“We must wait for her orders.”
In truth, Zomi Kidosu was only half right. As she looked into the open jaws of the garinafin, Gin Mazoti gambled.
After Dafiro Miro returned from Tan Adü and showed Zomi Kidosu and the other scholars the fire rod of the Adüans, they finally understood a mysterious anatomical feature of the garinafin.
The dentition of the garinafin was generally in line with what one would expect of an herbivore. The six incisors were long and shaped like cleavers to break and chop tough grass and shrubs, and the thirty-two premolars and molars were ridged, flat, and clearly designed for grinding down the fibrous diet.
Even the ferocious upper canines were not too surprising to the anatomists. Many herbivores, such as the sludge-horse of Crescent Island, which grazed on aquatic plants, had fearsome, oversized canines for defense and territorial combat. It was conceivable the garinafin canines served similar purposes, given that the garinafins could not always summon fire breath, especially when they didn’t have enough fermented gas stored up in internal sacs.
But it was the lower canines that truly baffled Zomi, Çami, Mécodé, and other scholars. If the upper canines of the garinafin reminded observers of giant daggers, then the lower canines most closely resembled scabbards. Shaped as hollow tubes, each was perfectly fitted to its upper mate, and a slit at the bottom of the tooth, near where it emerged from the gum, allowed liquid accumulated within the tooth to drain. This seemed a design destined to trap food particles and lead to tooth decay.
Indeed, the problem seemed evident to everyone who noticed that each of the upper canines showed small holes near the tip. If the beasts slept with their upper canines sheathed within the lower teeth, and bits of food and saliva were trapped at the bottom, decay would naturally start at the tips of the canines and create the pattern of honeycombed holes the scholars observed.
But with the model provided by the Tan Adü fire rods, the scholars finally realized that the unique garinafin canine teeth were actually fire starters.
Bits of dried grass became stuck in the holes in the upper canines and acted as kindling. When a garinafin wished to breathe fire, it pushed its tongue forward to plug up the drainage slit in the bottom canines, forming an airtight seal. As the garinafin snapped its jaws shut, the force and speed of the upper canines plunging into the lower canines compressed the air trapped inside the hollowed teeth, just as the fire rods of the Adüans crushed the air trapped inside their bamboo tubes.
The result was extreme heat that set fire to the tinder in the tips of the canines. When the garinafin opened its mouth and expelled a mixture of exhalation from its lungs and the flammable fermented gas from its internal sacs, the stream was lit, and that was the secret of the garinafin’s fire breath. This explained why, as Zomi Kidosu and the others had often noted, the garinafins always snapped their jaws shut right before breathing fire.
Onboard Silkmotic Arrow, as the probing garinafin dove at the airship, Gin Mazoti had noticed that the nostrils of the approaching garinafin weren’t flared, indicating that it wasn’t taking a deep breath in preparation for fire breathing. What’s more, while the garinafin had its jaws open, they weren’t opened as wide as they’d be if it was planning to snap them shut with maximum force to generate a big spark.
In other words, all signs indicated that it was only bluffing. A test.
The marshal had certainly been gambling, but it was a calculated risk, the kind that Luan Zya and Kuni Garu both would have approved of. After all, as she wrote in her strategy book, knowing the enemy was more than half the battle.
Having ascertained that the Imperial airships really were as inept as they appeared, the garinafins moved in for the kill, confident that they could dispatch these impressive-looking but useless giants with ease. The Lyucu warriors whipped the Dara peasants who manned the city-ships’ oars to urge them to work harder so that they could get to the shore faster for the storming of Ginpen.
The Dara navy that had emerged from the port of Ginpen moved to intercept. The marshal’s plan was to hold the garinafins back with her airships and to prevent the Lyucu fleet from landing, giving the nimble Dara navy a chance to do as much damage to the massive city-ships as possible. The success of the plan, of course, depended entirely on the air battle overhead.
Twenty jaws opened wide as the garinafins approached the airships, their wings beating slowly and deliberately to conserve strength.
“Hold it….”
Gin Mazoti’s eyes were cold and steady. She put her hands on the handle of Na-aroénna, which was so heavy that it had to be held in a dedicated harness in the gondola. She missed her old sword, with which Kuni Garu had once slain a giant white python.
Could I repeat the feat of the emperor today and slay the great beasts?
She could feel the power of the machinery hidden out of sight behind her, a force that tingled her spine and made her hair stand on end.
With a grunt, she drew the Doubt-Ender from its scabbard and raised it overhead. “Box Formation, now!”
Dafiro Miro leapt to a nearby gong and struck it loudly three times to transmit the order to the rest of the crew throughout the gondola and the hull overhead, and signaling officers passed the same order to the other ships by flag signal.
Women and men aboard all the airships scrambled over the complicated internal skeleton of the massive hull, ducking beneath billowing lift gasbags to adjust rigging, turn levers, spin wheels, and perform the intricate choreography needed to operate the hidden machinery that revealed the true design of the airships.
Coordinated by a fresh round of spinning shanties, soldiers strained and pushed against the spokes of giant winches to wind thick silk cords. Slowly, the giant ceramic ballast balls hanging right aft the gondolas started to shift, changing the center of gravity of each of the airships, pitching and rolling them in midair.
Spirit of Kiji, Heart of Tututika, Resolve of Fithowéo, and Vigor of the Twins—the four airships flying in diamond formation in the middle—shifted their ballast balls aft, tilting up the prows of the ships until they were standing on their ends. Rowers on the four ships worked their feathered oars furiously until the four airships backed into each other to form a box, presenting their now-vertical gondolas to the outside like miniature castles built halfway up sheer, floating cliffs of billowing silk.
Moji’s Vengeance, flying below them, rose higher until its top touched the bottom edges of the floating walls to form the floor of the box.
Silkmotic Arrow, up at the top, went through an even more amazing transformation. The ballast ball was shifted until the ship had completely rolled over so that the ballast ball dangled from what used to be the upper surface of the ship, and the gondola was perched at the top. As the ship rolled, Marshal Mazoti and all the other members of the crew in the gondola moved with the tilting floor and walls until they were standing on what used to be the ceiling. Then Silkmotic Arrow slowly descended until its billowing hull joined the other ships to form the top of the box.
Rowers in all the airships retracted their feathered oars, which were foldable and collapsible to facilitate storage. More crew members at the rims of the saucer-shaped hulls tossed rigging across gaps to lash the ships together.
The six airships now formed a floating fortress with six gondolas pointing in every direction. This structure remedied one of the greatest weaknesses of the airships: their vulnerability to attacks from above and below, which had been taken advantage of by the highly maneuverable garinafin riders during Kuni Garu’s invasion of Rui.