Authors: Kin Law
“Crikey that’s nasty,” Albion remarked. His goggles, though cracked, shielded him from the dust.
“There you are,” said Mordemere, whirling about. There was too much stone dust in the air, and it was in his eyes- they screwed up like a crying baby’s. He wielded his terrible lightning weapon again, but the arc only tore the air over Albion’s scalp.
Albion had guessed correctly- Mordemere was used to judging his world through words and datum points, not his eyes and ears.
True, in the aeon-rich environment of the
Nidhogg
, all it took was something to focus intent, but the alchemist was accustomed to seeing his intended victims. If Mordemere had focused on the sound the Victoria made as it settled next to the father of modern science, he might have noticed it seemed a bit light to be in the possession of a daring pirate like the Manchu Marauder.
“There’s the difference between a wailing child latched on to his betters, and someone willing to carry through his dreams, Mordemere,” Albion continued to say. He allowed himself this one luxury- once the deed was
done, there was no telling what would happen. “The latter is prepared.”
Albion pulled the trigger of the Red Special, sending the single bul
let he removed from Victoria rocketing into the crystal floating in the center of the room.
And then there was Chaos.
Dimly, Albion sensed the ship lurching all about him, loose objects freed of their moorings. Insect dioramas, rare paintings and finely bound tomes floated in a soup of vintage liquors and alchemic potions. Some of it splashed onto the elaborate control panels, sending up arclight sparks. Others collided into each other, fizzing and exploding in flames, blooming and writhing loose from the caress of the Earth. Albion felt something strike him, and when he touched there, something hard was embedded in his shoulder. Then he was thrown away from the dais, rolling and scrabbling, by the force of a sudden explosion.
“You fool! You blasted fool!” Mordemere’s voice echoed after him. His neat suit had been ripped, and there was gold glittering beneath. The alchemist could not get up. His steamworked limbs had been thrown akimbo, jerking uncontrollably from the aeon explosion.
“Far too dramatic. This is why we don’t monologue. I thought you wanted a conversation? Don’t ask if you don’t like my reply!” Albion yelled back, before staggering out of some sudden opening in the walls. He vaguely saw it was the obelisk doors, thrown open and jerking back and forth on chaotic cogs. As he left, his foot kicked into Victoria, fallen into the opening and jamming the doors open.
Life draining from his body, strength gone from his limbs, Albion honestly thought it was over.
So much for the Scourge of Shanghai, the Corsair Chinois, the Manchu Marauder. He had never even set foot in Shanghai. The name was a slur. With all the raids he had been on, the best crew in the world, was this how he was to end? Bleeding to death thousands of feet over Europe?
The faces of everyone he held dear seemed to flash before his eyes, like some cheap picture house melodrama. He had thought such things were a myth, and he, Albion Clemens, immune to such sentimental swill. Cid Tanner, Auntie and Alex, who had cared so much for the
Huckleberry’s
Captain they would safeguard his son, adoptive or no, from his own folly. Vanessa Hargreaves so full of fire and loyalty, true to the last to Queen and Country. Elric Blair, even, the pointless idiot, sacrificing himself for the truth- what was truth in the face of earth-shattering, overpowering might?
Rosa Marija danced into view, as she oft did in the evenings, all beauty and grace and lack of compromise. Albion regretted not taking her up. Wasn’t it the pirate way to chuck out the rules and do whatever they wanted? Rosa deserved better.
Finally, Captain Sam swam into view, through a familiar fog of cigar smoke. He seemed to waver, then solidify, walking through the fog of smoke and slapping Albion clean across the cheek.
“The hell are you doing, you danged stupid boy?” He yelled in Albion’s face.
“Captain?” Albion blurted, shocked. Confusion, love and murder warred somewhere between his strained lungs. “How…?”
“None other,” Captain Sam drawled, seemingly unconcerned. “Just look around.”
They were no longer in Mordemere’s anteroom at the peak of the
Nidhogg.
Warm wood, tea smells, and comfortable worn cushions threatened to smother them both. It was Auntie’s galley on the
Berry.
“I see. I guess when you die, this is what happens,” Albion sighed, earning another roundhouse slap. It stung like the devil.
“Keep talking like that and you will be, boy,” Captain Sam said, lighting up another cigar. “You hurt, means you’re still alive. Not for long, just for now, until your brain succumbs to lack of air, now the ship’s gone haywire. Funny, an air pirate suffocating to death.”
“So you’re not really the Captain,” Albion said, disappointed. “What happens now?”
“I’m real enough. What do you think happens? It’s your own damn mind, make it up.”
“I really wanted to find you, and beat the tar out of you.”
“What made you stop and take on this fool’s errand, then?” the Captain asked. “You ought to have followed me when I left this devil ship.”
“Don’t rightly know. Obligation, maybe?”
“Right.”
“I guess… I thought it was what you would have done. Not the Sam you showed me, but the one you show other people. You were always going out of your way to help.”
“Maybe I was working out my repressed sense of guilt over the
Kyushu Maru
. Ever think I just did them things because I wanted to?”
“It’s the only reason to do anything.” Albion smiled. “I’m all right. I can die knowing I did what I thought made a difference. We all chose to be pirates, in the end, just doing whatever we wanted. It makes no difference now.”
“Why in the blue blazes not?”
“Why not?
I’m bleeding to death, and with the ship not working, the elevators are shot. There’s no other way down. My only way out is if the ‘
Berry
flies up to this window, and she can’t hardly make it this high.”
“You’re a damn pirate, ain’t ya? Figure it out yourself!”
A sign Albion was fading: the anteroom with its Chesterfields and brocade was coming back into view. There was a faint sound of something smashing its way down the hall- Mordemere, most likely, making the most of his thrashing machine limbs.
The floor seemed tilted, a fact Albion initially attributed to the blood streaming down his arm, but it wasn’t- the sky looked wrong outside. He caught sight of a regal clock face staring him in the eyes- the Big Ben, not a hundred yards away. Then it passed as they drifted higher.
“Captain Sam? I’m sorry I kicked you off your own ship.”
But the Captain was no longer there.
Albion pushed himself up on something, anything, which turned out to be his old, dented cutlass. It was more of a prop than anything else- the blade was good for cutting lines on ships, and scaring deckhands. Albion hadn’t thought of it as a weapon, more as a tool… maybe it still was.
With a mighty roar that ended up more of a wheezing gasp, Albion summoned up the last of his strength. Just as the pattern of Mordemere’s suit reappeared in the anteroom, Albion charged the French doors, tall, floor-to-ceiling pieces of art that likely cost more than Albion could steal in a month.
His cutlass handle made a convenient focal point, shattering the glass. Then Albion was outside, in very thin air, sliding down the slanted spire of the
Nidhogg
by the seat of his trousers. His buckles caught and sparked yellow, spinning him round and round as he struggled to find some purchase on the slick spire.
“Albion!”
Albion barely heard the voice, like the sweetest auditory illusion. Yet, he reacted, driving his cutlass deep into the side of the ship. The metal scrabbled and slipped, then the point caught in some crevice and stuck.
It flexed, terrifyingly, and then Albion found
himself hanging over slate clouds, clutching his sword in both hands, boots braced against the swiftly tilting airship. He hoped and prayed to whatever patron saint of pirates or sage of uppity rogues the damn sword wouldn’t crack into a million pieces.
“Oh my God! Captain Clemens!” Vanessa Hargreaves’ voice came from close by, then the more familiar one he had first
heard, Rosa Marija’s. Two sooty heads emerged from a window far above him. They retracted, and after a minute, they reappeared, now just above him. He had been sliding just over some stairwell at the side of the spire his friends just happened to be climbing.
“Come on then!”
“Blair, put Cezette down and help us!”
They manhandled the injured, dangling Captain into a window, where his dynamic entry nearly tumbled them all right down the stair. Then they were all together, all four of them again, staring into each other’s eyes in shock and relief.
“Alby?” Rosa appeared in Albion’s vision. He blinked blankly at her, and looked down, where her bustle was torn in a very suggestive place. She jiggled obligingly, like she usually did. He looked back up into her eyes. She developed an expression of wanton abandonment, like she usually did.
Only this time, Albion reached out, grabbed her by the waist, and kissed her deeply, drinking of her sweet mocha like a man in the midst of caffeine withdrawal.
“You smell rank,” he commented, coming up for air. “Where have you been?”
“Shut up, gorgeous,” she said, and stifled the pirat
e’s airway once more.
17: Leviathan
As it turned out, Rosa Marija didn’t have long to enjoy her newfound triumph. The
Nidhogg
was still breaking up around them, venting steam in unlikely places, developing seams where there was only impenetrable bulkhead before. The team dashed headlong down the stairs, heedless of bustles in disarray and blood smeared in streaks on the bannisters.
Hargreaves had hastily tied up Albion’s shoulder, once Rosa extracted the shrapnel embedded there. One of them would not have been enough. It took both Hargreaves’ field medicine training and Rosa’s stock of paralytics to halt the bleed.
Meanwhile, it seemed like Cezette Louissaint was feeling a hundred percent better. Rosa could not help but notice her recovery coincided with the vast explosion they heard, just before Albion had come flying in out of the blue. Cezette put her head together with Blair, inspecting Moore’s schematics of this strange airship. By the time Rosa and Vanessa bound up Albion, they had a plan.
“We head to ze cargo hold, here,” Cezette explained, pointing excitedly. Her accents became more pronounced with her excitement. Rosa and Albion looked at each other pointedly.
“Oh no,” Hargreaves interjected. “You’re not getting another pirate. She’s coming with me after this, we’ll sort her out at the Yard.”
“Aww!” The pirates groaned as one.
“You two are sickening,” Elric Blair said, smiling.
The hold was at the bottom
of the ship, and easy to find. It was one of the reasons they decided on the plan.
The catch was, the air was becoming thinner and thinner, and the light increasingly brilliant, folding in and around them in shades of Caribbean clear and Atlantic navy. The ship was still rising, despite the major malfunctions shuddering all about them.
“What the blazes is going on?” Elric Blair wheezed. He was still carrying Cezette, who was pointing emphatically at the next turn.
“The Leviathan’s been summoned- I don’t think it can be gotten rid of so easily!” Albion hollered. Every part of the
Nidhogg
was jittering randomly, lines full of steam whipping around like fazed serpents. All the aeon in the ship was reacting to the presence of the Leviathan, joining themselves to its cerulean glory.
“How do you know? What’s happened to Mordemere?” the Inspector seized on the opportunity to interrogate. Rosa figured she had been holding it in since Albion appeared.
“Just keep going! Mordemere isn’t going to be a problem,” Albion reassured them. He was clutching his cutlass, still.
They made it down to the bottom, in spite of rivets clattering loose all around them. At the last unceremoniously kicked-down door, they found a vast room of naked steel b
eams hanging over a howling wind, and below that, empty space.
As they watched, a section of flooring juddered loose from the supports, sliding down, down, flipping over and over into the clouds.
“Now what?”
“Ze Morse lantern!” Cezette squealed. “We use eet now!”
“That’s right!” said Hargreaves. “We can signal the
Gwain
with it!”
“The
Gwain
?” Cezette inquired bemusedly. Her head tilted just like a cat’s- it was really quite cute, Rosa thought, before she did a double take. The
Gwain
? So, the lion and the unicorn would make an entrance after all. Hargreaves just shrugged, and saluted. Albion scratched his head, before motioning for her to continue.
Hargreaves fumbled at her belt for a moment, to Albion’s delight, at least until Rosa whacked him over the
noggin. Hargreaves produced the Morse lantern, only to groan- glass spilled out of the gadget in a shower of disappointment.
“Luckily,” Elric Blair mentioned, as everyone was staring at the Inspector’s hands, “Morse was a brilliant inventor. The codes can be communicated by sound, as well.”
“We’re a mile up in the bleeding sky! No chuffing way-” Hargreaves protested.
“There’s a way,” Albion said. “I have a feeling…
But I’m going to need everybody’s help.”
Arturo C. Adler hung about on the bridge of the Gwain, looking on the diminutive, bearded form of Captain Leeds with some apprehension. It didn’t show on his face, but the scope of the situation was well beyond his abilities. An amateur detective simply didn’t go about solving national crises, no matter how in vogue his cravat happened to be. It simply wasn’t done!
Maybe he had felt some slight relief when he lost track of the Inspector, as she left that bucket of an air ship. What was it called,
The Raspberry? The Snozzberry
? No matter.
It gave him just the tinge of guilt
, what he’d done to sneak on the
Gwain.
Really it was merely a matter of acquiring a uniform and taking the place of the scope officer on the bridge, with the aid of a sleeping dart, of course.
He had been all too surprised to find, as the
Gwain
lifted off again to pursue the
Nidhogg
, the regal figure he had oft thought to meet, Queen Victoria III, there on the bridge as if she was a permanent fixture. She was sipping at what smelled like Earl Grey, with a selection of country cheddars.
Arturo bemoaned his outfit.
“Captain, are we in range?” The Queen asked of Captain Leeds. The magnificently mustachioed Englishman gave his monocle a stroke, and his teacup a toke before answering.
“Yes Your Majesty. The
Gwain
is prepared for ramming speed, but I must protest, with your august personage aboard, I am unwilling to undertake such a risky strategy.”
Arturo tensed. The shield and maiden figurehead was no figurehead at all, but a slug of dense alloy rooted into the ship’s chassis. At full speed, not even their mark’s fearsome weapons would slow ten feet of British-made ramming steel. Who knew what other destruction would rain on the rest of the ship?
“We must capture this traitor at all costs,” Queen Victoria declared. “Call me foolish, but I would share in the fate of my subjects in this endeavor. This dreadful ordeal must stop.”
A masterful move, Arturo thought. With the Ottomans approaching, the Queen needed all the support she could get. If the navy chose this incident to declare loyal to her, added to the recovery of Westminster, she would have all the favors she would need in the coming conflict. Her presence was bold, befitting the youngest Queen in the history of the British Isles.
Then again, if the
Gwain
was destroyed…
Before them, the naked bulk of Mordemere’s ship hung exposed in the air, like a giant kraken with empty arms.
Arturo was focused on any pattern of lights. He had tasked himself the rescue of the Inspector, and with his talents, a message would not escape him. He just hoped the
Gwain
did not begin the attack while Hargreaves was still aboard. Perhaps he was staring too long. Occasional shadowed shapes drifted across his vision, silhouettes of small, rather nasty dirigibles. Poppycock- the assembled navies of the world would never allow such an invasion of their theater.
If necessary, he would report some strange sound in the vicinity of the target, to delay the attack. Perhaps metal fatigue?
As it turned out, his stratagem was not far off the mark.
“What’s this?” Arturo murmured. He was no true scope officer, but h
e knew Morse when he heard it. Knowing it was one of the tools of his trade.
Now there it was, clear as day: the sound of
staccato clanking, like metal striking. It was strange, even with the instruments at the
Gwain’s
disposal, there was a cacophony of arc energy and steel grinding over there.
The
bridge shouldn’t have been able to hear a thing, yet there it was: the steady tap of long and short bursts, indicating some intelligence.
Arturo translated the message, before straightening up once more. He maneuvered one of the intricate dials nearby, sending a tightly guarded beam of Morse light toward the belly section of the
Percival
nearby. He marveled this was the only assistance the remarkable Hargreaves required of him. However much they enjoyed sniping at each other, he had always been awed by her daring. Yet he did not envy what she would have to do, not one bit.
The Queen looked to him momentarily, shocking the detective with her powers of perception. She knew. Arturo gave the smallest of nods, mouthing ‘Your Majesty.’
“Commence the attack!” the Queen ordered.
Aboard the
Nidhogg
, the crew of the
Berry
was having qualms about the plan.
“What about Cezette? She might crack a knee cap or something!”
“It’s all about relative velocities. The
Gwain
will be moving at the same speed as we are. It will catch us, then slow down.”
“And if they didn’t get the message?”
Hargreaves was still holding the bullet, which she used to tap against one of the main structural supports of the
Nidhogg
. According to Moore’s schematics, the steel beam ran right through the Core, and up the whole spire. She had been skeptical, and still was, but she was the only one who had any real practice with a Morse lantern.
“You have to concentrate!” Rosa yelled. “Unless you mean it, the aeons won’t respond!”
“I don’t believe this!” Hargreaves wanted to say, but she knew that was the point. If she didn’t, this wouldn’t work. The aeon impurities in Albion’s bullet, retrieved from the Victoria, wouldn’t resonate if Hargreaves didn’t feel the genuine need to be saved. For the fiercely independent Inspector, it was comparable to career suicide.
“Right!” Hargreaves declared. “One more time!”
“No time, I’m afraid,” Elric Blair hollered from the porthole nearby. The hold was falling apart around them, but he had located the safest spot for them to stand. He had even set Cezette against one of the pillars. “The ship won’t hold much longer.”
“Any sign of the
Berry
?” Albion got an emphatic shake of the head as an answer.
“Prissy Jack had better take care of her,” Rosa griped. “If I die, and she gets a scratch on her, I’ll kill him.”
Blair bent down and tied Cezette to his back. There always seemed to be cord somewhere on dirigibles.
There hadn’t been much wind when they arrived, but now more bulkheads
were gone from the bottom of the ship, and the hurricane was beginning to bleed into their calm eye. The light was blinding now, too bright to look into directly. It was all around them, scintillating off the edges of everything. The Leviathan seemed to build solid hallways and mezzanines, soaring towers and vast galleries. Hargreaves wondered if a person could get lost in the heavens simply by ascending those illusory stairs.
“Ready?” Albion asked, looking at his pocket watch. He had somehow acquired a utilitarian leather jacket
. It made him look a bit more mature. The Inspector regretted not having been more of the barmaid with him.
“No,” Hargreaves answered truthfully. No, she wasn’t, not at all
ready.
“Too late. It’s time!”
Looking back on it, Vanessa thought it might have been a very strange sight indeed. On the ship, they had no idea the time they had been tapping out in Morse coincided precisely with Queen Victoria’s attack on the
Nidhogg
. Later, she got the horrific nitty-gritty from a propaganda crew working a moving-picture machine on the
Percival
.
The great, long shape of the
Gwain
lined herself up, her screws spinning furiously. Meanwhile, the
Percival
and the
Baba Yaga
, last surviving Muscovite Balaenopteron, began bombarding the invincible
Nidhogg
- only this time, their shots were unhampered by protective measures and stolen landmarks. Ammunition rocketed into the tentacle arms of the gantries, ripping through them like a whale through a squid.
The oddly geometric patterns of light beginning to form around the
Nidhogg
were no protection, even if they flared angrily into red shapes amidst the flaming rounds.
Noise tore the skies, shrapnel fell in great, mountainous quantities, and melted slag was reportedly smelt all the way in Geneva.
Then, as the flames licked the very body of the
Nidhogg
, the spire housing Mordemere’s chambers and the nefarious Core, the
Gwain
struck. At full speed, the ship bearing the name of one of the noble knights of England sallied forth, her shield blazing blue arcs as enemy weaponry turned it red-hot. The
Gwain
thundered into the body of the
Nidhogg
, tearing it asunder as a noble lance might the carapace of a fell drake.