Tanvanaki decided that she could not afford to wait. Even if the riders succeeded in removing the caltrops, which seemed unlikely and would take time, the airships would take advantage of the delay to rearm themselves. She could see that airship crews were already hurrying to winch back their gigantic crossbows and reload them.
She pressed her bone speaking tube against the back of Korva’s neck and spoke an order that she thought she would never have to give:
Talons.
Korva repeated the order to the other garinafins with mournful bellows.
In traditional garinafin warfare, this was an order given only in desperation. Only a pilot whose mount had exhausted almost all supply of fermented gas and could not maintain flight or fire breath would resort to fighting with the last weapons possessed by her mount: teeth and talons—and the garinafins right now lacked even teeth.
Yet Princess Vadyu’s order wasn’t completely insensible. The airships, after all, were fragile constructions of silk and bamboo, lacking the tough leather and flesh that armored the garinafins. They could hardly withstand a direct strike from the powerful beasts.
Most of the garinafins were still too pain-addled to respond, but a massive brown garinafin now approached Spirit of Kiji, one of the airships forming a wall of the box formation, her talons leading the way as she folded her wings in a killing dive.
The airship crew tried to work even faster at winching back the crossbow. The pilot of the garinafin whistled sharply, and the other riders on the garinafin’s back let loose a barrage of hard, round stones with their slingshots. Several of the crossbowers fell down, their skulls crushed by the missiles. Another screamed as her left arm hung uselessly, broken.
A few women emerged from the hull to take the place of their fallen and injured comrades, and more arrows flew from the arrow slits, but most bounced harmlessly off the riders’ tough leather armor.
“Now!” the pilot shouted into the speaking tube pressed against her mount’s neck.
She and the rest of her crew braced themselves against the harnesses and atop the saddles as the garinafin reared up, her powerful wings generating a wild, turbulent storm, and reached out with her left claw, slashing the sharp talons across the billowing hull of Spirit of Kiji.
Instantly, a massive gash appeared in the silk-and-bamboo hull. Bamboo girders snapped like toothpicks, and lift gasbags lay exposed like the swim bladders of a great fish.
“Compensate for Kiji’s loss of lift,” Mazoti shouted from within Silkmotic Arrow. All the airships were connected together in this formation, and Kiji threatened to drag the whole formation down. “Rescue survivors if you can, but get those crossbows loaded!”
The brown garinafin continued to tear and rip at the hull of Spirit of Kiji. Gasbags popped like the soap bubbles blown by children in summer. Crew tumbled from the widening gash like pearls spilling out of a ripped pouch; screaming, they fell to their deaths in the raging waves below.
As the crews of the other airships scrambled to help the crew of Spirit of Kiji escape their dying craft and adjusted the gasbags in their own ships to maintain the stability of the overall formation, everyone held their collective breath. If a spark appeared now, all the Imperial airships would be doomed.
The garinafin ripped away the last of the gasbags on this side of the ship, and, with a triumphant series of bellows, flapped her wings and backed away. What was left of the billowing, bulky frame of Spirit of Kiji was now too heavy to be supported by the other ships. Slowly, the box formation began to sink toward the sea.
“We have to detach!” shouted Dafiro Miro.
Gin Mazoti nodded, her face grim. Not all the crew of Spirit of Kiji had been rescued, but loss of altitude was fatal to the rest of the fleet. Dafiro gave the order by banging a pattern on the gongs.
Crew members at the rims of the hulls of the other ships climbed to the very edges and cut the cables that kept Spirit of Kiji attached to her sister ships.
Slowly but inexorably, Spirit of Kiji separated from the box formation and fell toward the ocean, taking with it about a dozen crew members who had refused to abandon their places at the massive crossbow, including the captain. The desperate crews of the other airships tossed out silken ropes to the sinking hulk, hoping to rescue as many of their comrades as possible. But the crossbowers shook their heads, refusing to reach for the lines.
“Ready to fire!” Mota Kiphi, the targeting officer, reported to Captain Mué Atamu of Spirit of Kiji. He was one of the few men who served aboard the airship, as his extraordinary strength compensated for his relatively heavier weight.
The platform jerked wildly as the ship swung from side to side, trying to balance itself. The crossbow crew stumbled and several fell.
Captain Atamu, an old veteran of the Chrysanthemum-Dandelion War, held on to a spoke for the crossbow wheel and nodded. “Let’s make this count!”
Because the few crossbowers who remained were far fewer than a full complement, turning the wheel was a slow and laborious process made possible only by Mota Kiphi’s extraordinary strength. He guided and rallied his comrades until the massive crossbow was pointing at a tan garinafin with light green stripes gliding away from them.
“Stop!” shouted Mota. Then he swallowed nervously and asked, “Captain, do you think they’ll remember us in the future like they remember the Hegemon?”
Captain Atamu looked at him. Mota was so young, so hopelessly in love with the idea of history. She looked at the other crossbowers, all of them looking expectantly back. The yearning in their eyes broke the old captain’s heart.
She kept her voice gentle as she said to them, “Probably not. Most soldiers who die are quickly forgotten. But we don’t fight to leave a name; we fight because it’s the right thing to do.”
“Oh,” said Mota, disappointment making him slump at the wheel. “I was hoping for a song.”
“Not all heroes need songs composed about them,” said Captain Atamu. “It is enough that we know who we are.”
Then she gave the order to fire.
The bolt leapt from the crossbow and traced a gentle arc through the air that ended in the body of the tan-and-green-striped garinafin. A loud moan. Then the sky was lit up with another fiery explosion.
The crossbowers cheered and embraced each other.
As the doomed wreckage of Spirit of Kiji continued to sink, the rest of the garinafins, now recovered somewhat from the pain of the caltrops stuck in their mouths, approached and took out their anger by swiping their sharp talons at individual crew members, ripping some cleanly in half and crushing others into bloody meat pies before tossing them to the ocean. Not a single crew member pled for mercy, and all died with their short swords in their hands, though they were useless against the garinafins.
The empty wreck of Spirit of Kiji crashed into the sea, and the small ships of the Dara navy had to scramble to get out of the way.
Heart of Tututika, Resolve of Fithowéo, and Vigor of the Twins shifted their positions to fill in the gap left by Spirit of Kiji. The airships, having reloaded their crossbows, fired again, and two more garinafins were struck by the bolts and disintegrated in the air.