Chapter 7
Leo and his noble whore finally find themselves alone in the squalid room. They sit on the bed, and she rubs his chest, her hand making its way to the buttons of his shirt.
“So you like to dirtdabble, eh?” she asks.
“On occasion. Are you game?”
“I need to know you’ll be gentle. Tell me about your first time.”
“Well,” Leo says, “I was at this brothel on the other side of town, the Split Eagle, and--”
The girl coughs a little and vomits onto her lap, tears around her eyes causing her eye makeup to run down her cheeks in black streaks.
“I--I’m sorry,” she says, “I think I had one too many Muscov Gins.”
The smell of the vomit causes Leo to lose his physickal willingness.
“It’s okay,” Leo says, “maybe you should just be on your way. Keep what I paid you, I feel lousy about slapping you anyway. I wouldn’t have done it, but Jenko would’ve dealt us both some serious pain if I didn’t, and I didn’t want him to focus his, um, ‘attention’ on you any longer.”
She nods her head vigorously, placing her hand on his shoulder for a short moment. She then wipes the tears from her face and scurries out of the room.
Zanther whips himself around on the deck, practicing longknife maneuvers while Novanostrum meditates. Varello tries to pick his way through a simple melody, to no avail. A small bird whizzes by Zanther’s head and he stops himself mid-swing.
“I told you, little bird, it’s dangerous to fly out here.”
“What?” Novanostrum asks, looking up.
“I think it’s the same bird I saw when we first flew over this accursed place.”
“That’s strange,” Novanostrum says, “the way I heard it, nothing lives out here. No birds, no insects, nothing at all.”
The little yellow bird perches on the end of the longknife for but a moment, then zips straight up and out of sight.
“What’s that whistling noise?” Varello asks.
“What’s that terrible smell?” Zanther asks.
“It smells like dragon manure,” Novanostrum says, all three of them glancing upward in a terrible instant of realization.
With the gas leaking out of the giant balloon holding them aloft, the skyyacht starts to lose altitude, gradually at first. After perhaps a tick, the rate of their descent begins to accelerate.
The three of them brace themselves on whatever they can grab, waiting for the imminent impact with the ground, though the skyship is not quite in freefall.
“We’re gonna hit it too fast,” Zanther says, “it’s hopeless. If only we could fall more slowly.”
Varello glances at Novanostrum’s watch. “Or if we could just slow down time...”
“Without my magick, it won’t work. Unless...”
Novanostrum hands his watch to Zanther, who reluctantly puts it on his wrist, wincing at the intense burning of metal-on-skin. “Zanther, at the last moment before we hit the ground, twist the ring around the dial all the way, grab us, and leap clear of the ship.”
Zanther nods and starts positioning himself, getting ready for the moment of impact, the severity of their situation temporarily taking his focus off his pain. As the flat, grassy endlessness gets closer and closer, his muscles tense. He steels his resolve and with just a few man-lengths between the ship and the ground, he activates the watch. The ship slows, and the horizon and everything he sees turns to black and white, save for the blue blood coursing through Varello and Novanostrum’s veins. He loops an arm around each of their chests, under their shoulders, and propels the three of them off of the ship and onto the ground in a relatively safe landing. Looking over his shoulder at the ship as it begins to impact the ground, Zanther eyes the large balloon still half-full of dragon flatuses and realizes that landing safely is not their only problem. He scoops them both up again and dashes frantically through his monochrome dream until they are a few hundred man-lengths away from the slowly-blossoming mushroom cloud.
He takes a deep breath and puts a hand over each of their mouths as time and color regain their dominion over reality in a deafening blast so loud and destructive that the fragile clouds above seem as if they will be shaken loose from the sky.
With the danger averted, Zanther fumbles desperately with the watch clasp, finally managing to get it off his wrist. He flings it at Novanostrum.
The lithe beauty swings her body like a pendulum, her legs wrapped around the wooden pole set in the middle of the stage. Men shout and curse in the dim lighting, and a glass mug sails through the air, shattering in a dark corner. The girl seems to ignore this, continuing her contortions.
A tall man in a long black coat enters the front door of the establishment and passes through the crowd, towards the stairs leading to the rooms being let out for the night. He nods at a withered maid carefully picking her way down the stairwell, proceeds down a hallway, and produces a key which fits the lock on room 206.
Once inside the room, he removes his coat and lights a lamp. A pair of cold eyes glares at him from a chair in the corner of the room.
“I don’t remember ordering ‘room service’ for tonight,” he says.
“Kaverle. So you’re the moneyman,” she mutters.
“I’ve been a Duke for quite a while, now. You’d do well to use my title.”
“And who is the so-called Duke Kaverle to orchestrate the kidnapping of a ruling queen?” Madra asks.
“I did no such thing,” the Duke replies.
Madra rises from her chair, a loaded powderblast in each hand. Both are pointed at the Duke. She lowers the barrel of one to his stomach, then lowers it a little more.
“You’ve got a lot of pluck’n’verve to think you could pull this off,” she says as she steps closer to him, “you think you’ve got the stones to dethrone me?”
The Duke, with his back against the wall, pulls a dagger from the sleeve of his frilly shirt, throwing it at Madra’s head in a fluid motion. She dodges just as fluidly, at the same time squeezing the trigger on one of the powderblasts. The Duke falls to the floor, both hands grasping his crotch.
At the sound of the reverberating shot, a brace of Claustrian royal soldiers bursts into the room. Madra nods at Marchand, the commander of the Stoneguard, her personal guard detail.
“This one isn’t going to the castle brig,” she says, “I don’t want this goatsucker anywhere near me. Take him to the cave in Murkmucker forest and start cutting off his fingers and toes one joint at a time until he tells us what he was hoping to accomplish with this little plot.”
Marchand touches his right fist to his left ear in the Claustrian gesture of salute. “It shall be done, your Majesty.”
She pulls her commander close and whispers in his ear. “After he talks, or if he runs out of fingers and toes, strap him to a roundwood log and roll it into the ravine.”
He nods and salutes again.
The Duke, convulsing in pain, looks up at Madra, barely able to form words. She puts her hand on her knee as she leans over him condescendingly. “Oh, Duke, I almost forgot...do you like to dirtdabble?”
Shaking with agony, he gives her a confused look. Madra hands her remaining loaded powderblast to Marchand, winking. “I think you know what to do with this.”
Jenko looks at the men and spits. There are roughly half a dozen of them, bearing maces, knives, and axes. He looks them over, calculating how much more his share will be if half of them get killed once the mini-siege begins.
“It’s almost time. Everybody ready?”
He turns to lead them out of the alley, and he almost runs into about fifty heavily-armored soldiers. He spins around to find more soldiers at the other end of the alley as well.
Jenko drops his longknife and smiles nervously. “Um, we heard there were some bad men about, and we wanted to stop them...”
The captain of the guard smiles back. “Nice try
.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Leo and eleven other men in a rowboat are quietly rowing down the small river. They pass under a wide bridge, almost a short tunnel. When they emerge, dozens of torches are suddenly lit and they see a cluster of soldiers with crossbows trained on them.
“One move and you’re all dead,” the commander shouts down at them.