This was rather unusual. Battle kites were most useful for lookout duty; since the Lyucu fleet was right there in front of their eyes, such additional reconnaissance hardly seemed necessary. Still, none of the naval captains paid them much mind.
The crews of the airships waved at the lookouts riding battle kites in the air near them. The lookouts waved back. Morale was high in the sky and over the sea for the fighting men and women of Dara, while the Lyucu sailors appeared to be grimly awaiting their fate.
The lookouts hanging from the kites even held lit torches, a truly strange choice. Were they going to signal with them?
Korva swept over the buildings and streets of Ginpen, spewing fire at the windmills, multistory wooden towers, ancient lecture halls, and dome-topped laboratories. The inhabitants of the city, hiding deep in basements, remained unharmed, but the city was going to suffer a great deal of damage.
The riders on Korva’s back had been poised to strike at the civilians of the city with their slingshots, and the fact that the city presented them with almost no targets left them howling and cursing.
Tanvanaki cursed repeatedly. She felt helpless. She had thought she could at least find out where the empress and her advisers were concealed and threaten them—perhaps that should have been her strategy from the start, instead of lingering to engage with the airships.
But now it appeared that even such a strategy wouldn’t have helped if the leaders of Dara were hiding like turtles in their shells.
What was she going to do? Korva could not remain aloft forever, and if the Lyucu fleet were destroyed, she would have no way to get Korva back to Rui. Every choice seemed bad.
Shocked voices came from behind her; the other riders had seen something astonishing.
She glanced back at the sea, and her heart almost leapt out of her throat as she saw the Imperial airships explode, one after the other.
The crews of the airships were absorbed with the approaching Lyucu fleet and adjusting their dangling shock chains to inflict maximum damage. After the discharges needed to kill the garinafins, the power left in the ballast spheres was weaker. But it still should be sufficient to deal death by lightning to the exposed Lyucu on the decks of the city-ships.
Lookouts on the kites behind them pulled arrows from their quivers, lit them with their torches, and shot the flaming missiles at the undulating, exposed gasbags of the Imperial airships.
For her strategy, Gin Mazoti had counted on the tendency of all militaries to overgeneralize from their own experience and to rely on their known strengths. Believing the garinafins to be invincible, the Lyucu had not adopted the fighting techniques of Dara and did not add archers to the ranks of garinafin riders.
After disabling the fire-breathing ability of the garinafins, the airships had discarded the silk skin over the hulls so that the crew could wield their silkmotic lances to shock the garinafins. The exposure of the vulnerable gasbags was deemed an acceptable risk because the Lyucu did not use fire arrows, which would have made short work of the Imperial airships.
The marshal had not counted on betrayal among her own ranks.
The flaming arrows crossed the short distance between the lookouts and the airships, plunging with a hiss into the gasbags.
Within moments, the airships burst into flames and started to sink.
Soldiers screamed as their bodies were lit on fire, and many dove from the wreckage. On the decks of the city-ships, the Lyucu warriors cheered wildly, and Pékyu Tenryo laughed with joy.
The gods were indeed with them.
“Zomi! Marshal!” Princess Théra screamed from the secret observation post as she saw the distant explosions. The palace guards had to hold her back lest she run onto the beach and into the sea.
In the distance, Empress Jia sighed and asked her attendants to prepare to set the firewood piled over the dais alight as soon as the Lyucu fleet began the final push toward the undefended city of Ginpen.
“All is lost,” she muttered.
Onboard Silkmotic Arrow, Gin Mazoti howled with rage as victory slipped from her hands.
The Imperial airships were designed with multiple clusters of lift gasbags divided by baffles made from garinafin hide to provide some measure of protection against fires. Because the lookouts had shot at them from behind, only the aft clusters were set aflame. The ships were losing altitude and pitching wildly, but they hadn’t completely lost control.
“Drop the ballast ball,” Mazoti ordered as she lost her footing over the tilting floor and fell down.
The ceramic ballast ball was dropped, and the ship wobbled and flexed in the wind. It was sinking much more slowly now, but still sinking. What’s more, it had lost the power source for its silkmotic weapons.
The other airships followed the example of Silkmotic Arrow.
“We have to abandon ship,” Dafiro Miro said, clinging on to a girder.
“If we abandon ship, there will be no stopping the Lyucu,” said Gin Mazoti. She looked behind her and saw the confusion among the Dara fleet.
Taking advantage of his role in wrangling supplies for the navy, Noda Mi had managed to have his followers infiltrate many ships in the auxiliary fleet as well as the Imperial navy during the last few months. By now, they had established control over a significant portion of the vessels, executing confused officers, sailors, and marines who couldn’t understand why their own ships were firing on the marshal.
To be sure, Noda Mi’s people weren’t able to control all the support ships or the warships of the Imperial navy, and Than Carucono tried to rally those still loyal to the marshal to respond. But he was hampered by the fact that he couldn’t tell which ships he could trust. Deprived of central leadership, ships still loyal to the marshal milled about in confusion, and Noda’s ships began to systematically surround them, breaking their oars, ramming them, and demanding their surrender.
“There’s nothing we can do now,” said Dafiro. “But if we survive today, we can still raise up an army in the mountains of Dara and continue to raid the Lyucu.”
“The chances of victory for such a strategy are slim,” said Gin. “The war might go on for years, and many more people will die. No, we must make our stand here, today.”
She struggled to stand up, and as the ship burned around her, smoke cracking her voice and heated air distorting her vision, she called out to her crew.
“Soldiers of Dara, we are close enough to the surface now that if we abandon ship, many of us will survive. But Dara will be lost if the Lyucu king survives, and so I intend to crash the ship into the pékyu’s flagship. You’ve followed me far enough. None of you need to come with me.”
Nobody moved to dive off the ship; they stayed by their posts.
Gin Mazoti smiled. “I never had any doubt. Our lives are but brief respites between stormy veils cast over the eternal unknown, and we must be guided in our deeds by the inner compass of our will, not what others may think of us. Yet now that death has come to us, we shall make this a day that will live on in song and story.”
The crew moved to the oars, including Gin and Dafiro. Putting their backs into the work, they started to sing as they propelled their sinking, flaming airship toward Pékyu Tenryo’s flagship, Pride of Ukyu.