the other seven . . . your friends and crew . . . in addition to yourself.”
It was a lie. The beads of glass were totally innocuous.
“When we have finished this mission, I promise you . . . we will remove the implants. You will be granted clemency, free to return to your families and your jobs after swearing allegiance to the High King.
“After this war is over we will all be Stonehavians again.”
One of the men laughed even though he looked terribly afraid. “How can we possibly trust you?”
Alani didn’t smile.
“Trust? I don’t want your trust. As traitors to your country you are being coerced, gentlemen. Let us call it what it is.”
“We’re not traitors. We’re patriots,” said the zeppelin captain. “And you sir, are a murderous liar. The very kind we’re fighting against.”
Alani grinned. His teeth were yellow and crooked and he knew it. He looked the captain directly in the face for maximum effect.