Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

“God’s blessings, Akilla yabass.”

I’ll give our Hanifa this, she wasn’t stingy with her gratitude; she didn’t even seem to be swallowing hard when she called our Adelaar a welcome stranger and wisewoman.

“Nada.” Adelaar went back to work. With a small army about to land on us, she wasn’t wasting more time on chat.

The Hanifa rounded up her women with an imperious sweep of her arm and took them outside. I unlimbered the launchtube, fed it a clip and followed her.

One of the raiders was more squarely built than the others, with broad shoulders and heavy arms; she’d been lugging around a powerful crossbow which I’d wondered about, it seemed a clumsy thing on a jaunt like this. Now she loaded it with a four-point grapple and aimed it upward at one of the windows. Our Hanifa was a lady with flair, no scrambling through ratholes for her. The woman loosed the bolt and it rose through a graceful arc, going up and up, four levels up, until it crashed through the glass and looped down outside, carrying a thin, knotted rope with it. A hard tug set the hooks, two of the raiders went at the rope like it led to the promised land and started swarming up it. The shooter slapped a second ropebolt in the slot, hit the next window over, slapped in a third, put it through the third window, whap, whap, whap, steady as a metronome. She thrust her arm through the bow’s carrystrap and ran at the last rope. The Hanifa sketched a salute in my direction. “I’ll leave this one for you.” She started climbing.

Pels came scooting down the ramp, back in hull .mode, little more than a ripple across the stone. “On my tail,” he yelled, his whoop filling the chamber with echoes. He’d been rambling around that maze interfering with the arrangements of the guardforce and he’d won us the extra few minutes that let the women get a good start up the ropes.

I put a couple of darts into the tunnel opening and blew down enough rubble to close it off. I started plinking the other exits, one by one, blowing out their sides and ceiling; things got touchy after I’d done five of them, the roof started groaning and shifting, it was an open question whether it’d come down on us before I finished sealing off the inlets. There was a lot of yelling and cursing coming through the noise of the falling stone and someone in one of the tunnels managed to get off some heatseeker missiles, but Pels knocked those down before they got anywhere.

Adelaar came out. “Peculiar, Quale, I didn’t believe it till I ran it twice, the Warmaster’s mainBrain is slaved to this one. I set a passive tap, one I can juice from the tug, tell you later.” She eyed the billowy pouf of dust with disfavor. “How do we get out of here?”

“The Hanifa left us a rope.” I pointed to it and swallowed a grin. She’d opted out of some of the last-phase planning, too impatient to sit through another bullshit session, so she didn’t know the emergency bolt hole we’d come up with.

“How nice. I’m supposed to go up that thing with this load?”

“Nope, we’re taking Pittipat’s private route. Pels?”

“All clear, just dust and cobwebs. All praise to paranoia.” Pels came from behind the throne, grinning and brushing at his ruffled not-fur.

The hole was a stupid breach in security; when we saw it the first time, we thought it had to be some kind of subtle trap. Kumari flaked that part of the EYEfeed and went over it cell, by cell, tracing out every branch. All she found was dust and dark.

Pels tripped the lock on the panel, circled around us and led us up a wormhole that was barely wide enough to clear our elbows and so low I was almost bent in half. It split and split again, but the direction sense he was born with and the practice he got as a scruffy cub scatting about his native subterras kept him on course. You couldn’t lose him anywhere underground.

We fetched up at the theater close to where we started, emerging through the back wall of the Imperatorial box. The tiers of seats were groaning and shivering as they would at the tail end of an earthquake and the flags in the well shifted under our feet, but the theater wasn’t going to collapse; there was a lot of hoohaw in the gardens outside it, parachute flares bursting over us, spotlights stabbing through fog that was even thicker than it’d been when we came in, yowling cats and howling men rushing about, god knows what they thought they were doing. Nothing much in here with us, just one guard and his brace of cats. He tried potting me, but I suppose I wasn’t much more than a moving blot, because he didn’t come close; that’s the problem with pellet guns, when you miss you miss completely.

I got him with the stunner and Pels took care of the cats. We swung onto the stage. I was worried about the miniskips, briefly afraid the cats had sniffed them out, but they were where we left them, the only problem was they were slimy with condensation. We strapped ourselves onto the belly pads and took off for the canyon.

I was tired enough to sleep a week and I suspected the others were about the same, though Adelaar would never admit it and Pels hid everything under his fur. On second thought, maybe he was just getting unlimbered and was sorry the fight was over, it wasn’t often he had a workout that used him up. Not that this skirmish had. We were going to lay up at the canyon for a few days, let things cool down and the Warmaster go back to sleep before we left for base. I spent a minute or so thinking about the Hanifa and several more minutes savoring the memories I had of rosepearls and the taste of all that lovely gratitude that was going to grease the way when I came back to open this market. The rest of the trip I drowsed, letting the miniskip fly herself.

10. In Windskimmer /slipping away from the swirling swarm of hornets at the imperatorial Palace/over Lake Golga/storm breaking about them.

The airship plunged south through what felt like the heart of the storm, though it wasn’t quite. Everything Karrel Goza knew about flying said get out of there, but he stayed over the, lake in spite of the danger so he could minimize the chance someone would hear the motors and talk about it. From what he saw when he dipped to the jetty and dropped the ladders for Elmas and the others, there was going to be trouble for anyone the Grand Sech found someplace they had no business being. He didn’t want to drag a trail to Inci.

Lightning crackled around them.

He’d had the cuuxtwok on this far, afraid the techs would get the Palace scanners working again, but there’d been no pulse wigglers slipping along its surface so they hadn’t done it yet; he shut the field off, he didn’t know its properties, but he thought it might attract a strike. Windskimmer didn’t have sufficient lift to rise clear of the storm; she was taking enough of a beating without the threat of being crisped by lightning.

Turbulent aircurrents battered at them; even worse, there were sudden pockets that dropped them into sheeted rain which pounded on them and drove them toward the icy water invisible below them.

Karrel Gaza’s body was battered and bruised from the restraining straps; he’d jammed his fingers repeatedly as he fought to keep Skimmer upright; one nail had a deep tear. The panel in front of him jerked and vibrated, impossible to read anything on it, he was working from feel and memory, blessing the Prophet’s benevolence for giving him so much flying time in this airship that he knew her like he knew his own body. Dimly he was aware of the isyas squealing as they were flung from side to side; even when they tried to hang onto the weatherstraps, the yawing lurches sent them rolling into each other. Elmas Ofka was cursing in spasms as she tried to get control of her chair; from the corner of his eye he saw enough to realize the brake had snapped and the chair was wobbling and swinging erratically; it could come loose and do someone serious injury if he couldn’t get this lumbering yunk to climb higher.