Gail Carriger - Timeless

The balloon remained rather low, especially for a lady accustomed to dirigible travel. Alexia remembered Ivy’s comment about the Drifters ordinarily landing at night because of the cold and then rising up with the heat of the day. It made her wonder.

With the initial flurry of float-off past, Alexia left her self-imposed position of noninterference, checked once more on poor Conall, who was still expunging, and made her way slowly to their rescuer. It was difficult to walk for, while the sides of the basket were made of wicker, the floor was a grid of poles with animal skins stretched between—not the easiest thing for a woman of Alexia’s girth and shoe choice. Add to that the fact that her moving about shook the entire basket most alarmingly.

“Pardon me, sir. It’s not that I’m not grateful, but who are you?”

The man smiled, a flash of perfect white teeth from within that trimmed beard. “Ah, yes, of course, lady. I am Zayed.”

“How do you do, Mr. Zayed.”

The man bowed. Then he pointed in turn. “My son, Baddu; my wife, Noora; and my daughter, Anitra.”

Alexia made polite murmurs and curtsied in their direction. The family all nodded but did not leave their respective posts.

“It is very kind of you to offer us, a, er, lift.”

“A favor to a friend, lady.”

“Really? Who?”

“Goldenrod.”

“Who?”

“You do not know, lady?”

“Evidently not.”

“Then we will wait.”

“Oh, but…”

The man’s face closed down.

Alexia sighed and switched topics. “If you don’t think it interfering, may I ask? We are very low—how can we float at night?”

“Ah, lady. You know some of our ways. Let me show you.” He made his way over to the middle and threw several blankets off what looked to be a container of gas, of the kind used for lamp lighting back home in London. “For special, we have this.”

Alexia was instantly intrigued. “Will you show me?”

The man flashed a brief grin of excitement and began unhitching and hooking in various tubes and cords. He hoisted the canister so its mouth pointed into the massive balloon.

While he was busy fussing, Alexia took a moment to take in her surroundings.

The balloon was utterly unlike the British-made dirigibles Alexia had utilized in the past. She had traveled in both small pleasure-time floaters and the larger mail post and passenger transports—the company-owned monsters. This balloon was similar to neither. For one thing, the balloon part itself hadn’t the shape of a dirigible and was entirely made of cloth. It was guided by means of opening and closing flaps rather than by a propeller of any kind. For another, the basket was bigger than a personal jaunt dirigible but much smaller than one of the larger cross-country behemoths. It was twice the length of a rowboat but basically square. In the center was the mooring for the balloon and all the associated straps and contraptions required to see it float and directed properly. As the basket slowly spun with the balloon, there seemed to be no particular front or back. There was an area clearly used for sleeping, another for cooking, and one tented corner that Alexia could only assume was meant for doing one’s private business. She supposed that the family lived in the basket and that the various hanging sacks over the edge and from the base of the balloon—which she had assumed were ballasts—were probably goods and supplies.

Prudence went wobbling past, the Drifter girl on her tail, both of them giggling madly and having a grand old time. Alexia made her way to Conall, to defend him from possible contact with his daughter. The last thing they needed was an airsick werewolf pup dashing about the craft. Better to have a large airsick man instead.

A blast of flame and a whoop of delight from the boy, Baddu, and the balloon began a stately rise upward, fuel from the gas giving them a boost of speed high toward the aethersphere. There was no lurching sensation; in fact, the movement hardly registered except that the ground retreated below them and Alexia’s ears popped.

Alexia knew in principle what the Drifters were aiming for. If they could get the balloon up and into an aether stream, they could hook into a current that would carry them south, up the Nile. It was a tricky maneuver, for should the balloon rise too much into the aether, there was a possibility of it getting torn apart, or caving with the sheer of crosscurrents, or the gas flame blowing out, causing them to drop out and down toward the desert.

Alexia tried not to think about it, instead looking down as Alexandria fell away under them.

Poor Conall, at this point reduced to dry heaving and little whimpers of distress, had his eyes tightly shut and his big hands white-knuckled about the side of the basket. Alexia wondered if she shouldn’t get Prudence to take on wolf form. Perhaps they could trap her as a pup in the corner? Prudence didn’t seem to feel the pain of werewolf shift, so perhaps she didn’t get airsick either? She certainly wasn’t suffering from the affliction now. She was having a wonderful time. And, Alexia noted with pleasure, always stopping politely should any of their hosts wish to show her the correct anchoring of a cord or explain to her the thermodynamics of floating—in Arabic, mind you. If Lord Akeldama did nothing else, he was instilling in his adopted daughter the very best manners.

Soon they had risen high enough to turn Alexandria into a spot of faint torchlight. Below and ahead, Alexia could see only the dark of the desert, here and there a lonely fire, and, glinting under the moonlight, the hundreds of long silver snakes that made up the Nile Delta. A sudden flurry of activity in the basket, and Alexia looked over to see Zayed hauling hard on one of the ropes while Baddu offloaded some weight. Then there came a jerk and a woof noise, and the top of the balloon caught an aether stream. Zayed turned up the gas and angled the canister toward the cave-in and the balloon rose up fully into the aether stream. It immediately began to float, with much greater speed, due south. Despite this change in pace, Alexia felt almost nothing. Unlike a dirigible, there were no breezes; the balloon was moving with the currents.

Conall straightened, looking markedly better and less green.

Alexia patted him sympathetically. “Human?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t do much good. I think I simply got everything, well, out. If you know what I mean?”

Alexia nodded. “Could it be our current proximity to the aether?”

“Could be. Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Are you going to make a note of it, wife? Seems that the God-Breaker Plague reaches all the way up to the aether.”

“Either that, or the aethersphere itself counteracts your supernatural abilities.”

“Well, if that were the case, scientists would have figured that out by now, wouldn’t they?”

Lady Maccon took out a tiny notebook from one of the secret pockets of her parasol and a stylographic pen from another. “Oh, yes? And how would they have done that? Vampires can’t float up that high, because they are tethered too short. And werewolves don’t float at all, because they get sick.”

“You can’t tell me no one has transported a ghost and body via float before?”

Alexia frowned. “I don’t know, but it’s worth researching. I wonder if Genevieve and her deceased aunt came via float or ferry when they left Paris for London.”

“You’ll have to ask her when we catch up.” They paused in their conversation, awkward for a moment; then Conall asked, “Can you feel the plague?”

“You mean that odd tingly sensation I felt at the edge of Alexandria?”

He nodded.

“Difficult to tell, since the feeling was already similar to that of aether breezes.” Alexia closed her eyes and leaned her arms out of the balloon basket, embracing the air.