The Stealers' War (44 page)

The skyguard and the war-kites didn’t so much attack the lurid enemy squadrons as dance around them, Rodalian flying wings buffeted by turbulence while performing elegant barrel rolls and breaks, seemingly turning by magic on pursuit curves that sent skel monoplanes drifting in front of their wing guns. A brief chatter of fire, followed by explosions, bandit planes blown apart, falling from the sky on plumes of dirty black smoke.
And there’s your disadvantage of flying heavy on full tanks
. Cross-turns, defensive splits, roll-aways; there wasn’t a manoeuvre the skyguard pilots hadn’t mastered during their strict temple training to be considered worthy of a plane. The skels, free company and air pirates, by contrast, were used to strafing ground-based peasants in kingdoms where the only planes to be seen were merchant aircraft passing overhead; where a solid air defence was a cocked crossbow behind a log rampart.

‘I’m nearly out of fuel,’ warned Anna.

Then so is everyone else on our side.
‘That’s fine and dandy. I said we were setting our compass for Salasang – never said we’d put in there. Our landing field is a tad closer to home.’ Jacob pointed at the closing carrier, her hangars built into base wings on either side of the massive aircraft. An eyrie for the enemy fighter squadrons.
They won’t be needing it
.

War-kite-wearing troops dodged and ignored the duelling aircraft, for the most part, riding straight up into the carriers’ flight paths. A few soldiers disregarded Jacob’s instructions and weaved among the enemy squadrons, pumping pistol and carbine shots into skel cockpits. Enemy pilots slumped forward dead on the stick, fighters veering out of control and diving into the mountainside. Most of his force followed through in the agreed plan. There was obviously panic and confusion inside the carrier formation, their battle scheme thrown into disarray. Half the cannons in the leviathans’ gun ports and turrets didn’t open fire on the approaching cloud of soldiers. The ones that did open up failed to find their targets – warriors weaving in and out, too small, too fast. The skels would have had more luck emptying their magazines into a swarm of locusts. Then the war kites were upon the carriers, soldiers grabbing the fuselage, embedding themselves into canvas-skin with hand claws, drawing slender, curved sword blades – thirty inches of low-carbon steel – ripping their way through and surging inside the carrier’s corridors and cabins. For a moment, the nearest bandit carrier looked more like the dead corpse of an animal, her flesh crawling with ants, and then she destroyed the illusion by pulling up, slowly, slowly. The soldiers had been instructed to leave war-kites tethered to the fuselage in the event their boarding action failed and they needed to abandon the bandit carrier. In a display of courage and contempt, the sky soon fluttered with hundreds of loose box-kites, drifting free and empty on the thermals. They would win here or they would die.
Saints help me; if I had commanded an army of these mountain devils I could have seized every feuding kingdom of the Burn inside a year.

Anna flew a slow lazy pass around the hangars built into the lower wing. What Jacob had been expecting. A standard design; dozens of launch ramps and catapults on the hangar’s open right-hand side, a series of dark landing tunnels off to the left . . . as long as the carrier’s wing could accommodate, a series of capture lines inside to slow returning fighters and shuttle planes. Each a self-contained fire-break to prevent a crash landing from damaging the hangar. Anna selected a landing tunnel on the far side of the wing and dove for the entrance, angling up at the last second and throwing her propeller into full reverse as they jounced once, hard, on the deck. Lines fixed on counterweights caught around the flying wing’s undercarriage, filling the air with an almost human groaning as they absorbed the plane’s velocity. Slowed to walking pace, the flying wing continued rolling down the tunnel as it widened into a mechanic’s space.

Three skel ground crew emerged from a hatch at the side, pelting towards the flying wing, rolling a fuel barrel in front of them, only braking as they realized this latest arrival was too pocket-sized to be one of their aircraft. They understood it well enough when Jacob vaulted out of the rear cockpit, drew both his pistols and gunned down the two nearest bandits. The engineers slumped to the floor still clutching wooden hooks needed to haul the plane on to a turntable. The third crewman stumbled backward, halting as Jacob raised his pistols towards the skel’s head.

‘What’s this carrier called – and the name of her master?’ ‘Am the
Razored Smile
– belonging to Duke Si-meliss,’ hissed the skel.
We’re on the right bandit carrier.
This crewman was of the same twisted pattern as the people who had attacked Northhaven all right, lizard-snouted with scaled skin and a short, thick tail protruding from the back of his trousers. So far from the common pattern it was barely worth considering them human. These workers inside the hangar weren’t particularly imposing, though. Not the same sizeable and vicious creatures that had raided Northhaven, carrying a quarter of the population away to Vandia as slaves.
They obviously stash their runts away up here, out of the fight.

Anna swung out of her flying wing and took a turn at questioning him. ‘There’s a Weylander on this bird, James Kurtain. Keeps the rotors turning for you.’

‘Am work for engineering,’ confirmed the skel, his eyes blinking in disbelief at the pilot. ‘A skin-of-night, same as you-woman’s skin.’

‘Take us to him,’ ordered Jacob, the pistol in his left hand twitching to indicate the hatch.

‘Weylanders am fighting together with skels,’ said the crewman, rather hopefully. ‘Fighting for king of you-people against mountain tribe groundlings.’

‘You’re fighting for blood and treasure,’ said Jacob, ‘same as you ever were. And the usurper’s just a shoe merchant who put the real king in the ground so he could loot the crown from the gutter.’

The twisted man grunted as if the politics of the groundlings was beyond him.
Not a warrior. Might never have left this plane to touch real land. Born up here to die up here
. It was hard to believe that this people had once been masters of Vandia, controlling the immense bounty of the stratovolcano until their own slaves and subject nations had rebelled, driving the skels into exile in the air. Making them slave soldiers in turn. These vast planes were all that was left of their empire.
And soon enough they won’t even have that.

‘You-man spare Del-alass?’ pleaded the skel.

‘I’ll make you a deal, Del-alass,’ said Jacob. ‘You lead us true to my friend’s brother and I won’t put a bullet in your ugly head. Does that sound like an amiable arrangement?’

Del-alass nodded rapidly, only too eager to agree, before leading them through a warren of gangways inside the wing. The
Razored Smile
’s interior wasn’t much different from the merchant carrier Jacob had taken during his pursuit of Carter. Narrow corridors, most of the walls and decks made from treated paper pulp that resembled wood but a dozen times lighter and stronger, hatches giving on to larger chambers, cabins and hangars. Everything weathered by age, patched walls that spoke of the city-sized aircraft having flown up here for numberless centuries. She wasn’t used to travelling so low in gravity’s hold, though, creaking from every beam like a rickety nautical sailing ship. Her decks trembled every time her cannons joined the fight outside. Sounds of distant combat echoed around the corridors, muffled shots and screams from both attackers and crewmen.
That’s what I remember from their raid on Northhaven – how human the skels sounded when dying
. Jacob could taste cordite on the air. This bird was still running on recycled cabin air, a slightly damp, musty smell with her pressurization machinery circulating the whiff of the boarding action. But then, the bridge crew had other things on their mind than venting in fresh air. The angle of the
Razored Smile
’s deck grew steep as she attempted to climb out of the range of the swarming war kites.
Too little, too late
. Occasionally the three of them ran into other crewmen, unarmed skels who took one look at the two Weylanders holding a pistol on Del-alass, before turning tail and fleeing in the opposite direction.

Del-alass led them through the aircraft and into the wing’s engineering chamber which showed all the hallmarks of having been recently abandoned – long workbenches covered with disassembled engine parts, metalworking lathes still with pieces inside their clamps. A wall of numbered hatches led off in the direction of the propellers; behind one of the open doorways Jacob caught sight of a leathery russet face.

‘Come on out!’ barked Jacob. His first thought, that this might be a gask, turned out to be incorrect. A similar leathery face, but instead of a spine-covered skin, there were cyan-tinged feathers around the twisted woman’s neck. Another skel slave, this one from an unfamiliar race and country.

‘James Kurtain,’ demanded Anna. ‘Where is he?’

‘James was taken away,’ answered the slave. ‘Everyone was rounded up when the plane’s bells sounded for combat. I hid in the rotor’s crawl space so they wouldn’t find me.’

Damn – the duke doesn’t want his house slaves making trouble for him during the battle when the majority of his warriors are outside in their fighter planes.
An efficient commander made everything more difficult for Jacob. ‘Where?’

‘The guards said we needed to be locked up inside the slave holds.’

Ready-built pens. Where else
.

‘Del-alass am not know this!’ cried the skel.

‘Del-alass get his chance to make it up by leading us across to the slave pens,’ said Jacob.

Anna waved her pistol at the female slave. ‘Hide. When soldiers who look like us come to secure this deck, you make sure you tell them where the slaves were taken.’

‘I will,’ she promised.

Jacob and Anna let the skel lead them deeper into the plane, gangways growing wider after they left the wing and entered the main body of the massive carrier. This is where the bulk of the boarding action was ongoing – they came across skel corpses sprawled across the decking, empty shell casings scattered across the floor, no sign of Rodalian casualties. Jacob noted none of the dead crew carried firearms, only cutlasses and daggers.
I reckon the duke up here isn’t the trusting sort. That’ll cost him dearly today.

‘We have to hurry,’ said Anna, not bothering to hide the worry in her voice. ‘You know what the slavers will do to our people when they realize their carrier has been taken.’

‘Who is in charge of the slave pens, Del-alass?’ asked Jacob.

‘Si-lishh.’

Name sounds familiar. Is he the same killer Carter told me about?
‘And I’m guessing the fellow isn’t what you’d call a good man.’

‘Am of the family-Si,’ said the crewman, as though that should be answer enough. ‘He strangle father of Del-alass dead for winning in chance-game. Not mercy for groundlings. Not mercy for toiler skels. Never from Si-lishh.’

‘Saints hate a sore loser,’ said Jacob.

The three of them encountered a squad of seven Rodalian soldiers. Jacob only just managed to stop the troops immediately opening up on their prisoner, catching Jacob and Anna in the crossfire. The Rodalians looked like air pirates themselves, warm padded sheep-pelt-lined coats, bandoleers of shells, short-barrelled carbines, smoke-blackened faces, blood-soaked cutlasses and half-empty grenade pouches.
Looks like they’ve been sucked backwards through an engine exhaust and come out fighting
. The troops fell eagerly enough behind Jacob when they heard of the recently filled slave pens.

After they reached the slave hold, Jacob found himself on a walled gantry high above a large chamber. Gloomy below with only a handful of tiny portholes for light, stairs on either side leading down to dozens of long cages with narrow walkways running between them. And every slave pen packed with the prisoners who kept the skels’ flying citadel high in the sky. Dozens of skel guards sheltered behind the makeshift barricade in gantries flanked by the pens. They clutched whips or razored cudgels attached to portable batteries, but no firearms Jacob could see. Not even the one who had to be Si-lishh – a giant among skels, almost as wide as he was tall.
The skel’s a brute, but he isn’t a stupid brute
. The plane’s slave master must have watched the flight of war kites and heard the fierce boarding action raging through the carrier, then calculated the anaemic odds of his survival with most of the skel fighting force in the air outside the
Razored Smile
. Si-lishh and his guards had used their time well. The corridors outside the slave pens stood lined with rows of fuel barrels, fused and ready to burn.
Yes, a sore loser all right
. Si-lishh was willing to turn his little fiefdom up here into an inferno if things went the wrong way for him.

‘Whips and shock cudgels against pistols and rifles,’ shouted Jacob. ‘Might be it’s time for you to surrender, Si-lishh.’

‘Not surrender,’ yelled the large skel, confirming his position as slave master. ‘Weylander am let Si-lishh leave with flying boat, or Si-lishh be cooking groundlings into most tasty meal.’

Anna ground her teeth in frustration. ‘If he puts a match to the fuse we’ll never break our people out of the cages in time.’

‘If Si-lishh am escaping,’ whispered their skel prisoner, ‘Si-lishh am hiding timer to burn slaves and destroy
Razored Smile.
Kill all-people in air.’

‘Not exactly what you’d call an oath-keeper?’ said Jacob.
Why doesn’t that surprise me
? He aimed his pistol carefully into the gantry below, sighting on the large skel. ‘I let him go, they burn. I put a bullet in him, they burn.’
I know which outcome I prefer
.

‘No!’ cried Anna.

‘There’s no other way. If we’re quick enough, we can still get your brother out.’

‘Not gun,’ urged Del-alass. He indicated the knife hanging from Jacob’s belt. ‘Champion’s knife. Charity of battle. All skels am honour this.’

‘A champion’s combat?’ said Anna. ‘That killer would actually honour that?’